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Acknowledgements viii
Abbreviations xi
Beginning Otherwise xvi
Notes 151
Bibliography 181
Index 189
vii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Like any meaningful work, this book is the result of a long journey
that catapulted me into it before I even knew it was beginning, reveal-
ing landscapes unanticipated and extraordinary. Along the way, I
have been the fortunate beneficiary of immeasurable guidance, sup-
port and inspiration from mentors, colleagues, family, students and
friends, whose invaluable contributions have not only made this book
possible, but also immensely enriched it. Their contributions con-
tinue to stir and enliven my thinking. Any shortcomings that persist
(in addition to the inevitable and unintended remains) are entirely
my own.
I am grateful to many colleagues at Hollins University, who wel-
comed me into their vibrant community. First and foremost I remain
indebted to Darla Schumm, who enthusiastically continues to sup-
port all of my efforts. I also want to thank in particular T. J. Anderson,
Jan Fuller, Pauline Kaldas, Marilyn Moriarty, and Alison Ridley for
their generous, unwavering friendship and rousing support of my
work as a scholar, teacher and colleague, which made my time at
Hollins so remarkable. In addition, I remain appreciative of the fac-
ulty research and development grant that I received from Hollins
University, which directly supported this book’s progress. I remain
beholden to my students, whose passions, hard work, curiosity and
support of each other continue to enrich and inspire my teaching,
thinking and way of being in the world.
I want to thank the library staff at the College of Santa Fe, most
especially Peg Birmingham and Val Nye for their untiring assistance
and friendship.
I owe my development as a scholar to a host of outstanding teach-
ers. Most notable among them is David L. Miller, who for more than
viii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ix
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
learn and find inspiration. When I was still quite young, they awakened
me to the vibrancy of intellectual life. They set aglow a passion for
questioning and exploration, discouraged me from ever foreclosing
on inquiry, and emboldened me instead to follow my ideas wherever
they led me, even when such pathways and destinations were unfash-
ionable or difficult to endure. They have freely, generously and
inexhaustibly given me their love and support, along with their atten-
tiveness, insights and suggestions. This book is dedicated most of all
to them, with inexpressible love and gratitude. Their incalculable
presence remains within and beyond the contours, the possibilities
and the impossibilities of my life.
A. N. S.
August 2009
Santa Fe, New Mexico
x
ABBREVIATIONS
xi
ABBREVIATIONS
xii
ABBREVIATIONS
xiii
ABBREVIATIONS
xiv
ABBREVIATIONS
xv
BEGINNING OTHERWISE
xvi
BEGINNING OTHERWISE
xvii
BEGINNING OTHERWISE
xviii
BEGINNING OTHERWISE
xix
BEGINNING OTHERWISE
xx
BEGINNING OTHERWISE
xxi
BEGINNING OTHERWISE
xxii
BEGINNING OTHERWISE
xxiii
BEGINNING OTHERWISE
xxiv
BEGINNING OTHERWISE
xxv
CHAPTER 1
1
DERRIDA, MYTH AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF PHILOSOPHY
2
‘WHAT, AFTER ALL, OF THE REMAIN(S) . . .’
3
DERRIDA, MYTH AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF PHILOSOPHY
At the same moment that the limit acclaims what it bars, the limit
itself is overturned by its own unwitting glorification of the ‘alien’,
foreign, unmasterable ‘plenitude’ that ‘invades’ the system and the
limit ‘to the core of its being’ (TVM, 73). This ‘alien plenitude’ is a
kind of ‘origin’, since it gives rise to the very system that attempts to
exclude it on the basis of its foreign nature.12 In Foucault’s view,
transgressive transgression opens the limit to an exorbitant expanse
that it is powerless to delimit or define. In this way, transgression is
excessive. It escapes all definitions and categories:
4
‘WHAT, AFTER ALL, OF THE REMAIN(S) . . .’
5
DERRIDA, MYTH AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF PHILOSOPHY
6
‘WHAT, AFTER ALL, OF THE REMAIN(S) . . .’
7
DERRIDA, MYTH AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF PHILOSOPHY
Classicist Luc Brisson points out that ‘the conflict between “myth”
and “philosophy” reaches its apex with Plato.’22 Plato defines and
distinguishes these two terms, setting them in opposition to one
another. As Brisson explains, ‘the m[y]thos/logos dichotomy [in Plato]
can be interpreted not only as the opposition between falsifiable dis-
course and unfalsifiable discourse . . . but also as the opposition
between narrative discourse – or, more simply, a story – and argu-
mentative discourse’ (HP, 112). In one sense, according to Brisson,
myth is unfalsifiable discourse, since its referent is situated ‘at a level
of reality inaccessible both to the intellect and to the senses.’23
In other words, ‘the referent is not susceptible of [to] any precise
description’ (PM, 102). Just as the remains of the philosophic system
are not presences, and therefore elude conceptualization, mythos’
referent is equally absent, rendering mythos just as ungraspable by
both the senses and the intellect. With neither a sensible nor intelli-
gible ground, mythos stands in stark contrast to the purportedly
intelligible foundation of logos.
Importantly, the difference between falsifiable and unfalsifiable is
unavoidably and disturbingly ambiguous. If myth is unfalsifiable, it
cannot be either proven or disproven.24 As neither truth nor fiction,
it oscillates between these two poles. It is neither true nor false. Logos
contains no such ambiguity: it establishes itself as truth. Its status
can be unmistakably ascertained. It does not slip and slide between
opposing categories; its identity is definitive. When understood in
this way, it becomes obvious that mythos is irreducibly indecidable,
since it vacillates between truth and falsehood. As neither true nor
false, mythos cannot be transformed into a tool of logical, argumen-
tative discourse (to which Plato opposes it) with a rational internal
order that presides over its organization and development.25 Any
attempt to categorize mythos one way or the other, as singularly true
or false, is stymied by the disseminating ambiguity of its indecidabil-
ity that renders it at once as neither true nor false.26 Employing the
laws of reason, it is impossible to prove it either true or false. For
philosophy, this is problematic because mythos can wrongly be used
to persuade, not through the powers of reason, but by appealing to
the ‘lesser’ faculties of the emotions and senses. In this view, human-
kind in general, and philosophy in particular, must be unbound from
the irrational, ambiguous grip of mythos. Mythos is therefore rele-
gated to its association with stories, which are not required to adhere
to the rules of logic, and defy empirical and objective validation.
8
‘WHAT, AFTER ALL, OF THE REMAIN(S) . . .’
9
DERRIDA, MYTH AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF PHILOSOPHY
the very terms of the analogy, not only from identifying those
terms but also from distinguishing them – for the terms themselves
cannot be given determinate, identifiable content; indeed, lacking
10
‘WHAT, AFTER ALL, OF THE REMAIN(S) . . .’
OTHER DIS-COURSES
Hegel’s Other
Thinking mythos not as a Hegelian other, but as an other that cannot
be synthesized and that does not return to identity, requires that we
first briefly explore Hegel’s concept of otherness. We can then exam-
ine Derrida’s and Taylor’s rereadings of Hegel’s notion of difference.
Jean-Luc Nancy dubs Hegel ‘the inaugural thinker of the contempo-
rary world.’33 In a 1971 interview, Derrida affirmed the importance
of returning to Hegel’s texts:
11
DERRIDA, MYTH AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF PHILOSOPHY
12
‘WHAT, AFTER ALL, OF THE REMAIN(S) . . .’
13
DERRIDA, MYTH AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF PHILOSOPHY
14
‘WHAT, AFTER ALL, OF THE REMAIN(S) . . .’
An Irreducible Other
It becomes clear to Derrida that, despite Hegel’s insistence that dif-
ference return to identity, there is in fact an irreducible, disruptive
difference that remains.44 Such an other cannot be thought or grasped
through the metaphysics of presence and identity, as Hegel attempts
to do. In order to think this difference as difference – that is, to think
difference as neither its identity nor its opposite (i.e. difference) –
Derrida coins the term, différance. Différance is ‘neither a word nor a
concept’.45 The ‘a’ of différance ‘cannot be heard. . . . It cannot be
apprehended in speech . . . it also bypasses the order of apprehension
in general’ (MP, 3–4). This disruptive, silent ‘a’ cannot be grasped or
accounted for by logos. The ‘tacit monument’ (MP, 4) of the ‘a’ of
différance is an unmasterable excess. ‘Différance is not only irreducible
to any ontological or theological – ontotheological – reappropriation,
but as the very opening of the space in which ontotheology – phi-
losophy – produces its system and its history, it includes ontotheology,
inscribing it and exceeding it without return’ (MP, 6), explains
Derrida. Différance is ‘irreducible’ to identity. Additionally, Derrida
avers that it is basic to that which cannot think, grasp, domesticate or
include it. This différance falls outside of Hegel’s dialectical economy,
since it cannot be accounted for or reappropriated by identity or
logos. Différer is drawn from the Latin, differre and carries the double
meaning of to space and to temporize. In the former it is ‘to be not
15
DERRIDA, MYTH AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF PHILOSOPHY
16
‘WHAT, AFTER ALL, OF THE REMAIN(S) . . .’
Logos’ Other
As we have seen, otherness is basic to identity, even if it cannot be
properly identified or synthesized into it. Likewise, logos’ other,
mythos, is fundamental to it, but neither as a Hegelian other that
returns difference to identity, nor as a binary one that marks two
separate, distinct parts. Insofar as mythos is such an irreducible,
unlogofiable other, it operates by way of différance. Its unending
oscillation between possible meanings creates an unbridgeable gap
in logos. This is why tracing the movement of différance within the
philosophic system – within logos – is essential to understanding
the deconstructive dynamic of mythos and the relation of logos and
mythos. Like différance, which is an ‘originary causality’, mythos acts
in a similar fashion, ‘founding’ and disorganizing logos from within.
Deconstruction allows us to understand mythos as an irreducible,
disruptive other that does not, in the end, return to identity or to
logos. Both Derrida and Taylor insist on an unsettling différance
within systems and structures that destabilizes their foundations. To
acknowledge mythos as irreducibly indecidable, and not attempt to
collapse it into ideology or to ignore it as philosophy has done, yields
new possibilities for understanding the very nature of thinking and
of philosophy.
Unfortunately, the deconstructive propensities of mythos have
been overlooked. As cases in point from two different disciplines,
17
DERRIDA, MYTH AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF PHILOSOPHY
18
‘WHAT, AFTER ALL, OF THE REMAIN(S) . . .’
19
DERRIDA, MYTH AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF PHILOSOPHY
These are not words with fixed meanings (indeed, no such words
exist), nor did their meanings change glacially over time, as
the result of impersonal processes. Rather, these words, along
with many others, were the sites of pointed and highly consequen-
tial semantic skirmishes fought between rival regimes of truth.
(TM, 18)
Lincoln’s point is that the magnetic poles of mythos and logos have
flipped. This, he concludes, leaves ‘the balance of power between
them unresolved’ (TM, 18). This historical analysis of their usage
does not go far enough. Even when mythos is flipped to the other
pole, Lincoln leaves its ambiguous roots unexamined. He does not
address the ramifications of mythos’ indecidability, and its resulting
effect on logos and thinking. For him, the relationship of mythos and
logos remains oppositional and confrontational. In literalizing the
polarities, as he does, he fails to apprise accurately how they relate to
each other. He posits a relation between them, but its complex, non-
oppositional essence eludes him.47
Lincoln’s message ultimately reflects the dominance of the kind of
thinking that he himself employs. Although he claims that none of
the ‘multiple actors, perspectives, and positions’ at stake in his study
‘hold a monopoly on truth’ (TM, 43), he nonetheless champions a
specific ‘discursive authority’ above all others. For him, the ‘central
issue’ with which mythos and logos wrestle is ‘discursive authority’
(TM, 43).48 However, Lincoln overlooks the double meaning of ‘dis-
cursive’, unintentionally undermining his own ‘discursive authority’.
Like mythos, the ambiguity of ‘discursive authority’ proves unwieldy.
One meaning of ‘discursive’ is to move coherently, using reasoning.
In this sense it acts visibly and intelligibly, subsuming parts into a
unified whole. This is the usage that Lincoln employs in discussing
the discourse of ‘dissimulation’, which, as he shows, at certain times
in history is referred to as ‘mythos’, and at others, as ‘logos’. Dissimu-
lative discourse, Lincoln points out, is often ideological and has the
propensity (as history has demonstrated) to be hegemonic. This is
why myth has often received a bad rap, and why Lincoln urges us to
treat it as potentially dangerous. Focusing on simply the intelligible
aspect of mythos and the logocentric function of the discursive misses
20
‘WHAT, AFTER ALL, OF THE REMAIN(S) . . .’
21
DERRIDA, MYTH AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF PHILOSOPHY
22
‘WHAT, AFTER ALL, OF THE REMAIN(S) . . .’
23
CHAPTER 2
24
SOLICITING PHILOSOPHY’S TEARS
25
DERRIDA, MYTH AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF PHILOSOPHY
26
SOLICITING PHILOSOPHY’S TEARS
27
DERRIDA, MYTH AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF PHILOSOPHY
[w]hile the locus of the origin of the work of art is the temple, the
site of the temple . . . is a cleft or cleavage. This cleavage is ‘a tear’
(Riss, whence zerissen and Zerissenheit) that fissures what had
seemed to be a solid foundation. (T, 112)
28
SOLICITING PHILOSOPHY’S TEARS
29
DERRIDA, MYTH AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF PHILOSOPHY
prepared to master it. And it (is) that which must elude mastery.
Only presence is mastered. . . . presence, then, is the trace of the
trace, the trace of the erasure of the trace. . . . Only on this condi-
tion can metaphysics and our language signal in the direction of
their own transgression. (MP, 65–6)
Writing with two hands at once allows the ‘unheard-of’ and unthought
to be written, read and thought as the excesses that they are. This
excessiveness is not limited to the either/or of absence and presence,
because even absence contains its opposite – presence – just as Hegel’s
notion of difference contains sameness. Rather, it overflows meta-
physical identification and limitation; it escapes every ‘philosopheme’.
Like the remains, this excess cannot be accounted for within the
system of metaphysics, yet is nonetheless a (non-)foundational part
of it, since all foundations are essentially and irreparably ruptured,
and therefore are non-foundational. The excessive trace (the excess
and remains can only ever be traces, since they are neither properly
present nor absent) that is ‘unthinkable by metaphysics as such’
‘signal[s]’ an other other that is itself prodigious, ‘elusive’ and unmas-
terable by any ‘philosopheme’. That is, this other cannot be subjugated
or corralled by logos. Thus, language and metaphysics (philosophy as
logos) ‘signal in the direction of their own transgression’. They ges-
ture to that which opens the limit in an act of tearing, to that which
exposes the system to the unthinkable excessive remains. This trans-
gression marks and simultaneously rends the limit of metaphysics
and the philosophical system. Without that which exceeds presence,
presence cannot even present itself.
30
SOLICITING PHILOSOPHY’S TEARS
31
DERRIDA, MYTH AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF PHILOSOPHY
There is always more than one text. In this way, every reading is
at least double. One text comes to disturb the work of the other,
32
SOLICITING PHILOSOPHY’S TEARS
The same ‘at this very moment’ seems to repeat itself only to be
dis-lodged without return. The ‘same’ ‘very’ (le ‘m̂eme’ du ‘même’)20
of the ‘at this very moment’ has remarked upon its own alteration,
one which will have ever since opened it up to the other. The ‘first’
one, which formed the element of reappropriation in the contin-
uum, will have been obligated by the ‘second,’ the other one, the
one of interruption, even before being produced, and in order to
be produced. It will have constituted a text and context with the
other, but only within a series where the text coheres with its own
(if this may still be said) tear. The ‘at this very moment’ only
coheres with itself by means of an immeasurable anachrony
33
DERRIDA, MYTH AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF PHILOSOPHY
Within ‘this’ moment (of ‘at this very moment’), there is an other
moment that is not overtly present, yet neither is it absent. It haunts
the first moment as a non-absent absence, forever fissuring and
shadowing the ‘present moment’, thereby revealing that such a pres-
ence is impossible apart from another moment that is not properly
present. By repeating ‘at this very moment’ throughout his text,
Levinas creates a repetition with différance that dislocates and pre-
vents reappropriation or the return of the same. The ‘same’ is never
the same, but forever estranged from itself. The movement, therefore,
is not circular like Hegel’s model, but errant. The tears are exposed:
no mending can sew them together and join them as the same.
In fact, the ‘first’ is ‘obligated’ to the errant, transgressive ‘second’.
The two moments are out of joint. Any seeming ‘coherence’ is in fact
an incommensurable anachrony. A fissure remains, which separates
and displaces what was once held together in alignment, and now
sets their incongruous parts next to each other in disjunction. Such
incommensurable anachrony is a wound that never heals. This repeti-
tion is a violent tearing that does not and cannot ‘enclose’ the other,
but rather opens the text to an ‘Other’ that exceeds categorization
and appropriation, much as indecidable mythos does.
These two moments simultaneously join and separate in a pas
de deux. However, how this double movement will unfold is not con-
trollable or anticipatable. It opens out into irreducible difference and
otherness that are excessive outcasts of the logocentric system of
presence and unity. As Derrida writes to E.L., acknowledging the
disseminative operation within what he himself writes, ‘dislocation
will have taken place, there is nothing you can do about it, and unwit-
tingly you will have read what will have made only possible, from
out of the Other, what is happening “at this very moment” ’ (ATVM,
25).21 Dislocating tears are always already within the text, and by
extension, within thinking, language, philosophy and logos. They are
basic to logos even if they escape every philosopheme’s attempt to
comprehend and master them. ‘By definition,’ this disturbance, avers
34
SOLICITING PHILOSOPHY’S TEARS
The first ‘moment’ gave its form or its temporal place, its ‘pres-
ence,’ to a thought, a language, a dialectic ‘sovereign in regard to
that Relation.’ So what will have happened – probably, perhaps –
is this: the second ‘moment’ will have forced the first toward its
own condition of possibility, toward its ‘essence’ . . . It will have
in advance – but after the fact within the serial rhetoric – torn
the envelope. But that very tear would not have been possible
without a certain hooking back (échancrure) of the second moment
and a sort of analogical contamination between the two, a rela-
tion between two incommensurables . . . (ATVM, 26)
35
DERRIDA, MYTH AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF PHILOSOPHY
36
SOLICITING PHILOSOPHY’S TEARS
‘is neither presence nor absence’ (OG, 154). In this way, it cannot be
categorized or comprehended by logos.
Each ‘moment’ (of ‘at this very moment’) both adds to and dis-
rupts the other moment(s). Différance is already at work from the
very first. The weave of these two is constituted as such: ‘[W]hat is
unbound, nonthematizable and wholly other to ontology and logo-
centrism can only be articulated through a certain repetition of
ontological or logocentric language, a repetition that interrupts that
language’ (B, 178). When we apply this understanding to the relation
of mythos and logos, we begin to realize that they do not and cannot
exist apart from one another. Mythos is ‘articulated’ through logos,
through a ‘repetition’ of ‘logocentric language’. Nonetheless, logos’
articulation of ‘unbound, nonthematizable’ mythos occurs through a
repetition that does not merely repeat and witness the return of the
same. Rather, this repetition cuts, destabilizes and interrupts logos.
The act of soliciting takes place from within, divulging the unsutur-
able tears that simultaneously construct and deconstruct logos. This
weave is not fabricated with uninterrupted threads that neatly inter-
lock between warp and woof. Instead, it consists of broken threads
(torn by the transgressions within and the tension between two
incommensurables) that in being retied, create impenetrable, disrup-
tive knots or aporias. The threads both bind and unbind, rend and
mend. Although the aporetic knots are tied together, ‘the interrup-
tions “remain” ’ (ATVM, 28). This enchainment is not logocentric.
Rather, the enchained discontinuities are out of joint. It is never a
matter of picking up where one left off. Continual interruption makes
doing so impossible. In the resumption of tears, the text’s breaches
are not restored, nor are they appropriated into a unity. ‘[R]esump-
tion’, explains Derrida, ‘is not any more logical than the interruption’
(ATVM, 27). It does not close the gap. Therefore it is not the continu-
ation of the same, nor is it a synthesis between once disparate parts.
Tears cannot be mastered or anticipated. In soliciting tears, one
has no control over what they will reveal and reveil in their errant
operations. Any attempt to patch these tears inadvertently divulges
the ruptures. Therefore, ‘The tear must be saved, for which one must
play off seam against seam’ (emphasis added, ATVM, 26), cautions
Derrida. Applying this to our focus here suggests that, although phi-
losophy as logos may desire to master the tears by sewing them
together into a seamless whole, any mending that attempts to interlace
37
DERRIDA, MYTH AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF PHILOSOPHY
Now if tears come to the eyes, if they well up in them, and if they
can also veil sight, perhaps they reveal, in the very course of this
38
SOLICITING PHILOSOPHY’S TEARS
[T]he blindness that opens the eye is not the one that darkens
vision. . . . the blindness that reveals the very truth of the eyes,
would be the gaze veiled by tears. It neither sees nor does not see:
it is indifferent to its blurred vision. (MB, 126–7)
39
DERRIDA, MYTH AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF PHILOSOPHY
CRYPTIC REMAINS
It is significant that Derrida uses the Greek word oikēsis, which
means residence, when he describes the a of différance as ‘secret and
discreet as a tomb: oikēsis’. Oikos is a house, and the word ‘economy’
is derived from the same root.32 Derrida describes the site of this
oikēsis as ‘the familial residence and tomb of the proper in which is
produced, by différance, the economy of death. This stone – provided
that one knows how to decipher its inscription – is not far from
announcing the death of the tyrant’ (MP, 4). The ‘economy of death’
is the hidden underside – the remains – of the economy proper; it is
40
SOLICITING PHILOSOPHY’S TEARS
Philosophy’s No-Place
As we have seen, crypts remain cryptic because they are inaccessible
to traditional modes of reception. Derrida affirms that ‘[n]o crypt
presents itself. The grounds [lieux] are so disposed as to disguise and
to hide: something, always a body in some way. But also to disguise
the act of hiding and to hide the disguise: the crypt hides as it holds.’34
Crypts elude the simple opposition between presence and absence
(much like the trace) since they mask a presence while at the same
time saving and preserving it. The place of the crypt is not a tradi-
tional space. It is an inner chamber, ‘an enclosure, an enclave’ that is
‘isolated from general space by partitions’ (F, xiv). As a space within
a space, ‘comprehended within another but rigorously separate from
it’ (F, xiv), the crypt is hidden and not readily accessible. It is not an
extension of our natural habitat. Like the remains that are not pres-
ent and cannot be apprehended as such, the crypt is part of the very
system that seeks to exclude it on the grounds that it cannot be
accessed or accounted for. With the crypt, however, it is not simply
that it cannot be accounted for, but more importantly, that its whole
purpose is to hide something that one cannot confront or prefers
not to have to acknowledge. Within the forum of the crypt, explains
Derrida, is yet another ‘more inward forum like a closed rostrum or
speaker’s box, a safe: sealed, and thus internal to itself, a secret inte-
rior within the public square, but, by the same token, outside it,
41
DERRIDA, MYTH AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF PHILOSOPHY
external to the interior’ (F, xiv). This forum within a forum ‘is (a)
safe, an outcast outside inside the inside’ (F, xiv). As an outside that
is inside, it is neither external, nor internal. The ‘cryptic enclav[e]’
serves ‘to isolate, to protect, to shelter from any penetration, from
anything that can filter in from outside along with air, light, or
sounds, along with the eye or the ear, the gesture or the spoken word’
(F, xiv). The inner, cryptic safe remains obscure. Nothing can pene-
trate it. It remains untouched by light (such as logos, the light of
reason), by the philosopher’s eagle eye (which cannot see inside), and
by the ear of the philosopher (which is deaf to the ‘unheard’ mute-
ness deep within).35 Logos cannot decrypt the inner safe.
It is important to understand that the inner safe is not synthesized
into the outer, more public space as a seamless aspect of it. Encryp-
tion does not entail the swallowing – or ‘digestion’ – of difference by
identity.36 Derrida carefully distinguishes two kinds of entombing:
introjection and incorporation. Introjection is Hegelian assimilation
in which the other is taken into the self for the purposes of enlarging
the self and attaining absolute, undifferentiated self-consciousness
that eventually results in absolute knowledge. In introjection, differ-
ence is returned to identity by merging the other with the same. By
contrast, in incorporation, a term Derrida borrows from Freud’s
‘Mourning and melancholy’, the foreign cannot be assimilated.
Difference does not return to identity. Incorporation involves the
double movement of protecting and inhibiting. That which is placed
in safekeeping and maintained is, at the same time, pushed away,
restrained and suppressed. On the one hand, the object of incorpora-
tion is cherished to such an extent that it is safeguarded. On the
other hand, the object is held in check and access to it is restricted.
The other is preserved as foreign. For this reason, the system attempts
to exclude it and shut it off from itself, just as white blood cells
engorge and isolate an invading virus. In this scenario, the ‘foreign
body’ is simultaneously excluded and ‘preserved as foreign’ (F, xvii).
Philosophy as logos nonetheless attempts to attenuate the crypt:37
What speculative dialectics means (to say) is that the crypt can
still be incorporated into the system. The transcendental or the
repressed, the unthought or the excluded must be assimilated by
the corpus, interiorized as moments, idealized in the very negativ-
ity of their labor. (G, 166)
42
SOLICITING PHILOSOPHY’S TEARS
43
DERRIDA, MYTH AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF PHILOSOPHY
44
SOLICITING PHILOSOPHY’S TEARS
45
CHAPTER 3
46
REND(ER)ING THE PHARMAKON: A WOUND WITHOUT A CURE
REPLAYING PLATO
Deconstruction recognizes that every text exceeds its intended
meaning. Every text is at least two texts, as we have seen. One reading
functions as a commentary, repeating the author’s intentions. The
other reading, attentive to the internal tears and aporias, interrupts
and disturbs the first reading. These two readings are not synthetic.
In fact, they remain irreducibly indecidable. In this chapter we will look
at Derrida’s commentary on Plato’s Phaedrus, which concerns itself
with reading Plato otherwise, revealing the internal gaps in Plato’s
text. However, in considering Derrida’s commentary on Plato’s
Phaedrus, we will also depart from it, pursuing some aporias inherent
in his text, all the while inviting the reader to engage the aporias in my
own. It is significant that, although the disruptive trace of mythos
emerges throughout Derrida’s critique, the relation of mythos and
logos is incidental to his analysis of speech and writing. In order to
understand the significance of mythos in Plato’s Phaedrus as well
as in Derrida’s commentary on Plato, we must first gain a grasp of
Derrida’s analysis. Our reading proceeds doubly. On the one hand, it
is a commentary on Derrida’s comentary, so that we can see how
Derrida unsettles Plato’s text and opens it up to another reading. On
the other hand, our reading will diverge from this commentary and
follow the inherent aporias and fissures within both Plato’s text and
Derrida’s. Reading in this way will expose the ways in which mythos
is a ‘foundation’ of logos.
As discussed in the first chapter, Plato extols logos as the pre-
eminent form of discourse. He dismisses mythos as inferior because
it appeals not to the intellect, as logos does, but to the baser, untrust-
worthy senses. In Plato’s view, in order to make way for reason,
mythos must be confined to fanciful narratives. However, if as Derrida
suggests, every text unavoidably exceeds its intended meaning, then
Plato’s is no exception. Another text disturbs the first. This other
disrupts logos from within, revealing a disseminative polysemy where
there at first appeared to be a single unity. Reading Plato’s Phaedrus
otherwise unmasks a fissure in the foundation of philosophy as logos.
This other, ‘ambiguous logic’ (to which Vernant refers in the quote
above) is not the logic of logos. Rather, it is the illogical ‘logic’ of
mythos. Mythos, Vernant reminds us, ‘brings into play’ (a play that is
not within the order of presence, or therefore, of logos), ‘shifts, slides’
and ‘oscillations’ that disrupt and discompose not just the text, but
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The unity running through these diverse types [of logoi], that is,
the determination of logos in that specific form which we vaguely
indicate (but also decisively conceal) when we speak of ‘rational
discourse,’ is not something that is clear in advance but rather is
initially a problem. (BL, 15)
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to it, on the one hand, and sheer ignorance and its inevitable silence
on the other hand. The contrast between logos and mythos is not a
contrast between a perfected and an imperfect discourse. (BL, 16)
Alogos
Play is vital, not merely incidental, to reading Plato and to under-
standing the fundamentally deconstructive nature of mythos and
pharmakon. Derrida shows that a text (his and Plato’s, and by exten-
sion, all texts) is, in fact, some sort of game. This game has something
to do with the interplay of presence/absence, secret/disclosure:
A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the
first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game.
A text remains, moreover, forever imperceptible. Its law and its
rules are not, however, harbored in the inaccessibility of a secret;
it is simply that they can never be booked, in the present, into any-
thing that could rigorously be called a perception. (D, 63)
All texts are, to some extent, ‘forever imperceptible’, that is, cryptic.
However, equally important is the fact that there is no code for
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hidden thread’ (D, 63), rather than just the threads present that lead
to synthesis and unity. One must ‘ge[t] a few fingers caught’ in the
complex weave of the text. Such an operation is an altogether differ-
ent kind of reading.
Reading in this way requires a double movement that both joins
and separates, exposing (as faulty) the ‘successfully’ mended and
reinforced seams philosophers have sewn to integrate writing with
speech and, for present purposes, mythos with logos. In other words,
reading doubly, by paying attention to the aporias within the text,
exposes these neatly mended seams for the fictions that they are.
It involves a ‘hidden thread’ that has slipped by the calculating eyes
of the philosopher unseen. The seams holding together, in dialectical
relation, speech and writing, and logos and mythos ‘must rip apart’
(D, 64), and necessarily rip apart, whether such an outcome is desired
or not. When the philosopher declares, always to the detriment of
mythos, that ‘logos is truth’, the is that weds logos to truth constitutes
such a reinforced seam. Derrida’s point from the outset is that the
relationship between speech and writing, and as a consequence,
between logos and mythos, is not merely one of opposition, nor one
of sameness, either. Their identities, and therefore their relationship,
are fissured and called into question.
It is helpful, in our attempt to grasp the vital role of mythos in
Plato’s Phaedrus, to extend Derrida’s insight to recognize not just
writing, but more importantly, mythos, as a supplement. These supple-
ments refigure all oppositional relations. A supplement simultaneously
represents an excess and an emptiness, a plenitude and a shortage. It
‘is neither presence nor absence’ (OG, 145). Oppositional relation-
ships, such as that of speech and writing, and mythos and logos, occur
within the mode of presence. Presence, however, is incapable of taking
into account the supplement, which oscillates between presence and
absence without inhabiting either one. How, therefore, is one to read
these supplements? Derrida provides an answer to this by suggesting
that they ‘must be rigorously prescribed, but by the necessities of a
game, by the logic of play’ (D, 64), rather than by the logic of logos. In
this game, as we have seen, all bets are off. It is impossible to anticipate
from the outset how things will play out. Thus, reading doubly and
thinking doubly must occur within the ‘logic of play’ – a logic that
also marks the supplement that, in turn, disfigures and refigures the
relationship between mythos and logos. This play that follows the hid-
den thread, and which can only be located through a veil of tears,
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Either play is nothing (and that is its only chance); either it can give
place to no activity, to no discourse worthy of the name – that
is, one charged with truth or at least with meaning – and then
it is alogos or atopos. Or else play begins to be something and its
very presence lays it open to some sort of dialectical confiscation.
(D, 156)
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preferred, ‘superior’ tool, logos. Plato must write the dialogues to for-
tify ‘superior’ speech (logos). Logos contains that which, on the one
hand, constructs it, and on the other hand, deconstructs it. Already
an association between these demeaned others – writing, myth and
pharmakon – begins to surface. Derrida’s assessment of the pharma-
kon and its alignment with writing allows us to extend this analysis
even further in order to see how mythos functions as a pharmakon
in Plato’s text, forging a ‘kinship’ between these two. It becomes
obvious that, notwithstanding attempts to the contrary, Plato’s logos
emerges from mythos. Instead of being free from its ‘subordinate’
other, logos is in fact inescapably inhabited by it.
Re-Covering Play
Before turning to Plato’s text, it is necessary to revisit Derrida’s essay
on play, delivered at a conference focused on the interplay between
structuralism and post-structuralism, in order to explore his insights
into their relationship. How are they related, if not linearly or dialec-
tically? The same question applies to the relationship of logos and
mythos. In order to approach this question otherwise, Derrida begins
with this key realization:
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[S]ystem and excess are not opposites but are codependent: there
can no more be a structure apart from the supplementary excess
that disrupts it than there can be an event of disruption without
the stabilizing structures it dislocates. This excess is never present
as such but emerges by withdrawing at the precise moment the
system of structures seems to achieve closure. Recovery is always
a re-covering and, therefore, inevitably remains incomplete. In this
way, closure dis-closes without revealing the openness of every
foundational base. (AG, 304)
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logos ‘can no more’ exist apart from mythos, an excess that disrupts
it, than mythos (the ‘event of disruption’) can exist without logos, ‘the
stabilizing structure[e] it dislocates’. Mythos is, therefore, not a primi-
tive form of imperfect logos, but an event that calls forth logos, just
as logos calls forth mythos in order to represent itself. Mythos and
logos are unavoidably codependent. The emergent complexity of sys-
tem and excess simultaneously stabilizes and destabilizes Plato’s
dialogue. Recovery, as Taylor points out, can only ever be re-covering,
resurfacing rather than returning as Hegel was wont, to an ‘original’
form. The supposed closure of the system ‘dis-close[s]’ by attempting
to cover over the openings that are the ‘events’ of mythos. Such
closure discloses the tears that forever remain, faulting logos.
Let us imagine Plato at the edge of the abyss of this ‘eventual
emergence’. He is standing at a chasm he cannot see, at the cross-
roads of two traditions: the oral and the written. Is it any wonder
that he attempts to tighten down the hub at the centre of the wheel of
structure, anxious to ensure against any unpredictable play, to secure
an unmoving centre so that philosophy will proceed on the firm
ground of undislodgable presence? On the one hand, Plato enlists
logos in an attempt to ensure certitude ‘beyond the reach of play.
And on the basis of this certitude anxiety can be mastered’ (WD,
279). Plato tries to recover (and produce) a history of presence and
of philosophy that never properly existed. The desire to accomplish
this drives the text. While at the same time, because that desire springs
from an inherent insufficiency (and anxiety) rather than from the
certainty that it hopes to express, this lack must be suppressed, lest it
reveal that genesis. On the other hand, Plato also invariably seeks
recourse in mythos. In spite of itself, philosophic discourse cannot
exclude it. The dialogue uses the disruptive playfulness of mythos in
its recovery, creating an ‘emergency’. Within the emergent network of
Plato’s text, two readings surface: one, desirous of a fixed structure,
‘dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play’ (WD,
292). The other, ‘which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms
play’ (WD, 292). The text denies play in order to affirm it, and affirms
it in order to deny it.15 It is not a matter of choosing between these
two texts. The choice is impossible; the two are always already at play.
The reader is inevitably caught in the midst of an emergency, situated
within this ‘eventful’ opening between two texts and two Platos.
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Sallis calls attention to the use of the word ‘contrived’ in Greek, and
its double meaning of both ‘devis[ing]’, as for example, ‘skillfully
composing an explanation’, ‘deceiv[ing]’ and ‘play[ing] subtle tricks’
(BL, 114). It also shares the same root as ‘wise men’ (BL, 114). The
wise men conceal the real import of this myth. First, they transform
natural things into mythical things. The wind becomes Boreas. Then
they hide the true meaning of the myth, which has to do with love.22
According to some versions, Boreas loved Orithyia. When her father
rejected him, Boreas swept her away and married her. Together they
bore children. The wise men’s myth
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This occurrence plays a pivotal role, even though Derrida does not
mention it in his analysis. Socrates’ self-knowing (which is essential
to logos) potentially has something to do with Typhon, ‘the most
frightful offspring of the earth, a monster with a hundred heads who
rose up against the gods, who was, as a result, killed by Zeus’s thun-
derbolt, and whose defeat marked the securing of the reign of Zeus’
(BL, 116). As head of the Olympic hierarchy, Zeus represents order.
He is also aligned with the panoptic, eagle eye of the philosopher.
Typhon is Zeus’ enemy. In an attempt to overthrow Zeus, Typhon
stole Zeus’s thunderbolts, stripping him of his very power and iden-
tity – of that which makes him Zeus. Through trickery, the mortal
prince Cadmus charms Typhon with song, allowing Zeus to reclaim
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his sinews (which Typhon had savagely ripped from the slain Zeus)
and defeat Typhon.25
Typhon is no ordinary monster, but the most monstrous of
monsters.26 He is a prodigious other, whose many-headed complexity
threatens the unifying reign of all-seeing Zeus. As such, he shakes the
very foundations of logos and philosophy as logos, undermining them.
However, even Typhon harbours a strange ambiguity and indecid-
ability. Although clearly monstrous, some of Typhon’s heads appeared
otherwise. ‘But while some of his voices cried like savage animals,’
explains Richard Kearney, ‘others were so “wonderful to hear”
(thauma akouein) that they were immediately understood by the gods
and seduced both mortals and immortals alike.’27 Certainly Socrates is
seduced. The many-headed Typhon is a figure of the indecidable: god
or monster? He is both at once. Typhon cannot be reduced to a single
identity. He illustrates how monstrosity is also hybridity. Forever oscil-
lating between categories, a monster is neither simply one thing, nor
another, and thus inhabits the liminal margin of neither/nor. In his
chapter on monstrosity in the theory of narrative, Andrew Gibson
posits that ‘monstrosity transgresses the metaphysics underlying sym-
bolic boundaries, the boundaries that determine all those categories
and classifications that separate kinds of being off from one another.’28
By looking to Typhon to know himself, Socrates intimates that to
know oneself is inescapably to encounter the indecidable. To know
oneself is therefore to open knowledge and thinking to an unmaster-
able, excessive polysemy that escapes reason’s categorizations.
Socrates invokes Typhon in order to question whether he himself
is monstrous – and as such, an uncanny transgressor of the laws of
logos – or rather, if he is un-Typhon-like, and therefore a proponent
of the reign of logos and philosopher-kings.29 It is as if either nature
depends upon and includes the other, but not in a dialectical relation
to be reconciled and synthesized under the Hegelian identity of
identity-and-difference. The otherness of Typhon remains within
knowledge, philosophy and logos. Kearney points out that even after
Zeus exiled the Titans from heaven, ‘Typhon stayed on as a reminder
of our wild terrestrial origins’ (SGM, 13). As a ‘reminder’, Typhon is
an undialecticizable remains. He memorializes the fact that philoso-
phy’s source is an experience of alterity ‘in terms of wonderment
(thaumazein) and terror (deinon)’ (SGM, 13).30 In fact, ‘by thus linking
the origin of philosophizing to a certain pathos of wonder and awe
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That is, it does not work only in the way in which it is intended.
Neither present nor absent, and simultaneously excess and lack, this
‘foundation’ is non-foundational. As such, the unwieldy pharmakon,
by figuring philosophy with an excessive nothingness (an ‘infinite
absence’) simultaneously disfigures philosophy and logos.
Although it is irreducibly indecidable, in Plato’s Phaedrus the
pharmakon marks the ‘passage into philosophy’,32 into logos. Its
duplicitous meaning and effect are as unwieldy as Typhon’s many
heads, and cannot be mastered by any language or concept. Only
through ‘skewing, indetermination, or overdetermination’ (D, 71) is
the pharmakon translated (logoscribed) as ‘remedy’, ‘recipe’, ‘poison’,
‘drug’, ‘philter’, and so forth. In choosing to translate it one way (i.e.
as either remedy or poison), one is suppressing its other, simultane-
ous meaning. Not only does the disseminating multitude of possible
translations point to the strange, other logic of the pharmakon, but it
also demonstrates how philosophy as logos has concealed, ‘masked,
obliterated, and rendered’ (D, 72) this unconceptualizable other.
Philosophy is founded on the ‘violent difficulty in the transference
of a nonphilosopheme into a philosopheme’ (D, 72). This ‘violent
difficulty’ is not merely a problem of language, but the very root
problem of a philosophical tradition that desires to locate presence,
instead of looking through a veil of tears (voir sans savoir), and
sees instead with an eagle eye attuned only to savoir (absolu). Non-
philosophemes (like monsters), though, cannot be domesticated
and transformed into philosophemes by dialectical operations. They
reside within philosophy, as part of its ‘foundation’. Whatever the
attempt, the disruptive alogical always remains.
In many ways, the tradition of philosophy as logos has been one of
translation. It has defined itself in terms of the promise of presence
and the masterability that translation provides.33 Translatability is, in
this way, an origin of philosophy. In this scenario, ‘meaning has
the commanding role, and consequently one must be able to fix its
univocality or, in any case, to master its plurivocality’ (EO, 120). The
assumption, therefore, is that it is always possible to put everything
into words. There would be no philosophy without translation. When
confronted with mastering the indecidable pharmakon, however,
philosophical discourse is impotent. Thus, any translation is always
‘an essential loss. . . . marking the limit of philosophy as translation’
(EO, 120). This limit is unavoidably transgressed the moment that Plato
introduces the pharmakon and mythos into the bedrock of discourse.
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every speech like a living creature should be put together with its
own body so that it is not without a head or without a foot but has
a middle and extremities, written in such a way that its parts fit
together and form a whole. (PH, 264c)
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Thoth’s presence in the text – as, among other things, the god of play –
refigures and disfigures the relation of mythos and logos. His otherness
is so disruptive that it unsettles the presupposed relationship of
mythemes to philosophemes, and mythos to logos, calling for a new
understanding that recognizes the suppressed affinity between them.
The foreign mythology of Thoth becomes a ‘foundation’ for Plato’s
own speech (logos) on writing. This outside (foreign mythology) that
is inside the text disturbs logos from within. In this way, Thoth’s pres-
ence in the text calls into question the very relation of mythos and
logos, and consequentially, that of mythos and philosophy.
At first glance it may appear that Thoth has a lot in common with
reason and philosophy as logos because his father is the all-seeing sun
god, Ammon-Ra. However, Thoth is subordinate to his father, and
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Just as the pharmakon is neither simply remedy nor poison, but even
both at once, and just as its double movement cannot be arrested and
held in place by logos, Thoth escapes simple equivocation and always
seems to slip by the calculative eyes of logos. He is irreducibly inde-
cidable. By putting ‘play into play’, he disrupts the relation between
opposites, and in mimicking dialectical movement through the
operation of play (with différance), he foils it. Derrida elaborates on
Thoth’s disruptive maneuvers:
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Bastard Dis-Courses
Thoth is summoned in Plato’s Phaedrus by Socrates, who recounts
the story in order to ‘say’ something about logos (to give an account)
that logos alone cannot ‘say’. In Socrates’ story, Thoth comes to show
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King Thamus of Egypt his inventions, which Thoth believes will ben-
efit society.46 He offers a pharmakon – that is, writing – as a gift to the
king.47 The king rejects the gift on the grounds that it is mischievous
(in other words, indecidable) and useless. He is suspicious of writing
not only because it is alien and comes from afar, and not simply
because it is opposed (or so the king believes) to logos, which is imme-
diate and therefore ‘living’, unlike writing, but more importantly
because it is a pharmakon, that is, a remedy that is really a poison.
King Thamus accuses Thoth of concealing the truth about writing
and professing the opposite of what it really does. From the king’s
perspective, writing produces forgetfulness – which is anathema to
living logos – and Thoth has produced not a remedy for memory, but
for reminding.48 Writing is an unnecessary crutch that distorts the
truth instead of supporting it. Therefore, the king denounces it as
treachery. However, the king’s statement assumes the inherent ambi-
guity of the pharmakon. He denies the pharmakon because it is the
opposite of how it appears. Thoth presents it as a remedy, but the
king perceives it as a poison. Derrida notes the striking (unintended)
irony: ‘It is precisely this ambiguity that Plato, through the mouth of
the King, attempts to master, to dominate by inserting its definition
into simple, clear-cut oppositions: good and evil, inside and outside,
true and false, essence and appearance’ (D, 103). When Plato (through
the speech of the king) equates the pharmakon with poison, he sup-
presses an alternative translation: that the pharmakon is also a
remedy. The duplicitous pharmakon cannot be wrangled into a singu-
lar category, because it is irreducibly indecidable. Once its ambiguity
has been introduced, the pharmakon cannot be domesticated by
Plato, philosophy or the king. Its outcome cannot be controlled.
Plato acknowledges this ambiguity, but only insofar as it furthers
the project of logos, insofar as it works towards an employable end.
The problem is that once it is introduced, and thereby unleashed, the
pharmakon resists every attempt to be identified or harnessed, as
Plato intended, in one specific way. As an indecidable, it fissures logos
from within, foiling its operations, however much Plato wills it to
further logos’ effectiveness.
Strikingly, when King Thamus accuses Thoth of ambiguous
deception, Thoth does not say a word. He is silent. It is easy to imagine
that Thoth would be inclined to speak in order to defend his creation.
Yet he is mute. Plato assumes that speech (logos) is pre-eminent, in
part because it is fully present and is able to explain and defend itself,
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and therefore immune to misuse. This scene reveals just the opposite:
‘Here is a silence walled up in the violent structure of the founding
act. Walled up, walled up within, because silence is not exterior to
language.’49 King Thamus’ accusation is just such a founding act
that serves to ground and constitute Plato’s discourse and the reign
of logos. Silence is inside language, and by extension, speech (logos).
It is not a secondary exteriority, but basic to logos. This absence of
speech speaks volumes. The presence (or more precisely, non-absent
absence) of this hiatus is disruptive. It does just the opposite of what
Plato intends. He seeks to put an end to mythos (and writing), to
subordinate them to logos’ establishment. However, through Thoth’s
silence Plato unwittingly contaminates his logocentric intentions.
This muteness faults all speech (logos):
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Logic of the Same against the menacing Other’ (O, 23). However,
this strategy necessarily fails, because it depends upon the invention
of the ‘truth’ of ‘absolute reappropriation’.52 As we have already
witnessed, ‘absolute reappropriation’ is impossible. There are always
remains (such as mythos in Plato’s Phaedrus) that cannot be accounted
for by logos. Despite efforts to expel or reconcile them, these irreduc-
ible others remain inassimilable by the system. Thus, philosophy as
logos is revealed ‘to be the myth of absolute reappropriation, of self-
presence absolutely absolved and recentered’ (G, 221). In Derrida’s
quote, ‘myth’ denotes a falsehood or illusion. Logos invents its truth,
that there is complete reappropriation, in order to secure itself. How-
ever, notes Guibal, ‘such a myth, dream or illusion is constantly,
unwillingly, thwarted by the forces of resistance that can never be
completely “sublated”, and which work and displace this alleged
mastery of the logos surreptitiously’ (O, 23). These other ‘forces of
resistance’ that counteract philosophy’s efforts at ‘absolute reappro-
priation’ are the remains, that is, they are mythos and the pharmakon,
which linger as ambivalent scraps that cannot be synthesized into the
system that they simultaneously constitute and destabilize. These
forces of resistance, of mythos itself, rend(er) the fable of absolute
reappropriation otherwise.
Resistance is more complex than it may initially appear because it
is not just the rejection of something. Extending this insight allows
us to understand how, in resisting indecidable mythos, philosophy as
logos affirms it. First we must recall how Hegel’s dialectic assimilates
difference, uniting it with identity. From this point of view, resistance
is ultimately pointless, since difference (resistance) is merely a passing
stage that is eventually negated. When negation is negated, resistance
becomes affirmation. However, from an alternative vantage point,
the dialectic is a response to resistance. In order to mitigate uncer-
tainty and otherness, it is designed to reconcile and domesticate these
upsetting others in order to welcome them, not as contraventions,
but as part of a whole. As we have seen, however, the dialectical
movement is incomplete. Its efforts at reconciliation can never com-
pletely disarm these opposites in order to remedy the unsettling tears
within itself. These others cannot be synthesized and attenuated in
the name of logos or identity. As much as they do not ‘belong’ to the
system, they are integral to it, and are therefore preserved by it. Yet,
in remaining, they also threaten the system from within. This explains
the need to constrain them, to keep them at bay, even while they defy
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Terminal Displacement
As we have seen, as indecidable forces, mythos and pharmakon
construct and constitute Plato’s philosophic discourse while simulta-
neously disrupting and deconstructing it. These irreducible others
give rise to the system that is powerless to control or synthesize them.
In this way, mythos and pharmakon are a grounding that is, at the
same time, not the least bit grounded. It is just this aspect of mythos
and pharmakon that Plato’s text also attempts to dominate and
banish. The ‘counterspell, the exorcism, the antidote, is dialectics’
(D, 121). Yet, as Derrida shows, once the pharmakon is introduced,
its ambivalent powers play out beyond control. What was remedy
may become poison, and what was poison may become cure. ‘The
element of the pharmakon’, states Derrida, ‘is the combat zone
between philosophy and its other. An element that is in itself, if one
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can still say so, undecideable’ (D, 138). Although inside the system,
indecidables function as outsiders that ‘can no longer be included
within philosophical (binary) opposition, but which, however, inhabit
philosophical opposition, resisting and disorganizing it, without ever
constituting a third term, without ever leaving room for a solution in
the form of speculative dialectics’ (P, 43). The philosophical system
seeks to dominate them because it cannot account for their unending
oscillation and deferral between significations. They are neither sim-
ply one thing, nor another, slipping between all possible categories.
Nonetheless, these indecidables are at the core of the system, giving
rise to it even as they rupture it.
Plato cannot control the indecidability of the pharmakon. Unable
to know for sure whether he is encountering remedy or poison, and
unaware that these two are inextricable, Plato administers the phar-
makon to develop and fortify logos. He fails, however, despite his best
efforts, to ‘send off’ mythos and to contain its ambiguity from spilling
over into his philosophical discourse because ‘sperm, water, ink,
paint, perfumed dye: the pharmakon always penetrates like a liquid, it
is absorbed, drunk, introduced into the inside . . . soon to invade
it and inundate it with its medicine, its brew, its drink, its potion, its
poison’ (D, 152). The ambivalent powers of the pharmakon permeate
the text. Its indeterminate excess contaminates logos, foiling all
attempts at domination and synthesis. Even though Plato tries to
cure the textual pharmakons by administering salubrious pharmakons
(such as the myth of Thoth), the defiling, oscillating excess (of pos-
sible meanings) cannot be arrested or banished. Through the figure
of the king, Plato attempts to dispense his cure, to engineer the
ambiguity of the pharmakon. Such a cure might be effective if the
pharmakon were simply exterior. If it were, it would pose not a termi-
nal threat, but a temporary one that could ultimately be remedied.
However, the pharmakon (which is specifically, in this context, the
myth of Thoth that Plato has Socrates tell) is not external, but inter-
nal. It is a groundless ground, an unmasterable cryptic core, from
which the entire dialogue emerges. Recognizing that mythos gives rise
to logos, just as the pharmakon gives rise to the entire dialogue, dra-
matically alters our conception of logos and philosophic discourse,
as Derrida suggests:
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text can control, via logos, this mythos that lacks both form and pres-
ence. Mythos is interior and ‘foundational’. The aporetic fissures of
mythos in Plato’s Phaedrus expose these scraps and leftovers as the
very possibility and ‘ground’ of the philosophic system, and mark
the impossibility of logos’ reappropriation of itself, of its ever achiev-
ing closure. Thus, the ‘philosophical locus’ is also, at the same time,
the locus of philosophy’s impotence, inscribing both its possibility
and impossibility in one forceful act. On the one hand, the inclusion
of mythos makes the purity and supremacy of logos impossible,
because that which is undialecticizable and unassimilable is, nonethe-
less, included within the system as a condition of its possibility. On
the other hand, this impossible inclusion enables the very possibility
of discourse, even as its inclusion simultaneously renders dis-course.
Therefore, it is impossible to forego mythos or to operate without it.
Philosophy proceeds from a rupture beyond the walled city of reason.
This procession is improper, errant and bastardly. Sallis calls atten-
tion to the fact that ‘in Athenian usage a bastard was the child of a
citizen father and an alien mother’:60 an outside that is inside. This
bastard is mythos – an ambiguous, ‘foreign’ strangeness that cannot
be entirely governed or assimilated by the father-son-king-logos.
Mythos simultaneously founds and unfounds philosophy as logos.
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opening of the dialogue, but also its ending. It has the first words and
the last.
The dialogue ends with Socrates’ recitation of a prayer to the
mythic god Pan. When read otherwise, it becomes clear that this
ending interrupts and disfigures Plato’s philosophic discourse, instead
of concluding and allowing for logos to return full circle. Socrates
prays to ‘beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place’ to
grant him ‘beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and
inward man be at one’ (DP, 279c). Why break with the conventions
of the rest of the dialogue by ending with a prayer? Furthermore, if
philosophy and reason mark the end of the mythic age of the gods,
why address this prayer to Pan? Examining Socrates’ supplication at
face value shows that he is asking an outside force to ensure that his
inward self (his soul) is in accord with his outward identity. However,
when read in terms of the disruptive interplay of mythos, it becomes
apparent that this is an impossible request. The many heads of
Typhon that lurk beneath the surface of Socrates’ identity belie any
such resolution. Despite its multiple attempts at synthesis, the text is
littered with pluralities, whether they are the oscillating meanings of
pharmakon and mythos, or the hundred-headed Typhon. As we have
seen, logos and, by extension, philosophic discourse, contain ‘some-
thing’ that they cannot account for or synthesize. Like Socrates, they
contain an inside that cannot be reconciled with their outside per-
sona. Socrates’ questioning of his own identity reveals an excessive,
heterogeneous alterity that inhabits self-knowledge. In this way,
Socrates acknowledges that his identity is not in accord or unified. If
it were otherwise, he would not need a prayer to grant him oneness,
because he would already possess it. Socrates uses prayer to summon
what he does not inherently have. His identity contains something
other that he cannot constellate or reconcile. It is not one (the logic
of the Same), but always already opened out onto an irreducible
other that is, in this case, a many-headed monster. When he endeav-
ours to know himself, he is therefore forced to confront différance –
to come to terms with an alterity that he cannot assimilate. Socrates’
identity crisis presupposes multi-sided complexity. His prayer to
counteract différance seeks the unattainable unification of that mul-
tiplicity, and for this reason, is inherently unfulfilable. Arising out of
that very impossibility, his entreaty cannot, as a result, be realized.
What he beseeches is unachievable. No wonder he enlists divine
power to accomplish it!
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CHAPTER 4
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Distyles
With its strange textual configurations, Glas eludes mastery as well
as conventional reading and thinking even more than most texts.
Therefore, how is one to approach it? It presents a quagmire for many
philosophers, even those attuned to deconstruction. As a case in
point, the philosopher Rodolphe Gasché, who is customarily a pro-
ponent of Derrida’s work, dismisses Glas as ‘literarily playful’
and therefore not ‘philosophically discursive’.2 This rejection echoes
Plato’s denigration of myths as inferior and imperfect forms of logos.
The implication is that, in the eyes of philosophy, play for its own
sake that does not purposefully align itself with philosophy as logos
(and play that discourse cannot readily control) is as inconsequential
as mythos. However, as we have seen, Plato’s dismissal of mythos
also inescapably marks his preservation of it. He simply cannot do
without it. It grounds while simultaneously ungrounding his Phaedrus.
Given this, one begins to recognize that Gasché’s privileging of
Derrida’s ‘philosophically discursive texts’ is his vane attempt to pre-
serve some semblance of philosophy as logos, and to cut off some
degree of deconstruction’s errant discursivity. Despite an ever-growing
fissure that deforms the self-reflexivity of absolute knowledge and
faults the project of philosophy as logos, Gasché still strives to safe-
guard an attenuated form of deconstruction that clings to logocentric
imperatives.
Glas is Derrida’s attempt to read, write and think otherwise, rather
than in the way that philosophy as logos traditionally does. It neces-
sarily fails to achieve the absolute knowledge promised by Hegelian
dialectics. Glas is not just a fancifully playful literary text. It is an
‘event’ that warrants rigorous consideration. As Gasché’s dismissal
illustrates, philosophy as logos does not even consider this ‘event’
(of play) meaningful.3 Nonetheless, as we have seen, play is in fact a
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If I write two texts at once, you will not be able to castrate me. If
I delinearize, I erect. But at the same time I divide my act and my
desire. I – mark(s) the division, and always escaping you, I simu-
late unmyself – I remain(s) myself thus – and I ‘play at coming’
[je ‘joue à jouir’]. (G, 65)
Glas is at least two texts at once, and often even more than two. It
plays without an eye toward a proper philosophical end. The textual
erections (this is a double entendre since the columns of text appear
phallic) play at coming, but as Derrida shows us, they can never
arrive at an all-encompassing meaning.5 Furthermore, the columns
of Genet and Hegel are inscribed and tattooed with(in) other col-
umns, other texts and other tongues. ‘[O]ne is never enclosed in the
column of one single tongue. If there is a system of the tongue, that
system never has the form of this cylindric closure.’6 Absolute trans-
lation is impossible since the ‘system’ of Glas’s tongues remains open.
Embedded within the columns are phrases in other languages, such
as German and French, which remain untouched by the translator’s
pen, as untranslatable aporias. This does not mean that ‘Glas belongs,
in its so-called original version, to the element of the French tongue’
(HTW, 17). On the contrary, not confined to a single language,
‘translation devours Glas, which exhibits in a way a passion for the
foreign tongue’ (HTW, 17).7 This ‘passion for the foreign tongue’ is
also a passionate solicitation of the other – an other that cannot be
read, thought or spoken in any traditional language or manner. Glas
opens out into another space that recalls the ‘foundational’ ground
of mythos in Plato’s Phaedrus. In the preface to the English transla-
tion, Derrida describes his work not only as a construction, but also
as a simultaneous deconstruction:
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that are, through and through, tongue and text. Kulindros always
names a round body, a conveyor roller for displacing stones, for
example in the construction of monuments, pyramids, or obelisks,
of other columns . . . Kulindros is also occasionally a rolled manu-
script, a parchment scroll. (HTW, 17)
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DERRIDA, MYTH AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF PHILOSOPHY
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remain always already within the system are staged in ‘the going-
and-returning from one column to the other (round trip without
circularity and without perfect specularity)’ (HTW, 20). Inasmuch as
Glas is a cut, a rending and a death knell, it is also a gluing and
adherence. ‘This text’, explains Derrida, ‘induces by agglutinating
rather than demonstrating, by coupling and decoupling, gluing and
ungluing [en accolant et en décollant] rather than by exhibiting
the continuous, and analogical, instructive, suffocating necessity of a
discursive rhetoric’ (G, 75). Glas’s operation is renegade and improper.
Instead of following the ‘necessity of a discursive rhetoric’, it proceeds
via the alogos of discursivity’s etymological root, which stipulates
both gathering and joining, and dispersing and scattering.
Glas’s fissured columns turn inside into outside and outside into
inside in such a way that it is hopeless to determine which is which.
This continual reversal and displacement make Glas an indecidable
text. It short circuits any attempt to follow a singular path, or to
arrive at a point. This excess of possibilities continually confronts the
reader. One column intervenes in another column. The complexity
is maddening. Such slips, breaks and agglutinations disrupt logos. In
this disseminative dynamic, savoir absolu is
dragged onto the stage, into the play of forces where it no longer
holds the power to decide, where no one ever holds that power,
where the undecidable forces one to release one’s hold, where one
can’t even hold onto it – the undecidable. (PTS, 23)
The ‘play of forces’ resists decidability, like the pharmakon, which for-
ever oscillates between remedy and poison, or mythos, which resonates
between falsifiable and non-falsifiable discourse. Emergent, aleatory
play disrupts logocentric thought from within. The ‘heterogeneous’
columns ‘deceive and play’ (G, 224) like the joker Thoth. There is no
simple relation between them. Derrida introduces ‘heterogeneous
forces’ into Glas by way of remains, marginalia, citations and the
cutting and joining of columns into the text (of Hegel, of Genet, of
Derrida) in order to show how ‘one cannot resist these forces, or
rather one resists them, but in such a way that the resistance creates
a symptom and is set to work on the body, transforming, deforming
it and the corpus from head to toe’ (PTS, 16–17). The corpus is
sick, beyond cure even with a pharmakon, contaminated with inde-
cidable, aleatory (and parasitic) forces. Through ‘displacements,
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not drunk’ (PS, 27), generating an other reading, one that is irreduc-
ibly indecidable.17 It makes impossible closure of the Hegelian circle of
thought and of the dialectic. Just at the moment that it appears that
the circle might (and where it insistently must) close, it is disrupted and
dislocated, suspended entre-deux. Taylor warns against misreading Glas
with one Cyclopean eye toward decidability or unity: ‘A duplicitous
text written with (at least) two hands at once cannot be approached
single-mindedly’ (A, 274). One must oscillate entre-deux, and read with
one’s ear and tear-ful(l) eye attentive to a non-synthesizable other. The
continual flux between the columns erects while it simultaneously
deconstructs meaning, forbidding foreclosure. Such an irresolution
slips and slides, plays at coming (to a point, perhaps a pyramidal point),
but never arrives. It conceals as it reveals, and reveals as it conceals.
Instead of monuments, as Derrida shows, there is only debris.
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You may think you smell infinite regress once again, but if so, you
are fooling yourself! The girl’s arm is covering up the critical spot
where the regress would occur. If you were to ask the girl to
(please) hand you her salt box so that you could actually see the
infinite regress on its label, you would wind up disappointed, for
the label on that box would show her holding yet a smaller box
with her arm once again blocking that regress.19
Just where the loop appears to close and reappropriate and repeat
the image, there is an aporia that renders closure and the return of
the same, or the ‘infinite regress’ that Hofstadter is concerned with,
impossible. The circle does not close, because the abyss, or gap, pre-
vents it from doing so. The image of the image on the Morton’s Salt
box is a blind spot, and not, as is commonly inferred, a mirror dis-
playing infinite repetition.20 Hofstadter’s familiar example illustrates
strange loops at work, loops that are sometimes mistakenly consid-
ered closed and therefore not strange.21 These strange loops are
generated by and emerge within the wounded, tattooed and breached
distyles of Glas.
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SOUNDING SA
On the Other Side
The odd logic of strange loops haunts the concept of savoir absolu,
which Derrida recasts in the siglum of Sa. In the first line tattooed on
the Hegel column in Glas, Derrida transcribes savoir absolu in an
unusual ‘equation’: ‘Sa from now on will be the siglum of savoir
absolu’ (G, 1). There is more to this interplay than meets the eye.
Hegel considered his encyclopedic book, Phenomenology of Spirit
(cited throughout Glas), to be a tome of absolute knowledge. As
such, in Derrida’s words, ‘all finite books would become opuscules
modeled after the great divine opus . . . so many tiny mirrors catching
a single grand image. . . . a book of absolute knowledge that digested,
recited, and substantially ordered all books’ (D, 46). Savoir absolu/Sa
is the culmination of this enterprise and the fulfilment of philosophy.
However, since this task is carried out in writing, it is always open to
being read and understood not as Hegel intended, but otherwise.22
Therefore, it is impossible to declare savoir absolu/Sa unequivocally.
Sa is also, at the same time, the Saussurian signified (signification
absolue), sa the singular, feminine possessive pronoun, as well as a
homophone of ça, the Freudian id. John P. Leavey points out that
Derrida’s ‘tachygraphy begins its own disruption of the tachygraphic.’23
That is, Derrida’s shorthand launches disturbances and disruptions
of transcription. Sa plays, generating strange loops of indecidability.
The term carries this multiplicity of significations within it simulta-
neously. Its polysemia renders its meaning indecidable, since no one
translation can capture all of its resonances. In reverberating it with
the other side, that of ça of the Freudian unconscious, and therefore
disrupting the ‘sense certainty’ of the here and now with which Hegel
begins his encyclopedia, Derrida writes, ‘it (ça) does not accentuate
itself here now but will already have been put to the test on the other
side’ (G, 1).24 Ça is not contained within the self-consciousness of Sa/
savoir absolu, but is necessarily involved in Sa, which cannot be con-
ceived without it. However, unlike Hegel’s savoir absolu, which thinks
the other and merges it with identity, this Sa/ça cannot be properly
apprehended, since in its ever-deferring multiplicity and indecidabil-
ity, it is never present as such. The unthought remains of Hegel are
inscribed into the Genet column, but that column ne génére pas Sa.
Far from presenting Sa in thought, nothing is generated within the
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strange loops of the two columns, one of which encloses the column
inscribed as Sa.
Sa’s operation mimics that of the oscillation between the columns
of Glas. It works in a double movement. Instead of tolling the
closure of philosophy, it opens out into a space that is neither philo-
sophical nor non-philosophical. Derrida explains the a of Glas and
Sa in the following way: ‘The detached remain(s) collared thereby, by
the glue of differance, by the a. The a of gl agglutinates the detached
differentiae. The scaffold of the A is gluing’ (G, 167). Sa is the double
movement of cutting and adhering. The ‘scaffold of the A’ of Sa (and
Glas) glues, while the S of Sa simultaneously disseminates. The S,
after all, is the ‘the “disseminating” letter par excellence’ (P, 96). Sa
adheres and cuts as it gathers and tears. Whereas the a of Glas and of
Sa ‘agglutinates’, causing the remains to stick together in a heap of
‘detached differentiae’, the s disseminates, scatters, cuts, and errs.
The ‘fallen s’ also ‘[c]over[s] the space between [l’entre-deux] the lips
or displaced letters – in (the) pyramidal nonument [monumanque
pyramidale]’ (G, 34). Like a sheath, the ‘fallen s’ is a strange ‘nonu-
ment’ between the alternatives of presence and absence. It is an abyss
(like the one between the lips) that cannot be thought or spoken by
philosophy as logos.
Sa has yet another resonance. Derrida introduces the myth of
Saturn into the text, associating Sa (with all of its significations) with
the god Saturn, whom he also demarks as ‘Sa.’ In the Hegel column,
Derrida recounts part of the story of Sa-Saturn-Kronos. With the
help of his mother-queen, Gaia (earth), Saturn castrates his father,
Uranus (sky), to become king. Yet, his kingship is as ill-fated as his
father’s, doomed to end violently (in not quite a repetition, but rather
in more like a strange loop). Warned that one of his children would
depose him, Sa swallows each of them at birth.25 However, Gaia
hides the baby Zeus when he is born, and presents Sa with a rock
dressed as a baby instead, which he mistakes for Zeus and ingests.
By tricking him into entombing this supplement in his bowels, Gaia
induces Sa to ‘take a pharmakon that forced him to vomit all the
children he had eaten’ (G, 232). By means of this pharmakon, Sa is
then deposed and castrated, like his father, Uranus.
Derrida’s association of Sa (savoir absolu) and the myth of Sa-
Saturn-Kronos incorporates other resonances. In Hesiod’s account,
Uranus’ refusal to allow Gaia to give birth precipitates her creation
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Disseminating Festivities
Transgressive rituals known as Saturnalias, which were often akin to
Bacchanalias, were held to commemorate Saturn/Sa. James G. Frazer
discusses the Roman Saturnalia as an event
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SECRETING MYTH: THINKING SA OTHERWISE
Such is the pharmakos: double of the king, but in reverse, like those
sovereigns at carnival crowned at holiday time, when order is set
upside down, social hierarchies reversed: sexual prohibitions are
lifted, theft becomes legal, the slaves take their masters’ place, the
women trade their clothes with men; then the throne must be
occupied by the basest, ugliest, most ridiculous, most criminal of
men. But, the holiday once ended, the counter-king is expelled or
put to death, dragging with him all the disorder which he incar-
nates and of which the community is purged at one blow. (emphasis
added, AAR, 489–90)
Akin to the Saturnalia, the rite of the pharmakos – like the pharma-
kos himself – is transgressive, wasteful and mad. By turning the
natural order inside out, the pharmakos creates a revelry of dis-ease.
Reason loses its head. This is not Hegelian inversion, however. Like
Sa’s Saturnalia, the rite of the pharmakos is the riotous interplay of
multiple seeds of dissemination. The play of these significations
imposes a gap. It puts the ‘concept [savoir absolu] out of order, stops
it, jams it inconceivably.’ This revelry cannot be tamed or retired the
day after the festivities. Despite elaborate prescribed rituals created
to get rid of them, these transgressive outsiders within can never be
completely expelled to the outside. Not only does the inside rely on
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the transgressive pharmakoi for its purity – for its supposed reappro-
priation of order and well-being – but significantly these inassimilable
outsiders must come from within. They are part of the very polis that
cannot quite do with them or without them. Like the crypt, they are
necessarily both preserved and suppressed. The pharmakos ceremony
involves simultaneous affirmation and denial. These forces of resis-
tance – as marginalia, citations, remains, pharmakoi – create a
symptom in the corpus (of the text, of the polis, of the philosopher-
king) that deform and transform it. This symptom of dis-ease requires
the pharmakon or pharmakos to cure it, but the pharmakon/pharma-
kos needed to heal and purify it also comprises the very poison that
it is employed to cure. The polysemia of Glas, as that of the pharma-
kon/pharmakos and Sa/ça-Saturn-Dionysus, is irreducibly indecidable.
There is no awakening from this madness, no ‘transparent repose’
to be found. Instead, there is a constant tolling and unending defer-
ral oscillating (like the clapper of a bell) entre-deux: preserving while
suppressing, keeping while expelling, affirming while denying, out-
side while inside. Resounding ceaselessly, the sound of philosophy’s
death knell also rings in a beginning that opens out – like a cut or
tear – from the already broken promise of savoir absolu. This gaping
fissure opens out into the complex network of mythos and logos.
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not ‘intrinsic to the system’ (G, 162), but it is unavoidable. Its exis-
tence reveals that through the act of incorporation, the system of Sa
depends upon something that it cannot include, but that nevertheless
‘assures’ the system of its possibility. This inclusion is nonetheless
impossible since this other within as an outsider is unaccountable
and unlogofiable. By its unavoidable and necessary inclusion, this
‘outside’ deconstructs the system from within. Yet it cannot be
excluded, since this other gives rise to the system. There can be no
system without it. The pharmakon, like mythos, is an inescapable
necessity that contaminates savoir absolu.41 It gives Saturn a belly-
ache, and induces vomiting. In Glas, ‘the taste for and the handling
of poison are declared throughout the text. The text is nourished by
them. . . . glas is a kind of poisoned milk’ (G, 15). ‘Poisoned milk’, as
Derrida so aptly delineates it, is a pharmakon. Mother’s milk, the
primordial source of nourishment, growth and health, carries poison
that undermines, even as it fortifies.
Although Sa cannot incorporate this foreign element into itself, it
unwittingly preserves it as a crypt that is too cryptic for logos to deci-
pher and assimilate by means of speculative dialectics or logocentric
discourse. In Glas, Sa announces the impossibility of fully realizable
thought, of closure. When thought ceases to return to itself, the glas
of Sa (as savoir absolu) is sounded as an indecidable excess inscribed
within the columns of Glas. Glas announces a tolling that opens
out.42 It is an oscillation of nothing that nevertheless disrupts. Even
Glas is barred from closing on itself, from synthesis, since each text
encounters the other text as inassimilable, just as philosophy or Sa
finds the pharmakon indigestible. This poisoned milk (that can also
be salubrious) may indeed come from the (m)other, from mythos.
As Derrida suggests, to read Hegel, or follow after him, is to do
so otherwise through simultaneous negation and affirmation. Glas
attempts to probe the fissures that rupture Sa. In incorporating
Hegel, but failing, inevitably, to digest him completely, these tears are
exposed. Glas alternates between affirmation and denial, and sounds
this strange loop: ‘But the operation is not negative, it affirms with
a limitless yes, immense, prodigious, inaudible. And the operation
constructs, a kind of solid transverse, in order to suspend the bell
between two towers’ (G, 228). The affirmation is as ‘inaudible’ as the
a of différance, yet it nevertheless resounds with a ‘limitless yes’.43
Unable to be conventionally heard, it is not ‘present’, yet undeniably,
neither is it absent.Glas harbours an inherent indecidability that can
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SECRETING MYTHOS
Encrypting
Having examined the column dedicated to Sa-Saturn-Saturnalia-
Dionysus, it is necessary to explore the other column curiously
in interplay with this one. Tattooed within the larger Sa-Saturn-
Saturnalia-Dionysus column is another that begins (although one
gets the sense that this ‘beginning’ is a continuation of something
that never ended) by posing a question: ‘what is it not to read Hegel
or to read him badly, or rather the text Sa? Is this negativity compre-
hended, included, and at work in the text Sa?’ (G, 231).44 This query
is followed by yet another: ‘What would it mean not to comprehend
(Hegel) the text Sa?’ (G, 231). Inscribing this question in bold print
within the Sa-Saturn-Dionysus column suggests that this inscription
is primary, and not secondary. In other words, the column of Sa-
Saturn-Dionysus is introduced as if to answer the questions engraved
within it, while at the same time, it looks as if it was always already
there, even before the questions were asked. It appears that this
inquiry falls directly in the domain of philosophy. Only philosophy
as logos can address this conundrum about the comprehension of Sa.
However, by inscribing these philosophical questions within the col-
umn of Sa-Saturn-Dionysus, Derrida is in effect saying: this inquiry,
although philosophical, cannot be solved or responded to by phi-
losophy as logos.
The fact that these questions are tattooed on the Sa-Saturn-
Dionysus column is equally significant. The transgressive art of
tattooing ‘slips between’ structural polarities such as inside/outside
and differentiation/unification.45 Taylor explains that ‘by repeatedly
alternating between unreconcilable opposites, tattooing (dis)figures a
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What recourse would the text Sa have, and before what authority
[instance] could it lead this nonreading or this bad preliminary
reading, or all the seductions, drifts, perversions, neither real nor
fictive, neither true nor false, that would entrain the text Sa out-
side itself, without subjecting themselves to its [sa] jurisdiction?
(G, 231)
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must fall as remains, and be allowed to play to no end, only for the
sake of play, Derrida cuts and pastes the following into his text: ‘like
such a note at the bottom of the page of the Concluding Unscientific
Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments’ (emphasis added, G, 232).
Derrida lets his reading fall, along with Kierkegaard’s. The two
tangle together. Kierkegaard’s work also ruminates on the margins
and remains of Hegel’s philosophic system, and on the means by
which such fragments upset knowledge and the appearance of truth.
Writing under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus, Kierkegaard
employs indirect communication in order to expose the gaps in
Hegel’s system. He, like Derrida over a century later, recognizes that
the question of philosophy – of savoir absolu – cannot be approached
directly. Doing so only reinscribes the system that one seeks to sub-
vert. Derrida quotes Kierkegaard as follows:
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Secretions
Mythos can never be fully present. It recalls a time not properly
present, a ‘once upon a time’ that is always past. In addition, due to
its irreducibly indecidable nature, it unavoidably disrupts and dis-
seminates. The myth of Saturn, and Derrida’s use of it, illustrates
this. The story at once summons resonances that, although not com-
pletely present, are not absent either. These echoes appear to come
from the other side of sense certainty, from ça, the underworld and
the fruits rooted in the dark womb of the earth, from Dionysus, and
from the pharmakon. As mythos gathers these in, it also disseminates
them, forever opening out into an excess of possibilities, reverberat-
ing between meanings and significations. Mythos both gathers and
disperses. Many scholars of myth have missed the profound signifi-
cance of mythos being neither falsifiable nor non-falsifiable discourse.
As discussed in the first chapter, Brisson establishes the definition of
mythos as discourse that is neither true nor false. It is on this basis
that philosophy as logos views it as inferior, even irrelevant. Since its
status cannot be determined, it is discounted by philosophy. As we
have established, however, looking through the eyes of deconstruc-
tion instead, we see that it cannot be devalued or excluded. Mythos
gives rise to logos, even as it also breaches, tears and deconstructs
logos. It is precisely these aporias that make logos both possible and
impossible. These questions that philosophy as logos cannot answer
can only be approached by means of mythos, whether this mythos is
the pharmacological playground from which the Phaedrus proceeds
and to which the text repeatedly returns, or the Sa played out in the
other column of Glas.
As we have seen, Glas blurs the distinction between inside and
outside. One cannot tell which column is within, and which one is
without. Furthermore, the questions of philosophy tattooed on the
Sa-Saturn-Dionysus column further displace the boundaries. There
is no demarcation or discrepancy between an outside that is inside
and an inside that is outside. The oscillation between these seemingly
incompatible positions is the very point: both are always already
simultaneously and continuously in play. In Glas, there is a strange
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The mother ‘always survives’, she remains to rend and fissure Sa.
‘And to remain, or to leave last, when no one will have any more time.
What can a mother do better?’ (G, 117). Ma is a (m)other, ‘attending,
impassive, fascinating and provoking’, that simultaneously constructs
and deconstructs the logic of Sa. ‘The mother (whatever forename of
pronoun she may be given),’ explains Derrida, ‘stands beyond the
sexual opposition. This above all is not a woman. She only lets her-
self, detached, be represented by the sex’ (G, 134). Ma is an unsettling
‘presence’ that is not a woman, since it is ‘beyond’ sexual dynamics.
Just as the pharmakon seduces Socrates to stray outside of the walled
city of reason, Ma draws Sa beyond its customary course, forever
displacing it. Ma interrupts Sa’s intentionality. It foils Sa’s home-
coming. Ma fails to work (to an employable end). It is the laughter of
the system, its désoeuvrement. Ma remains: already.
To think Sa otherwise is to toll the glas that simultaneously rings
in a beginning that illustrates how mythos is basic to logos. We strain.
It is difficult to hear this clearly, and to see mythos secreted through
philosophy’s tears. These tears open the eyes by blinding and blind
by opening. However, these tears do not arrive simply in response to
philosophy’s death knell. They emerge from mythos, which appears
only in beginning to be lost, but which nonetheless brings to our
thinking its contours, depth and complexity.
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CHAPTER 5
IMPOSSIBLE INCLUSIONS
The preceding chapters have unwaveringly responded to the avoid-
ance of mythos by both philosophy and religion. Since philosophy as
logos views mythos as un-philosophical, and therefore as inferior, it
denies and ignores mythos, refusing to give it any serious consider-
ation, denigrating it, or omitting it altogether from discourse. The
works of Taylor and Derrida serve as valuable resources and provide
sufficiently radical and nuanced methodologies for thinking mythos
as a non-foundational foundation of logos. However, neither of these
thinkers actually undertakes a sustained examination of mythos
and its relationship to logos. Derrida confines himself to alluding to
mythos indirectly, although these intimations are themselves fruitful,
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DERRIDA, MYTH AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF PHILOSOPHY
as we have seen. For the most part, Taylor avoids mythos. When he does
address it, he does so with the same preconceptions that have plagued
both religion and philosophy. These assumptions stem from a key
misconception that mythos simply constructs. What is overlooked is
that it also disseminates and deconstructs. This latter dynamic is
ignored by proponents of mythos who idealize its constructive func-
tions. This study has been borne along by the urgency of re-engaging
traditions that would prefer not to speak of mythos or, if they must, to
do so from the privileged position of a logos that remains blind to its
intimate, inescapable relation to mythos, as if that were possible. These
avoidances perpetuate the belief that mythos exists in an inferior dia-
lectical relation to logos. Restricting mythos in this way makes it
possible, and even preferable, to deal only with logos to the exclusion
of mythos. The two are understood as separate or dialectical, rather
than as co-emergent. In this limited view, only logos is fit for reasoned,
philosophical discourse, and mythos must be cured of its mythicity, of
its ambiguity. To this end, a philosophical antidote is administered to
usher in the light of reason by removing all of the shadows of mythos.
Even when philosophy recognizes that the identity of mythos is tied to
logos, it only acknowledges mythos as an inferior. Logos is unity and
identity; the result of the dialectic is One. Difference is subsumed
under the banner of identity, just as mythos is relegated to logos.
As we have witnessed, the work of Derrida calls this logic into
question by rigorously re-examining Hegel and Plato. In doing so,
Derrida, and Taylor in his wake, reveal the tears inherent within the
dialectic and logos. In approaching a limit that it cannot think or
account for, the system nonetheless includes this limit within it as an
outside that is inside. This incommensurable outside within ruptures
savoir absolu. Instead of the eternal return of the same (i.e. conscious-
ness returning to itself and therefore becoming fully conscious of
itself in the self-presencing of itself to itself), there are strange loops
that never quite close, continually disrupting every logical operation.
The excessive remains that the system attempts to exclude forever
fault it from within. These exterior interiors generate the system that
nonetheless cannot synthesize them. An other other, and a different
difference remain. Identity is not simply the identity of identity-and-
difference. Rather, identity always contains and, in fact, is generated
by a non-identity, synthesis by a non-synthesis, foundation by a non-
foundation. While these ‘non’-entities are not exactly present, neither
are they absent. These non-absent absences and non-present presences
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DERRIDA, MYTH AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF PHILOSOPHY
Poly-Seamy Webs
Kierkegaard’s spider, confronting his web in Either/Or, offers an apt
starting point from which to consider networks and worldwide webs:
What portends? What will the future bring? I do not know, I have
no presentiment. When a spider hurls itself down from some fixed
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DERRIDA, MYTH AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF PHILOSOPHY
126
MYTH AND THE GIFT, IF THERE IS ANY
127
DERRIDA, MYTH AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF PHILOSOPHY
128
MYTH AND THE GIFT, IF THERE IS ANY
129
DERRIDA, MYTH AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF PHILOSOPHY
130
MYTH AND THE GIFT, IF THERE IS ANY
131
DERRIDA, MYTH AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF PHILOSOPHY
132
MYTH AND THE GIFT, IF THERE IS ANY
133
DERRIDA, MYTH AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF PHILOSOPHY
134
MYTH AND THE GIFT, IF THERE IS ANY
135
DERRIDA, MYTH AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF PHILOSOPHY
136
MYTH AND THE GIFT, IF THERE IS ANY
Even though it must leave nothing behind it, even though it must
efface everything, including the traces of repression, this forget-
ting, this forgetting of the gift cannot be a simple non-experience,
a simple non-appearance, a self-effacement that is carried off with
what it effaces. (GT, 17)
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DERRIDA, MYTH AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF PHILOSOPHY
[A]t stake in this forgetting that carries beyond any present is the
gift as remaining [restance] without memory, without permanence,
without consistency, without substance or subsistence; at stake is
this rest that is without being (it), beyond Being, epekeina tes
ousias. The secret of that about which one cannot speak, but which
one can no longer silence. (emphasis added, GT, 147)
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MYTH AND THE GIFT, IF THERE IS ANY
precisely, thought, speech, and desire can never attain. Indeed, the
impossible might well engender thought, speech, and desire to
the very extent that it announces itself and yet remains inaccessible.
(I, 226)
Mythos is both what logos cannot speak about, and what logos can
no longer silence. It is the impossible, like the gift, that ‘engender[s]
thought, speech, and desire to the very extent that it announces
itself and yet remains inaccessible.’ In this way, the gift maintains a
simultaneous relation (albeit, of no conventional sort) to both the
impossible and the possible. It moves between these two. Just as the
impossible ‘might well engender’ logos while nonetheless remaining
inaccessible to it, mythos (as an event) gives rise to logos, even while
remaining inaccessible (in other words, unlogofiable) to it. Logos and
mythos are co-emergent. We must be careful not to oversimplify their
relation by attempting to delineate it in terms of the founder (mythos)
and the founded (logos). There cannot be one without the other. As
we saw in regard to the emergence of the event of play in Chapter 3,
the emergence of logos from mythos is not a linear process paradigm.
Mythos and logos, like the impossible and the possible of the gift, are
always already in relation. Since this relation is not an ordinary rela-
tion in the economy of presence, it is a relation ‘without’ relation.
The ‘without’ marks the impossibility of presence and serves as a
reminder of the fact that the gift is not (a) present.
Relations
As we have seen, the purpose of deconstruction is not to escape
or transcend structure or philosophy. It maintains an intimate, but
non-dialectical and non-binary, relation to structure. As Taylor
expresses it: ‘the codependence of figuring and disfiguring shows
why neither structuralism nor poststructuralism (i.e. deconstruction)
taken by itself is adequate’ (AG, 308).22 The nontotalizing network
of mythos and logos demonstrates just that. Such a non-totalizing
structure always maintains a relation to traditional structure, even
though it is not limited to it, just as mythos always preserves a rela-
tion to logos, and logos to mythos. In regard to the gift, escaping
or transcending circularity or economy is impossible. Such a desire
is an unfulfilable, errant fantasy. Derrida affirms this in speaking of
the gift:
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Even though the gift is the impossible and, as such, does not present
itself to thought or speech, or occur in an apprehendable time, it
nonetheless makes the presentable actions of thought and speech
possible, thus inhabiting them without being limited and defined by
them. The kinship between the impossible and the possible can only
occur as a ‘relation without relation’, which escapes all attribution,
and cannot be related to the possible in any traditional way. This
‘relation without relation’ lacks a definable identity that would allow
one to draw a simple analogy, for example. Therefore the ‘without’
signals that intangible dynamic that prohibits collapsing the relation
of the impossible and the possible, or mythos and logos, into a
straightforward kinship. Yet, the impossible and the possible, like
mythos and logos, nonetheless stand in vital relation to each other.
Carlson elucidates the nature of this ‘relation without relation’:
[T]he impossible is not simply cut off from and opposed to the
possible (which might be realized in knowledge or experience).
Rather, the possible circles around the impossible. The impossible
sets the circle of the possible moving, and thus stands with it in a
‘relation without relation’. (I, 227)
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MYTH AND THE GIFT, IF THERE IS ANY
The impossible always remains, but these remains are not present. It
calls forth the possible and is always within it, giving to the possible
its contours and depth. To convert the impossible into that which can
be spoken, thought and actualized is to annul it by turning it into the
possible. However, as with difference that always remains despite
dialectical synthesis, in spite of attempts to annul the impossible, the
impossible still always remains. This is true on two counts. First, there
is always that which has not yet been thought or spoken, and so
therefore remains. Second, there is the extent to which the impossible
forever remains as the impossible because there is that which cannot
be said, thought, actualized or given over to presence or receivability.
Not even savoir absolu has recourse to the impossible remains. The
impossible (gift), therefore, simultaneously figures and disfigures
the possible.
Mythos functions as the impossible gift event, figuring and disfig-
uring logos. It gives, no thanks to giving. Its involuntary giving is
improper and without purposeful intentionality. The economy of
logos is set into motion by the mythos-gift event that always already
exceeds the economy it engenders, even as it participates in it. Just as
there can be no gift without the economy that it transgresses, and no
economy without the gift-event that exceeds it and puts it into play
(even as the gift-event simultaneously undermines the circular, eco-
nomic path), there can be no logos apart from the unforeseeable
irruption and interruption of mythos. Reciprocally, mythos cannot be
made visible (to the extent that it can be expressed) without logos. As
we have seen, mythos gives rise to logos, and logos, in turn, makes
some presence of mythos possible. Nonetheless, this presencing still
exceeds the limitations of representation. Once mythos makes itself
present – necessarily and inescapably by means of logos – it is no
longer purely mythos. In other words, it has been screened through
logos, and is inextricably bound to it. The mythos-gift event calls
forth structure, discourse and relation (logos), even while it destabi-
lizes these very elements.23 In this dynamic, when mythos is actualized
and made present (to the extent that it can be) through logos, it is no
141
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142
MYTH AND THE GIFT, IF THERE IS ANY
and set aglow by that which it cannot quite think. The impossible
always remains and gives, no thanks to giving, to the possible its
richness, engendering its very possibility.
The gift, like mythos, does not ‘give’ in a traditional sense. It does
not give anything. How, therefore, is one to affirm the gift of mythos?
Although mythos inescapably shadows thinking and logos, it is not
explicitly apprehendable. That is, it is not rationally ‘thinkable’. Its
irreducible indecidability makes it too elusive for us to grasp fully
within the limitations of logos. This gives mythos an irreconcilably
ambiguous quality. Therefore, to affirm mythos in all of its excessive
irreducible indecidability is to acknowledge it in a way that takes this
elusiveness into account. It requires an unusual affirmation that is,
at its core, non-affirmative. This affirmation is not the customary
affirmation of something. Rather, non-affirmative affirmation ‘con-
sists not in affirming, upholding and withstanding what is’ because
it ‘does not answer to ontology any more than to the dialectic’
(APN, 48). It affirms ‘only by an excess of affirmation and, in this
surplus, affirming without anything being affirmed – finally affirm-
ing nothing. An affirmation by way of which everything escapes and
that, itself escaping, escapes unity’ (APN, 49). To affirm mythos
in this manner (that does not assert a thing or a totality), is thus
to disfigure logos by acknowledging that which both escapes and
engenders it.
Far too often we see myth affirmed and theorized without this
acknowledgment. Such strict one-sidedness either heralds or demon-
izes it. All too easily we slip into this temptation, much as Plato
did in ignoring the simultaneous multiple meanings of pharmakon.
When sought within the order of presence and metaphysics, the non-
affirmative affirmation
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144
MYTH AND THE GIFT, IF THERE IS ANY
NO THANKS TO GIVING
It is impossible to speak of mythos except in (and through) logos, and
it is precisely the gift-network that not only makes the mythos-logos
dynamic visible, but also allows access to mythos, as it is already sum-
moned by logos. As demonstrated earlier, there can be no economy
without gift, and no gift without economy. Therefore, gift and econ-
omy come together (as a gift and not a present). In the same way,
mythos and logos figure and disfigure one another. They co-emerge
always already in a ‘relation without relation’. The gift-network gives,
no thanks to giving. If it comes about with the express intention
of giving or of receiving thanks, it would no longer be the gift
that engenders the passion of thought and a ‘feast of thinking’. ‘The
event and the gift, the event as gift, the gift as event must be irruptive,
unmotivated – for example, disinterested’ (GT, 123), confirms
Derrida. Otherwise, such a ‘gift’ would be economic, intentional a
present, and not a true gift at all. The economic present acts not as
an enrichment, but more as a poison, because its presentation with
the expectation of a counter-‘gift’ imposes an indebtedness.
Mythos’ calling forth of logos is disinterested to the extent that
it bears no intended message to be communicated. This event (i.e.
mythos engendering logos) happens. It is neithor a teleological neces-
sity nor something that can be anticipated in advance. Tellingly,
Derrida’s reflections on the gift are summoned by a narrative, Charles
Baudelaire’s short story ‘Counterfeit Money’ (La fausse monnaie).
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DERRIDA, MYTH AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF PHILOSOPHY
The gift, like the event, as event, must remain unforeseeable, but
remain so without keeping itself. It must let itself be structured by
the aleatory; it must appear chancy or in any case lived as such,
apprehended as the intentional correlate of a perception that is
absolutely surprised by the encounter with what it perceives,
beyond its horizon of anticipation – which already appears phe-
nomenologically impossible. . . . a gift or an event that would
be foreseeable, necessary, conditioned, programmed, expected,
counted on would not be lived as either a gift or as an event, as
required by necessity that is both semantic or phenomenological.
That is why the condition common to the gift and the event is a
certain unconditionality. (GT, 122–3)
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MYTH AND THE GIFT, IF THERE IS ANY
ABSOLUTE INTERPLAY
When all play is interplay, as it is in the network of mythos-logos, the
absolu of savoir absolu and philosophy proper must be reconsidered.
As we have seen, mythos and logos are always already in a relation-
ship that is neither binary nor dialectical. Understanding this allows
us to envision them in terms of the network and the gift, where the
foundation is non-foundational and the structure is ‘nontotalizing’,
yet holistic. The ‘parts’ of this ‘whole’ do not form a singular har-
mony. They disperse and gather, seminate and disseminate. While
joining they reach out, and in reaching out, join.When system and
excess are understood to be co-emergent, then the absolute of abso-
lute knowledge, of logos, is disfigured. Such disfiguring solicits
figuring anew.
‘Absolute’ derives from the Middle French ‘absolut’ and Latin
‘absolutus’, which is a participle of ‘absolvere’. As the similarity indi-
cates, ‘absolvere’ is the derivative of ‘absolve’, which, means to loose
from or set free (i.e. acquit). The absolute, therefore, is that which is
freed, separated, loosened, detached or disengaged. In a philosophi-
cal sense, it can also mean that which is unconditioned or unqualified.
It is, in other words, that which is free from conditions, much like
the gift-event. This latter usage is what Hegel has in mind when he
sets out in pursuit of a knowledge that is knowable and ascertainable
for human beings and yet, at the same time, unconditioned. Hegel
resolves to solve what Kant was unable to, by laying out a method of
inquiry that would lead finite beings to an unconditioned, absolute
knowledge. According to Hegel, this knowledge must be grasped
through the Concept, and the Concept would eventually lead to a
knowledge of reality as it is in itself (that is to say, unconditioned).26
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For Hegel, savoir absolu is not affected from the outside, nor
context-dependent. In this sense, it is ‘loosed’ and ‘set free’ from con-
ditionality, corresponding instead to the absolute truth (to God, the
One), to that which is not dependent upon the changeable and finite
(for example, nature and the human). However, upon closer exami-
nation, we see that the Hegelian absolute is dependent upon (and
therefore tied down to) rendering difference in terms of identity. The
other must (by force, if necessary) be taken up into identity. Hegel’s
theory postulates that, in the final analysis, the unknown and
unthought is transformed and brought into the fold of thought. The
underlying assumption is that nothing unthinkable or unknowable
therefore remains. Hegel’s Concept is conditional, despite his best
efforts, because it depends on that assumption, an assumption that
cannot be upheld. Even the absolute bids us to think it otherwise.
Taylor does just this in Confidence Games: Money and Markets in
a World Without Redemption. Drawing on the etymological root of
‘absolute’, Taylor fractures savoir absolu and recasts it as ‘absolute
relativity’ (CG, 326). ‘If’, as Taylor posits, ‘being is relational, there is
nothing that is absolute in the traditional sense of the term because
there is nothing that is not relative. Relativity is what makes every-
thing what it is and as such is absolute’ (CG, 326–7). This absolute is
a ‘virtual matrix, which is neither precisely inside nor outside the
economy’ (CG, 327). ‘Nothing’ is ‘not relative’ and yet, when ‘absolute’
is placed together with ‘relativity’, a strange paradox opens up.
‘Relativity’ relates and brings together, while ‘absolute’ sunders and
pulls apart. Together, these two operate in yet another double move-
ment. Taylor’s ‘absolute’ is not an infinite God, but relativity itself
– a relativity that is not simply relational, because it is absolute in the
sense of ‘unfettered’, ‘freed from’, ‘unconditional’. His analysis must
be refigured even further. If, as Taylor suggests, the network is the
current milieu ‘in which everything arises and passes away’, then all
relations, and specifically that of mythos and logos, must be under-
stood in that context. The prescriptive nature of this understanding
reframes our conception of savoir absolu and philosophy as logos.
Savoir absolu, therefore, becomes savoir de savoir: a knowledge about
one’s knowing.27 This knowledge is intimately tied to non-knowledge,
not in a traditional relation of presence, which would make non-
knowledge into a kind of knowledge, but as we have come to
understand, in a ‘relation without relation’, in which the impossible
resides within and sets the possible into motion. To think the abso-
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MYTH AND THE GIFT, IF THERE IS ANY
lute is to let loose, to keep alive the play that plays for play’s sake, and
to resist all temptations to tighten up or rigidify. As with a bicycle
wheel, if there is too much play in the spokes, the wheel is useless. If
the spokes are over-tightened, the wheel risks failing under its own
strain. The tension on the spokes must be calibrated somewhere
between too little and too much. Taylor explains that self-organizing
systems emerge ‘between order and chaos’ (MC, 24), and like the net-
works that comprise them, function at the edge, somewhere between
order (fixity) and disorder (laxity). When Sa is re-envisioned in terms
of absolute relativity, the gift of mythos can be affirmed and recog-
nized as a disruption and disfiguration necessary to creation and
figuration.
Although not present, and therefore not entirely logofiable,
mythos calls forth logos, and gives to thinking and understanding
their contours without ever being fully present to these activities.
Irreducibly indecidable mythos is the impossible inclusion within
logos. It is the impossible that is always already in interplay with the
possible, and with logos. Without mythos, therefore, philosophy
would not be possible. Mythos gives to philosophy, no thanks to giv-
ing, philosophy’s very possibility, depth and contours. It impassions
thought, calls it forth, and stirs us to think that which, inevitably to
some extent, always remains veiled. The disfigurations of mythos
make possible the very figurations of logos, and of lived experience.
In this way, mythos is both the impossibility, and the possibility, of
philosophy.
149
EPILOGUE
150
NOTES
PREFACE
1
Jacques Derrida, Points . . . , Elisabeth Weber (ed.), trans. Peggy Kamuf
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 356. Henceforth cited as PTS.
2
Indecidables are important ‘concepts’ in deconstruction and are discussed
at greater length in the following chapter. I am grateful to Hugh J.
Silverman, who has pointed out that the French term ‘indécidable’ is better
rendered as ‘indecidable’ in English, since ‘indecidable’ preserves the
oscillation between opposing poles. Undecidable denotes (although this is
certainly not how Derrida construes it, but is rather due to linguistic
associations in English) something impossible, whereas indecidable sug-
gests an ambiguous status that defies any singular category, not something
impossible. Therefore, ‘indecidable’ is used throughout in place of ‘unde-
cidable’. An indecidable (such as mythos) cannot be reduced to one
meaning or the other (truth or fiction), nor is it even possible to decide
the degree to which it participates in either one. Thus it is ‘irredicibly
indecidable’. See for instance, Hugh J. Silverman, Textualities: Between
Hermeneutics and Deconstruction (New York and London: Routledge,
1994), 46, where he writes: ‘Deconstruction goes to the place of indecid-
ables, such as communication (oral presentation/transmission of messages),
écriture (speaking/writing), difference (distinction/deferral), pharmakon
(poison/remedy), trace (footprint/imprint), correspondence (exchanged of
letters/matching of similarities), supplement (additions/replacement), and
so forth. . . . the deconstruction of texts requires the elucidation and elab-
oration indecidables and their indecidability.’
3
Mark C. Taylor, Tears, (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1990), 100. Henceforth cited as T.
4
See Hugh J. Silverman, ‘The limits of logocentrism’, in Inscriptions: After
Phenomenology and Structuralism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern Univer-
sity Press, 1997), 281–93. Henceforth cited as INS.
5
Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), x. Henceforth cited as TM.
6
Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. and Richard Rand
(Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1974), 231. Henceforth
cited as G.
7
Mark C. Taylor, Hiding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 325.
151
NOTES
CHAPTER 1
1
Philosophy, which substantiates itself as embodying logos, and legitimates
itself in terms of logos, unavoidably shares in the attributes as well as the
omissions of logos, its virtues as well as its sins. Logos is the ground of
philosophy, and the ground of logos is also the ground of philosophy.
Therefore, throughout this text, ‘philosophy as logos’ is used on occasion
in place of ‘philosophy’ as a reminder of that essential equivalency.
Likewise, discussions of the foundation of logos are simultaneously dis-
cussions of the foundation of philosophy. Derrida reminds us that ‘[a]ll
the metaphysical determinates of truth, even the one beyond metaphysical
ontotheology . . . are more or less immediately inseparable from the
instance of the logos, or of a reason thought within the lineage of the logos,
in whatever sense it is understood’. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology,
trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1976), 10. Henceforth cited as OG.
2
Increasingly, vital indecidable, unclosable paradoxes seem to lie at the
heart of inquiry for a number of disciplines. It has been routine procedure
in college physics labs for decades that fresh, young observers re-examine
with ever-sophisticated tweaking Thomas Young’s two-hundred-year-old
Double-Slit experiment exposing the essential, puzzling nature of light.
Because light’s indecidably dual, simultaneously particle/wave behaviour
is really not unlike mythos’ indecidability and the resulting dilemma of
how to ‘think’ mythos, it is noteworthy that physics students are typically
confronted with light’s indecidability before exploring quantum mechan-
ics in its more sweeping complexity.
3
Glas is the French word for ‘death knell’ or ‘passing bell’. Geoffrey
Hartman notes its further significance: ‘[Glas] is endlessly “joyced” by the
author, to suggest that voice has no monument except in the form of a
rattle in the throat covered or sublimed by the passing bell. The sound
reverberates in the labyrinth of writing and, in dying, lights it up.’ Geoffrey
Hartman, Saving the Text: Literature/Derrida/Philosophy (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 5–6. The various ‘sounds’ of Glas
are explored in Chapter 4.
4
Derrida is not the first to consider remains. In Ideas Pertaining to a Pure
Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Edmund Husserl
seeks to think the remains; that is, what is excluded in cogitare. Husserl
posits that ‘consciousness has, in itself, a being of its own which in its own
absolute essence, is not touched by the phenomenological exclusion. It there-
fore remains as the “phenomenological residuum,” as a region of being
which is of essential necessity quite unique and which can indeed become
the field of a science of a novel kind: phenomenology.’ Husserl, First
Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. F. Kersten
(Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1983), 65.
Although Husserl’s study begins with the remains, it nonetheless reduces
them to a science and a metaphysics of presence. For this reason, his read-
ing stays within the traditional limits of philosophy, unlike Derrida’s.
152
NOTES
5
Jacques Derrida, ‘The pocket-size interview with Jacques Derrida’, by
Freddy Tellez and Bruno Mazzoldi, trans. Tupac Cruz. Critical Inquiry
33.2 (2007), 381, 362–88. Henceforth cited as PSI.
6
The field of mathematics came to accept this situation when Kurt Gödel,
after Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead’s Principia Mathe-
matica (1910, 1912, 1913), realized that there are ‘remains’ inherent to the
foundation of the system of mathematics that could not be proved math-
ematically (i.e. by applying any of its processes, operations, or assumptions).
Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem argues, in essence (contra Russell and
Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica), that it is ‘impossible for a system to
be both consistent (i.e. free of contradictions) and complete.’ Mark C.
Taylor, Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without
Redemption (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 115. Henceforth
cited as CG. See also Gödel, Kurt. ‘On formally undecidable propositions
in Principia Mathematica and related systems,’ trans. B. Meltzer. http://
www.csee.wvu.edu/~xinl/library/papers/math/Godel.pdf. For the most
part, mathematics accepted that these remains ungrounded and destabi-
lized the whole system on which all its work was based, recognizing the
limits of what could be established by its proofs. Philosophy as logos, how-
ever, has not yet caught up with mathematics. It still resists any such
acceptance of the limits of what can be established by logos.
7
Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, trans. David B. Allison
(Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 102–3. Hence-
forth cited as SP.
8
As we will learn in Chapter 2, thinking the unthought does not mean
bringing it into full presence and knowability. Since it eludes categories
and systems of meaning, it can never be fully conceived or apprehended.
Nonetheless, it remains, not in the mode of presence, but rather, as a nei-
ther-entirely-absent nor-entirely-present ghost haunting logos.
9
Later in this chapter we will explore Hegel’s notion of otherness, in
which identity must transgress its limits in order to recognize itself in the
other.
10
Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1992), 27. Henceforth cited as TSN.
11
Michel Foucault, ‘A preface to transgression,’ in James D. Faubion (ed.),
Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–
1984, Volume II, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: The New Press, 1999),
73, 69–87. Henceforth cited as APT.
12
A more thorough discussion of the outside that is inside as a ‘foreign
plenitude’ within occurs in Chapter 2.
13
Non-affirmative affirmation is a topic covered in Chapter 5.
14
This connects to a Hegelian understanding of the relationship between
difference and identity, which will be discussed later in the chapter.
15
Through the course of this study it will become clear that ‘giving rise to’
does not imply a continuous process paradigm. This statement does not
denote a teleological process. ‘Gives rise to’ must be read as that which
keeps a constant relation to the inherent disruptions and transgressions.
153
NOTES
16
As a consequence of philosophy’s alignment with logos as a means of
expression and self-identification, what faults logos consequently faults
philosophy.
17
In his essay, Foucault further states that ‘we experience not the end of
philosophy but a philosophy that regains its speech and finds itself again
only in the marginal region that borders its limits’ (APT, 78). We will see
how the ‘marginal region’ that remains within philosophy, despite the fact
that philosophy cannot properly think it, is that of logos’ other, mythos,
which is inescapably disruptive and deconstructive.
18
‘Foundation’ is set off by quotation marks in order to mark it off from a
traditional foundation. Such a foundation is in fact non-foundational, as
the rest of this study shows.
19
Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1954), 109. Henceforth cited as IE.
20
Maurice Blanchot, L’Entretien infini [The Infinite Conversation], trans.
Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 431.
Henceforth cited as EI. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 each develop mythos as a non-
absent absence.
21
Customary readings of Plato ignore the indecidability of mythos and the
role that mythos plays in his texts.
22
Luc Brisson, How Philosophers Saved Myths: Allegorical Interpretation
and Classical Mythology, trans. Catherine Tihanyi (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2004), 11. Henceforth cited as HP.
23
Luc Brisson, Plato the Myth Maker, trans. Gerard Naddaf (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1998), 102. Henceforth cited as PM.
24
Brisson does state that, at times, the truth of mythos is, in part and accord-
ing to Plato, dependent on whether or not it accords with philosophical
discourse on the same subject. Even in this case, logos is the supreme met-
ric against which all else is measured. For more on Brisson’s argument see
PM, 91–111.
25
Chapter 3 underscores Plato’s insistence on this internal logic for argu-
mentation and philosophic discourse and demonstrates how elements
within his Phaedrus effectively render such synthesis impossible.
26
This argument regarding the deconstructive propensities of indecidables is
further elaborated in Chapter 3, in a discussion of pharmakon and
mythos.
27
Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 35. Henceforth cited as GT.
28
A discussion of this can be found in the ‘Translator’s Introduction’ to PM,
xii–xxvi.
29
The full import of this as it pertains to Hegel’s dialectic is the topic of
the next subsection.
30
Thomas A. Carlson, Indiscretion: Finitude and the Naming of God
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 16. Henceforth cited as I.
31
John D. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought (Athens:
Ohio University Press, 1978), 144.
32
Relation is of critical importance to us, and is dealt with throughout
in many different ways. One example of a relation of structure to
154
NOTES
155
NOTES
42
G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Humanity
Books, 1969), 417. Henceforth cited as SL.
43
Radical implies something that escapes presence and synthesis, something
untamed and undomesticated. What is meant by radical difference and
otherness will become more evident shortly in the discussion of Derrida’s
and Taylor’s conceptions of difference and otherness.
44
Derrida is not the only thinker who is concerned with Hegel’s domestica-
tion of difference. Heidegger recognizes an ‘unthought’ (other) in the
Hegelian system that he calls ‘the difference between Being and beings’.
From Heidegger’s perspective, this difference cannot be thought in terms
of presence, as Hegel attempts to do. Others, such as Bataille, Merleau-
Ponty, Blanchot, and Emmanuel Levinas, to name but a few, are equally
concerned with an other (a difference) that cannot be reduced to identity.
45
Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1982), 3. Henceforth cited as MP.
46
Lawrence Hatab, Myth and Philosophy: A Contest of Truths (La Salle,
Illinois: Open Court, 1990), 10–11. Henceforth cited as MPA.
47
Mythos and logos remain, perhaps, in an unusual bi-polar disorder.
48
The remaining chapters of Lincoln’s book focus on the ‘return’ to myth in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which occasioned Romanticism,
nationalism and Aryan triumphalism. This ‘return’ is to myth as an ideol-
ogy, and therefore ignores the deconstructive dynamic of mythos that
destabilizes any such totalizing structure. Taking up the banner of myth in
this fashion focuses solely on the structuring aspect of myth, not on its
simultaneous deconstructive aspect.
49
Chapter 2 includes a further discussion of Derridean double movement.
50
Importantly, Socrates is drugged with a pharmakon, which is irreducibly
indecidable. This is discussed in Chapter 3.
51
John Sallis, The Verge of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2008), 28. Henceforth cited as VP.
52
F. M. Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy: A Study in the Origins of
Western Speculation (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), emphasis added,
260–1. Henceforth cited as FR. Chapter 3 deals with these very issues.
53
This parallels Derrida’s idea of play, which operates beyond and without
intention. See Chapter 3.
54
As noted earlier, ideology implies masterability. One of Lincoln’s points,
with which few (if any) of us would argue, is that mythos can be dangerous
because it can be used, adapted and fashioned into a political or ideologi-
cal weapon. Lincoln points out how genocides, for example, have been
justified and carried out via the abuse of mythos. However, this overlooks
the ‘fundamental’, deconstructive aspect of mythos. Just as he misses
mythos’ irreducible indecidability, he also ignores the ‘dis’ of dis-course,
which disseminates and resists every attempt at synthesis.
55
This recalls Derrida’s playful subtitle, ‘hors d’oeuvre’, that begins Dissemi-
nation, thereby deconstructing the very function of a preface by inscribing
that which ‘will not have been a book’ (D, 3). This also brings to mind
Blanchot’s non-absent absence of writing, which simultaneously con-
structs and deconstructs every book.
156
NOTES
CHAPTER 2
1
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1978), 6. Henceforth cited as WD.
2
Derrida first uses soliciting in ‘Différance’ in a discussion of the privileging
of presence in metaphysics: ‘This privilege is the ether of metaphysics, the
element of our thought that is caught in the language of metaphysics. One
can delimit such a closure today only by soliciting the value of presence
that Heidegger has shown to be the ontotheological determination of
Being; and in thus soliciting the value of presence, by means of an inter-
rogation whose status must be completely exceptional’ (MP, 16). Later in
the essay he picks this up again: ‘It is the domination of beings that dif-
férance everywhere comes to solicit, in the sense that sollicitare, in old
Latin, means to shake as a whole, to make tremble in entirety’ (MP, 21).
3
As Derrida reminds us, in speaking of Heidegger’s avoidance of Geist,
which Heidegger does in order to try not to get stuck in its traditional,
metaphysical limitations, ‘all of those modalities of “avoiding” . . . come
down to saying without saying, writing without writing, using words with-
out using words.’ Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question,
trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1989), 2. In other words, these ‘modalities of avoiding’ do
not successfully avoid. Instead, through this ‘avoidance’, the ‘avoided’ ele-
ment reappears to subvert that which had tried to avoid it. To pay heed to
the disruptions that are always already underway is to witness the ways in
which philosophy’s avoidance of mythos has unwittingly reinscribed and
re-marked mythos in logos.
4
As mentioned in the preface, this reading is not final or totalizing either.
These ideas will be explored shortly in regard to Derrida’s reading of
Levinas.
5
As opposed to other usages, such as to slip into bed or to slip (by stealth)
into the room.
6
For example, biology identifies constantly dividing cells as labile.
7
Note that the use of the phrase, ‘gives rise to’ parallels the usage of the
phrase in regard to mythos and logos (mythos gives rise to logos). This
phrase does not imply a continuous process paradigm or a teleological
necessity. Rather, logos emerges through the unforeseeable ‘event’ of
mythos, and mythos emerges (in terms of presence) through the structures
of logos. For more on this, see the discussion of emergence in Chapter 3
and the analysis of Derrida’s gift-event in Chapter 5.
8
‘Pas de deux’ must also be read doubly as both ‘two-step’ and ‘not two’.
‘Not’ is not a negation. The pas de deux is both simultaneous and separate,
as will become clear. Barbara Johnson, the translator of Dissemination,
uses this term in her introduction to describe ‘both a dance of duplicity
and an erasure of binarity’ (xxvii).
9
Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New
York: Harper and Row, 1969), 47. Henceforth cited as IAD.
10
Taylor further adds to his reading of Heidegger by commenting on the sig-
nificance of the cleavage on which the temple is situated: ‘The alternating
157
NOTES
strife of world and earth forms the “tear” (Riss) that lies in the midst of
Being and beings’ (A, 50). Taylor takes this yet a step further by
suggesting that ‘cleaving’ has a double meaning (just as tearing does): it
is both to divide and to adhere, simultaneously joining and separating (A, 48;
T, 113).
11
In Face of the Deep, Catherine Keller tantalizingly opens her ‘pre/face’
with the following: ‘What if beginning – this beginning, any beginning,
The Beginning – does not lie back, like an origin, but rather opens out?
“To begin” derives from the old Teutonic be-ginnan, “to cut open, to open
up,” cognate with the Old English ginan, meaning “to gape, to yawn,” as a
mouth or an abyss’. Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of
Becoming (Routledge: New York, 2003), xv. In arguing for creation ex pro-
fundis as opposed to creation ex nihilo, Keller begins with a tear that opens
out. This ‘beginning’ is in fact a gaping cut.
12
A painting by Mark Tansey, suggestively entitled Doubting Thomas, pref-
aces Taylor’s book. It depicts a car that has come to a stop in the middle
of a highway. The passenger door is open and not far from it, in the fore-
front of the painting, is a man (a postmodern version of St. Thomas, as
the title suggests) kneeling over the road as if in the process of bending
down in the act of prayer. His left hand is outstretched and probes the
great crack that has opened across the macadam (that has perhaps origi-
nated from a rocky cleft at the margins of the road’s surface, although
the true origin of the fissure remains elusive), scarring and disrupting it.
The chasm-like crack has dislocated the centre line of the road along with,
one might infer, Thomas’s faith. It is also worth noting that ‘Altarity’
is spelled with an ‘a’, not an ‘e’, which simultaneously resonates with
Derrida’s ‘a’ of différance, makes visual reference to the ‘A’ of the Hegelian
pyramid that houses a crypt and recalls a religious altar.
13
Many writers refer to this essay as a piece of Festschrift. However, a
Festschrift is done in gratitude. It blindly assumes that the text being
read is limited to the author’s intent. Derrida insists on reading Levinas
not in gratitude, but in ingratitude. The title of Derrida’s piece comes
from a phrase of Husserl’s, ‘im selben Augenblick’ (‘at that very moment’).
Derrida considers Husserl’s phrase in Speech and Phenomena (see 49ff)
and in this piece on Levinas picks it up again.
14
Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, in Robert
Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (eds), Re-Reading Levinas (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1991), xii, xi–xviii.
15
In his consideration of ethical Saying (le Dire) in contrast to the ontologi-
cal language of the Said (le Dit), Levinas is concerned with intentionality
(and by extension, decidability), which implies a metaphysical presence.
16
Simon Critchley, ‘ “Bois” – Derrida’s final word on Levinas’ in Robert
Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (eds), Re-Reading Levinas (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1991), 171,162–89. Henceforth cited as B.
17
This double movement between masculine/Same and feminine/Other is
paralleled by Sa and Ma in the analysis of Glas in Chapter 4.
18
Jacques Derrida, ‘At this very moment in this work here I am’, in Robert
Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (eds), Re-Reading Levinas, trans.
158
NOTES
159
NOTES
25
This relates to the discussion of analogies of relation, as opposed to those
of attribution, in Chapter 1. Also, for a discussion of ‘relation without
relation’ see Chapter 5.
26
This is no ordinary play. See the discussion of Derridian play in Chapter 3.
27
Oikēsis is examined in the next section.
28
Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins,
trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1993), 126. Henceforth cited as MB.
29
Chapter 4 is devoted to an in-depth exploration of Sa as it appears in
Derrida’s Glas. In the beginning of Glas, Derrida states that ‘Sa from now
on will be the siglum of savoir absolu’ (G, 1). This siglum refers to Hegel’s
idea of Absolute Knowledge, which marks the completion of philosophy.
Sa as savoir absolu sees and therefore knows all. Its gaze accounts for
everything. Nothing remains unseen and therefore unknown. The notion
of a seeing not aligned with sa is playing off of the French verbs, where ‘to
see’ (voir) literally lacks the sa of savoir. Such linguistic play refigures
knowing and knowledge.
30
John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion
Without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 312.
Henceforth cited as PT.
31
In a footnote, the translator notes that ‘a play on words has been lost in
translation . . . the difference between the e and the a of différence/dif-
férance can neither be seen nor heard. It is not a sensible – that is, relating
to the senses – difference. But, he [Derrida] goes on to explain, neither is
this an intelligible difference, for the very names by which we conceive of
objective intelligibility are already in complicity with sensibility. Theōrein
– the Greek origin of “theory” – literally means “to look at,” to see; and
the word Derrida uses for “understanding” here is entendement, the noun
form of entendre, to hear’ (MP, 5). Derrida’s use of language demonstrates
the degree to which sensibility and intelligibility are mutually implicated.
They are accomplices in their perpetuation of logocentrism, and each
assumes this presence – a presence that the senses are enlisted to attune
themselves to, even to the exclusion of all other modes of reception – as
the very foundation of theoretical understanding.
32
Chapter 5 includes a discussion of the economic circle that always returns
home from whence it departed. Recall that in Hegelian thought, thinking
must come back, full circle, to itself in order to achieve absolute
knowledge. Différance, on the other hand, works by disseminating. Always
errant, it forever wanders, disrupting and deferring presence, thereby pre-
venting the return of difference to identity, and rendering all knowledge
(and logos) incomplete. This other operation is not the least bit economic
because losses (negations) are not always turned into gains. It leaves unac-
countable remains. Economic systems (like Hegel’s), on the other hand,
strive to transform losses into gains by negating the original negation.
Their goal is to leave nothing unaccounted for by returning difference to
identity. As we have seen, this operation cannot exist apart from the
remains that are within the system. Therefore, the circle is always already
160
NOTES
161
NOTES
CHAPTER 3
1
Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Society in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet
Lloyd (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press Inc., 1980),
239–40.
2
Shortly after this chapter was completed, John Sallis’s Verge of Philosophy
was published. Strangely echoing what this chapter sets out to do, Sallis
writes, ‘one could envisage still another discourse that would complement
162
NOTES
163
NOTES
164
NOTES
21
In his translation of the Phaedrus, Stephen Scully comments that
Socrates is punning on Phaedrus’ name and that Phaedrus is anything but
a ‘Bright-Counsel’, and instead, is ‘dim-witted and undisciplined in aes-
thetic or philosophical judgment’. Stephen Scully, ‘Interpretative essay’, in
Plato’s Phaedrus (Newburyport, Massachusetts: Focus Philosophical
Library, 2003), 78, 73–99. The oppositions staged in Plato’s text are ironic
and ambiguous.
22
Indeed, the entire dialogue is also about love and bonds. Of course,
the other logic at work in the text calls into question every perceived
intimacy while simultaneously revealing unsuspected ones, such as the
non-oppositional affinity between logos and mythos.
23
For Hegel, Socrates ‘carried out the command of the God of knowledge,
“Know Thyself,” and made it the motto of the Greeks, calling it the law
of the mind, and not interpreting it as meaning a mere acquaintanceship
with the particular nature of man. Thus Socrates is the hero who estab-
lished in the place of the Delphic oracle, the principle that man must look
within himself to know what is Truth.’ G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the His-
tory of Philosophy, Volume I, trans. E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson
(Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, Inc., 1974), 435. In
Hegel’s analysis, the Delphic injunction urges Mind to know itself, and
through a dialectical movement, come into contact with the underlying
unity of the Absolute (savoir absolu). Mythos and pharmakon (along
with Typhon), however, mark the impossibility of such fulfilment, as this
study reveals.
24
Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Stephen Scully (Newburyport, Massachusetts:
Focus Philosophical Library, 2003), 230a. Henceforth cited as PH.
25
For a thought-provoking retelling of Cadmus’ defeat of Typhon see Roberto
Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, trans. Tim Parks (New
York: Vintage Books, 1994), 377–89. Cadmus is responsible for introduc-
ing the Greek alphabet. This aligns him with the Egyptian god, Thoth,
who figures predominantly in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ and is a source of discus-
sion later in this chapter. Cadmus, although identified as Greek, was not
born in Greece. He, too, is a foreigner, although it appears that he under-
goes a process of domestication that Thoth does not. When Typhon
defeats Zeus, the Olympians flee to Egypt. Calasso refers to Cadmus’ gift
of the alphabet as ‘ “gifts of the mind”: vowels and consonants yoked
together in tiny signs, “etched model of a silence that speaks” – the alpha-
bet. With the alphabet the Greeks would teach themselves to experience
the gods in the silence of the mind and no longer in the full and normal
presence, as Cadmus himself had the day of his marriage’ (390–1). As
Calasso suggests, the invention of writing (which concerns Derrida in
Plato’s Phaedrus) also marks the withdrawal of the gods. Their disruptive
trace (which is neither absent nor present) is inscribed within the alphabet,
within writing.
26
‘Monster’ derives from the Latin monstrum which, in turn, is related to the
verb monstrare, which means to ‘show’ or ‘reveal’. A monstrum, therefore,
is a message that comes from afar, improperly entering into the regulated
order as an undomesticated stranger. Monsters disclose dis-closure.
165
NOTES
27
Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters (London: Routledge,
2003), 13. Henceforth cited as SGM. In Theogony, Hesiod describes the
hundred snake heads of Typhon as each sending forth a different voice:
‘and inside each one of these horrible heads / there were voices / that threw
out every sort of horrible sound / for sometimes / it was speech such as the
gods / could understand, but at other / times, the sound of a bellowing
bull, / proud-eyed and furious / beyond holding, or again like a lion /
shameless in cruelty, or again it was like the barking of dogs, / a wonder to
listen to, / or again he would whistle so the tall mountains re-echoed to it.’
Hesiod, Theogony, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1968), lines 829–34. Henceforth cited as TH.
28
Andrew Gibson, Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1996), 237.
29
Sigmund Freud’s seminal essay on das Unheimliche, or the uncanny, iden-
tifies it as that which is simultaneously das Unheimliche and das Heimliche.
That is, it is both ‘unknown and unfamiliar’ and ‘familiar’, ‘intimate’ and
‘homely.’ It is that which is ‘familiar’ and ‘concealed and kept hidden’.
Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David Mclintock (New York: Penguin
Books, 2003), 132. Henceforth cited as U. The uncanny, therefore, is ‘the
frightening element . . . that has been repressed and now returns’ (U, 147).
Something ‘that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it
only through being repressed’ is now revealed and brought out into the
open (U, 148). Freud sees modernism as uncanny, since it stages the return
of the previously repressed ‘primitive’. The similarities between mythos
and the uncanny are developed in the course of this chapter.
30
See also Mary-Jane Rubenstein’s Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphys-
ics and the Opening of Awe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008),
which makes a similar point. She argues that philosophy’s genesis is
thaumazein, which ‘arises when understanding cannot master that which
lies closest to it – when, surrounded by utterly ordinary concepts and
things, the philosopher suddenly finds himself surrounded on all sides by
aporia. . . . Wonder, then, comes on the scene neither as a tranquilizing
force nor as a kind of will-toward-epistemological domination, but rather
as a profoundly unsettling pathos. . . . the philosopher’s wonder marks his
inability to ground himself in the ordinary as he reaches toward the
extraordinary; it indicates, in fact, that the skyward reach has rendered
uncanny the very ground on which the philosopher stands. . . . it leaves
thinking thus ungrounded’ (3–4).
31
The Typhonic, unnamable other is perhaps the result of the play of dif-
férance. This echoes Derrida’s final words in ‘Structure, sign, and play in
the discourse of the human sciences’: ‘Here there is a kind of question, let
us still call it historical, whose conception, formation, gestation, and labor
we are only catching a glimpse of today. I employ these words, I admit,
with a glance toward the operations of childbearing – but also with a
glance toward those who, in a society from which I do not exclude
myself, turn their eyes away when faced by the as yet unnamable which is
proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is
in the offing, only under the species of the nonspecies, in the formless,
166
NOTES
167
NOTES
168
NOTES
46
In his translation, Stephen Scully calls Thamus ‘Ammon’ and gives the fol-
lowing explanation: ‘I accept Postgate’s emendation of thamoun (Thamus)
for theon (“god”). According to Herodotus (2.42), Ammon also known
as the sun god Ra, is the Egyptian name for Zeus; This god-king differs
from a philosopher-king in that he pronounces, more in the manner of
a prophet (cf. 275c8), than of a philosopher exploring the truth of a
statement’ (PH, 64).
47
In GT, Derrida turns the notion of gift on its head. See Chapter 5, which
analyzes Derrida’s notion of the gift in terms of mythos. Thoth’s gift to the
king is not (simply) (a) present. In other words, this is no ordinary present,
but one that ruptures the very economy of presence.
48
See PH 274e–275b.
49
Although referring to the mystical foundation of law, this description
encapsulates Thoth’s refusal to invoke logos as a response. Jacques
Derrida, ‘Force of law: the “mystical foundation of authority” ’, trans.
Mary Quaintance, Cardozo Law Review 11.5–6 (1990), emphasis added,
943, 920–1045. Henceforth cited as FL.
50
The full import of Taylor’s statement and the ways in which alterity (or, as
Taylor rewrites it, ‘altarity’) infects the entire dialogue are examined at the
end of this chapter in an analysis of the Phaedrus’ closing prayer to Pan.
51
Francis Guibal, ‘The otherness of the other – otherwise: tracing Jacques
Derrida’, Parallax 10.4 (2004), 22, 17–41. Henceforth cited as O. For
another thought-provoking consideration of Plato’s good, see VP, 29–52.
52
In this sense, the project of philosophy could be considered a mythology.
That is, a fiction.
53
See the discussion of Hegel’s inner contradiction in Chapter 1.
54
Derrida confirms this abiding understanding in an interview, proclaiming,
‘it was not a question of opposing a dialectic. Be it opposition to the dia-
lectic or war against the dialectic, it’s a losing battle. What it really comes
down to is thinking a dialecticity of dialectics that is itself fundamentally
not dialectical.’ Jacques Derrida, ‘I have a taste for the secret’, trans.
Giacomo Donis, in Giacomo Donis and David Webb (eds), A Taste for the
Secret (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), 33, 1–92. Henceforth cited as TS. This is
what we have attempted to do throughout.
55
In part, Taylor derives his term, ‘nonfoundational foundation’, from
Derrida’s essay, ‘Force of law’. Derrida describes a ‘mystical foundation’
that is before the law and other to it, and thus grounds and ungrounds the
law itself. This ‘foundation’ constructs the law that it nevertheless escapes:
‘Its very moment of foundation or institution . . . the operation that con-
sists of founding, inaugurating, justifying the law (droit), making law,
would consist of a coup de force, of a performative and therefore interpre-
tive violence that in itself is neither just nor unjust and that no justice and
no previous law with its founding anterior moment could guarantee or
contradict or invalidate’ (FL, 941–3).
56
This matrix is akin to the network or gift examined in Chapter 5.
57
In resisting structure, they also unwittingly reinscribe it, lending to a
simultaneous construction and deconstruction. This is illustrative of our
169
NOTES
earlier discussion about the codependence of system and excess, and struc-
turalism and post-stucturalism.
58
Mark C. Taylor, About Religion: Economies of Faith in Virtual Culture
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 83. Henceforth cited as AR.
59
Jacques Derrida, On the Name, Thomas Dutoit (ed.), trans. David Wood,
John P. Leavey Jr. and Ian McLeod (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1995), 100–1. Henceforth cited as ON.
60
John Sallis, Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s ‘Timaeus’ (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1999), 120.
61
Recall here as well that for Plato, speech is superior because, unlike
writing, it is present.
62
Given Derrida’s concern with speech and the privileging of presence in
Plato’s Phaedrus, it is curious that he did not address the ending prayer
in his analysis of the text.
CHAPTER 4
1
As mentioned earlier, ‘gives rise to’ does not connote a linear process.
Mythos and logos are co-emergent in the same way as event and structure,
which were analyzed in the previous chapter. This is discussed in greater
detail in Chapter 5.
2
Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of
Reflection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 4. As dis-
cussed in the first chapter, discursive carries a double meaning of both
gathering and dispersing. Gasché’s use of the term unintentionally puts
both of these meanings into play, thereby subverting his own privileging
of a logocentric discursiveness.
3
In The Moment of Complexity, Taylor suggests that the ‘combinatorial
play’ of networks encourages us to reconsider meaning as playful ‘interac-
tive events’: ‘Rather than viewing events as meaningful, meaning must
be understood as an event.’ Mark C. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity:
Emerging Network Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001),
214. Henceforth cited as MC.
4
Genet’s name also echoes the homophones, je nais, meaning ‘I generate’
and genêt, a flower.
5
Castration emerges as one of many themes in the text. Later in the chapter
this thread is picked up in relation to Saturn. For Jacques Lacan, the threat
of castration marks the entrance of the child into the symbolic order,
which is also the paternal order of logos, of language. Derrida, however,
refuses to submit to this genealogy. That is, he will not write or think
exclusively within the domain of the father-son-(philosopher-)king. At the
same time, Derrida cannot but be castrated by his text whose fissured col-
umns of writing construct and deconstruct beyond his own intentions.
This double effect of conservation and suppression is a reoccurring motif
in Glas, and is examined later in the chapter. For studies on the theme of
castration in Glas see Gregory Ulmer, ‘Sounding the unconscious’ in
170
NOTES
171
NOTES
13
Derrida translates Hegel’s Aufhebung a bit playfully as relève, which means
both to lift up (as Hegel’s Aufhebung does) and to relieve (i.e. to relieve
of a burden). Derrida’s relève is inscribed with the disseminating mark of
différance.
14
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Glas-piece: a compte rendu,” Diacritics 7.3
(1977), 29–30, 22–43. Henceforth cited as GP.
15
The ‘relation without relation’ of the columns of Glas mirrors the
relationship between mythos and logos. Chapter 5 includes a discussion
of the relation of these two as a ‘relation without relation’.
16
As it turns out, Saturn/Sa is associated with Dionysus. This connection is
explored later in the chapter.
17
In his preface to Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel describes philosophical
truth in the following way: ‘The True is thus the Bacchanalian revel in
which no member is not drunk; yet because each member collapses as
soon as he drops out, the revel is just as much transparent and simple
repose’ (PS, 27). Hegel’s preface is necessary in order to explain his large
and wide-ranging work, which includes topics as seemingly diverse as the
family and an academic critique of Kant’s categorical imperative, with
styles varying from parables to philosophic discourses. In other words,
without the introduction, the Phenomenology ceases to make perfect sense,
to be entirely logical. Therefore, Hegel must write his preface in order to
explain his work. (See Derrida’s critique of Hegel’s necessity for a preface
that automatically acts as an excessive exterior within Hegel’s work, dis-
rupting its intentions and preventing logic’s closure in ‘Outwork, prefacing’
in Dissemination, 1–60.) Furthermore, the entire Phenomenology is itself a
preface to Hegel’s Science of Logic. The ‘revelry’ of Hegel’s Bacchanalia is
the seemingly disjointed, chaotic moments of the dialectic that may appear
to be drunk and out of control (if one focuses simply on a snapshot of one
movement, such as the movement into otherness before consciousness is
for-itself). However, in the final analysis (which takes into consideration
the end point of the dialectical movement and therefore the movement as
a whole), there is ‘transparent and simple repose’. As Hegel states imme-
diately after what is quoted above, ‘Judged in the court of this movement,
the single shapes of Spirit do not persist any more than determinate
thoughts do, but they are as much positive and necessary moments, as
they are negative and evanescent’ (PS, 27–8). The ‘single shapes of Spirit’
are ‘necessary moments’ – as Bacchanalian as they may be – but in the
end, philosophical truth recollects itself in order to repossess and return to
itself as savoir absolu. The movement arrives at the identity of identity-
and-difference. This is the ‘transparent and simple repose’ that Hegel
speaks of. The road travelled to get to this point has moments that,
although they may appear errant, such as the movement into difference,
into otherness before consciousness returns to itself in order to exist
for-itself, actually stage the return of difference to identity. They enact
a homecoming to a peace of mind from the disruptive and disorderly
conduct under the influence of drunken ‘thoughtlessness’. However, in
recalling the wayward opening movements of Plato’s Phaedrus, one is
172
NOTES
173
NOTES
174
NOTES
25
Saturn’s swallowing of his children parallels the movement of the dialec-
tic, where difference is ‘ingested’ by identity.
26
Note the strange similarity here between Uranus and Ra, who tried to
prevent Nut from giving birth. Thoth creates an excess of days so that
Nut can give birth.
27
Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melan-
choly: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (New
York: Basic Books, 1964), 135. Henceforth cited as SM.
28
Ned Lukacher, ‘K(Ch)ronosology’, Sub-Stance 8.4 (1979), 59, 55–73.
Henceforth cited as K.
29
There are some notable similarities between Sa/Saturn and Thoth. First,
there is an inherent ambiguity, an ‘internal contradiction’, associated with
Kronos/Saturn that, like the translation of pharmakon, appears to be put
to rest by fixing its character as if no such duplicity exists. As we have seen,
however, the repressed returns. In other words, this ambiguity disrupts
Sa’s identity, despite the fact that the Romans attempted to render it one
way as opposed to another. Furthermore, in this move, the Romans asso-
ciate Sa with a system of counting and money. Thoth, too, is associated
with weights and measures (see Chapter 3). The connection of Saturn
with money and a system of exchange and accounting cannot but bring
to mind Hegel’s savoir absolu, which is a system par excellence, set up to
account for everything.
30
Plato, The Laws, trans. Trevor J. Saunders (New York: Penguin Books,
1970), 713a. The section in the Statesman is 269a–274d.
31
Taylor’s discussion of Sa hinges on the element of time. See Tears, 74–5
(playing off of chronos as time, the chapter is entitled, ‘The anachronism
of a/theology’) and Altarity, 293–5. This false origin does not undo the
relevance of Taylor’s argument. In fact, it works as an anachronism, caus-
ing Taylor’s work to stray into philosophy’s abyss in ways that Taylor had
not envisioned or intended. Richard Kearney, citing Heidegger’s Saturn
(which Heidegger also falsely links with time), suggests that there is a
‘ “chronological” character . . . captured in Kronos’ threefold act of
devouring, substitution and castration, each of which represents a funda-
mental aspect of time. . . . In this reading, cyclical time which seeks to
return to itself gives way to chronological time which acknowledges
the ineluctability of historical transience and mortality’ (SGM, 170).
Kearney’s analysis suggests that Saturn marks the rupture of the circle, of
cyclical time, and thrusts finite beings into ‘the ruptures of mortal exis-
tence’ (SGM, 170). In his reading, Saturn’s monstrous qualities emerge.
Perhaps like Typhon, Saturn inscribes the tears or fissures that make clo-
sure, whether of self-knowledge or of time, impossible.
32
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey
(New York: Avon Books, 1998), 290. Henceforth cited as ID.
33
See Freud’s account of the myth in terms of a fourteen-year-old male
patient in The Interpretation of Dreams, 657–8, where he misrecollects it.
Lukacher provides a thought-provoking analysis of this (Freudian) slip.
Freud’s error inscribes his own pathology into his theory of castration,
175
NOTES
176
NOTES
177
NOTES
CHAPTER 5
1
Maurice Blanchot, ‘Affirmation and the passion of negative thought’, in
Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (eds), Bataille: A Critical Reader (Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 47, 41–58. Henceforth cited as APN.
2
In gemmology, an inclusion is a tiny flaw or marking within the gem itself.
It is a visible, interior fissure included within. I thank Ed Casey for point-
ing this out to me.
3
See Chapter 1 for an analysis of inner contradiction.
4
This anticipates a reading of absolute that occurs later in the chapter, in
which the absolute is viewed in terms of its etymological roots, linking it
to that which is ‘loosed’ and absolved.
5
Blanchot’s statement is also a critique of Heidegger’s existential analysis in
Being and Time that views ‘being toward death’ as the possible. Critical of
Heidegger’s one-sided promotion of possibility, Blanchot and Derrida
both re-envision it otherwise.
6
Mark C. Taylor, Hiding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 325.
Henceforth cited as H.
7
Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or Volume I, trans. David F. Swenson and
Lillian Marvin Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), 24.
8
Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty likens myth to an ‘implied spider’ in her study
The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1998). Although she examines questions of identity and
difference that plague any methodological study of myth in the post-
modern era, her work does not pursue these issues with any philosophical
rigor. It is not the relation of mythos and logos that interests her. She views
myth solely in terms of its capacity to construct narratives, thus ignoring
the indecidable, disseminative aspects of mythos.
9
Taylor devotes a small segment of the chapter entitled ‘Screening informa-
tion’ in MC, 201–14, to myth and summarily touches on the role of myth
in terms of the network in AG, 16–32.
10
This perspective, although clearly articulated in After God, was confirmed
in a conversation when Taylor insisted that, if deconstruction has any sort
of ‘essence’ or ‘foundation’, it would be the act of criticism – of writing –
itself. However, it is possible to take issue with this perspective insofar
as Derrida showed himself to be concerned with sociopolitical issues.
Derrida’s later work on friendship and hospitality, for example, demon-
strates that he is occupied with some practical aspects of lived experience,
as well as with criticism. Certainly deconstruction does articulate alterna-
tive structures by demonstrating that no structure is as it seems, and that
178
NOTES
there is always another aspect to it. That core realization opens an invita-
tion to see and to proceed otherwise. Derrida’s abiding generosity towards
generations of students, colleagues and friends alike further suggests that
his work did not comprise just negative criticism, but also practice – a
practice that influenced many to see beyond the limitations of a structur-
alist world. Taylor is one such beneficiary. Taylor’s own works emerge
from the creative possibilities articulated by Derrida. Derrida’s important
insights on structures and systems unquestionably promoted creativity
and offered new potentialities. It is only by discovering how to disassemble
a wall, by ascertaining its permeability, that it becomes conceivable to see
over or beyond it. Taylor’s After God would have been unimaginable apart
from the possibilities that came about as a result of both Derrida’s criti-
cism and guidance. Inasmuch as After God may diverge – in some crucial
ways – from Derrida, it also undeniably emerges from within the creative
openings he articulated.
11
See The Moment of Complexity, 11–12, where he uses his statement
from Hiding in order to ‘anticipate the argument of The Moment of
Complexity’.
12
Syn means ‘together’ and ballein ‘to throw’. Symbols, therefore, throw
things together.
13
This explains why criticism born of a limited understanding of mythos
suspiciously links it to master narratives, and therefore thinks that myth
should be avoided at all costs.
14
Taylor’s oversight is similar to translating ‘pharmakon’ as either ‘remedy’
or ‘poison’. He fails to acknowledge the inherent slippage and indecidabil-
ity of mythos.
15
For more on how religion is network, see After God, 12–33.
16
In Confidence Games (which falls between The Moment of Complexity and
After God), Taylor is intent on maps. He asserts that ‘[i]n this uncharted
territory, maps matter’ (CG, 329) and in effect, as a cartographer, he draws
a new network of religion and culture. Certainly the territory is ‘uncharted’.
However, these maps are not always subjected to the rigor that Taylor has
elsewhere prescribed. The dissimulative and deconstructive aspects of the
network disfigure every map. In his book Representing Place: Landscape
Painting and Maps Edward S. Casey examines mapmaking as an enter-
prise which ‘pass[es] over places in their [maps’] zeal to represent the
totality of the world.’ He also notes that ‘[t]he power of maps to incorpo-
rate contiguous and ever more inclusive parts of the earth in carefully
delineated representations . . . is at the same time a weakness with regard
to the representation of subregional localities, which are conspicuously
neglected by these maps that purport to furnish a world picture.’ In
other words, maps – by their very nature – totalize and thus inevitably
repress particularities and complexities. For Casey, landscape paintings, as
opposed to maps, are attuned to the ‘subtle specificity’ of a place, and
‘resituat[e] these spots and vistas, these discrete endroits and lieux.’ Edward
S. Casey, Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 241. When Taylor calls for maps
and schemata, posing his entire project in these terms, he is undertaking
179
NOTES
180
BIBLIOGRAPHY
181
BIBLIOGRAPHY
182
BIBLIOGRAPHY
183
BIBLIOGRAPHY
184
BIBLIOGRAPHY
185
BIBLIOGRAPHY
186
BIBLIOGRAPHY
187
INDEX
189
INDEX
190
INDEX
Dionysus xxiv, 105–6, 108, 110, entre deux 94–5, 100, 103, 110, 119,
113–4, 116, 118, 172n. 16, 137
176n. 39 Eros 69–70, 167n. 39
discourse xvii–xix, xxi–xxiii, 1, event xvi, xxiv, 35, 55–9, 82, 87, 93,
7–10, 19–21, 23, 24, 28, 36, 106, 117, 121, 137–9, 141–2,
47–50, 53–4, 59, 60–1, 66–71, 145–7, 157n. 7, 163n. 9, 170n. 1,
76–8, 80, 82–6, 88–91, 92–3, 170n. 3
95–6, 98, 105, 112, 115, 118, excess xxi, 4–6, 12–13, 15, 22–3,
121–2, 141, 146, 150, 154n. 24, 29–35, 43, 49, 52, 58–9, 64–5,
163n. 2, 166n. 31, 168n. 45, 67, 69–70, 73, 82, 84–6, 89–90,
171n. 10, 171n. 9, 172n. 17, 97–8, 105–6, 112, 114, 116,
180n. 23 118–9, 122–3, 130, 143, 147,
discursive 19–23, 27, 93, 98, 170n. 2 155n. 32, 162n. 37, 170n. 57,
disfiguring xx, xxv, 55, 57, 99, 111, 172n. 17, 173n. 18, 175n. 26,
114, 129, 131, 133–4, 139, 177n. 50
141–2, 144, 147, 150, 177n. 46 eye xxii, 23, 24, 27, 38–43, 51–3, 63,
dissemination 96, 105, 107, 109, 67, 72, 88, 100, 104, 106, 120,
114, 156n. 55 144–5, 161n. 33, 161n. 35,
distyles 95–6, 99, 101 166n. 27, 166n. 31, 167n. 40,
doppelgänger 109 173n. 20
Doniger O’Flaherty, Wendy
178n. 8 fabric, of the text 24, 27, 33, 36–8,
double relation 121, 124, 134 147, 159n. 19
duplicitous 61–2, 67, 70, 75–6, 81, father 62, 71–2, 76–8, 89, 103–5,
99–100, 119 107, 111, 120, 161n. 33,
drug 162n. 37, 164n. 17, 167n. 37,
see pharmakon 168n. 40, 170n. 5, 176n. 33
Father Time 104
economy festival 107–8
of death 40–1, 168n. 42 figuring xxv, 67, 101, 129–31,
gift in relation to 134–6, 141, 133, 139, 141–2, 144, 147,
145–7 177n. 46
Odyssean 134–5 Foucault, Michel 4–6, 154n. 17
in terms of Hegel’s foundation xix–xxi, xviii, 1, 3–4,
philosophy 108, 161–2n. 37 6–10, 17, 22–3, 24–30, 35, 41,
uneconomic aspect of 135–6, 47–8, 50, 58, 60–1, 64, 67–8,
145–7, 160–1n. 32 71, 74, 78, 82–3, 85, 87–9, 92,
see also oikēsis 94, 96, 117–19, 121–3, 125–7,
edge xx, 33, 59, 149, 159n. 19, 129–30, 132, 146–7, 152n. 1,
173n. 18 153n. 6, 154n. 18, 160n. 31,
Eliade, Mircea xvii 162n. 40, 164n. 12, 169, 255,
emergence xxv, 57–9, 92, 119, 128, 169n. 49, 173n. 18, 176n. 39,
139, 157n. 7, 164n. 13 178n. 10
emptiness 36, 52, 68, 73, 121, 144 Frazer, James G. 106–7
191
INDEX
192
INDEX
193
INDEX
194
INDEX
palinode 68–70, 83, 167n. 36, Phaedrus xxiii, 21–2, 44, 47–50,
167n. 37 52, 54, 60, 62, 63, 67–8, 71, 74,
Pan 90–1, 169n. 50 77, 79–83, 89, 93–4, 113,
pas de deux 27–8, 34, 38, 97, 157n. 8 117–18, 129, 154n. 25, 161n. 33,
Persephone 106 163n. 2, 163n. 3, 165n. 21,
Phaedrus xxiii, 21–2, 44, 47–50, 52, 165n. 25, 169n. 50, 170n. 62,
54, 60, 62, 63, 67–8, 71, 74, 77, 171n. 9, 172n. 17, 177n. 41,
79–83, 89, 93–4, 113, 117–18, 177n. 43
129, 154n. 25, 161n. 33, 163n. 2, play in 50–2, 89
163n. 3, 165n. 21, 165n. 25, prayer to Pan 90–1
169n. 50, 170n. 62, 171n. 9, Republic 22
172n. 17, 177n. 41, 177n. 43 Statesman 104
Pharmacia 61–2, 89 shift from orality to literacy 9, 59
pharmacy xxiii, 74, 77–8 use of pharmakon 61, 67, 75,
pharmakon 77–8, 80, 84, 86
definition of 10, 61, 66–7, 73, Platonism 49, 61, 68, 77–8
164–5n. 20, 168n. 43 play
gift as 47, 75, 169n. 47, 180n. 19 Derrida’s theory of 53–4,
myth of Thoth as xxiii, 70–4, 84, 163–4n. 9
86, 89 of Dionysus 106
operation of 66–7, 84–7 in Glas 94–5, 98–100, 102, 106–9,
Plato’s use of 61, 67, 75, 77–8, 116
80, 84, 86 in Plato 50–2, 89
as pharmakos 108, 110 Thoth as god of 70–4
Saturn’s swallowing of 103, Plotinus 104
110–12 poeisis 70
Socrates and 65–6 poison
in relation to mythos 10, 55, 61–2 see pharmakon
writing as 74–6 polis 60, 108–10
pharmakos 108–11 possible, the xxiv–xxv, 125, 133–4,
philosopher-king 22, 45, 64, 95, 137, 139–43, 148–9, 178n. 5,
119, 167n. 31, 168n. 45, 180n. 17
169n. 46, 170n. 5 post-structuralism 55, 126–8,
Plato 173n. 18, 180n. 22
distinction between mythos and prayer 40, 70, 90–1, 158n. 12,
logos xvi–xvii, 8, 47–50 169n. 50, 170n. 62
distinction between speech and prescriptive 105, 127, 132–3, 148
writing 75–7, 170n. 61
employment of mythos 48–9, Ra
54–5, 59–62, 67–78, 86–9 see Ammon Ra
employment of palinode 68–70 reading
Lincoln’s reading of 21–3 deconstructive 9, 23–6, 30–1, 47
Laws 104 otherwise 35–8, 47–8, 51–2
195
INDEX
‘relation without relation’ 36, 99, Saturnalia xxiv, 106–9, 111, 113,
134–6, 140, 142, 145, 148, 150, 176n. 39
160n. 25, 172n. 15 savoir absolu xxiv, 39, 41, 43, 92,
religion xix, xvii–xviii, xxii, 1, 18, 98, 100, 102–3, 108–12, 114–17,
48, 121–2, 127–8, 131–2, 144, 119, 122–4, 129, 132, 134–5,
174n. 24, 179n. 15 141, 144, 147–8, 160n. 29,
remains 164n. 17, 165n. 23, 172n. 17,
in contrast to mathematical 173n. 20, 174n. 23, 174n. 24,
remainders 2, 153n. 6 175n. 29, 177n. 39, 180n. 27
Derrida’s definition of 1–2 schemata 130–4, 179n. 16
in Glas 1–2, 95–8, 100, 102, scraps
111, 115 see remains
of Hegel’s texts 11–12, 111 seam 17, 33, 37–8, 52–3, 97, 99,
laughter as 116 114, 123, 159n. 19
mythos as 10, 22, 79 secret 25–6, 38, 40, 42, 50–1, 72,
pharmakoi as 109–10 99, 119–20, 138, 169n. 54,
Typhon as 64–5 177n. 51
remedy self-knowledge 54, 65, 90, 175n. 31
see pharmakon semination 105, 111
repetition 31, 34, 36–7, 73, 101, 103, senses, the xvii, 8, 38, 40, 76, 88,
140, 159n. 20 160n. 31
repressed xviii, 6, 9–10, 32, 42, 48, silence
162n. 37, 166n. 29, 175n. 29, of a of difference 15, 38–40
176n. 33 of Thoth 75–6
Republic 22, 168n. 40 Socrates 21, 54, 60, 62–6, 68–70, 74,
resistance 78–83, 91, 98, 110 77, 83–4, 89–91, 120, 156n. 50,
resurrection 162n. 37, 171n. 12 161n. 33, 165n. 21, 165n. 23,
rhythm xxv, 10, 27–8, 53, 99, 107, 167n. 31, 171n. 9, 177n. 43
150 soliciting 24–31, 33, 35, 37, 41,
Ricoeur, Paul xvii 43–4, 117, 157n. 2
Sophists, the 76–7
Sa xxiv, 39, 102–9, 112–18, 120, soul 90, 104, 168n. 42
149, 159n. 17, 160n. 29, sowing 96, 105–8, 111
172n. 16, 174n. 23, 175n. 29, sparagmos 106
175n. 31, 176n. 39, 180n. 24 speech xxii–xxiii, 7, 9, 15, 17–19,
safe 21, 47–50, 52, 54–7, 60, 65–6,
see crypt 68–72, 75–6, 91, 96, 138–40, 142,
Sallis, John 22, 49–50, 54, 60, 62, 154n. 17, 158n. 13, 166n. 27,
163n. 2, 163n. 3, 89 167n. 37, 170n. 61, 170n. 62,
Saturn xxiv, 103–8, 110–14, 116–18, 171n. 10, 174n. 22
161n. 36, 170n. 5, 172n. 16, see also logos
174n. 23, 175n. 25, 175n. 29, spider 124–5, 178n. 8
175n. 31, 176n. 33, 176n. 39 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 97
196
INDEX
197
INDEX
uncanny 64, 105, 166n. 29, 166n. 30, World Wide Web 125
167n. 31, 177n. 43 wound xxiv, 2, 24, 34, 82, 91, 96,
undecidable 100–1, 108, 114, 119, 150
see indecidable writing xxiii, 6–7, 9, 11–2, 29–30,
unknowable 6, 11, 61, 123–4, 130, 47–8, 52, 54–5, 57, 70–1, 75–7,
148, 173n. 20 84–5, 96–7, 99, 102, 105,
unthought 3, 5–6, 9–10, 26–7, 30, 151n. 2, 152n. 3, 157n. 3,
42, 100, 102, 123, 124, 126–7, 157n. 56, 159n. 19, 165n. 25,
148, 153n. 8, 156n. 44 168n. 42, 170n. 5, 170n. 61,
Uranus 103, 105, 175n. 26 171n. 10, 174n. 22, 178n. 10
198