Notes on KIrby, V.  (2014)  Human Exceptionalism on the Line. SubStance 43 (2): 50--67. DOI: 10.153/sub.2014.0028 Dave Harris [Difficult, technical, and I have not read enough Derrida to really get into the analysis of his arguments. From what I can see, she just wishes to extend Derrida's argumentative strategy back one stage. So just as speech can be seen as the actualisation of a more complex and virtual writing, so human writing can be seen as a more actualised version of a complex and virtual natural writing. There are the usual problems with the univocity of being in this, which become clear. There is also the tendency noted by DeLanda, to leave a gap for God as the most complex and virtual system of all,although he cited Cartesianism ( see Dalziell) ]. Kirby detects an enduring interest in human exceptionalism in the work of Derrida, following from his interest in origins. We can already suspect 'an inaugural signature that authorises' human capacities' (50). For Derrida, Western metaphysics depends on human exceptionalism, which provides a dual legacy as we shall see: it is thus unnatural, 'a special case of perversion'. Normally, human exceptionalism is seen as natural mistake or a fall from grace. Derrida insisted that 'nature writes' [in Of Grammatology?], But this can still be a different form of language from human. In particular, Hyppolite was to object that nature had no agency or intention, lacking the assumed 'organizing centre or subjectivity'. Nature's writing might be random or programmatic, capable of complexity, but lacking conscious intent, only 'proto-, or automatic writing' (51). Humans appear as necessarily unnatural, ontologically different from the rest of life. This is sometimes described as a sense of lost innocence. The separation from nature can lead to 2 versions of a power game. On the one hand, it means that humans are fundamentally alienated, a version of original sin, generating 'brutal self-interest'. However, the second version argues that this very separation means we can develop ethical responsibility, politics, and uniquely transcend 'bad' nature. These two are linked in 'torsional tension' (52) which you find in every account to explain human origins. An obvious place to start is with language. For some, the ability to offer 'abstractions and intentional re-formations of language' marks the beginning of the anthropological. Language is seen as a tool or instrument enabling the world to be reinvented, something uniquely human. Derrida is more ambiguous. For example he argues that we should not operate with the common oppositions between nature and culture, but also not '"muddle everything and rush, by analogism towards resemblances and identities"' [from The Beast and the Sovereign volume 1]. Dividing things and introducing separations is Cartesian, but trying to build an argument by stressing a difference or distance from a binary distinction is a 'vanguardist pretension' [more on this below.] We can focus on two parts of the overall argument in Derrida — a discussion about internal differences within human identity leading to the 'naturalization of the indigenous as primitive', and a review of various themes in The Beast that show the problems of assuming that human complexity arises from alienation from life, whereas for him, it is 'internal'(53): how do the various materialisations of life gets separated into categories like programmatic and unthinking, or intentional and self-conscious? There may be some more interesting [level] underneath. The first discussion is the 'writing lesson' found in Of Grammatology. This describes a first contact between an illiterate tribe in the Amazon and some Western technicians. Derrida compares himself to what Lévi-Strauss made of this encounter. Lévi-Strauss assumed, for example that the tribe was innocent, and, indeed could not write. Derrida's critique questions this narrative and leads to questions about anthropology and its methods and credentials. Anthropologists believe in fieldwork giving access to some '"crystalline"' structure of a community. Lévi-Strauss knows that reading events through ethnography is necessarily 'second-order, mediated, an inevitably distorted relationship to the truth of what was present'. This also acknowledges the dangerous power and authority of ethnographic writing. For Derrida, the problem starts earlier — perception itself is a text, allowing to a sense of here and now to emerge, involving both 'historical prejudices and an elaborate conceptual apparatus'. Such apparatus is pervasive and deep-rooted, and affects ['un-does'] conventional terms such as the concept or the way in which language mediates between percept and concept. Derrida argues that the concept is not something that comes second once we have exercised rationality on raw perception. Instead, 'systemic complexity – "language in the general sense" is originary' (54), [acting to organize experience as well as concepts]. Language is not an acquired tool, working epistemologically on deficient experience. There is an underlying 'graphematic structure', a system, which 'confounds the opposition between epistemology and ontology, knowing and being'. [Kirby then quotes some 'infamous statements about perception' in Derrida — that pure perception does not exist, that we are written by an agency within us which guides our perceptions, the subject of writing is not the sovereign human, but a system of relations]. Indeed, writing 'supplements' perception, before perception is even crystallized out as something separate — 'the perceptual apparatus already performs, already is cognition's organizational focus'. This system of relations generates identity, and nothing precedes it — hence there is nothing outside of text. What looks like individual entities separated from each other are 'the system's self-expressions'. This means that 'separation and inseparability are strangely confounded' and cannot be divided by a simple line.  Overall, writing does not develop as some sort of sequel to an entirely different system of being in the world. This is 'the radical interiority of Derrida's "general writing"'. Going back to the first contact example, Lévi-Strauss believes that writing is spontaneously generated and uniquely human. It can extend the time scale of speech acts, operate as a mnemonic, re-present the experiential, the lived moment. This is what also gives it its power to transform, including to corrupt and misrepresent. But this need not be deliberate — it is 'mandated by writing' (55). It follows there is no naturally authentic indigenous community, with some transparent non-writing form of communication. Even Lévi-Strauss's account hints at this. Instead of transparent communication, the tribe also displayed 'treachery, domination, secrets betrayed' as well as 'writing in the narrow sense'. For example to speak a word or a name involves 'a complex system of interpretive transactions, meaningful proscriptions and possible incitements'. No words exist outside of classifications and systems of differences. When Lévi-Strauss gets little girls to break the taboo on naming adults, this shows an originary linguistic trait, a 'sleight of hand' that retrospectively affirms some imaginary original integrity. So within any spoken word, 'there is a complex vitality of entangled stratifications...a fracturing or more accurately, a diffraction-ing that is meaning making'. It would be wrong to see this as a loss of innocence, meaning betrayed, because those are provided by shifting context [maybe]. In general, 'signification is comprehensively and always systemic, "spoken" by and through a system that masquerades as alien, other, outside and elsewhere, and yet is internal to its very operation' (55 – 6). [So even when you deviate, you are obeying the rules of deviating]. These underlying processes that inform speech also animate writing in the usual sense. This goes against a common tendency to segregate speech from writing, which has become implicated with all sorts of other binaries, views of the other which include the primitive and the feminine. It implies 'a corporeal immediacy, closer to the animal, which is yet to evolve' (56). So Lévi-Strauss, despite his good intentions, can be condemned for underlying prejudice and ethnocentrism — his misrepresentations have serious political implications. Even here we must be wary not to replace the error 'with its corrective'. For Derrida, ethics and responsibility must involve '"having doubts about responsibility, decision, one's own being ethical"'. But raising these debts can 'risk exposing our own fragility and the many disavowals (in the psychoanalytic sense) that work to refuse it'. [I think Barad has lots of disavowals, including continually asserting that she is responsible and cares, even though she supports experiments that tear the limbs off starfish]. So Derrida is not just offering 'a negative critique that justifies a certain moral outrage'. Instead he is saying that writing, including in this case 'mediation, dissembling, perversion' is always already present in speech. This still implies that allegedly primitive people were lagging behind the sovereign identity of the rest of humanity — we have recuperated these notions, even while Derrida insists we should interrogate them. [And at this point Kirby bends the thing to suit her own interests]. At least we have raised questions about the division between nature and culture, seeing humans as caught within their own culture, unable to access outside reality at all, which must therefore remain 'definitively unknowable, primitive, illiterate, inaccessible' (57). This tendency to locate speech in nature and then to relocate it in culture as writing, as something uniquely human, is challenging in Derrida. He also wants to reconsider the whole system which divides animals and men. The same danger arises if we just reverse some of the terms — nature to culture, speech to writing, primitive to civilized. This helps us be more inclusive, to admit more people into humanity, but it also further entrenches anthropocentrism. Reverses like this have not dealt with 'the question of originary writing', (57) and the issue of 'originary pre-scription (an interesting oxymoron)'. Instead, we must [go back a stage]. If the immediate in the here and now is really an expression of articulating forces which produce coherence from incoherence, then that should apply to human identity [as in exceptionalism] as well: it 'will also be subject to this "writing"'. Nor will attempts to split human identity into a rational and irrational part serve [she has in mind Lacan, with lots of others, who give an important role to the unconscious, seeing that as the source of originary writing — but '"who" authors this "general writing"? What and where is the unconscious?' [The usual answer that it resides in the social makes her point again?] So we understand speech as a condensation of various conventions and historical examples, 'the warp and weft of an interpretive worlding' usually called culture. If we deconstruct this notion, we do more than just reverse a binary or deliver a 'category correction' [what you thought was speech was in fact writing et cetera]. The point is 'to displace both these terms'. We can do this by asking 'a more counterintuitive question, namely, how is writing speech?' (58). This will produce a suitable hesitation, enabling thought. Speech is indeed a materialisation of a process of worlding, what is often called 'cultural condensation', and can never be understood from the outside since every word is affected by 'the play of the systems self reference'. In Derrida's grammatology 'the system (of generativity) is all-encompassing: there is no first and then second' and so no binaries like nature and culture. Or, better, these divisions 'certainly hold in the main' in the everyday, but their separation and causal dynamics are only apparent. For Derrida, linguistic translation is a matter of origins, the processes are 'genetically constitutive, ubiquitous, intrinsically entangled'. We domesticate this complexity if we imagine some outside, nature as 'the real beginning, the transcendental anchor point to which we can have no access'. This might look like Butler's argument where terms like nature or the body can only ever be signs, a representation of something inaccessible, a human exercise 'in modelling and projection'. But this will not sufficiently answer the conundrums in Derrida, because it 'remains faithful to identity', to the sign and to human culture separated and able only to mediate. There is a further assumption that 'moments in time and in space are straightforwardly individual' [not so clear]. Instead, 'the habits of structuration's internal machinations' should be read as 'torsional self-expressions (59) — of nature, the real origin and 'genesis of worlding' 'a constant mutation whose author is life'. This might be 'rarely entertained' but it follows from the axiom of radical interiority [it 'hails such a reading']. There might be unsettling bewildering consequences because there can be no human exceptionalism, only a question of human specificity. We will still need to rethink 'the equation of human specificity with complexity as its identifying and unique signature'. In the second debate, in The Beast and in preceding articles, Derrida seems to have shown 'a "zoological turn"', although it would be wrong to just see this as an isolated topic. Derrida has apparently said that the question of animals has always been important and decisive and he has addressed it frequently '"either directly or obliquely"'. He also sees this as continuing the whole issue about language in life — what is animals' living being and how does it link to human living being, agreeing that language is the crucial area. Again we have to be careful not to leap in too quickly, because this is an 'attempt to disorient the very basis of our adjudications' (59 – 60). We already know that some animal studies show apparently human capacities and properties like intelligence and agency, which are interesting, but which still preserve intact 'the properties of "being human"' (60), and assume that things like intelligence or language 'are stable reference points of comparative measurement', or suggest some hierarchy of legibility. Derrida argues instead that what is normally seen as properly human '"also belongs to other living beings if you look more closely"'. Is not just a matter of fascinating demonstrations of intelligence in other creatures: Derrida says this should lead to a 'reflexive assault on our dearest sense of self' [in a quote which follows, he seems to be saying that the issue is how these very wonderful specific qualities became attributed just to man — as a linguistic philosopher, he wants to introduce straw men by saying that we might not even have "a concept of it that is pure, rigourous, indivisible as such" — you can bet your boots we don't, of course]. Comparative judgements where animals  possess human-like qualities will not do if we try to be rigorous — a lack of qualities in animals is often tautologically taken as proof that only human beings have it [maybe] [the example seems to be the Lacanian one about animals being unable to deliberately erase their tracks — Derrida says humans may be conscious in experience of erasing their tracks, but there is no way to judge '"the efficacy of this gesture"'. This seems a strange point to me — is he denying that human beings actually do erase the tracks, whereas foxes do not? Is it a matter of saying that we might think we have erased our tracks, but cannever actually know that we have? It seems to be the latter]. Every contact leaves a trace, but a deconstructive trace involves much more than just assuming a past presence ['a positivist appeal']. Further, appealing to 'self-conscious intent' is naive. There is the unconscious, but we should not just see that as something that awkwardly intrudes and ambushes intention. Derrida's point is that 'the presence to self of consciousness is intrinsically incoherent' (61) if we take the notion of the unconscious which cannot be 'other and elsewhere'. He is attacking Lacan, and makes the point that psychoanalysts should know particularly well that consciousness or control is delusional [still seems like silly point scoring to me]. This can look like 'rhetorical and philosophical obfuscation' [hear hear]. Kirby find something more rigorous and profound and suspects that people who attack deconstruction are rattled by the idea that human identity might not be so obviously apparent, an 'uncritical sense of pre-possession' — apparently there are many examples in The Beast, even despite 'considerable analytical credentials'. Human exceptionalism is defended unswervingly.  To really grasp Derrida's radical critique means we must not just translate it all back into conventional politics 'with its answers and correctives'. We see this with the critique of Lévi-Strauss. He is obviously disturbed by injustice, clearly has good faith and political concern for the indigenous people. But for Derrida, this is still '"ethnocentrism thinking itself as anti-ethnocentrism"', altered by '"the consciousness of the liberating progressivism"'. If  an anthropologist acknowledges guilt because the other suffers, the other does not have a sovereign identity. The other lacks 'the burden of enlightened responsibility' [harsh stuff, capable of being levelled against Denzin and his associates]. This is 'delusional arrogance within declarations of human peccability' (61 –2). It also implies that only humans have this singular capacity both to 'execute horror' and then to repent and perfect themselves, only humans are intrinsically good. Derrida even rebukes Deleuze for saying that bêtise is only found in humans [in a little joke as I recall, hardly a serious argument] , that humans are the 'capriciously cruel' ones. Derrida says this means that beasts are inferior because 'they "have no relation to the law', they cannot be sovereign. Human beings can only rebuke themselves for the bestial once it is assumed that humans are really free and responsible, that they can depart from 'an accepted set of rules and behaviours deemed reasonable and rational'. This will apply to humans in general even if it does not to particularly foolish individuals. Does Derrida imply that we should extend human qualities to animals, including bêtise? That would be to apply a corrective again. That would be '"to homogenise things and erase differences"'. The point is that we lack criteria again and so are unable to allocate bêtise only to humans [silly word games really — any term must imply its opposite by contrast and so on. And all this only follows in a system of signs]. This still seems to imply the importance of culture — and has the paradox that to be accused of foolishness involves the opposite capacity to understand the rules and standards [Durkheim on deviance again really]. But there are further implications to unpack: the animal question tends to be located within anthropocentrism [even with those who want to grant animals some equal status?]. Derrida says both Deleuze and Lacan presume the animals do not have an unconscious [designed to annoy Deleuze who tries to distance himself from Lacan]. Freud's authority could be used here to show how the conscious and responsible self really depends on the 'egological structure "I, me"' (63) but deconstruction must do more — not just denying the egological structure of subjectivity, for example because that would leave unquestioned 'what it involves'. Derrida rather points to the implicit appeal to subjectivity in Deleuze — 'the enigma of "who"' says these things, how Deleuze seems to construct 'a seemingly ubiquitous authorial presence' whose identity remains mysterious [in his writing -- in his discussions about 'humans' and what they do and think, what we all know etc?]. What mechanics of subject formation are involved, and how are they manifested and localised? Derrida tries Nietzsche's language in order to be acceptable to Deleuze, especially nature and force. This will, properly pursued, show the fragility of the egological structure in Freud [the quote has Derrida arguing that any living being is not just something finite and outside the activities of various forces which localize themselves in different agencies, including those which '"resist... oppress and suppress others' — this is a better way to explain the ecological structure, and it denies human exceptionalism at the same time?]. This forcefield is writing, belonging to nobody and yet materializing in individuals. How could we make sense of this generalized language, though? [Any attempt would still belong to that forcefield itself — no outside means no critical purchase either?] And how do we move to the specifics, dividing lines and limits, separate identities and other differences — the very term difference in Derrida implies separateness but also integrity of entities?. She has to read Derrida differently, and see apparently separate identities as not external to each other 'in any straightforward way', but showing the process of localisation and the constitution of entities or differentials that appear external to them. The results remain dynamic. Shifting to the internal life of those entities we can see 'the superposition of other events, other entities or space/time differentials'. It is a matter of constant 'parthenogenetic reinvention', and even the outcomes are 'consubstantial or entangled'. Derrida himself refers to a '"parthenogenetic emergence… [Of] nature or natural or biological life to its others"', when '"physis included all its others"'. The outside generates internally fractured entities. Of course we cannot use binary logic referring to internal versus external. However, the attack on binaries often becomes 'a diagnostic triumphalism, as if the moral imperative to hunt down binaries and "out" them isn't itself a corrective enterprise in binarization'. Instead we have to think of a unified field 'that presents all of itself… as quotidian, local, individual'. Difference becomes 'an involuted crosscontaminated forcefield' appearing as finite. [Then a really weird bit, seemingly turning Derrida back on himself — he has complicated deleuzian notions of the agential and  shown that intention is the result of various forces appearing as human will. Perhaps we can use the same argument of 'intentional super positioning' to discover Derrida in Deleuze?' To reread Deleuze as agreeing with this point?] The sovereign subject has to be both rejected and accepted. It does exist, and yet Derrida would understand it as an expression ['signature'] of 'an alien and nonlocal forcefield (general writing)' (65). If we look at the lithograph on the front of Hobbes's book Leviathan, we can see that the apparently supreme sovereign power actually 'is already hostage to a populace' appearing as various divisions. This is how we should think of the agent I/me — 'invaded, peopled'. The idea of sovereign responsibility, based on the authority of the I/me probably cannot do justice to these intricate political complicities 'that comprise such adjudications' [political judgements I assume]. Sovereignty remains a riddle [a Derrida quote says that there can be no contrary of it even though there are other things, and that in politics what we are doing is choosing between different forms of sovereignty and its conditions, so it is wrong to think of sovereignty as '"pure and unconditional"'. This sounds terribly weaselly to me, using this linguistic trick of finding opposite terms implied in existing ones to argue that even oppression is a form of sovereignty as well as vice versa?]. Derrida wants readers to ask about political and ethical responsibility, and how it might be based on premises that look incontrovertible but which can still be deconstructed. The problem is indivisibility which [typically] 'already presumes what remains in question', challenged by the idea of the human as exceptional compared to the most basic living beings. He sees distinctions within life, or even the judgement ['adjudication'] about what counts as life as opposed to nonlife — all as 'the cross-referenced animations of life'. The human is not outside the forcefield, not external to 'life's machinations, life's biopolitical calculations, agencies and representations of itself'. We cannot argue that the nonhuman is somehow outside the same processes, even if it cannot posit itself as an agent, an I/me. All identity formation involves 'space/time condensations' (66). Derrida argues this by discussing 'the paradox of an unconscious consciousness' (66) [where the same experience has the quality of existing in fact, whatever that means, and in the unconscious]. So for Kirby, 'life separates itself from itself, yet in a way that involves no distance at all' [another Derrida quote describes the unconscious as indifferent to contradiction, so it contradicts itself all the time, tells the truth and lies, never renounces anything. We see the problems here of the indifference of the univocity of being? Truth, lies, both are produced by the same process?]. [Kirby prefers the optimistic]' nature's every speech act must involve a certain truth'. An individual with an I is exceptional and specific and yet also 'at the same time' dispersed. We are not talking about inclusions or corrections but a completely new intervention. It is 'radically disorienting', and might explain why even anthropocentrics find others 'uncannily human'. The suggestion is that we see 'life as creative writer', 'a phonologism', and this will help us reopen the question of human exceptionalism, not just blankly refuting it, but rather 'refusing to close the question with a definite affirmation or negation'. back to Kirby page