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Abstract
This article focuses on Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive re-elaboration of the tradition of mechanicism, from the Cartesian animal–machine to contemporary scientism. It shows that Derrida does not counter this tradition by resorting to the metaphysical presupposition of Freedom – as sovereign independence from the machine – which secures the traditional oppositions of Man and the Machine and of the biological and the psychical. Rather, since his interpretation of the cybernetic concept of programme, he had been concerned with a conception of machines that takes account of their hypercomplexity – that is, of the semiotic and grammatological element implicit in them. According to Derrida, this element provides us with the analogical and general code of the biological and the cultural and thus with the protocol for telling a nonhumanist and differential history of life. In particular, this article explains that the grammatological conception of the cybernetic programme undergirds the re-elaboration of the relation between the biological and the psychical as well as of the Cartesian legacy underpinning the modern thought of the Animal, which Derrida develops in his unpublished seminar La Vie la mort and in his late essays on animality, respectively.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
This article was published thanks to the support received from the British Academy. It is a result of the research that I carried out as a British Academy Fellow at Durham University. I thank my anonymous reviewers at Angelaki for their helpful comments.
1 See Psyché: The Invention of the Other II 40.
2 “Almost,” she points out (as a good psychoanalyst), since this freedom “would not be emptied of unconscious determinations” (WT 47). For a recent critique of scientism in the light of Sartrean freedom, see Gabriel 10–33.
3 For a different and influential elaboration of hypercomplexity in contemporary French thought, see Morin 127–47. For further remarks on Derrida’s engagement with contemporary French thought and complexity, I refer to note 23.
4 Later, Derrida explains that:
the difficulty, it seems to me, is to take into account the possibility of this extreme, extended, and extendable mechanization, and to forget that there is a point where calculation reaches its limit: play, the possibility of play within calculating machines. (WT 58)
5 For Derrida’s definition of the space of inscription as the opening of a regulated play of differences, see OG 44–50.
6 For instance, see Krell 76–99 and McCance 71–85, who do not interrogate the relation between animalism and the concept of the machine.
7 For suggestive remarks on a new grammatological concept of the machine, see Wills 1–28.
8 On the legacy of Cartesian mechanicism in post-war France and, in particular, Georges Canguilhem’s re-elaboration of this legacy, see Geroulanos 78–89.
9 For the proximity of this idea to the zoosemiotics instituted by Thomas A. Sebeok in 1963, see Maran et al. 77–100. More generally, on the resonances between Derrida’s grammatological understanding of the biological and biosemiotics (in particular, a certain engagement with Peirce’s project of semiotics), see Vitale 218–20. Here I remark that, beyond these resonances at the level of formulations, it remains to explore whether biosemiotics, across its multiple (sometimes alternative) articulations, has engaged in a critical and deconstructive elaboration of mechanicist and humanist underpinnings. On this point, see, for instance, Barbieri’s mechanicist critique of the anthropomorphism that would inform what he designates as Peircean biosemiotics (151–69).
10 For an analogous claim, see also WT 63.
11 For an interpretation of these passages in relation to their cultural references and within the trajectory of Derrida’s early work, see Geroulanos 315–31 and Vitale 18–27, respectively.
12 For a synthetic formulation of the cybernetic concept of programme, based on Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948), see Johnson 481:
The cybernetic system involves a coupling of programme and mechanism via a channel of communication. This coupling is not simply a linear one of cause to effect, from programme to mechanism: in cybernetic systems information on the result of the command (signal) transmitted to the mechanism is looped back to the programme itself to check and, if necessary, compensate for any deviation from the parameters set by the programme, in a circular or reflexive process known as “feedback.”
13 See Léroi-Gourhan 219–68, for the author’s use of the cybernetic concept of programme. On the legacy of his materialist history of life in Derrida’s early work, see Johnson 471–87.
14 See Voice and Phenomenon 51–74. On the key role that this work plays as Derrida’s thought develops, see Positions 5 and AIA 111. For a reading of these texts, allow me to refer to Senatore (section 2).
15 For Derrida’s grammatological interpretation of semiotics and grammar (vs. the humanist underpinnings of linguistics), see his reading of Peirce in OG 48–50 and his remarks on Plato’s conception of the grammatical science in Dissemination 165–67, respectively. For Derrida’s interpretation of the element of writing (the trace) in terms of institution, see OG 44–47.
16 For an extended reading of the passages examined below, see Vitale 58–74. In my examination, I try to offer a closer engagement with Derrida’s text, with a view to showing that this text seeks not so much to liberate the biological discourse from its metaphysical presuppositions as to reveal the implications that follow from the semiotic code of biological discourse and that, at some point, Jacob neutralizes by giving in to those presuppositions.
17 The translation of this passage is taken from Vitale 61. On my reading, here Derrida draws attention to the analogical – that is, semiotic – code that has imposed itself to modern biologists (cf. Vitale 61–62).
18 For such a grammatological interpretation of modernity, as the contestation of the metaphysical and humanist presupposition of Man as sovereign independence from the machine, see, for instance, Derrida’s remarks on the question of the subject in Saussure’s linguistics (OG 67–69).
19 For a different reading of this passage, see Vitale 61–62.
20 For the translation of Derrida’s text, see Vitale 63.
21 For a definition of this differential animalism, see AIA 92.
22 It is worth remarking that Monod elaborates an analogous conception of contingency in his 1970 masterwork entitled Chance and Necessity (113–30). For Derrida’s reading of Jacob’s suspicious recourse to the opposition between contingency and deliberation, I refer to the forthcoming publication of Michael Naas’ paper “Lucky Us: Contingency and Teleology in Derrida’s Life Death Seminar,” presented at SPEP 2018.
23 For the translation of Derrida’s text, see Vitale 68.
24 For the translation of Derrida’s text, see Vitale 68–69. I should observe that the style in the causality of change as it is described by Derrida here resonates with contemporary accounts of auto-organization in authors such as Jean Piaget, Edgar Morin, and Henri Atlan. See, for instance, Atlan’s Biological Organization and Information Theory (1972), which, in the wake of Piaget’s Biology and Knowledge (1967), argues for the generalization of the mechanical model of auto-organization from morphogenesis to learning, from biology to culture (217–84). On this point, I recall that Geroulanos proposes reading Derrida’s grammatology as the affirmation of a “hyperdeterminism” or a “hyperdeterministic complexity” (330–31).
25 See WT 40: “At certain ‘moments,’ this differance can interrupt these laws; at other moments, it can introduce the economy of a new configuration into the immanence of the living being.”
26 For this articulation of the economy of the same and the wholly other as the very enigma of differance, see Margins of Philosophy 19.
27 The authors examined by Derrida as representative of this modernity are Kant, Heidegger, Lévinas, and Lacan.
28 For an overview of the scholarship on Descartes’ treatment of the animal, see Franco 102–07. Here I draw attention to the line of thought opened up by Gaukroger and further developed by Franco, who reread Cartesian mechanicism by attempting to think the hypercomplexity of the Cartesian animal–machines. In the chapter devoted to animal psycho-physiology from his work on Descartes’ System of Natural Philosophy, Gaukroger argues that Descartes acknowledges a certain emotive and cognitive activity in the animal–machines and describes this activity through a linguistic model of processing information (196–214). Finally, Gaukroger admits the fixity of this processing (“the signs of passions in animals are, like their cognitive behaviours, natural and invariant,” 214). Franco pushes this line of thought further by calling this fixity into question and showing that animal processing is shaped and thus transformed by experience (126–30). Here I also recall Bates 43–68, which in fact develops Derrida’s aforementioned project of a cybernetic re-elaboration of Cartesian mechanicism. Bates unfolds an original reading of Descartes’ corpus as “a seminal effort to think the human from within the cybernetic automaton” (68). Overall, he seems to diverge from Derrida’s project as he does not understand the cybernetic in grammatological terms and thus identifies the specificity of the humans in their capacity of interrupting their automaticity.
29 See note 12.
30 As I demonstrate later, for Derrida, Descartes detects the analogical code of response (and thus of programme) much earlier than the coming of cybernetics, when, this code affirms its metaphorical effervescence across regional discourses. For a formalization of the cybernetic concept of response, see Wiener 95–115.
31 In the note added to this passage, Derrida explores further the link between Cartesian fixity and cognitivist approach (represented by the work of Joёlle Proust), between response/reaction and prewired response (AIA 173).
32 Derrida develops this reference to animal reflexivity in a longer passage from the second essay included in AIA. There, he sketches an animalist and differential genealogy of modesty that goes from the genesis of animal reflexivity and narcissism – associated to the identification of a fellow creature (belonging to the same species) and thus the pressure of sexual desire – to the relation between modesty and the dissimulation of sexual erection in the humans (AIA 59–61).
33 As the last page of AIA suggests by staging an imaginary confrontation between Nietzsche and Heidegger concerning the question of animality, this second step of Derrida’s argument can also be read as Nietzschean – that is, as building on Nietzsche’s deconstruction of the presupposition of Man (AIA 160).
34 On hetero-affection, see the deconstructive elaboration of the Husserlian concept of autoaffection that Derrida has in Voice and Phenomenon (60–74).
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