Derrida Today Deconstructive Empiricism: Science and Metaphor in Derrida’s Early Work

Citation preview

Deconstructive Empiricism: Science and Metaphor in Derrida’s Early Work

Jeremy Butman Abstract The work of Jacques Derrida is often characterized as anti-scientific, and his philosophy of language taken to mean we are sealed off from empirical reality, confined to our metaphysical prison. This position is reinforced by the fact that his forerunners, Heidegger and Nietzsche, did diminish the importance of the sciences, and argued that we are enclosed within the limits of language. Today, philosophy continues to deconstruct the nature/culture distinction, and challenge the meaning of materialism, but in recent decades has realized that this work requires, in addition to a critique of the modern concept of science, a rehabilitation of the sciences outside their metaphysical definition. The fact that Derrida continues to be understood as an anti-science thinker has led to the exclusion of his work from this project. In this paper, I show that Derrida, while deconstruction the metaphysical concepts of science, nature and empiricism, in fact takes the mathematical sciences as an important force of deconstructing, and develops an interpretation of empiricism that points to a non-metaphysical understanding of it. From this perspective, Derrida’s work is useful for thinking through the relation of the human to language and nature in the age of globalization and anthropogenic climate change. * In his essay ‘Nineteenth-Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism’, Richard Rorty draws what has become a familiar Derrida Today 12.2 (2019): 115–129 DOI: 10.3366/drt.2019.0205 © Edinburgh University Press www.euppublishing.com/drt

116 Deconstructive Empiricism comparison between Jacques Derrida and Immanuel Kant, and the modes of philosophy each represents. The comparison suggests that Derrida’s ‘claim that all problems, topics, and distinctions are languagerelative’, (Rorty 2010, 122) like Kant’s assertion that ‘the mind perceives only its own ideas’ (Ibid., 126), subordinates science to literature, and rejects empirical certainty. ‘[B]oth movements adopt an antagonistic position to natural science . . . . Both insist that there is a point of view other than, and somehow higher than, that of science’ (Ibid., 122). The central difference between the two, Rorty concludes, is that ‘whereas nineteenth-century idealism wanted to substitute one sort of science (philosophy) for another (natural science) as the center of culture, twentieth-century textualism wants to place literature in the center, and to treat both science and philosophy as, at best, literary genres’ (Ibid.). Rorty was one of his most serious readers, and he does not have Derrida solely in mind here. However, this interpretation is a widely accepted one. It explains the central role Derrida played in the so-called ‘science wars’ of the 1990s, and also why contemporary, scientifically-minded attempts to dismantle Kantian metaphysics, such as those of Quentin Meillassoux and Bruno Latour, disregard Derrida (Hägglund 2011, 115; Harman 2009, 12, 25–6).1 The idea that Derrida antagonistically reduces the natural sciences to literature, or elevates literature over science, overlooks the many explicit comments Derrida makes to the contrary, and is incompatible with Derrida’s overarching project. In fact, deconstruction begins from an understanding of empiricism that attempts to free it from its philosophical history, and identifies science as a force of resistance against metaphysics and phonocentricism. To be sure, antagonism toward the natural sciences, of the type Rorty describes, can be found in Derrida’s most prominent forerunners, Nietzsche and Heidegger. Derrida, however, pushes back on each precisely at the points where they assert the priority of art over science. Heidegger’s (1977a) arguments that the natural sciences ‘skip over’ things in their essential being, and that mathematics does not describe nature as meaningfully as poetry (1977b), are grounded in the distinction between the ontic and the ontological, a distinction that Derrida deconstructs at length, with particular force in ‘Ousia and Gramm¯e’ and ‘The Ends of Man’, the latter of which makes the case that the ontico-ontological difference is itself a reading of metaphoricity.2 The deconstruction of the ontological difference throws into question the legitimacy of privileging either science or poetry over the other. The more challenging legacy, with respect to Derrida’s treatment of science, is that of Nietzsche. ‘In reminding the philosopher that he remained enclosed in a language, Nietzsche was surely more violent and

Jeremy Butman

117

more explicit than anyone else’, Derrida writes (Derrida 1982a, 177). One of Nietzsche’s most direct treatments of the sciences in the context of the relation of language to empiricism and epistemology is in the 1873 essay ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’. There, Nietzsche mounts a frontal attack on the correspondence theory of truth, arguing that logic, mathematics and scientific concepts are neither products of necessary rational laws, as Kant had it, nor objective references to empirical perception, as in Aristotle. For Nietzsche, empirical experience is filtered through a series of metaphors, generated by both our sensory faculties and linguistic expression, which, in the process of creating stable meanings in understanding and communication, cover over genuine empirical perception. The first in this chain of metaphors ties a perceptual experience to an imaginative image as a metonymic representation; the second attaches this image to a spoken sound. The adumbrations of visual data into stable images in the mind, and the subsequent substitution of these images for words, give rise to the possibility of scientific concepts, which, he says, are ‘the lingering residues of metaphors’ (Nietzsche 2010, 41). By relying unconditionally on abstract concepts such as causation and categorization, science and logic alienate the empirical, lose their sensory referent and fail to grasp their primordial foundation in poetic and artistic metaphors. The work of science is consequently only to rein in empirical experience to conform to concepts: ‘to fill that colossal, towering framework [of concepts] and fit the entire empirical world, that is, the anthropomorphic world, into it’ (Ibid.). However, as Derrida points out, Nietzsche retains the traditional value of empiricism in this work. Of the most immediate contact with the empirical, Nietzsche says: ‘Every metaphor of intuition is individual and without equal and so always knows how to escape all classification’ (Ibid., 32). This assertion of the singularity of empirical intuition, and the inherently non-philosophical content of experience repeats in a different voice the Kantian and Aristotlean understanding of the empirical, and so does not fundamentally challenge the operations of metaphysics. In two texts, ‘The Supplement of the Copula’, which takes ‘On Truth and Lies’ as a starting point, and ‘White Mythology’, a detailed account of metaphor and the abstraction of concepts of perceptual experience, Derrida shows that a fuller account of scientific knowledge and its relation to metaphor disrupts Nietzsche’s distinction between perception and conception, and allows that the empirical is something other than this non-conceptual region of singularities; it is not erased in the process of user, but remains active within metaphorical language.

118 Deconstructive Empiricism Furthermore, in Derrida, science continues to be the name for an inquiry into the empirical, and is what permits an analysis of metaphor as such. For Derrida, science is one of the driving forces of deconstruction, and, indeed, deconstruction might be conceived as an attempt to grasp the historical force of science outside its traditional, Kantian and Aristotlean, determinations.

1. In Of Grammatology, Derrida writes: ‘Within cultures practicing socalled phonetic-writing, mathematics is not just an enclave . . . . This enclave is also the place where the practice of scientific language challenges intrinsically and with increasing profundity the ideal of phonetic writing and all its implicit metaphysics’ (Derrida, 1974, p. 9; my emphasis). The language of mathematics serves as an enclave because it is not phonocentric – it is not a transcription of phonemes or representation of speech – and so it is fundamentally disconnected from the logocentrism of metaphysics, and the science of representation and categorization. Mathematics is fundamentally heterogeneous to the logocentric picture of the signifying relationship between word and empirical object, because number does not refer in itself to anything empirical. The incongruity between mathematical writing and phonocentric, alphabetical writing is the site of a challenge to the metaphysical order, a place from which to view the closure of metaphysics. Because scientific language draws from this nonphonocentric mathematical enclave, the natural sciences find the resources to exceed traditional philosophical determinations; indeed, the sciences, Derrida says, increasing and intrinsically demand the rethinking of metaphysical concepts and categories. The rupture between mathematical and phonetic writing points to an interpretation of empiricism that exceeds the definition of empiricism in metaphysics. Number does not in itself refer to anything empirical, and so its capacity to describe nature and experience has always disturbed the sense of signification and meaning in an epistemology of representation. As a practice of tracing the movement of différance, ‘grammatology’ – an over-determined articulation of deconstruction – is inaugurated as a science that follows this expanded idea of empiricism. Grammatology is ‘the science of writing:’ a science that ‘runs the risk of never being established as such and with that name. Of never being able to define the unity of its project or its object. Of not being able either to write its discourse on method or to describe the limits of its

Jeremy Butman

119

field’ (Derrida 1974, 4). It is itself non-categorizable, but not because of its fidelity to the ‘empirical realm’, but rather because what evades categorization cannot be confined to a particular region. Grammatology studies writing, or arche-writing, which refers not to any particular system of notation, but the landscape of marks and traces that traverses across the boundaries of perception and conception, thought, sight, and sound, and from which we discern meaning generally. To read this text of traces involves an empiricism that follows not the system of differences constructed through a philosophical system, but différance, which disturbs the established system of differences that in the first place makes the distinction between the perceptual and conceptual possible. This form of reading would be itself empirical, but in a wholly new sense. Derrida writes: ‘In the delineation of différance everything is strategic and adventurous . . . [it is] a strategy without finality, what might be called blind tactics, or empirical wandering’ (Ibid., 152, my emphasis). The empiricism of deconstruction hinges upon the recognition of ruptures, breaks within any stabilized order; it proceeds from moments of incongruity such as that between mathematical and phonetic writing. Empiricism in its traditional sense refers to the external world, or to the exteriority of experience. The empirical is understood as that which is put in opposition to thought, language and reflection: the mind’s other, the absolute referent against which knowledge is tested and according to which language signifies. As Derrida describes it in ‘Violence and Metaphysics’: ‘Empiricism always has been determined by philosophy, from Plato to Husserl, as nonphilosophy, the inability to justify oneself, to come to one’s own aid as speech’ (Derrida 1978, 151). The empirical is that inviolable limit at which language fails, the face of the world which will not speak. This determination, however, is phonocentric, and inextricable from the philosophy of truth-as-correspondence and language-as-representation: knowledge is giving voice through language to the silent empirical. It is phonocentrism that establishes the separation of language from things, and the thought that language expresses the empirical. In this very articulation, however, the empirical remains alienated from philosophical discourse, explicitly available to thought only through appropriation and substitution – through metaphor. Derrida goes on: this incapacitation [of the empirical], when resolutely assumed, contests the resolution and coherence of the logos (philosophy) at its root, instead of letting itself be questioned by the logos. Therefore, nothing can so profoundly

120 Deconstructive Empiricism solicit the Greek logos – philosophy – than this irruption of the totally-other; and nothing can to such an extent reawaken the logos to its origin as to its mortality, its other. (Ibid.)

The empirical, a pure exteriority whose concept lives at the heart of the interiority of the logos, will always haunt and threaten the structure of representation and reference. This empirical solicitation of the logos no doubt includes both Nietzsche’s critique of concepts, as well as Hume’s critique of causation. These critiques are examples of the empirical reawakening the logos, which are part of the normal, anticipated movement of knowledge in the metaphysical picture. Nietzsche’s interpretation of empiricism remains within the scope of metaphysics, and so his critique of the sciences does not reach the source of scientificity. The wandering empiricism of grammatology, by contrast, does not assume the stability of empirical otherness, but interprets the exteriority of the empirical in Levinasian terms, as a radical alterity that stands over and against the opposition between perception and conception itself, against all such philosophical distinctions. It is Levinas’ thought of radical exteriority that Derrida has mind when he speaks of tracing différance as an empirical practice. By radicalizing the theme of the infinite exteriority of the other, Levinas thereby assumes the aim which has more or less secretly animated all the philosophical gestures which have been called empiricisms in the history of philosophy . . . . By taking this project to its end, he totally renews empiricism, and inverses it by revealing it to itself as metaphysics. (Ibid.)

Empiricism in its deconstructive sense appears as the movement of otherness within, and against, the linguistic order. This radical empiricism demonstrates that the traditional view of empiricism, as the silent other of the logos, is not itself grasped empirically, but rather metaphysically and philosophically. Derrida asks, from within the perspective of this new empiricism: How can one affirm the empiricity of the movement which leads to signifying in general and to signifying within a language, and that does so with recourse to an organization of forms, a distribution of classes, etc.? Finally on the basis of what system, and also from whence historically, do we receive and understand – before even positing the empiricity of signification – the signification of empiricity? (Derrida 1982a, 192)

The circularity running between signification and empiricity here is the resource by which metaphysical empiricism can be deconstructed:

Jeremy Butman

121

representation and signification take empirical reference as their ground, but find this ground only by first positing the theory of representation. Even in metaphysics, the empirical is a name for the movement of otherness in language and experience, though this otherness is safely contained outside of language; the definition of the empirical as perceptual substratum contains this otherness within an established order of differentiation that secures the autonomy of both nature and thought. Beyond this definition, otherness is released from its restrictive definition as the perceptual term in the opposition between conception/perception. It is not, as Hume had it, that the empirical grants probability rather than necessity, or even that, as Kant argued, empiricism is empty without concepts. Empiricism is not that which must be expressed through language in a series of metaphors for sensory experience, or structured according to a set of a priori concepts; it is that which disrupts the order of metaphoricity itself, and contests pure concepts. In ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, Derrida writes, ‘[t]he true name of this renunciation of the concept, of the a priori and transcendental horizons of language, is empiricism’ (Derrida 1978, 151). Empiricism, then, like Levinas’ ethical sight,3 attends to what is other, attends to what disrupts, as if from nowhere, the conceptual schematics of philosophy and ‘normal science’, to use Thomas Kuhn’s vocabulary (Kuhn, 1962). Derrida goes on: ‘[Empiricism] is the dream of a purely heterological thought at its source. A pure thought of pure difference’ (Ibid.). Empiricism is that which differentiates within a field of perception, but more fundamentally, what disturbs the delineation of perception itself.4 But Derrida’s empiricism is not Levinasian without further ado. Levinasian otherness cannot be taken up in language without being canceled and appropriated into the order of the same. The vision of pure heterogeneity, as in Levinas’ ‘other’, is a dream; Derrida continues: ‘We say the dream because it must vanish at daybreak, as soon as language awakens’ (Ibid.). As Derrida argues at length in ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, there can be no pure otherness, but every otherness contains a trace of the same, and vise-a-versa; any purity is contaminated inherently with the means of its own impurification. Pure exteriority, whether conceived in Levinas’ or Nietzsche’s terms, cannot stand, and because there can be no absolute externality of language, this empirical other does not arrive at the gates of language, but from within. For Derrida, the fact that empiricism encounters the wholly other within philosophical discourse cannot mean that language has access to a stable order of truth, even where this encounter is interpreted as

122 Deconstructive Empiricism epistemological rather than ethical. Instead, empiricism occurs within language as part of the general economy of différance, simply as an act of transgression against a normalized system of boundaries that shows the violability of these boundaries. The question remains: if empiricism does move through language itself, how does it register, and what is the force of empiricism within the appropriating work of linguistic metaphor?

2. If every linguistic expression inevitably and unavoidably shapes and packages what it expresses, no expression has perfect authority to speak about ‘reality’ outside the context of its own expressive packaging. Science is that which has the capacity to trespass from one context to another. Expression is not of the ti esti nor a representation of to on; it is a way, an action that is inherently also a response, a self-responsibility that inaugurates itself as what must take care of itself, must be itself by distancing itself from itself in order to maintain itself. For Derrida, expression, as arche-writing, is not limited to the human, but traverses the borders of logic, speech, and even life. Ways of expression include philosophical metaphor and logic, evolution and genetic inscription, as well as mathematical equations, general relativity and quantum mechanics. But they also include petroglyphs, painting and poetry, every syntactical language, phenotypic expression itself, fossilization, carbon decomposition. Science is what reads this self-responsibility in its selfdistancing and returns it to itself. It maintains the unity of expression by finding its disunity, incorporating it or externalizing it. As such, science must (1) await and attend to the incalculable alterity of (a) what appear to be irruptions of heterogeneity internal to a manner of expression, which is to say, the appearance of differences not accounted for within the normalized system of differences in an system of expression (e.g. an alphabet, vocabulary, fluctuations in the microwave background or phenotypic traits) and (b) between heterogeneous systems of expression, and (2) bring alterity into the calculable framework of a linguistic system, which can only happen by locating the trace of the normalized order of the same within the heterogeneous difference; by modifying the established order, changing it to include the unanticipated (formerly incalculable) difference, which has the effect, through change, of making the same all the more same. And yet this work, because of the character of expression itself, is unending. Phonocentrism, as a cultural-historical moment that begins with phonetic writing – with the idea that writing is transcription and

Jeremy Butman

123

representation of speech, and in turn interprets thought as representation – is one such manner of expression, in which science is determined as an inquiry into the empirical heterogeneity only between speech and sight. In its far-reach, phonocentrism is responsible, as Derrida writes, for ‘the concept of science or the scientificity of science’ (Derrida 1974, 4); my emphasis). The scientificity of science ‘has always been determined as logic – a concept that has always been a philosophical concept, even if the practice of science has constantly challenged its imperialism of the logos, by invoking, for example, from the beginning and ever increasingly, nonphonetic writing’ (Ibid., my emphasis). Derrida contrasts scientificity, the theoretical, phonocentric concept of science, with the work and practice of science, and argues that, ever increasingly, science undercuts its own metaphysical scientificity. In this sense, deconstruction, as something that takes place in language, is a function of the movement of science against philosophy. Much of what may appear to be a deconstruction of science is in fact a deconstruction of the philosophical idea of nature, and this deconstruction clears the way for an understanding of science that exists otherwise than within the framework of representationalism. Deconstruction wants to show the joinery that brings science and representation together, in order to demonstrate that this pairing is not necessary, and science can operate outside the bounds of metaphysical language. The idea that scientificity is necessarily a question of representation is Aristotlean. In ‘The Supplement of the Copula’, Derrida address the standard reading of Aristotle on the relation between empiricism and language by way of a reading of the structural linguist Émile Benveniste. It is Benveniste who notes an ambiguity in Aristotle’s distinction between expression and the expressed, sign and signified, an ambiguity that lies in thought and the difficultly of distinguishing thought from the empirical. Aristotle believes his scientific categorization of nature follows empirical observation: Benveniste notes that ‘unconsciously [Aristotle] took as a criterion the empirical necessity of a distinct expression for each of his predications’ (Benveniste1982a, 190). From what empirical information could such a necessity about expression be drawn? As Benveniste argues, such a distinction follows the necessity of linguistics, not empiricism. Thus, from Aristotle forward, the empirical necessity is determined not simply through observation, but equally, and perhaps more decisively, through the requirements of the linguistic mode of expression. However, for Derrida, Benveniste’s own observation operates with another unconscious assumption, a concept that is deemed

124 Deconstructive Empiricism empirical but is in fact philosophical: that of the category, in this case, the category of the empirical itself, in distinction from that of the conceptual/linguistic, ‘as if the idea of category in general . . . were in some way natural’ (Derrida 1982a, 184). In so doing, Benveniste reproduces a tripartite framework: on one side lies the empirical, on the other linguistic expression, and in the middle, serving as intermediary, is thought. ‘Is it not necessary’, Derrida asks, ‘to take into account the fact that it [the categorial interpretation of nature] was produced on the very terrain where the simple opposition of language and thought was put into question?’ (Ibid.). Derrida interprets the category as itself a problem of grammar, as a product of ‘culture’. Derrida’s argument hinges on an analysis of heterogeneous linguistic systems, comparing the grammar of the copula to other ways of signifying identity and propriety, through aspiration of breath or repetition of the third person pronoun (rather than ‘he is rich’, ‘he rich he’). Derrida illustrates that ‘natural’ categorization and predicate logic are not dictated by empiricism, nor linguistics in general, but by the syntactical necessity of the copula. The upshot is to demonstrate that the relation between empiricism and language has no final logic. The operations of philosophy and science, and their interlinking histories, are founded on this proto-philosophical grammatical-empirical excursion of language. At the bottom of the question of scientificity in metaphysics (and beyond) lies the problem of thought as that which stands independent of both linguistic and empirical value in the logic of phonocentric. In metaphysics, thought is the site of the transfer of meaning from the empirical to its expression, and as such is engaged, Derrida writes, in ‘an impossible or contradictory operation’ (Ibid., 196). How can the fit of a metaphor be judged? According to what criteria can one evaluate the adequacy of metaphor in metaphysics? It cannot be from pure logic, which only has authority through reference the empirical, and not from the empirical, which must pass through metaphorization before its value can be considered by logic. The metaphysical understanding of metaphor, at base, after having undergone deconstructive reading, grasps the metaphorical as a ‘dissimulated conjunction’ of the empirical and linguistic. Thinking itself is this dissimulation conjoining experience and expression of experience. It is ‘an ‘enigma’, a secret narrative’ (Derrida 1982b, 243). ‘Enigma’ is Aristotle’s word, in Poetics, where he himself writes that metaphor aims ‘to describe a fact in an impossible combination of words’ (Ibid.). It is within this enigma, from out of this secret narrative, that the trace of the empirical and a science liberated from metaphysics appears within philosophy, and wherein

Jeremy Butman

125

language emerges and moves. One form of this liberation is found in the trespass between linguistic systems. ‘Representation’ is the phonocentric interpretation of the enigma of thought, but the enigma yields radically different interpretations, which can be found in a certain practice of comparative linguistics. But there is liberation also in the mundane iterations of language. The radical alterity that appears within the normal iterations of a linguistic system of expression, in distinction from, though not disconnected from, the alterity of heterogeneous systems of signification, can be glimpsed in Derrida’s treatment of metaphor in ‘White Mythology’. There, Derrida discusses the iterability of metaphor in terms of ‘the insistent return of that which subjects metaphysics to metaphor’ (Ibid., 268). ‘That which subjects’ does not refer to something exterior to metaphysics or to metaphor, but a function of expression and the joinery of thought, which covers over the empirical even as it unveils it. Metaphor results in ‘presence disappearing in its own radiance, the hidden source of light, of truth, and of meaning, the erasure of the visage of Being’ (Ibid.). This does not say that truth is lost, but that the source of truth is concealed. In the disappearing of presence, what Derrida calls the ‘self-destruction’ of metaphor, the empirical remains active in language, as language. The essential iterability and heterogeneity, the plurality, of metaphor, means that it limns the truth without offering the possibility of an exhaustive, definitive account. This situation is a condition of metaphor’s relation to syntax, and the limits of an expressive form. ‘[I]t is because the metaphoric is plural from the outset that it does not escape a syntax; and that it gives rise, in philosophy too, to a text which is not exhausted in the history of its meaning’ (Ibid.). However, the limiting condition of syntax, which would threaten to seal us off within a language, ultimately also serves as a mechanism of liberation. ‘But it is also because the metaphoric does not reduce syntax, and on the contrary organizes its divisions within syntax, that it gets carried away with itself, cannot be what it is except in erasing itself, indefinitely constructing its destruction’ (Ibid.). Metaphor carries itself away from its own sense as it arrives in a syntax, as its empirical luster settles into expression. In the context of deconstruction, this interpretation of being carried away does not follow the model of user, but instead the structure of the relation of the Saying to the Said in Levinas. Derrida considers two routes forward, two ways of grappling with this self-destruction of metaphor. First, philosophy maintains the metaphysical assertion of the pure exteriority of the empirical, and

126 Deconstructive Empiricism accepts metaphor as merely a ‘provisional loss of meaning’ in the system of representation (Ibid., 270). On this account, the limiting conditions of metaphor can be calculated against and corrected for. The second route embraces the self-destruction of metaphor as the only means by which thought is able to move beyond any mode of expression: this time it is no longer a question of extending and confirming a philosopheme [such as representation], but rather, of unfolding it without limit, and wresting its borders of propriety from it. And consequently to explode the reassuring opposition of the metaphoric and the proper, the opposition in which the one and the other have never done anything but reflect and refer to each other in their radiance. (Ibid., 270–1)

To explode the opposition between the metaphoric and the proper is to grasp these terms in their mutual-referentiality, and embrace the impossibility of ever taking one without the other: rather than tack the proper – the empirical, the scientific – to a particular metaphor, and insist, despite some provisional loss of meaning, that that metaphor describes a proper, objective representation or correspondence, to allow metaphorical philosophemes to unfold without limit, without belief in propriety absent of metaphor, but to find the proper in every metaphor, to allow philosophical metaphors to continue their empirical wandering. It is to invite continuing scientific investigation, rather than dream its end.

3. The character, and the slippage, of metaphor, as well as the way it accommodates and opens to scientific observation, can be seen in the historical fate of the metaphor of the sun in Plato’s allegory of the cave, which Derrida analyses in ‘White Mythology’. As truth is the centre of discourse, the sun, taken as the source of nature’s causal, rational order, becomes the metaphorical centre and ground of nature, a metonym for natural order itself. This metaphor posits a scientific theory about organic growth and causal relations, but does so with an analogy to language and with reference to a network of anthropocentric metaphors that grasp truth and knowledge as light and vision. Were these definitions of knowledge and nature anything more than metaphor, and if the language in which they are expressed were not itself ensnared in metaphorical relations to heterogeneous manners of empirical expression, such as mathematics, science would not recognize the need to explore and challenge the Platonic model

Jeremy Butman

127

of nature and truth. The inadequacy of the metaphor – the ways truth evades comparison to the sun, and the ways the movement of the stars resists a simple heliocentric nature – provokes further attention to the empirical. The scientific revolution was above all a revolution in metaphor, which challenged the sun as the centre of nature, and thus the fixity of truth in discourse. This revolution in metaphor is not fully confronted in philosophy until Nietzsche, who grasps the multitude of suns in the universe as a metaphor for the multitude of systems of truth and value. The slippage of the metaphor of the sun solicits science, which in turn transforms the metaphorical sense of nature, thought, and the empirical. It is the aspect of empiricity in metaphor, within linguistic expression, that deconstructs the metaphysical interpretation of nature, which, as it were, de-natures nature. Having exploded the opposition between metaphor and the proper, the opposition between the natural and the artificial is also exploded. ‘If the sun is metaphor always, already, it is no longer completely natural. It is . . . one might say an artificial construction, if one could still give credence to this signification when nature has disappeared’ (Ibid., 242). But this does not mean science is a ‘social construct’, and it does not mean, as Rorty proposes, that science is superficial. Derrida’s analysis of science, nature and metaphor represents instead a new accommodation of metaphor to the empirical. ‘For if the sun is no longer natural, what in nature does remain natural? What is most natural in nature bears within itself the means to emerge from itself; it accommodates itself to artificial light, eclipses itself, ellipses itself, always has been other, itself’ (Ibid.). Derrida continually, throughout his work, interprets nature as that which emerges from itself, departs from itself, is self-othering, through the logic of autoimmunity, the logic of the trace, the interplay between the calculable and incalculable. Deconstructive empiricism grasps nature, to use Derrida’s language in Of Grammatology, as ‘an element without simplicity’ and ‘arche-synthesis’ (Derrida 1974, 9), always a metaphorical (dis)jointure of incalculable otherness and calculable value. Thought, as the metaphorization that allows manners of expression to join and disjoin from one another, under the logic of self-responsibility and self-departure, escapes the bonds of any particular expressive system and explores others precisely by finding in each its moment of lapse; the fitting together of systems shows their unity, and their truth, then, but can never reach a final unity: the incalculability that permits calculable metaphor will also inevitably undo it.

128 Deconstructive Empiricism This view of nature is attuned to modern scientific theory, from evolution and genetic reproduction to general relativity and quantum mechanics. Karen Barad, taking up the precarious work of illustrating how modern physics reflects the practice of deconstruction, has shown these connections rigorously.5 But while scholarly work focuses on the extent to which deconstructive ideas appear in science, a discussion of the degree to which science and empiricism are operative forces in deconstruction remains obtuse. This is a lost opportunity, a casualty of readings like the one floated by Rorty in the essay mentioned above. It is a loss because philosophy, in its engagement with ecology, with ‘new materialism’, with planetary sciences and global culture, continues to press the deconstruction of the natural/artificial distinction, and the Kantian separation of conception and perception. In the work of Alain Badiou, Quentin Meillassoux, and for that matter Bruno Latour and Timothy Morton, philosophy sees that this project demands the rehabilitation of the sciences and mathematics outside the context of metaphysics. Were he not pushed into the field of literary criticism, textualism, not marked by a polemical charge of relativism, Derrida’s work could be seen at the centre of this discussion.

References Barad, Karen (2018), ‘Troubling Time(s) and Ecologies of Nothingness: Re-turning, Re-membering and Facing the Incalculable’, in Eco-Deconstruction, eds. Matthias Fritsch, Phillipe Lynes and David Wood, New York: Fordham University Press, pp. 206–49. ——, 2007), Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Derrida, Jacques (1974), Of Grammatology, trans. G. Spivak, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. ——(1978), ‘Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas’, trans. A. Bass, in Writing and Difference, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 97–193. ——(1982a), ‘The Supplement of the Copula: Philosophy before Linguistics’. Trans. A. Bass, in Margins of Philosophy, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 175–207. ——(1982b), ‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’, trans. A. Bass, in Margins of Philosophy, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 207–73. ——(1982c), ‘Ousia and Gramm¯e’, trans. A. Bass, in Margins of Philosophy, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 29–67. ——(1982d), ‘The Ends of Man’, trans. A. Bass, in Margins of Philosophy, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 111–36. Hägglund, Martin (2011), ‘Radical Atheist Materialism: A Critique of Meillassoux’, in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, eds. L. Bryant, N. Srnicek & G. Harman, Melbourne, Australia: re:press, pp. 114–29.

Jeremy Butman

129

Harman, G. (2009), Prince of Networks, Melbourne, Australia: re:press. Heidegger, Martin (1977a), ‘Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics’, trans. David Farrell Krell, in Basic Writings ed. David Farrell Krell, New York, NY: HarperCollins, pp. 267−307. ——(1977b), ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, trans. W. Lovitt, in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, New York, NY: HarperCollins, pp. 307–42. Kuhn, Thomas (1962), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Levinas, Emmanuel (1969), Totality and Infinity, trans. Alfonso Lingis, Norwell, MA: Kluwer Academic. Nietzsche, Friedrich (2010), ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral sense’, trans. T. Carman, in Truth and Untruth, ed. T. Carman, New York, NY: HarperCollins. Rorty, Richard (2010), ‘Nineteenth-Century Idealism and Twentieth Century Textualism’, The Rorty Reader, eds. C. Voparil & R. Bernstein, Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 122–39.

Notes 1. Hägglund’s essay asserts that Meillassoux’s project takes Derrida as a target (and shows that his scientific realism does not escape the specter of transcendental conditionality). Harman argues that Latour must turn away from Derrida because the latter does not take into account material entities. 2. In discussing the distinction between the ontic and ontological as fundamentally different modes of temporality, Derrida asks: ‘is not this opposition of the primordial to the derivative still metaphysical?. . . And why qualify temporality as authentic – or proper – and as inauthentic – and improper – when every ethical preoccupation has been suspended?’ (Derrida 1978c, 63). More to the point, with respect to my argument below, in ‘The Ends of Man’ he writes: ‘It remains itself that Being, which is nothing, is not a being, cannot be said, cannot say itself, except in ontic metaphor (Derrida 1982d, 131). More explicitly: ‘on the basis of . . . the thinking of the ontico-ontological difference, one could even make explicit an entire theory of metaphoricity’ (Derrida 1982d, 130). 3. ‘Ethics’, Levinas says, ‘is an optics’ (Levinas 1969, 23). This ethical optics would itself be an expression of an empiricism that exceeds the bounds of metaphysics. In relation to Levinas’ empiricism, Derrida would add that it cannot be solely a question of ethics, because, having deconstructed the perfect alterity of the other person, the otherness that disrupts would not be simply ethical, as it would not be simply perceptual, but would be ensnared in the ethico-scientific matrix; it would be at once incalculable in its ethical demand, and also scientifically calculable, though calculable in a way that would not have been already anticipated. 4. The microscope, for instance, does not tell us more about what we perceive, but rather alters our perception; does not tell us about what is there in front of us, but opens a new space and a new ‘there’. What is seen under the microscope transforms our conception of things perceived, but this transformation is accomplished as much by the empirical observation through the microscope as by the conceptual hypothesization that called for the microscope. The microscope itself is what indicates the meaning of the empirical. 5. See Karen Barad 2018, pp. 206–49; and, more generally Barad 2007.

Copyright of Derrida Today is the property of Edinburgh University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.