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Vitale What BIo Deconstruction Is Not
Vitale What BIo Deconstruction Is Not
Vitale What BIo Deconstruction Is Not
Not
Francesco Vitale
Università degli Studi di Salerno, Italy
little surprised to see my work inscribed in the horizon of the so-called “New
Materialism.” At the time, I confess, my knowledge of this “new” horizon came
down to what I heard at the conference “New Materialisms and Economies of
Excess,” held in 2016 in Atlanta, where I presented a paper titled “Living
Matter: Teleology between Philosophy and the Life Sciences.” Even recogniz-
ing a familiar atmosphere in the attention paid to scientific discourses, I was
having trouble articulating it in the perspective of deconstruction (or of what
I think deconstruction implies): first, and more generally, because the preten-
tion of a “new -ism” always presupposes a linear, progressive conception of
history that Derrida has questioned from the beginning (see Derrida 1990). As
is well known, he contests not only the teleological presuppositions in Hus-
serl’s discourse on “historicity,” but also the notion of historical “rupture” or
CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 19, No. 3, 2019, pp. 1–12. ISSN 1532-687X.
© 2019 Michigan State University. All rights reserved.
1
2 What (Bio)deconstruction Is Not
If I have not very often used the word “matter,” it is not, as you know, because
of some idealist or spiritualist kind of reservation. It is that in the logic of the
phase of overturning this concept has been too often reinvested with “logo-
centric” values, values associated with those of thing, reality, presence in
general, sensible presence, for example, substantial plenitude, content, refer-
ent, etc. Realism or sensualism—“empiricism”—are modifications of logocen-
trism. (I have often insisted on the fact that “writing” or the “text” are not
reducible either to the sensible or visible presence of the graphic or the “lit-
eral.”) In short, the signifier “matter” appears to me problematical only at the
moment when its reinscription cannot avoid the making of it a new funda-
mental principle which, by means of theoretical regression, would be recon-
stituted into a “transcendental signified.” It is not only idealism in the narrow
sense that falls back upon the transcendental signified. It can always come to
reassure a metaphysical materialism. It then becomes an ultimate referent
according to the c1assical logic implied by the value of referent, or it becomes
an “objective reality” absolutely “anterior” to any work of the mark, the seman-
tic content of a form of presence which guarantees the movement of the text in
general from the outside. (Derrida 1981, 64–65)
Most recently, having to write an essay for a Parallax issue devoted to the
“body,” I tried to give more details about my perplexities concerning such
approaches in the horizon of the “New Materialism” (Vitale 2019). Reading
some work, in particular, by Karen Barad and Vicky Kirby, I appreciated, once
again, many interesting suggestions concerning possible and necessary de-
constructive readings of the scientific discourse, but, at the same time, I also
recognized the attempt, more or less explicit, or at the least the risk, to use
deconstruction to build a new ontology, a new metaphysics of nature.
Francesco Vitale 3
Obviously, nothing forbids it, but, I think that such attempts would have at
least to justify that use by confronting it with what Derrida says about or
against an ontological reading of his work. In the end, at least for the moment,
I subscribe to what Geoffrey Bennington, interviewed by Alberto Moreiras,
says about this atmosphere:
Now, my feeling is that today, when of course ontology is all the rage again—
the word, and the concept, and the project of ontology are back in many forms
and on many sides, as though there were something very desirable about
ontology, as though it were an object of philosophical desire to formulate
an ontology, as though the very word “ontology” were irresistibly seduc-
tive—my feeling is that those attempts have not registered the force of
Derrida’s arguments, nor thereby of Heidegger’s, if we accept that Derrida
is radicalizing Heidegger in this respect. So these new ontologies, new
realisms, object-oriented, whatever they want to call it, speculative real-
isms, I don’t think those movements of thought have registered the force of
Derrida’s account of the trace structure, différance, dissemination, decon-
struction. (Moreiras 2017, 41)
extending from the elementary features of the most rudimentary forms of the
living right through the human psyche to the cultural achievements of human-
kind, be it the sciences, the arts, economics, politics, you name it. (Rheinberger
2018)
In fact, in Biodeconstruction I insist on the fact that for Derrida the deconstructive
notion of text imposes itself in the reading of Jacob’s The Logic of Life as a heuristic
model and not as an ontological structure of the living, that is, because of its
capability to account for essential aspects of living phenomena highlighted by
Jacob himself, better than the writing model, imported from cybernetics and
adopted by Jacob. In the seminar La vie la mort, Derrida is very explicit:
Why, then, should we speak of text? Well, I believe that this necessity obviously
has nothing absolute about it, nothing that is not bound and motivated by a
certain historico-theoretical situation and to the politico-scientific strategy
related to this situation. By referring the living to the structure of a text, we
evidently make conceptual progress in bio-genetics, a progress in knowledge,
in the knowledge of the living, if you like, it being understood that this progress
of knowledge is at the same time a transformation of the status of knowledge
that, as I said last week, has no longer to do with some meta-textual real but
with the text and thus consists in writing text on text. It is not the recourse to
the textual “model” that has made progress possible, but just as much the
opposite: a certain transformation of knowledge imposed what we call the model
of the text. Conversely, what we call model allows for new hypotheses, new
constructions, and is in turn determined by that of which it is the model: we
understand otherwise a text, what a text is, when the function called model is
at work. This is when, whatever the inadequation of the concept and the word
“model,” we become aware of the necessity of this theoretico-political strategy
I was speaking about a moment ago . . . .There is not the living and the text. Not
only there are typical structures of the living and typical structures of text but,
even if one is not content with the empiricist positing of this multiplicity, there
are several ways of defining the textuality and structure of the living. It is
obvious that if we determine textuality this time on the basis of a model of text
(for example, the phonetico-logocentric text, oriented by a present meaning,
Francesco Vitale 5
And yet, are not the thought of the meaning or truth of Being, the determina-
tion of différance as the ontico-ontological difference, difference thought
within the horizon of the question of being, still intrametaphisical effects of
différance? The unfolding of différance is perhaps not solely the truth of Being,
Francesco Vitale 7
More strikingly, différance knots together the different meanings of the word
difference with the entirely different significations of the verb to defer (différer),
from whose participle the noun différance was derived; yet there is no etymo-
logical justification for doing so. Only by means of quasicatachrestic violence
can the neologism différance be made to refer to the semantic field of the word
8 What (Bio)deconstruction Is Not
For us, différance remains a metaphysical name, and all the names that it
receives in our language are still, as names, metaphysical. And this is particu-
larly the case when these names state the determination of différance as the
difference between presence and the present (Anwesen/Anwesend), and above
all, and is already the case when they state the determination of différance as
the difference of Being and beings.
“Older” than Being itself, such a différance has no name in our lan-
guage. But we “already know” that if it is unnameable, it is not provisionally
so, not because our language has not yet found or received this name, or
because we would have to seek it in another language, outside the finite
system of our own. It is rather because there is no name for it at all, not even
the name of essence or of Being, not even that of “différance,” which is not
Francesco Vitale 9
a name, which is not a pure nominal unity, and unceasingly dislocates itself
in a chain of differing and deferring substitutions.
“There is no name for it”: a proposition to be read in its platitude. This un-
nameable is not an ineffable Being which no name could approach: God, for
example. This unnameable is the play which makes possible nominal effects, the
relatively unitary and atomic structures that are called names, the chains of
substitution of names in which, for example, the nominal effect différance is itself
enmeshed, carried off, reinscribed, just as a false entry or a false exit is still part of
the game, a function of the system. (Derrida 1982, 26)
I wanted to recall that the concept of text I propose is limited neither to the
graphic, nor to the book, nor even to discourse, and even less to the semantic,
representational, symbolic, ideal, or ideological sphere. What I call “text” implies
all the structures called “real,” “economic,” “historical,” socio–institutional, in
short: all possible referents. Another way of recalling once again that “there is
nothing outside the text.” That does not mean that all referents are suspended,
denied, or enclosed in a book, as people have claimed, or have been naive enough
to believe and to have accused me of believing. But it does mean that every referent,
allrealityhasthestructureofadifferentialtrace,andthatonecannotrefertothis“real”
except in an interpretive experience. The latter neither yields meaning nor assumes it
except in a movement of differential referring. That’s all. (Derrida 1988, 148).
NOTES
4. From this point of view, I recall that many physicists today consider very dubious the notion of
“time,” to which Meillassoux attributes a decisive role in his book. Many of them claim that
“time” does not exist as a physical entity, that it is only the effect of our perception of changes,
ultimately, depending on our relationship with the world. See, for instance, Rovelli 2018.
REFERENCES
Changeux, Jean Pierre. 1997. The Neuronal Man. The Biology of Mind, trans. Laurence Garey.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1975-76. La vie la mort, Archive-Derrida, IMEC, DRR 173.
. 1976. Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
. 1981. Positions, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
. 1982. “Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: Chicago
University Press 1982.
. 1988. Limited Inc., trans. S. Weber, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
. 1990. “Some Statements and Truisms about Neologism, Newisms, Postisms, and Other
Small Seismisms.” In The States of ‘Theory.’ Art and Critical Discourse, ed. D. Carroll, 63–
94. New York: Columbia University Press.
Gasché, Rodolphe. 1986. The Tain of the Mirror. Jacques Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kandel, Eric R. 2005. Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and the New Biology of Mind, London: American
Psychiatric Publishing.
Meillassoux, Quentin. 2008. After Finitude. An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray
Brassier, London: Continuum.
Moreiras, Alberto. 2017. “On Scatter, the Trace Structure and the Opening of the Politics: An
Interview with Geoffrey Bennington.” Diacritics 45:2.
Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. 2018. “Review of F. Vitale, Biodeconstruction. Jacques Derrida and the
Life Sciences.” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 7:16.
Rovelli, Carlo. 2018. The Order of Time, trans. Simon Carnell and Erica Segre. London: Penguin.
Vitale, Francesco. 2018. Biodeconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences, trans. Mauro
Senatore. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
. 2019. “Microphysics of Sex. Sexual Differences between Biology and Deconstruction.”
Parallax 25:1.
X X X
FRANCESCO VITALE is Associate Professor of Aesthetics at the University of
Salerno (Italy). His academic interests have focused on Derrida’s work since
his PhD dissertation in philosophy on Derrida’s relation to Hegel (University
12 What (Bio)deconstruction Is Not