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E1754850009000360
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E1754850009000360
Claire Colebrook
Abstract
In On Touching Derrida locates Jean-Luc Nancy (and, briefly, Gilles
Deleuze) within a tradition of haptic ethics and aesthetics that runs
from Aristotle to the present. In his early work on Husserl, Derrida
had already claimed that phenomenology’s commitment to the genesis
of sense and the sensible is at one and the same time a commitment
to pure and rigorous philosophy at the same time as it threatens to
over-turn the primacy of conceptuality and cognition.Whereas Nancy
(and those other figures whom Derrida cites, such as Merleau-Ponty)
express a faith in a return to the sensibility of flesh, Derrida presents
his own work as manifestly more cognisant of the necessary distance
between flesh and sense. Another ‘approach’ to the haptic is suggested
by Gilles Deleuze, whose work Derrida locates within phenomenological
presence, despite Deleuze and Guattari’s trenchant rejection of ‘the lived’
and the human organism that inevitably subtends any discussion of the
relation between sensibility and sense. Rather than decide for or against
this border between flesh and cognition, between post-deconstruction
and deconstructive rigour, this essay examines this curious border of
touch between philosophy and sensibility, and does so by referring to
William Blake’s problem of returning the signs of sense to the sensibility
of the hand.
*
How do proper names operate in theory? I ask the question of theory,
not philosophy, insofar as theory is both the invasion and disruption of
literary studies that occurred on or about 1976 with certain threatening
and enticing French authors, and the capacity of a distanced and critical
view of a scene whose own relations are not immediately self-evident.
Theory can at one and the same time be marked and dated as an event,
as a style of thinking, writing and invoking proper names, at the same as
Derrida, Deleuze and Haptic Aesthetics 23
would once again take up a voice or proper name in order to open its
potentiality, rather than recognise it as one more instance of an ‘ism’.
It is just that theoretical persona – a voice that defers to, and desires
what an other voice would seek to find beyond philosophy, while
lamenting the impossibility of such a ‘beyond’ – that has enabled a
certain Deleuzian theoretical persona to overtake what remains of
‘theory.’ The notion of a death or end of theory, or a time after theory,
has itself produced its theoretical personae: an ethically irresponsible
textualism that is now ameliorated by a return to history, or – as in
the case of Deleuzism – an overly linguistic or critical Derrida, now
answered by a return to life. If ‘Derrida’ functions as a personification
for a critical failure of nerve, for a remaining within the conditions
for the possibility of experience (with experience narrowly defined as
meaningful experience), ‘Deleuze’ stands for a release from critique
and an affirmative, possibly literalist, project of genesis, emergence and
vitalism. What I want to examine in the essay that follows is not so
much the legitimacy or correctness of Derridean deconstruction versus
the vitalism of Deleuze, but the ways in which these personae – of a
responsible linguistically-nuanced critique on the one hand and a post-
linguistic affirmation of life on the other – themselves replay certain
rigidities in thinking.
I want to approach these thought figures, or theoretical territories,
through a particular motif gestured to in On Touching: the
deconstruction of Christianity. That idea, so crucial to the forward
movement of Nancy’s thought, is touched on in passing by Derrida,
and this brevity of touch (I would suggest) has a certain force of its
own, perhaps a resistance to thinking that we might so easily overcome
piety. The very idea of a deconstruction of Christianity is at once
an idea indebted to Derrida (as deconstruction) and, as an idea, a
refusal or negation of everything that ‘Derrida’ has come to stand for:
would it be possible, so easily, for us to overcome transcendence, and
would such a possibility have arrived, perhaps before or beyond Nancy,
in Deleuze and Guattari? The very possibility of a deconstruction of
Christianity is, as the relation among present and absent personae in On
Touching demonstrates, at once the most inevitable and vital of ideas,
and uncannily devoid of force.
To telescope the idea of the deconstruction of Christianity as put
forward by Nancy: once Christianity commits itself to monotheism, and
once monotheism is, in turn, committed to the complete divinity of God,
the idea of God destroys itself from within. If it is the case that God
is absolutely and divinely creative, then all that exists must emanate
Derrida, Deleuze and Haptic Aesthetics 29
from His being, but as divine emanation and creation there could not
be a radical distinction between creator and created, between natura
naturans and natura naturata. There is, then, an inevitable progression
to Nancy’s position of sensible immanence that is offered (by Nancy)
as philosophy’s and history’s fulfilment. For Nancy the sensible is not
an escape from philosophy and monotheism, a naïve retreat to some
beyond of sense; it is the fulfilment of sense. Insofar as I posit a God
who would be the very genesis of all that is, I move from transcendence
to immanence. It might be possible to begin the thinking of ‘the sensible’
by attributing genesis to a transcendence, a God ‘who’ authors this
world. Like Deleuze and Guattari, Nancy suggests that the logic of
transcendence arises from the sensible, that has always been thought
as the sensible apprehension of being. Also, like Deleuze and Guattari,
he suggests that transcendence will overcome itself. Once we try to think
the origin of all that is, the very ground of being, then we arrive properly
not at the origin of sensibility, but sensibility as origin. Once we think of
God, not as a god who could be figured like any other being, but as the
condition for all figures, then God is nothing other than this sensible,
immanent, and never delimitable existence. There is not a finitude,
beyond which we might posit or think an ungraspable infinite; the finite
as finite is always intimating what is not itself, and must remain finitely
incomplete. Transcendence is impossible, and undoes itself. Thought
destroys its self-immolation before an infinite that would be other than
this finite world; thought arrives – naturally, properly – at its own fragile
singularity.
Gilles Deleuze (2004) makes a similar argument about the becoming-
secular of Christianity in his book on Francis Bacon. The very project
of painting the divinity of Christ’s flesh, the striving to present spirit in
matter, ultimately arrives at the spirituality of matter, of paint become
spirit. The enslavement to transcendence, so often figured today in the
Deleuzian literature as an enslavement to the linguistic tradition or the
‘signifier,’ is not only presented as avoidable; it would be an act of
unthinking stupidity, or life-denying malevolence to remain attached
to transcendent figures beyond life. This is the force of Deleuze and
Guattari’s What is Philosophy? (1994) which charts its way through
a series of names – from Plato to Whitehead – all of whom indicate a
potentiality for immanence. Phenomenology, they suggest, comes close
to arriving at immanence, but fails when it places immanence within the
plane of ‘the lived.’ Their philosophical task, similar to Nancy’s, would
be to release and realise this positive potentiality of immanence that
must, and should, arrive if thought is not to remain pious. Philosophy
30 Claire Colebrook
this appeal to destruction, for it has a double force. On the one hand
Blake declares war on destruction, on all those writers who would
dampen, deaden and impede the intellect, and he does so in the name
of ‘mental fight’ and ‘spiritual war.’ On the other hand, in destroying
destruction, Blake must believe in a spirit or force of war that could
overcome the deadening piety of tradition. Such a double sense occurs in
any act of self-archiving: to destroy and overcome the past requires both
an identification of the way an archive can limit the imagination, at the
same time as imagination it must – in destroying – take up some weapon,
figure, force or piety of its own. Now, let us translate that double sense
of war and self-archiving into the way names operate in On Touching:
Deleuze’s name is placed alongside Nancy as one who would believe
in the haptic, and who would – in the supposed war on transcendence
and the infinite – once more subject thought to an unthinking naivety or
piety. From a Deleuzo-Guattarian commitment not only to the haptic,
but to the ‘war machine’ that would destroy the force of law and
transcendental conditions, the failure to arrive at the haptic is a failure
to arrive at real conditions.
So now I want to ask a stupid question: who is right? Is it possible to
think beyond the linguistic paradigm and consider the life from which
such systems emerge; would this amount to the final abandonment
of piety, with the absent god of language no longer being the great
mediating condition that figures our subjection? Or is such a turn to
life and genesis that would present itself as the overcoming of all piety
the most unthinking of pieties, a vitalism that sacrifices itself (and the
responsibility of thinking) before a life and force that it must always
figure as its own? I want to reiterate that this is a stupid question,
indeed a malevolent question, in which thinking dramatises its own
paralysis as an opposition between theoretical personae. Such a stupidity
is, of course, no accident and is enabled (at the very same time as it is
forestalled) in both Derrida’s and Deleuze’s texts. By citing both Nancy
and Deleuze as symptoms of a fall back into an appeal to the presence of
the lived, Derrida creates a persona, but he is able to do so only because
the possibilities of theoretical personae – of transforming problems into
proper names – is one of the ways in which theory has always destroyed
itself.
The move to Deleuze in theory today is a move to life, an affirmation
of the forces that generate figures, and a liberation from any body as
such that might deprive thought of its immanent power. Deleuze can
operate as a way of upping the anti-; however radical deconstruction
might have been in the move beyond the mind of man to the signifier,
32 Claire Colebrook
it failed to move beyond the signifier to life. But one can also, after
Deleuze, maintain a hold on deconstructive ethics. So, is it a question,
as it might appear to be from a certain way of reading On Touching,
that however desirable or seductive an approach to the sensible might
be, we remain with a relation to the sensible? How might one decide
on the responsibility of these warring proper names: is it responsible
to recognise that a thought of the sensible is always a thought of the
sensible, distanced and difficult? Or, is the imperative to go beyond
the conditions of thinking to life and vitality itself, beyond all the human
agonisings, the only genuine ethic of philosophy?
In On Touching Derrida argues both that a certain privileging of
the haptic is essential and necessary to Western metaphysics and that
this essence and necessity can be discerned in the work of Deleuze.
On the one hand such a definition and an inclusion might come as a
surprise. Isn’t Western metaphysics constituted by a originary privileging
of pure ideality: that there can be a sense or eidos grasped in a pure
act of apprehension without any medium of touch or affect? Isn’t it
this philosophical gesture par excellence which requires writing (or the
body through which thought conveys itself) to be posited as secondary,
parasitic and accidental? It is that logocentric notion of philosophy as
thought thinking itself that might appear to be targeted by an emphasis
on the body, matter, affect or the sensible.3 In his reading of Husserl’s
reduction, which would bracket any factual or worldly being of the
sign and instead turn back to its origin in constituting sense, Derrida
insists that Husserl is the completion and apotheosis of metaphysics.
What else is metaphysics if not the drive to incorporate, master and
recognise as always already its own those dispersed fragments of history,
writing, language and the body that would at first glance seem to
preclude thought’s self-mastery? In this regard we could place Derrida
with Deleuze in the post-phenomenological tradition dedicated at one
and the same time (following Husserl and Heidegger) to the destruction
of received and constituted systems in favour of genesis and (against
Husserl and Heidegger) to the demonstration that such a genesis is plural
and anarchic, incapable of being grasped as thought’s own. One way of
thinking about the relation between Deleuze and Derrida has been to
argue that while both are similarly critical of the metaphysical privileging
of foundational and constituting mind, Derrida will only demonstrate
the limits of thought from within, while Deleuze will take that next post-
or anti-Kantian step and intuit the geneses that make up the subject
of thought and life. So, Derrida’s inclusion of Deleuze within a haptic
Derrida, Deleuze and Haptic Aesthetics 33
while forgetting the ways in which life, for Deleuze, violates and perverts
itself.4 Second, while one might want to say, then, that the opposition
between Deleuze and Derrida is too simple and stupid, too lacking
in nuanced and post-dialectical distinctions, the territorial readings of
Deleuze and Derrida cannot be dismissed as mere accidents or parasitic
excrescences. For there is a use of proper names by both authors that
would assign the other’s body of work to a form of piety, a falling
back into a belief in the haptic as such or writing as such. Deleuze
and Guattari’s minimal references to Derrida accuse him of just that
fetishisation of writing and signification: as though one regime of
signs could overcode or reterriotrialise all others. But Derrida, also,
requires his symptomatic proper names, and this might indicate that
something like philosophy – or the creation of concepts and thinking as
such – cannot take place today, and can only operate as theory, as the
reading through of other texts as symptoms. But if auto-affection is no
longer possible, is the idea of a body that undoes itself so easily thought
(whether that be a God who arrives at immanence, a text that destroys
its own thesis, or a body that frees itself from organs)?
In On Touching Derrida will make a number of deconstructive
manoeuvres regarding the conditions for the possibility of auto-
affection. First, that supposedly immediate touch before submission to
the system of conscious concepts, before experience, is no longer one’s
own, discrete and singular, and is already invaded by and conditioned by
what is not itself. To feel, to sense, or to live this here and now as one’s
own is to already mark it as bearing a relation to oneself, and to have
this self that feels is already to be alien from oneself. To be or live in this
pure presence of ipseity requires auto-affection; and one can only feel
oneself touching the other if one has already placed oneself in relation.
Relations cannot therefore unfold from the self, for selfhood or ipseity
presupposes relationality. Second, auto-affection or the recognition of
oneself as a self which would be required if one is to experience or take
up a relation to what is not oneself has always required a normative
image of the body. The body is the vehicle through which the self lives
and orients its being. This is certainly the case for the phenomenology of
the lived body that runs from Kant, for whom we do not need to prove a
world of space and time outside ‘me’ precisely because that ‘inner’ me is
already spatial, to Merleau-Ponty for whom the world is infolded from
the ‘I can’. The body is therefore not a container for mind but active,
orienting, synthesising – not in the world but for the world. The body has
always (received through the history of these proper names) been a body
of auto-affection; all its responses and motilities are not acts of some
36 Claire Colebrook
therefore, refer to the conditions and assumptions that are in play before
reading; theory would be a turning back to the position of reading, an
attention to the lens or context through or from which we read.
But such a reference to conditions and such a notion of theory as self-
reflection and critique does not yet yield that positive and affirmative
dimension upon which Derrida insists. One way of thinking about
positivity and affirmation would be through the concept of life. If theoria
is primarily the problem of the received, lived, intuited and given, where
the given is given to some subject, then it might be possible to think
beyond theory and beyond the lived to life. If, as Paul de Man argued,
there can be no theory of narrative we can think about this negatively
and critically: any attempt to offer an account of the emergence of
narrative would itself take some narrative form – a before and after – and
would therefore have presupposed what it tries to explain. This would
mean that we would always already be within narrative, rhetoric and
lived time, never capable of intuiting time in its pure state. But is there
not a positive way of thinking theory and narrative, not as conditions
within which ‘we’ (as linguistic beings) move, but as the production
or unfolding a space of relations? Here both theory and narrative (like
writing, trace, text, différance) would have to lose their narrow critical
sense. Writing would not be the condition within which we approach the
lived, for before the lived as such there would have to be something like
writing. This would require, in turn, that a certain notion of life would
have to be re-thought.
This is why a meditation on touch, flesh and the body is not a
consideration that comes to Derrida late in his philosophical career,
through and with Nancy. If the normative understanding of self-affective
life has allowed us to place writing and text after the immediacy and
presence of touch, then only a different thought of the living being
will allow us to move beyond the language of the ‘linguistic turn’.
Vitalism, then, far from being the revolutionary post-Derridean and
vibrantly post-human liberation that Deleuzians often claim it to be,
would be the metaphysical gesture par excellence. Consider, before the
vitalisms of Bergson, James and Husserl – for despite his critique of
Lebensphilosophie Husserl demanded that reified and technical systems
be returned to their animating spirit – the vitalism of William Blake:
The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling
them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers,
mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous
senses could percieve. And particularly they studied the genius of each
38 Claire Colebrook
city & country. placing it under its mental deity. Till a system was formed,
which some took ad-vantage of & enslav’d the vulgar by attempting to realise
or abstract the mental deities from their objects; thus began Priesthood.
Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales. And at length they pronouncd
that the Gods had orderd such things. Thus men forgot that All deities reside
in the human breast.
(Blake 1966, ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, plate 11)
In the beginning is the expansive and creative act, flowing from ‘enlarged
and numerous senses.’ That originally living and animating force,
through repetition, becomes systematised and reified until the instituting
sense is forgotten. From an originally productive, active, spontaneous
and creative poetry to the system of priesthood: this might seem like
the first step in overturning Platonism. But Platonism has never been a
simple negation of life in favour of an ordering Idea, and the resistance
to the Platonic distance of ideas from life goes back as far as Aristotle.
(In Difference and Repetition Deleuze defends a radical and reversed
Platonism, against Plato and Aristotelian naturalism). In Plato’s own
texts the Idea is privileged because it is the genetic principle which
gives being and life to matter, so that even as far back as Plato we
can say that there has been a vitalist lament regarding the fall of
thinking into inert systems, such as the thinking that would be devoted
to rhetoric or semblance rather than the life of things. Not only does
Blake’s celebration of energy and animation anticipate Bergson’s appeal
to a creative life before the fall into the efficiency of the intellect, and
recall centuries of mourning regarding the loss of life and spirit in
merely technical systems (including theory); it also brings to the fore
the persistent vitalism of the normative body. Enlarged and numerous
senses: the unfallen body is receptive to the flux of life, responsive and
creative: giving to the world an animation that would be impossible if
the body were one thing among others. The condition for the possibility
of the lived is the lived and living body.
There has always been a grounding of the genesis of the world in a
vital body in a tradition, as Derrida notes, that runs from the proper
potentiality of Aristotle, for whom the human body is oriented to
perceiving the reason of the world, to phenomenology. There is always
in the return of systems to life, a normative image of life, which is also a
normative image of the body, and thereby a normative image of touch,
of the haptic. The properly living being from which the question of
philosophy ought to begin can never be the body within the world,
but must be that body that can recognise itself as the ground from
Derrida, Deleuze and Haptic Aesthetics 39
References
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Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Blake, William (1966), The Complete Writings of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey
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Blake, William (1966), The Complete Writings of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey
Keynes, Oxford: Oxford University Press, plate 11.
Clough, Patricia Ticineto and Jean Halley, eds. (2007), The Affective Turn:
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Deleuze, Gilles (1994), Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York:
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Derrida, Deleuze and Haptic Aesthetics 43
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Notes
1. As an example: ‘Mr. Derrida was known as the father of deconstruction, the
method of inquiry that asserted that all writing was full of confusion and
contradiction, and that the author’s intent could not overcome the inherent
contradictions of language itself, robbing texts – whether literature, history
or philosophy – of truthfulness, absolute meaning and permanence.’ Jonathan
Kandell, ‘Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74,’ The New York Times,
10 October 2004.
2. An obituary authored by Derridean scholars, Derek Attridge and Thomas
Baldwin, was published in The Guardian on 11 October 2004: ‘Imitations of the
Derridean style seldom succeed, and it is not surprising that a caricature version
of Derrida emerged. But this flamboyantly self-regarding figure, dismissing the
search for truth, declaring historical knowledge to be impossible, denying that
there is anything beyond language – and doing all this in a relentless series of
puns and neologisms – bore no resemblance to the person himself.’ The caption
below the picture of a somewhat startled Derrida read, ‘Jacques Derrida: deep
thinker or truth thief?’
3. See the introduction by Patricia Ticinento Clough to The Affective Turn:
Theorizing the Social, ed. Patricia Ticineto Clough, with Jean Halley (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2007).
4. For Deleuze and Guattari, ‘That is the only way Nature operates – against itself.’
A Thousand Plateaus, p. 242.
DOI: 10.3366/E1754850009000360