Today I woke up to news of Israel murdering aid workers & activists on the Freedom Flotilla attempting to break the siege on Gaza. @humanprovince, amongst all the outrage, provided this useful frame for the inevitable word of words after/over tragedy. Having studied theories of pressure group dynamics, I understood the importance of such stratagems, but  still had to voice my lament. @troyrhoades replied to my comment mentioning Derrida and parergons, and while I didn’t see how that was relevant, I googled to see where it would take me.

Here is one interesting text I found, relevant & irrelevant in many ways. I copy it a google cache image, as the original server was down when I tried to access it.

(Pre/text: or the reason why I will not write a preface

<1> A preface, normally a relatively short piece of writing which introduces a book, might have various aims: setting up an argument, clarifying the author’s intention, retracing the evolution of the main text, explicating and anticipating the theories which will be developed later, etc. Thus, whether by the author him/herself or an editor or whomever else, such preface presupposes that the person writing it has already identified the themes or thoughts that will be detailed in the book to follow. The preface aims to be a sort of gate, a passageway from an outside world — the “real” one with a political, intellectual, social context — into the world of the text. At the same time, it might also wish to delimit the main text, to establish clear contours by clarifying what such text will be about, and what instead it won’t be about. It provides a programme, it sets up a stable reassuring ground from which to view the horizon of the text.

<2> I don’t wish to write such a preface mainly for two reasons, which as you will notice are really just one. If I did, I would find myself in a double bind: in wishing to summarise my main topic I would inevitably go against its very nature. Moreover, in giving you an introduction I would contradict precisely what I am going to tell you regarding the function of certain structures (let’s momentarily call them that for lack of a better definition), which are precariously positioned between an inside and an outside, on a limit between two edges.

<3> Already, having anticipated my subject, I have in a way betrayed my aim in avoiding this introduction. Thus I wish to interrupt myself straight away and start anew. Without preambles.)

“If there were no main topic, there would be subject for conversation”[1]

<4> I will speak, therefore, of a word.

<5> Yes. You will probably be surprised to know that you are about to read a whole paper on one single word. Did I find so much to say about a word? I did. In fact, there is a lot more that I left unsaid. I couldn’t say it all because I have borders to delimit the size of this text. I must draw margins around what I write, to differentiate between what is relevant and what is not so relevant. Between the inside and the outside. I must confine my writing to the inside, enclose it within a perimeter, which forms a circular line, an orbit around the text. I am not allowed to go outside, ex-orbit unless through footnotes or parenthesis (discrete strategies to overrun or spill over the circumference, taking the text somewhere other, on a detour, but always only to come back to the inside of the main topic). But what is the main topic of this text? You must excuse me if I was already digressing, already blurring the borders. So end of note: I will get back on track.

<6> So my main topic is a word. Detour. This word leads me astray towards other words that share with it a certain movement, or a tendency to movement, or something else, which I will try to uncover. I want to talk about ellipsis, about circles and about différance. Yes, of course these words are related to Jacques Derrida, as words tend to (related also in the sense of a relation through kinship). I am going to start with the essay “La différance” in the book Margins of Philosophy (1882). Reading it, I noticed detour, which caught my eye. Derrida mentions the word a few times and relates it to the workings of the pleasure and the reality principles as they are explained by Sigmund Freud in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” However, detour has ramifications in a certain philosophical context, which Derrida doesn’t fully acknowledge. How so? To begin with, Derrida, despite what some would like to believe, does not break with the tradition of Western metaphysics. “Such a break with tradition … is the best tradition of philosophical thought” [2]. Instead, he does something much more subtle and constructive. He engages through debate and exchange with such a tradition in order to exhibit its inconsistencies and gaps.

<7> However, the omission to mention the origins of detour might also be a rather unconscious slip in the best Freudian way, rather than a willing ellipsis. Thus, I am spurred to follow this word by two similar withholdings: Derrida’s and Spivak’s [3]. In fact, in the introduction to Of Grammatology (1976), on page xliii, Spivak quotes a passage from “La différance” and she argues that

It emphasises the presence of Freud in the articulation of what comes close to becoming Derrida’s master-concept — “différance” spelled with an “a.” Let us fasten on three moments in the quotation — “differing,” “deferring,” and “detour”…

She returns to differing and deferring as anticipated, but she never returns to detour. Why? Is this an unconscious gap? A repression? Spivak, just like Derrida, only mentions Freud (a Freudian non-slip) in relation to the origin of this idea of detour, but no one else. She completely forgets about detour, left to oblivion in the pages of the introduction and to its own devices in the pages of anything else. Yet, detour can be traced back to somewhere else, somewhere that for some reason Derrida forgets or decides not to mention, to Nietzsche and Heidegger among others [4]. Through them, the tracing back of detour becomes entangled with the emergence of other words. As I continue my reading, I start noticing that some of these words have affinities with detour: exorbitant [5], ellipsis [6], circle, etc. So, before I proceed, let’s take a little etymological detour:

Detour o n. a divergence from a direct and intended route; a roundabout course. ov. make or cause to make a detour. [F detour change of direction f. detourner turn away (as DE- , TURN)]
n. diversion, deviation, circuitous route or way, roundabout way, bypass ov. deviate (from), turn away (from), divert (from)
De (…) f. L. de: off, from
Tour o n. 1 a journey from place to place as a holiday. b an excursion, ramble, or walk… (2 a spell of duty on military or diplomatic service )… 3 a series of performances, matches, etc., at different places on a route through a country etc. o v. …make a tour… [ME f. OF to(u)r f. L tornus f. Gk: tornos lathe ][7]
n. … expedition, voyage,… peregrination,…stroll, … walkabout, … excursion, …circuit,….
Exorbitant (of a price, demand, etc.) grossly excessive, … [LL exorbitare (as EX-, orbita ORBIT)]
Ex… a. out, forth…d. remove or free from
Orbit …4 the eye socket… [L orbita course, track (in med L eye cavity); fem. of orbitus circular f. orbis ring] (- please bear this eye in mind for later.)
Ellipse a regular oval …[F f. L ellipsus f. Gk elleipsis f. elleipo come short f en in + leipo leave]
Ellipsis (also ellipse) 1 the omission from a sentence of words needed to complete construction or sense … 3 a set of three dots indicating an omission[8]

<8> I apologise for this seemingly irrelevant and rather tedious diversion, but etymological excavations are not unusual in a certain circuit of thinkers among whom is Derrida himself. In this way, I have introduced three words or concepts — circle, orbit and ellipsis -- which will reappear again and again in the course of this text and whose paths will cross with the names of three thinkers, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Hélène Cixous, whose writings are intertwined with Derrida’s own. Also, through such detour I start to see the resemblance between these words. I could even say that these assemblages of letters and in particular detour and exorbitant, mean roughly the same thing, or at least they refer to the same movement, a sort of dislocation or removal from what is an intended trajectory, a temporal or/and spatial displacement of sorts. My emphasis is on a subtle implication of their meaning. I think that both imply an awareness of — if not a return to — what is the tour or the orbit, what is the proposed or due course. They affect a deviation, while keeping that from which they deviate in mind. Of course, one must know the direct trajectory to diverge from it, and one must know where the orbit is to be able to go off it. Thus, if you are in a forest, for example, and you are on a detour, I suspect that you are willingly abandoning the beaten track, distracted by the singing of a bird or the smell of a flower or the sight of a river. You leave your route, you go and hear the bird, smell the flowers, paddle in the water, but turning your head from time to time towards the traced path which will take you to your final destination. Also, a detour suggests a sort of leisurely, moderate pace, “as on a holiday.” You could go from A to B directly, walking fast, neglecting the scenery, or instead you could choose to take your time. As I have read Derrida, I feel this is exactly what he does. He goes on a stroll. Derrida doesn’t write philosophical treatises with the aim of going from a beginning to an end without distractions. He goes on excursions in the forest of metaphysical thinking. Maybe I am stretching this metaphor too far, but let me see if I can take it even further.

<9> If I think of the orbit as a metaphor for Western philosophy, then an ex-orbit would represent a certain movement away from this tradition, but always within it, or with the aim of returning to it, after a decentering or a deconstruction (de- again) of its concepts. A detour would be a critique of metaphysical foundations from the inside. I have the feeling that Derrida is looking for the right geometrical metaphor for the sort of writing he has envisioned, a writing that will enable him to disrupt the orbit of a whole history of metaphysical thinking. He is seeking a figure that could encompass at once spatial and temporal movements, a deviation from the philosophical tradition and especially a critique of the ontology of presence. According to Derrida, this is precisely the gravest fault philosophy has ever committed: the thinking of the meaning of being according to full presence, which is both temporal (the present) and spatial (proximity). The insistence of Derrida on writing is especially efficient in the disruption of this concept of presence. Writing relies and functions on the absence of a presence. Temporally, it produces a delay, an after-effect. Spatially, it does without the present actuality of its author. In a sense, writing even requires the writer’s death to be what it is.

How far have the lonely
stars travelled in cosmic circles since I held you
in my midnight arms [9].

<10> Derrida believes that the “‘repressive’ logic of presence” [10] has worked toward the persistent exclusion of anything that would shake philosophy’s foundations or disrupt its internal working: absence, writing, the other, etc. He defines Western metaphysics as “the ‘circle’ in which we appear to be enclosed” [11]. In “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences,” Derrida criticises the circle, together with any other structure which revolves around a centre. The centre is even worse than death. It guarantees “fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude,” [12] preventing the possibility of play. It is a paralysing, stable grounding for all concepts within the structure. It gives meaning and coherence to its elements. This centre has been called by different names, but is always derivative of full presence or logos: “eidos, arche, telos,…God, man…” [13]. Thus Derrida realises the need for a rupture in this structure, the need to think of the centre not as a “fixed locus, but [as] a function” [14] to allow for the play of infinite signification. However, he cares to stress that we cannot achieve this play without the language and the concepts of philosophy, but we must establish a “metaphysical complicity” [15] to engage in a (de)constructive critique. In other words, he is recommending a little detour off the orbit/circle of metaphysics, but with the intent of never losing sight of it.

<11> Robert Smith in Derrida and Autobiography (1995) has also noticed a recurrent concern in circles and other shapes in Derrida. He writes

… as absolute non-loss and continuity, the circle symbolises presence… the analysis of the circle is sustained throughout [Derrida’s] career — as if he too were circling around it and had to keep coming back to it from an autobiographical compulsiveness — from “Ellipse” in L’ecriture et la difference, to the “alliance” in La Dissemination and elsewhere, to the circle made around the neck by tie and noose in Glas, to the encyclopedism of Hegel which he analyses, to the circumcised glans in Schibboleth, to the world-circuit of tourism and travel in Ulysses gramophone… [16]

<12> And I shall come back to Ulysses shortly. But first I would like to return to my three words and to the three names I have mentioned. I will start with ellipsis and Nietzsche. To begin with, keeping in mind what I have just said about Derrida’s aims with structure and circle, the ellipse has the advantage of being a distorted circle, but the disadvantage of having a centre. However, apart from a geometrical figure, ellipsis is also the voluntary omission of something that is supposed to be there. This suggests not only a motive or a strategy for the non-inclusion of the origins of detour in Derrida and Spivak, but it also provides a convenient play of absence and presence: what is not there — the non-written — and what is there — the three dots representing what is missing. These two meanings of ellipsis come together in Nietzsche’s theory of the eternal return. Beginning from a discussion of Edmond Jabès’ The Book of Questions, Derrida moves onto Nietzsche, when he comes to the conclusion that

the return of the book is of an elliptical essence. Something invisible is missing in the grammar of this repetition. As this lack is invisible and undeterminable, as it completely redoubles and consecrates the book, once more passing through each point along its circuit, nothing had budged. And yet, all meaning is altered by this lack. Repeated, the same line is no longer exactly the same, the ring no longer has exactly the same center, the origin has played. Something is missing that would make the circle perfect… The return of the book here announces the form of the eternal return… This repetition is writing because what disappears in it is the self-identity of the origin, the self-presence of the so-called living speech. [17]

Listen to me! For I am thus and thus.
Do not, above all, confound me with what I am not! [18]

<13> So there is something missing in repetition, which makes repetition non-self-identical. What is missing is the centre or full ontological presence. Derrida clarifies this point in a book called The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, in which he investigates Nietzsche’s most autobiographical work, Ecce Homo. Derrida considers the initial part of this text in light of the eternal recurrence as explicated in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. This is not a cosmological view of the world. Nietzsche doesn’t say that the world has and will always repeat itself unchanged (like an orbit or a circle), but he is advancing a moral obligation or a challenge to make of one’s life something one will never regret and thus will be happy to repeat again and again. However, this isn’t an identical repetition, but a selective one. Repetition “cannot be identical… without abolishing itself thereby. “[L]’anneau de l’eternel retour …. {becomes} a ‘retour eternel de l’autre’…the ring of the event…comes into being through this seal of contractual (and contracting) difference” [19]. L’autre being, in the case of Nietzsche, the other which prevents his self-identity. In Ecce Homo, he claims Ich bin der und der: I am this and this, “the both, the two, life the dead [la vie le mort],”[20] the living mother and the dead father. Nietzsche is always caught in this differential non-self-identity, which implies that the self can never be there as full presence because it is always already divided. Thus, when Nietzsche says “I write myself to myself,” he is referring to this other within himself that prevents his self-identity. Autobiography, which is supposedly an attempt at self-knowledge, turns itself into an allo-biography, because it requires a detour to the other to come back to the self: “self-identity has to be mediated though an other” [21]. When Nietzsche writes in the first person, when Nietzsche signs his name in his own signature by writing his own autobiography, the “I” is not constituted yet. He does not exist yet. Only when the signature returns back to him via the eternal return is it finally validated. This countersignature affirms the first. I am sure Derrida must have used the example of travellers’ cheques somewhere. When you first get one of these cheques, you sign it. Then, when you later present it at the cashier, you have to authenticate your own signature with another of your own signature — a countersignature — otherwise the legal and economical value of the cheque is null. So the countersignature that returns to Nietzsche when he writes himself to himself validates the first by repetition.

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