Derrida and the Writing of the Body

Jones Irwin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138278578
• eBook ISBN: 9781317152675
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Michel Foucault refers to 1965-1970 as, in philosophical terms, 'the five brief, impassioned, jubilant, enigmatic years'. This book reinterprets Jacques Derrida's work from this period, most especially in L'Écriture et la Différence (Writing and Difference), and argues that a transformation takes place here which has been marginalized in readings of his work to date. Irwin follows with a look at how the 'grammatological opening' becomes crucial for Derrida's work in the 1970s and beyond, incorporating one of his last readings of embodiment from 2000. By drawing our attention to the politics of desire and sexuality, this groundbreaking book engages with the work of key continental theorists, including Artaud, Bataille, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Habermas and Cixous, whilst also examining Derrida's relationship with Plato and feminist theory. It will appeal to a wide range of readers within the social sciences and philosophy, particularly those with interests in gender and sexuality, social theory, continental thought, queer studies and literary theory.

Chapter 1

Derrida, Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and the ‘Writing of the Body’

Introduction

This chapter will argue against the oft-quoted accusation that the ‘formal’ aspects of Derrida’s work mean that deconstruction has more affinity with discourse (understood exclusively as ‘theory’) than with the non-discursive, visual, spatial or performative dimensions of embodiment and sexuality. Rather, the opposite interpretation of deconstruction is the one I will take up here. That deconstruction, in specific instances, constitutes exactly a performative attack on discourse in the name of the non-verbal, the embodied, the spatial, the visual. This aspect of deconstruction can be linked to Derrida’s reading of the concept of non-sense in Speech and Phenomena (Derrida 1967b/1973) and to the elliptical typography and content of a work such as Glas (Derrida 1974a/1986a), but here my primary focus will be on Derrida’s readings of Artaud in seminal essays in Writing and Difference (Derrida 1967c, 1978a). Derrida’s interest in Artaud extends across the chronological breadth of his work and, to conclude this chapter, I will look at Derrida’s return to Artaud and specific questions of avant-garde poetics in his later writing (Derrida 1998a/2002a).

Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty called for a re-inspiration of ‘breath’ – ‘the question of breathing is of prime importance’ (Artaud 1970: 89) – against the degenerative affects of classical metaphysics and its lingering influence on modern philosophy and art. The dualisms between body and mind, text and performance, instituted a breathless death of what Artaud affirmed as the ‘life-force’ or ‘existence’. Derrida’s early essays on Artaud (Derrida 1967h/j, Derrida 1978f/h) initially portray his work as instigating an original and powerful critique of philosophy. Derrida credits Artaud both with overcoming a certain ‘naive’ metaphysics and with being irreducible to the ‘essentialist’ interpretations of avant-garde readers such as Maurice Blanchot. Derrida’s own work here seems to take its cue from Artaud’s radicality, as if deconstruction was carrying on the work of the Theatre of Cruelty. Derrida comes close in these early essays to saying that deconstruction is also a kind of theatre, a performance of philosophy which takes us beyond philosophy to the very ‘breath’ and ‘life-force’, the very ‘existence’ which constitutes philosophy itself. Characteristically, however, Derrida’s deconstructive reading also presents some of Artaud’s key concepts (such as ‘breath’) as falling victim to the very metaphysical system which The Theatre of Cruelty is meant to overcome. That is, Derrida posits a certain revenge of philosophy against Artaud’s ‘breath’ of existence.1 This chapter will reinterrogate the boundaries of this encounter.

Derrida’s philosophy has always paid due respect to the originality and radicality of Artaud’s theatre, from early essays in the 1960s right up the work before Derrida’s death, such as Artaud le Mômo (Derrida 2002). Here, I will be concerned primarily with the essay ‘La Parole Soufflée’ (Derrida 1967h/1978f, originally published in Tel Quel in 1965) or ‘The Breathed Speech’ (or ‘The Stolen Speech’), where Derrida brilliantly aligns deconstruction with Artaud’s reinvocation of ‘breath’ while also cautioning about the complicity between Artaud’s theatre and the very metaphysics which he seeks to transgress.2

Artaud, Breath and Writing the Body

Writing and Difference (Derrida 1967c, 1978a), published in 1967 in France alongside Speech and Phenomena (Derrida 1967b, 1973), represents a rupture in Derrida’s phenomenological methodology in the measure to which much of the analysis no longer stems from an intra-phenomenological critique, as with Introduction to the Origin of Geometry (Derrida 1962/1989) or Speech and Phenomena. Two key essays in the collection do engage with phenomenology, the early essay on ‘Genesis and Structure in Husserl’ (Derrida 1967g) and the infamous critique of Levinas’s phenomenology, ‘Violence et Métaphysique: Essai Sur La Pensée D’Emmanuel Levinas’ [hereafter ‘Violence and Metaphysics’] (Derrida 1967f/1978d). But the overarching significance of Writing and Difference is its shift from a focus on phenomenology to a focus on the avant-garde: ‘Force and Signification’ (Derrida 1967d/1978b) engages a reading of Mallarmé, ‘Structure, Sign and Play’ (Derrida 1967l/1978j) engages Nietzsche, ‘A Hegelianism Without Reserve: From a Restricted to a General Economy’ (Derrida (1967k/1978i) engages Bataille and two essays in the collection offer readings of Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty (Derrida 1967h/j, 1978f/h). This is nothing less than a paradigm-shift in Derrida’s work, which sets the framework for Derrida’s work in the 1970s and beyond, in Margins of Philosophy (Derrida 1972b, 1982a), Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles (Derrida 1979), Glas (Derrida 1974a, 1986a), etc.

A Non-Hegelian Difference

The conception of ‘écriture’ (or writing) is paradigmatic in this context, giving the title to the very collection of essays. One can also see how this conception underwrites the invocation of a non-Hegelian difference in the essay on Bataille:

a difference which would no longer be the one which Hegel conceived more profoundly than anyone else: the difference in the service of presence, at work for (the) history (of meaning). The difference between Hegel and Bataille is the difference between these two differences (Derrida 1978i: 263).

Derrida thus looks not to phenomenology but to the French avant-garde for a basis for his conception of ‘différance’, which would be Bataille’s difference rather than Hegel’s. Artaud too, Derrida tells us, understood this:

Artaud knew this well: ‘a certain dialectics…’. For if one appropriately conceives the horizon of dialectics – outside a conventional Hegelianism – one understands, perhaps, that dialectics is the indefinite movement of finitude, of the unity of life and death, of difference, of original repetition, that is, of the origin of tragedy as the absence of a simple origin (Derrida 1978h: 248).

Différance would from the beginning then be avant-garde; surrealist rather than phenomenological, Artaudian rather than Levinasian.

Here, I will focus specifically on the longer of the two texts which Derrida devotes to Artaud in the Writing and Difference collection, ‘La Parole Soufflée’ (Derrida 1967h, 1978f), this title capturing the ambiguity of either a ‘stolen speech’ or ‘inspired speech’, or both: ‘soufflée: entendons dénobée par un commentateur possible … entendons du même coup inspirée depuis une autre voix’ (Derrida 1967h: 261–2). The authentic self has been displaced, according to Artaud, by the machinations of Western metaphysics and its infiltrating influence on all art and social forms. Our breathing has been suffocated by over-conceptualisation and over-textualisation. But here, Artaud also holds out for a different reality, a breathing (inspiration) which can be said to exist, or which at least re-exist, if his own project of a Theatre of Cruelty can be brought to fruition. What Artaud calls ‘cruelty’ signifies a new rigor and consciousness of the tragic theft of our very breath and ‘life-force’, by metaphysics. It also seeks to reinstantiate what Artaud calls the ‘body without organs’, a pure body (‘un corps sans souillure’, 1967h: 271) in effect the authentic self who breathes for him/herself, and who can inspire cultural and social revolution.

Artaud applies this understanding to the history of theology: ‘do you know anything more outrageously fecal/than the history of God’ (quoted Derrida 1978f: 121). After Nietzsche, but in a slightly different key, Artaud seeks to drive the death of God to its most radical conclusion. God is the apex of the metaphysical mindset and has reduced the life-force of the divine to a pathetic anthropomorphism (‘et qu’as-tu fait de mon corps, Dieu?’ (quoted Derrida 1967h: 269). Far from constituting idealism or utopianism, modern religion is nothing but human excrement, a fecal excess. The divine must be restored through the de-excrementalisation of human culture and society.

A Writing Against Writing

The status of ‘writing’ within Artaud’s project is problematic: writing is all trash.3 Artaud is a writer who, on one level, disavows writing de jure. Instead of words, Artaud calls for a physical theatre and a physical language, of shouts, gestures, expressions; ‘we could listen more closely to life’ (‘nous pourrions mieux écouter la vie’, Derrida 1967h: 282) and return to sonority, intonation, intensity. Derrida commends Artaud’s work for overcoming the ‘naivete’ of traditional metaphysics but also that of contemporary ‘critical and clinical discourse’, where Derrida is referring to psychoanalysis and the work of philosophers such as Foucault and Blanchot. Despite the subtlety of the latter theorists, in effect they get Artaud wrong. Artaud’s work presents more of a challenge to critical and philosophical discourse, and its conceptualisations, than has previously been allowed. Here, Artaud’s central notion of ‘breath’ (le souffle) is crucial for Derrida. Paradoxically, this must be reinforced by writing itself, but a nonphonetic, ‘hieroglyphic’ writing of the body (‘l’écriture du corps’, 1967h: 287), to bring about ‘the alienation of alienation’ (Derrida 1978f: 230). ‘C’est de créer une maîtrise absolue du souffle dans un système d’écriture non phonétique’ (Derrida 1967h: 287).

Susan Sontag’s defence of a more revolutionary conception of theatre (Sontag 1994) throws into relief some of the key innovations which Artaud’s discourse on theatre made vis-à-vis previous art and theatre criticism, and also its implications for our thematic of embodiment, a writing of the body. Sontag seeks to defend Artaud against the presumption of what might be termed a ‘psychological theatre’ or a ‘theatre of character’, which stress the verbalisation of emotion through text-based drama and then development of character through dialogue.

Such theatre sees the stage itself as merely a means to an end, the performance of the theatrical event itself reduced to a means to the semantic transmission of authorial meaning. For Artaud, it is the hegemony of such theatre which constitutes the crisis of contemporary theatre, which is also to be identified with a very crisis in existence or life itself. ‘This obstinacy in making characters talk about feelings, passions, desires, and impulses of a strictly psychological order, in which a single word is to compensate for innumerable gestures, is the reason … the theatre has lost its true raison d’etre’ (Sontag 1994: 100). This psychological theatre must be replaced by a ‘theatre of the senses’ or a ‘pure theatre language’ (‘ce langage théatral pur’, Derrida 1967h: 287) which ironically, as Sontag observes, constitutes a move from psychological theatre to a theatre which is more heroic (and also more philosophical). This de-psychologisation of the theatre and its re-philosophisation is no doubt one of the attractions of Artaud’s work for Derrida. It involves a move from a Brechtian paradigm to a paradigm which bears closer resemblance to other art forms, most notably the Happenings of performance art or the cinema of Antonioni and Godard, where we move beyond the binary ‘positives and negatives’ of psychology.

This moves us also away from the paradigm of humanism (again, a link to Derrida), and away from not simply the moral dimension but even the replacement of morals by aesthetics (à la Nietzsche), towards what Sontag describes as the ‘ontological’ plane (Sontag 1994: 101). In contrast, the Artaudian theatre, what Sontag refers to as a ‘theatre of the senses’, disavows the textual author, privileging instead the ‘person who controls the direct handling of the stage’. If we can say that Sontag’s work on Artaud (and the development of his thinking in works by Peter Brook and Peter Weiss) borders on the eulogistic in its conception of Artaud’s revolutionary break, one can say that Derrida’s essays on Artaud constitute a more problematical inheritance.4

A Radicalisation of Style

Derrida’s early essays on Artaud initially portray his work as instigating an original and powerful critique of philosophy. Derrida credits Artaud with overcoming a certain ‘naive’ metaphysics and with launching us into a space which seems genuinely transgressive and creative. Certainly, there is a clear sense that Derrida is uneasy with the status of traditional philosophical discourse and his own encounter with Artaud allows him to develop a different kind of (nonphilosophical) textual practice or performance. As Derrida observes, for example, in his dialogue with Richard Kearney:

I have attempted more and more systematically to find a non-site, or a non-philosophical site, from which to question philosophy … I try to compose a writing which would traverse, as rigorously as possible, both the philosophical and literary elements without being definable as either (Derrida 1986c: 106).

Of course, we must also bear in mind that there is a simultaneous debt to and borrowing from the very philosophical tradition which is being subverted or questioned: ‘my philosophical formation owes much to the thought of Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger’ (Derrida 1986c: 110).

Tracing the genealogy of Derrida’s early work, one can see a gradual radicalisation of style, which can be linked to his attempt to create this ‘nonphilosophical site’ from which to question philosophy. This is methodologically no doubt what interests him in a thinker like Artaud, and indeed in avant-garde poetics more generally. Artaud’s ‘theatre’ inscribes philosophy in a space in which it can be contested. Undoubtedly, both thinkers owe a significant debt to Nietzsche here, that the Nietzschean call to instigate a critique of all values (or a ‘transvaluation of values’) would also apply to the value of philosophy itself. All the internalist critiques of philosophy would have come to nought insofar as they assumed the worth of philosophy as an arbiter of philosophical value.

But instead of asking whether it should be this philosophy or that which wins out, Artaud and Derrida, as with Nietzsche, are asking: whether philosophy at all? What is the value of philosophy? This is a question which philosophy itself cannot ask of itself without the answer already being in the question. And this is, for Derrida, as for Artaud, a question of desire, of erotics: the desire to have or not to have philosophy, but also a question of meaning. Here, we see the connection back to Derrida’s earlier readings of Husserl. Is Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty an attempt to stand outside the need for philosophical meaning, to assert a (physical) independence of meaning? For Derrida, such a pure outside of philosophy is impossible. By the same token, however, Husserl’s project fails because it tries to make too inflexible a distinction between meaning and nonmeaning (Derrida 1962, 1967b). At its best, Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty overcomes its tendency to physical purism and affirms the ‘difference, of original repetition, that is, of the origin of tragedy as the absence of a simple origin’ (Derrida 1978f). It is in this way that one can overcome metaphysical but also anti-metaphysical naivete.

This then will also be a question of style, of a ‘writing of the body’ (‘l’écriture du corps’). While Derrida’s first works, from a content perspective, radicalise phenomenology, in form they remain internalist phenomenological critiques (Derrida 1967e, 1967g, 1962). But this starts to change with the essays developed in the Writing and Difference collection. Now, something else is happening, and often it is noticeable in the prefaces. Derrida writes contorted prefaces, they are obscurantist. They distract and accumulate confusion and one feels, as a reader, that one is not being guided into something but being thrown deliberately into a space which has no real orientation. Derrida’s prefaces inscribe us within a labyrinth, we feel paralysed and lost. To quote a later Derridean text, discussed below, these texts act as ‘subjectiles’ (Derrida 1998b), taking the reader to a place ‘outside-sense’.

This, we might argue, is Derridean theatre, Derrida’s performance art. What must be overcome is what Derrida refers to in ‘La parole soufflée’ as ‘the naivete of the discourse’ (Derrida 1978f: 169); ‘naiveté du discours’ (Derrida 1967h: 253). According to Derrida, Artaud’s designation of the theatre of cruelty as ‘life’ or ‘breath’, for all its apparent utopianism, ‘absolutely resists [résiste absolument] as was never done before – clinical or critical exegeses; he does so by virtue of his adventure [son aventure]; attempting to destroy the history of dualist metaphysics’ (Derrida 1978f: 174, 1967h: 261). Artaud’s resistance to ‘clinical’ exegeses is, of course, more than simply an academic or even aesthetic issue.

As is well known, Artaud was institutionalise...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Derrida, Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and the ‘Writing of the Body’
• 2 ‘Except for a Certain Laughter’: Derrida, Bataille and the Transgression of Dialectic
• 3 From the ‘Outwork’ to ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’: On Derrida, Plato and Pickstock
• 4 Mallarmé After Plato: On Derrida and ‘La Double Séance’
• 5 What if Truth Were a Woman? On Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles
• 6 On Derrida and Feminism
• 7 Re-Politicising Deconstruction: From ‘The Old Mole’ to Cosmopolitanism to An-Economic Forgiveness
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index