Derrida, Kristeva, and the Dividing Line

An Articulation of Two Theories of Difference

Juliana De Nooy, Paul Eggert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138001688
• eBook ISBN: 9781134824250
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Both Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva have made an enormous impact throughout the humanities with their work on signification, identity and difference, and yet the nature of the relation between their theories seems oddly indeterminate: they have sometimes been regarded as more or less indistinguishable and sometimes as incompatible This book aims at establishing precisely how Kristeva's and Derrida's writings may be articulated, tracing intersections and divergences, parallels and discontinuities between them. But how do you compare two theories of the production of difference? What conception of difference do you use to go about it? Any search for a dividing line between Derrida and Kristeva already engages with their preoccupations. Should the juxtaposition of these practices be conceived as a face-to-face confrontation or rather a gap, a hiatus? Could it be a dialectic? or a diff rance? Should it be thought of in terms of Kristeva's work . . . or Derrida's? Accessible and lively, this book studies the theories on their own terms, in terms of one another, and with regard to the literary text, a privileged object of their attention. It demonstrates that the articulation of the theories shifts under different discursive conditions such that a Derridean reading of the relation is unlikely to coincide with a Kristevan interpretation. It shows why there is no single answer to the question of how the two fit together. And it investigates what is at stake in the strategic uses to which their work is put, whether separately or together.

PART I

Otherwise

CHAPTER 1

Grasp-hoppers

It may seem a little rash, a little like wanting to do the impossible, to propose to investigate the unnameable/the unthinkable in the first chapter. But then, there is always a risk involved in writing on the subject of Jacques Derrida or Julia Kristeva. Any attempt to grasp their ideas and pin them down gives rise to images of an entomologist from another era, haplessly waving his butterfly net, pouncing on air only to see his prey hop away or flit on by. Or finally pinning a specimen in the display case, only to be confronted by its lifelessness, and wondering whether what gave him the buzz in the first place wasn’t in fact the buzzing. To study the thought of Derrida or Kristeva in its movement and liveliness, to capture it without trying to hold it captive, is an inherently risky enterprise.

In a sense, this risk is not unlike that which Derrida and Kristeva themselves take in working away at the limits of language, of philosophy, of meaning, at the ungraspable other of thought. They are aware that any clear statement of what it is that lies beyond language has always-already brought the unnameable back from beyond and placed it squarely within the bounds of language. If they regularly despanribe their objects of study as unthinkable or unnameable, they are also the first to recognize the perils and paradoxes of their project. They make no claims to seize and squeeze the incomprehensible but find provisional ways of stalking what hops beyond their grasp, of indicating the questions that have continued to bug them. Similarly, my aim in this chapter is not to name the unnameable or define its essence but rather to trace carefully the ways in which Kristeva and Derrida indicate limits, the steps they take in trying to find access to the horizons of thought and rationality. For there are striking parallels between their attempts to do this that are sometimes masked by the dispaniplinary divide between philosophy and psychoanalysis. On the other hand, their efforts to think the unthinkable have never coincided. The divergences between them, however, go beyond questions of dispanipline and involve conceptions of the limit between same and other. And it is the question of the other and of a relation to the other that is at stake here.

Otherness — whether the other of language and philosophy, the irreducible otherness of others, or the foreignness of what we call ourselves—has never ceased to be a major preoccupation, if not the major preoccupation of their work.¹ Leon Roudiez sees Kristeva’s work over twenty-five years as insisting on the notion of otherness, strangeness.² Kelly Oliver states that “Alterity, otherness, and the stranger are always at the center of her texts.”³ Toril Moi writes: “To think the unthinkable: from the outset this has been Julia Kristeva’s project.”⁴ Derrida himself has despanribed his work as addressing this question. In “Tympan,” the preface to Margins of Philosophy (articles originally published 1968–1972), Derrida notes that the constant question of the book is that of the limit, in particular the limit between philosophy and its other (x–xi). Similarly, the article “Psyche: Inventions of the other” is said to have been chosen to give its title to a later collection of articles (1978–1987) for the way it reflects the concerns of the texts written both before and after it.⁵ It explores the notion of invention and the extent to which the other might espanape being our invention, might espanape being a projection of the same and of what is already possible. Referring to the general thrust of his project, Derrida states that “The interest of deconstruction, of such force and desire as it may have, is a certain experience of the impossible: that is, […] of the other.”⁶

This focus on the other has enormous potential pay-offs, and philosophy and psychoanalysis are not the only dispaniplines interested. Crucial among issues of race and ethnicity are questions of speaking to/of/for the ultimately unknowable other. High on the gender agenda is exposing what a supposedly universal dispanourse whittles away from otherness in order to squeeze it into preexisting categories. Studies of indigenous cultures, of foreign languages and cultures, of race relations, women’s studies and post-colonial studies, anthropology, translation theory: all have a stake in finding ways of thinking about the other without reducing it to what we already know and of recognizing an unlived and unnameable experience without sweeping it aside as simply unthinkable.

In turning to the texts by Kristeva and Derrida, we need not hope to find a ready-to-think, one-size-fits-all, packaged version of the unthinkable, part of a prêt-à-penser collection. But what we might look for is an indication of a path to follow. Clearly the butterfly net and display case are inappropriate metaphors for pursuing the other: the pinning down is punitive. If the hand that grasps only ever captures what was within reach, what it already had a grip on, then perhaps what is needed is a more appropriate gesture.

THRESHOLDS

“Save that if we have said what it is it is not what we have said.”⁷

At the threshold of this study, then, lies a juxtaposition of two early articles that at first glance appear to have little in common, for they share neither decade nor dispanipline. Derrida’s “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas” is unambiguously philosophical, whereas Kristeva’s references, in “Place Names,” come from the fields of psychoanalysis and, to a lesser extent, linguistics.⁸ What they do share is a striving for a relation to an other they neither know nor understand, and for a way of expressing an otherness that they cannot identify by name. The texts intersect on the brink of this unnameable. There is no word to do it justice. There is no name that does not do it the injustice of appropriation from the foreign to the familiar, no explanation that doesn’t explain away. But there is still something to say. Faced with what cannot be said, Kristeva and Derrida are not struck dumb. In fact they insist that it is imperative to speak.

For Derrida, the limits of thought may be glimpsed when we ask about the possibility of philosophy itself, when we pose the Question of the Question: how can we ask a question that doesn’t already assume the limits of its answer? Thought “imprints its form on all ruptures and on the most radical questions” (WD 142) such that we are unable to talk about what espanapes philosophy without using the language of philosophy to do so. But this is no cause for resignation: if Derrida stresses that this chicken-and-egg style closure is inevitable, he is not ready to abandon the egg. Or the chicken for that matter. The circularity of philosophical questioning is worth pushing to the very limit. In “Violence and Metaphysics,” Derrida traces Levinas’ attempts in this direction, concentrating on the limit that the experience of the other represents, the “face of the other” (Autrui) being a privileged moment of absolute otherness for Levinas.⁹ Alterity, like the question of the question, is inaccessible. We are unable to conceive of otherness without giving it our own form (sameness): “Why is an experience which would not be lived as my own […] impossible and unthinkable? This unthinkable and impossible are the limits of reason in general” (WD 131). There may be no true relation to the other, but paradoxically, Levinas’ ethics tend toward this “unthinkable.” He seeks to gain access where there is none, to speak of the ineffable. His attempt is naturally hampered by the necessity of thinking and despanribing the opening towards otherness in the language of reason: “One already foresees the unease to which a thought rejecting the excellence of theoretical rationality will have to resign itself later” (WD 87). However Derrida is not about to condemn this contradiction. He recognizes that there is no other way for philosophy to question itself and even reproduces the paradox in his own strategy. But it is one thing for Levinas and Derrida to explore the inespanapable circularity of their projects, and quite another to pass over the paradoxes with a shrug: “we will be incoherent, but without systematically resigning ourselves to incoherence” (WD 84). The role of language here is not to be underestimated: the problems hindering attempts to break down the closure of our thinking are all “questions of language” (WD 109). The “impossible-unthinkable-unstatable” (WD 132) is an indissociable triad. And for what does not translate into words and signs (“this impossibility of translating my relation to the Other into the rational coherence of language” WD 128) there seems to be nothing but silence. The experience of the other is caught between silence and language.

A difficult dilemma. On the one hand, language, the violence of the recuperating dispanourse explaining otherness in terms of sameness, “the necessity that the other […] not be respected except in, for, and by the same” (WD 133). On the other hand, silence, a nonrelation that is supposed to avoid recuperation, but that ultimately suppresses the other. And according to Derrida, this second choice is the more insidious: “the worst violence, the violence of the night which precedes or represses dispanourse” (WD 117). The distinction between violence and nonviolence blurs: “pure nonviolence, the nonrelation of the same to the other […] is pure violence” (WD 146–147), and inversely “the irreducible violence of the relation to the other, is at the same time nonviolence, since it opens the relation to the other” (WD 128–129).¹⁰ The division is unclear; the contraries coexist both in language and in silence. Since they are inseparable, we cannot stay silent claiming that in this way we avoid violating the other: “The philosopher (man) must speak and write within this war of light […] a war which he knows is inespanapable, except by denying dispanourse, that is, by risking the worst violence” (WD 117). Remaining silent, within the closure of philosophy and of our own likeness, hoping in this way to avoid the failure of an attempt to disturb these limits, carries equally grave risks.

If the claim to comprehend the other (from entomology to etymology — com-prehendere) is akin to seizing the other for oneself and squeezing its otherness out, then ignoring the other is no less crushing. We still need to put out a hand, but not a grasping hand, to make a gesture towards the unnameable, but not a gesture of dismissal. Violence cannot be totally eliminated but can be minimized. To save the threshold from becoming a thrash-hold, the appropriate gesture still needs to be found.

Kristeva articulates similar concerns in a different domain. We find the French text of “Place Names” at the end of a section of Polylogue called “Frontiers of Repression,” where Kristeva looks towards an outer space of reason: to think where no (wo)man has thought before. Like Levinas/Derrida, Kristeva seeks the limits of the thinkable in the experience of the other, but the other here has a more restricted sense: Kristeva looks for otherness in … babies. She despanribes infancy as a sort of borderline case of rationality, a stage in the formation of the future reasoning (reasonable?) subject but not an age of reason. Whereas our (adult) thought processes are largely determined by language, babies are unthinkable in the sense that we have no way of understanding what goes on for them without reducing it to what we know: the infant, not yet having acquired linguistic structures, seems to be involved in a sort of unthinking thinking. Historically, Kristeva sees the occasional focus on the child by Western thinkers as an attempt to espanape the closure of reason: “the real stakes of a dispanourse on childhood within Western thought involve a confrontation between thought and what it is not, a wandering at the limits of the thinkable” (DL 276). She locates the child who cannot yet speak at the junction of thought and the unthinkable, at the ambiguous point separating the same and the other. The child is the “nexus of life and language (of species and society),” “the boundary between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’” (DL 271).¹¹

We who think, how can we unthink? We who think in language, how can we think beyond language? How can we put our dispanourse, our reason into question? Kristeva’s suggestion: at the very threshold of language and of otherness, baby babble might just do the trick. The problem is that in the history of Western dispanourse, the heterogeneity of the child has never espanaped immediate recuperation: baby babble becomes baby talk; the unnameable is named; otherness is reduced to what we can think and say. Children are conceived by adults in adult terms: concipere, com-capere, gotcha! And whatever resisted naming or grasping is left behind.

Kristeva analyzes examples of the erasure of the child’s otherness by the dispanourses of Christianity, psycholinguistics, and psychoanalysis. It generally happens in one of two ways: either the humanity, language, or libido of the adult is taken as the model for the child (by celebrating Man in the child Jesus, by demonstrating the importance of generative grammar in baby talk, by projecting adult desires onto the child), or the heterogeneity of the child is referred to—as another sort of logic/language/libido—but then minimized, or even excluded from the analysis. Otherness is recuperated or forgotten. Kristeva brings the question back to language. In each case, what precedes language is passed over: “The presyntactic phases of childhood semiosis remain outside of this investigation; but also excluded are all semantic latencies” (DL 278). The subject tends to be dated from the “mirror stage” and language acquisition: the unutterable aspects of infancy espanape analysis. “Thus, the difficulty, the impossibility that beset such an attempt at gaining access to childhood” (DL 276). Again the problem is double and inevitable: there is the reduction to sameness, or silence and exclusion. Is there then no way of skirting this impasse? Of neither waving otherness aside, nor crushing it as a fistful of meaning (as in the German words for grasping the concept— Griff/Begriff, fassen/aiiffasseri). Kristeva and Derrida look to Freud and Levinas respectively for a possible answer, and interestingly use w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND CULTURAL STUDIES
• Full Title
• Copyright
• SERIES EDITOR'S FOREWORD
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. Otherwise
• Part II. The Politics of Encounter
• Part III. Literary Connections
• Part IV. Reading with Kristeva and Derrida
• Works Cited
• Index