Germs of Death

The Problem of Genesis in Jacques Derrida

Mauro Senatore

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781438468495
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

Germs of Death explores the idea of genesis, or dissemination, in the early work of Jacques Derrida. Looking at Derrida's published and unpublished work from "Force and Signification" in 1963 to Glas in 1974, Mauro Senatore traces the development of Derrida's understanding of genesis both linguistically and biologically, and argues that this topic is an overlooked thread that draws together Derrida's readings of Plato and Hegel. Demonstrating how Derrida's analysis liberates the understanding of genesis from Platonic and Hegelian presupposition, Senatore also highlights Derrida's engagement with the biological thought of his day. Senatore also shows that the implications of Derrida's insights extend into contemporary ethical and political questions relating to postgenomic conceptions of life.

1

PLATONISM I

The Paternal Thesis

How can we set off in search of a different guard, if the pharmaceutical “system” contains not only, in a single stranglehold, the scene in the Phaedrus, the scene in the Republic, the scene in the Sophist, and the dialectics, logic, and mythology of Plato, but also, it seems, certain non-Greek structures of mythology? And if it is not certain that there are such things as non-Greek “mythologies”—the opposition mythos/logos being only authorized following Plato—into what general, unnamable necessity are we thrown? In other words, what does Platonism signify as repetition?

—Derrida, Dissemination, 167–68

Throughout his reading of Plato’s text, Derrida demarcates dissemination from the understanding of genesis that he calls “Platonism.” I start my exploration of this reading by focusing on the earliest moment of it, the long essay “Plato’s Pharmacy,” first published in Tel Quel (1968) and then included in Dissemination (1972). In this essay, Derrida describes Platonism as the thesis that the living logos, assisted by its father and determined by the traits of the noble birth and the body proper, is the element of all regional discourses, from linguistics to zoology, from cosmology to politics. He understands this thesis as the myth itself, the story that the logos tells (a mytho-logy) about its origin—that is, its originary and nonmetaphorical relation to its father. Platonism tends to annihilate what Derrida identifies as its anagrammatic structure—namely, the site of the concatenations of forms, of the tropic and syntactical movements, which precede and render possible the concatenation or movement of Platonism itself, as well as of philosophy in general. I examine “Plato’s Pharmacy” by taking as my point of departure session 2 of the recently edited course on Heidegger: The Question of Being and History (1964–1965). My argument is that the later essay can be reread as an elaboration of Derrida’s earlier analysis of Heidegger’s insight that philosophy demarcates itself from mythology for the first time in Plato. Therefore, a path between two notions of grammar, or syntax, awaits us. On the one hand, we have Heidegger’s search for a grammar for the destruction of the history of ontology and the demarcation of philosophy from mythology. On the other hand, we have grammar as the science of the concatenations of elements, invented by the Egyptian god Theuth, which, for Derrida, constitutes the science of the origin of the world, of the living as well as of the logos, of the disseminated trace.

A PROBLEM OF SYNTAX

In session 2 of Heidegger: The Question of Being and History, Derrida focuses on the problem of language concerning the destruction announced by Heidegger—that is, the destruction of the history of ontology as “a covering-over or a dissimulation of the authentic question of Being, under not ontological but ontic sedimentations” (Derrida 2016, 1).1 In so doing, he brings to the fore an issue that Heidegger confines to a marginal place. As he acknowledges, the question “is posed in an added remark, which is a little surprising and, if I have forced Heidegger’s thinking, it is by placing this added remark in the foreground” (25). This remark is included in the final paragraph of the introduction to Being and Time, dedicated to the “Exposition of the Question of the Meaning of Being.” Heidegger presents this paragraph as a supplementary remark on the style of his subsequent analyses, which he demands the reader to measure against the task that is being undertaken in the book. I propose inverting the movement of Derrida’s text by starting with the Heidegger passage that Derrida quotes and, from this, going back to the latter’s formulation of the problem of language. Heidegger’s remark reads:

With regard to the awkwardness and “inelegance” of expression in the following analyses, we may remark that this is one thing to report narratively about beings another to grasp beings in their being. For the latter task not only most of the words are lacking but above all the “grammar.” If we may allude to earlier and in their own right altogether incomparable researches on the analysis of being, then we should compare the ontological sections in Plato’s Parmenides or the fourth chapter of the seventh book of Aristotle’s Metaphysics with a narrative passage from Thucydides. Then we can see the stunning character of the formulations with which their philosophers challenged the Greeks. Since our powers are essentially inferior, also since the area of being to be disclosed ontologically is far more difficult than that presented to the Greeks, the complexity of our concept-formation and the severity of our expression will increase. (1996, 34)2

In the pages that precede the quotation from Heidegger’s text, Derrida anticipates the problem of the language of destruction by highlighting the feature of the forms of concatenation (enchainement). “Whence are we to draw the concepts, the terms, the forms of linking [enchainement] necessary for the discourse of Destruction, for the destructive discourse?” (Derrida 2016, 23–24), he wonders. A few paragraphs later, he develops this reference to the forms of concatenation of language and discourse by reformulating the problem of the language of destruction as mainly a question of syntax, where syntax is implicitly understood to designate the science of the concatenation of concepts and words. The problem of language, he notes, “is not only a problem of philosophical lexicology, but it is a problem of syntax which concerns the forms of linkage [enchainement] of concepts” (25). Here Derrida sheds light on Heidegger’s introductory remark that the task of the subsequent analyses is jeopardized by a lack of syntax. In the following pages, he sets out a careful examination of this remark that takes his exposition beyond the boundaries of Heidegger’s text, toward a seminal reading of Plato’s Timaeus. This examination is developed under the heading “ontic metaphor” (26), which seems to resonate with the ontic and not ontological sediments that dissimulate the question of Being. Derrida reformulates, once again, the problem of language by linking it to Heidegger’s self-inhibition of narrative. “The language difficulty,” he explains, “hangs, then … on the fact that for the first time we are going to forbid ourselves resolutely and absolutely from ‘telling stories’ [raconter des histoires, as Derrida interprets the German über Seiendes erzählende zu berichten (the English edition has ‘to report narratively’), which is translated literally, between parentheses, by ‘informer en racontant’ (26)]” (26). Furthermore, he adds that narrative—namely, telling stories—has a specific meaning for Heidegger here: it accounts for “philosophy itself” as the ontic dissimulation of the question of Being and thus as “metaphysics and onto-theology” (26). This suggests that, despite the discrimination between Plato’s and Aristotle’s analysis of Being and Thucydides’s narrative, the former are still on this side of philosophy as telling stories.3

To explain what telling stories means, Derrida alludes to a distinction between origin and genesis, which, as we will see, is at work in a key moment of the Timaeus and, on my reading, grounds the interpretation of Platonism elaborated in “Plato’s Pharmacy.” Derrida (2016) observes:

To tell stories is … to assimilate being [être] and beings [étant], that is, to determine the origin of beings qua beings on the basis of another being. It is to reply to the question “what is the being of beings?” by appealing to another being supposed to be its cause or origin. It is to close the opening and to suppress the question of the meaning of being. Which does not mean that every ontic explication in itself comes down to telling stories; when the sciences determine causalities, legalities that order the relations between beings, when theology explains the totality of beings on the basis of creation or the ordering brought about by a supreme being, they are not necessarily telling stories. They “tell stories” when they want to pass their discourse off as the reply to the question of the meaning of being or when, incidentally, they refuse this question all seriousness. (29)

I highlight what interests us here: on the one hand, origin as the Being of beings, on the other, genesis as the transition from a being to another, as the becoming of things. Therefore, telling stories consists in the ontic explanation of the origin of beings. The recourse to the expression “telling stories,” in order to interpret Heidegger’s remark, is made explicit a little later on, when Derrida turns to section 2 in the “Introduction” of Being and Time. In the passage recalled by Derrida, Heidegger borrows from Plato’s Sophist the determination of the ontic explanation of the origin of beings as a narrative, as telling a story.

The being of beings “is” itself not a being. The first philosophical step in understanding the problem of being consists in avoiding the mython tina diēgeisthai, in not “telling a story,” that is, not determining beings as beings by tracing them back in their origins to another being—as if being had the character of a possible being. (Heidegger 1996, 5)4

As Derrida observes, philosophy demarcates itself from “telling stories” when the Stranger in Plato’s Sophist claims to abandon the mythological discourse in order to address the problem of Being as such.5 Furthermore, in a remark on the translation of Heidegger’s passage, Derrida draws attention to the present tense “consists,” observing that telling stories is “a gesture that always threatens the question of being, yesterday, now and tomorrow” (2016, 31). The reading of “Plato’s Pharmacy” that I propose below interrogates the irreducibility of this threat. Unfolding Heidegger’s reference to the Sophist, in the seminar, Derrida explores how Plato takes the first philosophical step beyond mythology onto the question of Being. The renunciation of mythology is inscribed in the dialogue at the moment when, after the well-known refutation and parricide of Parmenides, the character of the Stranger sketches out a short history of past ontologies. Plato’s text reads:

As if we had been children, to whom they repeated each his own mythus or story [in the French edition quoted by Derrida: “ils m’ont l’air de nous conter les mythes (muthon tina ekastos phainetai moi diēgeisthai),” Derrida 2016, 32]; one said that there were three principles, and that at one time there was war between certain of them; and then again there was peace, and they were married and begat children, and brought them up; and another spoke of two principles, a moist and a dry, or a hot and a cold, and made them marry and cohabit. The Eleatics, however, in our part of the world, say that things are many in name, but in nature one; this is their mythus, which goes back to Xenophanes, and is even older. Then there are Ionian, and in more recent times Sicilian muses, who have arrived at the conclusion that to unite the two principles is safer. (242c–e)

It is worth reading what Derrida adds at the end of the first case of ontology recalled by Plato. He suggests that what the latter tells is the history/story of being as “the history of being as a family history, as a family tree” (Derrida 2016, 32), thus alluding to the ideas of genesis and becoming. The conclusion of the Stranger’s argument, Derrida summarizes, is that “Being is other than the determination of the onta” and thus “one must be conscious of this alterity which is not a difference between onta, in order to transgress mythology when one asks what is the origin of beings in their being” (34). However, Plato too admits that the task of abandoning mythology is impossible for the philosopher. Derrida evokes the example of Timaeus’s preliminary remark in his discourse about the origin of the universe—about “the origin of the world, the origin of the beings” (35), as Derrida puts it—in Timaeus 27d–29d. This remark is interpreted by Derrida as a “response” to Socrates’s demand for “a true story (alēthinon logon)” and not “a muthon” (35), which precedes the discourse. Approving his interlocutor’s claim for the historical authenticity of the forthcoming discourse, Socrates observes: “The fact that it isn’t a made-up story but a true historical account is of course critically important” (Timaeus 26e).6 Timaeus begins by explaining that his discourse is marked by two related impossibilities: (a) the task of speaking about the father of the universe to everyone is impossible (28c); and, consequently, (b) it is impossible to give an account of the origin of the universe, namely, of the becoming of beings, that would be “altogether internally consistent and in every respect and perfectly precise” (29c), for the very reason that it regards becoming and not Being.7 Derrida interprets Timaeus’s remark at different levels: as a direct response to Socrates’...