The Reproduction of Life Death

Derrida's La vie la mort

Dawne McCance

• Éditeur: Fordham University Press
• Année: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780823283927
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Philosophy
• Sous-sujet: Deconstruction in Philosophy

During the 1975–76 academic year, Jacques Derrida delivered a seminar, La vie la mort ( Life Death ), at the École normale supérieure, in Paris. Based on archival translations of this untapped but soon-to-be-published seminar, The Reproduction of Life Death offers an unprecedented study of Derrida's engagement with molecular biology and genetics, particularly the work of the biologist François Jacob.Structured as an itinerary of "three rings, " each departing from and coming back to Nietzsche, Derrida's seminar ties Jacob's logocentric account of reproduction to the reproductive program of teaching that characterizes the academic institution, challenging this mode of teaching as auto-reproduction along with the concept of "academic freedom" on which it is based. McCance also brings Derrida's critique of Jacob's theory of auto-reproduction together with his reading of reproductivity, the tendency to repeat-reproduce, that is theorized and enacted in Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The book further shows how Derrida's account of life death relates to his writings on autobiography and the signature and to such later concerns as the question of the animal.McCance brings extensive archival research together with a deep knowledge of Derrida's work a background in genetics to offer a fascinating new account of an encounter between philosophy and the hard sciences that will be of interest to theorists in a wide range of disciplines concerned with the question of life.

CHAPTER 1

Double Helix

Without wanting to pose any hard and fast distinction, Derrida suggests in “Psyche: Invention of the Other” that since “the dawn of what we might call technoscientific and philosophical ‘modernity’ (let us say in the seventeenth century, as a very rough and inadequate empirical marker)” (Psy 29), the word “invention” has undergone a semantic shift. “A few centuries ago,” he writes, invention was represented as a discovery, “an erratic occurrence, the effect of an individual stroke of genius or of unpredictable luck” (28). Today, however, when it is “subjected to powerful movements of authoritarian prescription and anticipation of the widest variety” (27), invention has become less a “discovery” than a “production” (28). Perhaps not surprisingly, the invention of deoxyribonucleic acid, the molecule commonly referred to as DNA, belongs to both of these semantic realms. For it was well into the twentieth century before biology was considered a “modern” science like physics and chemistry, and until that time the study of heredity, especially in the hands of breeders, proceeded as “more of an art” than a rigorous experimental science (Allen, Life Science in the Twentieth Century, xvi). In this climate, in 1869, and as something of a chance finding, Friedrich Miescher, while looking for proteins in the nucleus of pus and other eukaryotic cells (yeast, kidney, liver, testicular, and nucleated red blood), happened upon an altogether unknown substance to which he gave the name nuclein. Quite by accident, Miescher—who trained as a medical doctor but suffering from a hearing impairment, turned to laboratory science—had discovered DNA. Not only that: He “suggested that the nucleus might have a unique chemical composition at a time when most investigators believed that there was nothing unique about the nucleus and that it was a relatively unimportant cell structure” (Portugal and Cohen, Century of DNA, 14). So inauspicious was his discovery, however, that it was not reported for some two years, attracting scant attention even then, for the reason that right up to 1950–51, researchers’ minds were set on proteins as “of first importance” for hereditary processes.¹

The delay in taking note of Miescher’s finding recalls Derrida’s point in the “Psyche” essay that, over the course of modernity, invention has become a programmed enterprise, determined to a large extent by prevailing social-political and scientific expectations and orientations, thus by “anticipation of the widest variety” (Psy 27). Missing from Miescher’s discovery was what Derrida calls the “moment of recognition” through which an invention is legitimated and the status of inventor is awarded, say “in the form of a Prix Goncourt or a Nobel Prize” (26). Not until research on Mendelian inheritance in the fruit fly Drosophila gave way in the 1940s to the study of smaller and smaller organisms, pneumococci and bacteriophages, did researchers begin to consider the biological importance of nucleic acids, although the complex structure of these macromolecules remained elusive until 1953. In May of that year, amid intense anticipation, rivalrous competitive pressure as to who might come out first, and some alleged pirating of data, James Watson and Francis Crick unveiled their model of DNA: an awkward assemblage of rods, clamps, and other metal parts put together, not incidentally, in a Cavendish machine shop and displayed in a famous photograph with its two inventors side by side, their status legitimated the following year with a Nobel Prize. The Watson-Crick production of a machine-model of the structure of DNA, followed relatively quickly by the so-called “cracking” of the genetic “code” and development of techniques to observe and manipulate genes, marked the arrival of biology as a “modern” science: a late arrival on the scene, yet a science that announced quickly enough the invention of its own truth.

At least, this is the claim made by the molecular biologist François Jacob, another Nobel Prize recipient who begins his book, La logique du vivant, by bemoaning the late arrival of the scientific study of the living relative to study of nonliving things. Long after physics had adopted the scientific method for study of the physical world, Jacob writes, “those who studied the living world continued to think of the origin of living beings in terms of beliefs, anecdotes and superstitions” (LL 1; 9). Only after Watson and Crick did biology abandon its appeal to a “metaphysical entity hidden behind the word ‘life’” (LL 306; 327) in favor of research on the mechanics of DNA and RNA operations (for his elucidation of the structure and function of the latter, Jacob received a 1965 Nobel Prize). Throughout his book, Jacob celebrates biology’s release from metaphysics and its coming of age as a science, yet his separation of biology and physics right from the first page—study of the living beings from study of what he calls “nonliving things”—already heralds the life/death opposition on which he relies throughout the book. At the same time, without undoing this opposition, he contends that the new discipline of molecular biology, given to the study of macromolecules such as DNA, represents the “fusion” of biochemistry and physics (LL 249; 269)—as if, with the unlikely pairing of a biologist (Watson) and a physicist (Crick) the and previously separating life and death became, for all intents and purposes, an is. This conclusion is not absent from Jacob’s text, or from many interpretations of the “revolution in modern biology” (Judson, Eighth Day of Creation) that followed upon the Watson-Crick “invention” of a structure for DNA. For example, in Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death and in a chapter titled “From Secrets of Life to Secrets of Death,” Evelyn Fox Keller notes that during the 1940s, when the world was at war, the search for what Francis Crick called “the secret of life” took place simultaneously with the pursuit of physicists to produce (“invent”) an atomic bomb, principally at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Here, she submits, “the secret of life has become the secret of death” (Keller, “From Secrets of Life to Secrets of Death,” 45), a reference not only to the metaphors of birth, of the bomb-as-baby, that permeated Manhattan Project discourse, but also to the double helix as reducing the “secret of life” to “the simple mechanics of a self-replicating molecule” (51). In her words, while the net result of the Watson-Crick invention “was in no sense an agent of death” like the atomic bomb, it gave rise nonetheless “to a world that has been effectively devivified” (52), a world in which “life itself” is considered to comprise no more than molecular mechanics.

At this juncture, we might open Derrida’s 1975–76 seminar, Life death (La vie la mort), the title of which substitutes for either an and or an is a silent, invisible “trait blanc” between the words “life” and “death.” Derrida chooses the title La vie la mort, he says, not in order to suggest either that life and death are not two, or that one is the other, but rather that the difference at stake between the two is not of a positional (dialectical or nondialectical) order. He remarks then, that although Hegel’s dialectic, for example in his Science of Logic of 1812–16, advances as a powerful thought of life and death and the opposition between them, Hegel in the end is incapable of thinking the relation between these two terms.² In Derrida’s words: “The trait blanc between life and death does not come in place of an and or an is” (VM 1:22). The trait blanc comes from another place altogether, another “logic” that neither opposes nor identifies life and death. It is this other “logic,” this “other alterity” (VM 1:22), that Derrida says he will approach in all fourteen sessions of La vie la mort, beginning with his reading of François Jacob’s La logique du vivant, the text that becomes his reference point for delineating the oppositional problematic—a constellation of metaphysical (at once scientific and philosophical) tenets—that he deconstructs throughout the seminar.

With this term “deconstruct,” I refer to the “general strategy” that Derrida describes in Positions as a “double writing” or “double gesture” that on the one hand, traverses “a phase of overturning” philosophical oppositions such as those that permeate Jacob’s La logique—recognizing “that in a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a vis-à-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy.” To deconstruct a philosophical opposition, “first of all, is to overturn the hierarchy at a given moment” (P 41). On the other hand, and simultaneously, without introducing anything from the “outside” to the “inside” of a text, in the “interval between inversion, which brings low what was high,” deconstruction marks the emergence of what Derrida calls supplementary “undecidables” that cannot be included within philosophical oppositions, but which nonetheless inhabit these oppositions, resisting and disorganizing them “without ever constituting a third term” (P 42–43). Reading Jacob in La vie la mort, with particular recourse to the work of Nietzsche and Freud, Derrida suggests that these “undecidables”—“the unknown or unbeknownst [l’insu] of the system” constituting its “non-step [non pas]” (VM 4:115)—introduce between life death a différance, that does not belong either to an is or an and, either to a positional or oppositional order.

Originally published by Éditions Gallimard in 1970, Jacob’s La logique du vivant was translated into English in 1973 by Betty E. Spillmann as The Logic of Life. The English title is unfortunate in that it misses a central point Jacob makes in the book: that in the process of its coming-of-age as a truly “modern” science, biology abandoned the term life, la vie, in favor of le vivant. The former term, he says, belongs to a search for the essence of life hidden behind phenomena, something like a grand metaphysical and mysterious lady, the “Psyche” whom philosophers are wont to call upon (LL 8, 17; VM 4:119). In referring to le vivant and not la vie, Derrida comments, Jacob wants to break with vitalism, with metaphysical obscurantism: Along with many modern biologists, he wants to affirm biology’s emancipation from any connection whatever to traditional metaphysical philosophy (VM 4:120).³ In one sense, La logique du vivant tells the story of this emancipation, of biology’s progress from la vie to le vivant (which in more ways than one, constitutes progress from the feminine to the masculine, a point to which I return below). As Derrida observes, Jacob’s narrative of emancipation unfolds in four stages, through the four phases he marks out between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, beginning with biology’s seventeenth-century postulation of a “first order” structure and culminating in the twentieth century with its “discovery” of the four-order structure of DNA, its four bases (adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine) arranged in infinitely varied combinations and permutations along a chain. In other words, Derrida suggests, the “structure of the order four” (VM 4:111) characterizes not only the so-called DNA “text” that Jacob analyzes, but also the “text” titled La logique du vivant, as if the latter were “a bit like deoxyribonucleic acid” (VM 4:112)—an expression that Derrida uses in passing with reference to connections between one and the other of the concepts that Jacob dissociates and then cannot bring back together, as if he were in the position of biologists after Miescher who knew of DNA but lacked any comprehension of its functioning. In the same seminar session, Derrida comments on the double-strand structure of Jacob’s text, indicating that he plans to move through La logique by following its two “fils conceptuels” (VM 4:115), the two conceptual threads that wind through the book, organizing Jacob’s theory of the genetic program.⁴ One of these threads, he says, has to do with reproduction (copy, duplication), and the other with model (analogy, metaphor). In his reading of La logique, these are the two threads that, Derrida indicates, he is “going to attempt to connect, or plug in, the one to the other, in order to see whether a current will pass between them” (VM 4:116).

In this chapter, intrigued by the possibility that Derrida may well approach the text, La logique du vivant, as if it were “a bit” like the “text” of DNA, as if Jacob’s text were a performance of that which it describes, I take up his reading of Jacob’s genetic program by way of these two conceptual threads—reproduction and model (analogy, metaphor)—giving particular attention to the first, fourth, fifth and sixth sessions of La vie la mort which, by and large, constitute the first of the seminar’s “three rings.”⁵ In these sessions, Derrida’s reading of La logique is ingenious, or better still, inventive: “Deconstruction is inventive or it is nothing at all” (Psy 23). He demonstrates that Jacob does construct a double-stranded text based on the order four, albeit without recognizing that textual function—that of DNA or of La logique du vivant—cannot be reduced to a phonologocentric programming machine. At the same time, by drawing on a supplementarity that already inhabits La logique, Derrida introduces between the two threads a différance that thwarts Jacob’s life/death oppositional logic—and allows a pulse to pass.

Reproduction

On picking up the first thread, Derrida points out that for Jacob, reproduction, which he defines as the preparation of an identical genetic program for the following generation, is the sole purpose of every living organism (VM 4:117). Reproduction, Jacob writes, is the organism’s beginning and its end, its cause and its aim, and for this reason, an organism should not be thought in the present since in his words, “it is merely a transition, a stage between what was and what will be” (LL 2; 10). And so, were there to appear “systems possessing certain properties of life, such as the ability to react to certain stimuli, to assimilate, to breathe, or even to grow—but not to reproduce,” these would not qualify as “living systems” (LL 4–5; 12–13). Central to biology’s emergence as a modern science in the mid-twentieth century, he explains, was its recognition that reproduction, the coming together of two living beings to yield an offspring, works as the transfer of inst...