CHAPTER 1
Double Helix
Without wanting to pose any hard and fast distinction, Derrida suggests in âPsyche: Invention of the Otherâ that since âthe dawn of what we might call technoscientific and philosophical âmodernityâ (let us say in the seventeenth century, as a very rough and inadequate empirical marker)â (Psy 29), the word âinventionâ has undergone a semantic shift. âA few centuries ago,â he writes, invention was represented as a discovery, âan erratic occurrence, the effect of an individual stroke of genius or of unpredictable luckâ (28). Today, however, when it is âsubjected to powerful movements of authoritarian prescription and anticipation of the widest varietyâ (27), invention has become less a âdiscoveryâ than a âproductionâ (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 âmodernâ science like physics and chemistry, and until that time the study of heredity, especially in the hands of breeders, proceeded as âmore of an artâ 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, Miescherâwho trained as a medical doctor but suffering from a hearing impairment, turned to laboratory scienceâhad discovered DNA. Not only that: He âsuggested 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 structureâ (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 1950â51, researchersâ minds were set on proteins as âof first importanceâ for hereditary processes.1
The delay in taking note of Miescherâs finding recalls Derridaâs point in the âPsycheâ 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 âanticipation of the widest varietyâ (Psy 27). Missing from Miescherâs discovery was what Derrida calls the âmoment of recognitionâ through which an invention is legitimated and the status of inventor is awarded, say âin the form of a Prix Goncourt or a Nobel Prizeâ (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 âcrackingâ of the genetic âcodeâ and development of techniques to observe and manipulate genes, marked the arrival of biology as a âmodernâ 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, âthose who studied the living world continued to think of the origin of living beings in terms of beliefs, anecdotes and superstitionsâ (LL 1; 9). Only after Watson and Crick did biology abandon its appeal to a âmetaphysical entity hidden behind the word âlifeââ (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 biologyâs release from metaphysics and its coming of age as a science, yet his separation of biology and physics right from the first pageâstudy of the living beings from study of what he calls ânonliving thingsââalready 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 âfusionâ of biochemistry and physics (LL 249; 269)âas 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 Jacobâs text, or from many interpretations of the ârevolution in modern biologyâ (Judson, Eighth Day of Creation) that followed upon the Watson-Crick âinventionâ of a structure for DNA. For example, in Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death and in a chapter titled âFrom Secrets of Life to Secrets of Death,â Evelyn Fox Keller notes that during the 1940s, when the world was at war, the search for what Francis Crick called âthe secret of lifeâ took place simultaneously with the pursuit of physicists to produce (âinventâ) an atomic bomb, principally at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Here, she submits, âthe secret of life has become the secret of deathâ (Keller, âFrom Secrets of Life to Secrets of Death,â 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 âsecret of lifeâ to âthe simple mechanics of a self-replicating moleculeâ (51). In her words, while the net result of the Watson-Crick invention âwas in no sense an agent of deathâ like the atomic bomb, it gave rise nonetheless âto a world that has been effectively devivifiedâ (52), a world in which âlife itselfâ is considered to comprise no more than molecular mechanics.
At this juncture, we might open Derridaâs 1975â76 seminar, Life death (La vie la mort), the title of which substitutes for either an and or an is a silent, invisible âtrait blancâ between the words âlifeâ and âdeath.â 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 Hegelâs dialectic, for example in his Science of Logic of 1812â16, 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 Derridaâs words: âThe trait blanc between life and death does not come in place of an and or an isâ (VM 1:22). The trait blanc comes from another place altogether, another âlogicâ that neither opposes nor identifies life and death. It is this other âlogic,â this âother alterityâ (VM 1:22), that Derrida says he will approach in all fourteen sessions of La vie la mort, beginning with his reading of François Jacobâs La logique du vivant, the text that becomes his reference point for delineating the oppositional problematicâa constellation of metaphysical (at once scientific and philosophical) tenetsâthat he deconstructs throughout the seminar.
With this term âdeconstruct,â I refer to the âgeneral strategyâ that Derrida describes in Positions as a âdouble writingâ or âdouble gestureâ that on the one hand, traverses âa phase of overturningâ philosophical oppositions such as those that permeate Jacobâs La logiqueârecognizing âthat in a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a vis-Ă -vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy.â To deconstruct a philosophical opposition, âfirst of all, is to overturn the hierarchy at a given momentâ (P 41). On the other hand, and simultaneously, without introducing anything from the âoutsideâ to the âinsideâ of a text, in the âinterval between inversion, which brings low what was high,â deconstruction marks the emergence of what Derrida calls supplementary âundecidablesâ that cannot be included within philosophical oppositions, but which nonetheless inhabit these oppositions, resisting and disorganizing them âwithout ever constituting a third termâ (P 42â43). Reading Jacob in La vie la mort, with particular recourse to the work of Nietzsche and Freud, Derrida suggests that these âundecidablesâââthe unknown or unbeknownst [lâinsu] of the systemâ constituting its ânon-step [non pas]â (VM 4:115)âintroduce between life death a diffĂ©rance, that does not belong either to an is or an and, either to a positional or oppositional order.
Originally published by Ăditions Gallimard in 1970, Jacobâs 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 âmodernâ 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 âPsycheâ 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 biologyâs 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 biologyâs 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, Jacobâs narrative of emancipation unfolds in four stages, through the four phases he marks out between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, beginning with biologyâs seventeenth-century postulation of a âfirst orderâ structure and culminating in the twentieth century with its âdiscoveryâ 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 âstructure of the order fourâ (VM 4:111) characterizes not only the so-called DNA âtextâ that Jacob analyzes, but also the âtextâ titled La logique du vivant, as if the latter were âa bit like deoxyribonucleic acidâ (VM 4:112)âan 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 Jacobâs text, indicating that he plans to move through La logique by following its two âfils conceptuelsâ (VM 4:115), the two conceptual threads that wind through the book, organizing Jacobâs 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 âgoing to attempt to connect, or plug in, the one to the other, in order to see whether a current will pass between themâ (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 âa bitâ like the âtextâ of DNA, as if Jacobâs text were a performance of that which it describes, I take up his reading of Jacobâs genetic program by way of these two conceptual threadsâreproduction and model (analogy, metaphor)âgiving particular attention to the first, fourth, fifth and sixth sessions of La vie la mort which, by and large, constitute the first of the seminarâs âthree rings.â5 In these sessions, Derridaâs reading of La logique is ingenious, or better still, inventive: âDeconstruction is inventive or it is nothing at allâ (Psy 23). He demonstrates that Jacob does construct a double-stranded text based on the order four, albeit without recognizing that textual functionâthat of DNA or of La logique du vivantâcannot 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 diffĂ©rance that thwarts Jacobâs life/death oppositional logicâand 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 organismâs 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, âit is merely a transition, a stage between what was and what will beâ (LL 2; 10). And so, were there to appear âsystems possessing certain properties of life, such as the ability to react to certain stimuli, to assimilate, to breathe, or even to growâbut not to reproduce,â these would not qualify as âliving systemsâ (LL 4â5; 12â13). Central to biologyâs 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...