Deconstruction does not have aims in any standard sense, and even on a construal that thought it did have aims (to bring about something called 'textuality', or some such thing), hypertext could not be said to realise those aims. Hypertext exploits some features of textuality that traditional forms of writing tend to conceal (to state it quickly, a degree of non-linearity, but I don't think any hypertext is *simply* non-linear) or even repress (the order of the Book), but these features do not automatically make it the deconstructionist's dream come true.
Bennington, Geoffrey and Seulemonde (Interviewer). “Interview.” in: Seulemonde Online Journal. No Date. (English).
What might be more interesting in relation to Derrida's work would be other features of electronic communication: its instantaneity, for example, but also the question of publicity, encryption, viruses and so on.
Bennington, Geoffrey and Seulemonde (Interviewer). “Interview.” in: Seulemonde Online Journal. No Date. (English).
Something about e-mail, for example, makes me write more freely and incautiously than I would in other circumstances (something very noticeable in discussion groups like the Derrida list - it came as a shock to me to learn that everything posted to the list is printed out and archived at UC Irvine): obviously this is double edged.
Bennington, Geoffrey and Seulemonde (Interviewer). “Interview.” in: Seulemonde Online Journal. No Date. (English).
My objections to many (not Lyotard's) use of 'Postmodern' is simply that it's a historicist category attempting to deal with a problem that is not essentially or primarily historical (or at least not in the historicist sense). So I'm sure I'd have to say that any attempt to define 'postmodern' historically in that sense was misguided (this is part of my general suspicion of a general, and widely accepted, historicism in discussions of almost everything). [I'm aware that there's a specific use of 'historicism' around postmodernism in architecture, but that's not the use I'm after here.]
Bennington, Geoffrey and Seulemonde (Interviewer). “Interview.” in: Seulemonde Online Journal. No Date. (English).
...when Lyotard starts complicating his use of the term so that it does not have a historicist relationship with the term 'modern', then that seems more interesting and promising, in part because of the performative aspect involved in using the term 'postmodern' postmodernly, rather than just modernly (historically). But this does of course lead the term to a sort of self-destruction, which I think Lyotard accepts rather ruefully, and then drops it. That's how I feel about it too, but that's probably because I'm not really interested in 'cultural' problems, and I don't think the modern/postmodern distinction has any real purchase other than a cultural one.
Bennington, Geoffrey and Seulemonde (Interviewer). “Interview.” in: Seulemonde Online Journal. No Date. (English).
Publishing has had such a long history of *print* that it is hard to make the adjustment to the electronic form. Word-processors were easy, because they were really a way of getting better, more reliable hard copy. But electronic publication is different, and will (or should) bring with it many changes in thinking about, say, copyright (from which publication is inseparable) and its various associated legal problems.
Bennington, Geoffrey and Seulemonde (Interviewer). “Interview.” in: Seulemonde Online Journal. No Date. (English).
I'll stick to a remark about the principle: this archival seism would not have limited its effects to the *secondary recording*, the impression and the conservation of the history of psychoanalysis. It would have transformed this history from top to bottom and in the most intimate inside of its production, in its very *events*. This is another way of saying that the archive, as impression, writing, prosthesis or hypomnesiac technique in general is not only the place for storing a *past* archivable content which would in any case exist, such as one still thinks it was or will have been without it. No, the technical structure of the *archiving* archive also determines the structure of the *archivable* content in its very emergence and in its relation to the future. Archivation produces as much as it records the event. This is also our political experience of the so-called news media.
Bennington, Geoffrey and Seulemonde (Interviewer). “Interview.” in: Seulemonde Online Journal. No Date. (English).
It's not hard in principle to see how to graft onto this problematic the issues I mentioned about viruses and encryption, I think (the importance of the issue of encryption is obviously directly linked to the issue of publicity, and viruses (though I know it's hard to get one through the e-mail) too seem to flow analytically from the possibility of 'perfect' (digital) communication we're talking about: the more 'transparent' the communication, the more vulnerable it is to infection by viruses - this is something poor old Habermas will never understand).
Bennington, Geoffrey and Seulemonde (Interviewer). “Interview.” in: Seulemonde Online Journal. No Date. (English).
I can imagine quite easily the extension of all these points about privacy, publication, archivation, contamination and so on into what I imagine will be the increasingly 'virtual' world, one of the obvious features of which would seem to be that in it everything will in principle be archived, which will give it some immediate advantages over the 'real' world, and presumably necessitate some quite important shifts in, say, ethics and politics.
Bennington, Geoffrey and Seulemonde (Interviewer). “Interview.” in: Seulemonde Online Journal. No Date. (English).
Again in a familiar deconstructive movement, Derrida connects this gesture towards an immemorial past, a 'past that has never been present', with a thought of the future or more precisely the 'to-come': and it is here that we encounter an ambiguity or an uncertainty that is my real point of departure today.
Bennington, Geoffrey. "Double Tounging: Derrida's Monolingualism." in: University of South Carolina. No Date. (English).
Given the situation in which there is no source language from which to depart towards a target or arrival point (and so, strictly speaking, no translation), these 'arrival' languages are never quite arrived at either (insofar as they don't know their point of departure nor, therefore, where they are going). Targets which are never hit, then, arrivals which are never arrived at. In a dense passage we may have to reconstruct in a moment, Derrida claims that this situation (a multiplicity of languages, then, in a relation of translation in some sense, but not translating any one source language) – that this situation is originary, and that anything like a subject arises from it, secondarily.
Bennington, Geoffrey. "Double Tounging: Derrida's Monolingualism." in: University of South Carolina. No Date. (English).
The 'subject', on this account, is born in this zone of arrival without arrivals, and is born as the desire to reconstitute the missing source language or departure language.
Bennington, Geoffrey. "Double Tounging: Derrida's Monolingualism." in: University of South Carolina. No Date. (English).
But where the early work at least on occasion appears to condemn, as 'metaphysical' precisely, this gesture of assigning an origin from a point where it has always already been lost, here Derrida appears rather to celebrate it. If the source language, the first language, is not given, but is to be invented after the fact by the desire generated from the 'secondary' position of arrival, which is the position of the apparent contingency of events and situations , here that desire seems to be valorised, perhaps as a creative gesture. This desire to reconstitute or restore – what the early work described as metaphysics – is in truth, says Derrida, a desire to invent a language that never existed: not a first language, then, but a pre-first language (avant-première langue) ...
Bennington, Geoffrey. "Double Tounging: Derrida's Monolingualism." in: University of South Carolina. No Date. (English).
One way of understanding this gesture of Derrida's is to see in it a suspicion about the dogmatism, piety, moralism and self-righteousness that is the bane of all self-proclaimed 'political' and 'cultural' criticism. It may even be that, from a deconstructive perspective, the very concepts of 'politics' and 'culture' are already complicit with dogmatism, piety, moralism and self-righteousness (and all that goes with them, such as censorship and scapegoating) – and if Derrida is right to claim that all culture is originarily colonial, as he does more than once in Monolinguisme (e.g. p. 68 [39]), then this suspicion would perhaps weigh more heavily or at least more acutely on so-called colonial and post-colonial studies than elsewhere...
Bennington, Geoffrey. "Double Tounging: Derrida's Monolingualism." in: University of South Carolina. No Date. (English).
Here, then, is one way into the deconstructive analysis of 'the colonial': the attitude which might be assumed to oppose colonialism in all its forms (and indeed provide a principle of ethical and political righteousness), i.e. 'relation to the other' or 'opening to the other' is here presented as in some relation of continuity with the 'colonial' attitude it is supposed to oppose, as being contaminated or inoculated by it to some extent, so that good and evil here become to some extent confused or indiscernible: whence the imagined accusation of mixing things up, and whence, I am suggesting, the suspicion of piety or self-righteousness levelled at those who rapidly invoke 'relation with the other' or 'opening to the other' as antidotes to, say, colonial violence.
Bennington, Geoffrey. "Double Tounging: Derrida's Monolingualism." in: University of South Carolina. No Date. (English).
Against this 'homo-hegemony' and its reductions to the 'One', Derrida will, familiarly and even predictably enough, invoke a value of plurality or multiplicity. A good deal later than the passage I have just been quoting, for example, he returns to this issue with an argument that 'One language does not exist' and that the inventive 'gesture' he still calls 'writing' is intrinsically plural.
Bennington, Geoffrey. "Double Tounging: Derrida's Monolingualism." in: University of South Carolina. No Date. (English).
A handshake is of course not a simple thing, either historically or phenomenologically. Somewhere between the ‘blow’ and the ‘caress’ that will occupy Derrida later in Le Toucher, supposedly a gesture of trust and confidence, whereby I extend my empty right hand (usually the right hand) toward the other’s empty right hand, originally it would appear as proof that it is not holding a weapon, but which I then still use, in the very clasp and shake (if there is a shake: in French one does not ‘shake’ hands (though my hand may of course shake with fear or anxiety as I extend it toward yours), one ‘squeezes’ or ‘clasps’ hands or even gets a fistful of hand [serrer la main à quelqu’un; une poignée de main]) – which I might still then use somewhat as a weapon, perhaps trying to intimidate my interlocutor by the firmness of my grasp, while simultaneously measuring it against the firmness of his (usually his: the paradigmatic handshake of course takes place between two men).
Bennington, Geoffrey. "Handshake." in: Derrida Today. Vol. 1, No. 1, 2008. (English).
Even a ‘normal’ handshake must involve two hands and two shakes, as it were (this being one of the reasons why in fact my shaking the other’s hand is an experience incommensurable to my touching my right hand with my left: just because I have one right and one left hand I cannot really shake hands with myself, in that a handshake involves usually two right hands (or occasionally, as I believe is the case in the boy scout movement, two left hands)). So nothing prevents (and in fact all the self-help business world discussions more or less secretly presuppose) some asymmetry at work in the handshake.
Bennington, Geoffrey. "Handshake." in: Derrida Today. Vol. 1, No. 1, 2008. (English).
The ‘wet fish’ handshake is, one imagines, identified as such by and from a handshake of a different type. The ‘pumper’ is usually pumping a non-pumper (two pumpers pumping each other is really not a pretty sight). The ‘glove’ is by definition not quite reciprocal: there are enclosing hands and a hand enclosed by them. So however we characterize the handshake Derrida gives Nancy, in Le Toucher or in Voyous, we might expect to find a different handshake coming back from Nancy to Derrida. How does it look when we consider the shaker shaken?
Bennington, Geoffrey. "Handshake." in: Derrida Today. Vol. 1, No. 1, 2008. (English).
In the curious kind of coherence that marks Jacques Derrida’s thinking, for which there is no doubt as yet no good working model, no satisfactory representation, it is as though I were searching for an origin-point, a point of founding or grounding, a moment of originary insight in which Derrida would have seen, if only perhaps in some embryonic or otherwise undeveloped form, what was to come, a moment that would provide the foundation for an edifice of thought, or perhaps be the first call for that ‘institution of reading’ called for, according to Jacques Derrida, by every text,and be simultaneously the beginning of the structure of legacy and inheritance that he taught us (especially in Spectres de Marx) is just part of being, and that has come more starkly into view since his death.
Bennington, Geoffrey. "Foundations." in: Textual Practice. Vol. 21, No. 2, 2007. p. 231-49 (English).
Derrida says that there is complexity at the origin. From his very early Master’s thesis on Husserl, in which he writes of an ‘originary dialectic’, and an ‘originary synthesis’, it seems that his thinking turns around the thought that the origin is not simple, and that a non-simple origin has immeasurable consequences for thought. One of the many ways in which these consequences appear throughout his work is in a thinking about institutions, and more especially about the founding gesture of institutions, the very instituting or the institution of institutions.
Bennington, Geoffrey. "Foundations." in: Textual Practice. Vol. 21, No. 2, 2007. p. 231-49 (English).
Even if we now find ourselves in a situation of complexity, and even of negativity and evil, that situation has arisen (so metaphysics says) on the basis of a presence that (perhaps only ideally, in some sense of ‘ideal’) came before it as its origin.
Bennington, Geoffrey. "Foundations." in: Textual Practice. Vol. 21, No. 2, 2007. p. 231-49 (English).
The supposedly simple and present origin itself has an origin in something else, and that something else, the origin’s origin, is not an origin in the normal sense at all, because it cannot be simple or simply present. For many of us, the most perspicuous way to think about this ‘earlier’ moment, what precedes the origin, is in terms of the trace, which Derrida most clearly develops in his reading of Saussure, but which he famously says in the Grammatology combines in one and the same possibility, ‘and without it being possible to separate them other than by abstraction, the structure of the relation to the other, the movement of temporalisation, and language as writing’. Broadly speaking, what Derrida is able to show is that Saussure’s insight concerning language as a ‘system of differences without positive terms’ entails a thinking of identity in which any element in a plurality is identifiable as the element that it is only insofar as it in some way bears the ‘trace’ of all the elements that it is not.
Bennington, Geoffrey. "Foundations." in: Textual Practice. Vol. 21, No. 2, 2007. p. 231-49 (English).
This complication of presence and absence, derived here from a description of language, but rapidly proposed by Derrida as a matrix for thinking about effects of identity in general, is what justifies Derrida’s claim that différance precedes even what Heidegger calls the ontico-ontological difference, and indeed Being more generally, and is what will give rise in his later work to the thematics of ghosts and haunting, and the more sweeping proposal, in Specters of Marx, to rethink ontology as hauntology.
Bennington, Geoffrey. "Foundations." in: Textual Practice. Vol. 21, No. 2, 2007. p. 231-49 (English).
Once language is up and running, as it were, other institutions can come into being by conventional or contractual means: but the institution of language itself is radical, and ‘pure’ in Saussure’s sense, in that it cannot have come about this way—the traditional conventionalist account of the origin of language (according to which people at some point agree on what words to use for what things or what ideas) must in fact presuppose a language already in existence, a problem which Saussure recognizes when he says that I do not consent to the language-system within which I speak, but receive it like the law.
Bennington, Geoffrey. "Foundations." in: Textual Practice. Vol. 21, No. 2, 2007. p. 231-49 (English).
Institutions by definition mark a break with nature, yet insofar as their founding moment can never be fully integrated and institutionalised, but remains as a kind of traumatic memory of their non-legal foundation, they remain haunted by a nature they have never quite left behind ...
Bennington, Geoffrey. "Foundations." in: Textual Practice. Vol. 21, No. 2, 2007. p. 231-49 (English).
Institutions thus ‘live’ in a kind of constitutive dissension or even permanent revolution that affects every institutional act or event imaginable, and explains their constitutive shiftiness and inevitable tendency to corruption. Institutions, we might say, are ‘corrupted’ and made fragile from the start by the violence of their institution, of their foundation, which is also however the only measure of their legitimacy.
Bennington, Geoffrey. "Foundations." in: Textual Practice. Vol. 21, No. 2, 2007. p. 231-49 (English).
This is why, among other things, it is possible for language to change and new things to get said, even though the institution of language tends also to secrete sub-institutions (academies, dictionaries…) the job of which is to attempt to prevent, or at least to restrain, change.
Bennington, Geoffrey. "Foundations." in: Textual Practice. Vol. 21, No. 2, 2007. p. 231-49 (English).
...but as Rousseau shows remorselessly and rigorously, the government, which cannot simply coincide with the Sovereign in some kind of radical democracy (a people of gods, says Rousseau, would govern itself democratically, but that would be a ‘government without government’ and the same as no politics at all)—the government cannot fail to usurp the sovereignty of the sovereign and lead to the eventual ruin of the social body itself. The institution can interpose between itself and this inevitable ruin any number of intermediate bodies, but the most that can be hoped is that they can delay what is an absolutely inevitable process. The outcome of that process is a return to a (‘natural’) violence that the social body was formed to guard against.
Bennington, Geoffrey. "Foundations." in: Textual Practice. Vol. 21, No. 2, 2007. p. 231-49 (English).
The University (and more especially, says Derrida, the ‘Humanities’) have a responsibility to foster events of thought that cannot fail to unsettle the University in its Idea of itself. For this to happen, the special institution that the University is must open itself up to the possibility of unpredictable events (events ‘worthy of the name’, as Derrida often says, being by definition absolutely unpredictable) in a way that always might seem to threaten the very institution that it is. On this account, the University is in principle that ‘lives’ the precarious chance and ruin of the institution as its very institutionality.
Bennington, Geoffrey. "Foundations." in: Textual Practice. Vol. 21, No. 2, 2007. p. 231-49 (English).
— This title is unspeakable.1 Or at least unpronounce-able. To speak it means a decision has to be made (there’s no possible fudging here, it’s a true either/or): words/words or word/swords, with no middle ground. Which one is it? What did you mean by it?
Bennington, Geoffrey. “Wordswords.” in: Open Book/Livre Ouvert. CreateSpace. 2005. Paperback, 352 pages, Language English, ISBN: 1440424438.
— But ‘Wordswords’ is not quite a word, and there’s already something quite offensive about it. I do come here armed with it (and not much else, in truth), ill-prepared, ill-intentioned and ill-disciplined, looking for trouble again. Its double-edgedness, and the point of the decision it demands and resists, might make you want to think of it as much as a sword as a word, a word-sword that’s not just a word-word. And don’t assume too quickly that this will simply resolve into something that can be captured, ensnared and put to death, by the operators of speech-act theory: beyond the performative and the incorporeal transformations it effects, wordswords whirl and flail, affect the body, strike and hit and hurt and eviscerate...
Bennington, Geoffrey. “Wordswords.” in: Open Book/Livre Ouvert. CreateSpace. 2005. Paperback, 352 pages, Language English, ISBN: 1440424438.
— Crossed wires, crossed swords, cross words. Where’s the discipline?
Bennington, Geoffrey. “Wordswords.” in: Open Book/Livre Ouvert. CreateSpace. 2005. Paperback, 352 pages, Language English, ISBN: 1440424438.
— As if. What violent fantasy of non-violent contemplation is this in Kant? What violent, sublime, pleasure, profit and complacency in the supposed ability to withdraw from the arena and watch from a safe seat. Violence of reason to reason, for the discipline of reason here is a discipline exercised by reason on reason, on its own tendency to go a bit wild and get a bit violent.
Bennington, Geoffrey. “Wordswords.” in: Open Book/Livre Ouvert. CreateSpace. 2005. Paperback, 352 pages, Language English, ISBN: 1440424438.
Last night I had a dream about Jürgen Habermas. In the dream I was sitting reading Kafka and wait- ing for a phone-call when he came in with a friendly smile, hand outstretched for a greeting. Somewhere in the background, Peter Dews and William Outhwaite were smiling too. The hand-shake was firm and warm, but modest and not overbearing, polite but not over-polite, reserved but perhaps promising something more open, an invitation to dialogue. The handshake was saying something: we can talk, let’s talk, it’s good to talk.
Bennington, Geoffrey. “Ex-Communication.” in: Deconstruction Is Not What You Think...And Other Short Pieces And Interviews. 2005. CreateSpace. Paperback, 280 pages, Language English, ISBN: 144042239.
We’re going to be on the frontier for the next three years. Or at the border, on the edge, at the limit, in the margin, on the boundary, perhaps in no-man’s land— maybe at the barrier or on the barricade, or even on the fence (let me remind you that ‘fence’ is the every- day sense of the French word clôture, now systemati-cally translated ‘closure’): and especially, perhaps, on the frontier (or border, edge, limit, margin, boundary, barrier, barricade or fence) between these various, non-synonymous words or concepts. But even though we’ll be on the frontier for three years, we’ll take things term by term.
Bennington, Geoffrey. Frontiers: Kant, Hegel, Frege, Wittgenstein. CreateSpace. 2003. Paperback, 498 pages, Language English, ISBN: 144043234.
What Sade left us. Sade, it would seem, has left us something, or at least put us in a position to extent that he might have left us something. Left us something, that ‘us’ defined just by our gathering under this title to sort out the inheritance. Sade has left us more or less perplexed as to what he has left us. In itself, that situation is not unusual and we might even want to say that it just is the situation we inhabit whenever we read. Any text is the open-ended appeal to readings of its legacy.
Bennington, Geoffrey. "Forget to remember, remember to forget: Sade avec Kant." in: Paragraph. Vol. 23, No. 1, 2000, p. 75-86. (English).
Reading just is the ongoing process or proces of attempts to decide what was left, or what is left. Writing, says Derrida famously in La Voix et le phenomene, is in essence testamentary, so one might say that, concomitantly, reading is in essence all about sorting out and understanding legacies.
Bennington, Geoffrey. "Forget to remember, remember to forget: Sade avec Kant." in: Paragraph. Vol. 23, No. 1, 2000, p. 75-86. (English).
One way, which I shall call hermeneutic, accepts that legacies are complicated and difficult to decipher. The task of reading on this model, is to allow for all of these complexities, to interrogate them as carefully as possible, to take the time that it takes, if necessary to refute hasty or ill-informed attempts to decide as to the legacy, but to do so with the view to establishing the truth of the matter, to sorting things out, to getting the legacy right, dividing things up as they should be, returning the text to the testator's will, respecting its intentions obeying its injunctions.
Bennington, Geoffrey. "Forget to remember, remember to forget: Sade avec Kant." in: Paragraph. Vol. 23, No. 1, 2000, p. 75-86. (English).
Source: European Graduate School (EGS)
