Jacques Derrida MARGINS of Philosophy Translated, with Additional Notes, by Alan Bass iN ‘THE HARVESTER PRESS3 published in Great Britain in 1982 by IE HARVESTER PRESS LIMITED. Tlie Spiers ‘Street, Brighton, Sussex 1982 by The Univer shed in Paris under Ieopie © 1972 by Lex Contents Translator's Note of Geneva, Form and Meaning: A Note con the Phenomenology of Language ‘The Supplement of Copule: Philosphy before Linguistics White Mythology: of Philosophy Valéry’s Sources signature Event Context 2 o 109 137 155 175 207 307‘Translator’s Note volume are “new” and "my own”. rida might say, as an adequate prec in my work by Dreyfus, and Barbara Reid, 1969), F.C. T. Moore, Naw Literary History 6, no. trans, Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlmat Signature Event Con Johns Hopkins Textual ip Lewis's "Vers ln traduction abus Jacques Derrida, Paris: Galilée, 1981) contains the criteria by which all translations of Derrida will be judged. ALAN Bass.‘Tympan in philosop! y Vorkof) is supposed to be made body expresses for Philosophy, which begins idTo tympat Being at the limit: these words do not a proposition, and even less a discourse. But them, provided that one plays upon, to engender almost all the sentences in this book. Does philosophy answer a need? How is it to be understood? Philosophy? The need? self intermi- tended to receive its name only fi hhas never ceased murmuring its itself from as close as possible—has always, in- cluding its own, meant to say it In the fa- miliarity of the languages called natural by philosophy, the languages elementary discourse has always insisted upon as- nceived, 1 de 10 all possible modes; 1¢ same token, in order has transgressed and therefore by to dispose of the solely to relever* fives, to head the procession of its method only “And I have cho- sen, as the sign be- neath which to place them, the entirely floral and subterra- extracted from its dark — terrestrial chapter heading. ‘The acanthus leave copied in school when, for better or for worse, one learns to use the fusain, the stem of a morn- ing glory or other limbing, plant the bel oon the shell ofa snail, the meanders of the ‘small and intestine, the sandy serpentine excreted by an earth, the curl of childish hair encased in a me the pur trid simulacrum ‘Tympan by passing the limit? Or indeed does the limit, ‘obliquely, by surprise, always reserve one more ‘blow for philosophical knowledge? Limit/passage. In propagating this question beyond the precise wm which I have just extracted refore relaunching in every sense the reading of the Hegelian Auffebung, eventually beyond what Hegel, inscribing it, ‘understood himself to say or intended to mean, ‘beyond that which is inscribed on the internal ves- tibule of his ear. This implies a vestibule in a del- rentiated structure whose orifices may remain unfindable, and whose entry and exit may be barely passable; and implies that the text_Hegel’s for example—functions as a writing, ‘machine in which a certain number of typed and systematically enmeshed propositions (one has bbe able to recognize and isolate them) represent the “conscious intention” of the author as a reader of his “own’” text, in the sense we speak today of ‘a mechanical reader. Here, the lesson of the finite reader called a philosophical author is but one proper? In One reappropriates 3 rather one misses yncerns the other, bot proper” Pihave drawn by a slight pressure of the fin- gers from a perela~ coligue,* the marblings that e bloom on the edges - of certain bound I books, the curved wrought iron, "modem style of the Métro ent the interlace of em- broidered figures on. sheets and pillow cases, the kiss-curl pasted with grease on the ‘cheekbone of a pros- ute in the old days of Casque d'or, hin and browner ble, the blender one of the string cable, the cerebral convo- lutions exemplified the corkscrewing of the vine, the imageym always amounts to the same. Between the proper of the other and the other of the proper. If philosophy has always intended, from point of view, to maintai ical place, a place of exteriority or Which one might stil treat of philosophy? Is there any ruse not belonging to reason to prevent phi- losophy from still speaking of itself, from borrow- ing its categories from the logos of the other, by affecting itself without delay, on the domestic page ofits own tympanum (stil the muffled drum, the tympanon, the iched taut in order to take 's beating, to amortize impressions, to make the types (typo) resonate, to balance the striking p: sure of the typtein, between the inside and the outside), with heterogeneous percussion? Can one violently penetrate philosophy’s field of listening ‘without its immediately—even pretending in ad- vance, by hearing what is said of it, by decoding penetration resor 1g the emission for between the following the path of a tube or inner opening, be it round or oval? In other ‘words, can one puncture the tympanum of a phi- losopher and still be heard) and understood by him? ‘To philosophize with a hammer. Zarathustra be- gins by asking himself if he will have to puncture them, batter their ears ( men erst die the sound of cymbals or truments, always, of some Diony- figuring the endless screw of drunken- blood, the concha ofthe ear, the sinuous curves of a path, everything wreathed, coiled, flowered, gar- landed, twisted, ar- abesque, the spur (which for my purposes here I imagine in a spi- ) of an espadon, the twists of a ram’s horn, all this I believe un- covered in the name ‘of Persephone, po- ly, awaiting only an impercepti- ble click like the ribbon of steel ly wound on self in the midst of the pinions of aclock- work or the spring in the closed-cover box which the bristly-bearded devil tenti eyes” too. But we the circular comy and the ear. But in the structure of the tympanum there is, discourse to participate in the most serene, disturbed, best served economy of irony. Which is to say, and examples of physical drumming are not lacking t taking this risk, one risks nothing From philosophy—to separate onesel to describe and decry its guid, to balance has not yet emerged. 2 spiraled name—or more broadly: a name, but whose gentleness is be confused the always more acter of that which has been dulled, since—quite to the contrary—what is rapprochemer made between the= ‘of the metaphysical dene- \modates itself very well to all Ibe, but according, f by philosophy, an other gation which ace these projects), in question toamovement unhear which is relationship following the mode of a nonrel ship about which it would be demonstrated si multaneously or obliquely—on the philosophical surface of the discourse—that no philosopheme will ever have been prepared to conform translate it. This can only be written according to 1 deformation of the philosophical tympanum. My intention is not to extract from the question of metaphor—one of the most continuous threads of this book—the figure of the oblique. This is also, thematically, the route of Dissemination.” We know that the membrane of the tympanum, a thin and. i; sephone” and “perce- cided in Persephone, because of the ‘which imparts some- thing undulating and. grassy, chimerical and fleeting, the extent that one might be tempted, by execut- ing an easy meta- thesis, to call her the Fay Person ...), but the one and the other end with an appeal to the sense of hear- ing, which is overtly ‘Tympan transparent parti from the ‘oblique! from outside to Wn separating the auditory canal front. Therefore of the canal. One of the effects of this obliqueness is to increase the surface of impression and hence the capacity of vibration. It has been observed, particularly in birds, that precision of hearing is in direct proportion to the obliqueness of the tym- panum. The tympanum sq set the loxds in the logos to wor and symmetrical protes or in any case to inscribe ant domestic denegation, in an entirely other form of ambush, of lathos, of textual maneu- Under what conditions, then, could one mark, for a philosopheme in general -ould not infinitely reappropriate, conce 's own, in advance engendering and interning, the process of its expropriation (Hegel again, al- ways), proceeding to its inversion by itself? How to unbalance the pressures that correspond to each. 8. On the problematic of overturning and displaceme Tuxate, of the organ by means of which au- ditory sensations pen and less directly in play for the goddess bby means of the suf- ‘gramophone; latter being an ine sstrument for which is more appropriate than the former the very euphonic end- beautifully The insect whose principal work is to gnaw on the inside from them, andTympan other on either side of the membrane? How to block this correspondence destined to weaken, muffle, forbid the blows from the outside, the ‘other hammer? The “hammer that speaks’ “who has the third ear” (der das How to interpret—but here interpretati longer be a theory or discursive practi ophy-the strange and unique prope course that organizes the economy of representation, the law of its proper weave, such. It assures without let-up the relevant movement of reappropriation. Can one then pass this singular which no more separates book do not answer this question, bringing to neither an ansier nor an answer. They work, rather to transform and deplac toward examining the presupp. tion, the institution of procedure, the headings ungraspable there are margins, is ther philosophy? which occasionally, so they say, perfo- daughter of Demeter that it too buries it- self in a subterra- rnean kingdom. The deep country hearing, described in terms of geology ‘more than in those of any other natural science, not only by virtue of the cartila- sginous cavern that constitutes its organ, but also by virtue of the relationship that pockets hollowed out of the terrestrial crust whose emptiness makes them into re sonating drums the slightest sounds. Just as one might about the idea insect—unless it had Tympan in a structure, enveloped in the hol to take a look. has been formed, how it the tympanum is a li But what is a hinge (signifying: to be reasoned in every sense)? Therefore, what legal question is to be relied upon if the limit in general, and not only the limi of what is believed to be one very particular thing hers, the tympanum, is structurally igably at issue is the ear, the distinct, differentiated, articulated organ that produces the effect of proximity, of absolute properness, the idealizing erasure of organic difference. It is an ‘organ whose structure (and the suture that holds it to the throat) produces the pacifying lure of or- ganic indifference. To forget it—and in so doing “phe fe already been broken by too violent a noise—it is equall permissible to fea \e vocal cords, which can be broken instantaneously when, for exampl loudly, subjecting 1m to excessive fension (in the case of anger, grie even a simple game dominated by the sheer pleasure of shrieking), so that one’s voice gets “broken.” An acci- my mother sometimes warned ‘me against, whether she actually believed thatit could happen, orwhether—asl tend, sve—she used. the danger as a sca- recrow that might make me less noisy, den|Tympan nomenon of the labyrinth” in which Speech and epigraph and very close to its juced the question of writing, vertigo” is the jermined dis- ‘changes of fen the mechanisms open hmes to separate the li Trovernent, na ceptors of balanc cle and saccule) ied granulations modifying the stimulation hick part of the membrancous cove at least for a while. Marginal to Perse- phone and perce-or- soldered. hardened—in broad, daylight—by their ection, which displace the lance has ‘Tympan If Being is in effect a process of reappropriation, names, a durable su- the “question of Being” of a new type can never ture is thus formed be percussed without being measured against the between the throat and the tympanum, which, the one as much as the other, are subject to a fear only from the structure of hearing-oneself-speak. 6 being injured, be- ‘The propius presupposed inall discourses onecon- sides both belonging ‘omy, sexuality, language, semantics, rhetoric, etc, t only in sonorous rep- to the same cavern- ‘ous domain, And in the final analysis cavers become the ‘geometric place in which all are joined together: the chthonian divinity, the insect piercer of signature, Timbre, style, and signaturearethesame Pits, the matrix in obliterating. divi the proper. They make Which the voice is ‘every event possible, necessary, and unfindable, formed, the drum What is the specific resistance of phi that each noise comes discourse to deconstruction? Iti the infinite mas- to strike with its tery that the agency of Being (and of the) proper seems to assure it; this mastery pen teriorize every limit as bing and as being, proper. To exceed it, by the same token, and there- fore to preserve itin secret part of being. its discourse on mastery (for mastery is a sigs ler to bring even bllceophieel power: to the totally naked always seems to combine fw fy. it 7 ‘On the one hand, a hierarchy: the particula ‘Saviyrok Our ait ences and regional ontgles are subordinated to *Pace the exhala- ions—of variable temperature, con: sistency, and orna- ‘mentation—that are wand of vibrating air; caverns: obscure pipe-works reaching. down into the most uestion ofthis ontological subordh Johns Hopkins University Press mn was begun in Of‘Tympan propagated in long, horizontal. waves rising straight political economy, psychoans sophical jurisdiction. In prin« tations of the outside systema world these domains (which therefore are no longer sim- On the one hand, ply domains, regions circumscribed, delimited, therefore, is the out: and assigned from outside and abov side; on the other .e other hand, an envelopment: the whole and, the inside; be- is implied, in the speculative mode of reflec and expression, in each part. Homogenous, con centric, and circulating inde the movement of the whole is remarked it nations of the system or encyclopedia, without the status of that remark, and the partitioning of the part, giving rise to any general deformation of the space. These two kinds of appropriating mastery, hi: ‘communicate with each tween them, the cav- ernous. A voice is usually described as ‘cavern ous’ to give the idea that it is low and ctf according to compl the two types is more power Descartes, Kant, Husserl, Heidegger) or there Spinoza, Leibniz, Hegel teeta ofthe ne hel whether eae ees tat of question, finally, of Heidegger's hermeneutical cir-_ the basse ther ‘je or of Hegel's ontotheological cice. ("White would seem more Mythology” deviates according to another whee.) Proper—in that it For as long as this tympanum will not have been Seems rough, a if destroyed. (the tympanum as also a hydraulic hewn withanax—to toed, described minutely by Vitruvius)” which thestone breaker, the chantante with a higher register and also more supple matopotasgue old, or pierced a gem, so begrimed nut ‘The drums are weought with ea Tympen simply discursive chiseler of funerary mg as these two marbles, tothe miner not have been desttoyed in with his pick, to the gravedigger, the ditchdigges, and (if Thangs a cork or dum saised by ic wheel which bears his name” dru are open on the surface of the dru eg nag ta in a i pina ofa dre. T Here, Lam reproducingTympan lean refer to a social ‘as even the philosophical concept of mastery will sophical machines, according to denegati ipitation, ignorance or stupidity. They very quickl ‘authors,’ will hav known or unknown to t ‘been called back to order. reversible whom in effect? And why not pe of the norm and the rule of law tympanotribe)? Ifthe displacement not effectively transform the situation, why prive oneself of the pleasure, and spe the laughter, which are never without a certain js hypothesis is not secondary. Wi neck, by step to descend a certain number of meters below sea- level (...) to open up a passageway through the organs by burrowing, lorder to be concerned pleasure? And if the Tympan fone must (know how to) destroy what one de- through the canal of stroys. ‘wound narrow but Therefore, if they appear to remain marginal to deep enough losophy sk the question of the 1 border which would make this question into a particular case, they are to blur the line which separates a text from its controlled margin. They interrogate philosophy rock, or fashioned in beyond its meaning, treating it not only as a dis- the most supple tee! course but a a determined text inscribed ina gen- _ifitisthatof singer, eral text, enclosed inthe representation ofits own emerging from the margin. Which compelsus not only to reckon with jnoist earth ofa hot. the entie logic ofthe margin, but also to take an iyase or stretched entirely other reckoning: whichis doubtless tore- out in breaking glass call that beyond the philosophical text there is ot flamentif thas sere a blank, virgin, empty margin, but another text, Srueereatunecmere 4 weave of dferences of forces without any Pes” eagiy ead cane ent center of reference (everything —"history”” [ua 9 us! Gm “politics” “economy,” “sexuality” etc.—said not 1 be vette in Boks the wort expression (eR *HUBH cnt with which we appear not to have finished step- ping backward, in the most regressive argumen- SPecies): or whether tations and in the most foreseeable it is the most vulgar places) and also to text of YORE, issuing from philosophy (this time in its books) overflows and ‘cracks its meaning. p4,,.9«4vd, To philosophize 4 corps pendu.® How did Hegel understand that? oF most Can this text become the margin of a margin? fin, mysterious is Where has the body of the text gone when the the voice that sings, margin is no longer a secondary virginity but an in relation to the inexhaustible reserve, the stereographic activity of Voice that speaks. an entirely other eat? The mystery—if oleic asthe sense o an opera sings i chanteuse is simply a female singer Sree (hothouse, glass-breaking jsnomasculine form cantteu? 1 Hegel's use of the expression & conspan ‘Overflows and cracks: that is, on the one hand compels us to count in its margin more and less than one believes is said or read, an ui to the structure of the mark (which is word as mar and as margin); and on the other hand, luxates the very body of statements in the pretensions to univocal rigidity or regulated. polysemia, A lock opened to a double understand ing no longer forming, Which does not amo the margin mai Philosophy says so too: within because philosoph- ical discourse intends to know and to master its negative about which there seems to be nothing, ora to do, a negative without effect in the internal spacings and the reg taneously, by means of rigorous, philosoph- inscription of marks which no longer belong, to philosophical space, not even to the neighborhood. the space of a closure 1 analogous to what philosophy can represent for itself is name, according to a straight or enclosing a homogenous space. To we wish at any price, for the purposes of discourse, to give a figure of speech that which by defi tion cannot have one—can be repre snted as a margin, a fringe surrounding fiable cause at the same time as the par- tracts it from the swampy depths in dinar facts are mixed up. Mus- ical el pared to ordinary locution, appears similar irisation, @ iry’s coat, whi the index of a con- nivance between that which could seem to Tympan intransigence that prevent ‘margin, by means printed according, travels through the book. How to put one’s hands [mains] on ympanum and how the tympanum could es- cape from the hands of the philosopher in order to make of phallogocentrism an impression that he no longer recognizes, in which he no longer discovers himself, of which he could become con- it being able to say ‘This impression, as alw. tympanum, whether reson double membrane that can be st question of the writing machine which is to upse' the entire space of the proper body in the un! machines, henc The question of the machine is asked one more time, between the pi and the pyramid, in the margins (of the Hi machines be only a human and the the fauna eraldomain’ every vel tur into a And when from spo- ken language— which is sutfic enigmatic itself, since external fashion or not, that thought takes on one is an enigma of the second degree, seeing that the closer the corporal. struc~ (of which each | appearance‘Tympan measure, And, if the sung, Verletzung) always some dislocation wit Hegelian wound ‘appears sewn up agai without suture, to some unheard-of partition. ting press, then, there is not one tympan'® but several. Two frame ‘generally wood and to one another, are lodged, if one can put it thus, in one another. One tympan in the 1e of wood the other of iron, one large and tion of the margin. This apparatus the marble on which the inked fe crank rolls the carriage under the then, with the aid of the bar, lowered onto the ‘small tympan. The carriage is rolled. The tympan and the frisket are lifted ("‘Frisket. Printing term. The piece of the hand-operated press ‘that the to keep it on printer lowers onto the she the tympan and to prevent the margins and spaces from being soiled.” Littré), and the sheet is then printed on one of its sides. From a treatise on ty- pography: “The large tympan is a wood chassis with a piece of silk stretched over it; the points, the margin, and successively each of the sheets to be printed are placed on the tympan. The lever to ‘which the frisket is attached is made of iron. The enses Derrida ich). I have ing on firm ground, one finds oneself, in the grasp of the purely sonorous id- om, of that which could not be said by means of words. And ‘even more so when the source of the song, rather than being a human mouth (that is, an organ with which we we or less fa- is a mechan- ical device adding to what is already strange in musical speech the surprise of being reproduced; one is then face to possessed a phono- graph (. . .) not only. were there no pro- visions for usin Tympan with a sheet or parchment glued underneath, ‘more usually’ ‘which penetrate between the wood and the silk, at the bottom by a hook, and at the sides by clasps. The platen falls directly onto the small tympan when it is lowered by the bar. The sheets of cloth (satin, or merino if aless dry impres- sion is desired), the cardboard, and the carriage tenance, and must be renewed as soon as they have begun to deteriorate.” Will the multiplicity of these tympanums permit themselves to be analyzed? Will we be led back, at the exit of the labyrinths, toward some topos or ‘commonplace named tympanum? Itmay be about this multiplicity that philosophy being situated, inscribed, and included wit oubtless, ph suring and absolute will have asked, tympanum is natural or constructed, if ‘one does not always come back to the unity of a stretched, bordered, framed cloth that watches but it could only be used for the cylin ders of small oF me- dium format, not for the large ones, such fas those that could be heard on the other gramophone, which was fitted with bi- zarre accessories that tended to clutter up all the house, along wi vast series of * inders) that my fathe had recorded him- self, and the still vir- ‘gin wax rolls that had yet to be engraved, the medium format fon the junior appa- tained this result with, the aid of a‘Tympan sired. proportions by break or of body, re tration as well as the metaphysics of cas- lar underside, the dene- wusseauisms, in their very gation of modern and of a brick dish color, a dia phragm of the type ordinarily ‘unthought, the suppressed, the Fepressed of phi- losophty?In order no longer to be taken in, as one so ofterris today, by the confused equivalence of jon must, round box with a bottom made of a inscribed on these steps. thas already begun, and al of this refers, cites, eval which bore the 1y hard appendix that was supposed sion into an organ made by a hand that is blind for never having seen anything but the here-and- there of a tissue. wax ‘What is then woven does not play the game of sensitive brane—a diaphragm which, when taken apart, could fit in toto in the palm hand, did transform to make holes, to traverse, to work one-side-and- the-other of the warp. The canal of the ear, what is called the auditory meatus, no longer closes after being struck by'a simulated successi ary phrase, the echo and logical art sound that has not yet been received, already an effect of that which does not take place. “Hollow time, / a kind of exhausting void between the ' by the blades of cutting / wood, / nothingness waves the os tions com seemed to be marked. all over its surface a kind imbered time themselves a This already enervated repercussion, that has not yet sounded, th tween writing and speech, coup de ‘As soon as ing to replace it by some gl varying depth that the original ve May 1972 had dug Michel L (Paris: Gallimard), pp. 85Différance ie, 27 January 1968, published ‘Adress given before the Societé frangaise de o iy September 1968, and 2 frangaise de pi Tel Quel (Pars: Editions du Seu, 1968)interest that one takes scribed by the mute tion. One can always act now that today’s discourse for, this silent lapse in spelling, than a kind of On the other hand, I will have to be excu some of the texts I have ventured to publish. This is precisely like to attempt, to a certain extent, and even though in principle and in the is impossible, and impossible for essential reasons, to reassem in a sheaf the different directions in which I have been able ze whi would call provisionally the word or concept impose itself upon me in its neographism, two reasons. On the one hand, I will not be concerned, as I might have been, with describing a history and narrating its stages, text by text by context, «demonstrating the economy that each time imposed this graphic disorde Twill be concerned with the general sy economy. On the other hand, ly that the assemblage to be ‘of a weaving, an interlacing which permiDifférance in the system of phonetic writing, and within the language and grammar which is as Ditferance ‘opportunely conveys or reminds us that, contrary to a very widespread, were is no purely phonetic pi phonemes and lets them be heard remains in and of sense of the word. the mark of an inapparent relationship between two spectacles. from this point of srence marked in the and hearing perhaps fortuitously affiliated with the re, therefore, we must let outselves resists the oppositi founding oppositions of philosophy, between the sensible and the intelligible. The order which resists this opposition, and because an a) between two differences or two letters, a diffrance which belongs neither to the voice nor to writing in the usual sense, and which is located, as the | strange space that will keep us together here for an hour,Différance truth, in the truth of a present or the presence ie I (and 1 also cross out the “}<’) what makes never presented as such. It ot exposing of truth at a certain precise point, as something, as a mysterious being, in the ‘a hole with indeterminable borders (for example, appearing a disappearance. It would risk appearing: disappearing So much so tha the detours, lotions, and syntax in which to take recourse will resemble those of negative theology, acasionally even to fe point of being indstinguishable from negative theology. Already we ha had to delineate that différance & not, does not exis, ie nota present-being( inany form, and we will beled to delineate also everything ie, everthing and. consequen ‘erives om no category of being, whether present or absent. And aspects of diferance which are thereby deli in the order of the most negative of nega Concerned with disengaging a superestenta seendent truth present old of writing can gover theologically the iy of the field, Adventurous because t is not a simple strategy the sense that strategy orients tactics according to , @ mastery and ultimate reappropriat the field. Finally, a strategy without finality, what might be and integra inverse, empirical iscourse. The concept of play keeps itself beyond this opposition, an- rnouncing, on the eve of philosophy and beyond it, the unity of chance and necessity in calculations without end. ‘Also, by decision and as a rule of the game, if you will, turning these prop- ositions back on themselves, we will be introduced to the thought of differance by the theme of strategy or the strategem. By means of this so wish to undedine that the efficac .ed must, one day be supers ave governed. Whereby, once again, it is not theologi would say, first off, that diférance, which is nor a concept 1k, if not to master— is maintained in a certain necessary relationship ts of mastery—what is most irreducible about our “era. that we can allegedly know who ts of an “era” might be, 2 Even though differance sr a word nor a concept, let us nevertheless tempt a simple and approximate semantic analysis that suage, and to a language that passes as less philosophical, nical than the other. For the distribution of meaning in 7Ditfeance and equally effects this suspe tffect. And we will se, later, how this temporization is also temporalization and. of time, the “or inscende! that can be written witha final fs or final ds, as you will, whether its a quest of dissimilar otherness or of allergic and polemical othemess, an interval, a distance, spacing, must be produced between the elements other, and be pro- duced with a certain perseverence in repetition. © Now the word différence (with an ¢) can never refer either to differer as tem ion or to difrends as polemos.” Thus the word differance (with an a) is to is loss of meaning, for diférance can refer simul- ‘configuration of its meanings. It is immediatel sent to the economy of wn any other word, the a immediately thereby bringing us close to the produced an effect constituted th an e).” In a conceptuality adhering, irene (in French ‘what would be its Ditférance would be said to designs the process of scission andi ngs or differences. But itive denotes as simpl imply mean the fact of moving, of movi {s resonance the act of resonating. We must con: of our language the endit in our language ‘being moved, in the usage ween the active and the be designated differance is thing like the middle voice, saying an operation that is not an that cannot be conceived either as passion or as the aDitferance sign, to oppose to them an “originary’” diférance, therefore would have two consequences. 11, One could no longer include difforance in always has meant the representation of a prese in.a system (thoug! {72 And thereb) concept of the sign, which ‘general as presence or abse! see can no longer be conceived wit dogger says in Being and Tinie ak rizon of the-question of Being, ectly oF incorrect the thinker wi to another. “Arbitrary and diffe ve characteristics.” “image,” the “psychical imprint” ical—phenomenon. We do not have to go into systematic play of differences. Such a pl jut rather the possibilty of conce 1 conceptual process and system in general. For the same reason, differance, which is not a concept, simply a word, that is, what is generally represented as the calm, self-referential unity of concept and phonic material. Later we will look into the y ‘word in general ‘The difference of which Saussure speaks is itself, therefore, neither a concept nor a worel among others. The same can be said, a fortiori, of. are thereby led to explicate the relation of one to the other. Ina language, in the system of language, there are only differences. Therefore 4 taxonomical operation can undertake the systematic, statistical, and classifi catory inventory of a language. But, on the one hand, these differences play: in language, in speech too, and in the exchange between language and speech. (On the other hand, these differences are themselves effects. They have not fallen from the sky fully formed, and are no more inscribed in a topos n are prescribed in the gray matter of the brain. If the word and of itself convey the motif of a final repression of difference, one could say that only differences can be “historical” from the outset and in each of their aspects What is written as duces”—by means of these effects of difference. This does not then, will be the ing movement that “pro- /—these differences, ce that producesDiffécance If such a presence were impl classical fashion, we then would have which very quickly inguage can be e order for speech to be i tnd history remain in complicity ith sh ime too far today-—toward the theory of the representation Fruhich we appear to be enclosed—and [utilize such concept only for their strategic convenience and in order to undertake tion at the currently most decisive point. In any event, fh we appear to be engaged, that here, diférance is no more static than histor against a structural all, not to ead what here is have not the least pertinence and uncomfortal Now if we consider the chain in wh of nonsynonymous substitu Ditférance Let us go on. It is because of diférance that the movement of signification sment appearing on thereby keeping. po this text Koyré gives long cital and proposes their translation. On two occ:Ditterance > by virtue of this, is abs ‘would be extended in mined moment, a dive would be related absolutely different from the simple And Koyré mi Beziehung. One might sa another text of Hege'’s in which one te Beziehung (This relationship is [the] present as a Another note of Koyré's: “The term different here is taken in an active ‘ginary” difference, but also the temporizing detour of defe thus written, although maintaining relations of profound af- lian discourse (such as it must be read), is also, up to a certain tunable to break with that discourse (which has no kind of meaning or can operate a kind of infinitesimal and radical displacement of If we answered these questions before examining them as questions, before turning them back on themselves, and before suspecting their very form, in- ‘cluding what seems most natural and necessary about them, we would ii mediately fll back into what we have just disengaged ourselves from. In effect, IN, Alexandre Koy inte Werke (Leipeig: Différance to be mastered and governed on the basis of the point of a present being, which itself could be some thing, a form, a state, ‘a power in the world to which all kinds of names might be given, a what, or a ‘And in this last case, notably, one would, in particular, remind us? Tha not a function of the speaking subject.” This implies that the subject identity with itself, or eventu its self-consciousness) is inscribed in language, is a “function” of language, becomes a speaking subject only by making its speech conform—even in so-called “crea ‘ransgression”—to the system of the rules of language as a system of differences, or at very least by he general law of, diférance, or by adhering to the principle of saage minus speech.” “Langu itcan produce al pothesis, we maintain that the opposition of speech to language is) absolutely rigorous, then différance would be not only the play of differences «within language but also the relation of speech to language, the detour through ‘which I must pass in order to speak, the silent promise I must make; and this is equally valid for semiology in general, governing all the relations of usage to schemata, of message to code, ete. (Elsewhere I have attempted to suggest that this differance in language, and in the relation of speech and language, forbids ‘of speech and language that Saussure, at anot 18 archi-writing without a present the regular erasure of the archi-, and the trans- ter executing. critical Jabor on everything within semiology, including the central concept of the sign, tions incompatible with the motif ofdifférance. But can one not conceive of a presence, an before speech or signs, a presence t itive consciousness? ‘a question therefore supposes th. excluding any trace and any difér very form of meanir to thought only as self-presence, as the in presence. And what holds for consciousness holds here e existence in general. ust as the category of the subject cannot thought without the reference to presence as hupoke: ‘s0 the subject as consciousness has never manifested i-presence. The privilege granted to consciousness therefore lege granted to the present; and even if one describes the ‘temporality of consciousness, and at the depth at which Husserl does so, one grants and of incessantly reassembling them. Tis privilege isthe ether of metaphysics, the element of our thought that is caught in the language of metaphysics, One can delimit such a closure today ® the value of presence that Heide ‘ontotheological determination of Being; and in thus s tence, by means of an interzogation whose status must be comp! ‘we are also examining the absolute privilege form or epoch of presence beside itself of consciousness—no k but as a “determination” and as an a system which is no longer that longer tolerates the opposition of ‘effect, or of indetermination and determination, expression ng sense speech, 3 to operate according to the lex ssche “the great principal act less lucidly deliberat ferance appears almost by name in their texts, and ‘everything is at stake. I cannot expand upon this he ues—for strategic rea- (ed and systematically calculated— f that whicl Before being so radically and purposely the gesture 0 0 made by Nietzsche and Freud, both sometimes in very similar fashion, put consciousnes: sgger, this gesture are linked to the symp- ‘an agency disguised in ssitaires de France,Ditferance diférance; or further, to the entire thematic of active interpretation, which t deciphering for the unveiling, of truth as the prese jing itself in its presence, etc. Figures without truth, or atleast a sy’ figures not dominated by the value of truth, which then becomes only an ineluded, inscribed, circumscribed function. france is the name we might the “active,” moving discord of different forces, and of differences of t Nietzsche sets up against the ‘entire system of metaphysical grammar, wherever this system governs culture, at this diaphoristics, which, as an energetics or itself to putting into question the primacy of presence as consciousness is also the major motif of Freucl's tho other diaphoristics, which in its entirety is both a theory of the figure (or of the trace) and an energetics. The putting into question of the authority of consciousness The two apparent theory: to differ as to defer as detour, relay, reserve 1, The concepts of trace (Spu breaching, from the Project ‘The origin of memory, and of the psyche in general, can be described only by taking into account the ifférance are tied together in Freudian separation, diastem, spacing: and ous traces and in the pro- preted as moments of ing to a schema that never Ditferance that the difference een the pleasure principle and the reality principle is the pleasure principle replaced by the veaty principe. This ler principle doesnot abandon the tion of ultimately obtaining pleasure, but carries into effect the postponement of satisfaction, ber of possibilities of gaining satisfaction and # pleasure as a step on the long indirect road (Au) Here we are touching upon the point of greatest obscuri of differance, on precisely that which divides its very concep! strange cleavage, We must not hasten to decide. How are we to neously, on the one hand, differance as the economic of the same, always aims at coming back to the pleasure’ or the presence t have been deferred by (conscious oF unconscious) calewlation, and, on tl Nand, dféance asthe relation to an imposs ‘wise. Or perhaps simp! consumption of writ 2. I. The Standard Lion ofthe Complete Paco ‘980 ‘cited as SI ¥ 10. aesends out delegates, the | For the economic character o in presence can always that we a provisionally and calculated delays the pe ver of proxies might omewhere, and | perception. Contrary #0 the metaphysical i this sense, contrary the metaphysical investments that jing” than itis any other ing, is no more a thing than it is a virtual or masked consciousness. This: iden. Rather, diférance maintains radical alterity as concerns every possible mode of presence is marked by the rmisconstrue, and which exceeds tion of the economic movement of différance, we must conceive of a aces (there are no ““consc language of presence and absence, the metaphysical discourse of phenom- nology, is inadequate. (Although the phenomenologist is not the only one to, speak this language.) The structure of delay (Nactrig temporalization (temporization) a present as an originary and uncea back i, gathered in on i ‘openings. The alt horizons of modified—past or future—presents, but has never been present, and which né never be a pr concept of trace past of what has been think the trace—and therefore, ‘tiférance—on the basis of the present, or of the presence of the present. ‘A past that has never been present: this formula is the one that Emmanuel Levinas uses, although certainly in a nonpsychoanalytic way, to qualify the trace and enigma of absolute alterity: the Other." Within thest and from this, point of view at least, the thought of diférance implies the entire critique of classical ontology undertaken by Levinas. And the concept of the trace, like that traces and the metaphysical name of the unc: process of presentation by means in person. In this context, and beneath this guise, know, a hidden, virtual, or potential self-presence metaphysics implies a restricted, "speculativ ilsophical econo f which there is nothing than meaning--to 8 "genera ‘meaning rom which there cn be peti, Concept the Auf, Ai {fouble meaning of conservation and lifted up to a higher ing from which the Aufl fect of difrance ‘no words with double, the translation of a wor to say the ontology of beings and beings that diférance everywhere Unless the difference between Being and Firs see “ViolenceDitférance unique, principal, or transcendet ‘Towhere exercises any authority nced by any capital only is there no kingdom of diféan | \every kingdom. Which makes it obviously threatening and by everything within us that desires a kingdom, the past or future presence of a kingdom, And itis always in the name of a kingdom that one may reproach diferance with wishing t0 reign, believing that one sees it aggrandize itself with vventable meditation? a, There is no simple Ina certain aspect of ‘ean never be presei appear and manif which profoundly links fundany fering and deferring, the trace is never iscourse, and especi attempts to whi the present ‘What is the present? What logy. And especialy throw text prompts us to examine the essence of the present ts presence? much des Ana (The Anaximander Fragment’). In this text Heidegger recalls that the forget ting of Being forgets the difference between Being and beings: ”. . . to be the Being of beings is the matter of Being (die Sache des Seins). The gramma of this enigmatic, ambiguous genitive indicates a genesis (Gen f what is present from presencing (des Anweseni essence (Wesen) of this emergence remains concealed (verbo form of epochality mn between presencing and wh: “Being has never had remains unthought. From early on it seems as though presencing and what is present were each something for itself. Presencing itself unnoticeably becomes something present . . . The essence of presencing (Das Wesen des. the distinction between presencing and the play of the trace. The play Pr 8 ig Boned EBC bt ide ply teanspotts ten. The oblivion of Being is oblivion of the why the Her the one in difference wi y 1 diapherein as ontological difference. task, and any er as the epochality nor as ontological passage through the truth of Being, or to ” ary, we must stay within ference, is not in any way to dispense with the oF misconstrueDitferance then when itis a matter of the forgetting of the to speak of a disapps lowing passage from ference (between Being and ance of the trace of the trace. It belongs so essent rises as the unveiling of what is present in its presencing, This means that the history of Being begins with the oblivion of Being, its essence, its distinction from beings—keeps It remains forgotten. Although the twa parties 10 land presencing (das Amwwesende und das Artwese do so.as distinguished. Rather, even the early-trace-(die tinction is obliterated when presencing appears as somet becomes a function trace of the erasure -by the text of metaphysics is co is not surrounded but rather travers legible; and to be read. marked in its interior by the monument and the mneously traced and erased, simultaneously ife's preserved rhe “early trace” of difference is lost in an invisi very loss is sheltered, retained, seen, delayed. In a text. In presence. In the form of the proper. Which carly trace, Heidegger can Ditferance trace. A bit further on: “However, the distinction between Being and beings, as) something forgotten, can invade our experience meditating on Anaximander’ Heidegger writes this: ig order and reck uusage delivers to each present being ‘metaphysics? It is ce ing (and) which unfoldsDifférance sence” of diférance at this ruth of the play of writing such re is not is neither a Being ve case when these names state the determi tween presence and the present already the case when they state the determination ‘our language has not to seek it in another language, ou! system of our own. Itis rather | nat even the name of essence or of Being, ‘and unceasingly dislocates itself in a chain of differing and deferring tions. “There is no name for nameable is not an ineffable example, This unnameable is the play whi the relatively unitary and atomic structures proposition to be read in its platitule. This un- 1g which no name could approach: God, for ‘makes possible nominal effects, are called names, the chains of Ditterance the game, a function of the system. ye would know part o Simander Fragment’: the quest for the proper word and unique name” Speaking ofthe first word of Being (das fue Wort des 5 Wireon), Hieidegger writes: “The relation to what i present that rules in essence of presencing it ). Therefore, in order to name the essential nature of Being (las wesende language would have to find a single word, the unique word (cin einziges, das einzige Wort). From this we can gather how daring every thoughtful word (denkende Wor ugesproclen wird). Nevertheless such daring is not impossible, since Being speaks always and everywhere throughout language” (p. 52). Such is the question: the alliance of speech and Being in the unique word, in [> finally proper name. And such is t ‘bed in the simulated. ation of differance. It bears (on) each member sentence: “Being, speaks / always and everywhere / throughout / language.”ind Grammeé: Note ona Note from Beir nd Timeusa and Grammé 1e present (Gegemioart) already marked the Poem of Par under the heading of that w! ble, exposed to vision or given by hand, wresence-atchand). This presence is pre- nocin, by means of a process whose “Those beings which show thi ‘hich ate understood as beings in the most authentic thus get interpreted with regard to the Present in of interdependent concepts (ous, parousia, Anweseneit, Gegentart, gegen is deposited at the entry to Being and Time: both posited and provisionally abandoned. And even if the category of Vorhandeneit, ‘of beings in the form of substantial and available objects, in effect never ceases to be at work and to have the value of a theme, the other concepts remain the final pages of Being ard Time (of ancient metaphysis determines theo bein jously un a being aware of| consequently from the character of time which Ousia and Gramme the pertinent traits thal \is concept. Th Rather, we are simply und opening the texts that Hi in commenting on this note is to attempt to extend it a bit, and ‘only ambit to do so according to two motifs. 1. To read in it, such as it is announced in highly determined form,* the Heideggerian question about presence as the ontotheological determination of egemdrtigen) ige)-which we represent as somethin ng ‘employ ‘present (das then we must understandsia and Gramme the meaning of Being. Is not to transgress metaphysics, in the sense understood to unfold a question which turns back on thi jon of presence. The past and the future 1ed as past presents or as future presents. 2. To indicate, from afar and in a still quite undecided way, a direction not ‘opened by Heidegger's meditation: the hidden passageway that makes the prob- lem of presence communicate with the problem of the writt By means simultaneously concealed and necessary passageway, ‘ive onto, open onto each other. This is what appears, and yet is elided, texts of Aristotle and of Hegel. Although he urges us to reread these texts, Heidegger detaches from his thematic certain concepts which seem to require sgreater emphasis that they have been given thus far. The reference (grammé) leads us back both to a center and a margin of Aristotle's (Physics IV). A strange reference and a strange situation. Are they slready roughly "prese he Closure The Note included, 1, dominated by the concepts in Aristotle's text? We are not cer Heidegger has fixed and our reading will The Note Itis only a footnote, but itis by far the longest in Being and Time, pregnant with jevelopments th inced and held back, necessary will see that it already promises the second volume of Be de Entvicklung the vulgar concept of(Ousia and Grammé sertion—according to which time isthe exist spirit in its automanifestation, in its absolute disquictude negation—depends upon a vulgar determinat ime, and therefore upon 4 determination of Dasen itself conceived on the basis of the now that is, Dasein in the form of Vorh The Note cuts this sequence in two. devoted to the Hegelian exposition of the concept of time in the philosophy of nature and before the subsection of "He The Note Nature (p. 1 195). Hegel di the concepts of aether and mot have as yet the rigid schematic form which it will have afterward, but still makes it possible to understand the phenomena in a fairly relaxed manner. On the way from Kant to Hegel's developed system, the impact of the Aristotelian ontology and logic has again been decisive. The Fact of impact has long been the path it has taken, even 's Jena Logic with the ‘physics! and ‘metaphysics’ of Aris- ing new light. For the above considerations, some rough sug- in connecting kironas with sphaira; Hegel stresses the i) of time. To be sure, Hegel escapes the central tendency of the in analysis—the tendency to expose a foundational connection the tade ti. Hegel's thesis that space fent reasons they have given. Bergson ly says the reverse: that time (temps fin French in the text in order to ‘oppose temps, time, to durée, is space. Bergson’s view of time too has obviously arisen from an Interpretation of the Aristotelian essay con time. That a treatise of Bergson with the ti senserit should have appeared at the same time as his Essai iiates de la conscience, where the problem. pounded, is not just @ superficial literary connection. Having regard to Aristotle's defi f time as the arithmos kineseds, Bergson prefaces his, th an analysis of number Succession. By a count and third divisions of Part Two. [ 37 \e preceding,usia and Grammé sentence has been deleted in the later editions of Being and Time, giving, ‘which joins ordinary discourse to spec- ive discourse, Hegel’ in particular? How could one otherwise than on the basis of the prese certain now in general fom which no The experience of thought and the thought of experience anything but presence. Thus, for Heidegger itis not a qu thinking that which could ro have been ror thought-fend dluced inthe thought ofthe impossibility of the otherwise, a certain difference, a certaif rembling. a certair-decentering that Dosiiorrof an other center. An other center would be an other now; on the contrary, this displacement would not envisage an se thing, Therefore we must—and in saying this we are already in sight of our problem, already have some footing on it—think our relation to past of hs history of phceophy otherwise then tn the ‘2 way impossible for any intraphilosophical moment, espe and everything ‘ranted so many profound renewals to Hegelian sp ‘within the metaphysics of presence, i of time. It would Moreover, did Hegel ever wish to declare that he is rendering to dialectics the t though revealed, in Plato and in Kant? 38 ‘The Exoteric There is no chance that within the sphysics anything might have budged, as concerns the concept of Aristotle to Hegel. The founding concepts of substance and cause, along, ir entire system of connected concepts, suffice by themselves—whatever their differentiation and. their internal problematics—to ensure (us of ipted continuity—however highly differentiated —of physics, Physics, and Logic, passing through Ethics. If one does not acknowledge this powerful, systematic truth, one no longer knows what one is talking about in allegedly interrupting, transgressing, exceeding, etc., “metaphysics,” “phi- Josophy,” ete. And, without a rigorous critical and deconstructive acknowledg- ment of the system, the very necessary attention to mutations, leaps, restructurations, natic of is precisely the limit of such a tribunal—philosophy—that is in question here. ‘The Exoteric | which is most ur word “now” ‘ever depart, the form bbe given; and yet the nun, in a certain sense, is not. If the basis of the now, one must conclude that itis not. The {is no longer and as that which is not is. To men gar autou gegome kai it has been and is no longer, and in‘Ousia and Gramme verse hypothesis: the is defined according in determining it as a is sense is not in be, in passing over to no-thingness in the form of bei Even if itis envisaged as (past or future) nonbeing, the no the intemporal kerné cation, the inalterable nucleus, in affecting it with no-thing. But in order to be, be affected by time, it must not become (past or ture). To participate the presence Ousia therefore ihe third person present of the TE Benge, Ue prevent the now, subtance, essence, are he present participle. And it could be shown that the passage ena supposes the recourse to the third person. And later it will be likewise for the form of presence that consciousness indicative here yields all ‘The Paraphrase: Point, Line, Plane Atleast twice, Heidegger reminds us, Hegel paraphrased Physics IV by ana- lyzing time in a “philosophy of nature.” In effect, the first phase of the exoteric Although Aristot ind reference—on« phase of the e the absolute diately something other 0 which the present devel is the expression cyclopedia, doubtless for esse vothing is yet related ing question could be asked: how do space, how do nature, in their undifferentiated immediacy, receive difference, determination, quality? Differentiation, qualification ‘overtake pure space as the negati te of abstract indi is properly the is determined by negating property the Inder on of space is the ro1 qualitative difference. As such aOusia and Gramme negates and conserves. f space. As the first d retains itself by suppres , the frst Being-other that is the Being-spatial ofthe point “According to the same process, by Aufiebung and negation of negation, the truth ofthe line isthe rave: sThe truth of the ther-Beingis, however, negation of negation. The line consequently passes over into the plane; which, on the ‘one hand, isa determinateness opposed t line and point, and so surface, simply fs such, but, on the other hand, i the sublated negation of space ie afgetotene [egtion des Raunes). tis thus the restoration (Wiedrkestlion) of the spatial totality which now contains the negative moment within a. ‘Space, therefore, has become concrete in having retained the negative within space is circular and re- that the line is not composed le-themselves; and ss. Henceforth the th the surface ferently the founding principle and the end of the he discussion of Kantian concepts ina series of Remarks. We must come question of time, still to be asked? Is The Paraphrase , oF looking toward, time. Point and time are thought in th other, And the very concept of spec le only by means of this infinite correlation therefore is the concept which, in Hegel as 2), Therefore it is not surprising that relations between spirit and time, since nature is the Being-outsid and time the first relation of nature to itself, the first emergence spirit relating itself to itself only by negating it ling outside itself. Here the Aristotelian aporia is understood, thought, and assimilated ly suffices—and it is necessary—to take things in and from the other side in order to conclude that the Hegelian(Ousia and Gramme te consider the passoge from Aristotle already cited (26) alongwith this de ‘aufteberden Unters selves” (p. 3), ‘This definition has at least three direct consequences in Hegel's text considered, as.a paraphrase of Aristotle. notwithstanding, in placing Kant in the dir leads from Aristotle to Hegel? 2. According to an elaboration whi Problem of Metapiyscs (and consequently, his definition 2) “Time is the same principle as the | ~ 1 of pure selfconsciousness" (bid ‘We would have to relate—although we cannot do so here—the entire Remark peda, which demonstrates thi section 34 of Heidegger's Kant, particularly to the section on Affection and the Temporal Character of the Self.” Does not Heidegger repee the Hegelian gesture when he writes, 1 found in Kant and the egel concludes from The Paraphrase no longer opposed to one another as unlike and incompatible; they are the same. Thanks to the radicalism with which, in the laying of the foundation of meta- physics, Kant for the first time subjected time and the ‘T think’ each taken jo a transcendental interpretation, Re succeeded in bringing them their primordial sameness (urspriingicie Selbigheit)—without, to be at everything comes to be and passes this coming-to-be and passing away” (Ene., sec. 258, p. 35). Hegel takes multiple precautions of this type. By opposing ‘them to all the metaphorical formulations that state the moreover, are not to be denied all ertque of inratempora ). This critique not only would be anal- and Time, italso would have to accommodate thematic of the fall or of the decline, the len. We will come back to this concept that no precaution—and Hegel took fewer precautions than Heidegger—can lift from its ethicotheological orb. the term of the orb in question is itself redirected toward temporal. Presence is intempor the Probiem of Metaplysics,p. 197. Translation modifiedOusia and Grammé analogous, but not id ‘upon the difference between the finite and the infinite.” 1e one proposed by Heidegger, becau iavontie differ- idegger would say. And in effect this is where the entire question would have to reside. What the Question Evades the following: in overtur ye now is nota part of time, does Arist the hypothesis, in dem- le extract the problematic 22,-The dliference between the finite andthe infinite is proposed here asthe dlference betwzen the now (Jets) and 3 (Geyemust). Pure presence, infinite parousie, feidegger tells us leo s que ieween fete, Cape [Being and Time. The confirmation is evident. The chal inguished from 46 ‘Question Fvades ja” concepts of part and whole, fom the predetermination ‘even as sti Let us recall Aristotle's two questions. 1. Is or is not time a part of onta? 2. After the aporias relative tothe properties which amount is asked what time is, and what its phys ted indeed shows that the Being, of the now, and of the now 5 not belonging to beings, fr to beingness (ousia) in any pure and simple fashion. These initial exoteric hypotheses never will be put into question at another level, a nonexoteric level.” Having recalled why it may be thought that time is not a being, Aristotle leaves the question in suspense. From here on the plysis of that whose belonging to still remains undecidable will be examined. As has been noted,* there is of Being.in the transcendental ‘omission which permitted all of metaphy is regard at least, constitu beyond or within metaphysics. The question was evaded because 1Cwas putin terms of belonging to being or to nonbeing, being already determined as b He by this gesture, Being and Time, ‘evaded in the question propagates its effects over the entire of the evasion, is recognizable not only Kant, metaphysics held time to be the nothingness or the accident° (usin and Grammé you will, paralyzed in the aporia be seen in Kant. Not only in Kant tus derigatious and to the concept ofa derived finitude above all in that which is most revolutionary and least metaphysical in his thought of time. This can be attributed, as you will, to the passive in Kant or ‘will have as little meaning in both cases. it is because time does not belong to beings, is no ‘more a part of them than yem, and because of (phenomenal or noumenal) being in general, that it must be made into a pure (the nonsensuous sensuous). This profound metaphy mn from which Kant profits, but which is the period of Being and Time. Ata certain ‘of metaphysics remains within metaphysics, only . of the Kantian gesture in Bei 4 Metres Transcendental Exposition of the Concept of his decisive common characteristic: ‘or which inheres in things as an Examining the piysis is neither change nor movement sis precisely how the “Tran- time in perceiving movement,” but hama gar kineseds eof Pure Reason, trans, No ‘What the Question Evades ygether that we have the sensation of movement and time.” When we are e dark, and are not affected by any body (m ifa movement is produced in the soul (en t psu time has passed, and, by the same token, together (hi seems to have occurred. Aristotle unites time and movement in wisthésis. And does so such that no sensory exterior content, or obj essary, Time is the form of that which can occur only e? of inner sense is also the form of all phenomena in general. The transcendental ‘exposition of time places this concept in an essential relation with movement its inaugural ambiguity, the critique of the nonsensous sensuous, Aristotle furnishes the premises of a ime no longer dominated simply by the present (of beings given in {seem to escape the domination ofthe present given in the form keit doubtless have been foreshadowed in Physics iRatance te being andthe noe same place. Only in time can two) Same object, namely, ome o ofthat body of a prinf sia and Gramme breakthrough, stch as it is repeated in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics,” Jing explicit something hinted picks up Zeno's argument. Whi nothing (218a), Aristotle repeats its aporia wi (among beings) Here, the that is supposes no-thing as time, as nonpresent under the heading. ‘already no longer.” Therefore, in order to state the n ‘appeal to time, to a precomprehension of time, 28. for example, in section 32 ("The Trans ‘Time’ whue shows how the pate intition Sich atin described in the "Trane Tetadatt Ete’ is fred rom the privilege of the present and the noe We must te Sonn posse fom section 32 that clarifies al the concepts of Sein und Ze, a pasage tha rest uo te Hest dag th conte fave down aw th tan Rehdohia imagination isthe ongh of pure sensible intuiton. Thus, we have prove nea pureiniuton afc rom the ranscenden tion However, Imagination and Its Relation to ‘which is capable of being received. ‘usually understood as the act of rec handenen) oF preset conception inspired Slightly modi), ‘What the Question Evades time in order to think nonbeing as nonpresent, and being as present. Being has been determined temporally as being:present in order to determine time as rnonpresent and nonbeing. In effect, what is said dia t0n exoterikon logdn? That 1] either does not .e components of time—of infinit incessant return (aei lambanomencs) 's nor-beings in its composition rems impossible tes in beingness The mé on, the no-thingness of time, therefore, is accessible only on the basis of the Being of time. Time as nothing can be thought only according to the modes of time, the past and the future. Being is nontime, time js nonbeing insofar as being already, secretly has been determined as present, and beingness (ousia) as presence. As soon as being and present are synonymous, to say no- thingness and to say time are the same thing. Time is indeed the discursive ‘manifestation of negativity, and Hegel, mutatis mistandis, will only make explicit what is saichof ousit'as presence. —Even before it is linked to the difficult analyses of the number—numbering is why itis not ousia (subsisting or substant jon of beingness (ousia) as energeiaorentelekiea, ‘The meaning of time is thought on the basis of the ime. And this {as the meaning of discourse, asthe orientation of the movement between arch and feos) has never been conceivable, within 4 metaphysics, oth- erwise than on the Basis of presence and as presence. The concept of sense, of ‘meaning, is governed by the entire system of determinations that we are pointing ‘ut here, and every time that a question-of meaning is posed, it must be posed(Ousia and Grammé Being determined, as its at nods noeses, the thought of thought, the pure act, the prime mover, the the meuning of Being, whatever ‘subjugated to no objectivity, no exteriority, well as fundamental) of such a movement ofthe citcle and of the return to ledge that asa question of mean- is point of departure, to the whose destruction it has ‘the question of meaning, rulgar” This is his word too. Proceeding to the question of the physis of time, Ar meaning of time, therefore, is determination according to presence tradition has never answered such a question (a gest is as determining as it is determined: it tells us what indefatigably repeated, even by Hegel and Heidegger). But afterward Aristot longer” or as “not yet”), but can do so only in order to let only develops the aporia in its own terms, that is, in the concepts whose con- ‘of a concept implicit in the relation between time and Being: that time could be hat is, following this present participle, only a present. Con- sequently, time could be a (in) being only in not being what it is, that is, in being: present. Thus, because time, in its Being is thought on the basis of the present, itis also strangely thought as nonbeing being), In believing one knows what time is, in its pn be asked only later has implicitly ben answered and this permits the conclusion, in the exoteric aporia, of time's bare existence, that is, we, One already knows, even if only in the naive practice of discourse be, what past (gegone) or future (melle) mean, in order to reach the conclusion identity of the now are problematical. “If in fact the now is always of time's bare existence or nonexistence. And past and future are thou and if none of the parts in time which are other are simultaneous (hama) ‘The Pivot of Essence first remarks that ha : its meaning. Time already ha Hgel. The prime mot ‘ relates eto 27 inimates all movement by means of the desire moment is that lintion. Perhaps good, and the supremely desir ‘why there is no other possible Wn of the meaning or Being of time thought on the basis of presence. Like : fon, and that orients becom! he transformation of paro supreme being into a subje precision in Pysies V: by this(usia and Gramme ‘ot, but formerly was, must have ceased to be or been destroyed at a certain moment, the ‘nows’ too cannot be simultaneous (Hama) 1g ‘now’ must always have been destroyed” (2160). How do the concepts of number (as the numbered or the numbering) and of gramme intervene in order to refurbish the same conceptuality in the same syS- tem? Tin a rigorously dialectical fashion: not in the st already in the Hegelian sense, Aristotle affirms op} ‘as a dialectic of opposites, and as the solution s of space. As in the Encyclopedia ition of the point (nonspatial sp The contradictory terms posted in the apor together in order to define the plysis of time. In a certain way, one might say that dialectics only always repeats the exoteric aporia by firming it, by making of time the affirmation of the aporetc. ‘Thus Aristotle affirms that the now, in a certain sense, is the same, and in another sense, is the nonsame (lode num 219b); that time is continuous according to ‘the now (kn stnebes te dé ho Khronos ti num, kal all these contradictory of the concept of gramme. always—governed contradictions resolving themselves as soon as 01 lationship under whose rubric they are considered: potent «ction between the potentiality and the act evidently isnot symmetrical, overned by a teleology of presence, by the act (eergeia) as presence that Aristotle rejects the representation of time by the gramme, here, by a linear inscription in space, just as he rejects the identification of the now with the His argumentation even then wa: |, and. it remained so. the noncoexis distinguished if the present now were: which is impossible. Even if it were annulled only by a now very distant from it, it would have to coexist with all the intermediate nows, which are infinite (indeterminate: apeiros) in number; (00 is impossible (218a). A now cannot coexist, asa current and present ‘now, with another now as such. Coexistence has meaning only in the unity of 33. See also 2228, The Pivot of Essence a single, same now. This is meaning, sei presence, One cannot even say that the coexistence ‘what unites meaning to vo different and eq (he same as presence. The now, presence This impossibility impl now, with which a now cannot coexist, is also in a certat ‘a now as such, and that it coexists with that which cannot coexist wit basis of, which th ‘and vice versa. The a synthesis—taking this word neut implying no position, no activity, no agent—let us say in a certain complicity implication maintaining together several current nows {muintenants] which id to be the one past and the other future. The impossible comaintenance is possible as the maintenance of several possibility, without a temporal gether two different nows. ‘of spatial coexistence arises only out jon. As Hegel shows. There is a with of time that makes possible the with of space, but which could not be produced a thout the possibility of space. (In pure Aussersisein there is no more determined space ed time.) these propositions in this way is to remain naive. We are ference between space and time were given as an obvious and 55Ousia and Gramme all, only of the com-pa 1e difference between time and space (for che distinction between mun and s a constituted difference, Being, mes down upon # word so small as to be hardly Visible, and hardly visible because it appears self-evident, as discreet as that self effacing, operating all the more “That which goes without saying, ela hat which henceforth will constitute the pivot [che 4 imetaphysics, the small key that both pens and closes the history of metaphysics in terms of what it puts at stake, the davile on which the conceptual decision of Aristotle bears down and is ticulated, is the small word ham. It appears five times in 218. In Greek ama means “together, once” Both together i is first neither 5 does not yet reassemble, with Iteays the complicity, the common origin of time and space, appearing together {com paratte} a the condition forall appearing of Being. Ina certain way it says the dyad as the minimum. But Aristotle does not sayit. He develops his dem location hnna says. He to take part in pure that several nows canno! cone another, for in this case there woul destroying each other in a not intervallic nows would be simi ‘or remain (in) the same no thousand years would be t0g¢ fable. However, the temporal Gramme and Number intemporal adverb hama, Let us consider the sequence of nows. The preceding now, its sai, must be destroyed by the followin Aristotle then points out, i cannot be destroyed" .h at the moment s (now, in act). No more can ithe destroyed in an other now (en al) rl a a now which has been, ing now. “One now cannot in another, if would exist at the same time (ama) as the innumerable nows between the two—which is impossible. But neither is for the now to remain (diamenein) always the same. No determinate divi Jing has a unique yntinuously extended in one or in more than one dimension; and it is possible to separate off a determinate time. Further, if being at the same time (to fama einai)—i.e. being neither anterior nor pposterior—means to be in one and the same now, then, if both what is before ‘and what is after are this same now, things which happened thousands of years ago would be simultaneous (I would be before or after anyt Gramme and Number Such, then, is the aporia. Despite its cinematic ‘meticism, And conversely, it appears that Bergson, in a sense perhaps di Jian than he himself be- an the one indicated by Heidegger, is more As(Ousia and Gramme 1. Time is neither movement (kinésis) nor change (metabole). These exist in Being-moved or in changing-Being, and are more oF less slow or cannot be the case with time. On the contrary, time makes possible mover change, their measurement, and differences of speed. Here time is what defines, termining 2 change between movement and change 218b,) “Therefore it is clear that (219a). What is it then that relates time to what in movement determines time? One must seek in time t {s, in sum, what relates time to space, and to changes of place. And one must find the concepts for this relationship. Discreet, advanced without insistence, as if they went without saying, the fundamental categories, here, are those of analogy and correspondence, They lead back, by other names, and barely di to the enigma of the time,” which both names and evad 1d obscures, the problem. Magnitude is continuous. This is ic here. Now, movement order of magnitude, corresponds to this order (akolowthei toi megethei he ‘Therefore it is continuous. Further, anterior and posterior are local (er topdi). As such, they are within magnitude, and therefore, according to the correspondence of the analogy of magnitude and movement within movement. And 4h other” (dia to akolo t pertinent and should not detain him— .e neither & movement nor exists without it” n of time as t e numbered number and ikhds): numbering number and numbered number rithmowmen all’ ho arithmoumens). change one wor ra Besses Univers Gramme and Number ‘This means, paradoxic matics or arithmeti e comes under the rubric of mathe- , in its nature, a mathematical being. It is a foreign to number the numbering number, as horses and men are different from the numbers that count them, and different from each other. And diferent from each other, which leaves us free to think that time is not a being, among others, among men and horses. “The number of one hundred horses and one hundred men is one and the same number, but the things—the horses and men—for which there is a number are other” (220b). ‘There is time only in the extent to which movement has number, but time, in the rigorous sense, is neither movement nor number ‘only insofar as it has a relation to movement accor ‘The unity of the measure of time numbered in this way is the now, which permits the distinction between before and after. And it is because movement is determined according to the before and the after that the graphic linear rep- resentation of time is simultaneously required and excluded by Aristoth tion according to the anterior an a certain manner to the point” (ako the continuous, extended unfolding of punc- tuality, Aristotle firmly indicates that this is not so. The spatial and linear represen- tation, atleast in this form, is relationship of time to movers adequate. What is criticized, thereby, is not the , nor the numbered or numerable Being of icture of the gramme represent mov the beginning of one and the end of another. But if as two, an arrest or pause is necessary, if the same to time. The importance specific, and will do so unces What is rejected, then, is as a composition iy. the gramme as such, (present), exists only potentially and by accident, takes its existence only from 59Ousia and Grammé sossible to preserve the analogy of the gramme: but as and not is permits us to distinguish between, on the one on the other, the gramme as a homogeneous ts unfolded in space; but, by the same token, this amounts ‘and movement on the basis of the felos of a gramme that is close to itself, that i, erases act, its tracing to be both beginning and end, only if the extrem’ movement of the circle regenerates itself indefinitely, the end inde in beginning, and the beginning in the end, In this sense the cit it y. The gramme is comprehended by metaphysics between the poi ity and the act (presence), ete.; and all the of time, from Aristotle to Bergson, remain within sion. Time, then, would be but the name of the lim {s thus comprehended, and, along with the gramme, the pos {in general. Nothing other has ever been thought by the name which is thought on the basis of Being as present if something—w! bears a relation to time, but is mot time—is to ration of Being as presence, it eannot be a ay expect a prior denunciatory dk at any given ly: every text of metaphysics carries wit of time and the resources that ym the system of metaphysics in order to criticize that con- ‘are mandatory from the moment when the sign the signifier and signified Gramme and Number general, whether or ni ited by metaphysical "vul function in a discourse. It is on the basis of this formal necessit discours supposing that such a discourse is possible, or that filigree of some margin. sketch such a demonstration. the itinerary that we have (220a). The now (Gegenwart), the pr S, which the limits are always made perfectly mathematical, , as concerns its essence, accidental. A rigorously Hegelian proposition: let us recall the difference between the present and the now. foreignness, which is comprehended points of view one might have about the now, the entire system of 6Ousia and Gramme 9b, 27-29) significations is organized by the nition of movement as the “entelechy oft ss such, such as this definition is produced in be in time, something must have begun to be and to tend, like every potentiality, toward act and form.” “Thus it is evident that non-Being will not always be in time . . “” (221b). ‘Although understood on the basis of Being as presence in act, movement and time are neither (present) beings nor (absent) nonbeings. The categories of desire therefore are already longing as much to the the present, as to the simple fr yet again submitted and subtracted in Aristotle’ tion of metaphysics as the thought overturning of metaphysics. “This play of submission and subtraction must be thought as a formal rule for anyone wishing to read the texts of the history of metaphysics, To read them, in the opening of the Heideggerian breakthrough, which is the (cess of metaphysics as such, but also to read them, occasior ‘beyond certain propositions or conclusions within which the Heideggerian breakthrough has had to constrain itself, propositions or sions which it has had to call upon or take its support from. For example, the reading of Aristotle and Hegel during the epoch of Being and Time. And this formal rule must be capable ing our reading” of fe Heideggerian In particular, it must permit us to pose the question of the inscription of the epoch of Sein und Zeit. 436, Even though Bergson citicizes the concept of the possible as possible, even though ther of dation nor even of toudency a movement ‘even § profound compli: inthe same denegation of the resistance, for exam ere although more distant, are no Iess oe The Closure of the Gramme and the Trace of Difference in order to suggest: chaps there is no “‘vulgar concept of time.” The concept of time, in to metaphysics, and it names the domination of presence, Therefore we can only conclude that the entire system of metaphysical concepts, throughout the concept of time (which Heidegger, doubtless, would not contest), but also that an other concept of time cannot be opposed to it, since time in general belongs to metaphysical conceptuality. In attempting to produce this ather concept, one ‘come to see that it is constructed out of other metaphysical or ontotheological predicates. Was this not Heidegger's experience in Being and Time? The extraordinary it still remains ceptual pairs That pet ‘of opposites which serve the destruction of ontology are ond fundamental axis: that which separates the authentic from the inauthentic and, in the very last analysis, primordial from fallen temporality. Now, as we have attempted fo show, not only simply to alfibut sition of a “fall of spirit into time,” but in the extent to which itis possible, the It, perhaps, has to be displaced. The metaphysical or ontotheo- btless consists less in thinking af which has no meaning for Heg mn has been suspended? One could multiply such ques 38. TN. Being an Time, p. 486, 63‘Ousia and Gramme tions around the concept of finitude, around the point of departure in the ied by the enigmatic proximity” to itself or joning (section to examine the opposition that structures the concept of temporal analytic leads back to it interrupting lity” leads to the meaning of Being, And thi is jestion and a suspension. The iple erasure of the theme of time and of every that Heidegger, point of departure e “destruction” operated by to goat it otherwise and, it may e themes that are depend ‘upon it (and, par excellence, those of Dasein, the transcendental horizon of the question of Being, but in I be reconstituted on the basis of the theme of the epochality of transition Being. ‘What about preser the movements of ‘The task here is immense and difficul In Being and Time and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysic tempted to say impossible—to distinguish rigorously be ‘wesenheit and presence nowness), The texts t temporal sense of rm, Metaphysics, ing as presence in both neously if Time, it seems more and more that Gegenettghit (Ihe Anaximander Fragmer presence (Prasenz) will connote, rather, another narrowing of Amwesen under the heading of subjectivity and representation. These linked determinations of pres- 1e meaning of Being by the Greeks, can § the texts of metaphy: determination of presence from a mot back from the present toward am (Armes ‘Along these lines, in sum, it would be a question of thinking a Wesen, or of making thought tremble by means ofa Wesen that would not yet even be Amwesen In the first case the displacements would remain within the metaphysics of presence in general; and the urgency or extent of the task explain why intrametaphysical displacements occupy al smselves as such, which indeed is rare enough. The o neously and separately. 3. The relationship between the two texts, between presence in general-(Ar- swesenhet) and that which exceeds it before or beyond Greece—such a relationship can never offer itself in order to be read in the form of presence, sup; anything ever can offer itself in order to-be vet ir such-a-form. And ye ‘which gives us to think beyond the closure cannot be simply abse either it would give us nothing, presence. Therefore the sign o concems all possible presence: fof beings in general, and yet, unthinkable by metaphysi ‘essary that trace. be. be absolutely excessive as ‘or disappearance ribed-within-the text of metaphysics,-e-trace-that continues to signal not in the direction of another presence, or another form of presence, but in the direction of an entirely other text. Such a trace carinot be thought more metapiysica. No philosopheme is prepared to master it ARE W(s) that which must elude mastery. Only presen: ifference between Being and beings, the very he determination of Being as presence, and of presence as pres ference is so buried that there is no longer any trace of it. The trace of(usia and Gramme trace that has disappeared in the forgetting of the difference between Being and beings. — Trihis not what “The Ananimander Fragment” seems to tll us tion collapses. tinction, what is present and presencing (das Ameserate und das An-toesen), reve themselves, they do not do so as distinguished. Rather, even the early tra smains forgotten. {rhe Spur of the i iterated when preseneing appears as som present (das Anwesen oie en Ancesendes ers the po: Of being the highest being present (in een (pp. 50-51 ‘But atthe same time, this erasure-of the trace must have been traced. in the metaphysical text. Presence, then, far from being, 2 is commonly thought, tit the sign signifies, what a trace refers to, presence, then, i te erasure ofthe trace. Such is, for us, the text of he language which we speak. Only on ‘And this is why its not contradictory to think fet ofthe trace. And also why there is no contradiction between the absolute erasure of the “early trace” of difference and that which maintains i as trace, sheltered find visible in presence. Thus Heidegger does not contradict himself when he sovtes further on-"However the distinction between Being and beings, as some- thing forgotten, can invade our experience only ir has-alrendy unvelTed itself with the presencing of what is present (wit dem \guage to which Being comes’ Henceforth it must be recognized that is no trace itself, no proper trace. rence could not appear as such. (Lichtung des is der Unterschied als der Unterschied ference above all could not appear or be named as sich is the a such which precisely, and as such, evades us forever, Thereby the “Teterminations whick-rame difference always come from the metaphysical or der. This holds not only for the deter ‘of difference as the 40, TN, "The Anaximander Fragment” in Early Greve an Erk Capuss ow Yorks Harper and Row, 1975) as the amorphous (to, arp morpa). A ace ‘Shieh fe neither sence nor presence, Ror, in whatever modality, secondary modality The and the Trace between presence and the present (Anesen! Ant a writing that absol ontology. A writing exceeding every! but also for the deter een Being and beings. If Being, would have been the very form ofits perhaps difference is, ‘more unthought than theThe Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel's SemiologyI, and more precisely (naher) language (Sprache here by medium? By semiologica um, whether it #8 a 41 Of sch or of anuage? Her, we ae it, em route, only a restriction of difference: the metaphysics could treat the sign taphysics is even indistinguishable from such a treatment ‘has such a treatment somehow overtaken the conceptif not permaner displaced or int spectacular these events might be fo unas legedly “original” characte and the Pyramid ly are no longer the ferences of these iogenous, ahisto 1k, not an origin, but see them from too close predicates which, even, permitting themselves to be ing events, however fascinating and .ccommodating glance? For as long as the great amplitude ofthis chain is not displayed, one can neither define rigorously the secondary mutations or order of trai the recourse to the same word in order to designate insformations, nor account for te a concept both transformed. and extirpated —within certain limits—from a previous terrain. (Unless one con- siders the order of language, words, and the signifier in general to be an ac- ‘cessory system, the contingent accident of a signified concept which might have n sdependent of the verbal Semiology and Psychology reappropriation, the coordination of the theory of the sign and th parousia, Which is also, as logic, a coordination with the invisible id Jogos which hears-itself-speak, a logos which is as close as possible the unity of concept and consciousness." It is the system of this coordination that we propose to analyze here. Its general character. They are exercised, in const tory of metaphysics, and in general over the entirety legedly has been dominated by the metaphysical concept of ‘would give to these constrain to their limits. nost systematic and powerful form, taken Semiology and Psychology ‘An initial index of all this is to be found in an architectonic reading. In effect, Hegel grants to semiology a very determined place in the system of science. In the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, the theory of the sign is to be found. in the “Philosophy of Spirit,” the third part of the work, which is preceded by the “Science of Logic” ("Lesser Logic”) and the “Philosophy of Natu ‘To what does this division correspond? Its meaning is assembled at the end of the Introduction (Section 18): “As the whole science, and only the whol imply in the abstract, but also i 10 as to gain a bei , Hegel specifies, we differences mu: 7The Pit and the Pyramid ‘The theory of the signs belongs phy of spirit. , most general determinat tion to itself in the element of spirit, a mode of the absolute's Let us narrow our angle of vision. Let us situate the t is articula 2. Objective 5 not only ideality, Freedom here becomes an existing, present ne the spirit and spirit in its absolut ‘The first two moments, then, are emergence (ters the sign indeed appears as a mode or spirit as a mediation or transgression the transition. But this way out ff, tis conceived under the jurisdiction and in the form dialectics, according to the movement concepts of Aufiebing and negatvi Simined i the dialectic that makes a thing have its cessation (Vergehen) by and in another” (p. 2). Let we define the place ofthis semiology more closely. Subjective spirit itself the object ropology that studies man in nature; as an identical reflection in itself and in the other, spit is oder Besonderumg), conscious logy of spirit if, as a subject for itself, the object of psychology (see. 387, p. 25) 4 Semiology is a chapter in psychology, the science of in itself as a subject for st us note, neverthel detain us here—that semi itself, does not belong to the science of consciousne: ‘This topical scheme, which inscribes semiology soul, and properly in a psychology, in no way upsets al sequence, fr at least does not do so in this way. The topical arrangement not only takes tus back to the numerous semiological projects of the Middle Ages or the eigh- teenth century, which are ially for his psychology: “The books of Aristotle discussions on its special aspects and states, are ity of idea and principle 8 Aris symbols, speech and fections or passions well known opening of Peri Hermeneias: “Spoken words (ta en t phone’) are itten words are the symbols of spoken to proceed from psychology whi of metaphysics, st is necessary gesture, whi trans. EM. Edghill“The Pit and the Pyramid and what laws govern them. Since the science does not yet ithas a right to existence, a place staked out in advance. smiology; the laws discovered by semiology w i iguistics, and the latter will circumscribe a well defined area within the mass of anthropological facts. To determine the ‘exact place of semiology is the task of the psychologi Let us deposit the following as a touchstone: significant! is the same linguist or glossematician, Hjelmslev, who, while acknowledging the importance * of the Saussurean heritage, put into question, as noncritical presuppos Saussuian science, both the primacy granted to psycholo} ‘granted to the sonorous or phonic “substance of expression.” the privilege go together, a8 we sh Init, the sign is understood according to the struct Aufiebung, by means of which the spirit, cle sof iccomplishing itself as interns {or itself, as such. The science of jes the faculties or general modes of mental [spirit {qua mental—ment ideation, remembering, etc., di pp. 179). As im the Peri Psukhés (432ab), Hegel on several occasions real separation between the alleged “faculties” of the soul (sec. 445 substantially separating faculties and psychic structures, then, one must d mine their mediations, articulations, and joinings, which constitute the w of an organized and oriented movement of the sign, which essentially consists of an is put forth in two long Remarks, remarks much longer than the paragraphs 10 which they are affixed, in the subchapter “Imagination” (Die Eintildungskraft, secs. 445-60). ‘Semiology, then, isa part of the theory of the imagination, and more precisely, specify, ofa phantasilogy ora fantasti, and Psychology ty of its own” igence recalls itself hese images in reserve, e water in a nightlike or ‘or rather like a precious, vein at the bottom of the mine. “But intelligence is not only consciousness and jstence, but qua intelligence is the subject and potentiality of its own is nolonger existent, resonating with al the pow brought back from the Egyptian desert which soon will be raised over the sober there composing the stature and status‘The Pit and the Pyramid itselfas fantasy, as sy But this is only reproductive imagination, remain syntheses working on an intuitive, receptive given that is pas received from the exterior, that is proffered in an encounter. Work operates on a found (gefunden) oF given (gegetene) does not produce, does not imagine, does not for and paradoxical its own G and does not produce sponte sua a closed in on itself. The self-identity o receive. But if this motif the Hege 7 Semiology and Psychology par excellence, for once it bears no implicit criticism of Kant. Which is not for- tuitous, and is in accord with the entire system of relationships between Hegel and Kant. In effec, itis a question here of the imagination, that is, of that agency in which all the Kantian oppositions regularly criticized by Hegel are confused ‘or negated. Here we are in that zone—Iet us indic der the heading of the “Critique of Judgment’—where the debate with Kant resembles most an jon and least a break. But it is also for convenience that here we are opposing the development to the displacement, We would also have to recon- sider this pair of concepts. In any event, it remains that the productive imagination—the fundamental concept of the Hegelian aesthetics—has a site and a status analogous to those of the transcendental imagination. Because it is also a kind of natural art—“an art concealed in the depths of the human soul,” a “productive imagination; Kant says too. But above all because the transcendental schematism nation, the intermediary between sensibility and understanding, the term” homogenous with the category and the phenomenon, carries along it the contradictory predicates of receptive passivity and productive spontaneity. Finally, the movem we transcendental imagination is the movement of temporalization:* Hegel also recognizes an essential link between the imagination productive: and time. Soon we will ask wha time signifies, how it signifies, ‘on. ation. the sign thus will be the place where jons of concepts are reas- all contradictory characteristics intersect. sembled, summarized and swallowed up representation which comprises the Suc ‘ofthe synthe the apprehension of the ‘the Pure Concepts of Unde‘The Pit and the Pyramid long the detour of ns, Hegel states the cris a Mite es converge, a middle and also the medium point, roductive imagination isthe nk in which the universal and Being, one’s own (as Eigene) and what mal, are completely welded into p21). n could extend its field infinitely in the Nevertheless, Hegel restricts its province by including it immediat structure of a dialectics that comprehends sign is to be put on account, in provisional reserve. This is the limit of abstract ‘The semiotic moment remains formal in the extent to which the content and truth of meaning escape it, in the extent to which it remains inferior, anterior and exterior to them. Taken by itself, the sign is maintained truth. “The creation: further and more definite aspects For the moment this internal st these abstract aspect ‘waste product or an empirical acci becomes a moment, however abstract truth. It belongs, as Hegelian Semiology ‘on the basis of the truth toward which itis oriented, but also with sight set on truth, as one says in order to mark the distance, the lack and the remainder in the process of navigation; set still further as a means of manifestation as concerns truth. The light, the brilliance of the appearing which permits vision, is the common source of phantasia and of the pha Why is the relationship between sign and truth thus? onger be understood as a “What does this bbe stated naively, presupposing or 4 limit at which the question “What does signification sigt Hegelian Semiology ‘The sign unites a words, a concey spendent representati ) and a sensory per ize a kind of separa ‘a being is given, a presence. For example, says presenting) ofa representation the place of something other, it becomes etous anderes 0 n and represent release and reas ‘semble all their meanings at once. trange “intuition” represent? The signifier thus presented to vhat? What does it represent or signify? stThe Pit and the Pyramid Hegel evidently defines it as an ideality, in opposition to the corporality of an jempted, in commenting elsewhere upon the ing, I would demonstrate here that such an interpretation is also valid for the Hegelian text. Such an extension is regulated by an internal and essential metaphysi the sensory flesh of intuition. The sign, as the u body and the signified id flesh, Hegel knew that this proper and animated bod; tomb, The association soma/séma is also. ‘way surprising," The tomb is the funerary monument. The body of the soul will be enclosed, preserved, Hegelin Semiology relation to its own body Phenomenology of the to retain and prot ‘The sign—the monument-ot sepulcher of a soul or of an embalmed proper body, the height conserving in its depths the hegemony of the soul, resi inscription—is the pyramid 1e word pyramid to designate the sign. The pyramid be- the signifier of signification. Which is not an was indeed necessary for death to be at describes the work of death—for a monumer 458, p. 212) tuition of absence, or more precisely the as representative ‘Thus we have, lof an abject that is put forth to be seen, here also marks the represent the recourse to what represents, to what is put in the place of the delegate of and reference to the other. Her mn is mandated to rep- ts proper content, an entirely representing a the pyramid (Hegel's emphasi‘The Pit and the Pyramid conserved (aufiewalrt: consigned, stored, put in storage)” tuating of the pyramid has fixed several essential characteristics of the {abuse or anachronism, the ari transplanted into the monument like an immigra the stone of the signi ther in its origin nor to the matter of the intuitive given, This heterogeneity amounts to the irreduc- ity of the soul and the body, ofthe intelligible and the sensory, of the concept cr signified ideality on the one hand, and of the signifying body ot t that is, in different senses, the irreducibility of two representations 2. This is why the immedi mn of the signifier rp other content (einen ganz anderen Inhalt) than that which it has fo ‘other than that whose full presence refers only to its ‘This relationship of absolute alterity distinguishes the sign from the symbol ‘The continuity of a mimetic or analogical participation can always be seen be- tween the symbol and the symbolized. “The different from the symbol: forin the symbol the original characte ject are more or less ident ‘whereas in the sign, stri the connotation of which it is a sign, have nothing to do id.). th the import which it bears as symbol; 3 intuition, and one another” symbolic Art , the "purely arbitrary linkage” rliche Verknpfung) which constitutes the sign itself, and above al ing when a sign is to be a symbol limitation of ikewise appropriate enough for some limited space of time; and the ‘as a whole has the same number of sides and angles as that appearing, idea of God when the determinations which religion apprehends in God at Hegelian Semiology “"Therefore in these sorts of symbol the sensuous present zorhacdenen Existenzen) have already in their owen existence (Dns (Bedeutung), for the representation (Di are used; and taken in ths wider sense, the but a sign which in its externality comprises in its of the idea (Vor! ich it brings into appearance. Yet neverthe not to bring tf before our minds as the concrel ‘only that universal quality of meaning [whi Inthe following chapter, “Unconscious Symbol to the Pyramid—this time, if we may sil putt thu ‘word. Ifthe Egyptian pyramid, in the Encyclopedia, sign, in the Aesthetics i is studied for itself tha ‘outset. The Egyptians went further than the Hindus in the concept of the re lations between the natural and the spiritual: they thought the immortality of the soul, the independence ofthe spirit, and the form death. This is marked in their funerary practices. the proper sense of the the symbol oF sign of the \agnificent vast excavations, passages half a mile long, chambers ieroglyphics, everything worked out wi then above ground there are built in ad amongst which the Pyramids are to be count After ai ) and, as external shapes produced is obvious vy are there for nature and only which here constitutes the meaning, possesses only one side, and that » of the true content of art, namely that of being removed from Knox (Oxion ‘the Aesthetics 85The Pit and the Pyramid the systemic necessity that includes semio effect, that psychology—in the Hegel Spit determining itself in tel as a subject ‘which “all [spirit] now has to do is to realize the clopedia, sec. 440, p. 179). This is why it was indispensabl architectonic articulation between psychology and semiology. This allows us better to comprehend the meaning of arbitrariness: the production signs manifests the freedom of the spirit. And there is more'mar in the production of the sign than in the production of the symbol. In ‘more independent and closer to itself. In the symbol, conversely, ‘more exiled into nature. “Intelligence therefore gives proof of wid lly foisted in somewhere as an appendix (Anhang: supplement, opposition of sign and symbol and the teleology which manstrated on the basis of each of the ey ‘a signified. 1 tc, a pail sales, could not be replaced By ust another symbol such as. place in the economy of i given” (ibid, ‘This activity, which cons content, of breathing a “soul produces the sign by Erinnerung—memory ion. We will now examine this relationship between a certain movement of idealizing interiorization and the process of the production of signs, memory and imaginal : (spatial and temporal) and therefore in its freedom, and bringing exterior existence, ;pedia under the heading of imagination, the theory llowed by the chapter on memory. In the Philesophical the same semiological content is inscribed under the rubric of mem- igns, is also thought itself. In a transitional ted to memory and the chaptes rman language has etymologicalThe Pit and the Pyramid Relever"—What Talking Means {question in ind schemas of the metaphysics jut essentially represents itself ry of bedeuten (meaning) 1m the outset regulated by the telos ‘of speech. As much later in Saussure, spoken language here is the “model” of the sign, and linguistics is the model of a semiology of which it still remains a part The heart of the thesis is quickly stated: the privilege or excellence of the linguistic system—that is, the phonic system—as concerns any other semiotic system, Therefore, the privilege of speech over writing and of phonetic writing, over every other system of inscription, parti ‘graphic writing, but equally over mathematical writ algebras, pasigraphies and other projects of the Leib ‘which has no need, as Leibniz sa ‘The process phase a somet acquires, when employed as assafecttee (hai bo s and them, replaced in Kind of promotion, by that which follows and relays or relieves one. the reléve of sensory-spatial fon. Such is the negativi Relever What Talking Means rest ofthe paragraph confirms: “Such is the nega the truer phase of the intuition used as a sign is der Zeit)” m must be thought in relation to the formulation which says of time he Dasein of ign, that the content of the sensory signifier) must erase itself, mus losophy of spi y its concept is th thi nd. el ropology and psycholo; tween these two sciences, as we know, is inscribed the phenomenology of spirit, oF the science of the experience of consciousness. | and above, “Ousia andThe Pit and the Pyramid the other hand, this phonic igible, the real and the idé nuhip between the sensory andthe determined hee av an cxprssve ide. The language cf sound speech, which carries does writing. Conserving the inside the outside, speech is par excellence that which confers existence, upon the interior representation, making the concept ‘exist. But, by the same token, insofar as the given of sensory-spatial intuition, th, producing thereby a kind of makes sensory existence pass existence of the concept. Such a. inguage: ulation to express specific jdeas—speech and its system, I sations, intuition i and higher ex ‘rally possess—invests them wi right of existence in the (des Vorst age which concerns us, Hegel is interested in language the special aspect of a product of intelligence for manif external medium.” He does not undertake the study of language ‘eel be put thus. He has defined the order of general se chology, and then the site of linguistics within a sem Releoer-What Taking Means relevant negativity which works within the sign has always already begun to forms hierarchies of types and regions according to their power of Among other consequences it follows from this that one may consider the con- cept of physical ideality as a kind of teleological a ‘one may recognize in the concept and value physics—also would that philosophy has ideality, then, is shared by two regions of the id sensibility to sound. They are analyzed in theThe Pit and the Pyramid / nature begins for the first time to become subjective” Correlatively, sight is an idea! sense, more ideal, by definition and as its name than touch or taste, One can also say that sight gives its sense to theory. bids their consummation.® The cannot be eaten. (reldce) sight. et, if sight is ideal, hea eality of light and vision, the objects perceived by the eye, for ‘example plastic works of art, persist beyond the perception of their sensory, exterior, stubborn existence; they resist the Aufiebung, and in and of themselves cannot be absolutely releoé by temporal interiority. They hold back t gis €0 writing as such, But not for music and speech. Hearing sense: “Hearing... like sight, is one of the theoretical and not prac ‘and itis still more ideal than sight. For the peaceful and undesiring (bee ‘contemplation of works of art lets them remain in peace and indepen« they are, and there is no wish to consume or hends is not something inherently posited ide ‘persisting in its visible existence. The ear, on the contrary, to a practical (praktis to objects, listens to the vibration is no longer of (Owing to this ‘of sound, inner subjectivity corresponds 20. The Hegelian theory of desi ‘of desire, death jets it evaporate, by means of ight, ind nd nly To vision, void ‘of man’s assumption pleasure in smell may not have had a considerable shar Roleoor What Taking Means which in and by itself is something more ideal sistent corporeality, gives up this more ideal existe comes a mode of expression adequate to the inner lif sdependently really sub- the center of the physics marks the passage, through the op- of sound as the movement of ideal the reléve of the visible into the audible, nature, the fundamental presupposition of the Hegelian al exteriority, ‘ophy of 21, Elsewhere: “The other theore sense is hinting view. Instead it hearing has to dow imple subjectivity, as ‘apprehended by the in this way the inne 3 (of objects is made apprehensible ty and interiosity, which ser) longer depending upon an empi ty two entera permite the elimination of touch (which is concerned ‘whic perfeclytheor sensuous and spatial opaquenes yous disease. This would rnnot be an organ af artistic enjoy rocess and‘The Pit and the Pyramid guage, notably of the so-called material part of language, lexicology. This pre- 15a specific system that organizes not only the relations of the losophy of nature ime and to the totality of sgelian teleology, but th the more general system and more ample chain of logocentrism. lexicology led us back to physics, gramma projects us, by anticipation, toward the study. sctand its articulation into categories. In effect, the Encyelopeta undertakes this further on: “As to the formal clement, again itis the work of analytic intellect which informs language with its categories: logical instinct which gives ris of languages still in their original (urspringlich) state, which we have first real begun to make acquaintance with in modern times, has shown on this point that they contain a very elaborate grammar and express distinctions which are lost or have been largely obliterated in the languages of more civilized nations. It seems as if the language of the most civilized nations has the most imperfect ‘grammar, and that the nation is in a more uncivilized state than (CE. W. von Humboldt’s Essay om the Dual)” (sec. 459, p. 215; cf. also Reasom in History.) ‘This relevant, spiritual, and ideal excelle language—and in general all spacing—remain i cording to an extension that transforms our an example or as the © ‘ogy, Hegel can make ‘of general semiolo, rmal element of discourse) the phonic makes every spatial id exterior. Writing, ac- may be considered as of the semiol- was a question joned against wh question of writing reated in an appendix, as a digression, a supplement. As we know, will also be Saussure’s, 10 After defining vocal language ( ‘original (usp inguage, Hegel writes: “We may touch, upon written language (Schrifsprache)—a further development [supplementary: particular sphere of language which borrows the hel Its from the province of immediate spat A. The Teleological Hierarchy of Writings At the peak of this hierarchy is phonetic writing of the alphabetic type: “AL- much to give stability and independence to the inward (see. 459, p. 218). History—which according to Hegel is always the history of the spi development of the concept as logos, and the ontotheological unfoldin, ousia, etc. are not obstructed by alphabetic writing. On the contrary, erases its own spacing better than any other, alphabetic writing remains the highest and more veleonnt medigtion. Such a teleological appreciation of alpha- betic writing constitutes a system and structurally governs the following two consequences: 1. Beyond the fact of alphabetical writing, Hegel here is logical ideal. In effect, as Hegel recognizes, in passing, certaitThe Pit and the Pyramid always been accorded (0 stand out between larger or smaller unities.** of uttering its ideas most worthi ‘consciousness and made an object ic writing, arise from an antecedent analysis of ideas. Thus jeas may be reduced to their elements, or simple tal desideratum of language 216-17; see also the three following paragraphs), ype seem to be marked by the the formalisms denounced by iversitaives de France, 1969), chap. 2 96 Relewr-—What Talking Means Hegel. The indictment is directed precisely word and the name. The princi :, Hegel incriminates what he considers as the great his torical models 4. Thoth—The Egyptian model first. Above all, Hegel reproaches this model for remaining too “symbolic,” in the precise sense we gave to this notion above. ‘Although hieroglyphics do bear elements of phonetic writing, and thus of ar- 25, “OF the representations (Dars one figure must be especialy noticed. form, aif brat, half Buman- Spict temerge from the merely Natural freely’ arout hich Egyptian Antiquity presents us with, Ine spice an tal « dae an ambiguousThe Pit and the Pyramid holds back the spirit, encumbers it, compelling the spirit to an effort of me- of objects which hhas no relation to the sonorous sign.—The idea of a written philosophical and universal language, dreamed of by so many minds, comes up against thi Of signs that would ness of hierogly or rather heard in absence of the voice, we. Under the heading of jes to make us which display (dar! individual speculative w ‘of meaning has to do w the German language. not having dearly He and Ruleyer—What Talking Means the symbol in Egy} time appears as meaning ( uly of deciphering has no ick of contemporaneity. Hegel specifies, rath« of the Egyptians themselves. Hence the transition fro deciphering and deconstitution of the hieroglyph, of secondary god, inferior to the god of thous god, man’s animal, god’s man,‘The Pit and the Pyramid dirus2* There too we must articulate the systematic chains in their differentiated amplitude, And ask why Hegel, here, reads the Egyptian mythemes as does Plato: “As an important element in the conception Osiris, Egyptian Hermes—must be specially noticed, ane inthe economy of legislation, the Spin becomes in ,, independent + nature, but as a particular existence, side by side with the powers of Nature—characterized also by intrinsic particu pecifc divinities, conceived as spiritual bols. “The Egyptian Hermes is celebrated as exhibiting theism. According to Jamblichus, the Egyptian priest degraded under physicalsymi Hegel apprehends th the Empire of China History has to begi oldest, as far as history gives us any information, and its principle has such substant at for the empire in que do we see China advancing to the con at this day, for as the contrast between objective existence and sul cof movement in it, is still wanting, every change is excluded, and the fixedness of character which recurs perpetually takes the place of what we should call the truly historical” (Philosophy of History, p. 116). 2. Exteriovity. This immediately follows the preceding in order to exclude from history that which nevertheless is defined as the origin of history, and which self has inspired the historian more than anything else: “China and India lie, 28. TN. On the rus and Thoth, see “Plato's Pharmacy.” in Derrida, D 100 riation Relever—What Talking Means progress. ly excludes the dis- substance cannot ‘moral aspect is said, from the carapace of tortoises. © Rewrdng tte their writing, as well as their philosophy, are founded far; one finds expressed in it only the most abstract ideas and oppositions. The two fundamental figures are a horizontal line and an equally long and broken ture is named Yang and the second Yin; these are the same are highly honored by first determinations, it is true, and consequently the most superficial. They are ‘united to form 4, then 8, and finally 64 figures.”‘The Pit and the Pyramid The Chinese model, takes every opportuni tian hieroglyph. A progress in for the sensuous and the natural the moment of abstract understanding, never recovers whe ‘Western speech finds then thatthe process over the Egyp- ument as concerns corresponds to wel over philosophy: pure thoughts are broug! vance, merely remaining is not conceived of specutat Following the cassia famework ofthe Hegelian crtque, Chinese culture and writing are reproached simtancousy for thei empiricism (naturals, Istorcism) and their formals (mathematzing abstraction). ‘A typical moverent of the Hegelian te course a sometimes quite presse piece o pressions. A certain nunber of very det Erin the very form ofthat which Hegel elsewhere eres: he juxtaposition ofan empirical content witha henceforth abstract form, an exterior form st pevimposed on that which should organize. This is manifest prtclry in Unnotced contradictions, contradictions without concepts and not edule the speculative movement of contradiction, "The propositions concering Chinese writing and grammar area symptomatic cmap BF twhich Hegel docs not add ois credit. Compared o Westen grammars, Chinese Syntax is ima stat of stagnant prmitiveness, paralyzing the movement of $- noticed the folloving two motifs: (I) the development and differentiation of figures (Ho-tu) which he saw on the back of a horse-dragon as i rose out ofthe river her figures (Lo-Ch {grammar are in an inverse relation to the spiritual a language; (2) the “Chinese’ standing, of mathem: lexicological funct the State—its require: of individuals. The nature of their Written Language is at the losophy of History, pp. 134-35). ‘The demonstration which follows alleges the great number of signs to learn (80,000 to 90,000). But as concerns the nefarious certain regulated polysemia (regulated, providentially accorded to the natural genius‘The Pit and the Pyramid the moment of abstract understanding, never recovers wh ive concreteness of Western speech finds then that the process: ¥y. Whence the analogy formal understanding wodel over philosophy: pure thoughts are brought to consciousness, from ordinary ideas, in- orms of representation and Following the classical framework of the Hegelian critique, Chinese culture and writing are reproached simultaneously for their empi historicism) and their formalism (mathematizing abstraction).” A typical movement of the Hegelian te course a sometimes quite precise piece of precautions. A certain number of very det and in the very form of that which Hegel elsewhere criticizes: the juxtaposition of an empirical content with a henceforth abstract form, an exterior form su- perimposed on that which it should organize. This is manifest particularly in unnoticed contradictions, contradictions without concepts and not reducible to the speculative movement of contradiction, ins concerning Chinese writing and grammar are a symptomatic ta) which he saw on the back of a horse-dragon as it rose out ofthe igures Lo-Ch Releyer—What Talking Means ‘grammar are in an inverse relation to the spiritual a language; 2) the “Chinese” moment of culture is a standing, of mathematical abstraction, ete.; now, in opposition lexicological function, the formal or grammatical foundation of a language pro- ceeds from the understanding, Entangling himself in these incoherences, Hegel always ends by some relafion of speech to writing. In China this relation is not what sciences appear thus pr ts material or does not express, as ours doe words to the eye, but represents (Vors appears at first sight a great advantage, and has gained the suffrages of many great men—among others, of Leibniz. In reali losophy of History, pp. 134-38) ‘The demonstration which follows alleges the great number of signs to learn (60,000 to 90,000). But as concerns the nefarious language, the demonstration also develops a pr ) the ideas themselves by signs. This I. (The Chinese language and insufficiently di , too accentuated and the circulation of values pesited by Rousseau in the this argument to be rec 4 certain regulated polysemia (regulated, providentially accorded to the natural genius of the German language) the speeuative dilcticeThe Pitand the Pyramid account of that separation. For our Spoken Language is matured to distinctness chiefly through the necessity of finding signs for each single sound, which latter, we learn to express distinctly. The Chinese, to whom such a means ‘orthoepic development is wanting, do not mature the modifications of sounds being represented by letters meanings and accents. Their writing reassembling living language, space of formal abstraction, that from one condensed to the metaphorical, metaphysical sense signifies way in general . . . Tao, thus, is the ‘original reason, the confused, The Chinese language, due difficulties; notably, these objects are dif yecause of their inher- ently abstract and undetermined nature. Von Humboldt rec ter to Abel Remu: (G. von Humbold er toM. Abel Remusat On the Nature of the Grammatical M4. The same argument can be Releoer—What Talking Means Forms . . . of the Chinese Languay Chinese language has no case inflector (Gibelin, pp, 248-49). Further on: “The taken as a philosophical model ‘This is the attitude inaugurated by Pythagoras. And when Leibniz seems to by numbers; and more , such as powers and so on, have been employed in philosophy for the purpose of regulating thoughts or ‘expressing them: Number, or eq} absolutely foreign to the concept such as Hegel conceptual movement. “We saw that number is the absolute determinateness its element is the difference (Llnterschied) which has become rg)—an implicit determinateness which at the same time is, science because all the matter are not intrinsic ‘subject matter possessing inner, intrinsic, relations which, as at first concealed, as not given in our immediate acquaintance by the efforts of cognition. Not only does therefore no problem for speculatThe Pit andthe Pyramid Relewer—What Talking Means bination itself in which there is no necest activity which is at the same time the extreme exter thought is engaged here in an face. Now, calculation, the machine, and mute writing belong to the same system of equivalences, and their work poses the same problem: at the moment ‘when thought is opposed is the result of the operation determination of externality itself, In number, therefore, sense is brought ‘number is the pure thought of thought’s own externalization’ aalation modified, governed by an inkable in that works. these concepts, the symbol past (gewesen). The ‘one and the other in turn must be thought (reev#) by language without language, the language become the thing it voice murmuring in the greatest proximity to the spirit the identity of the name (and) of Being. The preface to the Pheno understanding, formality, still machinate its presentation. here, now, of the following nology of the Spirit had posited the equivalence of .exteriority, and death. being so much an external and the hhas been possible fo construct machines (Mas ) which perform 38, See pages 21 and 26-36 (i he Miller translation). 107‘The Pit and the Pyramid taphysics, and even legelianism: “The time of is different from the time of calculation (Rechnens) that pulls our thinking in all directions. Today the computer (Denkmaschine) calculates thou- sands of relationships in one second. Despite their technical uses, they are inessential (wese its equivalents, in order to change the machinery, the system or the terrain. 39. Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference trans, Joan Stambaugh (New York: Hagper '4L. This text, which however belongs to one of the most interrogations of hegelian thought, would have to be made to communicate ‘phonological motifs of Heideggerian discourse that we have already pointed out and. {ve mil make more specific elsewhere. See “The Ends of Man,” 108 The Ends of Man“Now, I say, man and, in gen- fundamental possil the value which haunt Jean-Paul Sartre, Being Nothing: “As the archeology of our thought easily shows, man is an inven- colloquium necessarily has a pol ich has always linked the es Beck (Chicago: Univers is edition.“The Ends of Man practiced, if at all, only in the extent to w are assumed, whether they are define: language and institution. But the establishing of r is also the promised complicity of a common el pplace only in a medium, or rather in the represer ‘must make of a certain transparent ether ‘what i called the universality of philosophical discourse. With am designating less a fact than a project, which is linked by ‘we should say by essence tught of Being and certain group of languages and Jing must happen or must, have happened to the diaphanous How else are we to understand repair, to surmount, to erase, or simply to relate colloquia—which aim to tional philosophical differ- today can say to himsel ‘was unimaginable a century ago, loquiuim simply would have no meaning, m2 The Ends of Man where it would be no more meaningful to instigate it than to prohi permit myself to rec: is the discourse on anthropos, difference, which is of an philosophical differences yond these borders, w! identity accommodates a nonidentity, does not ind the coming, diversity, even= wut saying that the philosophers preset ir thought (why else would they be this can only remain problematical, and in part depends upon the discourses to be proffered here 2. No more than they identify with each to speak in my own name here. More toan essential gener is generality that I wish to state it, When I was im mn could end only when I was assThe Ends of Man any more than Ido, and do not in assuming those policies, atleast insofar as they are participating in this colloguium. ‘And yet it would be naive or purposely blind to let oneself be reassured by age oF appearance of such a freedom. It would be illusory to believe that jocence has been restored, and evil complicities undone, when op: them can be expressed in the country i only through the ‘own citizens but also those of foreign citizens, and that hencefoth .e. oppositions, may freely and discursivel That a declaration of opposition to some offic thorized by the authorities, also means, precise order to begin, by speaking of to place the accent on form no less and schematic principle, is the questio arations for this encounter, from the invitation and Martin Luther King. A bit later, when I was ty Paris were invaded by the forces of order—and simply found it necessary to mark, dat circumstances in which I prepared 1 appear to me to belong, by all rig colloquium, communication. These circumstances 1 the field and the problematic of our Humanism or Metaphysics Thus the transition will be made q) theme of this commu e naturally between the preamble and the imposed upon me, rather than as Ichose current fashion in France, along philosophical structure. What indices and for the time of this exposition, will be the nonempirical site of a movement, a structure and an articulation of the question “of man.” Following this is would be possible, and doubtless necessary—but then only—rigorously to relate this site with every other instance defining something, ‘Where then is France, as concerns man? 1 Metaphysics lism, and in conjunction with a fundame! inated France presented! itsel to summarize Sartre's thought under the slogan it must be recognized that in Emotions, etc., the major concey horizon and origin is what was then cal this is a translation of Heideggerian Dasein, A monstrous translation in many respects, but so much the more significant. That this translation proposed by Corbin was adopted at the time, and that by means of Sartre's authority it reigned, gives us much to deggerian type; because the “change of terrain” is far from upsetting the entire French landscape to which I am referring: because what Nietzsche said, is a change of “style”; and if there is sty is signaled both the increasing! d in France, and the divis 135The Ends of Man ‘The latter—who is not the last man—awakens and leaves, He burns his text and erases stout, directed toward a return sphysical repetition of humanism, the form of a memorial or a guarding, e house and of the truth of Being. He will dance, outside the house, the aktive Vergessl and the cruel (grausam) feast of which the Genealogy of Mor that Nietzsche called for an active forgetting of Being: ‘metaphysical form imputed to it by Heidegger Must one read Nietzsche, with Heidegger, as the sicians? Or, on the contrary, are we to take the que: as the inderstand the eve as the gu 18 to the day that is coming, at whose eve we are? Is there an economy of the eve? Pethaps we are between these two eves, which are also two ends of man. But who, we? May 12, 1968 ‘would not have the 1¢ great metaphy- of the truth of Being The Linguistic Circle of Geneva‘And in reconstituting the history or prehistory of thelr sclenc covering numerous ancestors, sometimes with a certain astonished recogni Interest in the origin of linguistics is awakened when the problems of the origin of language cease to be proscribed (as they had been from the end of the nine- teenth century), and when a certain geneticism—or a certain generativism— comes back into its own. One could show the ‘This hist no longer elaborated sok practice, and its results are already being felt. In p ce according to which lingui ofa single “epistemological break”—a concept, called Bachelardian, much used. for abused today—and of a break occurring in our immediate vicinity. We no longer think, as does Gramm “everything prior to the nineteenth cen- tury, which is not yet linguistics, can be expedited in several lines.”" Noam which presents in My aim here is not to justify the interest of this investigation, nor to describe summarily its pro- ‘cedure, but instead to underline that by a curious detour it takes us bac tradition of ancient thought, departure or a radi innovation in the domai If we were to set ourselves down in the space of this “curious detour,” we could not help encountering the “linguistics” of Rousseau. We would have to ask ourselves, then, in what ways Rousseau’s reflections on the sign, on lan- ‘guage, on the origin of languages, on the relations between speech and writing, inguistic science, thatis, modernity “human sciences” refer to linguistics and General and Reasoned Grammar of Port-Roy. and that were held in high esteem by Feary on the Origin of Languages even closes with one ofthese cations, Thus Roussenu acknowledges is debt Logic, Locke's Essay pets (Paris: GallimardThe Linguistic Circle of Geneva llusion to Rousseau himself in the Cart compares him to Humboldt, The Opening ofthe Field The Opening of the Field ‘every supernatural exp! the origin and fun theological hypothesis is not simply set asid ‘name, de jure, in Rousseau’ explication and descr nified in at least two texts and at two points: in the second Di Essay on the Origin of Languages. Referring to Conaillac, to whom he recognizes he owes a great des clearly expresses his disagreement as concems the procedure Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge. Condillac, ted society, created by God, as given at the the question of language, the question of the genesis and system of language, of the relations between natural and instituted signs, ete. Now Rousseau wants to account for the very emergence of convention, account simultaneously for society and language on. of a “pure state of nature.” So he must put between parentheses everything that Condillac takes as given, and in effect this is what he allegedly does, The concept of nature, therefore, bears the burden of scientificty here, as ‘much in the requirement of a natui ultimate reference to a purely (presocial, prehistoric, prelingui slate. The field of the analysis, the genealogical regression, functioning, areall opened as that Rousseau himself opened this, recognize the signs system remain t0 be cor ‘or methodological insThe Linguistic Circle of Geneva tude is accommodated to a natural expla rework in which the concepts , experience, (The most remarkable example of known influence on Rousseau.) He of the flood, whose analog will be found in Rousseau, liberates the functioning of the natural explanation. This does not prevent Rousseau from taking his leave from Conaiillac precisely at the point at which he reproaches Condillac for taking as given that which is to be explained, that is, “a kind of already established society among the in- vventors of language.” Rousseau reproaches Condillac less for rejecting every .. model of natural explanation—that would be untrue—than for not radicalizing his concept of nature: Condillac would not have descended to a pure state of nature to analyze the emergence of language: “Permit me for a moment to consider all the confusions of the origin of Languages. I could content mys g or repeating here all of Abbé de Condil which fully confirm my feeling, and which, perhaps, gave me my ideas, But given the manner in which this Philosopher resolves the difficulties he creates for himself on the origin of institutionalized signs, that is, a kind of already established society among the inventors of language, | believe that in referring to his reflect those who, reasoning on the State of Nature, transport into ideas taken from Society.” ‘The properly scie only to purely natural cuases. Such is the mot ‘The Opening ofthe Field causes alone’*(p. 5). Now, without even entering into the content of the natural genealogy of language that Rousseau proposes, let us note that the so-called pee then the latter, themselves acting as a force of break with uugurate an order radically heterogeneous to the natural order. ion ofa scientific continuously autonomy and origi suspended, in that ', real, and natural description, being but the index of an internal structural description. 7 "s Certainly all this is neither without difficulty nor without a certain apparent incoherence, for which Rousseau often has been reproached. An: that much easier to make this reproach because Rousseatt himself on several occasions seems to renounce the natural explanation and to acl violent—catastrophic—interruption into the concatenation of natural causality An arbitrary interruption, an interruption of the arbi decision which ‘One comes the necessity of this question wherever the conceptuality organized around the opposition nature/arbitrary is accredited. Before defining the neces- lure, before underlining the accommodates its opposite here, let us apparition, smpting, by means of a fiction, a derivation of languages on the ive dispersion in the state of pure nature, on the basis of the Rousseau has to tice again that the his needs to explain, and consequently more‘The Linguistic Circle of Geneva juals as there are to speak them, to which leaves no idiom the time to | for to say that the Mother dictates uuse to ask her for such and such a multiplies Languages by as many indi rg horotot "2, And later, when he has taken as given, by means of a supposition, bot imense space there had to be between the pure state of Nature and the need nguages,” and the solution of the circle that demands speech before thought and thought before speech, Rousseau must yet again, @ third Aft: he must even feign giving up on a natural ex tue t interval between the supposition and the apparent resignat proposed an entire theory of language: a functional, systematic, and structural theory, whose elaboration is occasioned by the pretext of a genetic questi fictitious problematic of the origin. the third and convinced of the would more necessary, an already bound Society, Tor t already invented for the establishment of Soci tid \4. On Father Lamy, 1 refer to Genevitve Rodi sitele, Bernard Lamy,” Le fran ‘The Opening of the Field same form: the circle in which tradition (or thought and language, society and language, each fe and produce each other reciprocally. But these seau’s project. Let us cite this text once more: “Let us begin by setting aside all 3 they do not touch upon the question. The Investigations one may center into on this subject must not be taken as historical truths, but only as hypothetical and conditional reasoning; more apt to enlighten the Nature of things than to show their veritable origin, and similar to the Investigations made ‘every day by our Physicians concerning the formation of the World 3. This is what accounts for the absolutely unforeseeeable intervention, in the Essay, of the “slight movement” of a finger which produces the birth of society and languages. Since the system of the state of Nature could not depart from its, could not itself depart from its 162), could not spontaneously interrupt itself, some perfectly ext ilythis departure, which is none other, pre Thad for him [M. Salomon] extended to cake supp 12. Discurs. pp. 1328 45‘The Linguistic Circle of Gene arbitrary. But natural or quasi-natural lines. The causal ivestock, and pasture, ture, were once spread. social, by the touch of a finger s the universe. I see such a slight movement changing the face of the earth and deciding the vocation of mankind: in the distance I hear the joyous cies of a naive multitude; I see the building of castles and ci homes, gathering to devour each other, and turni (pp. 38-38). is fiction has the advantage of sketching out a model that explicates nature's departure is simultaneously absolutely natural and ab- must simultaneously respect and violate natural legality. a force simultaneously void and infinite. is model respects the heterogeneity of the two orders oF the two moments (nature and society, nonlanguage and language, etc.), and coordinates the continuous with the discontinuous according to what we have analyzed elsewhere under the rubric of supplementarity For the absolute irrup- the unforeseen revolution which made possi ete., however, has done nothing but develop the in the state of pure nature. As is said in the second ural it which he would have remained. assures a cohering and joining function {as between the two temporal e break—which scan the passage from na perceptible progression and vol. 3, p. 531) and De la grammatolegie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967), pp. 260ff influene, sbi, and Dela granmatolgie, ibid 5. Discours, p. 162 46 ‘The Opening of the Field ture to society." But despite the concepts of pure nature and of virtuality, and even if the original movement of the finger can still supplement the theological hypothesi remains that iscourse, can by al without any supernatural explanation, and, putting all history and all factual chronology between parentheses, can Pr propote a struct i and function of lar of language and s the order of nature, primarily ical order of his nature. Thereby the typolo conform to a general topology, and “local difference’ account in the origin of south/north is the opposit which are distinguished by the Essay, correctness-prose-writing. the origin, the more one tends to come back t speech. And, between the two polar series, rey tarity: the second series is added to the first in order insupplementing a lack in the first series, also to, the second series will hollow out a new lac which enlarge th for a new supplement, etc. The same lo‘The Linguistic Geneva jother way of comparing languages to consider their ser regular relation to the state of language and determining their relative ant 5, p- 16) and in its principle: “The art of writing does not at alf depend upon that speaking, It derives from needs of a develop earlier or later according to circumstances ent we duration of the people” (p.19) Reduced to their m principial frame- work, such would be the motifs of an openin, id Rous: is opening, or is he already taken up and. included in it? The question has not yet been elaborated fully enough, the terms are stil too naive, the alternative is stil too restricted for us to be tempted to coffer an answer, No problematic, no methodology today seems to us to be capable of pitting itself effectively against the difficulties effectively announced ithout great risk, and still in th the massive borrowings, despite the complicated ge- ‘ography of sources, despi lly under the rubric yields a reading of a rel the field of a The Closure of Concepts Saussure: “Language and writing are two distinct systems of signs; the second ‘exists for the sole purpose of representing the fi Rousseau: “Languages are made plement of speech and the spoken forms of word: (pp. 3-24). " compartment for observatio! consider nonphonetic writing—for example, a universal characteristic of the Leibnizian type—as evil itself.” 2. Both make linguistics a part of general semiology, the latter itself being only 4 branch of the social psychology which grows out of general psychology and general anthropology. Saussure: "A science that studies the life of signs should be a part of social psychology and conseque: I shall call it semiology (from the Greek sémeion, Semiology should show ‘What constitutes signs, what laws govern them. Since the science does not yet vould be but thas righ ly of general psychology; 49is inseparsble speech is due not to need but pass recognized by another as a senti cor need to communicate his feelings to do.so. Such means can be derived only from the senses, ly instruments through which one man can act upon another. Hence thi ion of sensate signs for the expression of thought. The inventors of language did not proceed rationally in this way; rather their instinct suggested the consequence to them. Generally, the means by which we can act on the senses of others are restricted to two: that is, movement and voice. The action of movement is immediate through touching, or mediate through gesture. The first can function arm's length, while the other extends as far as the visual ray. Thus hearing are the only passive organs of language among dispersed individuals” (chap. 1, pp. 5-6). There follows a confrontation of the language of gesture and the language of voice; although both are “natural,” they are unequally dependent upon convention, From this point of view, Rousseau certainly can vaunt the merits of mute signs, which are more natural and more immediately eloquent. But, in linking society to passion and convention, he grants a privilege to speech ‘within the general system of signs; and consequently to linguistics within semiol- ogy. This is the third point of a possible comparison of principles or program. eof speech is linked, in particular, in Saussure as in Rousseau, y the sign. The verbal sign is more arbitrary, Rousseau and Saussure think, than other signs: ‘Scussure: “Signs that are wholly arbitrary realize better than the others the \ost complex and. sense linguistics can become the master although language is only one particular Rousseau: “Although the language of ‘The Closure of Concepts We break from natural need, a break which simultaneously initiates passion, convention, and speech. 4, For the same reason, and as Saussure will do pertinence of the phy'si Rousseau rejects any a) ;nimals do not speak, it is because they do not articulate. The possi in language, its emergence from animal calls, wh functioning of conventional language, concept of articulation play a central natural language, a language of unarti song, modeled after the neuma. ‘the vocal apparatus “obviously takes a secondary place in the problem of speech,’ Saussure continues: “One definition of articulated speech might confirm that conclusion. In Latin, articulus means a member, part, or subdivision of a sequence; applied to speech, articulation designates either the subdivision of a spoken chain into syllables or the subdivision of the chain of meanings into significant units; gegliderte Sprache that what is natural to mankind is not oral speech but the faculty of constructing a language, i.e. a system of distinct signs corresponding to distinct ideas” (p. 10) ‘One could push the inventory of analogies a long way, far beyond the pro- sgrammatic and principial generalities. Since their interweaving is systematic, fone may say a priori that no locus of the two discourses absolutely escaj For example, it suffuces to accredit abso e and there, the opp: concepts of sign ‘which we know goes back further than Plat from which no element 151‘The Linguistic Cicle of Geneva “author,” “title and unity of the lay have become profoundly prob- tne system ofthe same fundamental conceptuality atthe point at which the opposition of pysis to its others—nom, natures, natureicon- vention, naturelart,naturesociety,naturefreedom,nature/i ; has governed, throughout the “history” ‘and language ofthe philosophy of science upto the twentieth he play of structural implications, and the mobility and com tary layers are complex enough, and unlnear enough, forthe same Occasion surprising transformations, partial exchanges, subtle dis- ‘repances, turnings backward, ete. Thus, for example, one may legitimately ‘elements of the Saussurian projec only to redisciver preSaus- or even criticize Saussure on the bass of Saussure or even on the “This does not prevent everything from “holding together” icourse and inthe kinship that inks him to be accounted explain the presence linguists who, despite their debt to condition, for exampl text of motifs that are indjspensable ‘Saussure in this regard, are no less critic ¥ detect the conceptual premises of glosse- ive grammar in the second Discourse and in uiekly can see at work, beneath 1e notions of “substance” and ‘each of the two former applied. ter. And how can we not thing accredited to “Cartesian linguistics” rot he who “began” with the Port-Royal Legic associate, from the very beginning, the theme of the creativity of language wi ‘of general grammaticality?* Tiny, 1964, pp, 23 mn Distr, whe Rowsscau describes 152 153Form and Meaning: ANote on the Phenomenology of Language Originally published in the Reoue internationale de pilsophie, 19679, no. 8 155To gar ikivios tow amorphow morph. Plotinus! Phenomenology’s critique of the state of metaphysics was aimed only at its restoration. Phenomenology ascer i physics to the essence of its task turous” speculation, to back to the critical project of “frst philosophy” If certain metaphysical systems awaken suspicion, and even if the entirety of metaphysics is de facto “sus- pended” by phenomenology, the latter does not exclude “metaphysics in gen- ‘The concept of form could serve asa thread to be wed in phenomenology’s Greek words in a highly equivocal fashion, nevertheless one may rest assured. that these words al refer to fundamental concepts of metaphysics. In reinseribing to deliver these concepts from the latter-day metaphysical hhad overtaken them, accusing these interpretations of having deposited, in the word itself, the entire burden of an invisible sedimentation. But Husserl always {and, if need be, against the founders, a to criticize an other concept of form—we inevitably evidence of a kernel of meaning. And the medium nothing other than the language of metaphysics. I “form” means, how the possibilt variations imaginable objections to it are this self-evidence can beForm and Meaning conceptuality can displace. All the concepts by means of which eidas or morplé have been translated or determined refer to the theme of presence in general, orm Formality is whatever aspect of the thing in general presents. seen, gives itself to be thought. That metaphysical thought— smenoTogy—is.a thought of Being as form, that in meta- ndige Gegenwart) scendental experience in gener Privilege of thdria, in phenomenology, is sometimes been said, and although the classical theoretisms are p back into question in phenomenology, the metaphysical dominati cept of form is bound to occasion some submission to sight. This submission always would be a submission of sense to sight, of sense to the sense-of-vision, since sense in general is the very concept of every phenomenological field. One could elaborate the implications of such a placnig-on-view. One might do so in ‘numerous directions, and based upon the most apparent places of the phenomenological problematic and text: for example, by showing how this pl ing on view and this concept of form permit one to circulate between the projet Of formal ontology, the description of time or of intersubjectivity, the latent theory of the work of art, ete. But, course, their relationship, as concems this placing om me particular attention. Thus have we chosen to narrow ‘our angle here, and to approach Ideas. Between the determinatio the predominance of the system. And yet coher these analyses into question, Meaning in the Text For more than two-thirds of the book, everything occurs as if transcendental ‘experience were silent, inhabited by no language; or rather deserted by expres- 158 Meaning in the Text sivity as such, sin the essence or telos of description of the fu of language, Husserl gave himself the right, for meth consider the “layer” of expression, provi Husserl ean give himself this right stitutes an original and rigorously The or correlations have just been described: the paral ‘oema. Thus, it is already a given that however original, logos would have to be organized according to the paral oema. The problem of “meaning” (bedeuten)' is approat which is entitled “The Noetic-Noematic Stratum of the ‘Logos.’ Meat ing (Bedeuten und Bedeutung).” The metaphor of the si tions. On the one hand, meaning is founded on some- and this dependence will be confirmed ceaselessly by ‘Husser!’s analysis. On the other hand, meaning constitutes a unity can be rigorously delimited credible throughout lines. This suspicion is not pu disquiet as concerns the descriptive fidelity the metaphor of the stratum does not correspond to the structure one secks to describe, how could ave been us chargeand Meaning, ‘This distrust of a metaphor is manifested the moment a new complication of ly to indicate that the tum, as we shall See, is far from apparent from the very openit lysis that itis a question of discourse that which assures the properly logical functioning, the essence or telos of language here are determined as logical; the theory of discourse reduces the considerable ue. A metaphor betrays the difficulty of this first reduction; will call for new formulations and new distin« act-strata in the s logical’ sense, are interwover therto considered, and in their case no less than in the parallelism of noesis and noema must be clearly brought out. The prevalent and unavoidable ambiguity of our ways of speaking which is caused by this par- + allelism and is everywhere operative where the concomitant circumstances a ‘mentioned, operates also of course when we talk of expression and meaning” (p. 345). "The interweaving (Verwebung) of language, the interweaving of that purely language in language with the other threads of experience const doth, The word Verwebung refers to this metaphorical zone, The “ “woven,” their intercomplicatio the warp cannot be distinguished {um of the logos were simply founded, one could ext prelinguistic stratum’ rest. We know already—and ription does not and simply founding ground of signification, ground, a pedestal of silence, does not found discourse in presence of the thing itself if the texture of the text, in a word, Il have been put back disentanglement are therefore the phenomenal Mirror Writing, Huse! begins by delimiting the problem, by simpliyingo pur He then proceeds fo a double exuson orf yeu wo» Baw to a necealty whose rig fatons and which wil never agnn be pat Sensory fae of language, its sensory and nonin the animate “proper body” (Le) of language, fs put ou of ecuation, Since,Form and Meaning separate the expres: sive stratum from the preexpr the one upon the other to an eidetic an: o formulation only after a certain progress of the analysis: “how to interpret the to those that are not expressed, and what changes th ‘expression supervenes; one i then led to different; and not only for very general reasons (agcess to an openly transcen- dental problematic, appeal to the notion of noema, acknowledged generality of Rather, he simply + Bedeutung for the order of expres If, and to extend the concept of sen discourse will abwaye have to dro pon ay, i only to repeat or to reproduce a content of sense which does not aw meat i ngs are thus, discourse will only transport to the the sick dusser: which was spoken of in the first of th Thus, we are already in possession ofthe first is, unproductie. Husser!'s analysis is on nition in its first stage: “The stra Productivity, its noematic service, ‘conceptual which first comes with in expressing, and in the form the expressing’ 48-49), ‘This unproductivity of the logos is embodied, if we may put it thus, in the Hussertian description. It again permits itself to be seduced by two metaphors to which we cannot not pay attention. ‘The first seems to pass by Husserl unnoticed. Iti displaced between a writing and a mirror. Or rather, it says mirror writing. Let us follow its constitution In order to set forth the difference between Sinn and Bedeutung, Husserl recurs to a perceptual exampl In a certain Way, the statement “this is white” is perfectly independent of the perceptual experience. It is even intelligible for someone who has not had this perception. ‘And the Investigations had demonstrated this rigorously. This independence of the expressive value equall the independence of the perceptual sense. We can make this sense explicit: “This process makes no call whatsoever on ‘expression neither on expression in the sense of ve as verbal meaning, and here the latter can also be present event adds no content of sense; and yet, des} of it the appearance of expression is rigorously new. Because it only reissues the noematic sense, in a certain way, expression is rigorously novel. To the extent that it neither adds nor in any way deforms, exp nse: by providing acces 163Form and Meaning y consists in not having to erase passageway of sense. ransparency must have some consistency: not only in order toexpress, bbe impressed by what afterward it will give to Y should indicate a I to transporting a cor the same token to bring this sense to conceptual generality altering it, in order to express what is already thought (one almost ould have to say written), and in order to redouble faithfully—expression then (0 be imprinted by sense at the same time as it expresses is the new image of its imprint itself on the naked page of mean of these two concepts, production and rev something which by its natu itself in a meaning, leaving or receiving its formal mark in a Beil 164 Mirror Writing sense already would be a kind of blank and mute writing tedoubling itself in ‘meaning. ‘The originality of the stratum of the Beiewtu kind of tabula rasa. The foreseen. In particula cepts—such as they are already and unig that meaning can be separated from themselves are always older principle, one could suppose that ‘welcomed the first production of sense, in fac in some way would have had its sense upon sense, di of sense, obliging, according to a given rule, syntact sne empirical necessity among oth cannot be put between parentheses in order to pose transcendental que of rightfulness, since the status of meaning cannot be fixed without It to see how it can be reconciled with his future thematic, for example that of The Origin of Geometry. This themati ously, and quite precisely, the one which we are following at the moment and that of a sedimented history ‘of badeuten. And even if one considers only egological history, how is the per- petual restoration of meaning in its virginity to be thought? However, the scriptural analogy does not hold Husser|s attention here. An= i other metaphor deman ‘The milieu that receives the imprint would be neutral. Husserl has just evoked conceptual Ausprigung. He then determines the neutrality of the mi of a medium without its own color, su as that ithout a determined opaqueness, without en, is less that of transparency than that of specular reflection: "A peculiar intentional instrument lies before us which essentially possesses the outstanding character (pp. 347-48). Cf logos to sense: on the oneForm and Meaning produced without adding anything to sense. Here one could speak, in a sense, of a conceptual fiction and of a kind mm that picked up the of sense in the generality of the concept. ‘The two words do not occur ductive production of logic would be original due to this strange concurrence fung and Einbildung. the accidental metaphoricity it of discourse. It is because discourse occasionally must lize images, figures, and analogies—which would be as its debris—that logos ‘must be described simultaneously as the unproductivity of the Abbildung and as the productivity of the Einbildung. If one tive discourse, by the same token one would \guage, to precisely what as the imaginativeness ‘h colours their appli- (p. 348). Therefore metaphor is yenomenological discourse is to ‘The Limiting Power of Form If Husserl suspects all the predicates brought into the milieu of the never criticizes the concept of the medium itself. The expressive stratu heading, precisel we just evoked and that we related to. logical’ medium, the medium of expression, philosophers and psychologists who are guided by general logic problems of expression and meaning (Badeutug) lie nearest of ‘generally speaking, which, so soon as one seeks seriously to reach their 166 The Limiting Power of Form shadow, the absolute transparence of discourse. : needs (discourse as pure meaning) to be useless: itis only to preserve and to glance at the sense which science confers upon it. Nowhere else can discourse ineously be more productive and more unproductive than as an element of theory. this unproductive productivity is the telos of expres- discourse has never ceased to function, here, as the ‘model of every possible discourse, ‘The entire analysis, henceforth, will have to be displaced between two con- cepts or two values. On the one hand, ideal discourse will have to accomplish an overlapping or a coincidence (Deckung) of the nonexpressive stratum of sense and of the expressive stratum of meaning. But, for all the reasons we have already recognize ‘overlapping can never be a confusion. And the work of