Derrida’s trace beyond/between Freud’s (un)conscious memory as deferred meaning beyond/between present/absent perception

“The thematic of the trace is a direct borrowing from the mind or mental process as a pattern for shifting traces and effects, derived from Freud directly as he himself says, as well as from Heidegger. Derrida’s very fictionalizing of history resembles closely the case-histories which Freud constrcuted from his analysands.” (Powell, 60)

“Derrida answers with is most abiding way of reading and using/abusing Freud’s text: he says it is a tale in which the human is made into a machine, and choices are pre-programmed by history, and destiny, or life-history. The Freudian texts approach the problem of memory, of how a virgin memory, always fresh to impressions, can also be inscribed, yet remain pure. Freud’s answer, which Derrida’s paper sets out to be bring to light more clearly, is that a virgin space can be both inscribed and uninscribed, by a writing of traces.” (Powell, 61)

“The metaphor of pathbreaking, so frequently used in Freud’s descriptions, is always in communication with the theme of supplementary delay and with the reconstitution of meaning through deferral, after a mole-like progression, after the subterranean toil of an impression. This impression has left behind a trace which has never been perceived, whose meaning has never been lived in the present, i.e., has never been lived consciously.” (Derrida, “Freud and The Scene of Writing” , Writing and Difference, 269)

“This is how Freud’s version of memory functions; and it is also how Derrida perceived the trace-writing to function in the mind of the writer, reader, and finally in any existent thing. The trace is constituted by its being erasable, and essentially absent at any given moment. Essentially absent rather than present, the trace exists not in the present, but in a time which keeps it repressed or lets it surface, in a space which is never here, but somewhere else, absent. But the correct term is not ‘absent’ , the opposite of ‘present’, but, rather , it is the term  ‘different’ : the trace is deferred and self-deferring.” (Powell, 61) 

Paradoxes and Oxymorons — John Ashbery

This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level.

Look at it talking to you. You look out a window

Or pretend to fidgit. You have it but you don’t have it.

You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other.

 

The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot.

What’s a plain level. It’s that and other things,

Bringing a system of them into play. Play?

Well, actually, yes, but I consider play to be

 

A deeper outside thing, a dreamed roll-pattern,

As in the vision of grace these long August days

Without proof.Open-ended. And before you know

I gets lost in the stream ans chatter of typewriters.

 

It has been played once more. I think you exist only

To tease me into doing it, on your level, and then you aren’t there

Or have adopted a different attitude. And the poem

Has set me softly down beside you. The poem is you

Derrida (signifiers as supplements for the lack of signification, void, formless, without origin, fluidity of the birthing process without goal/aim)

“… a conflict points to a unity, a unity which is precisely absent. And since the origin is lacking, is not present, cannot be so any more, then the structure is an irreal, rather baroque, mathematical imposition on the variety of experience.” (Powell, 59)

“The overabundance of the signifier, the supplementary character is the result of a finitude, that is to say, the result of a lack which must be supplemented.’ (Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play 367)

“The absence is a lack of signification which our signs supplement. When there is no origin, the signs are set free, free of objects and of sense.” (Powell, 59)

“I employ these words, I admit, with a glance toward the operation of child-bearing — but also, with a glance toward those who, in a society from which I do not exclude myself, turn their eyes away when faced by the as yet unnamable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so , as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the non-species, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying forms of monstrosity.” (Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play” Writing and Difference,  370)

” … the ceaseless enjoyment and study of the fluidity of the mind, and the absence of origins …” (Powell, 60)

John Ashbery : The Tennis Court Oath

What had you been thinking about

the face studiously bloodied

heaven blotted region

I go on loving you like water but

there is a terrible breath in the way all of this

You were not elected president, yet won the race

All the way through fog and drizzle

When you read it was sincere the coasts

stammered with unintentional villages the

horse strained fatigued I guess … the calls …

I worry

 

the water beetle head

why of course reflecting all

then you redid you were breathing

I thought going down to mail this

of the kettle you jabbered as easily in the yard

you come through but

are incomparable the loving tent

mystery you don’t want surrounded the real

you dance

in the spring there was clouds

 

The mulatress approached in the hall – the

lettering easily visible along the edge of the Times

in a moment the bell would ring but there was time

for the carnation laughed here are a couple of “other”

 

to one in yon house

The doctor and Philip had come over the road

Turning in toward the corner of the wall his hat on

reading it carelessly as if to tell you your fears were justified

 

the blood shifted you know those walls

 

wind off the earth had made him shrink

 

undeniably an oboe now the young

 

were there there was candy

 

to decide the sharp edge of the garment

 

like a particular cry not intervening called the dog “he’s coming! he’s coming” with an

 

     emotion felt it sink into peace   

 

there was no turning back but the end was in sight

 

he chose this moment to ask her in detail about her family and the others 

 

The person.   pleaded—“have more of these

 

not stripes on the tunic—or the porch chairs

 

will teach you about men—what it means”

 

to be one in a million pink stripe

 

and now could go away the three approached the doghouse 

 

the reef.   Your daughter’s

 

dream of my son understand prejudice

 

darkness in the hole

 

the patient finished

 

They could all go home now the hole was dark

 

lilacs blowing across his face glad he brought you

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Caputo on Plato’s/Derrida’s Khora failing/beyond words, not universal/abstract , radical singularity in need of the proper name it is not

“Everything Plato says of khora or that is said of khora in the history of interpretation, comes too late, constituting a retrospective illusion, an ‘anachronism’ born of speaking of it in terms borrowed from the things which it contains but from which itself withdraws.” (95)

“Khora is always ‘prior’ to any mark or imprint, any form or determination that is attributed to it; it has nothing proper , no property of its own. It receives all and becomes none of what it receives” (95)

“Khora is not a universal (abstract place in general), not a particular (a contained place), but something radically singular:place itself — within which multiple places are inscribed. Like every singularity. it bears a proper name — treat Khora as if it were a proper name, like someone you know, capitalized — even though it has no proper name or essential propriety but just takes on the form of whatever inhabits it. For we need, we must, speak of ‘something like the khora — which is not something and which is not like anything’ , some way to determine this utterly indeterminable somewhat. We need some way to address it:not ‘the khora’ but’Oh, Khora.” Who are you , Khora”? (96)

“The discourse on the khora thus forms an almost perfect inversion of the discourse on the Good.” (96)

“On the one hand, a hyper-essential sur-reality for which words fail us, of which words fall short; on the other, a hypo-essential subreality, an almost unreal, indeterminable indeterminacy which seems rather to fail words, to fall short of word or meaning.” (96)

 

Caputo on Plato’s/Derrida’s Khora Beyond Giving/Receiving and Metaphor

“”It might appear at times that khora looks a little like the unknown God, the deus absconditus, the mysterious origin beyond origin, about whom we cannot say a thing.” (92)

“… two ‘tropics of negativity,’ that is, two opposing ways in which philosophical thought finds itself up against its limits, against something that resists being said, two things equally unsayable but for quite opposite reasons.” (93)

“Plato’s theory of the Good beyond Being … while giving birth to being, movement, and knowledge, it is itself beyond them all.” (93)

“But the khora constitutes another way to be otherwise than Being, another kind of third thing, one moving in a fully opposite direction and submitting to different tropes … khora seems to drop below being, barely to be at all, to be if at all next to nothing.” (93)

“…khora tends to slip outside philosophy, to resist any analogizing or participatory schema, to remain adrift and lost. Now, Plato says khora is ‘amorphous,’ and even though things come to be and pass away in it, khora itself does not become (or ‘participate’ in) any of these things. Although khora takes on the look of the things with which it is filled, that is true only for the while that they persist and these things do not in any way stain or mark it in their station.” (94)

“It is therefore, not a receptacle, because it is ‘older’ than any receptacle, which is something later on inscribed in it. As something absolutely indifferent to anything sensible or intelligible, it cannot be treated metaphorically, which always amounts to providing a sensible likeness for something intelligible. It is not so much a third kind as no kind, without generic determination. Khora is just there.” (94)

“… it does not ‘give’ or provide a place … Nor is it properly receiving, since it is unaffected by which it is filled. It is not even absolutely passive inasmuch as both active and passive operations take place in it. It resists every theomorphic or anthropomorphic analogy. It is not any kind of ‘it’ that is or does or gives anything.” (95)

“… khora pushes up against the very limits of naming.” (95)

Derrida (The Visitor/Stranger God Traumatizes The Subject, Changing Self/Names)

“… the subject as hostage, vulnerable subject subjected to substitution, to trauma, persecution, and obsession.” (364)

“the three monotheistic religions, as Abrahamic religions, are issued from a patriarch that came to this earth as a ‘stranger, a hote,ger,’ and a kind of saint of hospitality.” (369)

“This visitation of Yahweh is so radically surprising and over-taking that he who receives does not even receive it himself, in his name. His identity is as if fractured. He receives without being ready to welcome since he is no longer the same between the moment at which God initiates the visit and the moment at which, visiting to him, he speaks to him. This is indeed hospitality par excellence in which the visitor radically overwhelms the self of the ‘visited’ and the chez-soi of the host. For as you know these visitations and announcements will begin with changes of names, heteronomous changes, unilaterally decided by God who tells Abraham that he will no longer be called Abram but Abraham (with wordplay, it seems, on Ab-hamon, ‘father of the multitudes’), much as later, before Isaac’s birth, he will change the name of Sarai into Sarah (‘my princess’ into ‘princess’).” (372)

Caputo on Plato’s/Derrida’s Khora as/and Text/Discourse, History, Layers

“can we — and this is what Derrida is asking — speak seriously, properly, of the khora, as if it were an eternal being about which we could give a stable logos? Or may we relax and enjoy ourselves, telling a likely story (ton eikton mython) about it, which is all that the probable world of sensible appearances permits? Both and neither — since khora is a third thing, neither intelligible nor sensible, the discourse on which can be properly situated neither as logos or mythos, certain or probable.” (87)

“The story Critias tells he remembers having been told as a child of ten by his ninety-year-old grandfather, Critias the elder. the latter had himself been told the story by the great Solon, who was a friend of Dropides, the father of the elder Critias. Solon was himself given the story by an Egyptian priest, who had learned if himself from ancient Egyptian writings that record the foundation of Athens. The story then told to Socrates by the younger Critias is thus embedded in layers upon layers of ‘textuality’, multiple stratifications …” (88)

“…weaving together; any discourse, whether oral or written down, is a ‘text’ and passes through these textual layers.” (88)

“The same thing is true of any text, ancient or modern, sacred or profane, which would always be structured, ‘constructed’ of layer upon layer, fold upon fold, play upon play, so that to read a ‘text’ is always to un-fold, de-construct, what is going on.” (88)

“

Derrida (Hospitality as Deconstruction of Self/Other (Concept)

 

“… the contradictions (atopical:madness, extravagance, in Greek: atopos) of which we are speaking produces or registers the autodeconstruction in every concept, in the concept of concept: not only because hospitality undoes, should undo, the grip, the seizure, the capture, the force or the violence of the taking as comprehending, hospitality is, must be, owes itself to be, inconceivable and incomprehensible …” (362)

“If every concept shelters or lets itself be haunted by another concept, by an other than itself that is no longer even its other, then no concept remains in place any longer.” (364)

“Hospitality — this is is a name or an example of deconstruxtion.” (364)

“Hospitality is the deconstruction of the at-home; deconstruction is hospitality to the other, to the other than oneself …” (364)

Caputo on Derrida’s/Plato’s Khora Beyond/Outside (In)Visible Distinctions/Reconciliations

 

“By taking up the khora, Derrida turns — predictably — to an unpredictable, dark, and remote spot in the vast and gleaming architecture of Platonism. When we think of Plato, we think of the two worlds or regions allegorized in the cave: the upper world of the intelligible paradigms, the sphere of invisible and unchanging being in the sun of the Good that shines over all, as opposed to the sensible likenesses of the forms in the changing, visible world of becoming … ” (84)

“Derrida will not, in the manner of Hegel, look for some uplifting, dialectical reconciliation of the two in a higher third thing, a concrete universal, which contains the ‘truth’ of the first two. Instead, he will look around — in the text itself — for some third thing which the distinction omits, some untruth, or barely true remnant, which falls outside the famous distinction, which the truth of either separately or both together fails to capture, which is neither and both of the two.” (84)

“the khora is an ‘abyss,’ a void of empty space; it is also an infinite play of reflections in which the paradigms produce their images, simply ‘reflecting’ sensible things like a mirror that is not altered by the images it reflects.” (86)