“I have constantly insisted on the fact that the movement of deconstruction was first of all affirmative – not positive, but affirmative. Deconstruction, let’s say it one more time, is not demolition or destruction. Deconstruction – I don’t know if it is something, but if it is something, it is also a thinking of Being, of metaphysics, thus a discussion that has it out with [“s’explique avec”] the authority of Being or of essence, of the thinking of what is, and such a discussion or explanation cannot be simply a negative destruction. All the more so in that, among all the things in the history of metaphysics that deconstruction argues against [“s’explique avec”], there is the dialectic, there is the “opposition” of the negative to the positive. To say that deconstruction is negative is simply to reinscribe it in an intrametaphysical process. The point is not to remove oneself from this process but to give it the possibility of being thought.” (Derrida)
“However affirmative deconstruction is, it is affirmative in a way that is not simply positive, not simply conservative, not simply a way of repeating the given institution. I think that the life of an institution implies that we are able to criticize, to transform, to open the institution to its own future. The paradox in the instituting moment of an institution is that, at the same time that it starts something new, it also continues something, is true to the memory of the past, to a heritage, to something we receive from the past, from our predecessors, from the culture. If an institution is to be an institution, it must to some extent break with the past, keep the memory of the past, while inaugurating something absolutely new.” (Derrida)
“That is what deconstruction is made of: not the mixture but the tension between memory, fidelity, the preservation of something that has been given to us, and, at the same time, heterogeneity, something absolutely new, and a break. The condition of this performative success, which is never guaranteed, is the alliance of these to newness.” (Derrida)
Let us not begin at the beginning, nor even at the archive.
But rather at the word “archive”-and with the archive of so familiar a word. Arkhe we recall, names at once the commencement and the commandment. This name apparently coordinates two principles in one: the principle according to nature or history, there where things commence-physical, historical, or ontological principle-but also the principle according to the law, there where men and gods command, there where authority, social order are exercised, in this place from which order is given-nomological principle.
There, we said, and in this place. How are we to think of there? And this taking place or this having a place, this taking the place one has of the arkhe?
(Derrida)
…ecstasy between the inside and the outside, of house and country, of source and mouth, of river and our Mediterranean, on this shore of introjection and incorporation… (Derrida)
6 He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?”
7 Jesus replied, “You do not realize now what I am doing, but later you will understand.”
8 “No,” said Peter, “you shall never wash my feet.”
Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no part with me.”
a whole chemistry of information largely under the sway of unconscious drives, as well as affects and phantasms that were already in place before calculation,
(Derrida)
“… this institution of fiction which gives in principle the power to say everything, to break free of the rules, to displace them, and thereby to institute, to invent and even to suspect the traditional difference between nature and institution, nature and conventional law, nature and history. Here we should ask juridical and political questions.” (Derrida)
” … like a piece in a borderless fiction, neither public nor private, with and without a general narrator.” (Derrida)
“This condensation of history, of language, of the encyclopedia, remains here indissociable from an absolutely singular event, an absolutely singular signature, and therefore also of a date, of a language, of an autobiographical inscription. In a minimal autobiographical trait can be gathered the greatest potentiality of historical, theoretical, linguistic, philosophical culture — that’s really what interests me. I am not the only one to be interested by this economic power. I try to understand its laws but also to mark in what regard the formalization of these laws can never be closed or completed.” (Derrida)
“Hospitality — this is is a name or an example of deconstruction.”
“… the subject as hostage, vulnerable subject subjected to substitution, to trauma, persecution, and obsession.”
“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 (Derrida)
“I have become increasingly interested in the philosophical border between man and animal, which also becomes an examination of the traditional boundary between culture and nature. I have chosen to tackle this issue via the thinkers who seem to have questioned the self-sufficiency of humanism most deeply: Heidegger and Lévinas. Despite their critique of a traditional concept of the subject, they remain humanists by insisting on an absolute distinction between humans and animals. The establishment of man’s privileged position requires the sacrifice and devouring of animals. Not even Lévinas is willing to sacrifice the sacrifice.” (Derrida)
“(A deconstructionist reading) would mean respect for that which cannot be eaten—respect for that in a text which cannot be assimilated. My thoughts on the limits of eating follow in their entirety the same schema as my theories on the indeterminate or untranslatable in a text. There is always a remainder that cannot be read, that must remain alien. This residue can never be interrogated as the same, but must be constantly sought out anew, and must continue to be written.” (Derrida)
“it is not a limit . . . of a knowledge, the limit in the progression of a knowledge. It is, in some way, a structural non-knowing, which is heterogeneous, foreign to knowledge. It’s not just the unknown that could be known and that I give up trying to know. It is something in relation to which knowledge is out of the question. And when I specify that is is a non-knowing and not the secret, I mean that when a text appears to be crypted, it is not at all in order to calculate or to intrigue or to bar access to something that I know and that others must not know; it is a more ancient, more originary experience, if you will, of the secret. It is not a thing, some information that I am hiding or that one has to hide or dissimulate; it is rather an experience that does not make itself available to information, that resists information and knowledge, and that immediately encrypts itself. (Derrida)
“Without writing, un-writing, the unwritten switches over to a question of reading on a board or tablet which you perhaps are. You are a board or a door; we will see much later how a word can address itself, indeed confide itself to a door, count on a door open to the other.” (Derrida)
“Death, the ‘proper result’ and therefore the end of life, the end without end, the strategy without finality of the living — all of this is not solely a statement of Schopenheur’s. It also coincides almost literally with several Nietzschean propositions that we had attempted to interpret: on life as a very rare genre of that which is dead (Joyful Wisdom), a ‘particular case’ and ‘means in view of something else’ (Will to Power), this something necessarily participating in death; and finally on the absence, in the last analysis, of anything like an instinct of conservation. The unconscious port of registry, at the distance of this generality, also will have been Nietzschean.”(Derrida)
In this world only the play of artists and children exhibits becoming and passing away, building and destroying, without any moral additive, in forever equal innocence. And as artists and children play, so plays the ever-living fire, building up and destroying, in innocence. Such is the game that the aeon plays with itself. It builds towers of sand like a child at the seashore, piling them up and trampling them down. From time to time it starts the game anew. A moment of satiety, and again it is seized by its need, as the artist is seized by the need to create. Not hubris but the ever-newly-awakened impulse to play calls new worlds into being. (Nietzsche)
… knowing that it took place but never, according to the strange turn of the event of nothing, what can be got around or not which comes back to me without ever having taken place, I call it circumcision, see the blood but also what comes, cauterization, coagulation or not, strictly contain the outpouring of circumcision, one circumcision, mine, the only one, rather than circumnavigation or circumference, although the unforgettable circumcision has carried me to the place I had to go to, and circumfession if I want to say and so something of an avowal without truth turning around itself, an avowal without “hymn” (hymnology) and without “virtue” (aretalogy), without managing to close itself on its possibility, unsealing abandoning the circle open, wandering on the periphery, taking the pulse of an encircling phrase, the pulsion of the paragraph which never circumpletes itself, as long as the blood, what I call thus and thus call, continues its venue in its vein. (Derrida)
The reality principle coincided with a determinate phase of the law of value. Today, the entire system is fluctuating in indeterminacy, all of reality absorbed by the hyperreality of the code and of simulation. It is now a principle of simulation, and not of reality, that regulates social life.
(Baudrillard)
“analysis as untangling, untying, detaching, freeing, even liberation — and thus also, let us not forget, as solution. The Greek word analuein, as is well known, means to untie and thus to dissolve the link. It can thus be rigorously approached, if not translated, by the Latin solvere (to detach, deliver, absolve, or acquit). Both solutio and resolutio have the sense of dissolution, dissolved tie, extrication, disengagement, or acquittal (for example, from debt) and that of solution of a problem: explanation or unveiling. The solutio linguae is also the tongue untied.” (Derrida)
“It calls upon the reader as witness in the way one might address oneself to a confessor or to some transferential addresse, some would say to an analyst, assuming that the reader is not always an analyst. Freud,then, has the premonition (Ich ahne) that something exceeds the analysis. The interpretation, the analytic deciphering, the Deutung of a certain fragment did not go far enough: a hidden meaning (verborgenne Sinn) exceeds the analysis.” (Derrida)
“things will get more complicated later on, notably in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which will also complicate, as we shall see, the question of sense.”
(Derrida)
“Resistance must be interpreted; it has as much meaning as what it opposes; it is just as charged with meaning and thus just as interpretable as that which it disguises or displaces: in truth, it has the same meaning, but dialectically or polemically adverse, if one can say that… If, however, resistance is not lifted by the revelation of its meaning, then, beyond all these discursive and intellectual situations that belong to the order of consciousness, it can only be lifted by the intervention of an affective factor.” (Derrida)
“The inability to gather oneself, to identify with oneself, to unify oneself, all of this is perhaps tragedy itself, but it is also (the) chance and if there is no reason to dramatize, it is not only because that serves no purpose but also because it has not the least pertinence for this alliance of destiny, namely tragedy, and chance as the possible or the aleatory.” (Derrida)
“it has no meaning (death drive) and it resists analysis in the form of nonresistance, for the primary reason that it is itself of an analytic structure or vocation. Some would be tempted to infer from this that psychoanalysis is homogeneous to it and that psychoanalytic theory, treatment, and institution represent the death drive or the repetition compulsion at work.”
(Derrida)
“What is called “deconstruction” undeniably obeys an analytic exigency, at once critical and analytic. It is always a matter of undoing, desedimenting, decomposing, deconstituting sediments, artefacta, presuppositions, institutions.” (Derrida)
“and all this deconstruction is also a logic of the spectral and of haunting, or surviving, neither present nor absent, alive nor dead.” (Derrida)
“pure life or pure death: for me, it’s the same thing and everything I say goes as much against a philosophy of life as against its simple contrary.” (Derrida)
“What is getting archived! That is not a question. It is once again an exclamation, with a somewhat suspended exclamation point because it is always difficult to know if it is getting archived, what is getting archived, how it is getting archived — the trace that arrives only to efface itself / only by effacing itself, beyond the alternative of presence and absence. It is not merely difficult to know this; it is strictly impossible, no doubt not because there is always more to be known but because it is not of the order of knowledge, This is never a sufficient reason not to seek to know, as an Aufklarer — to know that it is getting archived, aithin what limits, and how, according to what detoured, surprising, or overdetermined paths.” (Derrida)
Not to say yes or no to reality except maybe occasionally, testing it with a foot, like a good dancer; to always feel kissed with a ray of sunlight and happiness (Nietzsche)
What should the language be such that seeing it and falling into it would be the same event? (Derrida)
to be filled with joy and always feel stimulated, even by affliction, since affliction upholds the happy man, and to see even in the most sacred things something comical. (Nietzsche)
it leaves the trace of an affirmation … it speaks! to all, to the other … the ambiguous force. and it speaks of what provokes it. (Derrida)
this sense of the continual fertility of the mother-site (an androgynous mixture of stars and sky). (Derrida)
we will have to circle around this appearance… and it is a question of offering.
(Derrida)
summed up in the word ‘seed’ , stars as seeds. the star-seeds will be linked with male and female milk. (Derrida)
through a process of transformation you will be able to follow, which stops to explain itself periodically, from quarter to quarter, sometimes fixing its mutations and reversals in some new schema. (Derrida)
Holds in reserve and exposes to view. (Derrida)
The reality principle imposes no definitive inhibition, no renunciation of pleasure, only a detour in order to defer enjoyment, the way station of a differance.Because the pleasure principle — right from this preliminary moment when Freud grants it an uncontested mastery — enters into a contract only with itself, reckons and speculates only with itself or with its own metastasis, because it sends itself everything it wants, and in sum encounters no opposition, it unleashes in itself the absolute other.(Derrida)
How shall we hear this name of abyss about which we will see that it opens up on the name itself, the name of name, and the name of which returns so often to the letter? (Derrida)
We have there two orders of order: sequential and jussive. From this point on, a series of cleavages will incessantly divide every atom of our lexicon. Already in the arkhe of the commencement, I alluded to the commencement according to nature or according to history, introducing surreptitiously a chain of belated and problematic oppositions between physis and its others, thesis, tekhne, nomos, etc., which are found to be at work in the other principle, the nomological principle of the arkhe, the principle of the commandment. All would be simple if there were one principle or two principles. All would be simple if the physis and each one of its others were one or two. As we have suspected for a long time, it is nothing of the sort, yet we are forever forgetting this. There is always more than one-and more or less than two. In the order of the commencement as well as in the order of the commandment. (Derrida)
As is the case for the Latin archivum or archium (a word that is used in the singular, as was the French “archive,” formerly employed as a masculine singular: “un archive”), the meaning of “archive,” its only meaning, comes to it from the Greek arkheion: initially a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded. The citizens who thus held and signified political power were considered to possess the right to make or to represent the law. On account of their publicly recognized authority, it is at their home, in that place which is their house (private house, family house, or employee’s house), that official documents are filed. The archons are first of all the documents’ guardians. They do not only ensure the physical security of what is deposited and of the substrate. They are also accorded the hermeneutic right and competence. They have the power to interpret the archives. Entrusted to such archons, these documents in effect state the law: they recall the law and call on or impose the law. To be guarded thus, in the jurisdiction of this stating the law, they needed at once a guardian and a localization. Even in their guardianship or their hermeneutic tradition, the archives could neither do without substrate nor without residence. (Derrida)
“Multiplicity and migration of languages, certainly, and within language itself, Babel within a single language … multiplicity within language, insignificant difference as the condition of meaning. But by the same token, the insignificance of language, of the properly linguistic body : it can only take on meaning in relation to a place. By place, I mean just as much the relation to a border, country, house, or threshold, as any site, any situation in general from within which, practically, pragmatically, alliances are formed, contracts, codes and conventions established which give meaning to the insignificant , institute passwords, bend language to what exceeds it, make of it a moment of gesture and of step, secondarize or ‘reject’ it in order to find it again.”
(Derrida)
“The expression “perpetual recurrence of the same thing” appears, between quotation marks, in the third chapter. Nietzsche’s name is not mentioned, but small matter. The passage concerns the existence in psychic life of an irresistible tendency to reproduction: this takes the form of a repetition no longer taking into account the pleasure principle, and even placing itself above the pleasure principle. In the fate neurosis this repetition has the characteristics of the demonic. the phantom of the demonic, and even of the diabolical, reappears measuredly in Beyond … Coming back — subject to a rhythm — this phantom deserves an analysis of the passages and the procedure, of everything that both makes him come back and conjures him up cadentially.”
(Derrida)
“Here, I am asking questions in the dark. Or in a penumbra, rather, the penumbra in which we keep ourselves when Freud’s un-analyzed reaches out its phosphorescent antennae. Reaches them out the unexpected structure of this text, of the movements within it which, it seems to me, do not correspond to any genre, to any philosophical or scientific model. Nor to any literary, poetic, or mythological model. These genres, models, codes are certainly present within the text, together or in turn, exploited, maneuvered, interpreted like pieces. But thereby overflowed. Such is the hypothesis or the athesis of the athesis.”
(Derrida)
they needed to diminish the stitches or reduce the knit of what they were working on. And for this dimunition, needles and hands had to work with two loops at once, or at least play with more than one.weaving a shroud by saving the lost threads (the lost sons) … (Derrida)
It is thus, in this domiciliation, in this house arrest, that archives take place. The dwelling, this place where they dwell permanently, marks this institutional passage from the private to the public, which does not always mean from the secret to the nonsecret. (It is what is happening, right here, when a house, the Freuds’ last house, becomes a museum: the passage from one institution to another.) With such a status, the documents, which are not always discursive writings, are only kept and classified under the title of the archive by virtue of a privileged topology. They inhabit this unusual place, this place of election where law and singularity intersect in privilege. At the intersection of the topological and the nomological, of the place and the law, of the substrate and the authority, a scene of domiciliation becomes at once visible and invisible. I stress this point for reasons which will, I hope, appear more clearly later. They all have to do with this topo-nomology, with this archontic dimension of domiciliation, with this archic, in truth patriarchic, function, without which no archive would ever come into play or appear as such. To shelter itself and sheltered, to conceal itself. This archontic function is not solely topo-nomological. It does not only require that the archive be deposited somewhere, on a stable substrate, and at the disposition of a legitimate hermeneutic authority. The archontic power, which also gathers the functions of unification, of identification, of classification, must be paired with what we will call the power of consignation.By consignation, we do not only mean, in the ordinary sense of the word, the act of assigning residence or of entrusting so as to put into reserve (to consign, to deposit), in a place and on a substrate, but here the act of consigning through gathering together signs. It is not only the traditional consignatio, that is, the written proof, but what all consignatio begins by presupposing. Consignation aims to coordinate a single corpus, in a system or a synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration. In an archive, there should not be any absolute dissociation, any heterogeneity or secret which could separate (secernere), or partition, in an absolute manner. The archontic principle of the archive is also a principle of consignation, that is, of gathering together.
(Derrida)
Such difference without presence appears, or rather baffles the process of appearing, by disclosing any orderly time at the center of the present. The present is no longer a mother-form around which are gathered and differentiated the future (present) and the past (present). What is marked in this hymen between the future (desire) and the present (fulfillment), between the past (remembrance) and the present (perpetration), between the capacity and the act, etc., is only a series of temporal differences without any central present, without a present of which the past and future would be but modifications. Can we then go on speaking about time, tenses, and temporal differences? …
(Derrida)
It follows, certainly, that Freudian psychoanalysis proposes a new theory of the archive; it takes into account a topic and a death drive without which there would not in effect be any desire or any possibility for the archive. But at the same time, at once for strategic reasons and because the conditions of archivization implicate all the tensions, contradictions, or aporias we are trying to formalize here, notably those which make of it a movement of the promise and of the future no less than of recording the past, the concept of the archive must inevitably carry in itself, as does every concept, an unknowable weight. The presupposition of this weight also takes on the figures of “repression” and “suppression,” even if it can not necessarily be reduced to these. This double presupposition leaves an imprint. It inscribes an impression in language and in discourse. The unknowable weight which imprints itself thus does not weigh only as a negative charge. It involves the history of the concept, it inflects archive desire or fever, their opening on the future, their dependency with respect to what will come, in short, all that ties knowledge and memory to the promise. … (Derrida)
It goes without saying from now on that wherever one could attempt, and in particular in Freudian psychoanalysis, to rethink the place and the law according to which the archontic becomes instituted, wherever one could interrogate or contest, directly or indirectly, this archontic principle, its authority, its titles, and its genealogy, the right that it commands, the legality or the legitimacy that depends on it, wherever secrets and heterogeneity would seem to menace even the possibility of consignation, this can only have grave consequences for a theory of the archive, as well as for its institutional implementation. A science of the archive must include the theory of this institutionalization, that is to say, at once of the law which begins by inscribing itself there and of the right which authorizes it. This right imposes or supposes a bundle of limits which have a history, a deconstructable history, and to the deconstruction of which psychoanalysis has not been foreign, to say the least. This deconstruction in progress concerns, as always, the institution of limits declared to be insurmountable,’ whether they involve family or state law, the relations between the secret and the nonsecret, or, and this is not the same thing, between the private and the public, whether they involve property or access rights, publication or reproduction rights, whether they involve classification and putting into order: What comes under theory or under private correspondence, for example? What comes under system? under biography or autobiography? under personal or intellectual anamnesis? In works said to be theoretical, what is worthy of this name and what is not? Should one rely on what Freud says about this to classify his works? Should one for example take him at his word when he presents his Moses as a “historical novel”? In each of these cases, the limits, the borders, and the distinctions have been shaken by an earthquake from which no classificational concept and no implementation of the archive can be sheltered. Order is no longer assured. (Derrida)
“The very condition of a deconstruction may be at work in the work, within the system to be deconstructed. It may already be located there, already at work. Not at the center, but in an eccentric center, in a corner whose eccentricity assures the solid concentration of the system, participating in the construction of what it, at the same time, threatens to deconstruct. One might then be inclined to reach this conclusion: deconstruction is not an operation that supervenes afterwards, from the outside, one fine day. It is always already at work in the work. (Derrida)
Since the destructive force of Deconstruction is always already contained within the very architecture of the work, all one would finally have to do to be able to deconstruct, given this always already, is to do memory work. Yet since I want neither to accept nor to reject a conclusion formulated in precisely these terms, let us leave this question suspended for the moment.” (Derrida)
and this openness opens the unity, renders it possible, and forbids it totality. Its openness allows receiving and giving. (Derrida)
In their form and in their grammar, these questions are all turned toward the past: they ask if we already have at our disposal such a concept and if we have ever had any assurance in this regard. To have a concept at one’s disposal, to have assurances with regard to it, this presupposes a closed heritage and the guarantee which is sealed, in some sense, by this heritage. And the word and the notion of the archive seem at first, admittedly, to point toward the past, to refer to the signs of consigned memory, to recall faithfulness to tradition. If we have attempted to underline the past in these questions from the outset, it is also to indicate the direction of another problematic. As much as and more than a thing of the past, before such a thing, the archive should call into question the coming of the future … (Derrida)
The king has indeed a body (and it is not here the original text but that which constitutes the tenor of the translated text), but this body is only promised, announced and dissimulated by the translation. The clothes fit but do not cling strictly enough to the royal person. This is not a weakness; the best translation resembles this royal cape. (Derrida)
… a presence both perceived and not perceived, at once image and model, and hence image without model, neither image nor model, a medium (medium in the sense of middle, neither/nor, what is between extremes, and medium in the sense of element, either, matrix, means). When we have rounded a certain corner in our reading we will place ourselves on that side of the lustre where the “medium” is shining. (Derrida)
The question of the question is more vast and stems from procedures of translation and theoretico-practical issues that join up at the borders (of several disciplines) that they destabilize.(Derrida)
It follows, certainly, that Freudian psychoanalysis proposes a new theory of the archive; it takes into account a topic and a death drive without which there would not in effect be any desire or any possibility for the archive. But at the same time, at once for strategic reasons and because the conditions of archivization implicate all the tensions, contradictions, or aporias we are trying to formalize here, notably those which make of it a movement of the promise and of the future no less than of recording the past, the concept of the archive must inevitably carry in itself, as does every concept, an unknowable weight. The presupposition of this weight also takes on the figures of “repression” and “suppression,” even if it can not necessarily be reduced to these. This double presupposition leaves an imprint. It inscribes an impression in language and in discourse. The unknowable weight which imprints itself thus does not weigh only as a negative charge. It involves the history of the concept, it inflects archive desire or fever, their opening on the future, their dependency with respect to what will come, in short, all that ties knowledge and memory to the promise. (Derrida)
“… we need at the same time interdisciplinarity, crossing the borders, establishing new themes, new problems, new ways, new approaches to new problems, all the while teaching the history of philosophy, the techniques, professional rigor, what one calls discipline”
“… audacious philosophers who cross the borders and discover new connections, new fields, not only interdisciplinary researches but themes that are not even interdisciplinary.”
“When you discover a new object, an object that up until now has not been identified as such, or has no legitimacy in terms of academic fields, then you have to invent a new competency, a new type of research, a new discipline.” (8)
“I try to dismantle not institutions but some structures in given institutions which are too rigid or are dogmatic or which work as an obstacle to future research.”
mark forshee 