Tony Thwaites

Department of English
University of Queensland
tony.thwaites@mailbox.uq.oz.au

 

Steven Helmling’s “Historicizing Derrida”¹ reads Derrida’s writings, and particularly the huge corpus of other writings which have grown up around them, as lacking an essential “historically informed awareness” (1) which he proposes in part to supply.

 

A starting place, then, a place where two — at least two — sets of texts face each other. A program: “historicizing Derrida” is to be taken in the objective rather than the subjective sense the construction allows. Derrida does not historicize, Derrida is to be historicized. Helmling’s first sentence elaborates on what this “historicizing” might involve:

 

Accounts of Derrida stress his work’s diversity, and handle it in various ways; but none that I know of narrativizes this diversity, whether to relate it to its historical period, or to consider it as a corpus with a development, a record of internal tensions or contradictions — in short, a history — of its own. (1)

 

Historicizing is above all to be the narrativizing of the particular development which is proper to a corpus: its own story, resulting from its own internal contradictions. It is a matter of constructing a chronology, from early to late, as marked by the original French publication dates. A staggered schedule of translation may have obscured this particular chronology, but now that most of the Derridean corpus is available in English it is possible to gain an overdue “historically informed awareness of Derrida” (1). Translation, in other words, has no real historicality: all it does is obscure history, the real history, the one to be narrativized. Once we have bracketed off such features as incidental to the real history of “Derrida” — and they would seem to include anything involving “Derrida” after the publication dates and anywhere else but in France — we find that this chronology is marked by a single and massive break, whose shorthand is “May 1968.” The texts written before and after this divide are significantly different: the earlier ones have “a hopeful (even apocalyptic) sense of possibility,” while the later are marked by a “steady-state pathos” closer, it would seem, to the existential despair of Sartre and Beckett (5-6). Later in the essay, this distinction become equivalent to another, between “Derridean ‘writing’ … as grammatological theme [and] as ‘perverformative’ practice” (24, emphases in original). If Of Grammatologywas a “project of liberation,” it was only as an “early excitement” from which the later writings have unfortunately strayed (5-6).

 

It’s not difficult to raise all sorts of objections to this schema. Even if we were to grant in all its vastness the reduction of historicity to bibliographical sequence, the proposal simply wouldn’t work in its own terms. Derrida’s writing just doesn’t fall into anything like such a simple before-and-after pattern, as indeed Helmling himself points out. In a careful piece of close analysis, for example, he shows very well that the pre-1968 Grammatology has its own elaborate rhetoricity which is quite irreducible to the constative (8-10). It would not be hard to find similar examples in all of the earlier work. On the other hand, neither do constative, argued and expository texts or texts of direct political intervention cease after the magic date. Indeed, one of Helmling’s more elaborate statements of this before-and-after schema (24) comes immediately after a paragraph most of whose examples point out the simultaneity of both constative and perverformative features, and thus the impossibility of maintaining that pre- and post-1968 distinction. I add French publication dates to underline the point:

 

in Glas [1974] itself, for example, the left-hand column, on Hegel, proceeds expositorily, in sharp (and highly deliberate) contrast with the hyper-“perverformative” right-hand column on Genet. Such “inter”-effects, effects between philosophy and literature, are almost always at play when Derrida uses the double-column format; he gets like effects by putting similarly dissonant texts inside the covers of the same book — in The Truth in Painting [1978], for example, between the material on Kant and Hegel in “Colossus” [i.e., “The Colossal,” part 4 of “Parergon,” 1974] on the one hand, and the diary or postcard (“Envoi” [sic] -like) format of “Cartouches” [1978] and the dialogue of “Restitutions” on the other; or in Margins[1972] itself, the contrast between “Tympan” [1972] and such pieces as “White Mythology” [1971].

 

Here, again, a helpful marker is the 1968 divide that marks and inaugurates the break between the “apocalyptic” Derrida of Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology and the later “perverformer”… (23-24)

 

But Helmling has just shown, this very moment, that 1968 marks no such break, and his earlier analysis of the “Exergue” from Of Grammatology has shown that neither does it inaugurate it. Something quite interesting is going on here. It’s not simply that Helmling is wrong about Derrida, though he is certainly that too. What is far more interesting about it is that he also points out quite clearly just where he is wrong about Derrida and the precise aspects of Derrida’s texts which show this, andin the very same passages in which he asserts Derrida’s error. Helmling both misreads Derrida extensively and in that very misreading gets things right. It is a pattern we shall see again.

 

Conceptually, the problems soon multiply. What Helmling offers as an internal history, powered by the internal necessities and developments of the corpus under study, depends on that massive reduction of the entire field of historicality to that of publication, an act of abstraction which is marked rather than alleviated by the recognition of the need to “relate [Derrida’s work] to its historical period.” In its focus on this development of what is already specified as internality, Helmling’s historicization risks not seeing what occurs other than as development of what is already given, and thus of proposing, despite itself, a programmatic determinism. As this development is linear and unidirectional, this also occludes the ways in which history is necessarily and irreducibly also retroactive, even in the details of the ways in which texts face each other. Zizek puts it memorably: the repressed returns not from the past but from the future², and the significant event is constructible as such only in the light of hindsight. Helmling’s “historicizing,” though, seems to be able to conceive of historiography only as transparent, secondary and unproblematic. All of this is a worryingly singular history, too: everything which is historical, genuinely historical, will line itself up on this one vector of publication dates punctuated by 1968. And as the omission of translation from consideration shows, what falls by the way includes the ways in which “Derrida” has been a very different thing in, say, France, the UK, the US and Australia: each of these, and more, would require their own complex chronologies, plural and diffuse, irreducible to each other in the concrete materialities of their specific modes of institutional, professional, pedagogical, economic and political existence. But even within these, the timelines surely proliferate and divide as one considers the various disciplines within which “Derrida” is done: “Derrida” in philosophy is not the same set of practices — or even concepts — as it is in literary criticism, and both differ again from the uptakes of “Derrida” in, say, architecture and the social sciences. It is odd that Helmling can claim a “historically informed awareness” of Derrida only by the total bracketing-off of the ways in which “Derrida” is already, as the very condition of its existence, a massive, diffuse set of practices which are irreducibly and simultaneously material, social, and, yes, political, whatever that politics might be. And it is, to say the least, distinctly ironic that a claim for genuine historical awareness and political realism should have as its model the succession of publication dates in French editions of Derrida.

 

Throughout Helmling’s argument, “historicizing” seems to be a matter of invoking certain grand signifiers which are monolithic, globalising and almost entirely without discernible materiality. Thus, for instance, “one ‘historicizing’ answer” to the question of why Derrida’s confrontations with his contemporaries such as Foucault, Lacan and Levinas tend to be more anxious affairs than his critiques of past giants such as Hegel

 

involves philosophy’s status in our current historical moment in the West. Here the “contest of faculties” motif appears, and with it the philosophy/literature opposition . . . . For two centuries and more, Western culture has worried that poetry, or “imaginative” literature generally (and in most versions of this anxiety, religion, too), must lose power as modernity advances. The fortunes of philosophy in the modern world are similarly troubled . . .³ (21)

 

What is “our current historical moment in the West?” Who are “we” that this is “our” moment? Is it only one? Helmling and I both work in English departments, but the “English” course and degree, indeed the university itself, mean different things in the United States and Australia; they do different things, within different relays of pedagogy, governmentality, commerce and the cultural industries, within different histories. We do not simply share a “current historical moment,” but are placed differently in a series of complex overlapping and differential historical temporalities. Is “philosophy’s status” the same everywhere in these? (Even if the chronologies of publication and availability of the contested texts are quite different for Anglophones and Francophones?) Where precisely do the “‘contest of faculties’ motif” and “the literature/philosophy opposition” “appear?”⁴ It is a massive synecdoche which says “Western culture” instead of the vastly smaller set of specific sites in which such contests and oppositions are shorthands for very real issues and contestations; it’s also a synecdoche which it is really only possible to make from certain positions. While it makes noises of urgency and unswervable import (what could be more pressing than “our current historical moment in the West?” — at least for us in the West, if that’s where Australians are), it also avoids saying anything in the slightest bit specific about the historicities and politicalities of philosophy and literature, either as concrete historical and political practices themselves or about their actual or possible relations to other such practices: the occasion for the invocation of our “current historical moment in the West” is, after all, a consideration of the protocols of what philosophers do . . . . Instead, what is offered as “historicizing” turns out to be a commonplace drawn from, of all people, Matthew Arnold.⁵

 

Or again, having characterized Derrida’s “perverformative” writing in texts such as “Tympan” as a “special writing, an elite or avant-garde writing . . .”⁶ (26), Helmling adds:

 

It seems a version of a thematic as old, in Western Culture, as the book of Job, if not of the Iliad, the conflict between collective salvations and individual ones. (27)

 

Now this is, to say the least, highly dubious history, literary, social or otherwise. Even if the Iliad is in some way about “salvation” (an assertion I can treat only with a great deal of scepticism), it makes no sense at all to see either Job or Homer in terms of an opposition of the individual and collective. That is, certainly, a thematic common enough in some forms of literary criticism over the last eighty years or so, if not quite over all of “Western Culture” per se. In other words, it is a relatively contemporary concern which has arisen in a particular nexus of disciplines, and is here being written back into previous texts to produce a tradition. Its effect is to remove the entire question of the individual and the collective from the historical, making it into an eternal verity like “human nature” and “Life” — ironically enough, here in the name of historicizing and politicizing.

 

Helmling’s vast brushstrokes paint a History of Ideas of the most idealizing kind. There is a huge leap between abstractions such as “Western culture” and concrete questions of what cultural formations such as the literary actually entail: their existence within certain institutions and cultural industries, their specificities of class, sex, ethnicity, their strategies of class distinction, their economics and pedagogies, and so on, and so on. Invocation of commonplaces from a moral-political high ground serve only to obscure and even trivialise the very politicalities of critical practices they supposedly champion.⁷ In reducing the complex temporalities of texts to single linearities, and the question of relationships among texts to ruptures marking out oppositions, Helmling produces an eminently mythic topos. Once narrativized by “historicizing,” it inevitably produces a story of the Fall, or its symmetrical opposite, the Apocalypse, or both: once “Derrida” was apocalyptic, but now it’s lost it.

 

Helmling’s judgement on the fallen Derridean “perverformative” after-texts can hardly be surprising then, given as it is by the initial setting-up of the problem. What may be more surprising, though, is the complex misgiving of its demurral:

 

And I’m afraid my first answer can’t help sounding a bit moralistic: ‘perverformativity’ diffuses the political application, or ambition, of Derrida’s work. (26)

 

That “I’m afraid” is on the one hand a way of making a bottom-line statement of an unpalatable truth which can neither be retracted nor modified (“That’s just the way it is, I’m afraid”). On the other hand, it’s a marker of a real apprehension in its apology for introducing the moralistic into a discussion of the political. The unease is in the sheer excess of qualifications: well, yes, this is moralistic, or at least it sounds moralistic, if only a bit and for a first answer; what’s more, this first answer is rapidly going to become a last word, as the matter is out of my hands, it can’t help sounding like this, that’s simply the way things are, I’m afraid. If it can’t help sounding moralistic, it’s because that’s exactly what the argumentative strategy here is: in its insistence on a certain position beyond negotiation or reconsideration, beyond contingency and event, moralism, in the pejorative sense both postulated and feared, is precisely the stance of withdrawal from the vicissitudes of the political: this, I’m afraid, is non-negotiable: the bottom line. And it worries the argument that at this point the only way it can progress is through such a move. A split has opened up again, which all its qualifications cannot close, only note.

 

The occasion for this nervous, diffident, even apologetic introduction of moralism is a move in which “application” comes to define “the political” itself. Outside of “application,” nothing can be political or have anything to say about the political; but it can become political if it applies itself in the right way, by immersing itself in and allowing itself to be determined by the criteria to which it dutifully applies itself. What “Derrida” can contribute, if it is of true political will to undergo these Loyolan exercises, is the obedient offer of its special skills to a project whose aims, means, conceptualisation and limits are already fully known and remain unchanged by its arrival: all that “Derrida”‘s arrival affects is the strategies its skills might enable in working towards those ends.

 

This asymmetry of “application” is perhaps at its clearest in Helmling’s persistent conflation of deconstruction and Ideologiekritik, as stated most concisely in an early footnote:

 

“Metaphysics” as analogy or synecdoche for “ideology” seems to me the self-evident premise of any “political” deconstruction, though only Michael Ryan, so far as I know, has made this premise explicit, in Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), and not until chapter 6, “The Metaphysics of Everyday Life:” “The deconstruction of metaphysics can be integrated with the critique of ideology because metaphysics is the infrastructure of ideology” (117). (footnote 2)

 

Ryan’s range of possible relations between deconstruction and Marxism is somewhat wider than a straight application of the former to the latter, though it is still far too concerned with showing them to be at bottom the same thing rather than with the more complex questions of the complementary and sometimes highly disjunct politicalities of two historically, conceptually and contextually specific discourses. Were this to be taken into account, we would have minimally to augment Ryan’s statement with a rider: the deconstruction of metaphysics cannot be integrated with the critique of ideology because metaphysics is also the infrastructure of critique. There must always be something left over in such an “integration,” which can thus no longer simply be an integration. Ryan recognizes this: to the extent that metaphysics is the infrastructure of ideology, the two cannot be coterminous. But for Helmling, the two are simply and unproblematicly analogous: one is the other, and that’s self-evident; deconstruction, if it is to have any political application at all, can only be Ideologiekritik.⁸

 

In this reconfiguration of the relations between two discourses as exclusively a matter of “application,” a distinction and an elision are being made at the same time. On the one hand, the distinction is between “the political” and “the apolitical,” or “the historical” and “the ahistorical.” The two need to be distinguished from each other very sharply for the argument to have any force. They have different moral values, for a start: Derrida does not historicize. But as the very narrative here is of making political, of historicizing and narrativizing and giving sight where there was only blindness before, the two cannot be held altogether separate: Derrida must be historicized. One term becomes the other, if it tries very hard (or alternatively not enough), or gets a little help. The simple and necessary possibility of movement from one to the other means that they can never be as far apart as on the other hand they need to be. In this conceptual-pragmatic economy, the distinction between them can only be one of an uneasy vigilance, which is always in danger of finding itself empty because all that is necessary to it is that it be a vigilance in making distinction. “Politically oriented criticism” in this sense — and here is the pity — is all too easily criticism which exhausts itself and its efficacity in this vigilance.

 

On the other hand, the simultaneous elision on which this distinction relies is that of the political with position. That is, rather than being an affair of what Arkady Plotnitsky characterizes as “the irreducible complexity of the heterogeneous”⁹ and the differences and differends which arise from the positional, “the political” becomes the name for a certain range of actual positions. What is between positions is collapsed into position, and this in turn — given Helmling’s emphasis on the constative as the favoured mode of the political — is collapsed into the proposition. The political is the propositional, the thematic, the referential. In that the “perverformative” resists reduction to the constative, it does not lend itself to the political, but must be redefined as purely linguistic, formal, immanent:

 

The Aufhebung of speech/writing proposed in Derrida’s early work was projected as belonging to the future (or, at a minimum, a future). By contrast, the point of “perverformativity” is its immanence in the “letter,” ideally indissociable from, and hence to be consumed in, the “present” of the reading experience itself, without any remainder of “the thetic” or any “thematization” importing anything for, or importable into, a future. (27)

 

We may question whether Aufhebung is really an accurate description of a series of investigations into what in “writing” refuses to be subsumed into “speech.” More importantly, can the immanence of performativity in the letter really be sustained for a moment? What performative force can the statement “I declare you married” have outside of the elaborate social-political-economic-religious-ethical-governmental apparatuses which support it, and only within which marriage becomes a possibility? Indeed, it is hard to see how any of even the classical Austinian illocutionaries such as contracts, promises, warnings, condolences and greetings — let alone the altogether more complex issues of Derridean “perverformativity” — can in any sense at all be “consumed in the ‘present’ . . . without any remainder . . . importable into a future”¹⁰. Odder still, though, in the very next sentence this hermetically sealed present from which nothing whatsoever passes into the future comes by quite unspecified means to determinethat future, and with an absolute and iron law:

 

The future . . . becomes . . . the future anterior, a “will have been,” a future determined by what preceded it, by the logic of “event” and of “outcome” — a continuity of present and future that makes the future, inescapably, “the same” as the present, thus foreclosing any possibility of change, revolution, rupture, etc., that would make it “different” from or “other” to the present. (27)

 

Grammatically, the “will have been” of the future anterior is not at all a matter of “a future determined by what preceded it:” that would be a possible — but certainly not even then a necessary — use of the simple future, the “will be.” The future anterior is a much stranger tense, of a future which has not yet arrived and is itself yet to be determined, but which determines retrospectively, in its turn, the past which will have beenfor that future. Invoking a past which has itself not yet arrived, or is always in the process of arriving, the future anterior not only describes the empirical delays attendant on any historicity, but also, in its complex textual folding, the very structure of historicity as perpetually renewed wager.

 

There is a strange blinkering going on here, through that elementary error in tenses: its effect is to allow two alternatives which logically exclude each other — a total and absolute granulation of time into an endless series of independent and monadic presents, and the equally total and absolute determinism of a single eternal present — to be collapsed into absolute equivalents. The move begs, I would suggest, to be read in the same way as the “kettle logic” from Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious¹¹: as a parapraxis giving away and at the same time attempting to manage an unease. What is being pushed out of consideration at the cost of this radical incoherence is again just the same sort of temporality we saw emerging at other points of unease in Helmling’s text. It resonates with the ways in which the before-and-after-1968 scheme refuses to behave itself, and in which Helmling’s very statements of it are contradicted in advance not only by the “Derrida” to which they opposed themselves, but also by Helmling’s own text in the act of positing them; and with the ways in which the very possibility of “application” relies on and is marked by an anxiety about the reversibility of what it needs to insist is one-way, the direction of authority itself.

 

Helmling’s text wants to posit a history which has a single and linear temporality as the development of the internal logic proper to its object. Within this history, the relations texts have to each other are oppositional: early texts face late, constative face “perverformative,” “historicizing” face “historicizable.” But over and again, whenever Helmling tries to argue this point his own text shows manifest unease — performs its own unease — at its insistent inability to maintain those very properties even for itself, as the distinctions collapse in the very passages which attempt to shore them up. On the one hand, Helmling explicitly answers and demolishes his own particular argument against Derrida, complete with scholarly protocols of evidence from the texts in question, before he even presents that argument. On the other hand, to the extent that the evidence for that demolition is already there in Derrida’s texts, they have already given an answer. On both counts, Helmling’s argument arrives too late for itself, answered in advance not only by Derrida but also by itself. It finds its arguments refuted in advance, by a text which refuses for all that to place itself in any relation of simple opposition to Helmling’s, but is instead implicated in it liminally. Where Helmling’s text wants to assert its coherence of purpose, it finds itself divided against itself; and where it wants to draw a clear opposition, it finds itself unable to sustain the distinctions.

 

It must be emphasised that this is not just a matter of aporetics. What begins to emerge across the multiple ruptures Helmling’s argument has to negotiate and the legible indecision to which that gives rise, is a very different set of temporalities and spatialities from those he proposes, and quite irreducible to the linear sequence which is his model. These temporalities and spatialities are those of the performativity within which and as all such argument takes place. Here, certainly, we must be careful: “performativity” here would have to be recast not in terms of willed acts by individual subjects, but as the very possibility of that subject’s appearance in the social, within a sheaf of multiple and already social, political, institutional histories which alone (and without necessarily delimiting) give the “performative” its locutionary force and possibilities. “Performativity” in this sense would be, among other things, a way of naming the time and space of the institution so thoroughly absent from consideration in Helmling’s account. In its complex, open and eddying temporalities and its fractal, invaginated spatialities, such “performativity” would no less describe quite precisely those very features of Helmling’s argument which that argument cannot itself account for, and before which it exhibits such distress. In particular, given the non-totalizability of the histories from which the performative takes its locutionary force¹², it describes the ways in which response itself — structurally, institutionally, historically — is never simply a matter of conceptual opposition, but always part of a claim in a wager on the future. The dynamics of that wager — within which a certain modernist vanguardism would be a possible if by now somewhat pre-empted move of doubtful efficacity — are yet to be outlined.

Notes

 

1. Steven Helmling, “Historicizing Derrida,” Postmodern Culture 4.3 (May 1994). All references to this article will appear as parenthetical paragraph numbers in the main text.

 

2.Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 55-56.

 

3.I’m not being flippant in suggesting that there may be a more immediate, perfectly concrete and pragmatic answer to the question of Derrida’s nervousness, and one which doesn’t involve recourse to abstractions like “our current historical moment in the West.” Live people argue with you. I feel much more apprehensive about Helmling’s reply than I ever did about getting e-mail from Freud in the last paper I wrote.

 

4.Here Helmling joins a number of other projects of winnowing Derrida’s writings to separate the good (or at least politically or disciplinarily acceptable) from the bad. See, for example, Christopher Norris, Derrida (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987), or Rodolphe Gasché, The Taint of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986).

 

5.Via that most Arnoldian of contemporary British critics, Terry Eagleton (34), the early chapters of whose Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983) accepts and re-inflects Arnold’s fears of a decline in religion, and whose critique of Raymond Williams in Criticism and Ideology (London: Verso, 1978) traces his own genealogy back to Arnold through Williams, Leavis and Eliot.

 

6.”. . . a writing whose whole point is to be different from (or ‘other’ to) writing in general, writing at large, writing-as-usual . . .” But Derrida’s point is that there is no writing in general, and in particular no normative writing from which one measures deviations. There are specific forms, modes, genres, practices of writing, all of which can be specified only in their differences.

 

7. For a particularly thorough version of this argument, see John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993).

 

8.To rehearse the differences very briefly: Ideologiekritik, as Helmling uses the term throughout, opposes knowledge and non-knowledge as truth and falsehood, sight and blindness, politicality and apoliticality, or political effectivity and ineffectivity. The pairings line up, and in each pairing one term excludes the other. With Derrida, though, what is at stake is the ways in which knowledge and non-knowledge are implicated in each other. Non-knowledge becomes a condition and possibility of knowledge. It is what makes knowledges possible, but in the same movement is also what makes their completion impossible — and this, it should be added, in a way which has nothing whatever to do with the “existential absurdity” with which Helmling conflates it (4-5), but everything to do with the insistent openness of such a structure to what Lacan designates “the encounter with the real” (Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 51-5). In Helmling’s version of Ideologiekritik, knowledge and non-knowledge are exterior to each other, at least ideally; in “Derrida,” they are liminal to each, forming each other’s internal and external limits. In the one case, they abut along a geometrical boundary; in the other, they are fractally invaginated into each other.

 

9.Arkady Plotnitsky, In the Shadow of Hegel: Complementarity, History, and the Unconscious (Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1993), 300.

 

10.To say nothing of the entire category of exercitives, which Austin significantly states as “troublesome” and “difficult to define” (Austin, 151) for their very diversity, frequency and multiplicity of function. When expositives “are used in acts of exposition involving the expounding of views, the conducting of arguments, and the clarifying of usages and of references” (160) — and they include performances of affirming, denying, conjecturing, accepting, asking, answering, revising, deducing, analysing, explaining and interpreting — we may doubt there is any such thing as a non-performative, purely constative text. For all the reservations it is necessary to make about Austin’s strictures on the “serious” or normative speech act, and the formalism of any attempt to locate “locutionary force” within language itself, the great value of the category of performativity is precisely — even if as much against Austin as with him — in its resistance to the decontextualization on which Helmling’s “historicization” of Derrida depends. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1962).

 

11.Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 100.

 

12.And here, the reference to Derrida is certainly useful: this is of course a central argument of “Signature Event Context,” in Writing and Difference (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982), 309-330.