Introduction:Of Biodeconstruction (Part I)

Erin Obodiac (bio)
DePaul University

Of Biodeconstruction is an invitation to an ongoing event, one that “precedes” even Jacques Derrida’s announcement that “the trace is the opening of the first exteriority in general, the enigmatic relationship of the living to its other” (Of Grammatology 75), and one that speculates on the day deconstruction’s “own historico-metaphysical character is … exposed” (9). The term biodeconstruction can be understood to include not only the already extensive writings about deconstruction and biopolitics, autoimmunity, nature-culture, the body, pharmakon, hospitality, death, vitalism, the question of the animal, survival, posthumanism, and the philosophy of life, but also a more recent emergence just as deconstruction is perhaps reaching its historical limits: for Catherine Malabou and others, contemporary biology brings deconstruction to these limits. This tension, if it is one, concerns in general the relation between philosophy and positivist-empirical science and in particular the critique of Derrida’s mobilization of biological discourses that deploy genetic, informatic, and cybernetic paradigms.

In the opening section of his 1967 book Of Grammatology, Derrida asserts: “today the biologist speaks of writing and of pro-gram for the most elementary processes of information within the living cell. And, finally, whether it has essential limits or not, the entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be the field of writing” (9). This mobilization both supports Derrida’s signature elaboration of arche-writing and the trace as “prior” to writing in the narrow sense—a “priority” that extends beyond the human being, the living, and the animate—and at the same time draws attention to the vestigial logocentrism of genetic and cybernetic discourses:

To suppose that the theory of cybernetics can dislodge by itself all the metaphysical concepts—all the way to concepts of soul, of life, of value, of choice, of memory—which until recently served to separate the machine from man, it must conserve, until its own historico-metaphysical belonging is also denounced, the notion of writing, trace, grammè [written mark], or grapheme. (9)

Cybernetics, it appears, does not overturn certain metaphysical conceptions of human and animal being, not only because it has not evaluated the way in which arche-writing and the trace are the conditions of its own (im)possibility, but also because it cannot make legible the critical difference, or better, the différance, between writing and arche-writing, code and trace. If Derrida directs us to understand “the history of life—of what we here call différance—as the history of the grammè” (91) or to see that “cybernetics is itself intelligible only in terms of a history of the possibilities of the trace as the unity of a double movement of protention and retention” (84), this directive occurs, perhaps, not so much as a zany repositioning of genetics and cybernetics within the history of deconstruction, but as the troubling dehiscence in play and at work in any reading or writing. And yet: just as we enter the postgenomic era, which puts into question the informatic paradigm in genetics, so too might we repose Derrida’s question concerning the historico-metaphysical limits of arche-writing and the trace.

Although biodeconstruction has come into its own in recent conferences, articles, and books, just as the linguistic paradigm in genetics has run its course—or, at least, has been challenged by epigenetics, systems theory, and research into the plasticity of the genome—Derrida’s engagement with biology, the life sciences, and the philosophy of life dates back to his earliest publications. For instance, in the 1963 Critique article “Force et signification,” he discusses epigenesis and preformationism as part of his critique of structuralism: we have here, avant la lettre, a preemptive strike against reified or formalist misreadings of Derrida’s emerging concept of writing—which might include “genetic writing,” given his familiarity with François Jacob and Jacques Monod’s 1961 article, “Genetic regulatory mechanisms in the synthesis of proteins,” which likens the workings of genetic material to cybernetic controls and linguistic operations. Derrida’s early books—Speech and Phenomenon, Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference—developed his signature concepts of arche-writing, trace, and différance alongside his critique of the living presence of self-consciousness, a cornerstone of phenomenology. His work began with and continued to dislodge logocentric, phonocentric, and phallocentric assumptions in the study of nature and technics, selfhood, the body, the machine, and death.

If biodeconstruction appears to be a latecomer, it would not be as an excrescence of deconstruction, which has always been engaged with questions of living being, the philosophy of life, and differential materiality. Neither is it quite a result of external pressures from contemporary biology or philosophy (such as new materialism, which tends to harbor a positivist conception of life). Malabou, for instance, argues that Derrida and other philosophers (such as Agamben, Esposito, and Heidegger) have trapped themselves in outdated understandings of biology. Yet some of Derrida’s writings are uncannily compatible with recent findings in the life sciences, as if living beings and their life processes were themselves “deconstructive.” This is not to say that deconstruction “got it right” after all or that it could ever be validated by the sciences; there is an interminable differend here, or, more optimistically, one that is persistently generative.

One example of this generativity, which presumes a metaleptic and proleptic skewing of any authoritative genealogy, could be the texts—Dawn McCance’s Reproduction of Life Death: Derrida’s La Vie La Mort (2019), Francesco Vitale’s Biodeconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences (2018), and Vicky Kirby’s “Tracing Life: ‘La Vie La Mort'” (2009)—that make a touchstone of Derrida’s 1975-76 seminar La Vie La Mort (which will finally be published in 2019). The seminar itself develops in detail—and in relation to Francois Jacob’s 1970 opus on genetics, La logique du vivant—the questions concerning biology that Derrida had already opened up in Of Grammatology in 1967. The life-death and living-on of the text is a vital concern of biodeconstruction, which is not to say that its practice is confined to genetic criticism, the avant-texte, or textual history. Although, for instance, box 22, folder 16 of the Derrida Papers at UC Irvine’s Special Collections and Archives includes a repository of conference brochures, panel materials, Derrida’s introduction, and notes from the 1992 colloquium “L’Analyse du génome humain: Libertés et responsabilitiés,” we might want to curb our archival enthusiasm and question the genealogical/genetic imperative, especially with regard to the biographesis of biodeconstruction.

Despite (and because of) these qualifications, this issue of Postmodern Culture would like to give special acknowledgement to the work of Francesco Vitale, whose lectures, articles, and books—and, not incidentally, his camaraderie—provide a well-versed entrée into deconstruction’s present conjuncture. In his recent book Biodeconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences, Vitale follows the Derridean premise that différance and the trace not only organize and constitute all life, from the amoeba to the human being, but also exceed the divide between life and death. Life as a texture of differential traces is explored in relation to the genome as a mode of writing; unlike François Jacob’s La logique du vivant, which presents a logocentric conception of the genetic code, differential traces allow for an openness to the outside. As demonstrated in Vitale’s analysis of Derrida’s seminar La Vie La Mort, this openness also deconstructs the opposition between life and death: life-death, autoimmunity, death-drive, and cellular suicide are not aberrations, but constitutive of all forms of life.

The essays in the present issue of Postmodern Culture navigate the conceptual analogues, and often the differend, between philosophy and biology by shoring up the critical force of deconstruction while attending to its limits. What comes into view is a differential materiality that counters the metaphysical tendencies in the philosophy of life and demonstrates that contemporary biology sometimes deconstructs its own positivism. The differential materiality outlined in this issue is partly in tandem with threads of new materialism, but counters the peculiar regressions—essentialism, transcendentalism, and positivism—that often mark that line of thought. Also undergirding the essays, perhaps symptomatically, is some ambivalence about the work of Catherine Malabou and Bernard Stiegler. Malabou’s exploration of plasticity as a philosophical and biological principle and Stiegler’s theorizing of epiphylogenetics as the dynamic at work in the history of technics exemplify two post-deconstructive ventures that take issue with Derrida’s elaboration of arche-writing and the trace. On the one hand, “plasticity” seeks to replace writing or inscription as a model, and on the other, “epiphylogentics” limits the trace to living beings, specifically the human being capable of exteriorized protentions and retentions. “Of Biodeconstruction” attempts to resist the tendency to retreat from or disavow some of the more far-reaching implications of Derrida’s statements about arche-writing and the trace. “Of Biodeconstruction” also hopes to loosen disciplinary strictures as the essays traverse terrain familiar and far-afield.

In the manner of a textual mitosis, “Of Biodeconstruction” is divided into two parts. Part I situates biodeconstruction within the current critical context and the Derridean groundwork; Part II presents targeted readings in biodeconstruction and an analytic response from Catherine Malabou.

Part I begins by asking “How do we do biodeconstruction?,” staging a conversation between Vicki Kirby, Astrid Schrader, and Eszter Timár on biodeconstruction as a practice that engages new materialist feminism, feminist science studies, the political economy of nature-culture, and biology as a social allegory. Biodeconstruction intersects with the work of collaborators/antagonists such as Lynn Margulis, Rosi Braidotti, Catherine Malabou, Jane Bennett, Judith Roof, Karen Barad, and Monika Bakke; intersectionality and the intrusion of attendant meta- or master discourses are given careful consideration.

The next essay, Francesco Vitale’s “Reading the Program: Jacques Derrida’s Deconstruction of Biology,” takes up Derrida’s 1975-76 seminar La Vie La Mort to analyze heredity, memory, and genetic program in relation to the trace and différance. In contradistinction to François Jacob’s The Logic of Life—which emphasizes a fixed program in genetics—Derrida’s intervention (along with George Canguilhem’s “The Concept of Life”) demonstrates that the totalizing closure and self-same identity that characterize the impermeability of “program” to the outside are untenable. The invocation of “writing” in genetics does not by itself produce a deconstructive biology—the risk of logocentrism and metaphysics in fact persists—rather, it pushes Derrida to zoom in further on the differences between arche-writing and writing in the narrow historical sense. Instead of confirming what might already be understood by heredity, genealogy, and memory, Derrida’s discourse on the trace, différance, and the supplement opens up a critique of DNA as fixed genetic program. In the seminar La vie la mort, the analysis of the analogy between cerebral memory and genetic memory, the analysis of the use of analogy in genetics, and the analysis of genetics as analogy expose the logocentric metaphysics imported by the informatic and cybernetic paradigm in biology. Derrida argues that between cerebral and genetic memory, instead of analogy, there is a differential relation: différance and the mnemotechnics of the trace subtend the cerebral and the genetic. Vitale’s essay suggests that for biology this différance means that the “program” is always open to the outside, a suggestion compatible with recent developments in genetics that emphasize environment, such as epigenetics.

In “Grammatechnics and the Genome,” Erin Obodiac argues for an expanded reading of the trace in relation to plasticity. Revisiting Derrida’s exposition of the trace as originary technicity and originary supplement, Obodiac suggests that understanding genetic writing as “plastic inscription” returns Catherine Malabou’s discourse on epigenetics and epigenesis to what was already intimated in Derrida’s 1967 Of Grammatology.

Mauro Senatore’s “Leaving a Trace in the World (II): Deconstruction and the History of Life” outlines ways in which the trace deconstructs the metaphysics of life and consciousness. Analyzing a range of texts from Derrida’s 1967 La Voix et le Phénomène [Speech and Phenomena] to the publication of The Beast and the Sovereign (Volume I) in 2008, Senatore follows through on Derrida’s sustained critique of phenomenological and Cartesian discourses on consciousness, temporality, and animality.

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Forthcoming in “Of Biodeconstruction” Part II, Elina Staikou’s “Autoimmunity in Extremis: The Task of Biodeconstruction” explores the radical dimensions of Derrida’s concept of autoimmunity. Raoul Frauenfelder’s “Biodeconstructing Merleau-Ponty” puts into question the teleological closure reasserted by the phenomenological reading of the living being. Jonathan Basile’s “How the Other Half-Lives: Life as Identity and Difference in Bennett and Schrödinger” sets biodeconstruction against new materialist, genetic determinist, and anthropocentric conceptions of life. Riccardo Baldissoni’s “Of Other Jaguars: Glosses to the Writing of God” reflects upon the continuity between ontotheology and biological science. Part II concludes with a response to “Of Biodeconstruction” from Catherine Malabou.

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The contributors to this double issue of Postmodern Culture would like to extend special thanks to Lynn Turner, who facilitated biodeconstruction panels at two separate Derrida Today conferences, and to Francesco Vitale, who convened an intensive seminar at the 2017 meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association, among several other biodeconstruction events.

Works Cited

• Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. (1967) Translated by G. C. Spivak, Johns Hopkins UP, 2016.