Reading the Programme: Jacques Derrida’s Deconstruction of Biology

Francesco Vitale (bio)
University of Salerno

Abstract

In the unpublished seminar La vie la mort (Life-Death) (1975-76), Derrida reads The Logic of Life by the biologist François Jacob. The seminar is oriented to answer a question already advanced in Of Grammatology: what are the deconstructive effects—if any—provoked by grafting the theory of information onto biological research, and in particular by the use of notions such as “programme” and “writing”? This essay shows how Derrida deconstructs the biological notion of “programme,” reading its definition in light of the dynamics of différance.

In the seminar La vie la mort, Derrida’s reading of François Jacob’s The Logic of Life is explicitly oriented to verify the following hypothesis, advanced in Of Grammatology (1967):

It is also in this sense that the contemporary biologist speaks of writing and pro-gram in relation to 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 programme will be the field of writing. If the theory of cybernetics is by itself to oust all metaphysical concepts—including the concepts of soul, of life, of value, of choice, of memory—which until recently served to separate the machine from man, it must conserve the notion of writing, trace, gramme, or grapheme, until its own historico-metaphysical character is also exposed. (9)

Throughout La vie la mort Derrida explicitly recalls this hypothesis, as well as the reasons for critical vigilance about it, and thus he also offers a verification:

Some ten years ago, in Of Grammatology, a chapter close to the beginning, entitled (just a coincidence, one would say, an almost subjectless prescience or teleology) The Programme, recalled that, I quote, “today the biologist speaks of writing and programme in relation to the most elementary processes of the information in the living cell.” But this was not to reinvest in the notion or word of programme the entire conceptual machine of logos and of its semantics, but to try to show that the appeal to a non-phonetic writing in genetics had, would have, to imply and provoke an entire deconstruction of the logocentric machine rather than call for a return to Aristotle. (1.22)¹

Therefore, the recourse to a theory of information and in particular to notions such as “programme” and “writing” grants by itself neither the emancipation of biology from philosophy (the rigorous scientificity of biology, as Jacob believes) nor the deconstructive impact of biological discourse. Conversely, these notions can easily work at the service of the “logocentric machine” and thus of the metaphysical conceptuality that structures the Western philosophical tradition. It would be possible to interpret the debt of genetic biology to cybernetics within the framework of the tradition of the “philosophy of life” that finds its roots in Aristotle and has developed through Hegelian synthesis, a tradition taken up unconsciously by genetic heredity, it being at the same time a repetition and a progress, a sort of evolutionary variation. This is precisely what Canguilhem argues in “The Concept of Life,” which Derrida recalls in this context:

When we say that biological heredity is the communication of a certain kind of information, we hark back in a way to the Aristotelian philosophy with which we began … To say that heredity is the communication of information means somehow to acknowledge that there is a logos inscribed, preserved and transmitted in living things. Life has always done—without writing, long before writing even existed—what humans have sought to do with engraving, writing and printing, namely, to transmit messages. The science of life no longer resembles a portrait of life, as it could when it consisted in the description and classification of species; and it no longer resembles architecture and mechanics, as it could when it was simply anatomy and macroscopic physiology. But it does resemble grammar, semantics and the theory of syntax. If we are to understand life, its message must be decoded before it can be read. (Canguilhem 316)

Derrida mentions this passage at the end of the first session of the seminar, after introducing his reading of Canguilhem’s essay as an interpretation of contemporary biology in light of the tradition of the “philosophy of life”:

Philosophy of life, these are the last words of Canguilhem at the end of the article. They are not taken at his disfavor, and if the entire article is oriented towards the demonstration that contemporary biology is still profoundly Aristotelian and Hegelian this is not taken against him, the opposite is true. (Derrida, La vie 1.20)

Yet, it is important to point out what follows: 1) Derrida considers it necessary to verify the hypothesis advanced at the time of Of Grammatology, that is, that recourse to the theory of information (in particular to the notions of “programme” and “writing”) does not necessarily entail by itself deconstructive effects but, on the contrary, can also consolidate metaphysical sediments within the scientific discourse; 2) this programme of verification must concern in particular the notions of “programme” and “writing.” What is at stake here is establishing the basis upon which the importation of these notions from cybernetics to biology and their specific use in biology can be justified. Respecting the programme of deconstruction, I shall start with “programme.”² In fact, Jacob ascribes to this notion a decisive role in the revolution that takes place in biology. It is only thanks to the incorporation of the theory of information into the life sciences that it was possible to understand the role of the DNA in the cell and, thus, finally, to describe the genesis and structure of genetic heredity on scientific bases:

Heredity is described today in terms of information, messages and code. The reproduction of an organism has become that of its constituent molecules. This is not because each chemical species has the ability to produce copies of itself, but because the structure of macromolecules is determined down to the last detail by sequences of four chemical radicals contained in the genetic heritage. What are transmitted from generation to generation are the “instructions” specifying the molecular structures: the architectural plans of the future organism. (Jacob 1)

In particular, for Jacob, the notion of programme imposed itself on the field of biology as it provides an account of the two traits of the living that he considers immediately evident to common sense:

The concept of programme blends two notions which had always been intuitively associated with living beings: memory and design. By “memory” is implied the traits of the parents, which heredity brings out in the child. By “design” is implied the plan which controls the formation of an organism down to the last detail. Much controversy has surrounded these two themes. (2)

Jacob alludes to the controversy about “acquired characters” and in particular about the possibility that the external environment influences and modifies the genetic programme of a single individual by generating mutations that will be transmitted to successive generations. For Jacob, this is a common illusion, a very old one, due to the ingenuous, intuitive, and non-scientific use of the analogy between “genetic and mental” memory (brain, mind, or psyche) (2). The analogy is justified, but if it is used naively, it can engender a dangerous confusion that leads us to identify genetic memory, the heredity that structures the living organism, with nervous or cerebral memory, which specifies the behavior of the individual with respect to the environment. If we attribute to genetic memory the structural traits of nervous memory—acquisition, conservation, and transmission of the data that derive from the environment—then it will appear legitimate to suppose that we can intervene from outside to modify genetic memory, that is, the genetic programme. According to Jacob, the introduction of the notion of programme allows us to establish the correct use (the effective, operative, and scientific use of the analogy between genetic memory and nervous memory), as it maintains the common characters and, at the same time, it avoids the identification of the two systems of memory so long as they correspond to two different and specific stages of the evolution of the living:

For modern biology, the special character of living beings resides in their ability to retain and transmit past experience. The two turning-points [points de rupture] in evolution—first the emergence of life, later the emergence of thought and language—each corresponds to the appearance of a mechanism of memory, that of heredity and that of the mind [cerveau]. There are certain analogies between the two systems: both were selected for accumulating and transmitting past experience, and in both, the recorded information is maintained only as far as it is reproduced at each generation. However, the two systems differ with respect to their nature and to the logic of their performance. The flexibility of mental memory makes it particularly apt for the transmission of acquired characters. The rigidity of genetic memory prevents such transmission. (Jacob 2)

Beyond the Analogy, the Difference

Derrida draws attention to the analogy examined by Jacob and more generally to the very concept of analogy here evoked. Firstly, for Derrida, Jacob imports a philosophical concept, such as “analogy,” into biological discourse by attributing to it a decisive, operatory value without considering its accuracy or its critical role with regards to the consequences that such value entails for the stability and consistence of a discourse that wishes to be rigorously scientific. The notion of analogy, of Platonic provenance, is in strict solidarity with the structure of hierarchized oppositions that characterize metaphysics (intelligible/sensible, signified/sign, proper/figured, concept/metaphor, and so forth); therefore, it works within this structure and, once adopted without critical vigilance, cannot but confirm the whole system:

As for the analogy in question, Jacob does not ask where it leads with its implications and with the very choice of its name. He determines that analogy as a similarity between two systems (in both cases, accumulation of a “past experience” and, in both cases, transmission of this experience). But one can only analyze the text to go further in the necessity and problematicity of this word analogy. Firstly, analogy is here between two systems and two logics, a system of relations of proportionality between multiple terms with variables. Just as nervous memory (that is, cerebral memory, thought and language in the traditional sense) accumulates and transmits information, so does genetic memory. This relation, this relation of relations (among four terms) was called by the Greeks a logos and an analogy. Here the analogy between the two relations, between the two logoi, is a relation between a memory that involves language or logos in the current sense (nervous or cerebral memory corresponding to the second emergence) and a memory without language in the current sense (genetic memory). Analogy in the logos of the modern geneticist (in his metalanguage or supposed metalanguage), between a logos in the so-called proper sense and an a-logos. (Derrida, La vie 1.15)

For the deconstruction of the metaphysical presuppositions implicit in the notion of analogy, Derrida explicitly refers to his essay “White Mythology.”³ In the seminar, he focuses on the consequences that the importation of the analogy carries into biological discourse. If what grants a properly scientific and non-metaphorical use of analogy is the discovery, realized by grafting cybernetics onto biology, that genetic memory works as a cerebral memory and thus as a language, that is, according to the structure and laws of logos, and, therefore, if logos is the guarantee of the rational structure—of the logic—of the living, then Canguilhem is right when affirming that through cybernetics, modern biology has unconsciously inherited the Aristotelian legacy of the philosophy of life and, thus, the metaphysical conceptuality on which this philosophy of life is grounded and from which Jacob wants to be free:

But this general analogy has been only possible when (today) we got to know, with a scientific knowledge, that the a-logos was also a logos in the broad sense, that genetic memory operated like a language, with code, message, possible translation of message, and that it operated also by means of analogies, that is, putting relations into relations [mises en rapport de rapports], and more precisely by means of four radical elements. (Derrida, La vie 1.15)

Once the relationship between genetic memory and cerebral memory has been subordinated to the order of logos and thus to the traditional conception of language that derives from it and that still governs the function of the key features of the theory of information (programme, code, message, transmission), there is a risk of importing into biological discourse, in its decisive articulation, the logocentric structure that characterizes the metaphysical tradition from Plato to Hegel up to Saussure and beyond, as it is demonstrated in Of Grammatology. In particular, the logocentric structure carries with itself the determination of the sign as the simple means of the external transmission of a signified constituted by itself, that is, produced within a certain ipseity (soul, subject, consciousness, brain) and, thus, autonomous and independent from the material exteriority of the signifier in charge of its transmission:

Once this analogy is accepted without interrogating what is logos, a message and a code determined on the basis of their semiotic code, it is possible to ask if this is enough to make the subject disappear, what Jacob calls “the intention of a psyche,” a formula that caricatures all traditional theological providences, in order to escape what the values of message, translation, design, end import from the system of logos, of traditional logocentrism. (Derrida, La vie 1.16)

One of the issues at stake in Derrida’s reading consists precisely in the possibility of liberating biological discourse from the bonds that tie it to the order of metaphysical discourse in order to highlight the latter’s deconstructive implications. Derrida deepens his analysis of the analogy between genetic memory and nervous memory to show that the latter’s precariousness and absence of rigor are the symptoms of the removal of an interpretative possibility that the adoption of the analogy itself prevents us from seeing for irreducibly structural reasons. The analogy, as Jacob formulates it, according to Derrida, is misconstructed: in order to establish an analogy between two or more terms—entities or relations between entities—it is necessary that each term be constructed by itself and determined independently from the other. It is necessary that between the terms of the analogy we recognize a qualitative and essential distinction, a difference of nature, as Jacob argues with respect to the difference between genetic memory and nervous memory. However, the first determination of the analogy proposed by Jacob is quantitative and not qualitative: the two systems of memory differ from each other because of a greater or lesser flexibility or rigidity, and not because of their nature or essence. The consequence that Derrida draws from this is important and goes far beyond Jacob’s intentions: “We are no longer dealing with two rigorously discontinuous types but with two relays of the same economy. … therefore, the analogy is no longer an analogy between two different terms, but a similarity within the element of homogeneity” (La vie 1.17). If between genetic memory and cerebral memory there is a distinction that is only economical or quantitative, then not only is the analogy ungrounded but it is necessary to recognize that the two different articulations are within the same order: that of general memory, understood as the system of acquisition, conservation, and transmission that structures the genesis and evolution of the life of the living. If they are phenomena of the same order, not only is it necessary to exclude their qualitative opposition, their difference in nature or essence, but it is also legitimate to hypothesize that between the two memories there is a relationship implied in their very determination and thus the two systems are not the one outside of the other; they are not determined the one independently from the other, but there is between them an evolutionary relationship and thus the one—nervous memory—is a specific emergence in the course of the evolution of the living that is structured according to the conditions of the other—genetic memory. This leads to the hypothesis that memory as an individual psychic structure is an evolutionary product of the genetic memory, of the programme that presides over the logic of the living, and, ultimately, that between nature (genetic memory) and culture (cerebral memory) there is a continuity and not a rupture, as the analogy established by Jacob supposes.

Here I do not want to credit a rigidly deterministic biologism according to which any cultural phenomenon should be brought back to the biological-evolutionary conditions that structure the life of human beings and in particular their brains. For Derrida, it is possible to think of a differential relation between genetic memory and nervous memory, and thus to articulate the dynamic of différance as the general condition of the life of the living and of its evolutionary history:

For my part, I would see no more than a progress in this suppression of a limit that has often served humanist or spiritualist ideologies or, generally speaking, the most obscurantist metaphysics. I would see no more than a progress here if the question of the logos of the analogy were elucidated in a critical fashion in order to avoid the return in force, merely legalizing a clandestine metaphysics, everything that has been attached to the value of logos and analogy across the tradition. To anticipate and to speak a little algebraically: I would be in favor of a de-limitation that destroys limits and oppositions (for instance, the two types of programme in which one would recognize on one side the pure genetic and on the other side the great emergence of the cerebral, from the being-erected to the zoon logon ekon and all that follows from it), destroying that opposition, then, not to give rise to something homogenous, but rather to a heterogeneity or a differentiality: for, as I was suggesting from the beginning, the functioning of the opposition has always had the effect of effacing differentiality. What interests me under the heading of the au-delà and of the pas au-delà, is precisely this limit without opposition of opposition and difference.(Derrida, la vie 1.17)

Derrida seems to adopt an evolutionary perspective that is very close to that of Leroi-Gourhan, to whom he is indebted for what concerns the elaboration of the notion of “arche-writing” in the framework of an evolutionary description of the genesis of the devices of memorization—from the genetic programme to writing, through memory as the individual psychic structure.⁴ However, since for Derrida différance regulates the history of life, the evolution should be thought as a differential/differing process in which each stage of the process of differentiation corresponds to a specific, relatively independent emergence that consists in both an articulation and an effect of differential iteration with respect to the conditions of the process itself. Therefore, for Derrida, evolution is not a linear and continuous process (whether teleological or not) and does not require leaps and irreducible ruptures. The hypothesis adopted here is neither “deterministic” nor “reductionist,” not even metaphysico-humanist and logocentric: between the genetic and the symbolic, between nature and culture, there is neither identity nor opposition but différance.⁵

In other works I trace this “differential” thesis in the seminar and beyond in order to verify its sustainability and implications within a deconstructive perspective. Here, I will go on with the analysis of the notion of programme and the deconstruction of the analogy between genetic memory and cerebral memory.

Derrida takes into consideration another distinctive trait, of a qualitative nature, that seems to be more rigorous and thus able to legitimate the opposition between the two systems of memory and the very possibility of establishing a relation of analogy. For Jacob, genetic memory and cerebral memory differ in their relation to the outside: while cerebral memory is open to the outside and is subject to its modifications, genetic memory is impermeable to external action: “The genetic programme, indeed, is made up of a combination of essentially invariant elements. By its very structure, the message of heredity does not allow the slightest concerted intervention from without” (3). If we look more closely, this is not the case: affirming that genetic memory is impermeable to the action of environment would mean denying the possibility of selection, which is essential to evolution. For Jacob the two systems are not opposed because of their opening or closure to the environment; they both open onto the outside. Their opposition concerns the relation that they entertain with the environment: cerebral memory interacts in a direct, conscious, and intentional way, with deliberate aims, and thus can modify its behavior, while the modifications that genetic memory undergoes—the so called mutations on which natural selection and thus the environment intervene ex post facto—are of the order of contingency, accidental and deprived of a direct cause and effect relationship:

Whether chemical or mechanical, all the phenomena which contribute to variation in organisms and populations occur without any reference to their effects; they are unconnected with the organism’s need to adapt. … Each individual programme is the result of a cascade of contingent events. The very nature of the genetic code prevents any deliberate change in programme whether through its own action or as an effect of its environment. It prohibits any influence on the message by the products of its expression. The programme does not learn from experience. (Jacob 3)

However, Jacob is forced to admit at another point in the text that, even if indirectly, the genetic programme does “learn from experience.” The mutations of the programme, due to contingent events, must always undergo natural selection, which favors those mutations that better adapt to the environmental conditions that influence their possibility of reproduction:

The very concept of selection is inherent in the nature of living organisms, in the fact that they exist only to the extent they reproduce. Each new individual which by mutation, recombination and addition becomes the carrier of a new programme is immediately put to the test of reproduction. If this organism is unable to reproduce, it disappears. If it is able to reproduce better and faster than its congeners, this advantage, however minor, immediately favours its multiplication and hence the propagation of this particular programme. If in the long run the nucleic-acid text seems to be moulded by environment, if the lessons of past experience are eventually written into it, this occurs in a roundabout way through success in reproduction. (Jacob 292)

For Derrida this opposition is again not rigorous enough: as psychoanalysis and modern structural sciences such as linguistics, semiotics, and anthropology have demonstrated, it is possible to extend to cerebral memory and thus to the sphere of language what Jacob maintains as an exclusive, distinctive trait of genetic memory. Cerebral memory, the individual psyche, is strongly bound to codes and programmes (linguistico-semiotic, social, religious, politico-institutional, economical, and so forth). With regard to these codes and programmes, the margin of the intentional and deliberate intervention is very tight and aleatory: the programme remains far beyond the threshold of individual consciousness and thus beyond its possibility of action and deliberation. Consciousness is indeed an effect rather than a cause. Such is the case of Jacob himself, who, in order to define the genetic programme, must resort against his own conscious intentiontraditional philosophical tools, from which he had believed himself emancipated:

The heterogeneity of causes and effects, the non-deliberate character of changes in programme, in a word, all that places the subjects within the system in a situation of unconscious effects of causality, all that produces effects of contingency between the action coming from the outside and the internal transformations of the system, all of that characterizes the non-genetic programme as much as the genetic one. Where does Jacob get the idea that outside of the genetic system and programme the change of programme is deliberate, essentially deliberate? Where, if not in a metaphysico-ideological opposition that determines the superior and symbolical programmes (with humanity at the highest level) on the basis of sense, consciousness, freedom, knowledge, the limit between the inside and the outside, objectivity and non-objectivity, etc.? Now, if something has been achieved by the so-called structural sciences today, it is the possibility of affirming that the systems related to language, the symbolic, cerebral memory, etc. also have an internal functioning, with an internal regulation that escapes deliberation and consciousness and makes the effects come from the outside be perceived as contingencies, heterogeneous forces, which are necessary to interpret, translate, assimilate into the internal code, attempting to master them in that code, or failing to do so to the point that “mutations” are produced that can take on all sorts of forms but which always signal a violent intrusion from the outside, forcing a general restructuration. (Derrida, La vie 1.19)

Derrida seems to defend an ultra-deterministic thesis by attributing to symbolical programmes the very rigidity of the genetic programme claimed by Jacob. However, the opposite is true, as the apparently paradoxical conclusions of the argument prove: the two programmes—the genetic programme and the symbolic one—function on the basis of different principles of internal regulation in view of their reproduction. This rigidity does not exclude their opening onto the outside; rather, it implies for both systems the necessity of being influenced and modified by what comes from outside and thus the necessity of interpreting what comes from outside with respect to the exigencies of the reproduction of the system. What comes from outside can simply be rejected from the programme if it is interpreted as dangerous, or it can be assimilated, conserved, and thus also transmitted if it is interpreted as useful to the survival of the system; it can induce corrections in the mechanisms in charge of the execution of the programme; ultimately, it can induce modifications of programme and thus true mutations, and this works for the symbolic programmes as well as for the genetic programme with effects that both systems cannot easily control, as they are relatively aleatory (to the extent that they are opened onto the outside and called to interpret its contingency). But it is noteworthy that the thesis implicit in Derrida—for whom there is a genetico/differential relation between genetic memory and nervous memory, which results from différance as the common condition of their emergence and the specific articulation through different levels of development—contradicts one of the fundamental principles of the biology of the time, formulated by Jacob in the aforementioned passage: “The programme does not learn from experience” (3), that is, genetic mutations cannot be caused by the environment where an individual lives.

From Deconstruction to Epigenetics

At the time of its elaboration, Derrida’s position would have been liquidated as an ingenuous Lamarckism, and this is perhaps one of the reasons the seminar has not been published. But the state of the art in biology is much different today; in particular, research has been carried out that is considered of revolutionary relevance and is congruent with Derrida’s thesis insofar as the latter could be read as anticipating and legitimating this research from a theoretical point of view. I allude to recent research conducted in the field of epigenetics, a science that studies the interaction between genes and environment, whether it is internal (the cellular environment) or external (what we ordinarily understand as environment). This research has provoked a radical mutation of the order of biological discourse and thus of the interpretation of the logic of the living and of its evolution. In particular, the role of the genetic programme in the construction of the architecture of the individual today appears less deterministic and, ultimately, not exclusive. The architecture of the individual is no longer considered the exclusive result of the rigid execution of the genetic programme in its cells; rather, it hinges on the interactions between genes and the cellular environment in which the genes are inscribed and on which they depend for the expression of their function. In particular, this expression undergoes a series of epigenetic regulations (methylation, RNA interference, histone modifications, genomic imprinting) that in some cases may depend on environmental factors external to the individual, such as pollution or exposure to a shortage or excess of food, but also on factors of psychological stress of a social or cultural order, such as the lack of a genitor’s care or war trauma. Some epigenetic regulations can even provoke a reassembling of the genetic programme of the individual (“reprogramming”), a reassembling that in some cases can be transmitted to the following generations and thus become hereditary. This feature is obviously decisive, not only because it allows us to affirm, against Jacob and with Derrida, that “the programme learns from experience,” but also because, from a more general perspective, it legitimates the hypothesis that these epigenetic regulations are essential factors of evolution, that is, of those genetic mutations that until now have been generically attributed to selection, which, as we saw above, affect populations and not the individual. In other words, this feature legitimates the hypothesis that those genetic mutations registered on the scale of populations are not only and exclusively due to mistakes in the transcription of the genetic programme, which are independent from the environmental factors that intervene only in the selection of more adaptive mutations. Indeed, these mutations may be epigenetic adaptations in singular individuals exposed to specific external or internal environmental factors.

To strengthen my argument and to grasp a deeper understanding of the relevance of this research, it may be useful to quote from the beautiful synthesis provided by Richard C. Francis in Epigenetics: The Ultimate Mystery of Inheritance. In particular, Francis focuses on the change of perspective induced by epigenetics with respect to the rigidly deterministic conception of the genetic programme, which had been endorsed for a long time precisely after the studies carried out by Monod and Jacob. He shows that, however important, the genetic programme is only one element of the cellular interactions that determine cellular differentiation and the organization of the living. Not only does the programme no longer represent the exclusive principle that regulates the rigid architecture of the living, but it is also liable to mutations due to the internal and external environment:

Some epigenetic alterations of gene behavior have effects that extend beyond an individual lifetime. The effect of these transgenerational epigenetic alterations may be direct or indirect. Direct transgenerational effects occur when the epigenetic mark is transmitted directly from parent to offspring, through sperm or egg. This is what I call “true epigenetic inheritance.” True epigenetic inheritance is not common in mammals like us, but it does occur. Indirect transgenerational effects are much more common … Much more indirect are the transgenerational effects observed in the maternal behavior and stress response. Here, the epigenetic alterations that influence these behaviors are recreated through the social interactions that they both influence and are influenced by. This transgenerational effect is a positive feedback loop involving gene action and social interaction. Whether direct or indirect, these transgenerational epigenetic effects should expand our notion of inheritance. (Francis 159)

What has been put forth seems to me to be enough to undermine Catherine Malabou’s thesis that Derrida’s notion of “writing” is closely bound to the concept of “programme,” elaborated by cybernetics and implemented by biology, and thus that this idea of writing can no longer be retained today, as it has become obsolete.⁶ However, traces of the deconstruction of the programme, and in particular of its deterministic features, can already be found in published texts such as Dissemination:

As the heterogeneity and absolute exteriority of the seed, seminal différance does constitute itself into a programme, but it is a programme that cannot be formalized. For reasons that can be formalized. The infinity of its code, its rift, then, does not take a form saturated with self-presence in the encyclopedic circle. It is attached, so to speak, to the incessant falling of a supplement to the code [d’un supplément de code]. (Derrida 52)

At this point the aim of Derrida’s analysis is clear: the definition of the notion of programme, as it is formulated by Jacob, imported by cybernetics, and transplanted at the heart of the living, is unconsciously overdetermined by the programme of metaphysics, with its fundamental logocentric and humanistic legacy:

Here too, you can see, the opposition between the two programmes cannot be rigorous, and this seems to me to depend upon the fact that, for want of a without reelaboration of the general notion of programme and the value of analogy, they remain marked by a logocentric teleology and by a humanist semantics, by what I would call a philosophy of life. (Derrida, La Vie 1.20).

Footnotes

This text reworks material from my book Biodeconstruction. Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences, published by SUNY Press in 2018. It is based on the reading of the partially unpublished seminar given by Derrida in 1975 at the École Normale in Paris titled La vie la mort. Traces of this work are disseminated in other essays I have recently published. See Vitale, “Conjuring Time: Jacques Derrida between Testimony and Literature,” “Via rupta: vers la biodeconstruction,” and “The Text and the Living.”

1. Citations of the seminar indicate the number of the session and the page, according to the original draft. Translations are mine unless otherwise noted. I thank Mme Marguerite Derrida for allowing me to quote Jacques Derrida’s unedited seminar La vie la mort. The seminar consists of fourteen sessions. In the first session, Derrida introduces the seminar and begins to read François Jacob’s The Logic of Life (1970). The second session is dedicated to Nietzsche, to the relation between the philosopher’s life and his oeuvre as developed in his writings, in particular Ecce Homo. What is at stake is the problem of auto-bio-thanato-graphy that Derrida treats extensively in his published works. I will limit myself to observing only that this problem comes out of the intersection between life, as the object of discourse (mythical, religious, philosophical, scientific, psychoanalytic, literary, and so forth), and the life of the subject of the discourse itself. This session has been published in full, with a few interpolations and the addition of footnotes, in Otobiographies (3-35). The first part of the third session also concerns Nietzsche, his theory of the physiological origin of the metaphor and, in more detail, the recourse to phenomena borrowed from biological life as a metaphorical resource to describe the state of degeneration of German academic institutions in On the Future of Our Educational Institutions. The second part addresses the metaphor/concept opposition within scientific discourse and, in particular, in relation to Jacob’s The Logic of Life and Canguilhem’s “The Concept of Life.” In sessions four through six, Derrida goes back to the analysis of The Logic of Life. His reading focuses on biology and, in particular, on the relationship between cybernetics and biology, taking as its point of departure the (at the time) recent discovery of the essential role DNA plays in the reproduction of the cell, that is, in the elementary unity of the life of the living. Thanks to this discovery, biology could elaborate the logic that regulates the life of the living, namely, the logic of self-reproduction, within the framework of the theory of evolution.

2. Here I open a path toward “writing” in Vitale, “The Text and the Living.”

3. For an accurate analysis of the deconstruction of analogy see Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror, 293-318. In particular: “As Derrida has demonstrated in Plato’s Pharmacy, a certain dominating and decisive hierarchization takes place between the terms of the relations that enter into correspondence in a relation of analogy. This hierarchizing authority of logocentric analogy comes from the fact that one term within the relation of relations comes to name the relation itself. Consequently, all the elements that make up the relations find themselves comprised by the structure that names the relation of analogy as a whole. That name, ultimately, is that of the logos” (304).

4. On this debt see Vitale, “Via rupta: vers la biodeconstruction.” See also Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech.

5. On the other hand, the hypothesis advanced should not surprise a careful reader of Derrida. It has to do with the programme elaborated in the essay “Différance”: “Thus one could reconsider all the pairs of opposites on which philosophy is constructed and on which our discourse lives, not in order to see opposition erase itself but to see what indicates that each of the terms must appear as the différance of the other, as the other different and deferred in the economy of the same (the intelligible as differing-deferring the sensible, as, the sensible different and deferred; the concept as different and deferred, differing-deferring intuition; culture as nature different and deferred, differing-deferring; all the others of physis—tekhne, nomos, thesis, society, freedom, history, mind, etc.—as physis different and deferred, or as physis differing and deferring. Physis in difference)” (18).

6. See Malabou, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing. Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction: “The Logic of Life confirmed the existence of this linguistic structure of being by privileging the role of writing within it … In this graph ontology, the origin—whatever meaning is attributed to this word—can only be thought in terms of a trace, that is, a difference to the self. Generally, it is the concept of program—which is obviously also a concept in the field of cybernetics—that culminates and completes the constitution of the graphic scheme as the motor scheme of thought. Derrida alone recognized the full importance of this fulfillment and culmination … Derrida describes here [at the opening of Of Grammatology] the semantic enlargement of the concept of writing, not as an arbitrary philosophical decision but as an event, the appearance of a new order, starting from the pregnancy of the motifs of program, information or code. It is only on the basis of this programmatic organization of the real as it is liable to come to the awareness of an era that writing was able to constitute itself as a philosophical motor scheme” (57-59). See also Malabou, “The End of Writing. Grammatology and Plasticity.”

Works Cited

• Canguilhem, George. “The Concept of Life.” A Vital Rationalist: Selected Writings from George Canguilhem, edited by François Delaporte, Zone Books, 1994, pp. 303-320.
• Derrida, Jacques. “Différance.” Margins of Philosophy, translated by Alan Bass, U of Chicago P, 1982, pp. 1-28.
• —. Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson, U of Chicago P, 1981.
• —. La vie la mort. Unpublished seminar, Archive-Derrida, IMEC, DRR, 1975.
• —. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. John Hopkins UP, 1997.
• —. “Otobiographies.” The Ear of the Other, translated by Avital Ronell, Schocken Books, 1985, pp. 1-38.
• —. The Post Card. From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Translated by Alan Bass, U of Chicago P, 1987.
• Francis, Richard C. Epigenetics: The Ultimate Mystery of Inheritance. W.W. Norton, 2011.
• Gasché, Rodolphe. The Tain of the Mirror. Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection. Harvard UP, 1986.
• Jacob, François. The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity. Translated by Betty E. Spillmann, Pantheon Books, 1973.
• Leroi-Gourhan, André. Gesture and Speech. Translated by Anna Bostock Berger, MIT P, 1993.
• Malabou, Catherine. “The End of Writing. Grammatology and Plasticity.” The European Legacy, vol. 12, no. 4, 2007, pp. 431-441. ResearchGate, doi:10.1080/10848770701396254.
• —. Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing. Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction. Translated by Carolyn Shread, Columbia UP, 2010.
• Vitale, Francesco. Bideconstruction. Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences. Translated by Mauro Senatore, SUNY P, 2018.
• —. “Conjuring Time: Jacques Derrida between Testimony and Literature.” Conjurations, special issue of Parallax, vol. 17, no. 1, 2011, pp. 54-64. Taylor and Francis, doi:10.1080/13534645.2011.531179.
• —. “The Text and the Living: Jacques Derrida, Between Biology and Deconstruction.” Oxford Literary Review, vol. 36, no. 1, 2014, pp. 95-114. Edinburgh UP, doi:10.3366/olr.2014.0089.
• —. “Via rupta: vers la biodeconstruction.” Appels de Jacques Derrida, edited by Danielle Cohen-Levinas and Ginette Michaud, Hermann, 2014.