How Do We Do Biodeconstruction?

Vicki Kirby (bio)
Astrid Schrader (bio)
Eszter Timár (bio)

Abstract

The word biodeconstruction asks us to consider what is appropriate to deconstruction as a practice and to reflect on the relationship between the discourse of biology and that practice. Within literary, philosophical, and cultural debate, deconstruction appears as a recognisable mode or style of analysis. However, what happens if we interrogate the radical interiority of textuality in terms of biology’s rhetorical structures and logics or through scientific evidence and methodologies? If biology is routinely equated with origins, prescriptions, and first causes, can this classical narrative of temporal unfolding be shifted? Can biodeconstruction refigure the relation between the empirical and the conceptual?

Our conversation began at the ACLA’s first biodeconstruction event in Utrecht, the Netherlands, in July 2017. We agreed that our collective contribution should take the form of a series of questions and answers about how biodeconstruction speaks to our respective practices. We jointly formulated a set of questions to which each of us would respond. Our aim was to highlight how different perspectives might illustrate the term’s inherent pluralization as well as its compatibility with our feminist commitments. What emerged in that process, in which initial questions were reformulated, is a mixture of individual statements and a conversation that seeks to clarify the relevance of different trajectories and relations to Derrida’s idea of deconstruction and the life sciences. Our hope is that these different perspectives might be suggestive of the sorts of interventions and concerns that the term biodeconstruction can enable.

Question: How does deconstruction relate to our work, and how and to what extent have we engaged with the sciences and biology in particular?

Astrid Schrader:

As a feminist science studies scholar and ex-physicist, an engagement with the sciences has always been my bread and butter. I turned to deconstruction through my interest in time and its relation to notions of justice in feminist theory. While poststructuralist feminists seemed to have “only paradoxes to offer” (Joan Scott, Only Paradoxes and Wendy Brown, “Suffering Rights” were particularly influential for me), Derrida’s articulations of the aporia of time suggested an answer or two: experiences without traversals. Without origin or telos, but through originary traces (memories), justice became conceivable (again) with the structure of a promise. As a student of Donna Haraway, I grew up with naturecultures (one word!) and the desire for better accounts of scientific knowledge production. With my other teacher, Karen Barad, and her notion of agential realism, it became clear that spacetimematterings required alternative articulations of time: intra-activities could not be articulated in ordinary or “vulgar” notions of time (Heidegger’s term), concatenations of present nows. In my dissertation, Dinos & Demons: The Politics of Temporality and Responsibility in Science, I read Barad’s agential realism and Derrida’s deconstruction together or through each other–diffractively, to use Barad’s term–in order to develop a reading of science that pays attention to nonhuman agencies and intra-active temporalizations. Once I began looking, I found haunting everywhere in science. Haunting and indeterminacy became crucial to my readings of science. Moving from physics into marine microbiology (and sometimes back), I feel that I have always been engaged in biodeconstruction, if that means reading biology (as a text or writing in Derrida’s expanded sense) deconstructively. Each of us may have a slightly different understanding of biodeconstruction and what that could mean. If “deconstruction is justice” (Derrida, “Force”), could biodeconstruction be aligned with (scientific) responsibility? What interests me here in particular is what the move from the “name of truth” to the “name of justice” could mean for the life sciences and scientific knowledge production.

Vicki Kirby:

I’d describe myself as a feminist with an interdisciplinary background in literature and then the social sciences. But I’ve always been fascinated by what counts as “nature”–the given, or what is difficult to change. My interest was especially piqued when, studying feminism in the early 80s with Moira Gatens and Liz Grosz, I came to appreciate that the analytical terms of the nature/culture division explained a lot of entrenched political discriminations even as they made little sense. The focus of feminist concerns at that time was Cartesianism, with its implicit denigration of the body (the feminine) as mere support for the mind (the masculine)–the proper site of self. I’d always been exercised by the riddle of origins as well as the question of language and how it is identified and circumscribed as a system among others (because it seemed to me that it wasn’t). For these reasons I’d risk calling myself an intuitive deconstructionist. When I read Of Grammatology it was such a relief, especially as my institutional setting at the time was largely positivist and I wanted a more complex appreciation of matter and the empirical. I didn’t see “language” as a second-order re-presentation of reality that could be defined against what wasn’t language. And I didn’t regard nature as an inaccessible “before,” a concept put under erasure because human culture is hermetically enclosed against what preceded it. It was precisely this spatial and temporal narrative of an evolving progress that I wanted to problematize. For this reason I felt as if I had a mate and a guide in Derrida, someone who could help me think origin questions and their political implications more rigorously.

Regarding the relevance of science and biology to my work, the body I was studying in philosophy was for me always a biological body. As my research was in anthropology, and the nature/culture question is especially germane to that discipline, I was aware that the biological body in different cultural contexts is capable of “performing” very differently: sympathetic magic that allowed Kwaio men to lactate, hook-hanging among Mandan Native Americans, or crucifixion ceremonies in the Philippines resulting in little bleeding and no scarring that demonstrate the variation in pain thresholds across histories and cultures. Placebo and nocebo effects also intrigued me, especially as a particular, measurable response was equated with no response because it was regarded as a psychological cause that was, by definition, not biological, not real and material–just a belief. I always thought that this segregation of responses into real and imagined was strangely unscientific, and yet only recently has science begun to acknowledge its oversight in this regard.¹

Freud’s recognition that the hysterical symptoms of his female patients “made sense” in terms of the stories they told about their lives was taken up by feminist scholars. It became clear that symptoms such as blindness, autographic skin, hysterical paralyses, and aphonia had political significance, functioning as signs whose theatrical disruption to normative social expectations told of personal injury and unconscious resistance. And yet almost all of this work failed to mention that biology was agential, writing its condition into legible signs. It seemed that the question, “How does biology do that?” was not on the agenda.² The need to remove biology from the discussion segregates culture from nature as the necessary default line of inquiry. If we concede that biology is inherently cultural in this example, then the temporal and spatial separation that secures their difference makes little sense. Indeed, we are left to wonder about the specific nature of biology if we have nothing to measure its difference against.

Derrida’s “originary différance” helps me to complicate the easy appeal to what purportedly comes first as an orienting reference point. Of Grammatology, for example, doesn’t confine its engagement with the question of nature to a diagnosis of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s ethnocentrism, Ferdinand de Saussure’s phonocentrism, or Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s pedagogical prejudices. Grammatology isn’t just a pernickety analysis of cultural politics that offers a corrective. When Derrida argues that “writing in general” is also genetics and cybernetics, he opens the very identity and exceptional capacities of anthropos to serious interrogation, and this seems especially pertinent as we consider anthropocentrism and questions about political culpability and the anthropocene.

Eszter Timár:

In my early postgraduate years, I studied what were then called feminist theories of embodiment (the work of Elizabeth Grosz and Moira Gatens, and Vicki’s work as well) and I was fascinated with the tensions between some of that work and Judith Butler’s queer theory of gendered embodiment. So I think because of this early familiarity with the vexed question of the meaning of biology for feminist theory, I was primed to develop this interest in what we have now started to call biodeconstruction. I was also interested in deconstruction and queer figurations in political discourse. Modern figures of queerness, such as the classic nineteenth- and twentieth-century figure of the male homosexual, always index nature and embodiment (both homosexuality, thought of as the “riddle of nature,” and the idea of “inversion” refer to a fundamental crisis of the sexed body), so I see a link between what are my apparently political and scientific interests. And, importantly for developing an interest in immunology, I got my PhD in Comparative Literature at Emory, in a department that is very interested in deconstruction, and I was there at the time when Derrida’s interview with Giovanna Borradori came out after the events of September 11 (Borradori and Derrida, “Autoimmunity”), which led to conversations about the Derridean use of autoimmunity.

It seems to me that biodeconstruction is not one thing: the name can indicate texts in which Derrida discusses biology and texts in which Derrida’s discussion of biology is further interrogated and re-read. I think some of Francesco Vitale’s works engage biodeconstruction this way. But other essays in this collection read the philosophy of life with the help of the Derridean oeuvre as a whole. I think our papers tend to practice biodeconstruction in a way that includes the readings of biological or biomedical texts with Derrida in mind, so what may qualify as such remains an interesting question.

Question: What does biodeconstruction mean for our work? How have we practiced it?

Eszter Timár:

My work with biodeconstruction has so far consisted of different readings of immunology in light of Derrida’s introductory footnote in “Faith and Knowledge.” In this footnote, Derrida traces the etymology of the Latin immunis as a political-religious term before he offers the following passage:

It is especially in the domain of biology that the lexical resources of immunity have developed their authority. The immunitary reaction protects the “indemnity” of the body proper in producing antibodies against foreign antigens. As for the process of auto-immunization, which interests us particularly here, it consists for a living organism, as is well known and in short, of protecting itself against its self-protection by destroying its own immune system. As the phenomenon of these antibodies is extended to a broader zone of pathology and as one resorts increasingly to the positive virtues of immuno-depressants destined to limit the mechanisms of rejection and to facilitate the tolerance of certain organ transplants, we feel ourselves authorized to speak of a sort of general logic of auto-immunization. It seems indispensable to us today for thinking the relations between faith and knowledge, religion and science, as well as the duplicity of sources in general. (80)

This footnote has fascinated me for years.³ On the one hand, Derrida’s use of autoimmunity is the opposite of the most conventional biomedical use of the term (in which the immune system attacks the organism) to the point that his use may be considered erroneous. On the other hand, however, it seems to anticipate recent immunological findings that deconstruct the metaphysics of presence in the very domain of biology (I think this is true for biology in general and physics, too, as attested by Karen Barad’s commitment to deconstruction). Importantly, immunity is one of our buzzwords today as a biopolitical incitement to protective violence, communicated through biomedical language that posits itself as the very stuff of biology and as the knowledge of “organic life itself.” Derrida’s footnote is priceless in underlining that it was always a political term–in other words, that the political use of immunity is not a derivation from the biological use. By dint of positing biology as the science of life prior to the emergence of the human, immunity appears untouched by the actual history of the human, and this in turn affirms a certain performative erasure, or separation, of the living etymology of the term from its pre-biomedical meaning. I find it politically interesting that immunology, the very natural science that is organized around this political phenomenon, keeps yielding results that undermine the legitimacy of political arguments that justify the maximization of protective violence. It’s not that the metaphysics of presence suddenly crumbles on eroding scaffolds, but I think that what Derrida says about the “domain of biology” is accurate: biology (what we can also dub, following Derrida, the “science of survival”) can yield a lexicon that renders the vocabulary of immunity less secure in its commitment to violence.

This is important because, as I mentioned before, immunity is a powerful buzzword today and it resonates quite a bit in contemporary biopolitics and feminist theory. In my reading, the affinity between the Derridean usage of autoimmunity and immunology challenges any sense that immunology is completely inscribed within the interests of what, after Donna Haraway’s influential text on immunology, “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies,” we can call the “chilling fantasy” of “the fully defended, ‘victorious’ self” (224). On the one hand, immunology is not perfectly immune to its own deconstruction, and on the other hand, neither is its political vocabulary particular to biopower.

For instance, in an article on the immunobiology of sperm (Timár, “Squirm”), I connect the tendency in recent immunology to undermine its own rootedness in a vocabulary of modern biopower’s commitment to protective violence with queer readings of masculinity in antiquity, relying on David Halperin’s work on democratic embodiment in his One Hundred Years of Homosexuality And Other Essays on Greek Love, especially the chapter, “The Democratic Body: Prostitution and Citizenship in Classical Athens.” I do this to suggest that via a sort of queering of the figure of the sperm (as in this example), recent immunological developments can undermine some of the most robust rhetorical figurations of dignified and violently protective masculinity in the West with the help of the same political vocabulary.

I’m concerned, though, that this affinity might motivate readers to exclaim that Derrida is, after all, right about biology—this would prove that the tendency to find Derrida obsolete or simply irrelevant when it comes to discussing matter or “real bodies” is erroneous. In my most recent work (Timár, “Derrida’s Error”) I argue that it is quite possible to read Derrida and some parts of immunology to argue that Derrida’s remarks in “Faith and Knowledge” anticipate an immunology that deconstructs the philosopheme of ipseity that is expressed in the lexicon of immunity. However, and this is important for assessing the stakes of biodeconstruction, the consistent commitment in the Derridean oeuvre to disrespect a consensus that would posit biological reference as primary and political reference as derivative, metaphorical, abstracted, and secondary when it comes to the lexicon of life, as well as the insistence that the lexicon of life is one that includes death through and through (instead of positing death as marking the end of life, as if it takes place outside the limit of life proper), serves to caution us about the risk of reaffirming the organicist construction of biology in finding Derrida right about it. In the essay I discuss two developments in the history of immunology: one recent and one a little more than a hundred years old. Without the older reference, we could see that recent developments justify Derrida even if we concede that his usage of the term autoimmunity is wrong (although it is not simply wrong). However, the older reference shows that it is not so much that now immunology catches up with Derrida, but that immunology as logos has a tendency to yield developments of a deconstructive drift.

Astrid Schrader:

When I read the term biodeconstruction in Francesco Vitale’s 2014 article “The Text and the Living: Jacques Derrida between Biology and Deconstruction,” I thought, yeah, what a great term, that is exactly what I thought I was doing all along: reading biological texts deconstructively. While Vitale meant the term to collect the Derridean texts that engage biology and analyse the notion of life with the help of the life sciences, I thought of it as a practice. I’d associate this practice with a branch of feminist science studies that has been informed by Derridean deconstruction and includes scholars such as Vicki Kirby, Elizabeth A. Wilson, and also (perhaps uniquely, most importantly, and slightly differently) Donna Haraway, as well as more recently Karen Barad. For me, if I may include my own work (Schrader, “Haunted Measurements”; Schrader, “Responding to Pfiesteria piscicida“; Schrader, “Microbial Suicide”) in this branch of feminist science studies, biology has always been a “text” in Derrida’s expanded sense, or as Haraway put it in 1988, a material-semiotic “apparatus of bodily production” (595). Biological texts or readings and writings as a “material-semiotic apparatus of bodily production”⁴ can of course not be reduced to linguistic or “cultural” productions. While naming is always risky and can lead to misunderstandings, I was delighted that our practice has received a name.

Approaching the question of biodeconstruction from “the other side,” if you will (as if there were two sides), as coming from within the sciences, I would (or could) not suppose a “consensus that would posit biological references as primary,” as Eszter puts it above. On the contrary, my paper on microbial suicide (apoptosis) tries to show, among other things, that the life sciences can make conceptual contributions to the notion of life. This is something Martin Heidegger had denied the so-called empirical sciences. For him, the scientific exploration of particular ways of living and dying would require a preconceived ontology of life and death. It is well known that Derrida (“Aporias” and “Of Spirit”) thoroughly deconstructed Heidegger’s claim that “the existential Interpretation of death takes precedence over any biology and ontology of life…it is also the foundation of any investigation of death” (Heidegger, Being and Time 291). My point in “Microbial Suicide: Towards a Less Anthropocentric Ontology of Life and Death” is that such a deconstruction is also possible from within the sciences. This has been one of my long-term concerns, as suggested by the title of a special issue in the journal differences, “Feminist Theory Out of Science” (2010), which I co-edited with Sophia Roosth.

In “Microbial Suicide,” I argue that research on marine microbes supports Derrida’s claim that empirical events and findings are inseparable from foundational conditions. I suggest that Derrida’s insistence that “one must…inscribe death in the concept of life” (“Beast” 110) can be read as both condition and result of research on microbial suicide, collapsing temporal boundaries and reconfiguring the concept of death from an uncertain limit of life towards a certain indeterminacy within life. I have suggested that “the scientific rendering of apoptosis in microbes presents what Francesco Vitale (2014) calls a ‘biodeconstruction,’ changing ‘the scene of writing’ from within; the scene of writing in this case constituted by scientific practice (see Kirby, 2009)” (Schrader, “Microbial Suicide” 53). Borrowing from Vicki here, I associate bio-deconstruction with a scientific practice: not something Derrida does or the critical reader of science performs but a performance that can be attributed to the scientific investigation. But perhaps only if it is read in a particular way: not all readings are deconstructive. We may disagree on this point. I am no longer sure why I introduced a hyphen between “bio” and “deconstruction” in my paper–perhaps in order to mark a difference from Francesco’s usage. In the context of that paper (“Microbial Suicide”), I take bio-deconstruction to involve the transformation of a normative practice with profound consequences for the meaning of life. Not only does microbiology support Derrida’s moves in suggesting alternative relationships between life and death, but in doing so it changes the role of science in the naturecultural business of meaning-makings, as scientists are changing what gets called “objective” or “vulgar” time (to use Heidegger’s term) from within.

Vicki Kirby:

Perhaps by returning to the building blocks of my own intellectual trajectory I can better explain why the term biodeconstruction remains a non-concept for me, one whose riddles are comprehensive because they’re not content specific. Let’s return to the nature/culture division and the political agendas that are leveraged and justified in terms of its logic. We are presented with two systems whose presumed difference from each other installs a spatial segregation and a temporal distancing, an evolution whose narrative order moves from what comes first to what comes second, from the more primitive and primeval towards a more complex and calculating sophistication. The alignment of nature with the body–the “before reason and calculation,” the intuitive, instinctual, affective and prescribed, the less than, the given or inherited–defines the pinnacle of culture in terms of enlightenment, masculinity, whiteness, intention, and creativity, reference points against which difference appears as deficiency and incapacity. A grab bag of associated “others” become the comparative failures against which this ideal is identified, much as a figure is identified against a ground, where the ground is read as the absence, the negative (no-thing) of the figure’s self-definition. We see in Eszter’s and Astrid’s comments above how this political algorithm works to close and prescribe.

Although the valuations of this political economy might seem like a simplistic cartoon with no real analytical purchase, or at least, an error whose denigrating and spurious assumptions could easily be corrected, this metaphysics remains ubiquitous and enduring. Even the appeal of the correction reaffirms it–we overturn an error and thereby separate truth from a mistake. Or perhaps we endeavour to counter or refuse this logic by reversing its valuations: nature is good and should be valued more than culture because it returns us to our Edenic roots; language and technology overlay our affective and more authentic selves; women are closer to nature and therefore more caring; animals are not capriciously violent and have no responsibility for climate change, or indeed, for anything. The list of moral and political adjudications that rest on authenticity and the trumping of error and failure are ubiquitous, and this persistence deserves further scrutiny. To my mind, to engage the workings of this logic, which is by no means straightforward, is not to hope for escape but rather to find within its sticky involvements and confounding of terms and concepts a different set of possibilities and provocations that are not as definitionally predictable and prohibitive. But more than this–and this is especially relevant for how we contextualize and understand the implications of biodeconstruction–it requires us to consider that a concept or idea is not a second order re-presentation of “something” that it isn’t. All of my work, even my first book, Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal (1997), tries to mire and derange this logical two-step in order to explore its counter-intuitive implications. Importantly, as I read deconstruction, or here, biodeconstruction, it isn’t about anything! If we think of biodeconstruction as the practice of life, then, to couple Astrid’s earlier comments with Eszter’s (and maybe to reshape them), biodeconstruction can’t be read as something that isn’t also the practice of death. If we grant this, then suddenly all those things we assume are dead, inert, passive–not alive–become strangely animated.

Eszter Timár:

So far, we have discussed biodeconstruction as something that is not one thing: as something that is both Derrida’s reading of biology and our readings of biological texts with Derrida in mind and as a non-concept because it is not content-specific. It may be worth mentioning that these different meanings share affinities or resonate in deconstruction; the term biodeconstruction invites engagement with “bio-logy” but resists attempts to fit it neatly into either term of the nature/culture distinction.

Astrid Schrader:

I think we can all agree on these points. However, how we judge the ubiquity and endurance of the metaphysics of a foundational “nature” separated from “culture” depends on our networks, communities, and audiences. As history seems to be turning in circles, I think we should sometimes be allowed to move on, at least those of us who went to graduate school after the “science wars”⁵. Derrida was never a social constructivist, and language was never a “property” of humans, not even an ability or capability restricted to homo sapiens. Having said this, it is undeniable that the relationship between feminist theory and biology has never been easy. However, it is always a source of amazement when I see a theorist or philosopher begin to read science and appear surprised to find that not all scientific inquiry can be categorized as some blunt or naive (genetic or otherwise) reductionism. This amazement turns into frustration when the struggles of an entire discipline (now called feminist science studies) are simply ignored. As Haraway pointed out in 1988, “The only people who end up actually believing and, goddess forbid, acting on the ideological doctrines of disembodied scientific objectivity–enshrined in elementary textbooks and technoscience booster literature–are nonscientists, including a few very trusting philosophers” (“Situated Knowledges” 576). Neither the centrality of genetics nor deconstruction is challenged by the science of epigenetics. How many ‘epi’s’ do we want to add to the phenomenon before we realize, as Susan Oyama did, that the entire structure needs an overhaul rather than just some fine-tuning (Oyama 2003)? If the entire structure that separates nature and nurture or body and environment needs an overhaul, then it raises the question of what tool might be most appropriate. In her contribution to Evolution and Learning: The Baldwin Effect Reconsidered, developmental biologist Oyama refers to the hammer: “when you have a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail,” noting that her “particular hammer [is] a preoccupation with the nature-nurture problem” (169).

Proposing a different frame, “one that does not rest on traditional dualities, but instead incorporates the full range of organisms’ developmental and behavioral relations with their surroundings” (169), Oyama may have deconstructed Catherine Malabou’s arguments about plasticity before they were made. The point here is about the assumed exteriority of certain discourses to each other. What if we considered biodeconstruction a practice in which science has always already been engaged? However, even if nature scribbles, as Vicki says, and all effects of texts are textual themselves, there are differences in language between scientists and the critical readers of science that cannot be denied. (I just learned from one of my students that even fish have different dialects or accents upstream and downstream.) The problem is how to articulate “our roles” in relation to the scientific text, while simultaneously accepting that there are only “readings” all the way down, and that these readings are also always already re-writings.

Vicki Kirby:

Yes, the move to bring deconstruction into conversation with biological evidence can certainly be tricky, as we see in Catherine Malabou’s work. Given the general awareness that epigenetics and neuronal plasticity have destabilized the appeal to biology as a fixed foundation upon which culture plays, her intervention is salutary. However, I think Malabou loses a significant opportunity when she reads deconstruction as a specific method or model of analysis–ironically, as the play of culture. Accordingly, she deems Derrida’s “general writing” to be dated because the metaphor of the grapheme no longer captures the current understandings of our contemporary moment. As Malabou explains in “The End of Writing?: Grammatology and Plasticity,” “We are witnessing a decline or a disinvestment of the graphic sign and graphism in general. Plastic images tend to substitute themselves for graphic images. Thus appears the necessity of constructing a new motor scheme, precisely that of plasticity” (438). Malabou’s need to substitute grammatology’s graphism with the preferred “double aptitude” of her own term, “plastology,” presumes that grammatology is a model whose application or relevance has now faded.

As I see it, there are two problems here. First, Malabou’s deferral to the neurological sciences as the touchstone of biological truth deserves further interrogation. Indeed, Eszter has reminded me that the science of neurology is a broad church whose focus is dispersed: it is not confined to the cerebrum, for it includes the cognitive structures in the stomach and large intestines. And there are scientists who also work in this field (Guillaume Dumas, Monica Galliano, Asaf Bachrach) whose research contests the difference between nature and culture as we conventionally understand it. This complicates the Cartesianism that sets mind (brain) apart from what is not mind, and muddles the what and where of the subject, such that we are left to wonder why the site of self is not regarded as thoroughly corporeal. Although the sciences can provoke these questions, feminist interventions as well as grammatological readings also anticipate the complications in these findings. I suppose my question to Malabou would be, “What comes first?” If, for example, the whole of the body is cognizing, then the science of neurology isn’t too far from the claims of certain corporeal feminisms. I’m interested in how the model and the object it purports to re-present can collapse into each other, because in this instance the body is as much object as subject.

As I see it, the second problem concerns Derrida’s understanding of the graphematic structure, because it was never one of representational accuracy. In “For the Love of Lacan,” Derrida notes the analyst’s reliance on the phonological, and yet he has no desire to diagnose Lacan’s choice of analytical term by replacing the phonological with the graphematic, as if a reliance on speech is the mistake that “writing” corrects. Indeed, regarding the appeal of terminological correctives, Derrida is quite impatient:

[The sudden substitution of the graphematic for the phonological] interests me here only as a symptomatic sign in what used to be called the history of ideas, and not in itself, for what I have proposed to call the trace, gramme, différance, etc., is no more graphic than phonological, spatial than temporal–but let’s leave that, this is not the place to deal with this serious and tenacious misunderstanding. (720)

Given this need to turn Derrida into a cultural constructionist, despite his many protestations, my own intervention is not to eschew culture in preference for nature, but to suggest that, as the logic of the supplement–one plus one–is grammatologically confounded, let’s begin and end with what counts as originary. Originary différance as originary technicity assumes very different implications if we insist that “there is no outside nature.”⁶

Question: How do we negotiate the status of scientific evidence and scientific methodologies in our approach to biodeconstruction? What is the difference between reading science and reading literary texts? What kind of expertise is required?

Vicki Kirby:

Following my responses to the previous questions I probably don’t need to underline that my interest in biological or scientific evidence or my research into psychosomatic riddles, for example, is strategic. In the main, my aim is to break open the complacency that has come to equate “cultural constructionism” with “no outside-text” (Of Grammatology 158), as if the relevance and reach of Derrida’s contribution explains the solipsism of human representational systems. Of course, a grammatological practice doesn’t aim to supplement the language of culture with new or additional information from outside culture–namely, from nature–as the term biodeconstruction might seem to suggest. But this is where things get difficult and we need to move slowly.

My paper “Autoimmunity: The Political State of Nature” (2017) addresses autoimmunity by blurring the difference between what counts as cultural and political discussion and what counts as biological evidence. However, my aim is not to show that a grammatological reading is also pertinent in biology, as if deconstruction might prove a useful model in other contexts. Rather, I want to argue that there is no “both,” that there are no separate, autonomous systems (biology plus politics, or nature plus culture) whose differences can nevertheless relate or communicate with other, quite alien systems. As an aside here, I’ve always wondered why this notion that the world is an aggregation of different systems that are “somehow” capable of communicating with each other isn’t more rigorously considered: what translative operation (différance?) within any specific system can already read, digest, and respond to systems that, by conventional accounts, it has yet to encounter? What language do these exchanges use to understand a difference that is radically alien? Let’s remember that in Positions and elsewhere, Derrida insists that deconstruction is not a third term, not something that mediates or works in the space between entities that pre-exist relationality (42-43). A corollary of this qualification is that deconstruction is not a method or model of anything, and for this reason biodeconstruction remains under erasure as a specific method that might appear more receptive or inflected by scientific protocols and contents. This is because the purported gap that secures and separates the analytical instrument from the subject who uses it and the object scrutinised becomes implicated in deconstruction, whether we are talking about literature or science. Derrida dilates on this question of the method or model in an interview with Richard Kearney:

Deconstruction is not a philosophy or a method, it is not a phase, a period or a moment. It is something which is constantly at work and was at work before what we call “deconstruction” started, so I cannot periodize. For me there is no “after” deconstruction–not that I think that deconstruction is immortal–but for what I understand under the name deconstruction, there is no end, no beginning, and no after. (Kearney 65)

Importantly, deconstruction is not a model of the world because, in a very real sense, it is always already of the world that it seeks to understand. Perhaps we can think of the world as subject to its own interrogations, its own refracted re-presentations of itself, a sort of self-reflexivity with the world as subject/object, such that all of life embodies and enacts these involvements. We see the resonance here between Derrida’s différance and Karen Barad’s sense of diffraction, and implicitly we are given a way to think biology through physics, and physics through language, and so on.

Eszter Timár:

When I say I read biological or biomedical texts, I mean that I read several kinds of texts. The first consists of summary articles that report on biological findings or results. In this regard, I’m gladly entertaining the idea that biodeconstruction is a development within the scientific proliferation of biopower (as a textual cyst of sorts). I see something like a boom in the popularization of the natural sciences and I can subscribe to multiple Facebook feeds, for instance, that inform me about significant or “intriguing” scientific findings. These usually lead to texts that explicitly show some sort of scientific authentication. I became interested in these “science bites”⁷ after becoming fascinated with Derrida’s usage of “autoimmunity,” first in the texts he wrote about September 11 and then after I read Elizabeth A. Wilson’s Psychosomatic (2004), which also draws on Derrida. Wilson engages neuroscientific debates about competing conceptualizations of the enteric nervous system, responsible for much of digestion (31-49). And she reads the political tropes of scientific debate: for instance, should we imagine the enteric nervous system (the gut) as a “rogue” character, circumventing the authority of the central nervous system (the brain)? This work had great affinity with the footnote in “Faith and Knowledge,” where Derrida discusses biology as something like a lexical space for developing political philosophy—and this was clearly the case in the texts Wilson read. From that point on, I’ve been reading the never ebbing flow of “breaking” discoveries as political fictions, or as modern developments of a general epic tropology permeated by figures of sexual difference. It’s not that this was new; it’s basically the same as Emily Martin’s work on the egg and the sperm some twenty-five years ago, in which she discussed fairytale-like motives in modern biology.

As I grew fascinated by my sense that recent immunology provides “results” that seem to justify Derrida’s usage, I also started to read other kinds of texts: texts on theoretical immunology (for example the work of Thomas Pradeu) and theoretical texts reading the history of immunology (Michelle Jamieson), although these are not always neatly separated (Alfred Tauber’s work belongs to both). As for the necessary expertise, yes, I had to develop a competence in immunological terminology; however, I don’t really think this is different from understanding the terms of a given literary text. Reading immunology, precisely because of the palpably political vocabulary, always felt like immersing myself in fantasy (which I never did, so I apologize if this sounds fundamentally wrong to readers of fantasy). I have to learn a lot of information relevant mostly for what I need to understand in a given text in order to navigate through its world. Microbes and immune cells figure as intriguingly uncanny and as very social and political creatures, and understanding their relationship is a challenge for our political vocabulary. What this means is that I cannot judge if a biological text is “right” about biology: when I read Thomas Pradeu on immunology I place my faith in the institutional academic protocols asserted in his citation of biological studies. But when he reads the theory of immunology and shows a dogmatic allegiance to an idea of the self that is based on a vague sense of autochthony, he is not really discussing experiments and his methods of conducting them; instead, he is discussing the way the results of experiments are narrated in terms of a legacy of thinking about organic life. So on the one hand, I have to stick to texts that have gone through some authenticating process in the research of biology. On the other hand, if I don’t have to judge the scientific accuracy, I can read these texts not as bound absolutely to their disciplinary knowledge base but as reservoirs of political figuration and rhetoric.

Astrid Schrader:

Vicki, you have mentioned the notion of “system.” I’ve been wondering why many of us committed to relational ontologies have been able to let go of pre-existing bounded entities such as “discrete objects,” but the notion of system seems to stick. While it seems almost common sense by now to say that “the root error,” as philosopher Joe Rouse puts it in conversation with Karen Barad’s work, “is the presumption that the world somehow already comes naturally composed of discrete objects” (313), “systems” seem to prevail both within and outside of the sciences. Although scientific objects do not have to exist in the metaphysics of presence, as Hans-Jörg Rheinberger reminds us—or in other words, they can be “absent in their experimental presence” (Rheinberger, Towards a History 28)—scientists don’t seem to be able to think without the notion of a system. More often than not, a hierarchical systems view in biology presupposes specific boundaries between inside and outside and makes assumptions about the location of the source of activity. Nevertheless, Rheinberger’s experimental systems must be capable of transformations leading to “unprecedented events” (134).

As feminist legal scholar Drucilla Cornell (“The Relevance of Time”) has convincingly shown, it is difficult to align any systems theory–Cornell is particularly interested in Niklas Luhmann’s system theory–that relies on a metaphysics of presence with Derridean deconstruction, or what she calls the “philosophy of the limit.” In addition to radically diverging conceptions of time, a major difference lies in their incompatible figurations of borders, boundaries and limits (Schrader, “Marine Microbiopolitics”).

Now, Oyama’s theory mentioned above is also a “systems theory” in some sense, but her developmental systems do boundaries quite differently from the paradoxical boundary establishment that Cary Wolfe finds in self-referential autopoietic systems in What Is Posthumanism? (xxi). Wolfe describes the latter in terms of “openness from closure”: they are more like Rheinberger’s experimental system in that they cannot be pinpointed in space and time. As I see it, however, developmental systems do not coincide with the boundaries of an organism but include changing environmental circumstances that render spatial or topological boundaries permanently insecure in order to stabilize a (repeatable, inheritable) process, namely development. The difference is always a difference concerning time. Indeed, Oyama reminds us of the undecidability between a first time and a recurrence in development when she writes, “transmission, whether of genes or culture is supposed to produce developmental regularity, but…it actually presupposes such regularity.…Something is judged to have been transmitted when it reappears” (Evolution’s Eye 195). Oyama’s comment implies the Derridean structure of iterability, that is, that any assumption of a unit presumes its repeatability in its very definition.

Vicki Kirby:

Yes, I agree that for many theorists, “system” does retain a foundational necessity in the face of grammatology’s excavation and displacement of foundations. I certainly rely on the words “system” and “systematicity,” and not unrelatedly, I find I’m uncomfortable with those arguments that claim, too quickly for my liking, that there are no foundations–as if we already know what a foundation is and could simply reject the notion and move on. I don’t think we can resolve these difficulties by saying yes or no to a term-any term. So for this reason I don’t reject the meaning of any word as simply wrong, but I do try to reroute what might otherwise hold a traditional signification in place as the measure of what counts as good thinking. Derrida deploys the term “system,” as we see here in a sentence from Positions concerning the workings of the trace: “The interweaving results in each ‘element’–phoneme or grapheme–being constituted on the basis of the trace within it of the other elements of the chain or system. This interweaving, this textile, is the text produced only in the transformation of another text” (387-388). Importantly, if there is no outside, no absolute limit or enclosure, then there is no straightforward inside either. Consequently, we are left with a riddle about any discernible (enclosed) unit. Whether sign, individual subject, cell, atom, or even one particular system among others, “it” will already comprehend what it is conventionally defined against. Little wonder that I find myself attracted to quantum “explanations” that confound local with/in non-local. Even when I was struggling to make sense of the Saussurean sign all those years ago I concluded that the sign is not so much an entity located in a system that surrounds it; rather, the sign is the system’s processual self-differentiation.

Astrid Schrader:

Another way I’d read “there is no outside-text” (Of Grammatology 158) pertains to the undecidability between text and context (inside and outside). In Limited Inc, Derrida writes, “nothing exists outside context” (152). This undecidability is not just an undecidability about what content falls inside a specific realm of consideration and what is constitutively excluded from it, for it concerns the very shape or form of the boundary or limit that seeks to demarcate the inside from an outside. This, for me, must involve a question about the relationship between space and time. The notion of “system” seems to hide some of the boundary problematics more evident in notions of “subject,” “individual,” “cell,” or “organism.” I am thinking here of what Derrida has called an “abyssal logic” in The Animal That Therefore I Am, which suggests a multitude of relations between space and time, a multitude of kinds of “limits” that often get reduced to one kind with the help of the systems metaphor.

This was quite a detour. Returning to the initial question, I don’t read biological texts any differently than I do philosophical or literary texts. I try to take their materiality just as seriously without extrapolating too much beyond their immediate possible meanings. The notion of evidence suggests that these texts answer to something radically exterior to their own practices; however, I don’t think that science works this way. The fact that scientific texts are often rendered in representational idioms–in other words, that they contain method sections–does not mean that they have to be read that way, as pointing beyond themselves. Published methodology sections are very selective retroactive readings of a far more complex practice required by a specific inherited tradition. I don’t find them very helpful in getting a picture of the practice. However, there’s a difference between method and practice. I think that practices can be deconstructive or not. I agree with Vicki that deconstruction is neither a method nor a concept nor a third term, but that it can be practiced, just like justice can be practiced but never achieved. In my 2010 paper on the fish-killer Pfiesteria, which deals with a scientific controversy that had not been settled (there was no scientific agreement on matters of facts), I try hard to construct my arguments independently of the veracity of the scientific findings; the necessary (partial) failure of that effort makes a case in point about my own responsibility and that is partially what that paper is about.

Question: How do we negotiate biological origin stories with “originary différance” and “originary technicity”?

Vicki Kirby:

As I mentioned above, I’ve always been exercised by the narrative that determines what constitutes biology/the body/nature/the other as a prior, more primitive, and contained system. Derrida’s non-concepts “language,” “writing,” and “textuality” question the story that understands nature as a sort of automatic writing, or program, because there is no thinking subject or author to explain what it does. If we subscribe to this description, then the comparative difference between nature’s program and human culture appears self-evident: human writing is regarded as calculated and potentially deceptive (political) because authored by a subject, whether individual or collective. In an early elaboration of this very point in “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourses of the Human Sciences” and its “Discussion” (1970), Derrida notes that the human is regarded as an aberration from what came before, a “mistake” that severs the human from its origins. Human exceptionalism appears unique as a consequence because it is able to mediate or re-present a world that is no longer accessible. My own interventions are primarily focused on this nature/culture interface, where the question of language is answered and given its proper place as the marker of species difference. I have always been nonplussed by definitions of language that easily determine what is or is not language. Consequently, Derrida’s aphorism “no outside-text” remains an invaluable touchstone for my research because, if we consider the implications seriously, then the various properties that identify and adjudicate human exceptionalism generate more questions than answers. Of course, there are difficulties in saying this if we assume that difference can be identified, compared, and evaluated by saying yes or no to it. In some of my work I’ve tried to initiate an intervention in human exceptionalism by working with the sort of argument that Derrida mounts in The Beast and the Sovereign Vol. 1, where he refuses to throw out sovereignty and yet twists it into an unfamiliar shape. I evoke the non-concept “originary humanicity” in order to effect a similar twist. If we can talk of “originary writing” and think this through the ontology of the animal and even the plant (and surely for Karen Barad and Astrid we have to consider “entities” in physics in a similar way), then what happens if we think “originary humanicity” through and as the ontology of the plant or animal? I’m trying to complicate “the how” and “the what” of the human—and of life for that matter—rather than assuming that it’s a given and we don’t need to ask what it is. For this reason I do feel a certain frustration when Derrida’s radical interiority is read as “no outside culture.”

Astrid Schrader:

For me, part of biodeconstruction entails showing that there are no biological origin stories. Once we have established that biology is a text in the Derridean sense like anything else, there is no need to distinguish the practices of deconstruction from biodeconstruction. This, in fact, is one of the main arguments in “Microbial Suicide”: with the “discovery” of apoptosis in microbes there’s no longer a need to postulate an evolutionary beginning of death or life. Stories of beginnings are stories about particular conceptions of time, and stories of progressive developmental temporalities become ever more difficult to justify from within the sciences. Biodeconstruction does both: it reveals and performs the absence of origins.

Question: How do we select the scientific text of interest? Or, does it select us? Eszter Timár:

In the texts where I cite “science bites” (“Eating Autonomy”), I’ve selected scientific texts in light of Derrida’s footnote and the larger Derridean interest in the ways texts that rely on the philosopheme of ipseity (in affirming what Derrida calls the metaphysics of presence) can’t help but undermine their own mission. Focusing on immunity and the microbiome, I’ve chosen texts that feature relevant findings and whose results call into question the idea that a self is an indivisible essence that can survive only by protective violence. If biology conventionally signifies the nonhuman logic of organic life, I select the authenticated results that actively undermine this significance. Examples such as learning that the microbiome that actively modulates “our” states of various kinds is us, or Astrid’s example of apoptosis in microbes, have a certain sensational value (which is what gets them published in popular media) because they provide “evidence” that our conventional assumptions about organic life are based on a certain humancentric view of life in general, a view in which beings are selfsame, bounded off, and in which life can occur in the absence of death.

Astrid Schrader:

Thinking of biodeconstruction as a practice, rather than thinking of deconstruction as applied to biology, changes that question. I don’t think that a conscious choice or a selection from a specific pool of available texts is at work here (or in my work in feminist science studies). Having said that, however, there might be a way to characterize the scientific texts (retroactively) that I’ve been working with; I think they are all texts that hold a promise to challenge specific norms or scientific ideas about their own practice. To what extent such a challenge is attributable to the science or the reading is of course debatable and ultimately undecidable. The science itself (whatever that might be) does not necessarily have to be radical within its own field; it might very well be quite mainstream and have a potential for a radical (norm challenging) reading.

Vicki Kirby:

I think a life “chooses,” or is hooked through and by a text in a specific way, maybe because it “sees itself,” albeit in some refracted sense that isn’t strictly self-present. In other words, an “entry point” isn’t determined in a causal sense, and yet it isn’t random either. I like Derrida’s comment on choice in Positions, a complexity I’ve described elsewhere as “natural selection”:

The incision of deconstruction, which is not a voluntary decision or an absolute beginning, does not take place just anywhere, or in an absolute elsewhere. An incision, precisely, it can be made only according to lines of force and forces of rupture that are localizable in the discourse to be deconstructed. The topical and technical determination of the most necessary sites and operators–beginnings, holds, levers etc.,–in a given situation depends upon an historical analysis. This analysis is made in the general movement of the field, and is never exhausted by the conscious calculation of a “subject.” (82)

Derrida manages to conjure a sense of precision in regard to a particular site of intervention or inquiry, because he insists that this point of entry opens within a field of forces that is subject to those same forces. Here, the specific and the general are not in opposition. I find it interesting that Derrida can preserve a sense of reflexivity that does not rely on human identity as the unique and sole repository of agency, self-consciousness, and personal choice.

Question: What is the relationship between biodeconstruction and feminist new materialism?

Eszter Timár:

As I mentioned before, for me biodeconstruction includes a fascination with Derrida’s insistence on not granting the language of biology a special status. He frequently uses apparently biological terms, terms relating to nonhuman organic nature, to refer to linguistic phenomena (such as grafting). At the same time he is vigilant about this language that can be wielded in the interest of “organicist totalization,” as he calls it in “Biodegradables” (816). It is not only a gesture of critiquing the nature/culture distinction, but also a practice of writing that resists a strict sense of this distinction.

There are many other examples of this vigilance (such as his discussion of the animal as a necessarily political term invested in humancentrism, or the many discussions of life across his oeuvre, including in “Faith and Knowledge”). “Biodegradables” is relevant here because this is a text that reflects on the disaster (intellectual, ethical, and emotional) of what Derrida calls “Paul de Man’s War” (“Like the Sound”). Arguably, for those who would be relieved to cast off the burden of reading de Man, the name “Paul de Man” may represent the corner of deconstruction most opposed to life (we can think of de Man’s discussions of materiality, for instance). Instead of citing de Man’s relevant texts here, let me quote Derrida’s “Typewriter Ribbon” and refer in general to the volume on Paul de Man in which it first appeared, Material Events. Derrida notes: “Materiality is not the body, at least the body proper as organic totality” (354). This choice to discuss de Man together with terms of organic life suggests to me that the term biodeconstruction would also refer to an interest in interrogating the relations, resonances, and contrasts between Derrida’s and Paul de Man’s work (including a keen attention to the political figuration I mentioned earlier).

Let me add another point: deconstruction’s resistance to a simple distinction between nature and culture also makes deconstruction relevant for feminist theory. Right now we are in the thick of what we habitually refer to as feminist new materialism. It’s an enormously heterogeneous body of work that, following Samantha Frost in “The Implications of the New Materialisms for Feminist Epistemology,” I regard as a commitment to a rigorous rethinking of the nature/culture distinction and as an accompanying openness to the fact that the resulting complexity will not yield easy answers that would affirm prior assumptions about feminist epistemology. I think this is remarkably compatible with Derrida’s textual politics. At the same time, I think this compatibility is accompanied by an incompatibility. While the work of Derrida is certainly read by theorists associated with new materialism (we have cited several such scholars), as I briefly mentioned above, new materialism relies very heavily on the theoretical currency of biopolitical thought, especially what Timothy Campbell delineated as its negative analysis: the combination of Foucault’s and Agamben’s work in “Bios, Immunity, Life.” Understandably, Foucault’s work, especially his History of Sexuality Vol. 1, which connects sexuality to biopower, has been immensely influential in feminist and queer theory. In the last chapter of the book, Foucault offers his thoughts on the specifically modern nature of biopower. Referring to Aristotle, Foucault suggests that Western modernity marks the first time in European history when politics takes what he calls life as its primary object (143). In this gesture of separating life and power, according to which power suddenly and violently encroaches on life, we can hear the resonance of the nature/culture binary as it was sketched by Vicki at the beginning of this conversation. Derrida delivers a detailed critique of this argument (including its subsequent treatment by Agamben) in the twelfth session of The Beast and the Sovereign Vol. 1, questioning whether we can view modern biopower as radically different from the way the relationship between politics and life could be figured prior to modernity (305-334). My point is that there is important disagreement between Derrida and biopolitics, and this may mean that if new materialism implicitly relies on the founding gesture of biopower, then Derrida’s work will sit somewhat oddly with it. And yet, precisely because of this affinity, the oddness may well motivate renewed engagements with deconstruction in general, and provide future occasions–perhaps a habitat–for generating and elaborating various inquiries we might still call biodeconstruction.

Astrid Schrader:

In the context of feminist new materialisms I would like to ask who the actors are in biodeconstruction. If there’s anything “new” in feminist new materialisms, then I would say it is a more thorough deconstruction of agency, no longer conceivable as an attribute of a bounded actor or “self.” In general, I think of it as a rather heterogeneous theoretical movement with perhaps the impossibility of opposing vitalism and materialism as the only commonality. Perhaps Derrideans and Deleuzians, who previously did not have much to say to each other, are re-engaging under a new heading? It might be a strategic gathering of loosely related theories with common concerns. So, who are the actors in biodeconstruction? As Francesco Vitale states, “[T]he living is a text that produces texts in order to survive” (“The Text” 111).

While feminist science studies is difficult to imagine without Foucault and biopolitics, biopolitics is certainly not just one thing. As Roberto Esposito has pointed out, Foucault’s apparent indecision about biopolitics as “power over life” and “power of life,” or the insufficient theorization of the relationship between a thanatopolitics and an affirmative biopolitics, has led to quite divergent approaches to biopolitics. The incompatibility of Agamben’s focus on sovereignty in a biopolitics that requires the distinction between bios (political life) and zoe (bare life) and Esposito’s alleged de-differentiation of all forms of life in a neo-vitalist formulation of biopolitics is at the core of Cary Wolfe’s latest book, Before the Law. Wolfe’s intervention, his search for a “third way,” is perhaps the most sustained engagement with biopolitics and deconstruction. With the help of Derrida, Wolfe’s project is to bring animal studies, which according to him has focused predominantly on ethics, together with biopolitics in order to think about animals politically. In this context, Wolfe is mostly concerned with the annual killings of more than ten billion industrial farm animals (in the US), which is constitutively biopolitical. In “Marine Microbiopolitics” I argue that Wolfe’s subject “before the law” is constructed “after science”; that is, in Wolfe’s account, biology may contribute to who counts as “subject” in the future, but it cannot interrogate the kind of limit that differentiates the “who” from the “what,” a subject from a non-subject or object. In other words, the role of science here is reduced to providing the content to the philosophical form; biology cannot interrogate the kind of “limit” between human and animal, bios and zoe, subject and object. That biology cannot make metaphysical or ontological contributions is a Heideggerian point (repeated by Wolfe) that is not compatible with what Derrida calls an “abyssal logic” in The Animal That Therefore I Am. Here, Derrida asks us to think what “a limit becomes once it is abyssal” (30-31), which I argue requires a reconceptualization of time (see also Schrader, “Abyssal Intimacies”). Thus, biodeconstruction–at least my take on biodeconstruction–goes further than Wolfe’s biopolitical re-rendering of the human/animal divide as a new “who”/”what” divide before the law that eschews species boundaries: the “subject” of politics is also constructed and deconstructed within (micro)biology. Or, as Vicki put it earlier, biology is agential.

Vicki Kirby:

In What if Culture was Nature all Along? (2017), my essay, “Matter out of Place: ‘New Materialism’ in Review,” directly engages this important question. With reference to Mary Douglas, I argue that all the different theoretical “turns” that produce a library of new titles every few years share a need to manage “matter,” and they put it somewhere that is either privileged or marginalised. It seems that if we don’t do this, then, as Douglas argues, things don’t make good sense. I agree with Astrid and Eszter that new materialism is heterogeneous in its claims, and often contradictory, and yet I think it offers a platform that can potentially reinvigorate arguments and assumptions that have become stale over the years. However, I have to admit that I’m often as encouraged as I am disappointed. For example, Eszter mentions Samantha Frost’s “rigorous rethinking of the nature/culture distinction.” However, I do think that the degree of interrogation is pre-emptively qualified in the introduction to New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, where Frost and Diana Coole note that “our material lives are always culturally mediated, but they are not only cultural” (3). It’s precisely here, in this appeal to what is outside or other than culture yet important nevertheless, that a lot of new materialist work finds its terms of reference.

My hope is that we can refresh the page by acknowledging that the very words, “new” and “material,” might prove misleading. My concern has to do with the way in which many self-described new materialists seem happy to define their practice as a break from language and representation, as if we can put those misguided fascinations to bed and focus on real and important matters–all those things we were previously led to believe were inaccessible (not that I think Frost and Coole are making their argument in quite this way). Notably, Derrida never divided the world up in terms of access or aggregation, and “textuality” is not the containment of a symbolic, representational system authored by humans who are thereby cut adrift from the world’s material gravitas.

I’ve certainly found a welcoming home of sorts in publications and events that come under the banner of (feminist) new materialism–I find it a broad church with quite disparate perspectives and an abundance of curiosity. For example, I’m learning a lot as research moves into intriguing areas, such as plant cognition and the sociality of vegetal life. So, regardless of the name that an intellectual movement might acquire, I guess we can always contest and reroute those names and their logics–the linguistic turn actually enabled me to consider “meat literacy.” I also agree with Astrid that there is an opportunity here for Derrideans and Deleuzians to reconsider their differences. I think that grammatological/feminist insights can always be had in uncanny ways and in unforeseen places if we pause to reconsider what might be hidden in plain sight.

Footnotes

1. For a quick introduction to what has now become a burgeoning literature, see Elizabeth A. Wilson’s discussion of the dilemma that placebo now poses for the pharmaceutical industry’s treatments for depression (“Ingesting Placebo”).

2. For a compelling illustration and critique of feminism’s inability to acknowledge biological plasticity see Elizabeth A. Wilson’s discussion of somatic compliance in hysteria (“Introduction – Somatic Compliance”).

3. Texts that look at Derrida’s usage from the point of view of immunology include Anderson and Mackay, Intolerant Bodies; Andrews, “Autoimmune Illness”; Samir Haddad, “Derrida.” See also Elina Staikou’s contribution in Part 2 of this special issue, as well as Staikou, “Putting in the Graft” and A. Timár, “Derrida.”

4. See also Haraway, “Modest.”

5. The “science wars” refer to exchanges between supporters of scientific objectivity (in the sense of neutrality) and postmodern critics in the 1990’s, which culminated with the so-called Sokal hoax, a supposedly nonsensical publication by physicist Alan Sokal in the journal Social Text.

6. In Biodeconstruction, Francesco Vitale comes to a similar conclusion regarding Malabou’s understanding of what she terms Derrida’s “motor scheme.” Vitale notes: “This concept implies a rather relaxed recourse to the classical opposition between the sensible and the intelligible and to the classical motive of imagination as a middle term. Despite the vicissitudes of the supposed graphic paradigm, the motor schema has no hold on deconstruction, for which it is structurally unsustainable” (213).

7. See Timár, “Eating Autonomy.”

Works Cited

• Anderson, Warwick, and Ian R. Mackay. Intolerant Bodies: A Short History of Autoimmunity. Johns Hopkins UP, 2014.
• Andrews, Alice. “Autoimmune Illness as a Death-drive: An Autobiography of Defence.” Freud after Derrida, special issue of Mosaic, vol. 44 no. 3, 2011, pp. 189-203. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/450737.
• Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke UP, 2007.
• Borradori, Giovanna, and Jacques Derrida. “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida.” Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, edited by Giovanna Borradori. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. U of Chicago P, 2003, pp. 85-136.
• Brown, Wendy. “Suffering Rights as Paradoxes.” Constellations vol. 7, no. 2, 2000, pp. 230-241. Wiley Online Library, doi:10.1111/1467-8675.00183.
• Campbell, Timothy. “Bios, Immunity, Life: The Thought of Roberto Esposito.” Diacritics, vol. 36, no. 2, 2006, pp. 2-22. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/dia.2008.2009.
• Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost, editors. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Duke UP, 2010.
• Cornell, Drucilla. The Philosophy of the Limit. Routledge, 1992.
• —. “The Relevance of Time to the Relationship between Philosophy of the Limit and System Theory.” Cardozo Law Review 1992, 13: 1579–1603.
• Derrida, Jacques. The Animal that Therefore I Am. Translated by David Wills, Fordham UP, 2008.
• —. Aporias: Dying–Awaiting (One Another at) the “Limits of Truth.” Translated by Thomas Dutoit, Stanford UP, 1993.
• —. The Beast and the Sovereign Vol 1. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington, U of Chicago P, 2009.
• —. “Biodegradables: Seven Diary Fragments.” Translated by Peggy Kamuf, Critical Inquiry, vol. 15, no. 4. 1989, pp. 812-873.
• —. “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone.” Acts of Religion, edited by Gil Anidjar. Translated by Samuel Weber, Routledge, 2002, pp. 40-102.
• —. “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundations of Authority.'” Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, edited by Michel Rosenfeld, Drucilla Cornell, and David Gray Carlson. Translated by Mary Quaintance, Routledge, 1992, pp. 3-67.
• —. “For the Love of Lacan.” Translated by Brent Edwards and Ann Lecercle, Cardozo Law Review, vol. 16, no. 3-4, 1994-5, pp. 699-728. HeinOnline, heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.journals/cdozo16&i=719.
• —. “Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man’s War.” Translated by Peggy Kamuf, Critical Inquiry, vol. 14, no. 3. 1988, pp. 590-652. JSTOR, jstor.org/stable/1343706.
• —. Limited Inc. Translated by Jeffrey Mehlman, Samuel Weber, and Alan Bass, Northwestern UP, 1988.
• —. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Johns Hopkins UP, 1984.
• —. Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
• —. Positions. Translated by Alan. Bass, U of Chicago P, 1981.
• —. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf, Routledge, 1994.
• —. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourses of the Human Sciences” and “Discussion.” Translated by Alan Bass. The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy, edited by Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, Johns Hopkins UP, 1970, pp. 247-272.
• —. “Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2) (within such limits).” Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, edited by Tom Cohen, et al., U of Minnesota P, 2001, pp. 277-360.
• Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley, Vintage, 1990.
• Frost, Samantha. “The Implications of the New Materialisms for Feminist Epistemology.” Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science, edited by Heidi E. Grasswick, Springer, 2011, pp. 69-85.
• Haddad, Samir. “Derrida and Democracy at Risk.” Contretemps, vol. 4, 2004, pp. 29-44. Globethics.net, www.globethics.net/gel/4410895.
• Halperin, David. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality: And Other Essays on Greek Love. Routledge, 1990.
• Haraway, Donna. “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies.” Simians, Cyborgs, Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 1991, pp. 203-230.
• —. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, 1988, pp. 575-599. JSTOR, doi:10.2307/3178066.
• —. Modest Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan©_Meets_On coMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience. New York and London: Routledge, 1997.
• Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time (J. Macquarrie, trans.). New York: Harper & Row, 1962.
• Jamieson, Michelle. “Imagining ‘Reactivity’: Allergy within the History of Immunology.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, vol. 41, 2010, pp. 356-366. Elsevier, doi:10.1016/j.shpsc.2010.10.016.
• Kearney, Richard. “Hospitality, Justice, and Responsibility: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida.” Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, edited by Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley, Routledge, 1999, pp. 65-83.
• Kirby, Vicki. “Autoimmunity: The Political State of Nature.” Parallax, vol. 23, no. 1, January 2017, pp. 46-60. Taylor and Francis, doi:10.1080/13534645.2016.1261661.
• —. “Deconstruction.” The Routledge Companion to Literature and Science, edited by Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini, Routledge, 2010.
• —. Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal. Routledge, 1997.
• —. “Tracing Life: ‘La Vie La Mort.'” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 9, no. 1, 2009, pp. 107-126. Project Muse, doi:10.1353/ncr.0.0059.
• Kirby, Vicki, editor. What If Culture Was Nature All Along? Edinburgh UP, 2017.
• Kirby, Vicki, and Elizabeth A. Wilson. “Feminist Conversations with Vicki Kirby and Elizabeth A. Wilson.” Feminist Theory, vol. 12, no. 2, 2011, pp. 227-234. SAGE, doi:10.1177/1464700111404289.
• Malabou, Catherine. “The End of Writing?: Grammatology and Plasticity.” Translated by Annjeanette Wiese. The European Legacy: Towards New Paradigms, vol. 12, no. 4, 2007, pp. 431-441. Taylor and Francis, doi:10.1080/10848770701396254.
• —. “How is Subjectivity Undergoing Deconstruction Today? Philosophy, Auto-Hetero-Affection, and Neurobiological Emotion.” Qui Parle, vol. 17, no. 2, 2009, pp. 111–22. JSTOR, jstor.org/stable/20685743.
• Martin, Emily. “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male Female Roles.” Signs, vol. 16, no. 3, 1991, pp. 485-501. JSTOR, jstor.org/stable/3174586.
• Oyama, Susan. Evolution’s Eye: A Systems View of the Biology-Culture Divide. Duke UP, 2000.
• —. “On Having a Hammer.” Evolution and Learning: The Baldwin Effect Reconsidered, edited by Bruce H. Weber and David J. Depew, MIT P. 2003, pp. 169-191.
• Pradeu, Thomas. The Limits of the Self: Immunology and Biological Identity. Translated by Elizabeth Vitanza, Oxford UP, 2012.
• Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. “Experimental Systems: Historiality, Narration, and Deconstruction.” The Science Studies Reader, edited by Mario Biagioli, Routledge, 1999, pp. 417-429.
• —. Towards a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube. Stanford UP, 1997.
• Rouse, Joseph. How Scientific Processes Matter: Reclaiming Philosophical Naturalism. U of Chicago P, 2002.
• Roosth, Sophia, and Astrid Schrader, editors. “Feminist Theory Out of Science: Introduction.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, vol. 23, no. 3, 2012, pp. 1-8. Duke UP, doi:10.1215/10407391-1892880.
• Schrader, Astrid. “Abyssal Intimacies: How (Not) To Care About Deformed Leaf Bugs in the Aftermath of Chernobyl?” Social Studies of Science, vol. 45, no. 5, 2015, pp. 665-90. SAGE, doi:10.1177/0306312715603249.
• —. Dinos & Demons: The Politics of Temporality and Responsibility in Science. 2008. University of California, Santa Cruz, PhD dissertation. —. “Haunted Measurements: Demonic Work and Time in Experimentation.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, vol. 23, no. 3, 2012, pp. 119–160. Duke UP, doi:10.1215/10407391-1892916.
• —. “Marine Microbiopolitics: Haunted Microbes Before the Law.” Ocean Legalities, edited by Irus Braverman and Elizabeth Johnson, Duke UP, forthcoming.
• —. “Microbial Suicide: Towards a Less Anthropocentric Ontology of Life and Death.” Body & Society, vol. 23, no. 3, 2017, pp. 48-74. SAGE, doi:10.1177/1357034X17716523.
• —. “Responding to Pfiesteria piscicida (the Fish Killer): Phantomatic Ontologies, Indeterminacy, and Responsibility in Toxic Microbiology.” Social Studies of Science, vol. 40, no. 2, 2010, pp. 275-306. SAGE, doi:10.1177/0306312709344902.
• Scott, Joan. Only Paradoxes To Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man. Harvard UP, 1997.
• Staikou, Elina. “Putting in the Graft: Philosophy and Immunology.” Derrida Today, vol. 7, no. 2, 2014, pp. 155-179. Edinburgh UP, doi:10.3366/drt.2014.0087.
• Tauber, Alfred. The Immune Self: Theory or Metaphor? Cambridge UP, 1994.
• Timár, Andrea. “Derrida and the Immune System.” Terror(ism) and Aesthetics, special issue of Et al.–Critical Theory Online, vol. 3, 2015. Et al, etal.hu/en/archive/terrorism-and-aesthetics-2015/derrida-and-the-immune-system/.
• Timár, Eszter. “Derrida’s Error and Immunology.” The Oxford Literary Review, vol. 39, no. 1, 2017, pp. 65-81. Edinburgh UP, doi:10:3366/olr.2017.0210.
• —. “Eating Autonomy.” Parallax, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 38-49. Taylor and Francis, doi:10.1080/13534645.2013.743723.
• —. “Squirm”. Bodily Fluids, special issue of InterAlia: A Journal of Queer Studies, no. 9, 2014, pp. 35-48. InterAlia, interalia.org.pl/media/09_2014/Timar.pdf.
• Vitale, Francesco. Biodeconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences. Translated by Mauro Senatore. SUNY P, 2018.
• —. “The Text and the Living: Jacques Derrida between Biology and Deconstruction.” The Oxford Literary Review, vol. 36, no. 1, 2014, pp. 95-114. Edinburgh UP, doi:10.3366/olr.2014.0089.
• Wilson, Elizabeth A. Gut Feminism. Duke UP, 2015.
• —. “Ingesting Placebo.” Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 23, no. 55, 2008, pp. 31-42. Taylor and Francis, doi:10.1080/08164640701827170.
• —. “Introduction: Somatic Compliance—Feminism, Biology, and Science.” Feminist Science Studies, special issue of Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 29, 1999, pp. 7-18. Taylor and Francis, doi:10.1080/08164649993290.
• —. Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body. Duke UP, 2004.
• Wolfe, Cary. Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame. U of Chicago P, 2013.
• —. “In Search of Post-Humanist Theory: The Second-Order Cybernetics of Maturana and Varela,” Cultural Critique, vol. 30, 1995, pp. 33-70. JSTOR, doi:10.2307/1354432.
• —. “In the Shadow of Wittgenstein’s Lion: Language, Ethics, and the Question of the Animal.” Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, edited by Cary Wolfe, U of Minnesota P, 2003, pp. 1-57.
• —. What Is Posthumanism? U of Minnesota P, 2009.