Grammatechnics and the Genome

Erin Obodiac (bio)
University of California, Irvine

Abstract

In Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida shows that a certain arche-writing of the trace is not only in play with any mode of language—spoken, written, or graphic—but is also a principle of “life”—whether human, non-human, cybernetic, or genetic. Catherine Malabou’s forays into new biologies of plasticity and epigenetics invite us to move away from programmatic readings of inscription that turn life into a cybernetic code or machine. According to the logic of the supplement, however, is not the trace always already a “plastic inscription”?

We might have to throw a very loose lasso with the term “script” when considering the genetic code as one of those “scripts that preceded the alphabet” (Grammatology 129), a writing before the letter, yet the Derrida of 1967 did not hesitate to bring cybernetics and genetics into the encircling ring of the grammè and the animating movement of the trace. Although books like Judith Roof’s The Poetics of DNA alert us to the pitfalls of understanding the genome by way of a “linguistic” model, Of Grammatology preemptively points us to “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing”; as arche-writing, the trace is an originary technics that subtends all conditions of mediality, prior to and post “book.” Even if the genetic might already be or always was outmoded as linguistic “code,” it nevertheless belongs to the trace, rendering “the history of life—of what we here call differance—as the history of the grammè” (84). And although John Johnston’s The Allure of Machinic Life argues that new theories of life are initiated or mediated by emergent technologies, pointing in particular to molecular biology’s “complete dependence on information technology or bioinformatics” (5) and suggesting there is “a ‘better image of the genetic program’—as a parallel distributed regulatory network” (6), Of Grammatology lets us know that a general concept of technology cannot elucidate the manner in which the trace is a technics; instead, the trace, as originary technics, points to the way in which all other technologies can be understood. But if the genome is a grammatechnics of inscription,¹ the question remains whether the age of grammatology has come to an end, as Catherine Malabou suggests with her concept of plasticity, and whether the ends of grammatology have met their match, not incidentally, in our post-genomic era.

Since the 1950s, likening the sequencing of DNA to a language has become a commonplace of bioinformatic and genomic discourses. Employing the rhetoric of language itself—DNA is information encoded in genetic material; this information is translated into protein by living cells; protein-coding genes are transcribed as messenger RNA; codon sequences are read in reading frames; spelling mistakes in the canonical genetic code or cipher can generate disease, and so on—this biosemiotic paradigm suggests that life is regulated by “linguistic” principles and that DNA can be understood as a bioarchive or a mnemotechnics of inscription.² Biotechnologies—and even more so, experimental bioart³ and biomedia—deploy this genetic language in chimerical fashion: gene-splicing and CRISPR technologies edit snippets of genomic text engendering transgenic creatures and green fluorescent bunnies; synthetic biologists encode lines from James Joyce in bacterial form; and dangerous genetic markers appear deletable with the stroke of a biocomputational button. The ubiquity of digital computers and media in our cybernetic era makes the genetic program second nature to us. Yet contemporary biotech might also be performing a kind of deconstruction of the Program beyond deconstruction. For instance, Johnston notes that technology counters biologist François Jacob’s insistence on the immutability of the genetic code, and that “the invention of gene-splicing suspended this very axiom … recent research … has challenged this orthodoxy, both in terms of the ‘invariance’ of the genome and the way in which the genome works as a ‘program’ … the genome itself is a complex adaptive system” (Allure 5, 6). The linguistic paradigm reigns in genetics and biotechnology even as bioart, synthetic biology, and transgenic art point to new modalities of bio-plasticity. To use a term popularized by Eugene Thacker,⁴ biomedia deploy genetic code in their productions, yet seek to depart from textuality and embrace media forms that purport not to be modeled on the book, including digital network media and analogue, indexical, or transductive media that are interactive, emergent, and adaptive. Molecular biology’s linguistic paradigm is an essential life support system and theoretical umbilical cord for much bioart and transgenic art, but most contemporary media theories adopt a Deleuzian distaste for the text. At stake in these differences between technics, media, and languages are questions of plasticity, and the most plastic thing of all: the living being. Some will argue that genetic code is a kind of blueprint or tool used in the production of the plastic artwork, but not the artwork itself. Similarly, the human genome is neither a human being nor even an embryo: these are plastic formations. Malabou’s forays into new biologies of plasticity and epigenetics invite us to move away from the programmatic readings of inscription that turn life into a cybernetic code or machine. Epigenetics, for instance—the study of modifications of gene expression—suggests that the genome is not so much a fixed code as a plastic form. Malabou believes we can no longer rely on deconstruction to point to these new understandings of life, because deconstruction is limited by its own techno-determinism.⁵ For Malabou, even Derrida’s concept of the trace (which launched a critique of code and other logocentrisms) is no longer plastic enough, despite the fact that “plastic inscriptions” might be a fortuitous term for living beings in our era of genomics and bioinformatics—and in every era before ours, given that life has always already been a technical graft or arche-writing, according to the logic of the supplement: “genetic writing as the determinant of life” (Grammatology lxxix).

Whether the trace provides a model for understanding the genome as a genetic code appears to be a question technologically determined by its own conditions of mediality: the era of textuality. Although Friedrich Kittler claims that technology determines the situation, and that media technologies in particular are epistemic tools that provide the models or metaphors for what things are and how they work, Derrida claims that the trace is not just one technics among others. Although it might speak of the equipmentality of the track (in French) or the silhouette (in English), and even though it tends to be misunderstood within the mediality of print and writing in the narrow sense, the trace might still have critical force as a non-empirical and non-transcendental operation, especially in this time of new materialisms. The trace is not a mark left behind by a presence, but the condition of (im)possibility of such a mark. The trace concerns différance, the deferring and spacing of difference.⁶ In Of Grammatology‘s first sections, Derrida writes that the trace is an “originary” technics (originary always in the sense of supplementary):

Technics in the service of language: I am not invoking a general essence of technics which would be already familiar to us and would help us in understanding the narrow and historically determined concept of writing as an example. I believe on the contrary that a certain sort of question about the meaning and origin of writing precedes, or at least merges with, a certain type of question about the meaning and origin of technics. That is why the notion of technique can never simply clarify the notion of writing. (8)

Derrida’s insistence that technics cannot tell us anything about the trace—rather, that the structure of the trace constitutes each and every technics—includes not only human technics, but also those that belong to living beings in their constitution as well as their activity. He relates the genetic program to the cybernetic program in general in order to reposition both within the larger sweep of arche-writing, something Gayatri Spivak underscores in the Afterword to Of Grammatology‘s 2016 edition:

The general argument is most pertinent to our time: that although the cybernetic and informatics revolution, using linguistics as a scientific model, is putting emphasis on writing—all that which used to assemble itself under the name of language now assembles itself under the name of writing—in fact, the “revolutionaries” are using not a new discourse to fix these new inventions, but versions of the millennial ethnocentric and Europocentric ideology of the thinking of Europe. The young Derrida writes in the hope that cybernetics and informatics will join hands with a philosophy defeating itself. (345)

Spivak reminds us that, along with phonocentrism, logocentrism, and eurocentrism, arche-writing deracinates the self-same origin of any programmatic-ism, including the cybernetic and genetic ones: the trace, the supplement of the origin, and differance (un)ground their possibility. When Malabou questions the reduction of life to DNA or genetic code and asserts that plasticity rather than inscription is essential to a critical understanding of life and living beings, when she suggests that epigenetics—the plastic expression of the genetic—aspires to replace the concept of the genetic program, does this mean that the old discourse of arche-writing is no longer “operative”?

Malabou observes that contemporary biology puts pressures on contemporary philosophy, and suggests that deconstruction falls short in its understanding of “life” and living beings in this new scientific context. From Of Grammatology‘s outset, Derrida speculates on the day when deconstruction’s “own historico-metaphysical character is also exposed” (9): does the concept of plasticity achieve this task of exposure? In his foreword to Malabou’s Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction, Clayton Crocket notes the filial and supplemental relation between the concepts of arche-writing and plasticity: “Plasticity replaces Derridean writing as a motor scheme by which to think and do philosophy” (xvi).⁷ He argues that the stakes of this substitution are not only philosophical but theological, insisting that we understand “the end of deconstruction as the deconstruction of Christianity” (xvii). Leaving aside the theological question, if “genetic writing … is the determinant of life” (lxxix), and if plasticity now takes the place of writing, more than philosophy undergoes a tectonic shift.

Although Of Grammatology primarily discusses human language, Derrida’s central claim about the phonocentric exclusion of writing (graphic and spatial specificities in particular⁸)—and the way in which writing or arche-writing provides the general structure of language—also opens up the manner in which a kind of writing is always already in play with living beings in general. In “Program,” the first section of the book, Derrida begins to extend the narrow understanding of writing to include media, plastic and performative arts, and human techniques in general: “inscription in general … cinematography, choreography, of course, but also pictorial, musical, sculptural ‘writing'” (9). Derrida subsumes (all?) human activities to writing, not in the sense of writing about these activities, but of these activities as writing:

One might also speak of athletic writing, and with even greater certainty of military or political writing in view of the techniques that govern those domains today. All this to describe not only the system of notation secondarily connected with these activities but the essence and the content of these activities themselves. (9)

All arts and technics are arts and technics of writing, not only for the human being, but also for all life forms, whether natural or artificial: “It is also in this sense that the contemporary biologist speaks of writing and of 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 program will be the field of writing” (9). Artificial intelligence as well as human intelligence, artificial life as well as natural life, cybernetic program as well as genetic program: all proceed as modes of writing. Derrida employs anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan’s work to situate grammatology and writing in relation to all life—machinic⁹ and genetic—and not just in relation to “man.” Embedded in a critique of the ethnocentric conception of writing, arche-writing belongs not only to all people, but also to all living beings:

it is not enough to denounce ethnocentrism and to define anthropological unity by way of the disposition of writing. Leroi-Gourhan no longer describes the unity of man and the human adventure thus by the simple possibility of the graphie in general; rather as a stage or an articulation in the history of life—of what I have called differance—as the history of the grammè. Instead of having recourse to the concepts that habitually serve to distinguish man from other living beings (instinct and intelligence, absence or presence of speech, of society, of economy, etc. etc.), the notion of program is invoked. It must of course be understood in the cybernetic sense, but cybernetics is itself intelligible only in terms of a history of the possibilities of the trace as the unity of a double movement of protention and retention. (84)

Derrida invokes Husserl’s terms protention and retention, anticipation and memory, to speak of the temporal synthesis that is founded by differance, the deferring of the trace: “this movement goes far beyond the possibilities of the ‘intentional consciousness.’ It is an emergence that makes the grammè appear as such” (84). Whether social, governmental, cognitive, or biological, all programs, plans, controls depend on the trace:

Since ‘genetic inscription’ and the ‘short programmatic chains’ regulating the behavior of the amoeba or the annelid up to the passage beyond alphabetic writing to the orders of the logos and of a certain homo sapiens, the possibility of the grammè structures the movement of its history according to rigorously original levels, types, and rhythms. But one cannot think them without the most general concept of the grammè.(84)

Grammatology therefore exceeds the anthropos itself, and Derrida suggests a continuum between all strata of the trace, whether animate or inanimate, natural or technological:

one could speak of a ‘liberation of memory,’ of an exteriorization always already begun but always larger than the trace which, beginning from the elementary programs of so-called ‘instinctive’ behavior up to the constitution of electronic card-indexes and reading machines, enlarges differance and the possibility of putting in reserve; it at once and in the same movement constitutes and effaces so-called conscious subjectivity, its logos, and its theological attributes. (84)

We see here in what manner the grammè constitutes life—natural as well as artificial, human as well as artificial intelligence—in a sweeping genetic, epiphylogenetic,¹⁰ and cybernetic program. We have a new sense of what is at stake with the grammè; in addition to being equivalent to the history of life, “this trace is the opening of the first exteriority in general, the enigmatic relationship of the living to its other” (70). This other includes not only death, the inanimate, and the technological, but also the epigenetic, i.e. the genetic trace’s “exteriority.”

Malabou’s forays into neurobiology and epigenetics have led her to question the division between the material medium and the symbolic—formulating instead a concept of plasticity whereby life is understood as that which brings together biology and the symbolic, calling the plasticity of the brain neuro-plasticity and the plasticity of the genetic code epigenetics; yet she also objects to understanding inscription as a model for life.¹¹ Malabou argues that plasticity goes beyond the grammatological conception of life, but whatever plasticity might be, is it not also subject to differance and the logic of the trace? Epigenetics and plasticity suggest that the genome is not a totalizing unity, therefore not a book but “evolving,” therefore subject to différance, i.e. a text, and it was Derrida who substituted text or writing (dissemination) for book (unity, totality), especially the book of life. Furthermore, in substituting plasticity for inscription and epigenetics for the genome, Malabou passes over the fact that Of Grammatology is also to a certain extent a critique of the epigenetic, not only in regard to language but life as well. The critique of the epigenetist concept of writing—the epigenetism that permits Lévi-Strauss “above all to consider the passage from speech to writing as a leap” (150)—follows from the position that writing does not appear ex nihilo, out of nowhere, as an appendage of speech. Derrida questions this pairing of structure and chance, originary structure and contingency: writing is not an epigenesis of speech, not an exteriority, secondary and derived. Arche-writing “precedes” the so-called historical development of writing and is constitutive not only of speech, but of all language in general. As differance, trace, originary supplement, and originary prosthesis, arche-writing brings that which is at the margins to the center—to the epicenter, so to speak. This is why, although Derrida launches a critique of the epigenetist concept of language, arche-writing is nevertheless always already epigenetic in the sense that the operation of the trace and the logic of the supplement put into question genesis or origin: “differance defers-differs” (68). Epigenesis (traced back to William Harvey, 1650, and earlier to Aristotle’s On Generation and Corruption) is a theory of (embryonic) development according to which the living being is unformed at the start and is formed over time and is distinct from preformationism, the doctrine that the living being is already predetermined from the start. For contemporary genomics, epigenesis suggests a plasticity to the fixity and innateness of the genetic code and forms in general. Epigenetics (the term was coined by Conrad Waddington in 1940) is a principle of differentiation from the genetic—for instance, in the differentiation from the genotype to phenotype, and in the differentiation of types of cells in a genetically uniform organism. Is not différance a kind of (non-transcendental) condition of possibility even for this mode of difference? Or are epigenesis and epigenetics fertile fields for an emergent philosophy that fosters cultivars of plasticity, weeding out the old grammatological paradigm? Malabou’s recent book Avant Demain: Épigénese et Rationalité maps genetics/epigenetics onto the old schema preformation/epigenesis, deploying plasticity as a way to address the problematic of Kant’s “epigenesis of pure reason.” Without invoking the logic of the supplement or the trace, she attends to a kind of plasticity of the transcendental whereby the accord between the a prioiri and objects of experience is understood as an epigenesis, a developmental differentiation rather than a preformationism. Foreclosed as well is the idea that this epigenesis is merely the exposure of the transcendental to materiality and experiential time and space, because the possibility of the accord between concepts and objects is, for Kant, originarily given.

This double foreclosure—neither preformationism nor a posteriori—would appear to lend itself to what Derrida calls the “supplément d’origine.” Derrida is discussing Rousseau, and only tentatively alludes to questions of the transcendental in Part I, but states in Of Grammatology‘s final section:

The question is of an originary supplement, if this absurd expression may be risked, totally unacceptable as it is within classical logic. Rather the supplement of origin: which supplements the failing origin and which is yet not derived; this supplement is, as one says of a spare part [une pièce], of the original make [d’origine]. (313)

In this context we can state the relation between genetics and epigenetics not as a relation between an interiority and its environment (the epigenetic is not an environmental principle, it does not come from the outside), but according to the logic of the “supplément d’origine.” Recent research on epigenetics suggests that the epigenetic belongs to the “deep structure” of the genetic; it comes not from the outside, like a pernicious exposure to the environment, but rises to the surface from interior layers of the genetic code. The epigenetic is “part” of the latency of the code in the manner of a spare part, something that adds to and subtracts from the whole. The temporal dimension remains obscure (there is no sequential unfolding, yet there is no fixity: there is deferral, differing, differance): the supplement is and is not present at the origin; there is, as Derrida states, no derivation. This is not a situation of production or growth—neither techne nor poiesis—but rather a more “originary” event. In this sense, epigenetics might be a kind of originary supplement.

Derrida targets epigenesis and the “‘epigenetist’ concept of writing” in Chapter 1 of Part II, The Violence of the Letter: From Lévi-Strauss to Rousseau. What Derrida objects to most famously throughout Of Grammatology is the separating and exteriorizing of writing from language; instead, a kind of arche-writing is the condition of possibility of both spoken and written language conventionally understood. He critiques the notion that writing is a mere modality of “language appending to itself its graphic ‘representation’ as an accessory signifier” to a “fully oral language, pure of all writing” (120). In Part I, Derrida extensively demonstrates in what manner writing is not a marginal accessory or appendage to spoken language, but is the condition of possibility of language “in general.” Likewise, we could argue that epigenetics is not an exterior, plastic expression of the genome, as Malabou might say, but rather that the plastic expression, supposedly secondary and accessory, is the condition of possibility of the genome: the supposedly programmatic genetic code is always already a plastic inscription, a trace. It is not a question of expression and molding; the trace makes plasticity (im)possible. These two epigenetic threads intersect precisely with the question of the origin of languages: Derrida insists that language is not a merely accidental or chance leap from the living being—language is not an epigenesis of life—but that the structure of the trace is already constitutive of the living being. He objects, for instance, to Lévi-Strauss’s statement that “on the scale of animal life, language could only have been born suddenly. Things could not have begun to signify progressively” (qtd. 121). For Derrida, life has always already been signifying, and no haphazard axe ruptures life and language. At the same time, he points out that “the appearance of certain systems of writing three or four thousand years ago was an extraordinary leap in the history of life. All the more extraordinary because a prodigious expansion of the power of differance was not accompanied, at least during these millennia, by any notable transformation of the organism” (131). The birth of writing (in the narrow sense) made little difference to the organism because life was always already inhabited by a kind of arche-writing.

How then does “the operation of the trace” (101) bear on the question of epigenetics? Rather than being reassured by the familiarity of the textual model in genetics, we find that the trace complicates the concepts of transmission, genealogy, and inheritance. There is, writes Derrida, an equivocation between genealogy and writing in the narrow sense, one that prioritizes the temporal and genetic line: “a people who accede to the genealogical pattern accede also to writing” (125); “the birth of writing (in the colloquial sense) was nearly everywhere and most often linked to genealogical anxiety. The memory and oral tradition of generations, which sometimes goes back very far with peoples supposedly ‘without writing'” (124). Genealogy speaks to a mnemotechnics that installs “the line” as a temporal sequence, which has a limit for so-called oral transmission. Here genealogy and genetics, writing and arche-writing conjoin: “The genealogical relation and social classification are the stitched seam of arche-writing; condition of the (so-called oral) language, and of writing in the colloquial sense” (125). A dehiscence irrupts from this “stitched seam”: the ethnocentric and phonocentric conception of language issues from the limit of the genealogical line. However, buried within arche-writing lies genetic writing, the genealogic code that is a technics and an archive of the hereditary, the genomic. Keeping “track” of biological inheritance and parentage—which belongs to anxieties about incest, or is perhaps at their origin—aligns the mnemotechnics of writing with family genealogy plus their concomitants (incest and parricide). This is why Derrida warns that “the metaphor that would describe the genealogy of a text correctly is still forbidden” (101). Genealogy structures itself around a prohibition not only because the question of the parent involves the incest taboo, but also because arche-writing signifies both the possibility and impossibility of genesis and genealogy. Cloning, transgenics, and genetic technologies in general are all suspect with regard to this taboo, which explains in part why contemporary bioart and biomedia are uncanny and transgressive. Malabou’s silence over Derrida’s discourse on epigenesis might concern filiation, the anxiety of influence, and parricide, yet The Violence of the Letter suggests that the issue is deeper: “if a text always gives itself a certain representation of its own roots, those roots live only by that representation, by never touching the soil, so to speak. Which undoubtedly destroys their radical essence, but not the necessity of their racinating function” (101).

Derrida’s reading of Lévi-Strauss underscores the point that structural anthropology declares writing to be a technical and evil supplement that comes from the outside. As derivative and “outside” the innate structure of language, writing is taken to be a kind of mutation or excrescence, a pernicious epigenesis of speech. Derrida places arche-writing “inside,” yet without making it an innate principle or a transcendental a priori. There is no “without writing,” so Malabou’s critique of genetic inscription and preference for epigenetics—with its evocations of a full and present plasticity—appears to perform an inadvertent “exclusion of writing,” one that both disavows the lessons of deconstruction and reissues them in another guise. Derrida considers Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology and structural linguistics as forms of phonocentrism, which makes writing a prosthetic and derivative staff. By separating epigenetics from the genetic, Malabou too maps the epigenetic onto the derivative staff and the genetic onto essential language, reinstituting a phonologism or phonocentrism in the realm of biology. We must hesitate here, though, because the genetic and the linguistic model she resists is not that of the trace, but of code. In a sense, Malabou’s championing of epigenetics and plasticity is a critique of structural linguistics, yet she does not name the trace as an operation that is always already epigenetic or plastic. Malabou wants to raise epigenetics above genetics and epigenesis above genesis, as Derrida has already done by calling origin, essence, and authenticity into question and bringing to the center that which is derived and at the margins: genesis and the genetic program are always already opened up by the trace, always already written and inscribed in a manner that operates by differance, differing and deferral. Derrida shows us in a thousand ways that there is always a writing before the letter, but he does not subscribe to a preformationism or an innatism of writing. Even though the trace is always the condition of possibility—and impossibility—of this or that, its priority is not temporal. The trace opens the condition of (im)possibility of temporality; its priority “stands before” the temporal.

Derrida’s critique of the “‘epigenetist’ concept of writing” (120) keeps the “priority” of the trace in mind by targeting an “epigenesis” operating in Lévi-Strauss’s origin story of the evolution of language, which runs: “If writing first made its appearance between the fourth and third millennium before our era, we must see it not, in any degree, as a conditioning factor in the Neolithic revolution, but rather as an already distant and doubtless indirect result of that revolution” (292). Although Lévi-Strauss asserts that writing is a derivative development issuing from the birth of agriculture and the domestication of animals, Derrida suggests that these practices can already be likened to a mode of genetic writing: a technical and mnemotechnical fashioning of organic life, retained and transmitted in the blood lines and the botanical archive. Plant and animal genomes are already a mode of genetic inscription, a “writing before the letter,” and a plastic one at that. Whether or not Derrida borrows “epigenesis” or “epigenetist” from Kant, when applied to Lévi-Strauss, the terms designate a spontaneous leap or chance emergence, a break or rupture in the genealogical line: “Such a leap would prove that the possibility of writing does not inhabit speech, but the outside of speech … From what does Lévi-Strauss arrive at this epigenetism that is indispensible if one wishes to safeguard the exteriority of writing to speech?” (126-27). If writing and the genealogical line belong together, the origin of writing is a paradoxical break with this pattern; in other words, the condition of possibility of genealogy is nothing genealogical. Rather than putting genesis into question, epigenesis here serves to safeguard it by way of an absolute rupture. Derrida also points to the ethico-political implications of epigenesis, because the epigenetist concept of writing allows Lévi-Strauss

to consider the passage from speech to writing as a leap, as the instantaneous crossing of a line of discontinuity: passage from a fully oral language, pure of all writing—pure, innocent—to a language appending to itself its graphic ‘representation’ as an accessory signifier of a new type, opening a technique of oppression. Lévi-Strauss needed this ‘epigenetist’ concept of writing in order that the theme of evil and of exploitation suddenly coming about with the graphie could indeed be the theme of a surprise and an accident affecting the purity of an innocent language from without. (120)

Derrida’s objection to Lévi-Strauss’s epigenetist concept of the origin of writing includes a rejection of its Western ethnocentrism and racism; those supposedly “without writing” are separated out as innocent according to an ideology that gives authenticity and plenitude to the spoken word and disavows the arche-writing at the heart of all language. Derrida observes that the separation of writing from speech “supports an ethico-political accusation: man’s exploitation by man is the fact of writing cultures of the Western type. Communities of innocent and unoppressive speech are free from this accusation” (121).

We might wonder if Malabou’s account of epigenesis likewise rejects innateness and essentialism but inadvertently reinstates them. In the context of her discussion of Kant and epigenesis, it might first appear that the objection to innateness or preformationism also rejects ethnocentric essentialism, reserving the opening of anthropological differences for epigenesis. Yet this hierarchical separation, like the separation of writing from speech, would reduplicate the ethico-political accusation, inadvertently shielding the transcendental subject from certain anthropological “incursions.” If, in Malabou’s analysis, epigenesis signifies a liberation, an emancipation, from the fixed program—something that we all might desire—this utopian preference for chance and change and the leap runs the risk of safeguarding the isolationism and fixity of the program: the epigenetic rupture is a moat that protects the fortress. And for Derrida, the fortress of language as spoken word is accompanied by a reactionary metaphysics of pure presence, essentialism, authenticity, phallogocentrism, and self-same identity. When Lévi-Strauss attempts in the essay “The Writing Lesson” to narrate a kind of colonial importation of writing, or a colonial occupation by writing, Derrida asserts that this parable does not describe the origin of writing but merely its imitation: the gesture of writing is mimicked, according to Lévi-Strauss, without understanding the signifying discourse. Yet this parroting nevertheless grasps the performative force of writing and its instituting power. Derrida objects that Lévi-Strauss separates the cognitive or constative dimension of writing from its performative force and its inscriptional violence, and suggests that the anthropologist wants to safeguard the theoretical and scientific dimensions of language from its political dimensions. We could take this as a cue to read Malabou’s advocating on behalf of epigenesis as a political declaration. Just as Derrida suspects that Lévi-Strauss’s epigeneticism—by which language is separated from biological life with an axe, and writing is separated from language with the same axe—ends up being a Western ethnocentrism in the guise of an anti-ethnocentrism (131), we might share similar conjectures about Malabou’s work on epigenetics, especially her book Avant Demain: Epigenese et Rationalité.

If Malabou’s forays into new biologies of plasticity and epigenetics invite us to move away from the programmatic readings of inscription that turn life into a cybernetic code or machine, what do they invite us to move toward? In Avant Demain: Épigenèse et Rationalité, the move from a genetic paradigm to an epigenetic paradigm concerns genetics, but also “mind,” because Kant uses the term epigenesis to describe the development of categories of pure reason. Malabou does not deploy the “logic” of the supplement as a way to address the problematic of Kant’s “epigenesis of pure reason,” and it appears that—like Rousseau—she “would like to separate originarity from supplementarity” (Grammatology 243) when she separates inscription from plasticity and genetics from epigenetics. The conceptual antagonism between genesis and epigenesis can be heard in an abstract for the talk “Epigenesis of the Text: New Paths in Biology and Hermeneutics,” which Malabou delivered on April 22, 2015 at UC Irvine:

In paragraph 27 of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant makes use of the expression ‘system of the epigenesis of pure reason.’ This biological analogy is meant to affirm that the categories of our understanding are not innate or preformed, but develop themselves just like an embryo, that is, through self-differentiation and addition of new parts. To what extent is this idea of self-formation of the transcendental prefiguring the current definition of epigenetics, the science which studies the wide range of non-genetic modifications of the living being? It seems that the raging debate that opposed epigeneticism to preformationism in Kant’s time finds its current version in the contrasted relationship of genetics and epigenetics. Far from concerning only the biological field, these confrontations also have a central hermeneutical meaning, as it appears in Paul Ricoeur’s thinking: interpretation, he claims, has to do with the epigenesis, not the genesis, of a text. Are we facing the emergence of an epigenetic paradigm in culture?

Leaving Derrida entirely out of the picture, Malabou mentions Paul Ricoeur and claims in Avant Demain (271) that he was, in his 1965/69 books on interpretation, the only thinker to discuss the thematic difference between genesis and epigenesis.¹²

The silence regarding Derrida is curious, given that Malabou returns to Kant’s discussion of epigenesis and preformationism and of the way they figure in the accord between a priori concepts and objects of experience. She does so in order to ask what contemporary developments in epigenetics mean for philosophy, and in what respect contemporary biology points to the limits of some philosophical discourses. Kant deploys the concept of epigenesis to give a sense of how the accord between a priori concepts and phenomena is neither innate nor derived from experience; rather, the accord is “the epigenesis of pure reason.” Malabou explores Kant’s formulation as well as its analogue in contemporary genetics—that is, epigenetics is to genetics what epigenesis is to preformationism—in order to dislodge philosophy from the constraints of the cybernetic and genetic program that informs contemporary conceptions of life; she wants to detach our understanding of life from the program of the symbolic and lead it toward plasticity. In her essay “The Future of Derrida: Time Between Epigenesis and Epigenetics” (an essay that, despite its title, does not discuss Derrida’s discourses on epigenesis), Malabou reminds us that Kant objects to the doctrine of preformationism and adopts epigenesis instead. For pure reason, knowledge is not derived from experience, but neither is it innate or preformed. For Kant, the accord that moves from a priori concepts to objects of experience (not the other way around) happens by “as it were, a system of the epigenesis of pure reason,” and not by “a kind of preformation-system of pure reason” (Pure Reason 265). Like a living being, pure reason appears to have a formative force: it is autopoietic. This assertion is compatible with Kant’s vitalist tendencies and his dissent from Blumenbach’s view that lifeless matter has as much of a formative force as animate matter (Before Tomorrow 107). Paragraph 65 in the Critique of Judgment confirms that, for Kant, formative force (Bildungstrieb) sets the living organism apart from the machine.

If living beings have an autopoietic formative force, the epigenesis of pure reason would, on this analogy, be an auto-epigenesis. Malabou relates epigenesis to the autoaffection of the transcendental subject, because the phrase “epigenesis of pure reason” suggests that there is a formative force, a plasticity, to the transcendental. This bears on the question of an a priori autopoiesis or “auto-organization” (Before Tomorrow 160), an epigenesis from the inside that is not a preformation but a transcendental feedback loop that has no interface with the environment or the outside, yet provides a basis for the one-directional accord between the a priori and the a posteriori. Inflected with concepts of freedom and “improvisation” (56), the “system of epigenesis” is somehow neither a spontaneous ex nihilo genesis nor a preformationism. For Kant, autopoietic systems are limited to life systems, and to such an extent that we can, says Malabou, equate epigenesis with life force (Lebenskraft) (166). Yet the notion of “system” was first applied to the arrangement of ideas and principles and only later applied to the organization of living bodies. When Malabou likens epigenesis to an interpretation of a text (169), it is surprising that there is no turn to the analysis of the epigenetist concept of writing in Of Grammatology. Malabou tells us that in contemporary biology (152), reading epigenetics as the interpretation of the genetic text is the reigning paradigm—and is, in essence, a hermeneutics (Before Tomorrow 91).¹³ Making use of the notion that epigenesis is a kind of expression or interpretation of a genetic text, she suggests that biological epigenesis and the epigenesis of pure reason are analogues of each other in their respective realms. Malabou clarifies that the “epi” in epigenesis means “au-dessous” and “sur,” and that we need not too quickly transpose this into an “après” (Before Tomorrow 59). She suggests that we should also understand “epi” in the geologic sense, as that which concerns the rising to the surface, or the location à propos the surface:¹⁴ the “epi” is the surface, the skin (as in epidermis). But doesn’t this surface/depth hermeneutics run the risk of reinstating epigenesis as a derivative of an authentic genesis? Alternately, we might think this “epi” as Derridean supplement or prosthesis: the accord between a priori concepts and objects of experience could therefore be an originary supplement, an originary technicity.

Another difficulty: although Malabou acknowledges that neutralizing the stance that the a priori is neither innate nor empirical would foreclose the specificity of Kant, and that the a priori can be established neither through positivism nor logic, she nevertheless considers reading the a priori as a mode of (genetic) inheritance and evolution (Darwin). This line of thinking leads to the idea that reason is a biological feature of the brain, and epigenesis therefore a kind of development of the brain. Stressing that Kant’s deployment of the phrase “epigenesis of pure reason” is not “simply a rhetorical artifice” (xiv), Malabou perhaps takes this figure too literally, imagining that the biological sense of “epigenesis” could unlock the meaning and straighten out the aberrations of reference here (287). In fact, the question of the accord between a priori categories and objects of experience is the primal scene of the referential function. Going so far as to admit that there is no argument if Kant’s use of the term epigenesis is merely one figure among others (313), Malabou makes a tautology (rather than an analogy) between life and thought (310), the brain and mind, claiming that Kant’s use of epigenesis is necessary: the epigenesis of pure reason essentially coincides with the plasticity of the brain (Before Tomorrow 312, 194). Malabou may over-stress the necessity that thought concern not only the transcendental subject but also the living being—”d’un sujet transcendantal et d’un être vivant” (Avant Demain 300)—when, in effect, Kant retains an affinity with Descartes before him and Heidegger after in his position that thinking is detached from, or, minimally, is prosthetically attached to the living being. For Kant, the transcendental subject is clearly not equated with the brain. Bernard Stiegler likewise observes that Malabou bypasses the inorganic-grammatological principle of inscription necessary for any reading, interpretation, or thinking (though he does so in a materialist register). In equating the epigenesis of pure reason with the plasticity of the brain, Malabou bypasses language entirely and shifts to describing solely the apparatus—whether mind or brain—that, as it were, reads and writes texts.

Consequently, Malabou does not consider transindividual thought or neuronal activity as networked activity that could be connected to all sorts of prostheses and environments and ontological strata. Nor does she discuss the epiphylogenetic offshoring of memory (texts, art, archives, media), an especially important aspect of transindividual thinking and a technical heritage for oneself and others (“tertiary retentions”). Although Malabou rejects “the abyss between the logical and biological origin of thinking” (1), she nevertheless adopts the idea that the brain is the substrate of thought rather than understanding the brain as one of the elements in a networked infrastructure of thinking and memory. Concepts like ecology of mind, extended mind, and epiphylogenetics indicate that human thought essentially relies upon technics and the prosthetic offshoring of memory onto the environment and symbolic systems. In addition, Malabou bypasses the intentional structure of thinking, i.e. the idea that thinking is always thinking about something (in literary parlance, the referential function). It goes without saying that she also forecloses the possibility that artificial intelligence is a mode of thinking, which need not have an organic brain or any other organic material as its substrate. Malabou persists in attaching thought to the zoon rather than understanding thought as essentially technical. She remains in the vitalist camp.

While Malabou need not mention Stiegler’s extensive Technics and Time project, there appears to be a major clash between epigenesis and epiphylogenesis, an epi-deconstructive clash between Malabou and Stiegler in the post-Derrida scene. This clash might be political—an antagonism between self-emergent autopoietic self-determination; a kind of utopian ex nihilo self-determination; and a causal, class, and institutional programmatic determinism—yet Malabou evades political and historical questions to focus instead on epigenesis as a process of temporalization and on the distinction between originary temporality and derived temporality (304). It makes sense to understand the epigenesis of pure reason as temporality, given that the inner sense (autoaffection) and temporality are one and the same for Kant, but Derrida’s deconstruction of the autoaffection of thought/temporality (especially in Husserl) already points to the way in which the trace is the condition of (im)possibility of temporality. Epigenesis is perhaps inadvertently substituting for trace in Malabou’s text. While Derrida asserts repeatedly that the trace is not a transcendental principle, the assertion that the trace is “prior” to temporality bears on the reading of Kant’s idea that time and space are the a priori conditions of possibility of appearance as such. Of Grammatology tells us: “The unheard difference between the appearing and the appearance … is the condition of all other differences, of all other traces, and it is already a trace” (65). For Derrida, the epigenesis of pure reason would concern, avant la lettre, the priority of the trace. Appearing to complicate her argument about epigenesis, Malabou writes: “the earth always appears as a collection of traces. … For Kant, it is not possible to date the past of the earth, which he calls its history, without using the archaeological calendar … for Kant the arche-fossil is always an architrace. And the architrace is always a trace of life” (Before 178). Aporetically caught between an ex nihilo autopoiesis and the heritage of the always-already-there (Quentin Meillassoux’s question concerning time prior to human consciousness, human life, and life in general), Malabou states that “l’épigenèse est à la théorie de la generation ce que la production des categories est à la philosophie transcendentale” [epigenesis is to the theory of generation what the production of categories is to transcendental philosophy] (Avant Demain 314). For Kant, the categories of understanding are neither innate nor empirically determined: the accord between categories and objects of sensation is “originally given” in the manner of an epigenesis. To elaborate the question of the categories, Malabou turns to Kant’s discussion of schematic and symbolic hypotyposes (paragraph 59), which present concepts and ideas in terms of sense. Without embroiling ourselves in the differences between schematic and symbolic (or direct and analogic presentation), we note that schemata are a kind of image or graph or diagram or inscription, at most, neuronal traces in a particular configuration, and not the living brain itself. To patch up the chasm between brain and schemata, Malabou reads schemata as cellular or neural automata. She claims that the schemata of reason are, in effect, autopoietic machines: “sans auteur, automatiquement produit par le concept ou l’idée dont il es l’image. L’hypotypose n’est pas de l’ordre de la creation ni de l’invention subjectives” [without author, automatically produced by the concept or idea of which it is the image. The hypotypose is not of the order of subjective creation or invention] (315). Void of subject, the mechanistic morphogenesis that produces the schemata of reason sounds much like an iteration machine that Platonically prints out the image of the idea. Is this plasticity or is this inscription?

In section XI. of her earlier book, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing, “The Ontological Economy, Or Absolute Controvertibility,” Malabou puts all her chips on form and plasticity. She insists that this championing of plastic form is not a regression into an arch-metaphysics, and seeks to come up with a different conception of form that concerns transformation and a kind of immanent economy of change.¹⁵ In doing so, she disregards Derrida’s point that the trace is the condition of possibility of form, and claims that differance excludes change or transformation. According to her reading, although differance speaks of difference and deferral, it forgets another meaning of difference: that something can become different, can change. She sees this as Derrida’s forgetting of Heidegger’s underscoring of Aristotelian change as alteration instead of as movement. Of the trace, Malabou writes: “only the vocabulary of displacement and migration, the metastatic lexicon, without its metamorphic corollary, was required, … in other words, all that is needed is a purely graphic lexicon” (Plasticity 48-49). One wonders where the cineplastic would be situated. In any case, differance (un)grounds change, whether alteration, movement, plastic modulation, or immanent transduction. In The Truth in Painting, Derrida insists that color as well as design concern differance and trace: “color, too, which is thought to be extraneous to the trait, as if chromatic difference didn’t count” (11). In the world of computer language, discrete and non-discrete languages are non-continuous and continuous respectively (digital and analogue), and although we are not in the habit of thinking trace in the context of energetic flows and fields, this does not mean that the trace (un)grounds only discrete, non-continuous languages. Malabou, then, reintroduces a clear distinction between form and trace, disregarding the manner in which arche-writing informs every and any form, and is not an accessory supplement from the outside. While the assertion that the trace does not have a form in the empirical or transcendental sense would be consistent with Derrida’s discourse, Malabou confuses the trace with the narrow, graphical conception of writing that Derrida deconstructs when she writes that the trace is the “line with no form. Indeed, if the trace had an image, it would be the image of slicing or deleting, never a rhythm, never a figure, never a contour” (49). In a certain alliance with Lyotard’s Discourse, Figure (which she mentions on 54-56)—one that requires a separate analysis—Malabou decrees that “Writing will never abolish form. The trace will never pierce the figure” (Plasticity 49). Although Derrida does say that the trace does not have a form, he does so in order to reject form as eidos and logos and form as spatialized scribble or graphical mark in the empirical sense.

Finally, Malabou speaks of writing’s historical circumscription (counter to Of Grammatology‘s argument) by stating that

The constitution of writing as a motor scheme was the result of a gradual movement that began with structuralism and found its mooring in linguistics, genetics, and cybernetics. A pure linguistic image, the image of the gap or difference, gradually established itself as the scheme of an ontological organization. (Plasticity 57-58)

In Of Grammatology, the so-called moorings are deeper than structuralism, even if we only consider the case of Rousseau. Nor is the trace linguistic or imagistic: arche-writing (un)grounds linguistics, genetics, cybernetics, distancing itself from any kind of status as a motor scheme, launching instead a critique of ontology and logocentrism. Malabou perhaps misidentifies the target with the explanation:

[François Jacob’s] The Logic of Life confirmed the existence of this linguistic structure of being by privileging the role of writing within it. In effect, the genetic code then became a true ontological motif. The “standard” meaning of writing was thus in the process of “widening.” Jacob’s book bears witness to the extension of the graphic scheme beyond genetic boundaries. DNA is the biological translation of a general ontology of the graph. “Any material structure can … be compared to a message,” Jacob declares. The concepts of genetic coding or writing witness the fact that the graph was in the process of establishing itself as the privileged hermeneutic image and instrument of an era. (Plasticity 58)

Although Malabou goes on to say that the trace is at the origin of image, she disregards the Derridean stakes in distinguishing trace from code, linguistics, language, image, and graph in “the narrow sense.” Even Rousseau has a discourse on the grapheme (as does Lévi-Strauss), yet Derrida elaborates a different kind of understanding of graph, of supplement, and difference. Derrida references François Jacob’s The Logic of Life to note that a linguistic paradigm reigns in biology, but he does so to differentiate arche-writing from writing in the narrow sense. Arche-writing is not code but something like the (non-empirical, non-transcendental) condition of possibility of code, whether human or genetic. Logos is neither “present” in human language nor in genetic language; it is entirely Derrida’s point to put into question the logocentrism of any and every “language,” whether human, genetic, or cybernetic.

Stating that the concept of program is the motor scheme of thought (although Derrida discusses the program not as a historical development that brings writing to the fore but as one that is (un)grounded by arche-writing), Malabou announces its end:

Derrida describes here 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 an awareness of an era that writing was able to constitute itself as a philosophical motor scheme.

Yet today we must acknowledge that the power of the linguistic-graphic scheme is diminishing and that it has entered a twilight for some time already. It now seems that plasticity is slowly but surely establishing itself as the paradigmatic figure of organization in general. (Plasticity 59)

One would wonder what the nature of this “figure” might be; as a figure in Malabou’s text, it is surely figurative. Although Malabou earlier announced a new reading method called “plastic reading” (51), we might have to pass over deconstructive readings of the rhetorical kind to try to understand this plasticity. Let us first note that Malabou does not proceed to make the argument about plasticity in genetics, but shifts to neurobiology. Plasticity in this context refers to “the capacity of synapses to modify their transmission effectiveness” (60). A synapse is a transducer, a structure that allows the transmission of a signal (chemical or electrical) from one neuron to another. This description, like any other, is technologically determined by the condition of its historical mediality, but the “rhetoric” of signal is notable in this discussion of plasticity. That the synapse is modified or self-modifies seems to describe a modification of both the apparatus and the signal, yet Malabou collapses the synaptic apparatus with signal, disregarding any distinction between structure and operation. (Stiegler has likewise observed that Malabou disregards the moments of representation, grammatization, mnemotechnics, and exteriorization in her discussions of neurobiology, rendering thinking and brain as equivalents.) Citing a neurobiologist who states that “we [now] have physical traces of the accessing of meaning,” Malabou disregards the term trace and insists that theses traces are “in fact first and foremost images and forms” (Plasticity 60). Even if this is so, is it really the case that the operation of the trace (in the Derridean sense) is not in play here?

Again, even though the medical imaging technology that “codes” the behavior of nerve connections and the transmission of signals “is called the graph” (60), Malabou disavows the rhetoric and insists that “this graph is not a writing; this trace does not proceed by printing or facilitation. Hence, the metaphor used to describe it is not a graphic metaphor” (60). She asserts this because the “graph” is said to be a graph of an assembly or network of neurons, suggesting that an assembly or network is not a diagrammatic writing—as if assemblies and networks, as systems of relations, were not paradigmatically graphs. She appears to assert that if something is in configuration or takes “shape,” it has nothing to do with either graphein or the spacing opened up by the trace. Malabou circles back to the question of genetic code that she left behind by saying that it “is striking to note that neuronal plasticity—in other words, the ability of synapses to modify their effectiveness as a result of experience—is a part of genetic indetermination. We can therefore make the claim that plasticity forms where DNA no longer writes” (60). Even though the rhetoric of graph and trace is used in neurological research, Malabou informs us that “the substitution of plasticity for imprint or trace in the current scientific description of the nervous system is an interesting and fundamental path to follow in order to understand the current becoming-obsolete of ‘trace’ or ‘writing'” (78-79). She ambivalently hedges on this claim and adds that neuronal traces, though traces, are not really traces: “The brain’s plasticity presents a model of organization that can still be described in terms of an imprint economy, but neuronal traces don’t proceed as writing traces: they do not leave a trace; they occur as changes of form” (79). Even if these traces don’t leave a trace—something problematic for psychoanalysis and memory studies in general—it was the Derridean trace that was always already under erasure, sous-rature, and retroactively “constituted”: a neurobiologist would be hard-pressed to track down the self-same identity of one of these constantly deferring, differing traces and rub them out without remainder. And even if neuronal traces do not proceed as “writing traces,” the arche-writing trace and its attendant deconstruction of the metaphysics of change and form might still have something to say about “changes of form” in an “imprint economy”: perhaps the neuronal trace is something like a plastic inscription. Likewise with the genetic trace: does epigenetics tell us that it is a plastic inscription? For the moment, many scientists are describing epigenetics as a surface scratching or marking of the genome, and as such is another kind of code. Chemical “marks” attach to genes and can, for a few generations, be transmitted or inherited along with their host DNA. The sequence of the DNA is not affected, but an additional layer (“epi”) or shell of information is recorded, stored, transmitted. As one biologist puts it: epigenetic modulations “scratch different kinds of code on the genome … There’s an epigenetic code, just like there’s a genetic code.” And in the lecture “Epigenetics: Its Redefinition, Molecular Mechanisms and Phenotypical Associations,” John Greally insists we shouldn’t even be using the term epigenetics anymore, but “regulative transcription.” Our understanding of the genome will no doubt find new figurations. When Derrida writes that “the trace is the opening of the first exteriority in general, the enigmatic relationship of the living to its other” (Of Grammatology 75), he speaks of a differential materiality plastic enough to span the “epigenetic landscape” (Conrad Waddington’s original 1940 formulation for the genome’s relation to environment), Catherine Malabou’s latest “change of form,” and the many biodeconstructions to come.

Footnotes

1. Instead of grammatology, “the science of writing” (Of Grammatology 4), I will use my term grammatechnics, the technics of writing, arche-writing as ur-technics. Bioarchives such as genetic codes lend themselves to grammatechnical methodologies—i.e. reading according to the materiality of inscription and the letter—because these codes are free from principles of teleology, intentionality, and consciousness: in short, the “natural” signs that constitute genetic codes could be read as purely material positings. Literary theory that has focused on the materiality of language may already be ahead of the game: biological life—human or otherwise—is a technics of inscription.

2. DNA has even been used as an information storage device: < https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/134672-harvard-cracks-dna-storage-crams-700-terabytes-of-data-into-a-single-gram>.

3. For some interesting examples, see the work of Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Eduardo Kacs, and Paul Vanouse.

4. See especially Biomedia and The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture.

5. A description of a talk that Malabou gave in Stockholm on January 26, 2015 reads: “Plasticity versus Inscription: A Change of Paradigm”: “The notions of trace, writing and inscription have been predominant in both philosophy and art since the turn of the 1970s. Claiming that all presence always consists in its own erasure, Jacques Derrida has shown that the movement of difference, or “différance,” is what always already displaces the metaphysical understanding of subjectivity, stability, and totality. However, the most recent discoveries in cellular biology, genetics, epigenetics, and neurobiology are challenging the hermeneutical importance of this paradigm of inscription. Neural networks, stem cells, genomes, are said to operate plastically, without leaving a trace but creating a form. A new vocabulary is thus emerging: firing, assemblies, populations. In her presentation, Catherine Malabou will evaluate the impact of such discoveries on the philosophical and artistic fields. Starting with Hegel, moving through Derrida, and ending with contemporary biology, Malabou will analyze three structures—totality, dissemination and regeneration—and will discuss them using three figures: that of the phoenix, the spider, and the salamander. Each time, images and concepts will be put into dialogue.”

6. In Of Grammatology, the trace is approached through different principles–the sign under erasure, retroactive constitution (Nachträglichkeit), deferral as well as difference–and although the arche-trace (61) is a strategy to avoid the “empirical mark … if all begins with the trace, there is above all no originary trace” (61). Derrida situates the term trace in relation to “contemporary discourses” and notes that “in all scientific fields, notably biology, this notion seems currently to be dominant and irreducible” (70). He cautions, however, that it also belongs to “the alterity of a past that never was and can never be lived in the originary or modified form of presence” (70).

7. Malabou makes this assertion herself: “Plastic reading aspires to the metamorphosis of deconstructive reading” (Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing 52).

8. In a gesture that hints at different materialities and media forms for arche-writing, Derrida does not prioritize the grapheme: “This arche-writing would be at work not only in the form and substance of graphic expression but also in those of nongraphic expression” (60). Derrida nevertheless retains the term writing.

9. The machinic, following Deleuze, is the name for any assemblage or synthesis, including living beings, inanimate machines, geological formations, and temporality itself. That grammè and the machinic share an affinity can be discerned when Derrida explicates grammè as synthesis, as arche-synthesis: “An element without simplicity. An element, whether it is understood as the medium or as the irreducible atom, of the arche-synthesis in general” (10).

10. Bernard Stiegler picks up on the gramme’s role in corticization as the exteriorization of memory and time by technics. Consciousness is an interplay of exteriorization (epiphylogenetics) and engramming by tertiary retentions.

11. Although Derrida appears to embrace a grammatological conception of life (what I prefer to call a grammatechnics of life), it must be understood on the principle of the trace, and not some other paradigm like symbol, semiotics, or structuralist linguistics. What Derrida means by arche-writing disrupts conventional paradigms of life that deploy linguistic models.

12. The English translation, Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality, reads, “The only thinker to make thematic use of the difference between genesis and epigenesis is Paul Ricoeur” (158).

13. “The metaphor of textual hermeneutics or musical interpretation is the figure that epigenetics explicitly foregrounds” (91).

14. Malabou asserts that “the transcendental is a surface structure,” a kind of “founding at the point of contact” (Before Tomorrow 36) by noting that the “epi” in epigenesis refers to a manifestation above or on the surface. Her concept of plasticity need not replace inscription here, and contemporary genetics in fact describes epigenetics as a kind of “scratching” on the surface of genetic code. Malabou herself says that “contemporary epigenetics actually studies the transformation mechanisms at work on the surface of DNA molecules during transcription” (36), and epigenetics works “on the surface (epi) of the molecule” (79).

15. Although onboard for a materialist reassessment of the transcendental, Malabou is suspicious of, for instance, Quentin Meillassoux’s arguments for radical contingency in After Finitude—she asserts that radical contingency turns into a new kind of transcendental—but still hopes for the freedom and creativity of a happy kind of contingency. Her desire for plasticity—that things can change, that change is possible—is one that many might share: we like the idea of neuro-plasticity and a plasticity of the genome. Who wants to be locked into the pre-determinism and preformationism of a fixed and programmatic brain and genetic code? Alternately, who wants to be subject to the infinite precariousness of radical chance? And politically, who embraces absolute totalitarianism or absolute nihilism? For Malabou, life itself is the plasticity that she desires. This outlook belongs to a long line of (vitalist) philosophers who make the living being an exception, Kant included: life falls eternally outside the grasp of biological science and philosophical analysis.

Works Cited

• Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. (1967) Translated by G. C. Spivak, Johns Hopkins UP, 1997.
• —. The Truth in Painting. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod, U of Chicago P, 1987.
• —. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass, U of Chicago P, 1978.
• Jacob, François. The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity. Trans. Betty E. Spillmann, Pantheon Books, 1973.
• Johnston, John. The Allure of Machinic Life: Cybernetics, Artificial Life, and the New AI. A Bradford Book, 2010.
• Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar, Hackett, 1987.
• —. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, Cambridge UP, 1998.
• Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “A Writing Lesson.” Tristes tropiques, New York, Criterion, 1961.
• Lyotard, Jean-François. Discourse, Figure. Translated by Anthony Hudek and Mary Lydon, U of Minnesota P, 2010.
• Malabou, Catherine. Avant demain: Épigenèse et rationalité. Presses Universitaires de France, 2014.
• —. Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality. Translated by Carolyn Shread, Polity, 2016.
• —. “The End of Writing? Grammatology and Plasticity.” The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms, Vol. 12, 2007, p. 431–441.
• —. “Epigenesis of the Text: New Paths in Biology and Hermeneutics.” Lecture, April 22, 2015 at UC Irvine, Irvine, California, USA.
• —. “The Future of Derrida: Time Between Epigenesis and Epigenetics.” The Future of Continental Religion of Philosophy, edited by Crockett, Putt, Robins, Indiana UP, 2014.
• —. Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction. Translated by Carolyn Shread, Columbia UP, 2009.
• Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude. Translated by Ray Brassier, Bloomsbury, 2010.
• Roof, Judith. The Poetics of DNA. U of Minnesota P, 2007.
• Thacker, Eugene. Biomedia. U of Minnesota P, 2004.
• —. The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture. MIT P, 2006.