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Jacques Derridas Writing and Difference

Maurizio Ferraris

Published online: 15 August 2007

Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007

1 Our Own Time Grasped in Thought

Philosophy, Hegel used to say, is its own time grasped in

thought. And, indeed, the book Im going to review would

have been inconceivable without the technological explo-

sion of writing (e-mail, SMS, the Internet) that has been the

distinctive mark of the last twenty years. If this book had

been published, let us say, in 1967 rather than in 2007, it

would have looked like the work of an insane person, a

visionary or an aesthete. Back in those years, there was the

predominance of what McLuhan defined as the hot

mediai.e. cinema, radio, television, letters were a

disappearing species, and people made use of telephones

only. The phenomenon of the return of illiteracy was quite

a concrete prospect for the inhabitants of an advanced

society. Moreover, it would have sounded absurd to say

that there is a constitutive link between writing and

thought, that we would have used our personal computers

as writing machines rather than as devices for thinking, or

that we were on the edge of an overflow of writing like the

Babel library into which we enter every time we switch on

our computers and phones. An illustration will suffice. In

the 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odissey, in the spaceship

the computer Hal is designed to think, whereas writing

machineswhich nowadays are seen as modern artifacts

are utilized for writing.

Another aspect of this book that a reader of the past

decades would have perceived as utterly out of time is the

remarkable confidence in philosophy that comes out from

its pages. It should be recalled, in fact, that for the large

part of the twentieth century, the widespread opinion wasthat the end of philosophy would have come within years,

and that something like post-philosophy was on the

horizon. In this case, too, the expectations have been

sharply disproved, since philosophy today seems to be

quite in good health. It is worth considering that these

two aspectsthe explosion of writing and philosophys

survivalappear to have been closely intertwined with

each other, thus disproving one of the most established and

repeated philosophical dogmas from Plato to Gad-

amer, according to which philosophy has to do in its

essence with the spoken word, with dialogue, and that

writing is therefore a potential adversary (or at least a

degenerated form) both of the spoken word and of crea-

tive thinking. But we live, of course, in 2007 and not in

1967, and no one is surprised by the fact that philosophy

has not dissolved itself into the natural or human sciences,

or that it has not reduced itself to its own historyand

most importantly that it is not something that belongs to

the past.

After all, we no longer live in the twentieth-century.

However, it is precisely this negative circumstance that

gives rise to one of the most objectionable traits of the

bookalong with many other positive hintsnamely, the

fact that the author, with the benefit of a hindsight that is

available to any graduate student of our time, makes fun

of some of the great authors of the twentieth century,

whether their name is Foucault or Bataille, Levinas or

Levi-Strauss, and simply refuses to consider them in their

specific historical context; on the contrary, he insists on

treating them as contemporaries. Let us be frank: as a

thought experiment this is not funny at all inasmuch as its

only result is to bring grist to the mill of the authors

futile pride.

M. Ferraris (&)

University of Turin, Turin, Italy

e-mail: maurizio.ferraris@labont.it

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2 Hindsight

Let us take the bull by the horns and deal with the first

aspect of the book, which is not entirely pleasant. On the

face of it, we are confronted with a survey of the mythical

figures of French literature and thought of the last century:

literary structuralism and the structuralism advocated by

authors such as Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Jabes, Levinas,Artaud, Bataille The choice is undoubtedly appealing

and definitely fascinating. Who were the ma tres a penser

that seduced and enchanted the French and American

cultures in the last century? What were their theories, their

mistakes, their exaggerations, their more or less innocent

obsessions and fixations? Every historian of culture could

be interested in such a book. But Derridas approach is

nonetheless morally deplorable, or at least is revealing of a

complete lack of good taste, for he treats such authors like

contemporaries, and criticizes them from the top of an

experience accumulated in the successive half of the cen-

tury. But having arrived later is not a plus, it is just a fact,just as having arrived before is not a fault in itself; to

overlook this fact is the sign of the narrow-mindedness of

ones historical sense, and amounts to treating disrespect-

fully the giants, or at least the teachers, who have carried us

on their shoulders.

Let me consider Derridas approach to structuralism in

the opening and in the penultimate essay, the one devoted

to Levi-Strauss. Its easy for Derrida to argue that the

dream of a structure completely detached from history is

not so different in and by itself from a critique of pure

reason. But, again, its easy to make such considerations

half a century later. This is even truer in the case of

Cogito and the History of Madness. From a contempo-

rary standpoint, it is too easy a win to criticize Foucault, to

proclaim untenable the views advocated in a 1961 book

such as Histoire de la folie a lage classiqueFolie et

de raison in the light of the successive, and well-known,

failures of anti-psychiatry. But the most objectionable

feature of Derridas critique lies in the fact that he doesnt

appeal to empirical evidence (e.g. anti-psychiatry has

failed) but rather simply offers captious arguments against

Foucaults theoretical assumptions. Foucault, as the reader

might recall, insisted on the socially constructed features of

madness, and, at the same time, wanted to see in madness a

radical alterity in relation to the rationality that left it out.

Its easy for Derrida to point out that, as long as we con-

sider madness as socially constructed, it is difficult to

maintain that there is something in madness that is radi-

cally at variance with the dominant rationality.

Derrida analyzes the subject of an impossible alterity

in detail, and, indeed, such a theme plays a fundamental

role in his argument against Levinas, in what perhaps is the

most dense and longest essay in the collection. As

historians of the philosophy of the last century know well,

Levinas philosophical activity was entirely devoted to the

search for radical alternatives to the tradition in which we

all grew up. Levinas saw metaphysics, as the thought of the

person, in sharp opposition to ontology, as the thought of

being; and, analogously, he saw Judaism in opposition

to Hellenism, the Greek philosophical tradition. Derrida

insists on the fact that this search is nothing other than amere illusion, just like the empiricist dreams of a pure

experience. The alternative to traditionDerrida writ-

esis nullified in the precise moment in which it becomes

word; in the same way that in the essay on Foucault,

madness is neutralized in the precise instant in which it

becomes the subject of reason. Derrida sums up his own

view by quoting Joyce, at the end of the essay: Jewgreek

is greekjew: Extremes meet. In other words, alterity looks

more like a dream than a reality. Now, its easy to reach

such a conclusion today in the aftermath of the failure of

revolutionary movements, or even of the critiques

addressed by Western alternatives to the system at atime when globalization has prevailed all over the world.

However, how can we blame someone like Levinas who

certainly didnt have a crystal ball and lived in another

century?

One may ask what is the fundamental core of Derridas

critique; as I said earlier, it is not founded on a number of

historical evidences, but rather originates from theoretical

considerations, not without an unforgivable vanity and a

deleterious passion for complexity. In a more general

sense, what we have here is a reiteration of Hegelian dia-

lectics, made more spicy and existential by the use,

between the lines, of Kojeves Hegelian comments. Con-

sidered in this light, Derridas passion for modern artifacts

never contradicts itself; however, in this respect too, Der-

rida does not stand out for his originality. Fifty years ago,

to talk about Hegel required some courage, all things

considered; but nowadays, when even analytic philoso-

phers show a renewed interest in Hegels philosophy,

Derridas gesture is not original at all. In his essay on

Bataille, Derrida confines himself to a number of triviali-

ties. For he strives to show us the intrinsic virtues of

dialectics, its being insurmountable as long as alterity can

always be absorbed into identity and the negative always

recovered by the positive.

3 The Materialism of the Incorporeal

I shall leave it to the reader to evaluate this proposal. The

argument Derrida offers in the essays devoted to Artaud is

somehow subtler. He praises Artauds combination of

metaphysics and corporeality. These, however, are not

viewed as incompatible ingredients, but rather are

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construed as two faces of the same coin, in agreement with

Artauds project of a materialism of the incorporeal that

inspired his experimental theatre. (The younger readers

may know nothing about the experimental theatre, and this

is surely a deficiency; but Derrida feels no need to spend a

single word to explain this phenomenon of the last century

to the younger people.) In this case too, by underscoring

the metaphysical theatre and the materialism of theincorporeal, Derrida runs the risk of explaining what is

obvious at a time when metaphysics has taken, once again,

its own place within the philosophical constellation, after

an ostracism that lasted for the entire twentieth century; in

fact, in the last twenty years, the debate over the mind

body problem has become a philosophical routine. How-

ever, there is a point that deserves attention, which

discloses Derridas sensibility for current philosophy, a

receptivity that I have already signaled at the outset of this

critical review. Derridas sensibility is so strong that even

the harshest criticas I think I amis somehow con-

vinced to turn a blind eye to his pontificating about thegreat authors of the past. Such a sensibility reveals itself in

Derridas construalwhich is nothing original, but is

perfectly in accord with our timesof writing (precisely

what is overflowing into our computers and cell phones) as

a good instantiation of Artauds idea of a materialism of

the incorporeal. Indeed, in this case, Derridas intuition

appears to be well grounded. The Materialism of the

incorporeal sounds more or less like an oxymoron;

however, as long as writingwhich is materialcan be a

vehicle of intelligible contents, we cannot dismiss Derri-

das view as simply untenable, since he points to a truth

that anyone can see. For once, let us acknowledge it,

Derrida does not put forth a mere triviality. In his sensi-

bility for what is actual, in fact, there are no concessions to

the postmodern idea according to which information sci-

ence has placed us in a dematerialized world. If it suffices

to pull out the plug of our computers to turn them off, then,

one can easily understand how important a form of

materialism is even in the realm of the incorporeal (recall

that here we are dealing with Derridas intuitions, which

today sound much less original than they could have

sounded twenty years ago when postmodernism was

flourishing).

I am quite aware that I have offered a rather critical

analysis of Derridas views, as they are put forward in these

essays. Nonetheless, it is difficult not to feel uncomfortable

when confronted with such a bizarre mixture of archaisms

and resolutely modern considerations with which virtually

anyone can agree. Incidentally: why has Derrida left this

book unfinished and why does he not revise his files in

order to finish it? Why did he only write a short intro-

ductory note in which he talks about sketches that must

be preserved? In the age of computers, to publish

unfinished essays is really a form of laziness. Enough with

the cahier des dole ances. It is time to explain the reason

why this book deserves to be published, and why there are

reasons to believe that, in spite of everything, it will be

quite a successful book.

4 A Psychoanalysis of Philosophy

The mixture of the old and the new, which is typical of

Derrida, becomes very visible in the essay on Freud, which

in this respect is exemplary. On the one hand, we face a

colossal archaism, namely, the philosophical concern with

psychoanalysis. Its been ages since this topic was dropped

from the philosophical agenda and now we perceive it

clearly as something belonging to the past. Derrida himself

must be aware of this, since, at the beginning of the essay,

he makes clear that appearances notwithstanding what

hes proposing is not a psychoanalysis of philosophy. But

then, for Gods sake, why should we deal with psycho-analysis? On the other hand, the caveat just mentioned has

to be reckoned as a denegation, a Verneinung, an

instance of that admitting by denying and denying by

admitting which was so popular in those days when

psychoanalysis was the latest craze in salons and

conferences.

But this is not the only archaism. Whos the patient to be

psychoanalyzed here? Nothing less than metaphysics, just

as if we were in Nietzsches time or, in the best case, in

Heideggers. This seems to lead to the following conclu-

sion: Derrida has spent a lot of time mocking past thinkers,

treating them like junk store items, and then it turns out that

his own tools of the trade are outdated as well. Like

Nietzsches Twilight of the Idols (a 1888s work!) or He-

ideggers writings from the 1940s. Hence, the best Derrida

can do is the following: we have to psychoanalyze meta-

physics, which suffers from so many tics and neuroses. He

claims then that metaphysics, a two-thousand-years-old

tradition which thinks of itself as being unselfishly in love

with the truth, needs a session with the psychoanalyst. And

the questions to be raised are: what are the grounds of such

a love? Is it really a feeling that has nothing to do with any

sensible motivation or technical implication? Is it true that

theres no hidden purpose behind it? With its back against

the wall, philosophy will try to defend herself, but Freudian

slips hidden between the lines of its texts will uncover the

resistances and truth will come to light.

We have the feeling of finding ourselves in the past

century in the middle of the 1960s, possibly in Paris, in an

apartment in Rue Saint-Andre des Arts, where men of

letters, philosophers and psychoanalysts (slightly Maoist,

as was in fashion at that time) meet. Now the reply is

foregone: this psychoanalysis of philosophy, which Derrida

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(following Heidegger, once again) calls deconstruction,

is pursuing truth too, and in so doing it is not immune from

the flaws and hypocrisies of metaphysics. Nevertheless,

Derrida seems to be more interested in the right/wrong

dichotomy rather than in the true/false one (and here we

can perceive the lesson of Levinas, despite the distance

with which hes treated in the essay devoted to him): if we

are wrong and unfair, selfish, racist, sexist, etc., thatsbecause we tend to repress too many things, caught as we

are in a dream of presence, integrity, and identity at the

level of morality, sociality, and sexuality. Thus, the history

of metaphysics turns out to be dominated by a struggle

between Good and Evil, whose presuppositions have to be

unmasked. In this context, the philosopher will appear like

the scholarly kinsman of the revolutionary.

So it was no mirage, after all. We really are in Paris,

between the Odeon and the Rue dUlm! Dien Ben Phus

defeat happened just yesterday and the battle of Algiers

stands out on front pages of newspapers. Philosophers,

people who are sensitive to Marxism and who are thepsychoanalysts of their own society, think they have

something important to say about the process of decolo-

nization: Western rationality is not the only one; on the

contrary, it is something historically determined and geo-

graphically localized. Whats important in this work of

disassembling is to question not only the purity of philos-

ophys intentions, but also its identity, that is to say, the

alleged existence of something like a pure philosophy,

separated from history, sciences, myths and, of course,

human events. This purity must be taken for what it really

is: a myth. It has to be shown that the centre of philo-

sophical discourse can never set its own margins (rhetoric,

technique) aside, and that in some cases it is intertwined

with its opposite (literature, fiction).

That was the Zeitgeistof those days. But, again, taking

(irritatingly) advantage of hindsight, Derrida seems to have

fun in playing the role of an older, wiser and more

responsible brother, when in actuality hes just a small

grandson who writes his verdict forty or fifty years later.

Philosophy, he explains (as if we didnt know that), is not

merely history or geography, although it has much to do

with (and in some respect it depends from) them. But the

exit from philosophy isnt really so smooth and easy as

those guys in Rue dUlm were supposing. Now that

libraries, websites and professors desks are overflowing

with post-colonial studies, it is worth wondering whether

dismantling a whole tradition is really such a simple

enterprise. Moreover, we know now that the revolution

didnt succeed, at least not the one which had been planned

between Rue dUlm and the Odeon. Here, again, Derrida

indulges in belated balances and retrospective looks. But

today its just too easy to see how things are going, whereas

we could accept lessons from him only if we knew that he

had really declared his intuitions in 1968s Paris, similarly

to what Heidegger did in 1933s Germany.

5 The Scene of Writing

Nonetheless, in this crowd of confused and illogical claims,

there is a truly shining gem, an idea which provides us witha useful insight not only into the spirit of 1968, but into the

challenges awaiting us today, almost half a century later.

Psychoanalysis is not only a way of uncovering complexes

and repressions. It can be examined with respect to the

concept of writing. This move may appear trifling, and

even obsessive, if we consider how compulsively Derrida

seems to find the theme of writingor, more precisely, of

its repressionin all his interpretations of philosophers

from Plato to Heidegger. Could we find in Freud, too, the

repression of writing? The question has to be answered

negatively. FreudDerrida points outneither represses

nor resists writing. Indeed, he represents the mind as awriting apparatus, in agreement with the classical images

of the mind as a tabula rasa or as an empty room from

Plato and Aristotle to Locke; but in so doing, Freud, unlike

many philosophers, doesnt slide toward the spirit, the

voice, the incorporeal. On the contrary, the metaphor of

writing, constantly emphasized, turns out to be more than a

metaphor; it constitutes a realization of that materialism

of the incorporeal which Derrida finds also in Artaud.

Here we have to acknowledge an aspect of concreteness

that characterizes Derridas perspective, which allows him

to resist the temptations of postmodern immaterialism. And

this is why it is ultimately correct to think of Derrida as

belonging to the realist turn, which is typical of our

century.

But let me proceed in order. The main theme of the essay

devoted to Freud is the comparison between the 1895s

Project of a Psychology, written by a still positivist Freud,

and a much later text, the 1925s Note upon the Mystic

Writing-Pad.The two essays deal with the same theme. If

experience is traditionally construed in terms of an

inscription, how is it possible that the writing pad is not

saturated very quickly? And how can a single space account

for the recording as well as the forgetting and novelty of

experience? In 1895, the physician Freud answers with a

physiological hypothesis: there are two types of neurons;

the first ones, impermeable, serve to record perceived

events; the others, permeable, do not retain the impressions

and thus ensure the novelty of experience. In 1925, the

philosopher Freud introduces a metaphor that involves

straightforwardly the notion of writing. The mind is like a

mystic writing-pad, one of those old small boards where

writing was obtained by means of a contact between a

celluloid sheet and a base of resin.

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Why all this emphasis on writing? And why should we

care about the magic pad? Here the answer is rather

obvious: because today, in 2007, we are in the age of

writing, and a magic pad, characterized by an infinite

possibility of inscription and deletion, can be found on

everybodys desk; there is surely one on the desk of the one

who is writing this review (i.e. my desk), and probably one

on the desk of the one who is reading it. Thus, what Derridaseeks out in Freud is an insight on the present. And this

insight has nothing to do with obsolete notions like the

unconscious, but rather with actual and still relevant issues

like consciousness or the mindbody relation. Here the

main thread of Derridas discourse is, again, the materi-

alism of the incorporeal, which, for him, is realized

precisely in writing. If we consider how usual it is to think

of the mind in analogy with computers, and how increas-

ingly consciousness and knowledge turn out to be a library

(a powerful apparatus for writing and recording) we have

to admit that Derridas bet seems to be a winning one, and

that his approach to Freud, despite the very unpromisingpremises, proves to be original and stimulating.

6 From Phenomenology to Grammatology

It should be acknowledged that the reference to writing is

neither a mere affectation nor a concession to the over-

whelming topicality of the theme. On the contrary, it

reflects a rigour in approach and a solid academic back-

ground, which do honour to the author, who proves to be

well-grounded in his readings on phenomenology, as is

testified to by the central (robustly academic) essay of this

book on Genesis and Structure (a contribution to a

conference, which is probably the original motive of all the

essays collected here). Indeed, phenomenology is Derridas

academic specialty, and the theme of writing, far from

being a sociological whimsicality, is rooted in an inter-

pretation of Husserl which tries to draw a correlation

between his thought and dialectical materialism. In this

context, once again, we find (but this is no longer a sur-

prise) apasticheof the old and the new. And the old here is

even decrepit: phenomenology and dialectical materialism!

We plunge right into the Fifties of the past century, face to

face with the Vietnamese philosopher Tran-Duc-Thao and

his book Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism

(1951). This is a very remote world, even older than the

one in which we tried the cocktail of Freud and philosophy,

since the barmen serving the cocktail of phenomenology

and dialectical materialism are not the older brothers, but

rather the academic fathers of those who liked to mix

Freudianism with Maoism.

This archaism leads Derrida to an entirely original

reworking of phenomenology, just as he did in the case of

Freud. Actually, phenomenology is an old obsession, and

in this connection a digression on the overall production of

Derrida may be useful. Fifteen years before Writing and

Difference, in his dissertation entitled The Problem of

Genesis in the Philosophy of Husserl, Derrida used phe-

nomenology as a tool to overcome the alternative between

structuralism (basically idealistic) and historicism (basi-

cally materialistic). This is very old stuff indeed,souvenirsfrom the 1950s, things whose origin can be traced back to

the days when Claude Levi-Strauss and Raymond Aron

debated each other. Here, though, with a youthful and

lively impudence, Derrida pretends that the debate is even

older than that. Thus, by introducing in this context a ref-

erence to Husserl (who had to deal with similar problems at

the end of the XIX century), Derrida, not only cunningly

predates the debate, but is able to point to its upshot: his-

tory and structure are complementary rather than opposed.

The one involves the other; since the ideal structures didnt

fall from heaven, they have origins to which they cannot be

reduced (in the same sense in which logic cant be reducedto psychology).

Ten years later, in his introduction to the French trans-

lation of Husserls The Origin of Geometry, Derrida faced

up to the alternative between history and structure, exam-

ining the special case of the history of a pure science. In

geometry idealism seems unavoidable: would we be will-

ing to accept that Every equilateral triangle is equiangular

is a truth of the same type as Caesar crossed the Rubi-

con? Geometrical truth seems to be completely

independent from any empirical fact whatsoever: Pytha-

goras theorem would still be true even if Pythagoras had

never existed and nobody had discovered it. And yet, as

Derrida remarks, an idealist philosopher like Husserl has

deeply revised this conception. Of course, Pythagoras

theorem cant be identified with its discoverer. But the fact

that an ideal (and, thus, not contingent) entity like Pytha-

goras theorem exists depends on the existence of a real and

contingent entity like Pythagoras; and if Pythagoras had

immediately forgotten his own discovery, the whole thing,

so to say, would have fallen into oblivion; and if he had not

communicated to someone else his discovery, using lan-

guage, it would have disappeared with him. Finally, if that

discovery did reach beyond the borders of his original

community, it was only because it was written down.

Thus, paradoxically (but not too much), the condition of

the ideal is to be found in something material like writing.

InVoice and Phenomenon, just published like Writing and

Difference, Derridas departure from phenomenology

becomes visible and the intuition just mentioned is gener-

alized along these lines: without writing, traces, memories,

signs and marks in general, not only would there be no

history; there would be no structure and idea, either. And

this is so because what has been called structure, or, in a

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more Kantian vein, transcendental, the condition of the

possibility of knowledge is ultimately a form of writing.

This is the topic of Derridas third book, published in 2007,

whose title is Of Grammatology. Incidentally, is there

anyone who wants to deny that a Spirit of the Time exists?

Derrida is a true iPod philosopher, to the point that his

philosophy would be inconceivable without it; the annus

mirabilis of Derrida (which Gerard Granel mysteriouslylinks to mystical and Heideggerian notions like the

withdrawal of the origin, upon reviewing the three books

from the pages ofCritique) is actually suspended between

Googles leap into cell phones and the release of the

iPhone. And we should notice that all this, far from chal-

lenging the validity of grammatological hypotheses, fully

confirms them.

Going back to pure philosophy: the categories, which

according to Kant mediate our relation to the world, are

transposed by Derrida into the notion of arche-writing,

which sums up the function of the inscription illustrated so

far. But Derrida doesnt show much concern for systema-ticity. Unlike the general semiotics developed by Umberto

Eco more than thirty years ago, grammatology is less

interested in describing the role of signs in the construction

of social reality, than it is in emphasizing how this role is

subject to a systematic repression both in the philosophical

tradition as well as in daily life. Logocentrism is the

name Derrida gives to this repression, which seems to

embody and to coincide with the fate of metaphysics from

Plato to Nietzsche: it is the fact that matter, signs, means

for transmitting and conserving disappear in the face of the

triad of Idea, Meaning and Spirit.

7 Deconstruction and Difference

Repression, logocentrism I can imagine what the reader is

going to ask: are we not talking once more about past fads,

like the philosopher that is a critic and physician of culture

(as Nietzsche has it), a figure that is two centuries old? Yes

and no. Or, better, this time we would rather not be driven by

an instinctive repulsion. Such an instinct was unavoidable

when we caught Derrida showing off with Levinas or Levi-

Strauss. Through his analysis, Derrida comes to what one

might call the Critique of Impure Reason: philosophers

and philosophy must awake from a dream of integrity and

purity, which turns out to be limited and totalitarian. In this

picture, it is not surprising that the fundamental notion of

Derridas philosophy is, as anticipated,deconstruction. The

termwhich is introduced in Of Grammatology, but

underlies Writing and Difference, and more generally the

whole work of Derridais borrowed from Heidegger (De-

struktionorAbbau), who introduced the notion eighty years

ago. Heidegger was concerned with the history of

metaphysics. His insight was that of de-sedimenting, or

reviving, inherited concepts, which have become inert, in

order to give a living meaning back to them. Derrida, how-

ever, wants to stress the constructive aspect of

deconstruction. In other words, deconstruction amounts to

the immediate construction of something different.

This is possible because Derrida is concerned with the

practical rather than with the theoretical sphere. One candemonstrate that a theory is false without thereby propos-

ing a true one, but it is impossible to criticize a form of life,

without thereby proposingat least implicitlyan alter-

native one. Still, the very idea of deconstruction is more

than a simple substitution of values. The underlying view is

that values are always relational: there is no white without

black, no center without outskirt, no figure without back-

ground, and thus no right without wrong (which is usually

identified with the different, the other, the stranger). Now,

deconstruction must first of all uncover this relationality,

the fact that the terms cannot exist apart from one another.

Just as in Hegels dialectic, the master does not existwithout the slave, identity does not exist without differ-

enceeventually, the one depends on the other. Therefore,

difference is implication, hidden complicity. This is the

intuition that grounds Hegels Logic: we just need to

introduce time, and the oppositions (between life and

death, day and night, nature, culture, technique, etc.) turn

into complementarities.

This is why Derridain the text of a talk he kindly put

at my disposal, and which will be delivered at the Institut

Philosophique on January 2008re-christens difference as

differance, with an a. In French, differencethe fact

that two things differis spelled diffe rence, with a e,

even if the two words are homophonic. The neologism,

which looks like a grammatical mistake (notice, for

instance, that Derrida has not entitled the book I am

reviewing Le criture et la diffe rance), transforms the

difference in a gerund, thereby stressing the reference to an

act of differing or postponing. The orthographical alter-

ation expresses in an economic way Derridas thought: the

couples of opposites that are part of our life do not exist

autonomously; rather, one exists with respect to the other,

and time shows the complicity underlying their opposition.

Should we come to the conclusion that everything is rela-

tive? Not at all. The right conclusion is that nothing is

definitive, and thatdifferently from Hegelian dialectic

we will never come to an absolute knowledge, or to a last

word.

8 Archive-ache

However, the objection that I have put forth and propelled

myself still stands, I suppose. Talking about regret and

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censorship, or aiming at deconstructions in the trans-

parent society of the Internet is definitively vieux jeu: it

leads us, if not to Nietzsches world, to Adornos world (at

best). Such a world is dumb dead, and the Critique of

culture along with it. If it is not dead, it is at least decre-

pitand, again, this aspect shows us a peculiar mix of

archaism and actuality. However, the reviewer cannot

elude a question: what if Derridas archaism and naivetewere not a fiction? What if in the society of the Internet,

which is so transparent, the repressions were not a daily

business, and the deconstructions more urgent than ever?

Let me make a suggestion to illustrate how hot and

topical the theme of writing is to-day. Theut, the Egyptian

semi-god, the inventor of writing, takes note of the merits

and faults of each soul till her or his judgment. The

archivist, or the secretary, has never performed a futile

activity. The archivist is the tutor of documentality, the

keeper of crimes and punishments, and, more generally, of

social objects. What if the final solution were not recorded?

What if it, as the Nazis planned, there really were a his-torical decision nobody would ever know about?

Eventually, everybody came to know it, and there are still

the notes of the meeting of January 20th 1942 when the

decision was taken, readily available on the Internet

without the aid of papers. Here we see the point: sans

papier is not just the clandestine in a Manu Chaos song

(perdido en el corazon/de la grande babylon/me dicen el

clandestino/por no llevar papel), but the world of the

archive, too, which is increasingly devoid of papers.

The current world of the archivist is infinitely more

fragile than the world of the paper-archives. It is so because

of the obsolescence of the supports (after all, in forty years

our hard disks may share the same destiny of vinyl records,

which are unreadable without record-players), and it is

even more so because of its power, which leads to the

inflation of the archive (the infinite versions of the same file

on our PC, the abnormal redundancy of e-mail). Therefore,

we can legitimately speak, in a sense, and following Der-

ridas suggestion, of a archive-achean ache that the

archive suffers in the transition from paper to sans papier.

But, indeed, the problem arising from the fragility of

supports is not as big as that arising from the excess of

means. The latter does not consist exclusively in the

inflation of data, but also and foremost in the impressive

transformation of the capacity and speed of the archive,

both omnipresent and polymorphic.

Let me take an example from the latest news. Once

more, in Iraq, images and words recorded by a cell phone

have embarrassed the American administration. I am

talking about Saddam Husseins execution. At the outset

Bush said that he was satisfied. Then he objected to the

manner of the execution. Besides, note that in the USA it is

forbidden to record executions, a very convenient provision

indeed, since it is doubtful that there can be flawless

executions.

The moral of the story, for me, is the following: Pro-

vided that even a cell phone can be an archive, anyone will

have (actually, we already have) an archive at hand: the

space of the archive is massively contracted, and the

consequences are easily foreseeable. Moreover, the timeof

the archive is massively contracted too. At a glance, we cancome to know, thanks to Googlenow available on cell

phones tooa huge amount of information about the per-

son standing right in front of us. A little space and a little

time, and the archive will be everywhere. This is the worst

of the archive-aches. We have invented systems and prin-

ciples for the safeguard of privacy, for the treatment of

sensitive data in short, for making sure that nobody

can mind our own business, if we dont decide to disclose

it. But the data emerging from the Internet, on Google, are

completely open; they are the public data concerning our

work, our affiliations, the public documents we have

written or subscribed to. Once upon a time, those data weredifficult to retrieve, you needed time and commitment;

those inertial difficulties constituted a form of spontaneous

privacy. Now that everything is accessible just in few

seconds, everything changes.

This is a strange and perverse realization of absolute

knowledge, and it would not be surprising if Derrida,

prompted by the reality he is diagnosing, were to write a

book on Hegel out of his interests in the link between

writing and societywhy not? He could title or subtitle it

What is left of Absolute Knowledge. We imagine the text,

written on many columns, as it is on the web, with

windows, annotations, footnotes and comments of all sort,

a blog having Hegel as respondent. What a satisfaction,

so to speak. Maybe, he could title it Glas in honor of his

computers screen. We will see. Surely it is a long work,

and it will take time to write such a book whose grounds

though lie here in the essays collected in Writing and

Difference.

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