Germs of Death

Mauro Senatore

Description

Germs of Death explores the idea of genesis, or dissemination, in the early work of Jacques Derrida. Looking at Derrida's published and unpublished work from "Force and Signification" in 1963 to Glas in 1974, Mauro Senatore traces the development of Derrida's understanding of genesis both linguistically and biologically, and argues that this topic is an overlooked thread that draws together Derrida's readings of Plato and Hegel. Demonstrating how Derrida's analysis liberates the understanding of genesis from Platonic and Hegelian presupposition, Senatore also highlights Derrida's engagement with the biological thought of his day. Senatore also shows that the implications of Derrida's insights extend into contemporary ethical and political questions relating to postgenomic conceptions of life.
Acknowledgments
Preface

Introduction
The Inaugural Inscription
The Scene of Divine Creation
The Legacy of Husserl’s Origin
The Most General Geneticism
The Generation of Consciousness
The Origin of Forms

1. Platonism I: The Paternal Thesis
A Problem of Syntax
The Origin and Power of the Logos
The Textuality of Plato’s Text
Autochthony
The Natural Tendency to Dissemination
The Science of the Disseminated Trace

2. Platonism II: Kho¯ra
The Earth of Fathers
The Boldness of Timaeus
The Dynamis of Kho¯ra
The Concept of History

3. Hegelianism I: Tropic Movements
The Philosophical Introjection of Ordinary Language
The Life of the Concept
The Hegelian Treatment of Equivocity
The Negation of Consciousness
The Two Deaths of the Metaphor

4. Hegelianism II: The Book of Life
The Systematic Figure of the Germ
The Tree of Life
The Circulation of Singular Germs
A Note on Classification

5. Hegelianism III: The Genetic Programme
This Is a Protocol
The Logic Text
The Two Deaths of the Preface
The Preface Is the Nature of the Logos
The Tain of the Mirror
A Non-genetic Thinking of Genesis

Postscript
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Éthique et morale
• Philosophie du langage
• Philosophie de la langue
• Philosophy
• Ethique et morale

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 15 février 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438468495
• Langue: English

Extrait

GERMS OF DEATH
SUNY series in Contemporary French Thought

David Pettigrew and François Raffoul, editors
GERMS OF DEATH
The Problem of Genesis in Jacques Derrida
MAURO SENATORE
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2018 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Jenn Bennett
Marketing, Fran Keneston
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Senatore, Mauro, author
Title: Germs of death : the problem of genesis in Jacques Derrida
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2018] | Series: SUNY series in contemporary French thought | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781438468471 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438468495 (ebook)
Further information is available at the Library of Congress.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Living things die, and they do so simply because they carry the germ of death in themselves.
—Hegel, Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline, Part I: Science of Logic , §92
Genealogy cannot begin with the father.
—Derrida, Glas
CONTENTS
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
P REFACE
I NTRODUCTION
The Inaugural Inscription
The Scene of Divine Creation
The Legacy of Husserl’s Origin
The Most General Geneticism
The Generation of Consciousness
The Origin of Forms
C HAPTER 1
Platonism I: The Paternal Thesis
A Problem of Syntax
The Origin and Power of the Logos
The Textuality of Plato’s Text
Autochthony
The Natural Tendency to Dissemination
The Science of the Disseminated Trace
C HAPTER 2
Platonism II: Khōra
The Earth of Fathers
The Boldness of Timaeus
The Dynamis of Khōra
The Concept of History
C HAPTER 3
Hegelianism I: Tropic Movements
The Philosophical Introjection of Ordinary Language
The Life of the Concept
The Hegelian Treatment of Equivocity
The Negation of Consciousness
The Two Deaths of the Metaphor
C HAPTER 4
Hegelianism II: The Book of Life
The Systematic Figure of the Germ
The Tree of Life
The Circulation of Singular Germs
A Note on Classification
C HAPTER 5
Hegelianism III: The Genetic Programme
This Is a Protocol
The Logic Text
The Two Deaths of the Preface
The Preface Is the Nature of the Logos
The Tain of the Mirror
A Non- genetic Thinking of Genesis
P OSTSCRIPT
N OTES
B IBLIOGRAPHY
I NDEX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
T his book is the result of the Conicyt/Fondecyt Iniciación project n.11140145, hosted by the Instituto de Humanidades, Universidad Diego Portales (Santiago, Chile). My thanks are to all those without whom I would not have written it: Marguerite Derrida (for supporting this project), the IMEC: Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (for making its resources available), Francesco Vitale (for being a guide for my work), Juan Manuel Garrido, Rodolphe Gasché, David Johnson, Martin McQuillan, Michael Naas, and Eduardo Sabrovsky (for their generosity), Azeen, Matías, and Ronald (for their friendship), and my family, Paola, Nicola, Giulio, Catherine, and Edouard (to whom this book is dedicated).
PREFACE
I n the early seventies, the biological paradigm of genetics, which had developed in France during the previous decade, began to tremble. According to this paradigm, biological heredity, transmitted from generation to generation and inscribed in the nucleic acid of a cell, constitutes the programme of development—the so-called genetic programme—of a living organism. 1
In L’Organisation biologique et la théorie de l’information ( Biological Organization and Information Theory , 1972), the young biophysicist Henri Atlan offers an initial formalization of the post- genetic understanding of life that he has improved throughout his subsequent work. In particular, in the last part of the aforementioned book, entitled L’Organisation , he calls into question the concept of the genetic programme. He argues that, since its primordial stage—that is, since the synthesis of proteins in the cell—the development of a living organism has consisted in the movement of self-organization through which a complex structure of life integrates the aleatory stimuli of the environment. Therefore, the synthesis of proteins would not amount to the mere execution of a set of pre-established instructions but to the process of disorganization and reorganization that derives from the irruption of the environment. 2 In the concluding section of the book, entitled “ Morts ou vifs? [Dead or Alive],” Atlan summarizes his understanding of life through a formulation that is pregnant with implications for the biological thought to come:
The dream of a cell is neither that of reproducing itself, nor of “enjoying” its metabolism, nor of assimilating, but, “like everyone [ comme tout le monde ],” that is, like every physical system in irreversible time—which is also the time of our representation—it is that of “resting” in the minimal state of free energy and thus of dying. … Here, as well as in physical systems, the only project remains that of returning to equilibrium, namely, death. … The rest, that is, organization, growing, development, learning, and reproduction, are not of the order of the project but of the aleatory perturbations that succeed in contrasting it. Living organisms thus appear as systems that are enough complex , redundant , and reliable in reacting to the aleatory aggressions of the environment, so that the achievement of the state of balance, namely, death, is only possible through the detours that we agree on calling life. (Atlan 1972, 284, my translation) 3
The analyses that follow are situated within these coordinates. They take up the thinking of genesis—namely, dissemination—that Jacques Derrida had elaborated in the sixties and the seventies, as a major contribution to theoretical debate surrounding post- genetic conceptions of life. This thinking demarcates itself from the philosophical understanding of genesis—what Derrida designates as the logos spermatikos —that undergirds the whole organization of knowledge and puts on the mask of preformationism in the life sciences. Furthermore, it demonstrates that genetics constitutes the latest feature of this preformationism. Therefore, Derrida’s nonphilosophical and nonpreformationist understanding of genesis provides the conceptual framework for a post- genetic interrogation of life. 4 Later, Derrida takes this understanding as his point of departure for investigating ethico-political issues in the organization of living bodies.
This book elaborates a systematic examination of how Derrida develops the Husserlian concept of genesis through a critical engagement with Plato’s and Hegel’s legacies as well as with the biological thought of his time. This examination describes a trajectory throughout Derrida’s early work that goes from his Introduction to Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry (1962) to Glas (1974). Within these limits, it draws together key moments in the demarcation of dissemination from the philosophy of genesis. The Introduction highlights the inaugural inscription of dissemination in the early essay “Force and Signification” (1963). In this text, Derrida broaches an articulation of the Husserlian concept of genesis, as the constitutive inscription of the ideal object, and of the Hegelian concept of the natural seed. He thus develops a new thinking of genesis in general (as a trace-seed) that is detached from the philosophical understanding of genesis (as a generation of consciousness). Chapters 1 and 2 offer an overall interpretation of Derrida’s engagement with Plato’s text, from “Plato’s Pharmacy” (1968) to his edited and unedited writings on khōra (1970–1993). They point out that Derrida finds in this text the conflict between Platonism and dissemination. On the one hand, Platonism is interpreted as the thesis of the originary and nonmetaphorical relationship between the logos- zōon and its father-subject, which is embodied in the autochthonous community of Athens. On the other hand, dissemination stands for the thinking of the trace-seed as the general structure of genesis. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the interpretation of the Hegelian text that Derrida develops from “Violence and Metaphysics” (1964) to Glas (1974). They explain that he understands this text as the book of life, in which the metaphorical exchange among ontological regions—for example, between nature and spirit—hinges on the presupposition that the truth of life is spiritual life or the life of the concept. Chapter 5 places dissemination in relation to the biological thought of the time by interpreting the preface to Dissemination (1972) as a critical response to The Logic of Life (1970), the masterwork of the French molecular biologist François Jacob. The chapter shows that Derrida’s preface dissociates the understanding of genesis from the philosophical presuppositions that underlie Jacob’s concept of the genetic programme. The book ends with a postscript that draws attention to a step forward taken by Derrida in his elaboration of the minimal conditions for genesis. Looking into significant moments in the seminar on the GREPH , delivered in 1974–1975, the postscript shows that the structure of genesis, the trace-seed, is attached to a drive for mastery and power. 5
INTRODUCTION
The Inaugural Inscription
The force of the work, the force of genius, the force, too, of that which engenders in general is precisely that which resists geometrical metaphorization and is the proper