Trace Derrida Levinas

The Trace in Derrida and Levinas Bettina Bergo Université de Montréal

Canadian Philosophical Association, London, Ontario, May 2005

for Nadia Sahely

Foreword

In this paper I want to follow the career of the trace as it unfolds in selective writings

of Levinas and Derrida.1 It will be impossible in this kind of presentation to give a com-

plete panorama of the functions and meanings of the trace; besides, Paul Ricoeur sug-

gested classifying traces according to the neuro-cerebral (“mnesic traces”), the conscious-

unconscious (“mnemonic traces”), and the written or inscribed trace (“historic traces”). A

clean, rather general classification—valid until we enquire about types of memory or un-

til we expand the concept of inscription or arche-writing.2

Now, if the trace, for Levinas, refers to what cannot appear—glory, the face of the

other, a dynamic collection of aphanological conditions—then it is also tied up with the

complex of memory, affectivity, and the birth of signification. In Derrida, the trace be-

gins its career in the critique of Husserl and the immediate self-presence of the inner

voice; that voice which is supposed to dispense with those traces called Anzeigen or indi-

cations. But the trace, in Derrida, continues its path between phenomenology and

aphanology, opening the question of the possibility of enlarging the meaning of writing to

processes of inscription, whether social, cybernetic or natural. In Derrida’s conference

“Éperons,” the trace is tied to the signifying complex of veils, veil-rendings (with the in-

stantiations of “Éperons” from stone spurs, daggers, Nietzsche’s umbrella and the trace or

Spur), and femininity. In later writings like Le monolinguisme de l’autre and Contre-al-

lées, traces are approached in their cultural ambiguities and their ability to be inscribed

on, or introjected into, bodies. In this brief sketch, we can see that the career of the trace

in Derrida perspectival: it crosses disciplinary boundaries while making the work of in-

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scription, identification, but most importantly, ambiguity, possible. I am interested, in a

broad sense, in the spread of this concept in 1960s French thought. That is, in its sources

and, in Levinas’s case especially, its connection to sensuous or affective memory? Thus, I

begin by discussing Levinas but will have Derrida in mind at all times.

1. The Trace and Repetition

In his collection of essays Noms propres,3 Levinas asks whether the work of Derrida

does not represent a line cutting through the history of philosophy, like the Kantian revo-

lution did. Levinas’s question is put in slightly bad faith, given Derrida’s debt to Heideg-

ger. The essay devoted to Derrida presents his 1960s work in broad strokes, to come to

the conclusion, just a year before the publication of Otherwise than Being (1974), that

Derrida’s trace-like conditions of possibility of language and writing invite the Lev-

inasian question of whether incipient inscription in all its forms, is not rooted in affective

traces which Levinas calls, variously, recurrence, sincerity, the Saying, etc. In short, Lev-

inas uses Derrida’s reflection on the trace to pose the question of the origins of intersub-

jective responsibility; according to Levinas, affective traces thus construed would ground

1 Heartfelt thanks go to Gabriel Malenfant, Andréanne Sabourin-Laflamme, and Roseline Lemire (Université de Montréal, Département de Philosophie) for their research and criticism, which made this pa-per possible. 2 And, of course, Ricœur realizes that his three “distinct realities” are heuristic. But proceeding on the indifference of neuro-science to phenomenology and that of the latter toward “the brain”, he is justified in speaking of distinct realities. Given his reading of the work of A. Leroi-Gourhan, however, Derrida seems to occupy a subtler position when he considers an expanded concept of the trace in archè-writing, whether this is natural inscription, social, or psychological inscription. Both positions entail difficulties, that of Derrida, toward a perspectival pluralism that strives to include all concepts of the trace under his archè-writing. For Ricœur’s remarks on traces, see La Mémoire, l’Histoire, l’Oubli (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2000), pp. 538-39; also see Jean Greisch’s critical engagement with Ricœur’s topography in « Trace et oubli : l’effacement et l’ineffaçable » in La Trace, entre absence et présence. Actes du colloque interna-tional de Metz, Pierre-marie Beaude, Jacques Fantino, and Marie-Anne Vanier, eds., (Paris : Cerf, 2004), esp. Pp. 271-293.3 Emmanuel Levinas, Noms propres (Montpellier : Fata Morgana, 1976; republished in the « Livre de Poche » format. Hereafter abbreviated in the text as NP.

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any speaking or writing as their transcendental condition. As we know, Derrida was char-

acteristically generous in his response to Levinas’s query.

The later work of Levinas identifies human sensuous vulnerability as its site of

predilection for the trace. Privileging the sensuous trace goes some way toward address-

ing why face to face responsibility repeats and increases. This is because the question of

repetition, enormously difficult for phenomenology, implies a relationship between

traces, a memory of the flesh that can be forgotten, and the conscious-unconscious struc-

ture of sensibility. That same question returns in Derrida’s later work in the form of

‘hauntings’ and fragments of autobiography. Thus two questions form the leitmotiv of

this paper: the first concerns the relationship between traces, memories, and sensibility;

the second concerns the proliferation of French discourses on the trace in the 1960s, a

proliferation I will try to illustrate here.

Can we speak of an inscription that is purely affective, or again: of sensuous mem-

ory? Strange questions these, if we acknowledge that we do not remember pain though

we admit that trauma leaves an impression on the body, accompanied by psychic mani-

festations. Now, the onset of the other, according to the later Levinas, is described as

traumatic. And responsibility belongs to an economy, or aneconomic order, of repetition.

It does this uniquely, as I am not responsible in the wake of other signifying traces, say,

in nature—even if they could traumatize me. Many things can be understood as inscrip-

tions or take the form of a trace, and never produce trauma or responsibility. Some mem-

ory of a sensation must lead us to infer the presence, sporadically forgotten then recalled,

of some sensuous alterity-in-the-same. That memory should allow us to infer that respon-

sibility intensifies even as it repeats, which means that it repeats in and as difference.

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Again, what is a memory of a sensation of a ‘presence’ that is excessive? Levinas com-

pares it with being “mal dans sa peau.” Translated by “too tight in its skin,” “mal dans sa

peau” is constitutional, existential, almost irremediable, like the poetic “mal de vivre.”

Yet this figure gives way, in Levinas, to an emphasis on intensification, recurrence, and

repetition, which means that some inscription of the sensuous excess passes through the

irrecuperably lost time-space that consciousness must reconstruct as representation. This

time-repetition conundrum is why Levinas likens the ‘otherwise than being’ to an adver-

bial inflection of the verbal ‘essance’, or what usually carries on in Being. But that im-

plies that we should be concerned with the way bodily memories congeal into dynamic

states, with or without the de facto presence of the other person, and thanks to the strange

effectivity of traces. Is there a way of speaking non-mechanistically about the form of

sensuous or bodily memory, without recurring to “abnormal psychology”? Such a mem-

ory, in becoming conscious, would have to abbreviate or congeal impulses and sensations

otherwise irrecuperable to us.

Because metaphoric nexus between the conscious and non-conscious sensation, affect

and memory is tied to the aporias of conceptualization, which reifies what it represents,

we can only offer analogies for this memory of sensation. Perhaps it is like the odd recog-

nition we have sometimes when, drifting into a dream, we half realize that we are return-

ing to an already familiar dream problem or dream universe. Whether it comes before or

after the unfolding of the dream situation, this recognition disappears almost immedi-

ately, and so, always seems somewhat suspect. But this is only a search for an analogy to

illuminate the unconscious-conscious dynamic of sensation and memory. For Husserl as

for Freud, sensation existed only in becoming-intentional, in being-represented. Indeed,

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Husserl came closest to sliding into psychology when he advanced an explanation of rec-

ollection on the basis of what he called a phenomenological theory of association. All

that lacked him was an unconscious, a fantasy life defined by repression, displacement or

temporal condensation, as well as the associative powers of phonemes or words said.

Husserl insisted that recollection be transparent in and to itself, like all the other acts of

consciousness, and therefore, true material for phenomenological description. And we

know that Levinas followed him up to one important deviation: Levinas’s repetitions are

possible, thanks to traces, and it is an otiose question to him whether these traces are in-

scribed in the flesh, or in some kind of memory. What is important for Levinas is that the

trace ‘is’ as it is enacted as sincerity, and this, out of a site that is neither conscious nor

precisely unconscious. In this enactment, expressed as “here I am,” the self becomes a

signifier, he says. Contrasted with the ego or representation, the self thus exists originally

as repeating, non-identical signification. The self is passive production of difference,

thanks to what inhabits it but is not it.

2. The trace as inscription

What is a trace for Derrida? Where does the trace begin, where does it end? In his

early study of Husserl, Speech and Phenomena,4 Derrida sets the trace in the laps of

space-time that is inassimilable to representation. “…We should be able to say a priori

that their common root [that of retention and representation]—the possibility of re-peti-

tion in its most general form, that is, the constitution of a trace in the most universal

sense, is a possibility that must not only inhabit the pure actuality of the now but must

constitute it through the very movement of differance it introduces. Such a trace is...more

4 Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, David B. Allison, tr., (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973; first published in French in 1967).

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‘primordial’ than what is phenomenologically primordial,” he argues (SP, 67). Is this not

the same non-structure, or non-site with its non-event, whose strange effectivity amounts

to the condition of possibility of the repetition of responsibility? The only question in the

matter of their rapprochement is whether a factical other need be there for Levinas’s trace

to make itself felt. It would appear not.

In Of Grammatology,5 the trace provides the ground for an extension of the notion of

writing to include those marks, visible and invisible, that differentiate and unify ideas, in-

tuitions, signifiers. Traces here are originary cuts. Speaking of Lévi-Strauss’s “penetra-

tion” into “the lost world” of the Nambikwara of Brazil, whose massive territory was

covered by bush, “traversed by a picada or crude trail whose track is not easily distin-

guished from that bush.” Derrida observes, “one should meditate upon all of the follow-

ing together: writing as the possibility of the road and of difference, the history of writing

and the history of the road, of the rupture, of the via rupta, of the path that is broken…of

the space or reversibility and of repetition traced by the opening…the silva is savage, the

via rupta is written…and inscribed violently as difference, as form imposed on the hylè

in the forest…it is difficult to imagine that access to the possibility of a road-map is not,

at the same time, access to writing” (OG, 107-108).

The entire critique of Lévi-Strauss’s Rousseauism, by which “petites peuplades sans

écriture” replaced the noble primitives “sans civilisation” in the Parisian academy, is

predicated on Lévi-Strauss’s metaphysics of the living presence of human to human in

primeval goodness, without technical intermediaries like writing. Absent an expanded

economy of the trace as genetic, repetitive, and ex-centric to any economy, Derrida’s cri-

5 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak, tr., (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hop-kins University Press, reprint edition, 1998). Hereafter abbreviated in the text as OG.

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tique of the metaphysical in politics, history, and ethnography could not proceed. As we

know, Of Grammatology shows painstakingly that the Nambikwara inscribed and carried

within themselves traces equivalent to an arche-writing. However it is Derrida who un-

derstands better than Lévi-Strauss what it means when, having handed out paper and pen-

cil to this “illiterate” group, Lévi-Strauss describes them as drawing lines, waves, connec-

tions, which he will ultimately acknowledge refer to kinship structures, clan belonging,

and social hierarchies. Yet this writing activity was not what Lévi-Strauss anticipated,

much less grasped, when he praised a pure people possessed of an “animal satisfaction as

ingenuous as it is charming” (OG, 122). What gives Derrida’s critique its pathos, is the

paradox that Lévi-Strauss constructs for himself. He comes to admit that the Nambik-

wara, at work with their pencils, were not just imitating the ethnographers. They were

“making diagrams, describing, explaining, writing, a genealogy and a social structure”

(OG, 124). To which Derrida adds, “It is now known…that the birth of writing (in the

colloquial sense) was nearly everywhere…linked to genealogical anxiety” (OG, 124). But

genealogical anxiety echoes a question that repeats obliquely in Levinas’s work: Who am

I? Whence do I come? What is my inner nature? Whether these questions are formulated

or enacted, they concern the other. And this, even if the other can not confer an essence

on us, but only makes us aware of our irreplaceableness. Our irreplaceableness, of course,

recalls the Proper Name and, as we know, Derrida has argued that writing—understood

as infinite and even indeterminate iterabilities—is possible only with the erasure of the

proper name. If we combine Levinas and Derrida, we discover the strange but plausible

circumstance that the proper name, as essence, is always already crossed out, always al-

ready replaced by political or cultural place-holders, and yet, it is diversely restored in the

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enactment of accounting for oneself to the other and in kinship traces. If the birth of writ-

ing enacts the insistence of anxiety as an affective, sometimes material, trace; if writing

broadly construed makes possible the repetition and combination with other traces, their

parceling and distribution in cultures, then we must add to this that the birth of speaking

for Levinas is connected also with the insistence of anxiety, once again as an affective

trace. Together, writing and speaking configure laws—at least, laws of combinatorials,

laws of differences, laws as differences—even as they continually encourage new laws or

norms, whether these are prohibitions or commandments. The trace as inscription is thus

always generative. The stranger question is whether identity and culture are always politi-

cal in some sense. When he reads Lévi-Strauss’s account of the “writing lesson,” Derrida

shows us that one can read traces even without being able to read words—and one can

read them in an immediately political and economic perspective. According to Lévi-

Strauss, the Nambikwara Chief imitated the transcriptions of the ethnographers, produc-

ing a full page of incomprehensible wavy scribbles. The Chief then proceeded to read

these scribbles as though they were words, says Lévi-Strauss, to the assembled members

of his clan. The resulting speech called for distributions of gifts and fulfillment of duties.

Whether these acts are already inscribed in the memories of the assembled or not repre-

sents a problem that goes unsolved. Following the Chief’s discourse, however, a strange

political violence took place in perhaps the least violent of forms. The chief’s followers

drifted away, and for good. “Those who moved away from him after he tried to play ‘the

civilized man’…must have had a confused understanding,” says Lévi-Strauss, “of the fact

that writing, on this its first appearance in their midst, had allied itself with falsehood”

(OG, 134).

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It was never clear what was the transgression that provoked the clan’s flight from

their Chief. There is reason to doubt that it was set off by the play at “civilized manhood”

or some perceived pretense at his reading from the whites’ paper. Can we really believe

that writing in this particular form provided a greater legitimation for commands whose

content was already implicit? The question should be rephrased: What happens in the

pencil-on-paper explicitation of those immanent inscriptions of implicit norms; what

takes place in the phenomenalization of internalized and forgotten traces—is an other

transgression enacted thereby? Or again, does everyday writing intensify inscriptions that

were implicit but already cultural or economic? If so, then writing in the colloquial sense

must suppose a deeper concept of inscription and with it, the affectivity tied to traces. I

suspect that that is at least the case with monotheistic religions…

Something of this episode cast Lévi-Strauss himself into a profound anxiety, an anxi-

ety so uncharacteristic that the spirit and value of his investigations—notably, the purity

of writing-free humanity—seemed threatened for a time. He “found…himself alone, and

lost, in the middle of the bush…demoralized…agitated by dark thoughts” (OG, 126).

4. Tachet

When Derrida traveled to Algiers with Catherine Malabou, he pointed out the sign of

a lithography shop that stocked wholesale wines, inscribed on the white-washed stone of

the old capital’s arcades fronting the Mediterranean. It looked like this:

LITHOGRAPHIE

JOURDAIN

VINS EN GROS

TACHET

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Below the sign, and inscribed like a legend on a map, stood the graffito: “Tachet.”

Not a noun one finds in the dictionary, “Tachet” is like the truncation that allows us to

form the participle “tacheté”—speckled, splattered, or spotted with brown; or the noun

“Tache”—spot. “Tachet” with a “t” sounds both like a state and an action. What it leaves

in its imaginary wake is a dark trace, some besmirchment, like the material graffito under

the commercial insignia. In “Ce corps extranjuif,”6 Hélène Cixous recently remarked that,

in his later writings, memories of sensations and scenes, fluids, sounds, residues—pas-

sional, almost immemorial traces—often constituted the core of Derrida’s reflections.7

It is as though he were working through the gamut of those traces that precede the

memorial, the de facto versus the de jure, the imaginary versus the fulfilled evidence.

“Sense, being temporal in nature…is never simply present. It is always already engaged

in the ‘movement’ of the trace,” Derrida wrote already in 1967, before following those

traces from his autobiography.8 With a certain psychoanalytic lightness, Cixous argues

that the autobiographical trace mixes with growing urgency with Derrida’s philosophical

themes. But then, so do themes that took shape in his long discussion with Levinas. Thus,

in the Monolingualism of the Other, he acknowledges a further fold in his thought:

“One is going to accuse me of mixing all this up. But no! Or, yes; one may and one

must, taking care over the most rigorous distinctions,…not lose sight of that obscure

6 Hélène Cixous, « Ce corps extranjuif » in Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly, eds., Judéités: Questions pour Jacques Derrida (Paris: Galilée, 2003),7 Hélène Cixous, « Ce corps extranjuif ,» Op. cit., p. 61. Cixous writes, « De plus en plus de reve-nance insiste un peu partout dans les textes de Jacques Derrida, comme si leur nature d’ancien jardin bom-bardé, maintes et maintes fois bombardé, et plus souvent que nous le savions, s’exprimait d’une voix im-possible à ignorer. »

“More and more revenance, returning, insists almost everywhere in the texts of Jacques Derrida,” she reminds us, “as though their nature, like an ancient bombed garden, bombed over and over again and more often than we knew, were expressed in a voice impossible to ignore.” 8 See Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, Op. cit., p. 85.

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shared power [obscure puissance commune], that colonial drive that will have begun by

insinuating itself, but is never slow to invading, in what they call, using an expression

worked to death: ‘the relation to the other!’”9

That strange noun-participle, “Tachet,” would have been the first thing one saw from

the boat, like an arrow drawn over the aerial photo of someone’s house; or like Derrida’s

reading of Abraham responding to the divine call with Kafka’s terrible question: “Who,

me?” What is more, “Tachet” would have been an original signifier on Derrida’s body,

attesting Lacan’s claim that the register of the phonetic stands apart from the ‘reign’ of

sense and signification in the unconscious. Connected by homonymy to “taché,” stained,

or “tacheté”—the erroneous graffito, “tachet,” with its inaudible “t,” recalls the a insinu-

ated into “différance,” whose presence one only ‘reads’ but does not hear. One will ac-

cuse me of mixing all this up, says Derrida, because, he adds: “All these words: truth,

alienation, appropriation, habitation…ipseity, place of the subject, law…remain prob-

lematic to my eyes….They carry the seal of that metaphysics imposed precisely through

that language of the other, that monolingualism of the other. So much so that [my] debate

with monolingualism will have been nothing other than a deconstructive writing…all the

way to the distinction between transcendental universality or ontology¸, and phenomenal

empiricity.”10

Functioning in the Anzeigen, ignored by Husserl’s transcendental subject, or in

those black traces that together form one trace or stain, traces represent in all their forms

the “incidences of [a] primordial non-presence.”11 It has not been noted often enough how

9 Derrida, Le monolinguisme de l’autre, ou la prothèse d’origine (Paris : Galilée, 1996), p. 70. He-reafter abbreviated in the text as MA.10 Ibid., p. 115.11 Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, Op. cit., p. 82.

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this original thinking—which Levinas compared to a line cutting across the history of

philosophy—how it arose in a context of thinkers intent on exploring the meaning of the

aphanological, of repetition, trace, event, and background. Around the same time that

Derrida published Voice and Phenomena, Deleuze was rethinking the concept of differ-

ence in itself, (1968). In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze argued that difference is not

just a matter of a demarcated, dark trace, but also of the strange relationship that insists

between the ground and the event; or the abyss, the surface, and its floating traces—and

there are always traces, for Deleuze, who writes:

“Indifference has two aspects: the undifferentiated abyss, the black nothingness…

but also the white nothingness,” (think of the white arcades of Algiers). He adds, “the

white nothingness or the once more calm surface upon which float unconnected determi-

nations like membra disjecta: a head without a neck, an arm without a shoulder…The in-

determinate is completely indifferent, but such floating determinations are no less indif-

ferent to each other. Is difference intermediate between these two extremes (of ground

and determinations)? Or is difference not rather the only extreme, the only moment of

presence and precision? Difference is the state in which one can speak of determination

as such.” On this he and Derrida are in full agreement—provided we realize that determi-

nation is never simple adequation or identification.

“The difference ‘between’ two things is only empirical…However, instead of

something distinguished from something else, imagine something which distinguishes it-

self—and yet that from which it distinguishes itself does not distinguish itself from it.”

(DR, 28)

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Having said this, Deleuze offers an empirical example: Nietzsche’s lightning,

flashing across a dark sky, to illustrate the process or event of difference-creation, accom-

panied by its ‘own’ ground of non-difference and non-distinction: the dark sky. The cru-

cial thing that Deleuze observes, and which recalls the hauntings increasingly present in

Derrida, is that the that from which difference distinguished itself also rises up and clings

to the event of difference, itself, as it ‘flashes’. Thus, adds Deleuze, “There is cruelty,

even monstrosity, on both sides of this struggle against an elusive adversary, in which the

distinguished opposes something which cannot distinguish itself from it, but continues to

espouse that which divorces it…Recall Artaud’s idea: cruelty is nothing but determina-

tion as such, that precise point at which the determined maintains its essential relation-

ship with the undetermined.”12

If cruelty were only determination; what we need to understand is how what is de-

termined, or receives a trace, either opens outward, as in Levinas’s thinking of the Saying

and of glory, or shuts down on itself, as “taché” becoming the inert or troubled support of

“letters on the body.” This question is difficult because the violence of the trace, in each

case, holds such different consequences, and there remains the problem of levels of dis-

course and investigation. Such a host of traces throng in the late 1960s and ’70s! Concep-

tually innovative, they laid claim to every level of reflection and object, arising after

failed efforts at recovery and restoration, as Cixous observed of the worlds shattered be-

tween 1933 and, say, 1954.13 But we no longer insist that continuities unite these traces,

forging historical grammars for them as structuralism said. As Derrida put it recently,

12 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, Paul Patton, tr., (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1994; first appeared in French with Presses universitaires de France, 1968), p. 29.13 When the anti-colonial revolution triumphed in Algeria, only to drift toward war with Marocco.

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“beyond memory and lost time. I am not even speaking of an ultimate unveiling, but of

what will have remained, for all time, foreign to the veiled face, to the very face or figure

of the veil itself…I know, ultimately, that I need no longer discern between the promise

and the terror” (MA, 135-36). This was also why he observed, in regard to Levinas, that

at the heart of responsibility abides also the greatest of betrayals. Cruelty, as Deleuze

said, is determination, a “tachet”—but a different cruelty lurks in the bathos of the ground

rising up and sticking to the lightning-event, the way Levinas’s il y a adheres to the in-

somniac.

5. The Trace and the Logics of Difference

Against both Hegel and Levinas, Deleuze adumbrated a logic of difference that

anticipated Derrida’s explorations of haunting. For difference to enter representation,

Deleuze proposed not dialectic or the ‘other’, but four Aristotelian categories: identifica-

tion, analogy, opposition, and resemblance. But he added, immediately, that “Difference

in general [must be] distinguished from… otherness. For two terms differ when they are

other, not in themselves, but in something else; thus when they also agree in something

else…” (DR, 30, emphasis added). Now, if the category of opposition restores Hegel’s

logic of the negative, Deleuze insists that as complete difference, opposition understood

as contradiction finishes by eliminating the subject or substance in which it occurs. By

contrast, what he calls “contrariety,” in the matter or the genus, “alone expresses the ca-

pacity of a subject” (he does not mean a psychological subject) “to bear opposites while

remaining substantially the same”—at least in the case of modifications to “matter.” At

the level of “essences,” contrarieties appear as though they were opposites: like “having

feet” versus “having wings.” But here, difference produces what is incommensurable, un-

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like yet related, feet or wings provide mobility, in different manners and different matters

(earth, air). Deleuze’s argument brings us back to the route, the picada, which Derrida

highlights as he reads Lévi-Strauss—not to mention returning us to the verb-noun, “Ta-

chet,” imposing an incommensurability without destroying the substance on which it is

inscribed as difference. Deleuze writes, “Contrariety in essence or in the form gives us

the concept of a difference that is itself essential” (DR, 30). This is because, without un-

dermining the so-called medium, “contrariety” undoes dialectical progressions and struc-

tural holism, in the form of a negative that may either ex-ist or in-sist. This is weak dif-

ference. Yet it inheres in a genus or subjectum as maximal difference (because it does not

destroy the concept) and as specific difference between substances. “Such a synthetic and

constitutive predicate, attributive more than attributed, a veritable rule of production, has

one final property: that of carrying with itself that which it attributes” (DR, 31).

Beyond contrariety, difference becomes sheer otherness and “risks escaping the

concept” of difference itself, and generic difference, says Deleuze echoing Aristotle, is

simply “too large, being established between uncombinable objects which do not enter

into relations of contrariety” (DR, 30). Difference as contrariety is mediated, by insisting

in some genus without abolishing it. Better, contrariety “is itself mediation,” because gen-

era are themselves “divided by differences” (DR, 31). Is this not also the trace abiding in

the living present, which, Derrida writes, “must, in order to be a now and to be retained in

another now, affect itself without recourse to anything empirical but with a new primor-

dial actuality in which it would become a non-now…this process”—why not call it “of

contrarieties”?—“is [one] in which the same,” says Derrida, “is the same only in being

affected by the other” (VP, 85). Here may lie a way toward thinking sensuous memory.

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Recall the picada traced by the Nambikwara. Productive, like a proto-writing,

‘provisionally indelible’ like all inscriptions, this quasi-line is the empirical and symbolic

difference that combines and unites the terrain, giving rise to the cultural and proto-politi-

cal designations that divide and unite the Nambikwara in relations of contrariety, both

among themselves and in regard to the Portuguese. Beneath this traced line—which, as

Descartes first realized, would be the very (non)entity that transformed “natural space”

into “mathematical space,” whose “matter” became the letters of analytic geometry—be-

neath the Nambikwara line lay the mnemonic and fantasmatic immanences that the Nam-

bikwara all knew. And, when obliged with paper and pencil, they proceeded to map out

and compare them: we call this “kinship structures,” but that is a simplification. This im-

mediate, half-intuitional knowledge corresponds to Lacan’s 1960s concept of the “sign on

the body” or the “letter on the body.” Invisible, without requiring a literal line, the letter

on the body traces boundaries, incipient form, and foreclosures. Its effectivity shows it-

self in human behaviors, moods, and the way ‘subjects’ ‘communicate’ their uncon-

scious. “Tachet” and “taché.”14

7. The Trace and the Signifier on the Body

Traces are. Or, as Aristotle-Deleuze argued: Being is not a genus because differ-

ences are (DR, 32). But traces ‘are’ in ways we cannot simply attribute to individuals or

genera. We consider them relations or mediations because we consider ‘mediational’ any

14 How not to think here of Derrida’s extraordinary critique of Husserl’s indications or Anzeigen, those marks, gestures, or silences, that enable movement from idea to idea, signifier to signifier? Husserl’s transcendental subject, speaking and listening to itself without indications, should be compared to Deleuze’s white ground, present to itself, indeterminate, and indifferent to all the fragments “floating on it as on a surface.” The inner monologue, said Husserl, never says anything new to itself, as though it were some God. To which Derrida responds, “A voice without difference, a voice without writing, is at once ab -solutely alive and absolutely dead” (SP, 102). The subject without revenance would be absolutely alive in timeless immobility.

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movement from, or transformation of, one thing into another. But, as Deleuze points out,

traces denote “specific difference.” We consider traces differentiating but not opposi-

tional, though oppositions readily grow from them when the trace slides from indication,

inscribed or phoneticized, to erasure or antonomasia. We understand traces as inscrip-

tional, because they persist and engage memory and phantasy—and these, in different

ways. Like a primal scene traces collect phantasy and anguish in repeating a memory that

cannot be represented because it keeps changing or better: it repeats-as-difference. Like

Levinas’s responsibility-psychosis of reason,15 traces as inscriptions endure as if “in us,”

as though we were engravable surfaces. This kind of recipience has the ‘arbitrary’ quality

to it of arising unpredictably, even cruelly, like an other in the same—as though

Deleuze’s ground heaved up one day in us, stuck fast to the event that tried to set itself

apart from that ground. The monstrous is the contrariety of difference versus non-indif-

ference. But the monstrous can be seen on both sides—that of the ground and that of the

differentiating event. Cixous insists, speaking of Derrida and circumcision: “One cannot

tell me that at eight days old the child is not present to his fate. Like the dead he lives ev-

erything and undergoes, but hasn’t the force then to say it. He will say it later on. Like-

wise one remembers events whose inheritor one is, even though they took place in a ‘be-

fore’ us.”16 This is the monstrousness of ‘revenance’.

“But there is no ego there at eight days old!” protest some Freudians. “There is

no-thing that could remember!” Is that not just like the anxiety, which Freud discovered

in the 1920s, always preceding, always deeper than those factical reminiscences that the

15 Levinas uses “psychosis” in 1974. It works in Otherwise than Being like a metonym, referring as a part to a whole, responsibility, that is never assembled in representation—much less in enactment; hence it too repeats. 16 Cixous, Op. cit., p. 68.

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patient supposed were the cause of his trouble? A regressus of sensuous traces antedates

ego formation. And if such a trace remains a question for us, was there not a body, or

body-ground, mute at first “like the dead,” said Cixous, were there not events? Inscription

is not causality; it inflects, differentiates. The trace inscribed is like Deleuze’s contrariety,

which does not destroy the substance. And the trace is always caught up in a process of

reformations, with losses and gains, like the footprint of which Lacan speaks famously.

Remember that he says that, if we approach the unconscious as having one side con-

cerned with meaning, with sens, the other side is tied up to the trace, to sound, and ho-

mophony. Psychoanalytic listening must therefore be double, with emphasis displaced to

the trace, and to its transference. Thus, for example, I see a trace in the sand. What is this,

I must ask: an image, or a figure of a foot that is no longer there? Is it a non-figural trace,

or an indexical of the passage of a person? The question Lacan is proposing is this: it is

up to us whether we take this trace as a sign of a thing, or not.17

Because, as Derrida understood well, we are always in language as inscription, we

may then utter: “footstep,” or “pas!” before this trace. In so doing we are already forget-

ting that the trace stood in for the entities “foot” and “person,” earlier on. Thus the attri -

bution of “pas” is not so much identificatory as it gives voice and creates a sound that ties

up with other sounds. Like a new event, lifting off from its dull ground and becoming au-

tonomous, “pas” is a creation in sound and therewith, a loosening of sense. But if we re-

turn to the trace, now, the sound “footstep” or “pas” no longer represents the step, or the

trace of the step. It has “transformed the trace of a step or passage into a letter (a “sign” if

you prefer) that bars” (PLL, 149) and separates from the initial event-encounter. Lacan

17 Philippe Julien, Pour Lire Jacques Lacan, (Paris: Seuil, 1995), p. 149. Hereafter abbreviated in the text as PLL.

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names this transformation, ironically, the “pas-de-trace.” Thanks to the voice, which is

not Husserl’s pure immanence, and “through the [ineradicable] phoneticism of writing,

there is a transformation of a trace into something traced (tracé), of a sign into a letter”

(Ibid.). But this process sets a border or barrier between the signifier and the signified; so

the moment of phoneticization—which made possible the separation of the letter that re-

veals and forecloses—does not exhaust the function of the thing traced (du tracé). “[B]y

the third moment there appears in the thing traced something that escaped the order of

words (l’ordre de la parole). The letter (as Lacan called it, echoing the imaginary space

that Descartes designated by letters)—the letter is not a pure and simple transcription of

sound.” And Derrida understood this. There exists another order, a supplement comes to

light: “that which, in the letter, draws a border [and a shore line], a littoral, as it inscribes

itself, something which is not read…Pure litura, which is the literal” (PLL, 150).

[In the interest of time I will close here, saying simply that this sums up Derrida’s

concept of trace and writing, even as it argues that the sensuous and affective trace, de-

spite its ostensible priority, cannot be separated from inscription or arche-writing and

Deleuze’s concept of ‘contrariety’. Both of these blur the boundaries between the ‘natu-

ral’ and the ‘cultural’, the psychological and the material. Such a project of surpassing

enlivened post-structuralist thinking even as it unsettled its insights. …] = Conclusion

for CPA.

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Derrida has often spoken of the impact of psychoanalysis on his thought. I am us-

ing Lacan’s process of off-lifting, by which one leaves the interrogative order of meaning

in the wake of that which we feel compelled to interpret as a sign, and moves toward the

sonorous trace in the word, called “letter” by Lacan, toward a different order of uncon-

scious combinatorials of sound. Letters on the body are, for Lacan letters the way

Descartes assigned letters to the mathematical space he helped to create. Letters on the

body recreate the body imaginary. Literally a letter as determination and trace that stands

in, the so-called letter on the body is not so much of the order of meaning as it is move-

able associability, like Deleuze’s floating members on the white surface of indetermina-

tion. But these traces are not indifferent to each other. Thus, “tachet” becomes a “letter

on the body.” And Derrida’s reflections on blood, circumcision, daggers and lancets

move between the metonymic (blood as who, as whose? Blood as histories lost, as spots

when spots stand in for abjection) and the memorial. “Tachet,” that letter that no doubt

went forgotten, yet moved or thrust Derrida forward. Tachet, that letter that changed the

Lithographer’s shop into a site foreclosed and a specific difference. All this despite the

fact that in becoming conscious of a letter on the body, one represses or confers it, or

thrusts it elsewhere. At the end of “Monolingualism of the other,”18 Derrida asks, “a

Judeo-Franco-Maghrebin-Genealogy does not explain everything, far from it. But could I

explain anything without it, ever? No, nothing, nothing of what occupies me and keeps

me in motion….again a scene. I just made a scene” (MO, 133-134). Another other scene.

8. The Memory of Sensation ‘bis’

18 Jacques Derrida, Le monolinguisme de l’autre, ou, la prothèse de l’origine (Paris: Galilée, 1996). Hereafter abbreviated in the text as MO.

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A longer essay would have to show how the logic of traces arises from at least

four disparate sources: first, older themes from Jewish mysticism such as the letters that

come into existence and go out of them with new generations; second, the evolution of

phonetics and linguistics away from historicism toward a thinking of the effectivity of the

double articulation of difference, phonemic and morphemic; third, the development of vi-

talism through Nietzsche, and psychoanalytic logics of the symptom, the connection of

words to memory, as well as theories of energetics and neural inscription. That discussion

exceeds the scope of this paper. However, because I began with a discussion of the trace,

sensation, and memory—a theme that brings Levinas and Derrida together—I now return

to that theme.

If writing occurs in and as the effacement of the proper name, as Derrida wrote in

1968, the effacement of the proper name is neither an event nor an archaic transgression.

Effacement of the name is the inevitability of ‘iteration’, the iteration and configuration

of traces. If this seems to have little to do the memory of sensation, we should remember

that the ‘discovery’ of this iteration begins with the discovery of the body, and its intelli-

gence, in Leibniz, Schelling, and Nietzsche. The mature work of Nietzsche, dating from

1885 through 1888, appears to present different ‘projects’. However, the most intriguing

seems to me the development of a massively expanded semiotics of unconscious traces

and forces in bodies, natural life and the inorganic. Pierre Klossowski and Gilles Deleuze

discussed this extensively between 1962 and 1968.19 The Nietzschean deconstruction of

19 Deleuze in his 1962 Nietzsche et la philosophie. See, for the English, Nietzsche and Philosophy, Hugh Tomlinson, tr., (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1983). Later on in Difference and Repe-tition (first published in 1968). Klossowski published Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux: Essai, in 1968, dedi-cated to his friend Deleuze. See Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, Daniel W. Smith, tr., (Chicago, Ill: Uni-versity of Chicago Press, 1998), our pagination comes from the French second edition (Paris: Mercure de France, 1991).

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the “I” or ego unfolded in tandem with the perspectival exploration of the nervous sys-

tem, bodily but also social energies urging that it is because consciousness ‘takes charge’

of the body—interpreting those of its events to which it accedes, and positing itself as in-

dispensable to that body—because consciousness monopolizes production of meaning

about ‘its’ body, that the body as site of interacting inscriptions and intensities was over-

looked by most of Western philosophy. It was Nietzsche who thus proposed three level

semiotics of 1) traces and signs of unconscious acting forces; movements of mood and af-

fect that simply suggest deeper events to which we cannot accede completely through lin-

guistic-conceptual structures (cf. Nietzsche’s remark, “the lightning does not flash”); fi-

nally, those conscious traces from which meaning and intentionality arise. These levels

are not hierarchized by Nietzsche; one is not truer than another. But they dissolve the

subject as proper name, arguing that what takes itself as a name or an essence, is epiphe-

nomenal (CV, 83); Moreover, language, whose grammars and signs lead us to suppose

that life consists of substances like nouns and actions performed by those subjects, is but

an endpoint, a sort of abbreviation of multiform events, even physio-chemical move-

ments, which pass incompletely into the consciousness that interprets them. This is not

materialist reductionism; this dimension of Nietzsche’s perspectivism concerns what Der-

rida would call inscription. The shattering of a mono-logic of natural forces, modeled on

language, is the thinking of the erasure of the proper name, as much as it is the pluraliza -

tion of sensation, sensibility, and memory. It is here, I believe, that we find the most radi-

cal approach to semiotics and ‘structuralism’ before the age of Roman Jakobson and

Lévi-Strauss. It is also here that the surprising later work of Levinas on the other-in-the-

same, the trace, and on repetition finds an equally surprising precedent. If there was a

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thinking of traces rooted in the body that did not situate itself in ‘being’ understood as in-

tentionality or its conceptual conditions of possibility, that thinking can be found in the

later work of Nietzsche. Who, if not Levinas and Derrida, would have failed to hear a real

effort to think beyond being in the following words:

“All movement is to be conceived as gesture, a sort of language in which (im-

pulse) forces agree. In the inorganic world misunderstanding is absent, communication

seems perfect. In the organic world begins error…The contradiction is not between

‘false’ and ‘true’ but between ‘abbreviations of signs’ and the ‘signs’ themselves. What is

essential is this: the creation of forms, which represent numerous movements, the inven-

tion of signs for whose species of signs. All movements are signs of some internal event;

and each internal movement is expressed through similar modifications of forms.

Thought is not the internal event itself, it too is but a semiotics corresponding to the com-

pensation of power of the affects.” (Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, cited by Klos-

sowski, CV, p. 73).

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Trace Derrida Levinas