Tracing Life: "La Vie La Mort"

Vicki Kirby

CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 9, Number 1, Spring 2009,

pp. 107-126 (Article)

Published by Michigan State University Press

DOI: 10.1353/ncr.0.0059

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 Tracing Life
La Vie La Mort

Vicki Kirby
The University of New South Wales, Sydney

The sign and divinity have the same place and time of birth.
The age of the sign is essentially theological.
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology

. . . if deconstruction were reduced to one single thesis, it

would pose divisibility: diffrance as divisibility.
Martin Hgglund, Radical Atheism

So farewell, elements of reality!

David Mermin, Entanglement

With the passing of Jacques Derrida it is inevitable that the legacy

of deconstruction undergo critical reassessment. There is a sense that with
the completion of Derridas oeuvre and the sure knowledge that the last word

CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 9, No. 1, 2009, pp. 107126, issn 1532-687x.
Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.

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108 Tr a c i n g L i f e

has been written, we can begin the forensic analysis of this body of evidence
to reveal its binding intention. However, as a methodology, deconstruction
eschews the sort of linear genealogy where an eponymous authority can ad-
judicate the truth and value of this inheritance. Put simply, deconstruction
complicates the logic wherein identities are posited as finite, locatable, as
simply present or nota logic that discovers difference in between existents,
as if origins can be separated from ends, causes from effects, or authors from
readers. Although common sense tells us what comes first in the unfolding of
times arrow, deconstruction fractures the classical coordinates of temporal
and spatial order in ways that resonate with puzzles in theoretical physics.
A comparison between deconstruction and physics may seem contrived
because it is rarely made. Other than Arkady Plotnitskys Complementarity:
Anti-Epistemology after Bohr and Derrida (1994), the connection, if there
is one, goes largely unremarked.1 For this reason, I want to mention some
of these provocations, as they will inform the broader implications of my
overall argument.
In physics, the phenomenon of superposition is a principle of decoher-
ence, inasmuch as one particle can be in different states at the same time.
We see the question of identity posed again, yet differently, in the principle of
nonlocality, which concedes that one photon, split into two, remains coher-
ent across space: interference with any half of the split photon is immediately
registered in the behavior of the other, despite the enormous distance that
may separate them. In the famous two-slit experiment that tests the wave/
particle duality of light, we have an added mystery that sees the intention of
the experimenter (to test for wave or particle) dutifully enacted in the behav-
ior under investigation. It is as if both subject and object are inseparable in
this experiment, as if their respective identities are profoundly entangled and
compromised. The assault on the way we perceive and conceive both iden-
tity and space/time is furthered by John Wheelers delayed-choice thought
experiment. Wheeler, a prominent physicist at the time, wondered if it was
possible to disentangle subject from object by delaying the experimenters
choice until after the photon had passed through the slit. In other words,
he wanted to know if the photon would simply be itself, as either wave or
particle, if the experimenters observation occurred retrospectively, or after
 Vicki Kirby 109

the behavior had occurred. Wheelers awareness that classical notions of

both identity and space/time were very much awry in this musing is reflected
in his comment, we decide, after the photon has passed through the screen,
whether it shall have passed through the screen (1980, 354).
Those of us practiced in the counterintuitive complexities of deconstruc-
tion are surely used to the awkward twists of expression required to complicate
the conventions of logic and everyday assumptions about the self-presence of
identity. In this regard, the confusing knot of temporality and spatiality repre-
sented above is not entirely unknown. Consider, for example, Derridas analy-
sis of Nachtrglichkeit in the analogy Freud makes between the operations of
memory and the childs toythe mystic writing padwhere the past has yet
to arrive.2 Or the temporality of an always already not yet that informs many
of Derridas meditations. Conventionally, such considerations are confined to
philosophical and literary concerns. Even when the suggestion that the scene
of writing includes neurological processes, as it does in the discussion of
memory, biology is routinely overlooked, as if the identity of biology is some-
how outside this text.3 We know that the symptoms of hysteria are obedient
to this sense of a future perfect, and that the registration of its timings will
manifest on the level of biology in such forms as tics, paralyses, blindness, and
skin disorders. Elizabeth Wilson has written at length on this subject, ask-
ing why post-structural interrogations of hysteria rarely ask how biology can
corporealize cultural signs and the temporal condensations of deferred action
(1999).4 Keeping Wilsons question at the forefront, a question that ponders
the relationship between Nature and Culture (matter and interpretation) and
more profoundly, questions whether there are, in fact, two different systems of
operation, we can return to John Wheeler. Since Wheelers conjecture in 1978,
technological progress in the sciences has enabled his thought experiment to
be conducted: the results have been confirmed by two different teams at the
University of Maryland and the University of Munich (Nadeau & Kafatos 2001,
50). The implications are remarkable and yet uncannily familiar to many of us
who work in critical theory:

These results indicate that the wave-like or particle-like status of a photon

at one point in time can be changed later in time by choosing to measure or
110 Tr a c i n g L i f e

observe one of these aspects in spite of the fact that the photon is traveling
at light speed.
The results of these and other experiments not only show that the ob-
server and the observed system cannot be separate and distinct in space.
They also reveal that this distinction does not exist in time. It is as if we
caused something to happen after it has already occurred . . . the past is
inexorably mixed with the present and even the phenomenon of time is tied
to specific experimental choices. (Nadeau & Kafatos 2001, 50)

I can anticipate that my imagined reader may be wondering about the in-
clusion of such esoteric material from the sciences in a discussion about
deconstruction, given that few of us in the humanities can comfortably
engage its intricacies. After all, we are discipline bound, our knowledge base
is circumscribed, and our objects of interest entirely different. And yet it is
deconstruction that encourages us to interrogate the very notion of circum-
scription, difference, the limit or line that secures the identity of one thing
from another. What happens if the dividing line can only exist in the breach;
if difference itself is fractured and dispersed? What then?
As this is a brief meditation about very big things, let me try to summa-
rize my reasons for alluding to the quantum problematic here. I am not at all
persuaded that endeavors in the sciences are alien and separate from those
in the humanities, and I suspect that the most astonishing and seemingly
abstract debates in deconstruction resonate with material implications in
physics as well as biology. What is so provocative in this possibility is that
interpretation, language, and representation are not immaterial.
But again, I can imagine my reader rushing ahead of me. Yes, we already
know thisafter all, there is an industry of work on embodiment that makes
this very point. Judith Butlers work, especially Bodies that Matter (1993), is
exemplary in its insistence that representation is materializing. And yet here
I arrive at the crux of my dilemma and it is this: if we regard language, rep-
resentation, and interpretation as cultural constructs and capacities, texts
whose play of self-reference we cannot escape by dint of the human condition,
then we ignore the curious challenge to this belief coming from quantum
mechanics. More importantly still, we refuse the provocations that arise in
 Vicki Kirby 111

our own disciplines when we assume that the entanglement of Nature with/
in Culture is inevitably and necessarily imagined. A telling example of this
problem is evident in an interview I conducted with Judith Butler, where I
posed the following question. Although its subject matter concerns biology
and not the broader purchase of physics, its relevance is clear:

Kirby: There is a serious suggestion that life itself is creative encryption.

Does your understanding of language and discourse extend to the workings
of biological codes and their apparent intelligence? (Breen et al. 2001, 13)

On this last point I was thinking of the code-cracking and encryption capaci-
ties of bacteria as they decipher the chemistry of antibiotic data and reinvent
themselves accordingly. Arent these language skills? Isnt this technology
of bacterial inquiry and transformation a sort of epistemological ontologiz-
ing? Butlers response is a form of admonition, a reminder that language is
circumscribed, that its author and reader is a knowing human subject, and
that the human endeavor to capture a world out there through cultural
signs will always be a failed project. To this end, she warns:

Butler: There are models according to which we might try to understand biol-
ogy, and models by which we might try to understand how genes function.
And in some cases the models are taken to be inherent to the phenomena
that is being explained. . . . I worry that a notion like biological code, on the
face of it, runs the risk of that sort of conflation. I am sure that encryption can
be used as a metaphor or model by which to understand biological processes,
especially cell reproduction, but do we then make the move to render what is
useful as an explanatory model into the ontology of biology itself? This worries
me, especially when it is mechanistic models which lay discursive claims
on biological life. What of life exceeds the model? When does the discourse
claim to become the very life it purports to explain? I am not sure it is pos-
sible to say life itself is creative encryption unless we make the mistake of
thinking that the model is the ontology of life. Indeed, we might need to think
first about the relation of any definition of life to life itself, and whether it
must, by virtue of its very task, fail. (Breen et al. 2001, 13, emphasis added)
112 Tr a c i n g L i f e

Butler is understandably vigilant about the seductive slide that conflates

representations, models, and signs that substitute for material objects, with
the objects themselves. In other words, although it is inevitable that we will
misrecognize one in the otherthe blinding pomposity of our anthropo-
centrismButler cautions against committing to the error. When dealing
with scientific objects the transparent self-evidence of reality is even more
persuasive, but even here we are encouraged to remember that these objects
are actually literarytextual, or encoded forms of languageand to this
extent, if they can only emerge through cultural manufacture, then their
reality and truth is attenuated, illusional.5 This commitment to an absolute
break between Nature and Culture, albeit Nature under erasure, fuels the
continuing impasse of the two culture problem.6 From the humanities side
we can happily report that models/representations have no real connec-
tion with what they purport to model. And given this pronouncement, the
recognized predictive capacity of medical and forensic data modeling, the
how of their remarkable diagnostic purchase, is a question we can simply
put aside.
Against this view, let us at least consider the sorts of puzzles that arise
from the quantum problematic regarding representation. Huw Price, in
Times Arrow, notes that for Niels Bohr, what we find in reality is in part
a product of the fact that we have looked (1996, 230). According to Bohr,
granting that observation is constitutive of reality does not imply that the
result is somehow wrong or illusional, or that a more substantive, physi-
cal reality is veiled behind our (erroneous) interpretations of it.7 (And in-
cidentally, Maurice Merleau-Pontys extraordinary reconceptualization of
perspectivilism and Vision as the self-encounter of the flesh of the world is
surely compatible with this.) As the observer and the observed are cut from
the same cloth (a common fabric-ation, a textuality?), the observation or
who/what does the looking, emerges through and as intra-activity.8 Not
unrelated, Nadeau and Kafatos in The Non-Local Universe explain that prob-
ability in the nineteenth century was assumed to be a representation of
physical reality that failed to capture its stasis, its essence. As probability, or
frequency, is the representational stuff of quantum mechanics, more recent
engagements with such modeling have earned a very different appreciation.
 Vicki Kirby 113

It is no longer possible to assume that the statistical averages are merely

higher level approximations for a more exact description (2001, 56).

Genesis as Writing

Can the previous set of provocations and juxtapositions help us in our re-
assessment of the deconstructive legacy? What difference does it make to
entertain the suggestion that the textuality from which we cannot escape is
the language of life, the worlds rewriting (of) itself, a language where human
literacy and numeracy are just particular expressions of its complex gen-
eralization?
To answer this, I want to return to one of the most important threads
in deconstructive criticism, the legacy of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de
Saussure and his struggle to define language. In the canonical text, Course in
General Linguistics (1974), which has operated as a foundational inspiration
for scholarly inquiry across the humanities and social sciences, Saussure
isolates the unit of analysis, the sign, segregates it into its component parts,
and unpacks a structural frame of relational expression and functional op-
eration whose relevance entirely exceeds the discipline of linguistics. Within
this enlarged system, or general semiology as he called it, we are introduced
to the paradox of reference that continues to sustain contemporary inter-
est: the self-evidence of Nature, whereby a word seems to operate as a mere
nametag for a particular part of reality, gives way to webs of association and
substitution whose entangled mediations derive from human intercourse
in its broadest sense. In other words, Saussure argues that the world that
humans perceive isnt so much a directly available reality, an unmediated
truth that is recorded by our senses, as it is a product of the communica-
tive and organizational invention of human socialitynamely, the cultural
manufacture of meaning-making processes.
The above description can certainly be attributed to Saussure, at least to
the Saussure whose ventriloquised authorship of the Course by its editors,
Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, we have come to accept. It would be fair
to say that the privileging of cultural constructionist arguments for reasons
that draw on the Saussurean legacy in various capacities is now routine in
114 Tr a c i n g L i f e

academic teaching and writing. Noticeable in the taking up of Saussures in-

sights however, is an inattention to the conundrum that both animates and
threatens their received wisdom. It is Saussure, for example, who confounds
his careful delineation of linguistic entities when he confuses the signifier
with the signified, the signified with the sign, and the sign with an extra-
linguistic reality to which his own theory denies access.9
By explaining the signs arbitrary attachment to a substantive referent,
Saussure reinforces the logic of nomenclature and inadvertently recommits
to the positivist authority of comparative and historical linguistics that he
hoped to overturn. In other words, he discovers meaning in the insistent
and enduring reality of the world, a reality that is unchanged by the pro-
cess of re-presenting it in signs. Consequently, the radical notion that the
whole linguistic (or semiological) system is the in-formative motor of valeur
(signification is a poor, if necessary translation of this words implications
here) is replaced by a timeless and universal referent. What is also lost is a
battery of attendant puzzles about how we can meaningfully individuate
anything if the manifestation of a referent is actually an internal artifact of
the system, as Saussure also insisted. We can only assume that Saussure was
aware of the contradictions that thwarted his desire for clarity because he
notes the torture he felt in trying to represent his thoughts and make an
effective intervention into the canon of his discipline:

. . . the more simple and obvious a theory may be, the more difficult it is to
express it simply, because I state as a fact that there is not one single term in
this particular science [linguistics] that has ever been based on a simple idea,
and that this being so, one is tempted five or six times between the beginning
and end of a sentence to rewrite. (Saussure in Starobinski 1979, 3)

What we need to consider is whether the infectious slide that corrupts Sau-
ssures entitiesa sort of hyperpresence in which all analytically different
terms merge and condense into each other while comprehensively expanding
their implications at the same timeis an error we might hope to correct.
Can the differences between terms be clearly outlined or delimited? Can sub-
stance, presumed to be fixed and entirely external to the plasticity of form,
 Vicki Kirby 115

be identified in this oppositional discrimination? Or if not, might we at least

entertain the suggestion that Saussures confusion indicates something more
complex about the self-evident nature of an individual entity, whether the
unit under consideration is a sign, an individual subject or event, a concept,
a biological organism, or even the proper identity of the enlarged system
within whose structured play of differentiation all individuations appear?
By incorporating questions about biological identity in a discussion that
muses about the analytical units of language and their genesis, we are re-
minded of Jacques Derridas early acknowledgement of the historical milieu
that excited his enterprise. What motivated him to evoke the nonconcept
writing in the general sense? We might recall structuralisms aspiration to a
scientific status that would exceed, or certainly complicate, philosophical and
ideological concerns. As Christopher Johnson notes, structuralism promised
not only a methodological efficacy in the study of man comparable to that of
the exact sciences (1993, 2), but more importantly, it linked the sciences with
the humanities by confounding the defining difference between their respec-
tive objects. At the end of the nineteenth century, we see a significant para-
digm shift in the way the object of investigation is perceived. Culminating in
the confluence of cybernetics and molecular biology during and after World
War II, this shift is also registered in the dissemination of post-structural
arguments in the human sciences. Johnson cites Michel Serress summation
of what makes this contemporary moment so extraordinary:

The sciences of today are formalistic, analytical, grammatical, semiological,

each of them based on an alphabet of elements. . . . Their affinities are so
apparent that we are once again beginning to dream of the possibility of a
mathesis universalis. . . . What biochemistry has discovered is not the mysteri-
ous noumenon, but quite simply a universal science of the character. Like the
other sciences, it points towards a general philosophy of marked elements.
(Serres in Johnson 1993, 3, emphasis in original)

Johnsons gloss on the shock wave that was to redefine disciplinary for-
mations is that life could not be reduced to a static, irreducible essence if its
iterations involved decipherment: in sum, the logic of life is scriptural (1993,
116 Tr a c i n g L i f e

3). The statement draws energy from Franois Jacobs The Logic of Life (1993).
Winner of the Nobel Prize for his work on RNA information transfer, Jacob
wrote at length about the way memory and design in the study of heredity
could be compared with the structure of natural languages. It is the detail of
Jacobs discussion, elaborated in the books introduction, The Programme,
that exercises Derridas close attention in a series of seminars entitled, La
Vie La Mort (1975). Derridas analytical engagement with the encodations of
biological life may appear surprising, if not misguided, to many readers who
understand deconstruction as a rather esoteric branch of philosophy and
literary criticism; it is perhaps in keeping with this reading that the seminars
have never been translated, and there is almost no mention of them anywhere
in commentaries that engage the range and relevance of his work. Johnson
is an exception. He reminds us that Derridas project emerged from a wider
disciplinary context, a pro-gramme of interdisciplinary involvements that
tracked the question of life as the ontogeny of information. Derrida therefore
locates his own conception of writing in a context more general than that of
philosophy proper (Johnson 1993, 45). Johnson notes that Derridas use of
the term criture to capture this generality is as much a symptom as it is a
cause (4), and he goes on to say, it is not the initiative or inspiration of one
individual thinker (Derrida), but the effect of a more general transformation
of the modern episteme (45). Derrida himself acknowledges as much in his
introduction to Of Grammatology:

For some time now, as a matter of fact, here and there, by a gesture and for
motives that are profoundly necessary . . . one says language for action,
movement, thought, reflection, consciousness, unconsciousness, experi-
ence, affectivity, etc. Now we tend to say writing for all that and more. . . .
[T]he contemporary biologist speaks of writing and pro-gram in relation to
the most elementary processes of information within the living cell. And
finally, whether it has essential limits or not, the entire field covered by the
cybernetic program will be the field of writing. (1984, 9)

Importantly, in La Vie La Mort, Derrida addresses this question of

the bio-gram more closely, asking what Franois Jacob and Georges
 Vicki Kirby 117

Canguilhem10 actually mean by this semiotic or rather by this graphic

of life, of this non-phonetic writing that they call without writing (1975,
Seminar 1, 22). He refers again to the above passage from Of Grammatol-
ogy, and it becomes clear that his purpose is twofold. First, he wants to
acknowledge the evidence of a generality of language that encompasses the
cerebral-institutional, to cite Jacob, or what Derrida will gloss as psychic,
social, cultural, institutional, politico-economic etc. (1975, Seminar 1, 19),
as well as the genetic. Elaborating this sense of conjunction however, Der-
rida will insist that Jacobs representation of the difference that separates
these systems is misguided because what Jacob reserves for the genetic
program is also apparent in the cerebral-institutional. And here we ar-
rive at the nub of Derridas intervention. We can read Derridas impatience
with Jacob as a bid to remind the geneticist that he is really a philosopher
of sorts, caught in the metaphysical commitments of cultural representa-
tions. In other words, the presumptive explanations of the behavior and
literacy of genes is an inevitable reflection of the language Jacob must use
to represent them: the tool constitutes and contaminates the object. But
Derrida is not confirming the notion of language/model that we saw earlier
in Judith Butlers conflation of textual enclosure with human language/
interpretation. There is something reminiscent of Bohrs provocation here,
something that inflects epistemological concerns with ontological dimen-
sion. Derridas argument cannot be reduced to an epistemological correc-
tive, as he is at pains to fracture any sense that language/thought is local
and properly human.10
Derridas second point is to remind us of what he said in Of Grammatol-
ogy: the biologist speaks today of writing and of pro-gram with respect to
the most elementary information processes in the living cell. However and
importantly, he goes on to emphasize that these comments were not made

. . . in order to reinvest into the notion or the word program all of the concep-
tual machine that is the logos and its semantic, but rather in order to attempt
to show that the call to a non-phonetic writing in genetics should implicate
and provoke a whole deconstruction of the logocentric machine rather than
to provoke a return to Aristotle. (1975, Seminar 1, 22, emphasis in original)
118 Tr a c i n g L i f e

We need to take stock at this juncture and reassess what it might mean to
evoke a starting point for deconstruction where the system textuality, writ-
ing, or language in the general sense already includes the heterogeneity,
the differentiality of biological algorithms, cybernetic communication, the
discriminating grammars of molecular and atomic parsing, and the puzzles
of quantum space/time configurations. What could exceed the systems com-
prehension (of itself) if, as Derrida insists, there is no outside (of) text?
Derridas non-concept diffrance suggests that the border or skin that
binds any entity to itself, separating inside from outside, is actually porous
and compromised. Yet this break in the integrity and coherence of identity
is not confined to an external border, as if the autonomy of an entity holds,
more or less, while nevertheless and always at risk from something alien. Dif-
france cannot be equated with something foreign and other that surrounds
an entity: it is not so much a context, a foundation, an external something,
for its operation is inherent to, and constitutive of, the relentless process
of identity formation. Similarly, and perhaps surprisingly, even Saussures
notion of difference, when considered in terms of the whole of the Course,
cannot be equated with division (conjunction), pure and simple. Saussures
separable entitieswhether signs, parts of signs, or even the proper object
of linguisticsare intra-active entities because they do not preexist the
system of differentiation from which they are generated. Recall that in
Saussures struggle to understand the elusive nature of linguistic entities he
deployed the notion of consubstantiality. If each unit is an articulation of
the systems infinite ability to refer to itself differently, then the system is not
an aggregation of existents.
I want to argue that if diffrance is a general animation, an epigenesis
of infinite mutation that arises from within the scene of writing, indeed, if
it is the scene of writing, then we might risk the suggestion that diffrance
is Life itself.11 Derrida animates the subject Life with critical capacity, not-
ing how life divides itself originarily (urteilen) in order to produce itself and
reproduce itself (1975, 3). This suggestion complicates the accepted division
between the letter of life, its genetic and reproductive programs, and the life
of the letter in literature and representation, because reproduction/re-pre-
sentation is discrimination/judgment. If the constant of life is reproducibility
 Vicki Kirby 119

as biologists insist, then from a deconstructive point of view, even literature

in the conventional sense is alive to such iterative processes.
If we consider the question of individuation in this way, as an expres-
sion of Lifes enduring reproduction of itself, then within this scene whose
identity is somehow unified and plural at the same time, it may seem that
Death has been entirely overcome. After all, Life enduresreinventing and
differentiating itself through infinite transubstantiation. Within this system,
where the finite integrity of an individual existent (of whatever sort) seems
impossible, how should we conceive the absolute limit, the endmortality
and finality, a last word, a final judgment? Indeed, is there one? It now
appears that this question, which ponders the transcendence of Death, the
capacity for transubstantiation, final judgment, and the process whereby the
word is somehow made flesh is irreducibly theological.
It is at this point that Martin Hgglunds recent contribution, Radical
Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, proves helpful. I will not pretend to do
justice to the books impressive scholarship here, as Hgglunds close engage-
ment with some of Derridas most difficult arguments deserves a similarly
intimate and passionate attention. And anyway, my own interest in the lit-
eracy of atomic and biological life, that is, in asking why a general textuality
has been so narrowly aligned with humanistic preconceptions, is a radical
departure from the stated focus of Hgglunds intervention. As he notes:

I am not concerned with the relation between how Derrida uses the term
autoimmunity and how it is employed in biological science. Autoimmunity
is for me the name of a deconstructive logic that should be measured against
the standard of philosophical logic. (2008, 9)12

This need to enframe an arguments operative leverage is entirely under-

standable; after all, I have just done this in my own acknowledgement
that the detail and complexity of Hgglunds position exceeds my capac-
ity to engage it here. Yet in another sense, and one that is not necessarily
displaced by Hgglunds caveat regarding disciplinary confinement, we can
open the question of the bio-gram from inside philosophy. If there can be no
simple division into Nature versus Culture in Derridas meditation on Life, no
120 Tr a c i n g L i f e

Cartesian separation of what is mindful from what is mindless (intended ver-

sus automatic writing), then Hgglunds thesis is an expression of a genetic-
institutional-cerebral play of differentiation or judgment: his argument is the
measure of the bio-grams capacity to articulate (read/rewrite) philosophical
logic. As this way of thinking seems again to refuse any appeal to an absolute
and final limit, a clear divisionDeath, in the little time remaining I will
gesture toward what it might mean to suggest that Life is diffrance, and that
diffrance is divisibility.
When we think of division, we think of something that precedes its
separation from itself. In conventional terms, we might think of a life lived,
and then the cut of death that in the end divides that life . . . from life. If
divisibility is originary, however, then we do not begin with the integrity of
an entity that is then divided from itself. Strangely, Death would be internal
to the very possibility of an entitys being itself, not simply at its birth, but
throughout its ongoing re-production/othering of itself. If we begin with an
algorithm of pluripotentiality in which the emergence of every individua-
tion is an articulation of the whole system (general writing), then the system
remains in constant touch with itself because it is divided from itself, because
it is pure divisibility, pure contamination. What is at stake in this apparent
knot of contradictions is an attempt to reconceive identity through a logic
that prescribes that what is must be identical to itselfthat its originary
form must be an indivisible unity (Hgglund 2008, 52, emphasis in original).
Hgglund captures the enormity of the problem when he adds:

To question the logic of identity is to encounter the most difficult problems

and to risk sounding nonsensical. Nevertheless, it is precisely these problems
and this risk we must face, since Derridas deconstruction aims at nothing
less than a revision of the logic of identity. . . . What is needed is thus an
argument addressing why the self-identity of presence is impossible and why
writing in Derridas sense is originary, as well as an elaboration of how this
arche-writing should be understood. (52)

I appreciate the need to return to these fundamental concerns, often

overlooked or too simply answered, and share Hgglunds desire to
 Vicki Kirby 121

emphasize and revivify their importance. How to do it, however, is a real

dilemma because even in critical theory these questions are often regarded
as old-fashioned and tiresome, and yes, even nonsensical. In the spirit of
maintaining their relevance and the difficulty that accompanies them, I
want to register certain tensions in our respective positions in the hope that
this will further debate. First, while I remain critical of the self-presence of
humanism (the integrity and autonomy of self ), I am not persuaded by
conventional deconstructive readings that reject the notion out of hand.
My preference is to claim presence, individuation, the singular and unique,
but in a way that strives to reconfigure the what and how of that indi-
vidual identity formation. On the level of biology, for example, the genesis
of an organism is an internal splitting (and splitting of the splitting) that
nevertheless presents a specific signature. The paradox is that it can remain
at one with itself through differentiation. If we read presence in terms of
absence, or life in terms of death, then we do not begin with divisibility but
with oppositional difference, and inevitably life will possess an integrity
whose finitude is marked by the fall into death. However, if originary vio-
lence is breaching, dehiscence, and not (simply and only) an assault from
the outside, then death cannot be equated with forfeit, loss, or the lack of
self-possession. Derridas life/death isnt an amalgam, or conjunction, but
perhaps more interestingly, it might be read as the torsional differential
that is becoming. What is life from one perspective is death from another, a
superposition of states that does not divide into the either/or of mortality/
immortality.
Another way to think the question of presence is to return to the mystic
writing pad. What is so provocative about the timing of this memory device
is that the disjuncture involved in lifting the outer membranes is not the
interval that separates what was from what will be. It is the differential that
is presence, a differential of interval-ing that allows presence to be (itself).
Hgglund argues that the trace can be obliterated, or erased entirely (2008,
18). However, the impressionable surface of the mystic writing pad speaks to/
through the outer leaves in such a way that the trace endures and morphs
at the same time. My own position is that the temporality of presence is a
fullness of sorts that involves the scene of writing and the plenitude of its
122 Tr a c i n g L i f e

intra-active timings. This scene renders homogeneity, or sameness, impos-

sible, and yet it doesnt prevent the figuring forth of an individual.
But what of God in this scene of writing that is pure contamination?
Hgglund reminds us that Derrida describes God as death, and he interprets
this to be a radically atheist claim (2008, 8) because it foregrounds mor-
tality. However, Derridas life-death need not be interpreted as the coming/
timing of an inevitable finitude. Elaborating the notion of auto-immunity,
Hgglund notes that for Derrida

every religion holds out such a horizon of redemption, of the restoration of

the unscathed, of indemnification. The common denominator for religions
is thus that they promote absolute immunity as the supremely desirable. (8,
emphasis in original)

Both Derrida and Hgglund show convincingly that autoimmunity will un-
dermine both the existence of and the desire for purity: we are always open
to dis-ease and anticipate its coming. But does this argument necessarily
herald the end of God, or could it provoke a radical reconfiguration of what is
implied by such a nonconcept? If the scene of writing is pure contamination,
if the plenitude of differentiation is utter contagion, then this generalized
infection can just as readily be considered an absolute immunity: What do
the terms mean in the end, or is it the beginning? Survival is ongoing? Im-
mortal? This last suggestion will not preserve God beyond the commonplace
corruption or morphogenesis of being, and to this extent, what is implied
by mortality is at the center of the very possibility of being anything. Just as
deconstruction is not destruction and never annihilation pure and simple,
need we rush to judgment to erase the existence of God when it is existence
itself, the existence of anythinga sign, an atom, a subjectthat is the most
remarkable and challenging of questions?

^
 Vicki Kirby 123

notes
1. Christopher Norris (1997) and Andr Brink (1985) also explore the connection between
deconstruction and quantum mechanics.
2. For Freud, this device clearly illustrated that recollection rewrites significance, such
that the presence and lived meaningfulness of perception remains open, or somehow
deferred. However, it can also be read as a provocative challenge to our conventional
understanding of time as an ordered narrative that flows from past to present to future.
In other words, we need not equate deferral with absence, as if presence is never quite
here and now, if the here and now is always/already an implicate order of timing/
writing that is full (of itself). See Freud (1961) and Derrida (1985).
3. I note with interest Catherine Malabous recent discussion of the inadequacy of the
Derridean grapheme to more recent discoveries in neurology and other information
sciences (2007). Although I dont agree that the grapheme was ever an entity whose
comparative rigidity and historical locality now require a revamp to plastology, I ap-
plaud the direction of these considerations as they acknowledge that the grammato-
logical textile must accommodate such implications. For a fascinating and accessible
discussion of neurological plasticity that undermines the sovereign subject altogether
and is quite compatible with deconstructive considerations, see Doidge (2007).
4. For a sustained argument about the need for cultural constructionism to acknowledge
the plasticity and complexity of biology rather than reject it as pre-scriptive, see Wilson
(1998) and (2008).
5. This question and answer and its contextualization originally appeared in Kirby
(2008).
6. C. P. Snows The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959) was an early ac-
knowledgement of the growing intellectual opacity between the sciences and the
humanities. More recently, the phrase the two cultures tends to evoke the impasse
between constructionist arguments that underline the cultural value, subjectivity, and
circumscription of knowledge, and scientific research that presumes objectivity and
referential proof.
7. A clear explication of the ontological dimension of Bohrs insights is provided in Barad
(2007, 12528).
8. Karen Barad, who writes on both physics and cultural criticism, provides a fascinating
account of why these endeavors and their objects are not mutually exclusive. A term she
uses to evoke what I would call the intricate involvement of diffrance is intra-activity.
It is not a relationship that occurs in-between entities, because it is an enactment,
not something that someone or something has. It cannot be designated as an attribute of
subjects or objects (as they do not preexist as such) (2007, 178, emphasis in original).
9. Here we see an example of Saussures reliance on an extra-linguistic referent whose ex-
istence, according to mile Benveniste, could only appear under the impassive regard
of Sirius (1971, 44):
124 Tr a c i n g L i f e

The idea of sister is not linked by any inner relationship to the succession of sounds
s--r which serves as its signifier in French; that it could be represented equally by
just any other sequence is proved by differences among languages and by the very
existence of different languages: the signifier ox has as its signifier b--f on one side
of the border and o-k-s (Ochs) on the other. (Saussure 1974, 68)

10. Derridas interest in Georges Canguilhem mainly concerns La Comaissance de la Vie

(1952) and Etudes dhistoires et de philosophie des sciences (1968).
11. As this is a relatively brief article, I refer the reader to Derridas dilation on evolution
as writing in his response to Jean Hippolyte in the Discussion following Structure,
Sign, and Play in the Discourses of the Human Sciences (1970). Here, Derrida refuses
the suggestion that, if evolution is a form of writing, then humankind arrives as an
aberration in these scribblings, an aberration because the complexity of intention and
calculation belong to the writing of humanity alone and could not precede this arrival.
Derrida again expresses irritation with the way Nature is divided from Culture and
the human fetishized as a unique case in his discussion of Jacobs two types of program,
the genetic (rigid) and the cerebral-institutional ( flexible). Derrida comments:

To say it with a slightly algebraic anticipation, I would be in favor of a delimitation

that effected a blowing up of limits and oppositions ( for example the two types of
programs where one recognizes on one side pure genetics, and on the other the grand
emergence of the cerebral, of upright posture . . . ), blowing up, therefore, this op-
position not in order to make way for homogeneity, but for a heterogeneity or for a
differentiality; for, as I suggested at the start, the functioning of the opposition always
has the effect of erasing the differentiality. (1975, Seminar 1, 17)

12. Martin Hgglund notes that Derrida remarks, life is diffrance (2008, 211).
13. Although I certainly accept Hgglunds reasoning, I cant resist noting that the subject
of auto-immunity in biological discourse and empirical research is perfect grist for the
deconstructive mill. Louis Pasteurs notion of a coherent self that is attacked from the
outside, a model that is today still in vogue, simply will not accommodate the incon-
sistencies of the data. A subject whose identity is constant only in its ability to embody
its changing context has much more purchase, as we see in the study of allergy. See
Jamieson (2008).

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