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Tracing Life: "La Vie La Mort" - Vicki Kirby
Tracing Life: "La Vie La Mort" - Vicki Kirby
Vicki Kirby
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
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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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
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:
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
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
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. . . 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
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,
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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)
. . . 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)
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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
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
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):
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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)
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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Vicki Kirby 125
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