Logics of Generalization: Derrida,Grammatology and Transdisciplinarity

Philosophy, Disciplinarity and the General

From the perspective of a deconstruction of presence, as Samuel Weber notes, all disciplinary ‘demarcation’ is ‘ambivalent’ since it ‘simultaneously entail[s] exclusions and incorporations, which render the system constitutively dependent on factors it cannot integrate or comprehend’. There is an irreducible reference to, and hence contamination by, any discipline’s ‘exterior’ necessary to establishing that very difference constitutive of its identity as a ‘self-contained body of investigative procedures and of knowledge’ (Weber, 1987: 145, 19, 147). Yet if this contamination is indeed generalized, in practice it does not unsettle all disciplines equally or in quite the same way. For philosophy cannot in this regard be considered as simply one discipline among others. The resultant complexity may thus be situated, up to a point, within the far broader problematic of the disciplinary autonomy of philosophy itself since the early 19th century – one in which it finds itself increasingly put ‘on a stage that it does not govern’ (Derrida, 1981 [1972b]: 50), and in which it is thereby opened up to other discourses as a condition of its ongoing (im)possibility.

The consequences of such loss of sovereignty remain a persistent concern across almost all of Derrida’s writings – hence, for example, the opening of ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, with its assertion that ‘the only questions today capable of founding the community of those who are still called philosophers’ would be those concerning ‘problems put to philosophy as problems philosophy cannot resolve’ (Derrida, 1981 [1972b]: 79). It is, however, probably most explicitly taken up in a ‘sheaf’ of texts written in the latter half of the 1970s and the 1980s, and collected together under the title The Right to Philosophy, where it is framed in terms of what is described as ‘a paradoxically indissociable couple: the hegemony/death of philosophy’ – a modern doubling irreducibly linked to ‘the relation between philosophy and [other] fields of knowledge as this relation has been established in the model of the university institution’ (Derrida, 2004 [1990]: 197, 212). Most important is what must thus appear, according to Derrida, as an irreducibly paradoxical conception of the ‘space’ occupied by philosophical disciplinarity itself. In The Conflict of the Faculties (1798), Kant attempts to relegitimate philosophy’s claim to stand theoretically over the other disciplines, despite its historical loss of territory to them, by virtue of its claim to ‘a freedom of judgement’ over questions of truth as opposed to a concern for ‘utility’. Yet Kant’s assertion that such ‘freedom’ just is the ‘unconditioned condition’ of university autonomy also means that this ‘unconditioned condition is nothing other than philosophy’. As a result, Kant’s attempt to ‘mark off the juridical borders’ immanent to the university can only result in an internally-divided conception of philosophy as that which, simultaneously, occupies the institutional space of one specific department, faculty or discipline, while also constituting the very essence or absolutely general ‘theoretical concept’ of the university space as a whole (Derrida, 2004 [1990]: 105–6). Historically, it is the paradoxical nature of this ‘topological perspective’ – at once transcendental and regional – that identifies an emergent problem which will only intensify once what Kant identifies as the two departments of philosophy – the historical sciences (including the ‘empirical knowledge contained in the natural sciences’) and ‘pure rational knowledge’ (including mathematics) – come themselves to separate off over the course of the 19th century. In particular, it raises a number of questions about the role played by philosophy in its guise as a kind of super-discipline of ‘generalized translation’, as Derrida puts it, with regard to those ‘differences’ constitutive of the general field of disciplinarity itself.

In part, then, a question of ‘absolute’ generality appears as ‘internal’ to the post-Kantian development of modern philosophy tout court – one thinks, particularly, of the Husserlian distinction between formal ontology (transcendentally applicable to the ‘object in general’) and the various regional or ‘material’ disciplines, as well as, more complexly, the Heideggerian re-opening of ‘the question of being in general, beyond all regional ontologies and all metaphysics’: a question that ‘broaches philosophy … and lets itself be taken over by philosophy’ (Derrida, 1976 [1967a]: 20–1). But it is also directly connected, in a rather different way, to the broader intellectual context from which Derrida’s own early writings emerged, and, in particular, to the ‘deconstructive’ implications of structuralism (as well as psychoanalysis) in the 1960s, in so far as these constituted themselves precisely as ‘non-philosophical’ forms of intellectual work that could no longer be viewed as ‘simple regional science[s]’, but instead claimed their own ‘generality’ and ‘a controlling meaning with regard to all local science’ (Derrida, 1976 [1967a]: 88). Hence, even if ‘modern linguistics remains completely enclosed within a classical conceptuality’, Of Grammatology notes, it can ‘no longer … be circumscribed as ontic science and regional ontology’ with respect to any strictly philosophical transcendentality or formal-general ontology (Derrida, 1976 [1967a]: 21).

Some of the difficulties attendant upon this are broached in a 1989 interview with Michael Sprinker in which Derrida discusses what he terms a ‘precritical theoreticism’ characteristic of, for example, Althusser’s adoption of structuralism, and of its attempts to elaborate the conditions of a ‘General Theory’ as ‘a matter of regions of objectivity, of regional ontologies as theories of objectivity without any questions … about the determination of the entity as object, about history, and the implications of this determination’ (Derrida, 1993: 189). Notoriously, in the 1963 essay ‘On the Materialist Dialectic’, Althusser suggested a substitution of the capitalized ‘Theory’ for ‘philosophy’ altogether, whereby the properly ‘scientific’ character of the former might thus be contrasted with the ‘ideological’ nature of the latter. And while this was a short-lived phase in Althusser’s work (as he acknowledges in the essay’s introduction in For Marx), its underlying rationale is not insignificant, insofar as it rests on a question concerning the nature of any supra-disciplinary ‘generality’ itself. Thus, by contrast to a ‘theory’ as ‘any theoretical practice of a scientific character’, ‘I shall call Theory (with a capital T), general theory’, Althusser writes, ‘that is, the Theory of practice in general, itself elaborated on the basis of the Theory of existing theoretical practices (of the sciences)’ (Althusser, 1977: 162, 168). In this sense, what Derrida describes as Theory’s ‘grandiloquent use of capital letters with regard to the theory’ itself internally registers a broader claim not only to displace but to replace ‘philosophy’ as the discipline of the ‘in general’ (Derrida, 1993: 188–9).

The obvious question is then: how does a thought of, say, writing – the ‘object’ of a grammatology, which must not be ‘just one regional science among others’ (Derrida, 1976 [1967a]: 83) – relate itself to a disciplinary field or topology in this sense, given what Derrida routinely describes as its own (ultimately ‘limitless’) ‘generalization’? If it is not, as Derrida insists, a general ‘theoreticism’ of its own, in what sense is writing a transdisciplinary concept, no longer contained by that ‘topological perspective’ which, for Kant, it was the task of philosophy to govern? And, if it is, how precisely does it relate to the form of generality of the philosophical concept itself?

What Was Poststructuralism?

Let us take a step back to the strategic privilege that I suggested earlier might be given to a reconsideration of the notion of poststructuralism. Importantly, in Derrida’s case, this concerns a confrontation, in the mid-1960s, with both structuralism’s exemplary challenge to the theoretical privilege of philosophy itself (as it is posed from the human or social sciences, those descendants of the department of ‘historical knowledge’ as Kant defines it, and in particular, from their claim to some non-philosophical ‘scientificity’ as such), and, second, the general conception of language or the sign that underpins such a model. It is significant that, in both cases, Derrida’s initial point of interrogation concerns the reliance of structuralism upon what he identifies as a series of precisely philosophical presuppositions that necessarily accompany the very aspiration to ‘disengage’ from philosophy itself. For it is as a result of this, Derrida argues, that structuralist thinkers tended inevitably to generate some new transcendental term (such as ‘structure’) to do the job of ‘explanation’ (or ‘generalized translation’) once reserved for philosophical thought – a ‘transcendental contraband’, as he calls it in Glas (Derrida, 1986 [1974]: 244). ³ This is, in short, the problem inherent to all attempts to have done with transcendental questions simply by placing some other term – language, history, the social, biology, etc. – in the privileged ‘structuring position’. As Derrida puts it of the ‘human sciences’, consequently the ‘step “outside philosophy” is much more difficult to conceive than is generally imagined by those who think they made it long ago with cavalier ease’ (Derrida, 1978 [1967b]: 284), insofar as it is always from philosophy ‘that the non-critical notions which are applied to its delimitation must be borrowed’ (Derrida, 1981 [1972a]: 180).

In the case of structuralism, specifically, a certain model of transdisciplinarity thus threatens to become a more or less positivistic renewal of the very transcendental philosophy from which it had thought to ‘disengage’ (Derrida, 1978 [1967b]: 284). ⁴ This is a point explored at greater length in, for example, the important 1971 essay on Benveniste, ‘The Supplement of the Copula: Philosophy Before Linguistics’, where Derrida discusses the linguist’s attempts to reduce the Aristotelian categories to ‘the fundamental categories of the language in which he thought’ (Derrida, 1981 [1972a]: 180). Here, linguistics performs an exemplary two-stage displacement of philosophy: first, by rendering itself as an autonomous discipline in such a way as to reinscribe a certain philosophical history as its own prehistory (Rousseau, Hegel, Nietzsche) – this being the very basis of its claim to have become a science (as opposed to ‘metaphysics’) – and, second, to take the place of philosophy through the assertion of its own ‘transcendental’ or ‘transcategorial’ status (Derrida, 1981 [1972a]: 195). It is this second move that indicates the resultant complexity of Derrida’s own relation to philosophy, and to ‘transcendental questions’ in particular, precisely from the perspective of a confrontation with what is itself a certain historical model of a ‘non-’ or ‘post-’ philosophical transdisciplinarity.

Most obviously, in Of Grammatology, this complexity is associated with an apparent endorsement of Heidegger’s ‘task of thinking’ as the ongoing deconstruction of the history of a metaphysics or onto-theology – an affiliation which, however, also seeks to distance itself from Heidegger’s own tendency to conceive of such post-philosophical thinking (a ‘thinking to come’) in the form of a simultaneous return to a pre-philosophical beginning associated with an accompanying metaphorics of proximity, gathering or dwelling. ⁵ And, certainly, it is true that Derrida’s stress upon the inescapability of some reflective and critical negotiation with a metaphysical inheritance, language and conceptuality both follows a broadly Heideggerian line, concerning the ‘closure’ of philosophy, and is in considerable part what animates the deconstruction of structuralist theory – where such theory might imagine that it could simply free itself of such a legacy (Derrida, 1978 [1967b]: 282).

It is in the attempt to reduce the complexity of this relation to philosophy that the two most persistent misreadings of Derrida can consequently be said to lie; each of which would effectively close down the trans- or counter-disciplinary problematics at stake here, but from opposed directions. On the one hand, there are those who have taken Derrida to be arguing that philosophy was nothing other than, say, a particular language game, rhetoric or literary genre – which would reduce philosophy to the concerns of some other hegemonic discipline, such as linguistics or literary criticism, that would, in turn, simply assume the metadisciplinary place of traditional philosophy itself. Yet this is precisely the basis for Derrida’s critique of Benveniste. On the other hand, there are those who have read him, conversely, as the very epitome of the transcendental philosopher, subjecting the sciences to some unknowable and thus mystified universal ‘law’ of différance that would ultimately reclaim philosophy’s mastery over any other, upstart disciplines (see, for example, the argument made partly in the name of ‘the sociological alternative to metaphysics’ in Rose, 1984: 5).

However, if it is true that a modified Heideggerian argument is set to work against structuralism, it is equally important that the latter functions, in turn, as a kind of corrective to, or contamination of, Heidegger’s own construal of thinking as connected to some more ‘originary’ – we might say: predisciplinary – moment in the history of Being that ‘knew neither a “logic” nor an “ethics” nor “physics”’ (Heidegger, 1993: 267). ⁶ The confrontation with the modernity of structuralism and psychoanalysis, as sciences that cannot simply be mastered by the existing discipline of philosophy, is pivotal to grasping this. Derrida’s comments on the perhaps ‘privileged place’ occupied by ethnology, in his 1966 essay on Lévi-Strauss, are especially pertinent: ⁷

[E]thnology could have been born as a science only at the moment when a decentring had come about: at the moment when European culture … had been dislocated, driven from its locus, and forced to stop considering itself as the culture of reference. (Derrida, 1978 [1967b]: 282)

Grammatology, Language and Transdisciplinarity

How then is one to understand the distinctive elaboration of a general ‘theory’ of writing in Of Grammatology as part of its transdisciplinary dynamics? Derrida’s initial philosophical interest in ‘writing’ derives, as is well known, from its consistent ‘abasement’ as a mere technical or material supplement that must be securely (if futilely) placed outside that self-presence said to be uniquely embodied in speech or consciousness, and hence as always ‘derivative, accidental, particular, exterior’ (Derrida, 1976 [1967a]: 29). As against this, Of Grammatology shows how, in fact, an essential contamination of the primary (speech) by the secondary (writing) must, by virtue of its necessary reliance upon that which it seeks to exclude in its very self-constitution, necessarily disrupt any such structure upon which a hierarchical ‘metaphysics of presence’ depends. This is a famous argument, not least through Derrida’s own formalization of it in Positions (Derrida, 1981 [1972b]: 41–2). Yet in its elaboration through the pages of Of Grammatology it also involves a number of different ‘levels’ of generality inherent to its unfolding across a number of different disciplinary domains.

Strikingly, early on Derrida appears to toy with the idea of elaborating something like an actual positive science, with all the appearance of establishing some ‘entirely new discipline whose inauguration is being undertaken’ (Nancy, 2011: 99). ‘The concept of writing should define the field of a science’ (Derrida, 1976 [1967a]: 27), begins the book’s second chapter. This is, he argues, first, because insofar as writing has been consistently denigrated as a mere adjunct to speech, no truly adequate account of writing, in either scientific or historical terms, has yet been produced (see Derrida, 1978 [1967b]: 230). Second, however, a positive thought of writing would additionally seem to be required, at this historical moment, precisely because of what Derrida describes, at the very beginning of Of Grammatology, as a contemporary cross-disciplinary inflation, in structuralist semiology in particular, of the very ‘sign “language”’ which is ‘the inflation of the sign itself’ (Derrida, 1976 [1967a]: 6).

Any reading of Derrida as a primarily linguistic (let alone ‘semiological’ or ‘social constructivist’) thinker is thereby profoundly mistaken. Indeed, on the contrary, what is at stake here is an attempt to demarcate a ‘linguistic turn’ across the human sciences as precisely a problem of its cross-disciplinary ‘inflation’, in which it becomes ‘adrift in the threat of [its own] limitlessness’:

However the topic is considered, the problem of language has never been simply one problem among others. But never so much as at present has it invaded, as such, the global horizon of the most diverse researches and the most heterogenous discourses. … The devaluation of the word ‘language’ itself, and how, in the very hold it has upon us, it betrays a loose vocabulary … are evidences of this effect. (Derrida, 1976 [1967a]: 6)

In his reading of Lévi-Strauss, Derrida quotes from the latter’s ‘Language and Kinship’ to this effect:

The advent of structural linguistics … [did not only] renew linguistic perspectives; a transformation of this magnitude is not limited to a single discipline. Structural linguistics will certainly play the same renovating role with respect to the social sciences that nuclear physics, for example, has played for the physical sciences. (Lévi-Strauss, cited in Derrida, 1976 [1967a]: 102–3)

However, if, as a result, grammatology can ‘no longer be presented’ as a new scientific discipline – indeed, if it resists all regionalization – this does not mean that one need not take seriously the issue of scientific knowledge in relation to the dynamics of such generalization, and, in particular, its challenge to the self-sufficiency of a philosophical ‘universality’, so as to ‘pursue and consolidate whatever, in scientific practice, has always already begun to exceed the logocentric closure’ (Derrida, 1981 [1972b]: 36) – or, at least, so Derrida continually insists. Indeed, this is one post-Kantian condition of its modernity. The dispute with Heidegger is, in part, to be understood on these grounds. ⁹ Equally, the crucial dimension of Derrida’s critique of structuralist science would relate, in large part, to its failure to be scientific enough in this respect. It is thus noticeable that Derrida’s argument with Lévi-Strauss deliberately proceeds along what can appear, initially, to be fairly conventional ‘empirical’ lines, pointing to the ways in which, for example, the latter dismisses signs of existing forms of inscription among the Nambikwara – ‘those “few dots” and “zig zags” on their calabashes, so briefly evoked in Tristes Tropiques’ – or the ‘fact’ of the Nambikwara’s prohibition upon the use of the proper name (Derrida, 1976 [1967a]: 108–10). Lévi-Strauss’s seemingly scientific ‘anti-humanism’ masks a covertly metaphysical privileging of the human and of speech that cannot itself, therefore, be justified upon ‘scientific’ grounds – one of the results of which is a certain dogmatic regulation of disciplinarity in the form of the closed and self-generating structure making up the so-called ‘human sciences’ as a whole. Against this, the necessity of ‘the most general concept of the grammè’ is located, according to Derrida, in its exceeding of any such disciplinary organization, instead extending a ‘history of writing’, and the ‘scientific field’ of its concept, from

‘genetic inscription’ and the ‘short programmatic chains’ regulating the behaviour of the amoeba or the annelid up to the passage beyond alphabetic writing to the orders of the logos and a certain homo sapiens … according to rigorously original levels, types, and rhythms. (Derrida, 1976 [1967a]: 84)

Levels of Generality

What is traced in Of Grammatology may be read, then, as a certain movement or dynamic of generalization – one that takes the ‘logical’ form of a demonstration of the unsustainability of each limit that might be placed upon such generalization. In schematic terms, this might be set out as follows. First, there is the proposition of grammatology as a science that, taking its cue from contemporary linguistics, biology and theoretical mathematics, as well as ‘the development of the practical methods of information retrieval’ (Derrida, 1976 [1967a]: 10), would form a historically new regional ‘object’, or, rather, something like a new thematic network, responding to a prior denigration and repression of the graphic. Second, moving up a level, so to speak, there is a deconstruction of the repression as it is continued – seemingly outside of philosophy as such, but in fact, in important respects, ‘philosophical’ through-and-through – in the initially meta- but ultimately trans-transdisciplinary inflation of the sign ‘language’ common to structuralism and the ‘linguistic turn’ more generally. Third, there is a claim that – given the ultimate incoherence of such an account of language, to the degree that what is said of writing can be shown to be already at work in speech, and to be structurally continuous with it – it must, in fact, be the traditionally secondary term (‘writing’) that, paradoxically, most plausibly ‘comprehends’ the field of language as a whole: ‘language is first, in a sense I shall gradually reveal, writing’ (Derrida, 1976 [1967a]: 37). Fourth, however, there is the recognition that what is therefore meant, at this point, by ‘writing’ can no longer be contained by its ordinary or empirical sense, in opposition to speech, and hence must be radically ‘enlarged’, made ‘exorbitant’, in such a way that it begins to ‘go beyond the extension of language’ per se. Language is, contra Lévi-Strauss, ‘a possibility founded on the general possibility of writing’ (Derrida, 1976 [1967a]: 7, 52). Fifth, there is a demonstration that this ‘enlargement’, or generalization, cannot, however, be limited at the point of covering only ‘the entire field of linguistic signs’, but can be shown to, in some sense, designate all ‘effects’ of presence, including those constitutive of ‘life’ itself. ¹¹ This is a kind of ‘writing before the letter’ or ‘inscription in general’, which is most evidently signalled in contemporary biology, paleo-anthropology and cybernetic systems theory. Sixth, and finally, there is an arrival at what in later texts is termed the quasi-transcendental concept of an arche-writing, which constitutes a ‘limitless generality’ (Derrida, 1992: 71): an unconditional generalization for which all ‘experience’ – indeed, all ‘being’ – is only ever, ‘everywhere, differences and traces of traces’ (Derrida, 1981 [1972b]: 26). ‘The trace must be thought before the entity’, whether linguistic or non-linguistic, living or non-living. If the specific term ‘writing’, with which this sequence of ‘levels’ began, is retained to name this ‘generality’, Derrida states, ‘it is only because it essentially communicates with the vulgar concept of writing’, insofar as ‘writing’ named, for the tradition, a ‘formidable difference’ (Derrida, 1976 [1967a]: 47, 57). The theme of writing, in other words, is useful in articulating this precisely because of those traditionally negative qualities associated with its empirical or narrow sense (mediation, representation, finitude, abstraction, exteriorization), while, at the same time, what it names at such a quasi-transcendental level must be utterly ‘exorbitant’, by definition, with regard to any such empirical sense itself.

This is a schematic presentation of the more complex flows through which such ‘levels’ interact within the book. What is described as a movement between levels, going up one at a time – suggestive of some hierarchy of ‘high’ and ‘low’ – could equally be described as a movement sideways; or, better, as both at once: akin to the gradual ‘inflation’ of a balloon. Nonetheless, it is in the transdisciplinary form that this movement takes that the question of how to grasp Derrida’s claim to reinscribe the empirical-transcendental relation most obviously arises. In defining transcendental philosophy in Critique of Pure Reason, Kant famously demands that ‘absolutely no concepts must enter into it that contain anything empirical, or that the a priori cognition be entirely pure’ (Kant, 1998: 134). With regard to other disciplinary formations, the transcendental is precisely that which ‘transcends every genre’, or discipline, absolutely (Derrida, 1981 [1972a]: 195) – a definition Derrida credits to Chancellor Philip in the 12th century, but which, he remarks, ‘[d]espite contextual differences … also suits the Kantian and Husserlian concepts of the transcendental’ (Derrida, 1981 [1972a]: 195). It is the impossibility of this absolute independence of the transcendental from experience that generated a series of apparently intractable problems for the self-sufficiency of philosophical thought in Kant’s wake. As such, it has also provided, over the last two centuries, the basis for a more thoroughgoing critique of philosophy, and particularly its claims to universality, on the part of other emergent disciplines.

It is in insisting, up to a point, on the inescapability of ‘transcendental questions’ (Derrida, 1976 [1967a]: 290–1) that Derrida’s own articulation of a quasi-transcendental ‘level’ must therefore be understood. This term has come to be used as the standard term for describing the peculiar ‘position’ occupied by what is named by words such as ‘différance’ or ‘arche-writing’ in much of the secondary literature on Derrida, although, in many ways, it is not ideal, if only because it can serve to overemphasize the exclusively transcendental (and Kantian) character of what is at stake within it. (In so far as différance is nothing outside of its ‘effects’ it might just as well be described as quasi-immanence, or for that matter, quasi-ontological; hence Derrida’s assertion that différance could be said to be, paradoxically, more ‘fundamental’ than the ontico-ontological difference ‘itself’ (Derrida, 1981 [1972b]: 22; 1976 [1967a]: 23–4).) Nonetheless, I retain it as justified – or, at least, useful – on the basis that if the ‘trace’ is the condition of possibility of all entities and experience, as Derrida argues, in a Kantian register, it is equally never actually transcendent to them, in as much as it nowhere exists (even theoretically) outside of these relations of traces ‘themselves’. As such, as well as constituting the condition of (im)possibility for any putative self-presence or identity whatsoever – hence its ‘limitless’ generality – it also marks out, on Derrida’s account, the formal impossibility of any absolutely transcendentalizing gesture with regard to this.

Like difference, supplement or trace, writing’s ‘appropriateness’ as a name is thus derived from association with modalities that, precisely as concepts, cannot be transcendentally positioned, but only relationally inscribed – mediation, representation, exteriorization, secondarity, etc. – which means that, where they are absolutely generalized, it can only be in an inherently ‘quasi-’ form. (What would it mean for difference to come ‘before’ what it differentiates, mediation ‘before’ immediacy, the supplement ‘before’ what it supplements?) As a consequence, while Kant seeks to shore up the autonomy and universality of philosophy vis-à-vis other disciplines by radically separating the transcendental from the empirical (which can then be properly parcelled out to the positive sciences), Derrida consistently attempts to demonstrate the ‘originary’ necessity of their contamination. Paradoxically, this means that a certain facticity or finitude assumes a contradictorily transcendental position with respect to the transcendental itself (since it is its own ‘condition of possibility’), thus bringing into question the very structure of transcendentality. To the extent that the quasi-transcendental ‘itself’ can never consequently be mastered by philosophy (or indeed any other hegemonic discipline), it requires, practically, a certain transdisciplinary movement as a condition of its very articulations. Indeed, the latter is, in some sense, a condition of it not becoming transcendentalized; the quasi-transcendental’s own condition of (im)possibility, so to speak. To put it another way, even an absolutely generalized writing cannot but be constructed, by virtue of such originary ‘contamination’, as a kind of reciprocally mediated transdisciplinary concept.

How to Name a Quasi-Transcendental

To the extent that, as Derrida tirelessly reiterated, there can be no ‘proper’ name for what is designated by arche-writing – a term derived, in this instance, only from the fact that, for the philosophical tradition, writing designated a ‘formidable difference’ (Derrida, 1976 [1967a]: 47, 57) – what ‘name’ it is given is always variant, part of a possible chain of ‘nonsynonymous substitutions, according to the necessity of the context’ (Derrida, 1981 [1972a]: 12). It is ‘strategically nicknamed’ (Derrida, 1976 [1967a]: 93) in a form that is only ‘meaningful for us’ for this moment and this form of domination (however historically extended) (see Derrida, 1976 [1967a]: 4). ¹² Or, in other words, its ‘naming’ can only ever be – in what is perhaps the most enigmatic concept in all of Derrida’s work – a matter of strategy:

If words and concepts receive meaning only in sequences of differences, one can justify one’s language, and one’s choice of terms, only within a topic [an orientation in space] and an historical strategy. The justification can therefore never be absolute and definitive. It corresponds to a condition of forces and translates an historical calculation. (Derrida, 1976 [1967a]: 70)

Second, while therefore a certain unconditional generalization may be structurally ‘without limit’ – hence its difference from the culturally or historically relativizing conception of a ‘quasi-transcendental’ to be found in Habermas’s Knowledge and Human Interests or Foucault’s notion of the historical a priori ¹⁴ – this motif or ‘name’, as itself historically finite, clearly is not. Indeed, it is necessarily limited by the relative elasticity of its ‘resonances’ as a ‘focal point of economic condensation’ (Derrida, 1981 [1972b]: 40). Hence the consequent opening to new motifs constructed along similar lines – Bernard Stiegler’s ‘technics’ for example, or Catherine Malabou’s ‘plasticity’ – since, however one might judge their efficacy or limits, they function via a strategy of reinscribing their own contemporary character by way of an engagement with new extra-philosophical problematics, such as digitization or neuroscience. ¹⁵ This is, in part, what accounts for the special significance accorded by Derrida himself in 1967 to ‘the entire field covered by the cybernetic program’ in Of Grammatology, since, ‘whether it has essential limits or not’, as a generalized concept the program may well be said to be already (quasi-)transcendent given its presentation in systems theory as ‘the condition of possibility of all structured form and all ordered (sequential) function, from DNA to primitive nervous systems to the human brain to … electronic memories, calculators and logical machines’ (Johnson, 2011: 91, emphasis added). Even more than structuralism, cybernetics was, in many ways, the transdisciplinary moment of the postwar era, transgressing any separation of the human and natural sciences, spanning biology, anthropology, early computer science, urbanism, and so on; hence, its distinctive historical significance here, as Christopher Johnson, for one, has noted. ¹⁶ ‘The role philosophy has played up to now has been taken over by the sciences’, remarks Heidegger in a notorious 1966 interview with Der Spiegel. ‘Philosophy dissolves into the individual sciences: psychology, logic and political science’. ‘And now what or who takes the place of philosophy?’ Cybernetics (Heidegger, 2006: 39–40). But if this is not simply to be construed as the straightforward death of philosophy (to be ‘replaced’ by another master discipline), or, conversely, as is more often the case today, the pretext for a return to doing pre-critical metaphysics under a new quasi-scientific name, ¹⁷ there then remains a question of how to relate the transdisciplinary and the quasi-transcendental as interlocking (but not identical) logics of generalization. This requires a careful and critically reflexive reciprocal mediation in ways that precisely cross the domains of philosophy and science in the form that Of Grammatology suggests.

Specific Generalities and Intersciences

In his now-famous introduction to We Have Never Been Modern, originally published in 1991, Bruno Latour reads through a series of articles from an unnamed daily newspaper. While some of these offer what Latour calls ‘soothing features’ focused purely on issues of politics or literature, the paper’s other articles – covering stories that range from climate change to the transmission of the AIDs virus to Japanese computing to the radio tracking of whales – ‘sketch out imbroglios of science, politics, economy, law, religion, technology, fiction’. ‘Yet’, Latour comments, ‘no one seems to find this troubling’. Instead, a ‘delicate network’ that ‘weave[s] our world together’ in proliferating ‘hybrid’ forms is sliced into ‘tiny compartments’, ‘broken into as many segments as there are pure disciplines’ (Latour, 1993: 2–3). For anyone schooled in the humanities or social sciences, such counter-disciplinary affirmations of the pervasive reality of hybridizations are hardly unfamiliar – indeed, they constitute the mainstream of most postcolonial and so-called ‘postmodernist’ theory over the last few decades. But what is new, according to Latour, is the assertion that such hybrids can no longer be (indeed never truly were) restricted to the disciplinary domains of culture and language, or what was called once the ‘human sciences’, but rather are extended and generalized in such a fashion as to relate to everything. ‘There are only natures-cultures’, and so there is nothing outside the hybrid: Il n’y a pas de hors-hybride. ‘The imbroglios and networks that had no place’, Latour writes, ‘now have the whole place to themselves’ (Latour, 1993: 104, emphasis added; 144). ‘All that exists is a legion of actants’, as two recent converts describe a now ‘familiar view’ for which ‘all, human, nonhuman, natural, and artificial objects [are placed] on the same footing’ (Amin and Thrift, 2013: 55, 6). And, whether it finds its privileged reference in Bergson, Tarde, Stengers, DeLanda or Latour, this flattened ‘all’ is fast becoming the common perspective and quasi-philosophical basis of a ‘transdisciplinary’ theory across the social sciences and humanities today.

Whereas, then, an earlier ‘anti-humanism’, associated with structuralist and post-structuralist thought, ‘mobilized primarily the disciplinary fields of philosophy, history, cultural studies and the classical Humanities in general’, writes Braidotti, in a posthumanist theory such as Latour’s:

the issue of post-anthropocentrism enlists also science and technology studies, new media and digital culture, environmentalism and earth sciences, biogenetics, neuroscience and robotics, evolutionary theory, critical legal theory, primatology, animal rights and science fiction. This high degree of trans-disciplinarity alone adds an extra layer of complexity to the issue. (Braidotti, 2013: 57–8)

In ‘Philosophy After Theory’, Peter Osborne suggests that from ‘the standpoint of the Anglo-American reception of the tradition of French theory, the current empirical answer to the question “What is theory (in the Anglophone humanities) after ‘Theory’?” is most definitely “Philosophy” … a turn to what Marx called “self-sufficient philosophy”, philosophy in its classical modern sense’. (Osborne, 2011b: 22). If this ‘turn’ is certainly manifest in the contemporary enthusiasm for ‘the full-blown metaphysics of Deleuze and Alain Badiou’, it is even more intensely the case (and considerably less qualified) in the various ‘new materialisms’, ‘speculative realisms’ and ‘object-orientated’ philosophies that have emerged in their wake. Here, the desire to do ‘ontology’ has more often than not signified a return to a pre-critical idea of philosophy: what Peter Sloterdijk calls the ‘old-European project of metaphysical sciences of essences’, even if such ‘essences’ are most likely to be couched today in terms of an ‘immanent’ difference, relationality or becoming (Sloterdijk, 2013: 95).

Indeed the pervasiveness of such re-philosophizing of the space of ‘Theory’ is especially manifest in the most recent development of Latour’s work, given its ‘origins’ in what would seem decidedly ‘non-philosophical’ and broadly empiricist practices of sociological and anthropological description. ¹⁸ While this has in part been a result of the emphatically philosophical readings of Latour’s commentators – most influentially, Graham Harman’s Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics, which constructs a kind of ‘formal ontology’ around Latour’s terminology of actants and networks (Harman, 2009; see also Maniglier, 2012) – such ‘ontologization’ is increasingly apparent in Latour’s own writings, and has assumed its own full-blown metaphysical form in An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (Latour, 2013); in particular, in the thoroughly classical turn to ‘Philosophy’ as a general ‘metalanguage’ bridging the ‘plurality’ of different ‘regional’ ontologies in an explicitly ‘metaphysical’ mode, at the end of the book’s introduction. ¹⁹ Given its own intensely complex relationship to philosophy, and to philosophy qua ontology in particular, there may therefore be something oddly timely about a reengagement with the logic of generalization, and of its own transdisciplinary form, in Derrida’s work.

In the closing pages of the 1966 essay ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’, Derrida writes: ‘A radicalisation of the thought of the trace would be fruitful not only in the deconstruction of logocentrism, but in a kind of reflection exercised more positively in different fields, at different levels of writing in general’. ‘These fields’, he continues, ‘would be numerous’, even if the ‘problem of their respective limits would be that much more formidable’ (Derrida, 1976 [1967b]: 230). However, if the concept of ‘writing’ may be said to function as both quasi-transcendental and transdisciplinary – and must do so – ultimately, across Derrida’s oeuvre, the elaboration of the quasi-transcendental always tends to win out over any reflection upon those ‘different levels’ of transdisciplinarity that the essay on Freud suggests. One reason is the increasing domination of Derrida’s later work (as of most of his acolytes) by an indissoluble linkage of a ‘quasi-transcendental’ logic of limitless generality to one of singularity, at least partly indebted to Levinas: that which cannot be reduced to the status of a particular case according to a general law or discipline, even as its very singularity is dependent upon its relations with others. (Hence, for example, Rudolphe Gasché’s repudiation of any association of ‘deconstruction’ with critique, in the name of doing ‘justice to what requires recognition on the basis of its singularity’; Gasché, 2007: 21.) This is more complicated than many suppose, since the singular is neither simply the individual nor the particular, nor is it either pure alterity or pure event, but is always ‘itself’ internally fissured by the necessary possibility of reiteration or re-marking elsewhere. Nonetheless, what its focus on ‘the other [that] remains inappropriable to the process of identification’ (Derrida, 1996: 84) can occlude is the ongoing necessity for alternate modes of generality and generalization – ‘different levels of writing in general’ – and hence different forms of specific transdisciplinary thought and conceptual construction.

It is perhaps for this reason that so much recent ‘deconstruction’ has tended towards not a transdisciplinary development of different logics of conceptual generalization, but an essentially tragic account of conceptualization (as unacceptably violent or abstracting) per se. Yet, here, an ‘ethical’ privileging of the singular risks simply reasserting, at another level, a metaphysical story of that ‘process of falling, an abstraction, degradation, or emptying’ which was the very ‘object’ of Derrida’s earliest deconstructive readings themselves (Derrida, 1981 [1972a]: 203). If this leads, on one side, towards an uninterrogated privileging of the ungraspable singular ‘event’, on its other side lies the cross-disciplinary fate of many of Derrida’s ‘most general’ concepts when set to work across other fields, where they can tend towards a local (and paradoxically transcendentalizing-ontologizing) de-specifying mimicry of a logic of generalization itself – such that all ‘texts’ come to be regarded as literature, for example. This can be observed in recent uses of the concept of ‘hauntology’ drawn from Spectres of Marx – itself a ‘re-formulation’ of the logic of the arche-trace – where, typically, as one Derridean puts it, ‘all stories are, more or less, ghost stories … all forms of narrative are, in one way or another, haunted’ (Wolfreys, 2002: 3). And it is not as though this is wrong. It is, however, unclear exactly what it can contribute to a theorization of narrative (itself a transdisciplinary concept) at such a level. Hauntology, or the ‘ghost in general’, Derrida writes, evokes the necessity to ‘introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept. Of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time’ (Derrida, 1994: 161, emphasis added). Il n’y a pas de hors-spectre. Strikingly, then, although this is written in the context of a discussion of Marx, it is a point at which any strictly political considerations must necessarily be displaced, since, because of its absolute generalization as the condition of possibility of any and all praxis whatsoever, this can, as a matter of principle, have nothing to say about any actual specific historico-political ‘calculation’ as such. To cite Derrida himself: ‘We must insist on this specific point precisely because it points to an essential lack of specificity’ (Derrida, 1994: 73). If a (political) question of ‘strategy’ reemerges here, it is, of necessity, at a different (more specific, or ‘lower’) level of transdisciplinary generalization.

In fact, if the ‘problem of their respective limits would be that much more formidable’, as Derrida asserts, there is nothing, in principle, that prevents the emergence of forms of specific generality, construed at ‘different levels of writing [or spectrality] in general’, and ‘exercised more positively in different fields’ (Derrida, 1976 [1967b]: 230); it is just that this remained substantially underdeveloped in Derrida’s own work. Certainly, the ‘respective limits’ (or ‘scales’ ²⁰ ) of such a specificity cannot be stabilized or guaranteed, given the generalized ‘entanglement’ of all entities upon which a quasi-transcendentality insists. But this is simply to acknowledge the forms of pragmatics, relationality and historicity necessarily built into the construction of any such conceptual generality – the necessity of what Karen Barad calls, in her own account of the essential entanglement of ‘matter and meaning’, the ‘cut’ through which agential interventions are co-constituted with ‘the determinate boundaries and properties’ of that ‘object of investigation’ which, via such a cut, they produce (Barad, 2007: 148). ²¹

Indeed, it is arguably something like this that is loosely envisaged in one of those texts included as an appendix to the Right to Philosophy collection – called ‘Titles’, written as part of a coauthored report produced in preparation for the founding of the Collège International de Philosophie – in which Derrida introduces a concept he calls the interscience. ²² As far as I’m aware, this word – which is ‘taken up … out of context’, Derrida observes, not from the lexicon of a philosopher but from Einstein, or, more specifically, from the latter’s citation in Braudel – plays no significant role outside of this particular essay (Derrida, 2004 [1990]: 297, n. 5). Here, however, ‘interscience’ serves to name not the ‘level’ of a limitless generalization – the privileged ‘concern’ of most of Derrida’s work of the 1980s and ’90 s – but rather, according to precise historical and institutional limits, ‘any thematics, any field, any research activity … that the map of institutions, at a given moment, does not yet grant stable, accredited, habitable departments’. The ‘interscientific’ is thus manifested as the construction of an open series of distinctive and hence specific ‘zones of instability’, which, in disturbing a ‘certain social representation of organised research’, are ‘sites of great traffic’ (or hybridity?), ‘privileged sites for the formation of new objects or rather of new thematic networks’ (Derrida, 2004 [1990]: 206, emphasis added).

This is a useful reminder that any account of transdisciplinarity must be configured not solely as a theoretical question, but also as an institutional one, and, in particular, as one concerned with ‘what has been handed down to us of the concept of the university’ (Derrida, 2004 [1990]: 85). I want to conclude, however, by wondering whether, as much as it is a quasi-transcendental concept, a thought of ‘writing’ should also be regarded as an interscience in this sense:

Now we tend to say ‘writing’ … to designate not only the physical gestures of literal pictographic or ideographic inscription … we say ‘writing’ for all that gives rise to an inscription in general, whether it is literal or not … cinematography, choreography, of course, but also pictorial, musical, sculptural ‘writing’. (Derrida, 1976 [1967a]: 9)

If the unfortunate term ‘deconstruction’ indicates anything, it is (or should be), by contrast, an emphasis on the critical demonstration (rather than merely speculative assertion) of a logic of generalization in which the ‘distinction between writing and speech’, or between the human and non-human, society and nature, ‘loses all pertinence’, according to a critical interrogation of the ultimate inadequacy of attempts to separate these within and across existing disciplinary fields (Derrida, 1988: 46–7). Ironically, given that at least some of it has been lauded for the degree to which it takes seriously the consequences of scientific work for philosophical concerns, the immediately ‘ontological’ orientation of recent ‘new materialist’ or ‘object-oriented’ thought actually forbids engagement with science as anything other than raw material for the ratification of an already given metaphysical ‘choice’. This is less ‘scientism’ than it is a form of ‘philosophism’, in which the classical, pre-critical sovereignty of philosophy reconstitutes itself again. While ‘we’ may not ‘now’ say ‘writing’ as we did in 1967, nonetheless a conception of an interscience’s multiplicity of successive transversal exchanges seems more compelling than most as a basic program for taking forward the theoretical humanities and sciences today. Unlike contemporary revalorizations of the philosophy of the concept (Foucault, 1984), however, this remains a problem that, qua philosophy, ‘philosophy cannot resolve’ (Derrida, 1976 [1967b]: 282).