Deconstructive Empiricism: Science and Metaphor in Derrida’s Early Work

16 Pages·2019·0.082 MB·English

by  Jeremy Butman

Deconstructive Empiricism: Science and
Metaphor in Derrida’s Early Work
Jeremy Butman
Abstract
The work of Jacques Derrida is often characterized as anti-scientific,
and his philosophy of language taken to mean we are sealed off from
empirical reality, confined to our metaphysical prison. This position is
reinforced by the fact that his forerunners, Heidegger and Nietzsche,
did diminish the importance of the sciences, and argued that we are
enclosed within the limits of language. Today, philosophy continues to
deconstruct the nature/culture distinction, and challenge the meaning
of materialism, but in recent decades has realized that this work
requires, in addition to a critique of the modern concept of science, a
rehabilitation of the sciences outside their metaphysical definition. The
fact that Derrida continues to be understood as an anti-science thinker
has led to the exclusion of his work from this project. In this paper, I
show that Derrida, while deconstruction the metaphysical concepts of
science, nature and empiricism, in fact takes the mathematical sciences
as an important force of deconstructing, and develops an interpretation
of empiricism that points to a non-metaphysical understanding of it.
Fromthisperspective,Derrida’sworkisusefulforthinkingthroughthe
relationofthehumantolanguageandnatureintheageofglobalization
andanthropogenicclimatechange.
*
In his essay ‘Nineteenth-Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century
Textualism’, Richard Rorty draws what has become a familiar
DerridaToday12.2(2019):115–129
DOI:10.3366/drt.2019.0205
©EdinburghUniversityPress
www.euppublishing.com/drt
116 Deconstructive Empiricism
comparison between Jacques Derrida and Immanuel Kant, and the
modes of philosophy each represents. The comparison suggests that
Derrida’s‘claimthatallproblems,topics,anddistinctionsarelanguage-
relative’,(Rorty2010,122)likeKant’sassertionthat‘themindperceives
only its own ideas’ (Ibid., 126), subordinates science to literature, and
rejects empirical certainty. ‘[B]oth movements adopt an antagonistic
position to natural science .... Both insist that there is a point of
view other than, and somehow higher than, that of science’ (Ibid.,
122). The central difference between the two, Rorty concludes, is that
‘whereas nineteenth-century idealism wanted to substitute one sort of
science(philosophy)foranother(naturalscience)asthecenterofculture,
twentieth-century textualism wants to place literature in the center, and
to treat both science and philosophy as, at best, literary genres’ (Ibid.).
Rortywasoneofhismostseriousreaders,andhedoesnothaveDerrida
solely in mind here. However, this interpretation is a widely accepted
one. It explains the central role Derrida played in the so-called ‘science
wars’ of the 1990s, and also why contemporary, scientifically-minded
attempts to dismantle Kantian metaphysics, such as those of Quentin
Meillassoux and Bruno Latour, disregard Derrida (Hägglund 2011,
115; Harman 2009, 12, 25–6).1 The idea that Derrida antagonistically
reduces the natural sciences to literature, or elevates literature over
science, overlooks the many explicit comments Derrida makes to the
contrary, and is incompatible with Derrida’s overarching project. In
fact, deconstruction begins from an understanding of empiricism that
attempts to free it from its philosophical history, and identifies science
asaforceofresistanceagainstmetaphysicsandphonocentricism.
To be sure, antagonism toward the natural sciences, of the type
Rortydescribes,canbefoundinDerrida’smostprominentforerunners,
Nietzsche and Heidegger. Derrida, however, pushes back on each
precisely at the points where they assert the priority of art over
science. Heidegger’s (1977a) arguments that the natural sciences ‘skip
over’ things in their essential being, and that mathematics does not
describe nature as meaningfully as poetry (1977b), are grounded in
the distinction between the ontic and the ontological, a distinction that
Derrida deconstructs at length, with particular force in ‘Ousia and
Gramme¯’and‘TheEndsofMan’,thelatterofwhichmakesthecasethat
the ontico-ontological difference is itself a reading of metaphoricity.2
The deconstruction of the ontological difference throws into question
thelegitimacyofprivilegingeitherscienceorpoetryovertheother.
The more challenging legacy, with respect to Derrida’s treatment of
science, is that of Nietzsche. ‘In reminding the philosopher that he
remainedenclosedinalanguage,Nietzschewassurelymoreviolentand
Jeremy Butman 117
more explicit than anyone else’, Derrida writes (Derrida 1982a, 177).
One of Nietzsche’s most direct treatments of the sciences in the context
of the relation of language to empiricism and epistemology is in the
1873 essay ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’. There, Nietzsche
mounts a frontal attack on the correspondence theory of truth, arguing
that logic, mathematics and scientific concepts are neither products of
necessary rational laws, as Kant had it, nor objective references to
empiricalperception,asinAristotle.ForNietzsche,empiricalexperience
is filtered through a series of metaphors, generated by both our
sensory faculties and linguistic expression, which, in the process of
creating stable meanings in understanding and communication, cover
over genuine empirical perception. The first in this chain of metaphors
ties a perceptual experience to an imaginative image as a metonymic
representation; the second attaches this image to a spoken sound. The
adumbrations of visual data into stable images in the mind, and
the subsequent substitution of these images for words, give rise to the
possibility of scientific concepts, which, he says, are ‘the lingering
residuesofmetaphors’(Nietzsche2010,41).Byrelyingunconditionally
on abstract concepts such as causation and categorization, science and
logic alienate the empirical, lose their sensory referent and fail to grasp
their primordial foundation in poetic and artistic metaphors. The work
ofscienceisconsequentlyonlytoreininempiricalexperiencetoconform
to concepts: ‘to fill that colossal, towering framework [of concepts] and
fit the entire empirical world, that is, the anthropomorphic world, into
it’(Ibid.).
However, as Derrida points out, Nietzsche retains the traditional
value of empiricism in this work. Of the most immediate contact with
the empirical, Nietzsche says: ‘Every metaphor of intuition is individual
andwithoutequalandsoalwaysknowshowtoescapeallclassification’
(Ibid., 32). This assertion of the singularity of empirical intuition,
and the inherently non-philosophical content of experience repeats in
a different voice the Kantian and Aristotlean understanding of the
empirical, and so does not fundamentally challenge the operations of
metaphysics.
In two texts, ‘The Supplement of the Copula’, which takes ‘On
Truth and Lies’ as a starting point, and ‘White Mythology’, a detailed
account of metaphor and the abstraction of concepts of perceptual
experience, Derrida shows that a fuller account of scientific knowledge
and its relation to metaphor disrupts Nietzsche’s distinction between
perception and conception, and allows that the empirical is something
other than this non-conceptual region of singularities; it is not erased
intheprocessofuser,butremainsactivewithinmetaphoricallanguage.
118 Deconstructive Empiricism
Furthermore,inDerrida,sciencecontinuestobethenameforaninquiry
into the empirical, and is what permits an analysis of metaphor as
such.ForDerrida,scienceisoneofthedrivingforcesofdeconstruction,
and, indeed, deconstruction might be conceived as an attempt to grasp
the historical force of science outside its traditional, Kantian and
Aristotlean,determinations.
1.
In Of Grammatology, Derrida writes: ‘Within cultures practicing so-
called phonetic-writing, mathematics is not just an enclave .... This
enclave is also the place where the practice of scientific language
challenges intrinsically and with increasing profundity the ideal of
phonetic writing and all its implicit metaphysics’ (Derrida, 1974, p.
9; my emphasis). The language of mathematics serves as an enclave
because it is not phonocentric–it is not a transcription of phonemes
or representation of speech–and so it is fundamentally disconnected
from the logocentrism of metaphysics, and the science of representation
and categorization. Mathematics is fundamentally heterogeneous to
the logocentric picture of the signifying relationship between word
and empirical object, because number does not refer in itself to
anything empirical. The incongruity between mathematical writing
and phonocentric, alphabetical writing is the site of a challenge to
the metaphysical order, a place from which to view the closure
of metaphysics. Because scientific language draws from this non-
phonocentric mathematical enclave, the natural sciences find the
resourcestoexceedtraditionalphilosophicaldeterminations;indeed,the
sciences,Derridasays,increasingandintrinsicallydemandtherethinking
ofmetaphysicalconceptsandcategories.
The rupture between mathematical and phonetic writing points to an
interpretation of empiricism that exceeds the definition of empiricism
in metaphysics. Number does not in itself refer to anything empirical,
and so its capacity to describe nature and experience has always
disturbed the sense of signification and meaning in an epistemology
of representation. As a practice of tracing the movement of différance,
‘grammatology’–an over-determined articulation of deconstruction–is
inaugurated as a science that follows this expanded idea of empiricism.
Grammatology is ‘the science of writing:’ a science that ‘runs the risk
of never being established as such and with that name. Of never being
able to define the unity of its project or its object. Of not being able
either to write its discourse on method or to describe the limits of its
Jeremy Butman 119
field’ (Derrida 1974, 4). It is itself non-categorizable, but not because
of its fidelity to the ‘empirical realm’, but rather because what evades
categorizationcannotbeconfinedtoaparticularregion.Grammatology
studies writing, or arche-writing, which refers not to any particular
systemofnotation,butthelandscapeofmarksandtracesthattraverses
acrosstheboundariesofperceptionandconception,thought,sight,and
sound, and from which we discern meaning generally. To read this
text of traces involves an empiricism that follows not the system of
differences constructed through a philosophical system, but différance,
which disturbs the established system of differences that in the first
place makes the distinction between the perceptual and conceptual
possible.Thisformofreadingwouldbeitselfempirical,butinawholly
new sense. Derrida writes: ‘In the delineation of différance everything
is strategic and adventurous ... [it is] a strategy without finality,
what might be called blind tactics, or empirical wandering’ (Ibid.,
152, my emphasis). The empiricism of deconstruction hinges upon the
recognition of ruptures, breaks within any stabilized order; it proceeds
from moments of incongruity such as that between mathematical and
phoneticwriting.
Empiricism in its traditional sense refers to the external world,
or to the exteriority of experience. The empirical is understood as
that which is put in opposition to thought, language and reflection:
the mind’s other, the absolute referent against which knowledge
is tested and according to which language signifies. As Derrida
describesitin‘ViolenceandMetaphysics’:‘Empiricismalwayshasbeen
determined by philosophy, from Plato to Husserl, as nonphilosophy,
the inability to justify oneself, to come to one’s own aid as speech’
(Derrida 1978, 151). The empirical is that inviolable limit at which
language fails, the face of the world which will not speak. This
determination, however, is phonocentric, and inextricable from the
philosophy of truth-as-correspondence and language-as-representation:
knowledge is giving voice through language to the silent empirical.
It is phonocentrism that establishes the separation of language from
things, and the thought that language expresses the empirical. In
this very articulation, however, the empirical remains alienated from
philosophical discourse, explicitly available to thought only through
appropriationandsubstitution–throughmetaphor.Derridagoeson:
this incapacitation [of the empirical], when resolutely assumed, contests the
resolution and coherence of the logos (philosophy) at its root, instead of
lettingitselfbequestionedbythelogos.Therefore,nothingcansoprofoundly
120 Deconstructive Empiricism
solicit the Greek logos–philosophy–than this irruption of the totally-other;
and nothing can to such an extent reawaken the logos to its origin as to its
mortality,itsother.(Ibid.)
The empirical, a pure exteriority whose concept lives at the heart
of the interiority of the logos, will always haunt and threaten the
structure of representation and reference. This empirical solicitation of
the logos no doubt includes both Nietzsche’s critique of concepts, as
well as Hume’s critique of causation. These critiques are examples of
the empirical reawakening the logos, which are part of the normal,
anticipated movement of knowledge in the metaphysical picture.
Nietzsche’s interpretation of empiricism remains within the scope of
metaphysics,andsohiscritiqueofthesciencesdoesnotreachthesource
ofscientificity.
The wandering empiricism of grammatology, by contrast, does not
assumethestabilityofempiricalotherness,butinterpretstheexteriority
of the empirical in Levinasian terms, as a radical alterity that stands
over and against the opposition between perception and conception
itself, against all such philosophical distinctions. It is Levinas’ thought
of radical exteriority that Derrida has mind when he speaks of tracing
différanceasanempiricalpractice.
By radicalizing the theme of the infinite exteriority of the other, Levinas
thereby assumes the aim which has more or less secretly animated all the
philosophical gestures which have been called empiricisms in the history of
philosophy....Bytakingthisprojecttoitsend,hetotallyrenewsempiricism,
andinversesitbyrevealingittoitselfasmetaphysics.(Ibid.)
Empiricism in its deconstructive sense appears as the movement
of otherness within, and against, the linguistic order. This radical
empiricism demonstrates that the traditional view of empiricism, as
the silent other of the logos, is not itself grasped empirically, but
rathermetaphysicallyandphilosophically.Derridaasks,fromwithinthe
perspectiveofthisnewempiricism:
Howcanoneaffirmtheempiricityofthemovementwhichleadstosignifying
ingeneralandtosignifyingwithinalanguage,andthatdoessowithrecourse
to an organization of forms, a distribution of classes, etc.? Finally on the
basis of what system, and also from whence historically, do we receive
and understand–before even positing the empiricity of signification–the
significationofempiricity?(Derrida1982a,192)
The circularity running between signification and empiricity here is
the resource by which metaphysical empiricism can be deconstructed:
Jeremy Butman 121
representationandsignificationtakeempiricalreferenceastheirground,
but find this ground only by first positing the theory of representation.
Even in metaphysics, the empirical is a name for the movement of
otherness in language and experience, though this otherness is safely
contained outside of language; the definition of the empirical as
perceptual substratum contains this otherness within an established
order of differentiation that secures the autonomy of both nature
and thought. Beyond this definition, otherness is released from its
restrictive definition as the perceptual term in the opposition between
conception/perception.
It is not, as Hume had it, that the empirical grants probability rather
thannecessity,oreventhat,asKantargued,empiricismisemptywithout
concepts. Empiricism is not that which must be expressed through
language in a series of metaphors for sensory experience, or structured
according to a set of a priori concepts; it is that which disrupts the
order of metaphoricity itself, and contests pure concepts. In ‘Violence
and Metaphysics’, Derrida writes, ‘[t]he true name of this renunciation
oftheconcept,oftheaprioriandtranscendentalhorizonsoflanguage,is
empiricism’(Derrida1978,151).Empiricism,then,likeLevinas’ethical
sight,3 attends to what is other, attends to what disrupts, as if from
nowhere,theconceptualschematicsofphilosophyand‘normalscience’,
to use Thomas Kuhn’s vocabulary (Kuhn, 1962). Derrida goes on:
‘[Empiricism]isthedreamofapurelyheterologicalthoughtatitssource.
A pure thought of pure difference’ (Ibid.). Empiricism is that which
differentiateswithinafieldofperception,butmorefundamentally,what
disturbsthedelineationofperceptionitself.4
But Derrida’s empiricism is not Levinasian without further ado.
Levinasian otherness cannot be taken up in language without being
canceled and appropriated into the order of the same. The vision of
pureheterogeneity,asinLevinas’‘other’,isadream;Derridacontinues:
‘We say the dream because it must vanish at daybreak, as soon as
language awakens’ (Ibid.). As Derrida argues at length in ‘Violence
and Metaphysics’, there can be no pure otherness, but every otherness
containsatraceofthesame,andvise-a-versa;anypurityiscontaminated
inherently with the means of its own impurification. Pure exteriority,
whether conceived in Levinas’ or Nietzsche’s terms, cannot stand, and
because there can be no absolute externality of language, this empirical
other does not arrive at the gates of language, but from within. For
Derrida, the fact that empiricism encounters the wholly other within
philosophical discourse cannot mean that language has access to a
stable order of truth, even where this encounter is interpreted as
122 Deconstructive Empiricism
epistemological rather than ethical. Instead, empiricism occurs within
languageaspartofthegeneraleconomyofdifférance,simplyasanactof
transgression against a normalized system of boundaries that shows the
violabilityoftheseboundaries.Thequestionremains:ifempiricismdoes
movethroughlanguageitself,howdoesitregister,andwhatistheforce
ofempiricismwithintheappropriatingworkoflinguisticmetaphor?
2.
If every linguistic expression inevitably and unavoidably shapes and
packageswhatitexpresses,noexpressionhasperfectauthoritytospeak
about ‘reality’ outside the context of its own expressive packaging.
Science is that which has the capacity to trespass from one context to
another. Expression is not of the ti esti nor a representation of to on; it
isaway,anactionthatisinherentlyalsoaresponse,aself-responsibility
that inaugurates itself as what must take care of itself, must be itself
by distancing itself from itself in order to maintain itself. For Derrida,
expression, as arche-writing, is not limited to the human, but traverses
the borders of logic, speech, and even life. Ways of expression include
philosophical metaphor and logic, evolution and genetic inscription,
as well as mathematical equations, general relativity and quantum
mechanics.Buttheyalsoincludepetroglyphs,paintingandpoetry,every
syntactical language, phenotypic expression itself, fossilization, carbon
decomposition. Science is what reads this self-responsibility in its self-
distancingandreturnsittoitself.Itmaintainstheunityofexpressionby
finding its disunity, incorporating it or externalizing it. As such, science
must(1)awaitandattendtotheincalculablealterityof(a)whatappear
to be irruptions of heterogeneity internal to a manner of expression,
which is to say, the appearance of differences not accounted for within
the normalized system of differences in an system of expression (e.g.
an alphabet, vocabulary, fluctuations in the microwave background or
phenotypictraits)and(b)betweenheterogeneoussystemsofexpression,
and (2) bring alterity into the calculable framework of a linguistic
system, which can only happen by locating the trace of the normalized
order of the same within the heterogeneous difference; by modifying
theestablishedorder,changingittoincludetheunanticipated(formerly
incalculable)difference,whichhastheeffect,throughchange,ofmaking
thesameallthemoresame.Andyetthiswork,becauseofthecharacter
ofexpressionitself,isunending.
Phonocentrism, as a cultural-historical moment that begins with
phonetic writing–with the idea that writing is transcription and
Jeremy Butman 123
representation of speech, and in turn interprets thought as
representation–is one such manner of expression, in which science is
determined as an inquiry into the empirical heterogeneity only between
speech and sight. In its far-reach, phonocentrism is responsible, as
Derrida writes, for ‘the concept of science or the scientificity of science’
(Derrida1974,4);myemphasis).Thescientificityofscience‘hasalways
beendeterminedaslogic–aconceptthathasalwaysbeenaphilosophical
concept, even if the practice of science has constantly challenged its
imperialism of the logos, by invoking, for example, from the beginning
and ever increasingly, nonphonetic writing’ (Ibid., my emphasis).
Derrida contrasts scientificity, the theoretical, phonocentric concept of
science, with the work and practice of science, and argues that, ever
increasingly, science undercuts its own metaphysical scientificity. In this
sense, deconstruction, as something that takes place in language, is a
functionofthemovementofscienceagainstphilosophy.
Much of what may appear to be a deconstruction of science is in
fact a deconstruction of the philosophical idea of nature, and this
deconstruction clears the way for an understanding of science that
exists otherwise than within the framework of representationalism.
Deconstruction wants to show the joinery that brings science and
representation together, in order to demonstrate that this pairing is not
necessary, and science can operate outside the bounds of metaphysical
language.
The idea that scientificity is necessarily a question of representation
is Aristotlean. In ‘The Supplement of the Copula’, Derrida address the
standard reading of Aristotle on the relation between empiricism and
languagebywayofareadingofthestructurallinguistÉmileBenveniste.
It is Benveniste who notes an ambiguity in Aristotle’s distinction
between expression and the expressed, sign and signified, an ambiguity
that lies in thought and the difficultly of distinguishing thought from
the empirical. Aristotle believes his scientific categorization of nature
follows empirical observation: Benveniste notes that ‘unconsciously
[Aristotle] took as a criterion the empirical necessity of a distinct
expression for each of his predications’ (Benveniste1982a, 190). From
what empirical information could such a necessity about expression be
drawn?AsBenvenisteargues,suchadistinction followsthenecessityof
linguistics, not empiricism. Thus, from Aristotle forward, the empirical
necessityisdeterminednotsimplythroughobservation,butequally,and
perhapsmoredecisively,throughtherequirementsofthelinguisticmode
of expression. However, for Derrida, Benveniste’s own observation
operateswithanotherunconsciousassumption,aconceptthatisdeemed
124 Deconstructive Empiricism
empirical but is in fact philosophical: that of the category, in this case,
the category of the empirical itself, in distinction from that of the
conceptual/linguistic, ‘as if the idea of category in general ... were
in some way natural’ (Derrida 1982a, 184). In so doing, Benveniste
reproducesatripartiteframework:ononesideliestheempirical,onthe
other linguistic expression, and in the middle, serving as intermediary,
is thought. ‘Is it not necessary’, Derrida asks, ‘to take into account the
fact that it [the categorial interpretation of nature] was produced on
the very terrain where the simple opposition of language and thought
was put into question?’ (Ibid.). Derrida interprets the category as itself
a problem of grammar, as a product of ‘culture’. Derrida’s argument
hingesonananalysisofheterogeneouslinguisticsystems,comparingthe
grammarofthecopulatootherwaysofsignifyingidentityandpropriety,
through aspiration of breath or repetition of the third person pronoun
(rather than ‘he is rich’, ‘he rich he’). Derrida illustrates that ‘natural’
categorization and predicate logic are not dictated by empiricism, nor
linguistics in general, but by the syntactical necessity of the copula.
The upshot is to demonstrate that the relation between empiricism and
language has no final logic. The operations of philosophy and science,
and their interlinking histories, are founded on this proto-philosophical
grammatical-empirical excursion of language. At the bottom of the
question of scientificity in metaphysics (and beyond) lies the problem
of thought as that which stands independent of both linguistic and
empiricalvalueinthelogicofphonocentric.
In metaphysics, thought is the site of the transfer of meaning from
the empirical to its expression, and as such is engaged, Derrida writes,
in ‘an impossible or contradictory operation’ (Ibid., 196). How can
the fit of a metaphor be judged? According to what criteria can one
evaluate the adequacy of metaphor in metaphysics? It cannot be from
purelogic,whichonlyhasauthoritythroughreferencetheempirical,and
notfromtheempirical,whichmustpassthroughmetaphorizationbefore
its value can be considered by logic. The metaphysical understanding
of metaphor, at base, after having undergone deconstructive reading,
grasps the metaphorical asa ‘dissimulated conjunction’ of the empirical
andlinguistic.Thinkingitselfisthisdissimulationconjoiningexperience
and expression of experience. It is ‘an ‘enigma’, a secret narrative’
(Derrida1982b,243).‘Enigma’isAristotle’sword,inPoetics,wherehe
himself writes that metaphor aims ‘to describe a fact in an impossible
combination of words’ (Ibid.). It is within this enigma, from out of
this secret narrative, that the trace of the empirical and a science
liberated from metaphysics appears within philosophy, and wherein