Levi Bryant, Philosophy, Collin College

11:09. Luke Higgins introduces Levi. He pronounces the name like “levy”, which Levi doesn’t ever seem to mind, but the real pronunciation is “LEE-vie.”

11:09. Levi begins with a quote from Derrida’s “Ousia and Gramme.” Levi’s paper will be largely about Derrida.

11:10. Levi makes the good point that Derrida identifies substance with presence. (And Derrida is simply flat-out wrong here.)

11:11. Substance is not present, but what withdraws from all presence. This is why Harman argues for withdrawal. Substance always withdraws behind all qualities.

11:12. Danger of falling into negative theology here.

11:12. Withdrawal cannot just be relational; substances must be withdrawn even from themselves.

11:13. Derrida’s critique of substance, a critique of Book IV of the Physics on the sequence of nows.

11:15. Derrida: there can’t be an indivisible now. It must be fissured from itself. Hägglund’s words of explanation are cited by Levi.

11:16. We must begin with the fact that time passes, and then try to determine the conditions that make this possible.

11:16. The now contains a dimension that was never present. Bergson in Matter and Memory pointed this out, as did Deleuze later. Derrida: presence is always already contaminated from within by absence. A past that was never present. A past that was always already past. An a priori past, haunting every present.

11:18. Object always split in half, as Levi argues in his forthcoming The Democracy of Objects. (Expect early 2011 for this book.)

11:19. Withdrawn part of entities must be thought of as a potentiality or potency. Actualized properties of an object are a mere crust or rind, hiding its molten inner life.

11:20. What authorizes a discussion of substance in terms of Derrida’s différance at all? The iterability of trace. Context cannot overdetermine any reality.

11:21. Repeating Derrida’s point that difference and deferral are the two senses of différance. Différance is the becoming-time of space and the becoming-space of time [note: Hägglund in Radical Atheism has an interesting discussion of this].

11:23. Just noticed that Levi is reading from his iPad, not from paper.

11:23. The object contains within itself a reserve that is not present. For example, retroactive traumas in Freud, Nachträglichkeit, things that were not traumatic at the time but become so later.

11:24. Objects are volcanic, always containing surprises.

11:25. Polemos between entities that withdraw from each other, as what Morton calls “strange strangers.”

11:26. Derrida’s praise of Saussure for saying that language is nothing but differences without positive terms. Does this not dissolve substances in favor of differential relations?

11:27. But in “Signature, Event, Context”, Derrida says that a sign exceeds its context. It must be legible, even when the moment of its production is irremediably lost.

11:28. Bold claim by Levi that Derrida actually ends up with something like Aristotle’s primary substances, which also escape any contingent context.

11:29. Iterability requires some minimal excess that allows anything to break its relations, and therefore substance cannot dissolve into a play of relations.

11:29. Harman’s concept of withdrawn substance is relevant here. Substantiality of substance must be something radically other than qualities. Nonetheless, we only encounter objects via their qualities, as a ghostly indicator of substances that can never become present.

11:30. Substantiality of substance must be seen, like Whitehead’s societies, as that which perpetually produces itself from itself as substance.

11:31. Leave for another day the mystery of how this happens.