Levi’s response

Responding to my disagreement with his equating of objects with différance, Levi writes:

“I was a little surprised by this post as Graham knows that I don’t hold that the being of objects does not consist in differing from other objects. I probably should have been clearer about this in my original post, but what interests me in my original post is, in particular, the dimension of deferral in Derrida’s non-concept of differance. I read Derrida’s differance as deferral as another name for withdrawal and Heideggarian aletheia.”

[ADDENDUM: link added]

The disagreement is still there. I don’t see how différance can be read as withdrawal. It plays out on a level that is entirely other than that of withdrawal (Laruelle sees this clearly when he speaks of Derrida as moving laterally rather than into the depths). Heideggerian Entzug is all about the real beyond presence, not about a disturbance within presence itself. Of Grammatology, by contrast, tries to turn Sein into Sinn, and to erode the very notion of anything existing in some realm free of all access. In short, for Derrida realism is the problem, in a way that need not be true for Heidegger (though Heidegger doesn’t really see it that way, as he continues to agree with Husserl’s formulation of realism/anti-realism as a “pseudo-problem”).

As for the rest of Levi’s response, there’s no disagreement. I also think that onto-theology is a political problem. My complaint about Derrida’s treatment of Aristotle is that he treats realism as the source of the political problem, and this is because of the fact that he conflates realism with onto-theology.

For example, when Aristotle makes his famous point that when Anaxagoras says that everything mirrors everything, this means that there is no reason why we wouldn’t walk off a cliff, or why we wouldn’t try to go to Megara by sitting still rather than by walking in that direction. Aristotle concludes his humorous reductio by saying that speaking with a person with such views would be no better than speaking with a plant. Derrida then implies that there are sinister political undertones to Aristotle’s claiming that his opponents are no better than plants, but that’s just grandstanding– there is nothing the least bit sinister either in Aristotle’s tone in that passage, or in his metaphysical view that a thing must be itself rather than everything.

Onto-theology is something completely different from metaphysical realism. Onto-theology is the view that some particular being, or some particular state of things, is a better metaphysical embodiment than others of the withdrawn reality of being– so that German, for example, is treated as a language somehow closer to Sein than is Spanish. And that’s obviously a shining example of bad politics. But it’s onto-theology’s fault, not realism’s fault. This isn’t a small issue, since the notion has been abroad for 30 or so years that if you think things exist outside their relations to us, there must be oppressive political consequences. But that’s only true if along with thinking that there is a non-relational reality, that you yourself have privileged direct access to that reality, and should be permitted to use your discovery of that reality to force other people to shut up. And this is of course an impossible view for anyone, like me, who thinks there is only oblique access to the real– or “one reality, many truths,” as I have sometimes put it. The problem with Derrida is that he leaves out the “one reality” part. He sees that as inherently oppressive and onto-theological in its own right, which it’s not.