The Immanent Critique of the Sign[1]
François Laruelle
In Machines textuelles: déconstruction et le libido-d’écriture (Paris: Seuil, 1976), p.249-255.
1. Textuel repetition is the immanent critique of the sign, one that is not done from whatever outside-text. Since it is necessarily effectuated within/as the sign of the sign, there is a power of auto-critique immanent to the sign, to language, if you will, but it is according to the angle of repetition that such and such language, such and such determined chain is capable of playing, activating and affirming, in accordance with the power or textuel libido of the deconstructor who is the writer or so-called author.
Since Nietzsche – and Heidegger “repeats” the same exigency – we know that the question is: what is it to think? And we take as a guiding thread of the mediation of this question the non-tautological formula (which undoubtedly says the “same” thing as repetition, but not identical to presence): thought thinks. But also, and perhaps more radically still: language speaks [la langue parle]. That is: “the sign signs.” This formula, which describes/writes the being of the sign as différance, condenses the production of “signifiance” as the libidinal process of textuel machines. What one such formula introduces is the affirmation of the desiring multiplicities of the sign, and the critique of the whole linguistic and structuralist onto-theology of the primacy of the signifier: towards an affirmation of the sovereignty of the sign, for if the textual machine functions like the economy of the “same” of the sign, it does not connect to any referent, to any identity which would not be a sign in the process, but connects to another “productive” apparatus of signs, plugging carried out by desire. Even the critique of the reactive and negative elements in the text of the sign is immanent to the sign or is confounded with the generativity that expresses, in its own way, the directing formula. The Eternal Return of the text, related to a “specific” form determined by the libido as libido-of-writing coordinating [agençant] the apparatuses of textuality “on-the-side-of” textual representation, is our faktum, one that is more than a faktum. It implies the transformation – the abandonment of its simple form – of the problematic of outside-texts, but also the concept of ideology. More than a new “decoupage” of the field of this concept, it is its carrying-on through the motif of the objective quasi-logocentric appearance. The classical determinations of the sign, text, and outside-text (the famous “real” or “objectivity”) are displaced by the sign as repetition, but their relations are not conserved within this displacement. The general text, like the classical text (which has never been), is no longer susceptible to be measured by material or spiritual instances, re-inscribed to the benefit of a-signifying materiality or textuel desire. The critique of the sign is displaced, generalized as repetition, “immanent” to the sign or text, and it is what gives itself to us to re-read the phenomenological and structuralist, etc., critique and use of the sign as drifts and residuals, as the “materialist” critique of its values. “The sign (of) the sign” defines no economic, sexual, political, religious or egological region: the transcendental ego, measured by transcendental immanence all in exteriority to the Full Body, is still a transcendent “region,” a specification of the Textuel Body which ex-cedes them and forms a system of this excess: the (transcendental) being of the sign as supplement to any region, even to any determined textual chain. We must not plug the “sign (of) the sign” into any kernel of meaning (except to open the latter to the textuel scene) nor confound its transcendental and différantial body with effects-of-transcendence (science, objectivity, ego, economy) to which it is immanent, and which includes, let’s repeat, the practice and theory of re-inscription: fixing them in their facticity is to restore a referent of the play of traces, under the form, for example, of the material and theoretical practices of the transformation of a text. Repetition strategically makes the signifier intervene, but to liberate the sign from its idealist/empiricist conceptuality and transvaluate structurality. General textuality, within the angle of repetition, counts-discounts the conceptuality that “defines” the text. The object of a thinking-desiring thought of the text is the degree zero of the sign as sign (of) the sign, and which is but the “same” within the economy of its loss, the loss of its transcendence, when it becomes an authentic desiring multiplicity of traces.
2. Language undoubtedly “contains” différance in its circle, and contains all of the forms of the critique of presence and the signified. But it is the “circle” or the desiring Body of différance in the sign that “contains” language. All of the forms of critique, immanent to the functioning of language, immanent to the play of the sign (of) the sign, and which draws all of their deconstructive resources from it, is therefore not equivalent from the perspective of power. Their typology would perhaps be possible in accordance with their proximity to the general textuel system of production and re-production, their power of repetition. The hermeneutic circle which can have several versions, according to which it is related to the “same” of a cogito or a Dasein, is an effectuation determined by this general economy of différance, a restrained version of desiring production in such a system of linguistic intervals, in such a system of values and chains.
There are several ways of being caught in this circle. They are all more or less naïve, more or less empirical, more or less close to the formulation – that is, to the formalization – of this circle (…). Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger, for example, worked within the inherited concepts of metaphysics. Since these concepts are not elements or atoms, and since they are taken from a syntax and a system, every particular borrowing brings along with it the whole of metaphysics. This is what allows these destroyers to destroy each other reciprocally.[2]
The ”generalized auto-critique of language” can only be done from the Other of Différance, from the Textuel Body, through the re-splitting of the intervals and their negativity in view of textuel machines which are the authentic critique in action or the immanent analytics of “ordinary language.” In a specular milieu and in terms of sense, the varying hermeneutic circles are the transcendent version of the play of traces (of) the trace which is inscribed within a transcendental immanence more radical, more withdrawn – and more open as Textuel Body – than the immanence of the ego or Dasein still inscribed in the massive interval of the signified and the signifier, remaining necessarily subordinate to an empiricism of meaning, to a “transcendental” experience of the “givenness” of meaning as signification rather than its production. The possibility of this generalized critique of logocentrism is itself inscribed within this circle, or rather it “is” this ex-centred “circle” which rebounds and is relaunched by the Other of différance.
Every critique of meaning is a trait drawn from the finite-infinite debt of différance within the sign, drawn from the transcendental immanence of the trace as the Body of the libido effacing itself, unavoidably. This is because the superlogos, which owes nothing to the powers of a specific metalanguage, envelops the faculty that has the machines of language carry out their desiring repression and the sign from being différanciated to designate “themselves” as sign-of-the-sign, machine-of-the-machine. It isn’t the referent or the outside-text (science, the relations of production, the transcendental experience of the ego) which motivate and harbor the most radical critique of language. It is rather the Référantial of the libido-of-writing insofar as it is the “general” Body for textuality that does. It is language itself, precisely liberated from the shackles of the structure or the yoke of the ego, that has become a productive-unproductive machine of signs. Textuel machines, because there is no limitation external to their functioning but only an internal imitation that deconstruction extends through any text (the “false” ensemble of the closure and beyond-closure), and because they function in a purely immanent way within effects that they produce (generativity), de-limit and cleave, they re-peat and already exceed our relation to themselves, an intervention that is reserved to us in super-marking. It is only possible to intervene here under the conditions of the re-splitting and chiasm precisely, under the conditions of the simulacrum, and not under the conditions of the reality (practical) principle or objectivity, since its immanence (all by being outside of the “Full Body”) composes with whatever force of intervention, whatever material practice, but by bringing these forces and practices to the cleaved state of the “subject.” It is why the “deconstructing subject” is the desiring subject of writing, one that is as cleaved and deferred/differed [différé] as the latter, consuming the libido-of-writing, and not some reserved transcendental will or some “practices” disguised as a so-called defunct metaphysics, the smartest of its statuses, that only recognizes a technical, rather than machinic, materiality for the textuel process.
The re-splitting, by a turn of writing, by a turn of the textual presuppositions and residua, displaces the transcendental critique that was made through the investigation of the presupposeds, the foundations, and even functionings. The point is not to reveal différance in a horizon and to veil it in specular transcendence. The point is to make it work within oppositions where it is restrained, to cleave the concepts to better make it “rise to the surface” and glimmer as the zero-surface of the transcendental immanence of textuality. The traditional forms of critique are not useless (Marxism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, etc.), but under the condition that their effects would be re-distributed, and in particular the effect of “reality” or “objectivity” which, if it is taken within an unconditional validity, can serve at worst as metaphysical and political reaction. There is no reality which counts – we must dis-count it and put our finger on the ephemeral différance that it obscures. The zero degree of (generalized) critique affects all ontic regions, and it is therefore also radically political – thereby it communicates directly with desire or is “identical” to it. Its political efficacy cannot solely keep to the reversal phase [la phase du renversement]: it is to reduce politics to its transcendent determination while, if everything is political as we say very quickly today, it’s not because politics has absorbed the remainder, it’s that there is a transcendental “generality” of politics that it draws within the system of traces or in the economy of différance and through which it is also and immediately, “metaphysical,” and first textuel.
3. The system of textuel production is “a powerful and thus imperturbable simulacrum, yielding the undecidable signs of its pretence only in the sub-text.”[3] But there is no more sub-text than outside-text: “outside a certain angle of the remark.”[4] It’s rather the text which remains as the power of différance and repetition, the system of the “waste” of the logos, redeemed but in no way sublated, a remainder which is the “object” of the super-reduction, forming the superlogos in language and which renders possible derived effects and functions of metalanguage. As necessarily effectuating within a chain, repetition is compromised but, in its turn, compromises every sign. Must I even write this?: The superlogos is not a “superior” language or another language. The superlogos is the system of alterity within ordinary language, the economy of its re-marks, its angularity, but related to its most powerful generality and its desiring functioning. The superlogos is the inscription of a wholly other law of the effects of meaning and réfeerance, a law which is no longer transcendent and no longer rules the classical relations of the text and its referents from their outside but from a non-punctual and non-conceptual immanence since it is made from the exteriority of supplements. And it is this immanence of the system of textuel repetition, absolutely “other” than conceptual interiority (more transcendent than transcendental) that is the destiny of thought: its necessity and transparency. Thought as thus affirmed and super-reduced, subtracted from vouloir-dire and not able to intend “anything” [ne voulant plus « rien » dire], only grants a strategic (provisional and technical) privilege to certain marks where deconstruction fictions [fictionne], and which prime the textuel machines within such and such determined text. Rigorously understood, under the conditions of libidinal production rather than the conditions of vulgar temporality, deconstruction forbids assigning a “decisive” point of entry (and thus an exit) in the text: what is started is done, what is started is acted outside of any de-cision [l’entame se fait, s’agit hors de toute décision].
Therefore, there is no critique of general repetition, no critique of all possible critique and which (as a process of textuel production) unceasingly deconstructs textual representation. There is no de-cisive, transcendent violence exterior to it because it is the system of all possible violence, and simultaneously the non-violence of the neutral: at least insofar as deconstruction becomes affirmative and active. As a delirious [délirante] machine as much as a desiring [désirante] machine, pushing back its limit or its unavoidable edge, we cannot attempt to cross without passing through and consenting with the destiny of thought. We have no choice, no decision to think, in the face of the destiny of thought: I entends[5] an absolute, decisive choice, for it is always possible to strategically chose. There’s no exterior grip over this machine that does not let itself be demolished by a referent because it only functions as broken down. It’s a surface in exteriority and consequently entirely immanent, the Moloch of the sign, a machine that is supposed to produce a ruled system of deformations, the coherent system of all possible incoherencies and which is effectuated by the specific turbulence of each text and each system of oppositions. Thought is fictioning. Thought intends nothing [ne veut rien dire]. Accurate to the level of a single repetition and single turn of writing, philosophy is always philosophy-fiction – fiction does not mean [ne veut pas dire] “imaginary.” Besides, it does not intend anything. My philosophy is a fable: the voice of Being as simulacrum, except that it is not my own and hardly anyone else’s – it’s a “floating fable.”[6]
[1] Originally published as “Une analytique immanente du langage ordinaire et philosophique,” or “An immanent analytic of ordinary and philosophical language.” – Trans.
[2] L’écriture et différence, p.413 [Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978) p.281 – Trans.].
[3] Dissémination, p.36 note [trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) 1981, p.30n28 – Trans.]
[4] Positions, p.117 note [trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982) p.111n4. – Trans.]
[5] To be understood in connection to Derrida’s use of vouloir-dire. – Trans.
[6] Dissémination, p.36 note [trans. p.29-30note28 – Trans.]
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