The Problem of Textual Repetition as Machinic and Transcendental
François Laruelle
From Machines textuelles: déconstruction et libido d’écriture (Paris: Seuil, 1976), p.23-28.
1) For several reasons articulated within the functioning of the “general text,” a historicizing and systematic critique of deconstruction is impossible and useless. These reasons can only be produced in the course of investigations, only appearing if this course is first initiated in a violence necessary for the locus of deconstruction. There are inevitable violences, without which it is impossible to make “modern” thought work: when it is conceived as already being all possible violence. This somewhat different goal in the name of which the practice-theory of deconstruction is brought back into play – at the same time as it is dissected within its mechanisms, parodied at the same time as repeated, diverted from its immediate textual practice towards a system of textual machines – is what I will designate as the general economy of textual production. This X is progressively determined, its general conditions are fulfilled at the same time as the analysis of the techniques of deconstruction are effectuated: from the re-staging to the desiring production of the text. There is nothing in this project that corresponds to a “superseding” and even less to an “application.” It is an analytic of the re-inscription and that renounces the primacy of textual labour, not through its negation, but through its intensification. An “analytic” of the production of the “general text” must itself, in turn, produce the process of the practical-theoretical functionings of the textual re-staging.
It is analytic in the sense of generalized splitting [re-fente] and cleaving. These investigations propose, among others, to re-mark the outside-of-the-Kantian transcendental analytic: they bear on functionings and no longer on conditionings (the conditions of possibility). However, these machinic functionings of textuality that are immanent and no longer exterior to it like conditions remain more than ever transcendentals. That the elaboration of the system of textual repetition has the style of a completely transformed “transcendental analytic” cannot be surprising and pass for a regression except under three conditions: a) to disregard the true place of textual practice that is subordinate because it is included within the concrete synthetic functioning of the double writing and the double gesture of re-inscription, which is realistically an “anonymous” process of repetition or production effectuated under the ilk of the text; b) to disregard the possibility of the transcendental being absolved of a problematic between the subject and the object: the repetition of textual differance is “transcendental” in its own way (neither Kantian nor Husserlian) because there is a non-subjective and non-representative concept of it. It is differance that is transcendental – that is, productive outside of the conditions of representation – and productive of representation: by this definition, excluding any constituting function of a subject, we occupy and displace the positions of the classical thoughts about the transcendental; and c) to disregard the style of the parody and the mimetic that belongs to repetition and that will be exercised here under the form of a paleonomy of the transcendental analytic, one that is rapidly cleaved and re-marked by the problematic of desiring production.
Our problem is therefore to extract from deconstruction its own power of repetition in view of constituting a process of textual and machinic production, no longer solely technical production. Immanent to the practice-theory of deconstruction, there is a thought of repetition. Repetition is not created ex nihilo: because it is a transcendental power, repetition already everywhere functions as a general system effectuated in a more or less restrained and repressed way by all texts. Repetition is activated by Derrida’s text: but repetition may not be inscribed there in the state of a general economy[1] and on a theoretical mode as it could be so. Stating the problems of the functioning of deconstruction on a theoretical mode always risks inducing a system where there is a practice. It is more important to make this practice appear as included within a process of production. We have privileged too much the destructive aspect of deconstruction at the expense of what it supposes: a production of textuality that is called “general,” general writing as a process of a generativity concerning which it is allowed to pose the problem of its libidinal conditions or the authentic subject of writing. It is in this direction through a sort of “analytic” cure of the “Derridean” text” that we will extricate that there is some machinic and energetic possibility within that which appears at first glance as the techniques of deconstruction.
2. Differance and its repetition (production) form the whole history of philosophy, which, in its current stage, is a thought of “general” differance – that is, transcendental, the transcendental being determined under differantial conditions and not, as philosophical common sense believes, by a “subject” wherein the concept of the subject always rather derives from the concept of the transcendental. Textuality attains a “generality” superior to the generality of the genus or the category, but it is only general because it derives from a textual differance (we will call it textuel to recall this destruction or cure of metaphysical textuality within a transcendental textuality) “smaller” and more positive than the given signifying difference, which is nevertheless the smallest difference produced by logocentrism as the restriction of general textuality. The generality of repetition has nothing to do with a conceptual or categorial generality. The generality of repetition is the generality of a production (here, the production of the text) that turns around a non-specific, non-individual, non-signifying differance – concerning the possibility of which it seemed necessary for us to question ourselves. This is to make deconstruction a problem and general textuality a question: we attempt to perceive within it an effectuation – perhaps a restrained one? – of generalized repetition as the Eternal Return of the Other, that is, that which appears to us to be the most powerful system of repetition and deconstruction.
One of the deconstructed texts among the most famous ones is “the” transcendental text (of course, nothing of such exists, there is no purely transcendental text – if not precisely affirmative general textuality, and any text is always transcendental to the extent where general textuality is immanent to it). In reality, that which is deconstructed is the value of subjectivity and the value of the transcendental insofar as it is associated to the value of subjectivity by the tradition. The transcendental subject is alone a restriction of a wholly other use of this concept – in particular a scholastic use, the supra-generic and more “objective” use and that must be related with the problematic of differance as production around which textuality turns, instead of, for example, turning around the signifier as linguistic and textual representation of the functionings of the text still do so.
The generality of writing that “henceforth” depends on this differance is projected beyond any generic generality and presence, even though the term “beyond” expresses no transcendence given by textuality in relation to effective texts but precisely that the text – through the traversal of its logocentric auto-interpretation – “transcends” or differs [diffère] towards its most immanent functioning each time. We have already said why we do not fear from resorting to this old vocabulary of transcendence (“transcendental,” not “transcendent”…), for reasons that precisely hold to the functioning of textuel machines as “energetic” or “desiring”: it is sufficient to make these old signs function as such machines, it is sufficient to render their machinic-transcendental deconstruction so that they would be produced, re-produced and consumed by a subject of writing as pure signs-simulacra inscribed on the Body of General Writing. There is no surer indication that one has remained a metaphysician and theologian than the refusal of certain words, the aphasia and treatment of certain signs as irremediably lost and compromised. Whoever refuses a sign does not think, and the definitive damnation of the term “transcendental” seems more concerning for whosoever utters it than for whosoever are its object.
3. Repeating deconstruction is therefore to generalize its procedures and its functionings in view of a textual mimetics of general repetition. Through deconstruction, it is to produce machinic effects, to liberate [dégager] the immanent transcendental machines of textuality inscribed as general. This machinic-transcendental element is inevitably repressed so that the motif of textual practice can be nuanced. The following investigation are – at once and indivisibly – exercises upon Derrida’s text and exorcisms of the persistent technique and practicity within deconstruction – “exorcises” and “exercisms”… a parody of re-inscription, a systematically regulated affirmation of differance as simulacra – at the same time as an analytic cure of deconstructing machines. Many problems await us, in particular the problem of the becoming of representation in relation to deconstruction. How do we articulate logocentrism or presence with the affirmation of the trace within a general economy? This is a question for one who looks in two diverging directions at once one and riven, unique and split: what is the mechanism of the insistence of presence? Can presence be entirely destroyed or not? What is the origin of the energy of deconstruction, what Levinas with somewhat different intentions calls “the energy of transcendental movement”? Under what conditions do these two movements articulate each other, one over the other, one within the other: in what place, or in what non-place? This is a question of the destiny of deconstruction and that returns to a theory-practice of textuel production as the effectuation of the most powerful repetition. Because differance is a “technique” of the splitting or cleaving of concepts, let us propose to cleave the concept of deconstruction: we do not go from representation to its deconstruction, but we go from the deconstruction of representation to the machinic and libidinal system as the genetic or textuel element of the scene of writing. Therefore, the problem is: through a repetition of deconstruction, how does one pass from deconstruction to a process of textuel production, and how do the non-technical machines of general textuality function?
Hence our risk and danger. It is because the repetition of the different takes on the mask of the same: the nihilist lassitude, the “everything is equal” of endless deconstruction, of the uniform affirmation of differential heterogeneity. Differance and the simulacrum as well have their disgust and lassitude. We must obviously protect the analysis, reading and re-reading of Derridean practices from deconstruction’s hasty reduction to a body of homogenous techniques of textual heterogeneity of a nihilist version of the general economy and the general strategy of differance. By assigning them another goal? By taking the risk of ordering them to a thesis because they are aimless and do not have the form of any thesis? It is difficult to practice a generalized suspicion without falling into the general formulae of suspicion, without being tempted by undifferentiated nihilist solutions and techniques, all ready to then help out ideological ends that would aggravate nihilism. However, our goal is different, either it is not a re-appropriation or it is not perhaps a goal: rather, the point would be to nuance textuel deconstruction and textuel production within their transcendental generality and differantiality, activating production within deconstruction, and to make “deconstruction” a machinic process determinable in terms of power and desire. The point is to bring the production of textuality to the point of excess where it would flow within the circle of the Eternal Return. Obviously, this is to expect more of the Eternal Return…
[1] The economy is general because it comports this moment of re-production internal to deconstruction in not confounding (even if it is the condition of it) with a capitalization of its effects. In Clang, Derrida contests the expression of general economy and sustains that it is always restrained and determined. If we understand him well, we want to signify the same thing: thus, it is the word “general” that does not have the same meaning here and there. The generality of the textual economy is by definition restrained – i.e., differantial. It is not at all a conceptual generality, but a transcendental generality that depends entirely on differance: the ring of the Eternal Return is only opened as a ring by being restrained, or is only opened as a strict passage (cf. Clang). Our use of the term “general economy” implies that it will be all the more general as it will be differantial (in the machinic-libidinal sense) or at the limit in-differant to textual values, but in-differant in excess of desiring differance of course. And it will be all the more restrained – transcendent, rather than transcendental – as it will be specified under the conditions of representation (in this sense, “restrained” is opposed to the differantial which is not opposed to it).
en-demic 