Trace, Dissemination, ‘Survivre’: Derrida’s ‘Biology’ and the ‘Socius’Colm J. Kelly, St. Thomas University, New Brunswick, CANADA

Abstract: There is no explicit philosophy of biology or evolution in Derrida, but many of his terms imply a sustained engage-ment with biological and evolutionary issues. For example, “dissemination” implies a rethinking of the concepts of repro-duction and even of organism. Dissemination is the scattering of the seed, rather than its maturation and recuperation intoitself. Self-dissemination instead of self-reproduction would be the ‘slogan’ of Derrida’s biology. The notion of survivre(survival or living on) implies a re-evaluation of life and death and the relationship between them, where life and death areno longer thought to be completely separable states of being and non-being. Once the biological resonances of central termsof Derrida have been elucidated, his entire body of work can then be interpreted, following the lead of Christopher Johnson,as an intervention in the history of life, where logocentric metaphysics and the cultures which inherit it are themselves amajor aspect of the hominization of the ‘animal’, and where deconstruction is a mutation in this evolution. Finally, it willbe shown that the problematic of biology implied in Derrida’s work can also be linked to an implied problematic of the‘social’ in the same work, potentially leading to a radical re-thinking of what we mean by ‘society.’

Keywords: Derrida, Philosophy, Problematic of Biology, Problematic of the ‘Social’

Approaching Derrida, Approaching theSocial

THE PRESENT WORK is part of a largerattempt to re-read Derrida’s work in light ofa theme which Derrida himself only touchedon in passing: the question of the nature of

society or the social. The terms Derrida favouredwhen he did directly address such matters were ‘thesocial bond’ or the ‘socius’, the latter being the Latinword which is a precursor to our word ‘society.’Before addressing the topics referred to in my title,it is necessary to address two preliminary issues:ways of approaching the work of Derrida in general;and ways of approaching the question of the socialin relation to Derrida’s work.

In approaching Derrida’s work in general I makeseveral assumptions, most of which are shared bythe best commentators on, and interpreters, of Der-rida.1 Derrida’s work is not nihilistic, relativistic orskeptical. Rather it is aiming for universality of scopeand is systematic in nature; however it is operatingat the limits of the very Western metaphysics withinwhich, for reasons which are both historical and ne-cessary, the concepts and values of the universal andthe system have constituted themselves. In strivingfor universality and systematicity at the very limits

of the system within which these same values aredefined, Derrida’s work necessarily produces para-doxical results. It will produce a universality of‘“very little, almost nothing’” (Critchley),2 and a“system beyond being” (Gasche, Tain), or a systemwithout system. These paradoxes are in turn tied intothe complicated, varied, and often difficult nature ofDerrida’s styles of writing, arguing and composinghis works. Derrida’s writings are normally very closecommentaries on texts of the Western philosophicaland literary tradition, to the extent that these com-mentaries subtly intervene into the texts of that tradi-tion, acting like a parasite or a virus, which sends itshost on a diversion, or in a slightly new direction.These writings never present themselves as a thesisor argument, which could be finally and fully collec-ted together in the form of presence, and deliveredinto the presence of the readers. This is the fameddifficulty of Derrida’s style, which however, is intim-ately connected, indeed central, to the deconstructionof the Western metaphysics of presence.

The result of the foregoing is that the presentcommentary must also strive to discover the universaland the systematic in Derrida, while at the same timeallowing for chance, singularity, the idiom, the event,the aubobiographical, and so on, those very entitieswhich challenge the logic of universality and system-

1 There are many fine commentaries on Derrida. In this context, I will mention only the two that have influenced and helped me the most:Gasche, The Tain of the Mirror, and Bennington, Jacques Derrida.2 This phrase, the title of Critchley’s book, is borrowed from Derrida’s early essay on Levinas, “Violence and Metaphysics,” from whichI quote (80): “A community of the question, therefore (…) A community of decision, of initiative, of absolute initiality, but also a threatenedcommunity in which the question has not yet found the language it has decided to seek, is not yet sure of its own possibility within thecommunity. A community of the question about the possibility of the question. This is very little - almost nothing – but within it, today, issheltered and encapsulated an unbreachable dignity and duty of decision.”

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aticity, to enter into and even disturb the comment-ary. Thus there must be a certain risk involved asone develops a commentary on Derrida, a risk thatone’s writing and presentation will be disturbed andextended beyond itself, and one must welcome, in-deed cultivate, that risk. For the present paper, thismeans that the terms in my title do not form a gener-ative matrix from which all my ideas would be de-rived. Rather they would form something more likea trail or a network of traces which I would try totrack and follow, with the possibility always beingthere that a new direction, to cite the overall themeof our conference and community, could be a diver-sion or a going astray, and that this possibility or riskof diversion is integral to the possibillity of any newdirection.3

It is now time briefly to discuss the question ofhow to address the idea of the ‘social’ based onDerrida’s work. The social could be the ‘last bestname’4 for what Derrida is drawn to, and feels thenecessity of, to go quickly and to use a troubledword, deconstructing. The ‘social’ would, then, beone of the latest names for the metaphysical themat-ics and topoi, which Derrida has been pursuing forso long. Émile Durkheim, probably the most sociolo-gical of thinkers from the era when sociology wasconsolidating and stabilizing itself, in a famous pas-sage from 1912, elevates society to the status of anall-encompassing totality: “Since the universe existsonly in so far as it is thought of, and since it isthought of in its totality only by society, it takes itsplace within society; it becomes an element of soci-ety’s inner life, and thus society is itself the totalgenus (le genre total) outside of which nothing ex-ists” (Forms 443 Formes 630).” 5

This conception of society as a totality, whichencompasses and explains everything, seems an easyand obvious target for deconstruction. Perhaps it istoo obvious a target. Is it a philosopheme, whichprogrammes the text of Durkheim and the history ofsociology, or is it a disguise, and a lure to lead usastray? In reading the apparent philosophemes in thehistory of sociology one must be attuned and re-at-

tuned carefully to where they lead, so as not to fallinto the trap of all too easily ‘deconstructing’ them.6

So, if one follows this path towards the ‘social,’caution is in order. One might have to withdraw, toretreat, and to try again, on a different route. Onesuch route might be to re-inflect the words and con-cepts ‘society’ and the ‘social’ in a new direction.Here a clue might be found in Derrida’s treatmentof Plato’s khora as “a general place or total recept-acle” (109) which itself does not take place or presentitself. Could the social serve as a temporary ‘nick-name’ for this “general place or total receptacle?”But this is just a clue. More generally, we could takea lead from the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, and workon re-inventing and re-using an already well-acceptedword, for example, the word ‘community.’ Thisword, in Nancy’s work, without losing a connectionto what we thought it had always meant, becomesre-invented, through repeated workings over. Wesee something there in ‘community’ that was neverthere before, but that must also always have left atrack or mark in the old concept (Inoperative). Ananalogous effort could be made with ‘society’ andthe ‘social’

The larger work, of which this paper is a part,seems to be allowing itself to be led down a differentpath. If we imagine, following what RodolpheGasché (Tain) taught us, that Derrida’s work ischaracterized by a non-finite ensemble of quasi-transcendental infrastructural concepts (here Gaschéwas referring to such quasi-concepts as the trace,arche-writing, the mark, etc.); or if we imagine, as Ido, that we could characterize Derrida’s more recentwork as proposing a non-finite ensemble of quasi-phenomenological analyses, which through retaininga quasi-transcendental trait, mark the essential limitsof such experiences as forgiving, lying, singularity,the event, the signature, mourning, etc.; or if weimagine again, as I do, that Derrida’s works areevents, interventions, tracks, traces, grafts, or viruses,which occur in the history of his life and his culture,in the history of metaphysics, in the history of liter-ature, in the history of ‘theory’, in the history of ourtimes, in the history of the ‘West’, in the history of

3 This paper was first delivered at a confrerence entitled “New Directions in the Humanities,” American University of Paris, June 2007,hence my reference to a new direction, here and elsewhere. I wrote about the theme of diversion over twenty years ago, in a paper that becamemy first publication, and which was written for Derrida in a course I had been pursuing with him in Toronto (“Homecomings”). (I deliberatelyuse the first person singular here and on occasion throughout the paper, as the chance of an intersection between two singularities, or twoautobiographies, mine and Derrida’s, something which happened empirically and actually on only two brief occasions, is a sub-theme ofthis paper and of the larger work of which it is a part.)4 In coining this phrase I am suggesting that the “metaphysics of presence” influences many different discourses, each one at the time be-lieving it has solved the fundamental problem, for example, of knowledge or morality. A new ‘last best name’ will always arrive after orduring the decline of the previous one. Cf. Derrida’s distinction between closure and end. We have reached the closure of Western meta-physics, but its end could be deferred indefinitely (Writing).5 I have on occasion, as here, slightly modified a translation from French. In all such cases, references to the French text are supplied.6 Rodolphe Gasché (“Deconstruction”) was one of the first to warn about turning what already and all too hastily been called deconstructioninto a shallow, mechanical operation. He must have helped many graduate students and others to rigorously articulate their own misgivingsabout what was transpiring in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, at least in North America. At least this is what his work helped me to do.For my own reading of Durkheim, which I believe learned the ‘methodological’ lesson Gasché intended, see Kelly, “’If the Child…’”

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the world, in the history of our species, in the historyof history, in the history of life; then it is possible toimagine that oneself, with one’s history, biography,education, singularity, and so on, could, howeverhumbly, countersign this immense work, this stillliving-dying, viral, machinal, death-bearing, life-af-firming, sometimes beautiful and usually disturbing,event which is Derrida’s work and signature. Thislatter approach, without excluding the first two, isthe one, however audacious or humble, that I findmyself taking.

The Trace and the Non-originDerrida’s work throughout his career, but more espe-cially in the 1960’s, was concerned to delineate thelimits of a systematic chain of concepts and a dis-course, which constituted Western metaphysics, andwhich had characterized a whole epoch of the historyof the west, and thus of the world. This attempt toidentify and delineate the limits of this entire concep-tual-philosophical system of course came to be calleddeconstruction, a term which hardly does justice towhat Derrida was engaged in. In delimiting thissystem there is no question of relativizing it or sub-jecting it to a sociological or historical materialistsociology of knowledge explanation. These resourcesare themselves internal to the system being decon-structed.

Instead Derrida takes the most rigorous philosoph-ical formulations of this system and identifies theirinternal limits and incoherencies. An attempt is thenmade to account for these through a more powerfullogic or system, a logic or system which exceeds lo-gic or system, a system beyong being, to paraphraseRodolphe Gasche (Tain), whose work has helped mehere and for many years. But this formalization of,and accounting for, the limits of a system of thoughtis not itself purely formal. Derrida makes powerfulclaims about the structure and nature of reality, life,history and so on, because the history of Westernmetaphysics is part of the history of the West, of theworld and even of life.

One of Derrida’s principal targets is the notion oforigin: a simple first point or moment, which givesrise to, or generates, or causes what follows. In placeof the origin, pure and simple, and an origin wouldalways be pure and simple, Derrida proposes thenotion of trace. A trace is, of course, a trace left bysomething else. A trace points to what originated,gave rise to or left behind the trace, to the origin ofthe trace, in other words. Derrida (Grammatology61) proposes, instead of the origin of the trace, thenotion of an originary trace, the arche-trace, or thetrace of a trace:

This trace is in fact contradictory and not accept-able within the logic of identity. The trace is

not only the disappearance of origin. Within thediscourse that we sustain and according to thepath that we follow it means that the origin didnot even disappear, that it was never constitutedexcept reciprocally by a non-origin, the trace,which thus becomes the origin of the origin.From then on, to wrench the concept of the tracefrom the classical scheme, which would deriveit from a presence or from an originary non-trace and which would make of it an empiricalmark, one must indeed speak of an originarytrace or arche-trace.

Then discussing both Husserl and some of theprominent linguists of the post World War II period,from Saussure to Hjelmslev, Derrida asks how thephonic element assume its form, that is, its imprintedform, its form that can be iterated or repeated as thesame? Through differences from other terms, as weknow from Saussure.

On the one hand, the phonic element, the term,the plenitude that is called sensible, would notappear as such without the difference or oppos-ition which gives them form (…) Here the ap-pearing and functioning of difference presup-poses an originary synthesis not preceded byany absolute simplicity. Such would be the ori-ginary trace. Without a retention in the minimalunit of temporal experience, without a trace re-taining the other as other in the same, no differ-ence would do its work and no meaning wouldappear (Grammatology 62).

Drawing together rather rapidly some inferencesfrom these quotations, the trace, the arche-trace, orthe trace of the trace, which never appears as such,inscribes or puts in play an alterity, or otherness,which is irreducible and which cannot be recuperatedor domesticated by the self-same or the identical,even though this reference to the other, as Derridaindicates in the quote above, is constitutive of theself-same or the identical. Rodolphe Gasche (Tain190, 191-192) explains as follows:

The arche-trace is a minimal structure of gener-alized reference, whereby reference must beunderstood in the broadest sense of referring,as alluding or pointing to something other. Thearche-trace is a minimal structure of referral tothe extent that it constitutes difference betweenterms or entities. Indeed what it describes is thatall reference to self takes place by way of a de-tour through an Other and thus presupposes anoriginary self-effacement. The arche-traceunites the double movement of reference (toself or Other) and of self-diversion.

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Note here that the alterity being here referred to isprimarily the other of the concept and of identity,and that a concept or an identity must make referenceto what it is not in order to constitute itself as itself.Note also that this otherness or alterity never presentsitself as such. It withdraws in doing its work; it isthus the other of the other, or the alterity of the other.

Note also that the work being done here seems tobe primarily conceptual, not referring to living othersor human others. But this reference to the other ofthe concept is not irrelevant to life, to living beingsor to living others. Derrida hints at a remodelling oflife along the lines of what the trace, and relatedconcepts, the supplement, iterability, the remark, etc.imply, and he also hints at remodelling concept,trace, sign, language, etc. along the lines of what thenotion of life implies: an economizing and protectiverelation to self by reference to the other; and thedissemination or dispersal of this self in relation tothe other. A trace is always effaceable; the generativegerm or gene is always mortal.

Science, Life, DisseminationDerrida’s approach to the conceptual and discursivestructures of Western philosophy and culture resonatewith a problematic of biology and of life, which arealso developed in his work, and also with a positiveor supportive attitude to science and technology, al-though the latter is only hinted at. Derrida’s briefreferences to the practice of natural science havenearly always been positive. In Of Grammotology,published in 1967, which is based partly on reviewessays published two years earlier, Derrida makesdiscreet references to biology, mathematics, inform-ation science and cybernetics, arguing that the expan-ded concept of writing that he is proposing has itsequivalent in all these fields. For example, relatinghis concept of the trace to Levinas, Heidegger, Niet-zsche and Freud, he adds: “And finally, in all scientif-ic fields, notably in biology, this notion seems cur-rently to be dominant and irreducible” (Grammato-logy 70). Or in relation to the concept of writing, hesays: “…the contemporary biologist speaks of writ-ing and pro-gram in relation to the most elementaryprocesses of information within the living cell”(Grammatology 9). Derrida also makes several ref-erences to mathematics and to the use of mathematicsin the sciences, especially with respect to howmathematical notation challenges or exceeds phono-centrism, that is the dominance of the phonetic as-pects of, and the phonetic model of, speech andwriting. The place of mathematics in cultures ofphonetic writing is “the place where the practice of

scientific language challenges intrinsically and withincreasing profundity the ideal of phonetic writingand all its implicit metaphysics (metaphysics itself)”(Grammatology 10). The concept of science, how-ever, still remains firmly lodged within metaphysics,and indeed, as a concept, may be inseparable fromit, in the form of theory and of the epistémè, that isin the form of the theory of knowledge. It is becauseof this metaphysical appurtenance of the concept ofscience, and not because of any opposition to thepractice of science (on the contrary), that Derridasuggests that grammatology will never become apositive science. The trace, the gramme, arche-writ-ing and so on, will never take on the form of presencewhich has always been required of the scientific ob-ject as metaphysically construed in the concept of,and in the philosophy of, and in the name of, sci-ence.7

Thus, in Derrida there is an openess to the prac-tices of the sciences, and not just to the pure sciences,but also to applied sciences and technologies. Thinkhere of Derrida’s repeated use of the motif of thegraft in his earlier work, and of the motif of theprosthesis in his more recent work (e.g., Monolingual-ism). This is part of his re-thinking of the concept oftechnology as it has traditionally been opposed tonature (the physis/techne couple). If there is no ori-ginary nature, as Derrida shows, in Grammatology;if there is no nature that has not always been supple-mented with something additional to nature, thenthere can be no in-principle opposition to new tech-nologies, even ones that seem to interfere with whatwe take to be life in general and human life in partic-ular. Everything to do with the treatment of the sup-plement undermines the idea of nature as a pure un-sullied state prior to any artificial or cultural interven-tion. For example, with respect to Rousseau, Derridawrites: “…for we have to read, in the text, that theabsolute present, Nature, that which words like ‘realmother’, etc., name, have always already escaped,have never existed; that what opens meaning andlanguage is writing as the disappearance of naturalpresence” (Grammatology 159, Grammatologie 228.The translator omitted “etc.”).

This is not to say that Derrida is proposing aphilosophy of evolution, or of the gene. On the con-trary, for Derrida there is no self-reproducing geneas such. Of course genes are copied and survive allthe time. But the possibility of error, drift, deviationand mutation are inherent to the very possibility ofthe gene and its suvival, the possibility of its beingcopied and living on. The “germ” is always “mortal.”Derrida says little of this directly. But it is impliedin many of his central concepts, perhaps the most

7 Of arche-writing, Derrida (Grammatology 57 Grammatologie 83) writes that it “cannot and can never be recognized as the object of ascience. It is that very thing which cannot let itself be reduced to the form of presence. The latter orders all objectivity of the object and allrelation to knowledge (toute relation de savoir)”

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obvious being ‘dissemination.’ Dissemination is thedispersal of meaning, the always present possibilityof internal drift and deviation in any message ormeaning. More specifically, it is a dispersal ofmeaning that cannot be recuperated into a theme ora unity or a totality (e.g. a monograph, a book or anencyclopaedia). It also refers more properly, althoughmetaphorically, to the spreading of ideas, and literallyor etymologically to the dispersal of seeds by a plantor tree. This notion is deployed by Derrida to coun-teract the paternalistic logocentric philosophy ofWestern metaphysics, where meaning, or the idea,is always recuperated into itself without loss or re-mainder, as a sort of self-fulfilling seed or self-repro-ducing father (Dissemination).

Christopher Johnson (System 150ff.) confirms anddemonstrates that this and other terms are meant toresonate with – amongst other things – a problematicof biology. In terms of its biological resonance, wecan think of dissemination as implying a rethinkingof the concepts of reproduction, descent, inheritanceand genealogy. Dissemination is the scattering of theseed, rather than its maturation and recuperation intoitself. Genetically, one can think of oneself as atransfer, or gathering and dispersal, point, fromwhich, spread out in front and behind of one, is ascattering of genes in a geometric progression. Self-dissemination instead of self-reproduction would bethe ‘slogan’ of Derrida’s biology, if we can put it socrudely for a moment. More precisely, there wouldnever be self-reproduction, as such; rather therewould be a mutually re-inforcing and mutually un-dermining intertwinement of self-reproduction andself-dissemination.

The biological resonances of Derrida’s work res-onate in turn with his many meditations on life andon death – or rather with his sustained, nuanced andvaried deconstruction of the life/death opposition.Here, given constraints of space, we can do no betterthan to turn to L’animal que donc je suis [The animalwhich therefore I am (I follow)], where he says,concerning “the question of the living and of theliving animal,” that “for me that will always havebeen the most decisive question” (Animal 402).Opening a qualification in a paragraph in which hetakes issue with the supposition that there is a singleline opposing the human animal to all other animals,Derrida writes:

Beyond the edge of the so-called human…rather than the ‘Animal’ or ‘Animal Life,’ thereis already a heterogeneous multiplicity of theliving, or more precisely (since to say ‘the liv-ing’ is already to say too much or not enough)a multiplicity of organizations of relationsbetween living and dead, relations of organiza-tion or lack of organization among realms thatare more and more difficult to dissociate by

means of the figures of the organic and inorgan-ic, of life and/or death (‘Animal’ 399).

For Derrida, then, life is implicated in death and vice-versa. But this co- implication is such that it cannotbe recuperated in any way, whether dialectically, ortheologically, or in terms of a pantheistic or pan-vi-talist cycle of life and death. Our deaths are carriedin our genes and in sexual reproduction. Our deathsare already announced more generally in what wecould call the trace-structure of experience in general.The traces we leave behind might perhaps surviveus, and so they anticipate our deaths. The names weare given carry beyond our lives and so carry ourdeaths within them. Every relation to the other carrieswithin it our own mortality and finitude, where asDerrida (Work 117) says, “we are only ever ourselvesfrom that place within us where the other, the mortalother resonates.” Every religious or political idealvalues human life itself, but always human life asmore than mere life, as a survivre, an above-life, ora more-than-life, for which life may have to be sac-rificed. Referring to this double postulate of respectfor life, and a sort of ritualized, mechanized sacrifi-cing of life, Derrida (Faith 50) writes: “What are themechanics of this double postulation (respect of lifeand sacrificiality)? I refer to it as mechanics becauseit reproduces, with the regularity of a technique, theinstance of the non-living of, if you prefer, of thedead in the living (…) It was the marionnette, thedead machine yet more than living, the spectralfantasy of the dead as the principal of life and of sur-vival (sur-vie). This mechanical principle is appar-ently very simple: life has absolute value only if itis worth more than life.” More generally, every soci-ety, and every institution and every social bond, ismarked by the deaths of those who have gone before,and the wish to carry on beyond the presently living.

The Law of Originary SocialityLet us now discuss some of the principal referencesin Derrida to the ‘social’, the socius. References tothe social are very sparing in the first half of Der-rida’s career, but I will make a few indicative refer-ences. In Freud and the Scene of Writing (226-227)Derrida makes the following comment:

The subject of writing does not exist if we meanby that some sovereign solitude of the author.The subject of writing is a system of relationsbetween strata: the Mystic Pad, the psyche, so-ciety, the world. Within that scene, on thatstage, the punctual simplicity of the classicalsubject is not to be found. In order to describethe structure, it is not enough to recall that onealways writes for someone; and the opositionssender-receiver, code-message, etc., remain

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extremely coarse instruments. We would searchthe public in vain for the first reader: i.e., thefirst author of a work. And the sociology of lit-erature is blind to the war and ruses perpetratedby the author who reads and by the first readerwho dictates, for at stake here is the origin ofthe work itself. The sociality of writing asdrama requires an entirely different discipline.

Here there is a deconstruction of the classicalautonomous subject, which Derria divides betweenthe unconscious, the psyche, society and the world.But there is no recourse to a classical sociology,which, as in Durkheim, would make society itself acapital ‘S’ Subject. Instead there is the ruse of refer-ence, decoy and diversion, which leaves none of thedichotomies between self and world, individual andsociety, in place. These ruses, this sociality, wouldrequire an “entirely different discipline” (“une touteautre discipline” – a totally other discipline) (Freudet la scène de l’ècriture 334). Here there are hintsthat there is some kind of originary sociality behindwhat sociology normally captures.

In the context of commenting on Lévi-Strauss inOf Grammatology (130-131, Derrida writes:

It has long been known that the power of writ-ing in the hands of a small number, caste, orclass, is always contemporaneous with hierarch-ization, let us say with political difference; it isa the same time distinction into groups, classes,and levels of economico-politico-technicalpower, and delegation of authority, and powerdeferred and abandoned to an organ of capital-ization. This phenomenon is produced from thevery onset of sedentarization; with the constitu-tion of stocks at the origin of agricultural soci-eties.

And Derrida continues:

This entire structure appears as soon as a societybegins to live as a society, that is to say fromthe origin of life in general, when, at very het-erogenous levels of organization and complex-ity, it is possible to defer presence, that is to sayexpense or consumption, and to organize pro-duction, that is to say, reserve in general. Thisis produced well before the appearance ofwriting in the narrow sense, but it is true, andone cannot ignore it, that the appearance ofcertain systems of writing three or four thousandyears ago was an extraordinary leap in the his-tory of life.

The first comment, as Derrida acknowledges, con-tains nothing new. But the second comment impliesan originary or arche-sociality, which precedes what

we ordinarily think of as society, and which refersinstead to the beginning of what we might call organ-ization. The organization of relations amongst thecomponents of living beings, however simple, wouldalready contain the reference to some other, or thetrace of something different, and this would be anoriginary sociality. It, however, would be a “verylittle, almost nothing,” which would make possibleall more complex forms of social organization, whilealso preventing them from solidfying into the formof fully present, fully existing entities. Here, asthroughout, these remain hints or traces, which I willpursue more relentlessly in a later work.

Let us now move forward rather abruptly to thesecond half of Derrida’s career, where, as is wellknown, reference to social and political matters ismore explicit. Let us focus in particular on the fol-lowing passages, drawing on Levinas, where Derridamakes his most explicit, clearest and longest everstatement on the social. Derrida has been quotingand commenting extensively on a phrase attributedto Aristotle, which in turn has been quoted and re-quoted repeatedly in the history of Western philo-sophy and literature. Derrida asks, what is happeningwhen one bases one’s discourse on a quote? Thewords are those of another, and yet one must takeresponsibility for them. This, argues Derrida (Politics230-231, Politiques 258-259), points to what wemight call a general structure of experience:

[E]ven before the question of responsibility wasposed, the question of ‘speaking in one’s ownname’, countersigning such and such an affirm-ation, etc. – we are caught up, one and another,in a sort of heteronomic and dissymetricalcurvature (courbure) of social space – moreprecisely a curvature (courbure) of the relationto the other: prior to all organized socius, priorto all políteia, all determined ‘government’,before all ‘law.’

The relation to the other is one of Derrida’s centraland obsessive concerns. By making “social space”a near synonym for the relation to the other, theformer term can acquire a significance, depth andscope, which cannot be under-estimated. But it willnot become a master-term. It will take its place in anindefinitely long and ever-changing chain of conceptsin Derrida’s work, all of which bear family-resemb-lances to each other but none of which can be directlysubstituted for the others. The heteronomy and dissy-metry of the social space, in particular, prevents thesocial from taking on the quality of an actual entity,while the reference to the relation to the other insertsthe social space in a network of references preciselyto the question of the reference to the other and thetrace of the trace, as articulated above by Gasche.Derrida continues, with respect to this curvature of

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social space, prior to all organized society, politicsor law:

Prior to or before it, in the sense of Kafka’sbefore the Law. Let’s get this right: prior to anydetermined law, as either natural law or positivelaw, but not prior to any law in general, becausethis heteronomical and asymmetrical curvatureof a sort of originary sociality is a law, perhapsthe very essence of the law.

After the Kafka reference, which we must pass overfor reasons of time and space, Derrida gives furtherprominence to the notion of the social, using the term“originary sociality”, and implying that it lies behindor before all established institutions of law, politicsand government. This is the most powerful and directstatement Derrida has ever made about the social.However, as noted above, we should be careful notto take it and erect it into a master-term, which wouldbe completely anti-thetical to what Derrida is attempt-ing. He continues, slightly changing tack, in the veinof what I call a quasi-phenomenology of experience:

What is taking place at this moment, the dis-quieting experience we are having, is perhapsjust the silent unfolding of that strange violencewhich has for so long, forever, insinuated itselfinto the origin of the most innocent experiencesof friendship or of justice.

Here Derrida is referring to his previous analysis ofthe strangeness of what is happening when he begins,and bases, his address to his audience on the afore-mentioned quote attributed to Aristotle, rather thandirectly on his – Derrida’s – own words. The “strangeviolence”, in short, would be the violence of the re-lation to the other, or more generally the violencethat consigns everything to the trace which will re-main of it in the future. Elaborating on this strangeviolence of responsibility, Derrida continues:

We have begun to respond. We are alreadycaught, we are already surprised, in a certainresponsibility, and the most ineluctable of re-sponsibilities - as if it were possible to think ofa responsibility without freedom. We are inves-ted with an undeniable responsibility at themoment we begin to signify something. Butwhere does that begin? Does it ever begin? Thisresponsibility assigns us our freedom withoutleaving it with us, if one can put it that way, and

we see it coming from the other. It is assignedto us by the other, from the other, even beforeany hope of reappropriation permits us to as-sume this responsibility in the space of whatcould be called autonomy.

Here Derrida is again re-thinking the classical sub-ject, by arguing counter-intuitively, that heteronomymust come before autonomy. The other gives us thelaw, and it is only from within this already institutedheteronomy that we can begin to take responsibility– to be hetero-autonomous, we might say. Thusagain, Derrida’s orginary sociality leaves its mark.We should also note that Derrida’s question – whendoes signifying begin? does it ever begin? - signalstowards questioning the absolute purity of the distinc-tion between response, as in responsibility, and reac-tion, as in something more ancient, more powerfuland less ‘human’ than responsibility.8 With respectto this experience of finding ourselves having begunto respond, Derrida continues:

In the course of this experience, the other ap-pears as such – that is to say, the other appearsas a being whose appearance appears withoutappearing, without being submitted to the phe-nomenological law of the originary and intuitivegiven that governs all other appearances, allother phenomenality as such. The wholly other(le tout autre), and every other is totally other/isevery other (et tout autre est tout autre), comeshere to upset the order of phenomenology. Andgood sense. That which comes before autonomymust also exceed it, that is succeed it, survive(survivre) it and indefinitely overrun (déborder)it.

What comes before autonomy is heteronomy - therelation to the other. This relation to the other alsosurvives autonomy; it survives the self’s relation tothe self. It survives life, we could say. Survival inthe sense Derrida has developed it means: survivre,a living on after life; the traces left of this life, whichalso come before it to hollow it out and haunt it; aliving on through inscribing a more than life, anabove (sur) life at the heart of life, something morevaluable than life at the heart of life, a sacrificialprinciple, a more than life, something to die for. Thiswould be survival as more than life, and less thanlife, a living on that carries death folded into it andis also a dying.

8 In relation to the above comments, I cannot resist recounting the following anecdote. I spoke to Derrida only twice, the second time at aconference in Albany about 6 years ago. On the first morning of the conference I was standing at the tables at the back of the seminar room,where the coffee was, anxiously waiting to be surprised by his arrival. I turned to the table for a moment, with my back to the door. ThenI turned back, and Derrida was standing with a colleague in the doorway. It was a small conference where almost everybody knew eachother, and the look on Derrida’s face was unmistakeable: a momentary look of slight surprise and puzzlement at the sight of someone whohe did not know or could not place. Surprised by his unanticipated surprise, the moment was gone before it had happened.

197COLM J. KELLY

Thus I am suggesting that Derrida’s brief butpowerful comments on orginary sociality can be abasis for a re-thinking of what we mean by the social.This new direction in the meaning of the social willallow it at once to be extraordinarily powerful andwide-ranging, but also to be “very little, almostnothing”, that is, the minimal level of organizationand reference to the other co-terminous with life andnecessary to get life going. From there, everythingthat sociology traditionally attributes to an almostomnipotent and ubiquitous ‘society’ will have to bere-inscribed into the psychic, the sexual, the econom-ic, the political, the ethical, etc. The social wouldleave none of these domains untouched, but norwould it govern them or the relations between them.The social would also be overlaid with and interlacedwith the lives, deaths and societies of the other ‘non-human’ species of animals, as it would be with thememories of the dead and the hope of survival in thefuture. In short, this new model of the social would

be both more alive than previous models, and morespectral and mournful, or more deathly.

By Way of ConclusionThe preceding comments are not intended to providea definitive matrix for re-thinking the social, and thisfor essential as well as contingent reasons. Rather,they may provide clues and traces for others, andespecially myself, to follow in pursuing questionsabout the social in the future: what it is or is not inits essence or lack of an essence, and how it relatesto questions of the psyche, the economic, the politic-al, the ethical, life-death, etc. Perhaps these and latercomments will intervene in the corpus of Derrida’swork, slightly re-orienting it, sending some part ofDerrida studies, and some part of the humanities andsocial sciences on a slight deviation, a diversionwhich might or might not become a new direction.

ReferencesBennington, Geoffrey and Jacques Derrida Jacques Derrida. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago and London: U

of Chicago Press, 1993.Critchley, Simon Very Little…Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature. London and New York: Routledge, 1997.Derrida, Jacques. “L’Animal que donc je suis (à suivre).” L’Animal Autobiographique: Autour de Jacques Derrida. Ed.

Marie-Louise Mallet. Paris: Galilée, 1999. 251-301.------------- “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow).” Tr. D. Wills. Critical Inquiry 28.2 2002. 369-418.-------------- Dissemination. Tr. Barbara Johnson. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981.--------------- “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of `Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone.” Tr. S. Weber. Pp. 1-

78 in J. Derrida and G. Vatti.mo, eds., Religion. Stanford University Press, 1998.---------------Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.---------------De la grammatologie. Paris: Les éditions de minuit, 1967.------------- “Freud and the Scene of Writing.” Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1978. 196-231------------- “Freud et la scène de l’ècriture.” L’écriture et la différence. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967. 293-340.--------------”Khora.” On The Name. Ed. D. Wood. Stanford: Stanford U.P., 1995. 89-127.-------------Monolingualism of the Other 1998. Tr. P. Mensah. Stanford University Press.------------- Politics of Friendship. Translated by George Collins. London: Verso, 1997.------------- Politiques de l’amitié. Paris: Galilée, 1994.------------ Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Trans. David B. Allison. Preface by

Newton Garver. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973.------------ “Violene and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas.” Writing and Difference. Translated

by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. 79-153.--------------- The Work of Mourning. Ed. Pasale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago and London: University of

Chicago Press, 2001.--------------Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.Durkheim, Émile. Les formes élémentaire de la vie religieuse. Paris: PUF. 1960 (1912).--------------- The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Tr. Karen E. Fields. New York: Free Press, 1995.Gasche, Rodolphe. “Deconstruction as Criticism.” Glyph, 6 1979. 177215.--------------- The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection. Cambridge and London: Harvard U.P., 1986.Johnson, Christopher System and Writing in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida. Cambridge U.P. 1993.Kelly, Colm. ““‘If I say: ‘The child has eaten enough:’” Durkheim’s Pedagogy as Promise.” Current Perspectives in Social

Theory 11 1992. 251-274.------------- “Diversions and Homecomings: Cultural Nationalism and the recent drama of Brian Friel.” Studies: A Quarterly

Irish Review 76 1987 452462.Nancy, Jean-Luc The Inoperative Community. Ed. Peter Connor. Minneapolis and Oxford: U of Minnesota Press. 1991.

THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HUMANITIES, VOLUME 5198

About the AuthorDr. Colm J. KellyColm Kelly studied at Trinity College Dublin, and York University, Toronto. He is currently associate professorof sociology at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, N.B. his main interests are in certain strands of contem-porary continental philosophy, especially Levinas, Nancy, and more centrally, Derrida. Working from this tra-dition he attempts to re-think some of the major categories of social theory, especially the concept of the ‘social’itself. He has published on topics in social theory, and cultural and literary theory.

199COLM J. KELLY

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