Non-Ethical Ethics

Writing and Violence in the Early Derrida

Daniel Lupo
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Non-Ethical Ethics: Writing and Violence in the Early Derrida

Il n’y a pas d’éthique sans présence de l’autre mais aussi et par conséquent sans absence,
dissimulation, détour, différance, écriture. L’archi-écriture est l’origine de la moralité comme de
l’immoralité. Ouverture non-éthique de l’éthique. Ouverture violente. Comme on l’a fait pour
le concept vulgaire de l’écriture, il faut sans doute suspendre rigoureusement l’instance éthique
de la violence pour répéter la généalogie de la morale.

1. Ethics and metaphysics: Derrida apart from Levinas 2

2. Ethics and the “science of writing” 5
3. Writing, violence, and the body 11
4. Logocentrism and localization: Derrida reading Lévi-Strauss 22
5. Violence of and against the origin 31
6. The violence of questioning/the questioning of violence 48
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-De la grammatologie1

1. Ethics and metaphysics: Derrida apart from Levinas

Whenever Derrida uses the word “ethics” or “ethical” in his early writings, there is often

the sense that he is not taking the word very seriously. This irresponsibility is by no means

insignificant. Rather, its effects on the significance of ethics for Derrida demonstrate its

complete earnestness and thoroughness. Nowhere does Derrida ever set forth a “system” of

ethics, or even an “ethics” itself, for this term has always been constructed as merely one of

many branches of the metaphysical system that all of Derrida’s work attempts to reconsider. It

was Levinas who, in Totalité et infini, first problematized this relegation of ethics to a

philosophical category, and who challenged it by proposing ethics to be the “first philosophy,” or

more precisely the irreducible relationship with the absolutely Other that makes philosophy

possible. Derrida’s inheritance of Levinas’ critique is palpable and deeply developed, even

outside of his long essay on Levinas in L’écriture et la différence, “Violence et Métaphysique.”

There is no question that Levinas’ ethical problematics directly influenced Derrida’s

deconstructive practice throughout his career. In fact, Levinas’ writings on the affirmative and

asymmetric face-to-face between the ego and the absolutely Other have provided the most

fundamental grounding for Derrida’s understanding of ethics of all the thinkers on whom he

writes.

But much of the critical commentary on the significance of ethics in Derrida seems to

focus solely on this inheritance and on this inability to classify Derrida as an “ethical thinker.”

Certainly, from the perspective of deconstruction, every attempt to provide an account of this

significance inevitably falls short, since it is impossible to connect Derrida with something like
1
Derrida, Jacques. De la grammatologie. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1967. p. 202.
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“ethical thought” without falling into the trap of classification. It is also convenient to avoid this

classification by reducing an ethical consideration of Derrida’s work to a comparative study of

Derrida and Levinas. Thus Simon Critchley’s The Ethics of Deconstruction, one of the first

major arguments for the existence of a viable ethical aspect of Derrida’s thought, bases itself

more on the solidity of Derrida’s Levinasian inheritance than on anything else. The aim of this

essay is not at all to downplay the seriousness of this inheritance and this dialogue, but rather to

explore the extent to which Derrida has developed his understanding of ethics beyond his

understanding of Levinas.

This endeavor entails much more than using the notion of ethics as a helpful “clue” to

understanding Derrida’s deconstruction in general, as Geoffrey Bennington suggests in

Interrupting Derrida.2 Derrida’s work is not ethical by association, nor does it set forth an

ethical program against its will. Rather, it must be shown how Derrida’s irresponsibility toward

ethics as a philosophical category is both foundational to his entire writing career and productive

of new ethical inquiry. If Derrida’s relationship to Levinas is still crucial in this regard, it is

because it is through Levinas that a certain definition of ethics for Derrida can begin to take

shape. I use the word “definition” with both the utmost caution and with a certain feeling of

resignation. For just as much as a definition of ethics is impossible to determine from a

consideration of Derrida’s work, it is equally inevitable that such a definition and classification

will arise from this consideration. In a certain sense, there is no choice but to take the risk of

oversimplification and misrepresentation in declaring Derrida’s thought to be fundamentally

ethical.

If a concise definition of ethics for Derrida is at once impossible and inevitable, it is

necessary to specify the scope of this project by proposing certain networks of concepts that
2
Bennington, Geoffrey. Interrupting Derrida. New York: Routledge, 2000. p. 35.
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overlap to form the general outline of Derrida’s ethical understanding. There seem to be three

such networks that comprise Derrida’s “definition” of ethics. The first is Levinas’ emphasis on

the affirmation of the absolutely Other, of that which presents itself to the subject beyond the

scope of his or her ego, in short the resistance to the idea of an unmovable and totalizing self-

presence that does not heed the call of the Other who proceeds the subject. The second network

is that of a certain empirical economy of knowledge, of a certain responsibility to the differential

system of meaning in which Derrida and his readers know themselves to be working and out of

which a completely radical transgression is unthinkable. The third network, the major focus of

this essay, is that of writing, the way in which the metaphysical tradition (that is, the West) has

subordinated one form of writing (alphabetic) to the “untainted” legitimacy and self-presence of

vocal expression in the name of a moral prerogative. This tradition, consciously or otherwise,

has consistently criticized writing as a violent misrepresentation of the originality of speech, as

the reduction of speech to the graphic letter, in short as a false stand-in for self-presence.

Derrida’s ethical inventiveness is to take this prejudice against the violence of writing as a way

of demonstrating how the violence of writing (writing as violence and violence as writing)

produces the very morality that the metaphysical tradition evokes in its condemnation of writing.

These three networks overlap the most extensively in Derrida’s De la grammatologie.

Using that text as a constant point of orientation, this essay will trace the connections between

these networks of ethical significance, placing a special emphasis on the roles that writing and

violence play in this significance for Derrida. For it is in the consideration of the interaction

between writing and violence that Derrida’s ethical thought presents itself the most radically,

especially in its departure from that of Levinas. Only with a consideration of this interaction is it

possible for an “ethical Derrida” to present himself to us.

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2. Ethics and the “science of writing”

It is possible even from the first lines of the “Exergue” of De la grammatologie to

determine the grounds for a critical analysis of certain very specific ethical standpoints in

Derrida. This project can never be formalized as systematically (Derrida might say,

“scientifically”) as something like a Kantian or a Hegelian ethical program, a fact that does not at

all lessen the seriousness and rigorousness with which Derrida works through such standpoints.

This latter statement only makes sense if it is proposed that it is possible for ethics to achieve its

fullest and most positive effects beyond the constraints of ontology and theology. Levinas would

say that the ethical can only be fully achieved beyond these categories. But this analysis cannot

proceed if it continues to use the word “ethics” uncritically, especially in the context of Derrida,

who, in the first chapter of De la grammatologie, writes: “Sans doute le sens de l’être n’est-il

pas le mot “être” ni le concept d’être, Heidegger le rappelle sans cesse. Mais comme ce sens

n’est rien hors du langage, et du langage de mots, il est lié…à la possibilité du mot en général”

(DG 37). This essay will contend that if, for Derrida, the meaning of being “is nothing outside of

language,” then ethics is nothing outside of it either. It must be noted that Derrida is not arguing

here that being is somehow “reduced” to language and thereby “diluted” by it, which his allusion

to Heidegger demonstrates. Rather, the meaning of being is completely bound up with the

“possibility of the word in general.” That is, being and language are not mutually exclusive.

What are the implications of saying the same about ethics and language? To what extent does

Derrida in De la grammatologie expand the meaning of ethics not only as it relates to language,

but also as it can be affirmed through the very movements of the text?

The beginning of De la grammatologie can be read as an introduction to Derrida’s ethical

thought. Before the first chapter, there is the “Exergue.” As it does in coinage, the Exergue
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marks De la grammatologie with a time and a place; it situates it within history. The difference

is that this Exergue specifically marks De la grammatologie within the metaphysical tradition,

which Derrida comes to determine as history itself. The Exergue is triple—one quote from

Hegel (“L’écriture alphabétique est en soi et pour sa la plus intelligente”), one from Rousseau

(“…La peinture des objets convient aux peuples sauvages; les signes des mots et des

propositions aux peuples barbares; et l’alphabet aux peuples policés.”), and one from an

anonymous ancient scribe (“Celui qui brillera dans la science de l’écriture brillera comme le

soleil.” “O Samas (dieu du soleil), tu scrutes de ta lumière la totalité des pays comme si c’était

des signes cunéiformes.”) (DG 11). What Derrida says about this Exergue, in the opening lines

of his argument, is worth quoting in its entirety, because it deals specifically with a situation of

dominance and presumptuousness:

Ce triple exergue n’est pas seulement destiné à rassembler l’attention sur

l’ethnocentrisme qui, partout et toujours, a dû commander le concept de
l’écriture. Ni seulement sur ce que nous appellerons le logocentrisme:
métaphysique de l’écriture phonétique (par exemple de l’alphabet) qui
n’a été en son fond—pour des raisons énigmatiques mais essentielles et
innaccessibles à un simple relativisme historique—que l’ethnocentrisme
le plus original et le plus puissant, en passe de s’imposer aujourd’hui à
la planète… (DG 11).

What is the scope of this “not only” (pas seulement)? First of all, it is understood here

that the metaphysics of phonetic writing, that which determines phonetic writing as “the most

intelligent” (Hegel), is the very originator of ethnocentrism and the basis of all of its

permutations. And it is the metaphysics of phonetic writing that is the condition for all

ethnocentrism because, as Derrida will soon show, it is precisely the development of phonetic

writing that made metaphysics possible (and therefore made history possible). Secondly, this

privileged dominion of phonetic writing—which Derrida calls “logocentrism”—that is in the

process of spreading itself all around the world is in control of three domains at once: the
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concept of writing, the history of metaphysics (which drives writing outside of the spoken logos

defined as truth), and the concept of science (a philosophical concept which nevertheless resists

this “imperialism” of phonetic writing) (DG 12). Derrida specifies logocentrism as that which

not simply subordinates the written word to the spoken word, but also attempts to push it

“outside” of an ostensibly pre-delimited territory of speech. Derrida will further specify this

action later on as one that pushes writing “outside” the realm of the living and the self-present.

Crucially, all this occurs at the same time that phonetic writing is praised as “the most

intelligent” and pertaining to the “most civilized.” Thus it becomes apparent that the logocentric

bias toward phonetic writing arises not because of any kind of graphic sophistication, but

precisely because phonetic writing is grounded in phonemes and would be helpless without

them.

All of this is dealt with extensively in the following chapters of De la grammatologie.

What is critical in the Exergue is the line of thought that follows from Derrida’s treatment of the

concept of science. For it is here that the first glimpses of a directly ethical response to

logocentrism can be traced in Derrida. It has already been noted that Derrida sees the concept of

science as a philosophical concept that nonetheless “n’a en fait jamais cessé de contester

l’impérialisme du logos” (DG 12), an imperialism that Derrida believes to have opened up the

very possibility of philosophy to begin with. Thus what Derrida sees in the situation of science

is a resistance to logocentrism, and thus to philosophy, that occurs precisely from within the

limits of philosophy itself. “Sans doute cette subversion a-t-elle toujours été contenue à

l’intérieur d’un système allocutoire qui a donné naissance au projet de la science et aux

conventions de toute caractéristique non-phonétique” (DG 12). That is, in that the concept of

science exists only within a system that designates it as such, so too is its resistance to that
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system to a certain extent “born” from the workings of that system itself. This is to say that

science’s contestation of the “imperialism of the logos,” “en faisant appel, depuis toujours et de

plus en plus, à l’écriture non-phonétique” (DG 12), in no way infiltrates from somewhere outside

of the history of metaphysics. The fact that this tradition subordinates non-phonetic writing to

phonetic writing does not preclude the fact that non-phonetic writing can still have a positive

force within it. For the reason that science’s contestation of phonetic writing does not proceed

from some unintelligible point “outside” of the logos is because the logos cannot declare non-

phonetic writing to be absolutely exterior to it in the first place. This reasoning could be

understood simply by the fact that mathematical and scientific notation are capable of

intelligibility despite the fact that they are not phonetic. But it could also be understood by

arguing that there is a certain extent to which all phonetic writing is non-phonetic, in the fleeting

and often unrecognizable instances in which the graphic character of a word overrides its

phonemic character’s claim as the bearer of ultimate intelligibility.

Regardless, it remains to be seen in what way this resistance to logocentrism from within

logocentrism does not have to end up inevitably falling flat and becoming yet another victim of

the logos’s imperialism. And yet, as Derrida recognizes a bit later in De la grammatologie (25),

there is a necessary risk involved in this resistance that it will fall back under that which it is

resisting and become indistinguishable from it. It seems there is much to be said about the

significance of this idea of risk, of decision, to the movements of deconstruction in general. But

for now, it must be recognized that the possibility of a positive resistance to logocentrism

becomes feasible for Derrida only by reference to a “science of writing,” or a grammatology.

Such a science must be understood both in the most radical sense possible and within the
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metaphysical limits of the concept of science itself. It can by no means achieve its effects as a

“system.”

Par l’allusion à une science de l’écriture bridée par la métaphore, la métaphysique et la

théologie, l’exergue ne doit pas seulement annoncer que la science de l’écriture—la
grammatologie—donne les signes de sa libération à travers le monde grâce à des efforts
décisifs. Ces efforts sont nécessairement discrets et dispersés, presque
imperceptibles….” (DG 13).

What is proposed is a science that only just falls within the range of intelligibility, and therefore

does not allow its effects to be completely subsumed and neutralized by that intelligibility.

This science cannot lay claim to a totality, to an attempt to “uncover” truth, to a rationalization of

its domain without falling prey precisely to that which it resists, because metaphysics for Derrida

is what opens the possibility of all of these claims to begin with. In this sense it risks never

being understood as a science, because in the metaphysical tradition, these claims come with the

concept of science itself. The question, then, is to what extent this science of writing could

actually be called a science if it cannot be decisive, if it cannot be unifying, and if it cannot have

a definitive object.

It must be reiterated that according to Derrida, science’s resistance to the logocentrism of

the metaphysics to which it necessarily belongs comes specifically in its appeal to non-phonetic

writing. In other words, the scientific conception of writing is the point at which belonging to

logocentrism means resisting logocentrism. And crucially, this “belonging to logocentrism” has

still not reached its end: “l’unité de tout ce qui se laisse viser aujourd’hui à travers les concepts

les plus divers de la science et de l’écriture est au principe, plus ou moins secrètement mais

toujours, déterminée par une époque historico-métaphysique dont nous ne faisons qu’entrevoir la

clôture. Nous ne disons pa la fin” (DG 14). Two conclusions must be drawn from this. First, it

is impossible to absolutely escape from this “historico-metaphysical epoch” toward an

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undeterminable point “outside” of it—as a historico-metaphysical epoch, it completely

conditions every aspect of Western thought in general, including the “inner/outer” distinction

that would purportedly lead to a liberation from it. And second, in that this epoch is always in a

process of closure but never at an end, its scope cannot be completely delineated. It is

impossible to think the “end” of this metaphysical tradition, because such a teleological

conception of history is a product of this very tradition. Rather, it is necessary to think of this

tradition as always approaching an end that can never be conceptualized as a finality or as an

event, but that announces itself as an impossibility in the present, as the risk of apocalypse or the

prospect of post-historical existence. Only in this sense—that of a risk, a moving towards within

a system, the possibility of the impossibility of a system—can an “exteriority” to this tradition

have productive meaning. What we have here, then, is a situation in which the idea of writing

and the idea of science only have meaning “within” the limits of this tradition that is nevertheless

not fully delimited.

It is precisely with this paradox of clôture that the ethics of a science of writing take their

fullest and most radical effect. At the end of the Exergue, Derrida makes the following

conjecture:

Peut-être la méditation patiente et l’enquête rigoureuse autour de ce qui s’appelle

encore provisoirement l’écriture, loin de rester en deçà d’une science de l’écriture
ou de la congédier hâtivement par quelque réaction obscurantiste, la laissant au
contraire développer sa positivité aussi loin qu’il est possible, sont-elles l’errance
d’une pensée fidèle et attentive au monde irréductiblement à venir qui s’annonce
au present, par-delà la clôture du savoir (DG 14).

Immediately it becomes apparent that the phrase “par-delà la clôture du savoir” implies

something entirely different from the phrase “par-delà la fin” or “les limites du savoir.” For

“par-delà la clôture” implies an externality beyond the categorical distinction “inner/outer,” an

externality from which the future is able to announce itself in and as the present. And the future
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of the science of writing as it is to be developed in its fullest positivity, is, like all futures, an

absolute danger. “Il est ce qui rompt absolument avec la normalité constituée et ne peut donc

s’annoncer, se présenter que sous l’espèce de la monstruosité” (DC 14). What does it mean

ethically for the development of a science of writing, in its resistance to the logocentrism to

which it belongs, to remain “faithful and attentive” to the monstrosity of the future anterior, to

that which exceeds the closure of logocentrism? Such a question can only be answered if this

excess that announces itself beyond the closure of metaphysics is specified not only as a

“monstrosity,” but as a violence, as the originative violence that opens up logocentrism to the

possibility of its impossibility.

3. Writing, violence, and the body

The history of the prejudice against writing that Derrida outlines in the first half of De la

grammatologie could just as crucially be characterized as a privileging of a certain type of

writing within the metaphysical tradition over many others. For metaphysics appears to take this

specific form of writing to be all that writing is or could be. The form in question is graphic

writing, writing as the letter, or what Derrida calls the “gramma,” the inscription. This writing is

first and foremost visual, and is seen by metaphysics to be at once a mere representation of

speech and a less ephemeral means of expression than speech. It is easy to overlook this double

movement of prejudice and privilege precisely because most of Derrida’s readers, as well as

Derrida himself, cannot help but make it unconsciously and uncritically, since they are reading

and writing within this very tradition. Although people in industrialized countries seem to be

writing more often in the digital age than they ever have been before, popular culture still tends

to emphasize conversations as a more “personal” form of communication than written messages

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because they supposedly offer a more direct access to a completely present subject. Completely

present not simply because they can be touched, but more importantly because they can be heard.

For speaking, as Derrida notes, is what this tradition has identified as the ultimate affirmation of

self-presence. But there is a sense in which this ranking of vitality, in which the graphic word is

supposedly more detached from a particular writing subject and thereby less vivid than the

spoken word, also indicates a certain esteem for the graphic word precisely because of its

shortcomings. That is, because the graphic word is made up of letters that could be pronounced

out loud by the person who wrote them, graphic writing is still undeniably attached to a human

subject. But it is only—or at least primarily—within the context of the possibility of its oral

enunciation that this attachment seems the most fulfilled.

What I am getting at here involves much more than a Eurocentric bias against non-

alphabetic languages such as Chinese, although this point is by no means parenthetical. More

critically, what Derrida calls the exclusion of writing from the limits of being as self-presence is

only possible because the idea of alphabetic writing implies a certain connection between written

letters and those who pronounce them. This exclusion only makes sense within the assumption

that writing is something like an “image” or a “representation” of speech (DG 66). This

assumption is precisely that of alphabetic writing. But what is the character of this “chasing

away” of writing and in what sense is its exclusion possible only because it is writing that is

being excluded? The answers to these two questions are inseparable from one another for

Derrida.

The institution of alphabetic writing is the condition for the exclusion of writing from the

spoken logos as the truth of being because writing itself—alphabetic, graphic, or otherwise––is

what generates the opposition interior/exterior within the metaphysical tradition. Crucially, this
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banishment of writing to the exterior, in response to the violence of writing against speech, is

itself a sort of violence. Violence not simply against graphic writing in its exclusion from the

domain of speech, but also a violence enacted by graphic writing itself in its domination of the

field of what “writing” could mean. The duality of this violence is the basis of logocentrism.

What this duality entails are the beginnings of a substantial critique of the idea of violence and

all of the ethical implications that come with it. Although Derrida discusses violence only

sparingly in De la grammatologie, it is perhaps in these discussions where the full effects of his

ideas on difference, the trace, and temporality can be felt the most radically. The most striking

of these discussions is a one-paragraph account of a certain “succession” of violences that make

their movements along with those of writing itself. The word “succession” is flagged here

because these movements cannot be understood within the framework of a linear conception of

temporality, which would neutralize their critical effects. Because Derrida creates this account

within a larger critique of Lévi-Strauss’ reflections on his own fieldwork, the anthropological

ramifications of the notion of violence in De la grammatologie are completely bound up with its

textual implications. There is an extent to which this particular section of the work is where

Derrida writes the most politically, or at least it is the section in which the consequences of what

may risk being read as solely a “textual” concern are made the most directly applicable to real-

life problems. This section will be discussed in further detail later on.

This risk, which presupposes the existence of a written text that is completely self-

contained and detached from the concrete activities of daily life, is a symptom of precisely the

same prejudice against writing that Derrida is calling into question. Thus the argument that

Derrida somehow “reduces everything to the text” is inherently contradictory. This idea of

reduction implies not only that there would be a text that could act as the site of this reducing,
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but also that there would be a text extensive enough to reduce and include everything. How can

something be both completely delimited and comprise an infinite number of entities? Only

within the logic of the interior and the exterior, within the notion of self-finitude, is this

contradiction a contradiction. And crucially, only within this logic can this apparent “reduction”

appear as an act of violence, whereby violence is seen as an unwarranted crossing of borders. In

this case, as Derrida notes repeatedly throughout his work, the border is most profoundly one

between life and death, between the “vitality” of the real, the personal, the firsthand, the spoken,

and the “static” of the written word in its detachment from the subject. To “reduce everything to

the text” would be to kill it.

But by the same token in which the assumptions of this logic take writing to be

disconnected from the life support of speech, they also take writing to be an undead wanderer.

Just as much as metaphysics sees writing as a rigidly technical yet necessary representation of

language, so too does it see it as capable of taking off in its own artificial vitality. Thus writing

is not completely dead after all; but this does not mean that it is even remotely living in the way

in which human life has been established by the metaphysical tradition. Or better, its vitality is

not that of speech, which is to say its vitality is not that of being as self-presence. To say that

writing is undead, that it has a “life of its own,” is to say that it lives beyond the categories of

presence and non-presence, subject and object, even life and death. This idea of writing as the

undead is not at all only a metaphor (since for Derrida writing is precisely what makes

metaphoricity possible). Rather, its seriousness cannot be underwhelmed on any front. Writing,

for both Derrida and the philosophical tradition to which he necessarily belongs, is nothing short

of a monster. In the strictest sense, it simply cannot be understood as anything else: “La

perversion de l’artifice engendre des monstres. L’écriture comme toutes les langues artificielles
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qu’on voudrait fixer et soustraire à l’histoire vivante de la langue naturelle, participe de la

monstruosité. C’est un écart de la nature” (DG 57).

These lines involve the recognition that the desire to “fix and subtract” writing from the

“living history of natural language” (which is the same as the desire for positive self-presence)

only serves to strengthen the monster that it has supposedly banished. By claiming an

unconditional divide between inside and outside, in which the existence of one side of the term is

completely dependent on that of the other, this desire sets itself up to be disturbed by that which

it attempts to exclude. This is primarily a situation of haunting: “Alors on s’aperçoit que ce qui

était chassé hors frontière, l’errant proscrit de la linguistique, n’a jamais cessé de hanter le

langage comme sa première et plus intime possibilité” (DG 64). What this amounts to saying, in

the context of the first part of De la grammatologie, is that the exclusion of a certain type of

writing as all possible writing from the domain of living language is made possible only by the

movements of writing itself. This contingency is what prevents the exclusion from being

absolute. Writing haunts language in the sense that it provides the conditions for its own

exclusion. Thus Derrida describes the exclusion of all writing as the imposition of one writing:

Un certain modèle d’écriture s’est nécessairement mais provisoirement imposé…

comme instrument et technique de représentation d’un système de langue. Et…ce
mouvement, unique dans son style, a même été si profond qu’il a permis de penser,
dans la langue, des concepts comme ceux de signe, de technique, de représentation,
de langue. (DG 63-64)

At this point several questions still remain open-ended. What are the features of this

action of taking one form of writing (the visual gramma that is thereby rigidly grammatical) as

all that writing could be? How is this action just as “violent” as the idea of reducing everything

to the text that some may accuse Derrida of promoting? To what extent can De la

grammatologie and many of Derrida’s other works be read as triggers for a new perception of
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writing as a fundamentally differential act that lives and breathes3 beyond the tradition of being

as self-presence but not outside of it?4 We have already learned from the “Exergue” that this

new perception of writing can only come as a monstrosity. How does Derrida see this violent

and haunting monstrosity, taken in its most powerful and unmetaphorical sense, as a

fundamentally ethical characteristic of writing, or even as a possibility for a new appreciation of

ethics itself?

So far I have described two violences, both of which involve what could be called a

reductive act. The first is on the part of writing, whose technical character is said to narrow,

stultify, and deaden speech all the while taking off on its own away from the speaking subject.

This is a claim that, as Derrida notes, spans from Socrates to Rousseau to Saussure. The second

violence is on the part of these very people and of the tradition to which they belong and have

helped to build, and its charge is brought up by Derrida himself, who nevertheless does not

attempt to condemn this violence on any moral high ground, or at all. Its indication is only the

indication of a symptom that cannot easily, perhaps ever, be remedied. This is why Derrida is

not quick to call this violence a “violence” in its own right—yet one of Derrida’s

accomplishments in De la grammatologie is to problematize the traditional conception of the

notion of “violence” itself. The reductiveness of this second violence—the institution of graphic

3
If what Derrida says in “Edmond Jabès et la question du livre” regarding absence, separation,
and spacing is to be taken as seriously as possible, then this idea of writing as “living and
breathing” is by no means inconsequential: “Absence enfin come souffle de la lettre, car la lettre
vit….Il y a donc une animalité de la lettre qui prend les formes de son désir, de son inquiétude et
de sa solitude” (ED 108). What are the implications of this breathing absence as an “animality”
that is also a monstrosity?
4
That is, constantly in sight of the closure of this system but not declaring itself to be completely
external to it. This idea forms a large part of the notion of the trace that, as the absolute past that
is absolute because of the impossibility of reviving an original presence, is thereby inextricably
connected with what is to come. This is the force of what Derrida calls the “future anterior”: the
affirmation of the monstrosity to come within the closing limits of a tradition whose origins are
absolutely inaccessible.
 18

writing as “the” writing, as that which as a whole is to be subordinated to the vitality of speech—

can be the most forcefully understood as a sort of synecdoche. What is only a certain “part” of

writing is taken to be the “whole” of writing. I use the word “synecdoche” with the utmost

caution, because it would be incorrect to suggest that Derrida makes the claim that there is any

completed “whole” of writing whose possible “parts” could be easily subtracted. More

specifically, I use it in the way in which Derrida uses a number of terms throughout his work; in

this context, I can use it only by rature, by crossing it out or erasing it. “Comme toutes les

notions dont nous nous servons ici, il appartient à l’histoire de la métaphysique et nous ne

pouvons l’utiliser que sous rature” (DG 89). Not by expunging it completely, but by allowing

the traces of its traditional usages to seep through and haunt my own. (It remains to be seen in

what way this rature is itself a kind of violence.)

So what we are dealing with here is a situation in which the privileging of a certain type

of writing takes the form of a synecdochical act by which a part is taken to be a whole that was

never fully present to begin with. And it is only with the idea of an “arche-writing” that is also

an “arche-violence” that this situation makes sense. For the major characteristic of this act is that

it is not performed “from the outside,” as it were, by any self-determined, free-thinking agent.

What is at stake here, perhaps, is a critique of the Enlightenment notion of freedom, which, just

as much as it claimed to “liberate” the creative potential of the human subject, also and thereby

instituted the notion that the violence of a violent subject necessarily belongs to his or her own

free will. The relationship between violence and subjectivity in Derrida must be taken in the

context of the following lines from De la grammatologie:

Or l’espacement comme écriture est le devenir-absent et le devenir-inconscient du sujet.

Par le mouvement de sa dérive, l’émancipation du signe constitue en retour le désir de la
présence. Ce devenir—ou cette dérive—ne survient pas au sujet qui le choisirait ou s’y
laisserait passivement entraîner. Comme rapport du sujet à sa mort, ce devenir est la
 19

constitution même de la subjectivité. (DG 100)

Becoming-absent as the very production of subjectivity, a becoming that is neither freely

selected nor submissively experienced—what are the consequences of this movement? What can

“happen” to a subject when subjectivity only arises through the developing unconscious absence

of a subject? An onerous question for sure. But for now it is important to underscore that, for

Derrida, subjectivity itself is produced by violence. First and foremost by a series of assertions,

effacements, and effractions of the proper name. This is the thrust of the critical paragraph on

violence that Derrida includes in his discussion of Lévi-Strauss, which is introduced by perhaps

one of the most generalized statements in De la grammatologie: “La structure de la violence est

complexe est sa possibilité—l’écriture—ne l’est pas moins” (DG 164). Its structure is complex

because there are three violences at the very least.

Derrida purposely commits the first one in the very act of specifying it: “Il y avait en

effet une première violence à nommer” (DG 164). There is a first violence to be named and a

first violence in naming. This is the originative violence of language, the originative violence as

the “arche-writing”: the loss of the proper, of self-presence, that occurs with the movements of

identifying, classifying, categorizing, “inscrire dans une différence,” “suspendre le vocatif

absolu” (DG 164). Inscribing a proper name is immediately a breakup of the proper, of the

feeling of self-presence that cannot be fully expressed in words and identifications. This is

another instance of reduction, a reduction of that which has never existed or called out prior to

language. Crucially, this inscription does not necessarily have to be a graphic one. It is rather

any instance of naming, clarifying, pinpointing, instances that are absolutely fundamental and

formative to human experience. This is why the autonomously vocal self-presence that

supposedly existed before it, that it is said to have interrupted and pigeonholed, can never be
 20

accessed or even known to exist. And in that this violence never spontaneously occurs to any

pre-linguistic subject, it can only be productive of the subject that is born when it is named, that

is, born out of the loss of something that it cannot mourn precisely because it cannot name it. In

that we both only know ourselves by our names and identities and recognize that our existence is

not solely defined by those names and identities, that there is something else to us that cannot be

represented, our sense of subjectivity can only be born out of the violence of identification.

The second violence strengthens the first by prohibiting it. This is the violence of the

metaphysical tradition, which, however much it may deny it, is also a type of writing: but

whereas the arche-violence is writing as inscription, this violence is writing as prescription. It is

what declares graphic writing to be inflexible and detached, and seeks to restore the vocative

self-same by erasing the marks of what it sees as its inadequate representation. Its morality,

however, is an instituted morality that as such can only be disseminated within the movements of

arche-violence, of proclaiming, adjudicating, condemning writing as this or that harmful action.

The reparative and redressive erasure of writing’s visual marks is thus nothing more than another

form of writing for the very reason that it is another form of the same violence. Is not the

declaration of graphic writing as inauthentic, or the establishment of human authenticity as an

irretrievable and unmediated vocal self-affirmation, merely another form of organizing the

human subject by privileging certain parts of the body (mouths, ears) over others? Thus for

Derrida, writing as violence is inextricable from violence on the body.

The third violence is the most provisional and, perhaps, the most directly palpable

because it is the most empirically contingent. “A partir de cette archi-violence…une troisième

violence peut éventuellement surgir ou ne pas surgir (possibilité empirique) dans ce qu’on

appelle couramment le mal, la guerre, l’indiscrétion, le viol…” (DG 165). This third violence
 21

describes the common understanding of violence as aggressiveness, brutality, and force. What is

at stake here, once again, is an act of classifying a body. But this time the writing of the body

takes the form of the destruction—not the reduction—of the body, a dispossessing nomination

carried out through a certain breaking and entering (effraction). “…le mal, la guerre,

l’indiscrétion, le viol: qui consistent à révéler par effraction le nom soi-disant propre, c’est-à-

dire la violence originaire qui a sevré le propre de sa propriété et de sa propreté” (DG 165). This

dispossession entails a reference to the other two layers of violence, to both arche-writing and the

law. A revelation of the expropriative power of the proper name occurs with the third violence,

which exploits and literalizes this power by turning the proper name against the one who holds it:

“Troisième violence de réflexion, pourrions-nous dire, qui dénude la non-identité native, la

classification comme dénaturation du propre, et l’identité comme moment abstrait du concept”

(DG 165). The major characteristic of this violence is its denudation of the “native non-

identity,” that is, the way in which it infringes the instituted morality of the second violence and

declares individual self-sameness existing before the name to be an illusion, and thus exploitable.

If the subject is born only when it is named, if it can only know itself to exist in that it is named

and can name, then the most fundamental violence it can suffer is the expropriation of its self-

determination. There is an extent to which the identification, categorization, and stereotyping of

subjects by social structures, reductive as it may be, can create (or inscribe) a sense of self-

certainty and self-empowerment in those subjects. The third violence is what displaces this self-

assuring pleasure in the violence of the proper name. Derrida’s crucial point here is that the

violence of war and rape is first and foremost an empirical derivation of the violence of naming

and identification that is characteristic of arche-writing. This is not to suggest that Derrida

trivializes the seriousness of this “empirical” violence as a minor consequence of arche-writing.

 22

Rather, the other side of this argument seems to be closer to what Derrida is describing here.

That is, war and rape are only derivative to the extent that those who perpetrate them lose any

claim to a completely autonomous agency and power.

My suggestion is that the most fundamental difference between the first and the third

violence comes in the effects that each of them has on the body. Arche-writing is writing not

simply in the graphic sense, but in the sense of an unending inscription, effacement, and

reinscription of identifications and proper names, as a violence that constitutes the subject

through the imposition of the proper name on a referent that has never fully existed. Is there a

body that preexists this subject? Is the body this nonexistent referent? Derrida perhaps does not

offer enough material to answer these questions. But it has been shown how the body is neither

completely absent from nor completely present throughout the last two forms of violence. In the

second, writing as the prescription against writing, a privileging of the oral and the audible as the

principle sites of being. In the third, writing as an attempt to damage the body by turning all the

body’s identifications against it. The major difference is the following: whereas the third

violence essentializes and stereotypes identifications in order to destroy the body, arche-writing

produces those same identifications in order to consolidate the notion of subjectivity. Arche-

writing, perhaps, creates actual bodies (not ideas of bodies) precisely by suspending the notion of

the body that affirms itself prior to language. It creates bodies that can, as it were, write with all

their parts—not just their hands and eyes, but also their mouths and ears—and thereby determine

themselves without ever fully delimiting themselves. Arche-violence, then, would be the

origination of the subject as the inscriptions and erasures of the unlimited body on the world and

on itself.
 23

4. Logocentrism and localization: Derrida reading Lévi-Strauss

Derrida’s views on writing and violence in De la grammatologie are inextricably linked

with a commentary on the body that is difficult to track in the text itself. This ?is one of the

major ways in which speech itself is a form of writing, if writing is taken in the sense of the

“supplement.” The prejudice against/privileging of alphabetic writing can be characterized as a

certain phenomenon of metonymy, whereby this one specific form of writing is taken to be all

that writing is or could ever be. One of the most persistent and crucial (and yet unwritten) points

of De la grammatologie is that the tradition that engages in this metonymy of writing is the same

one that conflates these concepts of uniqueness and individuality, indeed the concept of being

itself, with certain parts of the body (mouth, ears) over many others.

Moreover, De la grammatologie makes it even more explicit that this conflation occurs

on different levels, emphasizing different body parts. At the heart of the Western determination

of being as presence is the question regarding the extent to which diverse ways of

communicating with the body can affirm this sense of presence the most efficiently and the most

securely. What this determination excludes, Derrida suggests, is the possibility that the body is

always already a text, that the reduction of being as self-presence to specific body parts is merely

the resulting violence of the impossibility of a fully self-present body existing beyond textuality.

The difficulties and frequent contradictions that this attempt at self-affirmation can pose are

apparent in the ways in which metaphysics is at once biased against the mediating properties of

alphabetic writing and biased toward its phonetic substructure as well as its durability. For just

as much as the construction of being as “presence” can imply the feelings of transparency and

immediacy ascribed to speech, which is nevertheless ephemeral, so too can it imply the

permanence and stability ascribed to writing as graphic inscription. In a very palpable sense, the
 24

“artificiality” of writing is equally the belief that writing is, to a certain degree, too present,

overly present—that is, the belief that its durability as inscription, perhaps even the hope for its

immortality, causes it to be treated as a stand-in and over-augmentation of the more “authentic”

intransience of personal activity and life in general. Thus the major thrust of Derrida’s notion of

writing as supplement is that, in being excessively present, writing ceases to exist as “real,” or at

least as “real” as unwritten human life. Logocentrism, then, is much more than Derrida’s term

for the traditional hierarchization of speech over writing, of the audio-vocal over the visual. It is

also, and more fundamentally, the localization of the notion of the being at specific—and sparse

—points on the body, each with its own consequences for the development of the senses of self-

awareness and subjectivity. What is problematic here is not so much the uncritical usage of

concepts such as “being,” “subjectivity,” and “presence” (or even the typical equation of being

and presence as the “origin” of subjectivity) as much as the reductiveness that has occurred in the

historico-linguistic development of these concepts.

If the notion of violence is crucial to an “ethical” reading of this work as well as to an

understanding of the significance of “ethics” for Derrida in general, it is primarily because the

reductiveness of logocentrism has always been carried out in the name of certain moral

perspectives on communication that change from one period of history to another. One problem

that this idea of reduction poses is not only the question of what is being reduced, but also the

question of to what it is being reduced. It must be specified that this so-called “metonymic

reduction” of writing is not simply a situation in which one “part” of writing is somehow

abstracted from and assumed to be the presumed “whole” of writing. On the contrary, Derrida

makes it apparent throughout his work that no such “whole” of writing is possible. But can the

same be argued for that which the prejudice against and privileging of writing “reduces”? That
 25

is, does it reduce something that was already established and intact prior to this reduction? Or is

it the case that this reduction is precisely that which establishes the body itself? Extending this

even further, is it possible to clarify this reduction as another form of writing in its own right?

To take on these questions, it is pertinent to reintroduce Derrida’s ideas on “arche-

writing” and “arche-violence” as he describes them in his chapter on Lévi-Strauss, which he

entitles “La violence de la lettre.” Derrida’s point of orientation in this chapter is Tristes

tropiques, which he reads as Lévi-Strauss’ attempt at something like a confessional

anthropology. In this work, Lévi-Strauss believes himself to be guilty of introducing writing to

the Nambikwara culture of Brazil. Here Derrida demonstrates the way in which the same

distrust of writing can acquire different moral motivations over time. The age-old stigma on

writing as artificial and distortional has been recontextualized within something akin to what is

nowadays known as “liberal guilt.” Along with its reputation of mechanic inauthenticity for

those who are literate to begin with, writing now bears the additional onus of being just another

extension of Western imperialism. Derrida is quick to identify Rousseau as Lévi-Strauss’

forefather in this feeling of culpability, for Rousseau was one of the first to praise the illiterate

and scientifically undeveloped cultures of the world for being more genuinely human than any

European scholar.

Derrida’s main critique of this inheritance, of the evaluative equation of illiteracy with

human authenticity, is not that it reinforces the very Eurocentrism it wishes to oppose by

essentializing and romanticizing every culture that has not matched Europe’s level of intellectual

advancement. Rather, Derrida’s critique centers specifically upon Lévi-Strauss’ belief that the

introduction of writing on an illiterate culture is necessarily an act of violence. Not only that, but

also his belief that one person could be so confident that he or she alone is capable of “exposing”
 26

another culture to writing that he or she could actually feel remorseful for having done so later

on. This, perhaps, is more violent than that for which Lévi-Strauss feels so guilty. For in a

certain sense, there is nothing more violent than depriving someone or some group of the

possibility of being violent, even when this deprivation comes in the form of admiration or

compassion. Without giving him more credit than is due, Derrida’s questioning of Lévi-Strauss’

self-culpability could be seen as a way in which Derrida recognizes the Nambikwara as a violent

culture without falling into the stereotypic condemnations of “savagery” and “barbarism” that

usually go along with that recognition. Derrida does this primarily by reiterating that anything

destructive of the proper name can be called writing:

Comment refusera-t-on aux Nambikwara l’accès à l’écriture en général sinon en

déterminant celle-ci selon un modèle? Nous nous demanderons plus tard…jusqu’à
quel point il est légitime de ne pas appeler écriture ces “pointillés” et “zigzags” sur les
calebasses, si brièvement évoqués dans Tristes tropiques. Mais surtout, comment
refuser la pratique de l’écriture en général à une société capable d’oblitérer le propre,
c’est-à-dire à une société violente? (DG 161)

In effect, Derrida is implying here that what Western thought has determined to be writing in a

definitive sense is nothing more than an ordered series of “dashes and zigzags” and nothing less

than the violent obliteration of the proper itself. Or better yet, Western thought has,

unconsciously or otherwise, assumed that this obliteration can only occur in a linguistic sense

through graphic inscriptions and in a physical sense through assault. It has excluded the

possibility that both senses are actually the aftereffects of a far more fundamental movement by

which the obliteration of the proper is precisely what produces meaning, difference, and

subjectivity and constantly opens up the subject to the prospect of the non-self-same.

Before exploring this possibility further, it is first important to examine what Derrida

means by “the proper” (le propre). This incredibly complex term is fundamentally equated in

the metaphysical tradition with the notion of a pure body, one that is untainted by artificiality,
 27

completely self-possessed and self-accessible, and fully present to itself to the extent that it can

hear itself speak. The “proper name,” however, is this graphic artificiality that stands in for the

authenticity of bodily self-presence, the identification that is essentially a misidentification and

misrepresentation of a body that preexists and transcends it. Derrida suggests that the

Nambikwara are both a “violent culture” and a “writing culture” for the sole reason that they

have prohibited the employment of proper names. That Lévi-Strauss seems to have taken the

term “proper name” in its ordinary sense—the use of a specific word as a nomination—is

perhaps the basis of his remorse. Derrida focuses on a passage in Tristes tropiques in which

Lévi-Strauss describes an event during which he causes a small group of “innocent”

Nambikwara girls to transgress this taboo (DG 163). After one of the girls slaps another for an

unspecified reason, the victim sits beside Lévi-Strauss and begins to whisper something in his

ear that at first he cannot comprehend. Seeing this, her assailant immediately rushes to his other

ear and whispers something else to him repeatedly. Before long, Lévi-Strauss understands what

the girls are up to: they are continuing their fight by revealing to him each other’s name.

Intrigued, Lévi-Strauss finds that he is not only able to uncover all of the children’s “names” by

pitting them against one another, but also that he can incite them to reveal the names of the

adults, who soon learn of the matter and reprimand the children (but not the anthropologist).

According to Derrida, the latter has misunderstood the point of the taboo. He justifies his

opinion with the following statement:

Nous ne pouvons entrer ici dans les difficultés d’une déduction empirique de cette
prohibition-ci, mais on sait a priori que les “noms propres” dont Lévi-Strauss décrit
ici l’interdiction et la révélation ne sont pas des noms propres. L’expression “nom
propre” est impropre, pour les raisons mêmes que rappellera La pensée sauvage.
(DG163)
 28

As Derrida sees it, the Nambikwara taboo against the proper name is concerned not with the

actual name itself, but with the very action of naming, regardless of the word used. This should

be understood “a priori” because this act is precisely consciousness itself: “Ce qui frappe

l’interdit, c’est l’acte proférant ce qui fonctionne comme nom propre. Et cette fonctionnement

est la conscience elle-même” (DG 163). Proper naming as consciousness consists in “[la]

désignation d’appartenances et [la] classification linguistico-sociale” (DG 164). This is to say

that, to the extent that every human being is conscious, he or she is ceaselessly designating and

classifying. More profoundly, it is also to say that consciousness is nothing more than socio-

linguistic designation and classification. Nothing is comprehensible or even perceptible outside

of this movement.

Derrida’s major (and “a priori”) claim about the Nambikwara as Lévi-Strauss describes

them is that the taboo of the “proper name” is a way in which they do violence to themselves. If

proper naming is essentially consciousness, then prohibiting the public declaration of the proper

name is prohibiting consciousness itself, which is prohibiting what is natural to human beings.

Certainly the Nambikwara taboo did not arise in order to anesthetize “consciousness” in the

Western sense. But what Derrida leaves unexplicit in his analysis is that the prohibition of

proper naming for the Nambikwara means above all the prohibition of speaking that which

functions as the proper name. This is the “act” to which Derrida refers. It is also the act that

most specifically characterizes the way in which Western philosophy has thought of being as

self-assured presence. The Nambikwara enact a certain violence on themselves through this

proposition to the extent that they deny the possibility of designation (which for Derrida is

consciousness) by refusing to channel this designation through a specific part of the body,

refusing to make it heard, and thus running the risk of compartmentalizing that which they are
 29

designating. Thus they enact a violence on themselves in order to prevent another violence from

occurring.

This violence to be prevented is the loss of the proper as absolute proximity and as self-

presence by the designation of that which functions as the proper name. But for Derrida, the

distinction between the “proper” name as socio-linguistic classification and “the proper” as the

fullness of self-presence that resists exhaustive classification is impossible. The “proper” that is

always already at work is not the preexisting uniqueness of self-presence, but the inscription of

the unique within difference through classification and designation. Perhaps the fact that the

Nambikwara girls knowingly transgress the taboo to continue their fight suggests that they can

intuit that the violence which the vocalization of this inscription entails can be parodied precisely

because that violence originates from the more fundamental violence of inscription itself. This,

Derrida argues, is what they really “reveal” in their condemnations:

La levée de l’interdit, le grand jeu de la dénonciation et la grande exhibition du

“propre” (il s’agit ici, notons-le, d’un acte de guerre et il y aurait beaucoup à
dire sur le fait que ce sont des fillettes qui se livrent à ce jeu et à ces hostilités)
consistent non pas à révéler des noms propres, mais à déchirer le voile cachant
une classification et une appartenance, l’inscription dans un système de
différences linguistico-sociales. (DG 164)

The violence of this prohibition—the attempt to conceal the always occurring process of

classification and designation—comes in the form of restricting what can and cannot be spoken

about a person. In that the prohibition attempts to obliterate the proper, it can be called writing.

But what Derrida wants to emphasize here is that the prohibition exists precisely because

speaking the proper is also a form of violence. In other words, speaking the proper is speaking

the inscription of classification that is always already in play.

Implicit in everything I have sketched in this chapter thus far are the three violences that

Derrida explains (for the first and last time) immediately after the lines quoted above. With the
 30

idea of the “proper” in slightly better focus, it is helpful to summarize these three violences

within the context of the Nambikwara taboo. The first consists in the inscription of the unique as

a naming or designating, which involves the loss of that which supposedly lies beyond

designation. What is lost in the Western sense is self-presence; neither Lévi-Strauss nor Derrida

specifies what is lost for the Nambikwara. But because what is lost can never be perceived or

understood outside of designation as inscription, it cannot be said to ever have existed in the first

place. This is why this violence is originative: it produces the notion that it has obliterated

something that actually preexists it.

The second violence proceeds from the belief that what has been lost must be restored in

the name of a moral project. This is the violence of the Nambikwara taboo, which seeks to

suppress the vocalization of the “proper name” that has already divided the truly proper that

precedes it, in order to secure a certain “moral order.” In the West, on the other hand, this

violence is the stigmatization of the graphic representation of the proper. Thus it can be inferred

that this second violence marks the point at which the aforementioned reductiveness occurs.

Writing, i.e., the effacement of the proper that never fully exists, comes to be seen as something

solely visual (for the West) or solely audible (for the Nambikwara).

The third violence—which includes war, rape, moral transgression, “violence” in the

common sense of the word—is not the violence of Lévi-Strauss taking advantage of the

“innocent” girls and “exposing” the Nambikwara to writing. It is the violence enacted by the

girls themselves, in their act of revealing what the prohibitive operation of the second violence

was attempting to hide: “la non-identité native, la classification comme dénaturation du propre,

et l’identité comme moment abstrait du concept” (DG 165). It must be underscored that for

Derrida, this violence can only proceed and can only have meaning because it is produced by the
 31

first violence of “arche-writing.” What this implies is that the supposedly autonomous agency of

violence in the common sense is itself created by the more fundamental violence of inscription as

classification.

Indeed, violence for Derrida is not something that simply “happens” to an

unconditionally innocent subject. What remains to be examined in depth is how it is possible for

him to make this claim without appearing to be overly permissive of the physical brutality that

the third violence often entails. In order to work out this problem, the movements of the first

violence must be placed in deeper perspective. At the beginning of this chapter I posed the

question of metaphor. The task at hand now is to specify precisely why Derrida uses the terms

“writing” and “violence” to describe this “arche” movement of classification as loss of the

proper, and why these terms are not simply inadequate metaphors for an un-classifiable

phenomenon, but are rather what make this inadequacy incessant and productive. This task is

only possible if it is shown how these two movements of writing and violence are at once the

origin of meaning itself and the effacement of the origin.

5. Violence of and against the origin

The question of violence in Derrida is inseparable from the question of origin, of a

“simple” origin that supposedly serves as the referent par excellence that exists outside of all

textuality. The violence that writing imposes upon this origin is the production of meaning itself,

which is why its “simplicity” can only be understood as yet another violence imposed upon its

own erasure. The most radical determination of the famous Derridian phrase, “Il n’y a pas de

hors texte,” would be that there is nothing outside of violence, no exterior realm of peace and

virginity that could fall prey to its structured play. This implies that if everything is violent, or if

violence is everything, then violence does not really exist and neither do its victims. The
 32

moment of universal violence would be the moment of universal peace. But does not this

suggestion neutralize the explicitness of violence, by both ignoring the sufferings of actual

victims and removing the possibility for anyone to be a victimizer? Only if it takes for granted a

congenital relationship between violence and victim, which Derrida does not always seem to do.

But also only if the closure (clôture) of the violent text in which Derrida and all of us are

working (and writing) can ever be concluded by something other than the apocalypse, i.e., only if

it would ever be possible to live after history, outside of history, post-violence and therefore

post-peace. This possibility of living completely after is unthinkable, and thus can only be

affirmed as the ultimate impossibility. Therefore the completion of the closure, the moment of

universal violence and of universal peace, will never come, because no one will be there to

declare it unconditionally closed. To say that violence is everything is to say that violence does

not really exist, but it is not to say that violence does not have any meaning or any consequence.

Rather, precisely because we live within the closure of violence as it is produced by difference in

the Derridian sense, we have a responsibility for all of its meanings and implications, a

responsibility that does not involve any kind of moral injunction or expectation.

This responsibility is where the ethics of Derrida’s thought, if it could ever be called

such, begins. Any consideration of ethics in Derrida must take into account the question of

violence, not simply because violence in general is an “ethical theme,” but because ethics and

violence for Derrida are absolutely inseparable, just as violence and peace and violence and the

origin are. In order to explore this fundamental relationship more closely, it is necessary to go

back to the origin, as it were, or rather to solicit the notion of a static and simple origin as the site

of an originative violence that is also an originative ethics and that conditions all of the

systematic and institutional understandings of ethics that have emerged throughout history. This
 33

act of solicitation is quite important for Derrida, and its ethical implications are by no means

overlooked in his usage of the verb, which means both to request something from someone and,

etymologically, to agitate someone, to “shake someone up.” (This latter sense is preserved in the

English connotation of solicitation as prostitution or accosting, which also is not to be

overlooked). There is a very critical sense in which deconstruction as Derrida sees it is at once

an act of asking the origin about its originality, calling into question its “origin-ness” and

disturbing the stasis and simplicity that it has imposed; as well as an act of giving oneself over to

it, respecting the secondary violence of this imposition and the hold it has on Western thought.

Solicitation, however, is not something that someone, Derrida or otherwise, ever does

singlehandedly. Not because no one can, but because—as questioning in the double sense of

attack and supplication—it is always already occurring within the closure of metaphysics as a

totality that is “grounded” in this notion of origin. This is why the specific act of solicitation,

which does not come radically out of nowhere, is precisely the expression of the responsibility

that everyone speaking and writing within the Western tradition has to this tradition’s ceaseless

questioning of itself. As Derrida says in “Violence et métaphysique,” this responsibility

manifests itself in the work of a community: “Communauté de la question sur la possibilité de la

question. C’est peu—ce n’est presque rien—mais là se réfugient et se résument aujourd’hui une

dignité et un devoir inentamables de décision. Une inentamable responsabilité” (ED 118).5

Another way of putting this would be to say that solicitation is the responsibility that is born out

of this tradition’s constant violence against itself, the constant possibility of its impossibility, of

its absence, along with every assertion of its totality and self-presence. “Pourquoi inentamable?

Parce que l’impossible a déjà eu lieu. L’impossible selon la totalité du questionné, selon la

5
Derrida, Jacques. “Violence et métaphysique.” In L’écriture et la différence. Paris:
Éditions du Seuil, 1967. L’écriture et la différence will hereafter be referred to as ED.
 34

totalité de l’étant, des objets et des déterminations, l’impossible selon l’histoire des faits a eu

lieu: il y a une histoire de la question, une mémoire pure de la question pure…” (ED 118). The

very movement of declaring an impossibility is an affirmation of impossibility as the ultimate

possibility, the possibility of destruction and non-being: “Il n’est donc ni loi ni commandement

qui ne confirme et n’enferme—c’est-à-dire qui ne dissimule en la présupposant—la possibilité de

la question” (ED 119). In that the question has already taken place, all solicitation is always too

late and too much. Since it has already happened, its reiteration is unnecessary—and yet the

necessity of posing the unnecessary question is the fundamental responsibility that comes from

not being “on time,” as it were, from never being an eyewitness to the origin’s effacement.

Before all of this can be expanded further, it is first important to explore why violence for

Derrida, far from something that he has “neutralized” into textuality, is absolutely implicit in the

origination of language as signification. This involves going back to the origin that has already

been erased, which, as an impossible movement, first and foremost poses the question of exactly

what this erasure consists of. For Derrida, neither the passive nor the active voice is sufficient in

describing this erasure: just as no exterior force can singlehandedly expunge the origin from

memory, neither can the origin completely “suffer” such an act of exterior effacement or efface

itself of its own accord. Both voices taken by themselves presuppose a pre-existing and fully

self-present origin to be acted upon or to choose to act upon itself. These insufficiencies express

the impossibility of a shift from total presence to total absence brought about by violent

obliteration. Nothing can be completely negated without thereby being at least somehow

preserved––this is the sense of Hegel’s notion of Aufhebung as Derrida understands it in his

translation of the term as relève (relief/lifting up). And it is precisely because this erasure is
 35

constantly occurring within the closure of difference that the absolutely irreversible change of

state that both voices imply (presenceabsence) cannot hold.

On a basic level, the insufficiencies and presumptions that Derrida is pointing out here

stem from a blindness to the ternary aspect of origination as erasure. Many thinkers would have

it that writing forgets about the origin (Socrates), does not respect the primacy of the origin

(Rousseau), corrupts the origin’s natural purity (Lévi-Strauss), and so on. All the ethical

implications of forgetting, disrespecting, and corrupting aside, the most abstract assumption of

each of these criticisms is a certain binary structure. Not only that, but a hierarchical binary

structure of victim and aggressor. As Derrida has shown in the cases of Socrates and Rousseau,

this is equally a hierarchical binary structure between deficiency and supplement. Certainly, the

notion of the origin has changed over the centuries and will continue to change (this is precisely

why it is always only a supplement and substitute), but its double status as victim and deficiency

reveals a certain “necessary violence” that must always occur at the moment of origination. The

origin must always be the victim because the origin is always never enough—the wholly present

and commandingly generative can never be sensed or comprehended as it is in itself. The very

moment of the discovery and attainment of the “single” or “simple” origin would be nothing less

than the end of history as the questioning and solicitation of the origin, which as we have seen is

an impossible prospect. In this sense, a completely transparent mimesis, a completely accurate

representation of the origin as transcendent signified (both oxymoronic propositions), would not

provide an access to the truth, but would be death itself. Rather, as Derrida has suggested time

and time again, signification only proceeds as signification through misrepresentation,

misinterpretation, deception, fraud, and it is only through this necessary violence that life can

have any meaning at all.

 36

But even this last statement assumes the binary relationship that it seeks to call into

question. Indeed, language would be incomprehensible without such relationships. However,

the radicality of this assertion is lost if it is not understood that the “comprehensibility” in

question only arises out of a series of violences that cannot be comprehensively categorized or

perhaps even followed. It is not simply the case that every person lives through the

misrepresentation (vocal and written) of origins, and it is even less the case that the origin does

not “actually” “exist.” The only way in which the idea of misrepresentation can move beyond

the dynamic of misrepresenter/misrepresented is if it is proposed as an originative violence that

produces that dynamic itself. There is no question that the ethical implications of this idea will

thereby undergo a corresponding transformation that will need to be further developed. It is at

this point that the “third term” can introduce itself, this mysterious and phantasmic figure that is

inextricably linked to originary violence as originary ethics.

If the origin is constantly vulnerable to misappropriation, misrepresentation, and

defilement by the system it supposedly produces, this is because its own claim to productive

power is itself an act of misrepresentative violence. Just as much as the origin inevitably needs a

supplement, so too is it the supplement for something else. There is always something other than

the origin and its corrupt representation that comes into play in this originary violence,

something that is, impossibly, the origin of the origin, which is to say the non-origin of the non-

origin. The proposition is maddening if it is processed in the context of precedence and

sequence, which to a significant extent is unavoidable. And it becomes dulled if it is thought

solely in the context of substitution, if one chooses to stop at the idea that every origin is actually

hiding its own secret origin and thus declares originality to be an entirely empty concept. Such

nihilistic and relativistic indifference completely ignores the challenging richness of the idea of
 37

something that is “other” than the origin that is neither that which the origin originates nor the

origin of the origin itself. It also flattens the irony inherent in the proposition and in Derrida’s

usage of the prefix “arche-“ in “arche-writing” and “arche-violence.” In order for the origin to

be both victim and deficiency, there must be a sense in which it requires its own supplementation

and thus its own effacing. This is why the origin for Derrida is neither present nor absent,

neither completely preservable nor completely forgettable. But the nature of this requirement is

still uncertain. Derrida nowhere suggests that it stems entirely from the origin itself, because that

would imply that the origin exists solely in itself and not already as a supplement. Rather, this

compulsion comes from the impossibilities of a third term in a binary structure and of an origin

of an origin, both of which are confirmed by and contained (enfermer in the above citation)

within a hierarchy that elevates the origin as simple and immutable. The problem at hand is how

it is possible to affirm a necessary violence whose necessity is called for by an impossibility. In

other words, how, for Derrida, does the impossible (origin as non-origin, origin of the origin, the

end of history, the third term etc.) rise up as an urgency that must be affirmed beyond the limits

of rational intelligibility? For, as I suggested earlier, there is a certain unavoidable sense in

which judging something to be impossible automatically reduces the impossible within these

limits. With this in mind, it must be shown how Derrida demonstrates the way in which a certain

“unmediated access” to the impossible can proceed only within the closure of a system (textual,

historical, metaphysical) that violently reduces everything into a spectrum of supplementation

and possibility. Moreover, it also remains to be seen in what way this “affirmation” of the

impossible within the system amounts to a responsibility that is both immovable (inentamable)

and decisive.
 38

But first it is necessary to undertake the (impossible) task of tracing impossibility back to

the origin and exploring its relationship to violence and inscription. In De la grammatologie,

Derrida describes this situation the most pithily in mathematical terms: “Ce qui peut se regarder

n’est pas un et la loi de l’addition de l’origine à sa représentation, de la chose à son image, c’est

que un et un font au moins trois" (DG 55). Here Derrida begins to elaborate on his idea of

supplementarity as an addition to the origin that is at once a repetition and a forgetting of the

origin. This is the double movement that occurs in the process of representation, in which the

original signified is both preserved and destroyed and thus inevitably misrepresented. But the

notion of representation as misrepresentation is even more complicated. For Derrida still has not

determined why this misrepresentation is a necessary violence. Certainly a part of the answer is

the constant insufficiency of the origin, its inability to present itself as it is. But the more critical

question is precisely why these qualities of insufficiency and misrepresentation are not simply

failures, but productive states. What is the multiplicity of the “at least three” created by

representation as misrepresentation? It is perhaps easy to speculate that the third term in the

relationship between represented and representer is the act of representation itself, but this risks

separating the act from both its subject and its object. In this regard, it is helpful to recall that

Saussure’s conception of the sign as the reciprocal relationship between signifier and signified is

not the same as a conception of the sign as signification itself. Rather, within the binary of

signifier and signified, a third term (the sign) can be thought that at once produces the other two

terms and is produced by their mutual difference and deferral. Thus the impossibility that is

excluded by the system is necessarily contained within it, but is in no way reduced or neutralized

by this containment.
 39

But there is no name for Derrida’s third term, which, because it could also be a fourth or

a hundredth term, does not present itself as explicitly or forcefully as the sign in Saussure’s

relationship. And yet it is with the creation of this “extra” term that violence, writing, meaning,

history begin. In the repetition of the origin, there is an unidentifiable and indistinguishable

moment at which the origin’s self-reiteration transforms into its own expropriation. In other

words, at a certain point the origin’s repetition of its self-presence can become a certain “excess”

of presence, which becomes its dissolution into inauthenticity and absence. This is the point at

which writing begins, and the fact that this point is impossible to identify means that writing as

misrepresentative representation is always already happening, even before graphic inscription.

Thus the moment of the third term is the moment of writing, which is the moment of splitting:

“Il n’y a plus d’origine simple. Car ce qui est reflété se dédouble en soi-même et non seulement

comme addition à soi de son image. Le reflet, l’image, le double dédouble ce qu’il redouble.

L’origine de la spéculation devient une différence” (DG 55). Unlike the Lacanian mirror, which

consolidates the naturally fragmented “origin” (the uncoordinated child) as an object of desire,

the mirror in this case splits apart an origin that was never completely whole in the first place.

And even more peculiarly, this mirror produces the augmented illusion of a consolidated, simple

origin precisely through this splitting. But really, there is no mirror in Derrida’s scheme. There

is only a reflection, a gleam (reflet), a double that preserves the original only by breaking it up.

This is only possible if the original has already been splitting within itself, even before the

beginning of its repetition: “Car ce qui est reflété se dédouble en soi-même….” And yet, there is

no “before” in this framework—in that the origin is always already splitting, it is always already

repeating itself in doubles. Thus the origin can only live as a self-present point of orientation to

the extent that it can only live as a constant series of false identities and insincere imitations.
 40

None of this, however, necessarily leads to what could be called chaos. Or rather,

perhaps it all would be chaos if it were not for the work of violent doubling and splitting (“de-

doubling”) that, by both preserving and forgetting the origin, opens up the system to its others

through difference. In fact, the very production of the system, or the structure, is contingent

upon this violence, which is the arche-violence to which Derrida repeatedly refers. For the

Greeks, Chaos was the originative gap or splitting of Heaven and Earth that produced all mortal

and immortal beings within the universe. For Derrida, the originative splitting is the opening up

of the system to its others, to that which it might not be able to comprehend, to the possibility of

its own destruction that occurs at the moment when the system asserts itself as a self-present and

comprehensive identity. This system could be metaphysics, science, mathematics, law, religion:

any structure that wishes to institute itself as a totality grounded around a definite and secure

center. However, as Derrida notes in his essay “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the

Human Sciences,”6 in order for this grounding to be regulatory, in order for the structure to have

the freedom to subsume and comprehend, its center must somehow exist both within and outside

of it, governing the game without losing itself within its play. This is to say that even the most

rigidly delimiting constructions of systems and institutions require a transcendence of their own

limits in order for those limits to be drawn and maintained.

Both violence and ethics involve a process of opening up to and reaching for one’s other.

At the time of the splitting of the origin, there is no difference between the two, since it is

precisely through the movement from origin to difference (see previous citation) that the

categories of violence and ethics are produced. And because this splitting is constantly

occurring, it could be said that, at a very fundamental level, there is never any difference

6
Derrida, Jacques. “La structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines.” In
L’écriture et la différence. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967.
 41

between the two. In this regard, their difference can only be instituted by either a code of

“ethical” conduct or a “violent” and coercive determination. Certainly, ethical codes are often

violently enforced, and violence often occurs in the name of ethics. The point is that, for

Derrida, both are produced not only as difference, but as opposition, by an arche-violence that is

also an arche-ethics (and arche-writing) at the time of the origin’s preservation through

fragmentation.

As previously noted, Derrida’s employment of the prefix “arche-“ is ironic, because the

Greek word archē signifies the very notions of fixed origin and proprietary sovereignty that

Derrida is problematizing. Which, of course, is not to say that he rejects the importance of the

term archē outright. In fact, the danger of regarding Derrida’s usage of this prefix as merely

ironic completely ignores the positive significance that this term has for De la grammatologie

and much of his work. Once again, he is here using a term under rature, which has the effect of

preserving the meaning of a concept precisely by crossing it out, recognizing the power it has in

shaping Western epistemology without taking that power for granted, in short paying tribute to

the conceptual heritage its usage has produced in the very act of subverting and destabilizing this

usage. For one of the major implications of solicitation as Derrida sees it is that the respect of

the origin, the return to the origin, the preservation of the origin, is always necessarily a

disturbance of and an infringement upon the origin. And this is the case because, already

fragmented from the very moment it asserts itself as definitively self-present, the origin is always

already other. As the center that can never be completely centered, that can never occupy a

definite locus within its structure, the origin must accede its own finitude in order to preserve

that finitude. There is always something that one misses when he or she attempts to trace a

history back to its archē , and also when he or she confidently determines something as the
 42

archē to begin with. It is precisely the nature of the archē to never be fully present, to rest in the

indeterminacy of being both inside and outside of the structure it supports and controls.

The agent of this expulsion of the archē or origin outside of its own system has,

according to Derrida, always been attributed to the notion of writing as supplement. But if the

origin cannot be an origin without this expulsion, if the origin is always already inscribed into a

difference, then writing cannot be a violence that simply happens to the origin. The origin does

not occupy a definite or stable enough place either within or beyond its system for such a strict

subject-object schema to apply to it. On the other hand, neither does the violence against the

origin arise entirely from the origin itself. The origin is never written entirely by a foreign hand,

nor does it singlehandedly write itself. Derrida’s reading of Tristes tropiques, for example,

suggests that the Nambikwara culture inflicts upon itself the prohibition of the proper name (i.e.,

of instinctive classification) only in order to prevent another violence from destroying the true

“proper” that resists such classification. Thus the determination of violence as either an

infringement by an outside force or a self-activated self-destructiveness is inadequate. As is any

attempt to combine the two alternatives, by arguing for example that the origin is at once the

victim and the agent of its own expulsion, which is the same as arguing that the origin is neither

the victim nor the agent of its expulsion. Both of these arguments reveal the inevitable

indecisiveness that these two alternative determinations produce in a consideration of Derrida’s

views on the origin.

On the contrary, it is precisely the ethical implications of the decision that Derrida

emphasizes in his treatment of the possibility of soliciting the origin as an unshakable,

unquestionable responsibility. Unlike judgment, the decision is the affirmative move that one

makes in the absence of objective truth and certainty of comprehension. Or at least this is the
 43

sense of the term for Kierkegaard, for whom ethics begins at the moment at which one

irrationally yet unconditionally embraces the infinite as it interrupts and agitates the finite

subject. With this in mind, it is necessary to move beyond the decision between the above

constructions of violence, which proceeds within an uncritical assumption of the categories of

inside/outside and subject/object, toward the decision to affirm violence as something that is

always already occurring and originating the origins of which we are so certain. This, naturally,

sounds extremely dangerous. Of course, one cannot simply decide to accept Derrida’s ideas on

violence as arche-violence because he is describing a movement that is never completely present

and thus never completely intelligible. Especially since Derrida is always the first to

acknowledge that he and everyone reading him are working within and thus responsible for this

Western culture of intelligibility. But the decision in question is not simply a decision to

“accept” Derrida, nor is it a decision to “accept” violence in the sense of being indifferent to it.

At stake here is the crucial difference between affirmation and acceptance. To accept violence as

originative is to treat it as if it were an origin and an end in itself, to pretend that one is not

completely affected by its productive power and even to pretend that it does not have a

productive power at all. On the other hand, to affirm violence as originative is to force oneself to

make the paradoxical movement of granting a certain power to it while at the same time

preventing that power from being authoritative and tyrannical. This prevention is only possible

if it consists in the affirmation of the power of violence as a specifically ethical power, in that its

productive capacity is its constant opening up of structure to that which it excludes, to its own

impossibility, from the very creation of structure itself.

However, this “opening up” of the totality to that which “exceeds” it is equally the

constant opportunity for this totality to absorb its other. Thus “there is no outside of the text”
 44

because there is nothing that the text cannot assimilate, nothing that is not susceptible to the

movements of textuality, and indeed nothing that is not incomprehensible outside of these

movements. But there is also no outside of the text because the outside of the text, as the “other”

of the text and the very impossibility of the text, is endlessly calling into question the limits of

textuality from its very origin. Neither of these suggestions necessarily implies that the

“outside” is always already “inside,” nor that the text is unlimited and infinite. The point here is

that the violence at the origin, the violence of the origin, is precisely the splitting of the origin,

the opening up to the other and the impossibility of the origin in the origin’s own, “proper”

repetition of itself. The repetition of original self-presence (what Derrida calls its “articulation”

in De la grammatologie) is necessarily the misappropriation of self-presence. The most

profound welcoming of the other is also the most profound violence against the other, because

the self-presence of the origin is always already lost in the endless repetition, re-presentation, and

totalization of that origin. Its solipsism proceeds only as its constant disturbance by the other

that it has always faced. Thus if the origin is always impossible to determine, always “outside”

of our reach, it is not only because it was never fully present to begin with. It is also because the

origin is only ever fully present to the extent that it is constantly outside of itself and its system,

agitated by its others as its impossibility and unable to embrace them without subsuming them.

Thus there is a splitting of the origin in the repetition of the origin; the above tension

between agitation and subsumption is the consequence of this splitting. Writing, then, proceeds

as these four movements (splitting, repeating, agitating, subsuming), respecting the origin while

thereby upsetting and rupturing it, respecting the other while thereby devouring it. Derrida

would call this not a paradox of violence and ethics, but rather an “economy” of violence and

ethics. That is, a series of movements that act positively and generatively with—and as—one
 45

another within a structured framework that cannot be absolutely transcended. They do not

simply cancel each other out, nor do they act outside of logic. It is only with this notion of

economy that one could trace a certain ethical imperative in Derrida’s early work. In order to

write or to speak, one must agitate the origin in respecting it and one must subsume the other in

welcoming it. Language for Derrida is impossible without this necessity. The “must” here does

not have the sense of a constrained futility or a necessary capitulation as much as it declares an

internal urgency that cannot be avoided.

But what exactly are the positive and generative effects of this economical ethics? Or

rather, since the language of causality, although unavoidable, is perhaps not appropriate here

(since, Derrida would say, these very arche-movements are what produce causality itself): why

are these violences not completely debilitating to communication? I would argue that for

Derrida, what they really produce is not only meaning itself, but also a certain responsibility in

the minds of those who mean. That is, not a responsibility to the origin in a civic or religious

sense, but instead a responsibility to the erasure of the origin. This is not to say a responsibility

born from the mourning of a lost but once present origin, for this would be the same

responsibility as in the first sense. The responsibility that Derrida seems to describe is the

responsibility to the violence of/at the origin, to the “always-already-erasedness” of the origin.

This is neither a responsibility of obligation, nor one of guilt. Rather, it is a responsibility that

activates itself in every moment of writing and speaking, in the economical “must” that compels

us to affirm the other while assimilating it to the same and to affirm the origin as it opens itself

up to difference and impossibility. It is writing and speaking as responsibility, as the constant

and often unknowing questioning of the laws of language, of rationality, of the origin in general.

There is a certain extent to which anyone who enters into the structured play of textuality (that is,
 46

anyone who communicates, even those who cannot write or speak) has no choice but to enter

into this responsibility. Of course, for Derrida nothing exists before this entering. For that

reason it is not an enforced entering or an obligatory responsibility imposed by an external

source. Communication can only have meaning as this responsibility.

More specifically, this is a responsibility to the third term, to the splitting of the origin as

the repetition of the origin, to the embracement of the other as a violence against the other, in

short to writing as the differential movement that generates meaning by this splitting, repetition,

embracement, violence. And it can be called a responsibility—not just a phenomenon or an

inescapability—because there is no act of language that is completely innocent and free of

blame. Every text, whether written or otherwise, and no matter how sincere in intent, is always

guilty of over-generalizing, of straying from its course, of never expressing enough, of always

expressing too much. Thus nothing can ever “happen” to language, because language, in the

absence of a completely self-present (human) origin, is the condition for all “happening.”

Something more genuine is always being corrupted, but the very charge of corruption is itself a

product of this constancy, as is this something. Everything within textuality is inevitably implicit

in this fraudulence and debasement, as well as in the creation of the illusion that something

primary and transcendent has been debased, or at least has had something “happen” to it in

general. This is the only sense in which writing is, as it were, not guilty: “Sa violence survient à

l’âme comme inconscience….la violence de l’écriture ne survient pas à un langage innocent….

‘L’usurpation’ a toujours déjà commencé” (ED 55). Likewise, in “La mythologie blanche,”

Derrida explains that metaphor is not something that simply “happens” (survenir) to the ultimate

transcendental signified of the Western tradition, the sun: “Ce nom [le soleil] n’est plus le nom

propre d’une chose unique auquel la métaphore surviendrait; il a déjà commencé à dire l’origine
 47

multiple, divisée, de toute semence, l’œil, l’invisibilité, la mort, le père, le ‘nom propre,’ etc”

(MP 291)7.

The theme of temporality that runs through this commentary on “happening” and on the

“always already” also forms a major part of the responsibility I am outlining here. For if the

origin has always already been erased, if metaphor has always already spoken the divided origin

of every seed, then there is a sense in which discursive practice is not only too little and too

much, but also too late. If the origin can never be understood as having been present, then it is

impossible for there to be any witnesses present at its effacement. It is equally impossible, I

would suggest, to understand what the violence of/at the origin consists of. One of the major

ambiguities that Derrida leaves open on this point is the problem of how it is possible for the

origin to be both originally split and originally erased. It is very doubtful that he would argue

that it is simply split “and then” erased. Perhaps it is precisely this temporal impossibility for

which discourse is always too late; that is, perhaps the fact that one can never know “what

happened” to the origin, as it were, creates the need to be attentive to the others that its splitting

or its erasure have equally produced, welcomed, and assaulted. In this regard, there is a sense in

which communication is always a sort of “making up for lost time.” Since writing according to

Derrida is both the articulation of time into space and the articulation of space into time, this

“making up for lost time” is the same as the “making up for a lost whole.” But where can one

proceed from this uncertainty? In the beginning of “Violence et métaphysique,” Derrida argues

that the responsibility of the question (or the question of the question, the questioning of the

simplicity of the “what is”) is also the responsibility of the decision. As previously suggested,

the most genuine of decisions can only come out of complete uncertainty. The same is true of

7
Derrida, Jacques. “La mythologie blanche: la métaphore dans le texte philosophique.” In
Marges: De la philosophie. Paris: Éditions du Minuit, 1972.
 48

the most genuine of questions. But what remains to be decided if there was never an origin that

never needed to be decided, that is an origin that was absolutely unquestionable? Does not the

prospect of an un-empirical decisiveness risk repeating the violences of subsumption and

totalization? Derrida would likely argue that such risks are to a certain extent unavoidable. But

in what way could an ethics—not a totalizing ethical “system”—emerge from this

unavoidability?

The first step in the exploration of this possibility is one that Derrida does not make

explicit in his discussions of the questioning of the origin, of the questioning of the question,

“what is the origin,” and of the fact that this questioning has never preceded the institution of the

origin itself. If, for Derrida, the establishment of the origin is the originative violence against the

origin itself, if violence is somehow the “origin of the origin,” then the responsibility of

questioning is not only directed towards the questioning of the origin, but more specifically to

the questioning of violence.

6. The violence of questioning/the questioning of violence

It is very difficult to maintain the notion of a certain “responsibility to violence” without

sounding utterly sadistic and un-ethical, despite the deconstruction of violence that Derrida

traces in his early work. This is especially the case when we recall that this violence is a

necessary violence, without which all meaning and all difference would be impossible. In a

certain sense, one that Derrida does not deny, the notion of violence can only ever be a metaphor

for the splitting, repeating, and erasing of the origin, which are themselves “only” metaphors for

other movements that can never be named. This is why all language is originally metaphoric.
 49

But even though these movements can never be named, even though Derridean terms and

concepts such as differance and arche-violence are neither terms nor concepts, the necessity to

which Derrida refers is precisely the necessity of naming them. For there is a certain risk of

indifference and inactivity in declaring the original metaphoricity of language as something

finished and unfruitful. This risk is also the risk of not being violent enough, as it were, of

denying the productive and indispensable possibilities of identification and classification, of

over-generalization and misrepresentation. But if language is always already violent, if this

violence is what produces both metaphor and identification, what for Derrida is the point at

which language can become too violent? When does the necessary violence become

unnecessary?

One of the few extended commentaries on this theme is Jack E. Marsh’s recent article,

“On Violence: The Force and Significance of Violence in Early Derrida,”8 which criticizes this

necessity for precluding any “real emancipatory possibilities” (Marsh 284) from concrete, socio-

historical violence. Necessary violence, for Marsh, is a necessity that need not be, and Derrida’s

own specifications supposedly prove this point. In his conclusion, Marsh argues: “Derrida’s

distinction between the (transcendental) ‘necessary’ and the ‘empirical’ (possible) violence

testifies to the priority of socio-material relations to the rigors of the Derridean trace…” (284).

The testimony, as Marsh would have it, is that Derrida’s necessary violence maintains a stagnant

and almost pessimistic ahistoricity that is only alleviated when Derrida moves from what Marsh

calls the motif of the “question” in his early work to that of the “promise” later on. Lacking any

affirmative eschatological possibility, Derrida’s early writings read as a “‘symptomology’ of a

metaphysical disease doomed to run its course…to war and keep on warring, infinitely” (284).

8
Marsh, Jack E. “Of Violence: The Force and Significance of Violence in Early Derrida.” In
Philosophy and Social Criticism, vol. 35, no. 3. 2009.
 50

Marsh’s simplistic distinction between “question” and “promise” is very suspect, but the

more pressing danger in this essay is that Marsh seems to fall back into the same accusations of

nihilism against Derrida that one would have hoped his subtle and sophisticated reading of him

could have avoided. In light of this apparently plain distinction between transcendental-

necessary violence and empirical-possible-historical violence, it is useful to underscore Derrida’s

own comments on historicity in “Violence et métaphysique”:

Un être sans violence serait un être qui se produirait hors de l’étant : rien; non-histoire,
non-production; non phénoménalité. Une parole qui se produirait sans la moindre
violence ne dé-terminerait rien, ne dirait rien, n’offrirait rien à l’autre; elle ne serait pas
histoire et ne montrerait rien…. (ED 218)

Without violence, nothing could be offered to the other: neither the choice to be violent nor the

choice not to be violent. Without this choice and without this offering, history would be

impossible, as would being and speech. Thus historical violence is not “possible” violence over

against “transcendental” violence. In fact, Derrida does not even speak of “transcendental”

violence, but rather of history as necessarily transcendence: “L’histoire n’est pas la totalité

transcendée par l’eschatologie, la métaphysique ou la parole. Elle est la transcendance elle-

même….Si, en ce sens, le mouvement de transcendance métaphysique est histoire, il est encore

violent, car, c’est l’évidence légitime dont s’inspire toujours Levinas, l’histoire est violence. La

métaphysique est économie : violence contre violence, lumière contre lumière : la philosophie

(en général)” (ED 173). If it is still appropriate to speak in these terms, it could be said that

history for Derrida is transcendence as the empirical and

Equally problematic is Marsh’s take on the significance of empiricism in De la

grammatologie. Throughout his essay, Marsh seems to assume that Derrida’s definition of the

“third violence” as empirical violence (rape, war, etc.) implies that this violence is only ever a

“mere” possibility. He begins his gloss of Derrida’s description of the three violences with a
 51

puzzling use of scare quotes: “This is an extremely loaded passage that will require closer

interrogation as we proceed, especially ‘mere’ tertiary, ‘empirical’ violence” (Marsh 277). In

Spivak’s translation of this passage, which he cites, the word “mere” is nowhere to be found, nor

does Derrida ever suggest that any form of violence is insignificant. Marsh’s employment of this

word is particularly confusing in light of his contention that Derrida’s own distinction between

necessary and empirical violence “testifies to the priority of socio-material relations to the rigors

of the Derridean trace.”

As Derrida’s comments on history and transcendence in “Violence et métaphysique”

demonstrate, such a distinction is bound to fold into itself. His schema of the three violences is

far from a hierarchy with “necessary” above “possible.” Rather, the empirical nature of the third

violence is absolutely contingent upon the first two; whether or not this violence arises depends

not on “mere” chance, but on the extent to which the originative expropriations of the necessary

first violence are revealed. Furthermore, Marsh does not take into account the methodological

importance of empiricism for Derrida’s project in De la grammatologie. For it is in Derrida’s

rethinking of the long-standing opposition between empiricism and metaphysics, between

science and philosophy, where the ethical underpinnings of his “science of writing” begin to take

shape.

The previous chapters have shown how a position of absolute exteriority to the structure

of philosophy (as logocentrism) is untenable. And yet, according to De la grammatologie, a

certain exteriority to this structure is required in order for what has come to be called

“deconstruction” to proceed: “Nous voulions atteindre le point d’une certaine extériorité par

rapport à la totalité de l’époque logocentrique. A partir de ce point d’extériorité, une certaine

déconstruction pourrait être entamée de cette totalité, qui est aussi un chemin tracé…” (DG 231).
 52

We have seen how the movement outside of the system, arising at the very origin of the system,

is actually a triple movement of a violence against the system, a welcoming and embracing of the

other, and a violent subsumption of the other. But what the relationship between empiricism and

exorbitancy adds to this commentary is the fact that it is only through such a violent exteriority

that the system can be understood to be a system in the first place. This is why the center of the

system, that which defines the system and governs its totality, must be de-centered beyond the

scope of this totality. The center of the system cannot be a part of the system. Thus moving out

of the system is only possible if the entire system is comprehended. That is, moving out is only

possible if one adopts a certain empirical methodology with regard to the system’s finitude: “A

l’intérieur de la clôture, on ne peut juger son style qu’en fonction d’oppositions reçues. On dira

que ce style est empiriste et d’une certaine manière on aura raison. La sortie est radicalement

empiriste” (DG 232).

On the one hand, the ethical violence of the system is that it opens itself up to its others as

its impossibility at the same time that it comprehends those others into its own totality. On the

other hand, this same movement of reducing the other into itself also involves its own reduction

into systematicity. Nowhere in Derrida’s economy of violence does on violence absolutely

dominate and vanquish another. This is true even of metaphysics as logocentrism, which, like all

systems, has never ceased to pose to itself the question of its own impossibility and its own

death, even (and especially) in those moments in which it seems to be asserting its dominance

and totality the most forcefully.

However, when Derrida speaks of an “economy of violence” and of the “necessary

violence” that produces meaning, he is not necessarily “reducing” socio-material circumstances

to some sort of fantastical realm of undifferentiated and uncontrollable “violence” as such. This
 53

is what Marsh seems to imply when he argues, “the infrastructures Derrida opens to us, and their

attending necessity, teeter on the brink of the mythic, and effectively imply the violence of

existence itself and the impossibility of a lasting socio-political Peace” (Marsh 283). The major

problem of Marsh’s essay is that, although he does include a detailed an insightful account of the

significance of the “three violences” in De la grammatologie, he ultimately fails to extend

Derrida’s questioning of violence in his own critique of the role of violence in Derrida’s work.

The notions of the “violence of existence itself” and the “impossibility of a lasting socio-political

Peace” remain irreconcilable only if “violence” is taken to be something monolithic that exists

outside of difference. Despite his ironical tone, Marsh is not completely exaggerating when he

claims that “the necessity of violence renders it the only abiding ‘as such’ in Derrida’s textual

fabrics” (270). But what he does not acknowledge is that violence remains a sort of “as such”

for Derrida only to the extent that it is not a unified and a priori “in itself” that is not in turn

subject to any number of violences against it.

However, the problem that Marsh points out is by no means invalid. The ways in which

Derrida demonstrates the “violence of existence itself,” the violence of Being, are numerous.

And Marsh is right to call into question the sense of inescapability that Derrida’s economical-

empirical readings of the violence of metaphysics continually evoke. Despite the aberrant and

parasitic character of his writing, there is an extent to which, for this very reason, Derrida is one

of the more conservative philosophers of the twentieth century. The notion of a complete

radicality is highly suspect in a Derridean framework. Indeed, as Marsh points out, “violence, in

Derrida’s playground, is first of all the reduction and effacement of alterity” (280), and yet

nothing exists that is radically “other” to the violence of systematicity. Certainly, if existence
 54

itself is violent, then the “emancipation” from violence to which Marsh refers throughout his

essay is impossible in a revolutionary sense. It can only be affirmed as a promise to come.

Although it is reasonable to commiserate with Marsh’s dissatisfaction with this painfully

indecisive moment in Derrida, this does not have to be the end of the story. True, it is difficult to

settle with the mere promise of emancipation in the absence of any certain strategy for the

transcendence of the violence of existence. But it seems that Marsh does not address this

difficulty critically enough. Nowhere does Marsh provide an explicit definition of the “Peace” to

which he repeatedly refers, except when he contrasts Derrida with a few perhaps more

“optimistic” philosophers: “Is not the difference between Benjamin, Levinas, and Adorno, on

the one hand, and Derrida on the other, precisely in the former’s affirmation of a specific

eschatological possibility: that of a just and lasting Peace?” (283). Perhaps Marsh is referring to

Derrida’s comments on the possibility of peace in “Violence et métaphysique,” in which he

makes the troubling remark that the desire for peace is nothing more than the desire for yet

another violence:

Si, comme le dit Levinas, seul le discours peut être juste (et non le contact intuitif)
et si, d’autre part, tout discours retient essentiellement l’espace et le Même en lui,
cela ne signifie-t-il pas que le discours est originellement violent? Et que la guerre
habite le logos philosophique dans lequel seul pourtant on peut déclarer la paix? (ED
171)

If this is the case, then the possibility of peace would have to exist at once in the “justness” of

free discourse and—since this discourse, reducing everything to the same, is essentially violent

—in the unthinkable termination of that discourse. If there were no violence in the world, there

would be universal peace; but this only means that there would be universal silence. This

silence, Derrida argues, is in a certain sense both the essence and the telos of discourse:

La distinction entre discours et violence serait toujours un inaccessible horizon. La non-

violence serait le telos et non l’essence du discours. On dira peut-être que quelque chose
 55

comme le discours a son essence dans son telos et la présence de son présent dans son
avenir. Certes, mais à condition que son avenir et son telos soient non-discours : la paix
comme un certain silence, un certain au-delà de la parole, une certaine possibilité, un
certain horizon silencieux de la parole (ED 171-72).

This is to reiterate the fact that, since its origin, as its origin, language has always been

engaged with the possibility of its own silencing, which is to say that it has always been engaged

in a process of self-questioning and self-transcendence. In other words, Marsh’s chronological

distinction between Derrida’s emphasis on the question, on the one hand, and the promise, on the

other, can no longer hold. The promise of peace, of the silencing of violent speech, is the

question of the origin, the cluster of violences that at once institute, split and erase the origin into

the trace. This promise, although unthinkable, is not fantastical. It is not beyond the scope of the

violence it is supposed to appease. Or rather, it is produced precisely by this violence, by the

economy of violences that is history. This is not simply to say that between each historical

violence there is an interval of historical peace; such a statement is far too schematic and over-

simplified. Rather, it is to say that every moment of violence is, from a certain point of view, a

moment of peace. A world without violence would be a world of ubiquitous peace, but so too

would a world of ubiquitous violence. Nothing could be called “violent” if everything was

violence. Peace is not possible for Derrida if it is taken as the indeterminate negation of

violence, or war. It is in this sense that a responsibility for violence begins to take shape:

La parole est sans doute la première défaite de la violence, mais, paradoxalement,

celle-ci n’existait pas avant la possibilité de la parole. Le philosophe (l’homme)
doit parler et écrire dans cette guerre de la lumière en laquelle il se sait toujours
déjà engagé et dont il sait qu’il ne pourrait s’échapper qu’en reniant le discours,
c’est-à-dire en risquant la pire violence. C’est pourquoi cet aveu de la guerre dans
le discours, aveu qui n’est pas encore la paix, signifie le contraire d’un bellicisme;
dont on sait bien––et qui l’a mieux montré que Hegel?––que l’irénisme est dans
l’histoire son meilleur complice” (ED 173).
 56

The doit in this passage is not one of moral duty, but of an economy that cannot be easily

avoided. No one can deny his or her participation in history, in the violence of discourses,

without risking the silencing of all discourses. The responsibility to originative violence is

precisely this economic imperative.

“[L’]irénisme est dans l’histoire…”: the significance of the italics here is that the peace

that, as Marsh would have it, exists for Derrida only in the inaccessible and absolute to-come

(the end of history as the end of speech, as the apocalypse), is in fact the very violent history that

it is supposed to transcend. If nothing can “transcend” the economy of violence, if nothing exists

beyond its reach, it is only because transcendence is this economy itself:

Dans l’histoire dont le philosophe ne peut s’échapper parce qu’elle n’est pas histoire
au sens que lui donne Levinas (totalité), mais l’histoire des sorties hors de la
totalité, histoire comme le mouvement même de la transcendance, de l’excès sur la
totalité sans lequel aucune totalité n’apparaîtrait (ED 173).

We see, then, that peace is violent not only as the silencing of discursive violence, but also as

discourse’s own self-critique and as both the product and the originator of new violences. The

possibility of peace as the absolute negation of the violence of history is in fact an impossibility,

but one that is constantly affirmed throughout the course of this history.

The ethics of this system is not an ethical system or a system of ethics. It has taken much

questioning to arrive at the term “ethics,” which is never sufficient enough to describe the violent

movements of and against alterity that are produced at and as the origin. The welcoming and

embracing of the other is always an absorption of the other into the same. But it is an absorption

into a same that is also an other—for the same is, by definition, the other of the other. Not only

that, but the same is also and originally the other of itself, fragmented at the moment of its

institution, exposed to its impossibility at the moment of its founding self-certainty. On the other

hand, the other can only be known to be other if it is somehow a part of the same: “l’autre n’est
 57

absolument autre qu’en étant un ego, c’est-à-dire d’une certaine façon le même que moi….Plus

autre et moins autre à la fois, ce qui signifie encore que l’absolu de l’altérité est le même” (ED

187). The absolute other of the system of the same is this very system itself; equally, the

absolutely and self-assuredly same is the fragmentation of the same into its others.

Of course, writing is this ethical violence—writing not as a metaphor among others, but

as metaphoricity itself. Thinking the other is no different from thinking the origin or from

thinking the limits of being as self-presence and certainty. Solicitation is at once an act of

respect and an act of disruption and distortion. One of the major points of De la grammatologie

is that neither ethics nor violence could have meaning outside of this critical thought, and neither

could writing be understood as productive of meaning outside of it. “Il n’y a pas d’éthique sans

présence de l’autre mais aussi et par conséquent sans absence, dissimulation, détour, différance,

écriture” (DG 202). The presence of the other is the disruption of being as self-presence: that is,

being as self-presence can only ever be deferred to the other. At best, I can only understand the

notions of self-presence, self-assurance, self-certainty, etc., as metaphors whose authenticity I

can only affirm for those who are not my self. And yet, no one can escape from my own

empirical determinations of same and other, from my own “egology,” as Derrida refers to it in

“Violence et métaphysique,” without dissolving into nothingness as non-self-presence. Writing

is what makes the apparently debilitating bind between these two urgencies not simply bearable,

but fundamentally ethical. More than that, writing is this debilitating bind: that of originative

metaphoricity and repetition of the same as erasure of the same into alterity. Derrida expresses

this point the most eloquently in the final lines of the first essay in L’écriture et la différence,

“Force et signification”:

L’écriture est l’issue comme hors de soi en soi du sens: métaphore-pour-autrui-en-vue-

d’autrui-ici-bas, métaphore comme possibilité d’autrui ici-bas, métaphore comme
 58

métaphysique où l’être doit se cacher si l’on veut que l’autre apparaisse. Creusement
dans l’autre vers l’autre où le même cherche sa veine et l’or vrai de son phénomène…”
(ED 49).

Ethics for Derrida is this access to the other through metaphor, this “digging” (creusement) into

the other to find the same and into the same to find the other. In other words, the most

profoundly ethical communion with the other comes as a moment not of peace, but of violence

and degeneration:

Car l’autre fraternel n’est pas d’abord dans la paix de ce qu’on appelle l’inter-
subjectivité, mais dans le travail et le péril de l’inter-rogation; il n’est pas d’abord
certain dans la paix de la réponse où deux affirmations s’épousent mais il est appelé
dans la nuit par le travail en creux de l’interrogation. L’écriture est le moment de
cette Vallée originaire de l’autre dans l’être. Moment de la profondeur aussi comme
déchéance. Instance et insistance du grave (ED 49).

The other is that part of the same—or of being—that is called forth (appelé) by this digging,

which is not oriented toward a source or asking what the origin is, but is rather the constant

engraving of a whole that never has complete access to itself before this movement. The

interrogative character of this digging does not, passively and teleologically, expect any

definitive answer, but rather jeopardizes the definitiveness of both the same and the other, of

both being and non-being. Digging “for” the other is more precisely the digging of the other in

the same, which has no life outside of this digging. The same can only be known to be a totality

in and through this digging. In this sense, the whole is something like a “grave” that is not dug

up in order to resurrect a lost presence, but that digs into itself to produce life and meaning

through fragmentation and erasure. Of course, the process is reciprocal: digging “for” the same

in the other is the digging of the same in the other, the engraving of its grave. Neither the same

nor the other can be accessed beyond a certain metonymy, beyond the point at which the whole

is always already hidden and can only be known through its parts.
 59

Violence, as Marsh notes, is “the only abiding as such in Derrida’s textual fabrics,” but

only in the sense that this “as such” necessarily implies that the question of violence is absolutely

crucial to both writing and ethics, writing as ethics and ethics as writing. For Marsh, Derrida’s

major ethical flaw consists in radicalizing the notion of being as violence to such an extent that it

prevents him from making any kind of positive assurance of “emancipation” as peace. This

would be the major cause of the supposedly sharp contradiction between the themes of the

“question” and the “promise” as they develop throughout Derrida’s work. But the complexity of

this relationship between question and promise even in the early Derrida as well as Marsh’s

failure to take seriously the specifically ethical significance of violence for Derrida makes a good

deal of his critique rather questionable.

In fact, I would argue almost the exact opposite of Marsh’s major claim. Far from

entrapping his readers in an inability to “emancipate” themselves from an entirely negative and

unproductive violence, as Marsh sees it, Derrida seems to continuously take his own idea of

originative violence for granted and leave them unexplored. It is true that this argument is

something of a tautology: in a certain sense, originative violence is everywhere taken for

granted. It would not be truly originative if it were not taken for granted, nor would it be truly

violent. But we have already seen how the responsibility of questioning the origin is precisely

the responsibility of questioning violence. Even in his most detailed accounts of violence,

Derrida is somehow reluctant to take up this responsibility. The only extended commentary on

violence in De la grammatologie is the incredibly dense passage on the three violences in the

chapter on Lévi-Strauss and the Nambikwara. His only major writing on the subject, “Violence

et métaphysique,” although extremely illuminating in this regard, is more of a critique of

Levinas’ ethical critique of metaphysics and his dichotomy of absolutely same and absolutely
 60

other than an innovative exploration of the ethical possibilities of violence in its own right.

Certainly, there are his numerous remarkable and idiosyncratic moments of terse paradox, as

exemplified in the exergue to this essay: “L’archi-écriture est l’origine de la moralité comme de

l’immoralité. Ouverture non-éthique de l’éthique. Ouverture violente” (DG 202). It is not the

case that Derrida fails to “explain” this statement and others like it, but rather that he does not

develop it as extensively as he could. His reluctance to provide an account of ethical violence, to

sufficiently answer his responsibility to the violence of the origin, appears first and foremost as a

reluctance to name this originative production of the possibility of naming as violence.

Just as there is a sense in which Derrida does not use the word “ethics” with complete

seriousness, neither does he seem to be fully serious when he uses the word “violence.” But

whereas Derrida’s irresponsible employment of the metaphysical concept of ethics is testament

to the great responsibility toward the fundamentality of ethics that he has inherited from Levinas,

his irresponsibility with the word “violence” is much more troubling. Not, as Marsh believes,

because it precludes the possibility of peace. But more crucially because it precludes the

development of an ethical appreciation that is one of the most innovative and provocative of any

thinker. The violence at the origin is the violence of originative naming: why does Derrida shy

away from naming this violence as violence? Is not the responsibility of the question, as he

explains it in “Violence et métaphysique,” precisely the responsibility of continuing this violence

of and against the system? Perhaps it is the case that this violence can continue without the

presence of someone to name it as such. To a certain extent, this is true. But if this violence

embraces the others precisely by subsuming them into the ego and inscribing them with an

identity, if this is the most profound ethical gesture for Derrida, is not his reluctance to give a

greater account of this violence, to classify it as violence, also a shirking of his responsibility to
 61

the others themselves? In De la grammatologie, Derrida criticizes Lévi-Strauss for his fear that

his introduction of writing as classification to a foreign culture is too invasive, too violent.

Could it not be argued that Derrida’s ethical urgency hesitates between this same fear, which is

also that of Levinas (resisting the inevitability of classification, of totalization, of domination, of

egocentrism), and the fear of not being violent enough?