Derridas Spinozistic Plotinianism
Derrida's position illuminates Spinoza's position.14
It is possible to argue that Derrida is a Plotinian disciple of Spinoza (a discipleship which is here referred to as meontotheology). We can begin to see this Plotinian Spinozism when we read Derrida insisting that 'in order to exceed metaphysics it is necessary that a trace be inscribed within the text of metaphysics, a trace that continues to signal . . . in the direction of an entirely other text'.15 It is this inscription that may allow 'an entirely other question'.16 But this question remains where it was by the very fact of it being an inscription. This question is, I suggest, why something rather than nothing? Why do we need something when the nothing will be more than sufficient? So this question takes place in the 'displacement of a question, a certain system somewhere open to an undecidable resource that sets the system in motion'.17 This question will be the un-questioning question of differance; un-questioning because it does not ask something, yet an unquestioning question because it does ask nothing.18 Derrida argues that this question is older than the ontological difference.19 Differance will 'provide' or generate the nothing as something. The question of differance risks 'meaning nothing'20 - an un-meaning which allows meaning to come after it, but such an un-meaning, this differance, is not before as it is before every before. (This is similar to Deleuze who grounds sense in nonsense.)21 Hence, 'the name origin no longer suits it'.22 It will be this un-questioning question that will make presence and absence possible.23 Furthermore, it will allow language to say nothing and thought to think nothing; we will be without being. Oppositions qua oppositions arrive within the active movement of differance.24 If differance renders the nothing as something, then the question of being cannot come first and the idea of origin is indeed problematised. The nothing as something is 'first', but this nothing as something detaches itself from these oppositional logics. Derrida is here endeavouring to escape ontic categories, yet still provide what those appeared to provide: language, thought and being. (Being is an ontic category in so far as it is trapped by the notion of the something.)25
Derrida appears to provide26 continually semantic performances of the nothing as something: pharmakon is both cure and poison, the hymen is marriage and virginity. (Each side supplements the other, thus allowing Derrida's text to provide all that it does under erasure: to be without being.) The most important example is that of the Plotinian ikhnos (trace). The unquestioning-question of differance 'goes without saying . . . remaining silent'.27 That is, language does proceed, but does not say something. It does not seek something; instead it treats the nothing as something. This lets it escape ontotheology, yet without lack. The silent 'a' of differance passes by unheard, like the intonation of this modern question: why something rather than nothing? This inscribed trace, which 'continues to signal', is the non-productive production we found in Plotinus and in Spinoza. (In Plotinus the One was the all, while the all was the One; in Spinoza God is Nature, Nature is God.) The trace is, according to Derrida, 'nothing'.28 It is for this reason that 'in a certain sense thought means nothing'.29 Just as 'deconstruction is nothing'.30
In a sense the trace, like differance, is before presence and absence, as it is a non-origin that is originary.31 This is the nothing as something, which for Derrida is an occultation, a 'disappearing of the ground necessary for appearing itself :32 this sounds like Hegel and, as we shall see later, also resembles moves made by both Sartre and Lacan. From where does this trace issue without origins? It proceeds from the work of Plotinus, who tells us that the 'trace of the One makes essence, being is only the trace of the One'.33 We know that, for Derrida, the trace is nothing and that this trace, according to Plotinus, is the trace of the One which is itself otherwise than Being and therefore nothing. This double bind resides within differance as 'primordial non-self-presence'.34 (Maybe this is a hyper non-being, an immanentised negation that becomes 'plenitudinal'.) Derrida speaks of this Plotinian transgression:
In a perhaps unheard of fashion, morphe, arche, and telos still signal. In a sense, or a non-sense, that metaphysics would have excluded from its field, while nevertheless remaining in secret and incessant relation with this sense, form would in itself already be the trace (ikhnos) of a certain nonpresence, the vestige of the un-formed, which announces-recalls its other, as did Plotinus . . . The closure of metaphysics, the closure that the audaciousness of the Enneads seems to indicate by transgressing.35
For Derrida we must think of 'differance as temporalization, differance as spacing'.36 It seems that this is another Plotinian trace.37 It was Plotinus who may have initiated a 'new subjectivity', a new temporality.
This temporality is the audacity of 'subjectivity'. Audacity, as the unquiet faculty of the soul stirs a desire, initiating a progression. The soul refusing to see all at once, all as the One, generates an endless alterity, an otherness which is the act of procession away from others (aie heterotes).38 (We find this Plotinianism in Alain Badiou's notion of the 'Two'.)39 As Plotinus says, 'time begins with the soul-movement'.40 It is with Plotinus' use of the wordparakolouthesis that 'a term translatable by "consciousness" appears in philosophy'.41 Furthermore, the term synaisthesis hautou, meaning self-perception in the sense of self-consciousness, also appears for the first time in the Plotinian text. Time is no longer the image of eternity, there is no Cosmic time, or recollection of eternal truths.42
Plotinus tells us of this new time: 'So it stirred from its rest and that state too stirred with it; they stirred themselves toward a future that was ceaselessly new, a state not identical with the preceding one but different and ever changing. And after having traversed a portion of the outgoing path they produced time.'43 Soul moves itself audaciously away into difference; alterity being the principle of procession.44 Motion measures this 'subjectivity'. What we find is that time is an intensive expression of heteronomy as endless consciousness. This expression pays witness to the silent provision of that which is. By this is meant the provision of being in the absence of being. Contemplation causes this passage of time as it produces the production of bodies: 'I contemplate and the lines of bodies realise themselves as if they fell from me.'45 But that which is produced is produced within a 'silent vision'.46 It is here that we notice the heritage bequeathed to differance. Differance silently produces language (doing so by silencing language), for it 'goes without saying', like the 'a' of the written differance, to 'speak of a letter' which cannot be heard nor apprehended in speech.47
Differance is the trace of the Plotinian One, which is non-being. Furthermore, differance temporalises and spatialises. It is for this reason that Derrida will announce that 'at this very moment in this work here I am'.48 In this moment Spinoza and Plotinus are conjoined. Differance is 'transcendentally' generating the space for time and the time for space, in terms of a certain 'subjectivisation' of reception. The temporality of time and the spacing of space are found in the 'I am', 'which goes without saying'. 'I am time', a possession which is a procession, allowing space to measure itself within this endless arrival: to occupy its own space. The space which space occupies is that of an audacious 'work', an ergetic generative becoming. (By this term I intend to imply work: Descartes' 'I think therefore I am', is an example of this in so far as the cogito must do something to be. In this case, the cogito must think.) This 'I am' is comparable to the Deus of Spinoza's Ethics. God is immanentised within the arrival of a 'work', which can be thought of as 'nature'. Nature and God arrive together, each as the other. This divinity is the effect of the trace, just as we saw that the Plotinian (and Avicennian) One requires the finite, arriving only within the finite (as the arrival of the finite). The arrival of the effects, which are always already within the movement of differance, belies the differing and the delay of all that does 'come'. God is different and deferred, in that God is an endless act of Nature, while Nature is an eternal God. Consequently, it too remains different and delayed. As with Spinoza, both terms cancel each other out yet, in so doing, an appearance is 'allowed'. This is the nothing as something.
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