19 writing as reading itself: a derridean reading of lost in the funhouse epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 3, (2015) © faculty of arts and social sciences writing as reading itself: a derridean reading of lost in the funhouse metin boşnak international university of sarajevo, bosnia and herzegovina asena boşnak heidelberg university, germany abstract lost in the funhouse is like textbook illustration of derrida’s views on language and writing. the book is both a guide for “how not to write” and “how not to define” writing, thus defying an ultimate center. although the lack of a “proper” theme and heavy metafictional structure makes it “difficult to read”, it is a struggle to subvert the definitions of writing. the author deconstructs the conventional form and theme that is believed to be necessary for writing. in this respect, barth operates through the narratives like derrida moves through ideas in history, and ending up with the conclusion that interplay is what matters rather than a fixed meaning. keywords: derrida; deconstruction; lost in the funhouse; barth; theory of language and difference epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 3, (2015) © faculty of arts and social sciences 20 m. bosnak and a. bosnak epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 3, (2015) © faculty of arts and social sciences theory of language and writing in particular has proved to be a fundamental issue in modern times probably because communication at technical, diplomatic, philosophical levels has gained importance. many of the modern ideas about writing, as about other issues, can certainly be traced back to plato. somehow, plato has constructed a great system of thought, which philosophers inevitably have argued for and against to come up with a system of their own. in other words, though plato has also synthesized ideas that were in the air before him, his system appears to encompass classical, modern and even post-modern ideas, and writing being one of them. plato provides a background of mediocrity even today against which people argue as far as writing is concerned. it was a common idea from plato to saussure that writing functions as a documentation of speech, a substitute for it in its absence. as speech has been seen as derivative of the thought, writing, similarly, has been seen as doubly derivative. along with its secondary value to speech, writing’s materiality by itself was completely ignored, since it was only a representation of representation, which is reminiscent of platonic concept of world of ideas. saussure, for instance, believes the distinctiveness of language and writing systems, stating that the latter exists for the representing the former (saussure, 1959, p. 23). he believes that there is an oral tradition independent from writing; hence, “purity” of speech is possible (ibid., p. 24). the privileging of writing over speech was the classical understanding. however, derrida rejects this hierarchy, noting that saying and hearing do not always correspond to each other, and that the speech is derivative. a term coined by derrida, difference, meaning “to defer”, and homophone of the word difference meaning, “todiffer” illustrates this problem. derrida asserts that it is not possible to distinguish the two words in speech; therefore, saussure’s attempt to restrict the language to audible word is completely rejected. therefore, his philosophy of writing undermines the platonic one and those who agreed with plato. in his essay, entitled “différance” derrida indicates that the signified always traces to different ‘signifieds’ while meaning is postponed each time through the constant deferral, which results in an endless chain of signifiers. according to him, there is no linear development and semantic center that totalize and harmonize the meaning; instead, there is “interplay ad infinitum” and “systematic play of differences.”derrida rejects the logocentric sign systems completely. he believes that in the beginning, “man” was the center of the systems and orientation was towards the “humanity.” however, after a certain philosophical event, man ceased to be the center of the world, and everything is left to decentralization, giving way 21 writing as reading itself: a derridean reading of lost in the funhouse epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 3, (2015) © faculty of arts and social sciences to free play (derrida, 1978, p. 278). without a center, language is structured through the differences; therefore, absolute truth is not possible. the present paper will use derrida’s theories to show the compatibility of the theory as applied to john barth’s book, lost in the funhouse. lost in the funhouse is a post-structuralist short story collection, consisting of a maze of stories, in which the author forces the reader to get lost with him. in that sense, the book works like a textbook illustration of derridean philosophy. in the book, the language’s documentary function is completely disregarded. there only remains a funhouse consisting in a series of the floating signifiers. tony tanner suggests that in barth’s works, signs “become more important than their referents” and that he “plays with them in such a way that any established notions of the relationship between word and world are lost or called into doubt” (tanner, 1974, p. 240). as derrida suggests, writing’s function is not to transfer sounds into written words, it is a material by itself that functions in the signifying process. likely, in his work, barth does not provide a reflection of the real world. apart from this, he constantly reminds the reader that this fiction is a maze of words and that the signification is an endless process. with his unconventional book, he forces the reader to understand that the world and literature are not necessarily one, and in fact, the reader is called in sometimes to write the text. with the use of metafiction, it is shown in the lost in the funhouse that language does not function to represent the world; it functions to prove that it has nothing to do with reality. by drawing attention to the language, the book prevents the reader from getting into the realm of the stories. the text is only a playground; it does not necessarily take the reader, author or narrator to anywhere. it wants to get readers lost in this playground, and indeed enjoy getting lost in this process by undermining the desire to reach a final point. as has been mentioned above, derrida (1981) states that language consists of “systematic play of differences,” indicating that the sign is not the representation for meaning and that signifying process is a constant difference and deferral of signifiers instead of a final signified. the meaning is an endless game of tracing and it is constituted by a tissue of differences, in the extent to which there is already a text, a network of textual referrals to other texts, a textual transformation in which each allegedly “simple term” is marked by the trace of another term, the presumed interiority of meaning is already worked upon by 22 m. bosnak and a. bosnak epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 3, (2015) © faculty of arts and social sciences its own exteriority. it always already carried outside itself. it already differs (from itself ) before any act of expression (ibid., p. 33). this is where intertextuality is come into being: it is the end of the linear structure and the birth of the interwovenness of the texts. lost in the funhouse is a good example of intertextuality, decentering and language as material rather than a teleological end. the book starts with “frame tale” a mobius strip that suggests, “once upon a time there was a story that began.” each turn of the mobius strip is a retelling of the same story that has already been told. although it says the same thing, it indicates that it renews itself each time. in his work, the play of the double in postmodern american fiction, gordon slethaug depicts the frame tell as follows: illustrat[ing] precisely derrida’s view to identify the structurality of structure, whether in myth, literary form, or idea is thereafter to deny the desire for thematic center or presence. space encircled by the möbius strip is a nonlocus, a hole, a loss, the absence of a center or subject, a labyrinth, a universe of discourse where an infinite number of sign substitutions come into discourse where an infinite number of sign substitutions come into play, where nothing contains everything, and where a gap constitutes the subject (slethaug, 1993, p. 138). this depiction of a möbius strip seems to reflect endlessness of signifiers derrida has suggested. here, the möbius strip is not a geometrical shape; it is a symbol of a theory, a symbol that is not absolute in the sense of stability. this shape is crafted out of the material of language; it is not a linear shape but in encloses the texts creating a new start for its each turn. it is both closed and endless. it is an intertext, a combination of the different tissues of all the texts that has been written. along with its intertextuality, it contains endless possibilities. also in the title story, the narrator ambrose is in a funhouse where he encounters many images of himself reflected on the mirrors; however, there is no center, there is no “ultimate” image of himself that he can rely on. this frustration makes him unable to find a way out of the plight. he feels like “an odd detachment, as though someone else were the master” (barth, 1988, p. 81). the signifieds that he believes to own are lost since they give way to endless possibilities. throughout the story, the narrator interrupts the narrative reminding that the story is not reaching a final point. for instance he says, “there’s no point in going farther; this isn’t going 23 writing as reading itself: a derridean reading of lost in the funhouse epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 3, (2015) © faculty of arts and social sciences anywhere; they haven’t even come to the funhouse yet.” in his story, barth “risks meaning nothing.” likewise, derrida (1981) states: “to risk meaning nothing is to start to play, and first to enter into the play of différance which prevents any word, any concept, any major enunciation from coming to summarize and to govern from the theological presence of a center the movement and textual spacing of differences” (p. 14). in his book derrida and lacan: another writing, michael lewis, explains that: the process of differentiating is the inscription of traces of the absence of one signifier in and as the presence of another. it is the process of archi-writing or archi-tracing. this will turn out to be all that we can know of that which is beyond language, that which is ‘real’: a mere (ability to) trace. derrida is quite explicit that the ‘trace’ is the ‘remnant’, the slightest vestige of the real, which is (potentially) a much greater and stranger entity, with many more capacities (lewis, 2008, p. 118). while the author “survives through,” trace he is also “effaced” through it (dick and wolfreys, 2013, p. 52). ambrose, can only survive by writing: “this is what they call ‘passion.’ i am experiencing it” (barth, 1988, p. 84). however, this trace does not make him present in the text: “how readily [ambrose] deceived himself into supposing he was a person” (ibid., p. 93). ambrose is both present and absent in the text. the narrator says: “is there really such a person as ambrose[?]” lost in the funhouse is a self-reflexive novel that does not seek verisimilitude. the author constantly reminds himself to the reader, reveals the figures of speech and narrative techniques used in a way that turning clichés and used-upness into a story about story telling. barth’s stories “constitutes a world unto itself, operating under laws of its own making” (green, 1991, p. 229-242). the story of echo’s linguistic structure is a good example: one does well to speak in the third person, the seer advises, in the manner of theban tiresias. a cure for selfabsorption is saturation: telling the story over as though it were another’s until like a much-repeated word it loses sense… tiresias the prophet. what is he doing here? conversing with narcissus. how does he know-because he knows everything. … tiresias can’t espy the unseeable, one may yet distinguish narrator from narrative, medium from message. … considerable time has elapsed, it seems, 24 m. bosnak and a. bosnak epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 3, (2015) © faculty of arts and social sciences since seer and seeker, prophet and lost, first met in the cave (barth, 1988, p. 98-102). it may be taking the life as a “raw material” but in richard poiriers words, it transforms language into a “world elsewhere” (quoted in green, 1991, p. 229-242). language becomes a new world by itself. john barth does not seek to convert the experience into a narrative, his effort is to create fiction world that is independent from reality. john barth suspects that signifiers are able to represent the world and he believes that the playfulness of the words creates its own creative realm. lost in the funhouse dismisses the fear that fiction is not able to reflect fully, because it is not its objective in the first place. john barth interrupts the regularity of sentence pattern to break the myth of realism. he makes fun of the effort that aims to achieve realistic fiction and makes use of this as a subject. the stories are about “the possibility of humanizing play of language” (ibid.). it is like fictionalizing the différance process; making a story out of the endlessness of signifiers.this process itself emphasizes the value of form and language “for its own sake” (ibid.). this technique is frequently used in the title story: en route to ocean city he sat in the back seat of the family car with his brother peter, age fifteen, and magda g —‘ age fourteen, a pretty girl and exquisite young lady, who lived not far from them on b — street in the town of d —, maryland. initials, blanks, or both were often substituted for proper names in nineteenth-century fiction to enhance the illusion of reality. it is as if the author felt it necessary to delete the names for reasons of tact or legal liability. interestingly, as with other aspects of realism, it is an illusion that is being enhanced, by purely artificial means. is it likely, does it violate the principle of verisimilitude, that a thirteen-yearold boy could make such a sophisticated observation? a girl of fourteen is the psychological coeval of a boy of fifteen or sixteen; a thirteen-year-old boy, therefore, even one precocious in some other respects, might be three years her emotional junior. john barth suggests that “owing to the floating nature of language, meanings are untenable” (tsai, 2003, p. 37-62). in lost in the funhouse, attempts for realistic depiction are frequently presented as problematic. for instance, in the book it goes: “to say that ambrose’s and peter’s mother was pretty is to accomplish nothing; 25 writing as reading itself: a derridean reading of lost in the funhouse epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 3, (2015) © faculty of arts and social sciences the reader may acknowledge the preposition, but his imagination is not engaged. besides, magda was also pretty, yet in an altogether different way” (barth, 1988, p. 75). his half way depictions like “the brown hair on ambrose’s mother’s forearms gleamed in the sun like” and “the smell of uncle karl’s cigar smoke reminded of ” (ibid, p. 74) indicate that the effort for achieving verisimilitude is vain. barth’s concerns are not only about the techniques used to achieve verisimilitude. he thinks “floating nature of language” also results from the lack of correspondence between the sign and the signified. as derrida indicates, the signs only mean in relation to each other by differing and deferring; there is no absolute meaning of the signifiers. likewise, ambrose experiences this problem: “it was to be my fate to wonder at that moniker, relish it and revile it, ignore it, stare it out of countenance into hieroglyph and gibber, and come finally if not to embrace at least accept it with the cold neutrality of self-recognition . . .knowing well that i and my sign are neither one nor quite two.” derrida has a similar saying: “i love this name [derrida], which is not mine of course (branningan and robbins, 1996, p. 219). moreover, just as derrida does, the book lays bare the problem of speech’s authority over writing. the story “petition” illustrates the difference between life and language. in the story, there are siamese twins, and the one attached on the backside writes a petition to the king to help him to get detached from his brother: i am slight, my brother is gross. he’s incoherent but vocal. i’m articulate and mute. he’s ignorant but full of guile; i think i may call myself reasonably educated, and if ingenuous, no more so i hope than the run of scholars. my brother is gregarious: he deals with the public; earns and spends our income . . . for my part, i am by nature withdrawn, even solitary: an observer of life, a meditator, a taker of notes, and a dreamer if you will (barth, 1988, p. 62). the siamese twins, metaphorically refers to the written and oral manifestation of the language. tony tanner interprets that the “incoherent brother is like life itself, constantly shrugging off the attempts of language to circumscribe it within particular definitions. language, in the form of the articulate brother, would be happy to pursue its inclination to ponder its elegant patterning in pure detachment from the soiling contacts of reality” (tanner, 1974, p. 254). such a distinction between life and language implicit in the relationship between the two brothers seems to correspond to derrida’s comparison between “speech” and “writing” (green, 1991, p. 229-242). 26 m. bosnak and a. bosnak epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 3, (2015) © faculty of arts and social sciences in derrida’s thoughts, writing has been viewed as “clambering pick-a-back on the more authentic use of language” while speech [is seen as] language in action (ibid.). the incoherent brother experiences life, he even has an intercourse with the other brother’s love, thalia, while the petitioner brother follows him and experience everything secondarily only by watching. the correspondent in “petition” must follow after his more active brother the speech as it has been dictated. however, the petitioner believes he has an advantage. “i can see him without seeing me; can therefore study and examine our bond, however to dissolve it, and take certain surreptitious measures to that end, such as writing this petition. futile perhaps; desperate certainly” (barth, 1988, p. 63). writing contains the speech; however, it is not dependent on it. it has a world by itself. writing is not dependent on speech; speech is dependent on writing to stay alive. according to green (1991), barth’s story dramatizes derrida’s characterization of writing as separate and secondary, but, through its very existence as a work of literary art … it also overcomes the specious opposition of speech and writing. language in “petition serves as both “elegant patterning” and direct expression, an affirmation of both art and “life.” more importantly, the need to affirm imaginative writing in this way--to overcome the “fear” so well represented by the story’s protagonist--becomes the true subject of the story (p. 229-242). as the forgoing has shown, lost in the funhouse is like textbook illustration of derrida’s views on language and writing. the book is both a guide for “how not to write” and “how not to define” writing, thus defying an ultimate center. although the lack of a “proper” theme and heavy metafictional structure makes it “difficult to read”, it is a struggle to subvert the definitions of writing. he deconstructs the conventional form and theme that is believed to be necessary for writing. in this respect, barth operates through the narratives like derrida moves through ideas in history, and ending up with the conclusion that interplay is what matters rather than a fixed meaning. references barth, john. 1988. lost in the funhouse: fiction for print, tape, live voice. doubleday anchor ed. new york: anchor press. brannigan, john, and robbins. ruth. 1996. as if i were dead: an interview with jacques derrida, in applying: to derrida. london: macmillan. daniella, maria-dick and julian wolfreys. 2013. the derrida wordbook. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. http://www.questia.com/read/122585309. derrida, jacques. 1978. writing and difference. chicago: university of chicago press. 27 writing as reading itself: a derridean reading of lost in the funhouse epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 3, (2015) © faculty of arts and social sciences derrida, jacques, and alan bass. 1981. positions. chicago: university of chicago press. green, daniel. 1991. “metafiction and romance.” studies in american fiction. 19, no. 2: 229-242. http://muse.jhu.edu/ (accessed july 28, 2014). lewis, michael. 2008. derrida and lacan: another writing. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. http://www.questia.com/read/117301906. saussure, ferdinand de. 1959. course in general linguistics. new york: philosophical library. slethaug, gordon e. 1993. the play of the double in postmodern american fiction. carbondale, il: southern illinois university press. http://www.questia. com/read/7280340. tanner, tony. 1974. city of words: american fiction 1950-70. new york: harper & up. tsai, chia-chin. 2003. “rupture/rapture in the funhouse: on john barth’s lost in the funhouse.” journal of applied foreign languages 1, no., pp. 37-62. http://repository.nkfust.edu.tw/retrieve/18921/jafl_v01_06_abstract.pdf. t h e t h i n k e r38 “do these new archival machines change anything?” jacques derrida, archive fever (1996: 4) by dominic pretorius wikipedia and archival problems: a derridean impression © s h u tt e rs to c k .c o m global 39v o l u m e 8 2 / 2 0 1 9 a s much as archive fever: a freudian impression is jacques derrida’s meditation on the notion of archives as it relates to sigmund freud, the person and the psychoanalytic tradition, many of his insights can be applied to theories of the archive in general. moreover, he is particularly concerned with the meaning of archives at a moment of rapid technological development. derrida (1996: 17) writes, “[at] an unprecedented rhythm, in quasi-instantaneous fashion, this instrumental possibility of production, of printing, of conservation, and of destruction of the archive must inevitably be accompanied by juridical and thus political transformations.” these ‘transformations’, in 1996, were the hopes that as computers and the internet became more sophisticated and accessible, they would issue in a new era of knowledge production, storage, and reproduction, that is, a democratic archive. derrida did not know, but may have vaguely sensed, that he was writing shortly before the advent of wikipedia in 2001 which, as its cofounder jimmy wales says, “imagine[d] a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge” (cited in gallert, mushiba, and winschiers-theophilus, 2016: 1). although wikipedia has arguably seen success, it has also failed to transcend many of the constraints, relating to privilege and power, that derrida expressed regarding the archive. in this article, i will apply derridean impressions onto contemporary debates regarding wikipedia’s exclusion, through policy and practice, of various people, languages, and knowledge systems. the word ‘archive’ stores its political function in its etymological roots. it means the place of the archons, the rulers in ancient athens who had the authority to make and represent the law. derrida (1996: 4) writes, “there is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory.” in the contemporary moment, there is not a singular place where knowledge and power coalesce as simply as in ancient greece. there are, of course, many archives – parliaments where legislation is formulated, the various courts where justice is distributed, universities where knowledge hierarchies are established. however, these archival places share two features: firstly, they have material substrates, for example, infrastructure, documents, and capital; secondly, they have officials who are invested with exclusive power over them (derrida, p. 2). over time, nation states have seen a general shift from monarchies’ absolute political power towards various forms of democracy with increased suffrage. concomitantly, these archival places are expected to be increasingly accessible and transparent, and ultimately to be by and for the people, the founding ideal of democracy. derrida (p. 4) writes, “effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation.” it is within this political trajectory that the internet, in its infancy, was celebrated as the next step towards a democratic archive. in a utopic imaginary, wikipedia would be the ultimate archive by and for the people: an easily, freely, and universally accessible repository of the vast and deep knowledge that has been accumulated throughout human history, where everyone could inscribe their own contribution in its ever-growing store. notably, these technological possibilities were announcing themselves at the same time that post-colonial societies were committing themselves in new ways to the process of decolonisation. for example, the empire writes back, a seminal account of post-colonial critiques of western notions of language and literature, was published in 1989.1 those who had for so long been oppressed by, and excluded from, the centres of power and knowledge were finally able to respond to those ideological systems and to speak on their own terms. for achal prabhala, an activist who served on the advisory board of wikimedia foundation from 2006 to 2018, wikipedia came at a time, with dropping telecom prices and cheap smart phones, when equality seemed to be near. prabhala (2018) writes: let’s face it: we will never catch up with the accumulated mass of formal knowledge produced although wikipedia has arguably seen success, it has also failed to transcend many of the constraints, relating to privilege and power, that derrida expressed regarding the archive. in this article, i will apply derridean impressions onto contemporary debates regarding wikipedia’s exclusion, through policy and practice, of various people, languages, and knowledge systems. global t h e t h i n k e r40 by europe and the us. not going to happen. but in the digital world? i did think it was the one place where we could have a kind of equality; new rules for a new world. and yet, in reality, the internet and wikipedia did not become the laudable knowledge commons that many prophesised. in fact, the internet very quickly became subject to the ‘tragedy of the commons’, a communal resource compromised by a few people acting in their own self-interest (hardin, 1968: 1244). as the internet became increasingly commodified, a minefield full of click-bait and advertising, wikipedia remained staunch in its belief that it would be an oasis for freedom. in 2005, cofounder jimmy wales assured the public, “we help the internet not suck” (cited in prabhala, 2018). but in a different sense, wikipedia was under threat from a ‘tragedy of the commons’ in which its openness apparently allowed for people to exploit and abuse it. many were sceptical about the reliability of its usergenerated content. malicious people could lead misinformation campaigns, thereby ruining the resource for everybody else. as garrett hardin (p. 1243) the economic theorist behind ‘the tragedy of the commons’ writes, “freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.” many of us who attended school in the 21st century will remember a teacher forbidding the use of wikipedia because it was not considered a reliable source. consequently, there was increasing pressure for wikipedia to assert more control over the production of its content. the issue caused major controversy when a hoax article was published on wikipedia, accusing a prominent american journalist of being a suspect in the assassination of former us president john f. kennedy (wikipedia contributors, 2019, ‘wikipedia seigenthaler biography incident’). the fallout from this article caused the site to apply, amongst other things, more stringent policies on referencing information and on who gets to publish and edit articles (giles, 2013). the only apparent way to guard against the ‘tragedy of the commons’ was for the site to become more regulated even if that meant foregoing its founding democratic values. hardin (1968: 1247) writes as a justification for this conservative turn that is, the privatisation of the commons “[i] njustice is preferable to total ruin.” consequently, wikipedia became increasingly constrained by two related things, text-based sources and a relatively small community of volunteer editors who are predominantly white, educated men living in the europe or north america (giles, 2013). in fact, 90% of all wikipedia editors are male, which would not surprise derrida (1996: 3), who noted that archiving has always been a patriarchal act. the site has been criticised for “reflecting a western, maledominated mindset similar to the perspective behind the encyclopaedias it has replaced” (cohen, 2011). it is necessary to pause here and reflect that these two things – citation and verification – represent the derridean physical substrate and authority that determine political power. and so, as derrida (p. 37) writes, “the question of the archive remains the same: what comes first? even better: who comes first? and second?” it is easy to lose sight of the underpinnings of wikipedia content, because it is on the internet, which is still a strange virtual world, and cannot be thought simply as a place in which an archive is stored and protected. but, remember, there are very real materials needed for wikipedia to function: the servers, the physical and digital texts it requires for sources, the telecommunication infrastructure, the personal computers and phones, and the volunteer labourers, who need homes, spare time, money, and education. these factors all contribute to what derrida (1996: 3) called the “privileged topology” of the archive which, although the internet may seem to exist everywhere and nowhere at once, has decidedly geographical implications. firstly, the archive excludes information about places and people that are on its periphery, because of the conscious and unconscious biases of its keepers. according to jim giles (2013), quoting research done at the university of oxford, “…many african nations have fewer articles than the fictional realm of middle earth. these regions… are ‘virtual terra in fact, 90% of all wikipedia editors are male, which would not surprise derrida (1996: 3), who noted that archiving has always been a patriarchal act. the site has been criticised for “reflecting a western, male-dominated mindset similar to the perspective behind the encyclopaedias it has replaced”. global 41v o l u m e 8 2 / 2 0 1 9 incognita’.” secondly, the knowledge produced on those peripheries is considered suspect, even if it conforms to the text-based (that is, not oral) sources required by wikipedia. prabhala (2018) notes an example in which articles about makmende, a kenyan superhero character, were blocked from wikipedia, despite their references to well-known kenyan newspapers. the article on makmende was only permitted to enter the archive when the subject received a mention in the the new york times. prabhala (2018) concludes with not a little exasperation, “…nothing really happens unless it happens in a journal published out of cambridge or a newspaper in manhattan. and wikipedia is passionately committed to this warped, outmoded, colonial view of the world.” furthermore, paul gallert et al (2016: 2), who have promoted the integration of indigenous knowledges into wikipedia, note that even the design of technology excludes certain groups of people because it replicates “cultural logics and literacies.” derrida (1996: 40) explains that “there could be no archiving without… archontic principles of legitimization… without criteria of classification and hierarchization.” importantly, here, derrida expresses the archive’s two-pronged concern regarding knowledge, that is, what constitutes knowledge and, moreover, what knowledge is notable or a matter of consequence. consequently, the many undocumented knowledges, many of which are archived in oral and embodied traditions, cannot enter wikipedia, which remains humankind’s most extensive archive. in archive fever, derrida (p. 34) draws attention to the “archival problems” of, for example, oral traditions and transgenerational heritage, ways of knowing that cannot be reduced to scientific inscription. on the other hand, those in the so-called developing world lack access to text, whether it be in printed or electronic form. and even if the knowledge has found a place in text, one of wikipedia’s 1,300 administrators, a position earned through the selfaffirming and myopic community of wikipedians, has the power to delete any article he determines to be inconsequential or frivolous. there is the story of anasuya sengupta, an activist from bangalore, who demonstrated this point at a 2010 conference for african wikipedians. she wrote a wikipedia article on bisi adeleye-fayemi, a prominent women’s rights activist in nigeria, during the conference proceedings. her entry was “marked for speedy deletion… [it was] judged to be trifling” (chafkin and kessenides, 2016). this editorial decision is telling when a meme regarding chuck norris has had its own wikipedia page since 2006 (giles, 2013). wikipedia’s archive, by limiting what constitutes valuable knowledge, in turn asserts what constitutes being human. the archive is stored in an ‘ark’, which we must think of in its two connotations: a chest and noah’s ark. a chest is for files, but is also your body’s chest, where your heart is, where your life and love are stored. in the story of noah’s ark, after making a covenant with the lord, noah constructs an archive of life on earth in case the world is wiped clean and human society must start again. analogously, wikipedia can be seen as the archive for everything ‘we/they’ know. and, contrary to common sense, the archive is not just about the past that it stores. future writing is based on the repository of knowledge and also on its footnotes that small archive at the bottom of each of these pages, those works that have become accepted in the archive, and thus the archive produces the future as much as it stores the past. as the story of noah shows, the ark is about reconstituting the future. it is based on a constant anxiety about the fragility of the present moving into the future, a future that will be defined by its archive and those who control it. derrida (1996: 36) notes accordingly: “it is a question of the future, the question of the future itself.” there may never be a biblical flood, but there is a constant dying, a piecemeal annihilation of human beings and their languages and culture. or as public enemy would say: “apocalypse bin in effect” (cited in eshun, 2003: 299). we live at a moment of knowledge prabhala (2018) notes an example in which articles about makmende, a kenyan superhero character, were blocked from wikipedia, despite their references to wellknown kenyan newspapers. the article on makmende was only permitted to enter the archive when the subject received a mention in the the new york times. global t h e t h i n k e r42 death, as globalisation assimilates and obliterates certain people, languages and cultures, all of which are carriers of knowledge, but knowledges that will transform or disappear in this process. it is the archived knowledge, stored in legible, exterior mediums, that will survive, thereby ensuring the survival of its officials’, and their descendants’, political power. instead of producing an infinite and diverse store of knowledge, archives “aim to coordinate a single corpus, in a system or a synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration” (derrida, p. 3). and, for wikipedia, that ‘ideal configuration’ is decidedly western and male. with its proliferation becoming ubiquitous, it imposes a ‘we’ on an ‘other’ in what derrida (p. 42) calls “the violence of [a] communal dissymmetry.” in this violent relation, the ‘we’ – the custodians of knowledge – becomes the overseers of the ‘other’ who cannot resist becoming subservient to the dictates of the archive, because of the uneven power dynamics present in that address. wikipedia’s concern as an archive with the future can also be read in terms of what mark fisher calls ‘sf capital’ – science fiction capital – which creates a “positive feedback between future-orientated media and capital” (eshun, 2003: 290). most simply, global capital flows towards the likes of elon musk and mark zuckerberg, and technologies like cryptocurrency, because they are believed to be producing the future. similarly, wikipedia can attract usd 104.5 million during the 2017/2018 financial year because it is believed to be the future’s archive (wikipedia contributors, 2019, ‘wikipedia: fundraiser statistics’). the foundation’s leverage is its promise to produce “reliable, neutral information” and to ensure “access to knowledge for everyone, everywhere” (wikipedia contributors, 2018, ‘2016-2017 fundraising report’). but, as i have argued, that funding is going towards producing a particular kind of knowledge for a particular kind of person, all of which will produce a particular kind of power structure in the future. importantly, kodwo eshun, as an afrofuturist, has theorised that black culture in africa and its diaspora was denied a history during the colonial period in order to subjugate black people. thereafter, eshun argues that there is a risk that black intellectual culture is, and will be, overdetermined by its concern with revising that historical archive, thereby leaving the future open to colonisation by former colonial powers. eshun (p. 288) writes, “the vigilance that is necessary to indict imperial modernity must be extended into the field of the future.” therefore it becomes of utmost importance that people work towards, and fight for, a future archive that is inherently democratic, because there is always the risk of history repeating itself. to try to rectify the archive, activists like prabhala have valiantly tried to change wikipedia, its culture and its citizens. in 2010, prabhala produced a film entitled people are knowledge, which documented his attempt to integrate knowledge from rural communities in india and south africa into wikipedia (prabhala, 2010). the documentary seeks to expose what derrida (1996: 4) calls the “limits declared to be insurmountable” by the keepers of the archive. in limpopo, a northern province of south africa, he interviewed sepedi people regarding mokgope, a drink made from fermenting marula fruit, and then facilitated the writing of a sepedi-language wikipedia article about it, while using the recorded audio files as the sources. although the article is active, it remains untranslated by other wikipedians because it is in a minor language and because of the audio references (prabhala, 2018). this stands in contrast to an entry on a french drink called pastis, which has been translated into 22 different languages. this is another example of how wikipedia’s archival limits restricts the spread of some knowledges compared to others. although prabhala had minor victories, ultimately, he quit trying to fundamentally change the structure and make-up of the site, because partially due to harassment from seasoned wikipedians. under perceived threat, they have become increasingly protective over their property. prabhala (2018) this archive and the internet in general are, therefore, like many archives before it, a nexus point for acquiring significant political power in determining what constitutes valuable knowledge and, moreover, what constitutes being human. global 43v o l u m e 8 2 / 2 0 1 9 concludes: “[don’t] be fooled: it’s merely the old system of power, wrapped in a dazzling gauze of technological emancipation and repackaged with a benevolent liberal bow.” in summary, i have tried to show how wikipedia, which for a time may have seemed to offer a significant opportunity to shift the power dynamics in the global production of knowledge, has fallen foul to the oft-hidden constraints of the archive. reading wikipedia seems a common, natural, and politically neutral research method. however, applying derrida’s insights onto contemporary debates regarding wikipedia’s policies and practices shows that, in fact, there are physical substrates and archons to this archive. this archive and the internet in general are, therefore, like many archives before it, a nexus point for acquiring significant political power in determining what constitutes valuable knowledge and, moreover, what constitutes being human. in the collective human body, the heart, in its archival chest, refuses to love large proportions of humankind, and this will inevitably have an impact on the future of this body, and how it constitutes and remembers itself. i think of koleka putuma’s ‘storytelling¹’, the opening poem in collective amnesia (2017), a body of work that writes back to the archive of western patriarchy, highlighting the voices that the archive keeps silencing. the poem’s title sits at the top of the page, but the page remains blank, not empty but full of whiteness; the title is footnoted though, directing your eyes to the bottom of the page in order to read below the footnote separator line because that’s where the power lies: “1) how my people remember. how my people archive. how we inherit the world” (putuma, 2017: 11). finally, one might want to consider or support initiatives that promote internet accessibility and literacy, which may lead to a more democratic wikipedia or an entirely different future archive. for example, the university of the western cape in south africa has worked with residents in mankosi, eastern cape, since 2012 to set up zenzeleni (translated as ‘do it yourself’), the country’s first cooperative-owned internet service provider network (tucker, 2017). this is a south african instantiation of a movement to close the internet connectivity gaps that exists globally, particularly on the african continent, through community networks that democratise the digital. ■ references cohen, n. (2011). when knowledge isn’t written, does it still count? the new york times, 7 august 2011. available: https://www.nytimes. com/2011/08/08/business/media/a-push-to-redefine-knowledge-atwikipedia.html derrida, j. (1996). archive fever: a freudian impression. trans. eric prenowitz. chicago: university of chicago press. eshun, k. (2003). considerations on afrofuturism. the new centennial review, 3(2): 287-302. available: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41949397 gallert, p., mushiba, m., and winschiers-theophilus, h. (2016). on persuading an ovaherero community to join the wikipedia community. 10th international conference on culture, technology, and communication, london, united kingdom. pp. 1-18. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-501093_1 giles, j. (2013). ‘free for all? lifting the lid on a wikipedia crisis. new scientist, 10 april 2013. available: https://www.newscientist.com/article/ mg21829122.200-free-for-all-lifting-the-lid-on-a-wikipedia-crisis/ hardin, g. (1968). the tragedy of the commons. science. 162(3859): 12431248. doi: 10.1126/science.162.3859.1243 kessenides, d., and chafkin, m. (2016). is wikipedia woke? bloomberg, 22 december 2016. available: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/ features/2016-12-22/how-woke-is-wikipedia-s-editorial-pool putuma, k. (2017). collective amnesia, cape town: uhlanga. prabhala, a. (2010). people are knowledge. vimeo, video. available: https:// vimeo.com/26469276 prabhala, a. (2018). writer and activist achal prabhala on expanding the parameters for what is considered knowledge. bubblegum club. interview with christa dee. available: https://bubblegumclub.co.za/art-and-culture/ writer-and-activist-achal-prabhala-on-expanding-the-parameters-forwhat-is-considered-knowledge/ tucker, b. (2017). how a rural community built south africa’s first isp owned and run by a cooperative. the conversation, 28 november 2017. available: https://theconversation.com/how-a-rural-community-built-south-africasfirst-isp-owned-and-run-by-a-cooperative-87448 wikipedia contributors. (2019). wikipedia seigenthaler biography incident. wikipedia, last revised 13 may 2019. available: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ wikipedia_seigenthaler_biography_incident wikipedia contributors. (2019). wikipedia: fundraising statistics. wikipedia, last revised: 6 april 2019. available: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index. php?title=wikipedia:fundraising_statistics&action=info wikipedia contributors. (2018). 2016-2017 fundraising report. wikipedia, last revised 25 september 2018. available: https://foundation.wikimedia. org/w/index.php?title=2016-2017_fundraising_report&action=info 1 the empire writes back was first published by routledge in london. it is, of course, ironic that the seminal work regarding the literary opposition to the empire was originally published by western academics within the empire. © s h u tt e rs to c k .c o m global https://foundation.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=2016-2017_fundraising_report&action=info https://foundation.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=2016-2017_fundraising_report&action=info _goback o legado de paulo freire para as políticas de currículo e para o trabalho docente, no brasil to cite this article please include all of the following details: pereira, talita; costa, hugo. (2015). challenges to curriculum theory in the 21st century. transnational curriculum inquiry 12 (2) http://nitinat. library.ubc.ca/ojs/index. php/tc i <access date> challenges to curriculum theory in the 21st century: thinking the school beyond the basics 1 talita vidal pereira2, hugo heleno camilo costa3 state university of rio de janeiro, brazil introduction inspired by the theme of the 5th triennial international association for the advancement of curriculum studies conference, we proposed to develop this article, having in mind the reflections made during this conference, which took place in may 2015, in ottawa, canada. here, we intend to reflect on the challenges imposed to curriculum theory in our century. among them, we are interested in analyzing how the uncertainties we face in the contemporary world have intensified movements to search and/or reaffirm basic principles which are seen as capable of minimizing our angst with what we cannot control. it is about discussing these principles and their ability to give us control, and, in doing so, build up to a deconstructed perspective to problematize the logics that hold up our basic principles. our analytical perspective seek to "evidentiate otherness, the impossibility of positivity and even the attempts to fix meanings" (lopes, 2013, p. 11). an alternative movement to the trend that has been highlighted globally and locally in education discourses, characterized, basically, by the affirmation of curriculum as the local of change. this is expressed in projects aimed towards getting rid of uncertainties, betting in organized and coordinated effo rts as the possibility of making what is signified be capable of stabilizing society, giving it an ultimate meaning. thus, as lopes (2004) reminds us, the curriculum ends up centered on educational policies. the curriculum is thought of as an identity project, taken for granted as the place where change happens. a perspective view of curriculum, it works as a mechanism of control and regulation of identities, of ways to be in the world. we question this perspective, starting with problematizing the principles that make it ground. we perceive the focus on knowledge as one of the principles that the appropriation of post-structuralism and post-foundational theory has allowed us to deconstruct. we argue that this focus is supported by realist and essentialist arguments, which, in the discourse, give an universal dimension to a particular knowledge, presented as a guarantee of the quality of education (macedo, 2009), or as a starting point to think in the terms of what that quality could be. with laclau (1996), we think the universal as an empty place, filled, temporarily, by hegemonic articulations. with derrida (1981; 1982; 1985), we propose the thought of translation as political, which gives us the opportunity to intervene in it, but not to have ultimate c ontrol over signification. we call attention to this theory in the following. translation and involvement pereira & costa. challenges to curriculum theory in 21st century: thinking the school beyond… transnational curriculum inquiry 12 (2) 2015 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 4 deconstructing the perspective of writing/textualization, to derrida (1981;1982), comes down to his interest in criticizing the role of second fiddle the spoken word, and thought, play to the writing. to him (derrida, 1997), that is what he calls logocentrism (a privilege of western reason, philosophical ideas, intention, the metaphysics of presence). with that, derrida (1981; 1997) proposes that we think of writing as a betrayal, a promise to replace the speaker, the spoken father, as a supposed origin of discourse. the writing, thought of as a replacement, works as a game of traces (derrida, 1982) and a supplement for the lack of presence, it is the order of pure signified, and no external reality or signifier can control, touch or surround it (derrida, 1981). to the philosopher, the writing word betrays the intention, the attempt at sending a thought, a reasoning, a presence, corrupting, and, therefore, supporting his critics to the "metaphysics of presence". writing, as a symptom of the differánce, gives itself to the infinite substitution, and the substitution of that substitution. in derrida (1981), the writing leads speech and thoughts to say what they never intended to. his idea of writing dispenses an original thought, a logos, because it always translates and simulates. extrapolating the supposed original thought, the writing, as intended translation, with violence, with breaking and entering, unfolds continually and subversively. writing is, therefore, repetition as well as addition, it has no property by itself, it is the indetermination in its fluctuation which makes the game of substitution possible (derrida, 1981). in plato’s pharmacy, derrida (1981) goes in on writing, pointing to its dynamics, or autonomy, not just as related to a supposed origin thought, but also its relationship with the listeners. he punctuates that, even if you try to resist communication, the translation does not realize that, does not allow access to the origin, which makes it possible to disseminate the meanings of a text regardless of what is done in the interaction between speaker/translator. in this case, the listener, even in the place of the signifier, can never fix it, cannot make the text unchangeable or stop the leaking of meanings. this is, therefore, the condition put to all involvement with life, with the world, with politics: translate/write. it is this the concept of translating/writing that we turn to, seeking to place it in derrida's philosophy as a way of highlighting the political understanding and the subjectivities involved. we understand that, in derrida, it is possible to read that every product (a product of the self, of politics, of life) is limited to the negotiation between signified and signifier. there is no transparency in language, and it is much less possible that we can access the essence or origin of the social aspect. more, the idea that interaction and negotiation can only be established through translation is supported. an attempt to understand the other escapes us, the search for access, to give meaning to politics. thinking, therefore, of this translation movement as the endless spread of discourse, and, then, as a support of the equivalencies produced by difference, we think it is important to problematize it as a contagious operation, and a strong proposer of policy. to think of that process, let us stick to jacques derrida discussion of translation. from the ideas developed by derrida (1985), in des tours de babel, we call attention to the concept of translation as an unconscious performance. it’s basically means thinking of it not as an option of the individual when face with the text where the world and i ts politics are made, but as the only possibility of extracting meaning from them, and existing in them. according to the philosopher, translation imposes insurmountable limits, which make it impossible for the translator/agent/individual to maintain and reproduce the "original" intention of a text. to derrida pereira & costa. challenges to curriculum theory in 21st century: thinking the school beyond… transnational curriculum inquiry 12 (2) 2015 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 5 (1982), said performance is an act of communication not limited to transmitting information of semantic content. when derrida (1985) thinks of "babel" as possessing a name, while at the same time questioning if we know what we are naming when we say "babel", he inserts the critic of western concepts and metaphysics as a transparent and conscious option. thus, he highlights his opposition to logocentric ideas that, in translation, we have speakers and listeners acting in full intentional control. quite the contrary, derrida (1982) says that leftovers, a remainder, are always there, there is always a dissemination that escapes any attempt to fixate a text, or politics, or rules, or boundaries to any signifier. the author considers writing/translation as an attempt to conciliate the intent, but there are nothing more than traces, traces which make their own asymmetry and the break up with the intent, with the possibility of total understanding and with the conscience of the individual as an organizing center. the inability of accessing the original meaning lies in intent and iterability, stopping any full presence or conscience. derrida (1982), therefore, ponders on the place of writer and reading, concluding that, when it comes to the writing, their position is the same: they are both translators/writers, since neither possesses absolute knowledge, both are susceptible to the writing as a changing structure. there is, in this insert by derrida (1982) with his idea of traces, the perspective that we are endlessly doing the job of corroding through asymmetry, of leftovers that escape to the meaning. we argue that these leftovers do not derive from an intentional desire to cause a rupture, but are the result of an excess of language, through which the real leads to traces. this reinforces the reading of asymmetry as a rupture of a conscious intent. this affirmation allows us to highlight that only through this excess of language, though these traces and leftovers, we can think of an unconscious subjectivity, an individual made in the translation of politics, of the text where politics are made. the trace (derrida, 1982), as this evidence of dissemination, exposes the spread of a supposed intent of the speaker, and highlight the idea that the process is the result of the articulation with a context, the result of an interaction produced by language. the trace is an event, it is the result of a given context, and it is impossible to think of it outside of this context. to the author, it is interesting to think of these ruptures as starting the very possibility of this language game. a context product which, because it is a result of the singularity of the trace, does not possess any other meaning, does not carry content and does not follow any order; does not refer to any intent or origin other than its own having happened and being new. it is considering this that we focus on the translation as an event, as a supplementation, as an unique production, the writing. the context here is not a neutral space with characteristics that can be objectively identified, but as a structure built on supposition. according to fish (1982), derrida punctuates his idea of context by distancing it from the traditional vision, which conceives it as a given, but instead pointing to the context as a product of the world. still according to fish (1982), derrida considered that only through supposing that we are interacting with something, or that a common ground exists, can we deduce certain characteristics. it is from deducing, from something's meaning, that we can read and build a context. to derrida (1982), a context is an interpretative construct, based on the assumption of a consensus, yet structurally vague, tending to attempt to coordinate what its limits should be, to pereira & costa. challenges to curriculum theory in 21st century: thinking the school beyond… transnational curriculum inquiry 12 (2) 2015 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 6 create rules or general agreements. to the philosopher, a context is never completely determined, and it can never be saturated. this structural incompleteness is a result of the dynamic of rupture inside the context itself. this is because, according to derrida (1982), the iterability (repetition and citation of what we supposedly refer to) ends up making it so that, for as much as we se ek to faithfully contextualize a citation, we will never keep intact the meaning of what we are merely attempting to reproduce. in this that we emphasize the singular and intense aspect of translation as repetition/writing, thinking both of what it produces and how it defeats any attempt to make it homogenous. thinking of iteration/translation as a means of articulation and irresistible, permanent betrayal (in which all and nothing ever stay) is to punctuate that contexts are fragile, built on the faith (derrida, 2002) that they are dealing with the same thing as a given signifier. they are fractured at the core, as the repetition of the différance leads to the failure of any intent or even mentions of the original. at this point, the origin or the common space of the context has been destroyed by the wide range or the nameless accents and spreading meanings. and so, by mentioning the context, we are already outside of it nor are we accessing it, but betraying its idea, creating other contexts. the reference is, therefore, a rupture, a disagreement, iterating a meaning of otherness, it is another context. to derrida (1982), the iteration is marked by difference, changes and creates something new. it contaminates the intention and makes the act of performing/speaking/writing/translating be something different that what was intended. in this perspective, we maintain that every statement is open to contextual ruptures. the author says that iterability, even though it authorizes this, corrupting the rules and codes that make itself, also spreads the changes through repetition, the spreading through citation. in this reading, derrida (1982) thinks the context as the place of impossible completeness and control, since in the iterability/writing/translation there is already a game, a gap, an independence from its origin, from the living intent or the production. he highlights, with this, the impossibility to determinate the context in which something was produced, the intent behind a statement of meaning, given the supplementary character which, from the start, changes the intent. for as much as it is necessary to delimitate a context, that delimitation suffers an intervention by différance, especially if we consider the fluctuation that motivates every sign (derrida, 1982). the author argues that any mark thought as writing, and writing as a separate function, as capable of operating beyond the intended meaning, primarily conceived as a disrupting, can be mentioned, cited, quoted. when doing it, the structure is made dynamic, generating countless other contexts which, as mentioned, are themselves impossible to saturate. the iterability of a mark (a term, a name), its citation possibilities or its duplication possibilities are not an accident, but what a mark cannot do without in order to operate "normally" (derrida, 1982). from this assertion, derrida questions, then, what could make a mark impossible to quote. writing as iteration, intervening in communication by exceeding it, unfolding in dissemination that is never reduced to multiple meanings, cannot be thought as an object of hermeneutical decoding, or unveiling of an original truth or meaning. the betrayal, as conceived by derrida, lies in the writing that, on one hand, does not want to neglect the existence of the intent or the conscience. intent has its place, but from that place it can no longer control all derived meaning. pereira & costa. challenges to curriculum theory in 21st century: thinking the school beyond… transnational curriculum inquiry 12 (2) 2015 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 7 intent, to derrida (1982), cannot even be present to itself and the content. it is essentially empty, and that emptiness, or its structural unconsciousness, is what the french-algerian philosopher will put as the reason why it is impossible to saturate or completely comprehend a context. in opposition to austin, the author considers that, for a context to be completely saturated, the intent would have to be its main point, making it necessary that said intent would be transparent and absolutely present to itself and everyone. in derrida’s perspective (1981;1982;1985) the translation may be supplementation, betrayal, a promise to represent what is missing or a transformation of a meaning that cannot be transported or comprehended. this unfinished aspect is the mark of babel (derrida, 1985). from this notion, he makes us think of translation as the subjectification by the other, a nod to the concept that translating/writing/iterating is the possibility of accessing the signifying of the world itself. derrida (1985) argues that the babelian performance consists in making it so that an element can at the same time mean and be untranslatable, belongs without belonging to a specific language, and is capable of creating unsolvable doubts to the translator. the acting of individuals/translators never stops, making the spreading of a political text, of politics themselves, operate continuously, coming back to the impossibility of translating a text which is produced in multiple languages simultaneously. he states that a translator never stops his/her personal work, even if under the council and inspiration of a preceding work, and so the translator starts the act of creation by co-opting, combining, and adapting, making the text not the same by the influence of their personality, even if the translator believes him or herself to be working towards a careful transmission of something has not even reached. this is the one and only, and unreachable, possibility for the existence of an original. every translation is, therefore, an original product when it is made, it always corrupts a preceding meaning. so we agree with derrida (1985) when he concludes that the text is alive and under context regeneration through translation, which is nothing but a promise. this impossible task blames the translator, but also acquits the translator, who cannot do more or less than what is done. the fluid foundations supporting curriculum keeping in mind the notions discussed above, we focus on the education field, looking to build lenses that may help us put the unstable character of the truths which support it in perspective. in order to do that, we look to the idea that education was built as a key cultural project in the process of the hegemonic constitution of modernity, made possible by repackaging social life itself, from a movement of rupture with the past and the establishment of new forms of thinking how the social works (peter & burbules, 2004). having no intention to deepen, in this text, the characteristics of this wide and diverse movement we have here named modernity, it is fitting to highlight that the importance education has in this movement can be expressed in the way different metanarratives have bet on its redeeming possibilities. this bet is that, with education, we could build a just and equal society, as long as we knew how to select the basic contents of curriculum which would be capable of guaranteeing that societal project, and, with them, develop precise projects to form individuals. a project that biesta (2006) defines as the intersection of subjects in a rational community, assumed as a condition for emancipation. pereira & costa. challenges to curriculum theory in 21st century: thinking the school beyond… transnational curriculum inquiry 12 (2) 2015 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 8 the certainties that characterize the discourse may, as lopes (2013) warns, be mystifying, and also remind us of essentialism, leading to a direct association between clarity and "the idea of a single voice, and, even more arguable, of a single unquestionable authority in meaning" (p. 10) these are the certainties which the "post" perspectives have problematized, criticizing the ways how modern thought tend to conceive the social. still with lopes (2013), we have to highlight that the prefix “post” refers to abandoning essentialist axioms. being “post” a movement or school of thought (structuralism, colonialism, modernism, foundationalism, marxism) implies to problematize that same movement or school of thought, to question its bases, its possibilities and impossibilities. it is not a liner advancement, not an evolution or an overcoming where the traces of the movement or school of thought are erased (p. 10). from this definition, we take a perspective of post-structuralist and post-foundationalist analysis, which allows us to leave behind objectivist, essencialist and realist axioms, to then state that what we call reality is a product of discourse, and therefore we must question any pretense of objectivity. the goal is to radicalize the understanding of reality, restating it as being mediated by language, through the defense of a fluidity of signified and signifier and by un-building the unity of the sign. in other words, a radical defense of the claim that reality can only be accessed through language. a radical critique to the idea of a transparent language, direct expression of "reality", supported by the understanding that language is always about the relationship between signifier and signified. in our studies, we have highlighted the contributions of laclau (1996), an author who understands the social as a discursive production, to think about the attempts to give a definite and closed meaning to names in curriculum policy. laclau develops a concept of discourse as a theoretical and analytical category, allowing us to investigate the mechanisms through which meanings are produced and how they happen in producing the social. the author conceives discourse as a practice of signification. therefore, to laclau, speech, texts, practices, institutions, as everything else that can produce meaning, are discourses. nothing exists beyond the discursive surface (laclau & mouffe, 2001). the authors here take discourse as a mean of articulation which is precariously and temporarily structured. it is impossible to shut down any attempts of creating meaning. based on this definition, we incorporated in our reflections, also thanks to laclau (1996), the idea of translation proposed by derrida (1997) to question the idea that texts, among them the curricular text, are charged with a priori meanings. for us, it consists in a structural idea of text that is based on the idea that meanings are fixed into a system, and also organizes arguments in defense of any projects that may determinate how individuals will be. with derrida (1997) we understand that translations is the only possibility of relationship in the language, in the interactions with the other, in the field of curricular discourse. so we problematize all the discourse that organize itself based on the idea that reality, and the phenomena we experience in it, can be completely represented by language, like in a transparent road which allows access to the "true" meanings of the text the world is made of. to this understanding, we add the statement that an opaque language does not give out direct meanings, neither does it give conscience or wholeness, but we operate in a world made understandable by different and multiple meanings (derrida, 1985). the intelligibility of a text is not related to a choice by the individual, but to the possibilities he/she has of giving the text meaning. we emphasize, however, that this cannot be pereira & costa. challenges to curriculum theory in 21st century: thinking the school beyond… transnational curriculum inquiry 12 (2) 2015 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 9 taken as limiting meanings, but it is just a possibility among others, and is always exposed to other’s view (laclau, 1996; derrida, 1981; 1985; 1992). intelligibil ity is simply a way of creating meanings on the world, a way of operating, as one can, in the language games (laclau, 1996). accepting the idea of translating implies recognizing that there is not a truth that can be accessed. there is not an original locus where meaning is created, or even a way to control it. every signification, according do derrida, is original, since it cannot be a copy (derrida, 1985). from these contributions, we want to understand the traditional concepts of curriculum as a project of identity construction, as discourse sewn on the foundation of a whole identity. attempts to stabilize and control the subjectivations, through schooling, through a perspective of the world that does not admit any other. this control is justified by the pretense of the existence of a ground below certainties. here, from a post-foundationalist point of view, we are not opposed to the need of a foundation, or betting in dispersive differences and isolated contexts. we are questioning the idea of fixated foundations capable of organizing society from outside society. we operate on the idea of contingent foundations, temporary and precariously built, in discursive articulations. we problematize the idea of control, since we understand control is only justified by acts of power, guide by contingent truths (short or long lived), without anything fixed or immune to corrections. we question the productivity of continuing to operate like anything ultimate on reality exists, anything capable of sustaining the pretense of fixed control. based on modern principles, curriculum has molded itself as an emancipator in the production of individuals, and its realization assumes a basic handle on subjects that are considered the most adequate. as biesta (2006) puts, a project which reduces the right to education to the right to learn. the right to learn specific content that have been selected as the proper ones. a project which either ignores or subordinates, seeking control over the processes of subjectivity by blocking differential fluxes that consist on the making of the individual, or on giving exclusive meanings to the unexpected (macedo, 2012). a logic which reduces emancipation to a teaching project "in which acquiring specific knowledge would make it possible to build an identity previously defined as the most adequate, limiting, or trying to limit, manifestations of otherness, of difference" (tura & pereira, 2013, p. 120). a logic that is justified while that knowledge is given as an expression of reality (young & muller, 2007). so the appropriation of a given subject would give the individuals (emancipated) the opportunity of intervening in a world, trying to build a fully realized society. in our view, this discourse articulates realism-based meanings, opposed to the antirealism approach we defend. a discourse that articulates realistic senses of knowledge and culture which support ways of classification and exclusion in several works in curriculum field (lopes, 2012; macedo, 2012). acts of power capable of signifying, creating and combating meanings (lopes & macedo, 2011), benefiting an education that is reduced to the pedagogical, centered on the methodological, in transmitting a given knowledge, in knowing how to teach. acts of power based in realistic concepts of knowledge and culture, which underpin attempts to control senses that laclau and mouffe (2001) assume as necessary and impossible to completely fulfilled. since we assume not be able to operate a foundational or structural reading of the world, but we bet in translators performances and therefore betraying a certain sense, we propose as a strategical possibility two arguments for reflection on curriculum thinking, that is produced politically, that produces curriculum policies: caution and possibility of intervening. pereira & costa. challenges to curriculum theory in 21st century: thinking the school beyond… transnational curriculum inquiry 12 (2) 2015 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 10 strategically, caution would show us the impossibility of making any final remarks on whatever it may be on the curricular sphere, since, on defending that there are not ultimate readings or even ultimate meanings, we cannot accept any such final statements. such acceptance relates also to the way we deal in policy, considering that the impossibility to access a given knowledge or identification, including that perspective we aim to combat, is to interpret that, in the same movement, it is blocked the possibility to achieve, “in fact”, such truth, and also that it is not be able to saturate the discourse, the experience, cannot encompass the full curricular horizon. at the same time, in relation to the idea of intervention, is worth emphasizing that it is impossible to access a transparent reading of reality, constructed discursively, whi ch empowers us is precisely this incompleteness or non-closure of the social, in its continuous discursive construction. this means that, like caution stops us from making any statements on reality as it should be, the possibility of intervention is given by the ways we translate and consider possible to operate in language. in other words, if we cannot deal with language transparently, and this condition is valid to all involvement (and it limits us), all we can do to intervene is to translate these knowle dge meanings, in education, in the curriculum, in every different power spheres. accepting the idea of education as incomplete and acting in it, accepting it is impossible to completely stop the construction of meanings through which the world becomes understandable. as laclau (1996), we state that in this being unfinished the potential for democracy resides. taking these marks as our limits to what comes to be a perspective on curricular thought in the 21st century means calling attention to the impossible when it comes to the ways to control or ultimately state what is the individual, what is education or what is society. it means recognizing that the potential to intervene is boundless, but the domination of the discourse is not viable, as there always leaks and translations, and they may or may not agree with the statement, but they will always betray. so it is possible to think the curriculum as a practice of enunciation, an endless flux of meanings that cannot be locked up, which rupture with any idea of curriculum as an identity conditioner that are, in our view, not productive if we aim towards a democratic educational project. a project negotiated from recognizing that we live in a time without certainties and without ultimate truths. a project that needs incorporate the differences expressed in particular demands. we understand that this is a great challenge to curricular theory in the current century. a century that lives the constant regeneration of its signification, by the same processes in which we defend not be possible to ensure a fixed place in the discourse, to say who is the subject or what is the society in curriculum policy. taking these arguments in the direction of curricular thought is a continuous bet to leave them incomplete, as a discourse through which different ideas can be built, here or anywhere else, looking to find a horizon, a democratic one, but not through affirming any properties of democracy, but through struggles around the curriculum meaning. a vision of democracy residing in the possibility of reaching a fixed horizon, emphasizing the opportunities for new articulations to leads us to new ideas, to new meanings, in this that we call the 21st century. we propose to accept that, while we criticize new ways of control, we al so seek to control certain perspectives, because we want a homogenous world view. it is fitting to highlight, however, that the moment that encourages a political affirmation, an identification process, is the same that leads to its criticism. this does not mean to think of every request as pereira & costa. challenges to curriculum theory in 21st century: thinking the school beyond… transnational curriculum inquiry 12 (2) 2015 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 11 valid, but that, in a certain context, even though we cannot control truth, we can contaminate the discourse as long as it is always something else. references biesta, g. j. (2006). beyond learning: democratic education for a human future. boulder: paradigm. derrida, j. (1981). plato’s pharmacy. london: athlone press. derrida, j. (1982). margins of philosophy. chicago: university of chicago press. derrida, j. (1985). des tours de babel. in: j. f. graham (ed.), difference in translation (pp. 209-248). new york: cornell university press. derrida, j. (1997). of gramatology. baltimore: john hopkins university press. derrida, j. (1992). the gift of death. chicago: ucp. derrida, j. (2002). force of law. london: routledge. fish, s. e. (1982). with the compliments of the author: reflections on austin and derrida. in: critical inquiry, 8, p. 693-721. laclau, e. (1996). emancipation(s). london: verso. laclau, e. (1998). deconstruction, pragmatism, hegemony. in: mouffe, c. (edit.). deconstruction and pragmatism (pp. 49-70). london: routledge. laclau, e. & mouffe, c. (2001). hegemony and socialist strategy. towards a radical democratic politics. 2sc ed. london: verso. lopes, a. c. (2004). políticas curriculares: continuidade ou mudança de rumos? rev. bras. educ, 26, 415434. doi:10.1590/s1413-24782004000200009. lopes, a. c. (2012). a qualidade da escola pública: uma questão de currículo? in: oliveira, m. a. t. de et al. a qualidade da escola pública no brasil (pp. 13-29). belo horizonte: mazza. lopes, a. c. (2013). teorias pós-críticas, política e currículo. educação, sociedades e culturas, 39, 7 -23. http://www.fpce.up.pt/ciie/sites/default/files/02.alicelopes.pdf. lopes, a. c. & macedo, e. (2011). teorias de currículo. são paulo: cortez. macedo, e. (2009). currículo e hibridismo: para politizar o currículo como cultura. educação em foco – questões contemporâneas de currículo, (8) (1 – 2), 13-30. macedo, e. (2012). currículo e conhecimento: aproximações entre educação e ensino. cadernos de pesquisa, 42(147), 716-737. doi:10.1590/s0100-15742012000300004 peters, m. & burbules, n. c. (2004). poststructuralism and educational research. rowman littlefield, united states. tura, m. de l. r. & pereira, t. v. (2013). políticas curriculares, sistemas de avaliação e conhecimentos escolares. in tura, m. de l. r. & garcia, m. m. a. (orgs.). currículo, políticas e ação docente (pp. 333-349). são paulo: cortez. young, m. & muller, j. (2007).truth and truthfulness in the sociology educational knowledge. educ. rev. [online], n.45, pp. 159-196. doi: 10.1590/s010246982007000100010. pereira & costa. challenges to curriculum theory in 21st century: thinking the school beyond… transnational curriculum inquiry 12 (2) 2015 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 12 notes 1 an early version of this paper was presented at the 5th triennial conference of the international association for the advancement of curriculum studies, held at the university of ottawa in may 26-29 2015. 2p.talitavidal@gmail.com 3hugoguimel@yahoo.com.br submitted: september, 28th, 2015. approved: december, 19th, 2015. mailto:p.talitavidal@gmail.com mailto:hugoguimel@yahoo.com.br microsoft word 21serra coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 226 cannibalism in montaigne, de certeau and derrida carles serra pagès abstract: in this text we introduce the discursive strategies of montaigne, de certeau and derrida in analysing the figure of the cannibal. both de certeau and derrida use textual strategies for their analysis, but whereas de certeau remains at the level of discourse and words and therefore at the level of phonocentric language, derrida’s analysis moves beyond western ethnocentrism. these different approaches lead de certeau and derrida to different conclusions. during the renaissance, the figure of the cannibal was the source of horror because it ate its own kind and married several women. de certeau inverts this ethnocentric ethics and shows that cannibalism was a form of paying tribute to the valor and honor of the victim, and polygamy showed the devotion and fidelity of women towards their husbands, not as a sign of male domination. contrary to de certeau, but building upon his critique of ethnocentrism, derrida does not bring about any reversal of values when analysing a particular cosmovision in the figure of the cannibal, for example. taking the meaning of the word “eating” in both a literal and a figurative sense, derrida shows that all cultures are organized around a notion of sacrifice that consists in clearing up an area that allows for a noncriminal putting to death. it is in this context that derrida denounces the ‘mass exterminations’ of animals and the ‘crimes’ against the environment that sustain carnivorous and industrialised countries. the figure of the cannibal also provides a good example of how western society constructs the height of its morality and good consciousness symbolically sacrificing and demonizing the other (the savage, the cannibal) just because it sacrifices another ‘other’: as all cultures are organized around sacrificial structures that are ethnocentric. keywords: derrida, de certeau, deconstruction, sacrifice, cannibalism, animal rights, environment. in the context of the congress “food for thought”, organized by the australian studies centre at barcelona university in february 2010, the present article analyzes two different interpretations of cannibalism carried out by two french authors: michel de certau and jacques derrida. both authors are representative of the so-called “thinking of the difference”, which originated with heidegger. in “montaigne's ‘of cannibals’: the savage ‘i’”,i as the title indicates, de certeau exposes his own method of textual analysis of montaigne's “of cannibals”. de certeau's text will be compared with and contrasted to an interview with derrida in 1989 by jean-luc nancy, entitled “‘eating well’, or the calculation of the subject”.ii their respective interpretations of cannibalism are a means to define western culture and law in relation to a hors-texte (outside the text, (t)exterior). copyright©2011 carles serra pagès. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 227 taken literally, the english expression “food for thought” is synthetic and a priori. it is synthetic because it is a statement about experience, and it is a priori because it is necessarily so – with the exception of god, a rational being always appears incarnated in a body that eats and can be eaten. this synthetic and a priori expression states the obvious in a context where the basic physiological needs are covered: nourishment, but also sleep, a basic sense of security, etc. (which means that “food for thought” is a necessary but not sufficient condition for thought). moreover, still in its literal sense, the expression “food for thought” implicitely carries within it a moral imperative. it is necessary to have the biological need of nourishment covered so as to develop good eating-thinking habits, that is to say, to eat what tastes good and is specially nurturing. in spite of appearances, what we eat is mostly a cultural thing. in western culture, insects are not usually eaten although they are highly nutritive, whereas mushrooms, which are barely nutritive, are very commonly eaten. in addition, taste and flavour are culturally determined, and what tastes good within a culture is also highly subjective. therefore, we must eat, and we must eat well. and if we understand “food” in a figurative sense, meaning as all that which nourishes not only the body but also the soul, the spirit, the mind, the metaphor of eating covers the whole field of culture. most commonly, the expression “food for thought” is used as an idiomatic expression in english. on the one hand, it refers to what triggers thinking, something that awakens your attention and deserves to be carefully or seriously considered; sometimes, it can also be said of something which deserves a second thought altogether. in this sense “food” means that which nourishes the mind. on the other hand, “food for thought” also refers to those bits and pieces in a legal or social context which are in dispute and which cannot be digested. what is at stake or at issue is “food for thought” (in sociopolitical debates and discussions, research institutions, etc.), because it is toxic and poisons society and politics at large. the figurative expression “food for thought” has, then, a double and interrelated meaning. sometimes it refers to that which nourishes thought, sometimes to that which in a certain sense poisons thought because it cannot be digested (“food poisoning”). “food for thought” as a matter of dispute puts a limit to thinking at the same time that it is a challenge to it and, therefore, a motivation and an impulse. for derrida and de certeau, what nourishes thought is 'difference'. in his reading of montaigne's “of cannibals”, de certeau expresses this thought in textual terms. he distinguishes between the “space of the other” and the “space of the text”. the “space of the other” constitutes and delimits the difference between the inside and the outside of a culture, the familiar versus the strange, and the way in which society is structured. it involves both ethnic and social values. on the other hand, the “space of the text” is the means by which the text structures itself and gives itself credibility, and makes a place of its own. it speaks about the other and it is the other that legitimizes in return the text that is produced in this way. the reader has to be made to believe that the text captures the truth about what it treats – its outside – whether the author relies on common opinion, myth, the authority of the ancients and modern rationality or questions them in the name of “bare experience”, as it is the case in montaigne's “of cannibals”. the “space of the other” produces the “space of the text” and the other way around. these are functional or “formal” distinctions, in between there is a “space of interplay” (this is how de certeau interprets difference). de certeau explains this “topography” in the following terms: the first aspect concerns the space of the other; the second, the space of the text. on the one hand, the text accomplishes a spatializing operation which results in the determination or displacement of the boundaries delimiting cultural fields (the familiar vs. the strange). in coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 228 addition, it reworks the spatial divisions which underlie and organize a culture. for these socio or ethno-cultural boundaries to be changed, reinforced, or disrupted, a space of interplay is needed, one that establishes the text’s difference, makes possible its operations and gives it “credibility” in the eyes of its readers, by distinguishing it both from the conditions within which it arose (the context) and from its object (the content). montaigne’s essay functions both as an index locorum (a redistribution of cultural space) and as the affirmation of a place (a locus of utterance). these two aspects are only formally distinguishable, because it is in fact the text’s reworking of space that simultaneously produces the space of the text (pp. 67-68). de certeau's cartography is elaborated in textual terms in the linguistic sense, that is, at the level of words and discourse. in montaigne's text, the words “barbarian”, “savage” and “cannibal” define that which organizes a language of culture in relation to its outside. but the outside always remains exterior to the topographical order that words and discourse place and organize. to that extend, these words name the unnamable, what allows a closure of culture in relation to an exterior, and that which threatens the symbolic order of language and culture. the “place of interplay” or difference between the outside and the inside is also what establishes a dynamic relationship between the familiar and the strange, and the inherent dynamism of every society. it is the same idea of difference that links what is familiar to what is strange (“what is near masks a foreigness”, p. 67). the cannibal is at the origin of a language of culture, it is that which is sacrificed for the sake of language and culture. what is foreign is first of all the “thing”. it is never where the word is. the cannibal is only a variant of this general difference, but a typical one since he is supposed to demarcate a boundary line. therefore when he sidesteps the identifications given to him, he causes a disturbance that places the entire symbolic order in question. the global delimitation of “our” culture in relation to the savage concerns the entire gridding of the system that brushes up against the boundary and presupposes... that there is a place for every figure. the cannibal is a figure on the fringe who leaves the premises, and in doing so jolts the entire topographical order of language (p. 70). derrida's interpretation of difference is similar to de certeau's in that it is also “textual”, but derrida resists talking about culture in topographical terms, and does not limit the meaning of “text” to linguistics, to words and discourse that amount to an inscription of speech and, therefore, to a phonocentrism, as de certeau does. interviewed by jean-luc nancy, derrida is questioned about the crisis of the idea of subject in the tradition of nietzsche, heidegger, levinas, foucault, and others. in answering to these questions, derrida refuses the idea that, previous to these discourses, there was a homogenous idea of the subject that would have been superseded. instead, he contends that these discourses have “reinterpreted, displaced, decentered, re-inscribed” (p. 258) the idea of the subject. as a result, there have been some consequences regarding what is understood as ethical, legal, political or scientific objectivity, and the definition of the subject has been put in terms of who answers to the call “who?” (even in those contexts when this question is not formulated in a natural language, as we will see), thus avoiding a substantialist metaphysics of the subject. talking about the “classic” (from descartes to kant and husserl) and “recent” discourses on the subject, jean-luc nancy proposes to do away with the word “subject” and to substitute it for a kind of topology, which is what de certeau does: “but in lieu of the ‘subject’, there is something like a place, a singular point of passage... how might one name this place?” (p. 259). in answering to this question, derrida explains what he understands as subject as a result of his analyses on writing, coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 229 which at the same time tells us how derrida interprets difference. he explicitely avoids speaking about the subject in exclusively topographical terms: in the text or in writing, such as i have tried to analyze them at least, there is, i wouldn’t say a place (and this is a whole question, this topology of a certain locatable non-place, at once necessary and undiscoverable) but an instance (without stance, a “without” without negativity) for some “who”, a “who” besieged by the problematic of the trace and of differance, of affirmation, of the signature and of the so-called proper name, of the je[c]t (above all subject, object, project), as destinerring of missive (p. 260). this paragraph deserves some explanation. the “instance” which lacks “stance” refers to the openness of the “who” that, in this context, means subject. as such, it means that in its relation to self this “instance” “without stance” is open to events and to the other, the opposite of nihilism. a pure identity that always remains identical to itself is oblivious to events and to otherness, even if it is also true that there is no identity without some sort of “stance”.iii the “who” refers to the call that comes from the other and that, in this way, lays out what makes presence and identity possible (not presence and identity as such, as they appear within a particular cultural context). the one who asks or wonders (with or without words) “who is it? who is there?” already acknowledges somebody's presence without the need of the other to answer in a natural language and according to a specific semantics, in particular without the need to answer “i” with all the implications that stem from grammar, attributing essence or substance to the subject of a sentence (“how can we get away from this contract between the grammar of the subject or substantive and the ontology of substance or subject?” (p. 262)). what derrida calls “the problematic of the trace and of differance” precisely refers to the critique he himself carried out of the “metaphysics of presence”, the belief that what constitutes a subjective identity is the subject's relation to self without the need of language, which requires intersubjectivity and history. the expression differance, we will recall, means both deferral in time and difference in the sense of non-identity. the “problematic... of the signature and the socalled proper name” refers to the basic structure of the iterability of language. and the “ject” of “subject, object, project” to the projectile and to dissemination, “destinerrance”, the fact that a missive, missile, letter or pro-ject may not reach its objective, its recipient. in conclusion, there are only traces, the always-already, there is no pure presence. it deserves special mention in this context that derrida elaborated the “problematic of... affirmation” in terms of a critique to heidegger. in being and time, heidegger defines “dasein” (man in the sense of a singularity that does not amount to but is presupposed by all the categories of human subjectivity: self, reasonable being, consciousness, person, etc.) as that being that can question its own being as well as being in general. the power to ask questions, or the ability to question that institutes a sovereign subject that questions, is what defines “dasein”. derrida critiques heidegger in this respect because derrida believes there is an autonomy that comes from otherness, a heteronomy that institutes the subject and is more originary – and it also involves an ethical responsibility – than the ability or the power to ask questions. this is how derrida states it: i have spoken of the “yes, yes”, of the “come” or of the affirmation that is not addressed first of all to a subject. this vigil or beyond of the question is anything but precritical. beyond even the force of critique, it situates a responsibility as irreducible to and rebellious toward the traditional category of “subject” (p. 274). coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 230 the relation to self, in this situation, can only be differance, that is to say alterity, or trace. not only is the obligation not lessened in this situation, but, on the contrary, it finds in it its only possibility, which is neither subjective nor human. which doesn't mean that it is inhuman or without subject... (p. 260-261). we will deal more extensively with derrida's reference to antihumanism when analysing the figure of the cannibal and sacrifice. certeau and derrida’s thinking of the difference that we have just exposed is what keeps thinking going, it refers both to something that makes you think and to the inherent rationality of the one who thinks and therefore is made to think (these are, again, formal distinctions). difference means rationality. it is “food for thought” in the sense of that which makes you think. but, as we mentioned above, the idiomatic expression “food for thought” also means issues to be considered in the public or legal square. in de certeau, the figure of the cannibal provides “food for thought” in that it constitutes and menaces the symbolic order of culture, we can always re-interpret the “horror” that cannibalism produces in western cultures and turn it into a noble figure. paradoxically, in the end the figure of the savage ends up teaching something about ourselves: “what is near masks a foreignness” (p. 67). in de certeau's text first comes a critique of the different forms in which the other (the savage, the cannibal) has been represented. de certeau follows montaigne's method and examples in this respect. first of all, common opinion or doxa about the savage appears reliable but lacks the rationality of the ancients; the discourse of the ancients about the barbarian are inaccurate because the ancients had no travelling experience, and the cartography and cosmography of the moderns is unreliable because the moderns always add things to their experience, providing a generalized view in place of their particular experience. all this can be put together in the “inventions of poetry, philosophy and deceit” (p. 71), ignoring the fact that what appears in a fictionalized form is a conjuntion of a series of disjunctions: “reliability without reason, reason without knowledge, knowledge without reliability” (ibid.). before being able to understand the figure of the savage, one has to do away with all the prejudices that go with tradition. the deconstruction of tradition is carried out by means of a theory of writing. the subject is a grammatical function which belongs to a particular system of symbolization and culture (there is no universal definition of who a subject is), and the object is also always caught in a particular system of representation that is different from the thing itself (the “thing itself” is not outside the text). detached from a pure presence or essence, subject and object are always disseminated. the different series of discourse montaigne deals with (doxa, the discourse of the ancients and of the moderns) can only be artifically sym-bolized: it is noteworthy that this “series” is structured as a written discourse: the written text, a spatial dissemination of elements destined for an impossible symbolization, dooms the unity it aims for (the thing, or meaning), as well as the unity it presupposes (the speaker), to inaccessibility (by the very fact of the exteriority of the graphs to one another) (p. 72). in view of this theory of writing, which de certeau shares with derrida, one could ponder what form of knowledge is the best to adopt when faced with the figure of the barbarian, the savage or the cannibal, and also about the effects of this theory of writing in language. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 231 what form of knowledge about the savage is the most reliable? montaigne is of course familiar with the literature about the savage but he does not make any reference to it to remain faithful to his method. it is a matter of “going back to things themselves” as they are given in bare experience and expressed in a speech that has gone through the deconstruction of tradition or the speech of the “simple” man to the extend that he is not a scholar. the acknowledged sources in montaigne's “of cannibals” are the things that have been brought from overseas (“he can see their objects and ornaments” (p. 75)), the “simple”, western man that has travelled and lived among savages, and then the savage himself. if one wants to understand or learn about the savage or the barbarian, one cannot rely on common opinion, establish a difference or a definition in terms of a particular form of rationality (reflective, instrumental, etc.) or use the discourse of modernity that generalises in concepts that are empty shells. instead, one has to rely on bare experience, and that is what “simple” means, because the simple man “admits the particularity of his place and his experience” (p. 72). the effects of the above-mentioned theory of writing are the dissemination of language and its essential sacrificial structure. the dissemination of language is shown in that the words “barbarian” and “savage” and the meaning of “cannibal” appear disseminated within montaigne's text. first, the word “barbarian” is used as a noun, then as an adjective. its use as an “adjective” proves that what was initially over there can switch sides and come over here, it does not have a fixed reference but is caught in the play – or systemic nature – of language. living in a natural state, cannibals are barbarian, whereas “occidentals are barbarian because of their cruelty” (p. 73), so occidentals are more barbarian than cannibals. “thus, the name comes undone” (ibid.). and it is the role of what is referred to as “cannibals” or savage to name the place, within language, of that which is “emptied”, “vacant and distant” (ibid.). the words have no fixed meaning.iv the sacrificial structure of the language of the savage or the barbarian is seen in that “the savage body obeys a law, the law of faithful or verifiable speech” (p. 75). ultimately, what this means is that the savage body is literally and symbolically sacrificed to speech.v once de certeau has described the experience of the simple man as the true witness of savage society, the recourse to direct perception of the savage body and its “objects and ornaments”, and to the conversation with the savage itself, the description of savage society focuses in their modes of symbolization, in the way they come together as a social (and therefore symbolical) and unified body by means of speech: the body of the savage is subject to law by means of the sacrifice of the body of men in war and of women to their husbands. men defend honour in war, and women are faithful to their husbands, and this is the origin of law and savage culture. what first appears as a monstrosity, the cannibal eating the body of the enemy in a symbolic ritual and the domination of the wives by men, is reversed in montaigne's discourse in terms of an “ethic of speech” and sacrifice. cannibalism is a “variety of war” which is not colonization, because it is neither motivated “by conquest nor self-interest” (p. 75). it is motivated by a “demand for “confession” under pain of death”, and in the pursuit of honour and glory. the sacrifice of the enemy's body is a tribute to its honour and genealogy, it is incorporated in the victor's own genealogy, and there is a “communion with the ancestors through the mediator of the enemy” (p. 76). in the case of polygamy, the honour of women is shown in that they work at the service of their husband's honour and virtue “without jealousy” (p. 75). “in both cases, the value of speech is affirmed in the ‘loss’ of self-interest and the “ruin” of one's own body. it is defined as a ‘triumphant loss’” (p. 75-76). in that it responds to the system of language and the economy of ethics, cannibalism and polygamy express the authenticity of a savage society which institutes its law, honour and values by means of a sacrifice of the body of the warrior in its exterior (war among men) and of the body of the wife in its interior (polygamy). what was seen as a monstruosity is now seen coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 232 as heroic thanks to the symbolic structure of society and the systemic nature of language, as soon as we understand who or what is sacrificed at the expense of speech and ethics. what gives “food for thought” to derrida is that the figure of the subject has always been constituted by means of the sacrifice of what is not subject. the gesture by which derrida describes and critiques the way the subject has been constituted in western thought is slightly different from de certeau's. following montaigne, we have seen that a positive view of the cannibal comes after the deconstruction of the discourses of the west (doxa, the reason of the ancients, the knowledge of the moderns) which allows for a subsequent reversal of values. cannibalism shows the honor of men in battle, and the incorporation of the enemy's body is seen as a tribute to the enemy's valor. polygamy is not a sign of male domination, it shows the devotion and fidelity of women towards their husbands. derrida also starts by deconstructing the prevalent philosophical discourses of the west about the subject, but not in order to bring about any reversal of values, because they all are constituted around another notion of sacrifice. derrida interprets sacrifice as the place of a “noncriminal putting to death”, and questions the legitimacy of the sacrifice of the living in general (and not just of the sacrifice of the human subject), menacing in this way precisely the sacrificial structure that constitutes the subject. in analysing the original call that institutes the “who” before language,vi jean-luc nancy asks about heidegger's statement that the animal is sad because it is “poor in world”. derrida answers that for heidegger the animal is poor in world because the animal lacks all the categories that are characteristic of original existence in the phenomenological sense (in the reflective structure of the “as such”), for example, the animal does not have access to the world of man, truth, speech, death, or the being of being. that is the reason why the animal is sad or appears sad compared to the society of man. and this is also the reason why heidegger and the whole western philosophical tradition think that the animal is not a subject. to the questions of whether the call heard by dasein “can come originally to or from the animal”, “the voice of the friend can be that of the animal”, “or whether friendship is possible “for the animal or between animals”” (p. 278), the answer is always “no”. the subject or dasein are essentially different from the animal, because the animal is “poor in world.” derrida contends that this poorness in world, the lack of the categories of original existence in the animal or the non-human living world in general is what constitutes “a place left open, in the very structure of these discourses (which are also “cultures”) for a noncriminal putting to death” (p. 278). in western culture, this “noncriminal putting to death” is “as real as it is symbolic when the corpse is ‘animal’”, and it is symbolic “when the corpse is ‘human’” (ibid.). western culture is carnivorous and vegetarian in that it sacrifices animals and plants without this sacrifice constituting a crime. lacking all the categories of original existence, the living world that is not man is less than human and is worth less, because it is poor in world. the death penalty and the exportation of illegal immigrants are examples of symbolic sacrifice. that is the reason why, derrida contends, the discourses of montaigne, de certeau, levinas, heidegger, etc. disrupt a “certain traditional humanism” at the same time that they “remain profound humanisms to the extent that they do not sacrifice sacrifice” (p. 279). derrida concludes: the subject … and the dasein are “men” in a world where sacrifice is possible and where it is not forbidden to make an attempt on life in general, but only on human life, on the neighbor's life, on the other's life as dasein (ibid.) derrida also explains how the subject has been instituted as “human” and excluding the animal in the coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 233 discourse of levinas. levinas recognizes the other man in his facial traits, there is no animal face for levinas. according to levinas, the transcendence of the other is first of all constituted in an ethical bound that obliges me not to kill her and, in this obligation, institutes the subject as “self”. the “thou shalt not kill” (your neighbour, your friend, etc.) is the imperative that establishes the first figure of the other as subject and as man, first as other, then as self (oneself as other, the subjective structure). consequently, responsibility towards oneself also comes from the other. as soon as you recognize the other you are not allowed to put him to death, you cannot kill the other without turning into a criminal and you are not allowed to kill yourself either. the “thou shalt not kill” protects the figure of man as subject in the sphere of society; when a man kills another man, that's a crime, but he can kill animals with impunity.vii subject is subject before the law and subjected to the law, against the law the subject turns into a criminal, he is outside the law. that is why, for levinas, the “thou shalt not kill” the other man has “become meaningful in religious cultures for which carnivorous sacrifice is essential” (p. 279). for levinas, the animal is not a subject. consequently, derrida's critique of the subject involves a critique of sacrifice, and a respectively literal and symbolic interiorization of food and language. derrida's critique of sacrifice involves acknowledging a moral imperative that is respectful toward the living in general, and not just man as subject. the definition of the concept of legal subject should not exclude animals and plants, the biosphere and the living generally, because it is in relation to them that the legal subject is constituted. the ideal of sacrificing sacrifice is very difficult to defend because most societies are carnivorous and vegetarian, but still, they must be granted some rights and be treated with some respect. insofar as the symbolic is caught within the real and the other way around, the figure of man and that of the living world go hand in hand. the discourses about the animal and the living world are introjected as subjective psychic properties which allow us to define what is human and what is not. the interiorization of food is a real thing, in that we eat meat, and symbolic, because it is accepted as something good in our societies to eat a particular kind of food, and this symbolization structures the “fiction” of law in leaving aside an area, that of man and the human subject, where putting to death is a crime.viii the ethical question revolves, then, around the question of how to eat well, about the most proper, respectful and giving way of eating, speaking, interiorizing the other in general. finally, since every culture establishes its own legal and illegal sacrifices, there are “several infinitely different modes of the conception-appropiation-assimilation of the other”: if the limit between the living and the nonliving now seems to be as unsure, at least as an oppositional limit, as that between “man” and “animal”, and if, in the (symbolic or real) experience of the “eat-speak-interiorize”, the ethical frontier no longer rigorously passes between the “thou shalt not kill” (man, thy neighbor) and the “thou shalt not put to death the living in general”, but rather between several infinitely different modes of the conceptionappropiation-assimilation of the other, then, as concerns the “good” [bien] of every morality, the question will come back to determining the best, most respectful, most grateful, and also most giving way of relating to the other and of relating the other to the self (p. 281). going back to de certeau's analysis of montaigne, the cannibal eats human flesh because in war the symbolic structure of the culture to which he belongs allows for a non-criminal putting to death of an individual of his own species who is not part of his tribe. let's remind ourselves that this act was carried out as a tribute to the enemy's valour, incorporating into his own flesh the flesh of their ancestors. the sacrificial structure is as symbolic as it is real, and it is universal. that is what made it possible for de certeau to deconstruct and reverse the values that characterized cannibals. in that sense, western culture is not better just because its symbolic structure does not allow for a remorseless eating of human flesh. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 234 symbolic sacrifice is ethnocentric. non-cannibalistic cultures deem cannibalistic cultures as inferior because they do not eat human flesh, not on rational or biological grounds: “they practice a different mode of denegation” (p. 282). this denegation, the unawareness that ethics is constructed around sacrifice is what makes western cultures believe that they are superior because they do not sacrifice, when the truth is that they simply carry out other kinds of sacrifice. the moral judgment that condemns cannibalism is in itself a symbolic form of cannibalism, in the sense that cannibals are judged as being less than human, they are non-human because they practice anthropophagy. this is the origin of morals, law, and politics: “the so-called non-anthropophagic cultures practice symbolic anthropology and even construct their most elevated socius, indeed the sublimity of their morality, their politics, and their right, on this anthropophagy” (ibid.). there is no culture that does not put itself together around an ethnic group and a certain form of sacrificial structure that delineates a particular form of ethics. in conclusion, since sacrifice and the clearance of a space for a noncriminal putting to death within culture are irreducibly real and symbolic structures, the question is that of determining what is good to eat at the same time as the good as an eating-thinking process that takes place in language and by means of language. what gives “food for thought” in a figurative sense is something that makes you think, and the awareness that as long as there is sacrifice – and there must be sacrifice, otherwise there is no eating and no thinking (and we have seen how these issues are both biologically and symbolically connected) – there cannot be good-consciousness. but there are always better and worse ways of putting the other to death. the moral question is open and continues to give us “food for thought”: the moral question is thus not, nor has it ever been: should one eat or not eat, eat this and not that, the living or the nonliving, man or animal, but since one must eat in any case and since it is and tastes good to eat, and since there is no other definition of the good [du bien], how for goodness’ sake should one eat well? and what does this imply? what is eating? how is this metonymy of introjection to be regulated? and in what respect does the formulation of these questions in language give us still more food for thought? (ibid.) works cited de certeau, michel, heterologies, trans. brian massumi, minneapolis, university of minnesota press, 2006. derrida, jacques, points... interviews, 1974-1994, trans. peggy kamuf and others, stanford, stanford university press, 1995. carles conrad serra pagès holds a double degree in english and philosophy, and is currently employed as an associate teacher at the university of pompeu fabra (barcelona), where he is working on his thesis on derrida’s concept of sign. he has been a member of the australian studies coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 235 centre at the university of barcelona since 2007. i the text was first published in le racisme: mythes et sciences: pour léon poliakov, ed. maurice olender, brussels, complexe, 1981, pp. 187-200. it was later on published as chapter 5 of de certeau's heterologies, trans. brian massumi, minneapolis, university of minnesota press, 2006, pp. 67-79. all references in my text refer to the latter edition. ii first published in cahiers confrontation 20 (winter 1989), the text appeared later on in derrida's points... interviews, 1974-1994, trans. peggy kamuf and others, stanford, stanford university press, 1995, pp. 255-287. all references in my text refer to the latter edition. iii later on in the text derrida states, talking about the relationship to self of the subject in presence: “the subject assumes presence, that is to say sub-stance, stasis, stance. not to be able to stabilize itself absolutely would mean to be able only to be stabilizing itself: relative stabilization of what remains unstable, or rather non-stable (p. 270)”. iv it is not that the dissemination of language and its essential sacrificial structure is discovered by a “simple man” (not a scholar) who has lived among savages and reported about his experiences once back in the west. if the experience of the “simple man” is privileged at one point in the narrative in disregard of the doxa and the knowledge of the ancients and the moderns, it is always with a prevision to make his experience the experience of a scholar or the other way around (by learning from the “simple man” or trying to see things as a “simple man” (also a child) would do, the scholar becomes a ‘true’ scholar). the outward journey is an inward journey, “what is near masks a foreignness…” v this is also the case regarding the western body, as we will see more extensively further on when discussing derrida. vi in the course of the interview, jean-luc nancy comments: “you are keeping at a distance, under suspicion, the question “who?” while you also increasingly validate the “who?” you validate it by suppressing that which, a priori, would limit the question to humanity”, to which derrida answers: “yes, i would not want to see the “who” restricted to the grammar of what we call western language” (pp. 276-277). vii the extent of this impunity would depend, of course, on the country and its legal system regarding animal rights or its policy regarding the environment. some countries, like the uk and australia, have strong laws regarding animal and environmental laws. viii this is so in an ideal context, where all human beings are so regardless of their social class, national or ethnic origin, a context in which the words “rights” and “legal rights” are not limited either to the nation state and its language and tradition. interstices 11 drawing has always been more than drawing” : derrida and disegno laurence simmons “…le dessin a toujours été plus que le dessin.” ( jacques derrida) 1. disegno it would be trite and obvious to say that all i can provide in a short essay is a sketch of the problem (or is it a thematics?) of drawing, from among the abundance of the references to the subject in jacques derrida’s writing. indeed, what i want to sketch is an answer to the, for me at least, simple and puzzling question: why drawing and not painting? the obvious answer would be that derrida speaks of drawing rather than painting (or of colour, as we shall see) because in drawing, in the encounter with drawing, there is the experience of the trait, of the differential trace that marks all his work from the ground-breaking essay on différance. derrida proposes the simple fact that any mark is already re-marked: the first mark is already second if it is to be identifiable and to signify. this is the structure of what derrida calls “the differential inappearance of the trait” (1993: 53). but the trait, as many have pointed out, is also the brushstroke (see brunette and wills, 1994). of course, matters are never by any means so simple with derrida, and so mine will be perforce an excessively and necessarily sketchy gesture, a drawing out and drawing down. in memoirs of the blind derrida confesses, “i have always experienced drawing as an infirmity … i still think that i will never know either how to draw or how to look at a drawing” (1993: 37). this, of course, did not stop him looking at drawings and writing about drawing. in a short text of 2005, le dessin par quatre chemins (the four pathways of drawing), derrida explores four lines of force around the fact that “the possibility and meaning of drawing remains to be thought” and that, in the phrase i have taken as my title, “drawing has always been more than drawing” (2005a: 4). those four lines of force which exert a certain attraction (attrait) upon each other are: dessiner, designer, signer, and enseigner. to draw, to designate, to sign and, to keep the assonance going, we might say “to assign” in english (although the french enseigner more literally encompasses both indicating and teaching). from the point of view of the possibility of drawing, and the responsibility of the trait, everything necessarily returns here to a question of the sign. everything in designing or projecting itself (through its signature) returns towards the same thing: the designatum. “ 115 in italian the word disegno refers to a figure, an image traced on a surface through a sign left by a pencil or other means (in other words a drawing), but the word disegno also means project or plan. in italian disegno is the noun from disegnare. however, in french from the old verb desseigner two nouns are possible: dessein (with two ‘e’s) and dessin (with one) are originally synonyms and also homophones separated by a silent ‘e’, but which come to denote with the enlightenment the metaphysical and the descriptive. that is, the not simply orthographic, but also semantic, silent ‘e’ marks the gap (écart) between conception and execution, between the intelligible and the sensible. to appropriate a derridean commonplace, le dessein (two ‘e’s) is always already dessin (one) and their relationship is co-extensive. as georges didi-huberman has recounted, for renaissance art theory “disegno was a word of the mind as much as a word of the hand. disegno, then, served to constitute art as a field of intellectual knowledge” (2005: 78). by speaking of disegno we have begun to design the subject of disegno, paving a pathway (one of derrida’s chemins) for it. in its claim to discourse on disegno (drawing), this paper will be the result of disegno (design) that speaks of itself in a reflexive structure, one that does not produce a coincidence with itself but instead forever projects forward the advent of drawing as disegno; that is to say, it follows a trace. drawing as disegno is designing itself as drawing. it presents itself from the start as a beginning that is already designed. there can be no metadiscourse on drawing since all work on drawing is also a work of drawing. fig. 1 valerio adami, jacques derrida (allegorical portrait), january 27, 2004, graphite pencil on paper. interstices 11 2. allegory “not a single day without the line”: nulla dies sine linea is the epigraph on italian artist valerio adami’s letterhead. this is the line that superimposes itself upon the white page. but what is it, this line? presence and absence; one and multiple; the same as itself and always different. perhaps, for this very reason it journeys with a single companion, the rubber: that cancels, chases away, renounces, places it under ‘erasure’ (sous rature), allowing it to be different to what it thought it was, to renew itself again each time. the journey of drawing was the title of adami’s exhibition for which derrida’s essay “+r”, to which i wish to return in a moment, was written. to follow a line, uncover derrida’s line on drawing, i want to read a drawing by adami. the drawing i have chosen is a drawing about which jeanluc nancy to complicate matters further, has also published a short reading in book form: à plus d’un titre (2007). valerio adami, jacques derrida, allegorical portrait, pencil on paper, january 27, 2004, first exhibited at the galerie daniel templon, paris in december 2004, barely two months after derrida’s death, among an exhibition of adami’s painting, dedicated to derrida’s memory and titled “préludes et après-ludes” (fig. 1). let me start with the description i have just furnished, according to adami: the subtitle “allegorical portrait” was apparently given by derrida to the drawing (nancy 2007: 85-6). derrida, i think, is slipping us a definition of drawing that is at once allegorical and ironical. the reference, of course, is to the two rhetorical figures that paul de man judged to be inseparable and irreducible. derrida writes in mémoires for paul de man: paul de man often stresses the ‘sequential’ and ‘narrative’ structure of allegory. in his eyes, allegory is not simply one form of figurative language among others; it represents one of language’s essential possibilities: the possibility that permits language to say the other and to speak of itself while speaking of something else; the possibility of always saying something other than what it gives to be read, including the scene of reading itself. (1986b: 11) if one were to recast adami’s portrait of derrida in de manian terms, the portrait is an allegory of drawing and of the attempt to read drawing: that is, to understand the activity of drawing. but, as a reader of de man will remember, reading as he (de man) establishes it, whether one is reading rousseau or proust (or a drawing) is forever impossible. the act of trying to understand drawing repeats the enigmatic unknowable event (drawing) that is the object of our anxious interpretation. 3. subjectile but let me try to recover some ground. let me really begin with the subjectile: an old technical word meaning what is put under the drawing or painting, the support, that which makes the image or representation possible. in adami’s drawing we might first wish to say that the subjectile becomes a subject. the point of the pen, one of those old-fashioned fountain pens, grasped tightly by bunched-up fingers, is placed exactly at the edge of the drawing, as if to run over – pour déborder (nancy 2007: 58) – in this way. this pen nib at the edge, on the edge, raises the question of how to get in to or out of the drawing. the term subjectile marks a certain crossing of borders, as well as an institution of the borders it crosses. 117 it is derrida’s reference to the hand – and indeed the very hand we are looking at – that asks us to consider again. the physicality of the primary gesture of the drawing hand here must also be understood as an impulse to touch that which should only be an object of visual perception, to transfer a presence to a deep memory. the drawing is in this sense a “search” rather than a “communication”. nevertheless, with drawing one is not dealing, according to derrida, with an experience of blocking vision, but of refinding it, through (behind [derrière]) the mirror, and igniting its internal sparks and revelatory breaths. as he has explored at great length, and with great subtlety, in le toucher jean-luc nancy (2005b), the privilege of the visible has been constantly sustained and framed by the privilege of touch. 4. desk and books the preface to a taste for the secret, written with maurizio ferraris, is titled “secretaire”, a reference to “a writing desk in which papers are locked away”, and a secretary “assistant … sparring partner … interviewer”, and “a catalogue, even an iconography or a portfolio, or more exactly an ichnography [from ichnos “trace”] in which one collects, writes or describes traces, which are, at bottom, secrets” (2001: vii). what secrets? in every drawing, in which there exists the tracing of drawing, there is a movement that is secret, that is separate from and irreducible to daily visibility. and here we have it, a writing desk and books: six in the first line and three in a second line, one held partially open as if it had just been placed back down in its place in the line and a finger or thumb had been removed from the gap between the pages. what might their titles be? let us fantasise for a moment that they might be hegel and genet: aesthetics, faith and knowledge, phenomenology of spirit, funeral rites, our lady of the flowers, the thief’s journal. the references would be to the building blocks of derrida’s strange and powerful “bookish” volume glas (1974), which blends a meticulous commentary on hegel’s philosophical works, in one column of a vertically divided page, with a more lyrical, fragmented commentary on jean genet’s literary writings in a facing column. this juxtaposition, apposition or opposition of the textual columns, and widely diverse writing styles gives rise to provocative semantic and phonemic networks: “phonogrammatic” is derrida’s adjective. there are also sidebars or baby columns in different typefaces; each column has its own continuity but is not impermeable to oblique interconnections, creating a multi-directional reading. the reading process is further complicated by the presence of a number of what derrida refers to as “judas holes”: peepholes through the commented texts that give self-conscious access to autobiographical or signatory effects. first published a year after glas in derrière le miroir, no. 214, and then reprinted in the truth in painting, the essay “+r (par-dessus le marché)” (“+r: (into the bargain)”) introduces adami’s drawing exhibition le voyage du dessin (the journey of drawing). derrida’s essay functions as part of the exhibition, and undercuts its commercial underpinning, as well as offering the supplementary function of critical commentary. in particular “+r” examines several drawings of adami, notably two studies for a drawing after glas and a portrait of walter benjamin, described by derrida as a “hieroglyph of a biography” (1987: 179). adami’s characteristic fissured picture plane, his composition by erasure, and his use of textual citations in the image become the ground for derrida’s examination of the interstices 11 art mark/art market and the economy of the (sur)plus-value of the letter. adami’s rendering of derrida’s texts and his handwriting become in turn the captions and illustrations dispersed in derrida’s subsequent essay. and, finally, adami’s use of derridean texts affords derrida the opportunity to comment on his own transformation into an image. the first drawing after glas (fig. 2), appearing to represent a text written on the back of a canvas, effects the figure of chiasmus as a crossing-out by a triple-play manoeuvre of, first, a text partially hidden under a fold at the bottom; second, the x near the middle which could be read as barred; and, finally, the x at the top, a sort of false start cut off by the edge of the paper. marges (margins, the title of derrida’s essay collection) written and crossed over at the top, occupies the title position but seems to have been folded over from the bottom of the other side of the canvas. the text’s continuation over the folds at the right undoes any notion that the writing preceded the folding. as does the mise en page of the drawing, its reduction in size, its place first of all in a sequence which includes its own repetition (in the truth in painting on pages 153, 167 and the front cover). the second drawing after glas is titled ich (fig. 3). the german first person pronoun ich when transliterated back into the greek (iota plus chi) designates christ, as traditionally symbolised by a fish-like emblem that provides a greek acronym for jesus christ. furthermore, for derrida, as a pseudomorpheme of the abbreviated greek word ichtus (fish), the reversed ich is chi chiasmus (x), the rhetorical figure whose double criss-cross marks this drawing as it did the previous one. in this chiasmatic exchange it would be wrong, though, to think of the fish as drawing and the words as writing. the outlines of the fish loosen and disintegrate and become at their tail an angular scribble, and notice how a capital ‘a’ and a ‘d’ seem to materialise at the right below its tail. the glas drawing contains several other truncated words, including part of derrida’s signature and an implied je (ich) in the capital ‘j’ of jacques, as well as, at the bottom of the page, a relic of derrida’s first poem published at the age of 17. one of derrida’s strategies in glas is to show how genet’s autobiographical writings comment on, and eventually undermine, the very assumptions about the role of the signature which inform definitions of autobiography. he does this through a commentary via those “judas holes” on the way his own signature, the name that signs glas, operates just as he claims genet has done. the result is not only a fig. 2 valerio adami, study for a drawing after glas by jacques derrida, 27 february 1975, graphite pencil on paper. fig. 3 valerio adami, study for a drawing after glas by jacques derrida, 22 may 1975, graphite pencil on paper, private collection. fig. 2 fig. 3 119 theoretical critique which questions the assumption that the signature is a mark in the text that points to an extra-textual source of the text, one that he developed around the same time in signsponge (1984), but is a radical displacement of the genre of autobiography that now must include glas as one of its examples. this still leaves the question of the (double) signature on the drawing. derrida’s signature or “half signature” is not original but reproduced; here it is a reproduction of a reproduction, the signature is as much adami’s as it is derrida’s, since it is reinscribed in adami’s characteristic hand. if in glas the reader has to generate a meaningful relation between the two juxtaposed texts on hegel and genet, in “+r” the viewer moves in a similar way between adami’s drawing and derrida’s writing. but, as i have been at pains to insist, the drawings are not illustrations. they function as an accompaniment. in the light of this account of derrida’s discussion we might ask: what then is drawing, a drawing, as such? is it possible to distinguish it, if we take the example of “+r”, from hypothetical writing on drawing, on these drawings? can we distinguish, that is, between writing that speaks about drawing and writing that appears within drawing? when does the drawing begin to become writing and the writing drawing? 5. landscape and circumflex like the portrait convention of placing landscape or landscapes behind the figure, adami’s drawing has its own background landscape: a pointed hill and a desert of dry, schematic trees. it is noteworthy adami confirms that for him this is derrida’s algeria, a desert of dunes, small hills and trees without leaves (nancy 2007: 91). given, as we have seen, the emphasis placed on the graphic effects of diacritical marks in glas it is perhaps significant, therefore, that the strangely pointed hill reminds us of the french accent, the circumflex. it is the same disseminative drift of the circumflex that features in glas in the play between the proper name genet and the flower genêt. it is all, derrida suggests there, “a question of the circumflex: of a ‘fruitless’ complication of the orthography” (1986a: 230bi 257). but the circumflex is not just a diacritical caprice, or an archaic mark of punctuation, it has the quality of what david wills calls a “graphic effect” that constitutes, he continues, “perhaps the most explicit example of the figural in derrida’s writing” (2001: 113). the very inbuilt graphicality of language becomes, as wills outlines it, “both a cohesive and disruptive force” (114). the circumflex is one of the minimal traces of the way in which, for derrida, writing is already constituted by the “figuro-pictorial” but for adami, in turn, how the pictorial is already constituted by the “semantico-syntactic”. 6. face we come now to the figure, the portrait face. to all appearances it is a face that dedoubles, its planes sliding and meeting behind each other, to cover and envelope, reveal and display as jean-luc nancy suggests “like the carapace of a tortoise or a suit of armor that plays against itself and pushes its plates or its scales one upon the other in slippages and progressive rubbings where the disposition of a face in waiting breaks up (se brouille)” (2007: 68; my translation). and what of the three eyes that all look to the left, the central one perhaps cyclopean (see derrida 1993: 87ff)? we register the hint of a certain non-presence in the gaze that looks to us but doesn’t regard us directly in the face, face-to-face. the expression on the interstices 11 lips: a mocking yet tender smile. a smile that now, inevitably, recalls derrida’s final words spoken for him by his son pierre at his graveside: “smile for me, he [derrida] says, as i will have smiled for you until the end. always prefer life and constantly affirm survival… i love you and am smiling at you from wherever i am” (2007: 244). je vous souris: we hear the assonance but also dissonance between survivre and sourire in what nancy has baptised as “this surviving portrait that will have become the allegory of his smile” (2007: 38; my translation). 7. cat according to david wills, the essay “+r” represents “the most fertile nexus of relations among framing, animals, and autobiography” in any of derrida’s writings (2001: 126). as we have seen, a fish hooked and emerging from the water is analysed by derrida as the figuration of a play or competition of his signatures, signatures that adami also draws on the surface of the work. in adami’s portrait of derrida, on our left protruding from the border, its head completely exposed, is a gazing cat. in terms of formal compositional dynamics, this cat is a case of what in the renaissance leonbattista alberti, giving advice to painters in his della pittura, called a “spectator figure”. it represents the displaced glance of the picture’s real spectator: it is the spectator’s painted deputy. what we see is not a gaze looking at us but the gaze, our gaze, itself displaced. by it, the cat, it is the act of our seeing that we see. plausibly posed as a bystander or onlooker to the depicted scene, the cat yet flagrantly represents us – like it, observers of a scene from which, spatially, we are and must remain implacably separate. often, like a lead-in figure, the spectator figure stands in the wings and gazes into the depicted scene. like the real spectator, it is separated from the scene it observes by a depicted space it can never cross. the structure of a cat’s eye is a permanent gaze that unblinkingly fixes the instant as if in a moment of eternal attention. it is the cat that considers and guards the secret of that which it sees. the cat without words. we notice the ears of the cat pricked up as if listening for language. the cat at the edge of the drawing recalls for us the moment, recounted in the animal that therefore i am, when one paris morning, while naked in his bathroom about to take a shower, jacques derrida observes his cat observing him. observe is not quite the right word here; this “looking” of the cat is more directed, more intentional, and more disturbing because of this. he was, derrida says, “faced with the cat’s eyes looking at me [qui me regarde] as it were from head to toe, just to see [pour voir], not hesitating to concentrate its vision [sa vue] – in order to see, with a view to seeing – in the direction of my sex” (2008: 373). “caught naked, in silence, by the gaze [le regard] of an animal” (ibid.: 372) derrida has difficulty overcoming his embarrassment. why he asks does he “have trouble repressing a reflex dictated by immodesty”? why is he disturbed by “the impropriety that comes of finding oneself naked, one’s sex exposed, stark naked before a cat that looks at you without moving”? he gives this old experience, the impropriety that comes “from appearing in truth naked, in front of the insistent gaze of the animal, a benevolent or pitiless gaze, surprised or cognizant”, a new name – animalséance – derived from the french for impropriety (malséance). in derrida’s essay where these events are recounted, the malaise of this scene in the bathroom plays out over a crossing of borders between human and animal. “the animal looks at us, and we are naked before it. thinking perhaps begins there,” suggests derrida (397). the nudity in front of the cat is like the nudity in 121 front of the drawer of the drawing. adami who gazes to draw his subject has remarked that in terms of the dynamics of the drawing he thinks of himself as the cat (nancy 2007a: 92). in his turn, the subject is exposed, his shirt front is open, his face is denuded under the artist’s gaze, indeed the drawing may turn against him and show him what he is not or what he does not want to believe/see. 8. table in the upper left of our drawing there is a table in the sky. tavola in italian also means board or panel (subjectile) for a painting. it is a table that floats in a phantasmatic fashion, its leg somehow fixed into another subjectile, the wall, one of the two walls we see of the four that must surround the figure. a single leg supporting the corner of a table suspended in the sky that has upon its table-top lightly drawn the sign of a cross. perhaps it is a “drawing table”, the table on which this drawing was drawn, a table that is then drawn mysteriously skyward? and what if the cross isn’t a symbol, a christian cross, but rather a mark of the artist’s process, a sign of the drawing, part of the squaring up, its mapping? as a sign of position and positioning its longer line may be extended as a mark for the j. (‘je’) of j. derrida, it points us to jacques, and the cross-line if extended passes through the forehead of the figure, the portrait of derrida. so, a sign of position and positioning. as if the writer’s desk has become this table/is this table lifted out, but no books, no hand that draws or writes, a tabula rasa. the cross is also the cross of erasure (sous rature) and the crossing of chiasmus (x). the cross on the table is also the ‘+’ (plus) of derrida’s economical title of economy. a seemingly off-hand incision that becomes a double and doubling signature, of writer and artist, a marking that through its double-crossings, its marking and marketing, signs and binds the two discourses of writer and artist. 9. signature so here in this drawing, like those of glas, we have it, a sort of signature, but not really, balancing on an inclined line that bisects the top quarter of the composition diagonally, crossed, divided or fissioned. but this may also be the line and the trait that the pen, which is gripped so firmly, at the opposing side of the composition is drawing. this name like a mountain range at the top of the drawing. a name like an avalanche that might slip down and be lost in the impossible. this incline is the counter-band (contre-bande) derrida makes reference to in glas (1986a: 244a). “a band passing from the upper sinister corner of the escutcheon to the lower dexter corner” (american heritage dictionary) (cited in leavey 1986: 178). but also a surnom that surmounts adami’s signature at the bottom right (adami’s name that shares a ‘da’ with it), next to the date of the drawing (257 days before derrida’s death). the portrait can only appear in truth in the disappearance (the surmounting) of the name. but also a nickname of sorts, like the one that might be carved in a desktop by a naughty schoolboy: jackie derrida. 10. colour perhaps the most striking thing about derrida’s essay on adami in glas is the absence of colour from the drawings discussed and yet the painstaking, if convoluted, analysis of colour in this text that draws meticulously upon visual examples that are just drawings and are colourless. how is it that the graphic is used interstices 11 to discuss an absent chromatic? or drawing to talk about painting? this is made even more striking because derrida chastens us on this very point in memoirs of the blind: “we are talking here about drawing, not painting” (1993: 44), he admonishes. but to return to “+r”; the text in question. it is no doubt of significance that the first mention of colour in the essay on adami comes in a passage where derrida is commenting on his own signature on the edges of the drawing and he remarks that two letters of his name (those two that he shares with adami) are missing: “the da is not there, hic et nunc, but it is not lacking. like colour?” he then defers… “we’ll have to see later…” (1987: 159). colour, then, is a mode of deferring, it is the “unanticipated”. colour is something we must wait for. on the same page as the passage cited earlier, derrida writes of all the drawn lines of the adami drawings, all their traits together: “let drawing = tr” (1987: 170). what can he mean by this enigmatic statement? what is the significance of this sublexeme tr? immediately, he lists a number of tr words which his translator cleverly catches: the treachery of this translation or transcription, the transpassing, the trance or tragedy of ich, the transpiercings, trunks, trepannings, the tréma or the ex-tra which interest adami have apparently no linguistic or semantic affinity with what i say i am doing … when i travail, tremble or become troubled while writing. (1987: 171) [my italics] he continues: “but if tr is each time altered, transformed, displaced by what appears to complete it, it keeps a sort of self-sufficiency” (171). this matrix, as jonathan tiplady notes, “is singular because it does not simply stand pregnantly vacant, allowing for an event but not already inciting it; instead the matrix tr already has within it the events it is supposed to be merely hatching” (2003: 208). despite their listing and retracing in moments of translation, travel, traction, trains, traits, transactions, transfer, traversals, trailings, and of course the italian ritratti (portraits), words encountered along the trajectory of tr cannot be retrieved in a thematic inventory. the two letters have no identity for themselves, for there is no way to vocalise tr, i have to say or spell it to you like that, ‘tr’. i now turn to a passage on the following page. in some way my entire essay so far has been working towards a citation of this unusual passage and to saying a few words about it in conclusion: the rigor of the divide between trait and colour becomes more trenchant, strict, severe and jubilant as we move forward in the [adami’s] so-called recent period. because the gush of colour is held back, it mobilizes more violence, potentializes the double energy: first the full encircling ring, the black line, incisive, definitive, then the flood of broad chromatic scales in a wash of colour. the colour then transforms the program, with a self-assurance all the more transgressive (perceptual consciousness would say “arbitrary”) for leaving the law of the trait intact in its inky light. there is, to be sure, a contract: between the drawing which is no longer an outline or sketch, and the differential apparatus of the colours. (1987: 172) derrida’s logic is clear enough. we have here what we might call the “countereffect of colour”: drawing the black line is an act of aggression against colour and by being that invites colour’s very revenge. colour most forcefully is when it is most rigorously held back and detained. in the context of derrida’s wider work 123 we have an example of what hillis miller has called derrida’s “refraining”: “the contradictory ‘with-against’ movement that characterizes derrida’s work” (2007: 279) he calls it. formulations where the system in question does not close because it is tr: entrenched, transposable, transgressive, traversed, tremulous, troubled etc. the opposition between the trait and colour is not really an opposition at all; it is a question of supplementarity. colour supplements the drawn line by filling it out. at the same time colour brings into the open what is the essential of the drawn line. colour is already there when it is most forcibly held back, when it is a retrait. adami’s colourless drawings precisely because they so strenuously resist it are already awash with colour. of course, in this sketch i have not been able to provide a satisfactory representation of derrida’s thought on drawing, nor, despite some hypotheses, a satisfactory account of what drew him to drawing. this is, i conclude, because with the question of drawing there can be no “originary” insight, because with derrida, as geoff bennington says, “there is complexity at the origin” and “his thinking turns around the thought that the origin is not simple, and that a non-simple origin has immeasurable consequences for thought” (2007: 231). there has been no colour here, in the images i have shown you, no chromatic in the graphic, but neither a simple chromatic-graphic distinction, and yet what i have been attempting to do is a certain kind of colouring in; the sort of “filling-in” one finds in those books that children use made up of thick black lines (like, of course, adami’s) which form spaces to be filled up upon a white page. it is a form of touching up which forces us to ask once again with derrida: “does one ever get over drawing, is one ever done mourning it?” (1993: 39). references alberti, l. (1991). on painting (cecil grayson, trans.). harmondsworth: penguin. bennington, g. 2007). foundations. textual practice (21:2), 231-49. brunette, p. and wills, d. (eds.) (1994). deconstruction and the visual arts: art, media, architecture. cambridge: cambridge university press. de man, p. (1979). allegories of reading: figural language in rousseau, nietzsche, rilke and proust. new haven and london: yale university press. derrida, j. (1986a). glas (j. p. leavey jr. and r. rand, trans.). lincoln: university of nebraska press. derrida, j. (1986b). mémoires for paul de man (c. lindsay, j. culler and e. cadava, trans.). new york: columbia university press. derrida, j. (1987). the truth in painting. (g. bennington and i. mcleod, trans.). chicago: university of chicago press. derrida, j. (1993). memoirs of the blind: the self-portrait and other ruins (pascale-anne brault and michael naas, trans.). chicago: university of chicago press. derrida, j. with m. ferraris (2001). a taste for the secret (g. donis trans., g. donis and d. webb eds.). cambridge: polity. derrida, j. (2005a). le dessin par quatre chemins. annali. fondazione europea del disegno (fondation adami) 1 (2005): 3-5. derrida, j. (2005b). on touching – jean-luc nancy (christine irizarry, trans.). stanford: stanford university press. derrida, j. (2007). final words, trans. g. walker. in w. j. t. mitchell and a. i. davidson (eds.), the late derrida (p. 244). chicago: university of chicago press. interstices 11 derrida, j. (2008). the animal that therefore i am. (d. wills, trans.). new york: fordham university press. didi-huberman, g. (2005). confronting images: questioning the ends of a certain history of art. (j. goodman, trans.). university park, pennsylvania: university of pennsylvania press. hillis miller, j. (2007). don’t count me in: derrida’s refraining. textual practice (21:2), 279-94. leavey, j.p. jr. (1986). glassary. lincoln and london: university of nebraska press. nancy j.-l. (2007). à plus d’un titre. jacques derrida. sur un portrait de valerio adami. paris: editions galilée. tiplady, j. (2003). colouring in beckett. the oxford literary review 25: 199-217. wills, d. (2001). derrida and aesthetics: lemming (reframing the abyss). in t. cohen (ed.), jacques derrida and the humanities: a critical reader (108-31). cambridge: cambridge university press. 125 non-refereed papers, projects, reviews & interviews changing societies & personalities, 2020 vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 158–171 http://dx.doi.org/10.15826/csp.2020.4.2.095 received 16 march 2020 © 2020 roman soloviy accepted 3 june 2020 r.p.soloviy@npu.edu.ua published online 9 july 2020 article “messianicity without messianism”: on the place of religion in the philosophy of jacques derrida roman soloviy dragomanova national pedagogical university, kyiv, ukraine abstract this article examines jacques derrida’s concept of “messianicité sans messianisme” (“messianicity without messianism”) as an important example of rethinking the role and nature of religion in the late period of the work of the philosopher. historical and philosophical analysis demonstrates that the appeal to the problem of messianism is inherent to many jewish philosophers of the early twentieth century. they tried to develop a concept of time that would maintain full openness to the future and at the same time remember the past. their work affected the interpretation of messianism in derrida, because he developed his concept in discussion with walter benjamin and emmanuel lévinas. as the most general structure of the experience of justice, openness to the undecidable future, and respect for other messianicity do not exclude the religious manifestations of messianism, calling instead for the unceasing deconstruction of their fundamentalist claims. keywords jacques derrida, religion, messianism, messianicity, hospitality, other introduction the overall goal of this article is to examine the rethinking of religion in contemporary continental philosophy as illustrated by jacques derrida’s concept of messianicity, which, according to many scholars, was the most influential form of philosophical interpretation of messianism during the twentieth century. with this aim in mind, we will start exploring the resurgence of the ideas https://changing-sp.com/ changing societies & personalities, 2020, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 158–171 159 of hope and the future in the works of the key jewish thinkers of the beginning of the twentieth century. then we will analyze how their work affected the interpretation of messianism in derrida, who developed his concept in conversation with walter benjamin and emmanuel lévinas. the central part of the article will study in great detail the peculiarities of the derrida’s interpretation of messianicity as a primordial structure of experiencing an openness to the coming of the others when we are unable to foresee their arrival. it is impossible to predict what is coming, or to become ready for it. it should be noted that derrida’s idea of messianicity is strongly linked to his conceptualization of an alterity. it’s also worth noting that other is a key word in jacques derrida’s terminology. the concept of otherness is essential in all of his work, even when it is examined with varying methods. according to derrida, this concept cannot be reduced to a simple linguistic formulation; every other is wholly other, and any idea of the other is open to paradoxes and aporias. however, close reading of derrida’s work proves that he calls it “something that is completely other, something that cannot be returned to the same by any form of dialectical sublation” (miller, 1996, p. 155). the derridian concept of the other that implies absolute singularity of every being has essential consequences for moral obligations, political activities and religion. as we will demonstrate, derrida’s notion of messianicity does not exclude the religious phenomena. we will conclude with an analysis of the full range of interpretations that derrida’s concept of messianiсity has been received. while some researchers have interpreted it as a clear sign of the religious intentions of the late derrida’s philosophy, others have maintained the atheistic nature of the concept, as simply deconstruction. appealing to philosophical thought when developing the theological concept of messianism is a recent phenomenon related to historical developments during the last two centuries. one of the main paradoxes of modern history is that the unprecedented growth of violence and the cruelty that characterizes it have been accompanied by a previously unknown revival of the concepts of hope and the future. the decisive role played in this process belongs to a number of prominent jewish intellectuals who were active during the beginning of the twentieth century (walter benjamin, franz rosenzweig, martin buber, ernst bloch, theodor adorno, gershom scholem, among others). they all sought to clarify the nature of the relationship between european and jewish culture, as well as find answers to current social and political challenges. as the french philosopher pierre bouretz (2003/2010) emphasized, their versions of the messianic utopia were developed as a faithful companion to twentieth-century suffering and terror, and at the same time as a form of protest against the concept of the irreversible progress of the world – that is, against the horrific excesses of immanence. by promoting the concept of being “witnesses of the future,” they rejected the idea of the past as completed and done with, they defied attempts to predict the blind future, and they encouraged resistance toward the view of man “having become purely a historical being” (bouretz, 2003/2010, p. 11). their purpose was to remember the past and tradition while also developing a concept of time that retains full openness towards a future, which cannot be confined by any horizons of significance and expectation. philosophical reflection on messianism continued during the second half of the last century. https://changing-sp.com/ 160 roman soloviy derrida’s messianicity in the context of jewish philosophical messianism it should be noted that while attention to ethical and religious issues is inherent to derrida’s later work, the texts from his early years also address topics related to religion. already in glas (derrida, 1974/1986), the question of religion is the focus of the philosopher’s attention in his reading of hegel’s early texts. between 1980 and 1990, derrida turned to the analysis of negative theology and the problems of the translation of sacred texts, as well as to phenomena such as confession, faith, hospitality, and gifts. works of this period call into question the established treatment of derrida’s philosophy as promoting atheism and late period modern secularism. is it possible to talk about the appeal to religion of a philosopher who has gone to so much effort to critique the metaphysics of presence, which is so important to religious discourse? according to derrida, the fundamental feature of the history of western metaphysics is the modality of thinking about being in terms of presence. human thought and language always refer to something external, and the being is an ultimate reference and “transcendental signified” of our discourses. as such, it provides a metaphysical justification of certainty of human knowledge. derrida claims that metaphysics of presence is a profound mistake since it fails to recognize that human understanding of reality is linguistically mediated. his philosophical project intended to undermine the possibility of disregarding the linguistic mediation of reality by deconstructing the “transcendental signified.” at first glance, deconstruction is not favorable to religion. if the idea of god is regarded as the name of transcendental signified, then the classical theistic view of the omnipotent god as a ground of all meaning can be deconstructed as a merely human concept. however, as the reading of derrida’s texts shows, he is not interested in returning to traditional theism. his purpose is much more radical, for he is convinced that the god of conventional theism has become a thing of the past. derrida tries to think of god and faith after enlightenment skepticism, the death of god, and the destruction of metaphysics. “messianicity” is one of the essential leitmotifs of the final decade of derrida’s work. philosopher explores traditional theological themes without reference to religion as an established system of dogmas, mode of social organization, or a foundation for the moral life. the methodology of derrida’s employment of theological concepts is well illustrated by his reflections on the nature of religion in the gift of death (derrida, 1992/1996). the ambiguity of the issue of death is understood here as the context for analyzing the responsibility of free subjectivity, access to which is provided by religion. however, religion here doesn’t mean traditional denominational beliefs and practices, but what derrida defines as “religion without religion,” that is, not classical theism or institutional patterns of religion, but a form of faith that does not require an event of revelation for its existence. derrida addressed problems of messianism initially in the essay “violence and metaphysics: an essay on the thought of emmanuel lévinas” (derrida, 1967/2001). lévinas’ project was aimed to break with husserlian phenomenology and heideggerian ontology, which by attempting to possess and know the other, concealed its infinite alterity and reduced it to the same. derrida offers an extensive critique of lévinas’ changing societies & personalities, 2020, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 158–171 161 interpretation of husserl and heidegger and questions his explanation of the ethical relationship in a face-to-face encounter. he also analyzes lévinas’ appeal to the tradition, which is beyond the bounds of the key concepts of greek thought, namely to “messianic eschatology.” it is certainly not that lévinas’ philosophy is based on the religious texts of judaism or is a form of “jewish theology” or “jewish mysticism.” moreover, the philosophy of lévinas “can even be understood as the trial of theology and mysticism” (derrida, 1967/2001, p. 103). in this sense, derrida is close to lévinas himself, who in totality and infinity denies the idea that eschatological theologies can supplement philosophical discourses through their prophetic proclamations of the ultimate purpose of being and through offering a clear picture of the future. in order for the “eschatology of messianic peace” to gain significance in philosophical thinking, it needs, according to lévinas, a primordial and original relation with being, a “relation with being beyond the totality or beyond history” (lévinas, 1961/2011, p. 22). derrida interprets this “beyond” as an appeal to experience itself, to practice, and to the irreducible alterity of the other. therefore, owing to eschatology, which goes beyond all totality and objective experience and awakens people to the fullness of their responsibility, a figure of the other is discovered, which, according to lévinas, cannot be understood within the framework of traditional philosophy, and which is the sole source of ethics. thus, in one of his earliest texts, derrida picks up on lévinas’ idea of messianic eschatology and uses it to assess if lévinas’ efforts to go beyond greek philosophical tradition are productive. it should be noted that despite the fact that for the first time derrida addresses the subject of messianism under the influence of lévinas, an even more important role in the development of his conception of the messianic was played by the philosophical legacy of walter benjamin (1892–1940), the author of one of the most influential versions of the philosophical understanding of messianism. written shortly before his tragic death in september 1940, benjamin’s on the concept of history (benjamin, 1996) denies that historical progress will inevitably lead to the replacement of capitalism by socialism. instead, the thinker underpins his own conception of historical time, the defining aspect of which is the idea of breaking, active messianic intervention in the course of events. refusing to interpret the historical process as a homogeneous and linear “empty time,” benjamin claims that every moment of the history is “the small gateway in time through which the messiah might enter” (benjamin, 1996, p. 397). for benjamin, temporality of “a time to come” is not of future as coming present, “but that of the future anterior, a time in which future and past do not so much come together as come about one another, doing so in a way that circumvents conventional modalities of presence and holds time open to the coming of another (levine, 2014, pp. 5–6). the sudden arrival of the messiah and the end of the history of the world – that is to say, large-scale historical transformations – can occur in an unprogrammed way, at any moment, even when their arrival is not expected. they are possible only as the radical interruption of linear time. therefore, benjamin is trying to defend the possibility of a revolutionary breakthrough in a situation where its occurrence is not conditioned by any socio-economic realities. here we find an echo of the widespread https://changing-sp.com/ 162 roman soloviy belief in jewish mysticism that glimpses of future salvation can be found in the present. in this context, it should also be noted that the experience of the moment as a moment of the symbolic unity of the religious community and its intense expectation of salvation is also inherent in the philosophy of franz rosenzweig. the author of the star of redemption (rosenzweig, 1921/2005) emphasizes that the community must be in a state of intense expectation that the kingdom of god is about to come. this experience of maximum intensity reveals an important paradox: the balance between the concentration of history in one moment interacts with a permanent delay, shifting the finale of history into the future. a critical moment of world history is approached by people who “have been endowed with a weak messianic power, a power on which the past has a claim” (benjamin, 1996, p. 390) – people who seek justice for the dead, forgotten in the whirlwind of historical cataclysms. they do not cherish the vain illusion that a happy future is coming as a result of rampant scientific and technological progress but retain the memory of a “secret agreement between past generations” who seemingly expected that new generations will set them free from stories written by the victors. the question of the degree of influence of benjamin’s “weak messianic power” on derrida’s “messianicity” remains debatable. at first glance, the approaches of the two philosophers are close enough, since both appeal to marxism and employ the notion of messianism. what is common to benjamin and derrida is “a certain messianic weakening,” or the refusal to give some specific content to the messianic promise or to determine the form of the messianic event. on this basis, john d. caputo even argues that benjamin’s “weak messianic power” and derrida’s “messianicity” are expressions of the same idea (caputo, 1997, p. 352). however, commenting on benjamin’s statement about weak messianism in specters of marx (derrida, 2006), derrida argues that the logic of his messianic thought is “turned toward the future no less than the past, in a heterogeneous and disjointed time” (derrida, 2006, p. 228). thus, while benjamin’s weak messianism contains a strong ethical impulse, calling for remembering the forgotten victims of history (or those who are at risk of oblivion), his appeal to the past carries with it the risk of losing focus on the future – that is, giving attention to what is always yet to come. history could be addressed with the critical selection of the heritage we want to bring to the future. the work of mourning is not a one-time task that can be accomplished and completed, but is rather an indication of an important way of being human. at the core, the formation of subjectivity takes place in the process of mourning, inheriting what is passed on from previous generations and developing an awareness of one’s duty toward them. we are not able to bring the dead back to life, but we are capable of witness and sorrow. it is impossible to establish justice and prevent the recurrence of wrongs from the past simply by “burying” the past. instead, one should constantly practice the “work of mourning” with its continued attention to the past for the sake of preserving the messianic hope for the future. thus, the decisive difference between derrida’s messianism and benjamin’s weak messianic power lies in the various “logics of inheritance.” for benjamin, it is important to preserve the totality of the past in order to perpetuate the memory of the forgotten victims of coercion and injustice, as well as to open up the possibility of changing societies & personalities, 2020, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 158–171 163 reawakening the past in an era of revolutionary catastrophes that threaten to forget about the suppressed. according to derrida, the duty toward the past consists not so much in preserving a certain tradition, but in remembering the past for the sake of repeating and confirming the difference of the other. mourning over difference requires a kind of “exorcism,” but not in order “to chase away the ghosts, but this time to grant them the right, if it means making them come back alive as revenants who would no longer be revenants, but as other arrivants to whom a hospitable memory or promise must offer welcome – without certainty, ever, that they present themselves as such” (derrida, 2006, p. 220). although inheritance confirms the return of the past, this past, paradoxically, is a time yet to come, a time that is fundamentally different from any other period in history that we know of. the task, therefore, is to open the past for the future, to leave in it the cracks through which newness can enter, to provide an opportunity for the disruption of the usual course of things. messianicity as openness to the arrival of an unpredictable other messianicity appears as a sign of the openness towards the future that is fundamentally unpredictable. this radical openness to the possibilities of the forthcoming offers a hope for coming of justice. undoubtedly, openness is never absolute – at every step forward something from the past is lost, and every moment of inheritance opens new possibilities for transformation and the multiplication of tradition. the driving force and at the same time the vulnerability of the gesture of inheritance derrida exposes in the concept of promise. according to the general structure of promise, the future (that is, not the future in conventional sense of the word, but the radical future – what derrida calls l’avenir) always exceeds any prediction or calculation. derrida denies an understanding of time as a sequence of modalized presents – the past is not the present that is past, and the present is not a mere result of the past. for this reason, the future cannot be regarded as a projected continuation of the present. it is not a descriptive empirical future, but a messianic eschatological future, an expectation of the arrival of an unpredictable other, in which our “come” is turned to the point that we cannot determine, predict, or calculate in advance who or what is coming. messianicity calls for inheriting those texts of the past that are most open to the future. this approach is exemplified by derrida’s interaction with the legacy of marxism, in which he sees the most striking modern manifestation of messianic hospitality, “certain emancipatory and messianic affirmation, a certain experience of the promise that one can try to liberate from any dogmatics and even from any metaphysico-religious determination, from any messianism” (derrida, 2006, p. 111). as derrida explains in his important essay faith and knowledge: the two sources of faith and knowledge at the limits of reason alone (derrida, 1996/2002), messianicity is depicted not as a religious phenomenon, but as the primordial general structure of experiencing an openness to the forthcoming (l’avenir) beyond any horizon of expectations defined by religious conceptual schemes. this messianic dimension does not depend on any messianism; it does not come from a definite revelation of https://changing-sp.com/ 164 roman soloviy the abrahamic religion. its essence consists in “movement of an experience open to the absolute future of what is coming, that is to say, a necessarily indeterminate, abstract, desert-like experience that is confided, exposed, given up to its waiting for the other and for the event” (derrida, 2006, p. 112). in contrast, religious and political messianisms form in advance a set of expectations and prophetic predictions that determine how, where, when, and under what conditions the other may appear. because messianisms contain a predetermined horizon of expectation, they inevitably commit violence towards unique singularities. thus, it is anticipated that we will extend radical hospitality to the arrivant without imposing on him any prior obligations or conditions. derrida defines it as “a waiting without horizon of expectation,” that is, “awaiting what one does not expect yet or any longer, hospitality without reserve, welcoming salutation accorded in advance to the absolute surprise of the arrivant from whom or from which one will not ask anything in return” (derrida, 2006, p. 211). an example of this register of an appeal to the present to go beyond itself is derrida’s interpretation of a “democracy-tocome,” which means not a specific form of government but something fundamentally different, something that still has to come, going beyond the previously known. the effectiveness of a democratic promise is linked to the eschatological expectation of some unpredictable alternativeness. it cannot be identified with any particular embodiment of democracy but calls for the endless transformation of the societies that exist here and now. in explaining the meaning of the messianic, derrida repeatedly uses the famous aggada of the babylonian talmud. he appeals to this story, influenced by the earlier interpretations of blanchot (1980, pp. 214–215). aggada begins with rabbi joshua ben levi meeting the prophet elijah and asking him when the messiah will come. the prophet replies that the rabbi can ask this question directly of the messiah, for he is sitting at the gates of rome dressed in rags. when the rabbi reaches rome and indeed meets the messiah in the company of the poor at the gates of rome, he asks him, “when will you come?” and the messiah answers, “now.” derrida notes a discrepancy, an inadequacy between the generalized and specific “now” in this story. in the same way that the messiah is not waiting and is coming right now, we should anticipate the coming of the future right at this moment in time. the messiah is not some future present; his coming is here and it is inevitable. the parable points to the messianic structure as responsibility, for the coming of the event. at the same time, derrida notes the “ambiguity” of the messianic structure: we can expect the arrival of the other, hoping in reality that he will not come, that the arrival of the messiah will remain in permanent delay. derrida points out that “we wait for something we would not like to wait for” (derrida, 1997, p. 24), or as john d. caputo explains, “the messiah must always be to come. the messiah is a very special promise, namely, a promise that would be broken were it kept, whose possibility is sustained by its impossibility” (caputo, 1997, p. 162). although derrida calls for a careful delineation of the notions of messianism and messianicity, he still leaves the question of the connection between them open. religious and political messianisms always annunciate the arrival of a clearly defined changing societies & personalities, 2020, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 158–171 165 messiah at a certain time and place. when the messiah actually comes, as soon as the future really becomes a definite presence, the messianic will immediately cease to exist, because its essence lies in the expectation of what is yet to come. the proclamation of the arrival of the messiah will pave the way for the other whose messianic experience is different from your messianism. derrida’s messiah is the one we hope to come to, even though we know he will never come. this is an impossible opportunity of the future. the impossible goes beyond the possible, not as its direct opposite, but as the desire to overcome what is obviously predictable. the coming of the messiah, his full presence, would deny any messianic expectation. by pointing to a particular messiah, confessional messianism defines the future and limits it to the scope of specific messianic determination. justice and expectations become related to counting, program, conformity, and predictable outcomes. idea of messianicity and religious messianisms derrida emphasizes that although his idea of messianicity is not related to what is considered to be the essence of religious messianisms, that is, the historical revelation and figure of the messiah, it does not mean that they should be dismissed as absurd eschatological fabrications. he refuses to identify messianicity with messianism, since the latter is always associated with a particular religion, limited by a specific cultural environment and a dogmatic system of beliefs. derrida’s secularized messianicity retains its separation from specific socio-cultural and religious contexts, allowing it to be a truly universal category. at the same time, as the most general structure of experience, messianicity does not exclude religious manifestations of messianism. at a roundtable at villanova university (1997), derrida explained his position in more detail. when i insisted in specters of marx on messianicity, which i distinguished from messianism, i wanted to show that the messianic structure is a universal structure. as soon as you address the other, as soon as you are open to the future, as soon as you have a temporal experience of waiting for the future, of waiting for someone to come: that is the opening of experience. someone is to come, is now to come. justice and peace will have to do with this coming of the other, with the promise. each time i open my mouth, i am promising something. when i speak to you, i am telling you that i promise to tell you something, to tell you the truth. even if i lie, the condition of my lie is that i promise to tell you the truth. so the promise is not just one speech act among others; every speech act is fundamentally a promise. this universal structure of the promise, of the expectation for the future, for the coming, and the fact that this expectation of the coming has to do with justice – that is what i call the messianic structure. this messianic structure is not limited to what one calls messianisms, that is, jewish, christian, or islamic messianism, to these determinate figures and forms of the messiah. as soon as you reduce the messianic structure to messianism, then you are reducing the universality and this has important political consequences. https://changing-sp.com/ 166 roman soloviy then you are accrediting one tradition among others and a notion of an elected people, of a given literal language, a given fundamentalism. that is why i think that the difference, however subtle it may appear, between the messianic and messianism is very important (derrida, 1997, p. 23). having stressed the necessity to maintain a distinction between the concepts of messianism and messianicity, derrida still hesitates about the true nature of their relationship, considering two possible hypotheses in faith and knowledge. according to the first one, messianicity is the most basic structure of experience, which has particular representations in historical messianisms. in this case, messianicity should be viewed on the same basis as the general structure of the offenbarkeit (revealability) developed by heidegger in the question of being (heidegger, 1957/1958), in order to clarify specific ways of being’s revealing itself and to evaluate their authenticity. religions are then only concrete examples of the universal structure of messianicity, and its study later involves first of all research into the fundamental ontological conditions of the possibility of religion. at the same time, derrida suggests another hypothesis, according to which the offenbarung (revelation) of abrahamic religious traditions were absolute, unique events, through which universal possibilities of messianicity have shown themselves. derrida does not give a definitive answer as to which of these hypotheses is more likely; he would like to find an explanation that combines both. the philosopher points out that, although his notion of messianiсity is significantly different from that of judaism, christianity, or islam, it still depends on these singular events of revelation. interpretations of derrida’s messianicity derrida’s concept of messianiсity has a wide range of interpretations. while some researchers have assessed it as clear confirmation of the religious intentions of the late derrida’s thought, others have insisted on the atheistic nature of the concept, as all deconstruction. the atheistic reading of derrida was supported by the swedish philosopher martin hägglund. in his view, widespread theological interpretations of derrida’s thought are inconsistent. the trajectory of deconstruction fits in completely with the logic of radical atheism, which not only denies the existence of god and immortality, as does traditional atheism, but also denies the very possibility of a person’s desire for god and immortality. in the seeming pursuit of infinite being and fullness, hägglund sees a desire to survive, to increase life expectancy that is determined by an openness to the unpredictable future that can either enrich or destroy us. “i argue that the so-called desire for immortality dissimulates a desire for survival that precedes it and contradicts it from within” (hägglund, 2008, p. 1). hägglund also sees radical atheism in derrida’s concept of messianicity. although this concept, more than any other, led to the suspicion that the philosopher secretly cherished the religious hope for salvation, according to hägglund, such readings of derrida’s thought are based on confusion of the notions of messianicity and concrete religious forms of “messianism”. in derrida’s vocabulary, messianicity changing societies & personalities, 2020, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 158–171 167 is just another name for the undecidable future, which creates a chance for the desirable, but at the same time threatens it from within. at the same time, traditional messianism is a religious or political belief in the future that will put an end to time, replacing it with an eternal tranquility that cannot be destroyed. the only common feature of messianicity and religious messianism is the formal structure of the promise of the coming, by which derrida reads messianism against itself. thus, hägglund concludes that derrida is inverting the logic of religious eschatology. derrida emphasizes that the coming of the other does not contribute to the end of time, but always exceeds any definite end of life or history. his version of eschatology proclaims not the end of time, but only absolute openness to the uncertainty and unpredictability of the future. in addition, messianic hospitality for the future is not connected to the promise of peace. the arrivant may not be the bearer of peace, the messiah, but as derrida recognizes, the wrongdoer, the bearer of hatred, evil, and violence. john d. caputo, an american philosopher and one of the influential proponents of the use of deconstruction in religious thinking, disagrees with such a reading of derrida1. in his interpretation, the concept of messianicity refers to the core of derrida’s special religion, “of the call for a justice, a democracy, a just one to come, a call for peace among the concrete messianisms” (caputo, 1997, p. xxviii). the difference between messianicity and messianism is interpreted as the difference between peace and war. the messianism of concrete, historical religions is always a source of exclusivism and violence, while the true meaning of messianicty lies in the promise of divine peace and the kingdom of god accessible to all. treating a specific religious tradition as the possessor of higher knowledge, granted only to god’s chosen people, is a formula for endless war. for instance, derrida viewed the conflict in the middle east as a merciless war of dangerous “messianic eschatologies”, driven by the desire to prove the truth of a particular version of messianism. therefore, as opposed to confessional messianism, caputo draws attention to the proclamations of the biblical prophets, who reminded their readers that god is seeking not ritual sacrifices, but justice for all oppressed people. in this approach, deconstruction is seen as the salvation of religion, because it cleanses it of its worst instincts. responding to hägglund’s reading of derrida in an atheistic perspective, caputo argues that the swedish philosopher misunderstood the deconstructionist’s interest in religion as an effort to protect common religious beliefs and denominational tenets. relying on derrida’s distinction between faith and religion, caputo defines the purpose of deconstructing religion in its reimagining as “religion without religion”, that is, more primordial faith (foi), quasi-transcendent for both theism and atheism, which are just different forms of dogmatic beliefs (croyances). this faith does not 1 for instance, see derrida, j., & caputo, j. d. (1997). deconstruction in a nutshell: a conversation with jacques derrida. new york, ny: fordham university press; caputo, j. d. (1997). the prayers and tears of jacques derrida: religion without religion. bloomington and indianapolis, in: indiana university press; caputo, j. d., dooley, m., & scanlon, m. j. (eds.). (2001). questioning god. bloomington and indianapolis, in: indiana university press); caputo, j. d., & scanlon, m. j. (eds.). (2005). augustine and postmodernism: confessions and circumfession. bloomington and indianapolis, in: indiana university press. https://changing-sp.com/ 168 roman soloviy exist in a state of unbroken peace; it is not protected from doubts, error, evil, violence, or death. rising from the abyss of unbelief, this “unprotected religion” is more open to uncertainty and structural risk. as caputo points out that in his analysis, hägglund relies on a truncated, caricatured version of deconstruction when he claims that it is the decisive refutation of religion and that “deconstruction proceeds on a level of neutral, value-free descriptive analysis of the logic of time” (caputo, 2015, p. 155). in fact, however, deconstruction is not about destroying religion by means of radical atheism; rather, it is a way of rereading and rethinking religion. caputo’s views on deconstruction are largely shared by another influential continental philosopher of religion, richard kearney. analyzing derrida’s statement that the name of god, like any other name, should be considered in the context of radical atheism, kearney concludes that derrida’s purpose is not to abandon the phenomenon of god as such, but to sustain a general openness to difference without name, that is, without the identity of the historical givenness of the deity of historical religions (kearney, 1999, p. 122). this general disposition to the arrival of the other, which is understood as the unpredictable occurrence of an event, is a messianicity that contradicts any form of the messianism of positive revelation. therefore, according to kearney, atheism for derrida is not a total rejection of the idea of god, but rather a disagreement with the statement that a definite god is a condition for the possibility of god, who still has to come, to be named. while agreeing with derrida’s call for unconditional openness to the arrival of the other, kearney nevertheless critically appreciates the assertion that the arrivant may be anyone or anything. he hopes that deconstruction waits for the coming of justice and associates this coming with the notion of a transcendent god who comes to save and liberate. however, for kearney, the possibility of combining the coming of this good god with the radical unpredictability of the future remains extremely problematic. caputo ignores this problem, agreeing with derrida that justice is concerned with the other, whose arrival cannot be predicted, while at the same time emphasizing that the other is always a victim and not a wrongdoer. given that, as derrida points out, anyone who comes can change his or her name and become anyone at any time, in “desire of god” (1999) kearney asks how we can distinguish between “between true and false prophets, between bringers of good and bringers of evil, between holy spirits and unholy ones … between a living god and a dead one, between elijah and his ‘phantom’, between messiahs and monsters” (kearney, 1999, p. 127). such a distinction is possible only if there are clear criteria. without giving them, derrida underestimates “the need for some kind of critical discernment based on informed judgment, hermeneutic memory, narrative imagination, and rational discrimination” (kearney, 1999, p. 139). however, it should be noted that derrida’s refusal to articulate a specific set of criteria does not mean that he underestimates the importance of identification and differentiation. on the contrary, derrida argues that such acts are necessary because of the unpredictability of the future. we have to identify and make decisions each time because we are not able to predict in advance how the other will act. establishing clear changing societies & personalities, 2020, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 158–171 169 preliminary criteria for the arrival of the other, derrida points out, would be an act of discrimination and a restriction of unconditional universal hospitality – openness to the newcomer, whoever he may be. total security is possible only if the possibility of something unexpected is closed. the rejection of the threat of trauma associated with the arrival of an unpredictable other is possible only at the expense of the rejection of the opportunity for transformation. another line of criticism of the messianic tradition of lévinas and derrida relies on a renewed reading of the texts of the apostle paul. in particular, we would like to mention such philosophers as alain badiou, slavoj žižek, and giorgio agamben. all of them, to one degree or another, accept jacob taubes’ confidence in the determining role of messianism in the theology of the apostle paul. they also share the conviction that messianism was an important structural factor in the history of western thought, finding expression not only in the judeo-christian religious heritage but also in secular phenomena. the findings of these philosophers signal a break with the phenomenological tradition of interpreting messianism. in particular, badiou deploys criticism of lévinas’ ethic of alterity, which, in his belief, either falls into quasitheological piety that emphasizes the absolute otherness of god or reduces itself to a liberal assertion of difference and individuality. badiou’s criticism of messianic ethics is based on a new reading of pauline messianism. the apostle’s faithfulness to the event of christ’s resurrection serves as foundation for a new universal truth that eliminates the conflict between jewish law and the greek logos. if badiou contrasts lévinas’ messianic otherness with paul’s messianic universality, žižek calls into question derrida’s messianic future, relying on the urgency of the messianic moment of the apostle’s theology, his emphasis on the messiah’s coming. the apostle’s belief that the messiah is here, according to žižek, resists the derridian existence in a state of uncertainty and constant delay, calling for life in the new space already opened by the event of christ (žižek, 2003, pp. 136–137). conclusion summarizing the analysis of derrida’s concept of messiancity, it should be noted that despite the criticism it has faced, the concept of “messianicity without messianism” has already became an influential concept in contemporary philosophy of religion. in the context of current civilizational challenges, it calls for openness to an absolute, unpredictable future and a respect for the other. in our view, derrida’s philosophy of religion and his call for the deconstruction of traditional messianism should not be characterized as atheistic. religious and political messianisms need constant deconstruction because, unlike abstract messianicity, they are incapable to respect the irreducibility of the other. however, their deconstruction is by no means an attempt to return to some sort of enlightenment version of “religion within reason alone,” for, as derrida points out, religion and science share a common source—the primordial faith that forms the basis for any social connection 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(2008). radical atheism: derrida and the time of life. stanford, ca: stanford university press. heidegger, m. (1958). the question of being (w. kluback & j. t. wilde, trans.). new york, ny: twayne publishers. (originally published in german 1957) kearney r. (1999). desire of god. in j. d. caputo and m. j. scanlon (eds.), god, the gift, and postmodernism (pp. 112–145). bloomington and indianapolis, in: indiana university press. lévinas, e. (2011). totality and infinity: an essay on exteriority (a. lingis, trans.). dordrecht: springer netherlands. (originally published in french 1961) levine, m. g. (2014). a weak messianic power: figures of a time to come in benjamin, derrida, and celan. new york, ny: fordham university press. doi: 10.2307/j.ctt13x0301 miller, j. h. (1996). derrida’s others. in j. brannigan, r. robbins, & j. wolfreys (eds.), applying: to derrida (pp. 153–170). london: palgrave macmillan. doi: 10.1007/978-1-349-25077-6_10 rosenzweig, f. (2005). the star of redemption (b. e. galli, trans.). madison, wi: university of wisconsin press. (originally published in german 1921) žižek, s. (2003). the puppet and the dwarf: the perverse core of christianity. cambridge, ma: mit press. doi: 10.7551/mitpress/5706.001.0001 https://changing-sp.com/ http://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x0301 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25077-6_10 http://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/5706.001.0001 microsoft word kameniar formatted080208.doc to cite this article please include all of the following details: kameniar, barbara (2007). dilemmas in providing hospitality to others in the classroom: stories about one christian religious education teacher. transnational curriculum inquiry 4 (3) http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci <access date> dilemmas in providing hospitality to others in the classroom: stories about one christian religious education teacher barbara kameniar the university of melbourne, australia introduction: hospitality and the teacher ‘teacher’, as a subject position, is highly complex. the teacher, like the zombie, the hymen, the pharmakon or différance is an undecidable who/that marks the limits of order. the teacher is like the maitre d’ who has oversight over a public/private space which is never her/his own. the maitre d’ simultaneously exerts conditional and discretionary control over that space but especially over the waiters who must perform the demands placed upon them without autonomy or with an autonomy that is circumscribed. acting as a host they must welcome whomever arrives and extend hospitality on behalf of another (a host, the host), while remaining vigilant in upholding the rules and norms of that host. the teacher, like the maitre d’, must also manage contradictory demands. the teacher must negotiate a pathway between the responsibility they have to those who enter the classroom, those before them (the students, the others about whom they teach) and those for whom they are agents (a multitude of others with often conflicting demands). like the maitre d’ teachers embody ‘undecidability’. they are an in-between subjectivity, marked by ambivalence. in terms of the argument in this paper, teachers who teach about another culture or religion are both ‘hosts’ to a ‘foreign’ other and ‘agents of the host/s’1. by ‘agents of the host/s’ i mean they represent hegemonic national culture, hegemonic national religious culture and the religious culture of the school, which, in the context of this paper are white australia, white christianity and, in terms of the religious tradition of the school, a white christian variant. in this paper i use ‘white’ to refer to a location of institutional privilege, power, and domination that goes beyond the physicality of ‘race’ as it is often understood (differences in skin pigmentation, eye colour etc.) to include the acquisition of ‘cultural capital’ and a ‘state of psychological entitlement’ (brodkin 1999, 8). i draw on the work of whiteness scholars (see for example frankenburg 1993; kincheloe & steinberg 2000; ware and back 2002) who see ‘white’ and whiteness as relational concepts involving diverse sets of practices that are established and reinforced through what brodkin calls an ‘invidious contrast with an invented blackness’ (1999, 8-9). that is, ‘white’ is a racialised and privileged identity produced through contrast with what it is not. when discussing christianity in this paper i am referring most particularly to anglo and european christianity because it is these forms that represent the religion of australian whiteness. coptic, asian and eastern forms of christianity exist as other to anglo-celtic and western european forms within the australian context and will therefore not be included in the conceptualisations of ‘australian’ identity, ‘australian christian’ identity and ‘white christian’ identity engaged in this paper. it is also vital to note that there is no singular ‘anglo’ or ‘western european’ or ‘australian’ or ‘white’ form of christianity. each of these categories is marked by difference and manifests in multiple 1 teachers are also always ‘hosts’ to the students in the class. however, this paper does not address this element. see ibrahim (2005) for a discussion of teacher as a ‘host’ of students. http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci kameniar: dilemmas in providing hospitality to others in the classroom transnational curriculum inquiry 4 (3) 2007 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 2 forms. however, insofar as religion is linked to culture, and christianity (in a multiplicity of forms) is the religious tradition of white, hegemonic culture(s) within the australian context, christianity’s relationship to white australian national identity (both consciously and unconsciously) is assumed. it is in a context of hegemonic white christianity that teachers are summoned forth as ‘host’ and ‘agent of the host/s’. as ‘host’, teachers are called not only to fulfil their obligations to laws of hospitality that have been determined through cultural histories and practices but also to the (im)possibility2 of offering unconditional hospitality and therefore responding to a ‘law without law’ (derrida 2000). in this position, teachers risk also becoming ‘hostages’ to the multitude of others they host, just as they risk becoming hostages to the host/s for which they are agents. foreigners and hosts in of hospitality derrida (2000) discusses relationships that may be possible between a ‘host’ and a guest, a ‘host’ and a foreigner, a self and (an)other. these relationships are determined by an understanding of ‘host’ as one who has certain rights as well as certain obligations. the ‘host’ is one who is able to imagine themselves as centred, as present, as having originary presence, as having rights of ownership, rights to speak first and to be heard, as the one who belongs in this place, here, now. the guest or the foreigner is one who is imagined as having originary absence, as one who comes to this place from there, from over there, beyond, one who is unknown, who lacks rights of ownership to this place, who must wait to be asked to speak and who must hope to be heard and to be given a ‘fair hearing’. what establishes one as host and the other as guest or foreigner, however, is dependent upon the relationship that must exist between them. for there can be no host without a guest, or without a foreigner to whom hospitality can/must be shown. and there can be no guest or foreigner without one who has the power to invite or exclude, as well as one who has the power to refuse to enter into a relationship on singular or unilateral terms. this relationship that exists between host and guest/host and foreigner is subject to certain ‘laws of hospitality’ (derrida 2000) that emerge from and are embedded in culture. however, this relationship is also subject to ‘the law’ (derrida 2000) of hospitality. that is, the law as the categorical imperative of unlimited hospitality, that which is above all laws and precedes and gives meaning to the laws. for as derrida tells us, the law of unlimited hospitality (that is, the imperative to give the new arrival all of one’s home and oneself, to give her or him one’s own, our own, without asking a name, or compensation, or the fulfilment of even the smallest condition, to be radically open to what is unforeseeable), exists with and relies upon (while simultaneously being in conflict with and contradictory to the laws [in the plural]), those rights and duties that are always conditioned and conditional. derrida (2000) argues that what distinguishes the foreigner (or she/he who is ‘other’) from the barbarian (she/he who is an ‘absolute other’ or wholly ‘other’) is whether they come with a name or not. and not just any name, but a ‘proper name’, because a ‘proper name is never purely individual’ (derrida 2000, 23), rather it is relational and carries with it both a past and the possibility of a future. for derrida ‘the name’ or the ‘proper name’ provides familiarity and elicits obligation, elicits responsibility. he notes: … this right to hospitality offered to a foreigner ‘as a family’, represented and protected by his or her family name, is at once what makes hospitality possible, or the hospitable relationship to the foreigner possible, but by the same token what limits and prohibits it. because hospitality, in this situation, is not offered to an anonymous new arrival and 2 drawing on derrida’s deconstructive work, i understand ‘that the impossible does not refer to what is not possible but to that which cannot be foreseen as a possibility’ (miedema & biesta 2004, 24-25). http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci kameniar: dilemmas in providing hospitality to others in the classroom transnational curriculum inquiry 4 (3) 2007 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 3 someone who has neither name, nor patronym, nor family, nor social status, and who is therefore treated not as a foreigner but as another barbarian. (derrida 2000, 23-25) christian variants may sometimes appear to be irreducibly different but the laws of hospitality, so embedded in western modes of thinking (derrida 2000, 155), require, indeed oblige, hospitality be shown to those who come with the proper name ‘christian’ regardless of their status as ‘foreigner’ or ‘other’. the hospitality that is shown by one christian to another is not absolute hospitality but conditional hospitality in the ordinary sense. that is, hospitality as a duty or as reciprocity – hospitality as a pact. one can expect to some extent that the expression of hospitality, the act of being hospitable, will be returned. however, the religious tradition that comes with a name that is unknown or unfamiliar, that has no history of automatic and mutual obligation, of reciprocity, is wholly other and therefore immediately recognisable as dangerous. the kind of hospitality to be shown to the ‘absolute, unknown, anonymous other’ (derrida 2000) is the kind of hospitality that breaks with conventional western laws of hospitality and has the potential to destabilise the sovereignty of the ‘host’, to make of them a hostage. derrida argues that conditional hospitality, or hospitality in the ordinary sense, is a hospitality of ‘invitation’ where the ‘host’ exerts the power to invite. however, unconditional hospitality is a hospitality of ‘visitation’ (derrida 2003, 129). it is an openness to a non-identifiable and unforeseeable other and as such ‘it exposes the host to the maximum risk, as it does not allow for any systematic defense or immunity against the other’ (borradori 2003, 162-163). other religious traditions, or the religious traditions of others, are always invited into the classroom on terms that are conditional. however, these traditions, like the tradition of the school, always already come with a ‘remainder’, with an excess, to that which is called upon to enter. it is this ‘remainder’, unknown, unknowable and uninvited, that may/will ‘visit’ unannounced and unexpectedly. it is this remainder that is always greater, and perceived as less difficult to control and contain when it ‘visits’ or comes from an other who does not have a name familiar to the ‘host’. derrida notes, ‘[t]he visit might actually be very dangerous, and we must not ignore this fact, but what would… hospitality [be] without risk’ (derrida 2003, 129). this conundrum, produced through the invitation/visitation of a cultural and religious other in the classroom, positions teachers in an ethico-political space that challenges them to negotiate between ‘two contradictory and equally justified imperatives’ (derrida 2001, xii) – that of providing hospitality to the other tradition about which they teach and that of honouring the tradition for which they are agents and burdens them with the requirement that they may have to break with established laws of hospitality, established rules of relationship, established obligations. as such, the teaching of a culture or religious tradition other than the dominant tradition of the school might be seen as ‘antinomic’ (derrida 2000) and therefore dangerous. dangerous visitations in a religious education classroom religious traditions other than the dominant tradition of the school are always located as other to the ‘host’ tradition. this otherness is not differentiated laterally but hierarchically, and the hierarchy is structured through the others’ proximity to the ‘family’ of the ‘host’. in the christian religious education classroom this proximity is never static but determined through shifting cultural, political and economic histories and practices. this results in differential treatment of different religions in different places and at different times. the examples drawn on in this discussion come from a multi-sited microethnographic study that examined how the subjects of religious education are racialised http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci kameniar: dilemmas in providing hospitality to others in the classroom transnational curriculum inquiry 4 (3) 2007 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 4 through discursive classroom practices3. the study was conducted almost ten years ago. it was a time before ‘the event’ in new york in 20014. it was a time when ‘asian’ immigration was considered the greatest ‘threat’ to white australia and people of south east asian descent, along with indigenous australians, were the dominant racial, cultural and religious other in australian and, most particularly south australian social relations (see hanson 1996; hage 1998; stratton 1998). it was largely in response to the perceived othering of australians of south east asian descent and those who lived in south east asia that i commenced this study. since that time global relations have moved restlessly in many different directions. at the time of writing this paper there has been a shift in the perception of who is the most feared racial, cultural and religious other in australia. today it is muslims, in what has been constructed as the global threat of militant middle eastern islam, who have come to occupy the unenviable position. the reasons for this are complex and a full discussion of them is beyond the scope of this paper. however, it needs to be noted that although the group that is currently occupying the position of the dominant other has shifted since the fieldwork, australia remains a white nation in which the racialisation of the subjects of religious education and the invisibility of whiteness in religious education, remains. the issue of how to respond to the racial/religious/cultural other in the religious education classroom also remains, as does the moral imperative to ‘host’ those who come as foreigners to our classrooms and our shores. in the next section of this paper i illustrate some of the ways one of the teachers who taught a unit of work on buddhism in adelaide, south australia, managed the competing obligations that being both ‘host’ and ‘agent of the host/s’ demanded. the particular components of the teacher’s representations of herself, christianity and buddhism i focus on here are drawn from observations within the classroom as well as responses to interview questions. the teacher’s representation of herself, christianity and buddhism in these different contexts illustrate attitudes and beliefs about religious, cultural and racial identities that go ‘well beyond that of the individual and her beliefs or attitudes’ (frankenburg 1993, 44) to the discourses available for teachers to ‘take-up’ in their teaching. that is, this teacher’s representations illuminate the discourses that circulate within religious education and the broader community that both constrain and make possible the ways in which the dominant religious tradition in the school and other religious traditions can or might be represented, can or might be shown hospitality. i close by considering how this teacher’s representational practices suggest that regardless of what discursive choices she makes, regardless of her location to the ‘host/s’ and her understanding of what it means to be ‘host’ to another tradition, and in spite of many of her representations remaining loyal to the logic of white european christianity, she cannot escape the ‘difficulty in choosing’ that being simultaneously positioned as both ‘host’ and ‘agent of the host/s’ demands. indeed these two positions/locations must be ‘restlessly negotiated’ (derrida 2001, xii). 3 research for the study took place during 1998. it involved ethnographic fieldwork in four different religious education classes. each class was at a different school. the amount of observational time spent in classrooms varied as follows: 14 weeks, 10 weeks, 10 weeks and 4 weeks. the time spent at each site was dependent on the length of time each teacher chose to teach a unit of work on buddhism. the teacher referred to in this study undertook a 10 week unit of work. 4 for derrida’s discussion of the difficulty in naming what happened in new york city on september 11, 2001, see his interview with giovanna borradori in philosophy in a time of terror. http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci kameniar: dilemmas in providing hospitality to others in the classroom transnational curriculum inquiry 4 (3) 2007 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 5 restless negotiations ‘caroline’ was one of four teachers who took part in the study. she taught in a co-educational year 12 class in a religiously affiliated school. the school was located in an area with a high migrant population where the average weekly income of individuals and households was amongst the lowest in the state. however, there were also a small number of households in the area with very high incomes. unemployment rates in the local area at the time of the research were well above the state and national average. according to the australian bureau of statistics 1996 census data, approximately forty percent of the people in the local area were born outside of australia. about a quarter of all people living in the area came from south east asia, east asia and south asia with the majority coming from south east asia. this distribution was also evident in the school. almost half of the households in the area spoke a language other than english and a large number of students in the school spoke english as a second, and sometimes third, language. a number of the students i interviewed spoke english as a second language. like many other children of non-english speaking migrant backgrounds, this class was distinctive not only because of a ‘catalogue of cultural differences’ but because of the class position they came ‘to occupy in australian capitalism’ (rizvi 1991, 188). religion education was a compulsory part of the curriculum across the school and across all year levels. the students in the study were taking part in a public curriculum as part of their sace5. the curriculum statement required students to learn about two different religious traditions and the school had elected to undertake a study of buddhism as one of those traditions because of ‘cultural relevance’ of the tradition to people in the area. a small number of students in the school were buddhist. i have chosen to represent caroline’s negotiations because it seemed to me that she most clearly represented a teacher for whom the imperative to undertake negotiations between conflicting obligations was most immediately apparent. she also represented a teacher who remained committed to an openness to what was unforeseeable in her negotiations. while caroline is but one teacher, the discussion of her negotiations highlights some of the complexities of what individual teachers bring to the ‘moment’ of teaching about (an)other and the ‘difficulties in choosing’ they face. caroline was a highly experienced teacher who held a position of responsibility in the school in which she taught. she was a convert to the christian variant of the school. her identity as a ‘convert’ was highly significant to her identity as a christian and her identity as a religious education teacher. it also had implications for how she understood her obligations as an agent of the school (one of the hosts for which she was agent) and her obligations as a ‘host’ to others. caroline referred to her conversion during a number of different conversations with me, speaking about it in a way that positioned her as being in a state of ‘between-ness’, neither entirely ‘this’ nor ‘that’, both inside and outside the christian tradition to which she now adheres. when i first started doing a grad. dip. in re you know, i think i’d been quite challenged by ideas that were different, because i’d actually, you know, converted from being [christian variant] to being [a different christian variant] and so i knew i wasn’t [the different christian variant] like other people were in terms of being that since birth… yeah! so like i knew that i didn’t even understand and even though i really valued the history and that was part of the thing that really fascinated me about [the christian variant to which i now belong] was the whole history of it, and the richness of the history, because there’s so much difference in history. 5 south australian certificate of education, a two year program of study. http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci kameniar: dilemmas in providing hospitality to others in the classroom transnational curriculum inquiry 4 (3) 2007 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 6 as a convert, caroline may be understood in terms of what derrida (1991) calls the metis or ‘cultural half-breed’6. according to derrida, the metis as a subject within culture is characterised equally ‘by a hybrid origin and by the myth of a single origin – by difference and by the discourse of a unitary nondifference’ (quoted in spurr 1999, 196). spurr (1999, 196-197) argues that when a cultural subject is cognisant of this ‘difference-withinthemselves’, as caroline was, they are able to negotiate border regions and other spaces, because they have abandoned notions of cultural or religious purity and are no longer threatened from the outside. of course some converts attempt to erase their hybrid origins and seek only to assert a myth of a single origin. for those converts, difference remains outside themselves and, as such, all threats are also seen to come from without. however, in the case of caroline she appeared to operate from the former standpoint. she recognised that her state of ‘between-ness’ existed because of her prior ‘outsider-ness’ and appeared to not only acknowledge her ‘between-ness’ but to assert it as a possible standpoint for students to take up as well. she suggested to the students: ‘let’s get out of our religious background’. as a convert caroline’s position was always slightly unstable and undecidable. indeed, it might be argued that it positioned her to negotiate the (im)possible position of being both ‘host’ and ‘agent of the host/s’ in a creative way. as a convert caroline was herself a ‘foreigner’ to the tradition she spoke for, was agent of. her relationship to the ‘host/s’ was not entirely seamless ‘like other people… in terms of being that since birth’, for she had ‘joined’ and had ‘been joined’ to the religious tradition of the school. by articulating a lack of ‘birthright’ (derrida 2000, 21) caroline expressed the seeming stability and naturalness of a connection between (and a union of) birth, culture, race, gender, sexuality, history, and religion, and called this connection (this union), into question by her own decision to convert. her relationship with non-christian religions reflected a very deep sense of a decentred self and an understanding of her own alterity (ashcroft et al 1997) or hybridity (bhabha 1990). in terms of her teaching, caroline utilised her undecidability to create a space ‘inbetween’, or a ‘third space’ (bhabha 1990) into which the other might be invited or might find a ‘place’. this place was a space for the articulation of a form of hospitality that attempted to negotiate between the law of unconditional hospitality and the laws of conditional hospitality, and between her obligations as ‘host’ and as ‘agent of the host/s’. in part, this was the result of the kinds of investments/requirements made by/of her as an outsider/insider on the inside/outside. that is, as one who was herself simultaneously ‘host’ and ‘guest’, and yet never fully either, she had to continuously negotiate a space for ‘outsiderness’, ‘insider-ness’ and ‘between-ness’ (her own and that of the students in the class) when there was no such necessity for the other teachers who participated in this study to do so. for each of the other teachers were not converts to the christian variant they represented in the classroom and nor were their classrooms as culturally diverse as the one in which caroline taught. more recently awad ibrahim has discussed the ways being ‘an immigrant black body that is assumed to be muslim in a post-9/11 united states’ (2005, 149) has positioned him as ‘host’ and ‘foreigner’, as ‘foreigner host’ in the classroom context. for ibrahim the classroom is always a place that opens up the possibility of hospitality. what becomes apparent from both caroline’s and ibrahim’s understanding of themselves as other to the hosts for whom they are agents is the ways in which that otherness encourages engagement with the modulations of the dominant culture’s and the student’s own otherness (britzman 1997, 37). caroline did not see her location as a convert as a disadvantage. rather, she expressed her conversion as advantageous to her practice as a religious education teacher. caroline said she felt having a different religious origin had taught her to value difference. 6 derrida describes himself as a metis. see spurr (1999) for a brief discussion of this. http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci kameniar: dilemmas in providing hospitality to others in the classroom transnational curriculum inquiry 4 (3) 2007 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 7 i reckon a lot of it came out of being a ... being challenged to value difference. not just accept it, but actually value it. and there’s a big difference. caroline distinguished between seeing and accepting difference and ‘actually valu[ing] it’. she saw a distinction between ‘acceptance’ and ‘value’ with one’s capacity to ‘value’ difference (that is, to give it positive worth), a more moral and just response. it is this valuing of difference that signals caroline’s striving towards an unconditional hospitality. it signals the depth of her commitment to negotiation, learning, exchange and the humility of an unconditional welcome. caroline’s notion of difference was highly complex. her relationship with non-christian religions and her high regard for them appeared to be located somewhere between a fascination with the exotic or entirely other, which was primarily evident in the language she used to describe her interest in others and other-ness, and a resistance to objectification which was most evident in the ways in which she negotiated representational issues and her relationships with students. the form of hospitality shown to a reified, exotic other can only ever be a circumscribed and formulaic hospitality that is little more than a performance of culturally determined laws. indeed, there is no obligation to provide any form of hospitality beyond that which is required by a self-imposed form of social politeness. however, when one resists objectification of the other, one opens oneself to unconditional hospitality. caroline would often query the language students used in their responses to her questions as a means of challenging them to think carefully about the ways in which they engaged with the other: caroline: what does this teach you about the value of meditation in buddhism? student: he escapes! caroline: that’s an interesting word. what is meant by it in buddhist terms? in this way she takes up her position as an agent of the tradition she is hosting and invites the student to enter into a relationship with buddhism that moves beyond learning about ‘the other’ to an openness to understanding the other on their terms. caroline described her approach to teaching religion in general and buddhism in particular as being primarily concerned with difference and diversity: the wonder of it all is that... the diversity thing, so... i try... i operate out of ‘isn’t this interesting ‘cause it’s different?’ and so you can learn something because it’s different, you know. you get something there about life or whatever because it’s different... so... um... yeah. so i think i took to heart this... that thing was ‘well let’s start valuing each other by being different’. for this school, an excursion to a buddhist ‘temple’7 came late in the program. caroline felt students needed a considerable amount of information about buddhism before they participated in an excursion. part of the information provided to students prior to the visit had included work on mandalas. caroline had shown the students a film about a group of tibetan monks who spent a lengthy period of time constructing a mandala out of coloured sands. once the mandala had been constructed, the monks destroyed it. the act of destruction was a 7 quotation marks have been placed around ‘temple’ to signal the problematic nature of this term. the term implies a building used for the worship of a deity, or a building in which a deity resides, and is therefore inappropriate in the buddhist context. these buildings are best described as centres of religious ritual and learning. however, as ‘temple’ remains the dominant english language term used by schools and buddhist communities in australia to name these centres i have used the term within the paper. http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci kameniar: dilemmas in providing hospitality to others in the classroom transnational curriculum inquiry 4 (3) 2007 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 8 reminder of anicca (impermanence). the students had found the destruction of the mandala to be disturbing and had become quite fascinated by the production and use of mandalas as well as the notion of anicca. this fascination had spilled over into the excursion where the students had decided to ask the chinese buddhist person who spoke to them at the temple (‘susan’) about the construction and use of mandalas. during lessons, no distinction had been made between the beliefs and practices of the tibetan buddhists in the film and the beliefs and practices of chinese buddhists in adelaide. instead, chinese buddhists, like tibetan buddhists and vietnamese buddhists, were all conflated under the category mahayana8. caroline said that at first she (like the students) had expected susan to know all about mandalas and had been quite surprised when susan didn’t appear to know what she was being asked: … when we got over to the temple the kids couldn’t… the… the… the lady couldn’t… couldn’t answer the questions… she… knew nothing, and they were so stunned when she knew nothing about a mandala… we… so we said it three or four different ways, with different inflections and pronunciations, and she still didn’t… have a clue what we were talking about… the attempts by caroline and the students to say ‘mandala… three or four different ways’ signals something of the confidence and investment students and teachers often have in their own capacity to ‘know’ about others. it suggests that part of the intention of the excursion was to affirm and confirm the students and caroline as knowing subjects. according to said (1995) and others (see for example hooks, 1992, 1994, 1995; razack, 2001; freire, 1985), it is always the subordinate or colonised other who possesses characteristics or practices that can be studied and ‘known’, and it is those at the centre, or dominant groups who ‘know’. through their knowledge of the known object, the knowing subject confirms their authority, power and privilege. when susan was unable to answer the question she not only called into question her own position as ‘native informant’ but also inadvertently destabilised the ‘mainstream positionality’ (hooks 1992, 24) of the students and most particularly caroline, who, as the white religious education teacher, is positioned as an all-knowing subject (in spite of her own ruminations to the contrary). however, while caroline was initially destabilised by the response she engaged in a self-reflexive analysis of what had occurred: i found that quite fascinating and i was trying to… well, i was trying to make a… a connection in my head. i was trying to say ‘well, i suppose it’s like asking…’ you know, it is like asking a pentecostal what mass is like, you know?… ‘what do you do for mass?’ i suppose. this analysis provided an explanation for why susan didn’t ‘know’ about the mandalas while also confirming the status of caroline and the students as knowing subjects. however, caroline’s explanation also signals a recognition of her place as a ‘visitor’, a ‘foreigner’, to the temple, which is, a foreign space within the national space. it signals the ways in which host/guest relations must always involve negotiations and require an ‘openness’ to what is unforeseeable, or as meidema and biesta (2004, 24) have written, the ‘unforeseeable incoming of the other’. it is about understanding that there is always ‘remainder’. teaching about (an)other religious tradition must always involve ‘the expectation of something 8 the categories ‘chinese buddhists’, ‘vietnamese buddhists’ and ‘tibetan buddhists’ are also heterogeneous but tend to function as homogenizing categories themselves. buddhist scholars no longer separate different traditions of buddhism into mahayana and theravada. recent scholarship separates the different traditions into three vinaya traditions: theravada, dharmaguptaka and mulasarvastivada. http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci kameniar: dilemmas in providing hospitality to others in the classroom transnational curriculum inquiry 4 (3) 2007 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 9 unrepresentable, running up against the unforeseeable’. as a teacher who was both ‘host’ and ‘agent of the host/s’ caroline attempted again and again to open students to that which could not be foreseen, could not be known and defied representation, even as she attempted to teach them to ‘see’, to ‘know’ and to represent. she returned to the students with her reflections on their shared misunderstanding and used the incident as a moment to recognise the tendency of those who occupy a position close to the centre to presume they ‘know’. she also used the incident as a space in which to differentiate difference (their own and others) in multiple ways. caroline’s capacity for reflexivity was quite extraordinary. in an attempt to explain what happened in the classroom for herself, the students, and their understanding of others, she resisted closure in her analyses of her own and other religious education teachers’ practice, preferring instead to dialogue with difficulties and successes which arose. however, caroline’s personal engagement with the material she taught and her willingness to be reflexive in a way that entailed sharing her doubts and reflections with the students in the class made her vulnerable. by sharing doubts she broke with strict obligations placed upon many teachers in religious education classrooms to act as ‘agents of the host/s’ who are generally called upon to assert an unproblematic and seamless ‘vision’ or representation of a coherent, united and unified universe in which white christianity is central9. caroline accepted and performed this vulnerability as a pedagogical and political technique which destabilized the privilege inherent in her own position as a white christian teacher who embodies the right to speak and to name the ‘real’ within the white australian national space. in so doing, she also destabilized the privilege of white christianity. caroline replaced a ‘myth of a single origin’ with a fluid and hybridised representation of christianity that defied attempts by some of the students to construct it as an absolute and definitive identity. caroline also attempted to construct fluid and hybridised representations of buddhism but, as shown above, she found this more difficult. conclusion all the teachers who participated in the original study engaged in representational practices that both enabled and limited the ways in which buddhism could be understood. each of the teachers engaged forms of essentialism at different times. however, teachers like caroline who were cognisant of difference, or what frankenburg (1993) calls ‘race cognisant’ were less likely to do so repeatedly. they were also more likely to see they were faced with representational choices in the classroom and that those choices carried with them the burden of addressing unequal power relations. they were also more likely to be those who entered into negotiations with the conflicting obligation being positioned as ‘host’ and ‘agent of the host/s’ demanded. on the other hand, when teachers engaged in essentialist discourses they were more likely to privilege their obligations as ‘agent of the host/s’ over their obligations as ‘host’, more likely to engage in ‘small acts of cunning’ (foucault 1991, 139) that subordinated buddhism and buddhists to white christianity, and were less likely to see the possibility for choice or the violence embedded in representation. this paper illustrates some of the possibilities available for teachers within religious schools if they come to understand their location as both ‘agents of the host/s’ and as ‘hosts’. these positions/locations must be understood as expressing ‘two contradictory and equally justified imperatives’ (derrida 2001, xii). as ‘agents of the host/s’ teachers are subject to ‘laws of hospitality’ (derrida 2000) that are multiple, complex, culturally determined and 9 something teachers are currently asked to do in their teaching of australian history and global politics. to do otherwise is to risk censure from a white nation as hegemonic host. http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci kameniar: dilemmas in providing hospitality to others in the classroom transnational curriculum inquiry 4 (3) 2007 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 10 made normative through cultural practices. as ‘host’ to the wholly other they are not only subject to ‘laws of hospitality’ but also to the law of hospitality that is, the law which is above the laws and obligates the ‘host’ to provide unconditional hospitality to a new arrival (derrida 2000). these two positions/locations must be ‘restlessly negotiated’ (derrida 2001, xii). when teachers develop an understanding that they are immersed within a network of power relations and that many of their discursive practices are anchored in colonial tropes that circulate throughout white australian society as commonsensical statements of fact that are anything but hospitable, then they might be able to actively engage with those power relations and discursive practices to produce creative ways of representing difference. power relations are both product and producer of discourse and yet teachers seldom see their place within various discourses and, at a structural level, are not provided with the tools to develop an understanding of the ways in which they are located within, produced by and reproduce, hegemonic discourses of difference and unequal power relations. as teachers within religious schools they are also positioned within changing but also persisting colonial discourses that both limit and enable the ways in which they can ‘talk religion’. how a teacher of religions represents their own tradition and that of others can reproduce, disturb or subvert hegemonic and colonial understandings of themselves and others. this paper has been an attempt to think through the (im)possible task of representation in a way that might allow teachers to understand their location in a system that structures them as undecidable, always located inbetween with conflicting obligations that, i would argue, are best served through dialogue and restless negotiations rather than fixed allegiance to dominant worldviews. like the teacher above, all teachers of religious education must negotiate and re-negotiate their relationship to the ‘foreigner’ and the host/s. teachers must resist unreflected practices that lead to the subordination of others. acknowledgments i wish to thank julie mcleod from the university of melbourne and lyn wilkinson and alia imtoual from flinders university for their comments on various drafts of this paper. references ashcroft, b., griffiths, g. & tiffin, h. (eds) 1997. introduction(s). in the post-colonial studies reader. london: routledge. bhabha, h.k. 1990. the third space: interview with homi bhabha. in j. rutherford (ed.) community, culture, difference. london: lawrence & wishart. borradori, g. 2003. philosophy in a time of terror: dialogues with jurgen habermas and jacques derrida. chicago: the university of chicago press. britzman, d. 1997. difference in a minor key: some modulations of history, memory, and community’. in michelle fine, lois weis, linda c. powell, & l. mun wong (eds.) off white: readings on race, power, and society. new york: routledge. brodkin, k. 1999. studying whiteness: what’s the point and where do we go from here? in belinda mckay (ed.) unmasking whiteness: race relations and reconciliation. nathan, queensland: griffith university, pp. 7-27. derrida, j. 2003. autoimmunity: real and symbolic suicides. a dialogue with jacques derrida. in philosophy in a time of terror: dialogues with jurgen habermas and jacques derrida. chicago: the university of chicago press. derrida, j. 2001. on cosmopolitanism and forgiveness (mark dooley & michael hughes, trans.). london: routledge. http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci kameniar: dilemmas in providing hospitality to others in the classroom transnational curriculum inquiry 4 (3) 2007 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 11 derrida, j. 2000. of hospitality: anne dufourmantelle invites jacques derrida to respond (rachel bowlby, trans.). stanford, california: stanford university press, pp.3-73. derrida, j. 1991. a derrida reader: between the blinds (peggy kamuf, ed.) new york: harvester wheatsheaf. foucault, m. 1991. discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. london: penguin books. frankenburg, r. 1993. white women, race matters: the social construction of whiteness. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. freire, p. 1985. pedagogy of the oppressed. ringwood, victoria, australia: penguin books. hage, g. 1998. white nation: fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society. annadale: pluto press australia. hanson, p. 1996. pauline hanson mp independent member for oxley speaking at australian reform party (vic.) melbourne. saturday, october 12. hooks, b. 1995. representations of whiteness in the black imagination. in killing rage: ending racism. new york: henry holt and company. hooks, b. 1994. teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom. new york: routledge. hooks, b. 1992. black looks: race and representation. boston, ma: south end press. ibrahim, a. 2005. the question of the question is the foreigner: towards an economy of hospitality. journal of curriculum theorizing, vol. 21, no. 1, pp 149-162. kincheloe, j.l. & steinberg, s.r. 2000. addressing the crisis of whiteness: reconfiguring white identity in a pedagogy of whiteness. in joe l. kincheloe, shirley r. steinberg, nelson m. rodriguez, & ronald e. chennault (eds.) white reign: deploying whiteness in america. new york: saint martin’s griffin, pp. 3-29. miedema, s. & biesta, g.j.j. 2004. jacques derrida’s religion with/out religion and the im/possibility of religious education. religious education vol. 99, no. 1, pp 23-37. razack, s. 2001. looking white people in the eye: gender, race, and culture in courtrooms and classrooms. toronto: university of toronto press. said, e. 1995. orientalism: western conceptions of the orient. london: penguin books. spurr, d. 1999. the rhetoric of empire: colonial discourse in journalism, travel writing, and imperial administration. durham & london: duke university press. stratton, j. 1998. race daze: australia in identity crisis. annadale: pluto press australia. ware, v. & back, l. 2002. out of whiteness: color, politics, and culture. chicago: university of chicago press. author barbara kameniar is a lecturer in curriculum studies in the faulty of education at the university of melbourne, victoria, australia. email: b.kameniar@unimelb.edu.au http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci mailto:kameniar@unimelb.edu.au 13 v o l u m e 8 6 / 2 0 2 1 abstract this paper studies the representation of the muslim body (within the context of the war on terror) as an instance of disembodied subjectivity that haunts through the remnants of its presence, via a close textual analysis of ishtiyaq shukri’s novels the silent minaret (2005) and i see you (2014). the paper examines the corporeal absence within the said texts as a template for understanding the modus operandi of the necropolitical regime and the extremities of state violence it implies. it explores the implications of spectrality within texts saturated by instances of taxonomical categorisations of the body and examines spectrality alongside the implications of absences and omissions in order to reveal how the three interact and inform each other. conceptualising spectrality as the dominant mode of writing for post9/11 novels, the paper engages with derrida’s work on deferred mourning in relation to spectres, offering a new paradigm for an understanding of the post-9/11 muslim experience. by iqra raza | peer review i (don’t) see you: absence, omissions, and spectrality in the wor ks of ishtiyaq shukri peer review *** ishtiyaq shukri, an award-winning novelist from south africa, premises his two novels – the silent minaret and i see you – on the extremities of state violence and their impact on individual human lives. the global geopolitical concerns are fleshed out in both the novels through characters whose lives are directly affected by the said politics. the locus of all the violence is the human body, whose presence and the lack of it throughout the text have varied meanings for various contexts. while the literature responding to the war on terror has thus far largely focused on visibility as a response to the misrepresentations of the muslim experience, shukri offers an alternative possibility in writing protagonists who are invisible, and who haunt the texts only through their absent presence (raza, 2020: 1). while he largely focuses on spectrality as a condition of being, he inscribes it within the body of his works through absences. hence, the texts are haunted by presences that do not correspond to corporeality in their immediate contexts but are alluded to and presented as memories. shukri uses spectrality as a metaphor to allude to various kinds of absences including omissions from the public discourse and absence from within the body politic. nationality is another contested terrain while undertaking such an activity. shukri’s emphasis hence lies heavily on the transnational aspects of identity, presented less as a treatment for the illness that plagues the world today, than as a mode of diagnosis itself. his protagonists are not preoccupied by their ‘ontopology’, which is not the same as saying that they are not aware of it. (derrida in specters of marx uses the term ‘ontopology’ to refer to an ontology reliant on and determined by topos and geographies.) while tracing their belongingness to the nations of their origin and being acutely aware of it, they not only lend solidarities to the oppressed across the globe, they also do not fashion themselves as located individuals. the writer highlights the limitations of such a transnational subject position by describing in detail their physicality which thwarts attempts at dislocation, tracing their origins to specific topos, which also anchors them to various other political or social subjectivities. profiles and photographs provide the writer a window through which to further his point about spectrality. thus, it is no coincidence that issa shamsuddin in the silent minaret is a research scholar while tariq hassan of i see you is a photojournalist. shukri’s most sustained commentary on the spectral, however, is contained in his second novel, i see you, where through the means of a war photograph captured by his protagonist, the fundamental ambivalence, characteristic of a spectre, is made apparent. tying his commentary on spectrality together is the way the themes intersect with the style of the texts. the silent minaret is crafted as what linda hutcheon calls ‘historiographical metafiction’ to make apparent the absences and omissions from discourse and representations, historical and otherwise. i see you achieves the same through photographs, which are themselves spectral in their superimposition of the past and the present. shukri erases the material body from the space of his textual world. in doing so, he hints at a radical subversion made possible by turning to ‘hauntology’ especially within a context wherein taxonomy reigns supreme and the subject is construed as an object of knowledge. while this might be doomed by the possibility of labelling what is outside epistemology as ‘dangerous’, shukri is cautious of the same and meticulously chooses to build the everydayness of the protagonists’ lives (before their disappearance) with minute details, making them relatable and unrelatable at once (raza, 2020: 1). peer review 14t h e t h i n k e r shukri erases the material body from the space of his textual world. in doing so, he hints at a radical subversion made possible by turning to ‘hauntology’ especially within a context wherein taxonomy reigns supreme and the subject is construed as an object of knowledge. 15 v o l u m e 8 6 / 2 0 2 1 peer review in specters of marx, derrida uses the term ‘hauntology’ to describe that which no longer corresponds to the ‘essence of life or death’, an element that ‘is neither living nor dead, present nor absent’ (1993: 63). for shukri, spectrality within the scope of the texts is employed as a stylistic technique, an intervention at the level of style and structure. it allows the writer to operate within and beyond the co-ordinates he chooses to lay his work at. thus, dublin talks to london, talks to pakistan, talks to palestine. it allows anachronism without slipping into absurdity. it links the war on terror to colonial violence at the cape colony, to the palestinian occupation, to apartheidera politics, and so forth. spectrality for shukri is less an ontological concern, and veers more towards social and political implications (raza, 2020: 2). the silent minaret is the story of issa shamsuddin’s absence f rom within the space of the textual world. on a dark night, as he sits in baghdad café, watching images f rom guantanamo and war-torn iraq being projected onto the screen, issa – as a history student conducting research on colonial violence in the cape colony – recognises the historical pattern of neocolonial violence, and quietly ‘slip(s) through the door into a dawn that is beginning to illuminate the devastation wrought by the violent night’ (shukri, 2004: 48). shukri draws the reader’s attention to issa’s absence f rom within the text by italicising his dialogues, which bring his absence to the fore by pointing to the fact that they do not exist within the linguistic registers of the novel’s world. issa’s absence is hinted as being a deliberate act of disappearance consequent of the protagonist’s acute awareness of his corporeality and how it serves the surveillance mechanisms of the necropolitical regime he is located in. in this context, it becomes an act of subversion, of defiance, of resistance. for issa, who is a transnational at heart, for whom differences are mere conversation starters, the reality of his ‘exceptionally good [arab] looks’ thwarts possibilities at subversion while being located and held down by his corporeal f rame. he chooses to turn into a spectre, haunting through the remnants of his presence in the form of clues he leaves behind. these clues highlight, quite literally, the margins, the ones out of f rame, as they present themselves mostly as scribbles at the margins of texts and newspaper reports. shukri’s second novel, i see you, appearing ten years after the first, is a story of its protagonist’s abduction and disappearance. tariq hasan is an award-winning photojournalist, abducted by zar corps, a mercenary organisation. tariq is also an activist who criticises the involvement of nations in each other’s affairs and, more specifically, territorial invasions such as that of palestine. the two novels are set within different contexts with different power dynamics and sociopolitical milieus. however, what unites them is the necropolitical power both the texts assume at the helm of their affairs. these regimes locate the individual body as the site for enacting violence. the necrality of their power lies in turning a body into a corpse while controlling the socio-politics of its being. therefore, the differences between concepts such as resistance and terrorism are eliminated. tariq’s absence, while creating a public hue and cry, does not therefore elicit a response f rom the state and the deep cabals of power. derrida, in writing about spectres, says: ‘…one does not know if precisely it is, if it exists, if it responds to a name and corresponds to an essence. one does not know: not out of ignorance, but because this non-object, this non-present present, this beingthere of an absent or departed one no longer belongs to knowledge. at least no longer to that which one thinks one knows by the name of knowledge. one does not know if it is living or if it is dead.’ (1993: 5) the spectre remains outside epistemology and it is precisely this positioning which allows it to survey without being surveyed. it was once there but no longer is, which equips it with the tools of epistemology, while allowing it to escape the box altogether. this liminality becomes a powerful subject position in that it facilitates a diagnosis. the spectre, knowing the epistemological tools through and through and being able to survey the present while being both in it yet outside it, can spot the lacunae and point out the necrosis. its location outside temporality also allows it to look for solutions f rom across time. in doing so, it poses questions of social, political, and ethical dimensions. the traditional ghost that has associations with the supernatural has often served a similar function in folklores, and later in magical realist texts. commenting on this, maria del pilar blanco and esther peeren write: ‘their [the spectres’] representational and sociocultural functions, meanings, and effects have been at least as manifold as their shapes—or non-shapes, as the case may be—and extend far beyond the rituals, traditions, ghost stories, folktales, and urban legends they populate’ (2013: 9). with the early twentieth century turn of the ‘spectral’, the spectre specifically served functions beyond its supernatural element and began to be incorporated within the scholarly and the theoretical. the ghostly at this moment had already shifted meaning f rom return f rom the dead to radical possibilities: economic, social, political, and ethical. at the peak of the world wars, as death became common, the spectres haunting europe in modernist writing (such as that by yeats and eliot) pointed to a lack of spirituality and a hollowness of being. eliot’s work specifically highlighted the ‘wasteland’ created by the spirits of war whose prayers are uttered only to be aborted by nursery rhymes (eliot, v: 68–98). despite the obvious reference to spirits, the works were never classified as ‘ghostly’, the spirits serving to question the ethics of war instead. as the enlightenment came to be critiqued, so did the principles of reason and the insistence on empirical possibilities. the ghost therefore moved away f rom being a question of rationale to that of ethics. for derrida as well, a ghost is not so much a return of the dead than it is a metaphorical signifier which exists to raise questions pertaining to justice in the radical possibility of its non-being. the spectre, in colluding temporal f rames, allows for a disruption along the said axis, offering alternative versions of history as well, the ones buried and whitewashed. it becomes especially potent in postcolonial texts where history suffers f rom omissions at the hands of the colonials. therefore, the spectre presents a rejection of metanarratives in favour of f ragmented versions of it. del pilar blanco and pereen write: ‘…spectrality is used as a conceptual metaphor to effect revisions of history and/or reimaginations of the future in order to expose and address the way certain subjectivities have been marginalized and disavowed in order to establish and uphold a particular norm, as well as the way such subjectivities can never be completely erased but insist on reappearing to trouble the norm’ (2013: 310). toni morrison’s beloved and michael ondaatje’s anil’s ghost come across as obvious examples of the same. in the former, the revenant is the murdered child of sethe, who comes back to question her death and to seek answers, ones that in turn raise serious moral and ethical questions. in the latter, however, it is not a return f rom the dead that is a spectral figure, but an absence. the skeleton of the ‘sailor’ serves to highlight the extremities of violence inflicted upon civilians by the state in sri lanka. both reappear, one quite literally, the other through the remnants of its presence – a skeleton. in shukri’s works, the functionality of the spectre extends more towards the second kind of reappearance, or a presence anchored on to some remnants of their once-being-there. however, much like in beloved and anil’s ghost, shukri’s spectres critique the politics that have rendered them invisible and point to histories and geographies of violence to bring connections to the fore and hence offer a diagnostic. for issa, the link between the war on terror and the colonial violence is obvious. for tariq, the absolute lack of ‘f reedom’ in post-apartheid south af rica, in palestine, in libya, in yemen, and in afghanistan require the same cure and hence are part of the same necrosis. both protagonists are preoccupied by highlighting connections of violence and building solidarities across the globe. responding to a question on what distresses him the most, shukri in an interview said: ‘when this war… is over, we will stand back and say, “what have we done?” i say “we”, because it’s not syria’s war, or iraq’s war, or the drc’s war. they are our wars, they brutalise all of us’ (shukri, 2014; emphasis added). shukri’s response highlights the need to be empathetic to others’ suffering by identifying with ‘the other’ as a human being, subverting the particularism of ethnocultural subjectivity. however, since such attempts are prevented f rom reaching f ruition by the state’s insistence on corporeal taxonomy, it is the spectre which deftly fulfils this function in his works. hutcheon (2003) contends that ‘postmodern fiction suggests that to re-write or to re-present the past in fiction and in history is, in both cases, to open it up to the present, to prevent it f rom being conclusive and teleological.’ derrida attests to this functionality fulfilled by the spectre in its being a catalyst in this process of opening up. alternative historiographies 16t h e t h i n k e r peer review allow for attempts at ‘conjuration’, a process of ridding the space of the ghost by recalling it. the silent minaret not only does that, but also fashions itself as an alternate historiography with copious footnotes and bibliography. issa, the spectre, leaves behind a thesis as well as scribbling at the margins of books that trace an alternative course of history, one that proposes a subaltern account of the historical events and their significance. issa, through his thesis, is able to pick out the transcultural fusion ‘of both people and ideas, in a historical context that is situated contemporaneously. his historical research delves into the hybridity of south af rican culture, which he uses to comment on the roots of “global cross-pollination”, and how history has been whitewashed to ignore them’ (frenkel, 2011: 131). disrupting the grand narrative of the european historical discourse, issa refashions islam as a religion that played an indispensable role in the anti-colonial uprising at the cape colony. shukri does both to probe the grounds as well as the processes of production of historical knowledge. he blurs the distinctions between history and fiction by imitating the style of a historical narrative for his fictionalised account of history. absences also form a chunk of the narrative. on a visit to the british museum with katinka, issa is quick to note: ‘it (the exhibition) was as much about forgetting as remembering. not a single thought spared for how the exhibits came to be here in the first place’ (shukri, 2004: 143; italics original). the absence of the historical records of violence unleashed by colonial expansion that has lent them the exhibits disturbs issa as much as the exhibits themselves. the absence of the history of dutch settlement at the cape colony, the cosmopolitan cultures of south af rica’s past, and the socio-cultural and intellectual history of islamic expansions, are just some of the other absences that are rendered visible through the alternate historiography. it is the work of mourning that allows for a rewriting of some of these discourses. the ‘traces’ left behind by the protagonists are read as an expression of a mourning of their absences. in these ‘traces’ lie the potentiality for subversion. while the politics of mourning of itself offers subversive potentiality, according to derrida, the ‘traces’ left behind are subversive in their scope, the two protagonists being activists. in an interview, derrida said of death and mourning: ‘in my anticipation of death, in my relation to a death to come, a death that i know will completely annihilate me and leave nothing of me behind, there is just below the surface a testamentary desire, a desire that something survive, get left behind or passed on—an inheritance or something that i myself can lay no claim to, that will not return to me, but that will, perhaps, remain.…’ (quoted in naas, 2015: 113) both of shukri’s protagonists, though not dead but ‘disappeared’, leave their ‘traces’ behind, in the form of words and pictures, which are revived in the wake of their disappearance. though what is mourned is not the protagonists themselves, since as derrida says, death annihilates the self, the subject to whom memories are attached, the ‘traces’, imply the existence of heirs who inherit them and mourn. however, as derrida says, it is not only the work(s) left behind which double up as ‘traces’ but ‘everyday gestures’ as well. hence, the two novels are saturated by instances that build up the everydayness of the protagonists’ lives, which are mourned in the absence of the protagonists themselves. in the silent minaret, issa’s f riends and family often recall and mourn him through their memories of him. the trace, argues derrida ‘must continue to ‘act’ and to be readable even if what is called the author of the writing no longer answers for what he has written, for what he seems to have signed, whether he is provisionally absent, or if he is dead’ (quoted in naas, 2015: 116). it must be readable even in the absence of the producer, the interpretation of the trace must not be contingent upon the presence of the producer, as he further adds ‘a writing [or any trace] that was not structurally readable—iterable—beyond the death of the addressee would not be writing’ (ibid). issa’s writings, 17 v o l u m e 8 6 / 2 0 2 1 peer review disrupting the grand narrative of the european historical discourse, issa refashions islam as a religion that played an indispensable role in the anti-colonial uprising at the cape colony. shukri does both to probe the grounds as well as the processes of production of historical knowledge. he blurs the distinctions between history and fiction by imitating the style of a historical narrative for his fictionalised account of history. as well as those of tariq, are read and understood by people, long after they are gone. some of issa’s texts, which were earlier thought of as overstatements, in fact start making sense when he is gone: ‘at the time she thought it might be overstated, but he wouldn’t change it. now she thinks he was right and sends a text message to his mobile number, as she still does f rom time to time: im by da wal@qalqilia. wen jan landd @cape he plantd a hedj 2 sepr8 setlaz f rm locls. da histry of erly urpean setlmnt @da cape is unversly&eternly pertnt x’ (shukri, 2004: 182). the same happens with tariq’s photographs. in his absence, they are widely circulated over the media, along with his writings as a symbolic gesture of public mourning. for derrida, mourning is always caught in a ‘double bind’, it is both ‘within us’ as well as ‘beyond us’. while the absent subjects are incorporated into our psyche, because they must be in order to make mourning possible, their ‘infinite exteriority’ remains, marking them as the other. so, one has to appropriate, in that one has to not leave the dead over to indifference, as well as not appropriate in order to respect their individuality, making mourning always unsuccessful. in the silent minaret, issa is caught in this double bind of mourning just before he disappears. he recognises the precarity of the lives of victims of the war on terror, sees a pattern in their deaths, and thinks immediately of the violence at the cape colony. however, he acknowledges the individuality of the chained men in ‘orange overalls’ and disappears. the aporia of mourning leaves him befuddled. he recognises his own death at the hands of the same power, in his awareness of how power structures operate in the necropolitical regime. in what i call here the moment of successful mourning for issa, the moment of his realisation of his own death while keeping those of others’ distinct, and not entirely incorporated into his psyche, he vanishes. shukri writes: ‘blurred pictures on the giant screen of heavily shackled men in orange overalls behind highsecurity fences, their arms chained behind their backs to their feet, sent an ominous hush through the room […] issa leaned back into his seat and watched as history rose up f rom the open manuscript on his table and came to hover between him and the images on the screen’ (2004: 53). it is immediately after this moment that issa decides to walk into the night and disappear hereafter. derrida argues: ‘the mourning of the other as such … has to be incorporated … but the incorporation should not be total, and in that case, of course, the other remains foreign in myself, it remains other, it doesn’t become part of myself. i cannot appropriate the other in myself so it is a failure in a work of mourning, but it is the only way of respecting the otherness of the other’ (2001: 66). in this aporia, derrida envisages the politics of mourning. aporia, for him, becomes the ‘provocation to think new paths, new ways through apparent impasses’, as issa does, and thus holds subversive power. mourning allows us to engage with the (former) subject and puts one on a trail, as we attempt to remake ourselves, enabling a resistance of ‘totalizing gestures’. mourning gives the other a ‘sort of survivance, a kind of living on’ (derrida, 2001: 23). as the protagonists are surveyed by their survivors, they are in turn surveyed f rom the place of their ‘infinite alterity’ (kirkby, 2006: 471) in their being spectres. the protagonists are offered readings, re-readings, analysis, and questioning of their ‘traces’ that open up space for subversive politics. the mourning does not cease as long as the ‘traces’ are kept open and the engagement with the dead continues. as stated, shukri’s concern for allowing space for a subversive politics to emerge is also located within his characters’ ‘traces’, the works and ‘gestures’ they have left behind. spectrality of certain communities as a political reality is conveyed through his portrayal of the precarity of the lives of muslims in the face of the war on terror in his first novel (including that of the protagonist) and most potently in his second novel through the victims of the kasalia civil war (and through the portrayal of palestinian lives, and lives of people like tariq hasan). both issa and tariq are deeply concerned about visibilising the invisible. issa, as well as shukri, addresses this by fashioning an alternate historiography, while tariq and shukri do this by capturing gaps and silences within their works which imply a depth discernible only when one scratches the surface. as minesh dass writes: ‘tariq’s career as a photojournalist has been driven by his desire to make people see the suffering and humanity of those deemed “beyond the f rame.” what most interests me, however, is how his photographic work is described, as an endeavour that posits the still 18t h e t h i n k e r peer review 19 v o l u m e 8 6 / 2 0 2 1 peer review as a surface that is capable of capturing depth’ (2017: 3). the photograph described by dass is of the kasalia war, which sits at the heart of the novel. photographs are spectral in nature in that they superimpose the past onto the present. this characteristic of photographs elicits a bodily reaction f rom viewers, akin to the enactment of physical violence that the photograph embodies. the picture of a young girl who has been raped looks like ‘at first sight, the kind of idealized depiction of rural privation so indulgently romanticized in banal watercolours and sentimental greeting cards’ (shukri, 2014: 41). the moment, a thing of the past being witnessed in the present and lending meaning to the present, has ‘women cross their legs as the realization of what has befallen the girl dawns’ (shukri, 2014: 42). this spectral potency of the photograph is what gives it power, and makes tariq’s works ‘powerful’, so much so that ‘with one photograph, he did more to stop it [the war] than un did with a hundred toothless resolutions’ (ibid). shukri’s focus on spectral subjectivities, however, extends beyond the war and tariq. he uses the themes of absence, silence, and omissions to further his point. while the silent minaret is saturated with omissions that issa takes upon himself to make apparent, i see you comments more on the former two aspects. recent theorisations of spectrality have seen scholars write about how certain subjects are prone to forms of erasure and hence omitted from the public sphere and discourse. issa sets out to correct this by attempting an alternate historiography of south africa: not through a process of destruction of the current history, one in favour of another, but rather through locating the aporia in the existing narrative and offering radical possibilities. in the silent minaret, issa makes astute and pertinent comments on the totalizing tendency of european historical discourse, and addresses the fissures created by a quite literal ‘whitewashing’ of history. issa is acutely aware that historical discourse is made intelligible by structuring events (which entails omissions) into a coherent narrative, subject to power structures in place at a given time (raza, 2020: 7). issa does not just discreetly maintain an alternative account of history, but also once conf ronts his history teacher at school with another version of the history of the anglo-boer war, only to have the latter retort: ‘history cannot be re-written […] history is, and at st stephen’s we accept only the thorough, rigorous and sanctioned historical versions outlined in the syllabus’ (shukri, 2004: 16; italics original). however, these ‘thorough, rigorous and sanctioned historical versions’ do not account for the omissions presenting a discord between history and memory. kagiso’s grandmother, commenting on the anglo-boer war and the involvement of baden powell (who was painted as a national hero) says: ‘the only reward our people received for their sacrifice, was more death – more than, 1 000 of our people died of starvation. so, your boy scouts’ baden-powell may be a national hero in jo’burg and london, but here, among our people, he’s a lying thief’ (shukri, 2004: 22). this discord between history and memory is highlighted further by the writer’s f requent use of the motif of remembering and forgetting which comes across in his commentary on religions as well. frances, an irish catholic lady enforcing an overlap between islam and christianity portrayed as entirely distinct religious civilizations, argues for the arabic heritage of jesus, which she thinks the bible has forgotten: ‘and don’t you think it peculiar, father, how one religion remembers things another doesn’t?’ (shukri, 2004: 17). while the silent minaret in addressing these omissions fashions itself as a historical text, i see you also presents the novelty of form and fuses it with content in its subversive intertextuality which requires the readers to fill in the absences and silences. as dass puts it, i see you achieves this by enforcing a link between seeing and reading: ‘in fact, the ekphratic aspects of the novel suggest a close link between the processes of looking and of reading. as readers, we are asked to imagine an image that we are not shown, and therefore, reading it “simply for what it says” is very complex, given that “what it says” is heavily mediated’ (2017: 4). absence and silence are referred to time and again in the novel. both are posited as states of being that further trauma. leila is asked to maintain silence after tariq’s disappearance, lest it compromise with his safety. this only makes her more traumatised and she decides to contest the elections to be able to speak. however, this leads to her house arrest. leila’s absence f rom the scene of tariq’s kidnapping also furthers her trauma as she is not able to wrap her head around the fact: ‘and the word ‘kidnap’, an act so alien, so seemingly irrelevant to my life, added yet further to the absurdity of the announcement such that at first i wondered why this man thought the information pertinent to me’ (shukri, 2014: 105). in so far as hauntology is described as a disruption occurring along ontological and temporal axes, the opera scene in i see you is important for its temporal deviations. the opera presents a series of looping scenes, inundated by the ref rain: ‘forget about beginnings. all we have is messy middles confused as twisted guts and eternal as the long intestine’ (shukri, 2014: 128). this reference is furthered by tariq’s kidnapping scene recurring and tariq losing sense of time in the cell, as he says: ‘i look to my body as a measure of time […] but how reliable a measure of time is the male body? a woman would know a month’ (shukri, 2014: 136). this theme recurs in all of tariq’s accounts as he struggles to keep track of minutes, hours, days. spectrality is also foregrounded in shukri’s use of the imagery of mashrabiya screens in both his novels. as yahya explains to leila in i see you, commenting on the spectralised subjects, in this case quite literally through the metaphor: ‘the idea [behind mashrabiya screens] is that the women of the house could look out on to the streets without anyone looking at them – they could see without being seen’ (shukri, 2014: 165). spivak, in her criticism of derrida’s specters of marx, talks about his ‘how-to-mourn-your-father book’ that fashions haunting as an entirely male-driven economy and ignores the exploitation of subaltern women in its commentaries on the new world order. she argues about the disservice done to the women by assimilating all marginalised groups into a mass of spectral entities. mashrabiya screens are also a metaphor in the silent minaret as issa’s favourite spot, linking him with the spectral. issa in the text is fashioned as a spectral subjectivity, shifted out of the political discourse, who turns himself into a spectre for the subversive potential of a bodily disappearance in a necropolitical regime that has built itself on the premise of surveillance. thus, shukri’s works skilfully explore the potentialities of spectrality and offer an astute commentary on it for muslim bodies subjected to surveillance and violence under the neo-colonial us empire. in commenting on the spectral subjects, shukri, unlike derrida, does not portray them as an undifferentiated mass of spectral entities but focuses on each individual subjectivity, and how they are affected in different ways by the same mechanisms of power. therefore, leila, as a woman, has to undergo a different trauma than yahya as a palestinian; like issa as an arab af rican muslim undergoes a very different experience f rom that of frances, an irish catholic woman. however, shukri makes sure to portray how geopolitics and necropolitics affect 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(2012). the indian ocean travels of sheikh yusuf and imam ali ali: literary representations in ishtiyaq shukri’s the silent minaret and achmat dangor’s bitter fruit. social dynamics, 38(2): 172–183. epiphany: vol. 12, no. 1, 2019 e-issn 1840-3719 72 | epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 12, no. 1, (2019) metaphysical or differential: fitzgerald's the great gatsby under derridean concept of love sayed mohammad anoosheh, yazd university, iran muhammad hussein oroskhan, shiraz university, iran abstract jacques derrida revolutionized western philosophy by reconsidering the previous ideas from a new perspective. in his view, human subjectivity is explained within the system of language and the meaning is conveyed through the concept of differánce. as such, he imparts the notion that nothing ever exists outside the text, yet the text is filled with innumerable meanings, not a specific one. the net of his deconstructive thinking cast vast enough to devote close critical attention to any previously regarded metaphysical idea like love. transcendental or metaphysical love is a shorn of meaning in the derridean notion of deconstruction. for derrida, love as a communicable sign is confined to the rules of iterability which proves the free flow of signifiers. in this regard, fitzgerald's the great gatsby as one of the most critically studied works in america is recruited to examine the derridean deconstructive notion of love. gatsby is exclusively focused on seeking daisy's transcendental love even at the expense of repeating the past. nonetheless, the evanescent fluidity of the notion of love totally ruins gatsby's chance of ever achieving daisy's love. accordingly, gatsby's ultimate failure is expected for the reason that an "absolute moment" is never devoid of any trace of past or future time. thus, the great gatsby attends to why the notion of love defies any metaphysical or transcendental status and instead it has differential and deferral meaning. keywords: the great gatsby, love, deconstruction, difference, inerrability. metaphysical or differential: fitzgerald's the great gatsby under derridean concept of love 73 | epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 12, no. 1, (2019) i n t r o d u c t i o n the beginning of the twentieth century ushered a circle of changes in american history. f. scott fitzgerald (1896-1940) tried to aptly encapsulate these changes in his works. his best attempt succeeds most probably in the great gatsby (1925) which is "one of two american books loved by both literary critics and a wide, general audience" (keshmiri, 2016, p. 1296). more prominent, however, is the way fitzgerald attempts to dissect the complexities of his time in his masterpiece. with fitzgerald's critical eye, the great gatsby becomes a microcosm reflecting the 1920's american society. fitzgerald's primary aim was to write "something new— something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned" (fitzgerald, 1978, p. 14), yet, the novel describes the shattering american society by revealing certain puzzling features beneath the surface of this society: the tragedy of gatsby as that of an individual and of a civilization would clearly depict the devastation of the dream (or shall we say the fantasy?) the american man was carrying along since he started building up the new world; the shattered image of success, idealism, and glory in a meretricious life (ghasemi and tiur, 2009, p. 35). thomas streissguth in the roaring twenties (2007) draws critical attention to the underlying reason beyond such sweeping changes in the 1920's american society by attesting to the fact that it is for the first time in the american history that urban society is shaped with more than half of the population living in cities (xi). accordingly, fitzgerald's central puzzle is to portray not specifically the transformation of american society into an urban society but more exquisitely the aftermath of such transformation on individuals' lives. to this end, fitzgerald recruits all his efforts to study his age through the great gatsby. in this regard, cleanth brooks (1973) asserts that: historically, the 1920s were not only an age of disillusionment and frenetic excitement; they were also an age of vital creativity and intellectual development….. but the world in which he [fitzgerald] did immerse himself he reported as faithfully and came to judge as honestly, as he could (p. 2284). fitzgerald's recording of american society in the great gatsby narrates to us the constitution of a new society which seems to end in failure as none of its ends is achieved. perhaps, "gatsby and his myth is an emblem of the irony of american history and the corruption of the american dream" (ghasemi and tiur, 2009, p. 119). consisted of the narration of america society, fitzgerald unfolds the unfortunate path of its failure, the dream of not arriving at the desirable society. hence, a discussion of the failure of the american dream is permeated through the great gatsby. an inevitable consequence of such perspective is that the great gatsby has become "the embodiment of the fluid polarities of the american experience: success and failure, illusion and disillusion, dream and nightmare"(ghasemi and tiur, 2009, p. 119). clarification of such woven concepts in the great gatsby needs a new method of study which can highlight some new aspects of this masterpiece. the great gatsby is a work full of opposite poles and the search for the internal contradictions of a text is one of deconstructionism's main concerns. deconstructionists may not appease a curious mind in search of some novel ideas, a mind which leads to the discovery of an original subject or an innovative explication that results in new meanings; nevertheless, they may revisit a previously studied subject in a new way so as to provide a different perspective for the reader. as such, instead of trying to clothe a text by a certain ideology, the reader celebrates the existence of different ideologies in the text. in this regard, catherine belsey's (2002) explanation justifies the significance of this type of reading: analysis reveals that at any given moment the categories and laws of the symbolic order are full of contradictions, ambiguities, and inconsistencies which function as a source of sayed mohammad anoosheh & muhammad hussein oroskhan 74 | epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 12, no. 1, (2019) possible change. the role of ideology is to suppress these contradictions in the interests of the preservation of the existing social formation, but their presence ensures that it is always possible, with whatever difficulty, to identify them, to recognize ideology for what it is, and to take an active part in transforming it by producing new meanings (p. 42). deconstruction by not focusing on a specific ideology has opened up a new chapter in the realm of theory and criticism. deconstruction has a tendency to unsettle a language through its rather compulsive "attentiveness" and "disruptive" tendency or, as derrida calls it, a tendency towards a "de-sedimentation" (derrida, 1976, p. 10). such an unprecedented perspective is indispensable to the novel observation in the field of literature and of the artifacts of the past or the present time. it is through this very "disruptive attentiveness", which is one of the crucial characteristics of deconstruction, that the multifarious features of love in the great gatsby is studied. love appears in a free flow of signifiers as opposed to how it is believed to have a transcendental being. as such, a new light is shed upon the nature of love by exploring it within the relationship among gatsby, tom, and daisy and it is proved that love has differential and deferral meaning. d e c o n s t r u c t i o n deconstruction is the word most associated with derrida. he used deconstruction for his way of thinking and dismantling the excessive adherence to one specific idea by learning to consider the aspects of truth that may lie in its opposite sides. it was in 1937 that derrida published his first major book, of grammatology. from that time on, "his works have been engaged in the business of transformation and reinvention" (royle, 2003, p. 105). derrida in of grammatology constitutes the ardent belief that an author can always be understood to be saying "more, less, or something other than what he [or she] would mean" (1976, p. 158). derrida tries to render all our familiar and preconceived notions, structures and presuppositions unfamiliar by considering it anew. accordingly, some points are to be buttressed for while having a deconstructive purpose to provide a brighter view on this issue. first, our reading will not be a form of hermeneutic interpretation of the text's inherent meaning(s). rather, it reveals that hermeneutic is itself rooted in a metaphysical desire for fixation of meaning which is reductionist in nature despite its whim to attribute an exalted position to the interpreter himself as the generator of meaning; hermeneutics is a quest for meaning, or, at least, it implies the possibility of reaching unified meanings. as we read in peter childs' and roger fowler's routledge dictionary of literary terms (2006): (hermeneutics) comprises the general theory and practice of interpretation … much as these hermeneuts differ, they do share an allegiance to universality, and to a common human nature which suggests a measure of co-operation and of shared discourse in the interpretive dialogue. hermeneutic objects may differ, but they are credited as truths which await illumination (p. 103 and 105). unlike hermeneutics, which tries to theorize a system of interpretation, deconstruction emphasizes the elusive nature of any such systems; it reveals the metaphysical structure of the hermeneutic quest for meaning and/or knowledge so as to defy the epistemological universalism which takes the subjectivity of the interpreter as unified and transcendent. deconstruction reveals that the subject and his perceiving consciousness cannot stand outside the text's boundaries. andy mousley (2000) observes: if language, within structuralism, tends to be regarded as an impersonal system, then language, for many poststructuralists, is the very site of human subjectivity. language, after all, makes it possible to say 'i', it allows us to locate ourselves as subjects (p. 75). being located in language, subjectivity becomes as unfixed as the meaning of a sign is because language works by difference an metaphysical or differential: fitzgerald's the great gatsby under derridean concept of love 75 | epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 12, no. 1, (2019) by permanent deferral of meaning. as mousley (2000) maintains, "if language enables or promises subjectivity, then it also postpones it, for we are constantly being dislocated and unsettled by language due to its inherent instability" (p. 75). a subject is not outside the text superimposing its presence to the text under his/her observation. on the contrary, it is a part of the totality of the text, it "is an elusive signifier, which is never fully present to itself" (p. 100). eventually, one cannot read more into the text, more than what it contains as some of the hermeneutists allege. quite the reverse, it is the text that exceeds the reader's/interpreter's power of understanding and overflows his perception . one may look for the solid structures which lead to fixed meanings in an act of interpretation as do the hermeneutists and in doing so; he/she has to suppress a meaning or some meanings to foreground a specific one. nonetheless, a deconstructive reader will release the text from the burden of such a suppression/suspension. he/she will reveal the reasons why the text cannot be tamed into an epistemic site of meaning. it never alerts to the fact that there is no meaning in a text. quite the reverse, it indicates that the text is a hoard of innumerable meanings. as such, all acts of interpretation find a reductive nature and hence betray the openness of the text itself. that is why derrida emphasizes that "there is nothing outside the text". all acts of interpretation are like cropping a part of an image and omitting the other parts which could otherwise offer a more complete picture. hence, a signifier in order to mean or to have a signified has to be taken off the natural flow of signification. meaning comes through the fixation of the signified by arresting the free flow of signification. however, every signified is a signifier to which is attached a number of other signifieds which are themselves more signifiers for more signifieds; the chain goes on and on to the extent that one may admit that there is no signified at all and eventually no meaning in its true sense. the only thing that remains is the signifier which leads to the other signifiers that, in turn, lead to other more signifiers. meaning exists as much as a text is verified for the signifier. nonetheless, since contexts cannot be saturated with meaning, meaning get illusively naturalized through the structure of its context. "'no meaning can be determined out of context," argues nicolas royle (2003), "but no context permits saturation': this is what derrida's texts keep affirming, while always affirming it differently" (p. 66). in this regard, words/signs find meaning only when one arrests meaning by cutting the chain of signification/differentiation. consequently, the meaning of a sign is always on the move and is yet to come unless we accept the metaphysics of presence, the idea that the meaning of a sign is presented to us through the one-to-one relationship between the signifier and signified and with the interference of interpretation and/or signification to discover this decidable and fixed relationship. in this regard, catherine belsey (2002) affirms, "meaning is no longer seizable, a pure intelligibility accessible to our grasp" (p.136). she emphasizes the undecidability of meaning by arguing that: deferred, as well as differed, pushed out of reach, meaning becomes undecidable. thus we can no longer understand the signifier to be preceded by an anterior truth, a meaning, the presence of a signified whose existence ultimately necessitates a transcendental signified (god, nature, reason) to which all truths can be referred (p. 136). thus, signifieds and meanings are part of our metaphysical humanism and essentialism, which, as we have already emphasized, are structures in the same symbolic order as language is. the human mind is symbolic and is structured linguistically. as such, derrida's innovative notion radically "alters the bases on which we might think about thinking, consciousness, presence, being, humanity, sayed mohammad anoosheh & muhammad hussein oroskhan 76 | epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 12, no. 1, (2019) animality, divinity, identity, intention, decision, responsibility, justice, friendship, desire, memory, death and language, as well as about so many discourses or practices" (royle, 2003, p. 144). d e c o n s t r u c t i v e r e a d i n g o f l o v e trying to sketch a status for love can be exhausting as there can always be the question of what is love. the question is always durable and extended in time. there is historicity about the question which makes it always temporally aloof from its answers. therefore, the answer is always in the status of yet to come. r. s. white (2001) does as much to leave the question "what is this thing called love?" white expostulates: that we find ourselves circling around an absent center of meaning, an evacuation. to the very pertinent and honest question which might be asked of the mature by the young, why do you not offer us reliable advice about love and desire, since our love-choices will affect us for the rest of our lives? the only answer can be 'because we do not know what they are (p. 5). this is in accord with the multiplicity of love's appearance in different contexts changing colors like a chameleon. irving singer (2009) has listed some kinds of love that we habitually speak of: love of self, of mankind, of nature, of god, of mother and father, of children, of tribe and nation, of sweetheart or spouse or sexual idol, of material possession, of food or drink, of action and repose, of sports, of hobbies or engrossing pursuit, of justice, of science, of truth, of beauty, and so on endlessly. each variety of love, involving it special object, has its own phenomenology, its own special iridescence within the spectrum that delimits human experience (qtd in nordland, 2007, p. 21). as singer shows, love is various and refers to a range of different human experiences. plato in his symposium also refers to the ambiguity concerning the idea of love when pausanias retorts to phaedrus's injunction to praise love: "if love were a single being, it would be fine, but as it is, there isn't just one of him. and since there isn't, it would be more correct to say first which particular love we ought to praise" (cobb, 1993, p. 21). derrida's argument that love is always divided between the love of who and love of what testifies to the divided nature of love's identity. he asserts: the history of love, the heart of love, is divided between the love of who and the love of what…. i speak of it abstractly, but i think that whoever starts to love, is in love, or stops loving, is caught between this division of the who and the what. one wants to be true to someone-singularly, irreplaceably-and one perceives that this someone isn't x or y. they didn't have the qualities, properties, the images that i thought i loved. so fidelity is threatened by the difference between the who and the what (youtube.com). derrida's unprecedented view of love is based upon his idea of "a decentring of the human subject, a decentring of institutions, and a decentring of the logos" (1973, p. 15). upon closer reading, one can notice the importance of decentering the logos which has indeed become derrida's primary reason of the whole idea of deconstruction: "the first step for me, in the approach to what i proposed to call deconstruction, was a putting into question of the authority of linguistics, of logocentrism" (p. 65). julian wolfreys (1998) summarize the derridean notion of logocenterism as follows: logocentrism … brings together two ideas: that of the logos, the greek term for the word or truth (as an unquestionable and desired value, i. e., the word of god); and center, the concept of a central or originary point, a moment of absolute beginning or origin from which everything springs and around which all ideas circulate or to which they refer (p. 198). derrida is not following the path of logos as the whole history of western philosophy did. he is against the changing of logos as each metaphysical or differential: fitzgerald's the great gatsby under derridean concept of love 77 | epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 12, no. 1, (2019) philosopher has done by substituting one originary point with another instead he aims at the free play of meaning. likewise, the nature of love can be subjected to his radical view. transcending love beyond time and space sets it in the realm of ideas, in the realm that is eternal and outlives man and his existence. how can love be eternal if it resides in a man? it has to precede and exceed man's existence in order to be eternal and unchanging. as such, it should reside in the world beyond the material changeability. it resides in the immutable world of immortals. this way of looking at the identity of things or beings, as barry stocker (2006) affirms, is rooted in logocentrism. "logocenterism in derrida," he avers, refers to the philosophical tendency to find truth in the presentation of being, sprit, consciousness, history across a philosophical system to any idea, mode of experience, emphasized in a philosophical system" (p. 52). accordingly, plato, descartes, hegel, and j. l. austin are logocenteric: plato is logocenteric because his dialogues claim to reveal truth with reference to dialectical speech; descartes is logocenteric because he claims to reveal truth in the clear and distinct ideas of our consciousness; hegel is logocenteric because he claims to truth in absolute spirit. a more empirical philosopher like austin is still logocenteric, because the truth of language appears in the immediate situation of the utterance of particular statements (p. 52). all these philosophers ascribe to unity for achieving truth and meaning. their attempts are to command their minds to the influence of this metaphysics of presence which guarantees the accessibility/presence of meaning, to the metaphysical ideal that meaning as a presence can be possible because the present time is a fixed totality. ironically enough, present time is always marked with past-ness because time is on the move unless we are able to freeze time and take a moment, a frame of time as a moment, out of it. this transiency and motion is the inherent quality of all things regardless of whether they are abstract or concrete. as derrida (1976) argues, "the metaphysics of presence as self-proximity wishes to efface by giving a privileged position to a sort of absolute now, the life of the present, the living present" (p. 309). however, the "absolute now", as mentioned earlier, is only possible if one takes the dynamicity off the beings. everything is organic as much as it is subject to time. that is, we need to freeze time in order to reach meaning. derrida repudiates the possibility of such total freezing of the moment by proposing the idea of representation and/or mimesis. to derrida, reality lies merely in representation, in signification, hence his famous statement declaration in of grammatology that, "there is no outside (of the) text" (1976, p. 155). there is the only a signification of truth, not the truth itself. origin is myth and truth is merely a textual construct which he attempts to deconstruct. as christopher norris (1989) declares: as for current post-structuralist theory, a good deal hinges on the crucial ambiguity of derrida's cryptic statement: there is no outside to the text. on the one hand this can be taken to signify a literary formalism pushed to the extreme, a last-ditch retreat from 'reality' into the solipsistic pleasures of textual free play… if reality is structured through and through by the meanings we conventionally assign to it, then the act of suspending those conventions has a pertinence and force beyond the usual bounds of textual interpretation (p. 109). love, therefore, cannot belong to a transcendental consciousness if it only exists as pure, intersubjective, and hence communicable form. if the knowledge of love rests on linguistic ability to communicate "meaning", "memory", and "experience", then it follows and has a medium of expression, a language. every language is based on a structure that makes it a metaphysical because any idea possessing a structure is metaphysical idea. ideas need to repeat themselves through the structures of their presence, in the architectonics of their sayed mohammad anoosheh & muhammad hussein oroskhan 78 | epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 12, no. 1, (2019) presence and thus to exist in the network of linguistic communication. "in referring to an architectonic," barry stocker (2006) argues, "derrida also cast doubt on this model of knowledge, which appears in foucault's earlier work, by pointing out the instability of any structure to which we might try to reduce knowledge" (p. 107). the structure cannot be transcendental and unchanging. they are on the move through being subject to the iterability of the sign. signs have to be repeated in order to signify. all structures are meaningful as long as they are iterable. derrida (1973) detects the primordially repetitive structure of the sign when he writes: by reason of the primordially repetitive structure of signs in general, there is every likelihood that "effective" language is just as imaginary as imaginary speech and that imaginary speech is just as effective as effective speech. in both expression and indicative communication the difference between reality and representation, between the vertical and imaginary, and between simple presence and repetition has already begun to wear away (p. 51). what we know as the so-called love that has been named for us throughout the history (historicity of love) and given that name, that transcendental structure of the name, to anything, to any feeling that resembles that historically repeated idea can never be deemed as a transcendental idea and should be studied through a different perspective by decentering it from its long-standing logos and putting it forward as a dynamic concept with a situational moment. d e c o n s t r u c t i v e r e a d i n g o f t h e n o t i o n o f l o v e i n t h e g r e a t g a t s b y kemberly hearne in a short note on the great gatsby refers to the contradictory nature of the american dream. he extrapolates that fitzgerald has concisely noticed american dream's contradictory inherent features and worked it through in the great gatsby: it is through the language itself, and the recurrent romantic imagery, that fitzgerald offers up his critique and presents the dream for what it truly is: a mirage that entices us to keep moving forward even as we are ceaselessly borne back into the past (2010, p. 189) of all the writers of the time, the writer that most clearly explained the ambiguous nature of the american dream was fitzgerald. to this end, he recruited the elusive nature of love into his service of harsh criticism to make everybody see the mirage behind the notion of love. in this regard, of central importance to this novel is the divided notion of love between the characters of this novel. it is worthy of note that love should not be deemed as a transcendental notion that exists by itself. indeed, deconstructionists actually criticize the mentality that sees the world, the people or systems in it as an oppositional contrast. as such, derrida poses the idea of différance. in the last chapter of speech and phenomena, he defines différance as a concept "to be conceived prior to the separation between deferring as delay and differing as to the active work of difference" (1973, p. 88). consisted of this view, love is not an originary being; on the contrary, it exists as long as it is differentiated from its others which are the product of the oppositional structure of language. love in the great gatsby can hardly be taken as given because as a signifier it has to suspend its evanescent fluidity in order to identify a solid meaning. it is set in an undecidable context of significance implying a plethora of varying and sometimes contradictory meanings such as emotion, affection, passion, self-indulgence, power, honor, pleasure, conjugation, oneness, etc., and quite paradoxically the list can grow infinitely as long as definite meanings are sought. the diversity of meaning is due to the evanescent nature of the signs, or due to différance (to use jacque derrida's pun). as we read in an essay on derrida's deconstruction in internet encyclopedia of philosophy: the widespread conviction that the sign metaphysical or differential: fitzgerald's the great gatsby under derridean concept of love 79 | epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 12, no. 1, (2019) literally represents something, which even if not actually present, could be potentially present, is rendered impossible by archwriting, which insists that signs always refer to yet more signs ad infinitum, and that there is no ultimate referent or foundation (reynolds, n.d.) in considering the diverse meaning of love in the great gatsby, one should refer to the relation among three characters including gatsby, tom and daisy within the novel. the triangular relationship among gatsby, tom, and daisy are deemed to show the impossibility of the existence of transcendental love and prove the differential and deferral meaning of love. daisy's relationship with tom and gatsby begins in a sequence. first, daisy feels in love with gatsby and decides to devote herself thoroughly to him, however, gatsby's return from the war is delayed and daisy is forced to marry someone else. at first, she mounts stiff resistance to this marriage proposal to the extent that in her wedding day, she decides to go back on her decision to marry tom and ruins everything: she groped around in a waste-basket she had with her on the bed and pulled out the string of pearls. take them downstairs and give them back to whoever they belong to. tell them all daisy's changed her mine. say daisy's changed her mine!' (fitzgerald, 1925, p. 82). by any happening, daisy marries tom. and after a while, jordan baker, daisy's friend, evokes a memory of daisy while she was having gone on a trip with tom: i saw them in santa barbara when they came back and i thought i’d never seen a girl so mad about her husband. if he left the room for a minute she’d look around uneasily and say ‘where’s tom gone?’ and wear the most abstracted expression until she saw him coming in the door (p. 83). once daisy used to be in love with gatsby; now she finds her true love in tom. such a radical change in the daisy's tendency in love denies the possibility of the transcendental love and puts love in the context of difference and away from the singularity of one person. derrida mentions that the act of loving of someone cannot be solely limited to the singularity of that person whereas the attributes of that person also play a major role in loving him/her. as such, derrida asserts that "one is attracted because the other is like this or like that inversely, love is disappointed and dies when one comes to realize the other person doesn't merit our love" (youtube). hence, tom's richness plays the difference here in compelling daisy to love him. nonetheless, gatsby's return after five years while he is richer than tom puts daisy in another same situation. expectedly, daisy switches to gatsby. this change of view is best shown when gatsby takes daisy home to show her his house and properties in it: he took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray. … suddenly with a strained sound, daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily .they're such beautiful shirts, she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. it makes me sad because i’ve never seen such— such beautiful shirts before (fitzgerald, 1925, p. 99). approaching the novel differently, it appears that the story is based on the failure of language. the origin of failure is the radical failure of language which begins in nothing. language fails to signify what it wishes to represent, to put in more precisely; the signifiers fail to reach the signified. while gatsby, tom, daisy and others are gathered in a hotel. daisy remembers her wedding in the middle of june when a man fainted due to the hot weather. afterwards, tom begins to introduce the man who fainted in the wedding day as follows: "'a man named biloxi. 'blocks' biloxi, and he made boxes—that's a fact—and he was from biloxi, tennessee" (p. 136). suddenly, everybody begins telling something about biloxi. jordan mentions that sayed mohammad anoosheh & muhammad hussein oroskhan 80 | epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 12, no. 1, (2019) '"they carried him into my house,' appended jordan, 'because we lived just two doors from the church. and he stayed three weeks, until daddy told him he had to get out .the day after he left daddy died" (p. 136). then nick adds "i used to know a bill biloxi from memphis, i remarked" (p.136). later, tom continues like this "that was his cousin. i knew his whole family history before he left. he gave me an aluminum putter that i use today" (p. 136). and when tom is confronted by jordan's question that from where did you know him? he answers; "'biloxi?' he concentrated with an effort. 'i didn’t know him. he was a friend of daisy's" (p. 136). at last, daisy responds "he was not, she denied. 'i'd never seen him before" (p. 136). as it is obvious, a number of signifiers are presented without even clarifying the signified at all. even these signifiers have caused more confusion and bewilderment and it is best displayed when nick comments about biloxi in this way, "tom and i looked at each other blankly.'biloxi?'" (p. 137). as it is shown, one signified is becoming the signifier for another signified and even it never ends in a final conclusion whereas the sequence of these signifiers and signified makes the situation more difficult to comprehend. the verification of signifier to settle on a fixed signified due to the free flow of signifiers is impossible. as such, meaning is not siezeable and is permanently deferred. such disorientation of signifiers is presented by fitzgerald just before gatsby's sudden movement towards challenging tom on daisy's love. the divided nature of love among gatsby, daisy and tom is the most prominent example of disoriented signifiers without fixing and determining the signified. when gatsby seems to doubt the possibility of daisy's unified love toward himself, he raises his doubt to nick by saying: "her (daisy) voice is full of money" (p.128). his doubt is mounted up to the point that he cannot control himself and challenges tom on daisy's love: 'your wife doesn't love you,' said gatsby. 'she's never loved you. she loves me .'you must be crazy!' exclaimed tom automatically. gatsby sprang to his feet, vivid with excitement. 'she never loved you, do you hear?' he cried. 'she only married you because i was poor and she was tired of waiting for me. it was a terrible mistake, but in her heart she never loved anyone except me!' (p. 139). afterward, gatsby seeks daisy's feedback to this situation but he is confused by daisy's response as she tries to evade answering the question of choosing between tom and gatsby because in each moment he really loved each of them. therefore, she responds in this way: "oh, you want too much!' she cried to gatsby. 'i love you now-isn’t that enough? i can’t help what's past" (p. 141). derrida believed that a moment in the present time is always marked with the trace of past unless one is able to freeze the time and as it is impossible to cut a moment in the train of time, the absolute now will never occur. regarding the concept of differance, he clarifies this point in this respect: difference is what makes the movement of signification possible only if each so-called 'present' element, each element appearing on the scene of presence, is related to something other than itself, thereby keeping within itself the mark of a past element, and already letting itself be vitiated by the mark of its relation to the future element, this trace being related no less to what is called the future than to what is called the past, and constituting what is called the present by means of this very relation to what it is not, to what it absolutely is not: that is, not even to a past or a future as a modified present (derrida, 1973, p.142). gatsby's central puzzle is his confusing moment about his present time and the past time. he wants to repeat the past in the present time; however, the present time being related to the past and future can never be dragged out and separated from the past time as it always carries with it a trace of past time. at a moment in the novel, gatsby claims to be able to repeat the past: "'can’t repeat metaphysical or differential: fitzgerald's the great gatsby under derridean concept of love 81 | epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 12, no. 1, (2019) the past?' he cried incredulously. 'why of course you can!'" (fitzgerald, 1925, p. 118). such bewilderment eludes gatsby to the end. though he admits the impossibility of this action, still he cannot believe it and when he is talking to nick about daisy's feeling toward tom, he says: "of course she might have loved him, just for a minute, when they were first married—and loved me more even then, do you see?" (p. 162). although the movement of the action of the novel after the love test scene should naturally be toward the signified of the words uttered by daisy, the actualization is caught in a permanent deferral and difference because daisy proves to be completely at odds with what she had claimed and was just incapable of concertizing what she really intended by not articulating her true love to gatsby. this actually conforms to the derridean idea of arrivant, that the event of love is and will be always on the state of deferral and delay, an arrivant which never completely arrives. "the arrivant", derrida writes: must be absolutely other, an other that expects not to be expecting, that i'm waiting for, whose expectation without what in philosophy is called a horizon of expectation, when a certain knowledge still anticipates and amortizes in advance. if i am sure there is going to be an event, this will not be an event (lucy, 2004, p. 6). gatsby in challenging tom on daisy's love foregrounds this deferral relationship by demanding daisy to express her love. the love test, however, launches a problem that can never be resolved unless the very idea of love is set in materiality that can defy the metaphysics of presence on the part of the language or any system of signification that is employed to present it. this is an impossibility which is the very condition of love's ontological existence. daisy is an image of idealism, transcendence, and the logocentric truth in the eye of gatsby. he assumes that he can earn daisy's ideal love once for all, nonetheless, he can never gain her truly. deconstruction is against all generalizations, metaphysical, reductionisms, and aphorisms. it reveals what is hidden, what we naturally tend to overlook in order to communicate; it aims at betraying, in derrida's words, "the illusion of unity or univocity" (wolfreys, 1998, p. 60). within the context of deconstructionists, the notion of love also follows the same role; it can never be expressed as a unified concept toward a singular person whereas it is a divided notion put in the context of difference. gatsby's imagination has built an imaginary world for him in which he searches for some predetermined truth and reality. he is unaware of the fact that the true nature of reality is a mere construction by which meaning is conventionally construed. reality indeed is a sort of representation at a moment which cannot be repeated at any other moment. and if one substitutes the usual bonds behind the formation of reality, the reality itself will take another shape and proves its illusive nature. at a moment in the novel, nick clearly shows gatsby's notion of reality along these lines: each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. for a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing (fitzgerald, 1925, p. 102). with the help of deconstruction, gatsby's failure in achieving his true love is best expressed. in this regard, gatsby's long and careful observation of green light at the end of daisy's house accords with his belief in transcendental love on which he could never live. most probably, nick as the narrator of the novel ends such a way: "gatsby believed in the green light, the organstic future that year by year recedes before us" (p. 193). nick's ending best support the argument of deconstructionist about its anti-centering nature. everything is organic as much as it is subjected to time. one can never reach an absolute now without freezing the time. therefore, the concept of truth is just sayed mohammad anoosheh & muhammad hussein oroskhan 82 | epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 12, no. 1, (2019) signified and is a mere construction by the human mind which derrida has tried to deconstruct. derrida has persistently emphasized that "there is nothing outside the text". in this respect, gatsby's repetitive observation of the green light can never be more than a mere illusion of daisy's transcendental love. everything is situated within the text and the meaning of each sign is unfixed and iterable. in our discussion, the iterability of the concept of love examined through gatsby's relation with daisy. c o n c l u s i o n by a brief review of philosophical history, a logical conclusion can be drawn that each philosopher has tried to bring up his notion of thought even if it is at the expense of neglecting the previously established notion of thought. nevertheless, derrida is the first one who claims not to discuss a new idea, yet examining the previous ideas in an entirely new perspective. unlike the previous system of thoughts which aimed at reaching a unified purpose and revealing the metaphysical structure of meaning, deconstructionists defy the concept of unified meaning. in this respect, human subjectivity as a site of meaning is located within the system of language. as such, the meaning of a sign works through the concept of differance. more importantly, the meaning is always limited to text; in other words, nothing outside the text ever exists or has the ability to determine the meaning, accordingly, the notion of metaphysics is totally rejected by the deconstructionists. furthermore, the deconstructionists establish the fact that a text is not directed toward one specific meaning whereas it is filled with innumerable meanings and what is commonly implied as meaning is only fixation of the free flow of signifiers. consequently, the meaning is always on the move and not fixed. in this respect, love as a human experience is considered by derrida while being based upon his idea of decentering and anti-metaphysics. transcending love beyond time and space is not acceptable in the derridean notion of deconstruction. as we are always within the train of time, everything is organic and mutable. in this regard, love as a communicable sign is confined to the rules of iterability and in the case of the great gatsby; it is presented as a signifier soaked in the evanescent fluidity and extremely far away from the possibility of having a fixed meaning. it implies a hoard of contradictory meaning for each person. approaching the concept of love with this regard shows the reason behind gatsby's failure in achieving daisy's love. gatsby's main concern is to repeat the past and fully gain daisy's love. nevertheless, present, past and future times are always interrelated and never exist without the trace of others. thus, he can never achieve an absolute moment or daisy's absolute love. metaphysical or differential: fitzgerald's the great gatsby under derridean concept of love 83 | epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 12, no. 1, (2019) references belsey, c. 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(1998). deconstruction: derrida. london: macmillan press ltd. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dj1bunmhjay http://www.iep.utm.edu/derrida/ sayed mohammad anoosheh & muhammad hussein oroskhan 84 | epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 12, no. 1, (2019) interstices 6 heidegger and the herringbone cowshed laurence simmons …and already the knowing animals are aware that we are not really at home in our interpreted world. —rainer maria rilke, “duino elegies” …technology is the mastery not of nature but mastery of the relation between nature and humanity. —walter benjamin, “one-way street” to render inoperative the machine that governs our conception of man will therefore mean no longer to seek new—more effective and more authentic—articulations, but rather to show the central emptiness, the hiatus that—within man—separates man and animal, and to risk ourselves in this emptiness. —giorgio agamben, the open figure 1: herringbone cowshed (diagram showing ‘angle-parking’) 21 i my paper is dedicated to ron sharp, who died last year. ron sharp was a waikato dairy farmer who in 1952 changed his 12 bail walk-through milking shed to a design of his own, now known worldwide as the herringbone cowshed. sharp’s design was a direct result of a knee problem, and designed to resolve the recurrent difficulty of having to stoop while milking. one estimate had a person milking for a season stooping 2,400 times for each cow—that is, 240,000 times for a 100-cow herd. as with all good ideas, the basics of the herringbone shed were simple. it included a pit for the milker to stand in down the middle of the shed and raised platforms for the cows, which were ‘angle-parked’ with their udders within easy reach and at a convenient height for the milker [figure 1]. the angle-parking idea came to roy after observing cars angle-parked in victoria street, hamilton’s main thoroughfare. cows in the herringbone shed could be milked in batches, rather than being let in one at a time. as each batch finished milking it was released to walk out the other end of the shed. the sharp cowshed could handle up to 90 cows an hour, compared with 30 in the traditional milking set-up. it was also calculated that the sharp system saved the milker around 225 kilometres of walking each dairy season. initially the herringbone design won little support from the dairy industry, but by 1964, ten years after its invention, there were thousands of herringbone cowsheds around the world, including india and the soviet union [figure 2]. the herringbone cowshed was later acclaimed by many as the greatest innovation in the dairy industry since the invention of the milking machine. by all accounts roy was a modest man who had no secondary education, having left school after primary school to help on the family farm during the depression of the 1930s. he never applied for a patent for his design, and never made any money from it. ii i am going to revisit, rework, and re-worry the bone of giorgio agamben’s careful re-reading in his book the open of martin heidegger’s attempt to distinguish animal life from human life. i want to explore the question of the animal, within the context of heidegger’s critical retrieval and transformation of the philosophical foundations of our technological conception of the world, and through jacques derrida’s and giorgio agamben’s re-reading of heidegger’s ‘empty interval’ between man and animal. to the extent that modernity formulates an understanding of the animal in terms of the mechanical paradigm this will involve me, among other things, in a shift from hand-milking [figure 3] to the herringbone cowshed. although it has been increasingly urgent to think the animal beyond the mechanical paradigm, i want to suggest that it may be equally crucial to venture an investigation of the mechanical component in the human: to explore, that is, the necessities and automatisms at the physical as well as psychological level; to investigate the blurring of the lines between human, animal and machine; and to open up questions of prosthetic subjectivity. or, to follow derrida, i intend to explore how “my guiding threads lace together in this knot: the question, the animal, technology” (1987: 57). an exploration of this knot may be necessary and crucial if we wish to stop the ‘anthropological machine’ of western thought that operates by interstices 6 creating an absolute difference between man and animal: a difference that, on the one hand, elevates the human above the animal and its environment and, on the other, places animality outside of what heidegger described as the human’s ‘openness’ to the world. heidegger’s foundational stance in thinking the question of the animal is a fundamental, and a fundamentally correct, one. it is radically non-anthropocentric in that it attempts to understand the animal’s relation to world on the animal’s own terms rather than from the perspective of the human. it is this ‘biocentrism’, in contrast to anthropocentrism, that has led subsequent commentators to use heidegger’s thought to justify a radical ecological critique of technological modernity and to see him as a forerunner of radical environmentalism. deep ecologists, who represent one branch of the radical ecology movement, have used heidegger to argue that nature, and the animal, has an intrinsic value apart from its usefulness to human beings, and that all life forms should be allowed to flourish and fulfill their evolutionary destinies (see naess, 1989 and zimmerman, 1993). nevertheless, it is clear that heidegger cannot avoid falling back on oppositional distinctions between animal and human, and is thus unable to overcome the anthropocentrism of the metaphysical tradition; he is unable to speak of ‘the open’ with respect to animal and human in a non-contradictory way. what inhibits him from achieving this overcoming, but also offers him the possibility of overcoming, i shall argue, is his reliance on a certain notion of technology. iii i will proceed according to four axes, each of which lead—separately and in tandem—to my conclusion on the relation between the technical and the animal. each axis or ‘question’ starts from a modality of ‘the animal’, as it is explored by heidegger, but i also follow through a critique of heidegger’s position using the ideas and responses of jacques derrida, giorgio agamben and bernard stiegler. 2� the question of language because plants and animals are lodged in their respective environments but are never placed freely into the clearing of being which alone is ‘world,’ they lack language. but in being denied language, they are not thereby suspended worldlessly in their environment. still, in this word ‘environment’ converges all that is puzzling about living creatures. (heidegger, 1998: 248) heidegger argues that animals lack a specific relation to language because they lack ‘world’. by world heidegger does not simply mean nature or environment, but intends the capability for standing in what he elsewhere calls ‘the clearing of being’, where being comes into presence and leaves. plants and animals do not exist outside of themselves in the clearing of being; rather, they live enclosed within their surrounding environments. this means simply that plants and animals cannot access beings beyond themselves in the way that human beings with language and world are able to do. the human body, on this account, is what belongs to the realm of the animal, and the human capacity for language and reason are specific marks of the human beyond the animal. heidegger here takes the cartesian (but also aristotelian in its origin) definition of the human as animal rationale (that which sets the human apart as the single and sole living creature with the capacity for language), and he insists that this capacity for language cannot be seen as arising from the human’s animal nature. language is not just one among a number of things added on to the essence of the human; “[r]ather”, says heidegger, “language is the house of being in which the human being exists by dwelling” (1998: 254). as this passage suggests—and derrida notes it clearly (derrida, 1989: 48)—heidegger’s questioning of the metaphysical definition of the human as animal rationale simply displaces one form of humanism in the name of another, more exacting humanism. heidegger opens up the question of the animal to existence, he shifts the question to a different register, but ultimately he offers nothing by way of critique of the traditional oppositional line drawn between human beings and animals; and so he closes the question down again. it is also important that for heidegger this line of division—of language—bears an essential relation to death. figure 3: heidegger hand milking (photocollage) interstices 6 the question of death mortals are they who can experience death as death. the animal cannot do so. but the animal cannot speak either. the essential relation between language and death flashes up before us, but remains still unthought. (heidegger, 1971b: 107) it is only the human that is capable of dying in the sense of complete, irreducible, untold loss taking place in/with the death of an individual. and it is given to humans to relate to their own death as that which uniquely individuates each of them. by contrast, the animal lacks memory; lacks the ability to repeat. in its absolute singularity, in its ‘losing itself at every moment’, it lacks presence and a substantive, continuing stability. heidegger writes elsewhere: “to die means to be capable of death as death. only man dies. the animal perishes. it has death neither ahead of itself nor behind it” (1971a: 178). thus heidegger distinguishes between the ‘biological-ontological’ death of animals and plants—deaths measured in ‘longevity, propagation and growth’—and the ontological death of dasein. while denying the relation between death, language and the animal, heidegger does not explicitly explore how the relation between death and language separates the human from the animal. derrida writes: against or without heidegger, one could point to a thousand signs that show that animals also die. although the innumerable structural differences that separate one ‘species’ from another should make us vigilant about any discourse on animality and bestiality in general, one can say that animals have a very significant relation to death, to murder and to war (hence, to borders), to mourning and to hospitality, and so forth, even if they have neither a relation to death nor to the ‘name’ of death as such, nor, by the same token, to the other as such. (1993: 75-6) derrida’s point is neither does “man as dasein” have a relationship to “death as such, but only to perishing” (76). thus the paradox of heidegger’s position is that since the animal is purely resolved into the species, its death ends up being a matter of that which may be repeated without loss. because of this, the animal (the labour of metabolic survival and reproduction of life that the animal names) is ‘undying’—it indicates life’s seamless continuum. the question of poverty man is not merely a part of the world but is also master and servant of the world in the sense of ‘having’ world. man has world. but then what about the other beings which, like man, are also part of the world: the animals and plants, the material things like the stone, for example? are they merely parts of the world, as distinct from man who in addition has world? or does the animal too have world, and if so, in what way? in the same way as man, or in some 2� other way? and how would we grasp this otherness? and what about the stone? however crudely, certain distinctions immediately manifest themselves here. we can formulate these distinctions in the following three theses: [1.] the stone (material object) is worldless [weltlos]; [2.] the animal is poor in world [weltarm]; [3.] man is world-forming [weltbildend]. (heidegger, 1995: 177) the stone is described as ‘weltlos’ or ‘without world, worldless’. the stone has no experience, no world: one cannot even say of a stone, employing some form of anthropomorphism, that it is indifferent to being. human beings are characterized as ‘weltbildend’ (translated as ‘world-forming’ or ‘world-picturing’). the human has access to entities and so ‘has a world’, and this access is the openness that is characteristic of dasein. we see the objects in the world as they are. for heidegger this capacity of a human being to grasp something as something is not due to the human possession of language, the fact that it can name things. in fact, in the radical nature of heidegger’s ontology it is the reverse: human beings have the facility of language because of the kind of being-in-the-world they are—that is, open to entities. in being and time he writes: we do not so to speak, throw a ‘signification’ over some naked thing which is ‘present-at-hand’, rather when something withinthe-world is encountered as such the thing in question already has an involvement which is disclosed in our understanding of the world. (1987: 150) animals are ‘weltarm’, ‘poor in world’. again, that they ‘lack language’ does not explain why animals are deprived in this context. in contrast to the stone, the animal is not absolutely without access to entities, and in this sense it can be said to have a world. however, in comparison to human beings, the animal is impoverished: its mode of having a world is in the form of not having a world as such. heidegger’s statement concerning the world-poverty of animals is meant to indicate a simultaneous having and not-having of the world, the assumption being that human beings are not simply part of the world but also in some sense have world. in the 1929/30 lectures heidegger explains this relationship in terms of how the biological drives that characterize the animal organism are ‘disinhibited’ by external factors, how a circle is put around them: “the animal, when it comes into a relation with something else, can only come upon the sort of entity that ‘affects’ or initiates capability in some way. nothing else can ever penetrate the ring around the animal” (1995: 254). in his book of spirit (1989) derrida has three related objections to heidegger’s account. first of all, he says, heidegger assumes ‘animality’ is one thing, that there is “one homogeneous type of entity which is called animality in general” (1989: 57). heidegger does not speak, or seem to think of, the domesticated animal when he writes (his examples are lizards, bees, moths, worms, amoebas, and so on). that is, he passes over the possibility that a different animal—say, one i live with or alongside—might be in different respects ‘another like myself’. derrida’s second objection is that heidegger’s thesis is circular. how can the essence of animality be determined by a process of exclusion if interstices 6 one does not have an essential knowledge of what constitutes inclusion in the category animal? “the logical contradiction between the two propositions (the animal does and does not have a world) would mean simply that we have not yet sufficiently elucidated the concept of world” (1989: 51). heidegger’s account of the animal placed somewhere between the stone and man, derrida claims, has simply left no category of existence for the animal. derrida’s third objection is that the concept of privation or poverty that informs heidegger’s account of animal existence “cannot avoid a certain anthropocentric or even humanist teleology” (1989: 55). that, even though heidegger wishes to avoid it, “the words ‘poverty’ and ‘privation’ imply hierarchy and evaluation” (56). the problem lies with the term ‘poor’: the animal is ‘poor in world’ is not to be understood in terms of hierarchical value; the animal is ‘poor’ does not mean to say in comparison that the human is ‘rich’ in having world. according to heidegger, the animal is poor in the world on its own terms, poor in the sense of being deprived. the question of the hand the [human] hand is a peculiar thing. in the common view, the hand is part of our bodily organism. but the hand’s essence can never be determined or explained, by its being an organ which can grasp. apes, for example, have organs that can grasp, but they have no hand. the hand is infinitely different from all grasping organs—paws, claws or fangs—different by an abyss of essence. (heidegger, 1968: 16) the sentence at the centre of this quotation is, derrida says, “heidegger’s most significant, symptomatic, and seriously dogmatic”; it is one, he continues, that risks “compromising the whole force and necessity of the discourse” (derrida, 1986: 173). “apes, for example, have organs that can grasp, but they have no hand.” this statement, derrida claims, presupposes a sort of empirical knowledge whose evidence is never shown. heidegger takes no account of zoological knowledge, and its recent rapid expansion, that is to be included under the word animal, or animality. we read here the inscription of an absolute oppositional limit between a human withdrawn from biologistic determination and an animality enclosed with organicobiologic programmes. as derrida notes wryly, what heidegger says of the ape without hand is a clear indication that he has not studied the apes in the black forest (174). the result of this discussion of the system of limits within which the human hand takes on sense and value is that the very name of the human, his or her geschlecht (‘species being’)1 a becomes problematic itself. the human hand, then, is a thing apart, not as a separable organ but because it is dissimilar from other prehensile organs (paws, claws, talons). the abyss that is reinstated between the human hand and the ape’s ‘paw’ is that of speech and thought. “only a being who can speak, that is, think”, heidegger writes, “can have the hand and can be handy in achieving works of handicraft” (heidegger, 1968: 16). thus for heidegger the human hand has a complex relation to thought and all work of the hand is rooted in thinking. derrida continues his critique: 1. this word, with its shifting meanings of ‘race’, ‘species’, ‘genus’, ‘gender’, ‘stock’, is the title phrase of a series of essays by derrida on heidegger: “geschlecht: sexual difference, ontological difference” (1983); “geschlecht ii: heidegger’s hand” (1986); and “heidegger’s ear: philopolemology (geschlecht iv)” (1992). 2� if there is a thought of the hand or hand of thought, as heidegger gives us to think, it is not of the order of conceptual grasping. rather this thought of the hand belongs to the essence of the gift, of a giving that would give, if this is possible, without taking hold of anything. if the hand is also, no one can deny this, an organ for gripping (greiforgan), that is not its essence, is not the hand’s essence in the human being. (derrida, 1987: 172-3) we might say that here that heidegger’s treatment of the animal ‘shows his hand’. for heidegger, the figure of the hand is determined not by a biological or utilitarian function—“does not let itself be determined as a bodily organ of gripping” (173)—but rather can serve as a figure for thought. the essential centre of this meditation opens onto what derrida describes as “the hand’s double vocation”. the word vocation describes the way that the hand holds on to speaking and at the same time shows, points out, gives itself as the extended hand. heidegger writes: but the work of the hand is richer than we commonly imagine. the hand does not only grasp and catch, or push and pull. the hand reaches and extends, receives and welcomes—and not just things: the hand extends itself, and receives its own welcome in the hand of the other. the hand holds (hält). the hand carries (trägt). (heidegger, 1968: 16, translation modified) the nerve of the heideggerian argument, as derrida points out, seems reducible to the opposition of giving and taking: the human hand “gives and gives itself, gives and is given”, like thinking or what gives itself to be thought, whereas the organ (let’s call it that) of the ape as a simple animal can “only take hold of, grasp, lay hands on the thing”, in that it does not have to deal with the thing as such (1987: 175, derrida’s italics). can the hand change hands? is it given or taken? what does it mean to be handed over from human to animal? then again, as derrida has repeatedly shown in a clutch of diverse texts, “the distinction between giving and taking” (176) is never one we may be assured of.2 furthermore, the hand for heidegger, as will be clear from the few quotations i have provided, is a singular thing; that is, heidegger always thinks the hand in the singular—“as if man did not have two hands but, this monster, one single hand” (182), notes derrida. the human that speaks and the human that writes uses one hand. the human of the typewriter (today we would say of the computer), and technics in general, uses two hands, as does, let me add, the human who milks the cow. so this is why, derrida writes, “[t]he hand cannot be spoken about without speaking of technics” (169). the question of technics however, reading heidegger on technology immediately invokes a technical problem, the question of translation. with heidegger, samuel weber has written, “what is lost in translation, often without a trace, is a certain practice of language, in which colloquial, idiomatic phrases play a decisive role” (weber, 1996: 55). the translation of heidegger’s famous 2. see, for example, the gift of death (1995) and given time i. counterfeit money (1992). interstices 6 paper “the question concerning technology” (die frage nach der technik, 1953) confronts us with the problem of translation, the problem of conceptual rendition. first of all, the english translation of ‘technology’ for ‘technik’ loses this trace of the colloquial. it is, as weber says, both “too narrow” in excluding the meanings of craft and skill and, at the same time, “too theoretical in suggesting that the knowledge involved is a form of applied science” (60). i shall follow weber and use the term ‘technics’ which is less theoretical in english but also, unfortunately, less habitual, than ‘technology’. a second problem arises with the word ‘concerning’ in the standard title, “the question concerning technology”; this word again is odd because ‘nach’ in german carries the primary meanings of ‘towards’ and ‘after’. let me quote weber again: “both meanings will play a significant role in heidegger’s train of thought as it moves towards the question of technics, but only by going (and coming) after it in a certain way” (61). even the word ‘question’ (‘frage’) in heidegger’s title designates something “very different from a mere striving after and answer, in the sense of cognition or information” (62). rather, it involves a movement of opening oneself up to something else which is worthy of being questioned.3 weber proposes that the equivocal title be translated as “questing after technics”. in “questing after technics” heidegger’s position contests the classically mechanistic understanding of technology. for heidegger, western metaphysics has not led to human ‘progress’, but instead to a technological instrumentalism in which everything—including humankind—stands revealed as raw material for the goal of greater power and security. in contrast, the dynamic sense of technics is ongoing and moves away from the idea of a pure and simple self-identity of technology. this is not in itself technical. again, to quote weber: “heidegger leads his readers in a quest after something that is not simply equivalent to technology, although it is that without which technology would not be” (63). the thinking of technology depends upon philosophical speculation, a presentation of philosophy’s constitutive inability to think technē, but a speculation that transforms philosophy in the process. the approach to the question, the questing, of technics allows the relation between the technical and the human to appear through past failures to think it. for heidegger this speculation starts from the distinction between a traditional and a modern technics. his example of traditional technics is drawn from the sphere of pre-industrial agriculture where nature is worked or tilled (‘bestellt’). but in the era of industrialization, he argues, nature is no longer worked and cultivated (bestellt), it is gestellt, literally, placed, ‘set up’ or ‘emplaced’. technics now has the sense of placing nature on order—a sort of extracting. gestell, we must also remember, comes from ‘stall’, once meaning ‘place, position’, but now, of course, as it is in english, ‘a stable or cowshed’.4 the notion of ‘emplacement’ (again i am following weber in using this ‘english’ word for gestell, in contrast to the standard english translation and subsequent commentary, where it is rendered as ‘enframing’) assembles the various ways in which everything, animals and human beings included, is set in place.5 but as emplacement the questing, the on-going of technics has an ambivalent character: the questing brings to a halt, it sets in place; and yet this placement is a constant ‘re-placing’, it is a dynamic process that opens up. it is in his 1926 essay “why poets?” 4. note also the interplay of these terms in heidegger’s ‘why poets? ’: “but that which is set up [das gestellte] —where is it set up [gestellt], and by what? nature is brought before man by human re-presentation [vor-stellen]. man sets up the world as the entirety of objectiveness before himself and himself before the world. man delivers [stellt zu] the world unto himself and produces [stellt her] nature for himself. we must think of this production [herstellen] in its wide and diverse essence. man tills [bestellt] nature when it does not satisfy his representation” (2002: 215). 5. taking up another hint of heidegger, weber (1996) also offers the translation of ‘skeleton’ to encompass the corporeal implications of gestell. 3. see derrida (1989) for a discussion of “questions opened by heidegger and open with regard to heidegger … to the question of the question, to the apparently absolute and long unquestioned privilege of the fragen” (7, 9). 2� that heidegger, following rilke, reverses his position on animal, being and world and concedes the existence of a community of living beings, “the integral entirety of beings”. heidegger writes in this essay: the absolute self-assertion of the deliberate production of the world … is a process that comes out of the hidden essence of technology. only in the modern era does this begin to develop as a destiny of the truth of beings in their entirety … (heidegger, 2002: 217) this is not simply a restatement of the commonplace that we live in a world articulated through increasingly sophisticated technological supports, which, in turn, bring with them a radical transformation of the site of humanity in the world. nor is it purely a case of a split between the position of an affirmation of the technicization of the world, or simply, in contrast, an affirmation of the human against these very processes of technicization. my argument will be that thinking through the relation between the human and the animal, as begun by heidegger, will allow us to think through the relation between the human and the technical, in a way that thinks technology without opposing thought to technics. or, to put this otherwise, my gamble is that it is the question of technics that allows us, will allow us, to think the relation between the human and the animal through all the past failures to think it. that will allow us to “take a hint”, as heidegger says, “from the phenomena of advancing technology, a hint in the direction of those regions from where, perhaps, an originary, constructive overcoming of the technical could come” (2002: 217). at times heidegger’s treatment of the animal, as i have noted, verges on a cartesianism (what derrida calls “the cartesian tradition of the animalmachine that exists without language and without the ability to respond” [2003: 121]): a position which treats animals as little more than machines. this is most clear in a now notorious passage from an unpublished lecture of 1949, where heidegger adverted to the holocaust. interestingly, the title of this piece was “das gestell”, and it was part of the lecture series upon which “the question concerning technology” was to be based: agriculture is now the mechanized food industry, in essence the same as the manufacturing of corpses in gas chambers and the extermination camps, the same as the blockade and starvation of nations, the same as the manufacture of atom bombs. (“das gestell”, 1949 lecture cited in rockmore, 1992: 241) this comment is perplexing. what was heidegger thinking when he compared modern methods of farming with the holocaust? is this remark a work of deep thought or an obscene comparison? does it display a shocking insensitivity to the mass murder of the death camps? which is greater: the scandal of heidegger’s post-war silence on the shoah or the scandal of this off-hand comment, this sort of throwaway discourse? on the one hand, roy sharp’s herringbone cowshed functions as an illustration of heidegger’s statement: it employs a technological means to make efficient a mechanical output. indeed, the phenomenon of modern mechanized agriculture is so momentous for heidegger that it is comparable to historical events such as the russian blockade of berlin and the american interstices 6 deployment of the atom bomb over japan.6 this race for efficiency—in gas chambers or milking sheds (“in essence the same”)—reduces being to raw material. but in its way the herringbone cowshed also suggests that the operative distinction is not between human being and animal, as heidegger ended up maintaining, but between the lived body and the objectified body, as his analogy to the death camps forces us to consider.7 as heidegger had already noted in “the question concerning technology”, “the essence of technology is by no means anything technological” (heidegger, 1977: 44). something deeper is going on in the mechanization of agriculture than first meets the eye. for, on the other hand, as heidegger was to fleetingly argue, the technē of sharp’s cowshed is not addressed at making or producing certain things, but at the unlocking of being as such. iv i want to turn now briefly, before returning to this question of ‘the unlocking of being’, to the work of someone who has tackled the broader immediate cultural and political stakes of this undersubscribed debate on the technical object, bernard stiegler. technics, as stiegler points out, is the unthought, repressed by philosophy as an object of thought. he writes: “the meaning of modern technics is ambiguous in heidegger’s work. it appears simultaneously as the ultimate obstacle to and as the ultimate possibility of thought” (stiegler, 1998: 7). my exploration of stiegler will also return us for a moment to the question of the hand (of the ape). a central section of stiegler’s first volume on technics and time consists of a discussion of the writings of the french paleontologist andré leroi-gourhan and his empirical analysis of the process of hominization based upon the evolution of the prosthesis—something not itself living—by which the human is nonetheless defined as a living being. stiegler elaborates how this account of the origin of man (in terms of the stone implement or tool) refuses to confront, despite having the terms to do so, originary technicity. in his book gesture and speech (1993), leroi-gourhan grants the prehominid (australopithecus) the possibility of speech, but refuses it the possibility of anticipation (memory and foresight), the symbolic, and the thought of death. leroigourhan thereby maintains that the technics of the prehominid is still of a zoological type. hence its language is nothing more than the articulation of an animal cry, a language constituted by signals rather than the general and abstract economy of signs. in other words, the prehominid has none of the (later) human qualities (anticipation, language, the symbolic). it is here that stiegler mobilizes derrida to argue that any possibility of speech already rests on a movement of idealization without which there would be no language in the first place, and that this idealization rests in turn on the possibility of anticipation. stiegler writes: “it is in the aporia of the origin of language that the chasm deepens: what will have come first, language for the foundation of society, or society for a decision on language?” (stiegler, 1998: 127) as a result, the passage from the prehominid to the hominid, which leroi-gourhan wishes to sustain, cannot have a simple origin. rather this passage, and remember we are precisely here at the moment of trying to think the passage from animal to human, demands to be thought in terms of its impossibility, in terms of the aporia of origin. furthermore, for leroi-gourhan’s hypothesis what marks the transition is the technical 6. heidegger’s lecture was delivered in 1949, the same year as the russian blockade of berlin, and four years after the deployment of the atom bomb. 7. for a broader discussion of the relation of non-human life in the factory farm or laboratory and human life in the camps see agamben’s discussion of the concepts of ‘bare life’ (1998) and the exceptionary power of sovereignty (2003) that are central to the power exercised over the human in the camp but may also be applied to non-human animal life. �1 intelligence in the use of a stone implement, but at the same time what lies beyond the animal is language, a symbolic transcendence of the technical. in his inability to think through the aporia of origin, leroi-gourhan’s analysis is thus beset by a non sequitur. technical intelligence ends up by being animal and yet it does not mark the specificity of the human. by refusing the abyss of essence between logos and technē, stiegler is both working within the heideggerian problematic and overturning it. this realignment with the constitutive role of technics has radical consequences for all of heidegger’s themes, methods and articulations. it should not be forgotten that heidegger’s concern was to understand the animal in its otherness, and to let that otherness be. this understanding was to be achieved, he thought, through an imaginative transposition of the human into the animal. in this self-transposition “the other being is precisely supposed to remain what it is and how it is. transposing oneself into this being means … being able to go along with the other being while remaining other with respect to it” (heidegger, 1995: 202). “it is not”, says derrida, “that the animal has a lesser relationship, a more limited access to entities, it has an other relationship” (1989: 49). the idea of an “other” relationship provides a crucial insight into the possibility of an animal world. derrida moves the question from one of its existence (does the animal have a world?) to that of the relationship by which humanity might discover the animal world (how can one speak of or comprehend an animal world?). in derrida’s critique of heidegger, the poverty of animal being presupposes, nonetheless, some mode of having, even as it drifts towards ‘not-having’. “the animal is deprived of a world because it can have a world”, says derrida (1989: 50). accordingly, animals are neither reticent inhabitants of the human world, nor are they, like stones, impassive to the environment of entities. rather, the animal inhabits, even if in a negative manner, a world that is at the same time not a world. it is at this point, declares agamben, that the ontological status of the animal environment can be defined: it is offen (open) but not offenbar (disconcealed; lit. openable). for the animal, beings are open but not accessible; that is to say, they are open in an inaccessibility and an opacity—that is, in some way, in a non-relation. this openness without disconcealment distinguishes the animal’s poverty in the world from the world-forming which characterizes man. (agamben, 2004: 55) v giorgio agamben concludes that from heidegger’s perspective on the ‘anthropological machine’ of western thought two scenarios are possible: (a) posthistorical man no longer preserves his own animality as undisclosable, but rather seeks to take it on and govern it by means of technology; (b) man, the shepherd of being, appropriates his own concealedness, his own animality, which neither remains hidden nor is made an object of mastery, but is thought as such, as pure abandonment. (agamben, 2004: 80) interstices 6 how are we to understand these projections? and for us they still are projections. i will conclude here by trying to get all of my cows out of the black forest back into their cowshed. heidegger’s strategy is not simply one of refusal of technology, nor the nostalgia involved in the return to an agrarian condition, but of a new relation of cohabitation and thereby a reconfiguration of humanity itself in relation to being as a whole. for what is most characteristic of ‘emplacement’ or ‘enframing’ (gestell), the transformation of the world into a totalized network of resources, is that it is not merely something humans do to an environment, or do with machines but, first and foremost, it is a demand, a requirement they place upon themselves, their transformation into the human resources necessary for total mobilization. this is how the question raised by technics, we might say, points beyond mere technology. it is in order to describe the face of this ‘beyond’, and the nature of its ‘suspension’ of the interval between human and animal, that agamben turns to two examples to illustrate these two scenarios. first of all, a letter of walter benjamin which introduces the enigmatic concept of the ‘saved night’.8 this agamben elaborates as follows: the ‘saved night’ is the name of this nature that has been given back to itself … the salvation that is at issue here does not concern something that has been lost and must be found again, something that has been forgotten and must be remembered; it concerns, rather, the lost and the forgotten as such—that is, something unsavable. the saved night is a relationship with something unsavable … for modern man the proper place of this relationship is technology [la tecnica]. but not, to be sure, a technology conceived, as it commonly is, as man’s mastery of nature … the anthropological machine no longer articulates nature and man in order to produce the human through the suspension and capture of the inhuman. the machine is, so to speak, stopped; it is ‘at a standstill,’ and in the reciprocal suspension of the two terms, something for which we perhaps have no name and which is neither animal nor man settles in between nature and humanity and holds itself in the mastered relation, in the saved night. (82-83) agamben’s second example is a late work by titian known as nymph and shepherd (vienna, kunsthistorisches museum, 1570-75) [figure 4]. there are two figures in the foreground in a dark country landscape. the shepfigure 4: titian, nymph and shepherd (vienna, kunsthistorisches m, 1570-75) 8. it is worth noting that agamben’s term ‘bare life’ (“life that may be killed but not sacrificed” [1998]) also has its origin in walter benjamin’s work “critique of violence”, where the term used by benjamin—bloßes leben (1996c: 33) —signifies ‘bare life’, ‘naked life’, ‘uncovered life’ or, as in the edward jephcott translation of the piece, “mere life”. rodney livingstone in the same volume translates benjamin’s die gerettete nacht as “the redeemed night”. �� herd (‘the shepherd of being’) facing us has just taken the flute in his hands from his lips. the nymph, naked and viewed from behind, lies stretched next to him on a leopard skin, a traditional symbol of wantonness. she has turned her face towards us and with her left hand lightly caresses her other arm. in the distance is a tree that has been struck by lightning and is now half-bare and half-green. an animal (a goat, according to some commentators) rears up to nibble at the tree’s leaves. what are we to make of the exhausted sensuality and subdued melancholy of this landscape? it points, agamben conjectures, to the existence of a space beyond both the figure of the human and the animal, in which neither openness nor concealedness are constitutive of being. it is an image not limited by the contest between human and animal; an image that allows the animal to exist outside the sphere of being; an image that “let[s] the animal be outside of being” (91). agamben writes: sensual pleasure and love—as the half-bloomed tree bears witness—do not prefigure only death and sin. to be sure, in their fulfillment the lovers learn something of each other that they should not have known—they have lost their mystery—and yet have not become any less impenetrable. but in this mutual disenchantment from their secret, they enter, just as in benjamin’s aphorism, a new and more blessed life, one that is neither animal nor human. it is not nature that is reached in their fulfillment, but rather (as symbolized by the animal that rears up … ) a higher stage beyond both nature and knowledge, beyond concealment and disconcealment … in their fulfillment, the lovers who have lost their mystery contemplate a human nature rendered perfectly inoperative—the inactivity and desoeuvrement of the human and of the animal as the supreme and unsavable figure of life. (87) titian’s lovers present an image of being in a state of suspension. the lesson that agamben draws from heidegger here is one of ‘letting be’. he conjectures the existence of a space beyond both the figure of the human and the animal, and within this state being is not driven towards the revelation of being, there is only a ‘lost mystery’ and a suspension of the desire to look further behind the façade of just being (2004: 87). this same movement allows the human to reconfigure its relationship with the animal within itself. as agamben observes, if humanity defines itself by its capacity to disconnect itself from its animal connection to its disinhibitors, then it should also possess the capacity to allow the animal to exist outside of the sphere of being, to “let the animal be” (agamben, 2004: 91). among the many things at stake here, i have tried to suggest, lies the break with instrumentality at the heart of technics: the instrumentality that holds technics is a means to an end. what heidegger wants is a conception of technics that is extroverted in a relation of indebtedness to and responsibility toward another. roy sharp’s herringbone cowshed may mechanize milking but it also opens up the animal as a place of spacing, the spacing of body with natural world, of human body to animal body, of animal with animal. it opens up the possibility of thinking the body as a place of clearing. we understand such things about animals quite instinctively: we gain entry to their bodily space, whenever animals are treated like objects, when interstices 6 cows are treated with hormones which grossly increase their productivity of milk but cause them great pain, when they are herded into stalls barely large enough to hold them, when they are mercilessly slaughtered (despite a lifetime of service as milk producers) for their hides. we understand this best, and quite instantly, when we cause animals pain. as deep ecologists have argued in the wake of heidegger, for humanity to realize its genuine potential, and thus to be authentic, human beings must let animals be what they are instead of treating them merely as resources for human ends. this is the realm of posthuman biopolitics, where to allow the animal to exist outside of being is precisely to remove it from the inquiry of human sujectivity, and thus call an end to the continued determination of life that characterizes the conflict between human and animal. references agamben, g. (1998). homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life (d. heller-roazen, trans.). stanford: stanford university press. agamben, g. (2003). stato di eccezione. torino: bollati boringhieri. agamben, g. (2004). the open: man and animal (k. attell, trans.). stanford: stanford university press. benjamin, w. (1996a). letter to florens christian rang (december 9, 1923; r. livingstone, trans.). in m. bullock & m.w. jennings (eds.), selected writings: vol. 1, 1913-1926. cambridge: harvard university press: 389. benjamin, w. (1996b). one-way street (e. jephcott, trans.). in m. bullock & m.w. jennings (eds.), selected writings: vol. 1, 1913-1926. cambridge: harvard university press. benjamin, w. (1996c). critique of violence (e. jephcott, trans.). in m. bullock & m.w. jennings (eds.), selected writings: vol. 1, 1913-1926. cambridge: harvard university press. derrida, j. (1987). geschlecht ii, heidegger’s hand. in j. sallis (ed.), deconstruction and philosophy. chicago: university of chicago press. derrida, j. (1989). of spirit: heidegger and the question (g. bennington & r. bowlby, trans.). chicago: chicago university press. derrida, j. (1992). given time: i. counterfeit money (p. kamuf, trans.). chicago and london: university of chicago press. derrida, j. (1993). aporias: dying—awaiting (one another at) the ‘limits of truth’ (t. dutoit, trans.). stanford. stanford university press. derrida, j. (1995). the gift of death (d. wills, trans.). chicago and london: university of chicago press. derrida, j. (2003). and say the animal responded (d. wills, trans.). in c. wolfe (ed.), zoontologies: the question of the animal. minneapolis: minnesota university press. heidegger, m. (1968). what is called thinking? (f.d. wieck & j. glenn gray, trans.). new york: harper and row. heidegger, m. (1987). being and time (j. macquarrie & e. robinson, trans.). oxford: blackwell. heidegger, m. (1971a). poetry, language, thought (a. hofstader, trans.). new york: harper and row. heidegger, m. (1971b). on the way to language (p.d. hertz, trans.). new york: harper and row. heidegger, m. (1977). “the question concerning technology” and other essays (w. lovitt, trans.). new york: harper and row. heiddeger, m. (1995). the fundamental concepts of metaphysics: world, finitude, solitude (w. mcneill & n. walker, trans.). bloomington: indiana university press. �� heidegger, m. (1998). letter on humanism. in w. mcneill (ed.), pathmarks. cambridge: cambridge university press. heidegger, m. (2002). why poets? in j. young & k. haynes (eds. and trans.), off the beaten track. cambridge: cambridge university press: 200-241. leroi-gourhan, a. (1993). gesture and speech (a. bostock berger, trans.). cambridge, ma: mit press. naess, a. with d. rothenberg. (1989). ecology, community and lifestyle. new york: cambridge university press. rockmore, t. (1992). on heidegger’s nazism and philosophy. berkeley: university of california press. stiegler, b. (1998). technics and time, 1: the fault of epimetheus (r. beardsworth & g. collins, trans.). stanford: stanford university press. weber, s. (1996). upsetting the setup: remarks on heidegger’s “questing after technics”. in a. cholodenko (ed.), mass mediauras: form, technics, media. stanford: stanford university press: 55-75. zimmerman, m. (1993). rethinking the heidegger-deep ecology relationship. environmental ethics, 15: 195-224. corresponding author: harris b. bechtol, phd sam houston state university email: hbb014@shsu.edu journal of applied hermeneutics march 20, 2017 the author(s) 2017 a hermeneutic phenomenology: the death of the other understood as event harris b. bechtol abstract this is a phenomenological description of what is happening when we experience the death of another that interprets surviving or living on after such death by employing the term event. this term of art from phenomenology and hermeneutics is used to describe a disruptive and transformative experience of singularity. i maintain that the death of the other is an experience of an event because such death is unpredictable or without a horizon of expectation, excessive or without any principle of sufficient reason, and transformative or a death of the world itself. keywords death, mourning, the other, event, phenomenology, derrida and you, o tree, whose branches already are casting their shadows on one poor body and soon will be overshadowing two, preserve the marks of our death; let your fruit forever be dark as a token of mourning, a monument marking the blood of two lovers. (ovid, 2004, 4.157-161) poetry, literature, and art in general have a unique ability to expose us to common experiences so that we see the heart of these experiences as we live them out in everyday life. art can function as a mirror of our deepest philosophical concerns by highlighting our average, everyday understanding of phenomena. though classified under myth, ovid’s account of how the mulberry tree came to bear red instead of white berries functions in just this way. he shows in the tragic love of thisbe and pyramus how the death of a loved one is carried by the world itself through the world’s own metamorphosis. death and world remain integrally bound so that the bechtol journal of applied hermeneutics 2017 article 6 2 loss of someone changes the world itself. this understanding of the relation between world and death at the turn of the first century is also part of today’s popular culture. the recent netflix series daredevil reflects back to us this average, everyday understanding of the transformative potentiality of the death of the other. when the questionable character, elliot grote, is killed by the marvel anti-hero the punisher, only three characters attend grote’s funeral: his legal representatives. father lantom, the priest presiding over the funeral, elaborates on this experience of death by highlighting this loss as more than just the loss of the person: “precious in the eyes of the lord is the death of his saints.” well, elliot grote was no saint. he was human—deeply flawed. every sunday, for as far as i remember, elliot would come here friendless and alone to sit right there in that pew. often, i would see him take whatever money he had—crumpled one hundreds, loose change, a rolex watch one time—and put it in the collection plate hoping for redemption, which would never come. praying for the light, but elliot died still in the dark with no one to mourn his loss except the three of you. and so, we might say one life gone, one sinful life, but one person is not just one person. in each of us, there is a world webbing out, reaching others. creating reactions. sometimes equal sometimes opposite. we rush to say one life gone, but each of us is a world. and today, a world has been lost [emphasis added]. (kelly, 2015) despite art’s ability to reflect back and highlight such experiences, it often does little to take us beyond their singularity. in a deeply important sense, any death is each time unique—chaque fois unique as jacques derrida says—so that any death is always already an experience of singularity that resists universalization. and yet such an experience of singularity to which art can expose us does not resist philosophical engagement. engaging such singular experiences philosophically requires that a way, path, or method be chosen that seeks neither to universalize nor exhaustively explain these experiences. undoubtedly, philosophy is wont to seek after the universal and the exhaustive, but this is not philosophy’s only concern. phenomenology and hermeneutics provide this way or path for philosophically engaging the death of the other in its singularity but without attempting to universalize the singular. through a phenomenological description of what happens when we survive, that is, live-on after, sur-vivre, the death of the other, we can provide the contours of and offer an interpretation of such an experience of singularity. the death of the other is, then, each time unique, but the repetition of such a common event allows us to describe some of the crucial and abiding structures of these events. each time unique, then, can be read as repetition of the same but always with a difference. this phenomenological description of surviving the death of the other offers an understanding of the relation of death and the world. by deploying event as a term of art from phenomenology and hermeneutics, i limn the lines around the abiding structures of an experience of the death of the other by providing an understanding of what happens when we live on after such death. with this description, the relation among death and the world begins to be understood insofar as the death of the other is more than just the loss of the person but also the loss of the meaningful contexts in which we find ourselves. in other words, the death of the other is a death of the world. 1 this 1 here, and throughout, i draw from jacques derrida’s insistence, “for each time, and each time singularly, each time irreplaceably, each time infinitely, death is nothing less than an end of the world” (sovereignties in question: the poetics of paul celan, ed. thomas dutoit and outi pasanen [new york: bechtol journal of applied hermeneutics 2017 article 6 3 phenomenological account provides an understanding of the transformative and disruptive potentiality of the event of the death of the other on account of its unexpectedness, its excess, and its transformation of the world in its happening. symptoms of an event: unexpected, excessive, and transformative considering that this description of the death of the other relies on the term event, understanding the symptoms of an event is necessary so that the importance of the description’s contours may come into full relief. the event as a term of art became popular around the middle of the twentieth century when philosophers in phenomenology and hermeneutics began exploring ontologies outside of traditional substance metaphysics, which many believe emphasizes the mastery of the human subject over the objects that stand over against it. substance metaphysical approaches, according to these philosophers, have been unable to engage with the most important aspects of life and being, which can be gathered under the heading of degrees or modes of givenness (marion, 2002a; gschwandtner, 2014). these philosophers are concerned with whatever exceeds the conceptual and linguistic horizons of subjectivity by either an excess of givenness or a givenness of recess. the name offered for such givenness is the event. yet the diverse group of philosophers concerned with such an event2 provides no universal definition that would capture the nature of an event. as jean-luc nancy (2000) aptly says, “[t]here is no event ‘as such’” (p. 169). nancy and others resist any definition of an event because an event is understood to be an experience of possibility, contingency, and singularity itself. all we ever have in terms of our experience of an event are our experiences of particular events. we can have many experiences of events, in this sense, but we never experience the event as such. thus, no universal, transcendent form of the event exists. only a plurality of singular events exists. attempts to universalize the singularity of any event are, then, resisted by these philosophers of the event. nevertheless, these philosophers often use similar language to describe what experiencing an event entails. for example, an event for these philosophers concerns a transformative moment when the “unexpected and unpredictable [disrupt] the normalized, neutralized, and forcibly pacified status quo” (zabala & marder, 2014, p. 9). and this disruption of a “singular occurrence” introduces “an element to our world or our situation that could not have been thought or predicated in advance and that, as soon as it has arrived, reconstitutes the previous relations between beings in a world because it interposes itself among them. thus, it changes and reconfigures the world” (van der heiden, 2014, p. 17). consequently, an experience of an event fordham university press, 2005, p. 140] emphasis mine). on the strange arithmetic of this phrase where each death is a death of the one world, see not only below but also harris b. bechtol “event, death, and poetry: the death of the other as event,” philosophy today (forthcoming) and dennis schmidt, “of birth, death, and unfinished conversations” in gadamer’s hermeneutics and the art of conversation, ed. andrzej wiercinski. 2 this group includes, but is not limited to, martin heidegger, especially his work from the mid 1930s where he focuses on das ereignis (the event) in conjunction with his career-long task of thinking the truth of being, along with the french reception of heidegger’s work by gilles deleuze, alain badiou, jacques derrida, jean-luc nancy, jean-luc marion, françoise dastur, and claude romano. in addition, john d. caputo’s recent work has made this topic popular for english speakers interested in continental philosophy. bechtol journal of applied hermeneutics 2017 article 6 4 has a “symptomatology” (derrida, 2001, p.105): we know when an event has disrupted the norms of everyday life because such a disruption carries common symptoms with it. with this, derrida’s own writing on events can be used to represent this largely agreed upon structure of an event as unexpected, excessive, and transformative. derrida enumerates numerous aspects of our experiences of events: surprise, exposure, unanticipatable (inanticipable), unforeseeable, without horizon, unpredictable, unplanned, not decided upon, unexpected, singular, impossible, and secretive. we can summarize many of these themes in his work under three major aspects: impossibility, secrecy, and symptomatology. the impossibility of an event acts as the condition from which the other aspects flow. for derrida says, “this experience of the impossible conditions the eventiality of the event [conditionne l’événementialité de l’événement] …. what happens, as event, can only happen there where it is impossible” (derrida, 2001, p. 96). he does not mean that an event is a logical impossibility. rather, the condition of an event’s possibility is found only in its phenomenological impossibility, that is, there where the occurrence of an event, the breaking in of an event into the status quo, does not accord with our horizons of expectation for an experience. an event is impossible in this sense because it is unanticipatable: its occurrence exceeds or even resists our horizons of expectation through which phenomena ordinarily occur for us. an event suddenly breaks in and surprises us because it cannot be seen according to these horizons of expectation. thus, derrida (2001) says that we must speak of “the im-possible event” where the hyphenation of this word indicates “not only the opposite of the possible” but also “the condition or the chance of the possible” (p. 101). this im-possible event is not, however, “inaccessible” because it still “announces itself … swoops down upon and seizes me here and now … in actuality and not potentiality …. it is what is most undeniably real” (derrida, 2005, p. 84). an event is possible there where it finds its limit in our various conceptual and linguistic horizons of rationality through which life becomes relatively predictable and stable. yet this does not mean that an event never occurs. rather, when an event arrives, its arrival disrupts the relative predictability and stability of everyday life. an event remains phenomenologically impossible to our expectations and known possibilities all the while bringing its own possibilities through which it appears. thus, derrida (2006) says, “it may be, then, that the order [of the event] is other … and that only the coming of the event allows, after the event, perhaps, what it will previously have made possible to be thought” (p. 18). only after an event can we then begin to think what this event has made possible on account of the new conditions of possibility that attend its arrival. with its possibility found in its impossibility, derrida points us to the second major aspect of an event: secrecy. an event is secret not insofar as it is hidden or clandestine but insofar as it “does not appear” (p. 105) in the way that we expect other phenomena to appear (derrida, 2001). as a phenomenological im-possibility, this non-appearance of an event removes it from any principle of sufficient reason or search for universal knowledge about the event. as such, an event remains “unexplainable by a system of efficient causes” (derrida, 1992, p. 106) because such a system belongs to our horizons of expectation through which life becomes relatively stable. accordingly, derrida (2001) says that if we can define an event with “one possible definition” it would be that “an event must be exceptional, without rule” (p. 106). an event obeys no rules or principles unless those principles are “principles of disorder, that is, principles without principles” (derrida, 1992, p. 123). considering that an event’s occurrence exceeds or resists our horizons of bechtol journal of applied hermeneutics 2017 article 6 5 expectation, the principles of its occurrence must be principles of disorder because its appearance disrupts our conditions of possibility for an experience. consequently, an event is an experience of the other that resists the hegemony of subjectivity. derrida utilizes this notion of the secret as a “way to let the other be, to respect alterity” (caputo, 1997, p. 180). an event as other can happen in the realm of the same, the realm of phenomenology, but when it happens there, it does not appear according to our expected principles for phenomena. it irrupts into the same as the other. thus, an event is irreducible to our phenomenological horizons that it interrupts and keeps open. it, then, appears without appearing. it shows up according to its own order or conditions of possibility and not our own. it appears as the correlate of an intention that cannot confine it. it surprises and exceeds us. as such, an event is a secret. for this reason, derrida insists that an event is also symptomatological. he uses this term not in any clinical or psychoanalytic sense. rather, he says that “this notion of symptom” (p. 105) comes from what he thinks about “verticality” (derrida, 2001). the arrival of an event is an arrival that “falls on me” (derrida, 2001, p. 97). he insists “on the verticality of this matter because the surprise can only come from on high” (derrida, 2001, p. 97). without this verticality, we could see an event coming on the horizon. we could expect an event. but, as we have seen, an event is precisely that which surprises and that which is an exception or without law. t hus, the symptomatology of an event suggests that an event’s arrival “can only give rise [donner lieu à] to symptoms” (p. 106) that befall us after the event’s occurrence (derrida, 2001). an event manifests itself only in symptoms: without horizon, surprising, unexpected, aleatory, excessive, transformative, etc. thus, if an event comes, a technological invention or a gift of forgiveness, for instance, it happens as a singular surprise, as “always exceptional” and “without rule” (derrida, 2001, p. 106). through its exceptional happening, an event as other enters phenomenality with a kind of “transcendental violence” (derrida, 1978, p. 123). 3 an event arrives in such a way that we can say something about the symptoms that have befallen us with its arrival. yet at the same time, an event arrives without arriving. the event still remains other and, thereby, secret and im-possible. while derrida’s work has proved helpful in understanding the largely agreed upon symptoms of an event, important differences in the philosophical approaches to the event remain. one such difference concerns the contrasting temporalities of an event: “following the event” and “awaiting the event in its imminence” (van der heiden, 2014, p. 137). some figures, for example, alain badiou, jean-luc marion, and claude romano, orient the temporality of an event around a past occurrence whose givenness causes us to return repeatedly to this occurrence in an effort to understand and mine its depths. consequently, these philosophers use birth as their primary figuration of an event. marion claims, for example, that i continually aim at my own birth “intentionally” by “wanting to know who and from where i am, undertaking research into my 3 here i am drawing on derrida’s account of transcendental violence in his essay “violence and metaphysics.” using husserl, he critiques levinas by saying, “[i]t is impossible to encounter the alter ego … impossible to respect it in experience and in language, if this other, in its alterity, does not appear for an ego (in general)” (p. 123). alterity, the other, must appear in the same, in phenomenality, for us to have any relation with or recognition of this other. yet such an appearance of the other in the same “in which the other appears as other, and lends itself to language … is perhaps to give oneself over to violence … an original, transcendental violence, previous to every ethical choice” (p. 125). bechtol journal of applied hermeneutics 2017 article 6 6 identity” (marion, 2002, p. 42). our life is “solely occupied … with reconstituting [our birth], attributing to it a meaning and responding to its silent appeal” (marion, 2002, p. 42). and yet other figures, such as martin heidegger, emmanuel levinas, jacques derrida, and jeanluc nancy, orient the temporality of an event around the advent of what is to come. death has, consequently, become an important figuration of an event for these philosophers. 4 yet the predominant approach to death has been through personal death or personal mortality. since at least plato, the history of philosophy has been preoccupied with the death of the self or one’s own death. heidegger’s existential analytic of dasein’s being-toward-death in being and time— where he argues that anxiety over one’s own death is our originary experience of death that exposes us to our own being, our relation to temporality, and our responsibility to become a self—has made this focus on our own death especially important. adhering to heidegger’s analysis, one’s own death can be understood as an event because our anticipation of this end engenders new interpretations of our being and of the meaning or being of things around us (polt, 2014). however, not until the works of levinas and derrida has this focus on our own death found important philosophical objection. they agree that our own death is not the most fundamental experience of death because the death of the other is more fundamental. as levinas (2000) says, “the death of the other: therein lies the first death” (p. 43). and they each maintain that the self is constituted first and foremost through its responsibility to the other. consequently, the death of the other is the “more originary experience” of death because it “institutes responsibility … in the ethical dimension of sacrifice” (derrida, 2008, p. 48).5 my “right to be” a self, then, “is already my responsibility for the death of the other” (levinas, 1989, p. 86). what remains to be done in this history of the event and its relation to death is to provide a phenomenology of the death of the other, in particular, that helps to understand this ordinary experience as an event. such a description would offer an account according to the symptoms of an event. consequently, the following describes the unexpected, im-possible arrival of the death of the other, the excessiveness of this arrival beyond our conceptual and linguistic horizons of rationality, and its transformative potentiality. the symptoms of the death of the other if the death of the other is an event, it must arrive without our ability to be ready for it. the death of the other must be an unexpected occurrence. this unpredictability is rather obvious in the case of tragic deaths. when parents must live on after the death of their own child, they are “experiencing the unimaginable and never expected experience of being a bereaved parent” bright et al., 2015, p. 1). as a bereaved parent, the natural flow of life has been brought to a halt: children are supposed to bury their parents—not the other way around. the natural flow of one 4 nancy does, however, admit, “in a birth or in a death—examples which are not examples, but more than examples; they are the thing itself—there is the event, some[thing] awaited, something that might have been able to be” (p. 167). 5 cf. derrida’s criticism of heidegger’s analysis of being-toward-death in aporias where he says, “[m]an, or man as dasein, never has a relation to death as such, but only to [the] perishing [of animals], to [our own] demising, and to the death of the other …. the death of the other thus becomes again ‘first,’ always first …. the death of the other, this death of the other in ‘me’ [in the experience of mourning], is fundamentally the only death that is named in the syntagm ‘my death’” (1993, p. 76). bechtol journal of applied hermeneutics 2017 article 6 7 generation to the next has unexpectedly been reversed. when lori and brian mcdermott lost their twenty-one year old daughter, maia, to a car accident, they comment that their past experiences of losing their own parents, grandparents, uncles, and cousins “provided little preparation for what [they] were now experiencing” (mcdermott & mcdermott, 2011, p. 12). the tragic loss of their child was unexpected and surprising, and their past experiences of death could not prepare them for this singular event. thus, we can say that sudden deaths surprise us because we did not see them coming, literally, and we could not have imagined them happening and especially in the way that they happened. however, the more planned, predicted, or imminent deaths of the other seem problematic. these deaths do not seem to be unpredictable, especially when we consider the instances of death where the other plans her own death on a particular date—as brittany maynard did on november 1, 2014—or when a doctor declares that a patient has a limited number of months left to live. this important difference between different ways that the other dies notwithstanding, all deaths of the other, even if imminent, remain unpredictable. after all, the focus with the death of the other is as much about the inception of this event when the other dies as it is about living on after this death, that is, surviving the other. whether the loss of the other was sudden or expected, one factical element pervades all of these experiences: those who survive the death of the other must live on in the world without this other. and this experience of survival is always unexpected because we can never be prepared for how the loss of the meaningfulness of things in our worlds will touch us after the other is gone. we can see from this experience the integral connection among the unexpectedness of the death of the other and its transformative nature. before turning to the latter directly, understanding the excessiveness of the death of the other will help us more fully appreciate its transformative potentiality. if the death of the other is an event, it must not only arrive unexpectedly but also excessively so. the arrival of the death of the other is excessive because it exceeds our conceptual and linguistic horizons of rationality. no matter how much factual information a person may have about when and how the other has died, the survivor continually comes back to the question, in one form or another, of why the other has died. in the wake of maia’s death, the mcdermotts express that “there is no reason for a loss that hurts this much” (mcdermott & mcdermott, 2011, p. 96). when tommy givens, “a baptist pastor’s kid, lifelong christian, former missionary and seminary professor,” survived his father’s death from lou gehrig’s disease, he describes his experience in this way: everything was the same, and yet his father was gone …. [tommy] stood in his parents’ living room where his father had just died—and wondered what to do next. ‘we were groping for what might help us navigate something very profound,’ [tommy] recalled, ‘something that would shape us for the rest of our lives.’ (thompson, 2015, pp. 23-24) regardless of the answers that tommy’s own faith had to offer him in this experience, he continued to grope for something that would make sense of it. belief in seeing the deceased again in the afterlife may assuage some worries in the survivor, but this belief does not help explain why the other has been lost. no exhaustive account or reasonable explanation placates the trauma and pain that accompanies this loss. even jesus, whom christianity claims to be both human and god and would, thereby, know the bliss that one of his followers would experience in bechtol journal of applied hermeneutics 2017 article 6 8 the afterlife, weeps when his friend lazarus dies. the death of the other resists any principle of sufficient reason, that is, resists this horizon of expectation as to why the other has died. we may certainly know what caused the death: heart failure, cancer, overdose, respiratory failure, etc. often these medical explanations can alleviate some of the pain, but none of nor all of them can cause us to stop asking why the other has died. these sufficient reasons cannot explain away the grief, pain, and trauma of this loss. suddenly, the survivors find themselves in the world of voltaire’s (1950) candide where the principle of sufficient reason has been reduced to a “pitiable state” (p. 29) unable to explain why this state of affairs “is for the best in this world” (p. 43).6 one phenomenological footprint for this excessiveness of the death of the other is the cyclical nature of the mourning or grieving process. we repeatedly return to the death of the other, perhaps even to its inception at the passage from life to corpse, in an effort to mine the depths of this event. yet we cannot reason our way through this event as evidenced by repeatedly living through and beyond this moment itself in our work of mourning. the death of the other is a traumatic event that, as such, “is not remembered per se, but recurringly relived” (jones, 2014, p. 141).7 the experience of the death of the other is relived “‘belatedly’ in the form of intrusive and uncontrollable flashbacks” (jones, 2014, p. 152). the survivors of the death remain unable “to integrate the experience into ordinary systems of personal history and meaning” because this trauma “short-circuits” the brain (jones, 2014, p. 151). the event “remain[s] stuck and never gain[s] access to the frontal lobes [of the brain], which is not only where language arises but is also the part of the brain that reasons and understands” (jones, 2014, p. 151). thus, we often hear from survivors who have lost loved ones that they cannot believe he or she is gone. they are struck by the reality of the other’s absence, by this absence’s facticity, but they fail to “‘believe in it,’ or say what it is” (jones, 2014, p. 152). consequently, these survivors tell and retell the story of the death of the other along with the stories about the life lived by the other who has been lost. the survivors find themselves mourning the loss of the other but unable to work fully through this loss. their past loss continues to haunt their present. thus, their work of mourning remains workless. as workless, their mourning is a negotiation between moving completely beyond their loss, in a sense forgetting the other who has been lost by interiorizing the other in their own memory, and what freud calls melancholia, that is, never coming to terms with the death of the other. derrida (2005b) maintains, in this regard, that a “certain melancholy must still protest against normal mourning” (p. 160) because the other as other can never be interiorized or appropriated to the subjectivity of the survivor. in the mcdermotts’ mourning of their daughter’s death, their mourning remains workless because “finding the balance between the ‘old normal’ and the ‘new normal’ would probably be a constant challenge forever more” (mcdermott & mcdermott, 2011). this cyclical, workless nature of mourning is a process that attempts to appropriate the unexpected loss of meaning or the unexpected absence made present in the world when the other dies. yet this appropriation always fails on account of the excessiveness of this loss beyond our reasoning and explanatory capacities. 6 exceptions to this might be when the deceased was a terrible person who mistreated or even abused those around him or her. in these cases, we might think that the death of such an other engenders a state of affairs that is for the best in the world. though this might be an exception, such a death would still come unexpectedly and be transformative of the world. 7 while jones’s account of trauma fits nicely here with this description of the death of the other as an event, she does not associate the trauma of the death of the other with this term of art event. bechtol journal of applied hermeneutics 2017 article 6 9 if the death of the other is an event, it must not only arrive unexpectedly and excessively but also with transformative, disruptive potentiality. when this event occurs, it transforms our meaningful contexts that have been constituted in relation to the other. in this transformation, we experience the death of the other as more than just the loss of the person because it is also a loss of the world. it is a death of the world. here the term world is understood phenomenologically as the context in which things and others have their particular meanings on account of the bequest of history, heritage, and tradition. thus, the world is understood as the meaningful contexts in which we find ourselves. while the earth on which we all live can be described as a world in this sense, this one world or context of meaning that we all share is at the same time many worlds. 8 thus, in life we find ourselves in many worlds in which things and people have meaning: home, work, the university, the study, the classroom, etc. and the constitution of these worlds, as both heidegger but more importantly nancy maintain, occurs always with the others with whom we are in relation. drawing on this understanding of the with-world or the world as co-constituted with others, the event of the death of the other not only shows us, often for the first time, that our worlds are always with-worlds but also marks our with-worlds with an absence of meaning or a givenness of recess. the death of the other, then, discloses both the birth of the world as a withworld and an end of the world. consequently, when the other dies, his or her absence is given to us or made present to us especially when we return to those places that mean the most to us on account of the moments we have shared in these spaces with the one who is now dead. the meaninglessness that attends the things in our world afterwards indicates how the death of the other is both an end of the world but also an origin of the world (derrida, 2005b).9 for example, when a loved one dies and you visit what used to be your (plural) favorite restaurant, now that he or she is dead, everything seems off, uncomfortable, or strange. “it just doesn’t feel the same without him/her,” we often hear from people in these situations. the food, though it is the same chef, ingredients, dish, and recipe, may even taste different. this alteration arises on account of the absence of the other that is made present at the restaurant. moreover, how often do we hear of a person or family moving houses after a husband, wife, partner, or child dies? the absence of the other is so present that it can become deafening in the house, making the house almost uninhabitable. when what we love is lacking, [t]he one who loves sees the world only through the absence of what he loves, and this absence … flows back on the entire world …. [t]he world has not disappeared; it remains present … but this disappearance [of what is loved] nevertheless strikes the appearance of the world with vanity. (marion, 1991, p. 136) the mcdermotts’ evidence this death of the world marked by the vanity or meaninglessness of things in their own experience of the death of their daughter. they describe this death as a 8 the german die umwelt captures this sense of world nicely because it denotes the world (welt) surrounding (um-) us. 9 here, i am drawing from and elaborating on derrida’s insight about how one of paul celan’s poems, “rams,” which concerns the death of the other, “says the world, the origin and the history of the world … how the world was conceived, how it is born and straightaway is no longer” (sovereignties in question, p. 162). bechtol journal of applied hermeneutics 2017 article 6 10 “shattering [of] our world” (p. ix) in which they have been “left behind … to adjust and find meaning” (p. xiii) in “a most unwelcome new world” (mcdermott & mcdermott, 2011, p. 3). after their loss on february 20th, they awoke to “a totally upended world” (p. 2) that they name “the post-220 world” (p. 27) and “the post-220 journey” (p. 35) (mcdermott & mcermott, 2011). but when they return to maia’s room and experience the presence of her absence through the things in her room, they recognize in this not only the end but also the birth of their world: when we opened the door and saw all of her things arranged as if in a state of permanent suspended animation, tears fell from our eyes and our hearts filled with sorrow. the still incomprehensible reality of it all hit us again: maia’s not coming back to finish reading that book by the bed, or go to the next class on her schedule, or use her computer to send us an email, or cuddle with all those pillows. (mcdermott & mcdermott, 2011, p. 28) they recognize that the book, the computer, the pillows, and the entire room has, or is, the meaning that it has on account of their relation with maia through these things. the mcdermotts recognize that “[d]eath sets a thing significant” (dickinson, 2013, p. 93) because, often, only when the other has been lost, do we then recognize that things like a book, computer, or pillows in a world have the meaning or significance that they have on account of the relation of these things with the one who has died. only then do we recognize the birth of the world as a withworld at the death of the world. the meaningful context of maia’s room and all of the things in it was co-constituted with maia—it is a with-world. however, with maia’s death, the meaningfulness of this with-world has been lost. her death marks a death of this world so that when they experience this post-220 world, they are experiencing the presence of maia’s absence through the recess of meaning or the meaninglessness of the things in their with-world without maia. in a sense not unlike the transformation of the mulberry tree in ovid’s poem, this absence made present in the world after the death of the other is a token of mourning that the world itself carries in the wake of the death of the other. to experience the death of the other, to undergo this event, is to survive a death of the world, and this survival, as we can see, extends beyond the moment in which the person is actually lost. consequently, this description of the death of the other shows that this event is not readily reducible to an inaccessible instant of passage from life to death but includes living on after the other is gone. the death of the other includes the aftermath, the shock, and the grieving of the loss of the person as well as the loss of what the world has meant to and with that person. the death of the other includes the grieving of a death of the world. after all, this loss of the world with the other is happening; for instance, in the instant that the funeral is being prepared and happening or tours of new houses are being given. thus, when the death of the other happens, occurs, breaks in, interrupts, or disrupts, it marks a transformation of the world. the pre-event world and the post-event world are radically different insofar as the meaning of the world, the world itself, has been lost. a “new order of [the] world” is at play when the other dies (bright et al., 2013, p. 6). therefore, when a husband, wife, partner, or child dies, those who survive this person often move houses because the presence of the other’s absence is suffocating now that the survivor of the other must carry on life in the house that he or she helped establish as the home, as one of the worlds for the family. for the loss that is experienced is the loss of what the world had meant to that person and what the world had meant to us, or to a group, on account of our relation with the now deceased. the being-with of the restaurant, the food, the house, etc. bechtol journal of applied hermeneutics 2017 article 6 11 includes the now dead other. so when we revisit those places where he or she used to be or that meant this or that to us on account of that person, we experience this absence, this token of mourning. the event of the death of the other transforms everything because the world means differently, worlds differently, in the aftermath or in the event of death. one of the most profound ways that the world worlds differently concerns the effect of the other’s death on the foundation of our temporal existence. certainly the death of the other is recorded as having taken place at a particular, temporal moment or now point: “the estimated time of death was…” “she was pronounced dead at…” time of death is codified on the death certificate. but the phenomenon of the death of the other as a whole is both inside time in this way while also outside of time. this death operates outside of time because in disrupting the world, this event solicits or shakes the foundations of our experience of temporality. on the one hand, the event of the death of the other “ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact” (blanchot, 1986, p. 1). death simultaneously ruins the world while leaving life intact. despite the fact that we may have just lost a loved one, a friend, a neighbor, a beloved pet, a mentor, god, etc., life continues as usual: the sun continues to rise, the weather continues t o change, and work must still be done. as the mcdermotts (2011) put it, “[t]he post-220 world still retained the entire pre-220 work world” (p. 35). when life seems like it should stop on account of the loss that has happened, life continues despite the death that marks a death of the world. life goes on in a way that “the new normal” becomes “facing the realities of life without” the other who has died (bright et al., 2015, p. 7). moreover, we now have myriad questions and problems to deal with: who’s the next of kin that we need to call? when will the funeral be? what do we do with the body: cremation or burial? what kind of music at the funeral? who will speak at the memorial? what about her car? how will the department recover from this? who will grade his students’ papers? am i ok? should i see a therapist? life continues intact but am i intact? will i recover? in fact, the wholeness of the self of those who survive this event may precisely be unwhole, incomplete, or fractured. death ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact. death may leave everything intact but only in some incomplete way. we seek closure over the death of the other but, perhaps, we are never “to have closure over such an event and perhaps we do not even want it” (bright et al, 2015, p. 8). perhaps, the closure we seek when the other dies remains a lack of closure. such a lack could be a recognition that our mourning is workless. or, perhaps, this lack of closure could result from the reality that someone might be irrevocably ruined, driven mad, driven to his or her own end because of the death of the other. this is always a possibility. after all, one of the things for which we can never be ready is how the death of the world that attends the death of the other, which almost just is the death of the other, will touch us. consequently, the death of the other in its ruination of the world may be a surprise or something we did not see coming. “she was too young to die.” “we all knew he wasn’t in good health, but i still cannot believe he is gone.” “it just doesn’t make sense.” or simply, “why?” beyond this surprise of the event in its happening, the way in which everything is left intact may even surprise us. the alarm-clock goes off one morning months after she is gone and the first thought from the survivor is, “another day? do i really have to get up? why am i still like this?” thus, the restitution after the event of the death of the other may be a tragic one. and it may not be. both are always live options here because we are dealing with an irruption of singularity and contingency, that is, with an event. the rupture of the world surprises us. the continuation of life after this death surprises us. moreover, the rupture surprises in the bechtol journal of applied hermeneutics 2017 article 6 12 instant that the restitution surprises us. the death of the world with the other is taking place in the instant that we plan the funeral, look for a new house, distribute his students’ papers to be graded, visit our favorite restaurant for the first time post-event, etc. consequently, the rupture and restitution of the world after the event bleed into one another, overlap one another, or instantly take place with one another. the moment of the loss of the other, the inception of the event, becomes a past that will not stay put. this past moment of the event has returned, come again—revenir—like a specter or revenant come to haunt the present. and in its haunting, on the other hand, we are reminded not only of the loss of the other and the loss of the meaningfulness that attended our relation with her but also of the loss of the future. as the mcdermotts (2011) attest, “[i]t is now time to emerge and face a totally upended world and a future that had shifted 180 degrees [emphasis added]” (p. 25). the possibilities that we once hoped for in relation with the other are now no more. such possibilities are, as futural, constituted by their absence that we hope one day will become actual and present. but now that hope for the actualization of these possibilities is lost itself thereby re-doubling the absence that constitutes them. therefore, our temporal existence after this event of the death of the other is thoroughly out of joint (shakespeare & hubler, 1987). the present remains haunted by a past that draws us back to the moment of the inception of this event. and yet this past continually returns or comes again as if from the future because “the specter is the future, it is always to come, it presents itself only as that which could come or come back” (derrida, 1994, p. 48). moreover, the present is riddled with the absence of future possibilities once hoped for but now lost or gone with the death of the other. our experience of temporality is thoroughly solicited, fractured, and shaken by this unexpected and excessive event to the extent that the world, the with-world, we still share after this event will never be the same. the world may still be present but its presence is felt as the absence of the other who has died. such is this tremendous, monstrous, or ungeheuer event of the death of the other. acknowledgements i would like to thank my dissertation director, dr. theodore george, for helping me craft the major project out of which this piece has developed. also, many thanks go to billy daniel for reading an early draft of this paper and helping me develop my ideas further. 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(2014). introduction: the first jolts. in m. marder & s. zabala (eds.), being shaken: ontology and the event (pp. 1-10). new york, ny: palgrave. http://joynetanyathompson.com/2015/03/23/to-live-and-die-well-fuller-magazine/ o legado de paulo freire para as políticas de currículo e para o trabalho docente, no brasil to cite this article please include all of the following details: costa, hugo heleno camilo. (2019) curriculum, context and otherness. transnational curriculum inquiry 16 (1) p. 61-74 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci <access date> curriculum, context and otherness1 hugo heleno camilo costa2 federal university of mato grosso, brazil introduction the view that the proposition of something that dissolves the supposed problems that a generic school would be going through is recurrent. in this direction, readings are constituted in the curriculum field, which, often colliding with each other, affirm horizons that can be reached when a certain orientation is (or is) assumed for the school, as discussed by pinar et al (2017) and garcia-huidobro (2018). at the same time as the affirmations of solutions in this field are current, so too are the questions about the paths defended for the school. thus, not infrequently, different readings aim to propose a way for a school, recurrently interpreted as that space to be thought, treated, understood or produced by some logic that may favor it in the best, most productive, emancipatory, entrepreneurial or critical direction. the concern that mobilizes this article is to draw attention to how much a politicalcurricular thinking3 can be taken as a meaning-producing textualization for the school. but this would not be enough, because it would continue to point to a view of school as locus that can be controlled by a logic of transparency of the senses that constitute it. therefore, i do not focus on the term school as given object in the world, but i draw attention to the perspective of context, understanding it as an interesting conception of proposition or movements to the other. i refer, therefore, not to a specific space-time, a particular school, but to the presupposition about the transcendentality of access to otherness when we aim at the significance of what is and how it should be. thus, i assume as a scenario to think about the way policies and theorizations in the curriculum field operate in a context control dynamics, whether it is meant as a school, as a social movement, as a space for the formation of a given subject, the world of work, space in which given experience occurs. it is the applicant is a question of a controllable environment assumption, on which a world reading find its resonance and productivity in relation to the subject/otherness. therefore, they are important questions: how to ensure priority contexts? and what is the other to be produced / found 'in' or 'from' a given contextual intervention? these questions aim to incite the limited character of a transparent context in terms of meaning, a context as a meeting point with the otherness that would be given from an a priori conception of what the world is. in opposition to such conception, in this article, which consists of a post-structural investment in the curriculum, i highlight the perspective of context from the proposal by jacques derrida, with a view to thinking about its deconstructionist power in the curriculum studies, the curriculum policy, particularly focusing on the discussion of knowledge, taking it as an example to this discussion. this work is linked to the efforts of different other researchers who have incorporated discursive readings, particularly derridean, into the field of education, such as aquino, corazza and adó (2018), biesta (2017), carvalho (2007), couto junior and pocahy ( 2017), fabbrini costa. curriculum, context and otherness 62 transnational curriculum inquiry, 16 (1) 2019 https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index <access date> (2005), jordan and buhrer (2013), miguel (2016), monteiro (2007), ponzoni (2014), skliar (2003), valenzuela echeverri (2017). in the curriculum field, specifically, i highlight works such as carvalho (2015), costa and lopes (2018a; 2018b), cunha, costa and pereira (2016), egéa-kuehne (2013), green (2017), lopes (2015), souza (2008), gough et al (2003), reis and paraíso (2014), macedo (2015; 2016; 2017), macedo and miller (2018), ng-a-fook (2014). such works concentrate efforts on criticizing structuring perspectives on the curriculum, the school, and the presupposition of what the subject and the meaning of the world become. in this sense, these contributions draw attention to the stealth character of otherness, pointing to deconstruction as a powerful interpretative horizon to the traditions that aim to pave the curriculum field, through themes such as knowledge, the subject, the school, the culture, the experience. given these contributions, this work focuses on a collaborative exercise through the search for the deconstruction of horizons that permeate curricular thinking in a metaphysical register. this is not a superationist expectation in which milestones of a western logocentric view would be supplanted. but it is important, as the philosopher points out, a movement of inscription in the very scenes of affirmation of such markers, so that, in revisiting the installations, we can tension them in their limits or operate in their margins, highlighting their precariousness (derrida, 1982). in a previous work (costa & lopes, 2018a), approaching official documents, we sought to think about the relationship of an expectation of control over context / contextualization through the idea of knowledge. in that work, we highlight the perspective of knowledge as property that, if well involved in supposed contextual aspirations, would lead to the formation of subjects capable of acting in all contexts in a plausible manner. in that approach to documents it helped to think of how different documents, although they can be read as productions linked to governments and / or groups of power, reiterate generic perspectives that make it possible to read a movement of structuring the curriculum and, consequently, the names triggered in the curriculum debate. here i outline as problematization the way, in addition to the official documents, different emblematic works in the curriculum field tend to operate the perspective of context as a given in the world, reasonable, transparent to analysis. i focus on the perspective of context by considering it as a mark of different moments of curricular political thinking, which, focusing on the brazilian scenario, i define as theoretical discussions of the curriculum field and official documents, such as the national curriculum guidelines for secondary dcnem (brazil, 1998; 2012) and the national curriculum common base for secondary bncc-em (brazil, 2018). i argue about control reading as to what is interpreted by context via, for example, knowledge. i point out that, not only in the scope of critical readings to what could be read as efficient and / or traditional, technicist, but i highlight different works, focused on different approaches to curriculum. in a first section of the text, i place the perspective of context in jacques derrida's thought, keeping it associated with the ideas of différance, writing and dissemination. in the second section, i focus on how a structural view of context tends to support approaches to knowledge as structuring of practice, understood as being exposed to apprehension and coordination. for this, i focus on traditional and critical approaches of the curriculum, as well as fragments of official curriculum documents, nuances of readings based on the calculation of what is supposed to be the practice, the context and how the knowledge structures and guides it. i point out that any attempt to control the knowledge, the practices of teachers and students, as well as any other identification involved with the field of education, is in a vain https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index costa. curriculum, context and otherness 63 transnational curriculum inquiry, 16 (1) 2019 https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index <access date> motion in the face of the generative potential of all meaning. similarly, in a third moment of the text, i put into perspective the idea that practice as a production of knowledge, within the scope of a discursive approach, cannot be read as limited to a particular institution or privileged moment, idealities and teleologies. i conclude by considering that all production of meaning is a practice of reading the world, a movement in favor of the hegemonization of a given focus, is already the production of a context, sustained in the attempt to mention, to refer to the other that wants to control or respond in the curriculum. context as an event in different works derrida focuses on deconstruction of markers of western logocentrism/metaphysics as a destabilizing alternative, critical of aspirations to absolute and totalized truths, for different ways of thinking about the world. among its arguments, it beckons the reading of the world through what it calls “text in general” (derrida, 1981), as a textualization that would fuse the boundaries of different productions, turning them into moments of an endless and uncontrollable text. it is a general text driven by difference, interpretive betrayal, and impossibility of access to sameness. from this scenario proposed by the philosopher, i draw attention to the idea of context, which derrida (1982) already argued to be a little treated issue, having in its articulation with the discussions of writing and différance (derrida, 1982). i do this in order to highlight the discussion of knowledge, which i argue is structured in different approaches of curricular thought as a way of constituting skilled subjects to consciously decide in previously conceived contexts. for derrida (1982), a context is an interpretative construction, based on the presupposition of an implicit, albeit structurally vague, consensus that aims to sustain what should be treated within its limits and / or to continue the dialogues on the horizon of a intelligibility and a truth of meaning (derrida, 1982), so that norms or agreements can be established. for the philosopher, a context is never absolutely definable, not saturable by any previous knowledge or calculation. this structural non-saturation would derive from the rupture dynamics of the context itself (derrida, 1982). this is because the iterability as a repetition or quotation of what it is meant to refer to leads to the fact that, as much as one seeks to retain and contextualize the quotation, the meaning of what one intends to reproduce or communicate can never be kept intact. in this reading, the unconscious, singular and intense character of the translation as an iteration / writing is highlighted, considering its productive dynamism and, simultaneously, its ability to fend homogenizing aspirations of writing/textualization, to split full contextual pretensions. to think of the iteration / translation as a means of involvement, irresistible and permanent betrayal, consists in pondering which contexts are fragile (in) founded, because they are constituted by a faith (derrida, 2002) to be dealing with the same thing in relation to a given name or signifier. it is important to conceive of contexts as fractured in their structure, since the additive repetition of différance leads to failure the expectation to mention the referential, which is supposed as the origin or common space of the context itself, which is crossed by the differential dynamics of the meanings articulated under same name/context/signifier. by signaling the context we are no longer in it or accessing it, but changing with the idea of what we are (trying) to mention, we are supplementing and engendering other contexts, inhabiting another contextualization. to mention is, therefore, to break, to iterate the meaning of otherness as an outburst, to be in another context. derrida (1982) marks the iteration as mobilized by différance, which supplements and makes something new happen, contaminates the intention and makes every performing / speaking / writing / translation act express something other than what it was meant https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index costa. curriculum, context and otherness 64 transnational curriculum inquiry, 16 (1) 2019 https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index <access date> to say. from this perspective, it is argued that every utterance is exposed to contextual rupture. for the philosopher (1982), the iterability, while authorizing, corrupts the rules and codes that it constitutes, diffuses the alteration in repetition, the dissemination of meaning by quoting. derrida (1982) considers the context as impossible to saturate and coordinate, given that iterability / writing / translation is the bearer of a game, a spacing, an independence from what could be considered as origin or living intention. thus, it marks the indeterminacy of the context of the production of something, the limitation of the meaning intention and the utterance beyond the context, given the supplementary operation of the iterability that, from now on, changes with the intention affirmed to itself (as full, as presence). although the affirmation of the limits of context is necessary, it is already interdicted by différance, emphasizing the fundamental fluctuation that motivates every sign. derrida (1982) argues that any brand, thought of as writing, is potent in operating beyond its supposed meaning and, being primarily conceived as a disruption of presence in the brand, can be mentioned, quoted. the affirmation of the limits of intention, of consciousness, breaks with every given context, leading to the indefinite constitution of other contexts which, in turn, are also absolutely unsaturable. the ability to be cited or duplicated, finally, the iterability of a name or an idea, is not an accident, but, according to the philosopher, is what a signifier cannot do without to have his operation considered “normal” (derrida, 1982). from this statement, derrida questions what would be a mark in the world that could not be mentioned. writing as supplementation, which intervenes in communication beyond it, which is dynamized in a dissemination that can never be reduced to polysemy, cannot be thought of as the object of the hermeneutic decoding or unveiling of an original truth or meaning. as conceived by derrida, the interpretive betrayal enclosed in writing does not, on the other hand, neglect the existence of intention or consciousness. intention may have its place, but this place is no longer able to coordinate all meaning. for derrida (1982), the intention is not present to itself and its content, but constitutes an absence to transcendentality. this “essential absence of intention in the actuality of the utterance, this structural unconsciousness” (derrida, 1982, p.369), which the philosopher points out as preventing the full saturation or apprehension of a context. according to derrida, for a context to be controllable, intention would need to act as its dominant guideline, which would confront it with the need to be absolutely present and transparent to itself and others. in this sense, derrida (1981) considers that there is no transcendental knowledge or consciousness, absolute control of meaning and, therefore, there is no knowledge about the limits and properties of context, but only a movement of generative dissemination of new senses. to this the philosopher attributes the impossibility of the prevalence of a teleological and totalizing dialectic that enables a certain occasion, moment, regardless of its distance/proximity, to be reconciled into a textual totality that guarantees a supposed truth of meaning. dissemination, which is considered to be inherent in all involvement with language, provides only the production of infinite semantic effects and the limitation to the return to a simple origin. it is the “supplement and the turbulence of a certain lack” (derrida, 1981, p. 45) that fractures the edges of the text in which the world is meant. with this, i do not think that the contextual disruption, through dissemination/différance, is a disagreeable expression, but i point out that, when we suppose to treat the same, we are already supplementing, betraying, producing other meanings in relation to what we aim to deal. it is to recognize in derrida (1981) that we play with parentage or similarity, with the simulation or fiction of a presence that is purely absent. https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index costa. curriculum, context and otherness 65 transnational curriculum inquiry, 16 (1) 2019 https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index <access date> from this reading, i focus markers of curricular thinking that i think tend to project contexts as susceptible to a knowledge, access, analysis, continents of truths. these are conceptions of context marked by the presupposition of awareness and / or precision of their limits in terms of meaning. i argue that contexts are being read as exposed to calculated action, conscious intervention. curriculum policy and the context of knowledge based on lopes and macedo (2011), macedo (2006) and pinar (2017), i draw attention to perspectives of curricular thinking that, although distinct from each other, as traditions tend to remain in the logocentric4 register of control and calculation of the curriculum, knowledge and the subject produced from it, about unforeseen contexts of practices. i consider that such practices tend to be supposed to be restricted to the work of teachers and students in the school environment. reading that, i argue, neglects the perspective that every statement about contextual practices are also contextual practices, that every production of knowledge, in a given context, is an event that, interpretatively revolving possible records, seeks to respond to what is challenging and questions the identity. for the authors, as well as for pinar (2017), since the beginning of the twentieth century, curriculum studies have sought to define its object in different ways, ranging from aspiration to precision about the best proposition of curriculum guides for educational networks until the understanding of what happens in the daily life of each school. lopes and macedo (2011) point out that the curricular tradition has, as a recognizable center, the search for the organization and conduction of processes understood as related to the educational process and, therefore, to the control of the experience, the practice of teachers and students. from the conceptual organization proposed by lopes and macedo (2011), i base this discussion focusing on what could be read as a first approach5 or moment of more organized curricular thinking as a field. so i take bobbitt's behavioral / efficientist arguments as well as his contemporary rivalry: dewey's progressive proposals. according to pinar et al (2017), the first one tends to be associated with more restrictive and directive approaches to the curriculum, understanding it as control and social administration based on scientific matrices. its perspective is the focus on knowledge and learning for solving tasks and the achievement of goals set as common and desirable for education. the second, also based on the resolution of social problems, is pointed by lopes and macedo (2011) as less coercive from the point of view of knowledge control, being linked to the defense of a more democratic education, based on the critique of inequality and valuation of the child's experience as a way to bridge the gap between formal educational presupposition and student interest. among such views, the difference in the way they think about the orientation of school practice, the production and the purposes of knowledge is highlighted, being central to bobbitt's efficiency the preparation of the child for the productive world, for adulthood. dewey's (1959) progressivism, on the other hand, would be based on the defense of learning as a continued process of knowledge production and not as a stage of adult education. however, as pointed out by biesta (2014), the author operates a projection of the subject to be constituted via knowledge in a given childhood and school, structuring, in this sense, the curricular production (dewey, 1959). according to lopes and macedo (2011), progressivism is organized as a social criticism, so that the knowledge of the child allows the reflection on social problems with a view to intervention for a more democratic society. for this, dewey's (1959) progressivism uses a set of propositions to ensure the development of an education articulated with the common social experience in school contexts. in this, a meaning of what the school context is and what should be the social experience for https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index costa. curriculum, context and otherness 66 transnational curriculum inquiry, 16 (1) 2019 https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index <access date> the subject would already be defined. the tension between technical perspectives and social experience made possible, according to pinar (2017), tyler's eclectic proposition, whose curriculum model, although intended to articulate the two views, focuses on the efficiency rather than progressive perspective. according to lopes and macedo (2011), tyler defends a model based on a precise link between curriculum and assessment, reducing the curriculum to a set of propositions and the evaluation for the function of verifying curricular effectiveness. according to the authors, the prescriptive character of the curriculum is what is in common between efficientism, progressivism and tylerian rationality. although the referred theorists are focused on different problematizations, they converge in the sense that the school is a context of application of presupposed knowledge and, therefore, exposed to control and rationalization. in common, such curricular readings have gathered around a knowledge view linked to the academicist view, which would be based on the presupposition of scientific knowledge as the basis for the construction of subjects to act in a society perspective. critical readings of such views led, in general, to two others, criticalreproductivist and emancipation and resistance. these approaches, despite the differences, advocated ways of knowing capable of raising awareness / forming subjects to a critical social reading, for recognition of their condition in the social structure of classes and, thus, mobilizing them for transformation, involvement with counter-hegemonic purposes. in response to efficiency and progressivism, the critical movement also affirms the interpretation of contexts as exposed to determinations of what is external, superior and hegemonic: ideology and power (pinar et al, 2017). for pinar (2017) and lopes and macedo (2011), the affirmation of the centrality of knowledge in the critical movement focuses on the presupposition of neutrality, drawing attention to how different proposals, such as efficiency and progressivism, even if conflicting, reduce the debate about knowledge to methodological or systematic concern in curriculum development. as highlighted by pinar et al (2017), the theoretical investments aligned under what may be called the critical-reproductivist approach turn to the questioning of school and curriculum as mechanisms of control, alienation and social reproduction. these views are based on macrostructural readings based on marxist thinking, to think about the relationship between economic base and superstructure (lopes & macedo, 2011). despite their distinct concerns, more or less deterministic, authors such as althusser, baudelot and establet, bowles and gintis, bourdieu, young and apple, have their perspectives directed to the view that the school and therefore knowledge are reproductive mechanisms of social structure and ways of knowing. highlight as emblematic (besides considered foundational to reproductivist theories) the thought of althusser. for the author, the hierarchies between different knowledges, the selectivity in access to them, the focus on methodologies that do not lead to criticism, and the way they are proposed to form subjects who should act in specific positions in the social structure, reiterate the school and the production of knowledge as a means of reproduction and social control. in this way, the school, as well as other scopes called “ideological apparatuses”, can be read as a transparent context to the interpretation of the researcher, who through macrosystemic analysis would know every form of being and doing inside. the school would have nothing but the univocity of the domain of a given ideology. critical-reproductivist readings were also considered alienating because they reaffirmed what they criticized, as giroux (1988) points out, by calling them “discourse of despair”. such readings have come under harsh criticism from movements driven by the influence of cultural studies and other microstructural approaches in the curriculum field (pinar et al, 2017). https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index costa. curriculum, context and otherness 67 transnational curriculum inquiry, 16 (1) 2019 https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index <access date> the thought of emancipation and resistance (lopes & macedo, 2011) opposes the view that the school is a mere space for reproduction of the social structure of classes, reproduction and transmission of world readings. this movement is mainly influenced by phenomenology, hermeneutics and existentialism, being supported also by works by freire, pinar, giroux, mclaren and willis. such readings commonly advocate the experience, the practice of knowledge production, the dynamic reality lived in schools, as critical to macrosystemic readings, which would tend to underestimate the life, nature and productive character of the school context, from and in relation to the expression of the daily life of the subjects (lopes & macedo, 2011). in this direction, for example, giroux (1988) points to the focus on human agency as a possibility of understanding the processes of mediation, accommodation and resistance to the logic of capital, as well as the social practices of domination. resistance thinking (giroux, 1988) stated that it is a gross mistake of reproductive thinking to neglect the need to produce a conception of agency that could favor the empowerment of subjects through their ways of knowing. for the author, the reproductive theory concentrates all its critical argumentation on the reiteration of the reproductive power of the school in the capitalist society. with these arguments, the authors of resistance built the opposition to reproductivist thinking and assumed, according to pinar (2017), the lead of critical thinking in the curriculum field, through an inversion of the interpretative perspective. they came to advocate school-centered approaches in contextual local experiences, seeking their interaction with broader social contexts. there were also works that advocated counter-hegemony, in response, focusing on everyday / contextual / experiential power, projecting the subject as active and potent in the production of knowledge through the empowerment of his world readings, via a critical appropriation of the world through knowledge produced by local solidarity networks. i agree with lopes and macedo (2011) to read that the projected conflict between traditional and critical thinking and, within the scope of the critical movement itself, between reproductivist and emancipation and resistance approaches, marks the search for the overcoming of a technical rationality, in a first moment. in another way, there is also the defense of the distension from a formal curriculum view, read as insufficient with the lived dimension, to a perspective of valuing the daily experience as knowledge production by the subjects in their local contexts. i consider that the conflicts marked by different productions, as they form a broader discursive field, continually affect the curricular production, also in the production of official documents, constituting the possibility of reading the curriculum policies as subsumed in a broader scenario of production of meaning. without assuming that such theoretical perspectives are transferred to curriculum documents directly, but by interpreting that, in a discursive reading, they are moments of a general text of curriculum policy, i focus on fragments of the texts involved with the national curriculum guidelines for secondary dcnem (brazil, 1998; 2012) and the national curriculum common base for secondary bncc-em (brazil, 2018), which mark what i have called here from a perspective of curriculum structuring via knowledge and context control. produced at different times and governments, these texts involved in the dcnem and bncc-em constitution movement are mentioned here not at random, but because they are considered texts of great repercussion in the public and academic debate. i consider that these are moments of attempts to represent a broader textuality of politics, besides assuming a character of obligation and foundation for the production and proposition of curricular changes in the most different levels of government and spaces of power. as a background, the text of dcnem (brazil, 1998) projects as specific contexts contemporary scientific, behavioral and https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index costa. curriculum, context and otherness 68 transnational curriculum inquiry, 16 (1) 2019 https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index <access date> social transformations as a way to support a given worldview. such a view, stated as inexorable, is supposed to impose on society an unknown view of society, but which will be appropriated through integrated knowledge via interdisciplinarity. knowledge is attributed to the ability to achieve social inclusion, preparation for the world of work, ethical, flexible, autonomous and critical training of the person produced by secondary level, so that it can act and adapt to the most different social contexts. knowledge, projected at the center of what is the function of education / curriculum, carries the opportunity for the formation of competences and skills capable of producing socially included subjectivities that would be knowledge producers and citizens (brasil, 1998, p.16).citizenship and competence, with the potential for preparation to do everything, in this case, would be constituted by knowledge. such reading allows the conjecture that citizenship, subjectivity and ways of conceiving the world are conditioned to a knowledge not obtained, but virtually proposed by dcnem. knowledge capable of ensuring the construction of a polyvalent subject and bearer of a critical potentiality defined by what is given as critical. from the perspective of the document (brazil, 1998), a specific knowledge is capable of producing a certain subject adjusted to act in all contexts supposed to be guaranteed for life. such knowledge is assumed to be capable of enabling access to supposed “true meanings about the physical and social world” (brazil, 1998, p. 27), knowledges considered competent to the formation of subjects capable of analyzing and producing solutions, of orienting to correct decision in the face of challenges, to provide adaptability to new situations (brazil, 1998, p.27).the acquisition of such knowledge is defended as fundamental to the production of subjects by the school and through disciplinary knowledge. the defense that knowledge must be contextually appropriate is specifically supported in the absence of a given subject. with this, we have a movement that tends to limit the meaning of the context through what should be known in it, on it and for it, defining it as given of knowledge, as having known properties in its entirety prior to the experience. this stands out when topics such as work and employment, also assumed to have fixed meanings, are assumed as priority contexts for curriculum production, being understood as contexts in which knowledge must constitute competences with preparatory potential for the subject to be in different situations in “ world of occupations” (brazil, 1998).thus, it is argued that knowledge cannot be fragmented, as in a traditional disciplinary model, but should be interdisciplinary and contextualized (brazil, 1998, p.37), appropriating the knowledge of different disciplines for the formation of competent subjects to act in different contexts. in the dcnem proposed in 2012, although mobilized by the mission to achieve the purposes not achieved by the dcnem disseminated in 1998, it is proposed the need for higher qualification of subjects for the industrial development of the country. in this sense, the formation of the ideal subject for the privileged context of the work and the continuous changes of this work is brought together in the missions of promoting social inclusion and citizenship. this perspective allows the idea that the production of subjects for the world of work is necessarily to form autonomous, critical and reflective citizens / workers who can deal with the challenges ahead of a world that is admittedly dynamic. to cope with the creation of ideal conditions, the school is now perceived as a primordial context for the “systematic dissemination of scientific knowledge built by humanity” (brazil, 2012, p. 150). nevertheless, the text defends the importance of the school making a connection with the students' life projects, so that it can succeed in the educational process, in the production of knowledge (brazil, 2012, p.155). as in the 1998 dcnem, the 2012 ones start from the principles of interdisciplinarity and contextualization as a way to ensure the importance of scientific knowledge, to which school subjects would be related. such https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index costa. curriculum, context and otherness 69 transnational curriculum inquiry, 16 (1) 2019 https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index <access date> configuration is considered fundamental to the production of competent subjects, as well as to the production of meanings in privileged contexts, controlling the forms of operation of such knowledge with the appropriate senses / meanings, seen as ideal for a contemporary society view. an integrated scientific knowledge perspective, in this case, is taken as the founding presupposition of the ways of knowing circulating in the curriculum. the contextual application of this knowledge would ensure the neutralization of the gap between theory and practice, producing subjects who are aware of what is defined as desirable in the contexts predicted for life (society, work, for example). the appropriation of scientific knowledge is effective (...) with contextualization that relates knowledge with life, as opposed to little or nothing active and meaningless methodologies for students. these methodologies establish an expository and transmissivist relationship that does not put students in real life, to do, to elaborate. (brazil, 2012, p. 167) scientific knowledge, once interdisciplinarized in its contextualization, along the dcnem texts (brazil, 1998; 2012), signals the expectation of knowledge capable of constituting subjectivities to operate contextually. in a rough perspective, bncc-em (brazil, 2018) intensifies criticism of the curriculum's disciplinary organization, often associating disciplines with the difficulty of constituting competent subjects to operate in supposed contexts for life, such as daily life, the exercise of citizenship and the work, as it points out that: [...] proposes the overcoming of the radically disciplinary fragmentation of knowledge, the stimulation of its application in real life, the importance of the context to make sense of what is learned and the student's protagonism in their learning and in the construction of their life project. (brazil, 2018, p.14) with this, it takes the disciplines as fragmentary bodies of knowledge, unable to deal with the formation of readings on such a common context. it also beckons for curriculum integration and contextualization as ways to achieve a given knowledge derived from the articulation of knowledge with experiences, both (previously) possessing the meaning of “real life” to the student subject. from this perspective, it is possible to interpret that the production of such contextual knowledge would be defined a priori of the subject, since in the affirmation of the text is punctuated the view of what the subject must "know" and must "know how to do", with a knowledge and context already set for their lives. while the document stresses the importance of curricular production being linked to life projects and the meanings of the contexts of a supposed real life, it advances the definition of meanings, for example, by establishing what characterizes as important for the subject and his future experience, as in defending “fields of experiences” and, consequently, expected learning (brazil, 2018, p.51).i consider emblematic of this movement of structuring and control of life contexts the idea of competence, defended in the bncc-em, which points out that the pedagogical practice has as its purpose the clear indication of what students should "know" (considering the constitution of knowledge, skills, attitudes and values) and, above all, what they should "know how to do" (considering the mobilization of this knowledge, skills, attitudes and values to solve complex demands of daily life, the full exercise of citizenship and the world of work) (brasil, 2018, p.12) these defenses aim to guide the pedagogical practices in schools as having to be aligned with a project of meaning of the student and teacher, their life and performance, the meaning of the experiences (in and out of school), and emphasize the school as a space-time of production of operational know-how, as pointed out by macedo (2015).i agree with the author in interpreting https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index costa. curriculum, context and otherness 70 transnational curriculum inquiry, 16 (1) 2019 https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index <access date> that such perspectives point to an opposition to the imponderable, uncontrollable dynamics of school, life, cultural flows that mark this or that context, which cannot be probed, whose meanings are produced contingently. the reduction of knowledge to a functional condition of know-how, which must be an operation planned in / for a given context, with a fixed meaning for the other, marks an important dynamic of a broader curricular textualization. it is, by the discussion that has been conducted in this text, to constitute the perspective of a deconstructionist inscription in the relation with documents, theories and studies of the curriculum. the aim is to highlight the power of a logocentric sense in the field, which seeks to control what is the other of / in school, life, work, society, daily life, the context of a subject, which should be known for a promised future. i consider these perspectives as moments of a broader curriculum policy, in which every decision, to agree or disagree, aims to recover opportunities to propose to otherness (through names such as knowledge, for example), to anticipate it where it is not, because it is (strangely) to come. conclusions working with the idea that knowledge could be omnipotent and functional for every context (school, work, family, society, etc.) points to an attempt to calculate (and thus reduce) ways of knowing the world. i think it is the denial of dealing with the unknown other, of placating the unknown questioning of an “wholly other” otherness (derrida, 1996) that continually imposes the need to revolve our forms of knowledge, whatever they may be, to "give" the response to what is assumed as inescapable. i consider that the context is not calculable, just as the knowledge presumed to be operated in it is not a property carried by a subject with a transcendental reason / consciousness. conceiving the context as not being able to be dominated by a logic or even retaken, knowledge can only be considered as a result of the decision to answer, which comes from a subjectivation (derrida, 1996).that is, with every motion of control, what is projected as sufficient knowledge (to answer what is imposed as questioning [never know where and how]) resides in the moment of madness (derrida, 1996), in the decision in answer, at which time we suppose that subjectivation is precipitated. supported by lopes and macedo (2011), i think of the curriculum as text and, in this sense, retaking the derridean concern that mobilizes these lines, i argue that both traditional and critical perspectives, as emblematic paths in the curriculum field, tend to assume knowledge and the context as exposed to control and rationalization. i emphasize this reading taking into account the state-centric character that marks macrostructural views, defending the verticalization of power, from top to down, in terms of control over the context of school practice, over the production of knowledge. also, the perspectives of emancipation and resistance, which in defense of the vivid and latent character of subjective experience in the context of school practice, reiterate the verticality of the curriculum by conceiving the practice as capable of producing resistance from the down to top, as a counter-hegemony (giroux, 1988). in this case, it would also be possible from a knowledge defined as capable of producing certain subject constituted for pre-established contexts. i think it is conjectured a vision of knowledge supposed to be able to transcend singularities, saturate (unknown) contexts, with the power to solve generic problems, affirm appropriate competences or skills to face whatever the otherness of the school event, of the curriculum, of life. my concern here is for the common presupposition, in the different perspectives and fragments of curricular texts mentioned, that the context of practice is somewhat apprehensible https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index costa. curriculum, context and otherness 71 transnational curriculum inquiry, 16 (1) 2019 https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index <access date> and rationalizable, either by a traditional / instrumentalist or critical logic. in addition, i am interested in highlighting the recurring readings of context as something in the world, as an object, which can be inferred from an interpretive metric, as well as tending to be delineated as a space-time open to the conscious eye, to a transparent analysis. to emphasize the perspective of the curriculum as text (lopes & macedo, 2011), reiterating the textual character of the world, as thought by derrida (1981; 1982), is to consider that all meaning of the curriculum is only a form of involvement, of decision. it is important to understand every practice as a practice of meaning with a view to hegemony, the production of meanings of knowledge, of a given enunciation, produced in a context that 'can no longer be recovered', revived. such arguments include interpreting that any movement of mention to a given context, in defense of something that is deemed important, is to create, contextually and provisionally, new contexts. along these lines of thought, every decision, as in stating a certain production of knowledge, consists of a traitorous contextual practice. it would not be interesting, therefore, to distinguish formal curriculum contexts from practices, for every motion of meaning is possible only if practiced contextually, in a "here and now" (derrida, 1994). establish relationships with such conceptions may imply that not only what is interpreted as the context of practice cannot be reduced to the differential action of teachers and students in schools, but is not restricted to practices limited to physical spaces or institutions. i support the view that all contextual production, like every possibility / opportunity of production of meaning, is singular and already in an asymmetrical movement in relation to otherness. i think it is important to understand that these words (in this text, as well as in all that concerns this discussion of contexts and their opacity), mark the ambivalence of being able to influence the production of new contexts and thereby perish as transcendental truths. notes 1this article is linked to the project “senses of knowledge in curriculum policies: geography and the national curriculum common base” (sentidos de conhecimento nas políticas de currículo: a geografia e a base nacional comum curricular), funded by cnpq and federal university of mato grosso. 2hugoguimel@yahoo.com.br 3i use the expression understanding that the theorizing that we call curriculum thinking is inseparable from the meanings that produce curriculum policies. in this direction, i agree with lopes and macedo (2011). 4according to derrida (1982), logocentric thinking would presuppose that language is transparent, reason and truth are presences affirmed as continuous and ideal. for further study on the subject, i suggest derrida (1981; 1982). 5from the conceptual organization proposed by lopes and macedo (2011), i base this discussion focusing on what could be read as a first approach or moment of more organized curricular thinking as a field. so i take bobbitt's behavioral / efficientist arguments as well as his contemporary rivalry: dewey's progressive proposals. references aquino, j. g.; corazza, s. m.; ado, m. d. l. 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(2013). a condição de aluno-professor de língua inglesa em discussão: estágio, identidade e agência. educação & realidade, 38(2), 669-682. https://dx.doi.org/10.1590/s2175-62362013000200018 lopes, a. c. (2015). por um currículo sem fundamentos. linhas críticas (unb), 21 (45), pp. 445-466.available: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=193542556011 .issn 15164896 lopes, a. c.; macedo, e.f. (2011). teorias de currículo. são paulo: cortez. macedo, e.f. (2006). currículo como espaço-tempo de fronteira cultural. currículo como espaço-tempo de fronteira cultural. revista brasileira de educação, 11(32), 285-296. https://dx.doi.org/10.1590/s1413-24782006000200007 macedo, e. f. (2015) curriculum and teaching in recent curriculum policies in brazil. in: hua z., pinar w.f. (eds) autobiography and teacher development in china. curriculum studies worldwide. palgrave macmillan, new york macedo, e. f. (2016). por uma leitura topológica das políticas curriculares. archivos analíticos de políticas educativas / education policy analysis archives, 24 (26).http://dx.doi.org/10.14507/epaa.v24.2075 macedo, e. f. (2017). mas a escola não tem que ensinar?: conhecimento, reconhecimento e alteridade na teoria do currículo. currículo sem fronteiras, v. 17 (3), pp. 539-554. macedo, e. f.; miller, j. l. (2018). políticas públicas de currículo: autobiografia e sujeito relacional. práxis educativa (uepg. online), 13 (3), pp. 948-965. miguel, a. (2016). historiografia e terapia na cidade da linguagem de wittgenstein. bolema: boletim de educação matemática, 30(55), 368-389. https://dx.doi.org/10.1590/19804415v30n55a03 monteiro, s. b. (2007). otobiografia como escuta das vivências presentes nos escritos. educação e pesquisa, 33 (3), pp. 471-484. http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/s151797022007000300006. ng-a-fook, n. (2014). provoking the very "idea" of canadian curriculum studies as a counterpointed composition. journal of the canadian association for curriculum studies, 12 (1), pp.10-69. available in:https://jcacs.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/jcacs/article/view/39590 . issn: 1916-4467 pinar, w. f.; reynolds, w.; slattery, p.; taubman, p. (2017). understanding curriculum. new york: peter lang. ponzoni, f. (2014). el encuentro intercultural como acontecimiento: una propuesta para el avance teórico de la educación intercultural. educación y educadores, 17(3), 537553. https://dx.doi.org/10.5294/edu.2014.17.3.8 reis, c.; paraíso, m.a. (2014). normas de gênero em um currículo escolar: a produção dicotômica de corpos e posições de sujeito meninos-alunos. revista estudos feministas, 22(1), pp.237-256. https://dx.doi.org/10.1590/s0104-026x2014000100013 skliar, c. (2003). a educação e a pergunta pelos outros. diferença, alteridade, diversidade e os outros outros. ponto de vista (ufsc), 5 (1), pp. 37-50. available in:https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/pontodevista/article/view/1244 . issn: 21758050. souza, r. m. (2008). língua de sinais e escola: considerações a partir do texto de regulamentação da língua brasileira de sinais. etd educação temática digital,7 (2), pp. 266-281.doi :https://doi.org/10.20396/etd.v7i2.808. https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index https://dx.doi.org/10.1590/s2175-62362013000200018 http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=193542556011 http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa https://dx.doi.org/10.1590/s1413-24782006000200007 http://dx.doi.org/10.14507/epaa.v24.2075 https://dx.doi.org/10.1590/1980-4415v30n55a03 https://dx.doi.org/10.1590/1980-4415v30n55a03 http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/s1517-97022007000300006 http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/s1517-97022007000300006 https://jcacs.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/jcacs/article/view/39590 https://dx.doi.org/10.5294/edu.2014.17.3.8 https://dx.doi.org/10.1590/s0104-026x2014000100013 https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/pontodevista/article/view/1244 https://doi.org/10.20396/etd.v7i2.808#_blank costa. curriculum, context and otherness 74 transnational curriculum inquiry, 16 (1) 2019 https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index <access date> valenzuela echeverri, c. e. (2017). derrida, herencia y educación. pedagogía y saberes, (46), 77-83. retrieved august 13, 2019, from http://www.scielo.org.co/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=s012124942017000100008&lng=en&tlng=es submitted: july, 20th, 2019. approved: august, 17th, 2019. https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index http://www.scielo.org.co/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=s0121-24942017000100008&lng=en&tlng=es http://www.scielo.org.co/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=s0121-24942017000100008&lng=en&tlng=es gheitury the book, deconstruction, and the religious sign dr. amer gheitury, department of english literature, school of humanities and literature, university of razi, beheshti blvd. kermanshah, iran. e­mail: amer@ razi.ac.ir. a. gheitury the book, deconstruction, and the religious sign abstract in this article, i investigate a possibility in the structure of the qur’an for rethinking the usually forgotten issue of the religious sign. this is where deconstruction, guided by a certain otherness or transcendence, renders all god’s attributes as unthinkable. thus, god’s presence is not the opposite of absence and his will is not in the way of our free­ dom. in fact, god is the other, not in a dual system. such an otherness brings about the idea of a sign which is non­dual in nature: it presents allah as the other who is never outside the book.1 in addition, he is so near, yet no thing in the book is like him. 1. introduction one can hardly deny nowadays the significance of the question of decon­ struction for philosophy, politics, literary criticism, sociology and other human disciplines. however, when it comes to religion, there is a certain doubt, as to whether the question can be asked at all. this is probably because decon­ struction is approached by many scholars, like the theologian mark c. taylor, as a modern form of atheism. while affirming the theological significance of deconstruction, taylor declares that “deconstruction is the hermeneutics of the death of god and the death of god is the (a)theology of deconstruction” (hart 1989:65). a totally different view is held by john dominic crossan, to whom deconstruc­ tion is not merely theologically significant, but is very much similar to and perhaps indistinguishable in its language from negative theology. “what derrida is saying leads straight into a contemporary retrieval of negative theology” (hart 1989:66). this is more or less similar to the position adopted by john d. caputo: 1 it should be noted that i use the term book (with capital “b”) to refer both to the en­ tire being, as the book of god and also to cases where the distinction between the qur’an and the book is not significant. i also use the term “religious sign” often as a substitute for the book. acta theologica 2009:1 41 how could derrida — for whom everything depends upon faith — rule out religious faith? why would derrida want to ban the name of god, a name he dearly loves? that would imply the excessively foolish notion, already sufficiently rebutted, that there is some sort of negative ontolog­ ical argument embedded in differance which shows the non­existence of god … (1997a:59). it should also be noted that derrida has never attempted to deconstruct a religious text, probably because … what he finds in some literary texts is also at work in religious texts, in the writings of mystics and mystical theologians where the vocabulary and concepts of philosophy present themselves as limited and askew, at variance with themselves (hart 1989:42). moreover, the question of faith and god appears as a major concern in der­ rida’s rather recent writings (1987 and 1995)2 and in the writings of those like caputo who, as we already noticed, describes derrida as a lover of the name of god and as one for whom everything depends on faith. one might consider the controversies on the possible link between religion and deconstruction to signify a re­emergence of the question of religion in a post­ modern context. this re­emergence, as far as derrida’s project is concerned, has been closely linked to the turn toward language or to locating any pro­ blematic, even religion, in the structure of language. derrida has uncovered in language a certain force or a space from which to question the very founda­ tions of western philosophy. it is interesting that along with this questioning, mysticism, which has been regarded by philosophers like kant as the “other” of philosophy, reappears, perhaps more seriously this time. for kant, “what gives life to the mystic brings death to philosophy” (hart 1989:210). the question, on the part of religion, has been whether deconstruction can lead the postmodern man again to religion and faith, and whether it can point to a universal faith, or in derrida’s own words, to a messianism (caputo 1997b:164­168). however, we should not be too quick to identify messianism with any one of the existing religions. what caputo says with regard to der­ rida’s love of the name of god should be considered against derrida’s own comments on his religion: “i have no stable position on the texts … the prophets and the bible. for me this is an open field” (caputo 1997b:21).” he has no one 2 derrida also defends himself against the accusation of being a nihilist: [n]ot only i but many people insist on the fact that deconstruction is not negative, is not nihilistic … [d]econstruction is or should be an affirmation linked to promises, to involvement, to responsibility … so when people say it’s negative, nihilistic and so forth, either they don’t read or they are arguing in bad faith” (norris 1989:6­11). gheitury the book, deconstruction, and the religious sign 42 religion, in the sense of the existing religions, yet the universal faith he looks for can also be sought in determinable religions (caputo 1997b:22). following this introduction which implies the theological significance of de­ construction, i will attempt to bring together deconstruction and religion into conversation on the account that both might be revisited as discourses on the sign. the logic for conducting such a research also appears in the next section. then, i will discuss those structural aspects of the qur’an which might put it at a distance from ordinary speech. although this distance or absence of ordinary language attributes can make the text look like derrida’s writing, the presence of god to readers puts the qur’an at a distance from deconstruction as well. in the structure of the religious sign, thus, one may no longer speak of speech­ writing or absence­presence dualism. in the conclusion, i will briefly refer to possible implications of the present research for deconstruction. 2. the text and the book: religion and deconstruction both teach us to view the world as sign speaking in general terms and not denoting a particular monotheism, we may notice a certain feature linking derrida’s project to religion: deconstruction has been, more than anything, a discourse on the sign, or more particularly, a critique of the sign, the most significant possession of the religion of the prophets. the specific conception of the sign derrida offers shades into the religious sign, where it adopts a very significant theme of european structuralism: the great teaching of modern semiologies following structuralism has been to look at any system as a system of signs or langue which consists of empty elements defined only in relation to one another. here, what constitutes the structure or system of signs is the difference which defines every member of the structure in relation to others. so every element is defined by its difference from others, by that which other elements are not (saussure 1959:120). this idea of struc­ ture has come to be considered as a meta­language for all discourses, be it mythology, literary or anthropological discourse.3 drawing upon de saussure’s concept of the relational structure and adding a further temporal dimension to the difference or the space by which elements are constituted as members of the structure, derrida proposes the unnamable, unstable notion of differance as that which constitutes the structure. difference 3 of course extending the structural model of language to other disciplines is for most part credited to roland barthes in works such as elements of semiology (1968), levi­strauss and his structural anthropology, and other poststructuralist thinkers, among whom derrida stands as the most prominent. acta theologica 2009:1 43 is itself a by­product of a differance, which sets every element simultaneously in a relation of difference and deference with other forms in the structure. this specially invented term makes manifest the two meanings of the french verb differer. as derrida describes it: on the one hand, it indicates difference as distinction, inequality, or dis­ cernibility; on the other, it expresses the interposition of delay, the interval of a spacing and temporalizing that puts off until “later” what is presently denied (harland 1987:138). by appealing to this “differance,” deconstruction thus describes language or the text as infinitely productive and unstable. what derrida proposes here is not merely a theory of language; it is, rather, a general framework for any system outside language as well. derrida is leading us to view everything as language, as a text, or as a world based on “differance.”4 in fact, he has led us to see the world as a text whose play of significations nothing can escape. presenting the phenomenal world as language and more particularly as sign is an old religious theme without which religion is not thinkable. as der­ rida puts it: “sign and deity have the same place and time of birth. the age of the sign is essentially theological. perhaps it will never end” (1974:14). der­ rida has in fact touched a religious theme which, in my reading, places him one step away from a purely materialist position toward being. a point to note here is that the critique of the dual sign and destructing it — if such a task were possible at all — does not lead derrida to claim it is no longer a sign; the critique and destruction of the opposition signified­signifier does not prevent it from functioning (1981:20). likewise, the signifier is after all a sign which never ceases to signify. accordingly, derrida’s language, though non­dual in nature, is still a system of signs. in a similar and at the same time different manner, the scripture (here the qur’an) as the sign from god, aims to describe the phenomenal world as the book of god. the revelations perform two fundamental functions at the same time: they introduce themselves as signs from god, then by virtue of an inter­ esting generalization, describe being as book and the things as its words. this is clearly seen in the qur’an, in verses which warn people against ignoring 4 the statement “il n’y a pas de hors texte” is sometimes taken to mean that “nothing exists outside language” and that “deconstruction is a suspension of reference.” this is apparently a mistake, as deconstruction is “deeply concerned with the ‘other’ of language.” derrida himself declares: i never cease to be surprised by critics who see my work as a declaration that there is nothing beyond language, that we are imprisoned in language; it is, in fact, saying the opposite. the critique of logocentrism is above all else the search for the ‘other’ (kearney 1984:123­124). gheitury the book, deconstruction, and the religious sign 44 and forgetting the signs of their lord, the signs which are with us in every mo­ ment of our life. we live in the book of our lord (30:56). despite the similarities and the common interest both sides take in the sign, the concept book comes to be the most problematic in the epoch derrida identifies with “the inflation of the sign and the inflation of language”; the book presumes a certain authority, unity and integrity which deconstruction threat­ ens to disrupt. speech as a concept closely related to book, which assumes the presence of a speaking subject who controls meanings is no longer the original form of language, for everything that we previously knew under the name of language, is summarised under the name of writing. it seems … as though the concept of writing — no longer indicating a particular, derivative, auxiliary form of language in general …, no longer designating the exterior surface, the insubstantial double of a major signifier, the signifier of the signifier — is beginning to go beyond the extension of lan­ guage. in all senses of the word, writing, thus, comprehends language (1974:7). in such a circumstance, derrida can speak of the death of speech, and for the same reason, the death of the book — an idea which is apparently not con­ sistent with monotheism. the qur’an describes the world as the book which is never detached from allah, who is always inside addressing believers from no distance. this makes the qur’an not only god’s book (kitab, from the root k­t­b meaning “to write”), but by virtue of his authority, also his speech, though, as we shall see, speech only in a special sense. nevertheless, there is a certain aspect of the religious sign or the book which might be significant for deconstruction: the religious sign that the qur’an represents is non­dual in nature. it transcends the attributes of ordinary lan­ guage, and other dualities like speech­writing, or absence­presence. for the purpose of the present study, deconstruction is identified by trespassing reci­ procity, the linear order of language, context, fixed speaker and addressee and other speech properties. what guides this transcending, going beyond, or so­called deconstruction is a certain otherness (of god) that is opposed or compared to no thing. as we shall see, it is by revealing the same otherness that the idea of an immanent god will be conceived. an important concern here would be how a text is affected structurally by deconstruction. if, as we discussed earlier, the qur’an describes anything out­ side as language or as the book whose words are exclusively of allah, we can plausibly expect that the qur’an should reflect in its structure the same god­ man or god­book relation as witnessed outside in the endless book of nature or being. i will argue that deconstruction, namely displacing language from its ordi­ nary position and putting it beyond metaphysical attributes, contributes most to acta theologica 2009:1 45 exploring the above fact in the qur’an. after this deconstruction, we can speak of the qur’an as a non­temporal writing which is beyond any context. the inter­ esting point i wish to underline is that, at least, as far as the struc ture is con­ cerned, deconstruction need not stop anywhere, as the further we go, the more a certain “presence” which is introduced into the text only after deconstruction is felt. deconstruction does not distance god from the text; conversely, it brings god closer. it is important to notice that the fact that god is so near derives from the fact of writing which constitutes god always as the other. as we will see later, the otherness which deconstruction brings to the book is the main mes­ sage of the religious sign the qur’an represents. this study does not mean i am attempting to argue there is deconstruction, in the sense derrida has employed the term, at work in the qur’an. neverthe­ less, i wish to put the claim this way: in the same way that there is so much for the religious to learn from deconstruction, conversely, there are good insights in the qur’an for those interested in the link between deconstruction and reli­ gion. in fact, i am not going to apply one side to the other, nor will i carry the essential concepts of the two discourses one over the other; these are worlds apart. i would rather place them in a conversation with each other. it is unfortunate that apart from a few works in the literature which have tried to incorporate deconstruction into a religious context, and more signifi­ cantly, bring it into conversation with negative theology or christian theology,5 there has been little or no significant work to deal with deconstruction and religion this way. derrida’s own work is itself silent in this regard. there are, nevertheless, a few works in which the ideas of muslim sufis have been compared to those of derrida. here we can cite ian almond’s recent efforts to compare the great muslim sufi of the thirteenth century, muhyiddin ibn arabi, to derrida. in one article (2003), he points to something in islamic mysticism which is very similar to derrida’s critique of metaphysical thinking. the mystic discourse of the sufi can be related to derrida’s deconstructive dis­ course in their similar opposition to rational thought. yet, in another work, he looks both in the sufi and derrida for ... the way a certain idea of infinity (be it the inexhaustible mind of an infinite god or the infinite array of different contexts for a text) leads to an infinitizing of the text (2004:97). however, none of these studies, whether islamic, comparative, or those with an interest in negative theology, have dealt with the question of the religious sign. they instead refer to the sign within the limits set by deconstruction, as if 5 for a detailed discussion of deconstruction and christian theology, see kevin hart (1989). gheitury the book, deconstruction, and the religious sign 46 any approach to deconstruction and religion should forget about the sign, for it has been deconstructed once and for all. there remains nothing of the sign after this deconstruction. so the religious sign within the context of decon­ struction is probably strange and out of place. in addition, although the qur’an has been the core of almost all philosophical and linguistic works in islam, to the best of my knowledge, the structure of the qur’an has not been looked at this way, to see how monotheism presents itself in the structure of language. the following analysis aims to be an immanent study of the qur’an without directly taking into account anything of the history and the original context of the revelations. for the purpose of analysis, a very small part of the text has been chosen to cite as evidence here. i should declare that i have tried to look at the qur’an from inside its structure and from the eye of a believer to whom reading it is communication with god. 3. the qur’an and ordinary language attributes like him there is [no thing] (42:11). it belongs not to any mortal that god should speak to him … (42:51) glory be to god above that they describe (37:159). a major theme in monotheist religions is that revelations are from god; hence they are the word of god and his speech. in the same way, muslims believe the qur’an to contain the exact word of god sent down to the prophet mohammad. however, the fact of being sent down appears along with the assertion that god’s words should not be understood as speech in the ordinary sense of the word. the fact is clearly indicated by the second verse above where to speak like a man has been denied of god; it is not fitting for god to speak to a human. the idea is supported by two other verses where god is presented as that which no thing resembles and no one can describe. thus, the most sig nificant attribute one might think of god is that he is above, beyond, and glorious; or using the quranic term sobhan (from the root s­b­h literally meaning floating). his attributes as well as his discourse should be beyond anything and any ordinary use of language. the act of declaring god’s transcendence (tasbeeh) is performed as a sort of worship, as an expression of obedience, and humbleness toward god. all a creature should do is declaring the fact that he is beyond description. tasbeeh guides the first part of our task toward the quranic discourse. to understand god as sobhan one should place the qur’an at a distance from ordinary language, or more particularly from speech, though not at a dis­ tance from god. for to say god is beyond does not entail distancing him from beings. as the first move away from ordinary speech one might refer to the acta theologica 2009:1 47 qur’an defining itself as qur’an (from the root “qara ’a” “to read” or to “recite”). before the book, the prophet assumes no position but that of being a reader. this can be shown by reference to the first revelatory experience, where he is commanded to read what is revealed to him: [read]: in the name of thy lord who created, created man of a blood­clot. [read]: and thy lord is the most generous, who taught by the pen, taught man that he knew not (96:1­4). unlike ordinary speech in which the two sides cooperate to build the dis­ course, what is revealed is solely of allah and the prophet knows very well that his part in this sort of communication lies not in saying something, but in listening, taking to his heart, and then reciting to people exactly what has been revealed. he must read and pronounce what his lord has said. to put it more clearly, the lord speaks through the prophet’s voice. in fact, god’s act of saying is not realized save by the prophet’s reading. the position of the prophet is more like a communication channel, or in rumi’s terms a flute blown by the lord, we are as the flute, and the music in us is from thee; we are as the mountain, and the echo in us is from thee (rumi 1926: vol. 2,35). apparently, this is not consistent with facts of ordinary language which is necessarily reciprocal and dialogic. the qur’an is not a report of a dialogue between god and his messenger. though the prophet is addressed he does not address god except through god’s own words. he is made to speak by god by being simultaneously the one who recites revelations to people and by being himself a significant part of the book and the message. such is the posi­ tion, not merely of the prophet, but of any other soul, as the book out of which there is no way, belongs to god. we too as readers, much like the prophet, are part of the sign. reading, apart from its linguistic dimension, appears thus as a key theological term which describes our position as human beings toward the lord. this i hope to be made clear as we proceed. another interesting point is that although the prophet is “addressed” to read or say something, having a fixed addressee, as we will see later, is not in line with the logic of the book. this is equally true of the speaker. a text in the sense we explained above should not be expected to have been uttered by a “speaker” in the ordinary sense of the word. accordingly, our question “who is speaking?” linguistically finds no one referent, or better, a variety of speakers, or as many as the names mentioned therein. in the majority of cases, after the phrase “in the name of god” and before the story of a prophet begins, a first person plural gheitury the book, deconstruction, and the religious sign 48 speaker who is the sender of revelation, of messengers, and of water from heaven is speaking: we have sent it down as an arabic [qur’an]; haply you will understand (12:2). the same speaker appears in first person singular as well: so remember me, and i will remember you; and be thankful to me; and be you not ungrateful towards me (2:152). nay, but they are in doubt of my remembrance; nay, they have not yet tasted my chastisement (38:8). still in other verses, the angels speak: none of us is there, but has a known station; we are the rangers, we are they that give glory (37:164­6). we come not down, save at the commandment of thy lord. to him belongs all that is before us, and all that is behind us and all between that (19:64). in the above verses, whose linguistic speaker is not the sender of the rev­ elation, god appears in the third person referred to as “allah”, “rabb” (lord), or “huwa” (he). but last of all comes the most interesting instance in which allah is addressed by the prophet or any reader: thee only we serve; to thee alone we pray for succour, guide us in the straight path, the path of those whom thou hast blessed, not of those against whom thou art wrathful, nor of those who are astray (1:5­7). deconstructing reciprocity and the speaking subject as witnessed above is well in line with a non­linear conception of language in which there is no longer a single voice to utter the sentences from a beginning to an end. a brief glance at the revelations indicates that they do not proceed in a linear order. there is even no chronological order, as some parts which came late in the prophet’s life appear at the beginning and some early revelations appear almost at the end. it is thus expectable to see a permanent change of differing subjects, even where the story of a prophet is told. to understand this point, the story of moses and his people in the qur’an is most revealing. the story appears in almost all great chapters (2, 20, 26, 28, 40) in a variety of details with parts repeated every time. what is significant is that each mention of the story is not complete by itself, and to understand it better one should refer to other occurrences of the same story. this opens up the boundary of each chapter or verse to others so that all references to the same story will converse in a ceaseless dialogue. the same is true of the rest of the text. there is a permanent change of sub­ ject everywhere, in a way one might not tell where the book begins or ends. acta theologica 2009:1 49 the non­linear ordering is an obvious fact one can hardly ignore. never­ theless, what concerns us here is not so much a question of the order in which revelations appear; it is rather the non­temporality that has given rise to it. it is possible to find stories like that of joseph, which appears continuously in one chapter. moreover, it is equally sensible to read each mention of moses’ report in the qur’an as a coherent passage on its own. the main issue here which can link us to the next section is to conceive the qur’an as a non­temporal writing. the ordering of verses becomes significant as long as it contributes to the above theme. i avoid citing examples here, as in the following section, we will deal with the non­temporality in some detail. 4. writing and presence: the lord is so near we indeed created man; and we know what his soul whispers within him, and we are nearer to him than the jugular vein (50:16). as noticed above, the qur’an presents itself as a text that in many respects resembles derrida’s concept of non­phonic writing. the question which makes itself felt now is how far we can proceed with deconstructing and escaping the logocentrism, or the duality inherent in any piece of discourse. however, if we wish the book to continue resembling the derridian concept of writing, we ought to end here, giving up the rest of the task. but what is the rest of the task? it may come to the reader as a surprise that thinking of a god who is so near to hear our praying, in this context, is dependent upon going further with the pro cess of deconstructing. in fact, what may keep us from thinking of a god so near is to hesitate at this point. up to here, what a negative theology does to language is very much similar to deconstruction. for the rest of the story, deconstruction as a school of thought and as an “­ism” might not choose to follow religion, fearing a collapse in the pure presence, supposedly because it would put an end to the science of writing or the grammatology which has based itself on negating the metaphysics of presence. yet, it is equally noticeable that theism too should not pause with decon­ struction at this point, fearing a certain blindness to see the god who is hear­ ing and seeing and nearer to men than the jugular vein. it is at this point that we part with deconstruction as a school, but deconstruction as an event that happens to language remains with us. should we proceed further, we would face an even more serious destruction of ordinary language attributes, one which might lead to shaking our ordinary conception of presence, authority, and unity. of these three and the many more attributes, presence stands out as the most widely discussed in the literature on deconstruction. although pre­ sence in the quranic sense of the word, being guided by a certain otherness, is basically different from the metaphysical presence, derrida’s opposition to gheitury the book, deconstruction, and the religious sign 50 presence seems to accept no exception, leaving no room for a non­metaphys­ ical presence, probably because pointing to such a presence will save the sign. presence and the sign at least in what we learn from derrida’s sharp criticism of the metaphysical tradition are not tolerable as concepts that always have threat­ ened the very essence of writing as a form of language realized in absence. but how does a writing as such open up to presence? will it not be a death awaiting writing? is it not a return to the voice whose presence always threatened the very essence of writing? for writing, to accompany presence is for the signifier or the material sign to unite or come to a compromise with the non­material mean­ ing. is it not the sign whose entire logic deconstruction seeks to destruct? despite a possible reluctance by deconstructionists to confirm and welcome such a presence, deconstruction has no power, no filter, and no initiative in keep­ ing it out. it appears powerless and helpless as it is in response to such a pres­ ence that the text gives in to deconstruction. the very essence of deconstruction in this case seems to be tied up with such a presence which is not a death but a life for writing, for the simple reason that it comes to the text only after trespass­ ing the metaphysical concepts. in fact, in this context, deconstruction moves hand in hand with the presence which is not the opposite of anything. my hypothesis with regard to the qur’an, which i hope to be confirmed to­ ward the end of this section is that it is in response to an overwhelming pres­ ence whom the text cannot stand that it gives in to deconstruction. that is, all deconstruction, of speaker, linearity, and so on, are sings of the presence who, by now, accompanies the book. the claim is borne out only if the text, now witnessing the presence, directly addresses the reader who is supposed to be before their lord. there being a present “i”, the reader should be present before this “i” and ought to be directly addressed. 5. the dialogue between god and man a brief glance at the text which is dialogic throughout will help us to conceive such an “i” in language. the qur’an develops all narratives or stories of the prophets through dialogues. these dialogues, in most cases, are directly report­ ed even when a chain of reported speech is at work. to substantiate our claim, let us consider an instance in which moses’ life and the story of his prophethood are reported in some detail. (parts in italics where a new report begins.) hast thou received the story of moses? when he saw a fire and said to his family, “tarry you here; i observe a fire. perhaps i shall bring you a brand from it … acta theologica 2009:1 51 when he came to it, a voice cried, “moses, i am thy lord; put off thy shoes; thou art in the holy valley, towa … “what is that, moses thou hast in thy right hand? “why, it is my staff,” said moses. “i lean upon it, and with it i beat down leaves to feed my sheep; other uses also i find in it.” said he, “cast it down, moses!” and he cast it down and behold it was a serpent sliding. said he, “take it, and fear not; we will restore it to its first state.” … “go to pharaoh; he has waxed insolent.” “lord open my breast,” said moses, “and do thou ease for me my task.” … said he, “thou art granted, moses, the petition. already another time we favored thee, when we revealed what was revealed to thy mother: ‘cast him into the ark, and cast him into the river, and let the river throw him up on the shore … when thy sister went out, saying, “shall i point you to one to have charge of him?” … “surely i shall be with you, hearing and seeing. so go you both to phar­ aoh, and say, [“we are the messengers of thy lord, so send forth with us the children of israel and chastise them not; we have brought thee a sign from thy lord; and peace be upon him who follow the guidance … chastisement shall light upon him who cries lies and turns his back.”] pharaoh said, “who is your lord, moses?” he said, “our lord is he who gave everything its creation, then guided it.” pharaoh said, “and what of the former generations?” said moses, “the knowledge of them is with my lord, in a book; my lord goes not astray, nor forgets he who appointed the earth to be a cradle for you, and therein threaded roads for you, and sent down water out of heaven, [and therewith we have brought forth divers kinds of plants.”] … so we showed pharaoh all our signs (20:9­56). several points are immediately noticeable here. firstly, the story of moses is developed throughout in dialogues, the opening of which is between allah and the reader or the prophet mohammad. in what follows we are led down into a chain of embedded dialogues, that is, different layers of reported speech, all subordinate to the beginning sentence “hast thou ...?” god reports the story of moses for the reader. then in a deeper level, the same speaker talks of what the lord had revealed to moses’ mother, and also inform him of what his sister has said to pharaoh. it is also interesting that the utterances reported are all in present tense direct and live. meanwhile, it is to be noted that in ordinary speech, to avoid ambiguity, reported utterances are favoured more. gheitury the book, deconstruction, and the religious sign 52 the direct address everywhere is necessarily twinned to a destruction of context as well. as we noticed above, the direct utterances are all necessar­ ily in present tense, but not fixed to a certain present. it is a “present” that is extended to every moment of reading the book. here we can talk about an eternal present which knows no time limit. an interesting extract which might support the above argument is when moses, in response to pharaoh’s question, describes his lord with “our lord is he who…” then pharaoh asks a second question and moses continues the same description, of lord as “creator of the earth as a cradle and sender of water,” but the same description is continued not by moses but by the creator who speaks through “and therewith we have brought forth diverse kinds of plants …” in other words, the same utterances reported are shared by two dif­ ferent speakers, the creator or the sender of water and moses himself. such examples, which are also found elsewhere in the text, invite the read­ ers to find their part in the book and act as one side of the dialogues, since the dialogues are present and no longer part of history. the reader, finding himself addressed in this way, is given a right to address his lord in turn, using the utterances with which moses addressed his lord, as is often the case in muslims’ prayers and worship. turning to the hypothesis we formulated above, the direct dialogue is pos­ sible only in the presence of an “i” who is the sender and the one speaker of the book. hence “the addressed” is also and only a reader, in whose act of reading allah’s speech is verbalized. it is interesting at this point to see that the more we attempted to show the deconstructive or grammatological features of revelations, the more the pre­ sence of an “i” was felt. now that deconstruction is applied to destruct speaker, linearity, context, and for the same reason the reader or the addressed, we may justifiably claim that every part of the book or every utterance comes to speak to the reader. though moses and others do speak, deconstruction of context and the interference of another speaker deprive moses of any right to speak. the same is true of any other speaker. no one remains speaker to the end, save the “i” that is always present. it seems that the further away we go from ordinary speech, the more justifiably we may pose the claim that the text speaks itself and its speech is what our lord says. this is the simplest picture of monotheism reflected in the religious lan­ guage which is never away from the lord. what makes our analysis even more interesting is the fact that this unity reveals itself only through dialogue. it is in fact merely for the direct and everlasting dialogues that the essential element of speech (though not ordinary speech), namely presence, comes back to the text to make it the book of god. it is further important to notice that before this book, the role of the reader is essentially different from what we have in structuralism acta theologica 2009:1 53 or poststructuralism. although the concept of the book implies the infinite knowl­ edge of allah and his unquestionable authority over what he writes, the reader being merely a receiver, god’s words are only realized in the reader’s act of reading. hence, to read is to do two different things at the same time: to utter god’s words and to act in the course of uttering these as an interlocutor. the significant point to stress again is that without this dialogue which is essentially dependent on the reader, no presence and hence no monotheism comes to be known. this makes the reader’s reading and god’s speaking one and the same act. so to speak, this is the unity of the two sides in the one book whose words are only of god. 6. the qur’an as the religious sign: allah is transcendent and immanent i began with “otherness” as the key to understanding the religious sign, and as what presents all divine attributes as unthinkable. i treated the realization of this otherness in language in a way as if it were easily possible to think of otherness without appealing to the inherent duality in the linguistic sign. re­examining otherness at this point, we cannot fail to confirm the significant role played by the dual sign in thinking of god as the other. here i wish to stress that in the same way that derrida cannot do deconstruction without the signified­signifier dualism, our thinking of a god who is the other no thing in the book resembles, is dependent on it. thus the duality inherent in the sign may well serve as a starting point to describe the religious sign, which is a sign after all. the qur’an describes itself as a sign from god. what we have here is not so much different from the ordinary dual sign: the sovereign god has sent down a sign or the book to people. much like the communication process, there is a sender­sign­receiver chain. the process appears to be reciprocal, or better, dual, describing god and readers as the two sides in a dialogue. it would be difficult to believe that such a duality does nothing in the book; it is the necessary or the essential core of any semiology without which one may hardly speak of commu­ nication between man and god. in fact, the book, at certain moments, seems to be strengthening such a dual picture. speaking of such duality may, at first notice, make the description similar to what is said of the hyper­being or hyper­essence of metaphysics. muslim exegetes, nevertheless, take these only metaphorically, maintaining that the dual picture of the universe implies nothing but the sover­ eignty and authority of god over beings (tabatabaii 1984: vol. 14,167). however, apart from the authority implied by the duality inherent in the sign, i will attempt to argue that it also plays a major part in presenting god as the other. yet, the otherness is otherness with a difference: it is closely tied to think­ ing of a god whose attributes are unthinkable, and who is beyond description. gheitury the book, deconstruction, and the religious sign 54 from here, i will attempt to approach otherness by appealing to a certain nearness and immanence attributed to allah. the god of the qur’an “is the first and the last, the outward and the inward. he is with you wherever you are” (57:3­4). he gets so near to address believers with very intimate words like “so remember me and i will remember you,” so near, in fact, to home in the heart, to make it his throne from which revelations come down to the tongue (shirazi 1982:191, 567). the likeness of god­man relation, as ibn arabi de­ scribes, is like the ocean and its waves, the ocean creates its waves and keeps watching them. he also describes the same relation as that between a person and his shadow (jahangiri 1996:427). but the god who is near and present is not caught in the book and is able to do anything he wishes. in other words, he is in and with everything, yet not imprisoned in it (ibn abi­talib 2000: sermon 1). in addition, he becomes near only in his transcendence. as we argued earlier, the presence that the qur’an introduces into the religious sign follows from the otherness which was realized by doing away with ordinary language attributes. thus, we should think of his presence in terms of his otherness, as god is not a member among the characters in the book. the best quranic description of this is indicated in the following passage: … god knows whatsoever is in heavens, and whatsoever is in the earth? three men conspire not secretly together, but he is the fourth of them, neither five men, but he is the sixth of them, but he is with them, wher­ ever they may be (58:7). it is important to notice that he is not the third of the three, nor is he the fifth of the five. though he is always with us, he is not one of us. thus we have two related arguments to support the claim that god is not the other in a dual system: the first is that god is beyond description and the second the fact that the other is so near. the transcendence or otherness is, thus, a very special one as allah is comparable to no thing and no one. he is not simply a member of the system to be defined negatively as what other members are not. he is even not compared to or defined as the opposite of evil. he is beyond any such opposition or comparison, and beyond any at­ tribute. to serve allah properly is to deny him of any attribute. one cannot ask where god is as it presupposes a place in which he is absent (ibn abi­ talib 2000: sermon i). he is the other in all his attributes; his attributes should be conceived only in relation to otherness. thus, otherness does not signify an opposition with everything, as his presence is not the other of absence. furthermore, he is one not opposed to two and three; he is the uncountable number. likewise this unity does not put an end to plurality, in the same way that his authority over being does not make us weak and powerless; we ac­ acta theologica 2009:1 55 quire our authority over nature only for his authority. nonetheless, the face of the religious sign is always turned toward god who gives any sign its life. accordingly, his transcendence is not opposed to his immanence. in this way, transcendence and immanence become one and the same concept, in much the same way that god’s eternal communication with mankind or his speech is instantiated by the non­temporal writing in the qur’an. it seems all that can be attributed to god should be understood not relative to any known example. as i indicated earlier, the immanence or the presence comes to the book only after the transcendence or the unthinkability has been established. here we can ask what the function of this sign is. the linguistic sign and concepts associated with it, such as presence, fulfil a very crucial task for religion. they awaken us from the forgetfulness of routine life, of living in the phenomenal world, to reveal to us the divine nature of everything as a sign in the book of god. they teach us to look for god everywhere. ordinarily, we per­ ceive what is material and phenomenal only in opposition to the non­material. this keeps us from thinking of god. the religious sign which the qur’an represents warns us not to think of a hyper/super­being, nor a creator god who has created and withdrawn, and not to think of a god who is imprisoned in the material world. it teaches us to believe in his transcendence and immanence as one and the same thing, understand­ ing one as dependent on the other. this transcendence and immanence as two mutually linked concepts constitute the structure of the religious sign. this is a sign which is not simply material or non­material. in its fundamentals, it is not dual and it does not leave anything outside, be it good or evil. this sign has no “other” and no opposite, though we continue using it to bear in mind and not to forget that there is a god who is beyond any attribute and any comparison. 7. conclusion we started with the plausible hypothesis that deconstruction is not atheist and negative, and that we may cautiously employ it to explore the religious sign. what we have done up to this point has been to demonstrate that deconstruc­ tion can be a key linguistic concept in the structure of the religious sign; it is an event occurring in language to make it a sign from god. however, even if we agree upon deconstruction’s having a religious side, which both derrida and his interpreters admit, the point remains largely controversial as to whether the linguistic event we know as deconstruction is entirely theological. nevertheless, treating deconstruction as theological and giving it a reli­ gious relevance is not new. this has been at work, as caputo reminds us, from the very beginning. gheitury the book, deconstruction, and the religious sign 56 that is why, one day “early on” in the discussion following the original 1968 presentation of the famous paper “differance”, an interlocutor who had heard enough exclaimed with some exasperation, “it [differance] is the source of everything and one cannot know it: it is the god of nega­ tive theology.” derrida responded with the most exquisite precision and deconstructionist decisiveness, “it is and it is not.” yes and no (1997a:2). however as caputo adds, this “no” is not negative, [s]o over and beyond, this first, preparatory and merely negative point, de­ construction says “yes”, affirming what negative theology affirms whenever it says “no”. deconstruction desires what negative theology desires and it shares the passion of negative theology — for the impossible (1997a:3). in spite of the shared desire and passion caputo talks about, it seems that deconstruction is usually presented even by derrida himself as something exceeding theology. the similar syntax of deconstruction and the negative discourse on god, he warns us, should not lead us to consider them one and the same thing (1982:2), apparently because to him, “the negative movement of the discourse on god is only a phase of positive ontotheology” (1978:337, n. 37). thus, for deconstruction to approximate negative theology is to come very close to admit the essential concepts of positive theology namely, the sign and presence. however, the fact that negative theology and deconstruction should not be considered the same thing does not make deconstruction ultimately neutral, for as caputo puts it: [d]ifferance describes the languages of faith and prayer which, as derri­ da’s work evolves, proves to be not just particular examples of language, but exemplary uses that exceed linguistic categorization and tend to co­ incide with language itself, to become the very yes, or amen of language to what is happening (caputo 1997a:13). we can consider this yes and amen as openness toward faith and god. deconstruction can thus be presented as an event occurring in language pre­ paring it for this amen to become open toward faith and to bow before god. despite the appropriate linguistic tool deconstruction can lend us, it is nonethe­ less, as hart rightly argues “neither theistic nor atheistic in any normal sense of the words” (1989:27). we can understand this the other way: deconstruc­ tion can be both theistic and atheistic. this argument makes deconstruction not only open to theism but also open to secular readings. given the textual nature of deconstruction as a discourse, it should allow for both possibilities; in fact, opposite readings make deconstruction what it is. acta theologica 2009:1 57 but is that enough reason for deconstructionists to remain between the­ ism and atheism and at the same time claim that deconstruction is not “ulti­ mately neutral” toward faith? when meeting deconstruction on purely syntac­ tic grounds as what happens to language, no such question is necessary; it can also be at work in a religious text. the question arises when we look for an answer as to why the text opens up to deconstruction. in negative theol­ ogy, we seem to have an answer: the negative discourse on god is one way of talking about the unthinkability of the attributes of a transcendent god. in the case of the qur’an, deconstruction was a response of language to the presence of the one god whose attributes are not thinkable. nonetheless, when it comes to deconstruction, no such answer exists. at issue is what the picture will look like if we tried to bring deconstruction closer to its semantics. i do not claim to have an answer to the questions i raise here. i would rather pose another question: what would deconstruction look like if it chose not to remain in between, becoming either totally theistic or entirely atheistic? to become atheistic, it should close the text to faith. this is what secular thinkers have been doing by totalizing derrida’s texts with respect to nietzsche and the death of god doctrine. but what will happen to deconstruction if it goes the path of religion? this, i hope, will become clear. despite the similarity of the quranic discourse to that of negative theology, i hesitate to equate monotheism to what is known in the west as negative or positive theology, for there is great doubt derrida would have received mono­ theism in the same way. in addition, i don’t know of a mystic or literary text structured like the qur’an. after all, there is a great difference between a liter­ ary text that reveals deconstruction only at the price of meaning, or the prayers of a negative theologian whose text always bears the name of its author, and a non­temporal language which always addresses the readers. the question i wish to underline here is: what if deconstruction of all that freezes the play of signs is realized in a sacred book which is realised in a distance from the phone and from the logos, but at the same time is never detached from the lord? my contention is that deconstruction as an event occurring in language would not experience a destruction by welcoming the theological presence as it is this that keeps the text alive and signifies end­ lessly. what is even more significant is that this presence spells no end to our life. it is not a presence after which we see no reason to live on. quite the con­ trary, this is what constitutes god as the “other” who is never outside, though resembled by nothing in the text. as we noticed earlier, the fact that there is a god who is the other in a dialogue is precisely dependent on the distance we move away from the phone. now, imagine if derrida had started not from a literary or philosophical text, but from these revelations. this could have made everything the reverse. in that case, he could have read other texts, philosophical and literary, in search gheitury the book, deconstruction, and the religious sign 58 of a presence which derives from a certain conception of transcendence or otherness. in ordinary discourses, the duality of absent­present places us in a state of forgetfulness, of blindness to that presence that is opposite to neither side of the dualities and that gives the text its life. the openness, freedom, and insight are not thinkable without this presence. it would need, then, a reader like derrida to uncover the extra­human capacity of language to go beyond itself to become the word of god. he truly could have reminded us of what is hidden and forgotten in ordinary discourse. what we may justifiably claim at this point is that the openness deconstruc­ tion seeks to place before our eyes is not foreign to monotheism, as deconstruc­ tion and thinking of the presence are interdependent in this context. op posite readings proliferate every moment, but we should take care that monotheism is not one reading among others, as evil is not a distinct realm. atheism is merely a forgetfulness which takes place not outside the book. therefore, it should come as no surprise to explore religious readings even in texts notoriously associated with the death of god doctrine. bibliography almond, i. 2003. the shackles of reason: sufi/deconstructive opposition to rational thought. philosophy east and west 53(1):22. 2004. the meaning of infinity in sufi and deconstructive hermeneutics: when is an empty text an infinite one? journal of american academy of religion 72(1):97­117. arberry, a.j. 1955. the koran interpreted. new york: macmillan. barthes, r. 1968. elements of semiology. trans. annette lavers & colin smith. new york: hill & wang. caputo, john d. 1997a. the prayers and tears of jacques derrida: religion without religion. bloom­ ington & indianapolis: indiana university press. 1997b. deconstruction in a nutshell: a conversation with jacques derrida. new york: fordham university press. acta theologica 2009:1 59 de saussure, f. 1959. course in general linguistics. eds. c. bally & a. secheheye in collaboration with a. reidlinger. trans. wade baskin. new york: the philosophical library. derrida, j. 1974. of grammatology. trans. gayatri chakravorty spivak. baltimore & london: john hopkins university press. 1978. writing and difference. trans. alan bass. london: routledge & kegan. 1981. positions. trans. alan bass. london: continuum. 1982. margins of philosophy. trans. allan bass. chicago: university of chicago press. 1987. psyche: inventions de l’autre. paris: galilee. 1995. the gift of death. trans. david wills. chicago: university of chicago press. harland, r. 1987. superstructuralism: the philosophy of structuralism and post­structuralism. london: routledge. hart, k. 1989. the trespass of the sign: deconstruction, theology and philosophy. cam­ bridge: cambridge university press. ibn abi-talib, a. 2000. nahjolbalaghe. trans. jaafar shahidi. tehran: elmi farhangi. jahangiri, m. 1996. mohyi­al­din­ibn arabi: the distinguished figure of islamic mysticism. tehran: tehran university publications. fourth edition. kearney, r. 1984. dialogue with contemporary continental thinkers. manchester: manchester university press. norris, c. 1989. jacques derrida: in discussion with christopher norris. [interview.] architec­ tural design 59(1­2):6­11. rumi, j. 1926. masnavi of jalal­ol­din rumi. trans. reynold a. nicholson. cambridge: cam­ bridge university press. shirazi, s. 1982. mafatih algheib. tehran: institute for cultural research & studies. tabatabaii, m.h. 1984. tafsir al­mizan vol. xiv. qum: dafter entesharat islami. gheitury the book, deconstruction, and the religious sign 60 keywords trefwoorde the book die boek deconstruction dekonstruksie monotheism monoteïsme presence teenwoordigheid qur’an koran religious sign godsdienstige teken derrida’s shadow in the light of islamic studies: an analysis of binary relations in the qur’an mahdi shafieyan abstract jacques derrida believed that metaphysics in the west has involved installing hierarchies, orders, and binaries in which one party enjoys the presence of a feature that the other party wants. every succession relies on the idea of originariness, and thus the identity of the latter depends upon the former, for the presence of one element takes priority to its absence. this is how a binary opposition comes to being. although basing his ideas on saussure’s philosophy of language, derrida objected to the latter’s “binary opposition” on the grounds that the interpretations predicated on this thought were called into question because there is no true opposition between a pair of notions. this protest led him to create binary pairs. this article reveals the problems accompanying the conception of the binary pair and offer alternatives. the researcher does not mean to reject the binary pair itself; however, underlining this idea in a way that obstructs other paths will be questioned and some supplementary notions for the binary opposition and binary pair will be proposed. keywords: islamic studies, the qur’an, postmodernism, jacques derrida, binaries, relations mahdi shafieyan, an assistant professor of english literature at tehran’s imam sadiq university, specializes in the postmodern philosophy of literature and islamic hermeneutics. among his many published books and articles are a critique of five famous quranic translations: arberry, pickthall, saffarzadih, shakir, and yusef ’ ‘ali; “derrida’s deconstruction imprisoned in performance poetry”; and “judgment: from islamic thought to postmodern literature.” ajiss32-2_ajiss 4/8/2015 4:03 pm page 51 52 the american journal of islamic social sciences 32:2 introduction for more than half a century postmodern reading, unlike other critical approaches demanding application, has attempted to show that all texts deconstruct themselves from within.1 one of the main notions marking this revolution is the impression of the “binary pair” posed against binary oppositions. this idea leads to pluralistic, unbound meanings, for the keystone of postmodern thought generally traces the (pre-)christian era, the time of deities and divinities, when truth was not embodied in one emblem but in at least two or three deities. however, the history of binary pairs in literature can at least be traced back to william shakespeare’s macbeth (1606), in which the witches say that the world is where “fair is foul and foul is fair.”2 from then on one should move toward the romantic period, when contraries were very important in poetics. although william blake, one of its eminent forerunners, said “without contraries is no progression,”3 in his milton (1804) he went on to say “[t]here is a place where contrarieties are equally true.”4 these examples are given just to draw attention to the fact that the concept has a historical background. in the present article, the endeavor is made to indicate the problems of emphasizing binary pairs alone. clearly jacques derrida (1930-2004), as this notion’s advocate, is the major thinker in my postmodernist discussion, despite some references to other sources. to do so, i first try to answer why such reconsideration, an undertaking that provides three possible responses, is desirable. then it comes to the features of “relations” in islamic thought. bearing these specifications and the derridean argument in mind, i will bring forth just ten qur’anic conceptual relations, even though they shape a doubly more numerous family. such suggestions will play the role of alternatives, which can walk along with binary pairs and binary oppositions that by now have been introduced to critical theory. the significance of this article can be seen in diverse readings of the qur’anic verses “it is he who spread out the earth, placed firm mountains and rivers on it, and made a binary5 of every kind of fruit; … there truly are signs in this for people who reflect” (q. 13:3, emphasis added)6; or, more generally, “we created binaries of all things [two spouses: male and female] so that you might take note” (q. 51:49, emphasis added); or, “did we not create you in binaries?” (q. 78:8). in other words, binaries are presented here as samples of divine signs on which we are invited to think. more momentously, god appreciates himself for creating binaries in “glory be to him who created all the binaries” (q. 36:36). in fact, there are a variety of binaries, for “he has created you variously” (q. 71:14), and even in different names, for ajiss32-2_ajiss 4/8/2015 4:03 pm page 52 example “even”: “by the even and the odd” (q. 89:3). to add to their significance, it is worthy of note that in the last verse god swears by binaries. literature review predicated on my search in local and international databases, no islamic critique of derrida exists. on the contrary, scholars like ahmed achrati7 and ian almond8 try to see points of similarity between postmodernism generally, or deconstruction specifically, and sufism, which they consider to the islamic view proper. they argue about the dissolution of subjectivity, the shackles of reason, and the mysterious nature of things, to name a few, as common denominators. it should also be mentioned that the former categorizes friedrich nietzsche, martin heidegger, søren kierkegaard, as well as gilles deleuze, under the umbrella term postmodernism and does not deal with derrida only. however, there are some critical works on this french philosopher’s ideas, not including postmodernism, from other perspectives. for example, andrew bowie argues that derrida’s mistake was to see metaphysics with respect to the subject’s presence or primacy: the “privilege” accorded to the subject as self-presence “is the ether of metaphysics.”9 nevertheless the subject, as a predicate of “transitive being” – a being that needs another being for its meaning – cannot be reflexively present to itself because it is preceded by an origin over which it has no control.10 walter j. ong says that, in terms of referentiality, a word’s referentiality cannot be abrogated if it has no similarity in shape with an object because it is words, not signs, that refer to the thing. he adds: “our complacency in thinking of words as signs is due to the tendency, perhaps incipient in oral cultures but clearly marked in chirographic cultures and far more marked in typographic and electronic cultures, to reduce all sensation and indeed all human experience to visual analogues.”11 even frank kermode, an admirer of derrida, agrees that “a continual attention to the operations of différance … may not be humanly supportable,” as the future is beyond human reach, and suggests that “even if this is the way things really are, most of us may still have to behave as if they were otherwise.”12 in a like vein, e. d. hirsch maintains that the unattainability of meaning, or what derrida calls “undecidability,” cannot be proven by experience, experiment, and ratiocination.13 a close issue caused by the refutation of referentiality is the birth of too many meanings. jurgen habermas criticizes derrida for overextending one of languages’ functions, namely, the poetic, to all discourses14 because, he states, to profit from the poetic language’s metaphor, shafieyan: derrida’s shadow in the light of islamic studies 53 ajiss32-2_ajiss 4/8/2015 4:03 pm page 53 irony, metonymy, and the like in a philosophical or scientific text is absolutely different from writing a piece of literature, especially poetry. another controversial dialog took place between john searle and derrida in “reiterating the differences: a reply to derrida.” the latter assumes that because writing is able to function in the absence of the writer, the reader, and the context of production, it is not the communication of the writer’s meaning to the reader. the former, however, argues that if this were the case, then it is not the iterability of the linguistic elements that discern writing from orality, but rather the relative permanence of the former that makes it possible to separate the utterance from its origin. he points out that any regulated system of representation, whether spoken or written, must be repeatable, for “otherwise the rules would have no scope of application.” moreover, written discourse is not discerned from speech by the receiver’s absence from the sender, for “written communication can exist in the presence of the receiver, as for example, when i compose a shopping list for myself or pass notes to my companion during a concert or lecture.”15 finally, perez zagorin comments on representation’s two mistakes. first, while language is arbitrary in regard to the association of a particular phoneme with a special signifier and the concept it designates, it is not arbitrary with respect to reference or meaning. once a language is in existence, nothing is arbitrary because the letters of the word promise always mean the act of promising. second, although it is true that anything can be re-described, it cannot be done so in just any way. if the amazon river is the longest river in the world, it can be re-described as located in south america, as flowing through several countries, and in many other ways as well, but never as the shortest river in the world.16 on the other hand, i did find some scholarly works that speak of relations mainly in terms of the opposition between key concepts in islamic, generally, and qur’anic, specifically, contexts. based on my investigation, such works adopt this relation only between the terms and then try to interpret them in a contrastive or comparative way. for example, muzhgan sarshar’s values and anti-values: opposition in the qur’an first defines two types of opposition (i.e., simple and combinative) and then delves into practical samples.17 another prominent work is toshihiko izutsu’s ethico-religious concepts in the qur’ān, for in chapter 11, “good and bad,” he examines good-doing versus evil-doing (birr vs. fasād, ma‘rūf vs. munkar, khayr vs. sharr, ḥusn vs. sū‘, ṭayyib vs. khabīth, as well as ḥarām vs. ḥalāl). by discussing each category, he opens up some minor words or those that could be posed in the same rubric.18 the last book is fazlur rahman’s major themes of the qur’an, which encounters the matter of opposition in a very marginal attitude. the only ex54 the american journal of islamic social sciences 32:2 ajiss32-2_ajiss 4/8/2015 4:03 pm page 54 ample that could serve the purpose of the present study is the historical analogy rumored among the makkans between usury and welfare or usury and alms; hence, the qur’an clarified its opposition to money growing “several-fold” (ad‘āfan muḍā‘afah) by prohibiting usury (q. 3:130) and rejecting the alleged equation between usury and lawful commerce (q. 2:275-80). it also underlined the antithesis between usury and alms in almost similar wording (fayuḍā‘ifahu ... aḍ‘āfā) (q. 2:245).19 argument problems with binary pairs to start with, a question of significance could be why binary pairs should be reconsidered from the islamic viewpoint. such pairs have three general defects that never were cleared: the first one is contradiction, which is there when we find derrida repelling binary oppositions but at the same time creating novel ones. just as in the case of two examples, refuting binary oppositions generates a new one between binary opposition and binary parity. moreover, he provides anchorage for writing rather than for speech.20 having another opinion in her preface to of grammatology and believing that this is “a very hasty view”21 because neither writing nor speech is privileged for derrida, spivak neglects his comment in writing and difference that there is “writing in speech,”22 not the other way around. this contradiction implies the necessity of having binary pairs along with binary opposites. nonetheless, not only does he not attempt to solve this problem, but he also supports and enjoys it: “difference in general is already contradiction in itself.”23 this quotation conducts us to the point that derridean binary pairs themselves are more often than not contradiction-and-binary-opposition makers. when one party, previously dethroned from merit, reveals the same privilege, it stands beside the other to make a pair; in this case, despite incongruity, both signify one thing. for instance, raman selden tries to show that in nathaniel hawthorne’s scarlet letter the letter “a” on hester’s chest does not only refer to profanity (adultery) but sacredness (angel).24 but how can something be both sacred and profane? therefore, beside the paradox, the argument makes another binary opposition. incomprehensiveness, the second reason, is itself a trio: first, derrida objected to the binary opposition, for example, of speech and writing in western philosophy but did not take islamic philosophy into consideration, although there is no contrast between speech and writing in it.25 in qur’anic exegesis, neither one is privileged over the other. the qur’an was revealed orally, the shafieyan: derrida’s shadow in the light of islamic studies 55 ajiss32-2_ajiss 4/8/2015 4:03 pm page 55 holy book itself is a written text in our hands, and both have their own values in islamic hermeneutics. in other words, undertaking exegesis is not practical with only one of them. while interpreting a verse, the critic sometimes has to be aware of “the condition of revelation” (sha’n-i nuzūl) as well as syntax and other formal features of the arabic language. here, as we see, speech is hidden in writing and derrida’s statement is thereby reversed: there is “speech in writing” due to orality’s temporal priority, for the scripture was first revealed and then put into ink. nevertheless, when we understand that before being revealed to prophet muhammad the qur’an had once been included in another book, the “preserved tablet (lawḥ maḥfūẓ)” (q. 85:21-2) that contains all information about everything in all worlds,26 the equation again alters: now, there would be ecriture (writing) in parol (speech). yet, the matter of priority in time, which derrida maintained that throughout the history of western philosophy hinted at privilege, does not make sense either intellectually or conventionally. if it were so, then the first revealed qur’anic chapters would be more important than those revealed later; however, the antepenultimate chapter of unity (sūrah tawḥīd) is evaluated as one-third of the entire the qur’an.27 in other words, we grasp the meaning of one sign by its relation in the context – whatever it is; opposition, difference, or those i am going to speak of below – to another entity. for instance, evil is perceived when it is collated with good: “these two groups are like the blind and the deaf as compared with those who can see and hear well: can they be alike? how can you not take heed?” (q. 11:24, emphasis added). this verse spotlights the fact that the two groups are contrary, and the opposition comes out of the comparison. it then questions in an exhortative way why people do not mind the juxtaposition to differentiate the two. the last ground for revising derrida’s ideas is deconstruction’s suffering from illogical demonstration. the french thinker was of the opinion that no succession is ever simply linear; it is always also hierarchical: good both comes before evil and is privileged over it. in every case, what is (considered) secondary is defined in terms of the lack of presence, albeit trying to define “good” without any recourse to the notion of evil is impossible. treating of two issues seems essential here. first, in a deconstructive mode this is to aver that the presence of good turns out to depend on a relationship with the absence of evil. hence, presence is in some sense secondary and contingent on a structure of “supplementarity.” this, of course, holds true for not only the concept of “good,” but also for every positive or originary one.28 that is why i shall call derrida’s ideas the “metaphysics of absence,” for according to hans bertens he comes “in defence of absence,”29 not presence. he verifies this in his “freud and the scene 56 the american journal of islamic social sciences 32:2 ajiss32-2_ajiss 4/8/2015 4:03 pm page 56 of writing” by disputing the onto-theological exclusion of trace in western philosophy through “repression”: “the repression of writing [occurs] as the repression of that which threatens presence and the mastering of absence.”30 in bertens’ words, a point is leading; the word “defence” stands to be very determinative inasmuch as, once again, one side overweighs the other in derrida’s perspective. an opposition of metaphysical concepts (speech/writing, presence/absence, etc.) is never the face-to-face of two terms, but a hierarchy and an order of subordination. deconstruction cannot limit itself or proceed immediately to neutralization: it must, by means of a double gesture, a double science, a double writing, practice an overturning of the classical opposition, and a general displacement of the system. it is on that condition alone that deconstruction will provide the means of intervening in the field of oppositions it criticizes.31 in the deconstruction of binary oppositions, the economy of present advantages and disadvantages, it sounds that either/or should give way to both/and. but what is problematic here is that derrida again speaks of hierarchies for he does not like to “neutralize” the binaries of opposition into binary pairs, but prefers “overturning” them into new binary oppositions, although indirectly. in islamic thought, however, the reverse case is espoused: when goodness is relinquished, evil is born even it is goodness, godness, who can do this operation. goodness that is proper to god, which is situated on a different plane altogether, is not the moral opposite of evil. as it is on the same level as the real or truth,32 the only opposite of the good is unreality or nothingness. therefore, while it is at one with the positivity of the absolute, evil derives solely from a negative capacity to repudiate the good, the real. in other words, the good is identified with the creator, while evil is a modality of the created.33 in this way, the good is in everything and everywhere. whenever it is cancelled out, evil emerges. the opposite is not applicable, as derrida upheld that when there is no evil there would be the good, and that the privileged term depends for its meaning upon the suppressed one34 since the good is ever-existing. moreover, god has not created evil, but only the conditions within which it emerges. evil, as such, has no ultimate ontological principle.35 it is worth dwelling on derrida’s beliefs for a while. primarily, he supposed that no succession is only linear, for all of them are hierarchical. nevertheless, not only does the qur’an inform us of linearity in creation, but it also states that first there was darkness, not light, which postmodernists take to be privileged36: “praise belongs to god who created the heavens and the shafieyan: derrida’s shadow in the light of islamic studies 57 ajiss32-2_ajiss 4/8/2015 4:03 pm page 57 earth, and made darkness and light” (q. 6:1).37 in the genesis as such, linearity and hierarchy do not go hand in hand; therefore, it does not seem correct to base our argument on “priority.” the islamic stance toward the absence of any order regarding this binary will be elucidated below. the way derrida read plato’s “world of ideas” as privileged over the “world below,” due to the lack of presence in essence, also fails to see the other side: by prioritizing the former, plato simultaneously gives precedence to “the unseen” over “the seen,” while in derrida’s viewpoint “the seen,” accompanied with presence, is prioritized “from plato to rousseau, descartes to husserl,” or simply by all metaphysicians.38 in fact, plato uses the word image, presupposing “seeing,” for what we find in this world. although derrida tried to justify this by saying that eidos, the root of idea, means “metaphorical sight,”39 i have pointed out elsewhere that he mostly determined the literal meaning of seeing, physical presence, as the problem.40 qualities of qur’anic relations now it is time to count the characteristics of binaries in islamic thought. the history of western philosophy, derrida assumed, necessitated one party being privileged in a fixed, opposite relation of a binary. he then attributed parity to the two sides so that their single fixed relationship would not vanish. nevertheless, binaries in islamic theosophy are mostly epistemological, not ontological. by epistemological, it is intended that binaries do not obey the same rule if they are of identical nature or existence. in reality, an islamic scholar can only distinguish between two binaries with the same qualities; in other words, even if they have the same features, two binaries do not necessarily belong to one category. this distinction requires theological knowledge, which is an essential element of islamic philosophy, for it is one of the jurisprudential basics that analogy cannot be used to voice an opinion.41 binaries are not always created in the assumed condition, but, on the other hand, they have been made so by the human mind. the best illustration ot this might be that of god and satan: the latter was not created as god’s enemy, but as a prominent and favored jinn. he did not become an opposite of god even after his fall, and yet the human mind has reckoned him in this way. this issue will be discussed further in one of the binaries below. by this instance, we conceive of the fact that binaries are not indissoluble; in other words, they can convert to another group, a fact that yet again implicates their epistemological, as opposed to their ontological, being. the third trait could be inferred from the aforementioned verse (q. 89:3), in which many commentators have interpreted “even” as all binaries of crea58 the american journal of islamic social sciences 32:2 ajiss32-2_ajiss 4/8/2015 4:03 pm page 58 tures and “odd” as god, who is one and unique.42 in addition, the same hermeneuts believe that the verse refers to odd and even numbers, making the whole system of relationships. simply put, relations are not restrained to binaries only.43 complexity is added when we detect binaries even in other numbers. the qur’an also proclaims that “you will be sorted into three classes [in the last judgment]: those on the right … those on the left … and those in front – ahead indeed” (q. 56:7-10). here, the word for “classes” is azwāj, the plural of zawj (binary). this indicates that binaries could be extracted even from within groups. the first kind of kinship between two entities is the “singular pair,”44 in which two opposites are gathered in one yet do not become one. multitude and oneness are opposites, but existence is at the same time both one and many in god: “he is god, the one” (q. 112:1). islamic scholars interpret the arabic word for “one” (aḥad) as “unique but many”; nothing is superadded to god nor is he separate from others.45 this does not mean that he has some parts, any counterpart, or is divisible. although allah is one, he exists everywhere and in everything; that is to say, he is pervasive (basīṭ). as an example, one can refer to “i [god] … breathed my spirit into him [humanity]” (q. 15:29); simply said, this means that he exists in humanity.46 indeed nothing, not even the most outward aspects of material existence, can be excluded from the divine reality, for “he is the first and the last; the outer and the inner” (q. 57:3).47 derrida also, as the first rather common point, adopted the creed that no true opposition exists between pairs of conceptions.48 yet we should note that, as will be explained below, that difference sometimes leads to opposition and sometimes does not. in this way, the title of the present article would indicate that some conceptual shadows of derrida could be detectable in islamic thought. the second category, “couples,” includes two different beings. here, neither opposition nor parity matters, whereas difference does. the controversial cases of man and woman, or white and black (as race, not a skin color), are the best ones, for they embodied in “we [god] created you [humanity] all from a single man and a single woman and made you into races and tribes so that you should recognize [not oppose] one another” (q. 49:13). from different beings, a man and a woman, he created different tribes, which could be white, black, american indian, and so forth, whom the western and eastern texts and contexts have long taken as opposites. once more, i remind the reader that derrida also admitted the concept of difference. however, as in the previous case, i should accent the contingency of difference as a sort of relation, not as the only single one. shafieyan: derrida’s shadow in the light of islamic studies 59 ajiss32-2_ajiss 4/8/2015 4:03 pm page 59 the third kind of “binary opposition,” which contains two absolute oppositions, is one in which the existence of one signifies the non-existence of the other.49 here, it is noticeable that one is privileged: “these two groups [unbelievers and believers] are like the blind and the deaf as compared with those who can see and hear well: can they be alike?” (q. 11:24, emphasis added). this verse takes believers and unbelievers as opposites and likens them to the hearing and the seeing on the one hand, and the deaf and the blind on the other. in essence, one cannot be both a believer and an unbeliever at the same time. the rhetorical question at the end addresses common sense; that is, even if the language betrays or could be interpreted in another way, per derrida’s presumption, common sense does not allow two opposite things to become a pair by themselves. however, as mentioned before, opposites can turn to one another: “[i]t is he [god] who gave you life, will cause you to die, then will give you life again” (q. 22:66). a person cannot be both dead and alive because death and life make a binary opposition. this verse asserts that human beings were dead god breathed his spirit into them, after which they became alive and then, at the end of life, they die once again. nonetheless, in the hereafter once more they will be given life, but this time an eternal life. despite derrida’s assumption that the supplementary equals the contradictory,50 “counterpoints” in the qur’an are two complimentary entities, neither of which is prioritized. and yet both are accepted and can exist at the same time: “did they not see that we gave them the night for rest, and the day for light?” (q. 27:86; similar to q. 28:73; 30:23; 69:40). here, there is no negative connotation for “the night”; indeed, night and day are not presented as traditional opposites. they are complimentary, for they make one twenty-fourhour day: “you [god] merge night into day and day into night” (q. 3:27). likewise, they could exist at the same time at dawn and at twilight.51 “neither pair” contains two entities, neither of which exceeds the other in rank and both of which are condemned. according to islamic theology, one can be neither a colonizer nor a colonized, for “[p]ermission to fight is given to those against whom war is made because they are oppressed.”52 in other words, “these people are not allowed to be oppressed.”53 umar nasafi also interprets udhina as “commanded,” which conveys the unacceptability of being in an oppressed position.54 the interpretation of this verse also directs us to two of the angles of binaries expounded above: to be “epistemological” and “dissoluble.” mahmud al-zamakhshari glosses over this verse, saying that before its revelation, muslims were not allowed to fight against those who were oppressing them.55 therefore, via this verse one binary turned into another and, as such, relations were not acknowledged by nature. indeed, these turning points withstand ontology. 60 the american journal of islamic social sciences 32:2 ajiss32-2_ajiss 4/8/2015 4:03 pm page 60 “metaphorical binaries” are poetic or, generally speaking, literary concepts that throughout literary history have been posited as opposites with no actual and factual contrariety. most of the time, these oppositions are shared among various nations in world literature. as they are conventional, occasionally one is superior and sometimes neither are superior. qur’an 2:257 could exemplify this relation: “god is the ally of those who believe [in him]; he brings them out of the depths of darkness [heresy] into the light [faith].” as we observed before about the night (darkness) and the day (light), neither of them bettered the other. but here, darkness is undermined by light.56 then, we have “hierarchy” as the seventh group, in which one is superior despite there being no opposition or parity between the two. a controversial example could be the relation between god and satan, which is a “superficial binary opposition” in western culture. on the surface they are two opposite forces: the origin of good and the source of evil, respectively. nonetheless, in the islamic tradition the devil is nothing before god, just one of his creatures: “[satan] said, “give me respite until the day people are raised from the dead” (q. 7:14) or, “we [god] assign satan for whoever turns away from the revelations of lord of mercy” (q. 43:36). in these two verses, satan’s request and god’s respiting and appointing him show that his power is under god’s control. another illustration could be that of god and his servant): “[jesus] said, ‘surely i am a servant of god; he has granted me the scripture; made me a prophet’” (q. 19:30). also, “it is he [god] who has sent down clear revelations to his servant [prophet muhammad]” (q. 57:9). in these two verses, god’s highest creatures, prophet muhammad and jesus christ, are called his servants. ‘abd, the arabic word for servant, derives from ‘ibādah, the arabic word for worship, thereby exhibiting the hierarchy. one may say that there is a difference between god and humanity after all, so this follows derrida’s supposition of difference between any two entities. however, in this case the difference is not meaningful, for it is so obvious from the qur’anic stance that anyone can discern it. there is nothing new, as a matter of fact, in discovering that humanity is different from god and thereby apprehending their meanings by the difference. one may state that howsoever huge we consider this difference to be, it is, after all, still a difference. yet the point is that derrida took difference to equal to opposition, which does not apply to the god-humanity relation: “[t]he phonic element, the term, the plenitude that is called sensible, would not appear as such without the difference or opposition which gives them form.”57 in “contranyms,” we have one word with two opposite meanings. here, in order to understand the significance, the difference between two signs or shafieyan: derrida’s shadow in the light of islamic studies 61 ajiss32-2_ajiss 4/8/2015 4:03 pm page 61 marks does not matter. contranyms are extant in all languages. for instance, the english word cleave means both “to divide” and “to stick,” and quiddity signifies “essence” and “trifling point.”58 the arabic word ishtaraw means both “bought” and “sold”: “these are the people who bought the life of this world for the hereafter”59 and “these are the people who sold the hereafter for the life of this world.”60 referring to claude levi-strauss, who saw both meanings of the same nature or as “equivalence,” derrida rejected such justification.61 i agree with derrida that “equivalence” is not applicable, either lexically or separately, although i do not see any contradiction or opposition in such a lexical structure62 and refer readers to the identical (similar) meaning of the two translations above. in other words, although the meanings of the above words are neither the same nor contradictory, it is the context that determies their resemblance. the linkage among signs goes beyond binaries, for sometimes we should consider a tripartite affinity to understand the meaning of a sign, which might be called “triptych.” javadi amuli holds that the true meaning of “justice” is seen when three components are tightly concatenated. in this condition, the absence of one makes the meaning of justice shaky. the first part is “just rules”: “god commands you …, if you judge between people, to do so with justice” (q. 4:58). the verb “commands” indicates the necessity of justice as a general rule for humanity. the just ruler is the second one: “[god] said, “my pledge does not hold for the unjust [to become divine leaders]” (q. 2:124). justice-seeking people make up the last component of the triangle: “we sent our messengers with clear signs, the scripture and the balance, so that people could uphold justice” (q. 57:25). if we have a just ruler and just rules with no justice-seeking people, the government becomes of ‘ali, the first imam, in nascent islam; in other words, justice is not fulfilled completely, amuli adds. as ‘ali himself says, the difference between my government and others” is that in the latter “people woke up in fear from the governer’s cruelty, and i woke up in fear from my subjects” [cruelty].”63 to have the other binary fomulas – to have a just ruler and justice-seeking people without just rules results in a chaotic society; justice-seeking people with just rules, but without a just ruler, have no executive person to do justice – also leads to injustice.64 the last kinship to explain here is among four signs, called “knitted binaries,” including two binaries, any of the previous ones, from each one entity is not mentioned. as the connection is made when two of them crisscross, the relationship among the four would be discovered: “this is a revelation, an illuminating qur’an to warn anyone who is truly alive so that god’s verdict [of punishment] may be passed against the disbelievers” (q. 36:70). ac62 the american journal of islamic social sciences 32:2 ajiss32-2_ajiss 4/8/2015 4:03 pm page 62 cording to this verse, human beings are either alive or disbelievers. thus we can find out that those who are alive are believers and that the disbelievers are judged as the dead. in a similar way, ḥayyā (alive) is paraphrased as “the wise,”65 so the unbelievers may be weighed as “the ignorant.” conclusion in this study, i tried to look into derrida’s concept of the binary pair through an islamic lens, delving into three foibles of the view and counting three features/fortes of the qur’anic relations. contradiction, incomprehensiveness, and illogical demonstration are among the possible disadvantages of the french philosopher’s perspective, and epistemological, dissoluble, as well as various are three adjectives that can be used to attribute to the qur’anic binaries or relations. then ten rubrics were introduced as a handful of many others, within which the postmodern concept was discussed in detail. the argument confirms that the binary pair and binary opposition cannot, on their own, lead to a comprehensive apprehension of texts; however, they can be possible strategies for this aim. after this research, i would like to see more thought on some samples of the binary pair and the binary opposition. in other words, bearing these alternatives in mind, we should investigate the “metaphysics of presence” versus (or along with) absence. the priority of writing over speech or vice versa beside chance and causality are two important matters tightly connected with the subject. process and fixity, as well as institutionalization and uninstitutionalization are also in this line. i hope this change can vary the direction of hermeneutics, exegesis, and literary criticism. endnotes 1. jacques derrida, acts of religion, ed. gil anidjar (new york: routledge, 2002), 264. 2. william shakespeare, the tragedy of macbeth (middlesex: echo library, 2006), 1.1.11. 3. william blake, complete poetry and prose of william blake, ed. david v. erdman (new york: doubleday, 1988), marriage 33; pl. 3. 4. blake, complete, milton 128, bk. 2. 5. as binary in english signifies “something made of two things or parts,” it could be seen as a general word when collated with its synonyms, such as brace, duad, duo, dyad, pair, couple, or couplet, among others. f. c. mish, merriamwebster’s collegiate dictionary, 11th ed. (springfield: merriam-webster, 2004). in arabic, zawj may be taken as its possible equivalent, for this word shafieyan: derrida’s shadow in the light of islamic studies 63 ajiss32-2_ajiss 4/8/2015 4:03 pm page 63 also shares this generality. husein al-raghib al-isfahani, al-mufradāt fī gharīb al-qur’ān (beirut: dar al-‘ilm, 1412 ah), 384; isma‘il al-sahib, al-muḥīṭ fī allughah (beirut: ‘alam al-kutub, 1414 ah), 7:148; muhammad ibn durayd, jamharat al-lughah (beirut: dar al-‘ilm li al-mala‘in, 1408 ah), 1:473. 6. all qur’anic translations, unless otherwise mentioned, are by m. a. s. abdel haleem, the qur’an (new york: oxford university press, 2005). i have made some slight changes, such as interpolations, in brackets. 7. ahmed achrati, “arabic, qur’anic speech, and postmodern language: what the qur’an simply says,” arabica 55, no. 2 (april 2008): 161-203. 8. ian almond, sufism and deconstruction: a comparative study of derrida and ibn arabi (london: routledge, 2004). 9. jacques derrida, margins of philosophy, trans. alan bass (sussex: harvester, 1982), 16. 10. andrew bowie, schelling and modern european philosophy: an introduction (new york: taylor, 2001), 68. 11. walter j. ong, orality and literacy: the technologizing of the word (new york: routledge, 2002), 74. 12. frank kermode, “endings, continued,” in languages of the unsayable: the play of negativity in literature and literary theory, ed. sanford budick and wolfgang iser (new york: columbia university press, 1989): 71-94; 72-73. 13. e. d. hirsch, “in defense of the author,” trans. farhad sasani, zībāshinākht 14 (2006): 123-39; 134. 14. jurgen habermas, philosophical discourse of modernity: twelve lectures, trans. frederick lawrence (cambridge, uk: polity, 1998), 207. 15. john searle, “reiterating the differences: a reply to derrida,” glyph 2 (1977): 198-208; 199-200. 16. perez zagorin, “rejoinder to a postmodernist,” history and theory 39, no. 2 (may 2000): 201-09; 205-06. 17. muzhgan sarshar, values and anti-values: opposition in the qur’an (tehran: sushia, 2006). 18. toshihiko izutsu, ethico-religious concepts in the qur’an (quebec: mcgillqueen’s university, 2002), 203-49. 19. fazlur rahman, major themes of the qur’an (chicago: bibliotheca islamica, 1989), 27. 20. c. e. bressler, literary criticism: an introduction to theory and practice (new jersey: prentice hall, 1994), 78. 21. g. c. spivak, preface to of grammatology, by jacques derrida (baltimore: johns hopkins university press, 1976), lxx. 22. jacques derrida, writing and difference, trans. alan bass (london: routledge, 2002), 47. 23. jacques derrida, positions, trans. alan bass (chicago: chicago university press, 1981), 101. paul de man, another postmodern thinker, says that “contradictions, however, never cancel each other out, nor do they enter into the synthesizing dy64 the american journal of islamic social sciences 32:2 ajiss32-2_ajiss 4/8/2015 4:03 pm page 64 namics of a dialectic.” paul de man, blindness and insight: essays in the rhetoric of contemporary criticism (new york: oxford university press, 1971), 102. 24. raman selden, practising theory and reading literature: an introduction (hertfordshire: billing, 2003), 79-80. 25. muhammad khamini, mullā ṣadrā: hermeneutics and the understanding of divine words (tehran: siprin, 2006), 48-49. 26. m. h. tabataba’i, tafsīr-i al-mīzān, trans. m. b. musavi hamadani, 5th ed., 20 vols. (qum: daftar-i intisharat-i islami, 1995), 7:182. 27. m. mahdavi damghani, ruḍat-u al-wā‘iẓīn (tehran: nashr-i nei, 1987), 180; sheikh saduq, khiṣāl, trans. y. ja‘fari (qum: nasim-i kowthar, 2003), 2:392; m. h. tabataba’i and m. h. fiqhi, sunan-u al-nabī (tehran: kitabfurushi-i islamiyah, 1999), 268. 28. niall lucy, a derrida dictionary (malden: blackwell, 2004), 102. 29. hans bertens, literary theory: the basics, 2d ed. (oxon: routledge, 2008), 96. 30. derrida, writing, 247, emphasis added. 31. derrida, margins, 329, emphasis added. 32. the real, the truth, and the absolute are god’s different names. 33. rida shah-kazimi, justice and remembrance: introducing the spirituality of imam ‘ali (london: i.b. tauris, 2006), 75-76. 34. keith green and jill lebihan, critical theory and practice: a coursebook (london: routledge, 1996), 215. 35. for a valuable discussion on ethical principles, see izutsu, ethico-religious. in addition, plato deals with this matter in the dialog between socrates and cephalus in the republic (256-312). 36. bertens, literary, 101. 37. it is worth noting that this is the case in all abrahamic scriptures. for instance, “and darkness [was] upon the face of the deep … and god said, let there be light: and there was light” (genesis 1:2-3). 38. jacques derrida, “afterword: toward an ethic of discussion,” limited inc. (evanston, il: northwestern university press, 1988), 93. 39. jacques derrida and maurizio ferraris, a taste for the secret, trans. giacomo donis (cambridge, uk: polity, 2001), 77. 40. mahdi shafieyan, “the ‘metaphysics of presence’ and contemporary american poetry performance” (ph.d. diss., tehran: iauctb, 2012). 41. nasir makarim, trans., the holy qur’an, 2d ed. (qum: dar al-qur’an al-karim, 1994), 6:101. 42. i. ‘amili, tafsīr-i ‘āmilī (tehran: saduq, 1981), 8:560; r. sutudih, the translation of majma‘u al-bayān fī tafsīr-i al-qur’ān (tehran: farahani, 1981), 10:485; h. kashifi sabzawari, mawāhib ‘alayh (tehran: iqbal, 1990), 1:1356; makarim, tafsīr-i nimūnih, noor al-anwār 2, on cd, 27 vols. (qum: c.r.c.i.s., 1998), 26:445, among others. 43. mahmud zamakhshari, tafsīr-i kashshāf, trans. mas‘ud ansari (tehran: quqnus, 2011), 4:929-30. shafieyan: derrida’s shadow in the light of islamic studies 65 ajiss32-2_ajiss 4/8/2015 4:03 pm page 65 44. i have coined these terms for the ten sorts of relation based on their literal meanings and the provided definitions. in this regard, their prior possible critical, literary, or philosophical meanings have not been intended. likewise, i have not used the already-known words in rhetoric, such as antithesis, merism, oxymoron, ṭibāq, or zeugma, to name a few, because this study addresses the conceptual relations between/among words, not their apparent figurative connection. 45. tabataba’i, tafsīr, 20, 670-71. 46. along with the qur’an, referred to above, the bible bears the same concept: “and god said, let us make man in our image” (genesis 1:26) and “behold, the kingdom of god is within you” (luke 17:21). derrida also confirms this point: “man’s spirit is holy because the holy god deposited it in him” (derrida, acts, 164). 47. shah-kazimi, justice, 147. heidegger talks of being’s dual nature as disclosed and hidden, which accords with what the abrahamic scriptures state. spinoza also believed that, as lawrence cahoone clarifies, the whole of existence is numerically one, and called it deus sive nature, whatever we call him pantheist, panentheist, or immanentist. there is a difference, of course, in that he exists everywhere but everywhere is not him. he is in human beings, but human beings are not him, as, for instance, humans are driven many times by an evil drive too; that is, as far as one is godly, one gets close to him. in interpreting spinoza and explicating panentheism, schelling tells us that nature is one part of god, but that god is not limited to nature and is more than that. for spinoza, god is not only the spirit or mind, but also mind and body together, the argument that rejects the binarity between the two. lawrence cahoone, “modern intellectual tradition: from descartes to derrida” (virginia: the great courses, 2010), lecture 5. 48. derrida, writing, xvi. 49. the same point can be found in aristode’s “first philosophy” or ontology, the study of the features common to all beings, such as the fact that no being can both be and not be at the same time. m. inwood, a heidegger dictionary (oxford: blackwell, 1999), 126. 50. jacques derrida, of grammatology, trans. g. c. spivak (baltimore: johns hopkins university press, 1976), 245. 51. spinoza’s psychophysical parallelism suggests mind and body working in parallel, according to cahoone. for instance, when one’s toe is struck by a hammer, simultaneously one’s mind orders the limb to ache. cahoone, “modern intellectual,” lecture 5. 52. m. h. shakir, the qur’an (new york: tahrike tarsile qur’an, 1999), 22:39, emphasis added. 53. in islamic traditions, we also have imam sadiq’s famous quotation that “neither determinism nor free will [is accepted], but a state between the two.” b. ja‘fari, trans., iḥtijāj, 2 vols. (tehran: islamiyah, 2003), 2:529. 54. najmuddin ‘umar al-nasafi, tafsīr-i nasafī, trans. ‘azizullah juweini (tehran: intisharat-i bunyad-i farhang-i islami, 1976), 482. 66 the american journal of islamic social sciences 32:2 ajiss32-2_ajiss 4/8/2015 4:03 pm page 66 55. zamakhshari, tafsīr, 3: 259. 56. gold and silver or gold and copper are two examples of this genus. in each, the former term excels over the latter noun. on the other hand, in english literature blake’s “the tyger” and “the lamb” (1789-94) represent a metaphorical binary in which neither is undernor overestimated. 57. derrida, of grammatology, 62, emphasis added. 58. mish, merriam-webster’s, 230, 1021. 59. shakir, the qur’an, 2:86, emphasis added. 60. makarim, the holy qur’an, 2:86, emphasis added. 61. derrida, given time: i. counterfeit money, trans. peggy kamuf (chicago: university of chicago press, 1992), 67-68. 62. another example can be what derrida discovered in hegel’s “aufhebung” (“to conserve” and “to suppress”). jacques derrida, ear of other: otobiography, transference, translation, ed. christie v. mcdonald (new york: schocken, 1982), 130; jacques derrida, points ...: interviews, 1974-1994, trans. peggy kamuf et al. (redwood city, ca: stanford university press, 1995), 101. in the context, one in which hegel explained this idea as synthesis, the first meaning, to preserve, could be preserved, as two things are kept into one; on the other side, the second import, to suppress, is unsatisfying, since if one nullifies the other, there still remains one, and this will not be what is called “synthesis.” 63. a. musavi (sayyid radi), nahj al-balāghah, trans. a. feid al-islam isfahani (tehran: feiz al-islam, 1986), 284, sermon 96. 64. ‘abdullah javadi amuli, “mahdavīat and divine justice,” intiẓār 13 (fall 2004): 41-54. the meaning of time is not complete unless one notices past, present, and future at the same time. trinity is among other examples, although inacceptable in the islamic tradition (q. 4:171, 5:73). my point here is about different relations between/among signs in different texts and cultures. as christians belive that the three persons in the trinity are the same, they should be regarded as being in a relation instead of as being two by two or separately in western or christian literature. in literary texts, it is sometimes necessary to criticize the text in regard to three characters. for example, in a psychoanalytical approach to william shakespeare’s hamlet (1601), we should see hamlet, claudius, and gertrude in a triangle. j. lacan, j. miller, and j. hulbert, “desire and the interpretation of desire in hamlet,” yale french studies 55/56 (1977): 11-52. 65. muhammad gunabadi, tafsīr-i bayān-u al-sa‘ādah fī maqāmāt-i al-‘ibādah, trans. rida khani and hishmatullah riyadi (tehran: payam-i nur university press, 1994), 12:194. shafieyan: derrida’s shadow in the light of islamic studies 67 ajiss32-2_ajiss 4/8/2015 4:03 pm page 67 to cite this article please include all of the following details: low, marylin and palulis, pat. (2004). laboured breathing: running with and against internationalizing texts of currere. transnational curriculum inquiry, 1(1) http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci <access date> laboured breathing: running with and against internationalizing texts of currere marylin low international educator, hawai’i, usa pat palulis university of ottawa, canada abstract two texts running a chiasmatic course – running with and against lines of separation. traces of bergamo 1999 linger in these textured doublings invoked by an invitation to baton rouge and a dialogue of international curricular provocations from which iaacs emerged. we query what happens when teachers and learners locate themselves in spaces where languages invoke a re-articulation of their pedagogic lives. incited by such cadences of ar/rhythmic moments, we write out of a living pedagogy that is always already in-between movements of translation and transformation. re-running the course – the course of running with and against our work – we have learned to read with aoki that the same is always already – toujours déjà – the same and not the same. and hence our laboured breathing…running with and against internationalizing texts of currere. http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci marylin low & pat palulis: laboured breathing transnational curriculum inquiry 1 (1) 2004 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 13 two texts running a chiasmatic course – running with and against lines of separation. traces of bergamo 1999 linger in these textured doublings invoked by an invitation to baton rouge and a dialogue of international curricular provocations from which iaacs emerged. 1. attentive to the double gesture of writing as inter-discursive moments of currere – as sender, we respond to our addressees who invited us to attend to our breathing and bring our bodies into the work. “i am experience. with each breath. experience. regardless of the context, i am, running a course. currere is to run” (pinar & grumet, 1976). 2. in our (w)rites of passage – moments of to-and-fro – at the scene of departure – a driver – le passeur – one who takes people across borders into ex-clusionary spaces – made reference to our going ‘up-the-way-a-bit’ – blurring the boundaries of our re-turn – and now – in the now of discourse we are ‘down-the-way-a-bit’ – revisiting – in a re-currence of discourse. fragment from heraclitus (robinson, 1987) inscribes that “a road up [and] down [is] one and the same [road]” (p.41). rerunning the course – the course of running with and against our work – we have learned to read with aoki (2003) that the same is always already – toujours déjà – the same and not the same. and hence our laboured breathing ... [chiasm(us) ] http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci marylin low & pat palulis: laboured breathing transnational curriculum inquiry 1 (1) 2004 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 14 what happens when we, as teachers and learners, locate ourselves in a space where languages provoke a rearticulation of our pedagogic lives? engaging with/in such chiasmatic acts of languaging has opened us to the international as texts of currere. in the ‘inter’ of our work with students, we are drawn to derrida’s double proposition of monolingual polyglossia, to aoki’s textured hybridity of language, and to bhabha’s in-between space, as sites that surprise and disrupt signs of difference in the classroom. and, we have become wary of the tenancy of those signs in our encounters with currere. through reading elsewhere and writing otherwise, we are alert to a labouring of signs we hadn’t anticipated. incited by such cadences of ar/rhythmic moments in the pedagon (smith, 1999) of our teaching lives, we dwell in a living pedagogy that is always already in-between movements of translation and transformation. for us, the inter is a curricular space of liminality, textured by gil’s (1998) modulating breath as passage – a passage taking “its pulse from…difference” (pollock, 1998, such a language would be one that grows in the middle. ted aoki ‘inter’ the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the in-between space – that carries the burden of meaning of culture. homi bhabha what is a body? it is a speaking respiration. respiration, breath, pneuma a modulating pathway ... any rhythmic expression, like rapid speech or hesitation, which reverberates there, is made possible, as such, by this property of the breath as a passage. jose gil we only ever speak one language. . . (yes but) we never speak only one language. . . jacques derrida a word located in a hybrid space in-between englishes [british/american] performs in tensionality beneath and beyond the sign. brackets clattering – clamo(u)ring – as discordant aspirations. tracking the economy of signs from husserl to derrida, caputo (1987) makes reference to the labor of the sign – the anonymous productivity of the sign – a productivity performing the work of tenancy in the presence and in the absence of objects. tracking a shift from the uselessness of the sign to the productivity of the sign, derrida contends that the sign performs the work of tenancy – holding on to the thing as the thing slips away from the sign. and what happens when signs labour to perform the work of tenancy in curricular spaces in-between languages? in a doubling moment of pedagogy, derrida (1998a) evokes two alternating symptoms: the first as an “asphyxia: a state of apparent death, a ceasing of respiration, a fainting fit, a cessation of the pulse” and the second as the pulse quickening as if “drugged, intoxicated, inebriated by the new richness” (p. 53). could yet another language emerge from this ar/rhythmic space – from a labouring of language that grows in the middle – as an aokian moment? running with and against the signs of pedagogy – across borderlines in the slippery inter spaces of an international currere, how can we begin to trouble the tenancy of the sign? we attend to ar/rhythmic breathing with our neighbours across the border – taking a pulse from difference – in the running of a course – up and down the road. from one neighbour to another – the property of a breath as passage. running the interval of translation as derrida’s notion of survivre – living on. each re-writing a doubling gesture – a transformative moment of discourse. [labo(u)r] http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci marylin low & pat palulis: laboured breathing transnational curriculum inquiry 1 (1) 2004 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 15 p.82). running with and against internationalizing texts invoked in our classrooms, we trouble and are troubled by passages of colonial nostalgia; where phantoms trafficking in english take on the guise of neo-colonial inscriptions, only to remind us that the colonial “smile [still] lingers in the air” (nandy, 1989, p. 276). classroom rhythms disrupted, interrupted, corrupted by the willful impositions of phantoms. surprised by ghostly remains, we are seduced into a laboured breathing of contingent and restless dialogues – of speaking respirations in the cutting edge of translation and negotiation – that move us on. we write out of the laboured breathing of our pedagogic lives enacted in translation – one shifting roles from a primary teacher to a teacher of teachers always already midst inter/national arrivals and departures, and the other a teacher of english language learners at home and elsewhere ever-dwelling in the difficulties of translation. entering into liminal folds of translation with our admittedly derridean curiousities, we take from trinh t. minh-ha (1992) that translation as grafting is “a problem of reading and identity” (p. 244). as writers/translators, we story into hybrid spaces of persistant instability that invoke difference into our co-evolving work with students. with jean-luc nancy (1993, p. 33) we track a trembling that “differentiates, defers, identity; that is how identity is colonialism may have vanished from the world scene but its smile lingers in the air. ashis nandy to write means to graft. it’s the same word. the saying of the thing is restored to its being-grafted. the graft is not something that happens to the properness of the thing. there is no more any thing than there is any original text. jacques derrida translation, like identity, is a question of grafting several cultures onto a single body so hybridization is not only between but within. trinh t. minh-ha a detour now with maurice blanchot (1982) into the space of literature. blanchot contends that ambiguity seduces us – evoking in us the desire for clarity – a desire that is endlessly deferred. gasché (1999) reading blanchot reminds us that “ordinary language seeks to remove ambiguity and to limit equivocality by putting a term to understanding” (p. 339). blanchot turns to literary language as a slippery passage for setting it free. i re-read ondaatje’s (1992) the english patient through the blanchotian (1995) citation of ambiguity in literary language as “in some sense abandoned to its excesses by the opportunities it finds and exhausted by the extent of the abuses it can commit” (p. 341). the hungarian count ladislaus de almasy, as the english patient, betrays and is betrayed through sly spatialities midst languages. what happens when ambiguity is halted? when an accent as acoustic hybridity is refused entry into englishness – is this how betrayal occurs? let us enter into the space of re-readings – the space of a hyphen where identities are de-stabilized. re-reading ondaatje re-works the hyphen. alerted to the property of a breath as passage i become aware of the english patient’s laboured breathing with and against his languages in the tensioned hybrid space of ambiguity and uncertainty – of promise haunted by the possibility of its perversion – a doubling gesture of betrayal through the textual ambiguities of his languages. what happens in the inter of international – always already a haunted space? there are no easy in-betweens in bhabha’s cutting edge of translation and negotiation. laboured breathing – the property of a breath as passage – as passage to the death of the english patient. the promise of breathing haunted by the inevitability of cessation. a derridean doubled symptom. the discourse in-between nations – a discourse of ambiguity halted. could this be what derrida means by performative contradictions? the occupant and the ghost – in the body of the text – in the text of the body – in the textual resonances of the body of the english patient. [de-tours] http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci marylin low & pat palulis: laboured breathing transnational curriculum inquiry 1 (1) 2004 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 16 given”. an aokian (2003) play doubles the space of ko-jin as individual – as both divided and undivided – exposing some slippage in the ‘inter’ of translation. with blanchot (1997, p. 56), we labour with the notion of “translating as the bringing into ‘work’ of difference.” theorizing internationalizing discourse(s) of currere through hybrid graftings and de-tours keeps us open to the im/possibilities of reading and writing the work of difference in classroom life. within the gesture of a performative and hybrid genre, we graft into wounds and gaps and fissures of pedagogy – running into troubled topographies – turner’s ‘limen’ – to interrupt our complicity with and against the globalization of english as a productive signifier. as teachers we ask, how can we enter into conversations with students and with each other, opening to the limen – the ‘inter’ – of internationalizing texts as generative sites of possibilities? sites that call into question experiences with english and its hegemonic tendencies? trembling with/in storied translations of curricular practices, we read with derrida (1998a) that he no longer has to distinguish between promise and terror – “a promise…is…haunted by the possibility of its perversion” (p. 93). laboured breathing as a dwelling with/in curricular practices of promise and terror… • the cinematic event of the english patient returns me to the acoustics of laboured breathing – a ‘sounding’ of hybridity – the english patient’s laboured breathing as he is held [host/age] in his charred burnt body – a rereading within the gap – the interval. rey chow (1995) alerts us to the generativity of detours through translation from novel to filmic script opening to yet another moment of pedagogy. my re-reading becomes another supplement in my writing – in my speaking – in my breathing – into the space of interval. trinh (1999) contends that “[t]he interval, creatively maintained, allows words to set in motion dormant energies and to offer, with the impasse, a passage from one space…to another” (p. xi). in re-viewing the television documentary “the resonance of the english patient” that followed the filmic version of the novel, i am re-reading trinh who envisions ongoing conversations around texts and scripts breathing life into the work – the reader invited into these circum-scriptions as supplement. three variations on an english accent – author/producer/director – engage in performative re-readings of textual fragments and engage in complicated conversations on the making of the film – in what trinh refers to as “the task of speaking nearby…in an interrelational space of detour” (p. xii). and viewing the documentary, i am startled by the enunciation of an ‘international’ sand club. limen: a no-man’s-land betwixt-and-between a fructile chaos, a fertile nothingness, a storehouse of possibilities, a striving after new forms and structure. victor turner [inter-val] http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci marylin low & pat palulis: laboured breathing transnational curriculum inquiry 1 (1) 2004 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 17 in an ‘inter’ space of the classroom, a complicated conversation errupts and enfolds derrida’s double proposition; “we only ever speak one language (yes but) we never speak only one language” (1998a, p. 10). in class a student labours through her thoughtfulness – a passage unsure of itself – sharing her responsibility of a group task. a fragmented language – “one that grows in the middle” (aoki, 1993, p. 99) – is halted to redress its impurity. teacher impulses work to purify a language at the cutting edge of translation and negotiation. it was what she wanted, wasn’t it? my (un)intentional curricular practices became language games, perpetuating necessary illusions of speaking “only one language”. a close colonial encounter labours to imprison the originary language, the un/grammatical core now arrested at the borderlines and imbued with imperial ink – my unsuspecting ink is used to map another. a cartography where colonial texts work to establish and sustain the possibility of a base rhythm of english resisted and transformed by acts of translation. learning (in) english proffers a place where the interdiction of english is the indisputable incursion of its own law – at once there is both obedience and a failure to obey. a jabèsian “cadence of subversion” (1996, p. 5) always already there destabilizes the colonial encounter with a language that grows in the middle – an aokian metonymic moment (aoki, 2003) that locates itself in the terror of a promise of “only one language”. another stopped by my office visibly upset. broken words midst ar/rhythmic pulses alerted me to what was for this international student from japan a troubled translation. living language in the abyss of a moment in exile, she had spoken japanese in an ‘english only’ classroom – a classroom invested with the ideals of linguistic purity and enforced by students outlawing the use of japanese, their originary language from which they sought leave. in front of her japanese classmates, she stood to take her curricular turn, speaking only in the unity of one language, english. the in-struct(ur)ed a sand club – a group of hash harriers – ex-patriates – running a course in desert lands – a currere in the desert – mapping a course for the other – in the jabèsian desert spaces beneath the words. but…running where? footprints disappear in desert sands that refuse our imaginary cartographies. in a radical reading of the cinematic version of the english patient, hanley (1998) critiques the romanticism of the film and calls for attentiveness to the “abrasiveness” of sand – the “maddening intrusiveness” of sand (p. 23). how can we work with abrasion as a tensioned space of generative possibilities? currere always already under erasure through maddening intrusiveness. and hanley draws our attention to the torment of kirpal singh as he hears news of the bombing of hiroshima and nagasaki. i am citing singh’s words from ondaatje’s work: “never turn your back on europe. the deal makers. the contract makers. the map drawers” and blurring the boundaries of national distinction: “american, french, i don’t care. when you start bombing the brown races of the world, you’re an englishman” (p. 25). troubling the sly spatialities of englishness in a slippery passage of globalization. commenting on the circulation of religion like an english word comme un mot anglais derrida (1998b) inscribes a globalization that is “running out of breath essoufllee, however irresistible and imperial it still may be” (p. 30). we listen deeply as derrida asks “what are we to think of this running out of breath?” (p. 30). laboured breathing as abrasive text(ure). de-stabilizing english. [currere] http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci marylin low & pat palulis: laboured breathing transnational curriculum inquiry 1 (1) 2004 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 18 base rhythms of english reverberated discordantly. the passage of english only was impassable; instead, she sought a hybrid place nearby. living a moment of terror of my mis-informed obligations as an english teacher disrupted my commonplace. i, too, had been seduced and become complicit in the colonial act of insisting on the (im)possibility of english only. disruptive discursive excursions. i found myself now wanting to risk opening to the possibility of never speaking only one language. her traces of japanese in a moment of translation troubled the english ear. what am i asking of her in an ‘english-only classroom’? what does ‘english only’ want? sutured by the geneology of graftings between and within one language, how can any language be pure? differing social and structural forms from language contact seep, spill, spin into and out of the other. living languages always already running with and against a course of translation, at once altering and maintaining their forms in fluid and fragmented (pre)tension – speaking only one language (yes but) never speaking only one language. the burden of purity of a language becomes its untenable demise. the enunciatory space of english in translation caught her by surprise. languaging in cultural uncertainty, her japanese slippage exposed itself in the summons of another language. an ambiguous space of speaking in-between languages – midst aoki’s (2003) vertical and horizontal signification and bhabha’s (1994) ‘inter’ – “the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the in-between space of limen that carries the burden of meaning of culture” (p. 38). a text emerges not as this language or that but as this language and that – a “third space” wherein the textured “others of ourselves” (p. 39) work to dissolve the weightiness of textual polarity – of this language or that. base rhythms of only one language troubled this student – she turned to intertextual moments – texts that invoked turner’s “storehouse of possibilities” within unwanted remnants of one language nested in another. it was in a class with ted aoki in the summer of ‘96 that we first heard of derridean différance – a neologism of difference and deferral – and we began to seek out readings on deconstruction. and now i’m reading derrida’s letter to izutsu. in derrida’s “letter to a japanese friend” on the difficulty of translating his notion of deconstruction – he writes on the chance of ‘deconstruction’ – “the chance of ‘deconstruction’ would be that another word (the same and an other) can be found in japanese to say the same thing (the same and an other) to speak of deconstruction and to lead elsewhere to its being written and transcribed.... i understand translation as involving the same risk and chance as the poem. how to translate ‘poem’? a ‘poem’?…” (kamuf, 1991, p. 275-6). derrida in his letter to izutsu contends that the sign of deconstruction interests him only when replacing other words “as ‘écriture,’ ‘trace,’ ‘différance,’ ‘supplement,’ ‘hymen,’ entame,’…etc.” – an open listing – translating the sign is a movement – a moment – a rhythm of aspiration. derrida punctuates his ending with an ellipsis that continues to breathe life into the work. and listen to aoki (2003) on the sign of ko-jin – the doubling of labour in the productivity of the sign – translating ko-jin as individual – as both divided and undivided – “an admission perhaps that in translation there is some slippage, something left untranslated, and thus incomplete” (p. 6). we learn with aoki that to be attentive to the ‘re’ is to dwell in the silence and the excess of the hyphen. grafting and being-grafted as a labour of language(s). [translation ] http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci marylin low & pat palulis: laboured breathing transnational curriculum inquiry 1 (1) 2004 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 19 and now returning from the blanchotian space of literature – two narratives – two storied memoirs – two students – dis/located through live(d) experiences midst sly spatialities. two hyphenated identities dwelling in hybrid spaces – spaces of promise haunted always already by the possible perversion of promise. a young algerian-jewish student expelled from school – an experience that derrida contends “leaves nothing intact, something you can never again cease to feel” (derrida in interview with wood & bernasconi, 1988, p.74). a japanese-canadian university graduate dis/located from mainstream society – displaced and relocated – an experience of pain that aoki felt bone deep (in conversation with ted aoki, 07/96). what does the hyphen want? who desires to limit the ambiguity of the hyphen? how does the violence of language and the law come to inhabit the space of the hyphen? and here i draw on a citation from cixous (1993): “why?…because. as you know this is the secret of the law: ‘because’,…. this is the law’s logic. logic. it is this terrible ‘because,’ this senseless fatal ‘because’ that has decided people’s fate …. it is this because that rules our lives. it pervades everything. it can even touch the fragile world of translation” (p.117). as graftings are halted. as bodies are excluded. as the colonial smile lingers in the air … a singular definite article questions the possibility of english being at one with itself – questioning the risk in wanting to speak the pure language of the master, a language that derrida (1998a) contends, is a system whose unity is always reconstituted. but this unity is not comparable to any other. it is open to the most radical grafting, open to deformations, transformations, expropriation, to a certain a-nomie and de-regulation. (p.65) i reassured her of the double bind of translation – those de-regulated (ar)rythmic movements of (in)alienated graftings where we never speak only one language. risking my desire to remain open to language-in-translation as a generative space within tensions of ambiguity and uncertainty, my words were quickly silenced as the western phantasms of unity, of purity, of clarity worked to motivate a re-constitution of the master’s language. english was only one language. wanting to re-work this site with her, i shared michel de certeau’s (1988) iteration of clarity as a betrayal of the richness of ambiguity. she did not want to hear these words. she had broken a promise – an illusory promise of speaking only one language – a promised sentence undelivered. the phantoms of the promise’s perversion did not rest. the student, a japanese writer of english living in the chiasmatic two-fold of translation midst the departure and arrival of languages, does not speak in only one language – can never speak in only one language. a reversal transverses the faltering terrain as she begins to question the im/possibility of english-only. yet, japanese is alienated in the english only classroom – a “sweet dream of reason” (doll, 1999) now implicated in derrida’s (1998a) “irremediable suffering” of the speaker when the double [re-turns] http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci marylin low & pat palulis: laboured breathing transnational curriculum inquiry 1 (1) 2004 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 20 fold of languages-within-languages is not assumed – when alienation “institutes every language as a language of the other” (p. 63). leaning on derrida’s notion of desistance as a rupture always already there, her trembling translation is at once a problem and not a problem. messy texts of translation (low & palulis, 2000) emerge, entangle, fragment, and create anew. speaking with a faulty tongue, estrangement breathes life (and death) into english. a living language she seeks to master, locates itself in the spaces between mastery and non-mastery. what english does she want? her “sweet dream” slips away as alienation lingers in her troubled aspirations. she pauses momentarily, disquieted yet intrigued by her unique ways with words. life in the abyss runs with and against such alienation and yet lives on in a language she can now bear to live with. is english only ashis nandy’s (1989) warning of the colonial smile that lingers in the air? is it a veiled assertion of colonial sovereignty in classrooms that enact languaging as a mastery of the other? faint traces work to preserve the ‘gift’ of an imperial passage – illusory tropes of a pure, unified english and its mastery – endemic with/in sites now engaged in internationalizing curriculum. the limits of speaking/writing english only become the limits of one’s world. a world labeled by english becomes limited only by the perversion of its mastery in the otherwise promise of an unlimited world. re-writing english only as derrida’s double proposition unveils a colonial smile and exposes a scandalous myth of translatable transparency. the colonial desire to deliver a limiting, perfunctory english narrative of the world is obliterated, no longer resting on assumptions of illusory clarity in the possibility of translating one language/one world as a passage into the other (english). borderlines always already crossing borderlands of foreign tongues – anzaldua’s (1999) new mestiza – indwelling midst texts in-between, texts always already in a constant flux of translation…laboured breathing. • a teacher trafficking in english. my canadian “i” was once an expatriate working in the oil company’s school in libya, north africa, when the time-was-out-of-joint. a moment surprised by difference in an early morning bombing attack. my identity – de-stabilized through border crossings – living with the terror of being mistakenly identified as the enemy ‘other.’ a few words in arabic – a passage – a modulating pathway through another language – the stranger in my ‘self’ speaking in the tongue of another – to mark my borders – frame my boundaries. a desire to clarify the ambiguity of the hyphen in expatriate. the words labo(u)ring to frame my difference from those who dropped the enemy bombs. working and worked by a double vowel. an experience, as cixous (1993) would say, of “[c]rossing the frontier...at the stroke of a signifier” (p.81). a displaced body seeking replacement – relocation – through the labo(u)r of the sign – the productivity of the sign – the productivity of an appropriated sign – the brackets clamo(u)ring in terror. cixous (1993) contends that “[t]he person who doesn’t tremble when crossing a border doesn’t know there is a border and doesn’t cast doubt on their own definition” (p.131). labo(u)ring across borders, i trembled. returning to libya, my english books are removed by airport security and hurled across the floor – bhabha (1994) makes reference to “the presence of the english book….surface that stabilizes the agonistic colonial space” (p. 110) – the surface of the english book as a sign of labour while the thing has already departed. the english teacher is passed through the gates – the body as a speaking respiration … a modulating pathway…the breath as a passage. but the english books are held in house arrest. trafficking in english – confiscated typographies – the english text as contraband. the body as a token of this exchange – a counterfeit economy – a space surprised by difference – complicity interrupted and disturbed. passing through security … a modulating pathway … [trafficking ] http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci marylin low & pat palulis: laboured breathing transnational curriculum inquiry 1 (1) 2004 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 21 discursive spaces of internationalizing curriculum, accentuated as sites of translation, constantly traffick in the presumption that practices can be translated from one cultural localism to another – from a curricular practice to the curricular practice – an imperial passage that constantly brushes against the conceit of its own discursive formations. i read internationalizing texts of currere as liminal, un/translatable spaces, spaces troubled within multiple and complex losses and gains of languages-in-flux. i am wary of dis-eased sites of colonial desire that seduce me into a cartography already mapped – a pilgrimage tainted by the residuals of social memory, a foreign tongue that threatens to alter the state of the language of the translator, and the symbolic loading of language games that become re-routed by scandals of translation. guarding against the scandals of translation is an imperial task of the translator (benjamin, 1968). yet, what happens when translation by scandals is refused? one, in a graduate class of students, labours in a language not his own. in his desire to participate with the other, he told me he couldn’t speak – at the threshold of an utterance his breath agonized in troubled perplexity – left with “a fertile nothingness” – constantly running with and against the sayable expectations of a graduate student. the silently oral enactment of a grafting not-yet-taken enacts a distortion of an initial selfpromise to the sayable now caught up in a network of texts living in the moment. his text – perhaps a derridian sur-vive – a ‘living on’ in words that are both at once translatable and untranslatable – becomes a text toiling to survive. a student, engages in benjamin’s (1968) task of the translator and, in the pause of a moment indebited to the search for words in english to prolong the textual life of his originary – was deferred by the voice of an other insisting to be heard. an other graduate wanting to speak. an act working un/intentionally to silence the promise of survival. for a moment, we were ‘down-the-way-a-bit’ in baton rouge engaged in complicated conversations conducted in cross-border english(es). running with and against internationalizing curriculum, we were hash harriers running the course in jabèsian desert spaces. a desert under erasure offers infinite hospitality – an opening to grafting multiple identities into a writing that always already doubles its gesture of deliverance. where are we? peggy phelan (1997) contends that, “[p]erformative writing enacts the death of the ‘we’ that we think we are before we begin to write” (p.17). and so we continue to write with and against – this englishness. we write toward what phelan terms “the radicality of unknowing who we are becoming” (p. 17) – our writing pushing against the hegemonic ideologies of knowledge – our writing pushing against this englishness that shifts with some degrees of separation. in the space of the ‘inter’ one imagines a coming and a going – a to-and-fro movement in in-between spaces – an ex-change of messages. translation as reading – iterability of the mark – translation always already adrift – language itself as a babelian event in the im/possibility of translation. how to write as/in a complicated conversation? reading giorgio agamben (1999), we are mindful of his call for a restoration of the difficulty of writing as “the task of the coming philosophy” (p.38). as a task for the coming community. translation is always already – toujours déjà – what marks and re-marks the “detour of language in languages” as drift (leavey, 1987, p. 36). we are crossing oceans now in drifting conversations – fragments in virtual space … detour of language in languages … [internationalization] http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci marylin low & pat palulis: laboured breathing transnational curriculum inquiry 1 (1) 2004 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 22 derrida’s (1998a) reference to a double proposition of monolingualism is a reminder of how the double-fold of language works to blur the boundaries of a text’s speakable passage – the internationalization of a curricular translation frays at the edges, finding trouble in the asymmetry of one language in another, “always for the other, from the other, kept by the other” (p.40). in the extended silence, was he seeking a form of survival that reproduced his original text in the language of arrival? the base rhythms of an imperial passage into english disrupted by a foreign tongue – english only as/in a colonial silencing of translation? the “sweet dreams of reason” return hauntingly with their “dark underside” (doll jr., 1999, p. 88) – their desire to absorb the other into one – one language appropriated by another. in the moment of a laboured pause, a colonial tendency to pre-empt the other was enacted – the cadence of english was not to be disrupted. an international graduate student signing his own desistance in hybrid pulsations – one language ar/rhythmically conversing with the other – experiences the double bind of translation. what do i say to this student, caught in the silence of his pronouncement – his desire to speak overcome by the sweet dream of reason? how does one live in spaces of laboured breathing, running with and against the internationalization of currere? i read with derrida (1985) that translation is not representation and reproduction of the orginary but is an act of “transforming the original as well as the translation” (p. 122). the obligation of the translator is to both sustain textual life and survive beyond – a kind of hospitality that becomes a symbolic alliance between languages – a language that grows from the middle, extending each language beyond itself – in grafting, a reconciliation of languages where the whole becomes greater than either the original or the translation. running with and against the colonial desire for an english only, translation as transformation welcomes the impurity of language and its multiple tongues. edmond jabès makes reference to an infinite hospitality. a generous hospitality was extended toward the participants in louisiana in the founding of a new association (iaacs) – welcoming the stranger in conversation. stamelman (1991) in his introductory essay to the jabès reader evokes the jabèsian notion of hospitality as “a form of dialogue and sharing offered to the other, to the stranger in his or her radical difference” (p. xxi). a jabèsian hospitality welcomes “the unknown person who suddenly appears from nowhere” (p. xxii). we responded to an invitation extended at bergamo to work on our breathing and to bring our work to louisiana. rosmarie waldrop (1991) translating jabès comments on a writing that does not seek to “master language” – a jabèsian writing opens language to silence…and “lets it breathe a larger air…listens to it, listens to language thinking and breathing...” (p. xxvi). could this be a modulating pathway for international dialogue? learning to listen to language thinking and breathing. what happens when listening invokes a modulating pathway for hospitality? derrida (1998a) writes of a generous hospitality in louisiana in april ‘92 at lsu – as an invitation to francophones and to hyphenated francophones. this derridean text that so entices us began as a presentation – as a labour of signs at an international/bilingual conference in louisiana entitled “echoes from elsewhere”/ “renvois d’ailleurs.” and it is from the space of hyphenated identities that derrida asks what the hyphen wants,contending that the hyphen is never enough – “never enough to conceal protests, cries of anger or suffering, the noise of weapons, airplanes, and bombs” (p. 11). we have learned to listen to the performative contradictions of hospitality and hostility. [hospitality] http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci marylin low & pat palulis: laboured breathing transnational curriculum inquiry 1 (1) 2004 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 23 if curricular traces of internationalization are understood as sites of intertextual translation – of benjamin’s kinship of languages, of derrida’s double proposition – would this graduate student’s task of speaking in an other language continue to be deferred, his tongues silenced in the imperialist’s desire for ‘pure’ english? his breath labours in attempting the im/possiblity of a transparent translatability? was he living in the borderline – running with and against base rhythms of english – dwelling in a derridian paradoxical agreement (in the abyss between translatability and untranslatability)? how can we, as teachers and learners – only ever speak one language (yes, but) never speak only one language – dwell in a moment of language reconciliation – in a complicated conversation of currere and its internationalization – in this practised place of classroom life? a text moves on … responding to calls – transporting words and transported by words from conference to conference – (e)migrating, mutating, translating, transformed and transforming. a text renews itself in a postscriptive labouring with words… after china. seated in the audience at the first world curriculum studies conference in shanghai, i heard through my earphones, the laboured breathing of a translator as a speaking respiration. a translator gasping for air. languagesgasping-in-transport. i heard the acoustic hybridity of translation-in-labour. one translator near asphyxia passes the work to an other … a pulse quickening …to pick up the laboured breathing of breath as passage and move it on. laboured breathing through translation� transported through language(s)� words and worlds of a complicated currere – a breathing, gasping pulse of difference. and at year end i am drawn to a headline: “china … exhales …” a reference to china’s extraordinary year and future possibilities. as one exhales an other inhales in modulating pathways … reverberations … of the breath as a passage. noel gough (2003) at the first world curriculum conference in shanghai calls for “rearticulations of the languages in which curriculum work is performed and represented” (p. 296-7). we listen for the resonance of the detour of language in languages. gough encourages us in building “transnational solidarities in curriculum work based on shared responsibilities rather than shared identities” (p.296). we struggle with the im/possibility of separating identity from responsibility. we work with and against gough: the ‘re’ of our re-articulation(s) labours to dis/mantle the language of solidarity. does not the language of solidarity require some tension to keep the work-in-motion? some abrasiveness as a maddening intrusion to radicalize an international sand club. we draw phelan into conversation as performative writing enacts the death of the ‘we’ that we think we are before we begin to write. what might happen to the tenancy of the identity ‘we’ in solidarity if it were a performative act? we read phelan’s notion of the radicality of unknowing who we are becoming with derrida’s contention that promise and terror are inextricable. a dis/articulation in a moment of curriculum theorizing – an aokian moment – as productive instability. our labo(u)ring signatures adrift as host(age) welcoming the unknown stranger who appears from nowhere to share in a discourse that grows in the middle – a grafting that begins in the ‘inter’ spaces of international curricula – that traveled from north america to china – that carried curriculum across the pacific where it was interrupted in conversation and transformed in its return. we welcome the reader to the text as stranger in his or her radical difference … to run with and against our words … [re-articulating...] http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci marylin low & pat palulis: laboured breathing transnational curriculum inquiry 1 (1) 2004 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 24 two texts running with and against languages of currere –vestiges of bergamo ‘99 and now iaacs resonate as we attend to the rhuthmos of our bodies and our breathing in this work – breathing that labours in complicated conversations inspirited by a louisiana invitation 1. ar/rhythmic interdictions dwelling in living spaces of internationalizing discourses as textured inbetweens 2. unsuspected cadences that disrupt the base rhythms of the colonial project in curricular practices and enter the space of the ‘inter’ – a space now rhythmed into the re/percussive double folds of lacoue-labarthe’s (1989) typography of the subject – of derrida’s (1989) rhythmic desistance–[rhythmic ruptures] – destablizing stances “set spinning from within” (p. 23) – where “there is no subject without the signature of this rhythm” (p. 31) – rhythms that are neither perceptible nor discernible, remaining outside of the sens(ibl)e – residing in the echoes of no sense. we attend to the inscriptive forces of an ar/rhythmic rupture – a ‘pedagon’ of un/translatability in the ‘inter’ of internationalization – a non-sensible disposition of unique ar/rhythms – opening to the possibility of an intelligible sense midst no sense – opening to the space of the double fold as a generative site. laboured breathing. could this be the frisson – a vibrant tensionality – of textured in-betweens in internationalizing discourses of currere? could this be an aokian moment of living pedagogy? [rhuthmos ] http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci marylin low & pat palulis: laboured breathing transnational curriculum inquiry 1 (1) 2004 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 25 references agamben, g. (1999). potentialities: collected essays in philosophy. (d. heller-roazen, ed. and trans.) stanford, ca: stanford university press. anzaldua, g. (1999). borderlands la frontera (2nd ed.) san francisco: aunt lute books. aoki, t.t. (1993). in the midst of slippery theme-words: toward designing multicultual curriculum. in t.t. aoki & m. shamsher (eds.), the call of teaching, (pp. 87-100). vancouver, b.c., canada: british columbia teachers’ federation. aoki, t.t. (2003). locating living pedagogy in teacher “research”: five metonymic moments. in hasabe-ludt & hurren (eds.) curriculum intertext (pp. ). new york: peter lang. benjamin, w. (1968). the task of the translator. in arendt’s (ed.) illuminations (pp. 6982). new york: schocken books. bhabha, h. (1994). the location of culture. new york: routledge. blanchot, m. (1995). the work of fire. (c. mandell,trans.) stanford, ca: stanford university press. blanchot, m. (1997). friendship. (e. rottenberg, trans.) stanford, ca: stanford university press. (p.56) caputo, j. (1987). “the economy of signs in husserl and derrida: from uselessness to full employment.” in j. sallis (ed.), deconstruction and philosophy: the texts of jacques derrida. (pp. 99-113). chicago,il: university of chicago press. chow, r. (1995). primitive passions: visuality, sexuality, ethnography, and contemporary chinese cinema. new york: columbia university press. cixous, h. (1993). three steps on the ladder of writing. new york: columbia university press. de certeau, m. (1988). the practice of everyday life. berkeley: university of callifornia press. derrida, j. (1985). the ear of the other. (peggy kamuf, trans.). lincoln: university of nebraska press. derrida, j. (1989).introduction: desistance. in p. lacoue-labarthe, typography, (pp. 142). (c. fynsk, trans.). stanford: stanford university press. derrida, j. (1991). “letter to a japanese friend”. in p. kamuf (ed.), a derrida reader: between the blinds (pp. 269 –276). new york: columbia university press. derrida, j. (1998a). monolingualism of the other or the prosthesis of origin (p. mensah, trans.). stanford, ca: stanford university press. derrida, j. (1998b). “faith and knowledge: the two sources of ‘religion’ at the limits of reason alone.” (s. weber, trans.) in j. derrida and g. vattimo (eds.) religion. stanford, ca: stanford university press. doll, w. jr. (1999). conversing with “the other”. journal of curriculum theorizing, 15, 3, 83-90. gasche, r. (1999). of minimal things: studies on the notion of relation. stanford, ca: stanford university press. gil, j. (1998). metamorphoses of the body. (s. muecke, trans.) minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci marylin low & pat palulis: laboured breathing transnational curriculum inquiry 1 (1) 2004 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 26 gough, n. (2003). transnational curriculum inquiry: towards new constituencies and solidarities in curriculum work. in the collection of papers to the first world curriculum studies conference (1). shanghai: institute of curriculum and instruction, east china normal university. hanley, l. (1998). “desert suits: viewing the english patient.” radical america 26(3), 20-27. jabes, e. (1982, 1996). the little book of unsuspected subversion. (r. waldrop, trans.). stanford: stanford university press. jabes, e. (1991). from the book to the book: an edmond jabès reader. (r. waldrop, trans.) hanover, nh:wesleyan university press. kamuf, p. (ed.) (1991). a derrida reader: between the blinds. new york: columbia university press. lacoue-labarthe, p. (1989). typography. (c. fynsk, trans.). stanford, ca: stanford university press. leavy, j. (1987). “destinerrance: the apotropocalyptics of translation.” in j. sallis (ed.), deconstruction and philosophy: the texts of jacques derrida. (pp. 33-43). chicago, il: university of chicago press. low, m. & palulis, p. (2000). teaching as a messy text: metonymic moments in pedagogical practice. journal of curriculum theorizing. 16(2), 67-79. nancy, j-l. (1993). the birth to presence. (b. holmes and others,trans.) stanford, ca: stanford university press. (p.32) nandy, a. (1989). shamans, savages and the wilderness: on the audibility of dissent and the future of civilizations. alternatives, xiv, 263-277. ondaatje, m. (1992). the english patient. toronto: mclelland and stewart. phelan, p. (1997). mourning sex: performing public memories. london: routledge. pinar, w. & grumet, m. (1976). toward a poor curriculum. dubuque, ia: kendall/hunt publishing company. pollock, d. (1998). performing writing. in p. phelan(ed.), the ends of performance (pp. 73-103). new york: new york university press. robinson, t.m. (1987). heraclitus fragments: a text and translation with a commentary. toronto: university of toronto press. smith, d. (1999). pedagon. new york: peter lang. stamelman, r. (1991). the graven silence of writing. in e. jabès, from the book to the book: an edmond jabès reader. hanover, nh: wesleyan university press. trinh, minh-ha t. (1999). cinema interval. new york: routledge. trinh, minh-ha t. (1992). framer framed. new york: routledge. waldrop, r. (1991). when silence speaks. in e. jabès, from the book to the book: an edmond jabès reader. hanover, nh: wesleyan university press. wood, d. & bernasconi, r. (eds.). (1988). derrida and differance. evanston, il: northwestern university press. http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci marylin low & pat palulis: laboured breathing transnational curriculum inquiry 1 (1) 2004 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 27 authors marylin low lives in hawai’i where she works with pacific educators and children of oral traditions around questions of language(s) and literacy(ies). she is particularly interested in bilingualism as/in resistance to global english and in global/local dialectics on linguistic and cultural exchange. correspondence to: marylinlow@hotmail.com pat palulis is an assistant professor in the faculty of education, university of ottawa. she is interested in the integration of theory and practice in teaching as living pedagogy. her research interests involve language, literacy, culture and spatiality. correspondence to: ppalulis@uottawa.ca http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci to cite this article please include all of the following details: nicholas ng-a-fook (2009). toward understanding a curriculum of being inhabited by the language of the other. transnational curriculum inquiry 6 (2) http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci <access date> 3 the southern wetlands await the louisiana migratory birds to fall from their skies. the canadian geese’s annual flypatterned return from a summer of birthing life, reminds me of a departure, a birthing of otherness, migrancy of a name, its title and genealogical trace of migration from china to guyana, south america to britain, and glasgow to kapuskasing, a small rural logging town in northern ontario. toward understanding a curriculum of being inhabited by the language of the other nicholas ng-a-fook university of ottawa i feel lost outside the french language. the other languages which, more or less clumsily, i read, decode, or sometimes speak, are languages i shall never inhabit. … but the “untranslatable” remains— should remain, as my law tells me—the poetic economy of the idiom… (derrida, 1996/1998, p. 56). in the south, the suspense of an autumn harvest shortens, as the southeastern sugarcane fields reach up towards the bluish sky. the cypress and live oak trees, leaning from the levees, shed this season’s greenery into the depths of the louisiana bayous murky meanderings. a grayness of spanish moss still dangles from the nakedness. i fall behind, and delay any headings, towards a final arrival at the academic shores of the louisiana state university instituted general examinations, what derrida (1980/1983) calls elsewhere a time of a thesis: punctuations. i have difficulty finding, “…the potential values that sleep or play at the bottom…” of writing, on writing, about derrida’s (1990/2002) philosophies, autobiography as currere1, the relationships among self, other, institutions, and their housed systems of universal knowledge (p. 4). often at the end of the night, after trying to negotiate and translate thoughts on derrida’s various concepts (deconstruction, idiom, aporia, genealogy, trace, difference, différance, language, translation, subject, etc.) into spoken and written words, i close his books which clutter the kitchen table in sweet submission, unable to surrender to the language of deconstruction, his deconstruction of language. dawn arrives before me, and as the sun surfaces at the horizon of louisiana’s wetlands, i struggle to translate their alien landscape. my thoughts continue to tremble with fear in the face of examining the untranslatable poetics ng-a-fook: toward understanding a curriculum transnational curriculum inquiry 6 (2) 2009 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 4 of derrida’s writing, his birthing of idiomatic conceptions, and their respective excesses of otherness. i long for the arrival of dusk, for the specters of derrida to whisper a gift of understanding, a translation of his conceptual riddles, the secrets of his aporias, and inscribe this time of thinking into the marks of a written language, always situated, limited, “…on the verge of untranslatability” (p. 41). under the shadows of the horizon, the following creative energy, electricity, teleports life, its materiality into re-marks, repetitions, and iterations from derrida’s writings onto the landscape of this textual body. “dusk is,” kohák (1984) reminds us, “the time of philosophy” (p. 32). in this nighttime of writing, its unconscious sleepwalking, its shadows, i am concerned most of all with where to begin a (philosophical, curricular) “complicated conversation,” from where to affirm our departure (pinar, 2004). this moment of writing then, is a response to questions raised in previous texts, in other academic landscapes, now mapped within the temporal limits of this autobiographical writing, as i “search for a method” of “understanding” derrida’s curriculum on inhabiting and being inhabited by the language of the other (see pinar, 1975/2000; pinar & reynolds, w., & slattery, p., and taubman, p. 1995). it is the end of august and under its starlit nights, off the shores of language, i continue to sleep and play on the horizon of derrida’s writing. this paper traces, often drawing on autobiographical examples, the temporal migrations of educational experiences in the language of the other. as a documented canadian and british citizen, an immigrant with an ex-appropriated proper name traced to guyana’s indentured chinese cane reapers, and thus, an imperial and postcolonial subject with certain identity disorders here in america, canada, and elsewhere, how is a migratory subject subjected to the language of the other? more specifically, how might one learn, via currere, from a migrant subject’s educational experiences of appropriation and alienation in the language of the other? in order to do so, in the first section i examine derrida’s concept of “deconstruction” and its relationships to deconstructing “the subject” of colonialism, language, and its translations.2 in the second section i problematize the impossible colonial politics of properly appropriating the language of the other. in the last section, i introduce a curriculum of hospitality towards the language of the other which moves beyond alienation and appropriation. now, let us open this paper with a letter. addressing a letter on the subject of deconstruction …i would say that the difficulty of defining and therefore also of translating the word “deconstruction” stems from the fact that all the predicates, all the defining concepts, all the lexical significations, and even syntactic articulations, which seem at one moment to lend themselves to this definition or to that translation, are also ng-a-fook: toward understanding a curriculum transnational curriculum inquiry 6 (2) 2009 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 5 a gift of death instituting slavery created a historical space for chinese indentured laborers, known as cane reapers, to birth their existence without origin into the margins of guyana’s national narrative. britain abolished the slavery of african subjects in 1834. however the west indies plantation owners’ demands for cheap labor did not diminish. chinese subjects subjected to persecution, famine, or wanting to escape a feudal system, in search of “common” wealth, migrated to british guiana (see sue-a-quan, 1999). china prohibited such emigration, fearing the possible political revolution caused by those who returned from “foreign” places. a subject, not yet hyphenated, traveled the tumultuous seas, without the possibility of return, in order to become an indentured laborer cutting cane along the tributaries of the demerara river. no longer with rights as a chinese subject, or protected by rights as a british subject, fook ng, my great, great, grandfather, was now a subject subjected to the power of colonial rule. deconstructed or deconstructible, directly or otherwise, etc. (derrida, 1983a/1991, p. 274). the silence of that hyphen does not pacify or appease anything, not a single torment, not a single torture. it will never silence their memory (derrida, 1996/1998, p. 11). it is before the thaw of daybreak. yesterday’s reading, thinking, and writing experiences a certain temporal death. however, the temporality of a yesterday— the writing and understanding of derrida’s concept of “deconstruction,” its immediacy—is suspended between the lines of these pages, dawn and dusk, life and death. my thoughts continue to inscribe their particular traces on these pages with a universal energy. today, this paper opens with an addressing, a re-turning, to the subject of deconstruction in a letter to a japanese friend.3 derrida (1983a/1991) cautions professor izutsu, it goes without saying that if all the significations [on deconstruction] enumerated by the littré interested me because of their affinity with what i “meant” [“voulais-dire”], they concerned, metaphorically, so to say, only models or regions of meaning and not the totality of what deconstruction aspires to at its most ambitious (p. 271). these models themselves, derrida (1983a/1991) maintains, must be submitted to “deconstructive questioning” (p. 271). derrida (1992a/2001) reminds us, asks us, demands of us in the name of responsibility for the other, to free “deconstruction,” the “subject,” “its human rights,” from the “word,” and its assumed logocentric or phonocentric idiomatic forms. deconstructive work involves tracing genealogies across academic borderlands, and uncovering the historical layers from which such concepts and their translations emerge, and thus are promised, and made ng-a-fook: toward understanding a curriculum transnational curriculum inquiry 6 (2) 2009 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 6 some time after the 1850s, the first ships from china made the arduous journey to the land of many rivers for which the local amerindians named guiana. on fook ng’s arrival at the gates of the colonial port, a british magistrate translated and reinscribed this foreign subject’s first and last names with the unfamiliar anglicized marks of john and cyril respectively. his son later re-appropriated his chinese name. hyphenating his father’s former chinese title, the family surname became cyril ng-a-fook. the descendents of john cyril ng-afook jr. learned how to embrace the inscription and father the language of this newly named title. although his title was translated, the subject of fook ng’s history continues to survive and surf the postcolonial hyphens between self, other, language, and culture. possible through language. in this movement of deconstructing “the subject,”— which derrida (1992a/2001) doubts is yet possible—the subject of deconstruction “is thus taking into account all the determinations and trying…to improve the concept of the human subject” (derrida, 1992a/2001, p. 179). the concept of “the subject,” like those of “deconstruction,” “colonization,” and their translations, can be traced, for example, through the greek, latin, german, french, and english languages. derrida (1992a/2001) maintains that we must first translate the words philosophy, deconstruction, or subject for example, “…into a different idiom, and finally in all the possible idioms,” in order to make, the “…word subject understandable in other cultures” (p. 178). therefore to approximate an understanding of deconstruction, or to deconstruct the subject of and subject within autobiography, one is faced first with the problem of translation. the “first thing you have to do is a universal translation” of what “the subject” is and is not (derrida, 1992a/2001, p. 178). deconstruction of the word “subject” is then first for derrida (1992a/2001), among other things, “the genealogical analysis of the trajectory through which the concept has been built, used, legitimized, and so on” (p. 177-178). and to deconstruct the subject is not, derrida (1983a/1991) makes it clear, to destroy, dissolve, or cancel the legitimacy of what you are deconstructing. furthermore, “the subject” of which derrida (1992a/2001) speaks, is not used the same way in the anglo-american tradition for example, as it is in continental philosophy. 4 beyond a dogmatic critique of pure reason, derrida (1990/2002, 1991a/1992, 1992a/2001) asks us to recall, with care and rigor, our double duty,5 our inheritance of concepts, and the language which conceives the subject of deconstruction, in order to reaffirm the limitless possibilities illuminated by the philosophical heritage of husserl, heidegger, kant, descartes, aristotle, and so on. the “…subject was first,” derrida (1992a/2001) explains, “in the aristotelian tradition the hypocheimenon, something which is underneath, identical to itself, and different from its different properties, qualities, attributes; it is the center of an identity” (p. 178).6 the “speaking subject” performs certain representations of identities—cultural and national— through language, his or her mother tongue (see derrida, 1967/1973, 1996/1998). butler (1990/1999) stresses, that “the domains of political and linguistic ‘representation’ set out in advance the criterion by which subjects themselves are ng-a-fook: toward understanding a curriculum transnational curriculum inquiry 6 (2) 2009 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 7 formed, with the result that representation is extended only to what can be acknowledged as a subject” (p. 4). how might one then reaffirm the structure of “the subject,” within autobiography for example, while questioning the limits of its canonized representations (e.g., a white european male bourgeoisie)? in the name of god, king, queen, country, state, or the metropolis, institutions such as the university guard and discipline the legitimacy of who is (which subjects are) entitled access to the universal systems of euro-, ameri, and/or can-centric knowledge. and, as butler (1990/1999) stresses, such universal systems work in turn to shape “the subject.” the american state, albeit not globally alone, continues to invest in a cultural, linguistic and economic capital which attempts to reproduce a common subject, with a common curriculum, and thus disseminates its empire through ideological apparatuses—juridical, educational, medical, religious, media, etc.— which makes the subject of deconstruction, and the deconstruction of “the subject” all the more pressing today. in “privilege,” derrida (1990/2002) continues to work, without settling for a resolution, through the oppositions, paradoxes, and aporias of “what is,” and “what is not” philosophy. who has the “rights” to such philosophical institutions? in following such lines of questioning, what are and what are not, the “rights” of a migrant subject? as a migrant, an indentured laborer, a postcolonial subject, what were john cyril ng-a-fook’s rights of access to the institutions which house a knowledge of citizenship, its language, and in turn his en-title-ment to, the right to name and to naming his rights? derrida (1990/2002) makes it clear that …the title given (or refused) someone always supposes, and this is a circle, the title of a work, that is, an institution, which alone is entitled to give (or refuse) it. only an institution (the title of the body entitled to confer titles) can give someone his or her title (p. 4). but who then, entitles an (colonizing) institution? such institutional entitlement is presupposed, derrida (1990/2002) explains, for institutions (philosophical, juridical, medical, educational, etc.) are already entitled to give someone his or her title. institutions entitle themselves through an exemplary system, a system of circular examples, (which, through a tradition of western logocentrism proves, offers proofs of its logic) originated, established, and privileged by an instituted foundation of what is and what is not. deconstruction, therefore, is a “questioning in the sense of search, exploration, reflectivity, rejection of all assumptions, not as an act of demolition, but as striving for awareness” of alterity, heading towards the possibility of otherness which resides at the marginal limits of such institutions (egéa-kuehne, 1995, p. 299). derrida (1992a/2001) suggests that if you call deconstruction “…an ethics of affirmation, it implies that you are attentive to otherness, to the alterity of the other, to something new and other” (p. 180). how does “the ng-a-fook: toward understanding a curriculum transnational curriculum inquiry 6 (2) 2009 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 8 through the process of translating derrida’s interview, i stumble across words for which translation and their immediate understanding are, deferred, not ready-athand. are they ever? but suspended, i am, in the cultural web of the french language. the following sentence, “le temps du sursis se rétrécit de façon accélérée,” eludes my present comprehension. the words “sursis” and “rétrécit” are alien, and alienate, my ephemeral moment of understanding. my memories of a language, the only language we had in the french catholic school system i attended, a language that was never mine, eludes a proper appropriation. although i find some reprieve keeping a french-english dictionary close at hand, i continue to struggle, while trying to negotiate the violence of universal translation, of excluding and reducing all possible meanings of the other, to a proper english idiom. i settle with the following phrase, “the time, suspended in reprieve, shrinks ever faster.” at the end of this process of translating french writing into language, its inscriptions into thoughts, thoughts back into english language, and its inscriptions into writing, i learn that derrida’s time suspended between life and death shrinks ever faster. subject” of deconstruction negotiate his or her (human) rights to name, of naming, his or her rights of otherness, his or her citizenship in the language of a colonizing other? how do the institutions of schooling and their languages work in the configurations of such entitlements? what knowledges are privileged and presupposed in (colonizing) educational institutions? writing towards the impossible terrain of “properly” understanding the answers to such questions is where this paper heads next. returning to the shores of a french language: colonial politics of language every culture institutes itself through the unilateral imposition of some “politics” of language (derrida, 1996/1998, p. 39). it is another day after yesterday in august. in the south, the humid invisibility, damp and heavy, floats over the landscape’s eroding skin. birds of flight continue their migration to the refuges of louisiana’s vanishing wetlands. once again, nighttime overshadows a place of thinking, reading, and writing. i entangle myself in le monde with the textual body of derrida’s interview.7 alien to the climate of this landscape, i sense the estrangement of invisibility coming from beneath the cracks of my apartment door. i struggle to translate, always with a certain amount of violence and death towards the language of the other. how might i then, whisper and breathe life into the words of derrida? under the alienating light of darkness and solitude, its shadows, i learn that derrida’s breathing and his suspension between life and death is shrinking, shortening, slowly ceasing. he is suffering, internally, with pancreatic cancer. just before daybreak, before the songs of mourning doves awake me, i am reminded of the parallels between him and my father’s colonial births, their shared encounters with ng-a-fook: toward understanding a curriculum transnational curriculum inquiry 6 (2) 2009 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 9 terminal illnesses, exclusions, separations, and en-titled ties to national citizenships and their alienating institutions. to be alien, an alien worker, is to live without title, without the human rights afforded under the language of entitle-ment.8 alienation is a certain death of the subject, and yet one’s own death is an alien moment in autobiographical writing. can derrida and my father write a currere of death, when death precedes such writing? one remains “…un-educateable with regards to the knowledge of knowing how to die,” derrida (2004) reminds us. yet, can one write about a certain death of yesterday, of who “i” was yesterday? there is also death between the hyphenated spaces of alienation and appropriation, a violence, a loss of meaning, involved in first, and second, and third, and fourth, …and…and…and, translations of a french language that was never mine, or an english language that never was fook ng’s. but, there is also a birthing of a language and its otherness in such—hyphenated—“third space” (wang, 2004). and therefore, how does one learn-to-live within the aporias—a language of undecidability—of such hyphenated third space? in response to this question, derrida (1996/1998) shares the following: 1. we only ever speak one language—or rather one idiom only. 2. we never speak only one language—or rather there is no pure idiom (p. 8). in monolingualism of the other, derrida works to situate our lived experiences in, and with, a language which moves beyond the hyphenated spaces of appropriation and alienation. derrida migrated from algeria to study in paris. but even before leaving the shores of africa in 1949, derrida spoke in the language of a country where he had never been himself. “my language, the only one i hear myself speak and agree to speak,” derrida (1996/1998) tells us, “is the language of the other” (p. 25). elsewhere derrida (1997/2001) explains, french is the only mother tongue i have, but while still a child i had a vague sensation that this language was not really my own. … so i had the feeling that this language, which was the only one i had, came from somewhere else (p. 38). his family migrated to algeria from spain before the french colonization. the crémieux decree in 1870 granted french citizenship to the jews of algeria. less than a century later in october of 1940, during wwii and the german persecution of jews, henri philippe pétain’s administration abolished the crémieux decree.9 ng-a-fook: toward understanding a curriculum transnational curriculum inquiry 6 (2) 2009 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 10 along with others, i lost and then gained back french citizenship. i lost it for years without having another. you see, not a single one. i did not ask for anything. i hardly knew, at the time, that it had been taken away from me, not, at any rate, in the legal and objective form of knowledge in which i am explaining it here (for, alas, i got to know it in another way). and then, one day, one “fine day,” without, once again, my asking for anything, and still too young to know it in a properly political way, i found the aforementioned citizenship again. the state, to which i never spoke, had given it back to me. … that was, i think, in 1943; i had still never gone “to france”; i had never been there. (derrida, 1996/1998, p. 15-16) two years later derrida was expelled from elementary school. “here we have a 12-year old boy,” derrida (1997/2001) writes, “who, without anyone explaining to him what anti-semitism is, or what is happening politically, is kicked out of school” (p. 37-38). yet, derrida (1996/1998) stresses, the denial of french citizenship did not prevent an unprecedented assimilation of the state official and institutionally privileged language. derrida (1997/2001) continues, “a crack is opened in the relative security of the school, the place where culture is offered to him, where languages are taught—especially the dominant models of the french language” (p. 38). as a result of his expulsion, derrida’s parents enrolled him in a jewish school. but he still experienced anti-semitism outside the school, in the streets, and among his circle of peers. the lived experience of not belonging, its alienation, affected his relationship with the jewish community. derrida’s (1997/ 2001) childhood trauma caused him to cultivate “a sort of not-belonging to french culture and to france in general, but also, in some way, to reject” his belonging to judaism (p. 39). in reading derrida’s account of exclusions due to his paternal and genealogical ties to judaism, cultural jewishness, i try to imagine how exclusion emerged/emerges under the proper surname of ng-a-fook and its traces of chinese-ness, or in turn, how it erases gaelic-ness under the maiden name gray.10 father gained and lost his british citizenship in the land of many rivers. when guyana was granted liberation in 1966, many former colonial subjects, who where not born on the queen’s crown land, now occupied a post-colonial11 status of not belonging, and lost their inalienable rights granted under the title of british citizenship and its entitlements: “citizenship, does not define a cultural, linguistic, or, in general, historical participation” (derrida, 1996/1998, p. 15). even during the global decolonization of the 1950s and 1960s, institutions in france and britain continued to define their national identities by the groups they did not— chinese, irish, jewish, black, indian, migrants—belong to. in “privilege,” derrida (1990/2002) writes, the surface of its [the institutions’] archive is then marked by what it keeps outside, expels, or does not tolerate. it takes the inverted shape of that which is rejected. it lets itself be delineated by the very thing ng-a-fook: toward understanding a curriculum transnational curriculum inquiry 6 (2) 2009 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 11 that threatens it or that it feels to be a threat. in order to identify itself, to be what it is, to delimit itself and recognize itself in its own name, it must espouse the very outlines of its adversary, if i can put it thus (p. 5). during different historical eras the french and british institutional apparatuses have had to react and redefine their cultural identities and respective national narratives in the “face” of a certain “masked” otherness, by declaring with a politics of language what they were not (fanon, 1967/1991). this universal system of exclusionary logic, of defining philosophically what the other is, and what one is not, its system of deferral, différance, displacement, worked and still works today to privilege certain national identities associated to the metropolises of a colonial motherland or fatherland. in the name of responsibility for the other, derrida (1990/2002) asks us, to question recursively the “essences” and “functions” of language which privilege the foundations of such (educational and colonizing) philosophical institutions. “it is the apparent firmness, hardness, durability, or resistance of philosophical institutions,” derrida (1990/2002) suggests, which “betrays, first of all, the fragility of a foundation. it is on the ground of this (theoretical and practical) ‘deconstructability,’ it is against it, that the institution institutes itself” (p. 10). cane reapers, former colonial, colonized subjects, eventually learned the hard secrets, now no longer secrets, about the frailty of colonizing institutions. some post-colonial subjects, alien in foreign lands, appropriated the languages of the other and learned to navigate the polyglot, hybrid, and hyphenated spaces between an appropriation of what is and an alienation of what is not colonial culture. here derrida (1991a/1992) tells us, “there is no culture or cultural identity without difference with itself” (p. 9). yet, how does a colonial or postcolonial subject negotiate between the hyphenated spaces of sameness and otherness, alienation and appropriation, the colonizer’s institutional language and one’s native language, the schoolmaster’s tongue and one’s mother tongue, which in turn is always already occupied by the language of the other? what are the limits-situations of such (re)appropriations? a curriculum of hospitality toward the language of the other what is happening today, and has been for some time, i think, are philosophical formations that will not let themselves be contained in this dialectic, which is basically cultural, colonial or neo-colonial, of appropriation and alienation (derrida, 1991b/2002, p. 337). this mother language with which we are at home is the language belonging to a community—a language of sharing, a language of familiarity, a vernacular ng-a-fook: toward understanding a curriculum transnational curriculum inquiry 6 (2) 2009 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 12 because that master does not possess exclusively, and naturally, what he calls his language, because, whatever he wants or does, he cannot maintain any relations of property or identity that are natural, national, congenital, or ontological, with it, because he can give substance to and articulate [dire] this appropriation only in the course of an unnatural process of politicphantasmatic construction, because language is not his natural possession, he can, thanks to that very fact, pretend historically, through the rape of a cultural usurpation, which means always essentially colonial, to appropriate it in order to impose it as “his own.” (derrida, 1996/1998, p. 23). language of daily conversation, a language with a profound respect of the other and self (aoki, 1987/2005, p. 239). …language is for the other, coming from the other, the coming of the other (derrida, 1996/1998, p. 68). the sound of morning bells tolls. it is october. the suspension of derrida’s breathing between life and death has ceased.12 today, an unseasonal humidity, its invisibility, still heavy and damp, floats on the surface of louisiana. i long for seasonal change. until then, “you” and “i” must host the death foretold of this season’s language. dawn and dusk, self and other, two strangers in the same sky, share a universal terrain of such seasonal language. language is our invisible prosthesis for moving between the shifting terrain of self and other. but language, its promise of a universal terrain, has no material body. self and other however, are able to perform their accents, intonations, and rhythms—of gender, class, race, culture, and differences—through the body of language. and yet, the universal landscape of language, its invisibility, eludes both a master’s ownership and a colonial subject’s (re)appropriations of a proper terrain called homo-hegemonic meaning. in monolingualism of the other, derrida (1996/1998) maintains, the colonial master, the teacher, “wants to make others believe” in his ownership of the language, of a universal terrain called homo-hegemonic meaning, “as they do a miracle, through rhetoric, the school, or the army” (p. 23). a first trick is thus played—a master’s ownership of an invisible place, which hosts language. “mastery begins,” derrida stresses, “through the power of naming, of imposing and legitimating appellations. … it always follows or precedes culture like its shadows” (p. 39). therefore, like a shadow and its visible absence of light, the colonial master’s lack of proper appropriation, ownership of invisibility, moves him to impose his fantasies of possessing the alchemy of a monolanguage, onto the linguistic landscape of a colonized other.13 ng-a-fook: toward understanding a curriculum transnational curriculum inquiry 6 (2) 2009 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 13 at immaculé conception i remember for the first time, hearing the teacher, master, perform and pronounce the accentuated strangeness of the name ng-a-fook, in the language of the other. or learning with difficulty to differentiate, differ, the different, grave, acute, circumflex, dieresis accentuated sounds of é, à, è, ê, û, ë, au, eu, ou, and où. i have flashbacks of flashcards. french was my language of learning at the elementary and secondary schools. for 6 hours a day the language of the other and its culture, attempted to teach me, they taught me. each day, we mastered a model which promised good speech and good writing. as a child, there was always a certain amount of unconditional hospitality towards the language of the other. my attempts to appropriate the impossible purity of its idioms were not, however, without a certain sense of accentuated alienation. english is my mother tongue. but there were few places of hospitality to receive its utterance at school. i was forbidden to practice the alchemy of the only language i spoke, never only spoke, and which never was mine inside and outside the school walls. for me, french was the schoolmaster’s language. because of my alien responses to experiencing the accentuation of a second language, or my refusal to utter in the language of the other, i often found myself sitting in the silent refuges of the hallway shadows, lost in translation, between the hyphenated spaces of appropriation and alienation. the master’s language of liberation, emancipation, revolution, and decolonization then plays a second trick. “it will provide freedom,” derrida (1996/1998) asserts, “from the first while confirming a heritage by internalizing it, by reappropriating it—but only up to a certain point, for, as my hypothesis shows, there is never any such thing as absolute appropriation or reappropriating” (p. 24). a master’s performed ownership, proper appropriation of a monolanguage, and the invisibility of its otherness, cannot be fully promised or assimilated by the other. this lack of promise, the unattainable terrain of homohegemonic meaning, is the madness at the heart of language. nonetheless, “the language, the only one i hear myself speak, and agree to speak, is the language of the other” (derrida, 1996/1998, p. 25). therefore, our responsibility for the other, in the face of a sovereign other, requires hospitality for the other’s inalienable alienable rights to the landscape of a universal language that is never mine. language is a structure, derrida (1996/1998) writes, of alienation without alienation. the practices of colonial alienation and of being othered by its language, derrida (1996/1998) maintains, is language. it is a mother tongue, which is already inhabited by the language of the other. therefore to be at home with the french or the english language, to inhabit it as my second skin, i must be at home with the other. derrida (1996/1998) stresses that the very conditions of unconditional hospitality towards the language of the other “relies upon a foundation, whose sovereign essence is always colonial, which tends, repressively and irrepressively, to reduce language to the one” (p. 40). “this homo-hegemony,” derrida (1996/1998) adds, “remains at work in the culture, effacing the fold and flattening the text” (p. 40). here, the host and the other’s language we receive, house and feed have the dual possibilities of being a guest and an enemy, a ng-a-fook: toward understanding a curriculum transnational curriculum inquiry 6 (2) 2009 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 14 … an irreducible experience of language, that which links it to the liaison, to commitment, to the command or to the promise: before and beyond all theoreticconstatives, opening, embracing, or including them, there is the affirmation of language, the “i am addressing you, and i commit myself, in this language here; listen how i speak in my language, me, and you can speak to me in your language; we must hear each other, we must get along” [nous devons nous entendre]. (derrida, 1991/1992, p. 61) so french is my only language. nevertheless, in the culture of the french in algeria, there was a way in which, despite everything, france was not algeria; the source, the norm, the authority of the french language was elsewhere. and, in a certain manner, confusedly, we learned it, i learned it as the language of the other—even though i could only refer to one language as being mine, you see! (derrida, 1983b/1995, p. 203). promise and a terror. and, if each of us is born into the concrete language of our mother tongue, as aoki (1987/2005) suggests, how then does one negotiate a curriculum to migrate through and beyond the hyphenated spaces of colonizer and colonized, appropriation and alienation, the language of the other and a language reduced to the one? in response to this last question, of a yesterday, today, and tomorrow, there are many strategic turns.14 but, as dusk marks the death of another day, the specters of derrida return and whisper, language must be a place of hospitality for the invisible movements of understanding between self and other to occur. concepts like deconstruction, subject, colonial, colonizer, postcolonial, alienation, appropriation, monolanguage, and their proper place of homohegemonic meaning, remain in a perpetual movement, a migration of unfinished promises, of exappropriation, caught in the inbetween spaces of translation, always on the verge of untranslatability. therefore monolingualism of the other, learning language and its translation, is a promise, derrida (1996/1998) suggests, which no longer expects what it waits for. and thus, learning the only language i speak, the only language i never speak, unconditionally hosting the invisible language of the other, its landscape of universal translation, welcoming him or her as a friend or enemy remains veiled by the promise of an understanding which can never be fully attained. falling behind: another heading it is this language that holds us, as both hostage and support (chambers, 1994, p. 33). wouldn’t this mother tongue be a sort of second skin you wear on yourself, a mobile home? but also an immobile home since it moves with us? (derrida, 1997/2000 p. 89). ng-a-fook: toward understanding a curriculum transnational curriculum inquiry 6 (2) 2009 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 15 to learn how to live is to grow, to educate also. to reprimand someone and say, “i will teach you how to live,” signifies at times like a threat, i will shape you, even break you. the ambiguity of this play then is more important to me. this space opens to a more complex interrogation; can one actually learn how to live? teach how to live? can we learn, through discipline or through study, by experience or by experimentation, to accept, or better still, to affirm life? … yet, i remain un-educateable with regards to the knowledge of knowing how to die. i learned or acquired nothing yet about this subject. the time, suspended in reprieve, shrinks ever faster (derrida, le monde, 2004). the language of fall is here. it is november. i witness another season shrinking, shortening, changing. at dusk, during the time of philosophy, my windows and doors are now open to host a different kind of invisibility which still floats on this southern landscape. a language of unions, on this terrain called homo-hegemonic meaning, between self and other, derrida’s texts and my translations, has made its singularities present. through death, derrida gives life to another language, a heritage of deconstruction, now suspended within these pages and the universal landscape of the english and french languages. memories, or is it the nostalgia of experiencing the language of the other, its alienation, appropriation, exappropriation, always migrating with us, that faithfully keep derrida’s philosophical inheritance alive? the responsible inheritance of derrida’s deconstruction asks us in the name of the other to recursively question “the subject’s” rights to name for example, and to name the rights of his or her institutional language. responsibilities of guarding this heritage of deconstruction, keeping it alive, also involve questioning any institutional language that presupposes its foundations with universal systems of exclusionary logic. deconstruction, derrida (1991/1992, 2004) tells us, guards against euroand ameri-centric institutional, cultural, national, and linguistic incorporations of an official cultural capital. the autobiographical examples utilized in this paper provide a foil, an exemplarity of singularities that challenges universal claims to a homo-hegemonic meaning. the value of exemplarity, derrida (1991/1992) writes, is that it … inscribes the universal in the proper body of a singularity, of an idiom or a culture, whether this singularity be individual, social, national, state, federal, confederal, or not. whether it takes a national form or not, a refined, hospitality or aggressively xenophobia form or not, the selfaffirmation of an identity always claims to be responding to the call or assignation of the universal (p. 72). each time that fook ng, john cyril ng-a-fook, and i utter our differences, the disorder of our cultural identities, we must call upon the universal terrain of language and inscribe its universality in the singularities of our educational ng-a-fook: toward understanding a curriculum transnational curriculum inquiry 6 (2) 2009 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 16 as the death foretold of winter nears, fly-patterned birds will once again make their migration north, to birth otherness into life. i continue to learn how to live while i witness my father leaning how to die. he is also at war with himself. robert cyril ng-a-fook continues to struggle with the bodily language of lupus. on his deathbed in toronto, his father, bertie cyril ng-a-fook longed to return to guyana, the landscape of many rivers, the place that baptized my proper surname. what landscape and language will father long for in the face of death? how might i in turn, learn to say goodbye? experiences, for example, with alienation and appropriation. in such examples the migrant, post-colonial subject, does not settle for a proper cultural and national identity, but is rather, unsettled, between the hyphenated spaces of colonizer and colonized, alienation and appropriation, the language of the other and a language reduced to the one. in monolingualism of the other, derrida teaches us the impossibility of properly appropriating the schoolmaster’s language. self and other are caught in the double movement of exappropriation, a hyphenated space of understanding that verges on untranslatability. however, derrida ask us to listen carefully, and host unconditionally, the language of the other. to do so, “you” and “i” must be open to a possible alienation without alienation caused by receiving each other’s otherness. this double movement of teaching and learning involves a listening, heading towards the other. the fall suspension of daytime shrinks ever faster. the sugarcane fields have been harvested. a time of darkness grows longer. the canadian geese are now here taking refuge in the vanishing wetlands of louisiana. meanwhile, i fear, the french language that was only mine, never only mine, the language of the other, held hostage inside me, is dying. how might i teach a dying language to survive, and in turn, learn to support a language that says goodbye? what landscape of language did derrida long for in the face of death? how does one host the language of death? and, how might its invisible terrain greet “you” and “me”? let us now say farewell to such goodbyes. notes 1 currere is the latin infinitive form for curriculum and means to run the course. pinar’s (2004) method of currere consists of the four following intertwining parts: regressive, progressive, analytical and synthetical. in the regressive phase one conducts free association with the memories in order to collect autobiographical data. the purpose is to try and re-enter the past in order to enlarge and transform one’s memories. the second phase, or the progressive, is where one looks toward what is not yet present. in the analytical stage one examines how both the past and the future inhabit the present. how might one’s future desires and/or interpretations of the past influence present understandings of relationships with alienation and appropriation in the language of the other for example? at the analytical stage, how might one bracket such experiences in order to loosen emotional attachments and one’s respective limit-situations? the synthetical is the last stage, where one brings together past, present, and future limitations and possibilities in order to re-enter the present moment hopefully with a sense of greater self-knowledge. ng-a-fook: toward understanding a curriculum transnational curriculum inquiry 6 (2) 2009 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 17 2 under one form or another, derrida’s concept of deconstruction can be found in all his writings. however, within the constraints of this paper, i limit my references to deconstruction to the following texts: of grammatology (1967/1976), a letter to a japanese friend (1983a/1991), the other heading (1991a/1992), and talking liberties (1992a/2001). 3 not unlike pinar’s (1975/2000, 1995) use of currere in the field of curriculum theory, derrida’s concept of “deconstruction” is controversial in the academic field of philosophy. although this section begins with a letter to a japanese friend, it is important to realize that derrida continued to discuss the concept of deconstruction in response to various questions put forth by fellow scholars in different academic fields and the french media until the moment of his death on october 9, 2004. 4 derrida traces a genealogy of “the subject” through the western tradition of continental philosophy. the purpose of this paper is not to trace the essence of what “the subject” is, but rather its relationships with language. for the convenience of keeping this conversation moving, this paper momentarily settles on how derrida and montefiore position “the subject” in talking liberties. in this interview, montefiore and derrida situate “the subject,” among its other determinants, as “identity to itself, consciousness, intention, presence, or proximity to itself, autonomy, relation to the object” (in biesta and egéakuehne, 2001, p. 188). it is important to realize that the “subject” is also conceived differently in psychoanalytical and feminist theory, etc. even if this paper did pursue such a tracing of the “subject,” how might tracing its trajectory through a westernized canon limit our conversation on the “subject”? what might eastern philosophy have to say on the concept of the “subject,” for example? for a further discussion on derrida’s deconstruction of the subject see for example eating well: or the calculation of the subject (1983b/1991), from speech and phenomena (1967/1973), and “différance” in margins of philosophy (1972/1982). 5 in the other heading, derrida (1991a/1992) explains, that it is our national and individual duty to criticize, both in theory and in practice, a totalitarian dogmatism which works to destroy democracy and its european, american, and canadian heritage. such a duty, also involves criticizing institutions which institute dogmatism under new guises. yet this same duty, derrida stresses, “dictates cultivating the virtue of such critique, of the critical idea, the critical tradition” and submits it, “beyond critique and questioning, to a deconstructive genealogy that thinks and exceeds it without compromising it” (p. 77). therefore this double duty, according to derrida, asks us, in the name of responsibility, to affirm our philosophical heritage while also submitting it to a deconstructive questioning. 6 here i offer a footnote on a footnote about the etymological closeness between “subject” and “substance.” in talking liberties, egéa-kuehne (2001) explains, “subject comes from the latin subjectum, past participle of the verb subjicere, which signifies to ‘throw or put under, to place underneath.’ the latin term substancia was constructed from the verb substare which means ‘to stand’ (stare) ‘under’ (sub).” egéa-kuehne continues that this word was utilized in order to translate aristotle’s “…huspotasis, which signified ‘what is underneath, basis, foundation’ (from hupo, ‘under,’ and stasis, ‘the action of fixing itself’)” (p. 184). the concept of substance was one of the most important notions in metaphysics up to the seventeenth century. 7 on august 18, 2004 le monde conducted an interview with derrida titled “i am at war against myself.” i have translated this interview in its entirety from french to english, yet not without losing some of its “original” meaning. can one ever? in deconstructive fashion, derrida avoids his interviewer’s initial question about his war with pancreatic cancer. yet derrida moves through the interview to recount his past work and share his current thoughts on various topics and concepts such as the conflict in iraq, same sex marriages, heritage, and the question of how one learns to live life. ng-a-fook: toward understanding a curriculum transnational curriculum inquiry 6 (2) 2009 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 18 8 in the oxford american english dictionary, alien is defined as: “belonging to a foreign country or nation; unfamiliar and disturbing; introduced from another country and later naturalized.” 9 soon after the initial invasion of france in 1940, and in the absence of the official french government, the national assembly voted in henri philippe pétain as the head of what was later known as the vichy administration which controlled the remaining two-fifths of unoccupied france. he then signed an armistice that gave germany control over the northern landscape of france. during his administration the language of the french constitution was changed from freedom, equality, brotherhood, to labour, family, country. not all french citizens supported the newly established government. charles de gaulle led france libre (free france), the french government in exile, from london. in the southern unoccupied terrain and elsewhere in france, the french resistance continued to fight the germans and help jewish subjects escape the genocide of the holocaust. after france’s liberation by the allies from the german occupation in 1945, pétain was sentenced to death and expulsed from the academic française. the following year his sentence was commuted to life in prison due to his old age (see encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com, 2004). 10 elizabeth gray is my mother’s family name and her mother spoke the gaelic language. 11 the hyphen between post and colonial indicates a period of decolonization after wwii (see boehmer, 1995). 12 derrida died of pancreatic cancer on october 9th, 2004. 13 upon arriving to foreign lands and during their colonization, it was common practice for europeans to systematically re-inscribe the landscape itself, and the animals, insects, plants, and indigenous people who inhabited it, with anglicized remarks. the colonizer, the master, demonstrated his fantasies of ownership through renaming the land, and thus, appropriating the indigenous terrain of meaning. for a further discussion that complicates colonial power, naming, and ownership of land, see smith’s (1999) decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples. 14 one of the concepts and strategies derrida introduces in order to problematize an appropriation of a language proper to itself is “exappropriation.” in this deconstructive double movement, “exap-” marks the sense of “-propriation” with an irreducible discordance or dissociation between its two directions” (kamuf, 1991, p. xxiii). “whereas the proper movement of the proper” kamuf (1991) states, “can only be in an appropriative direction back to itself, the circle of return cannot complete itself without also tracing the contrary movement of expropriation” (p. xxiii). the more master and colonial subject seek to appropriate, jealously own a language, one proper to itself, and thus uncontaminated by the other, the more “-propriation” loses itself in the “ex-” of an exteriority to itself. for a further discussion on the concept of exappropriation see derrida’s of hospitality (1997/2000), the post card (1980/1987), and there is no one narcissism (1983b/1995). references aoki, t. t. (1987/2005). “the dialect of mother language and second language: a curriculum exploration. in w. f. pinar and rita l. irwin (eds.). curriculum in a new key. mahwah, hew jersey: lawrence erlbaum associates. boehmer, e. (1995). colonial & postcolonial literature. new york and oxford: oxford university press. butler, j. (1990/1999). gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. new york: routledge. ng-a-fook: toward understanding a curriculum transnational curriculum inquiry 6 (2) 2009 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 19 chambers, d. (1994). migration, culture, identity. new york and london: routledge. derrida, j. (1967/1973). speech and phenomena and other essays on husserl’s theory of signs, (trans.) d. b. allison. evanston, illinois: northwestern university press. derrida, j. (1967/1976) of grammatology, (trans.) g.c. spivak. baltimore and london: the johns hopkins university press. derrida, j. (1972/1982). margins of philosophy, (trans.) a. bass. chicago: the university of chicago press. derrida, j. (1980/1983) “the time of the thesis: punctuations,” (trans.) k. mclaughlin. in a. montefiore (ed.), philosophy in france today, cambridge: cambridge university press, (pp. 34-40). derrida, j. (1980/1987). the post card: from socrates to freud and beyond, (trans.) a. bass. chicago and london: the university of chicago press. derrida, j. (1983a/1991). “letter to a japanese friend,” (trans.) d. wood and a. benjamin. in p. kamuf (ed.) a derrida reader: between the blinds, new york: columbia university press, (pp. 270-276). derrida, j. (1983b/1995). “there is no one narcissism,” (trans.) p. kamuf and others. in e. weber (ed.) points…interviews, 1974-1994. stanford, california: stanford university press (pp. 196-215). derrida, j. (1989/1995). “‘eating well’, or the calculation of the subject,” (trans.) p. kamuf and others. in e. weber (ed.) points…interviews, 19741994, stanford, california: stanford university press, (pp. 255-287). derrida, j. (1990/2002). “privilege.” in who is afraid of philosophy? (trans.) j. plug. stanford, california: stanford university press. derrida, j. (1991a/1992). the other heading. reflections on today’s europe, (trans.) p.a. brault and m. b naas. bloomington, indianapolis: indiana university press. derrida, j. (1991b/2002). negotiations…interventions and interviews, 1971 2001, (trans. and ed.), e. rottenberg, stanford, california: stanford university press. derrida, j. (1992a/2001). talking liberties. in g. j. j. biesta denise & egéa kuehne (eds.), derrida & education, new york and london: routledge (pp. 177-185). derrida, j. (1992b/1995). points…interviews, 1974-1994, (trans) p. kamuf and others and (ed.) e. weber, stanford, california: stanford university press. derrida, j. (1996). monolingualism of the other, or the prosthesis of origin, (trans.) p. mensah. stanford, ca: stanford university press. derrida, j. (1997/2000). of hospitality, (trans.) r. bowlby. stanford, california: stanford university press. derrida, j. and ferraris, m. (1997/2001). a taste for the secret, (trans.) g. donis, and (ed.) g. donis & d. webb, oxford, cambridge: blackwell publishers. derrida, j. (2004). “i am at war with myself.” in le monde. ng-a-fook: toward understanding a curriculum transnational curriculum inquiry 6 (2) 2009 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 20 http://www.lemonde.fr/web/recherche_articleweb/1,13-0,36375883,0.html. egéa-kuehne, d. (1995). deconstruction revisited and derrida’s call for academic responsibility. educational theory, 45 (3), pp. 293-309. egéa-kuehne, d. (2001). derrida’s ethics of affirmation. in g. j. j. biesta denise egéa-kuehne (eds.), derrida & education, new york and london: routledge, (pp. 186-208). fanon, f. (1967/1991). black skin, white masks, (trans.) c.l. markmann. new york: grove press. henri philippe pétain. retrieved december 1, 2004, from http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/henri+phillippe+petain kamuf, p. (1991). (eds.), a derrida reader: between the blinds. new york: columbia university press. kohák, e. (1984). the embers and the stars: a philosophical inquiry into the moral sense of nature. chicago & london: university of chicago press. pinar, w. f., and reynolds, w., and slattery, p., and taubman, p. (1995). understanding curriculum. new york: peter lang. pinar, w. f. (1975/2000). “search for a method.” in w. pinar (ed.), curriculum studies: the reconceptualization. troy, new york: educator’s international press (pp. 415-424). pinar, w. f. (2004). what is curriculum theory? new jersey: lawrence erlbaum associates. smith, l. t. (1999). decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples. new york & london: zed books ltd. sue-a-quan, t. (1999). cane reapers: chinese indentured immigrants in guyana. british columbia: riftswood publishing. wang, h. (2004). the call from the stranger on a journey home: curriculum in a third space. new york: peter lang. author nicholas ng-a-fook is an associate professor of curriculum studies in the faculty of education at the university of ottawa. email: nngafook@uottawa.ca microsoft word quinn_tci.doc to cite this article please include all of the following details: quinn, molly (2010). ‘ex and the city’: on cosmopolitanism, community and the ‘curriculum of refuge’. transnational curriculum inquiry 7 (1) http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci <access date> ‘ex and the city’: on cosmopolitanism, community and the ‘curriculum of refuge’ molly quinn teachers college, columbia university broadway-lafayette on a saturday night – the warm breeze of trains bounding in, snapshots right before eyes’ mind arranged as if by artistic design. bound by moment of connection, trains running like wine flows. a small girl in braids sits upon her mother’s lap complaining, sweetly says ‘good bye’ to me with full-on eyes in departing. through subway glass now this woman’s baby bouncing, full black head of hair bobbing, on bench leaning over from behind ‘bum’ with cheap tees for sale. the palette of humanity passing before me prenatal in pregnant moments of waiting, seemingly without sense, yet telling all, oh so much – we, none of us are strangers; strangers, all are we… the inarticulable, unspeakable fullness enveloping me…. (quinn, 2006, june, excerpts from on city waiting) quinn: cosmopolitanism and a curriculum of refuge transnational curriculum inquiry 7 (1) 2010 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 78 i had forgotten how rich in sights and delights of stories this city is. uncannily warm for february’s way, i’ve walked the streets sans gloves in open coat, leisurely making my unmarked way to kelly ann’s art opening. and later with cam to a chelsea haunt of hers, sueños, ‘dreams’ in homemade fresh guacamole, key lime pie with caramel, erroneously rendered multiple rounds of almond rounds frosted with powdered sugar, ‘til we can eat no more – much more mouth-watering memories of flavors to savor but i wander from these streets… night lights there as ever they were, not just for me, but then and there, yes!... to see a sea of souls in harold square. hooves clapping the pavement, heels tapping, hearkening former times…. happening upon has-been haunts in that there had been better times there, times that have passed, friends i know now not where, cares come somehow to take their places. crowding out, too, the wandering, city jaunts and haunts and stories of the streets. quinn: cosmopolitanism and a curriculum of refuge transnational curriculum inquiry 7 (1) 2010 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 79 cam still wanders. of late, she says, sapon bestowed citrus almond hand cream divine, quotidien, the perfect peaceful café moment with the perfect egg salad and baguette. cam still wanders, cam still dreams – sueños! sueños! come again to me, or me to thee. this night, despite late-night, slow, subway-fatigue journey home, thy dreamy visitation upon me has indeed been sweet. (quinn, 2008, february 10, excerpts from on city wandering) cosmopolitanism, curriculum and the city: a prelude of the particular and personal in approaching the subject of my address, i find myself compelled to begin with this medley of ‘subway soliloquies’ selections to foreground the living textures of city life, as well as the context for my own engagement with cosmopolitanism, and as in relation to community and curriculum as and of refuge. this engagement is also neither as a ‘cosmopolitan’ woman in the familiar sense – although i live and have lived in new york city for some time, i am essentially and quintessentially a southern ‘hick from the sticks’ – nor as a scholar of cosmopolitanism per se. rather, this work represents a recent interest and relatively new inquiry of mine, the arrival to which – counter to those who have critiqued cosmopolitanism for its epistemic everywhereness, no-whereness (gaudelli, 2007, february) – has not been rationalistic or universalistic or abstract in any real or primary sense, but instead has issued from my own lived experiences. more particularly, i have come to cosmopolitanism through my experience of the inhospit-abilities, inhospitableness, inhospitality, of academia, my own attempts to reckon with the testimonies of the even greater experience of such for teachers in schools with whom i have worked: the inhospitable dwellings – if they are and can be that, dwellings, that is – we have made of education, curriculum, schools, for children. the theologian arthur sutherland (2006) documents our moment of want, our times as particularly inhospitable, and that with myriad statistics, as have many educational thinkers with respect to the ways in which quinn: cosmopolitanism and a curriculum of refuge transnational curriculum inquiry 7 (1) 2010 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 80 education fails to include much less welcome many (i.e., delpit, 1995; kozol, 1991, 2007; and polakow, 1993). seeking to understand, and respond to, this scene has taken me first to jacques derrida’s work (1997/2000, 2002) on hospitality – and the question of ethics constituting it: hospitality as radical openness to the other, ‘to the other than oneself, the other than “its other,” to an other beyond any “its other”’(2002, p. 364). in well-known curriculum thought, these explorations have met up with dwayne huebner’s (1999) notion of curriculum itself as otherness, and teaching as the art of lending out our minds each to the other – involving care for ideas, in nel noddings’ formulations (1992), openness to imagining things ‘other-wise’, encountering other voices and views, as in city waiting and wandering. as such, derrida (2002) suggests that hospitality raises questions for us, then, about the very concept of ‘concept’ itself, sheltering and letting itself be haunted, visited by, another concept. how open are we, in education, to encountering new and ‘other’ understandings? how present are we to differences, to stories of the streets? so we might ask ourselves, would that we were truly cosmopolitan perhaps, in this way. maxine greene’s work (1973) on the teacher as stranger has beckoned here, as well – bringing the otherness of herself as well as curriculum into contact with that of her students; as well as on the educational potential of a pedagogical aesthetics of ‘making strange the familiar’. this inquiry and interest have also strongly resonated, then, with hongyu wang’s (2004) sense that at the heart of education is this relationship of self to other, and as stranger, and also to the stranger within. awad ibrahim (2005) and barbara kameniar (2007) each, albeit from different self and social locations, explore this kind of relationship, explicitly taking up the question of hospitality in the work of teaching, and its complications – teacher as host, or agent of another cultural ‘host’, pedagogically acting, too, to make familiar the strange, and perhaps centrally via the curriculum. i have noticed that while education is full of welcoming discourses and convocations, and entertaining such relations, questions remain with respect to welcoming courses of curriculum for scholars, teachers, students, and beyond, particularly in a cosmopolitan age and context of globalization. my sense has been that inquiring into hospitality might open me to hospitable possibilities in my – and our – work and world: in thinking and dwelling in curriculum in the now, in ways that might truly support the aspiration to ‘cultivate our humanity’ (nussbaum, 1997) via education, as classically conceived, to attend to the ‘vocation of humanization’ to which paulo freire (1970/1995) calls us. for me, this intention means learning to become present to our selves, each other, our manner of dwelling together, in wide-awakeness (greene, 1978) and respect. this ideal embraces dale snauwaert’s emphasis (2002) on what he calls ‘the principle of humanity’, moral equality, authentic selfawareness, and ethical agency, in his articulation of a cosmopolitan education. it also takes up david hansen’s affirmation (2007, february) of ‘open-hearted and open-minded exchanges’, those that welcome encounters with the foreign – stories of the streets, by which we might give and grow and find mutual delight. thus, my hope here includes a concern also for learning to be present to and in joy and love together educationally, as well. via what simon critchley and richard kearney (1997/2006) call derrida’s form of ‘conceptual genealogy’, historical analysis of concepts, i have undertaken such in order to understand and also hopefully respond in some affirmative, ethically-sensitive manner to my situation in the world, which clearly has also finally taken me into the study of cosmopolitanism, to which hospitality is a central concept. i have wandered into this ‘citizenship of the world’ particularly via the work of derrida (1997/2000, 2002, 1997/2006) then as well, among others, and also as inspired by lectures at teachers college made by hansen (2007, february) and snauwaert (2006, october) i was fortunate to be able to attend. quinn: cosmopolitanism and a curriculum of refuge transnational curriculum inquiry 7 (1) 2010 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 81 from my own situatedness, thus, i have felt compelled first to reckon with the painfulness of situations (local, national, global) of profound inhospitableness (many such examples here of which we all could give)1, which is also a coming face-to-face (levinas, 1961/1994) with human vulnerability, frailty, unanswerability, unfathomability, in which we must respond beyond the limits of the politics of identity, even the ethics of identity, attending to human ‘subjectivity that saturates’ in social-‘situatednesses’ that can be neither foretold nor foreclosed in their futurity (pinar, 2008, march). reckoning with this experience and context of inhospitality means responding in view, too, of the ‘bloody traumas of history’ (critchley and kearney, 2006) that live on into the present, which marianna papastephanou (2002) on cosmopolitanism, with paul ricoeur, highlights – that we are constituted by histories we can’t reach, of inherited cultural debts or injuries we are often neither conscious of nor can truly repay or fully heal when recognized, and that ever only as in a glass darkly. given such, via derrida’s cosmopolitan address and call for the city of refuge (1997/2006), i have been taken with this sense of an ontical if not ontological need for refuge; inciting also emmanuel levinas’ insights into cities of refuge – which perhaps multicultural curriculum efforts fail to fully consider – that we are, each and all, ever in relation, and as both victims and victimizers, guilty and innocent, hospitable and inhospitable, etc. (eisenstadt, 2003, winter): both of which require asylum and amnesty – sanctuary, haven for hiding, healing, forgiveness….and unendingly, before the unforgivable, seeking ever to make possible the impossible. moreover, this brokenness is also part and parcel of our ‘exquisite humanness’ (forsthoefel, 2006) – hearth of humanity’s hearthing too together, a brokenness all too-often denied in educational thought, curriculum inquiry and pedagogical practice, and to much suffering as well. in this way, i am affirming william pinar’s (2008, march) emphasis on the ‘worldliness’ of curriculum (via janet miller, and edward said) in his turn to cosmopolitanism2, that the ‘perpetual peace’ for which the cosmopolitan philosopher kant hopes is ‘predicated upon passion’ – the heart of reason perhaps, or the heart whose reasons reason knows not of. i have begun, thus, from the place of my own passions, the heart of my own reasons, my own way of waiting and wandering in the world – and herein, perhaps, in some lightness, and admittedly much privileged peace, albeit not without relation to the brokenness, darkness and violence to which i have hearkened. in preview of our ‘city tour’ together, then, i offer a glimpse here into some of my own genealogies of, and journeys into, cosmopolitanism as a curriculum theorist, and into where it is taking me – embryonic and tentative to be sure as yet as such is – in terms of conceptualizing via cosmopolitanism this idea of the curriculum of refuge. in a sense, i have presented, in advance of the paper, something of my own ‘curriculum of refuge’, and thus also transgressed the borders and boundaries of the academic address – which is, of course, also an intentional experiment, an attempt here to an act of hospitality as host(ess) of difference, toast to alterity. such, in affirmation of the face-toface, constitutes an invitation to conversation3 between/among the ‘us’ brought together via 1 derrida (1997/2006), in a context ripe with state and non-state sponsored violence and the legacies thereof (whether via terrorism, enslavement, persecution, censorship or other) in which the victims are innumerable, hesitates here to set forth a particular example as to “risk sending the anonymous others back into the darkness…, a darkness which is truly the worst and the condition of all others” (p. 6). 2 for a more thorough and most excellent address, see pinar (2009), the worldliness of a cosmopolitan education: passionate lives in public service. 3 while my choice of the word ‘conversation’ here is deliberate, a rich word with a rich history, and favored here over ‘deliberation’ or ‘dialogue’, albeit not excluding such, i cannot explicate such richness at present or its relation to a cosmopolitan ethics. its use does reflect a direction in which i expect i am moving, to consider the possibilities of pedagogies of nonviolence, a direction strongly influenced by certain world visionaries quinn: cosmopolitanism and a curriculum of refuge transnational curriculum inquiry 7 (1) 2010 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 82 this address by which we may entertain some of the questions such an inquiry raises, as well as the possibilities for curriculum it might open us up to, open up to us, visit upon us: with thanks to those who choose to take to the streets, as it were, with me in this way, and entreaties to those whom such transgression offends to – yes! please forgive – and persevere with me still. introduction in a 1996 strasbourg address to the international parliament of writers on the call of cosmopolitanism in contemporary times – the way of asylum and work of amnesty less and less respected amid ‘the violence which rages on a worldwide scale’ (derrida, 1997/2006, p. 5), derrida comes to the question in this wise: …as for this citizen of the world, we do not know what the future holds…. we look to the city, rather than to the state…because we have given up hope that the state might create a new image…; our plea is for what we…call the ‘city of refuge’. (pp. 3, 6, 7, 8) it might be said that similar questions might be posed and pleas made concerning the curriculum in contemporary times; it might be posited that the call of cosmopolitanism be heard – the way of asylum and work of amnesty attended – as well, with respect to our educational listening and labor, if even only as brought into conversation with central multicultural courses and discourses of the day. in a time when the ‘state’ – particularly perhaps in the us – has created a problematic image for the curriculum and crafted mechanisms of control for the school (i.e., via no child left behind & ncate regulation, see pinar, 2004; kozol, 2007; leonardo, 2007), my plea is for what i call the ‘curriculum of refuge’, and i draw upon cosmopolitanism in my address, re-searching its promising vision of community, responsibility, and its potential relation to the public space of what we call ‘education’. in response to current intellectual inquiries in the field oriented ‘toward civic responsibility’ (i.e., see tate & anderson, 2008), as well as my lived context in new york – city of the world, and cosmopolitan experiment in democratic asylum, i have entitled this work, ‘ex and the city’: on cosmopolitanism, community and the ‘curriculum of refuge’. i play, too, on the former hbo series (and subsequent films) sex and the city not only as a popular cultural icon for new york and life in the city; but more specifically in reference to its exploration of the search for community and connection amid a world of strangers, and attention to the politics of identity in the making, breaking, and re-imagining of relationships – and thus also the perpetual need for personal asylum and amnesty – in pursuit of the good life (i.e., the american dream). moreover, in striving toward civic responsibility and citizenship, and seeking to re-search and cultivate such educationally, we must remind ourselves that implicitly here we are acknowledging a faith or hope for the ‘city’, the very meanings of these ideas/ideals etymologically rooted therein (i.e., see the random house unabridged dictionary, 2006; the oxford english dictionary, 1989). the interests in and efforts toward the internationalization of curriculum studies in recent years perhaps reflects as well this faith in the city, and hope for world citizenship via education beyond ‘state’ borders (i.e., see http://www.iaacs.org; pinar, 2003, 2006, may; gough, 2002, 2004). in highlighting ‘ex’ (rather than ‘sex’), i aim (archetypal teachers of peace and justice like gandhi, king, jr., mother teresa and the dalai lama) whose refuge-curricula – certainly constituted by resistance, deliberation, sacrifice and suffering – have achieved much in transformatively bringing people together, and together in envisioning the possibilities and praxes of justice and peace anew, in cultures of violence and those which teach violence. quinn: cosmopolitanism and a curriculum of refuge transnational curriculum inquiry 7 (1) 2010 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 83 also to allude, for my thesis, to its important myriad significations, i.e., ‘ex’-without, not including, or without the right, to deprive of; to bring to a certain state; free from; free of charges; exodus; to delete or cross out; outmoded, of antique appearance (i.e., see the random house unabridged dictionary, 2006; the oxford english dictionary, 1989). in stirring up these many meanings, and these many relations to and for the city, i mean to affirm the call of cosmopolitanism – an ethics of universal hospitality rooted in antiquity (and, alas perhaps, out of fashion4, or a new ‘gen ex’ ethics); as well as inclusion of, even sanctuary for, the exiled (ex-iled), whether rooted in nationality, language, race, religion, class, gender, sexuality, ability, or other – in the curriculum. the ‘gateway of opportunity’ which while new york city has symbolized to many in the us – particularly for the foreigner given its history of immigration – education represents to even more across the world is perhaps closed altogether for subsequent generations, the future of humanity, without such affirmation. for, indeed, ‘the geography of opportunity has become a local, state and global challenge’ where ‘cities and metropolitan regions are experiencing intensified… disparities’ and this ‘trend toward increased classand race-based geospatial polarization has implications for schools, neighborhoods…’ and beyond (tate & anderson, 2008). i feel that cosmopolitan criticism – with a heart for the ‘open’ and ‘free’ city, brought to bear upon multicultural debates in education, and undertaken toward the call for and conceptualization of the ‘curriculum of refuge’ can assist us in opening up new geospatial possibilities for social justice in and through education, and can speak in powerful ways to the cultivation of ‘civic capacity’ that recognizes our global interdependence and embraces a responsibility of world citizenship, even as locally lived and rooted. thus, we set out for the city, as it were – wandering, welcoming city jaunts and haunts and stories of the streets. in section one, city sidewalks, we seek first to get our ‘lay of the land’, as it were, attending to the ground upon which we walk in our explorations of cosmopolitanism, articulating something of the historical context for its introduction into, and the path leading to, our thinking of curriculum anew in this way. to do so, while we take our way largely through the postructuralist readings of jacques derrida (1997/2006), we also welcome kwame anthony appiah (2006), among others, as he is a particularly well-known contemporary advocate of cosmopolitanism, in and out of academic circles, whose view and vista can assist us in our walk. then, in city of lights, section two, we seek guidance in our journey and jaunt together via illuminating thought in ‘cosmopolitan’ education – i.e., audrey osler and hugh starkey (2003), nick stevenson (2003), dale snauwaert (2002), david hansen (2007, february; 2008), and marianna papastephanou (2002) – highlighting through this work that which in our view we deem to be important to considering this notion of a curriculum of refuge built upon cosmopolitan insights. finally, borrowing from derrida’s plea (1997/2006) for the ‘city of refuge’, a plea which also incites a rich history of hospitable practice and thought, in section three, hot child in the city?, we consider a frame, or structure for dwelling of some kind, for entertaining the possibilities visited upon us in conceptualizing the ‘curriculum of refuge’ for our children via education in a cosmopolitan way. city sidewalks: walking into a cosmopolitan way in the world ‘where have we received the image of cosmopolitanism from? and what is happening to it?’ derrida (1997/2006, p. 3) first asks us concerning this tradition we have summoned to our 4 as formerly noted, this ethics of hospitality, it has been evidenced, has been weakened, undermined, in present times (sutherland, 2006). we might add here, as well, that our times are particularly inhospitable for children – in and out of school settings – too (i.e., kozol, 1991, 2007; polakow, 1993; delpit, 1995; steinberg & kincheloe, 1997; kliewer, 1998; lareau, 2003; quinn, 2003; leonardo, 2007). quinn: cosmopolitanism and a curriculum of refuge transnational curriculum inquiry 7 (1) 2010 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 84 curriculum ‘conversations’ (pinar et al, 1995). seeking inspiration in it anew, he calls it ‘more than twenty centuries’ old, situating it in the abrahamic laws of hospitality, tracing the cosmopolitan ‘tradition’ particularly through greek stoicism, pauline christianity, and enlightenment thought – of which kant’s formulation of the ‘law of universal hospitality’5 in his ‘definitive article in view of perpetual peace’ is most famous (see kant, 1795/1972). others, such as the political philosopher appiah (2006), ground cosmopolitanism more definitively in the expression coined by the cynics of the 4th century b.c. (i.e., the story of diogenes) – one subsequently, however, taken up in the third century b.c. by the stoics (i.e. cicero, seneca, and roman emperor marcus aurelius), and also through them later influencing christian thought. from cosmos, meaning ‘world’, and politēs, referring to a ‘citizen’ of a particular city or polis, these critics paradoxically called themselves ‘citizens of the world’, calling into question the customary idea that every civilized person solely belonged to a particular community among communities, and affirming a shared universal humanity to which we are also all bound. from such, appiah highlights twin threads woven together in the notion of cosmopolitanism: 1) ‘that we have obligations to others... beyond…ties of kith and kind, or even the more formal ties of shared citizenship’; 2) ‘that we take seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives, which means [also] …the practices and beliefs that lend them significance’ (p. xv). particularly in the global age of worldwide communications, through which we can learn about and affect lives anywhere and everywhere, we have responsibilities as such to all persons. thus, appiah also places at the heart of the cosmopolitan concern an affirmation of ‘the very idea of morality’ (xiii), ‘the idea that in the human community, as in national communities, we need to develop habits of coexistence: conversation in its older meaning, of living together, association. and conversation in its modern sense, too’ (p. xix). it is, here, as well, that appiah and derrida, perhaps, agree – returning to cosmopolitanism as a conversation of and on ethics – the ethics of identity and citizenship – in the face of particular and universal human suffering, and over issues of human difference and solidarity. thus also, derrida (1997/2006), in embracing cosmopolitanism in his address, as that which historically commands respect – affirming its present promise, despite its tensions and possible as well as historical perversions, does so particularly in the way of respecting an ethics of hospitality. he explains: hospitality is culture itself and not simply one ethics amongst others. insofar as it has to do with the ethos, that is,…the familiar place of dwelling,…the manner in which we relate to ourselves and to others, to others as our own or as foreigners, ethics is hospitality. (pp. 16-17) this respect lies for such figures, too, not in an unproblematic or uncritical image or history of cosmopolitanism, and as such, the symbols and moments taken up as central to its endorsement are distinguished from others, within and from a context that begs the question derrida raises around what is, in fact, happening to cosmopolitanism. we have walked our way, we might submit, if only sideways, into it. this question is inclusive, then, of a larger 5 within this law is the conceptualization of the individual in the context of world citizenship, a condition kant postulates that peace requires. the stranger, also a fellow-citizen in one sense, has the right in traveling beyond the borders of home not to be treated as an enemy, but rather to associate, to sojourn, if only temporarily. as inhabitants all of the earth’s surface, of which once none had more claim to than any other, we are responsible for engaging the presence of each other. in recent times, there has been a renewed interest in kant’s work on peace, particularly in a context of increased world migrations as well as issues around immigrant rights and rights to asylum. quinn: cosmopolitanism and a curriculum of refuge transnational curriculum inquiry 7 (1) 2010 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 85 one concerning what is happening in the present historical moment, a moment that particularly calls for something of the restoration of this tradition’s dignity, revival of its heritage of meaning. derrida insists that it at once constitutes a new cosmopolitanism, ethics, ‘cosmopolitics’ – a true transformation in the history of the right to asylum, a bold innovation in the duty of hospitality – to which we have yet to arrive. indeed, political philosopher seyla benhabib (2006) identifies ‘cosmopolitanism’ as a keyword of our times – highlighting that certain cosmopolitan norms of human right and international law are now well at work as life has moved to a global scale, yet also reminds of cosmopolitanism’s many and conflicted significations. succinctly summarizing some of these differences, scholar of law jeremy waldron (2006) speaks of interests in world order and polity – norms of justice, celebrations of the fluidity of culture and dissolution of cultural boundaries – conceptions of identity as hybrid and fragmented, and concerns regarding the universal love of humankind and a shared humanity – responsibilities all persons owe to one another. despite his express ambivalence in ‘settling’ on cosmopolitanism, especially in any affiliation with that ‘unpleasant posture of superiority’ over the provincial, appiah (2006) embraces it from a place of critique: 1) in repudiation of ‘globalization’, signifying nothing and everything under macroeconomic terms; and 2) in dismissal of ‘multiculturalism’, which he describes as a ‘shape shifter … so often designat[ing] the disease it purports to cure’ (p. xiii). in this, he feels scholars have magnified the ‘strangeness of strangers’ out of all proportion, and aspires through a return to cosmopolitanism to make it a little more difficult for us to see the world so easily divided, particularly between an ‘us’ and a ‘them’. derrida’s inspiration to this call emerges from the highly contested and politically charged enforcement of the debret laws in france, inhospitable to immigrants and those without rights of residence. he also references a world context pregnant with violence, soaked in ‘the bloody traumas of history’ (critchley & kearney, 2006, p. vii), where, too, the inviolable rule of state sovereignty has become increasingly precarious. he will, of course, interrogate the secularization of what hannah arendt (1967) calls a ‘sacred history’ – i.e., the language of forgiveness is incited even by countries in the east (of non-abrahamic religious origins) with respect to human rights in international relations – as well as the ‘conditions’ kant sets upon the claims of ‘unconditional’ hospitality, subjecting it to the state ultimately as defined by the law, in cosmopolitanism. yet, this philosopher so known for his poststructural, deconstructive ‘rage against reason’ (bernstein, 1991), turns nonetheless to a new idea of cosmopolitanism, historically founded upon a faith in human reason, within reason, or perhaps within a reason reconceived, as well.6 my inspiration to cosmopolitanism issues similarly from a national context here in the us – and some might argue, an international and global context as well – wherein immigrant rights are seriously at issue, and questions of hospitality loom large with respect to our openness to the ‘other’ – and to who is the ‘other’ – in an ethos affected by contested responses to terrorism and war, natural disasters and declining economies, and the possibilities of global warming and universal healthcare, among others. of course, particularly perhaps in new york city as a historical and contemporary site of immigration, our schools (and universities) also reflect these issues and uncertainties, and sadly – as some would argue, via the dominant influences of nclb legislation and high-stakes standardized testing, among others – an inhospitable educational scene as well, especially for other people’s children, to borrow from the language of lisa delpit (1995; see also footnote 1.). unsurprisingly, then, we are also responding to a renewed interest in cosmopolitanism in 6 for more on this notion of the faith of reason, and reason reconceived, in concert with adorno and horkheimer’s affirmation of certain enlightenment tenets despite persisting issues with reason and other central foundational ideas therein, see quinn, 2001. quinn: cosmopolitanism and a curriculum of refuge transnational curriculum inquiry 7 (1) 2010 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 86 education, particularly in the realm of ethics and around the question of citizenship, that has arisen in recent years (i.e., papastephanou, 2002; snauwaert, 2002, 2006, october; osler & starkey, 2003; stevenson, 2003;, 2007, february, 2008). admittedly, too – in concert with the etymology of ‘curriculum’ as a course for running, then of study – not only has the world scene brought us to this path, but also my present educational journey has given me reason to engage this course to and discourse of cosmopolitanism in confronting questions within my own work i could not side-step, specifically with respect to multiculturalism and teaching for ‘social justice’.7 in this way, taking a cosmopolitan way, in walking beside such questions, has also cast them in a new light, opening up new possibilities for response and responsiveness in conceptualizing education and curriculum in present times. city of lights: illuminating the call of cosmopolitanism in education by cosmopolitanism i mean a way of viewing the world that among other things dispenses with national exclusivity, dichotomous forms of gendered and racial thinking, and rigid separations between culture and nature, and popular and high culture. (stevenson, 2003, p. 332) cosmopolitan citizenship does not mean asking individuals to reject their national citizenship…. education for cosmopolitan citizenship is about enabling learners to make connections between their immediate contexts and the national and global contexts…. it implies a broader understanding of national identity….that…may be experienced differently by different people. (osler and starkey, 2003, p. 252) perhaps because of the history of cosmopolitanism in its claims of and to world citizenship, much of the literature in education that seeks to take up this philosophical tradition does so through the aim of teaching or learning for citizenship. from osler and starkey, whose work involves research undertaken in the uk with some 600 students on their views of community and civic engagement, we find first an important point of illumination via their attention to the sense of belonging that is required for any understanding or experience of citizenship – a sense constituted through many personal and cultural aspects of identity that are not always primarily or essentially or solely ‘national’ in construction. while endorsing citizenship as a contested concept and education as a site for such conceptual debate, they are critical of the ‘national’ limitations set upon the term as educationally-engaged, not only because legally these limits have already been called into question, but also because such conceptions reflect deficit-oriented views of youth that largely ignore their lived experiences and complex identities as well as ‘participatory’ views of citizenship. children are not, in fact, ‘citizensin-waiting’, but performing citizenship in manifold ways in the various communities in which they daily live and move. this criticism calls to mind the contention of dewey – whom hansen (2007, february), incidentally, identifies with a cosmopolitan legacy in education – that education be not only a preparation for life, but an engagement in and with life itself, and hope for the school community as ‘an embryonic democracy’ in which students participate, as well. 7 in the ‘mystical foundation’ of multiculturalism? cultivating cosmopolitan consciousness & democratic dialogue in curriculum and pedagogy (quinn & shah, 2008), we articulate in some detail the professional context that led us to take up cosmopolitanism in our work, particularly as counter-narrative and counter-praxis to multicultural conceptions in education, which we also herein critique. quinn: cosmopolitanism and a curriculum of refuge transnational curriculum inquiry 7 (1) 2010 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 87 recognizing the fragility of democracy and import of the sustainability and solidarity of communities – an understanding evidenced both in their review of research on education for democratic citizenship (2006) as well as their own inquiries with students (2003), osler and starkey posit that we must re-imagine the nation – the state – as a truly diverse and inclusive community, as a necessary precondition for democracy’s renewal, which also involves education for what they term ‘cosmopolitan citizenship.’ citizenship, and citizenship education, is ever, in fact, referential of an imagined community that is all too often envisioned homogeneously with the expectation that minorities, immigrants, those constituting ‘difference’, assimilate; and that also fails to acknowledge the many communities of which students are simultaneously members. we foreground, via this wandering and wondering, the import of attending to imagining and re-imagining8. stevenson (2003) grounds much of his work here, as well: his focus, a cultural model of citizenship for a cosmopolitan age, critiquing present conceptions of culture and related forms of education for modern citizenship, he posits, present conditions exceed. the cultivation of a ‘cosmopolitan imagination’ is called for, amid the rise of what has been called the ‘cultural’ society wherein citizenship is oriented more around norms, meanings, identities and practices than legal rules, procedures and sanctions. here, much as herbart kliebard (2004) claims in exploring the ‘struggle for the american curriculum’, the sites of power are to be found in the minds of people, in the symbolic forms ever in societal creation, embodied as such also in codes, discourses, and narratives that are in circulation. the struggle over the ground of this imagined community also, in this way, returns us to the want of belonging, and for inclusion. thus, stevenson (2003) asserts: ‘definitions of citizenship need to link the struggle for rights and social justice with the quest for recognition and cultural respect’ (p. 331). such definitions must attend to the inherent complexities of citizenship and cultural identity, as well. from their studies of student conceptions of citizenship, osler and starkey (2003) conclude that, perceiving themselves as active participants of ‘overlapping communities of fate’ – a term borrowed from political theorist david held (1995, 1996) – that are at once local, virtual, regional, national, and global, students are not likely to find education that is oriented around strictly national – or for that matter, narrow and insular cultural – conceptions of citizenship able to embrace their own experiences and identities or contribute to their meaningful integration. nor does such a view, i would suggest, critically challenge postures of hostility toward those deemed ‘other’, much less cultivate those of genuine recognition and respect. thus, stevenson (2003), quite importantly, emphasizes the quest for a communicative society, labor that attends to the sustained import and influence of the media, globalization, identity politics, democratic ideology and the struggle for cultural inclusion. this reckoning with the import of belonging and identity as concerning community, culture and the imagination, within global as well as local contexts, appears to be essential to any cosmopolitan conception of curriculum. the citizen of the world does not relinquish the home of – that is – the citizen heror himself, and in context. the context of globalization – not only economic, but also ethical in development – reflected in the international human rights movement, snauwaert (2002) claims, ‘expands the scope of the egalitarian logic of democracy transnationally,’ necessitating the articulation of ‘a cosmopolitan theory of democratic education’ (p. 5).9 in a sensitive philosophical 8 such is foundational to conceptualizing the curriculum of refuge, as well, in order to resist our propensity for essentializing or exoticizing otherness and/or our relational aspirations to peace and justice. 9 political theorist david held (1995, 1996), in outlining a model of cosmopolitan democracy, also asserts that the locus of democracy is not only to be found within the nation-state. audrey osler and hugh starkey (2003) draw upon his work, as well, in their argument for a cosmopolitan conception of citizenship in education. quinn: cosmopolitanism and a curriculum of refuge transnational curriculum inquiry 7 (1) 2010 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 88 exploration of the shared principles of democracy and cosmopolitanism – documenting historically, via such ‘events’ as the nuremberg tribunal and u.n. declaration of human rights, what he suggests constitutes moral progress and a positive development in human history – he works to establish a shared humanity that ‘carries with it a moral imperative to respect the dignity of every human life’ (p. 8). snauwaert goes on to assert that such an imperative is not merely an ideal, but one grounded in the customs of democratic societies and principles of the international community, and also ties it to the kantian possibility for peace in the world. in sketching out the contours of a cosmopolitan democratic education, he foregrounds the cultivation of citizens who can respond in ways consistent with this ethical imperative – the principle of moral equality, or what he calls ‘the principle of humanity.’ here, he highlights the positive value of sympathy, which actively engages a response of care toward the other, and what he identifies as a negative value – respect, constituted in its requirement that one refrain from violating the rights of the other. such dispositions additionally cohere in ‘a moral identity and sensibility that is grounded in an authentic sense of self…. the basis of self-determination and thus moral agency’ (p. 11). addressing, as well, central dispositions – principally rooted in fear of a loss of self constituted by external possessions (including beliefs and ideologies) and socially-constructed identifications – that inhibit such authenticity, snauwaert advocates what he calls ‘a more authentic’ mode of living and being than one based on ‘having’: authentic self-awareness. here, he affirms maxine greene’s work (1978) on the import of ‘wide-awakeness’ as at the heart of moral agency. from our perspective, snauwaert’s work points to an important problem, one as yet perhaps remains to be more fully and formally theorized in education and curriculum, or thought in pedagogical practice: the problem of fear and desire. joseph knippenberg (1989, november) actually critiques the work of contemporary peace educators in this regard in their chief reliance on what he calls ‘enlightened fear’ for the cause of peace. in a comparative analysis of rousseau and kant on cosmopolitan education, he also sides with kant in his focus on the moral love of honor, the attachment to human dignity, as the better path to peace – perhaps not willing to entertain as does snauwaert (2002) possibilities beyond the possessive mode of being. in addition, while snauwaert does not speak of hospitality, per se, his affirmation of an authentic self-awareness resonates strongly with derrida’s notion of ethics as hospitality with respect to ‘a manner of being there’ in the ways we relate to ourselves as well as to others as ‘other’ or not. it remains, of course, as well, to conceptualize the meaning of hospitality and means of its cultivation in educational and/or curricular terms.10 while to take up this course directly here might take us too far a wandering, considering and articulating the ‘curriculum of refuge’ seems to call for an ethics of hospitality. hansen (2007, february; 2008) – who also grounds his interest in cosmopolitanism in re-imagining education in terms of an ethical vision for, and in response to, present times – seeks as well to move us toward such curricular terms. these are times, he says, characterized by ‘accelerating acceleration’ in which the intensified experience of the unfathomability and impermanence of human life flies in the face of our deep need and desire for stability; in which new forms of indifference and violence are generated – and thus also fear, along with enhanced communications and modes of connectivity. he looks forward to curriculum anew through this view, not only in terms of 10 for an initial attempt here, regarding the theorizing of hospitality in relation to curriculum, in an educational context, see quinn (in press), “‘no room in the inn’? the question of hospitality in the post(partum) labors of curriculum studies”, in e. malewski (ed.), articulating the present (next) moment in curriculum studies: the post-reconceptualization generation(s). new york: routledge. concerning the pedagogical address of hospitality, see also ibrahim (2005) and kameniar (2007). quinn: cosmopolitanism and a curriculum of refuge transnational curriculum inquiry 7 (1) 2010 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 89 content conceived as cosmopolitan inheritance through which we can better understand our time and this, our truly multiand inter-cultural legacy, albeit particularly others in an appreciative light, but also cosmopolitanism itself as ‘an engine of ideas’ for curriculum, teaching and learning. issuing from dewey’s claim that we can learn from all the contexts of life, he emphasizes a quest for meaning, the perennial human project, that does not deny this unfathomability and impermanence, or need for stability, but rather reckons with such as a question of ethics concerning what it means to be human, and how we are to live – and that, together within a world compass, via the cosmopolitan call to engage with and learn from innumerable contexts and encounters with others. thus, no blueprint as such is embraced in education nor can it ever be, but rather care is taken concerning how we: ‘hold our educational values, cultivate open-hearted and open-minded exchanges, and welcome such encounters with the foreign’ in order to learn and grow. i submit that this conception of the ‘curriculum of refuge’ i am hoping to develop, and to which we shortly turn, takes up such care and cultivation, implicitly reflecting an ethics of hospitality – an exhortation of radical openness to the other (derrida, 1997/2000, 2002). the sense of risk and necessity for refuge11, as it were, that perhaps attends this call entails, however, also addressing what critchley & kearney (2006) have called ‘the traumas of history’ – the historical-relational context of cross-cultural encounter that papastephanou (2002) emphasizes in her illumination of ‘arrows not yet fired’ in articulating education in a cosmopolitan way. ‘cosmopolitanism envisions peace and reconciliation…’ (p. 69), she says and continues: ‘it paves paths for encounters. encounters undo identities, reshuffle their interpretative material and their self-understanding, and unleash new creative energies’ (p. 69). such exchanges are bound to be discomfiting, particularly in the presence of unresolved conflicts that thwart the call of openness to genuine encounter. because such is the case, papastephanou undertakes a critical reading of cosmopolitanism through ricoeur’s attention to historical memory and human temporality, which she suggests is not yet adequately taken into account. while cosmopolitanism is future-oriented – engaging the imagination with respect to yet-to-come possibilities that might encourage the advent of society in a new image grounded in equality, compassion and care – it must embrace this futurity in the now, in which the past is also present, and reverberates. in our midst, then, are also others who are ghosts of a vampire past, which requires of us not only a sensitivity to our future codwellings but also a reckoning with disputes and differences that are rooted in history, unequal power relations, in which we presently live nonetheless. ‘it is history that nourishes many of our misconceptions, expectations, feelings and opinions about others…. [we cannot] overlook the fact that i and the other have never really been disengaged’ (p. 78). thus, papastephanou emphasizes a conception of cosmopolitan education that acknowledges the demands the cultural dimensions of teachers’ and students’ identities make upon them, in terms of the historical – in its ‘diachonic aspect’: an understanding of the other as other is presupposed, including the recognition of each community’s own past relations and its interactions with many others, those that live out contemporarily in complex ways. ibrahim (2005) – via his experience of being both teacher and ‘foreigner’ – and kameniar (2007) – in her study of a convert to and teacher of a ‘foreign’ religion – actually explore these complex cultural demands and dimensions, and the pedagogical difficulties and possibilities they present, as they are played out in the work of 11 these two necessities relate to hansen’s (2008) educational call for the cultivation of a cosmopolitan sensibility in a dynamic space of interaction that honors local, global, universal and individual simultaneously. this curricular permeability mirrors the cultural porosity of contemporary times – open to deepened, expanded, transformed understanding and experience through encounters with others – as it acknowledges and supports efforts to recognize and reaffirm the integrity of persons and cultures as they are, have been and are becoming. quinn: cosmopolitanism and a curriculum of refuge transnational curriculum inquiry 7 (1) 2010 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 90 teaching. both also engage the notion of hospitality, by which we might understand classroom and curricular contexts as places of cultural encounter, characterized too by hybridity, plurality and ‘multi-chronicity.’ another point of elucidation here, then, is the importance of attention to intercultural study, the relations between and among difference, of which cameron mccarthy’s discussion of ‘nonsynchrony’ (1990) is particularly also generative – i.e., our own cultural identities are intercultural, as it were, themselves plural, paradoxical, complex, conflicted and shifting, ‘in relation’. bringing the light of history to this ideal is not meant to continue into the present the pain and suffering of the past, but rather to acknowledge that which does live into the present, and to do justice to the ‘entanglement of cultures’: the reality of cross-cultural contacts and conflicts – conflicts that have created cultural debts, and that call us to responsibility, beyond simply understanding (papastephanou, 2002). herein is not only a recourse to an other-oriented curriculum that explores past and present relations with such otherness, but also to a course of actual engagement that reckons with this indebtedness – a model of forgiveness, in turning to ricoeur (1996), ‘teaching of the kind of forgiveness and the request for forgiveness that emerge only out of a genuine engagement with the other’ (papastephanou, 2002, p. 81).12 as papastephanou takes up his work thus, she embraces the work of forgiveness as central to the aspirations of cosmopolitanism, and to education in its service, ‘a specific form of that mutual revision, the most precious result of which is the liberation of promises of the past which have not been kept’ (citing ricoeur, p. 83). as i see it, by attending to the dangers of memory – the aftermath of which often includes repression, guilt, shame, condemnation, internalized oppression or self-deception, she posits that forgiveness opens up possibilities for encounters that are truly synchronistic, such that genuine repentance and meaningful and dignified expiation, in the language of religion – healing, reconciliation, and peace – also become genuine possibilities, new and more humane ways of dwelling together. moreover, it is this reading of cosmopolitanism by the light of forgiveness, this illumination of the work of forgiveness as essential to its educational address, that most profoundly brings us to derrida’s recovery of the idea of the ‘city of refuge’ – questions of amnesty and asylum at the heart of it, and to this formulation/transformation of curriculum via the notion of the ‘curriculum of refuge.’ let us, perhaps in pause on our walk through this city, come together finally now to – and to explore – the potential sanctuary of such a vision. hot child in the city? imploring the ‘curriculum of refuge’ each human being suffers in a way no other human being suffers. henry nouwen injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. martin luther king, jr. 12 ricoeur does acknowledge the virtues of other models that seek to integrate identity and alterity, or at least authentically engage difference in the way of shared understanding: in efforts of translation, though symbolically important as ‘linguistic hospitality’, as a passage to cultural hospitality and acknowledgment of the spiritual relationships among languages and cultures, certain meanings can be lost or altered, or alterity subsumed. while an exchange of memories is vital too, in listening to and really hearing another, he maintains that exaggerated memory or the loss thereof has contributed much to the tragedy of human oppression and violence (papastephanou, 2002). quinn: cosmopolitanism and a curriculum of refuge transnational curriculum inquiry 7 (1) 2010 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 91 all of us suffer. suffering is tragically universal and profoundly particular. we are all, too, subjects both of justice and injustice. there is no escaping – via our past and present and even future actions and encounters – the unrelenting need to forgive, and for forgiveness, personally, and collectively, as a result of the communities in which we dwell and participate, and collective histories into which we have been born, as well. as the characters in sex & the city, already in community and ever-seeking the experience of community, we are ever in relationship – making, breaking or re-thinking/recreating it, yet also existentially every alone, ex-iled in the city too, condemned to face or perhaps flee from our impact on and how we are impacted by the other – our radical responsibility and radical inter-course and interconstitution. in this way, the need for asylum and amnesty is a need we all share too – the acknowledgment of which is, we must add, by no means an abnegation that this suffering is particular, and particularly and profoundly plays out via unequal power relations, not just interpersonally but also between and among cultures of difference. the need for asylum and amnesty may be indeed more urgent for, even more acknowledged by, some more than others, and for diverse reasons requiring different responses, yet not wholly foreign or unrelated each to the others’, in the need itself. still, whether we conceptualize our manner of ‘being [here-] there’ with heidegger (1927/1962) as our ontological condition of ‘being-guilty’ in the forgetfulness of being, or with derrida (1985/1988) via ‘otoor autre-biography,’13 in recognition that it is ‘the ear of the other who signs’ our name, or through some less philosophical formulation, we find that we are all, each, implicated in the ‘bloody traumas of history’, the present world scene and curriculum situation, the suffering of others, the pain of the world, and many would argue, even our own plight (i.e., serres, 1986/1989; asher, 2006, september), and plight of our own. every decision we make, action we take, even if in the pursuit of justice, ever cuts, and divides, undertaken – derrida (1990) continues through kierkegaard – in ‘the night of nonknowledge’ in which the impact can never be certain or ever fully known. if we introduce levinas on ‘cities of refuge’ (i.e., as discussed in eisenstadt, 2003, winter) into our conversation, he puts it in this wise: we attend through them, and this human history, so consciously to the manslaughterer because we are all manslaughterers14 – perhaps ‘killing’ without intention, participating unwittingly in oppression, but guilty, as such, nonetheless, even in our innocence; and, perhaps, suffering from such as well. if democracy is fragile, it is because we are. the idea of the city of refuge, and thus the curriculum of refuge, while issuing from historical circumstances defined by a heightened experience of exile and exchange in a cosmopolitan age, is built then first upon an acceptance of human vulnerability – fallibility, imperfection, incompletion, and collective unprecedented constitution – and thus also does not deny these fears, desires, and needs for belonging and restitution (even revenge?) that making our way through the wisdom of those advocating a cosmopolitan education have already highlighted for us; and from which emerges our capacities for imagining community anew. this is, of course, in itself no easy task – and radically understated as well. for, not only does it require of each of us a reckoning with our own mysterious, terrifying, ambiguous and exposed unanswerabilty even to ourselves (butler 2005; greene, 2008a, march, 2008b, march) as well as before the other – and as educators, shepherding others in addressing the same; but also, as stevenson (2003) points out: ‘the subject is now constituted as an active, choice-driven, and risk-reducing individual’ (p. 337), 13 here, derrida (1985/1988) highlights the voice – and word, and sound – of the other in the construction of one’s subjectivity, referencing in french the ear with oto, and the other with autre in discussing autobiography (otoand autre-biography). 14 for those interested in exploring further this aspect of our being, and its impact – educationally and beyond, see quinn (2001), especially chapter 2. quinn: cosmopolitanism and a curriculum of refuge transnational curriculum inquiry 7 (1) 2010 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 92 competitive, entrepreneurial, infinitely flexible in movement. ‘its [sic] is these virtues that are ‘threatened’ or at least partially disrupted by the presence of the urban poor, refugees, immigrants and beggars’ (p. 338), who are not only seen as social failures and excluded but also deemed needing ‘discipline’, especially in our cultural institutions, like schools.15 we might consider, though, that it is not just or even principally the difference the presence of these others in our midst introduce to us that we fear so much, but rather their reflection of our own vulnerability (i.e., in heidegger’s formulation, our being-guilty, thrownness, being-toward-death, etc.) with which we have not reckoned – and the shame, blame or other associated with it. most of our wisdom traditions go so far as to suggest that at and by the very site and ‘stench’, if you will, of our brokenness is brought forth the fragrant offerings that heal and bless and bring us together. in this respect, perhaps in concert with william pinar and madeline grumet’s ‘poor curriculum’ (1976), we might recommend a ‘broken curriculum’16 as foundational to any conception of the curriculum of refuge. we have worked overly much to establish here the place for curriculum from this fractured scene of human existence, what the dalai lama (2007, october) in a recent new york city public lecture on ‘peace and prosperity’ called the ‘fundamental human condition’ we share, or what thich nhat hanh (1999) refers to as ‘inter-being’, our ontological interconnectedness. the other is always and irreducibly wholly other, but also i and the other are indeed – paradoxically, aporetically perhaps – one, as well. we are one, for one, in the need for asylum, no matter where we choose to take refuge – if even as our ‘sex & the city girls’ in their signature cocktail of choice, ironically perhaps, named ‘the cosmopolitan’, though its harmonious sweetness is found ‘in the mix.’ but part of the plea here is exactly not to lose ourselves in or to the, or any, ‘drug of representation,’ as michel serres (1986/1989) calls it. the ‘cosmopolitan’ of our imbibing via the curriculum of refuge rather calls us to the ‘toast of relation’ – sueños! sueños! to realize the sweet dream: more aptly, to break bread together – challah, pita, wheat-free or wonder – in an ethics of hospitality, and all the delights such an ethics entails, as well as demands of us. derrida (1997/2006), of course, turns to this historical provision of the city of refuge also in response to particular, present historical conditions, as do we here concerning curriculum. we do live in a heightened sense of the need for sanctuary, in the acceleration of and unavoidability of encounters with otherness, as well as of, alas, the experience of inhospitableness. and this intensified experience is evident, as well, in our schools. the rise, in the us, of campus and school shootings by and of students across the country in recent years quickly at first comes to mind. in new york city, as in other locales, the state also threatens the city schools with takeover if their students are not performing and conforming to prescribed standards and purposes as determined via pre-scripted assessments. five year-olds fill classrooms where play is diminished, barely permissible, because 15 for powerfully illustrative examples here, see arendt’s analysis (1967) of ‘border police’ as related to immigrant history, as well as derrida’s discussion (1997/2006) of her work in relation to cosmopolitanism; and in an educational context, david nasaw’s social history of american public education (1979) as a response to growing immigrant populations. our posture, via the curriculum or refuge, we suggest, flies in the face of an educational and curriculum history and legacy grounded in human perfect-ability, the denial of human vulnerability and efforts at its eradication. 16 i borrow this term from william doll (2008, january), coined in a graduate seminar entitled bending time, in which he was entertaining where the new might come from, particularly, in time, how the new might emerge in curriculum. undoubtedly influenced by chaos, complexity and systems theories, in affirming a ‘broken curriculum’, he highlights the value of ‘symmetry-breaking’, the breaking down of systems, disequilibrium – the nonlinear, unpredictable, unaccountable, unforeseen. there can be no transformation without perturbation, some degree of instability. herein, the vulnerable, questionable, even inequitable, might also be seen in a new and potentially uplifting light. quinn: cosmopolitanism and a curriculum of refuge transnational curriculum inquiry 7 (1) 2010 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 93 kindergarteners must become, as expeditiously as possible, competent for an adult culture that seems to lend more importance to ‘concept mapping’ than ‘sharing’ and ‘napping.’ if one takes seriously ‘post’-critiques of knowledge (i.e., serres, 1986/1989, 1991/1997; lather 1996, 2007), at least as conceived and advanced in the west, this ‘small thing’ with our ‘little ones’ in itself is not unrelated to the ‘the violence which rages on a worldwide scale’ (derrida, 1997/2006, p. 5); rather, we must consider that we are, in fact, educating our young in artless inhospitality, into a culture of violence. jonathan kozol (1991), for example, further documents in great detail the ‘savage inequalities’’ particularly evident in american schools serving poor children and children of color. the term r.d. laing (1967) picks up from jules henry’s critique of the work of schooling, from the 60s, is fitting here: ‘the pathetic surrender of babies’ (p. 72).17 in the name of citizenship defined by our highest ideals, the political-powers-that-be, generally via the state, initiate these dogged pursuits of academics and educators, creating conditions of duress for many, and especially for many children (i.e., see pinar’s, 2004, analysis with respect to governmental regulation of education in the us). we are all, and our children, in manifold ways, each the ‘hot child in the city’, as it were, in search of a place of refuge, for difference, for the face-to-face, for forgiving and forgiveness. stevenson (2003), taking up foucault, pushes us further through cosmopolitanism to a ‘queer’ ethics that affirms not only the right to be different, but also the freedom to invent difference, to create a space for the possibilities of experimentation, for the creation of new identities. these are problems and potentialities that conjure up visions of the city of refuge – the call for free and open cities, of the curriculum of refuge that might support such views and ‘vagrancies’ of thought and practice. what the city of refuge, for derrida (1997/2006), means is that we must ‘make an audacious call for a genuine innovation in the history of the right to asylum or the duty to hospitality’ (p. 4) – for difference, our share in it, and for its living, inventive, collective embrace. what such suggests is an innovation along the order in education echoed by the inclusion movement, perhaps, the curriculum of refuge that is multicultural in terms of inclusive curriculum – anti-racist, anti-oppressive, et al – a sanctuary for the unsanctioned: different epistemologies, subaltern discourses, other courses; initiated in audacity for interrogating the apparatuses of welcoming (2002), practices of legitimation, in academia and education themselves, including the rights and responsibilities curriculum takes up (or doesn’t), and has (or hasn’t) historically, too. so conceived, this call may also involve offering protection, as well, to children, from a culture of consumerism, for instance, what has been called our ‘audit society’, and the machinations of adulthood; and even hiding from curriculum inquiry itself as well – in calling for a protective haven from the grasp of research – observations and experiences of the most compelling encounters and beautiful engagements happening among teachers, students, and others in classrooms and schools (tocci et al, 2008); i.e., resisting the scholastic urge to turn all of life experience into ‘data’. this certainly must entail addressing what noel gough (2002) terms ‘the long arm of globalization’, in its metaphorical meanings and multiple manifestations, here referential of the omnipresent educational embrace via the state, and the totalizing scripted and tested 17 laing’s (1967) politics of experience engages a psychological analysis of the age of alienation. to sustain our own image of ourselves in conditions marked by oppression and colonization, and to rationalize the industrial-military complex in which we participate, we must interiorize our own violence upon ourselves and our children, and hinder our capacity to see clearly. this work begins in the home, and via schooling, with children – where we teach them to hate one another without appearing to do so, where violence is disguised as love. jules henry’s work (1963) is central to laing’s analysis of “the mystification of experience” as related to educating the young, this work of schooling. quinn: cosmopolitanism and a curriculum of refuge transnational curriculum inquiry 7 (1) 2010 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 94 curriculum it authorizes – as well as the omniscient grasp of ‘mono-cultural’ accountability18 through assessment of student, teacher, school, school of education – from which we must flee and find refuge. this curriculum of the city, as it were, counters that of the state, coming against the propensity to absorb every person and experience and effect in education as data, against the reification of human understanding and ‘rubrification’ of human life, and coopting of culture. in this way, perhaps, curriculum may be conceived as a refuge for culture itself – including a commitment to preserving the culture of childhood, which is also a haven for childhood, and – in accord with derrida’s (2002) conception of culture – a haven for hospitality itself, an affirmation of humanity19 itself, as well. by such rights and duties, this educational course so re-visioned is not only multicultural, but also intercultural, and perhaps trans-cultural or post-cultural too: it seeks to invent, reinvent, community and culture, making room for their imaginative transformation and experimentation by and with and among the new life that is in our midst, for the not-yet and yet-to-come [i.e., the child/children as curriculum, all that we hope for and cultivate with(in) the child/children via education; see jardine, 1992; huebner, 1999]. acknowledging and addressing the histories and hybridities, complexities and contradictions, of such, this curriculum of refuge is, too, a curriculum of ‘interculturality’ (egéa-kuehne, 2008, march) – engaging encounters with and across difference, and exploring their effects, entertaining the ethics of our dwellings together. herein, reckoning with the past that is present now and in the future, this curriculum meets with contexts of desire, othering, guilt, shame, blame, loss and fear, too, in the way of world citizenship – the critical and creative call of hospitality: opening to otherness, conversing with difference; and engaging the possibilities of difference beyond difference, of engaging difference differently, other-wise. this work means, also, undertaking experiments in forgiveness, and healing, in inventing differences in our relations to each other, in relating differently. as such, the curriculum of refuge, inciting a ‘sacred’ history via the city of refuge, is perhaps also a kind of attempt at a redemption of or reconciliation with, and transformation of, history.20 it may be, for example, that israeli and palestinian children educationally working through their own wounds, the traumas of their histories, together, might invent a different history, possibilities for peace, that the negotiations of international governments and ‘peace’ talks of states cannot.21 the curriculum of refuge means imagining and creating spaces where forgiveness, healing, communion, and fellowship might actually be made possible. 18 for a convincing and compelling critical analysis of the discourse of ‘accountability’ in american education, see pinar (2004). relatedly, leonardo’s (2007) analysis of nclb discourse and documentation, which lucidly unveils a constitutive albeit concealed whiteness throughout, is also of interest with respect to my argument here. 19 derrida (2002) claims that there is no culture that is not one of hospitality, and continues to posit culture as hospitality itself, as well as linking such to that which confirms the essentially human. the womanist, theological scholar, n. lynne westfield (2001) concurs, saying: “…to describe hospitality is to describe the delightfulness of being human…” (p. 46). 20 derrida (1997/2006) picks up from arendt (1967) this identification of the right to asylum with a sacred history – grounded in an enduring medieval tenet that he who is in a territory is of the territory, albeit a right which, in her analysis, has been increasingly eradicated, and this in the face of great numbers of refugees and situations of great need. historically, as identified with a divine command to moses for the affordance of cities of refuge, principally for those guilty of manslaughter, these sites made possible human acts of atonement as well as protection. a response to the problem of vengeance, too, the right to sanctuary denied or violated was deemed of great criminal offense. by the judaic codes, clean roads of double-width were to be constructed to such cities, and signposts created, to support fugitives in flight to them. those in charge of these towns were also charged with finding accommodations for those who arrived in such conditions, as well (i.e., the holy bible, 1985; douglas, 1962). 21 derrida (1997/2006) also affirms arendt’s recognition (1967) that the relations between states, treaties between governments, limit international law, also in ways a world government would be hard-pressed to quinn: cosmopolitanism and a curriculum of refuge transnational curriculum inquiry 7 (1) 2010 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 95 the theoretical or critical reflection involved here, is also then, as derrida (1997/2006) claims, ‘indissociable from … practical initiatives’ (p. 4). for instance, derrida’s insistence that these open cities of refuge so conceived across the world be autonomous – each as independent from the other as from the state as is possible, though allied to each other according to ‘forms of solidarity yet to be invented’ (p. 4) – incites ideas of initiatives making for free sites for curriculum experimentation, with global (and cross-, inter-, multi-cultural) affiliations, collaborations, communications, exchanges – akin to the freedom schools, perhaps, into which pinar (2004) inquires anew from the scene of the present historical moment – and governance by the state, as such, suspended, re-constituted. hiro saito (2008, march), in ‘re-envisioning cosmopolitan education,’ seeks to explore the possibilities to be found in some of our already existing non-governmental, transnational resources: for example, problem-solving programs that get students cross-culturally involved in tackling local and global world issues together. with him, we might also highlight the necessary educational tasks of cultivating emotional affiliations with concrete foreign others among ourselves as well as our students via shared interests and exchanges of stories, photographs, and even important statistics; and of cultivating transnational understanding, elucidating the global connections that are already present inside our own environments, how the local materials we use, even to which we are attached, are made available to us through the labor of others in other parts of the world. such considerations may involve such simple curriculum – even classroom-specific – initiatives as pedagogical investigations into the production and distribution of familiar items of treasured use (i.e., like my daily cup of dark-roast coffee; see also asher, 2005, for additional examples critically engaged in a college course in a teacher education program) or communications cross-culturally via e-pal exchanges, or larger curricular experimentations – ‘curriculum of refuge summits’, as it were, organized around particular inquiries or addresses, like the problem-solving programs saito finds potentially supportive in cultivating a cosmopolitan consciousness and ethics of world citizenship. ‘how can the hosts…and guests of cities of refuge [ – teachers and students, ‘ex’s and texts, of the curriculum of refuge – ] be helped to recreate, through work and creative activity, a living and durable network in new places and occasionally in a new language?’ derrida (1997/2006, p. 12) might have us ask. here, in doing justice to the ‘entanglement of cultures’ (papastephanou, 2002), the marginalization of ‘others’, the ‘othering’ is acknowledged and challenged; educators are called to create ‘free’ spaces that allow for the unheard stories to be heard (boler, 2004), for conversations to thrive in a context of shared and mutual responsibility to and for each and every ‘other’; schools – as places of asylum and amnesty – are charged to welcome all in as citizens (kliewer, 1998); and in, albeit beyond, the progressive tradition, education might also be reconstituted – and perhaps that principally through the curriculum, to bring forth what derrida (1997/2006) imagines: ‘the experience of cities [curricula] of refuge’, and also as that which gives ‘rise to a place…for reflection – for reflection on the questions of asylum and hospitality – and for a new order…and a democracy to come to be put to the test’(p. 23). akin to the school as ‘an embryonic democracy’ in dewey’s conceptualization, herein the curriculum of refuge – site for subjective and social reconstruction (pinar, 2004) – may, in fact, contribute to that for which derrida hopes in reconstituting the cities of refuge, that they re-orient the politics of the state as well. moreover, we must concur with him that such work demands a prudent distinction between categories (i.e. immigrant, foreigner, exiled, displaced, etc.), highlighting the import of difference and vigilance against its exclusion, as resolve, and as such, looks to the legacy of cities of refuge, offering a kind of sovereignty to and of the city, as a site of possibility for addressing the concerns of amnesty and asylum, international human rights. quinn: cosmopolitanism and a curriculum of refuge transnational curriculum inquiry 7 (1) 2010 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 96 well as a re-formation, trans-formation, of our very modalities of membership, constructions of citizenship, engagements with difference. addressing this call for the curriculum of refuge, in reconceptualizing and recontextualizing the landscape of contemporary curriculum studies through the understandings of cosmopolitanism, is, to me, a first step toward realizing such possibilities, toward taking hospitality to the streets, so to speak – wherein, too, school smarts and street smarts may freely also meet. cosmopolitanism, curriculum and refuge from conclusion: a post-script to the scripted there’s a sense in which cosmopolitanism is the name not of the solution but of the challenge…. cosmopolitanism is an adventure and an ideal. (appiah, 2006, p. xv, xx) …the voyage of children, that is the naked meaning of the greek word pedagogy. learning launches wandering. (serres, 1991/1997, p. 8) my ‘subway soliloquies’ selections with which i began this address – initiated as they were by walking city sidewalks into a new way, wondering anew before illuminations of bright city lights, wandering into unexpected moments of refuge as well as memories of refuge’s want – are, in truth, no soliloquies at all, as such, albeit underground, indeed, perhaps. their records and recollections come only by encounters with others, brought into being by my relationship to strangers, the call of others and otherness, in my midst. relationships are present; encounters are shared, even as constituted by alterity or experienced as solitary. i have given them visual form in my imagination as subterranean trains of thought, moving trains for thought, upon refuge, the experience of refuge – that are at once also places for reflection, sanctuaries for difference, haven-dwellings for openness to otherness; all of which are ever also inconclusive, incomplete, their ‘not yet’, more than they already are, moving – and moving, changing, me too, and this as challenge, and adventure, and ideal. yet, really, i make the poetic, as much as the politic, by walking it;22 take up the cosmopoetic, as well as the cosmo-politic/-politan, by wondering and wandering into it too – and perhaps welcoming, at least entertaining, its call to me, that which it illuminates for me. and this, from the text-ures of living, con-texts of life. thus, though this personal track, tracking the trail of humanity’s footprints from cosmopolitan terrain, is laid down here in advance, meaning to foreshadow, mirror, abstract, prefigure, the trains of thought i go on to present in the more professional address that follows, temporally, i brought such personal poetic musings to this work after the re-search story was writ and recorded – although they were penned actually in an earlier chronological time.23 and, as embracing adventure, ideal, the challenge of responsive encounter with another, curriculum in a cosmopolitan way, with community and culture, is indeed, and especially with respect to the experience of refuge, all and much a matter of time. 22 with this turn of phrase, i am alluding to the published conversation between two champions for human and civil rights, miles horton and paulo freire (1990), on education and social change, which they frame through a line translated from the poetry of antonio machado (1982), affirming that: “we make the road by walking.” 23 though to engage the central and constitutive concept and experience of time – not only with respect to a cosmopolitan ethics but also to curriculum studies – here is to take us too far a field from our present inquiry, i foreground temporality here intentionally (i.e., the past and future as ever in the present), particularly playing on papestephanou’s (2002) consideration of forgiveness as related to cosmopolitanism, via ricoeur, as the possibility of synchronistic, in additional to diachronistic, encounters with each other. quinn: cosmopolitanism and a curriculum of refuge transnational curriculum inquiry 7 (1) 2010 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 97 here, for instance, in response to a lecture of maxine greene (2008b, march), ‘the poet, the city and curriculum’, of which i was also in attendance, wendy kohli (march, 2008) borrows from other poets to claim that the only reason to read a poem – to which i might also add, and/or write a poem – is to open to another life, to see the world as it could be otherwise, other-wise. she goes on to suggest that herein one does not really merely read the poetic, but actually participates in it, lends one’s life to it, by which the new opens up: via the metaphorical constitution of the poetic, new things are brought together, opening out and expanding horizons, enabling us to move back and forth between actual and possible. i hope a sense of this movement has been made possible for the reader here in my initiation via, experiment with, the poetic, perhaps expanding notions of cosmopolitanism, postulating new openings for curriculum by it as well, inviting new encounters with otherness – for encountering difference, the world, the world of curriculum, citizenship, otherwise; for reflections on the experience of refuge in education that embrace both actual and possible, asylum and amnesty. for, this event, with another lecture by greene (2008a, march) delivered on the occasion of her 90th birthday, in which she emphasized the dire need in education to cultivate a ‘passion for the possible’ (in the words of ricoeur), distinguishing such from the predictable – which now dominates in schools, moved me, and opened up new and expanded ways for me of seeing in and being with my work on cosmopolitanism – encouraging me to lend my life to it, as it were, which is also to embrace a posture of hospitality. greene (2008b, march) introduces her thoughts here through the poet of and on the city, too, elucidating from such this essential work of education in ‘opening doors’ ‘with no keys’. she critiques teacher education, and curriculum development, for its locked rooms and closed doors, for, in a hunger for final solutions, failing to truly attend not only to the stories of teachers and students and their existential engagements in and with the world and each other, but also in ignoring the temporality by which all narratives are marked, that these stories are ever unfolding and in their very telling also give to life its meanings (citing sartre). she affirms, too, drawing upon merleau-ponty, that the self appears, then, not as or by interiority, but rather via dialogic meanings, discovered and recovered in the midst of others. these encounters, with and in the midst of others and otherness, have thus compelled me to bring myself, my own stories, and something of the temporality of their unfolding, to this inquiry into cosmopolitanism: the setting and scene of its address, its sights and insights, and sources of possibility for conceiving curriculum anew via its vision in the ‘city of refuge’. such in and of itself has also experientially been something, for me, of a curriculum of refuge. it has reminded me that the beauty of the world may be embraced, without denying or abnegating its brokenness too – and that part of the beauty is indeed found in our human response to both, but perhaps most profoundly, to and in its and our brokenness. as greene interrogates the educational discourse of the day, asking ‘accountable for what? to whom?’ – foregrounding too the question of responsibility, and ethics, she also acknowledges the inhospitable conditions that have brought me, through and with derrida as well as via the work of others, to the study of cosmopolitanism: that the world into which educators initiate children is, in fact, one subjected to far too much indifference and violence. she envisions teachers, then, in their strangeness in classrooms amid strangers and reckoning with such, at work as healers of this ‘plague of indifference.’ awake to the ambiguities and unanswerabilities of their life and practice, they challenge in the national context the ‘american idols’ that via celebrity and materialism capture the imagination of youth in a prescribed vision within a questionable moral fabric, and work to create a space in this world for children wherein trust is possible, and help them not only to trust, but also to be capable of outrage. for if even a labor of loss, our humanity requires both empathy and the impetus quinn: cosmopolitanism and a curriculum of refuge transnational curriculum inquiry 7 (1) 2010 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 98 to fight the cruelty of our forgetfulness and disinterest, as well as the violence issued by manifold modes of inhospitality. and such, too, ever extends beyond the national context. in this, conceiving a curriculum of refuge, in concert with derrida’s call for the revival of cities of refuge, is the work of hospitality, of care, even love – to take up this ‘passion for the possible’ in education and curriculum studies via the heart of cosmopolitanism, as much as its mind. for every, each, moment, ‘love calls us to the things of the world’ (wilbur, 1988), and simultaneously to, in fact, in the words of ghandi, be the change we wish to see in the world – i.e., world citi-zenship, and particular responsiveness concerning the ex-iled. let us, here too, never conclude, but rather commence, ever again and again, in invitation, bringing our stories, taking ourselves, to the streets, to the places where there are no streets, praying, playing and laboring to come together in, across, through, by our shared otherness, brokenness, vulnerability, as refuge to and for one an-other. references appiah, k. 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(2008). 2008 aera program theme: research on schools, neighborhoods, and communities: toward civic responsibility, (http://www.aera.net/meetings/default.aspx?menu_id=342&id=2898). washington, dc: american educational research association. tocci, c., johnson, e., kontovourki, s., oppenheim, r., and quinn, m. (2008). how does this impact students and teachers? exploring the ‘significance’ of educational research in relation to curriculum. unpublished manuscript. waldron, j. (2006). cosmopolitan norms. in r. post (ed.), another cosmopolitanism (pp. 83101). oxford, england: oxford university press. wang, h. (2004). the call from the stranger on a journey home: curriculum in a third space. new york: peter lang. westfield, n.l. (2001). dear sisters: a womanist practice of hospitality. cleveland, oh: the pilgrim press. wilbur, r. (1988). “love calls us the to things of this world,” in new and collected poems (p. 233-234). new york: harcourt. author molly quinn is associate professor of education in the department of curriculum & teaching, teachers college, columbia university, box 31, 525 west 120th street, new york, ny 10027, usa; e-mail: quinn@tc.columbia.edu. the author of going out, not knowing whither: education, the upward journey and the faith of reason (ny: lang, 2001), much of her work as a curriculum theorist engages ‘spiritual’ and philosophical criticism toward embracing a vision of education that cultivates wholeness, beauty, compassion and social action. the art of self-fashioning foucault studies © paul allen miller, 2005 issn: 1832-5203 foucault studies, no 2, pp. 54-74, may 2005 article  the art of self-fashioning, or foucault on plato and derrida paul allen miller, university of south carolina     abstract: this paper examines foucault’s reading of plato and ancient philosophy as part  of his continuing dialogue and debate with derrida. it contends that this debate not only in  part motivates foucault’s turn to antiquity, but also is directly revelatory of the most basic  differences between foucault’s and derrida’s conceptions of philosophy.      michel  foucault  began  his  1982  course  at  the  collège  de  france,  l’herméneutique du  sujet,  with  a  meticulous  reading  of  the alcibiades.1  this  dialogue,  which  is  considered  by  some  today  to  be  pseudo‐platonic,2  was  widely  appreciated  in  antiquity  and  universally  accepted  as  genuine.  one  reason for its wide popularity was its theme: the necessity of caring for the  self (epimeleisthai heautou), defined as caring for the soul, as a propaedeutic to  entering  into the affairs of state. for this reason,  in  late antiquity when the  study  of  philosophy  had  predominantly  become  an  exercise  in  textual  commentary, and when the reading of the platonic corpus proceeded through  1   michel  foucault,  l’herméneutique  du  sujet:  cours  au  collège  de  france.  1981‐82,  ed.  frédéric gros (paris: gallimard/seuil, 2001). see also his resumé of the dialogue in his  unpublished lecture of february 16 1983, in the course le gouvernement de soi et des  autres  (1983),  tapes  of  which  are  available  at  the  institut  mémoires  de  l’édition  contemporaine. i thank the institut for making these recordings available to me.  2   for  a  survey  of  the  problem  and  a  persuasive  argument  for  the  dialogue’s  authenticity,  see  nicholas  denyer,  plato:  alcibiades  (cambridge:  cambridge  university press, 2001), 14‐26. for a brief survey of the latest stylometric research, see  leonard  brandwood,  “stylometry  and  chronology,”  the  cambridge  companion  to  plato, ed. richard kraut (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1992), 112. and for  foucault’s position and an updated bibliography on the status of the controversy in  france, see foucault, l’herméneutique du subjet, 71, and gros’s accompanying note.  croiset’s  budé  edition,  which  would  have  been  foucault’s  reference  volume,  emphatically rejects all doubts about the dialogue’s authenticity. maurice croiset, ed.  and  trans.,  platon:  introduction,  hippias  mineur,  alcibiade,  apologie  de  socrate,  euthyphron, criton, 9th ed. (paris: société d’edition «les belles lettres», 1960), 49‐53.  original = 1920.  54 miller: the art of self-fashioning a structured curriculum, the alcibiades was generally the first text read, just as  the philebus was often the  last. the alcibiades,  in particular, was thought to  provide both a protreptic admonition  to  turn  to philosophy, as a means of  caring for the self, and a general overview of platonic philosophy.3   foucault saw  in  the alcibiades  the  first and  fullest  theorization of an  ethic of self‐relation that was to constitute his primary object of interest in the  last years of his life. for him, it provided not only an explicit theorization of  one of the guiding threads of the platonic corpus, it also represented a model  of self‐relation that made possible the stoic ethic of the care of the self in the  first two centuries of the roman imperial period.4 it was this latter form of  self‐constitution and  cultivation  that foucault would directly contrast with  the christian model of confession and self‐renunciation  that he saw at  the  heart of modern technologies of disciplining and normalizing the self.5 the  stoics, starting from plato’s initial model, offered an alternative form of self‐ relation  both  to  the  christian  archetype  and  to  that  described  later  and  implicitly denounced  in foucault’s middle works such as surveiller et punir  and  la  volonté  de  savoir.  it  was  this  alternative  model  on  which  foucault  concentrated during the final years of his life.6   in this paper, i shall examine foucault’s reading of plato and ancient  philosophy as part of his continuing dialogue and debate with derrida on the  importance  and  interpretation  of  plato  in  contemporary  philosophy.  this  debate, i shall contend, not only in part motivates foucault’s turn to antiquity,  but also is directly revelatory of the most basic differences between foucault’s  and derrida’s conceptions of the philosophical enterprise. very schematically,  where derrida remains concerned with the origin and nature of metaphysics,  foucault in his late interviews and lectures on ancient philosophy, as well as  in the history of sexuality, offers a direct rebuttal while outlining a philosophy  of  practice.  i  will  close  the  paper,  however,  by  questioning  whether  the  foucauldian and derridean analyses of plato are truly mutually exclusive.  3   foucault, l’herméneutique, 164; denyer, plato: alcibiades, 14; pierre hadot, qu’est‐ce que  la philosophie antique? (paris: gallimard, 1995), 238‐40.  4   foucault, l’herméneutique, 65. in his final course in 1984, foucault lectured on the care  of the self in the laches, apology, crito and phaedo. see alexander nehamas, the art of  living: socratic reflections  from plato  to foucault  (berkeley:  university  of  california  press, 1998), 163.  5   foucault, l’herméneutique, 242, 247; frédéric gros, “situation du cours,”  in michel  foucault, l’herméneutique du subjet: cours au collège de france. 1981‐82, ed. frédéric  gros (paris: gallimard/seuil, 2001), 490‐93, 507; michel sennellart, “la practique de la  direction  de  conscience,” foucault  et  la  philosophie  antique,  eds.  frédéric  gros  and  carlos lévy (paris: kimé, 2003), 157.  6   foucault,  “l’herméneutique  du  sujet,” dits  et  écrits: 1954‐1988,  vol.  4,  eds.  daniel  defert and françois ewald (paris: gallimard, 1994), 364; james miller, the passion of  michel foucault (new york: simon & schuster, 1993), 322, 340.  55 foucault studies, no 2, pp. 54-74 my claim, of course, is not that foucault’s debate with derrida was the  exclusive or even necessarily  the primary motive  for his  turn  to antiquity.  any  such  mutation  in  a  complex  philosophical  project  is  obviously  overdetermined.  moreover,  it  would  be  vain  and  anti‐foucauldian  to  speculate on his precise  internal motivations. there are  in addition explicit  ethical and political concerns motivating this shift that are well documented.  in the last two volumes of the history of sexuality and in his lectures at the  collège  de  france  from  the  same  period,  foucault  sought  to  elaborate  an  ethics founded not on the juridical, authoritarian, or disciplinary structures of  modernity, but on what he refers to as an “art” or “stylization” of existence.7  the  purpose  of  this  stylization  was  not  self‐absorption,  but  to  offer  new  means of resistance to the normalizing structures of the market, scientific and  social  institutions,  and  the  state.  8  an  ethics  and  aesthetics  of  existence,  founded  on  the  history  of  subjectivation,  was  in  part  to  be  a  means  of  resistance  to  the  commodified,  sexualized,  and  normalized  subject  of  capitalist modernity.9 my goal in this paper is to reconstruct one portion of  the complex dialogic situation out of which this turn to ethics and antiquity  evolved.  it  is  a  project  conceived  in  much  the  same  spirit  as  arnold  davidson’s foucault and his interlocutors10.    we can provisionally date the origins of foucault’s ethical turn to 1970 and  his  praise  of  deleuze’s  1969 logique du  sens.  deleuze,  in  this  idiosyncratic  work,  launches an attack on  the  insidious platonism  that he sees  infecting  7   j. miller, passion, 323‐22, 340, 346‐47; david h.  j larmour, paul allen miller, and  charles platter, “introduction: situating the history of sexuality.” rethinking sexuality:  foucault  and  classical  antiquity,  eds.  david  h.  j  larmour,  paul  allen  miller,  and  charles  platter  (princeton:  princeton  university  press,  1998),  22‐33;  alain  vizier,  “incipit  philosophia,”  rethinking  sexuality,  67‐68,  71.  on  the  relation  between  foucault’s  late  ethical  thought  and  anglo‐american  “virtue  ethics,  see  neil levy,  “foucault as virtue ethicist,” foucault studies 1 (2004): 20‐31, who to my mind fails to  emphasize  sufficiently  the  importance  of  aesthetics  in  the  final  foucault,  but  nonetheless notes some  important points of meeting between  these  two bodies of  thought.  8   slavoj žižek, enjoy your symptom: jacques lacan in hollywood and out (new york and  london: routledge, 1992), 180‐81; gros, “situation du cours,” 524‐25.  9   jorge  davila,  “ethique  de  la  parole  et  jeu  de  la  vérité,”  foucault  et  la  philosophie  antique, eds. frédéric gros et carlos lévy (paris: kimé, 2003), 207. on the relation  between disciplinary practices and capital, see foucault, “les techniques de soi,” dits  et écrits: 1954‐1988, vol. 4, eds. daniel defert and françois ewald (paris: gallimard,  1994),  785;  foucault,  “la  sociéte  punitive,” dits  et  écrits,  vol.  2,  466‐70;  hubert  l.  dreyfus and  paul  rabinow, michel foucault: beyond structuralism and hermeneutics  (chicago: university of chicago press, 1982), 135; and ron sakolsky, ʺʹdisciplinary  power,ʹ the labor process, and the constitution of the laboring subject,ʺ rethinking  marxism 5.4 (1992): 114‐26.  10   davidson, foucault and his interlocutors (chicago: chicago university press, 1997).  56 miller: the art of self-fashioning western thought. using stoic logic’s distinction between bodies and events, as  well as lewis carroll’s alice in wonderland and through the looking glass, he  sets  out  to  undermine  platonism’s  doctrines  of  the  representation,  recollection, and imitation of an ideal original, in the hope of uncovering an  alternative  philosophical  tradition  that  privileges  surface  over  depth  and  event over essence.11 for deleuze, stoic doctrine represents the logical inverse  of platonic metaphysics.  in stoic  logic,  the  ideal, precisely because  it  is an  “incorporeal,”  is  always  only  an  effect  of  a  body’s  surface  rather  than  the  ultimate guarantor of its essential identity. no longer representing the realm  of strict determination, as in plato’s philebus, the ideal is now associated with  the world of becoming and the unlimited: “the realm of becoming and the  unlimited becomes the event  itself,  ideal,  incorporeal, with all the reversals  that  are  proper  to  it.”12  for  deleuze,  stoic  logic  is  an  open  system  of  expanding  and  multiplanar  surfaces,  as  opposed  to  the  closed  system  of  platonic metaphysics. it represents the possibility of new lines of flight, rather  than  the  consolidation  of  an  ideal  identity  that  is  thought  to  subtend  and  determine the world of becoming.   in  his  laudatory  review  foucault  argues  that  deleuze’s  method  of  reconstructing this system is “rigorously freudian.” it is based on a careful  symptomatic reading of  the omissions, displacements, and repressions  that  constitute the history of western philosophy, offering a restoration not of a  lost depth, but of a lost surface. the upshot of the review is not only a call for  a return to ancient philosophy, but to precisely those texts and events from  antiquity that are the least read and most frequently neglected:    we should not scorn hellenistic confusion or roman platitudes, but listen to  those things said on the great surface of the empire; we should be attentive to  those things that happened in a thousand instances, dispersed on every side:  fulgurating  battles,  assassinated  generals,  burning  triremes,  queens  poisoning themselves, victories that invariably led to further upheavals, the  endlessly exemplary actium, the eternal event.13     although foucault’s eventual reading of the stoics would be very different  from deleuze’s—focusing on the elaboration of an art of existence rather than  a  counter‐platonic  logic—and  although  foucault  and  deleuze  would  later  take  their  distances  from  one  another  philosophically  and  politically,  11   thomas  benatouïl,  “deux  usages  du  stoicisme:  deleuze,  foucault,”  foucault  et  la  philosophie antique, eds. frédéric gros et carlos lévy (paris: kimé, 2003), 20.  12   gilles deleuze, logique du sens (paris: minuit, 1969), 17.  13   foucault,  “theatrum  philosophicum,”  language,  counter‐memory,  practice:  selected  essays and  interviews,  trans. donald f. bouchard and sherry simon, ed. donald f.  bouchard  (ithaca:  cornell  university  press,  1977),  172.  original  =  1970,  reprinted  under the same title in dits et écrits: 1954‐1988, vol. 2, eds. daniel defert and françois  ewald (paris: gallimard, 1994), 75‐99.  57 foucault studies, no 2, pp. 54-74 nonetheless, even at this early date we can see foucault’s interest in the stoics,  as  well  as  the  cynics,  and  such  ostensibly  marginal  figures  as  diogenes  laertius.   more  importantly, we can also see  in this same review his emerging  conviction  that  the  opposition  to  the  classic  metaphysics  of  “platonism,”  which he, derrida, and deleuze all saw as subtending western thought, can  be  found  in  plato  himself:  for  he  contends  that  a  counterdiscourse  to  metaphysical platonism can be found not only in the later stoics, but also in  the pre‐socratics,  the  figure of socrates himself, and  in plato’s sophist.14  in  foucault’s  later  work,  this  perception  of  the  inherent  heterogeneity  of  the  platonic oeuvre will  lead  to his reading  the dialogues as an  interconnected  web  of  individual  texts  rather  than  attempting  to  subordinate  them  to  a  single‐overarching vision.15 in the manner of pierre hadot, he reads plato less  as an abstract theorist than as an advocate for a specific mode of reflective  life.16   this  pragmatic  reading  is  in  many  ways  separate  from  the  mainstream  of  philosophical platonism in early twentieth‐century france, as represented by  the works of people like festugière,17 robin,18 diès,19 and boussoulas.20 this  14   foucault, “theatrum philosphicum,” 166‐69; benatouïl. “deux usages du stoicisme,”  24, 30‐31, 36; thomas flynn, “foucault as parrhesiast: his last course at the collège  de  france  (1984),” the final foucault,  eds.  james  bernauer  and  david  rasmussen  (cambridge, ma: mit press, 1991), 112. at this same period, in his inaugural address  to  the  collège  de  france,  foucault  already  envisaged  returning  to  plato  and  the  sophists to examine the division between true and false discourses, which philosophy  establishes, and how this division differs fundamentally from a the concept of truth  embodied in the pronouncements of traditional poets such as hesiod. see l’ordre du  discours (paris: gallimard, 1971), 16‐17, 64.  15   anissa castel‐bouchouchi, “foucault et  le paradoxe du platonisme,” foucault et  la  philosophie antique, eds. frédéric gros et carlos lévy (paris: kimé, 2003), 176, 186‐87.  for a defense of this approach to the dialogues, see matthew kenney, seducing the  soul: erôs and protreptic  in  the platonic dialogues.  dissertation.  university  of  south  carolina (2003), 8‐27.   16   hadot, “forms of life and forms of discourse in ancient philosophy,” trans. arnold  i. davidson and paula wissing, foucault and his interlocutors, ed. arnold i. davidson  (chicago:  university  of  chicago  press,  1997),  211‐12;  hadot,  que’est‐ce  que  la  philosophie antique?, 102‐03.  17   nonetheless, it would be wrong to underestimate the influence of these earlier more  traditional french platonists on the  later postmodernists’ thought. thus festugière  defines philosophie as “le soin de l’âme” [“care of the soul”] and opens his chapter on  “la vie intérieure” with a citation from the alcibiades, ti estin to heautou epimeleisthai?  [“what is the care of the self?”]. a. j festugière, contemplation et vie contemplative selon  platon, 2nd ed. (paris: vrin, 1950), 61, 130. original =1935.  18   léon robin, “notice,” platon: le banquet (paris: société d’edition «les belles lettres»,  1929), vii‐cxxi; la théorie platonicienne de l’amour, 2nd ed. (paris: presses universitaires  58 miller: the art of self-fashioning latter  tradition  was  that  to  which  derrida’s  reading  of  the  phaedrus  and  philebus in “la pharmacie de platon” and la carte postale was an heir and a  response.  this  observation  is  important  because  foucault  in  his  return  to  plato at the end of his life is not simply carrying forward his ongoing dialogue  and later debate with deleuze, nor is he merely grafting a reading of hadot  onto his own concerns with the body and sexuality; he is also continuing a  polemic with derrida  that has  its origins  in  the  latter’s 1963  lecture on  the  former’s histoire de  la  folie.  indeed,  the platonic subtext remains one of  the  most  lasting  threads  in  the  set  of  discussions,  debates,  and  dialogues  that  constitute french poststructuralist thought.   that derrida’s criticism of foucault had struck a nerve can be seen in  the fact that he waited over nine years to respond and that, when he did, he  ignored  those  parts  of  derrida’s  argument  that  dealt  directly  with  the  constitution  of  western  reason  through  the  socratic  dialectic.  instead,  he  silently  dropped  from  the  1972  edition  of  the  book  the  original  preface  in  which he had made the claim that the greek logos knew no opposite.21 there  was  no  longer  a  place  for  such  sweeping  generalities  about  ancient  philosophy. as foucault admitted at  the beginning of volume two of  the  history  of  sexuality,  it  had  become  clear  to  him  that  his  genealogies  of  modernity  could  only  be  valid  if  their  difference  from  and  grounding  in  antiquity were solidly established.22   nonetheless, neither the history of sexuality nor foucault’s courses at  the collège de france during the eighties should be seen as a concession to  derrida; rather they constitute a continuing rejoinder to his criticisms.23 in his  initial  response  to  derrida’s  essay,  foucault  had  argued  that  derrida’s  perspective was too exclusively philosophical, that it sought to reduce history  to a system enclosed within the socratic logos, and that it treated socially and  historically  embedded  discursive  practices  as  mere  textual  traces.24  twelve  de france, 1964), original =1933; “notice,” platon: phèdre (paris: société d’edition «les  belles lettres», 1985), vii‐ccv. original = 1933.  19   auguste diès, “notice,” platon: philèbe (paris: société d’edition «les belles lettres»,  1941), vii‐cxii.  20   nicolas‐isidore boussoulas, l’être et la composition des mixtes dans le «philèbe» de platon  (paris: presses universitaires de france, 1952).  21   roy boyne, foucault and derrida: the other side of reason (london: unwin hyman,  1990), 74‐76, 118.  22   foucault, l’usage des plaisirs, histoire de la sexualité, vol. 2 (paris: gallimard, 1984), 11‐ 14.  23   by all evidence, the debate continued to fascinate derrida as well. see his analysis of  the ambivalent place of freud in histoire de la folie and foucault’s later work, “‘to do  justice  to  freud’:  the  history  of  madness  in  the  age  of  psychoanalysis,”  trans.  pascale‐ann brault and michael naas, foucault and his  interlocutors, ed. arnold  i.  davidson (chicago: university of chicago press, 1997).  24   foucault, “mon corps, ce papier, ce feu,” histoire de la folie à l’âge classique suivi de mon  corps, ce papier, ce feu et la folie, l’absence de l’oeuvre (paris: gallimard, 1972), 584, 602.  59 foucault studies, no 2, pp. 54-74 years  later, when volumes two and three of  the history of sexuality were  published, the more strictly philosophical discourses of plato, aristotle, and  seneca were consistently read  in  the  light of ancient medicine, manuals of  domestic conduct such as xenophon’s oikonomikos, and the correspondence of  the younger pliny. thus while foucault granted derrida’s contention that it  was  impossible  to  do  a  genealogy  of  western  reason  without  a  thorough  consideration of its earliest exemplars, he refused to grant philosophical texts  any special status. they were always examined as part of a larger ensemble of  related  discursive  practices,  as  opposed  to  the  disembodied  texts  of  traditional  philosophy,  of  which  he  saw  derrida  as  the  latest  and  “most  decisive representative.”25 in fact, foucault’s later readings of plato remain deeply implicated in  his polemic with derrida on the origins and constitution of western reason.  the  range  of  his  response  is  multileveled  and  often  quite  subtle.  but  the  significance of this ongoing debate is not to be underestimated if we are not to  miss both  the philosophical stakes of foucault’s evolving understanding of  the socratic  logos and the centrality of plato to the debates that shaped the  french intellectual scene in the last half of the twentieth century.   thus, at the start of his 1982 course on the hermeneutic of the subject,  before  his  actual  reading  of  the alcibiades,  foucault  sketches  the  historical  importance of the concept of the “care of the self”—in both its socratic and its  later hellenistic and imperial versions. the practice of the care of the self is  contextualized  in  the  history  of  western  philosophy  in  relation  to  that  of  “knowing the self.” for foucault, the practice of being a subject can never be  disarticulated  from  its  relation  to  specific  conceptions  and  practices  of  knowledge and truth, even though the relative priority or secondariness of  those technologies of self‐constitution in relation to the domain of knowledge  may be radically historically variable. at this point in his exposition, foucault  pointedly refers to descartes’ exclusion of madness from his first meditation  as an example of the way in which the conditions for the subject’s access to  truth come to be increasingly defined within the domain of knowledge in the  modern period, as opposed to knowledge being predicated on the subject’s  access  to  truth,  in  those  periods  when  the  ethic  of  the  care  of  the  self  is  predominant. the editor of the volume immediately picks up on a reference  to the earlier polemic with derrida in an accompanying note.26 the topic is  foucault published a more concise response to derrida in a japanese journal the same  year.  it  does  not  differ  in  substance  from  the  above.  see  foucault,  “réponse  à  derrida,” dits et écrits vol.2, eds. daniel defert and françois ewald (paris: gallimard,  1994), 281‐95.  25   foucault, “mon corps, ce papier, ce  feu,” 602. see angèle kremer‐marietti, michel  foucault:  archéologie  et  généalogie,  2nd  ed.  (paris:  livre  de  poche,  1985),  131;  and  boyne, foucault and derrida, 75.  26   foucault, l’herméneutique, 19.  60 miller: the art of self-fashioning returned to  later  in the course. there  it  is a question of whether descartes’  meditations constituted actual spiritual exercises in the antique mode, or were  purely textual investigations. again the reference escaped neither the editor  nor,  one  imagines,  foucault’s  auditors27:  for,  it  will  be  recalled  that  the  understanding of descartes’ practice as an actual meditation was crucial to  foucault’s  response  to  derrida  (since  one  who  dreams  can  still  think  and  hence  meditate,  but  one  who  is  demens  cannot  engage  in  this  methodical  practice of thought).28     indeed,  evidence  of  a  subtle  retort  to  derrida’s  reading  of  plato’s  phaedrus  and  the  latter’s  suspicion  of  writing  can  be  seen  in  foucault’s  privileging of the stoics throughout his later work.29 foucault observes that in  the  stoics,  and  indeed  all  the  philosophers  of  the  imperial  period,  the  exclusion of writing  is completely discarded.30 philosophical pedagogy had  changed, he notes, following hadot.31 “the platonic culture of the dialogue  cede[d] its place to a culture of silence and the art of listening.”32 in making  this case, foucault implicitly argues that there is an alternative philosophical  tradition  to  the  (neo‐)platonic  one  from  which  derrida  derives,  a  tradition  whose  primary  focus  is  ultimately  on  practice  rather  than  the  logos,  and  whose  chief  concern  is  the  ethics  of  self‐fashioning  rather  than  the  metaphysics of presence.     indeed,  while  derrida  is  never  mentioned,  the  careful  reader  of  foucault’s dits et écrits can discover a careful rebuttal of all the major points  made in “la pharmacie de platon,” beginning with the pharmakon itself.33 the  27   ibid., 340‐41.  28   foucault, “mon corps, ce papier, ce feu,” 591.  29   evidence of foucault’s counterdiscourse to derrida can be seen already in les mots et  les choses (paris: gallimard, 1966). where derrida had argued in his early work de la  grammatologie (paris: minuit, 1967), l’écriture et la différence (paris: seuil, 1967), and la  voix  et  la  phénomène  (paris:  presses  universitaires  de  france,  1967)  that  western  metaphysics was constituted by the systematic exclusion of writing in favor of the  voice and consciousness’s immediate self‐presence to itself. foucault, however, in les  mots et  les choses argues for an alternative  tradition of renaissance philosophy  that  privileges writing (p, 53). this theme would be further developed in the 1982 course  at the collège de france where montaigne is specifically seen as the heir to the late  antique  tradition  of  the  care  of  the  self  (l’herméneutique,  240;  “a  propos  de  la  généalogie de l’éthique,” 410), a theme that is later repeated by hadot (qu’est‐ce que la  philosophie antique, 395, 413) and nehamas (the art of living). foucault’s les mots et les  choses  was  published  the  year  before  derrida  published  his  three  books,  but  the  latter’s  ideas  had  been  in  circulation  for  some  time  in  the  form  of  lectures  and  conference papers.   30   foucault, “l’herméneutique du sujet,” 361.  31   hadot, qu’est‐ce que la philosophie antique, 271‐72  32   foucault, “les techniques de soi,” 796  33   in at  least one case, foucault’s  interviewers clearly  invite him  to situate his work  relative  to  the  problematic  investigated  by  derrida  in  “la  pharmacie.”  foucault’s  response is to switch immediately to a discussion of the history and technical status  61 foucault studies, no 2, pp. 54-74 pharmakon,  it  will  be  recalled,  symbolizes  writing’s  suspect  status  as  something  outside,  yet  also  integral  to,  the  logos  itself.  thus  plato  in  the  phaedrus has ammon argue that writing is a pharmakon that allows people to  appear to know more than they do by repeating the discourses of others, as  phaedrus does  in the case of lysias, rather than coming to real knowledge  through an active engagement  in dialectic. in contrast, foucault points out,  even  a  platonist  such  as  plutarch  recommends  learning  the  discourses  of  others as a pharmakon, or drug, that guards the soul against illness.34 aretê on  this  model  comes  from  study  and  prescribed  spiritual  exercises.  socratic  epimelia  heautou  (“care  of  the  self”),  as  outlined  in  the  alcibiades,  has,  in  imperial philosophy, become indissociable from the practice of writing.35   thus,  what  plato,  according  to  derrida’s  reading,  sees  as  harmful,  imperial philosophy, according to foucault, views as beneficial. where plato  rejects writing, according to derrida, as mere hupomnêsis instead of mnêmê, the  philosophers of the empire, foucault observes, directly advocated the keeping  of hupomnêmata,36 or notebooks, not as a substitute for memory—conceived of  by  plato  as  vital  and  interior  to  the  soul—but  as  a  form  of  practice,  a  technology of the self.37 writing, rather than undermining the presence of the  logos  to  itself  or  representing  a  form  of  discourse  whose  author  is  never  present to defend the integrity of his intentions, actually renders the absent  party present, according to seneca.38 the grapheme is not the foreign element  that threatens the interiority of the soul, but rather the technology that makes  interiority possible. foucault states:    the hupomnêmata  ought  to be resituated  in  the context of a very palpable  tension  during  this  period:  inside  this  culture  that  was  so  affected  by  tradition,  by  the  recognized  value  of  the  quotation,  by  the  recurrence  of  discourse, by the practice of “citation” under the seal of age and authority, an  ethics was in the process of developing that was very openly oriented by the  care of the self toward some very precise objects: the retreat into oneself; the  of hupomnêmata, a move that appears to refuse the engagement with derrida while  simultaneously  accepting  it  on  his  own  terms  (“a  propos  de  la  généalogie  de  l’éthique,” 624‐25).  34   foucault, “l’herméneutique du sujet,” 360; foucault l’herméneutique du sujet, 310.  35   jean‐pierre vernant, mythe et pensée chez les grecs, vol. 1 (paris: maspero, 1965), 112.  36   the  importance  of  the  hupomnêmata  as  a  genre  of  philosophic  writing  that  was  designed to serve as a spiritual exercise, and hence a technology of the self, was first  discussed  by  hadot  in  reference  to  marcus  aurelius’s  meditations  (la  citadelle  intérieur: introduction aux pensées de marc aurèle (paris: fayard, 1992) 40‐49; arnold  davidson,  “introduction:  pierre  hadot  and  the  spiritual  phenomenon  of  ancient  philosophy,” philosophy as a way of life: spiritual exercises from hadot to foucault, ed.  arnold i. davidson, trans. michael chase (oxford: blackwell, 1995), 10‐11.  37   foucault, “l’écriture de soi,” dits et écrits: 1954‐1988, vol. 4, eds. daniel defert and  françois ewald (paris: gallimard), 417‐19; foucault, “l’herméneutique du sujet,” 360‐ 61; foucault, l’herméneutique du sujet, 343.  38   foucault, “l’écriture de soi,” 425.  62 miller: the art of self-fashioning interior life; independence; the taste for oneself. such is the objective of the  hupomnêmata:  to  make  the  memory  of  a  fragmentary  logos  transmitted  by  teaching, listening or reading, a means of establishing a relation with oneself  as adequate and as perfect as possible.39   thus foucault carefully and unobtrusively takes up each of derrida’s major  themes  with  regard  to  the  role  of  writing  in  the  constitution  of  western  philosophical  reason—the  pharmakon,  mnêmê  versus  hypomnêsis,  presence  versus absence, interiority versus exteriority—and demonstrates the existence  of  a  counter‐tradition  that  derrida  ignores.  that  counter‐tradition,  like  foucault  himself  in  his  response  to  derrida’s  attack  on histoire de  la  folie,  privileges practice over  the abstractions of pure reason, and self‐fashioning  over  textuality.  thus  it  is  no  surprise  that,  immediately  following  his  discussion  of  descartes  in  l’herméneutique  du  sujet,  foucault  returns  to  a  discussion of the practice of philosophy in the first and second centuries ce,  where he demonstrates  that reading,  through  the practice of meditation,  is  directly linked in stoic practice to writing, and thus that writing was central to  the care of the self.40 the  final  and  most  explicit  proof  of  the  validity  of  this  reading  of  foucault’s interpretation of plato in light of his continuing engagement with  derrida can be heard in the recordings of his 1983 course on le gouvernement  de  soi  et  des  autres.  this  course  is  devoted  to  an  in  depth  examination  of  parrhêsia, the greek term for truth‐telling or frank speech.41 it chronicles the  changing sense of the word as  it evolves from a primarily political term  in  fifth‐century  bce  athenian  politics  and  culture  to  one  that  refers  to  the  courage of the philosopher to tell the truth, in the first instance to his prince,  and ultimately to his disciple, who in the very different world of first‐ and  second‐century  ce  imperial  rome,  would  often  be  his  social  superior  and  patron.  in  the  latter  instance,  it was a  tool of  the philosophical director of  conscience  to  produce  a  self‐relation  of  ideal  transparency  in  the  consciousness  of  his  charge.42  in  line  with  this  investigation,  the  course  39   foucault, “a propos de la généalogie de l’éthique,” 625‐26.  40   foucault, l’herméneutique du sujet, 341  41   for a discussion of the concept, see flynn “foucault as parrhesiast.” for foucault’s  knowledge of philodemus’s surviving treatise peri parrhêsias at a time when it had yet  to be translated  into any modern  language, see foucault, l’herméneutique, 372, and  david  konstan,  “parrhêsia:  ancient  philosophy  in  opposition,” mythos and  logos: how to regain the love of wisdom, eds. albert a. anderson, steven v. hicks,  and  lech  witkowski  (amsterdam:  rodopi,  2004),  27.  philodemus’s  text  is  now  available  in english under  the  title on frank criticism:  introduction, translation and  notes by david konstan, diskin clay, clarence e. glad, johan c. thom, and james  ware (atlanta: scholars press, 1998).  42   see  l’herméneutique  du  sujet  as  well,  232,  357‐63,  and  382‐89.  for  the  changing  meanings of parrhêsia  from classical athens  to  the hellenistic period, see konstan,  “friendship,  frankness,  and  flattery,”  friendship,  flattery,  and  frankness  of  speech:  63 foucault studies, no 2, pp. 54-74 features an extensive, detailed, and at times brilliant reading of euripides’ ion  (january 12, 19, 26, and february 2), as well as shorter interpretations of the  phoenician women, the bacchae,  and  the orestes  (february  2).  there  are,  in  addition,  examinations  of  specific  passages  from  polybius  (january  12),  thucydides (february 2), and isocrates (february 2). the rest of the course is  focused  on  plato  and  features  explications  of  specific  passages  from  the  republic (february 9), the laws (february 9), and the letters (february 9).  the key discussion for our purposes comes in the course of a lengthy  reading of plato’s seventh letter on february 16, 1983. after an examination of  the authenticity of the letters in the preceding meeting,43 foucault turns his  attention to the twin problems of the nature of philosophical knowledge and  the refusal of writing, as those problems are formulated in the seventh letter.  the  letter  itself  is addressed  to  the  followers of dion of syracuse after  the  latter’s death. they are seeking advice on how to prosecute their continuing  opposition to the tyranny of dionysus ii. in the course of his response, plato  outlines  the  circumstance  under  which  he  undertook  his  second  visit  to  dionysus ii at the urging of dion and his friends in an attempt to convert the  young tyrant to philosophy and convince him to rescind dion’s banishment.  plato  had  tried  to  instruct  dionysus  once  before  and  had  met  with  little  studies of friendship in the new testament world, ed. john t. fitzgerald (leiden: brill,  1996), 7‐19.   43   he contends that 6, 7, and 8 are authentic, while the others are more  likely to be  forgeries. cooper indicates that the seventh letter is “the least unlikely to have come  from  plato’s  pen”  and  certainly  dates  from  the  period  and  shows  a  thorough  acquaintance  with  plato’s  personal  history  and  philosophy.  john  m.  cooper,  ed.,  plato: complete works, assoc. ed. d. s. hutchinson (indianapolis: hackett, 1997), 1635.  irwin rejects it as spurious, but agrees that it must date from the period and be by the  hand  of  “someone  who  knew  plato  well.”  his  note  contains  a  good  english  bibliography on the question. terrence irwin, “plato: the intellectual background.”  the  cambridge  companion  to  plato,  ed.  richard  kraut  (cambridge:  cambridge  university press, 1992), 51.  julia annas notes  that such  forgeries were a common  rhetorical genre exercise throughout antiquity, annas, “plato,” the oxford classical  dictionary, 3rd ed., eds. simon hornblower and antony spawforth (oxford: oxford  university  press,  1996).  brandwood,  however,  indicates  that  the  seventh  letter  is  stylometrically  consonant  with  the  late  dialogues  (“stylometry  and  chronology,”  111‐13), and penner notes its thematic and tonal continuities with these same works.  terry penner, “socrates and the early dialogues,” the cambridge companion to plato,  ed. richard kraut (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1992), 130. souilhé, the  editor of the budé edition of the letters, which was foucault’s reference text, has both  an excellent history of the controversies surrounding the  letters  in general (v‐xxxi)  and what is to my mind a convincing defense of the authenticity of the seventh letter  (xxxiii‐lviii).  joseph  souilhé,  ed.  and  trans., platon: lettres  (paris:  société  d’edition  «les  belles  lettres»,  1960).  see  also  morrow’s  defense  of  the  authenticity  of  the  seventh and eighth letters (glenn r. morrow, studies in the platonic epistles: with a  translation and notes [urbana: university of illinois press, 1935], 11‐22) and festugière  on the seventh (contemplation, 61n. 1).  64 miller: the art of self-fashioning success.  nonetheless,  dionysus  had  claimed  a  continuing  interest  in  philosophy during plato’s absence and held dialogues with the members of  his court. plato, thus, decided to test him on his return. he discussed with  him  a  number  of  issues  at,  apparently,  a  high  level  of  abstraction  and  probably included such difficult notions as the forms of justice and the good  as  first  principles  of  nature  (344d).  the  goal  was  to  expose  to  him  the  difficulty  of  the  philosophical  pursuit  and  to  see  if  dionysus  would  be  inspired  to  undertake  the  strenuous  labor  necessary  to  live  the  life  of  a  philosopher. “those who are really not philosophers but have only a coating  of opinions, like men whose bodies are tanned by the sun, when they see how  much  learning  is required, and how great the  labor, and how orderly their  lives must be to suit the subject they are pursuing, conclude that the task is  too  difficult  for  their  powers”  (340d).44  unsurprisingly,  the  young  tyrant  failed the test (345a). but dionysus, plato notes, was rumored to have later  written  a  book  based  on  their  discussions.  it  is  in  this  context  that  plato  launches into a brief digression on the nature of philosophical knowledge and  its relation to writing.  dionysus or any other writer, he argues, could not have been serious if  he  attempted  to  set  down  plato’s  essential  doctrine,  or  that  of  any  other  philosopher, in writing. such an exclusion of writing, of course, would seem  to provide direct evidence for the derridean thesis of the phonocentric nature  of the logos at the dawn of occidental philosophy. the seeming contradiction,  moreover,  of  plato’s  contention  with  the  manifest  fact  that  he  himself  did  write  would  appear  to  be  an  example  of  precisely  the  kind  of  aporia  and  undecideablity  that  derrida  traces  in  his  minute  examination  of  the  term  pharmakon and its peregrinations throughout the platonic corpus.   foucault, however, constructs a different reading of the letter. he notes  that plato argues there are five aspects to the knowledge of any real object:  name,  definition,  image,  the  acquaintance  our  minds  have  with  the  object  (scientific knowledge, reasoning, and right opinion), and the object itself in its  abstract  ideality  (342).  inasmuch  as  the  first  two  elements  are  language‐ dependent and hence mutable, and inasmuch as the third is dependent upon  individual material instantiations, which is made clear in plato’s discussion of  the example of a circle, then, while these three elements are necessary to the  formation of the fourth element they can never be adequate to a true epistêmê  of  the object  in  itself. hence, “no sensible man will venture  to express his  deepest thoughts in words, especially in a form which is unchangeable, as is  true of written outlines” (343a).   44   morrow  “letters,”  plato:  complete  works,  ed.  john  m.  cooper,  assoc.  ed.  d.  s.  hutchinson (indianapolis: hackett, 1997), 1658. all other translations of the letters are  from this edition. plato only once tried to lecture on the good. aristotle tells us it was  completely incomprehensible (metaphysics a.6).  65 foucault studies, no 2, pp. 54-74 the problem is not, according to foucault one of writing per se, but of  philosophy as a practice rather than as a set of “formulas.”45 according to the  seventh letter, we arrive at the knowledge of “real” objects not through direct  sense  perception,  nor  through  the  memorization  of  discrete  formulas,  but  through  the  process  of  approximation,  refutation,  and  reformulation  that  characterizes  the  socratic‐platonic  elenchus.46  the  elenchus,  moreover,  is  pursued in the intense transferential relationship between master and disciple  evoked by socrates at the beginning of the alcibiades47 when he confesses his  love  for  the  young  man,  and  described  by  lacan  in  his  reading  of  the  symposium.48 the seventh letter is clear.    there is no writing of mine about these matters, nor will there ever be one.  for this knowledge is not something that can be put into words (rhêton) like  other  sciences;  but  after  long  continued  intercourse  (sunousias)  between  teacher and pupil in joint pursuit of the subject, suddenly (exaiphnês),49 like  the  light  flashing  forth  when  a  fire  is  kindled,  it  is  born  in  the  soul  and  straightaway nourishes itself. (341c‐d).  45   foucault seems to be paraphrasing souilhé (platon: lettres, l), but see also festugière  (contemplation, 191), as well as hadot, qu’est‐ce que la philosophie antique, 106.  46   irwin, “plato: the intellectual background,” 65‐66, 68‐69; penner, “socrates and the  early dialogues,” 139‐47; gail fine, “inquiry in the meno,” the cambridge companion  to plato, ed. richard kraut (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1992), 203‐11;  nehamas, the art of living, 82‐87. foucault makes this clear at the conclusion of the  course on april 9, 1983 in a discussion of elenchus and the gorgias.   47   souilhé, platon: lettres, liv‐lv; kenney, seducing the soul, 28‐90. foucault notes that the  term for this relationship is sunousia (“being with”), which often has an erotic sense;  he then asserts that it has does not have that sense in the context of the seventh letter  while admonishing us not to “overinterpret.” it is difficult to know how seriously to  take this admonition. on the one hand, it could be a deliberate attempt to innoculate  his audience against a premature or facile psychoanalytic reading. on the other hand,  foucault  is  well  aware  of  the  erotic  frame  of  the  alcibiades  and  its  relation  to  alcibiades’ drunken entrance in the symposium, which is the crux of lacan’s reading  of this latter dialogue. by calling attention to the possibility of the erotic reading of  sunousia before an audience of non‐hellenists, while simultaneously warning against  it,  foucault  both  calls  our  attention  to  the  intense  affective  relationship  between  master and disciple and cautions us against an overhasty assimilation of it to a purely  genital one. of course, the ancient satiric texts reveal that this assimilation was as  common in a pre‐freudian era as it is today. see juvenal 2 and satyricon 85‐87 as well  as  daniel  mcglathery,  “reversals  of  platonic  love  in  petronius’s  satyricon,”  rethinking sexuality: foucault and classical antiquity, eds. david h. j.larmour, , paul  allen miller, and charles platter  (princeton: princeton university press, 1998). on  erotics as an essential protreptic strategy in plato, see kenney’s excellent seducing the  soul.  48   jacques lacan, le séminaire livre viii: le transfert, ed. jacques‐alain miller (paris: seuil,  1991). see symposium, 211 a‐b. for a comparison of  this passage with  the seventh  letter, see robin (le banquet, xci).  49   on the centrality of this concept in platonic metaphysics, see boussoulas (l’être et la  composition des mixtes, pp.77‐82).  66 miller: the art of self-fashioning   lest foucault’s audience miss the larger importance of his highlighting this  passage to his understanding of the role of writing and speech at the origins  of western formal reason (and consequently of his entire rereading of plato in  terms of the practice of the care of the self), foucault pauses to invoke directly  derrida’s reading of this same problematic as a foil to his own. to paraphrase,  foucault  says,  “you  see  the  platonic  exclusion  of  writing,  therefore,  has  nothing  to  do  with  the  birth  of  logocentrism  in  western  philosophy.”  “logocentrism”  is of course derrida’s  term  for  the constitution of western  reason under the sign of the self‐presence of the transcendental signified to  itself, which in turn is manifest in a phonocentrism that privileges speech over  writing as the immediate transparence of meaning to consciousness itself.50   foucault  continues  by  noting  that  plato  does  not  in  fact  contrast  writing with the logos in this passage, but rather asserts the inadequacy of the  logos to the thing itself in its abstract ideality. the problem of writing, then, is  not one of its difference from or deferral of full meaning, but of its rigidity, its  removal from the question and answer of the elenctic process that leads to the  flash  of  insight  in  the  intense  relation  between  master  and  student.  “the  refusal  of  writing  is  not  made  in  the  name  of  the  logos,  but  of  something  positive.  it  is  made  in  the  name  of  tribê,  exercise,  work,  and  a  laborious  relation of the self to itself. it is the western subject itself that is engaged in  this simultaneous rejection of writing and  the  logos.”  just as  in 1972 when  foucault  published  his  response  to  derrida’s  1963  lecture,  in  1983  he  continues  to  see  the  latter  as  the  “decisive”  representative  of  a  certain  tradition  of  teaching  philosophy  in  france,  a  tradition  that  emphasizes  systems, categories and metaphysics as opposed to the relations, technologies,  and practices that were foucault’s central focus.51     there are, of course, a number of potential weaknesses  in foucault’s  response  to “la pharmacie de platon,” some more apparent  than real. the  first is the seeming contradiction between plato’s rejection of writing in favor  of  the  direct,  interpersonal  practice  of  dialectic  and  the  fact  that  plato  nonetheless not only wrote, but wrote voluminously and with great care. for  derrida, as noted above, this contradiction is embodied in the ambivalence of  the word pharmakon and of writing itself both in the phaedrus and throughout  the  platonic  corpus.  though  foucault’s  and  derrida’s  responses  to  this  problem  are  not  logically  mutually  exclusive,  foucault’s  is  convincing,  shifting the ground firmly back from theory to practice. he begins by drawing  our attention to passage 344c in the seventh letter, “what i have said comes,  in short,  to  this, whenever we see a book, whether  the  laws of a  legislator  50   derrida, de la grammatologie, part 1.  51   gros  “situation  du  cours,”  506;  flynn,  ʺfoucaultʹs  mapping  of  history,ʺ  the  cambridge  companion  to  foucault,  ed.  gary  gutting  (cambridge:  cambridge  university press, 1994), 29.  67 foucault studies, no 2, pp. 54-74 (nomothetes) or a composition on any other subject, we can be sure that if the  author is really serious, this book does not contain his best thoughts; they are  stored away with the fairest of his possessions” (emphasis mine). foucault is  quick to note the seeming contradiction with the laws and the republic where  plato appears to play precisely the role of the nomothetes or lawgiver. he then  notes  that  plato  also  invents  and  relates  a  variety  of  myths,  such  as  aristophanes’ tale of the androgyne in the symposium, the chariot procession  in heaven of socrates’ great speech  in  the phaedrus, or  the story of er  that  concludes the republic. these myths he argues are also not “serious” in the  sense that they are not to be taken literally. rather they are a provocation to  thought and thus to a reexamination of our relation to ourselves, and hence of  our capacity to govern both ourselves and others. foucault then asks if this is  not the real philosophical work of the laws and the republic as well: not to  provide  prefabricated  recipes  and  formulas  for  the  perfect  state,  but  to  prompt readers to question the nature of how they govern themselves and  others and to seek what may be the best laws for each. in this regard, he cites  the  admittedly  fictive  fifth  letter,  which  he  believes  nonetheless  reflects  platonic  if  not  plato’s  thought.52  it  contends  that  the  philosopher’s  job  as  counselor  to  the state  is not  to  impose a constitution, but  to  listen  to each  particular constitution’s voice, and to help it come to speak “its own language  to gods and men” (321d‐e). if we accept this, as well as the seventh letter’s  judgment that philosophy cannot be reduced to “formulas” and that what we  must seek instead is a system where men can live under freedom and the best  laws,  then  the  notion  that  the  republic  and  the  laws  constitute  actual  blueprints for a real state becomes absurd. thus, foucault concludes,  these  dialogues  are  not  to  be  taken  “seriously,”  but  are  to  be  read  in  a  fashion  analogous to the myths themselves.53   the republic in fact explicitly supports this claim when socrates states  that  he  does  not  wish  to  discuss  the  possibility  of  putting  his  plan  into  practice but rather  to  indulge his “fancy  like an  idle daydreamer out  for a  solitary walk” (458a‐b).54 later, when he and glaucon are discussing whether  the  ideal  philosopher  would  actually  take  part  in  politics,  we  find  the  following exchange:    glaucon: you mean  that he will do so  in  the society which we have been  describing and which we have theoretically founded; but i doubt  if  it will  ever exist on earth.  52   souilhé, lettres de platon, lxxxix‐xci  53   see elizabeth asmis, “plato on poetic creativity,” the cambridge companion to plato,  ed. richard kraut (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1992), 338.  54   desmond  lee,  ed.  and  trans., plato: the republic,  2nd  rev.  ed.  (london:  penguin,  1987), 178‐79. all translations of the republic are from this edition.  68 miller: the art of self-fashioning socrates: perhaps  .  .  .  it  is  laid up as a  pattern  in heaven,  where  he  who  wishes  can  see  it  and  found  it  in  his  own  heart.  but  it  does  not  matter  whether it exists or will ever exist . . . . (592a‐b).55   the  philosopher  is  to  be  the  new  artist  who  faithfully  reproduces  the  harmonic forms of beauty and  justice in themselves (500c‐501b), rather than  copies of copies like the mimetic artist who is expelled in book 10. his is a  higher fiction that points beyond the limits of the means of representation and  actualization  as  in  the  myth  of  er.  as  the  athenian  says  in  the  laws,  responding to an imaginary petition on behalf of the tragedians, “our entire  state has been constructed to be a ‘representation’ of the finest and noblest life  . . . so we are poets like yourselves.”56   a  more  weighty  objection  to  foucault’s  critique  of  derrida  is  to  be  found in his focus on the seventh letter: for, while it is possible to argue that  the  letter’s  text  does  not  discount  writing  in  favor  of  the  logos  as  the  transcendental guarantor of meaning, but rather focuses on philosophy as an  interpersonal practice of subject  formation, one cannot say  the same of  the  phaedrus,  which  is  the  primary  focus  of  derrida’s  exposition.  the  myth  of  theuth  makes  clear  that  writing  itself  is  seen  as  opposed  to  epistêmê  and  mnêmê,  for  ammon  does  not  condemn  writing  as  part  of  a  broader  denunciation of the reduction of philosophy to verbal formulas as plato does  in  the  seventh  letter,  but  he  condemns  the  invention  of  writing  per  se  as  leading to a neglect of memory (mnêmês ameletêsiai).57 mnêmê and epistêmê, as  in the meno58 are equated with one another in the myth recounted in socrates’  great speech. the forms, as  is made clear there, provide the transcendental  guarantee of meaning, and it is our immediate recollection of the forms that  constitutes real knowledge and sparks our love of wisdom (philosophia):     for the soul that has never seen the truth, will not assume human form. for it  is necessary that a person understand what is spoken (legomenon) according  to  the  form  (eidos),  a  language  which  goes  from  the  multitude  of  sense  55   on  the  translation, see  the note  in lee, plato: the republic and adam’s  important  discussion ad loc. james adam, the republic of plato, 2nd ed. (cambridge: cambridge  university press, 1963).  56   trevor j. saunders, laws, plato: complete works, ed. john m. cooper, assoc. ed. d. s.  hutchinson  (indianapolis:  hackett,  1997),  1483‐84;  asmis,  “plato  on  poetic  creativity,”  338;  andrea  wilson  nightingale,  genres  in  dialogue:  plato  and  the  construct of philosophy (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1995), 88.  57   ameletêsia is an alpha‐privative form of the word meletaô (“to care for”), which gives  us the epimelia of foucault’s epimelia heautou or “care of the self.”  58   walter  hamilton,  ed  and  trans.,  plato:  phaedrus  and  letters  vii  and  viii  (london:  penguin, 1973), 55 n.2.  69 foucault studies, no 2, pp. 54-74 impressions to bringing them together by reasoning (logismôi)  into a unity  (hen). (249b‐c)59   writing here, therefore, suffers from the same degree of ontological inferiority  that poetry does in book 10 of the republic and that the lover who physically  consummates his desire for the beautiful boy in socrates’ great speech does,  and each must be expelled from the realm of pure presence constituted by the  forms, if only to return through the backdoor in the guise of eros as mediator  in the symposium, the writing on the soul of the phaedrus, or the myth of er at  the end of the republic.    of course, foucault, after such a provocative gesture as singling out  derrida for criticism, is neither so foolish nor so poor a scholar as to neglect  the phaedrus. he turns to  it two weeks  later on march 2 as part of a  larger  discussion  of  the  relation  between  philosophy  and  rhetoric.  this  lecture  contains no direct acknowledgement of derrida. his first  two  texts for  this  lesson are taken from the apology. in one, socrates announces that he will not  use a speech produced by a logographos, but will address the court in his usual  manner (18a). he thus contrasts his etumos logos (“true speech”) with the false  or fictive rhetorical speech that is usually heard in the courts.60 in the second  passage, he explains why, if he claims to speak the truth, he nonetheless does  not speak in the assembly (31c‐32). his answer is that he would not be heeded  and would have certainly been put to death before now. in both passages, as  foucault  reads  them,  the  emphasis  is  on  socrates  as  parrhêsiast  and  on  philosophy  as  the  effective  use  of  truth  telling.  foucault  then  turns  his  attention to socrates’ great speech as another example of an etumos logos. his  argument is that in the phaedrus socrates’ true speech is directly contrasted  with lysias’s attempt at a rhetorical tour de force in the speech phaedrus reads.  lysias  is  later  in  the  dialogue  explicitly  referred  to  as  a  logographos  and  59   the  translation  is  my  own.  the  passage  is  much  controverted.  for  three  very  different  translations see claudio moreschini and paul vicaire, eds., platon: phèdre  (paris: société d’edition «les belles lettres», 1985); alexander nehamas and paul  woodruff,  eds.  and  trans.,  plato:  phaedrus  (indianapolis:  hackett,  1995);  and  hamilton, plato: phaedrus. nehamas and woodruff adopt badham’s emendation of  iont’ for  ion, which changes the subject of the  last clause. this  is  in  line with their  overall interpretation of the dialogue as moving from the transcendental vision of the  forms found in the republic to a more immanent, almost aristotelian vision, found in  the philebus (xlii‐xliii).  60   in point of fact, the adjective etumos appears nowhere in the apology, although the  phrases  ton  t’alêthê  legonta  [“speaking  the  truth”]  (17b4‐5), pasan  tên alêtheian  [“the  whole truth”] (17b8), and t’alêthê legein [“to speak the truth”] (18a6) do. the phrase  etumos  logos  does,  however,  occur  in  the  phaedrus,  where  it  is  attributed  to  steisichorus and serves to introduce socrates’s great speech (243a9). it is impossible  to tell whether the conflation is deliberate and foucault is anticipating his argument  on the phaedrus or a simple slip, given that we are dealing with oral teaching and do  yet not have access to an official transcript.  70 miller: the art of self-fashioning phaedrus,  now  converted  to  what  he  thinks  to  be  socrates’  point  of  view  condemns  him  for  that  reason.  nonetheless,  as  foucault  notes,  socrates  reproves phaedrus on this point and indicates that the question is less if one’s  logos is graphos (“written”) than if it is aischros (“shameful”) (258d). lest we  miss the derridean resonances to these passages, foucault underlines the fact  that logos is used by plato for both written and oral speech.   he concludes then by arguing that phaedrus says that for a speech to  be good, the person who delivers it must be someone who knows the truth.  but socrates is not satisfied with this. rhetoric on this model is conceived of  as  an  add‐on  and  ornament,  a  mere  externality.  knowledge  of  the  truth,  however,  is  not  given  in  advance,  but  is  a  function  of  discourse  as  it  is  practiced through the elenchus as discussed in the seventh letter.61 from here  he concludes that the true art of rhetoric is nothing other than psychagogia, that  is,  the  ability  to  “lead  souls.”  dialectic,  not  rhetorical  set  speeches  in  the  manner of lysias, is the true example of this art. the tricks of rhetoric found  in the manuals are only valuable to the extent that they are subordinated to  the dialectic (and its etumos logos). dialectic in fact makes a double demand,  the knowledge of being and psychagogia. these are two faces of the same coin.  it  is by  the movement of  the soul  that one comes  to know being, and  it  is  through knowing the nature of being that one knows the nature of the soul.  thus, according to foucault, socrates’ great speech has only the function of  giving an example of the etumos logos, that is of anticipating the discussion of  rhetoric in the dialogue’s final part and hence of showing the link that exists  between access to the truth and the soul.    foucault’s reading  is a  tour de  force.  it offers an  interpretation of  the  dialogue that at once unifies the two sections and recasts the phaedrus not as a  meditation on writing’s relation  to  the  logos, and hence  to  the soul, but as  rhetoric’s  relation  to  philosophy’s  vocation  to  speak  the  truth  and  to  lead  others  to  the  truth. nonetheless, while valid  in  its own  terms and offering  important insights into how the phaedrus can be read in terms of philosophy,  viewed as a set of practices that are aimed in the first place at the relation of  self  to  self  and  then  of  self  to  truth,  it  not  clear  that  derrida’s  reading  is  therefore invalid. first, foucault never offers a counterreading of the myth of  theuth,  which  is  derrida’s  strongest  piece  of  evidence.  second,  he  never  addresses the way in which the vocabulary of writing as a pharmakon relates  to the myth of pharmakeia that opens the dialogue or to the nature of eros as  depicted in the competing speeches, nor, in spite of foucault’s assertions to  the contrary, can the discourse on love be reduced to a mere illustration of the  61   this  is a reasonable deduction, but foucault does not cite a specific passage and i  know of nowhere in the phaedrus where socrates actually says this.  71 foucault studies, no 2, pp. 54-74 problem  of  true  speech  as  opposed  to  rhetoric.62  third,  foucault  oversimplifies  what  derrida  means  by  writing.  as  derrida’s  critique  of  husserl  in  la  voix  et  le  phénomène  makes  clear,  there  can  be  no  meaning  without some form of inscription. all language represents a materialization of  thought, an encoding of the conceptual in the signifier whether its medium be  that of vibrations in the air, synaptic firings in the brain, or paper and ink. but  thought  has  no  reality  outside  that  materialization,  thus  writing  always  precedes speech. language  is not merely  the medium of  thought, but  that  which  makes  thought  possible.  writing  in  derrida  stands  for  the  formalization of thought that is at once inescapable and yet always alienates  thought  as  pure  meaning  from  itself.63  the  attempt  to  expel  writing  from  western metaphysics is the attempt to recover a lost origin, a realm of pure  meaning  that  like  the  forms  is  always  posited,  but  never  present.  thus  foucault’s  observation  that  plato  uses  logos  of  both  speech  and  writing  ultimately falls wide of the mark. as ferrari observes, “there is no such thing  anymore—certainly  not  in  philosophy—as  pure  speech.  speech  is  always  speech‐in‐the‐light‐of‐writing—a tool self‐consciously adopted.”64   in  the  end,  in  spite  of  foucault’s  polemical  jibes,  and  the  strong  evidence that it was at least in part the challenge of derrida that led foucault  to return to plato, it is not clear that the two levels of analysis are mutually  exclusive. as alexander nehamas observes, in response to hadot’s claim that  ancient philosophy was only concerned with theory as an incitement to and  support for a mode of life, “needless to say, theory was never very far away  and  very  often  closer  than  hadot  believed.”65  by  the  same  token,  while  foucault is undoubtedly right to refocus us on the problematic of the care of  the self in ancient philosophy and the relation of the subject to truth as a set of  practices,  nonetheless  we  cannot  neglect  the  fact  that  it  is  with  plato’s  dialogues  that  the  very  possibility  of  formulating  in  a  rigorous  manner  questions about  the nature of  the good,  the  just, and  the relative merits of  pleasure and knowledge comes into formal existence in occidental thought.66  plato  is  the  founder  of  western  metaphysics,  and  the  conceptual  and  epistemological foundation of this ontology was from the beginning, as any  62   which is not to say that it does not also serve as such an illustration. see g. r. f.  ferrari,  “platonic  love,”  the  cambridge  companion  to  plato,  ed.  richard  kraut  (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1992).  63   catherine h zuckert, postmodern platos: nietzsche, heidegger, gadamer, strauss, derrida  (chicago:  university  of  chicago  press,  1996),  201‐16;  allan  stoekl,  agonies  of  the  intellectual:  commitment,  subjectivity  and  the  performative  in  the  twentieth‐century  french tradition (lincoln: university of nebraska press, 1992), 201.  64   ferrari, listening to the cicadas: a study of plato’s phaedrus (cambridge: cambridge  university press, 1987), 219‐20.  65   nehamas, the art of living, 164.  66   alexander  grant,  the  ethics  of  aristotle  illustrated  with  essays  and  notes,  vol.  1  (london: longman’s, 1866), 45.  72 miller: the art of self-fashioning reader of the ion67 must know, linked to a break from the predominantly oral  and poetic structures of thought that dominated greek education and culture  until at least the middle of the fifth century bce. 68   plato’s  relationship  to  writing  is  problematic  and  the  fact  that  this  problematization is linked to a conception of what must ultimately be called  philosophy as a spiritual practice pursued through the socratic elenchus does  not exclude it from also being a theoretical conundrum. writing’s relationship  to  thought  and  the  fundamental  realities  that  make  rigorous  conceptual  investigation  possible  is  fraught  with  ambivalence  and  contradiction.  the  problem of externality and inscription, whether in the case of poetry, as in the  67   for  a  discussion  of  recent  readings  of  the  ion  in  relation  to  the  republic’s  “banishment”  of  the  poets  and  the  elaboration  of  plato’s  mature  metaphysical  theories, see ledbetter, who accepts a rigorous distinction between the early socratic  dialogues and the  later platonic dialogues. grace m. ledbetter, poetics before plato:  interpretation  and  authority  in  early  greek  theories  of  poetry  (princeton:  princeton  university press, 2003), 78‐99.  68   it was eric a. havelock, preface to plato (cambridge, ma: harvard university press.  1963) who most decisively, if somewhat monochromatically, demonstrated this. his  text remains fundamental. see nightingale, genres in dialogue, 17; rosalind thomas,  oral  tradition  and  written  record  in  classical  athens  (cambridge:  cambridge  university press, 1989) 34; john miles foley, the theory of oral composition: history  and methodology (bloomington: university of indiana press, 1988), 62; jesper svenbro,  phrasikleia: an anthropology of reading  in ancient greece,  trans.  janet lloyd  (ithaca:  cornell university press, 1993), 1; bruno gentili, poesia e pubblico nella grecia antica:  da  omero  al  v  secolo  (rome:  editori  latera,  1984),  53;  asmis  “plato  on  poetic  creativity,” 361 n.1; peter w. rose, sons of  the gods, children of earth:  ideology and  literary form in ancient greece (ithaca: cornell university press, 1992), 337;although  its more extreme claims, particularly about alphabetic literacy and the direct causal  effects  of  literacy  are  today  questioned  see  thomas,  oral  tradition,  3,  17n.2,  26;  thomas, literacy  and orality  in ancient  greece  (cambridge:  cambridge  university  press,  1992)  17;  william  v.  harris,  ancient  literacy  (cambridge,  ma:  harvard  university  press  1989),  50n.23;  rose,  sons  of  the  gods,  pp.116‐17).  see  also  paul  zumthor, introduction à la poésie orale (paris: seuil, 1983) 34, 46; jack goody and ian  watt, “the consequences of literacy,” literacy in traditional societies, ed. jack goody  (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1968) 53; harry berger, jr., “phaedrus and  the politics of inscriptions,” ed. steven shankman, plato and postmodernism (glenside,  pa: aldine press, 1994: 82); thomas, literacy and orality, p.18; and harvey j. graff,  the legacies of literacy: continuities and contradictions  in western culture and society  (bloomington: university of indiana press, 1987), 5.    on poetry as the dominant form of paideia, and the lack of any significant form of  book trade until the end of the fifth century bce, see grant, the ethics of aristotle, 50;  anthony  snodgrass, archaic greece: the age of experiment  (berkeley:  university  of  california press, 1980), 174; harris, ancient literacy, 57‐59, 84‐93; graff, legacies of  literacy, 26; thomas, literacy and orality, 8, 13, 51; oral tradition, 21; leslie kurke, the  traffic  in praise: pindar and  the poetics of social economy  (ithaca: cornell university  press,1991),  88;  gregory  nagy,  greek  myth  and  poetics  (ithaca:  cornell  university  press, 1990) 38; nagy, pindar’s homer: the lyric possession of an epic past (baltimore:  johns hopkins university press, 1990), 404.  73 foucault studies, no 2, pp. 54-74 republic’s  doctrine  of  mimesis;  of  sexual  attraction,  as  formulated  in  the  phaedrus and the symposium; or of writing’s relation to thought and the real,  as defined in the phaedrus and the seventh letter, is central to plato’s concerns.  the doctrines of recollection and spiritual purification that plato describes in  the great middle dialogues and integrates directly into his general theory of  knowledge certainly have their roots, as vernant69 and morgan70 have shown,  in traditional greek religious and pythagorean practices. but spiritual practice  is  ultimately  inseparable  from  its  theoretical  values,  however  informal,  unconscious, or provisional. by the same token, the structures of thought that  make  possible  the  socratic  elenchus  are  inconceivable  outside  a  culture  of  formalized abstraction and hence writing.    acknowledgements   i owe a debt of gratitude to my colleagues jill frank, david konstan, micaela  janan, and charles platter, who read various versions of this paper and made  invaluable  suggestions  for  its  improvement.  thanks  are  also  due  to  the  editors of foucault studies, stuart elden, clare o’farrell, and alan rosenberg,  as  well  as  to  the  journal’s  anonymous  referees,  whose  help  and  support  greatly improved the final product.    69   vernant, mythe et pensée, vol. 1, 92‐117  70   michael l. morgan, “plato and greek religion,” the cambridge companion to plato, ed.  richard kraut (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1992).  74 acknowledgements 1palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 22 no. 3 julio de 2019. e2236 la aporía de la muerte: comunicación entre vivos y muertos carolina mazzetti-latini1 recibido: 13/04/2018 enviado a pares: 16/04/2018 aprobado por pares: 06/07/2018 aceptado: 11/10/2018 doi: 10.5294/pacla.2019.22.3.6 para citar este artículo / to reference this article / para citar este artigo mazzetti-latini, c. (2019). la aporía de la muerte: comunicación entre vivos y muertos. palabra clave, 22(3), e2236. doi: http://doi.org/10.5294/pacla.2019.22.3.6 resumen el propósito del artículo consiste en una aproximación a la construcción social de la muerte desde algunos aportes de quien instalara la deconstrucción como estrategia de escritura y análisis, jacques derrida. el objetivo central no consiste en recorrer exhaustivamente la obra del autor (exhaustividad que iría en contra de su propuesta ontológica), sino más bien en tomar algunas categorías analíticas y ponerlas al servicio de la comunicación entre vivos y muertos. la estrategia teórico-metodológica se sostiene en un diseño de investigación cualitativa basado en el análisis de relatos desde un marco biográfico interpretativo. se parte de relatos de entrevistas que narran experiencias personales de algún tipo de comunicación con personas fallecidas o de reflexiones acerca de la creencia en torno a la posibilidad de este contacto, para problematizar el registro comunicacional vida/muerte y dar cuenta de la operatividad de la lógica derridiana. el trabajo se enmarca en un proceso de investigación que rastrea los principales supuestos que modelan el sentido social de la muerte, cuyos resultados preliminares ponen en evidencia la necesidad de trascender los binarismos y las dicotomías 1 orcid.org/0000-0002-3956-129x. centro de investigaciones y estudios sobre cultura y sociedad, argentina. c.mazzettilatini@conicet.gov.ar http://dx.doi.org/10.5294/pacla.2019.22.3.6 http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3956-129x http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3956-129x mailto:c.mazzettilatini@conicet.gov.ar 2 la aporía de la muerte: comunicación entre vivos y muertos carolina mazzetti-latini para alojar la contradicción y lo paradójico en torno a la vida y la muerte. la conclusión, y de ahí el aporte de este enfoque que aboga por el devenir espectral, radica en que la polarización vida/muerte aporta elementos sustanciales para retomar la reflexión en torno a la comunicación entendida como dispositivo hermenéutico. es decir, la muerte se constituye en metáfora para pensar la comunicación. palabras clave (fuente: tesauro de la unesco) muerte; comunicación; vivos; muertos; deconstrucción; jacques derrida. 3palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 22 no. 3 julio de 2019. e2236 the aporia of death: communication between the living and the dead abstract the purpose of the article is to approach the social construction of death from some contributions of jacques derrida, who originated deconstruction as a writing and analysis strategy. the main objective is not to exhaustively explore the author’s work —exhaustiveness that would go against his ontological proposal—, but rather to take some analytical categories and make them available to communication between the living and the dead. the theoretical-methodological strategy is based on a qualitative research design from the analysis of stories within an interpretive biographical framework. it starts from interviews that narrate personal experiences of any communication with the dead or reflections on the belief about the possibility of this contact in order to problematize the life/death communication register and account for the operability of the derridian logic. the paper is part of a research process that verifies the main assumptions that shape the social meaning of death, whose preliminary results emphasize the need to transcend binarism and dichotomies to accommodate contradictory and paradoxical aspects of life and death. the conclusion, and hence the contribution of this approach that advocates spectral becoming, is that life/death polarization provides substantial elements to reintroduce the reflection on communication understood as a hermeneutical device; that is, death becomes a metaphor for thinking about communication. keywords (source: unesco thesaurus) death; communication; living people; dead people; deconstruction; jacques derrida. 4 la aporía de la muerte: comunicación entre vivos y muertos carolina mazzetti-latini a aporia da morte: comunicação entre vivos e mortos resumo o propósito deste artigo consiste em fazer uma aproximação da construção social da morte a partir de algumas contribuições de quem instalou a desconstrução como estratégia de escrita e análise: jacques derrida. o objetivo central não consiste em recorrer com exaustão a obra do autor (exaustividade que iria contra sua proposta ontológica), mas em tomar algumas categorias analíticas e colocá-las a serviço da comunicação entre vivos e mortos. a estratégia teórico-metodológica está apoiada em um desenho de pesquisa qualitativa, baseado na análise de relatos a partir de um referencial biográfico interpretativo. parte-se de relatos de entrevistas que narram experiências pessoais de algum tipo de comunicação com pessoas falecidas ou de reflexões sobre a crença na possibilidade desse contato, para problematizar o registro comunicacional vida-morte e demonstrar a operatividade da lógica derridiana. este trabalho está delimitado em um processo de pesquisa sobre os principais pressupostos que marcam o sentido social da morte, cujos resultados preliminares evidenciam a necessidade de transcender os binarismos e as dicotomias para apoiar a contradição e o paradoxo em torno da vida e da morte. a conclusão, e dela a contribuição desta abordagem que defende o devir espectral, está em que a polarização vida-morte contribui elementos substanciais para retomar a reflexão sobre a comunicação entendida como dispositivo hermenêutico. isto é, a morte se constitui em metáfora para pensar a comunicação. palavras-chave (fonte: tesauro da unesco) morte; comunicação; vivos; mortos; desconstrução; jacques derrida. 5palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 22 no. 3 julio de 2019. e2236 cuidémonos de decir que la muerte sería opuesta a la vida. el ser vivo no es más que un género de lo muer to, y un género muy escaso. jacques derrida a morte mata, mas os mortos não morrem. roberto da matta el error está en pensar que las comunicaciones resolverán los problemas de comunicación, que un mejor cableado eliminará los fantasmas. john durham peters introducción el propósito de este artículo consiste en una aproximación a la construcción social de la muerte desde algunos aportes de quien instalara la deconstrucción como estrategia de escritura y análisis, jacques derrida. el objetivo central no consiste en recorrer exhaustivamente la obra del autor (exhaustividad que iría en contra de su propuesta ontológica), sino más bien en tomar algunas categorías analíticas y ponerlas al servicio de la comunicación entre vivos y muertos. a pesar del aparente contrasentido entre el propósito y la estrategia (que aspira a su contrario), el acuerdo no invalida los recorridos posibles que advierte acerca de la imposibilidad de la muerte. esta perspectiva ofrece herramientas relacionales en pares dicotómicos que no solo se explicitan desde la oscilación contradictoria, sino fundamentalmente desde la mutua interdependencia e indecidibilidad en la configuración simbólica. se parte de relatos de entrevistas que narran experiencias personales de algún tipo de comunicación con personas fallecidas o de reflexiones acerca de la creencia en torno a la posibilidad de este contacto, para problematizar el registro comunicacional vida/muerte y dar cuenta de la operatividad de la lógica derridiana. el trabajo se enmarca en un proceso de investigación doctoral (actualmente en ejecución), que rastrea los principales supuestos que modelan el sentido social de la muerte. es decir, se indaga la construcción social de la muerte profundizando diferentes dimensiones, una de las cuales alude a la comunicación entre vivos y muertos; aproximación que se ofrece en este artículo. dado el registro vida/muerte, y a la luz de los datos empíricos, los 6 la aporía de la muerte: comunicación entre vivos y muertos carolina mazzetti-latini aportes de derrida colaboran esencialmente ofreciendo categorías de análisis para abordar la muerte como paradoja. la aporía asedia la propuesta del autor en tanto obsesión por lo indecidible, no como frustración, sino como la indeterminación de aquello infinitamente interpretable. de modo que, como en la aporía reside algo de lo místico, la vida y la muerte en lo fantasmático se entremezclan a partir de un desplazamiento constante. y así se habilita una mirada que aloja la contradicción a partir de la comunicación como articulación que trasciende la dualidad binaria. el pensamiento derridiano es un pensamiento inclasificable, porque sus aportes están en la línea del injerto y lo monstruoso. además, es un autor que no se caracteriza por proporcionar definiciones en el sentido tradicional, sino que brinda una narrativa expansiva no lineal en la que los textos están abiertos infinitamente. de ahí que no es el objetivo de este artículo ahondar en conceptualizaciones que ni siquiera el propio derrida define, sino más bien ofrecer un análisis a partir de un acercamiento a su obra. la riqueza de su enfoque aboga por el devenir espectral que en este caso es posibilitado por la comunicación como dispositivo hermenéutico, el cual desmitifica el pretendido rol objetivo, transparente, neutral y pacífico del lenguaje para asumir su carácter conflictivo. en tanto bisagra ontológica trascendental de todo ciclo vital, la muerte no solo afecta al individuo que muere, sino también al grupo social al que pertenece el propio sujeto. ello evidencia que la muerte no significa un mero hecho individual, sino fundamentalmente un acontecimiento de dimensiones colectivas. y en ese devenir, a pesar del desenlace biológico, la muerte se refiere a un concepto construido socialmente, ya que los relatos que la nombran están embebidos culturalmente y articulados desde experiencias diversas. la complejidad de la muerte ha dado lugar a diversos enfoques epistemológicos que han conformado un amplio y heterogéneo campo de estudio en torno a ella. gayol y kessler (2011) señalan que como en las ciencias sociales las ideas rectoras de los estudios sobre la muerte provienen de los países centrales de occidente, se torna necesario impulsar propuestas descentralizadas de aquellas y situadas en nuestras propias realidades locales para ofrecer nuevas ideas y matices, romper esquemas binarios y evitar generalizaciones indiferentes a la edad, el género, la 7palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 22 no. 3 julio de 2019. e2236 clase y la forma de morir. en consonancia con esta advertencia, la relevancia de esta investigación, en un enfoque cualitativo, contribuye a recuperar las voces de personas mayores, es decir, los relatos de sus propias vivencias en relación con la muerte. a continuación, se ofrece un breve recorrido por algunos antecedentes que ubican al lector y a la temática abordada en un extenso campo de estudio. antecedentes en unas ciencias sociales y humanas crecientemente especializadas, los estudios sobre la muerte y el morir han cobrado mayor impulso en las últimas décadas (gayol y kessler, 2011), de modo que son abordados desde diferentes disciplinas (antropología, sociología, historia, filosofía, psicología, comunicación, semiótica, arte, derecho, teología, etc.), que dan prioridad a lo social, lo cultural, la enfermedad, el cuerpo, el cronotopo, lo patológico, entre otros registros (bondar y giordano, 2017). la diversidad de los modos de entender, teorizar y construir el problema de la muerte crea un gran campo inter-, multi-, pluriy transdisciplinar, cuyos antecedentes cuentan con estudios considerados clásicos de la mano de ariès (2011, 2008), barley (1995), elias (2015), gorer (1965, 1955), morin (1974/2011), thomas (1985, 1991, 1993), vovelle (1983), ziegler (1975), entre otros. las distintas indagaciones se traducen en una multiplicidad de enfoques, metodologías, teorías, territorios, sujetos, modos de morir, épocas y culturas en los que la muerte se configura como objeto de indagación. en retrospectiva, pueden determinarse en el último siglo tres periodos de mayor interés en la producción de conocimiento sobre la muerte: a inicios del siglo xx, en las décadas de los sesenta y setenta, y a partir de la década de los noventa. recorrido que se confecciona esencialmente a través de la bibliografía de los países centrales (gayol y kessler, 2011). la inevitabilidad de la muerte biológica estimuló estudios que aspiraron a su conceptualización y caracterización (da matta, 1936/1997; malinowski, 1948/1985; rodrigues 1983; thomas, 1993), así como fue necesaria la referencia a los muertos, los moribundos y los fantasmas, de ahí los trabajos de aisengart (2004), da silva (1998), elias (2015), segato (2013), tello (2016), entre otros. inclusive el duelo constituye una 8 la aporía de la muerte: comunicación entre vivos y muertos carolina mazzetti-latini temática del campo, cuya expresión asume el carácter emotivo y cognitivo (alizade, 2012; beltrán y torres, 2011; butler, 2010; gómez sancho, 2003; gómez-batiste, 2003; mamo, 1999; neimeyer, 2002; rosaldo, 2000), así como un compromiso colectivo asociado a ritos hacia los muertos y los vivos (garcía, 2012; sheper, 1999; skarveit, 2009; zenobi, 2014). los orígenes de los cuidados paliativos, cuya preocupación gravitó en torno a la humanización de la muerte, también cuenta con numerosos estudios y referentes (alonso, 2013; benítez del rosario y asensio, 2002; bermejo, villacieros, carabias, sánchez & díaz-albo, 2013; costello, 2000; de simone, 2000; faulkner, 1992; giraldo-cabadiv, 2008; gómez sancho, 2003; gómez-batiste, 2003; kübler-ross, 1972/2014; luxardo, alonso y esquivel, 2013; montes de oca, 2006; skulason, hauksdottir, ahcic & helgason, 2014; wainer, 2008). en lo que respecta a los ritos mortuorios, la antropología posee una gran cantidad de trabajos y exponentes que ponen en evidencia la resistencia humana de aceptar la muerte biológica y el deseo de prolongar la partida del muerto a través de variados procesos de transición (bondar, 2012; geertz, 2003; hertz, 1990; hidalgo, 2011; lewis, 2012; noel, 2013; rosaldo, 2000; van gennep, 1908/2008). en cuanto al recuerdo y a las nociones de reencarnación o regeneración que ponderan las creencias en el espíritu y en las almas sobrevivientes y sostetienen que la muerte biológica no finaliza con la vida, es posible hacer referencia a bermúdez (2016), flores (2014), lifton y olson (2004), riaño (2006), tola (2012), uribe (1996), van gennep (1908/2008), entre tantos otros. según kastenbaum y aisenberg (1976), citados por blanco y antequera (1998), el hombre desarrolla antes la idea de la muerte ajena que la propia. sin embargo, las actitudes que ocasiona son heterogéneas y dependen de múltiples factores influyentes, muchos de los cuales todavía están poco estudiados (uribe-rodríguez et al., 2008). esta heterogeneidad se debe a que las diferentes maneras de analizarla no siempre coinciden, mucho menos se complementan a plenitud (hodelín, 2008). de ahí la necesidad de prestar mayor atención al análisis de las variaciones motivadas por los contextos socioculturales, ya que cada sociedad y su marco cultural posee una manera idiosincrática de entender la vejez, la vida y la muerte (blanco y antequera, 1998). a propósito, en tanto perspectiva teórica y 9palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 22 no. 3 julio de 2019. e2236 empírica específica, el estudio de la muerte en la vejez también constituye un área en expansión (lynch y oddone, 2017; méndez, 2007; pochintesta 2011, 2012, 2016; rodríguez, 1998; uribe, valderrama y lópez, 2007; uribe-rodríguez et al., 2008) en este gran campo. campo epistemológico que se interroga sobre el estilo de vida/estilo de muerte (davies, 2012), la calidad de muerte (durán, 2004), el modelo ideal de muerte (de miguel, 1995), su enseñanza y normalización (de la herrán y cortina, 2007; rodríguez, de la herrán y cortina, 2012) o, incluso, sobre eufemismos asociados (mellado, 2013), entre otros. las muertes propias de cada época no solo se deben a su mayor ocurrencia, sino a la forma en que la sociedad piensa y se interroga sobre ellas (gayol y kessler, 2015). en suma, corresponde señalar como advertencia fundamental que las diversas referencias bibliográficas mencionadas son susceptibles de ser reagrupadas según otros criterios de clasificación e inclusive varias de ellas pueden ampararse en más de una categoría temática. aquí solo se ha intentado proporcionar una síntesis, que por breve no es exhaustiva. de ahí que muchos otros estudios y publicaciones sumamente valiosos hayan sido omitidos. metodología la estrategia teórico-metodológica de este estudio se sostiene en un diseño de investigación cualitativa basado en el análisis de relatos desde un marco biográfico interpretativo. al tratarse de una propuesta que trabaja desde los principios que inspiran la teoría fundamentada (grounded theory; glaser y srauss, 1967; strauss y corbin, 2002), el diseño necesariamente es flexible, con lo cual los cambios realizados a lo largo del trabajo de campo se conciben como instancias progresivas del proceso de investigación en la complejidad. a partir de criterios teóricos, se trabajó con una muestra intencional en la que la selección de los casos combina el criterio del investigador y el muestreo bola de nieve, teniendo en cuenta sexo, edad y variables socioeconómicas como nivel de instrucción, situación civil y composición familiar. la investigación profundiza en las experiencias de mujeres y varones de más de 60 años que, en conjunto, recorren la mayor parte de la tercera edad (adultos mayores) y representan diferentes posiciones en el curso de la vida. acerca de los criterios definidos para la selección muestral, se trata de una investigación que se centra en personas mayores autoválidas, 10 la aporía de la muerte: comunicación entre vivos y muertos carolina mazzetti-latini física, psíquica y socialmente, nacidas entre 1923 y 1954, cuyas edades versan entre los 62 y los 95 años, que sostienen estilos de vida activos y autónomos, que viven solas o con sus parejas y que desarrollan actividades de socialización y aprendizaje con pares. es decir, no son personas dependientes o asistidas, moribundas, en situación de vulnerabilidad extrema, hospitalizadas o internadas en centros geriátricos, sin perjuicio de que algunas de ellas hayan atravesado situaciones de enfermedad a lo largo de su vida. hasta el momento, entre 2017 y 2018, han sido entrevistadas 29 personas mayores, de las cuales 16 son mujeres y 13 son varones. pertenecientes a distintas cohortes correspondientes a los siguientes rangos de edad: de 60 a 69 años (9 casos), de 70 a 79 años (11 casos), de 80 a 89 años (8 casos), de 90 a 99 años (1 caso). la mayoría de las veces el contacto con los entrevistados se realiza a través de intermediarios con quienes existe un vínculo de confianza (investigador-intermediario-persona mayor). en otros casos, minoritarios, el primer contacto lo realiza el investigador directamente. todas las personas entrevistadas participan en su condición de alumnos de talleres en centros de jubilados o espacios sociorrecreativos y de aprendizaje para adultos mayores de la ciudad de córdoba, argentina. previa notificación a la institución correspondiente acerca de la investigación en curso y del contacto establecido con los profesores como con las personas mayores, la convocatoria, en tanto invitación voluntaria a participar de las entrevistas, se realiza de dos maneras. por un lado, a través de profesores talleristas o personas mayores que interceden como intermediarios, y por otro, a través del contacto directo entre investigador y entrevistado. en ambos casos, se le informa a la persona (potencial entrevistado) sobre la investigación en curso y se le consulta sobre el posible interés en participar. a quienes manifiestan intención de colaborar se les proporciona mayor información y se acuerda con el investigador un lugar y horario para concretar el encuentro. es decir, la participación es libre, voluntaria, individual y confidencial, por lo cual los participantes brindan su consentimiento informado. en lo que respecta a las implicaciones éticas del trabajo, cabe mencionar que los principios de autonomía, beneficencia, no maleficencia y justicia (berenguer, fernández y pons, 2014; loue, comité central de bioética y molina, 11palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 22 no. 3 julio de 2019. e2236 2015) se han asumido desde los inicios de la investigación para no dañar a ninguno de los involucrados. en relación con la situación de entrevista, antes de iniciar el diálogo en torno a la temática del estudio, se le agradece la participación al entrevistado, se le recuerda el objetivo de la entrevista y se le informa que como constituye una instancia libre y voluntaria no es obligatoria, de ahí que, si en algún momento no desea continuar la conversación, esta puede ser interrumpida cuando la persona lo desee. así, también se le informa que la conversación será registrada y grabada en audio, aunque su identidad será resguardada en todo momento. como medida de protección y cuidado, la identificación de cada una de las personas entrevistadas se realiza a través de las iniciales del nombre y apellido para garantizar el anonimato y el respeto por la intimidad. en cuanto a las desgrabaciones (transcripción de audio a texto), se evita la individualización prescindiendo de todo tipo de dato que permita la identificación personal. en consecuencia, no se detalla información sobre denominaciones, lugar exacto de residencia, nombre del profesor que dicta el taller o la actividad en la que participa, datos de terceras personas referenciadas, entre otros aspectos. al concluir la entrevista, se le agradece nuevamente por la participación, se deja abierta la posibilidad de un nuevo encuentro y se le informa que al finalizar la investigación será notificado sobre la disponibilidad de los resultados. asimismo que estarán disponibles para los intermediarios (profesores, institución, personas mayores) que posibilitaron el vínculo entre entrevistado e investigador. en general, las entrevistas se desarrollan en uno o dos encuentros, a lo largo de una hora y media o dos horas como mínimo y cuatro horas y treinta minutos como máximo en cada instancia, de modo que en promedio cada encuentro se sostiene a lo largo de tres horas aproximadamente. la duración de las entrevistas varía debido a la disponibilidad del entrevistado, al ritmo de la conversación, al clima de intimidad logrado, a la capacidad de diálogo mutuo, a la verborragia o capacidad de síntesis del entrevistado y al contexto en el que se desarrolla la entrevista. la decisión por parte del investigador de proponer un segundo encuentro está directamente relacionada con estos factores, así como con la necesidad de profundizar en aspectos 12 la aporía de la muerte: comunicación entre vivos y muertos carolina mazzetti-latini mencionados durante la conversación mantenida y que se vislumbran relevantes. los fragmentos de las entrevistas que aquí se presentan corresponden a una unidad más amplia, no obstante se exponen en su parcialidad. lo indecidible de la vida y de la muerte el artificio discursivo en torno a la pureza de las cosas se invalida cuando se evidencia la recurrente contaminación en los registros de lo empírico. la pureza de las ideas sufre contagios constitutivos que denuncian todo mestizaje como única condición de posibilidad. sin embargo, el pensamiento metafísico occidental se estructura en términos binarios y dicotómicos (alma-cuerpo, femenino-masculino, objetivo-subjetivo, natural-artificial, etc.), lógica desde la cual se clausura la interpretación del mundo según derrida; todo ejercicio de descentramiento implosiona el lenguaje mismo y promueve perspectivas de análisis alternativas por fuera de los binarismos. dado que las entrevistas se enmarcan en recorridos biográficos, las preguntas intentan recuperar diversos aspectos del ciclo vital en torno a hechos o situaciones en los que la muerte cobra protagonismo. sin embargo, aquí solo se brindan fragmentos2 que recuperan la comunicación entre vivos y muertos como eje central a partir de anclajes en torno a vida/muerte, fantología, iterabilidad, differancia, lo indecidible. a continuación, la protagonista relata la aparición de dos cuerpos blancos durante la madrugada luego de la reciente cremación del cuerpo de su exmarido.3 el acontecimiento sucede mientras ella dormía en su habitación: y después de la cremación, cuando me entregan la urna, yo me la traigo […] y a la madrugada se me aparecen los dos cuerpos. el ángel que lo tendría a él. […] amoroso. divino. yo nunca tuve miedo. yo siempre lo cuento porque es una cosa maravillosa. miro a los pies de la cama y estaban esos dos cuerpos blancos […] me pasó que se me presentó ese ángel, que era él el que lo custodia. porque para mí siempre tenés un ángel de la guarda. […] al otro día teníamos turno a las diez de la mañana para llevarlo a enterrar. entrevistador. ¿usted se despertó de golpe? 2 en algunos casos, la extensión tiene como objetivo privilegiar el entendimiento contextual de la situación. 3 cabe mencionar que la alusión a “exmarido” no refiere a un “nuevo vínculo” a partir del acontecimiento de la muerte, sino a la condición civil de la entrevistada. 13palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 22 no. 3 julio de 2019. e2236 respuesta. claro, esa imagen me despertó. yo miré a los pies de la cama y me pasó eso. capaz han sido décimas de segundo de abrir los ojos y ver. pero yo nunca tuve miedo ni nada. yo lo único que hice fue ver que era él con un ángel un poco más grande. y después yo recé y listo. siempre lo cuento, sí, siempre lo cuento. entrevistador. ¿cómo interpretó eso? respuesta. era mi marido en ángel como que se venía a despedir o algo así… entrevistador. ¿cómo estaba? respuesta. yo me acuerdo que estaba el cuerpo acá y el otro cuerpo acá, pero eran dos imágenes blancas a los pies de la cama. entrevistador. ¿al frente suyo? respuesta. sí, acá ¿ves? mirá, esta es mi mamá, este es mi papá, mi marido [señala un pequeño altar con fotos de sus seres queridos]. yo estaba ahí y a los cuerpos los veía acá [indica en la habitación cómo era la disposición de la aparición]. (mi, mujer de 63 años) estos cuerpos se le aparecen en la punta de su cama y la despiertan por la sola presencia. ella los nombra ángeles. su exmarido —ya muerto— se le presenta en forma de ángel, junto con el ángel guardián que lo sostiene. presencia que ella interpreta como despedida. la noción de fantología u ontología asediada por fantasmas desarrollada por derrida (2012) permite dar cuenta de aquellos espectros que nos dan a pensar, ya que el fantasma —en este caso en forma de ángel— es un muerto que no ha muerto en tanto se le presenta. el fantasma asedia, transitando entre umbrales, entre la vida y la muerte. particularmente en esta manifestación, la presencia de quien muere es testimoniada por quien visualiza esas presencias a partir de una ausencia que no es entendida como definitiva. en otras situaciones, el fantasma que asedia se hace notar a partir de sombras, ruidos o plantas: porque mirá qué cosas raras me pasan. el limonero aquel, que está allá [señalando], cuando germán [pareja fallecida] pone el limonero en 2015 él se acerca al limonero y le dice: si vos el año que viene no largas limones yo te arranco. y mirá los limones que tiene el limonero. ves. mi mamá [fallecida] tenía un rosal acá, reviejo, y vos sabés que se llenó de rosas el año pasado en 2016. fue una cosa impresionante. 14 la aporía de la muerte: comunicación entre vivos y muertos carolina mazzetti-latini entonces yo digo: germán estás acá […] pero a mí las plantas me cuidaron y mi mamá estaba acá. y florecieron todas las orquídeas. todas florecieron. y yo hablaba con germán. una noche me acuesto. yo no tengo miedo a los muertos eh… mi cuñada me había regalado un cubrecama con plumas, germán no quería que lo usara porque había sido de la madre y quería que lo sacara, entonces lo saqué. mirá un ruiderío en ese dormitorio donde estaba [el cubrecamas] en la valija. cerré la puerta, se abrió la puerta, todo. increíble. yo no creo en las brujas, pero yo leo el i ching, entonces digo tampoco voy a consultar el i ching, porque yo tengo que quedarme libre, porque yo tengo acá a mi mamá, a germán… están todos conmigo. vos sabés que esa noche escucho en el cubrecama [reproduce sonido de roce] y yo que no me podía despertar. y me quería dar vuelta y no podía. y a la vez no podía tampoco hablar. entonces vos sabés que recién cuando me puedo mover digo: germán, sos vos, ¿no? y me doy vuelta y vos sabés que yo vi una sombra. bueno, para mí el espíritu de él estaba acá, porque hacía muy poquito que se había ido él. dicen que están seis meses, bueno él estuvo los seis meses. […] y yo me voy y le digo: me vas a cuidar la casa, ¿no? y germán me cuida la casa. yo vuelvo, está todo perfecto, ningún problema. yo no siento miedo. porque podría sentir miedo porque estoy muy sola acá. me siento perfecto. por supuesto, yo rezo mucho, hablo mucho con dios. […] para mí la muerte es eso, es una continuación. no sé si es verdad o mentira. nadie volvió para decir yo estoy o no estoy. pero a mí me hace bien creer. si es verdad, mentira o no, bueno, a mí me hace bien. no lo estoy comentando. (mel, mujer de 71 años) la aclaración “yo no tengo miedo a los muertos” confirma la percepción de la presencia recurrente de ausencias, en la que un muerto que nunca está del todo muerto está presente o puede hacerse presente. la permanencia y la partida coexisten: “para mí el espíritu de él estaba acá porque hacía muy poquito que se había ido él”. en este caso, los muertos no solo la acompañan, sino que conviven con ella y se manifiestan a través del “limonero”, “el rosal”, “las orquídeas”. esquivando toda impugnación de memoria y herencia, la entrevistada otorga hospitalidad a los espectros: “yo tengo acá a mi mamá, a germán… están todos conmigo”. este testimonio, a su vez, evidencia la regla general mencionada por durkheim (1992) acerca de que el muerto conserva la personalidad del vivo, que tiene el mismo carácter, los mismos odios y los mismos afectos, hecho que se confirma por el ruiderío en el dormitorio, la puerta que se abre, el roce en el cubrecamas, la sombra de germán. manifestaciones que se suceden a causa del desagrado que le 15palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 22 no. 3 julio de 2019. e2236 provoca al muerto el cubrecamas de su madre. asimismo, el contacto con quien ha muerto se liga a la misión de la compañía y las experiencias frente a las cuales no existe el temor porque el muerto cumple funciones de protección y cuidado, lo cual reafirma el contacto entre vivos y muertos: entrevistador. ¿cree que es posible algún tipo de contacto con estas almas que ya han partido? respuesta. sí, sí. yo creo que hay contacto. yo creo en eso. entrevistador. uno estando en este plano y las almas donde estén, ¿cree que es posible ese contacto, comunicación? respuesta. yo digo que sí, que puede haber. mire, a nosotros nos pasó que —volviendo a mi madre— ella tenía siempre la ambición de juntarnos a todos los hermanos y nunca nos pudo juntar. cuando hacía algo siempre faltaba alguno. el día que fallece ella, fallece un sábado a la noche, se pasa el domingo, y el lunes a la mañana se la entierra. y el lunes a la noche estábamos todos reunidos y había un reloj y justo se paró a la hora que estábamos reunidos. y se paró a la hora que murió ella. a las 8:25 murió ella, como evita,4 que murió a las 8:25, y se nos paró el reloj estando todos nosotros ahí a esa hora. todos nos dimos cuenta de que puede haber sido el alma de mi madre que avisó que ella estaba también ahí. […] es una señal… pero “no le diste cuerda”. “sí le di cuerda”, decía mi hermana, “sí, sí, yo le di cuerda”. porque siempre le daba cuerda. yo creía realmente que mi madre debe haber estado porque era tanta la ambición de ella de juntarnos a todos. y en ese momento estábamos todos los hermanos reunidos. habíamos cenado juntos. y a las 8:25 del 8 de agosto del ’66 se paró el reloj a donde nosotros estábamos. (as, varón de 86 años) el entrevistado atestigua que su madre fallecida se hizo presente en la cena familiar avisando que “ella estaba también ahí”. esa presencia se corrobora a partir de una señal, la hora indicada por el reloj, al detenerse, en la habitación en la que cenaban los hermanos reunidos. “a las 8:25 murió ella, como evita que murió a las 8:25”. cabe mencionar que esa hora constituye un hito en la historia argentina, ya que el 26 de julio de 1952 a las 20:25 eva perón muere. fecha y hora popularmente conocida como el paso a la 4 maría eva duarte de perón, popularmente conocida como eva perón o evita, fue una dirigente política y actriz argentina. http://www.jdperon.gov.ar/2014/07/26-de-julio-de-1952-evita-entraba-en-la-inmortalidad-2/ http://www.jdperon.gov.ar/2014/07/26-de-julio-de-1952-evita-entraba-en-la-inmortalidad-2/ 16 la aporía de la muerte: comunicación entre vivos y muertos carolina mazzetti-latini inmortalidad de eva perón,5 lo cual es recuperado como argumento político y literario que cobra tal trascendencia que todavía es una fecha recordada y conmemorada por muchas generaciones. la asociación del entrevistado lo pone en evidencia. en este sentido, la coincidencia en el horario de fallecimiento de su madre con la de evita habilita cierto juego analógico acerca de la inmortalidad de las almas de ambas figuras femeninas, su madre y evita, que se hacen presentes entre sus hijos/pueblo argentino. siendo “las 8:25 del 8 de agosto del ’66 se paró el reloj a donde nosotros estábamos” pasando a la inmortalidad de su historia familiar el recuerdo de su madre. en este relato, se cruzan dos presencias fantasmáticas en las que la vivencia personal e íntima recupera aquel acontecimiento de dimensiones colectivas. la comunicación entre vivos y muertos puede ser entendida como reconocimiento de presencias que asumen desde la consciencia una modalidad dialogada: respuesta. yo he tenido varios, cómo te puedo decir, algunos… dos o tres familiares que se han muerto y me han visitado. pregunta. cuénteme. respuesta. la señora de mi hermano […] era muy celosa de la relación que yo tenía con mi hermano. entonces por ahí inventaba cosas o decía… me hacía quedar mal con mi hermano y con los chicos. yo nunca le llevé el apunte o nunca lo tuve mucho en cuenta, pero yo sufría la pérdida de mi hermano como lo he vuelto a tener ahora. y resulta que una noche […] yo estaba acostada en la cama. ha sido antes que muriera mi marido. él murió un año después de ella. y esto sucedió a los pocos días de haber muerto ella. yo estaba durmiendo y sentí que alguien me tocaba y vi una nube blanca, una cosa blanca y, sin preguntar, sin voz, sino mentalmente pregunté si era ella y qué quería. si quería que le hiciera rezar una misa. entonces es como que ella se alejó un poco y como volvió. yo me levanté, porque, igual que acá, estaba mi dormitorio y había otro donde estaba la computadora. yo me levanté, me fui a la computadora y me puse así [reproduce la postura apoyando los codos en el escritorio cubriéndose la cara]. yo la sentía atrás mío. “haceme saber qué querés, qué necesitás”, le dije yo. 5 referenciado en los medios de comunicación de la época y en numerosos textos históricos y literarios. por ejemplo: a las 20:25 la señora entró en la inmortalidad es el título de la obra literaria de mario szichman (hanover, ee. uu.: ediciones del norte, 1981) en alusión a ese registro histórico. http://www.jdperon.gov.ar/2014/07/26-de-julio-de-1952-evita-entraba-en-la-inmortalidad-2/ 17palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 22 no. 3 julio de 2019. e2236 entrevistador. ¿lo verbalizó o lo pensó? respuesta. todo pensado. nunca lo verbalicé y la respuesta nunca fue verbal sino que fue psicológicamente. y era que me pedía disculpas. entonces yo le dije que no tenía que perdonarle nada, que no era nadie, que yo lo único que quería para ella era lo mejor, que ella estuviera a la luz de dios, que estuviera en un mejor lugar… todo mentalmente, eh. y yo solo le conté a una cuñada que más o menos le podía contar estas cosas. (ga, mujer de 81 años) la entrevistada afirma en su relato haber tenido varias visitas de familiares muertos: “dos o tres familiares que se han muerto y me han visitado”. uno de esos muertos es su cuñada que, a los pocos días de haber fallecido, se hace presente mientras la entrevistada dormía. al despertar visualiza “una nube blanca, una cosa blanca” y a partir de ahí la comunicación entablada entre ambas sucedió “sin voz […] mentalmente pregunté si era ella y qué quería”, es decir, el intercambio ocurre en un plano mental sin expresión fónica. incluso reitera en su testimonio cómo fue la modalidad del intercambio: entrevistador. ¿lo verbalizó en voz alta o lo pensó? respuesta. todo pensado. nunca lo verbalicé y la respuesta nunca fue verbal sino que fue psicológicamente. en ese diálogo mental, la entrevistada le ofrece una misa mientras esa presencia reacciona alejándose, para luego volver. de modo que insiste en su pregunta para dilucidar el pedido de su cuñada: “haceme saber qué querés, qué necesitás”, le dije yo […] y era que me pedía disculpas. es decir, su cuñada muerta la asedia pidiéndole perdón, a lo cual la entrevistada le responde: “yo le dije que no tenía que perdonarle nada, que no era nadie, que yo lo único que quería para ella era lo mejor, que ella estuviera a la luz de dios”. luego, el testimonio de la comunicación mantenida solo es relatado a otra cuñada a quien “más o menos le podía contar estas cosas”. de igual modo, la comunicación con un muerto puede asumir una enunciación unidireccional al nombrar al fallecido o una modalidad dialogada desde la interpretación de presencias, aunque verbalizada fonéticamente: 18 la aporía de la muerte: comunicación entre vivos y muertos carolina mazzetti-latini respuesta. mire, algo hay. algo que no lo puedo precisar bien porque me ha tocado vivir de cerca para tener fe y esperanza; por ejemplo, la visita de uno de los muertos, vino a conversar conmigo. un muerto familiar. estuvo conversando conmigo un rato largo de la vida como era allá… entrevistador. ¿esto dónde fue? ¿en la clínica o en otro lado? respuesta. estando en la montaña en la cordillera de los andes. eso lo tuve y lo recuerdo como siempre muy bien. […] entrevistador. ¿recuerda que habló con esa persona? ¿quién era esa persona? respuesta. no lo pude precisar. si era un familiar o un amigo. él me contaba […] un resumen de todo lo que había hecho en su vida y lo que le esperaba ahí. […] yo estimé que era una continuación de lo que uno ha hecho acá lo sigue haciendo en el otro lado. (ar, varón de 95 años) el diálogo se sostiene entre una persona viva —el protagonista que lo narra— y una persona muerta en un encuentro que le tocó vivir de cerca, es decir, lo experimentó él mismo, nadie se lo contó. aquí paradójicamente la muerte engendra pruebas de vida “para tener fe y esperanza”. la conversación recupera la muerte como intercambio verbal acerca de “lo que le esperaba ahí”, lo cual el protagonista entiende como una continuación, lo que “uno ha hecho acá lo sigue haciendo en el otro lado”. continuación que se da en otro espacio, en “otro lado”. así también años más tarde, el protagonista del diálogo argumenta el paso a la condición de muerto mientras era operado en un hospital: respuesta. fui una persona que estuvo muertita allá arriba [risas]… allá estaba, no sé si alguna vez habrá visitado o tendrá idea de lo que es aquello… entrevistador. no. respuesta. [esposa de e]: nadie tiene idea [risas]. respuesta. hay un pasillo largo donde estaba yo sentadito ahí y pasaban algunos y por ahí viene uno y me dice: ¿qué está haciendo usted acá? no sé, me han mandado a mí acá… ¿cómo? no. usted tiene un montón de cosas que hacer allá. vamos, raje […]. 19palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 22 no. 3 julio de 2019. e2236 entrevistador. la situación que usted contó antes, ¿estaba como dormido? respuesta. y sí… respuesta. [esposa de e]: se fue, lo volvieron. la chica lo volvió. respuesta. yo no estaba ahí. ya me había ido. y de allá me echaron. cuando estaba en un pasillo largo, me dijeron: ¿qué está haciendo usted acá? no sé, me han mandado a mí acá. no, no, usted tiene un montón de cosas que hacer todavía. y es cierto porque hasta ahora tenemos cosas que hacer. y entonces cuando me quiero acordar estoy en la sala […] la mujer venía a cada rato al pecho, a hacerme así en el pecho [hace el gesto de reanimación], y le dice: siento yo porque antes no había escuchado nada porque estaba en el otro lado. y cuando yo ya regreso, los muchachos le decían: dejá ese pobre viejo que ya está muerto, no lo jodás más. entrevistador. ¿usted escuchó eso? respuesta. sí, lo escuché, lo escuché. yo moví una pierna o el brazo y los muchachos dijeron: che, parece que está vivo. y saben qué dijo ella: ¿qué se creen ustedes? están tratando con una profesional. todo eso yo lo retengo. […] y ahí nomás salió uno de los médicos para avisar que había reaccionado, que estaba de vuelta. así que los médicos vinieron al trote y me encontraron lo más bien. yo ya me movía, había reaccionado. estaba perfectamente bien. entonces los médicos hacen todos los trámites para pasarme a la sala… así que fui a parar a la sala del mortuorio ese. y bueno, allá era motivo, imagínese que las preguntas que venían eran muchas, ¿no? de ambos lados. así que acá estoy para contarla. […] entrevistador. ¿qué le preguntaban? respuesta. y qué había pasado, como había sido. yo lo único que puedo contar es de acá hasta allá. de ahí yo, un viaje que hice y que como no me quisieron me mandaron de vuelta. […] entrevistador. y cuando pasó para el otro lado, ¿ese escenario, esa imagen, en donde usted estuvo se parecía al hospital o era otro lugar? respuesta. no, no. era otra cosa. aquel espacio es como mirar acá y hacer una planificación en el techo, arriba, y usted se encuentra de pronto en un cacerón grande. paredones para acá y para allá; pasillos para acá y pasillos para allá. y se encuentra en un pasillo. es lo que 20 la aporía de la muerte: comunicación entre vivos y muertos carolina mazzetti-latini a mí me tocó, no sé si será para todos o fue para mí solo. estar ahí, más o menos, se lo voy a graficar [dibuja imaginariamente sobre la mesa]. acá estaba el pasillo este y había otros pasillos para allá, y acá estaba yo en la esquina. entrevistador. ¿justo en la esquina? respuesta. en la esquina. y de ahí era que bajaba… bajaba como un pajarito, volando, y shinnn… cuando me quería acordar ya estaba en el hospital militar. así fue. entrevistador. ¿y quién le habló en esa instancia? ¿era alguna persona conocida? respuesta. no, no. era la persona que me atendía allá… “no, usted tiene mucho que hacer todavía allá”. esas palabras no me las olvido más. y es cierto que he hecho muchas cosas desde que volví. mire, casarme por segunda vez [risas], viajar… con ella hemos viajado por tres años. (ar, varón de 95 años) en términos de derrida (1996), el testimonio, subsumido en la frase “acá estoy para contarla”, invalida la prueba, ya que en cuanto hay sobreviviente no hay prueba porque el estar vivo la anularía; cuando el testimonio aparece confirmado, corre el riesgo de perder su valor o su sentido, su estatuto de testimonio. el protagonista en su condición de vivo/muerto participa de la muerte sin pertenecer a ella; “no estaba ahí. ya me había ido. y de allá me echaron”. es decir, no estaba ni acá ni allá; estando acá y allá al mismo tiempo. todo sucede en un presente que está más allá del presente vivo porque es un tiempo que “ya no” porque ya pasó, pero es un tiempo que “todavía no”, porque está por suceder. una temporalidad desarreglada (out of joint). un presente que nunca es contemporáneo de sí mismo, sino que está habitado por fuerzas de retención y por fuerzas prospectivas. según derrida (1998), la actualidad no se trataría más que de una artefactualidad, entendiendo por ello que “no está dada sino activamente producida, cribada, investida, performativamente interpretada por numerosos dispositivos ficticios o artificiales, jerarquizadores y selectivos, siempre al servicio de fuerzas e intereses que los sujetos […] nunca perciben lo suficiente” (p. 15). se sucede un juego de lo diferido, aquello que no se hace presente, que genera un corrimiento de la presencia y de toda centralidad. asimismo, se trata de una muerte interrumpida: “cuando yo ya regreso los muchachos le decían: 21palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 22 no. 3 julio de 2019. e2236 dejá ese pobre viejo que ya está muerto, no lo jodás más”. esta aporía muestra lo insostenible de nuestras percepciones cotidianas sobre la muerte en las que la idea de frontera es clave: “no se habla la misma muerte allí donde no se habla la misma lengua […] cuando se pasa así la frontera de una cultura, se pasa de una figura de la muerte como tránsito a otra figura de la frontera entre la vida y la muerte (derrida, 1998, pp. 48-49). por otra parte, en lo que respecta a la idea de la reencarnación, esta se liga a la iterabilidad de la vida a partir de una repetición en tanto alteridad. en los relatos que mencionan la reencarnación o la existencia de vidas pasadas, se evidencia la unión de la lógica de la repetición y de la alteridad; repetición de un fragmento de vida pero alteridad en tanto es un otro. así lo expresa una de las personas entrevistadas: respuesta. cuando venía al illia,6 me pongo a conversar con el taxi y me dice: qué lindas las actividades… si le digo “de esta vida no hay otra”, viste, a veces te sale para desahogarte. […] hacía poco que se había muerto ramón y yo iba con esa pena [en tono de lamento] […] ¿usted no cree en la reencarnación?, me dijo el taxista. no sé si creer o no creer, le digo yo. usted va a encontrar a otra persona. sí, pero no va a ser la misma cara, le dije. no, pero va a tener los mismos sentimientos, me respondió. mire, yo no sé si creer o no creer. porque no me quiero meter con esos que te lavan la cabeza y te hacen creer algo nuevo. […] eso me hizo entender el del taxi: no, no va a ser la misma cara, ni la misma persona, ni el mismo nombre, pero los sentimientos van a ser iguales, me dijo. y al año justo lo encuentro a este hombre [refiriéndose a su actual pareja] con las mismas intenciones, con la misma forma de seducirte. (eg, mujer de 64 años) sin embargo, si bien para algunas de las personas entrevistadas la idea de la reencarnación se presenta como un tema que no es fácil y que es complejo de entender, la sentencia del significado de la muerte en tanto final se pone en duda. sobre todo cuando ciertas técnicas permiten la posibilidad de acceder a vidas pasadas: respuesta. también está la reencarnación que es un tema que yo lo tengo agarradito con alfileres. que me cuesta entenderlo, quizá sea por mi formación católica. es lo que recibí yo, no solamente del colegio, 6 refiere al nombre de la institución para adultos mayores en la cual realiza actividades recreativas y de aprendizaje. 22 la aporía de la muerte: comunicación entre vivos y muertos carolina mazzetti-latini sino de mi padre. no son temas fáciles. pero hay que estar mejor con esas cosas porque esas son las cosas que el día en que llegue tu momento, sea un buen momento. […] los estudios dicen que, de desprogramación biológica por ejemplo, puede ser útil el pasaje, conducir a una persona para ver las vidas que ha tenido anteriormente. mi amigo, este que te digo yo, sí sabe cómo hacer la tarea. tengo una compañera que también lo hace. […] es más una técnica que te ayuda a transitar por otras vidas. a mí no me lo hicieron nunca y hasta ahora no me he animado a que me lo hagan. o sea que mucha confianza no le tengo. […] yo sabía tener una conocida farmacéutica que hacía numerología marcando lo que vos has sido en otra vida y un día me agarró. […] a mí me sale que en otra vida vos fuiste de averías, que fuiste un caso serio. nada que ver con lo que sos hoy. es muy probable que vos hayas venido a esta vida para saldar cuentas pendientes [risas]. y yo le pregunté: por qué acá dice, de acuerdo con la numerología, que vos fuiste de la pesada. por ejemplo, un carlo corleone. así que le digo yo: ¿y eso he sido yo en mi otra vida según vos? sí. vos viniste a esta vida… y mirá dónde naciste, en un lugar modelo. porque ella me preguntaba: y no solo eso, sino que también estudiaste medicina para hacer el bien. y fuiste a colegio de cura, religioso. o sea que viniste a levantar el aplazo que habías tenido en tu vida anterior. yo me cagaba de risa, por supuesto. y eso me quedó dando vueltas […] y yo veo las películas de chorros, de estafadores, y yo los veo cuando están por robar algo, y no sabes lo nervioso que me pongo cuando está por venir la policía. en vez de alegrarme les digo: muchachos, tengan cuidado que viene la policía […] espero no tener que volver más porque así sería que en esta vida cumplí con las cosas. no creo que termines de cumplir nunca porque siempre algo queda. y dicen que el castigo es volver. te vuelvo a repetir, no me he animado a hacer una sesión de otras vidas y tengo dos o tres conocidos confiables que están metidos en eso. pero hasta acá yo todavía no. (vhg, varón de 69 años) las técnicas de “desprogramación biológica” y “la numerología” se mencionan como prácticas que ofrecen información sobre vidas pasadas. en el caso de la primera, se alude a la noción de pasaje, que, interpretado desde el concepto de ritos de pasaje de van gennep (1908/2008), la muerte no constituye un final sino el pasaje a otro estado. sin embargo, el relato no alude a vidas en otro estado sino a otras vidas, es decir, el volver a la vida en otras vidas. y allí la noción de iterabilidad es clave porque explicita con claridad la dinámica de la repetición en tanto alteridad, fundamentado en la mejora continua, expresado en la frase: “levantar aplazos de vidas anteriores”. de este modo, la recurrencia de la vida permitiría “cumplir co23palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 22 no. 3 julio de 2019. e2236 sas”; en efecto, si “siempre algo queda”, la iterabilidad es excluyente con lo cual “el castigo es volver”. sin embargo, la vuelta a la vida puede tener como propósito “purificar el espíritu”: respuesta. me convence esto de decir que uno elige cómo va a reencarnar. esa es la parte que me convence porque veo tanta diferencia entre la vida de una persona y la de otra sin motivo aparente, que me hace pensar que uno tiene que pasar determinadas cuestiones para ir… me gusta el concepto de que tenés que ir, realmente, purificando tu espíritu. y por eso son todas las veces que tenés que volver. yo leí mucho juan salvador gaviota que es esa la explicación, transformarte en la gran gaviota. (ms, mujer de 67 años) la iterabilidad al servicio de la transformación mediante la continuidad/discontinuidad de un proceso de eliminación de impurezas para “transformarte en la gran gaviota”, según argumenta una de las mujeres entrevistadas. en este sentido, si la iterabilidad implica la alteridad, ya que “uno elige cómo va a reencarnar”, entonces se trata de una mismidad que elige una otredad diferida, es decir, una alteridad. una mismidad que decide volverse otredad; una otredad definida desde una mismidad anterior. al decir de derrida, cada cultura se caracteriza por su manera de aprehender, de tratar y de vivir el tránsito. “cada cultura tiene sus propios ritos fúnebres, sus representaciones del moribundo, su prácticas del duelo o de la sepultura, su propia evaluación del precio de la existencia, de la vida colectiva o de la vida individual” (1998, p. 49). en este sentido, la cremación acarrea un abanico de argumentaciones según las creencias y percepciones. algunas personas aluden a un cuerpo muerto que siente: “cremarme no, no quiero que me duela” (mi, mujer de 63 años), en que los límites vida/muerte no se presentan fijos, dado que el tratamiento del cuerpo no solo responde a patrones de respeto de un cadáver, sino al confort de un cuerpo, “poniendo a una persona cómoda en el cajón”: entrevistador. ¿y a tu marido lo velaron, lo cremaron? respuesta. claro, él oscar [marido] era de la idea, porque siempre íbamos al cementerio a ver a su papá y su mamá, a todos… entonces a mí no me nació esa idea porque yo veía que él visitaba a su familia. entonces es como que a él también le gustaría que lo que vos hacés es porque te gustaría que te lo hagan. y no nos dio tiempo 24 la aporía de la muerte: comunicación entre vivos y muertos carolina mazzetti-latini a preguntar porque se acostó y al otro día [murió]… no, no, jamás. aparte, como dicen las chicas que han visto otros papás de amigas de ellas que los tenían arregladitos en el cajón para cremarlo… y ¿para qué? es algo como que se contradice ¿me entendés, caro? para que lo arreglás tanto si después lo vas a cremar… porque era milico entonces el sable, la gorra. […] mi marido nunca fue de la idea de cremarse y yo… me parece como una mortificación de la persona. más allá que se sabe que uno… es como decir ponerla cómoda en el cajón a una persona, pero si ya no siente, pero vos te quedas bien. me parece que debe sufrir… entrevistador. ¿que sufre cuando se lo crema? respuesta. sí… o no sé si es uno el que sufre. no sé cómo entenderlo. yo sé que es un negocio porque también lo entiendo. yo pago carusso [empresa funeraria]. pago por mi mamá, mis dos hijas y por mí. (eg, mujer de 64 años) para algunas personas, la cremación es atestiguar desde lo indecidible de un cuerpo muerto que siente al expresarse en la paradoja que se vive como contradicción del sinsentido de “arreglar” un cuerpo muerto que luego será cremado; “para qué lo arreglás tanto si después lo vas a cremar”. devenir un muerto en cenizas figura “la mortificación de la persona”, es decir, dañar al muerto lastimando su cuerpo. sin embargo, si no es posible desaparecer al desaparecido, ¿cabe la posibilidad de mortificar a un muerto? asimismo, el argumento en torno a la cremación no invalida la posesión de cenizas: con decirte que todavía tengo cenizas de ramón en mi casa. […] a mí lo que me hizo sentir en ese momento fue que compartían mi dolor cuando me dieron [un poco de cenizas] porque ellos lo cremaron. y había tenido mujer y había tenido otra… entonces le dije: no sé si es mucho pedir, ya que no pude ser parte de su vida… has sido parte porque él estaba contento con vos, me dijo [la nuera del fallecido]. porque esa noche nos sacaron una foto, yo todavía la tengo. no sé si ellos lo hacían por acompañarme, que yo iba a mi casa y después me iba a tomar un rato mate con ellos. que me querían mostrar un video, pero yo les dije que no quería porque ya era morboso verlo. en ese momento, tenía esa pena, esa pena. (eg, mujer de 64 años) el reclamo de cenizas se argumenta en la frase “ya que no pude ser parte de su vida”, a partir de la cual la posesión de cenizas la hace partícipe 25palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 22 no. 3 julio de 2019. e2236 de su muerte perpetuando su presencia en la conservación de una ausencia: “todavía tengo cenizas de ramón en mi casa”. a pesar de la concepción acerca de la cremación como mortificación de una persona, su producto —las cenizas— no son interpretadas por la entrevistada como la posesión de restos de un muerto mortificado. pese a que la mortificación no tendría efecto residual, las cenizas en tanto residuos de la mortificación constituyen las huellas del martirio. las cenizas llevan en sí mismas la representación de la muerte: la ceniza no es, no es lo que es. ella resta de aquello que no es, para no re cordar en su quebradizo fondo más que no-ser o impresencia. el ser sin presencia no ha sido ni tampoco será ahí donde hay la ceniza y donde hablaría esa otra memo ria. ahí, donde ceniza quiere decir la di ferencia entre lo que resta y lo que es. (derrida, 2009, p. 25) lo incinerado ya no es nada salvo ceniza, es un resto cuyo deber es no quedar. la difunta ceniza es la casa del ser, aunque esta no recoge nunca su diseminación. en virtud del enunciado “me querían mostrar un video pero yo le dije que no quería porque ya era morboso verlo”, es posible recuperar la capacidad que tienen las tecnologías de acaparar ese más allá del presente vivo. que ya porta la muerte en sí desde el momento mismo del registro; así la supervivencia se divide entre ese presente que nunca es del todo presente y una alteridad espectral que es la supervivencia, en que la lógica espectral desplaza la ontología. la tecnología permite la convivencia de imágenes y voces de vivos y muertos, cierto contacto de naturaleza fantasmal en tanto restitución como presente vivo de lo que está muerto (derrida y stiegler, 1998), que hace de la experiencia de la ausencia una presencia, es decir, una supervivencia testamentaria, que, mediante una economía de contaminación y parasitamiento, no invalida la ausencia y la presencia como coexistencias. así como los límites vida/muerte no se presentan fijos, tampoco la temporalidad en que sucede la muerte es definida. la muerte sucede en una temporalidad desarreglada. es intempestiva, ocurre fuera del tiempo: respuesta. no me hagas acordar que eso es terrorífico lo que hizo mi vieja. […] hubo que esperar tres días. primero la velamos. después hubo que esperar tres días que estuvo en el crematorio del 26 la aporía de la muerte: comunicación entre vivos y muertos carolina mazzetti-latini aeropuerto. estuvo guardada, digamos [se ríe]. después tuvimos que ir para cremarla porque tenés que estar presente. y después la tuvimos que llevar a las sierras a tirar las cenizas. fue un horror para mí, realmente fue espantoso. no se lo pediría a mis hijas. […] yo tenía una prima que es muy de la… no sé, ella dice que ve cosas, siente cosas, medio como espiritista […] ella le dijo que con el cremado inmediato sufre el alma porque todavía no se ha ido del cuerpo. que para cremar había que esperar tres días para que el espíritu pueda salir. entonces se le puso [a su madre] que había que esperar tres días [risas] pero después nadie quiso… porque mis hermanas insistían en que fuera de esa manera y que quería tirarla por capilla del monte en una montaña que es un viacrucis, en una de las estaciones [risas]. pero nadie se quería hacer cargo de la caja. cuando me dieron la caja que estaba caliente […] yo la tuve que llevar todo el camino desde acá [risas] hasta capilla del monte en mi falda porque nadie se quería hacer cargo. […] encima cuando llegamos arriba dije: yo no la tiro. yo no decidí esto, así que háganse cargo. y mi hermana abrió la caja y las cenizas con el viento [risas] nos bañó a todos… y la negra [hermana] decía: ¡me estoy comiendo a la mami! […] estábamos todos. todos, todos. hoy es para risa pero en ese momento fue duro. (ms, mujer de 67 años) en este testimonio, se evidencia la ruptura del tiempo en el que sucede la muerte. retomando la idea de la cremación mencionada ut supra, aquí se alude al “sufrimiento del alma”; en tanto el alma se separa del cuerpo al tercer día en que sucede la muerte, la cremación no podría efectuarse inmediatamente. por ello, “había que esperar tres días para que el espíritu pueda salir”. es decir, el espíritu se aloja en el cuerpo muerto, lo habita, y revoca la noción de muerte. en tanto se trata de un muerto con espíritu, habría una supervivencia, un muerto no tocado por la muerte. el espíritu habita la muerte, argumento que demora su transformación en cenizas. de esta manera, hay huellas de huellas; huellas de vida en las huellas de la muerte; lo ausente resulta presentado, regresa justo en esa huella. para la mujer entrevistada (quien respetó el deseo de su madre aunque le pareció “terrorífico”), el acontecimiento suspende la razón: “yo no decidí esto”, volviendo inapropiable las herramientas para entender la muerte de su madre: “se le puso que había que esperar tres días”. la muerte es aquello sobre lo cual no se puede testimoniar por otro, porque no se puede testimoniar sobre ella para sí, se trata de la sobrevivencia del sobrevivir, como lugar de testimonio y como testamento que encuentra a la vez su posibilidad e imposi27palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 22 no. 3 julio de 2019. e2236 bilidad (derrida, 1996). el testimonio testimonia sobre una supervivencia porque algo de lo desaparecido perdura en las sombras. discusión y conclusiones rehusar la identificación de la significación incorporada e inamovible —en detrimento de la diseminación de sentido— expone cuán fuerte opera el pensamiento metafísico occidental influyendo de lleno en la manera ideal y lineal en que se piensa la comunicación. algunos argumentos sostenidos desde el sentido común presumen que toda comunicación garantiza el entendimiento de consciencias por la sola presencia del lenguaje, con lo cual toda falta de comunicación se constituye en el reclamo que motiva el concepto mismo de esta. simplificación que se extiende cuando “el concepto comunicación se presenta como una solución fácil a problemas humanos inmanejables: el lenguaje, la finitud, la pluralidad” (durham, 2014, p. 23). sin embargo, y aquí es donde la propuesta derridiana atraviesa un nudo problemático en el campo de la comunicación, la palabra lleva en sí misma consigo una falta, lo cual acarrea la indeterminación de significado. por ello, borrar toda equivalencia entre significado y lenguaje refuerza el propósito de invalidar binarismos que profundicen e inviertan las jerarquías de aquello que fue dicho. si bien nombrar es una manera de dar existencia, esa existencia es problemática porque nunca es completa ni transparente sino que está mediada. y toda mediación suple algo. es otra cosa. es una falta. la mediación está contaminada; es una falta contaminada. en la muerte, el asunto se complejiza, porque, “en lo que se refiere al concepto y a la cosa, hay una palabra que no resulta asignable ni asigna nada en absoluto, esta es la palabra muerte” (derrida, 1998, pp. 46-47). la muerte es lo irrepresentable, lo incomunicable. su posibilidad es su condición de imposibilidad. no obstante, lejos de cerrar, la muerte es apertura, en tanto los diferentes testimonios validan la diseminación de sentidos que porta. enfoque que habilita a sostener el argumento de que la muerte no cierra ni abre, sino que abre donde cierra como cierra donde abre, porque la muerte es una aporía que no se supera en la perspectiva derridiana. al neutralizar las dicotomías a partir de las nociones de parasitamiento o contaminación, el límite se pierde y opera una economía de impurezas en la que las fronteras tienen características de permeabilidad, porosidad, que unen a la vez que separan. el 28 la aporía de la muerte: comunicación entre vivos y muertos carolina mazzetti-latini límite entre vida y muerte se desdibuja, por lo que se asiste a una espectrogénesis o espectropoiesis en la que se indecide la barrera o la frontera que separaría el interior vivo del afuera muerto, a partir de la noción de fantología. como para derrida la vida vale más que su faceta biológica o zoológica, el recuerdo de la persona fallecida evoca un modo de producción con inmensos efectos operativos en los que la idea del duelo originario remite al espectro que desborda la vida en todos sus límites. la polarización vida/muerte aporta elementos sustanciales para retomar la reflexión en torno a la comunicación, a pesar del contrasentido aparente. como argumenta durham (2014), si se historiza sobre la capacidad para establecer una comunicación no corpórea, este fue el tema central de la recepción intelectual del telégrafo, el teléfono y la radio; marco en el que el espiritismo fue un vehículo principal para la formación de las ideas sobre la comunicación en el siglo xix y principios del siglo xx. la palabra, la voz o imagen de una persona muerta o distante, canalizadas a través de un medio delicado: ese es el proyecto común de los medios electrónicos y la comunicación espiritista. de hecho, toda comunicación mediada es en algún sentido comunicación con los muertos. (durham, 2014, p. 184) la comunicación contiene en sí misma la facultad de la continuidad dada la potencialidad del diálogo y el sentido, sin embargo, también involucra su discontinuidad, ya que es imposible pensar una conversación por fuera de pausas e intermitencias. ambas dan existencia a la noción de comunicación, así como a la reciprocidad vida/muerte. en tanto que ningún significado puede ser fijado fuera de su contexto, así como ningún contexto permite la saturación (derrida, 2003), el sentido acerca de la muerte es indecidible porque jamás se agota, ya que los desplazamientos permanecen en el cambio y motivan cambios en toda permanencia. el autor insiste en que los significados de un significante solo pueden emerger en su relación con otros significantes. la cuestión del sentido de la muerte y de la palabra muerte, la cuestión ¿qué es la muerte en general?, ¿qué es la experiencia de la muerte?, la cuestión de saber si la muerte es —y lo que la muerte es— están radicalmente ausentes como cuestiones. de antemano se 29palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 22 no. 3 julio de 2019. e2236 suponen resueltas gracias a ese saber antropológico-histórico como tal, en el momento en que este se instaura y se otorga unos límites. esta presuposición adquiere la forma de un se da por supuesto: todo el mundo sabe muy bien de qué está hablando cuando se menciona la muerte. (derrida, 1998, p. 51) de esta manera, en términos lógicos, no existe un origen trascendental de la significación, ya que todos los signos siempre se refieren a otros signos confeccionando una cadena ad infinitum. como la deconstrucción evidencia el desenmascaramiento de todo centro, en consonancia con el abordaje en torno a la construcción social acerca del sentido de la muerte (que adquiere la forma de un supuesto, aquello que se da por supuesto), esta solo puede entenderse desde la perpetua intertextualidad mediada que desorigina toda enunciación. por ello, abordar la comunicación a través de movimientos analíticos deconstructivistas redunda en un potencial expansivo en el campo disciplinar; territorio caracterizado por fronteras difusas que, en tanto práctica social, configura un objeto de estudio de interés común para varias disciplinas. de este modo, a partir de la puesta en duda de la cadena jerarquizada vida/muerte, la muerte se constituye en metáfora para pensar la comunicación, puesto que, al fin de cuentas, esta es parte de algo que está más allá de ella misma. referencias aisengart menezes, r . 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(1975). les vivants et la mort: essai de sociologie. parís, francia: éditions du seuil. https://revistas.javerianacali.edu.co/index.php/pensamientopsicologico/article/view/74 https://revistas.javerianacali.edu.co/index.php/pensamientopsicologico/article/view/74 http://www.scielo.org.co/pdf/acp/v11n1/v11n1a12.pdf al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016): 42-113 abstract as derrida charged, plato’s famous declaration of speech’s superiority to writing would seem to have resonated with inheritor cultures similarly transitioning from orality to literacy, and especially the islamicate; despite the explosion of writerly culture from the 2nd/8th century onward, arabic scholarship continued to evince a categorical, if increasingly rhetorical, mistrust of writing. in the 8th/14th century, however, as the age of encyclopedism dawned throughout the islamicate heartlands, the superiority of writing to speech was formally and categorically asserted by arabic and persian encyclopedists, including most prominently ibn al-akfānī (d. 749/1348) of mamluk egypt and shams al-dīn āmulī (d. after 787/1352) of ilkhanid iran. it is hardly coincidental in this connection that the same century also witnessed the burgeoning popularity among scholarly and ruling elites of lettrism (ʿilm al-ḥurūf), kabbalah’s coeval cognate—the occult science that posited the cosmos itself as a text to be read, even rewritten. synthesizing these literary and occult-scientific currents, in the early 9th/15th century a network of muslim neopythagoreanizing lettrists—chief among them ibn turka of isfahan (d. 835/1432)—developed the first formal metaphysics of writing. this article analyzes ibn turka’s unprecedented valorization of writing over speech in terms both epistemological and ontological, as well as the sociocultural ramifications of this move throughout the postmongol persianate world. letter-number, he argued, is a form of light eternally emanated from the one; hence vision, that faculty of light, must be the sense most universal; hence visible text must be the form of the one most manifest. in support of this thesis, he synthesized the avicennan-ṭūsian doctrine of the transcendental modulation of being (tashkīk al-wujūd) with its illuminationist upgrade, the transcendental modulation of light (tashkīk al-nūr), to produce his signature doctrine of tashkīk al-ḥarf: letters of light as uncreated, allcreative matrix of the cosmos, gradually descending from the one in extramental, mental, spoken and finally written form. far from being a peculiar intellectual rabbit trail of no enduring significance, i argue that ibn turka’s lettrist metaphysics of light was embraced by subsequent thinkers in iran as the most effective means of conceptualizing and celebrating islamicate writerly culture; these include the famed philosophers jalāl aldīn davānī (d. 908/1502) and mīr dāmād (d. 1040/1630), founder of the so-called school of isfahan. nor was its of islamic grammatology: ibn turka’s lettrist metaphysics of light* matthew melvin-koushki university of south carolina (mmelvink@sc.edu) * my thanks to mana kia, nicholas harris, gil anidjar, alireza doostdar, nicole maskielle, kathryn edwards, joshua grace, tom lekan, antoine borrut and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on a draft of this article. 43 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) influence limited to aqquyunlu-safavid philosophical circles; i further argue that ibn turka’s system informed the explosion of persianate book culture more generally, and by extension persianate visual culture, from the early timurid period onward. a telling example in this context is the emergence of the album preface as a new genre of art history-theory in early safavid iran, a phenomenon that has been well feted and studied by art historians; but they have wholly elided high lettrism as the genre’s most immediate philosophical context. this principle may be extended to the persian cosmopolis as a whole: two of the most seminal discourses on writing developed in the ottoman and mughal contexts, by taşköprüzāde (d. 968/1561) and abū l-fażl ʿallāmī (d. 1011/1602) respectively, are demonstrably ibn turkian. like derrida was to do half a millennium later, in sum, early modern muslim lettrists rejected plato’s speech-writing hierarchy; unlike derrida, for whom writing can have no ontological edge, they put forward a profoundly humanistic neopythagorean ontogrammatology as core of the philosophia perennis—and that so trenchantly that it served to shape islamicate intellectual and aesthetic culture alike for centuries. the modern ideologues of east-west rupture notwithstanding, moreover, i propose this cosmology as a major node of islamo-christianate cultural continuity even to the present. * * * * the pen is the most powerful of talismans, and writing its [magical] product.1 —apollonius of tyana the one who will shine in the science of writing will shine like the sun.2 [t]he science of writing—grammatology—shows signs of liberation all over the world, thanks to decisive efforts.3 —jacques derrida in the phaedrus, plato famously declared speech superior to writing, that bastard child of the soul.4 yet he made this declaration in writing; and so it has reverberated to the present. this paradox expresses the central anxiety in cultures transitioning from orality to literacy, in this case greek: does writing diminish our humanity—or enhance it? does it denature philosophic or moral authority—or preserve it intact over time? is not the divine fiat lux eternally spoken, not written? more worryingly, once writing, that pandora’s box, attains to cultural hegemony, can we ever again think or speak beyond its seductive strictures? can there be any escape from logocentricity graphemically embodied? certainly not, says derrida, while diagnosing a terminal metaphysical distrust of writing in western culture, from plato to the present, and epitomized by saussure’s platonic damnation of writing as a perversion of speech, as tyranny.5 but derrida upends 1. al-qalam al-ṭilasm al-akbar wa-l-khaṭṭ natījatu-hu. this line is attributed to apollonius (balīnās) in al-tawḥīdī’s (d. 1414/1023) treatise on calligraphy (rosenthal, “abū ḥaiyān al-tawḥīdī on penmanship,” 25). 2. this ancient egyptian description of a scribe, taken from the 1963 colloquium essay l’écriture et la psychologie des peuples, opens of grammatology (3). 3. ibid., 4. 4. the works of plato, tr. jowett, 322-27. 5. it should here be borne in mind that a distrust of writing is common to ancient greek, zoroastrian and al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 44 this hoary hierarchy and bids us obey our perverting tyrant. for writing writes us; the world is a litter of its hieroglyphs of light.6 what of islamicate culture, then, half western, heavily hellenic, just as thoroughgoingly logocentric, and reputedly even more phonocentric? did it too fail to develop a grammatology? the answer, quite simply, is no: derrida’s diagnosis is inapplicable to islam.7 as i argue, despite the high degree of genetic continuity between christianate and islamicate cultures, muslim scholars came to valorize writing over speech to a greater degree than many of their counterparts to the west, such that by the 9th islamic century (15th century ce) a formalized neoplatonic-neopythagorean metaphysics of writing had become hegemonic from anatolia to india—precisely as printing was emerging in renaissance europe. like derrida, these thinkers inverted the semiotic hierarchy;8 unlike derrida, they asserted written language to be superior to spoken both epistemologically and ontologically, universal in its reliance on the comprehensive faculty of vision: written letters as forms of light fully descended from the all-emanating one. the latter, in short, were hardly the forerunners of derridean hyperstructuralism, yet propounded—and that with remarkable success across much of the early modern afro-eurasian ecumene—a semiological physicsmetaphysics that may be styled hyperstructuralist with equal justice.9 vedic and rabbinic jewish contexts—in the latter two writing was even considered ritually impure (zadeh, “touching and ingesting,” 462). 6. derrida, of grammatology; idem, “plato’s pharmacy”; goody, the power of the written tradition, 111. most significantly for the purposes of this study, for derrida writing precedes being “insofar as writing conditions history and all genesis”; hence his term arche-writing (lawlor, “eliminating some confusion,” 84). it must be emphasized, however, that his definition of writing, écriture, is far broader than the standard empirical one. as geoffrey bennington summarizes: “[t]he concept of writing [for derrida] exceeds and comprehends that of language … writing or text in derrida’s sense is not discourse or any other recognizable determination of language, but the beginning of the in-determination of language into the absolute generality of the trace-structure.” as such, he is “primarily concerned to bring out the conditions of impossibility of any grammatology” (“embarrassing ourselves,” los angeles review of books, 20 march 2016 <https:// lareviewofbooks.org/article/embarrassing-ourselves>). 7. to be clear: i invoke derrida here as somewhat of a straw man; his project to fundamentally deconstruct western culture pointedly excludes islam—precisely because western modernity itself depends on the recasting of islam as the eternal, oriental tout autre—, and is not historiographical in the slightest. (his perplexing contention that islam, like judaism, is not logocentric—a qualification he reserves for christianity alone—stems from his idiosyncratic definition of the term as referring to the essential independence of reason, logos, from linguistic mediation (lawlor, “eliminating some confusion,” 79).) that proviso notwithstanding, i conclude this study with an attempt to put derrida in conversation with the islamojudeo-christian lettrist-kabbalist tradition, and particularly its ibn turkian formulation, of which his deconstructionist project is curiously reminiscent. on the theme of derrida and islam see almond, “derrida’s islam”; anidjar, semites. 8. this similarity, of course, is merely terminological; derrida “does not wish to reverse a binary opposition” between speech and writing, but to disappear that opposition altogether by redefining language, whether written or spoken, as a necessary absence, a mark whose structure “has the attributes often given to writing” (personal communication from gil anidjar). 9. derrida’s project has been variously described as poststructuralist, antistructuralist, ultrastructuralist and hyperstructuralist (see e.g. dosse, history of structuralism, 2/17-31). the handle hyperstructuralist has 45 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) a growing number of studies investigate the social and literary aspects of the development of islamicate writerly culture during the “classical” and “postclassical” eras both, though focusing almost exclusively on the arabophone abbasid and mamluk contexts, and art historians have thoroughly explored the physical and metaphysical ramifications of calligraphy as the islamic art of arts. but the specific mechanics of this islamicate metaphysics of writing shaped by and shaping such social and aesthetic phenomena have yet to be schematized. the present article is a preliminary offering in this direction. for reasons of space i limit myself to a representative case study of one of the most influential metaphysicians of writing in islamic history, ibn turka of isfahan, this as prompt to further research; examples could easily be multiplied. i introduce our thinker below. but first, some context: when did islamicate writerly culture emerge and reach maturity? and why has its contemporary metaphysical framework been largely ignored in the literature to date? from prophetic orality to encyclopedic textuality following in the footsteps of its greek exemplar, burgeoning arabic-islamic culture, centered in abbasid baghdad, underwent the transition from orality to literacy from the 2nd/8th century onward; by the middle of the 3rd/9th century books had become a fullblown obsession.10 a technological revolution in papermaking and the concurrent abbasid translation movement together gave visual form to an arabic philosophia perennis, the surviving, recorded wisdom of the greek, egyptian, hebrew, persian and indian ancients.11 at the same time, many scholarly exponents of this new, synthetic arabic-islamic culture, predicated in the first place on the explicitly oral revelation that is the quran and the vaster corpus of hadith, resisted this seachange, continuing to assert the superiority of speech over writing in all matters doctrinal and legal, and by extension grammatical, medical and philosophical—presuming, that is, in increasingly anachronistic fashion, a strict and permanent equivalency between arabic-islamic culture and oral isnād culture.12 as gregor schoeler observes: [i]n islam in particular, scholars upheld the idea—or sustained the fiction—that writing should have an auxiliary function at most in the transmission of learning (and in establishing legally valid proof). until the time in which literary books as we similarly been applied to lacanian psychoanalytical theory. 10. the famed bibliomaniac and litterateur al-jāḥiẓ is here a case in point; see e.g. montgomery, al-jāḥiẓ, 4. on the burgeoning of abbasid writerly culture more generally see toorawa, ibn abī ṭāhir ṭayfūr. 11. the authoritative study here is gutas, greek thought, arabic culture. saliba has proposed an earlier beginning to the translation movement, i.e., in the umayyad period (islamic science, 27-72); whether or not his argument holds, the importance of writing already under the umayyads has likely been underestimated (my thanks to antoine borrut for this observation). 12. hirschler, the written word, 11. on legal debates over the materiality of the quran as text—including its magical-medical and talismanic applications from the 2nd/8th century onward—see zadeh, “touching and ingesting.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 46 know them emerged, and even beyond that time, the true transmission of knowledge remained oral, from person to person—at least in theory.13 but as sociocultural realities change, so must theory. social historians have shown that the initial explosion of writerly culture in the abbasid caliphate in particular only gained in intensity and scope in the arabophone west with the rise of the ayyubid and then mamluk sultanate, such that the heart of the arabic cosmopolis shifted definitively from iraq to egypt and syria.14 most notably, during the transformative 7th/13th and 8th/14th centuries, which saw the mass immigration of maghribi and mashriqi scholars alike in the face of invasion and plague, mamluk cairo and damascus emerged as islamdom’s intellectual center of gravity, which had theretofore been in iran; the mongol conquest on the one hand and the reconquista and general political turbulence on the other forced a mixing of eastern and western intellectual traditions that had been developing semiindependently for centuries.15 this arabo-persian synthesis in turn generated an islamic cultural florescence more explicitly and thoroughgoingly textual than any that had preceded it: the age of encyclopedism had begun.16 it is hardly surprising, then, that the encyclopedic classifications of the sciences (sg. taṣnīf al-ʿulūm) produced during this period testify precisely to this definitive triumph of writing over speech as preeminent vehicle of scholarly authority in islamic culture. that is, while the fictitiousness of writing’s status in arabic letters as mere auxiliary to speech had become patent long before, encyclopedists did not begin to assert its superiority to 13. schoeler, the oral and the written, 85; see also cook, “the opponents of the writing of tradition”; macdonald, “literacy in an oral environment.” the theory, or fiction, of speech’s superiority to writing became increasingly and clearly rhetorical from an early period. shiʿi hadith specialists, for instance, were privileging written elements in collected traditions and wisdom sayings already in the 2nd/8th century (see crow, “the role of al-ʿaql”). it should be noted that europeanists have investigated this theme at much greater length; see e.g. patrick geary, “oblivion between orality and textuality.” (my thanks to antoine borrut and an anonymous reviewer for the latter references.) 14. hirschler’s the written word is the definitive study on the mamluk context; and see now his medieval damascus. on arabic book culture more generally see e.g. rosenthal, muslim scholarship; pedersen, the arabic book; bloom, paper before print; leder, “spoken word and written text”; atiyeh, ed., the book in the islamic world; schoeler, the genesis of literature in islam; günther, “praise the book!”; and see now the two volumes of intellectual history of the islamicate world (4/1-2 (2016) and 5/1 (2017)), edited by maribel fierro, sabine schmidtke and sarah stroumsa, dedicated to islamicate book cultures, from the fatimids and the cairo geniza to 18th-century china and 20th-century egypt. 15. it should be noted that this larger process was first set in motion by a 4th-5th/10th-11th-century climate change event. as richard bulliet has shown (cotton, climate, and camels), the big chill wrecked the cotton industry in iran (a primary basis of the ulama’s wealth), creating a diaspora of persophone scholars— whence the vast persian cosmopolis; it also precipitated the epochal mass turkish migration southand westward. both developments transformed the face and sociopolitical structure of islamicate civilization and eventually shifted its cultural center of gravity back to the eastern mediterranean, where it remained until the rise of the great turko-mongol perso-islamic empires of the early modern era. ibn turka is here representative: like a host of his fellow persophone elites, the isfahani scholar completed his education—and was transformed into a lettrist—in mamluk cairo. 16. see hirschler, the written word, 19; muhanna, “encyclopædism in the mamlūk period”; idem, “encyclopaedias, arabic,” ei3; gardiner, “esotericism,” 276. 47 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) speech categorically until the 8th/14th century. ibn al-akfānī (d. 749/1348), for instance, succinctly asserts in the first section of his guidance for seekers of the sublimest of goals (irshād al-qāṣid ilā asnā l-maqāṣid), an immensely influential arabic instance of the genre that served as model for the subsequent mamluk-ottoman encyclopedic tradition: the benefit [of writing (kitāba)] is manifest; for this science, together with [the science of reading (qirāʾa)], is trained on a single purpose: to provide knowledge of how writing signifies speech. know that all things that can be known can only be made known in three ways: by gesturing (ishāra), speaking (lafẓ) or writing (khaṭṭ). the first requires one to be directly witnessed [by the addressee]; the second requires the addresse’s physical presence and their ability to hear; but writing requires nothing, for it is the most universal and the most excellent [form of communication], and the only one exclusive to humankind.17 though he declined to elaborate, the cairene physician-alchemist could not be clearer in his verdict: writing not only far outstrips speech in practical terms (a principle that had been held since the high abbasid period), but is also the only means whereby we can realize our humanity.18 nor are such assertions of humanistic textual universalism exclusive to the mamluk arabic tradition; contemporary persian encyclopedists take the same point further. most notable among them is shams al-dīn muḥammad āmulī (d. after 787/1352), ibn al-akfānī’s cognate in ilkhanid iran, who proposes in his equally influential and far more comprehensive jewels of sciences delightful to behold (nafāyis al-funūn fī ʿarāyis al-ʿuyūn) a wholesale epistemological restructuring of the religious and rational sciences— one in which writing alone stands as the foundation of the edifice of human knowledge.19 like ibn al-akfānī, he devotes the first section of his encyclopedia to the literary sciences 17. irshād al-qāṣid, 26-27. on this encyclopedia see witkam, “ibn al-akfānī.” in the k. al-ḥayawān (1/3334), al-jāḥiẓ identifies four modes of communication—speech (lafẓ), writing (khaṭṭ), gesturing (ishāra) and finger counting (ʿaqd)—, and notes that some authorities count five. 18. al-jāḥiẓ’s famous section in his k. al-ḥayawān in praise of books suggests the same humanistic conclusion, although it is not stated so clearly or succinctly; see montgomery, al-jāḥiẓ. but as he rhetorically asks: ‘what could be of greater benefit, or a more assiduous helper, than writing?’ (k. al-ḥayawān, 1/48). similarly, abū rayḥān bīrūnī (d. after 442/1050) opens his celebrated taḥqīq mā li-l-hind with praise for writing that is yet tellingly qualified (1): truly has it been said: second-hand reporting cannot compare to direct observation (laysa l-khabar ka-l-ʿiyān). for observation entails the immediate perception by the eye of the observer of that observed in a single moment and place. but were reporting not subject to the buffetings of ill circumstance, its virtue would exceed that of observation; for the latter is restricted to the moment of perception, and cannot extend to other moments in time, whereas reporting encompasses all moments equally, whether those past or future, and indeed all that exists and does not exist. and writing (kitāba) might almost (yakādu) be [judged] the noblest of all types of reporting: for how could we learn of the histories of nations (akhbār al-umam) were it not for the pen, whose traces perpetually endure? 19. on the nafāyis al-funūn and its status as model for most subsequent persian encyclopedias see vesel, les encyclopedies persanes, 38-41; melvin-koushki, “powers of one.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 48 (ʿulūm-i adabī); unlike his egyptian peer, however, who despite his valorization of writing does not give it explicit pride of place in this section,20 āmulī formally classifies it as the first of his 15 literary arts (fann)—he is the first encyclopedist in the islamicate tradition as a whole to do so21—and argues for writing’s epistemological supremacy with proofs both traditional and rational. given its status as watershed persian statement on this theme, i translate the relevant passage in full: the first art of the first discourse of the first section of this book, jewels of sciences delightful to behold, is the science of writing (ʿilm-i khaṭṭ), meaning the knowledge of graphically representing utterances with the letters of the alphabet, the manner of their construction and the conditions that pertain thereto. this is a craft most esteemed and a science most instructive; through it beauty and elegance is perennially achieved, and all hold it in the highest respect. in every place it presents itself boldly; for every group it is the keeper of secrets. it is always the engine of fame and honor; the tyrannical cannot overmaster it. it is recognized in all lands and leaves its imprint on every edifice. indeed, the magnitude of its excellence is epitomized by the declaration of the lord of lords, his names be sanctified, in his revelation most true: n. and by the pen, and what they inscribe (q 68:1). and again: recite: and your lord is most generous, who taught by the pen, taught man what he knew not (q 96:3-5). the pen that produced the book suffices for all honor to the end of time: for god has sworn by the pen. said [ʿalī b. abī ṭālib] (upon him be peace): “write beautifully, for it is a source of provision.”22 and said a certain sage: “writing is a form of spiritual geometry (al-khaṭṭ handasa rūḥāniyya) manifested by means of a physical instrument.”23 it has also been described as “the breeder of thought, the lamp of remembrance, the language of distance, the life of the seeker of knowledge.” jāḥiẓ declared: “writing is the hand’s tongue, the mind’s emissary, the repository of secrets, the exposer of reports, the rememberer of achievements past.”24 it has further been said: “writing is black to sight but white to insight.”25 again: “excellent speech recorded in beautiful 20. under the rubric of ʿilm al-adab ibn al-akfānī gives equal treatment to speech and writing as vehicles of communication, with emphasis on poetry and rhetoric, treating sequentially of lugha, taṣrīf, maʿānī, bayān, badīʿ,ʿarūḍ, qawāfī, naḥw, qawānīn al-kitāba, qawānīn al-qirāʾa and manṭiq (irshād al-qāṣid, 22-29). 21. see vesel, les encyclopedies persanes. 22. ʿalay-kum bi-ḥusn al-khaṭṭ fa-inna-hu min mafātīḥ al-rizq. this and many of the following dicta in praise of writing are also found in, for example, abū ḥayyān al-tawḥīdī’s treatise on the subject, translated and transcribed in rosenthal, “abū ḥaiyān al-tawḥīdī.” 23. al-tawḥīdī attributes this statement to euclid (ibid., 15/25 no. 56): al-khaṭṭ handasa rūḥāniyya ẓaharat bi-āla jasadiyya. 24. this sentence is not present in modern editions of the k. al-ḥayawān, suggesting it as a later addition. 25. al-tawḥīdī attributes this statement to one hāshim b. sālim (rosenthal, “abū ḥaiyān al-tawḥīdī,” 13 no. 42). 49 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) writing is delightful to the eye, sweet to the heart and fragrant to the spirit.” [in sum], it is [universally] held that writing is superior to speech: for writing, unlike speech, profits those near and those far alike.26 scholars disagree as to who invented writing. some are of the opinion that when the real most high taught adam all the names (q 2:31)—that is, taught adam (upon him and our prophet be peace) the names of every thing and the virtues of each—he also taught him about the virtues of the pen, and adam then communicated this to seth, who invented writing. other scholars cite the saying the first to write (khaṭṭa) and sew (khāṭa) was enoch (idrīs) to argue in favor of enoch’s (upon him and our prophet be peace) status as the inventor of writing (and sewing). it is also transmitted from ʿurwa b. al-zubayr and ʿabd allāh b. ʿamr al-ʿāṣ that adam, a hundred years before his death, assigned a language to each of his children [and their offspring] as a separate group; [to this end], he inscribed on a mass of small sheets like rosepetals the script appropriate to each language and its basic rules, then baked them [for preservation]. but the sheet for the arabic language was lost in noah’s flood, and its people forgot how to write and speak it until the time of ishmael (upon him be peace). ishmael, having made his home in mecca and there acceded to the honor of prophethood, dreamed one night that a treasure was buried on abū qubays mountain [outside the city]; on the morrow he therefore arose and walked around that mountain, searching it assiduously until he discovered the sheet. but because it was tall and wide and filled with strange markings, he was greatly confused. he therefore called out: “o god! teach me its secret!” the real most high accordingly sent to him gabriel (upon him be peace) to provide instruction in the matter; and so ishmael came to know the arabic language and its script. ʿabd allāh ʿabbāsī (god be pleased with him) has similarly transmitted that the first person to establish arabic and its script was ishmael. it is transmitted from [hishām] kalbī, however, that [arabic] writing had three inventors: marāmir b. marra [or marwa], aslam b. sidra and ʿāmir b. jadhra.27 the first invented the letterforms; the second invented their conjunctions and separations; the third invented their diacritical points. still others hold that members of the ṭasm clan invented arabic writing; they were the rulers of midian during the lifetime of seth (upon him and our prophet be peace). their kings were [six], named as follows: abjad (abjd), hawwaz (hwz), ḥuṭṭī (ḥṭy), kalman (klmn), saʿfaṣ (sʿfṣ) and qarshat (qrsht). they put these names into graphic form, and to them added two further constructions from the remaining letters, termed auxiliary: thakhadh (thkhdh) and ḍaẓagh (ḍẓgh).28 [for his part], abū jaʿfar ṭabarī transmitted from zayd b. arqam and żaḥḥāk that these six are rather the names of the six days of creation wherein the real most high created the 26. cf. ibid., 11 no. 27, where the same principle is attributed to one ibn al-tawʾam. 27. cf. ibn al-nadīm, al-fihrist, 12, where slightly different versions of these names are given. 28. i.e., the original 22 hebrew letters plus six additional arabic ones. the same is report is transmitted in ibn al-nadīm, al-fihrist, 11. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 50 heavens and the earth—hence the fact that all instruction must needs begin with the abcs (abū jād). of all the well-known scripts, including arabic, greek, uyghur, indian and chinese, the arabic script is the loveliest and most elegant; [the techniques] whereby it is refined and beautified are firmly established. in former days, the standard script among the arabs was the maʿqilī script, after which the kufic script was developed. as for the type that is now most common, some say ibn muqla developed it; others credit [ʿalī b. abī ṭālib], commander of the faithful. the latter say [in this regard] that when [ʿalī] was teaching ʿabd allāh b. ʿabbās [how to write] he instructed him: “ʿabd allāh, widen the space between each line, bring the letters close together, preserve the correspondence between their forms and give each letter its due.”29 thereafter a group of those who strove to further refine this craft, including ibn bawwāb and others, created a diverse range of calligraphic styles, including muḥaqqaq, thuluth, naskh, riqāʿ, ʿuhūd, tawqīʿ, taʿlīq, rayḥānī, manshūr, mudawwar, ṭūmār, musalsal, muthannā, ghubār, habāʾ, and so on.30 this celebration of writing draws heavily on abbasid bibliophilic precedent, al-jāḥiẓ (d. 255/869) and ibn al-nadīm (d. 380/990) in particular, including in the first place its valorization of textuality over orality. but āmulī’s case for an islamic textual universalism goes beyond earlier formulations to fully textualize revelation itself; and textualized revelation as a perpetual historical process in turn constitutes the genesis and basis for a sacralized, universal intellectual history: the philosophia perennis. writing is the primordial prophetic act; men are to wield pens as god wields the pen. literacy, that is, is here elevated to a sacred calling, and writing to a metaphysical category. it is an embodied spiritual geometry, says the sage—and so an aperture onto supernal realities. in short, encyclopedists like ibn al-akfānī and shams al-dīn āmulī are far past the orality-textuality tension that defined early islamicate scholarship; by the mid-8th/14th century writerly culture reigned supreme in mamluk egypt and ilkhanid iran alike.31 this did not entail the obsolescence of oral methods of transmitting knowledge, to be sure, especially in the context of education or with respect to disciplines more esoteric or elite; but the epistemological hierarchy that prevailed in the first centuries of islam was now inverted: textuality had become primary and orality auxiliary—the preferred mode, at least ostensibly, for keeping secrets.32 29. al-tawḥīdī gives a different version of this saying (rosenthal, “abū ḥaiyān al-tawḥīdī,” 18-19 no. 88). 30. nafāyis al-funūn, 1/22-24. for similar treatments see roxburgh, prefacing the image, 112 n. 113. 31. symptomatic of this definitive textual turn is the fact that early legal debates over the medical and magical potencies of the quranic text and their application as part of prophetic medicine (al-ṭibb al-nabawī)— practices strongly favored, for example, by abū ʿubayd b. sallām (d. 223/838) in his faḍāʾil al-qurʾān, but just as strongly rejected by contemporary scholars—finally gave way to a consensus in favor of such practices in the 7th/13th and 8th/14th centuries, exemplified by jurists like al-nawawī (d. 676/1277) and ibn qayyim al-jawziyya (d. 751/1350) (zadeh, “touching and ingesting,” 465-66). 32. works on the occult sciences serve as the best index of this epistemological textuality-orality inversion. even during the great florescence of occultism that swept the islamicate heartlands from the late 8th/14th century onward, whereby the production and copying of occult-scientific texts was increasingly 51 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) as a majority of scholars now recognize, the so-called postclassical era (a polemical misnomer) was in no way one of cultural decadence and stagnation, but rather scene to a remarkable cultural florescence, one intensely textual in orientation; book production massively increased and new commentarial practices and arts of the book were born.33 the sheer mass of surviving texts—at least 90% of them unpublished and still more unstudied— is indeed overwhelming;34 previous generations of orientalists, perpetuating colonialist declinism, accordingly found it more convenient to dismiss “postclassical” islamicate intellectual and cultural history out of hand as derivative, baroque and sterile than to risk drowning in that immense textual ocean.35 over the last decades, however, specialists have begun the rehabilitation process on many fronts, from philosophy, poetry, painting and law on the one hand to political and social history on the other, such that some now identify the post-mongol era not simply as one of equal brilliance to the formative high caliphal period but indeed as the era of islam’s greatest cultural, political and economic flourishing, its apogee of henological imperial-intellectual universalism. the studies cited heavily patronized by ruling and scholarly elites, such texts still feature the formulaic injunctions against revealing their contents to the unworthy, lest powerful techniques fall into the wrong hands and cause the breakdown of society, that had long been standard; yet the burgeoning of an occultist writerly culture would seem to render the traditional preference for oral transmission obsolete. as noah gardiner has shown (“esotericism in a manuscript culture,” 78-160), books themselves became teaching and initiatic instruments within the “esotericist reading communities” that coalesced around the letter-magical writings of aḥmad al-būnī (on whom see below) in mamluk egypt during the 7th/13th century; in this context, the primary technique for keeping secret the occultist lore the sufi mage divulged in his works was no longer oral transmission, but rather intertextuality. that is to say, his reliance on tabdīd al-ʿilm, the ‘dispersion of knowledge,’ whereby the keys to understanding any individual work were scattered across his corpus as a whole, rendered mere possession of a single būnian text by the uninitiated an insufficient condition for mastering its contents. rather, it was only through membership in an esotericist reading community that had access to and mastery of the corpus that one could understand each of its components. by the 9th/15th century, then, when books emerged in mamluk-timurid society as “standalone sources of knowledge” (159) and the de-esotericization of occultism was rampant, it was precisely intertextuality, not orality, that served as the primary means of keeping occultist secrets for the protection of society. on this orality-textuality tension in shiʿism see dakake, “hiding in plain sight”; on the same in jewish kabbalah see halbertal, concealment and revelation; wolfson, “beyond the spoken word.” 33. on the illegitimacy of the term “postclassical” in an islamicate context see e.g. bauer, “in search of ‘post-classical literature’”; on the later islamicate commentary culture see e.g. ingalls, “subtle innovation,” 1-31. 34. estimates of the current number of surviving arabic manuscripts only (to say nothing of persian or turkish) range from 600,000 to several million—these, of course, representing a small fraction of what was originally produced (gardiner, “esotericism,” 17). the first estimate is far too low, moreover; until recently almost 400,000 manuscripts were preserved in timbuktu alone. 35. fuat sezgin (b. 1924) is here representative. his magisterial geschichte des arabischen schrifttums (1967) is not merely positivist in approach, but blatantly triumphalist, eurocentric and whiggish, and pointedly excises what he deems the religio-intellectual cancer that is occultism by acknowledging only the achievements of valiant muslim thinkers laboring to preserve “real” science—greek, not eastern (persian and indian), and certainly not occult; thus only was arabic science able to transmit the torch of the classical greek heritage to europe, subsiding into irrelevance after 430/1038 (for further examples see lemay, “l’islam historique”). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 52 above on the explosion of writerly culture in the arabic heartlands during the middle period are here cases in point.36 yet there persists in the literature that peculiarly modern penchant for divorcing sociopolitical currents from their intellectual-spiritual contexts and vice versa, a reflexive insistence on decoupling manifest from occult, ẓāhir from bāṭin—a strategy that does great violence to our sources and renders the worldview of our historical actors illegible.37 this problem is most acute precisely with respect to the period 1200-1900, and to disciplines now considered intellectually illegitimate, including in the first place the occult sciences themselves; the intellectual and social history of mainstream, heavily patronized, naturalmathematical disciplines like astrology, alchemy or geomancy has yet to be written.38 needless to say, such scholarly vivisectionism but perpetuates the enlightenmentand especially victorian-era attempt to separate out “science,” “magic” and “religion” as distinct categories, this in order to valorize the first, damn the second, quarantine the third 36. while “middle period” is much preferable to “medieval,” the eurocentric adjective most frequently used in the literature for post-1100 islamicate developments, its implication as to the “postclassicalness” of phenomena so described makes it problematic. nevertheless, i use it here for the sake of convenience, while holding that alternate periodizations like “high persianate,” spanning the 8th/14th century to the 13th/19th and in some regions the 14th/20th, are more neutral and appropriate for the post-mongol context (for a discussion of this term see melvin-koushki and pickett, “mobilizing magic”). 37. shahzad bashir’s recent sufi bodies, for instance, exemplifies the analytical benefits that accrue from recoupling ẓāhir to bāṭin in the study of islamicate societies. on this theme more generally see now shahab ahmed’s posthumous masterpiece, what is islam?, which argues for contradiction and ambiguity as primary structuring principles of islamicate civilization, and especially its persianate or balkans-to-bengal subset; and mana kia’s forthcoming sensibilities of belonging: transregional persianate community before nationalism. 38. the standard arabic term for the occult sciences more generally, including astrology (aḥkām al-nujūm), alchemy (kīmiyā) and a variety of magical and divinatory techniques, is ʿulūm gharība, meaning those sciences that are unusual, rare or difficult, i.e., elite; less frequently used terms are ʿulūm khafiyya and ʿulūm ghāmiḍa, sciences that are hidden or occult. these terms are routinely used in classifications of the sciences, biographical dictionaries, chronicles, etc. its 19th-century european flavor notwithstanding, the term “occultism” is used here simply to denote a scholarly preoccupation with one or more of the occult sciences as discrete natural-philosophical or mathematical disciplines. occultism is thus to be strictly distinguished from sufism and esotericism, for all that scholars from corbin onward have habitually and perniciously disappeared the former into the latter. a number of scholars are beginning to address this gaping lacuna with respect to islamicate occultism in the post-mongol period: on ottoman astrology see, for example, şen, “reading the stars”; on mughal astrology see orthmann, “circular motions”; on mamluk alchemy see harris, “better religion through chemistry,” and on its ottoman continuation see artun, “hearts of gold”; on ilkhanid-timurid-mughalsafavid geomancy (ʿilm al-raml) see melvin-koushki, “persianate geomancy”; on mamluk lettrism see gardiner, “esotericism,” and coulon, “la magie islamique”; on its timurid continuation see melvin-koushki, “the quest”; on ottoman lettrism and geomancy see fleischer, “ancient wisdom”; on ottoman astrology, lettrism and geomancy see şen and melvin-koushki, “divining chaldiran”; on ottoman talismanic shirts and oneiromancy (ʿilm al-taʿbīr) see felek, “fears, hopes, and dreams”; on deccan sultanate talismanic shirts see muravchick, “objectifying the occult”; on ottoman physiognomy see lelić, “ʿilm-i firāsat”; on safavid oneiromancy and various divinatory practices see babayan, “the cosmological order”; on safavid bibliomancy see gruber, “the ‘restored’ shīʿī muṣḥaf”; on safavid geomancy, lettrism and alchemy see melvin-koushki, “the occult sciences”; and on mangit lettrism see melvin-koushki and pickett, “mobilizing magic.” 53 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) and disappear the sociopolitical context of all three. many critical theorists have shown, of course, that this project was the primary theoretical engine of european colonialism, a natural extension of its (wildly successful) divide et impera strategy—and hence worthless as a heuristic for studying human societies, past and present, east and west, civilized and savage: for it is the mission civilisatrice itself that orientalizes and savages.39 why then are scientistic positivism and occultophobia still so sorcerously hegemonic in academe generally and the study of islam specifically? why are the islamicate “positive sciences” such as astronomy still studied in strict isolation from their immediate sociopolitical and intellectual contexts? why do we not speak of a metaphysics of empire?40 why has no history of the practice of islamicate philosophy been written?41 and as for the great middle period explosion of writerly culture here in view, the social, literary and aesthetic aspects of this transformation have been and are being masterfully explored;42 but should we not also seek for a metaphysics of writing? as noted, this article proposes to complement the social, literary and aesthetic history of islamicate writerly culture during the 7th-10th/13th-16th centuries by supplying its original letter-metaphysical context. in so doing, it constitutes a historical-philological extension and correction of the seminal studies of annemarie schimmel and seyyed hossein nasr on the metaphysics, or spirituality, of islamicate calligraphy,43 and a confirmation and refinement of the more recent work of gülru necipoğlu and david roxburgh on persianate visual theory.44 i argue that ibn al-akfānī’s celebration of textuality as the key to our humanity and āmulī’s renewed emphasis on writing’s status 39. see e.g. latour, we have never been modern; taussig, the magic of the state; bracken, magical criticism; kripal, authors of the impossible; styers, making magic; hanegraaff, esotericism and the academy. 40. on this theme see melvin-koushki, “early modern islamicate empire.” 41. rizvi, “philosophy as a way of life”; this question is pursued in melvin-koushki, “world as (arabic) text.” 42. on its literary aspects see e.g. losensky, welcoming fighānī; bauer, “mamluk literature.” 43. these include schimmel’s calligraphy and islamic culture and deciphering the signs of god (particularly the chapter “the word and the script”) and nasr’s islamic art and spirituality. while these studies are broad in scope, they overwhelmingly focus on sufism to the detriment of occultism, often disappearing the latter into the former, and hence do not discern the increasingly philosophically systematic valorization of writing over speech in islamicate culture for which i argue here. most problematically, ibn turka, chief among muslim metaphysicians of writing, is wholly absent from schimmel’s account, while nasr does indeed cite him in passing—but only as a sufi thinker. the latter even acknowledges ibn turka’s signature doctrine of the three levels of the letter (islamic art, 32-33); but because it is excised from its original philosophical context, ibn turka’s fundamental point that written language is ontologically superior to spoken is lost. cf. samer akkach’s reading of islamicate architecture in ibn ʿarabian terms (cosmology and architecture) and carl ernst’s discussion of a timurid sufi treatise on calligraphy (“sufism and the aesthetics of penmanship”), as well as oliver leaman’s general introduction to the topic (islamic aesthetics). 44. in his prefacing the image, for instance, roxburgh surveys its theoretical and literary-historical context, with some attention to physics-metaphysics; necipoğlu focuses on the latter aspect in her recent and magisterial programmatic article “the scrutinizing gaze,” wherein she updates her findings in the topkapı scroll (1995) to argue for an early modern islamicate hyperrealism (over against renaissance naturalism) predicated on the emergent theoretical primacy of “sight, insight, and desire,” this by way of a synthesis of neoplatonic, aristotelian and sufi discourses on beauty and the power of imagination and vision. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 54 as spiritual geometry are in no way mere rhetorical conceits or mystical gushings, but rather directly informed by contemporary philosophical developments in mamluk egypt and ilkhanid iran; they must be taken seriously as such. doing so will not only enhance our understanding of this major social transformation, but also bring to light cultural connections and discourses that have been largely or wholly occluded in the literature to date. quite simply: restoring the bāṭin of arabo-persian textuality to its ẓāhir reveals a rather different picture of islamicate culture during this pivotal period—one more occult than is usually acknowledged. to illustrate the interdependence of social and intellectual history posited above, then, i offer a brief case study of an outstanding thinker active in late mamluk egypt and early timurid iran: ṣāʾin al-dīn ʿalī b. muḥammad turka iṣfahānī (770-835/1369-1432), longtime resident of cairo, shafiʿi chief judge of isfahan and yazd and the most influential occult philosopher of the 9th/15th-century persianate world. most significantly for our purposes here, ibn turka appears to be the first in the arabo-persian philosophical tradition as a whole to propose and systematize, in expressly neopythagorean-neoplatonic terms, what may be called a lettrist metaphysics of light. he did so, moreover, explicitly to lionize and explain the explosion of islamicate textual culture as vehicle of the philosophia perennis: for only writing can constellate that golden chain that is intellectual-prophetic history; only light—and by extension the human faculty that perceives it, sight—is universal; hence only written text can fully manifest the one. as i argue, this is the most relevant theoretical context for understanding the unprecedented degree of text-centrism in middle period islamicate culture, exemplified by encyclopedists like ibn al-akfānī and āmulī and their heirs. the warm reception of ibn turka’s system in philosophical circles in iran, from the aqquyunlu-safavid period through the late qajar, as well as its reverberations in mughal india and ottoman anatolia, further suggests it as perhaps the most successful islamic metaphysics of writing to have ever been developed. reading the two books in islam: lettrism the study of later islamicate societies remains in its infancy; yet even so, that those metaphysicians most obsessed with understanding the world as text—lettrists—have been systematically elided in studies of islamicate writerly culture to date is an irony particularly striking, and a classic symptom of the vivisectionist, occultophobic bias identified above. compounding this irony, the same bias has now been largely retired in the study of early modern christianate culture, particularly that of the renaissance and the so-called scientific revolution; the cosmological doctrine of the two books, scripture and nature, is widely feted by specialists as the basis for the emergence of “scientific modernity”—the upshot of europeans (and no one else) reading the world as text. the kabbalistic decoding of this text becomes science; its recoding, originally by way of magic, becomes technology. yet contemporary muslim neopythagorean-occultists were no less committed to reading the world as (arabic) text, including in the first place ibn turka and his colleagues and heirs; but because their brand of kabbalist hermeneutics did not lead to scientific 55 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) modernity, did not progress beyond its literalist-transcendentalist-magical reading of the world, they may be safely disappeared from this hallowed teleology. this remains the case even for those scholars and theorists who have successfully shown “modernity” to be a profoundly logocentric and illusory, even sorcerous, construct.45 but eurocentrism in this respect is unavoidable: the almost total absence of scholarship on relevant muslim thinkers makes it impossible for nonspecialists to account for cognate developments in islam. christian kabbalah is here a case in point. first advanced by giovanni pico della mirandola (d. 1494) as the core of his humanistic philosophy—indeed as the best means of divinizing man, of finally marrying plato and aristotle—, this hebrew-cum-latin science is now widely recognized to have been a central preoccupation of and inspiration for later heroes of the european renaissance, including giordano bruno (d. 1600) and john dee (d. 1608), major exponents of the two books doctrine and devoted kabbalists; they in turn laid the groundwork for the “scientific revolution” (more properly a mathematical revolution, being largely confined to astronomy and physics) as spearheaded by committed neopythagorean-occultists like johannes kepler (d. 1630) and isaac newton (d. 1727), whose principia mathematica then became the basis for scientific modernity.46 yet lettrism, kabbalah’s coeval arabic cognate, enjoyed a similarly mainstream status in the islamicate world during precisely this period, rendering the two books doctrine equally salient to muslim metaphysicians—but not a single study to date has acknowledged, much less attempted to analyze, this striking intellectual continuity. it is therefore imperative that the double standard that still prevails among historians of science be retired, whereby pico’s or dee’s obsession with kabbalah, and kepler’s selfidentification as a neopythagorean, heralds the modern mathematization of the cosmos, but ibn turka’s obsession with lettrism heralds but islamic decadence and scientific irrelevance: for islam produced no newton. (it also produced no oppenheimer.) most perniciously, this double standard elides a major problematic in global history of science and philosophy. triumphalist teleologies notwithstanding, that is, it is remarkable that, in the absence of direct contact, the quest for a universal science was universally pursued along neopythagorean-kabbalist lines throughout the islamo-christianate world during the early modern period—a trend that became mainstream significantly earlier in the persianate context, where the cosmos was first mathematized.47 in sum: if we seek a formal islamicate metaphysics of writing, it is to the lettrists we must turn. given how thoroughly lettrism has been occulted in the literature, however, a definition and brief historical overview of its development are first in order.48 while the arabic ‘science of letters’ (ʿilm al-ḥurūf), like its hebrew cognate,49 is properly 45. see n. 39 above. 46. wirszubski, pico della mirandola’s encounter. 47. melvin-koushki, “powers of one.” 48. an adequate survey of lettrism’s development over 14 centuries is of course well beyond the scope of this article; for a fuller treatment see melvin-koushki, “the quest,” 167-283. 49. see e.g. wasserstrom, “sefer yeṣira and early islam”; ebstein, mysticism and philosophy in al-andalus; anidjar, “our place in al-andalus.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 56 an umbrella category covering a wide range of theories and techniques, some of them being transformed or shed over time, the term (sometimes in the form khawāṣṣ al-ḥurūf, ‘the active properties of letters’) is nevertheless regularly used in the sources to identify a discrete science from the 3rd/9th century onward. as such, lettrism encompasses the two modes of applied occultism as a whole in its basic division into letter magic (sīmiyāʾ) on the one hand and letter divination (jafr) on the other. letter-magical techniques include most prominently the construction of talismans (sg. ṭilasm), usually defined as devices that conjunct celestial influences with terrestrial objects in order to produce a strange (gharīb) effect according with the will (niyya, himma) of the practitioner.50 the engine of a talisman is usually a magic square (wafq al-aʿdād), which may be populated with letters or numbers relevant to the operation at hand; these are designed to harness the specific letter-numerical virtues of personal names, whether of humans, jinn or angels, phrases or quranic passages, or one or more of the names of god. (the latter operation, it should be noted, is a typical example of the sufi-occultist practice of ‘assuming the attributes of god,’ aka theomimesis (takhalluq bi-akhlāq allāh)—hence the divine names as a major focus of lettrism, often termed for that reason ʿilm al-ḥurūf wa-l-asmāʾ, or even simply ʿilm al-asmāʾ, ‘the science of names.’) letter divination, for its part, includes most prominently the construction of a comprehensive prognosticon (jafr jāmiʿ), a 784-page text containing every possible permutation of the letters of the arabic alphabet.51 from such a prognosticon may be derived the name of every thing or being that has ever existed or will ever exist, every name of god in every language, and the knowledge of past, present and future events—especially political events—to the end of time. this divinatory aspect of lettrism is associated in the first place with the mysterious separated sura-initial letters in the quran (muqaṭṭaʿāt), similarly held to contain comprehensive predictive power, and to have inspired the basic lettrist technique of taksīr, separating the letters of words or names for the purposes of permutation. most letter-magical and letter-divinatory operations are profoundly astrological in orientation, moreover; careful attention to celestial configurations is essential for the success of any operation, and letter magic often involves the harnessing of planetary spirits (taskhīr al-kawākib) (together with angels and jinn). fasting, a vegetarian diet, seclusion and maintenance of a state of ritual purity are also regularly identified as conditions of practice in manuals on these subjects. among the occult sciences that became permanently intertwined with islamicate culture from its very inception, including in the first place astrology and alchemy, it is lettrism that underwent the most complex evolution. most significantly, it eventually emerged as the most islamic of all the occult sciences, this despite its explicitly late antique, non-islamic parentage—or rather because of it. that is to say, lettrism’s reception as an essential component of the philosophia perennis, this through its association with 50. this is the definition standard from ibn sīnā onward. see e.g. his r. fī aqsām al-ʿulūm al-ʿaqliyya, 75; and quṭb al-dīn shīrāzī, durrat al-tāj, 155-56. 51. a completed comprehensive prognosticon has 784 pages, with 784 cells and 3,136 letters per page, resulting in 87,808 cells and 2,458,624 letters in total (fahd, la divination arabe, 221 n. 1; note that a misprint gives the incorrect figure 2,458,424). 57 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) the prophet-philosopher-king solomon and a host of other ancient prophets and their sage disciples, especially hebrews like daniel, greeks like pythagoras and plato, egyptians like hermes, persians like zoroaster and indians like ṭumṭum and sāmūr, mirrored the status of the quran itself as the culmination of prophetic history.52 historically, lettrism first entered the islamic tradition by way of two main vectors: 1) the symbolical cosmogonical speculations and sorcerous proclivities of so-called extremist (ghulāt) shiʿi circles of 2nd/8th-century iraq, largely inspired by late antique hellenic “gnostic” movements;53 and 2) the divinatory texts associated with the house of the prophet, including the original comprehensive prognosticon (al-jafr wa-l-jāmiʿa) and the codex (muṣḥaf) of fāṭima.54 it is the second vector in particular that prepared the way for lettrism’s definitive islamicization, with ʿalī b. abī ṭālib and jaʿfar al-ṣādiq being routinely identified in later lettrist tradition as the science’s supreme exponents for the islamic dispensation. it then underwent a progressive philosophicization within a neoplatonicneopythagorean framework, particularly on display in the 3rd/9th-century jābir b. ḥayyān corpus and the 4th/10th-century rasāʾil of the ikhwān al-ṣafāʾ; during this phase lettrism became associated with ismaʿilism in north africa, which combined its cosmogonical and magical-divinatory applications as eclectically explored during the fraught emergence of shiʿism. (the semi-ismaʿili epistles famously declare magic, together with astrology, alchemy, medicine and astral travel (ʿilm al-tajrīd), the queen of all sciences and ultimate goal of philosophy.55) seminal maghribi grimoires like maslama al-qurṭubī’s (d. 353/964) ghāyat al-ḥakīm, enthusiatically received in the latinate world as the picatrix, were direct products of this ikhwānī philosophical-spiritual current.56 during the same period and primarily in the same place—north africa and al-andalus— lettrism underwent a process of sanctification, this entailing its recasting in specifically sufi terms rather than either natural-philosophical or shiʿi. this move was part of the larger sufi challenge to shiʿism, whereby sufis began to position themselves as rival claimants to the shiʿi category of walāya, the ‘sacral power’ peculiar to the imams; this category was therefore massively expanded by sufi theoreticians to designate islamic sainthood in general. most notably for our purposes here, and perhaps due to residual ismaʿili influence, the same sufi theoreticians elevated lettrism to the dual status of science of the saints (ʿilm al-awliyāʾ) and science of divine oneness (ʿilm al-tawḥīd) par excellence: simultaneously a tool for cosmological speculation and for controlling creation, as well as vehicle of mystical ascent or return to the one. 52. see e.g. melvin-koushki, “the quest,” 318-28; van bladel, the arabic hermes. 53. see tucker, mahdis and millenarians. the handle “gnostic,” of course, is an almost unusably flabby one (my thanks to dylan burns for clarifying this point); see smith, “the history of the term gnostikos.” on late antique gnosticizing and platonizing christian number symbolism see kalvesmaki, the theology of arithmetic. 54. modarressi, tradition and survival, 4-5, 18-19. 55. epistles of the brethren of purity: on magic i, 95-96. 56. see e.g. de callataÿ, “magia en al-andalus”; fierro, “bāṭinism in al-andalus”; saif, the arabic influences. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 58 this sanctification process began in the late 3rd/9th century and came to full flower in the work of two authorities in particular: aḥmad al-būnī (d. 622/1225?), the greatest mage of islam, at least in his later reception, representing applied lettrism (i.e., letter magic); and ibn ʿarabī (d. 638/1240), the greatest mystical philosopher of islam, representing theoretical lettrism (i.e., letter metaphysics). the oeuvres of both authorities together thus represent the definitive synthesis of all the preceding lettrist currents; in their hands lettrism became the most quintessentially islamic of sciences, yet without losing any of its old occult potency—indeed, that potency was amplified, now combining both philosophical-scientific and spiritual-religious legitimacy. in short, by the 7th/13th century lettrism was emerging as a universal science, the marriage of ancient and modern, hellenic and islamic, the ideal vehicle for neoplatonic-neopythagorean philosophy on the one hand and the performance of sainthood on the other. significantly for our purposes here, the suficization of lettrism was accomplished by “esotericist reading communities,” as noah gardiner has called them, that coalesced around the writings of al-būnī in mamluk cairo and those of ibn ʿarabī in mamluk damascus over the course of the 7th/13th century.57 while these reading communities were highly secretive (hence the handle esotericist), at some point in the 8th/14th century al-būnī’s lettrist treatises in particular suddenly exploded on the cairene scene as favorite objects of elite patronage; production of manuscript copies of his works sharply increased in the second half of that century and remained relatively high through the end of the 9th/15th.58 in other words, the unprecedented elite reception precisely of suficized lettrism played a crucial role in the explosion of mamluk writerly culture; and cairo’s new status as intellectual hub of the islamicate world (as well as damascus to a lesser extent) meant that this western būnian-ibn ʿarabian science was rapidly propagated eastward by the many persophone scholars who came to the mamluk realm to study—including, of course, ibn turka. having initially come to cairo to study law, the isfahani scholar there became the star student of sayyid ḥusayn akhlāṭī (d. 799/1397), kurdish tabrizi lettrist-alchemist and personal physician to sultan barqūq (r. 784-92/1382-90). while his own surviving writings on lettrism are scattered and piecemeal, akhlāṭī nevertheless stands as the greatest occultist of his generation, pivot to a vast occultist network operative between anatolia and iran via cairo. most notably, he was responsible for training the two most influential and prolific occultist thinkers of the early 9th/15th century: ʿabd al-raḥmān al-bisṭāmī (d. 858/1454), chief architect of ottoman occultist imperial ideology;59 and ibn turka, who sought to fill the same role for the timurids.60 this, then, was the context in which middle period encyclopedists like ibn al-akfānī and shams al-dīn āmulī constructed their writing-centric classifications of knowledge. that of the former, a cairene physician-alchemist who perished in the black death epidemic of the 57. gardiner, “esotericism,” 43-46, 78-160. 58. ibid., 263-70, 347-50. 59. fleischer, “ancient wisdom”; gardiner, “esotericism,” 329-40. 60. melvin-koushki, “the quest,” 16-18, 47-49. i examine the political-imperial ramifications of this lettrist revolution in my forthcoming the occult science of empire in aqquyunlu-safavid iran: two shirazi lettrists. 59 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) mid-8th/14th century,61 is accordingly heavily occultist in tenor, this despite its avicennan framework; it posits an astrology-talismans-magic continuum62 as the very backbone of natural philosophy, running the epistemological-ontological gamut from celestial simple bodies to terrestrial or elemental composite bodies, and allowing the competent philosopher-scientist experiential control of the cosmos.63 despite his clear letter-magical proclivities, however, ibn al-akfānī’s highly succinct treatment of these sciences does not directly reflect the burgeoning popularity of specifically sufi lettrism; but that of his ilkhanid colleague does. as noted, āmulī’s encyclopedia offers a far fuller and more comprehensive treatment of the religious and rational sciences; the theory of knowledge and classificatory scheme it advances is unprecedented in the arabo-persian encyclopedic tradition as a whole. what makes the nafāyis al-funūn truly pivotal in the present context, however, is its status as the first encyclopedia to register a) the rise of sufism to sociopolitical hegemony, and b) the sanctification of occultism. āmulī flags these twin developments by first elevating the science of sufism (ʿilm-i taṣavvuf) to the status of supreme islamic science, equal in importance to all the other religious sciences (including jurisprudence, hadith and theology) combined, then designating lettrism the supreme sufi science.64 at the same time, he retains the category of sīmiyā, letter and talismanic magic, as an applied natural science, further classifying it as one of the ‘semitic sciences’ (ʿulūm-i sāmiyya)—i.e., positing a connection to hebrew kabbalah.65 yet even there he stipulates that proficiency in sīmiyā is predicated on, among other things, a mastery of astronomy (a mathematical science) and astrology (a natural science).66 āmulī’s sophisticated and nuanced classification here thus signals the emergence of lettrism as a simultaneously islamic, natural and mathematical science—that is to say, a universal science—and a defining feature of the religio-intellectual landscape of the islamicate heartlands from the mid-8th/14th century onward. 61. it should here be noted that the sudden explosion of elite interest in būnian lettrism occurred in tandem with the black death catastrophe, followed by recurring plague outbreaks and consequent famines for decades thereafter. this was hardly coincidental; i suggest that the apocalyptic conditions that prevailed in mamluk cairo, where half of the population perished virtually overnight, are precisely what created this elite demand for books on letter magic, presumably in a bid to establish a measure of control over a world politically, socially, economically and biologically in flux. 62. respectively, ʿilm aḥkām al-nujūm, ʿilm al-ṭilasmāt and ʿilm al-siḥr. 63. see melvin-koushki, “powers of one.” 64. nafāyis al-funūn, 2/91-110. 65. nafāyis al-funūn, 3/183. ibn al-akfānī gives an etymology of the term sīmiyāʾ (> gr. sēmeia) as deriving from the hebrew shem yah, ‘the name of god,’ indicating the science’s association with the divine names as loci of magical power (irshād al-qāṣid, 51). 66. nafāyis al-funūn, 3/191. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 60 seeing the text: ibn turka’s lettrist metaphysics of light the supernal pen is made of light and extends from heaven to earth.67 —ḥusayn vāʿiẓ kāshifī the eye, that is the window of the soul, is the principal way whence the common sense may most copiously and magnificently consider the infinite works of nature.68 —leonardo da vinci [v]ision is tele-vision, transcendence, crystallization of the impossible.69 —maurice merleau-ponty such was the state of the art when a young ibn turka left his native iran around 795/1393 to study shafiʿi law in cairo—and there was so intellectually captivated by sanctified ibn ʿarabian lettrism that he made it the focus of his life’s work.70 unlike the andalusian master, however, his prime exemplar, ibn turka sought to formally systematize this lettrist tradition so as to open it to philosophical-scientific-imperial use; to this end, he drew on his broad mastery of avicennan and illuminationist philosophy on the one hand and theoretical sufism on the other to synthesize a wholly unprecedented lettrist metaphysics of light. integral to this new system was ibn turka’s categorical assertion, equally unprecedented in the lettrist tradition, of the epistemological and ontological superiority of writing to speech, which he explicitly advanced as a framework for explaing the rise of islamicate writerly culture as culmination of the philosophia perennis. for all his reliance on mainstream avicennan-illuminationist philosophy, however, ibn turka sought to fundamentally undercut it by delegitimizing its exponents’ preoccupation with such concepts as existence (wujūd) or quiddity/essence (māhiyya). in several of his lettrist works he advances the premise that drove his intellectual project as a whole: these faux-universal concepts of avicennan-illuminationist philosophical speculation notwithstanding, only the letter (ḥarf) encompasses all that is and is not, all that can and cannot be; it alone is the coincidentia oppositorum (taʿānuq al-aḍdād); hence lettrism is the only valid form of metaphysics.71 67. this assertion is part of kāshifī’s explication, in his popular quran commentary mavāhib-i ʿaliyya, of god’s swearing by the pen in sūrat al-qalam (4/320): ḥaqq subḥāna-hu sūgand yād farmūd bi davāt u qalam va bi qalam-i aʿlā ki az nūr ast va ṭūl-i ū mā bayn al-samāʾ va-l-arż. ḥusayn vāʿiẓ kāshifī (d. 910/1505), sabzavari polymath extraordinaire, naqshbandi sufi and chief preacher of herat, was the most important writer on lettrism and the other occult sciences of late timurid iran, and author of the first thoroughgoingly lettrist tafsir, javāhir al-tafsīr, unfortunately unfinished, which features ibn turka as a source (see melvin-koushki, “the quest,” 261-67). on kāshifī’s asrār-i qāsimī, a grimoire that became hugely popular in the safavid period, see subtelny, “sufism and lettrism” (my thanks to professor subtelny for sharing a working draft of this article). 68. quoted in summers, judgment of sense, 73. 69. the visible and the invisible, 273. 70. as noted, his teacher in cairo was sayyid ḥusayn akhlāṭī, who dispatched his star student and fellow persophone scholar back to iran to promulgate lettrism among timurid elites. 71. that is to say, letter-number, as the coincidentia oppositorum, renders the immaterial material; unites 61 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) at the same time, the isfahani occult philosopher commandeers the distinctive avicennan doctrine of tashkīk al-wujūd, the transcendental modulation of existence, as the basic framework for his lettrist metaphysics. this doctrine was first proposed, in a form unknown to hellenic philosophy, by ibn sīnā (d. 428/1037) in his mubāḥathāt as a means of avoiding the conclusion that the essence (dhāt) of god, defined as the necessary existent (wājib al-wujūd), is composite of and dependent on the two concepts existence and necessity, which violates the principle of absolute divine oneness (waḥda) and selfsufficiency (istighnāʾ).72 it should be noted, however, that by tashkīk al-wujūd the shaykh al-raʾīs means only the transcendental modulation of the concept of existence (tashkīk fī mafhūm al-wujūd), not the reality of existence (tashkīk fī ḥaqīqat al-wujūd).73 in his upgrade of avicennism, suhravardī (d. 587/1191) accordingly enlarged the scope of this concept, proposing rather the doctrine of tashkīk al-nūr, the transcendental—and real, not conceptual—modulation of light, the ground of all being, as the basis for his essentialist answer to ibn sīnā.74 but it is only with naṣīr al-dīn ṭūsī (d. 672/1274) that the levels of such transcendental modulation, whether of existence or light, are formally identified as semantic; writing thus becomes the level of being furthest from extramental reality. in his seminal commentary on ibn sīnā’s al-ishārāt wa-l-tanbīhāt, an expansion of fakhr al-dīn rāzī’s (d. 606/1209) commentary on the same, ṭūsī asserts the following in explication of the ishāra on the relation between a term (lafẓ) and its meaning (maʿnā) as it pertains to logic:75 because there is a certain connection between a term and its meaning. i say: things possess being in extramental reality (al-aʿyān), being in the mind (al-adhhān), being in [spoken] expression (al-ʿibāra) and being in writing (al-kitāba). writing thus signifies [spoken] expression, which in turn signifies a meaning in the mind. both [writing and speech] are conventional signifiers (dalālatān waḍʿiyyatān) that differ as conventions differ, whereas mental meanings signify external [realities] in a natural manner that is always and everywhere the same. thus between a spoken utterance (lafẓ) and its meaning only an artificial connection obtains; hence his statement occult (bāṭin) with manifest (ẓāhir), first (awwal) with last (ākhir); makes the one many and the many one; marries heaven and earth. the verse he is the first and the last, the manifest and the occult (q 57:3) is hence the central motto of ibn turka and his lettrist colleagues. 72. treiger, “avicenna’s notion,” 329. 73. eshots, “systematic ambiguity of existence.” 74. on the place of ibn al-haytham’s (d. ca. 430/1039) theory of optics in islamicate discourses on vision see necipoğlu, “the scrutinizing gaze,” 34-40; on the metaphysics of light in its european receptions see e.g. cantarino, “ibn gabirol’s metaphysic of light”; lindberg, “kepler’s theory of light.” 75. the ishāra in full (al-ishārāt wa-l-tanbīhāt: al-manṭiq, pt. 1, 53-56): because there is a certain connection between a spoken word (lafẓ) and its meaning, such that the modalities of its utterance may affect those of its meaning, the logician must therefore be sure to deploy a term in its absolute sense, as it is in itself, undelimited by the usage (lugha) of any one group. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 62 a certain connection, for the only true connection (al-ʿalāqa al-ḥaqīqiyya) is that between a [mental] meaning and its extramental reality.76 here ṭūsī reiterates, in short, the standard conventionalist definition of writing as signifier of a signifier. (saussure would be pleased.) as sajjad rizvi has shown in his monograph on the subject, it is this avicennan-suhravardian-ṭūsian fourfold schema of the semantics of being that mullā ṣadrā (d. 1045/1635) drew on in formulating his signature doctrines of tashkīk al-wujūd and aṣālat al-wujūd, the two cornerstones of his radically existentialist philosophy. in his logical epitome, al-tanqīḥ fī-l-manṭiq, for instance, the safavid sage restates ṭūsī’s formulation essentially verbatim: ‘the being of a thing is extramental (ʿaynī), mental (dhihnī), uttered (lafẓī) or written (katbī).’77 the celebrated sadrian synthesis, usually taken to represent the culmination of all preceding philosophical and mystical currents in islam, sunni and shiʿi alike, would thus seem to provide for an adequate metaphysics of writing. yet we are still far from a properly lettrist metaphysics—necessarily radically anticonventionalist—wherein letters transcend the very categories of existence and essence themselves. we have seen that lettrism had become intellectually mainstream in iran by the ilkhanid period; given that philosophy was emphatically not a hermetically sealed discipline in the way it is in the euro-american academy, and philosophers were often acclaimed as powerful occultists in service of state and society (suhravardī, fakhr al-dīn rāzī and ṭūsī all being cases in point), we might therefore expect it to have been incorporated into philosophical discourse on the nature of writing during the three-century interval between ṭūsī and mullā ṣadrā. enter ibn turka. as i argue, his emanationist-creationist lettrist system may be said to pivot on the twin doctrines of aṣālat al-ḥarf, the ontological primacy of the letter, and tashkīk al-ḥarf, the transcendental modulation of the letter in written, verbal, mental and extramental form.78 that is to say, ibn turka sought in his challenge to philosophy to replace the avicennans’ wujūd and the illuminationists’ māhiyya and nūr with ḥarf in all respects, and found tashkīk a concept eminently suited to this end.79 ibn turka was clearly a master of the philosophical curriculum standard by the early 9th/15th century; his doctrine of tashkīk al-ḥarf should thus be considered an innovative critique of and formal alternative to the avicennan-suhravardian-ṭūsian model of the semantics of being, whose conventionalism it utterly rejects. in ibn turka’s reading of the world as text, letter-number is the uncreated, all-creative matrix of reality, transcending both being and essence—and hence the only conceivable subject of metaphysics. more to the point: letternumber, he argues, is a form of light eternally emanated from the one—and so his tashkīk al-ḥarf is equally tashkīk al-nūr, the signature illuminationist doctrine now reformulated in explicitly occultist-lettrist terms. 76. ibid., 53-54. see rizvi, mullā ṣadrā, 1. 77. al-tanqīḥ fī-l-manṭiq, 19; trans. in rizvi, mullā ṣadrā, 1-2 (slightly modified here). 78. the isfahani lettrist nowhere uses the terms aṣālat al-ḥarf and tashkīk al-ḥarf, though the connotation of each matches his philosophical position precisely; i suggest them here as useful heuristics. 79. mullā ṣadrā himself may be said to have simply replaced nūr with wujūd in his own formulation and reinforced the proofs offered by suhravardī (eshots, “systematic ambiguity,” 2). 63 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of letters ibn turka’s lettrist metaphysics of light, then, is entirely predicated on this fourfold tashkīk schema; the latter accordingly structures his most important lettrist works. for reasons of space only two will be examined here. his earliest such work is the persian treatise of letters (r. ḥurūf), written in shiraz in 817/1414 for the timurid (occult) philosopher-king iskandar sulṭān (r. 812-17/140914), grandson of temür (r. 771-807/1370-1405) and main competitor with shāhrukh (r. 807-50/1405-47) for control of iran.80 the r. ḥurūf divides lettrists into two broad camps: the ahl-i khavāṣṣ, concerned with the practical applications of the science, associated with al-būnī in particular; and the ahl-i ḥaqāyiq, concerned with its theoretical basis, associated with ibn ʿarabī in particular; the treatise provides for its royal patron a survey of the latter approach.81 the author then proceeds to lay out his core doctrine of the three (or rather four) descending levels of the letter, which alone constellate the chain of being in its emanation from the one, and allows for the ascent and descent thereof: spiritual-mental (maʿnavī lubābī), spoken-oral (lafẓī kalāmī) and written-textual (raqamī kitābī). (the fourth and highest extramental (ʿaynī) level is not assigned a separate section here, but is clearly operative.) as he states in the introduction: now three loci of self-manifestation (majlā) have been created for the letterform, through which it manifests and reveals the end and the essence of every thing. the first is the faculty of sight (baṣar), to which the ʿayn in the word ʿabd (ʿbd, servant) refers; the second is the heart (qalb), to which the bā in ʿabd refers; the third is the faculty of hearing (samʿ), to which the dāl in ʿabd refers. by this measure, then, the letter may be divided into three categories (qism): 1) the written-textual (raqamī kitābī) form, which through the agency of fingers and hands is given form upon the open spread of white pages and reveals realities to both sight (abṣār) and insight (baṣāyir) as its proper loci; the exponents of this mode are those possessed of hands and vision (ūlū l-aydī wa-l-abṣār) (q 38:45).82 2) the verbal-oral (lafẓī kalāmī) form, which through the agency of the tongue and the various points of articulation that modify the breath is embodied and 80. while he lost this contest to his more conservative, sunnizing uncle, iskandar sulṭān nevertheless stands as an early and important model for the new forms of universalist islamicate kingship, explicitly predicated on occult-scientific principles, that were developed in the post-mongol persianate world; see melvin-koushki, “early modern islamicate empire.” 81. on this treatise see melvin-koushki, “the quest,” 88-90; an edition and translation are provided at pp. 463–89. in it ibn turka refers to a major lettrist work in progress, likely to be identified with his k. al-mafāḥiṣ. he also refers to his important commentary on ibn ʿarabī’s fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam, unique among the host of commentaries on this text in its overtly lettrist approach, and completed in 813/1411, presumably for iskandar sulṭān as well (ibid., 112-13). 82. cf. r. shaqq-i qamar, 111, 116, where this phrase refers to the imams as repositories of all occult knowledge. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 64 expresses realities to the hearing (asmāʿ) and to reason (ʿuqūl) as its proper loci; its exponents are the folk of verbal remembrance (ahl al-dhikr) (q 16:43, 21:7). 3) the spiritual-mental (maʿnavī lubābī) form, which through the agency of the rational and imaginative faculties (quvvat-i ʿāqila u mutakhayyila) is analyzed within the broad realm of meaning with the heart as its proper locus; its exponents are those possessed of minds (ūlū l-albāb) (q 2:179, etc.): he gives wisdom to whomever he will, and whoso is given wisdom has been given much good; yet none remembers save those possessed of minds (q 2:269). each of these categories is specific to one of the three primary human faculties, to wit, the heart, the hearing, and sight. it is in this respect that quranic verses typically refer to all three together, usually giving precedence to either the heart (as in the verse surely in that there is a reminder to him who has a heart, or will give ear with a present mind (q 50:37), and the verse there is nothing his like; he is the all-hearing, the all-seeing (q 42:11)) or to the hearing (as in the verse and he appointed for you hearing, and sight, and hearts (q 16:78, 9:32, 67:23)). the first order reflects the fundamental and essential precedence of the heart with respect to the other members, and indeed with respect to all things in existence, whereas the second order reflects hearing’s precedence at the moment of creation, inasmuch as it was the faculty singled out to receive the [spoken] command be! (kun) from among the various members and faculties of perception. however, because the accepted usage in teaching (taʿlīm, tafhīm) involves giving precedence to that which is the most manifest (aẓhar)—as for example in the verse how well he sees! how well he hears! (q 18:26)—it is here more appropriate and useful to treat first the written form of the letters. (indeed, the fact that the imperative form is used in the verse just cited suggests precisely the objective of teaching.) yet it must be noted that despite the fact that its written form is more manifest and its spiritual form more occult (akhfā), the first is not self-evident and must be learned, whereas knowledge of the second need not be; that is to say, knowledge of the numbers and their degrees is innate, in contrast to knowledge of the written form of the letters and their shapes, which cannot be understood until they are learned. this is so because of a basic principle of divine oneness (tawḥīd), as those who have studied this know.83 here ibn turka, in short, overturns lettrist precedent by promoting the written form of the letters over the oral, which had long been awarded epistemological precedence in the tradition due to its association with prophetic revelation84—including by the ikhwān 83. r. ḥurūf, 478-79. 84. a similar dynamic long obtained among jewish kabbalists; as elliot wolfson observes in his magisterial language, eros, being (78): in spite of the persistent claim on the part of kabbalists to the oral nature of esoteric lore and practice—a claim always made in written documents—at least as far as historians are concerned there is little question that kabbalah as a historical phenomenon evolved in highly literate circles wherein writing was viewed as the principal channel for transmission and embellishment of the 65 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) al-ṣafāʾ themselves;85 his tashkīk schema even departs from ibn ʿarabī, who is aware of the ṭūsian formulation but assigns it little importance.86 most significantly, this new theoretical framework allows the isfahani lettrist to associate prophethood (nubuvvat) strictly with the spoken level of the letters, and sacral power or sainthood (valāyat), its actualization, with the written and mental both; ibn turka’s innovation here is his bold assertion of the superiority of written to spoken, of walāya to nubuwwa, to the same degree that vision is superior to all other physical senses: for light (nūr), unlike sound, is incorruptible and universal, the directest aperture onto the one. in so doing, he is giving lettrist form to the infamous ibn ʿarabian doctrine of the superiority of sainthood to prophethood.87 this lettrist physics-metaphysics of light in turn explains ʿalī b. abī ṭālib’s status as primary vector of walāya during the islamic dispensation, for he was responsible for perfecting the written shapes of the 28 (or 29) arabic letterforms, matrix of the uncreated quran, which alone allow for the transmission of words through time and space—and also inventor of the prognosticative mathematical science of jafr, which allows us to write the history of the future.88 in other words, ibn turka posits writing as simultaneously an exclusively alid patrimony and primary vehicle of the philosophia perennis, from adam to the end of history. at the same time, he holds number (ʿadad)—the mental-spiritual form of the letter—to represent the core of the prophetic revelation as actualized by the elite among the saints in every generation, including in the first place pythagoras as foremost disciple of solomon.89 yet here too ibn turka designates this perennial doctrine a special patrimony of the house of the prophet. as he states: [t]he ancient sages held the science of number to be the alchemy in whose crucible traditions. 85. as necipoğlu summarizes (“the scrutinizing gaze,” 31-32): the brethren regard hearing and sight as “the best and noblest of the five senses,” reminding their audience of the koranic affirmation that god endowed humans with the gift of “hearing, sight and hearts” (koran 23:78). nonetheless, their neoplatonic view of mimesis (recalling the parable of the cave) accords a superior status to hearing: the species that inhabit this world are only representations and likeness of forms (ṣuwar) and beings of pure substance that inhabit the higher world of the celestial spheres and heavens, “just as the pictures and images [al-nuqūsh wa-l-ṣuwar] on the surface of walls and ceilings are representations and likenesses for the forms” of animate beings of flesh and blood. 86. it should be noted that ibn ʿarabī offers no such consistent lettrist schema; in his al-futūḥāt al-makkiyya, for instance, the andalusian master refers twice in merest passing to ṭūsī’s formulation (1/45, 4/315). 87. see e.g. elmore, islamic sainthood, 147, 155-60. 88. r. ḥurūf, p. 481. i have discussed elsewhere the imamophilia intrinsic to the sunni lettrist tradition, especially in the timurid context (melvin-koushki, “the quest,” 69-77). it must also be emphasized in this connection that lettrist theory is necessarily predicated on the doctrine of the uncreatedness of the quran; ibn turka accordingly bemoans the contemporary popularity of zamakhsharī’s (d. 538/1144) kashshāf, singling out his failure to recognize the intrinsic ontological majesty of the quranic letters for special censure (melvinkoushki, “the quest,” 59, 54, 76, 116, 342). 89. see melvin-koushki, “the quest,” 315-20. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 66 all other sciences are produced and the elixir [productive] of all manner of rarities and marvels. the holy imam jaʿfar [al-ṣādiq] (upon him be peace) also greatly vaunted this science, and those who cleave to the threshold of his walāya have penned numerous works on the subject.90 but celestial-mathematical realities cannot be preserved except in written—which is to say, talismanic—form.91 ibn turka accordingly identifies the greatest exponents of the perennial philosophy, the imams and the ancients, together with their disciples in every age, with the quranic phrase ūlū l-aydī wa-l-abṣār: those possessed of hands and vision, or men of main and vision—to wit, the coterie of inspired thinkers who have preserved for posterity prophetically revealed neopythagorean-neoplatonic philosophy in written form. evidence suggests that from ibn turka onward this phrase entered common usage as a designation of sages and philosophers in general.92 the book of inquiries shortly after completing of letters, and again almost certainly at the instance of iskandar sulṭān, ibn turka began writing his magnum opus, the book of inquiries (k. al-mafāḥiṣ): the first arabic summa of islamic neopythagoreanism. this book, completed in 823/1420 and revised and expanded in 828/1425, represents the fullest expression of his lettrist metaphysics.93 as such, it massively expands on the fourfold schema first proposed in his earlier treatise, treating of the meanings of the letters according to their three forms, numerological (iḥsāʾī), symbological (kitābī) and phonological (kalāmī), as well as the letters as they are in themselves (fī anfusi-hā). as ibn turka elsewhere states, knowledge of these three forms is the sole preserve of the companions and true heirs of the prophet (aṣḥāb al-khātam wa-warathatu-hu)—i.e., those men of main and vision occupying the highest rank in his intellectual hierarchy, the imams and their lettrist followers.94 the primary purpose of this work, the author asserts, is to demonstrate the roots of 90. r. ḥurūf, 472. the alchemical references are here significant; ibn turka has in mind jābir b. ḥayyān in particular, whose science of the balance (ʿilm al-mīzān), the basis of jābirian alchemy, is fundamentally lettrist in approach (melvin-koushki, “the quest,” 180-82, 353). 91. in her discussion of calligraphy in deciphering the signs of god, schimmel emphasizes the talismanic and divinatory applications of the quranic text (152-54); and nasr observes (islamic art and spirituality, 30): “since the verses of the quran are powers or talismans, the letters and words which make possible the visualization of the quranic verses also play the role of a talisman and display powers of their own.” 92. in sharaf al-dīn yazdī’s munshaʾāt (85), for instance, ūlū l-aydī wa-l-abṣār is used in a letter written for ibrāhīm sulṭān b. shāhrukh (d. 838/1435) to denote the leading lights of the muslim community charged with the preservation and transmission of the quran. similarly, in his popular akhlāq-i jalālī (320-21) davānī applies the phrase to the ‘famed sages’ (ḥukamā-yi nāmdār), and in his r. khalq al-aʿmāl (68) to the al-aʾimma al-kibār, here meaning the leading theologians and philosophers (man mārasa ṣināʿataya l-ḥikma wa-l-kalām) who have dealt with the subject of the creation of human actions. it should be noted in this context that the shirazi philosopher, following ibn turka, also explicitly associates the written form of the letters with the men of main and vision (r. tahlīliyya, 65). 93. melvin-koushki, “the quest,” 97-99, 330-78. 94. melvin-koushki, “the quest,” 315-20. 67 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) all manifestation in the one and schematize the mechanics of multiplicity’s derivation therefrom. this information, in turn, will allow the adept to manipulate the letters—the uncreated, creative matrices through which the one self-manifests—to access and control every epistemological and ontological level of the cosmos, thus constituting a continuum from ultra-rarefied letter theory to purely practical letter magic. the supreme dignity of its object necessarily renders lettrism the supreme science: the subject of the science we have here in view is the one (al-wāḥid) insofar as it is one, regardless of the form in which it manifests in all the variety of its significations. the all-pervasive, all-encompassing nature of one with respect to existence being obvious, this science is therefore necessarily superior to all other sciences by an order of magnitude.95 he proceeds to make an invidious comparison between the object of lettrism and the concept of absolute existence (al-wujūd al-muṭlaq), the standard focus of avicennan philosophy; because this concept is only relevant to things that exist, and is forever relativized by its opposite, it can hardly serve as the object of a universal metaphysical science. only the letter encompasses all that is and is not, all that can and cannot be; it alone is the coincidentia oppositorum, the intellect’s only vehicle of return to the one.96 (it should be noted in this context that the isfahani lettrist is here updating the ibn ʿarabian concept of the creative imagination (khayāl) as all-encompassing faculty, making explicit what the andalusian master left relatively implicit by privileging the role of the letters with respect to the creative imagination’s mechanics and outworkings.97) in the exordium that opens the mafāḥiṣ, ibn turka therefore flatly declares metaphysics the supreme science, and lettrism—that branch of metaphysics focused on the one rather than existence or essence—the only valid form of metaphysics: the metaphysical sciences (al-ʿulūm al-ilāhiyya), in all their methodological varieties and with all their programmatic differences, represent the highest object to which [human] ambition aspires and the ultimate point to which the chargers of generous natures are led. but it is only a science that admits of not the slightest insinuation of doubt that can truly show the [different] rankings [of its practitioners] as the finest riders compete on its racing grounds for the palm: [the science of letters] … it is this [science] that god has spread out in the abode of his islam as groundcloth for the 95. ms majlis 10196 f. 53b. 96. see e.g. ms majlis 10196 ff. 55a, 58b, 76a; ibn turka cites the concept of the marriage of opposites variously as taʿānuq ḍiddayn, taʿānuq al-aṭrāf, majmaʿ li-l-ṭarafayn wa-muʿtanaq li-l-mutaqābilayn, etc. the latin term was coined, intriguingly, by ibn turka’s later contemporary nicholas of cusa (d. 1464); on the latter’s equally thoroughgoingly neopythagorean project see albertson, mathematical theologies. more generally, on the coincidentia oppositorum as a pivotal concept in the history of religions movement see wasserstom, religion after religion. 97. that is to say, letters, as the most fundamental of images, represent the atoms of the imaginal realm (ʿālam al-mithāl) (personal communication with william chittick). on the similar importance of the creative imagination to thinkers in late medieval and early modern south india, for example, see shulman, more than real. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 68 repast of his speech, favoring his servants with the varieties of growth that sprout forth from the ground of their aptitude at the banquets of his lawāmīm, feeding them so as to strengthen them and bring them to maturity with the delicacies of the doves of his ḥawāmīm, giving them to drink of [the water of] tasnīm so as to revive them to an everlasting life from the cups of his ṭawāsīn.98 he then classifies lettrist metaphysicians as historically belonging to one of three camps: 1) those focused on speech; 2) those focused on writing; and 3) those focused on number, the heirs of ʿalī b. abī ṭālib, inventor of jafr. while all access a measure of supernal truths with their chosen method, writing is far superior to speech, and number far superior to both—yet it has been curiously neglected. ibn turka therefore issues a call for scholars to return, in effect, to the neopythagorean project of the ikhwān al-ṣafāʾ, who in their rasāʾil likewise found all of human knowledge on the science of number. at the same time, he updates and fully islamicizes their model by synthesizing it with the ibn ʿarabian theory of walāya, then giving the whole a distinctively imamophilic-perennialist cast:99 how often have consummate and vigorous [thinkers] among the leading figures of this community sought to acquire [this science]; driven by the burning cravings of their aspiration, they were not willing to settle for the toughened, jerked meat left by those who have gone before but rather strove to reach ripe and succulent truths from the boughs of each second of each hour, from now to eternity. such individuals include those who make for the east of expansiveness and manifestation (basṭ, ẓuhūr) and succeed in picking the ripe fruits from the crown of the tree of his manifestation by way of speech (kalāmī), limiting their diet to this and seeking nothing further. they also include those who rather make for the west of constriction and occultation (qabḍ, khafāʾ) and are fortunate enough to amass priceless pearls from the submerged hoards of his manifestation by way of writing (kitābī)—and upon my life, it is the latter who inherit the choicest truths (khaṣāʾiṣ) from the holy seal (al-ḥaḍra al-khatmiyya).100 these include the oral (matluwwa) wealth he passed down 98. ms majlis 10196 f. 52a. the muqaṭṭaʿāt references here stand metonymically for lettrism as a whole. 99. while ibn turka’s sunni identity is not in doubt, it is testament to his lettrist-imamophilic proclivities that he breaks with ibn ʿarabī’s identification of the khātam al-walāya al-muṭlaqa/al-ʿāmma as jesus, in this appearing to follow the shiʿi mystical philosophers ʿalī b. sulaymān al-baḥrānī (d. ca. 670/1271), maytham b. maytham al-baḥrānī (d. after 681/1282) and ḥaydar āmulī (d. after 787/1385), who similarly awarded this status to ʿalī as part of their project to synthesize ibn ʿarabian theory with twelver theology (see al-oraibi, “rationalism in the school of bahrain,” 333-34). 100. the theme “west is best” similarly runs through ibn ʿarabī’s writings, and particularly in the ʿanqāʾ mughrib, where he identifies the mahdi, for example, with the ‘sun rising in the west’ (shams al-maghrib) as sign of the last hour (see elmore, islamic sainthood, 163-95). as ibn ʿarabī states in his r. al-intiṣār (trans. in ibid., 175): for the spiritual opening of the west (fatḥ al-maghrib) is unrivalled by any other opening, since its allotted existential time is the night (al-layl), and [the night] precedes the daytime (al-nahār) in the glorious scripture in every passage. in [the night] the ‘night-journey’ (al-isrāʾ) takes place for the prophets, and therein the spiritual benefits (al-fawāʾid) arise [for the saints], and the selfrevelation of the real shall come to pass for his servants … for the ‘virgin-secrets’ (abkār al-asrār) 69 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) to his heirs (aqrabīn), having himself inherited it from his noble forefathers, i.e., the preeternal speech (al-kalām al-qadīm) taught him by one terrible in power, very strong, [who] stood poised (q 53:5-6), as well as the new rarities he possessed, ripe fruits [unique] to the seal’s garden, i.e., the temporally-originated speech (al-kalām al-ḥadīth) that he read from the [eternal] tablet of he revealed to his servant what he revealed (q 53:10). god reward these [pioneers] on our behalf with the greatest reward. however, in restricting the path of superabundance to these two nodes, both among the seal’s most prized possessions, and making them the [only] path, [the leading scholars of the community] neglected the third [node], which is the rarest and choicest and serves to strengthen [the first two].101 it is through this last that the gate of veriest truth (ʿayn al-ṣawāb)102 is opened, and behind this gate are the treasuries of the seal’s glory and the protected space of his intimacy (qurb) which contain necklaces of precious jewels (ʿuqūd farāʾid al-jawāhir) and all else laid there in store. [the seal] collected all this and provisioned therewith his son [ʿalī b. abī ṭālib], the seal of sacral power ( walāya) and standard-bearer of understanding and guidance. these necklaces (ʿuqūd) are numerical knottings (al-ʿuqūd al-ʿadadiyya), the spiritual-intellectual form of the book that was sent down from the highest pen to the noble tablet. number (ʿadad), then, is the best means of acquiring sciences of great benefit and numerous as grains of sand, the primordial mine preserving the gems [at the core] of all the standard and mainstream sciences.103 as noted, the book of inquiries as a whole is structured according to the fourfold schema ibn turka first deployed in his of letters; but now the substance (mādda) of the letter is identified as light, which alone makes possible his revolutionary lettrist valorization of writing over speech. space does not here permit a full analysis of this extremely dense and complex work—naturally still unpublished and unstudied despite its status as a seminal work for centuries.104 for the purposes of the present study, however, a paraphrase of the introductory subsection of each of the four levels of the letter provides an adequate outline of ibn turka’s unprecedented lettrist metaphysics of light: are only ‘deflowered’ with us [in the west]. thereafter, they emerge before you in your east (mashriqu-kum) as ‘divorcees’ (thayyibāt) who have ended their period of waiting. then you marry them at the horizon of the orient. for we share equally in the pleasure of ‘marriage,’ but we [in the west, particularly] win the pleasure of ‘deflowering’! 101. cf. q 36:14: when we sent unto them two men, but they cried them lies, so we sent a third as reinforcement (fa-ʿazzaz-nā bi-thālithin). 102. ṣawāb (ṣwab) = 99. 103. ms majlis 10196 ff. 52a-b. note that ʿadad, translated here as ‘number,’ is also the standard term for arithmetic as part of the quadrivium. 104. a preliminary analysis is offered in melvin-koushki, “the quest,” 330-78. i am currently preparing a critical edition and translation of the mafāḥiṣ. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 70 section 1: on the mental form of the letters in order to analyze the cosmos at the macro level it is necessary to use the most general, comprehensive categories possible; hence the use in metaphysics of such concepts as existence (wujūd), oneness (waḥda), quiddity (māhiyya), etc. philosophers hold absolute existence (al-wujūd al-muṭlaq) to be the most comprehensive of all such general concepts. yet even by the philosophers’ own standard this concept cannot be all-encompassing, since it, like most philosophical concepts, is offset and relativized by its opposite, in this case forms of absolute nonexistence (al-aʿdām al-muṭlaqa); forms of relative existence are likewise counterbalanced by forms of relative nonexistence (al-aʿdām al-muḍāfa). in short, every positive category is twinned with its negative inversion. the sole exception to this rule is the concept of waḥda, the state of being one; because it cannot be thusly relativized, the one alone is all-encompassing. that is to say, every other concept, even multiplicity (kathra) itself, may be understood in terms of its singularity—it is a concept. it is the one that necessitates, qualifies and constitutes the many (al-kathīr); it alone is capable of being united with its opposite without impairing its essential integrity. furthermore, the concept of one and its ascending numerical degrees is wholly self-evident (badāha), unlike the concept of existence, whose supposedly self-evident status nevertheless requires demonstration. this is why all the revealed prophetic books dwell exclusively on the one, not on existence as such. let the researcher therefore set aside his various misconceptions and inquire into the matter of number, for it is the fountainhead of all the sciences, the quarry of all realities, an ocean of insights both manifest and occult.105 section 2: on the written form of the letters the written form is the most manifest (ajlā) of the letterforms and the most fixed in its manifestation. the author first counterposes the view that this distinction belongs rather to the spoken form of the letters, in that speech is more universal than writing—indeed, even animals communicate through sound—, whereas only the educated elite of humanity, very few in number (shirmidha khāṣṣa min aṣnāf al-insān), become capable of expressing themselves through writing after years of training and laborious effort, and must spend further years developing the methods of critical thought. ibn turka states in response to this that two considerations obtain here: 1) the prophetic mission must indeed rely on the spoken form of language in order to reach the greatest number of people, especially as its point is to exhort them to physical acts of piety; spoken words may also powerfully affect listeners 105. ms majlis 10196 f. 56a-b. ibn turka is here restating almost verbatim the declaration of the ikhwān al-ṣafāʾ at the beginning of their rasāʾil: ‘the science of number is the root of the sciences, the essence of wisdom, the foundation of knowledge and the [principal] element of all things’ (rasāʾil, 1/21–22; trans. in endress, “mathematics and philosophy,” 133). 71 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) precisely because they are fleeting. spoken letterforms are thus most appropriate to the prophetic mission. 2) by contrast, the responsibility to guide laid upon those possessed of sacral power (walāya) is far better suited to the written form of language, since it is only through this medium that the full complexity of that contained implicitly within the prophetic mode may be expounded, this in a form that endures and is capable of communicating to each generation the central revelatory truths (al-ḥaqāʾiq al-kashfiyya). the written form also has the distinction of being that form that fully intermixes (imtizāj) with the perception of it to the point of total identification (ittiḥād), unlike any other sensible form. this is because written letterforms are communicated to the light of vision (nūr al-baṣar) by light (ḍiyāʾ), and the meeting of separate rays of light results in total union rather than mere conjunction. thus one can see two clashing colors at the same time without either being denatured (fasād) by the other, unlike all other types of sensory data such as sounds, smells, textures and tastes, wherein clashing instances are mutually denaturing when they occur simultaneously; if one hears two inharmonious sounds at once, for example, one cannot make out either, since their medium is air rather than light. in other mediums discrete sensory data must follow in succession to be perceived properly, whereas visible things may be seen simultaneously and still maintain their integrity. written letterforms are thus not bodies and cannot clash, and for this reason they stand unique among sensory objects in their abstraction (tajarrud) from denaturing and obscuring material constraints (al-mafāsid al-hayūlāniyya wa-qādhūrāti-hā l-ẓulmāniyya). by the same token, spoken letterforms as communicated through airwaves (al-tamawwujāt al-hawāʾiyya) that pass with the elapsing of each moment are susceptible to such denaturing by virtue of their medium. in addition, the more descended (anzal) such forms are, the more they are complete, encompassing and comprehensive of special characteristics (akmal wa-ajmaʿ li-l-khaṣāʾiṣ wa-ashmal).106 section 3: on the spoken form of the letters while it is the written form of the letter alone that remains imprinted on the pages of time across the ages, all peoples from ancient times to the present laboring to record and preserve the choicest insights of humanity in the form of various sciences, the spoken form of the letter, for its part, encompasses every mode of expression, both rational and irrational, that gives voice to the consciousness of man and animal. the final level of descent from existential oneness (al-waḥda al-wujūdiyya)—itself the shadow of the true or divine oneness (al-waḥda al-ḥaqīqiyya)—down through the chain of being that comprehends all is described 106. ms majlis 10196 ff. 72b-73b. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 72 by the technical term of oneness of genus (al-waḥda al-jinsiyya). this level in turn involves descent through levels of its own through which its fullness is expressed, this descent terminating in the low genus (al-jins al-sāfil), its fifth and final stage ... this lowest level, moreover, is reflected in another type termed oneness of species (al-waḥda al-nawʿiyya), the category comprising man as microcosm (al-kawn al-jāmiʿ). when this process of descent is complete, the last level becomes host to the divine name the living (al-ḥayy) and site of the manifestation of its properties, as well as those of all the names subsidiary thereto. the first thing that is engendered from this blessed union (jamʿiyya) is a perfect existential form that discloses the contents of consciousness termed the voluntary voice (al-ṣawt al-ikhtiyārī); this is what first manifests from an animal upon birth … now it may be asked: how can vocal expression (ṣawt) be existential, for it is clear that it is but a transitory accident, a fleeting engendered thing? i answer: this refers only to the voluntary voice associated in the first place with the animal; it is evident that voice is necessarily attributable to existence when it constitutes a reality expressive of what is contained in the hidden levels of existence, yet remains an engendered accident insofar as it is borne to the hearing by soundwaves. the two properties are not mutually exclusive. this is the view of the speculative [philosophers and theologians] (ahl al-naẓar); in terms of sapiential insight (al-wajh al-ḥikmī), however, the voice is a corporeal representational form (ṣūra jasadāniyya mithāliyya) subsisting existentially in itself, regardless of the fact that it manifests through airwaves, in this respect being similar to light (ḍawʾ) (which topic was discussed in the section on the written form of the letter). for this reason the philosophers hold contradictory views on the subject, with some being of the opinion that the two are separate bodies. it is, however, clear to the intelligent that it cannot be a body qualified by flowing and moistness (ruṭūba) and subject to superficial alterations. given this premise, then, know that the spoken form of the letter is an accidental form pertaining to the voice and compounded of parts and vocalizations that serve to distinguish [utterances] according to context. this may be known from the fact that air, due to its subtle and balanced nature, is uniquely fitted to enter the kingdom of the human constitution as servant, there to wait upon its caliph, the holy secret (al-laṭīfa al-qudsiyya), and withdraw upon its command arrayed in robes of light. thus no majlis or other gathering is worth the name if luminous words be lacking. the quranic reference here: surely good deeds will drive away evil deeds; that is a remembrance unto the mindful (q 11:114). that is to say, good things—the light of existence—must needs drive away evil things—the darkness of nonexistent engendered beings. insofar as the spoken form of the letter represents speech, then, it conveys the holy lights that negate the darkness of the material realms. it is for this reason that most of the religious duties god imposes on his servants have to do with this spoken 73 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) form, such as ritual prayer and other forms of worship—this fact alone suffices to indicate its great dignity.107 section 4: on the letters as they are in themselves, i.e., the material substance (mādda) underlying the letters’ three forms as discussed above having discussed the three aspects of the letters together with the properties, effects, accidents and concomitants of each—this discussion representing the choicest intellectual fruits of the age and providing the framework for extracting exalted types of wisdom from the revealed heavenly letters—, we must now turn to the letters themselves to explicate their supreme eminence in the sensible realms of engendered existence; for the letters are the straight path for all seekers. every fixed substance and transient accident that exists in the visible world falls into one of two categories. the first comprises those that are luminous (nūrānī), i.e., those which are apparent in themselves and manifest other objects through their effects, such as the sun. the second comprises those that are dark (ẓulmānī), i.e., those which are nonapparent in themselves and obscure other objects, such as gross bodies (ajrām kathīfa). given this premise, it will be clear to anyone with a modicum of discernment that only things that are in the first category may serve to provide us new information about what is unknown. however, the first category comprises many subcategories, since substances and accidents differ widely in the extent to which they furnish such information. some things only illuminate their immediate surroundings, such as a lamp, while others illuminate all sensible objects, such as the sun and moon. despite their difference in degree, however, these two instances do not fundamentally differ in that both reveal objects to the perception without themselves perceiving; this category therefore represents the first level of light (nūr). the second level of light comprises those things that are capable of perceiving objects in their own right as well as making the same objects perceptible to other things, such as the light of vision (nūr al-bāṣira) with respect to colors and luminosities. this level is superior to the first, yet is still incapable of fully expressing the category of light: for such things cannot perceive themselves nor occulted or absent objects, and those objects they do perceive they frequently perceive inaccurately—moving things as motionless, large things as small, etc. the third level of light comprises that which is capable of perceiving itself as well as all other existents, whether sensory or immaterial, present or absent, occult or manifest, and of making such objects perceivable to others: this is the intellect or reason (al-ʿaql). yet it too, despite its great facility in revealing objects as they are, suffers from a certain incapacity in fully expressing the divine name light (al-nūr), since by its nature it tends towards what is interior (buṭūn) and hence is best able to perceive universals and the categories of transcendence and incomparability (taqdīs, tanzīh); when it attempts to analyze that which is external (ẓāhir), however, 107. ms majlis 10196 f. 83a-b. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 74 involving rather a comprehensive awareness (jamʿiyya) of engendered particulars and the category of similarity (tashbīh), it is incapable of doing so directly and must rely upon other faculties. given the necessity of such reliance, reason cannot but fall prey to various types of ambiguity and confusion (talabbus, tashawwush) and thereat hesitate and vacillate (taraddud, tadhabdhub). this is because the faculties upon which reason relies are often at cross purposes with each other, which leads to conflicting and contradictory data (taqābul, taʿāruḍ). more, in seeking the assistance of these faculties reason’s own power is compromised and it cannot maintain its control over them; they rather interfere even in the arenas proper to reason and confuse its perception, such that it is rarely able to carry out its office free of doubt. finally, the fourth level of light comprises that which is able to reveal things as they are in an absolute sense, and pertains solely to the revealed heavenly form which is wholly unsusceptible to error from within or without: this is the letter. to it alone belongs the all-comprehensive sublimity (al-ʿuluww al-iḥāṭī) that allows it to transcend all dichotomies (mutaqābilāt), through it alone are the scales of judgment preserved from any deviation or irregularity of measurement proper to most engendered beings. for every nature (ṭabīʿa), excepting the letter itself, must needs occupy one of two opposed categories (mutaqābilayn). the letter therefore stands to all dichotomies in the manner described by the verse: praise be to god who has sent down upon his servant the book and has not assigned unto it any crookedness (q 18:1). for this reason the letter is uniquely capable of making perceptible not only things that exist (mawjūdāt) but also things that do not or cannot exist (maʿdūmāt, mumtaniʿāt), and this in equal measure. it alone may reveal the absolute (al-iṭlāq) that otherwise transcends all perception and thought. the preeminence of the letters is such that god has included them (i.e., the muqaṭṭaʿāt) among those holy substances he sent down to his servants by way of his prophets to guide them to felicity. the letter is the enlightening elixir (al-iksīr al-munīr); were a drop of it to strike the vaults of dark bodies that fill the realms of contingency (al-ʿawālim al-imkāniyya), it would forthwith dispel their intrinsic darkness and transform their substance from base to noble, rendering those gross bodies pure light to illumine the dark realms of matter and becoming.108 as ibn turka argues, in sum, every level of the letter is a construct of eternally emanated divine light, both ontologically and epistemologically—even speech. yet writing is its most manifest form, for it alone is apprehended by vision, that human faculty proper 108. ms majlis 10196 ff. 88b-90a. after citing these demonstrative analogies and rhetorical-poetical proofs as to the ontological and epistemological supremacy of the letter, ibn turka proceeds to list selected quranic verses and hadiths that support his point, followed by sayings from the companions and successors (including ʿalī and ḥusayn) and from the righteous salaf, such as aḥmad b. ḥanbal and al-shāfiʿī. the author ends the opening section of part four by singling out zamakhsharī’s failure to recognize the intrinsic majesty of the quranic letters for special censure. the remainder of part four pursues this theme by applying it in various ways to the three forms of the letters established above. it treats successively the supreme name allāh (alh), the basmala, and various grammatical and rhetorical considerations, ending with an examination of the ontological and epistemological status of prosody. 75 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) to light and hence most universal. for all that plato is lionized by lettrists like ibn turka as preeminent exponent of the philosophia perennis, then, and original model of the theosized sage, in the early 9th/15th century they finally called his phaedrean bluff: far from being the guarantee of philosophical integrity, speech is metaphysically the least reliable form of the letter; but its written-numerical form—epitomized by the quranic muqaṭṭaʿāt—is the very key to the cosmos.109 lettrism and sociocultural history needless to say, ibn turka’s revolutionary metaphysics of writing was hardly worked out in vacuum, but rather reflective of equally sweeping sociocultural and political changes taking place in the islamicate heartlands during the 8th/14th and 9th/15th centuries—including in the first place the burgeoning of arabo-persian writerly culture. tabulating such changes is of course well beyond the scope of this article, which simply proposes ibn turkian lettrism as their relevant metaphysical context. nevertheless, the pairing of intellectual history with sociocultural or political history i called for above has the potential to enrich, perhaps even transform, many current scholarly lines of inquiry. though their ramifications cannot be pursued here, those relevant to the study of middle period islamicate writerly culture include: post-mongol imperial ideology i have elsewhere argued at length that ibn turkian lettrism, together with astrology, was an essential component in the construction of a timurid universalist imperial ideology; this dual astrological-lettrist platform in turn served as template for the aqquyunlu, safavid, mughal and ottoman versions of the same. that is to say, post-mongol islamicate imperialism, to a far greater degree than its pre-mongol iterations, was heavily occultist in tenor. this political transformation began under the ilkhanids, as reflected, for instance, in āmulī’s nafāyis al-funūn, but only became systematized in the early 9th/15th century. ibn turka played a pivotal role in this process: he almost certainly wrote his of letters and began his book of inquiries for iskandar sulṭān, his first timurid patron, who despite an abortive reign came to stand as model of universal (occult) philosopher-kingship, a status pointedly claimed by the millennial sovereigns of the early modern persianate world. as such, the theory and practice of post-mongol islamicate imperialism simply cannot be understood without reference to lettrism.110 furthermore, the sharp increase in elite patronage of occultist texts during this period significantly impacted writerly and manuscript culture: works on lettrism and the other occult sciences constitute as much as ten percent of the massive corpus of surviving 109. this is not to imply a direct reception of the phaedrus in arabic, which does not appear to have occurred (gutas, “greek philosophical works,” 811). 110. i develop this theme in melvin-koushki, “early modern islamicate empire.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 76 manuscripts, still almost wholly untapped.111 ibn turka’s philosophical-scientific works on lettrism aside, even those of his treatises that are more strictly literary in tenor stand as index of this dramatic shift in postmongol imperial ideology—as well as the unconscionable neglect in scholarship to date of sources of the closest pertinence to this theme. his debate of feast and fight, naturally still unpublished and unstudied, is here representative. completed in 829/1426 for the timurid prince-calligrapher bāysunghur b. shāhrukh (d. 837/1434), the munāẓara-yi bazm u razm is an ornate persian work that expressly imperializes the venerable feast vs. fight (i.e., court vs. military) trope within a lettrist-literary framework. for the first time in the centuries-old arabo-persian munāẓara tradition, that is, which had never before allowed a debate’s resolution, ibn turka marries the opposites in a manner clearly meant to be instructive to his timurid royal patron: he is to perform the role of lord love (sulṭān ʿishq), transcendent of all political-legal dualities.112 this lettrist mirror for princes is thus not simply unprecedented in persian literature, a typical expression of the ornate literary panache of these scientists of letters, but also serves as key to timurid universalist imperial ideology itself in its formative phase.113 history of science ibn turka and his student and friend, sharaf al-dīn ʿalī yazdī (d. 858/1454), the timurid dynastic historian and mathematician, were friends and colleagues to the preeminent astronomer qāżīzāda rūmī (d. 835/1432), first director of ulugh beg’s (r. 811-53/1409-49) samarkand observatory; yazdī even worked there for a time. now historians of science acclaim qāżīzāda, together with his student ʿalī qūshchī (d. 879/1474), as being responsible for the revolutionary mathematization of astronomy by ridding it of aristotelian physics— the freeing of astronomy from philosophy, as jamil ragep has summarized their project.114 the same scholar has argued that this newly mathematized astronomy served in turn as a primary inspiration for copernicus.115 these remarkable findings aside, the current historiography of science nevertheless wholly abstracts these timurid astronomers from their lived, sociopolitical context—a context in which lettrists and mathematicianastronomers appear to have professed a common, expressly neopythagorean purpose, maintaining a correspondence with one another and sharing their treatises to this end. in 111. see melvin-koushki and pickett, “mobilizing magic.” 112. it is here significant that al-qalqashandī (d. 821/418)—ibn turka’s contemporary and fellow resident of cairo—penned for one amir abū yazīd al-dawādār al-ẓāhirī, favorite of sultan barqūq and like bāysunghur a skilled calligrapher, a debate on the variant theme of sword vs. pen (mufākharat al-sayf wa-l-qalam) that rather concludes with both parties formally making peace of their own accord and declaring their perfect equivalence (ṣubḥ al-aʿshā, 14/231-40). barqūq, of course, was likewise akhlāṭī’s patron, and seems to have had a keen interest in the occult sciences in general and lettrism in particular. 113. for an edition and translation of this work see my forthcoming the lettrist treatises of ibn turka; for an analysis see my forthcoming “the coincidentia oppositorum imperialized: ibn turka’s munāẓara-yi bazm u razm (1426) as a lettrist mirror for timurid princes.” 114. “freeing astronomy.” 115. saliba advances a similar thesis in his islamic science. 77 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) such a context, in other words, it was only natural for a neopythagorean like qāżīzāda— or kepler after him—to seek to mathematize the cosmos; and his warm friendship, from childhood, with ibn turka cannot but have shaped his thinking.116 it will be recalled that the isfahani lettrist began pushing precisely for a return to a mathematical cosmology, this in his mafāḥiṣ, in 823/1420: number as key to the cosmos and highest expression of walāya. in the same year construction of the samarkand observatory was begun. there is thus every reason to suspect that qāżīzāda had read and taken inspiration from the book of inquiries, and his letter thanking ibn turka for sending him a copy of the latter’s lettrist sharḥ al-basmala, dedicated to ulugh beg, is extant. indeed, there survives a great deal of ibn turka’s correspondence with the spiritual, intellectual and political elites of his day, which allows for a reconstruction of the sociopolitical networks in which he and his colleagues and students moved—an islamicate republic of letters, as evrim binbaş has called these networks.117 the explosion of islamicate writerly culture, in short, also entailed an upsurge in epistolary culture; we may therefore speak of scientific-philosophical networks in the islamicate world, just as later emerged in europe. such social networks, then, are the proper context for studying mathematical astronomers like qāżīzāda rūmī—together with their lettrist colleagues. comparative intellectual history i noted above the remarkable degree of intellectual continuity between the islamicate and christianate realms in the early modern period, with lettrism/kabbalah as a major vector. why the sudden obsession with world as text in 15th-century iran and italy? scholars have yet to explain this signal cultural shift, common to the mediterranean zone, or identify its mechanics. while a few european scholar-occultists, like ramon llull (d. 1316), did know some arabic, there is no evidence of direct east-west transmission before the 17th century,118 and certainly not persian-latin (though perhaps persiangreek); rather, islamic and then reconquista spain would seem to be the pivot.119 that ibn ʿarabī, the greatest lettrist theoretician in islam to that point, was himself an andalusi is telling in this context. although very little research has been done on the relationship 116. melvin-koushki, “powers of one.” on kepler as neopythagorean see e.g. hallyn, the poetic structure of the world. 117. see his intellectual networks in timurid iran, which focuses on yazdī as timurid historian and committed lettrist. 118. exceptionally, the jesuit polymath athanasius kircher (d. 1680), “the last man who knew everything,” devotes a full chapter of his celebrated oedipus aegyptiacus (rome, 1652-54, 2.1/361-400) to cabala saracenica et agarena, saracenic-hagarenic (i.e., islamic) kabbalah, subtitling it de superstitiosa arabum, turcarumque philosophia hieroglyphica; it immediately follows a chapter on hebrew kabbalah (cabala hebræorum) (my thanks to liana saif for alerting me to this text; see stolzenberg, egyptian oedipus). 119. the eastern byzantine-ottoman connection was presumably also an important vector for the transmission of islamicate occultism, and perhaps even lettrism, to (greek) christendom, though this possibility has been little studied. most notably, gemistos plethon (d. 1452) himself, the great byzantine paganizing neoplatonist, seems to have become acquainted with the new brethren of purity during his purported sojourn in ottoman territory; see siniossoglou, “sect and utopia.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 78 of kabbalah to lettrism, the two currents seem to have coevolved from the beginning of the islamic period, reaching maturity together in 6th/12th-century islamic spain.120 with the reconquista, however, and the ultimate expulsion of jews and muslims from spain, kabbalah was carried north and east to france and italy, while lettrism was carried due east to egypt and syria, and thence the persianate world. (ibn turka, again, became a lettrist in cairo.) the sudden presence of jewish kabbalists in italy in particular led to the invention of christian kabbalah by pico in the late 15th century, which neopythagorean discipline would go on to inspire the most feted thinkers of early modern europe—as well as, in some part, the doctrine of sola scriptura itself, war-cry of the protestant reformation. it is just as well that hebrew kabbalah and not arabic lettrism was transmitted to europe; unlike the other arabic occult sciences received so eagerly in the latinate world, by the 7th/13th century lettrism—the most islamic of the occult sciences—was wholly predicated on the ontological supremacy of the quran. this would clearly have been a sticking point for christian occultists, had they been aware of lettrism as a science; they therefore turned to the hebrew bible instead as key to the cosmos. this slight divergence notwithstanding, the fact remains: something happened in islamic spain to engender the common lettrist-kabbalist cosmological doctrine of the two books, which by the 10th/16th century was espoused by thinkers as far afield as delhi and london, paris and shiraz. literary culture the 9th/15th century likewise saw the florescence of highly “artificial” persian poetic genres in iran, including in the first place the muʿammā or logogriph and the qaṣīda-yi maṣnūʿ. although both have long been cited by scholars as proof of timurid-turkmen cultural decadence, paul losensky in particular has shown them to rather epitomize the period’s structuralist-textualist turn, bent on the codification and amplification of the whole of the persian poetic tradition.121 but whence this new obsession with the written form of poetry, this ubiquitous interest in names? to what extent was the ‘fresh style’ (ṭarz-i tāza) then emergent in persian poetical practice and dominant by the safavidmughal period informed by the new lettrist-semiological sensibility sweeping the persophone world? whence many of its literary stars’ determination to ‘speak the new’ (tāza-gūʾī)—and render it in complex visual form?122 i have observed elsewhere that the muʿammā in particular, far from being an empty pastime for vapid litterateurs, was reconfigured by ibn turka’s student and friend sharaf al-dīn yazdī in his seminal treatise on the subject, embroidered robes (ḥulal-i muṭarraz), which explicitly presents the logogriph as a useful skill in the lettrist’s technical repertoire—an immediate, poetic means of analyzing a person’s name in order to discern their character, perhaps even their fate.123 (similarly, chronograms, properly constructed, offer insight into the texture of history.) logogriphs were most commonly deployed as 120. ebstein, mysticism and philosophy in al-andalus; anidjar, “our place in al-andalus.” 121. welcoming fighānī, 154-64. 122. ibid., 198-205, et passim. 123. melvin-koushki, “the quest,” 379-89; binbaş, intellectual networks, 48, 81-89. 79 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) social calling cards, to be sure; but their extreme popularity testifies to a broader social consciousness, informed by influential timurid lettrists like ibn turka and yazdī, that the world is semantic, and hence deconstructable—and reconstructable—at a formal level. the same observation may be extended to contemporary mamluk arabic literary culture, wherein a preoccupation with the formal also prevailed as expression of a general mamluk “linguistic consciousness” that achieved the “poetization of everyday life.”124 it is hardly an accident in this context, then, that ibn turka himself was a leading exponent of the hybrid mamluk-timurid ornate literary culture of the early 9th/15th century.125 arts of the book as is well known, patronage of the arts of the book, especially calligraphy and painting, boomed under the timurids. responding to this cultural transformation, by the end of the timurid period historians began to pay far more attention to calligraphers and painters, from the reign of shāhrukh onward, than had ever before been merited; and in the 10th/16th century, under the successor safavids, an entirely new art-historical genre was born: the album preface.126 this genre is naturally of primary importance for understanding timurid-safavid writerly-artistic culture, and has been celebrated by islamic art historians as such; i accordingly look briefly at two safavid album prefaces in the next section to gauge the extent to which their discourse on writing exhibits lettrist influences. for now, however, i will simply observe that lettrists have here again been wholly elided in the historiography on timurid-safavid arts of the book; for reasons that should now be obvious, they must not be. the abovementioned timurid prince bāysunghur b. shāhrukh, for instance, achieved renown as a calligrapher; he also commissioned one of ibn turka’s most important lettrist treatises, query of kings (r. suʾl al-mulūk), wherein the isfahani thinker lays out his vision for a timurid occultist imperialism (as in his debate of feast and fight, written for the same prince). ibn turka’s valorization of the category ūlū l-aydī wa-labṣār, men of hands and vision, would also seem to be highly significant in this calligraphic context. by the same token, ibn turka’s unprecedented declaration of the epistemologicalontological superiority of sight to hearing, on strictly lettrist grounds, can be read as a 124. bauer, “mamluk literature,” 109, 130. 125. melvin-koushki, “the quest,” 379-407. ibn turka’s sharḥ-i naẓm al-durar is a case in point: it represents the first persian adaptation of the new mamluk anthology-as-commentary genre first developed by ibn nubāta (d. 768/1366) and emulated by al-ṣafadī (d. 764/1363) and ibn ḥijja al-ḥamawī (d. 837/1434), the isfahani lettrist’s contemporary. it is also significant in this connection that the mafāḥiṣ ends precisely with a discussion of prosody (ʿarūḍ). most notably, malik al-shuʿarāʾ bahār (d. 1370/1951) presents ibn turka as one of the greatest stylists of ornate persian prose (nasr-i fannī) of the 9th/15th century, and identifies him as the first arabic and persian writer to use an ornate literary (adabī) style for scientific (ʿilmī) subjects (sabk-shināsī, 3/352; he devotes a separate section to ibn turka at 3/233-34). 126. roxburgh, prefacing the image, 125, et passim. it bears noting that the album preface derives from the taẕkira preface as parent genre, and so the latter is of equal salience here. nor is it incidental in this connection that dawlatshāh samarqandī’s (d. 900/1494 or 913/1507) taẕkirat al-shuʿarā—the model for most subsequent instances of the genre—valorizes ibn turka and yazdī as the two most prominent intellectuals of shahrukhid iran (melvin-koushki, “the quest,” 17). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 80 preface most appropriate to the burgeoning of persianate visual culture from the timurid period onward. that is: it is hardly an accident that the advent of ibn turkian lettrist hyperstructuralism directly preceded that culture’s embrace of hyperrealism.127 popularization as konrad hirschler has shown, textualization and popularization were interdependent processes in the arabophone west from the 7th/13th century onward.128 the same happened, of course, in the persophone east—and within the high occultist tradition itself. that is to say, the esotericist reading communities that coalesced around the writings of al-būnī in cairo and ibn ʿarabī in damascus during the 7th/13th century gave way to increasing levels of elite patronage for the production of copies of occult-scientific texts from the mid-8th/14th century onward; responding to this elite interest, lettrists like ibn turka and ʿabd al-raḥmān al-bisṭāmī wrote their most influential works in a persian or arabic style accessible and attractive to their royal patrons. both al-bisṭāmī’s arabic works on lettrism, encyclopedic in the signature mamluk style, and ibn turka’s persian and arabic treatises on the same, pellucidly clear and systematic, fly in the face of the perennial injunction to secrecy pervading the islamicate occultist tradition to that point.129 in other words, over the course of the 8th/14th century and especially the early 9th/15th occultism was effectively de-esotericized to an unprecedented extent.130 i suggest that this remarkable development was part and parcel of the textualization-popularization process taking place in the mamluk-timurid realms during this period.131 moreover, in sharḥ-i naẓm al-durar, his hybrid mamluk-timurid ornate persian commentary on the al-tāʾiyya al-kubrā of ibn al-fāriḍ (d. 632/1235), a major teaching text of the ibn ʿarabī school, ibn turka applies his tashkīk al-ḥarf schema to the question 127. on the neoplatonic, aristotelian and sufi discourses increasingly used to celebrate and promote this visual culture see necipoğlu, “the scrutinizing gaze.” her usage in this context of the term hyperrealism, as versus european renaissance naturalism (see n. 44 above), is not to be confused with, for example, its application to the critical theory of jean baudrillard (d. 2007), who posited history as simulation model (see e.g. the illusion of the end, 7). on the tired theme of islamic iconoclasm, nigār ẕaylābī has recently argued that early islamic prohibitions on painting had solely to do with its association with the manufacture of idols on the one hand and talismans on the other, and hence did not hinder the development of persian book painting in particular (“payvand-i ṭilismāt u ṣūratgarī dar islām”). i here argue, however, that it was precisely the occultist renaissance in the islamicate world from the 8th/14th century onward that partially inspired and informed emergent persianate visual culture. 128. the written word, 112. 129. where al-bisṭāmī seeks to present the lettrist tradition as exhaustively as possible, however, ibn turka mentions but few authorities (ibn ʿarabī, saʿd al-dīn ḥamuvayī, jābir b. ḥayyān), and is far more concerned to rationalize and systematize the tradition for philosophical-scientfic-imperial use. 130. gardiner suggests the descriptor “post-esotericist,” given that the formerly esoteric nature of the occult sciences only added to their prestige during this period (“esotericism,” 55); see n. 32 above. 131. similar arguments have been made with respect to the later impact of mass printing on language and literary practice and form (my thanks to mana kia for this observation). on printing’s transformation of traditional scholarship in the late 13th/19th and early 14th/20th century, for example, see el shamsy, “islamic book culture.” 81 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of popularization. he there summarizes his arguments as presented above, arguing for the primacy of sight vis-à-vis hearing: the latter is biased toward the spiritual realm and therefore cannot render a wordform in its fullness, unlike vision, which registers spiritual and physical objects with equal accuracy.132 at the same time, the faculty of hearing is the only means whereby the illiterate masses may be spiritually enlightened—hence the orality of prophecy. ibn turka therefore deems the recent explosion in production of sufi poetry to herald a new age of human development: for the masses, who constantly listen to this poetry performed to music, now have access to accurate knowledge of the structure of reality, which is therefore no longer the preserve of the intellectual and spiritual elite.133 aqquyunlu and safavid receptions the implications of incorporating ibn turkian lettrism into the sociocultural and political historiography of persianate societies are thus far-reaching indeed. what, then, of post-timurid intellectual history? did ibn turka have heirs in the later islamicate philosophical tradition? and to what extent was his metaphysics of writing mainstreamed in persianate scholarly culture as a whole? to understand the receptions of ibn turka in the persianate world in the centuries after his death, we must first bracket out his receptions in 20th-century scholarship, iranian and euro-american alike, which have served only to occlude and elide his occult philosophy as sketched above. in the influential reading of henry corbin and seyyed hossein nasr, ibn turka is but a sufi-shiʿi thinker serving as a modest, nondescript link in the intellectual chain of ascent from naṣīr al-dīn ṭūsī to mullā ṣadrā; as i have shown in detail elsewhere, such a designation radically misrepresents the isfahani lettrist’s project— he was certainly neither sufi nor shiʿi.134 similarly, ʿallāma ṭabāṭabāʾī (d. 1402/1981) celebrates ibn turka in his al-mīzān as a preeminent synthesizer of avicennan philosophy and theoretical mysticism (ʿirfān), ranking him in this regard with fārābī and suhravardī; that is to say, he recognizes him as a neoplatonist, but not as a neopythagorean, and in no way an occultist.135 departing somewhat from this consensus, the late muḥammadtaqī dānishpazhūh (d. 1417/1996), while more willing to acknowledge ibn turka’s lettrist commitments, declared him rather the ‘spinoza of iran.’136 (ʿabd al-ḥusayn zarrīnkūb (d. 1420/1999), in response, took issue with this title as being misrepresentative of ibn 132. sharḥ-i naẓm al-durr, 38-39. 133. melvin-koushki, “the quest,” 401. note that in early modern persian taẕkiras poets are routinely portrayed as having access to supernal truths (my thanks to mana kia for this observation). cf. thomas bauer’s proposal that mamluk literature represents a shift to a participational aesthetics away from the monumental representationalism standard in the abbasid period (“‘ayna hādhā min al-mutanabbī!’”). 134. melvin-koushki, “the quest,” 6-8. 135. al-mīzān fī tafsīr al-qurʾān, 5/282-84. his association of ibn turka with suhravardī is not entirely inappropriate, however, given that, as i argue, the former commandeered the latter’s doctrine of tashkīk al-nūr for lettrist purposes. 136. “majmūʿa-yi rasāʾil-i khujandī,” 312; specifically, he asserts ibn turka to be the ‘spinoza of iran’ to rhetorically underscore the necessity of publishing and studying his works. needless to say, it is a rather ironic choice, given spinoza’s own project, essentially antithetical to ibn turka’s, of biblical criticism. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 82 turka’s mystical and lettrist concerns.137) all such readings are well-intentioned, to be sure, but err in their assumption that lettrism forever remained a minor subset of sufism—in this ignoring a massive body of evidence to the contrary, including the arabo-persian encyclopedic tradition itself. for ibn turka’s project is expressly revolutionary: he sought to demote sufism and philosophy both from their wonted positions at the top of the epistemological hierarchy and install his lettrist metaphysics-physics in their place.138 for all that this basic point is lost on modern scholars, it was manifestly clear to his contemporaries and heirs throughout the persianate world; and these include a number of thinkers far more feted in the scholarship than ibn turka himself. indeed, the best index of the centrality of lettrism to ibn turka’s project is the fact that he was received solely as a lettrist until the 13th/19th century.139 nor was the scope of his influence limited to iran during his own lifetime and after; in one later work, for instance, he declares himself a seeker of knowledge whose writings are borne abroad by the north and east winds and are well received in all regions and on all shores, with travelers from india (hindustān) and anatolia being dispatched in search of copies of his treatises and books, and whose students come to him from all lands, including shiraz, samarkand, anatolia and india (hind).140 in other words, ibn turka’s lettrist corpus, like al-būnī’s before it, quickly emerged as an important node in the explosion of persianate manuscript culture; many early copies of his mafāḥiṣ may indeed be found as far afield as istanbul,141 and lettrist treatises like the r. ḥurūf were equally popular—it is included, for instance, in ms fatih 5423 (tiem 2054), a gorgeous, deluxe collection of ibn turka’s works copied in 1439 for an elite ottoman patron.142 this would seem to be an unsually fitting fate for works that advance, for the first time in the islamicate context, a systematic metaphysics of writing. here again, a full account of ibn turka’s students and heirs is beyond the scope of this article; but i offer a few select examples to show that his lettrist metaphysics remained current in philosophical circles in iran through at least the early 11th/17th century— whence it permeated scholarly understandings of the nature and epistemologicalontological supremacy of writing throughout the persianate world, from anatolia to india, during the same period. the philosophers of aqquyunlu-safavid iran most openly indebted to ibn turka are 137. dunbāla-yi justujū dar taṣavvuf-i īrān, 142. 138. melvin-koushki, “the quest,” 330-33. 139. on ibn turka’s reception in safavid and qajar iran see melvin-koushki, “world as (arabic) text.” 140. nafsat al-maṣdūr-i duvvum, 209-10. note that hind variously designates those regions of the subcontinent under muslim rule, the subcontinent as a whole, or the indo-gangetic region of north india only (my thanks to mana kia for this observation). 141. for a preliminary list of surviving manuscript copies in iran and turkey see melvin-koushki, “the quest,” 97-98. 142. my thanks to maria subtelny for examining this majmūʿa on my behalf. for a preliminary list of surviving manuscript copies in iran and turkey see melvin-koushki, “the quest,” 88-89. 83 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) two: jalāl al-dīn davānī (d. 908/1502) and mīr dāmād (d. 1040/1630). both are widely acknowledged in the literature to be both pivotal figures in their own times and among the most influential philosophers in islamicate intellectual history more generally. the latter, hailed as the third teacher (muʿallim-i sālis) (i.e., after aristotle and fārābī), intimate of shah ʿabbās i (r. 995-1038/1587-1629) and mentor to mullā ṣadrā, is usually considered the founder of the so-called philosophical school of isfahan; as such, most of his works have been published and studied extensively. this safavid philosopher embraced ibn turka’s lettrist metaphysics in at least three works, including his seminal firebrands and meeting stations (jaẕavāt u mavāqīt), a persian summary of his philosophical system as a whole; citing the r. ḥurūf in particular, mīr dāmād even adopts the fourfold tashkīk al-ḥarf schema analyzed above.143 given persistent scholarly occultophobia, however, this crucial fact has been flatly ignored in the literature to date. for his part, davānī is celebrated as an eclectic illuminationist-ibn ʿarabian-ashʿari thinker, the last major heir of fakhr al-dīn rāzī, and together with his great rival mīr ṣadr al-dīn dashtakī (d. 903/1498) and the latter’s son mīr ghiyās al-dīn dashtakī (d. 949/1542) accounted the most important source for safavid philosophy.144 davānī’s influence in india, whence hailed a number of his students, was similarly outsize, and likewise in ottoman scholarly circles.145 the aqquyunlu philosopher penned two popular persian lettrist works, one of which, on the declaration of divine oneness (r. tahlīliyya), effectively reasserts ibn turka’s lettrist hierarchy of knowledge, whereby lettrism serves as supreme metaphysical science, superior to both avicennan-illuminationist philosophy and sufi theory; and his presentation of this science follows ibn turka’s to the letter—including, naturally, its signature tashkīk al-ḥarf schema.146 yet here too davānī’s embrace of ibn turkian lettrism has been wholly elided in the literature. nevertheless, that two of the most influential philosophers of iran, both in service to, respectively, aqquyunlu and safavid ruling elites, pointedly adopted ibn turka’s metaphysics of writing suggests it to have been well-known and attractive to scholarly elites more generally; it should therefore be detectable as a cultural discourse well beyond philosophical circles. i have argued elsewhere that mīr dāmād’s reception of ibn turka, pivoting consciously on davānī’s, is the crucial context for understanding the striking neopythagorean turn in safavid philosophy, whereby even ibn sīnā himself, the second aristotle, was 143. jaẕavāt u mavāqīt, 134, 143-34; see melvin-koushki, “world as (arabic) text.” 144. on the formative davānī-dashtakī rivalry see bdaiwi, “shiʿi defenders of avicenna.” 145. rizvi, “mīr dāmād in india”; el-rouayheb, islamic intellectual history, 52. 146. melvin-koushki, “the quest,” 256-61. davānī’s summary of these levels is useful in this context (r. tahlīliyya, 65-66): 1) spiritual-mental, wherein the letters take form in the human mind before being expressed, in this corresponding god’s knowledge of realities before their coming into being; these letters are called the high letters (ḥurūf-i ʿāliyāt) or thought letters (ḥurūf-i fikriyya). 2) oral, wherein the letters are expressed in audible form; these are called the medial letters (ḥurūf-i wusṭā). 3) written, wherein the letters are made visible to men of might and vision (q 38:45); these are called the low letters (ḥurūf-i sāfila). furthermore, letters have spirits, bodies and hearts. their spirits represent their numerical values, their hearts their oral form, and their bodies their written form. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 84 transmogrified into a neopythagorean-occultist;147 i further suggest it here as an important factor in the equally striking florescence of safavid book culture.148 most emblematic of safavid perennialist bibliophilia, even bibliomania, is the sharply increased production of philosophical anthologies (which often feature lettrist texts), on the one hand, and the consolidation of a new genre of art history-theory, the album preface, on the other. a telling example of the first is british library ms add. 16839, a classic 11th/17thcentury safavid anthology of philosophical and mystical texts that features a heavy lettrist emphasis; most significantly, it conjuncts a number of lettrist and other treatises by ibn turka, including the r. ḥurūf, with mīr dāmād’s jaẕavāt, together with treatises by a range of other authorities, from ibn sīnā and ṭūsī to davānī and mullā ṣadrā.149 a celebrated instance of the second is qāżī aḥmad’s (d. after 1015/1606) rose garden of art (gulistān-i hunar), an unprecedentedly comprehensive work of art historiographybiography completed around 1006/1598 (revised 1015/1606) and dedicated to shah ʿabbās. this is a curiously hybrid work, simultaneously a technical treatise on writing and a biographical dictionary of calligraphers, but also functioning, according to david roxburgh, as a “gargantuan album preface.”150 i wish to call attention to two features of the gulistān-i hunar relevant to the present context. first, qāżī aḥmad opens his work by copying and slightly reworking the beginning of shams al-dīn āmulī’s section on writing as translated above—a borrowing not previously noticed. that the nafāyis al-funūn is drawn on so prominently as a source for emulation is of special significance here: it implies that qāżī aḥmad was well aware of its status as the first persian encyclopedia of the sciences to a) formally valorize writing over speech, and b) elevate sufism, and by extension lettrism, to the status of queen of the islamic sciences. as i argue, these two departures from precedent are intimately connected, and would presumably have been understood to be so by a consummate scholar like qāżī aḥmad. his opening assertion of the supremacy of writing, moreover, like āmulī’s, is categorical: ‘it is evident to the minds of those with insight that the finest thing a person can possess is excellence and skill (fażl u hunar), and that no [skill] is finer than the ability to write beautifully (ḥusn-i khaṭṭ).’151 second, qāżī aḥmad, like all other safavid album preface writers of the 10th/16th century, places great store by ʿalī b. abī ṭālib’s status as inventor of the kufic script, as well as inspirer, through a dream vision, of ibn muqla (d. 328/940), the abbasid vizier universally considered to be responsible for codifying the ‘six scripts’ (al-aqlām al-sitta, shish qalam)152 derived from kufic and hence the patron saint of arabic calligraphy as such.153 (qāżī aḥmad also expands on this theme to praise imam ḥasan and imam zayn 147. melvin-koushki, “world as (arabic) text.” 148. see e.g. endress, “philosophische ein-band-bibliotheken.” 149. rieu, catalogue of the persian manuscripts, 2/833-35. 150. prefacing the image, 2. 151. gulistān-i hunar, 4. 152. i.e., thuluth, tarqīʿ, muḥaqqaq, naskh, rayḥān and riqāʿ. 153. roxburgh, prefacing the image, 188; on the reforms of ibn muqla see tabbaa, “the transformation.” 85 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) al-ʿābidīn ʿalī as potent calligraphers and copyists of the quran in their own right.) of imam ʿalī he declares: that script (khaṭṭī) that, like kohl, salved and illumined the eyes of men of vision (ūlū l-abṣār) in communicating the divine inspiration and commands and prohibitions vouchsafed the holy messenger (god bless and keep him and his house) was the kufic script. there survive to this day some of the letters (arqām) produced by the miraculous pens of the holy shah of sacral power (shāh-i valāyat-panāh) (the peace of god be upon him)—how richly do they illuminate the eye of the soul and burnish the tablet of the mind! none has written more beautifully than that holy eminence (the blessings and peace of god be upon him), who produced the finest examples of the kufic script ever written … masters [of this art] therefore identify that holy eminence (the blessings of god be upon him) as the originator (sanad) of that script and trace its chain of transmission back to him. the first to marry beautiful writing to beautiful conduct was murtażā ʿalī, and that mightily. for this reason said [the prophet] (god bless and keep him and his house): writing is half of all knowledge (al-khaṭṭ niṣf al-ʿilm). that is, for whomever writes well, it is as though he has mastered half of all sciences. whose writing did the chief of the prophets, in his knowledge and wisdom, declare the half of all knowledge? the prophet declared it of the writing of murtażā ʿalī. murtażā was truly the king of all saints (shāh-i awliyā); but when the caliphs usurped [his right] he made seclusion his practice, for a time eschewing all intercourse, preferring rather to copy the quran (kitābat-i muṣḥaf)— hence the great honor and majesty that redounds to writing! for how could writing like his be within human power? his script was beyond human, his writing other.154 given the imperial twelver shiʿi context in which qāżī aḥmad and his fellow album preface authors were writing during the 10th/16th century, most scholars have reflexively assumed such encomiums for ʿalī as simultaneously the inventor of kufic and “king of the saints” to be both historical fictions and quintessentially, uncontestably shiʿi. but such a conclusion is rash and unwarranted, especially if our goal is to recover the it is significant in this context that āmulī simply reports that scholars differ in crediting the invention of kufic to either ʿalī or ibn muqla, without supplying, like qāżī aḥmad, a dream-vision narrative to resolve the attribution in favor of ʿalī. 154. gulistān-i hunar, 13-14. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 86 safavid metaphysics of writing. for ibn turka—a committed sunni imamophile—appears to have been the foremost authority in safavid iran on matters letter-metaphysical, as we have seen; and his metaphysics of writing is founded on the doctrine that writing and mathematics are the directest expressions of walāya, whose preeminent exponent during the islamic dispensation is ʿalī—inventor, ibn turka says, of the kufic script and jafr both. such a neat congruency between ibn turka’s pneumatic-grammatic theory and qāżī aḥmad’s rhetoric is thus hardly coincidental. that is to say: lettrism was the sunni intellectual current most utilizable by shiʿi scholars seeking to construct a new imperial safavid shiʿi culture; any account of the transformative shiʿization of iran that elides timurid-aqquyunlu lettrist precedent must therefore remain incomplete. but the gulistān-i hunar does not explicitly employ the neoplatonic-neopythagorean schema systematized by ibn turka in ibn ʿarabian terms; for this we must turn to the most famous of the safavid album prefaces, that of dūst muḥammad (d. after 972/1564), written for the album prepared for bahrām mīrzā (d. 957/1549), brother of shah ṭahmāsb (r. 930-84/1524-76). the ornate opening passage of this preface has been analyzed masterfully by david roxburgh in particular;155 but no art historian has yet noted its overtly lettrist framework.156 it begins: the noblest writing … is praise of the creator, by whose pen are scriven and by whose tracing are limned the high letters (ḥurūf-i ʿāliyāt) and the supernal forms (ṣuvar-i mutaʿāliyāt). according to the dictum the pen exhausted its ink with [writing all] that will be until doomsday, the coalesced forms and variegated shapes of the entifications (aʿyān) were—according to the dictum i was a hidden treasure—secreted in the treasury of the unseen beyond time; then—according to its continuation i craved to be known, so i created creation in order to be known—he snatched with the fingers of destiny the veil of nonbeing from the countenance of being, and with the hand of mercy and grace and the pen of the first thing god created was the pen painted them masterfully on the canvas of existence. [it is praise of] the maker, who in the workshop of god created adam in his form rendered the totality of the human form—a microcosm (ʿālam-i sānī) in its all-comprehensiveness of forms and meanings—upon the page of creation in the most beautiful guise, wiping the dust of nonexistence from the tablet of his being with the polish of favor, then [set him to] ascend the levels of assume the attributes of god [by] making the mirror of creation the site of manifestation of his names and traces. 155. prefacing the image, esp. 189-98. 156. as roxburgh notes (ibid., 165), while most scholars agree that the content of dust muhammad’s preface is particularly remarkable … [i] ts turns of phrase and figures of speech were thought to be hackneyed (and incapable of signifying anything other than their life as literary devices), and the narrative content of its stories were considered topoi, the product of pure rhetoric, and never taken seriously. without thoroughgoing analysis of the preface, its immediate meaning—viz. the licitness of depiction—and rationale—a justification for depiction and explanation of safavid art in the present—came across to some scholars as somewhat flimsy, perhaps even as anachronistic. 87 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) [it is praise of] the almighty, who embellished the seven heavens—which are inimitable on the model of the seven repeated (sabʿ al-masānī),157 nay, by way of organization and stellation (tanjīm)158 on the model of the pages of the quran [as a whole]—with the verse-signs (āyāt) of the gorgeous stars and the tenth and the fifth [markers] that are the sun and the moon,159 and, having made rulings with the lines of light rays (khuṭūṭ-i shuʿāʿī), with the white ink of dawn and the vermilion of sunset established on the azure page of the celestial sphere a template for the four tablets.160 most significantly, dūst muḥammad here invokes the doctrine of tashkīk al-ḥarf: he posits the pen as first existent, whence are first produced extramental forms (aʿyān), which coalesce downward into the high letters (ḥurūf-i ʿāliyāt)—davānī’s technical term for the mathematical-mental level of the letter—,161 until finally their physical-elemental reality, which is to say the written form of the letter (and by extension painting), is manifested. it is striking that he ignores the level of speech altogether—creation is here entirely the product of the pen, not the divine utterance be! of similar significance is his poetic equation of the cosmos to the quran; this, of course, is a classic expression of the two books doctrine. a few decades later, mīr dāmād restated this doctrine in strictly philosophical terms in his jaẕavāt: the totality of macrocosm and microcosm together constitute the book of god, inscribed by the pen or universal intellect, with all existents being letters, words, sentences, verses and suras in that cosmic scripture.162 finally, dūst muḥammad associates the neoplatonic doctrine of man as microcosm with the ibn ʿarabian-būnian doctrine of the cosmos as manifestation of the infinite names of god (asmāʾ allāh), whereby human beings can reascend to the one, can self-divinize or achieve theosis (taʾalluh), by way of theomimesis (tashabbuh bi-l-bāriʾ)—fully incarnating the names through lettrist praxis. 157. i.e., the fātiḥa. 158. this term usually denotes astrology. 159. in illuminated manuscript copies of the quran, every fifth verse (khams) is marked with a gold rosette or kufic h, equal to 5, and every tenth with a gold medallion containing the word ten (ʿashr) (gacek, the arabic manuscript tradition, 22, 54). 160. dūst muḥammad’s preface, preserved as topkapı sarayı müzesi h.2154, is transcribed and translated in thackston, album prefaces, 4-17; the translation here, which renders the technical terminology more accurately, is mine. the four tablets are identified by ʿabd al-razzāq kāshānī (d. 730/1330) in his taʾwīlāt as follows (trans. in murata, the tao of islam, 155): there are four tablets: the tablet of precedent decree [qaḍāʾ] towers beyond obliteration and affirmation. it is the first intellect. the tablet of measure [qadar] is the universal rational soul, within which the universal things of the first tablet become differentiated and attached to their secondary causes. it is named the guarded tablet. the tablet of the particular, heavenly souls is a tablet within which is inscribed everything in this world along with its shape, condition, and measure. this tablet is called the ‘heaven of this world.’ it is like the imagination of the cosmos, just as the first [tablet] is like its spirit, and the second [tablet] is like its heart. then there is the tablet of matter, which receives the forms of the visible world. and god knows best. 161. see davānī’s definition of the four levels in n. 146 above. 162. jaẕavāt, 21-24; see melvin-koushki, “world as (arabic) text.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 88 by lettrist praxis i mean, of course, letter or talismanic magic, which, tellingly, was hugely popular in safavid iran.163 now it will be remembered that lettrism was first sanctified by ibn ʿarabī and al-būnī precisely through their fusion of neoplatonicneopythagorean cosmology with the sufi doctrine of names—hence lettrism’s alternate designation as ʿilm al-asmāʾ, and hence āmulī’s reclassification of lettrism as the supreme sufi science. (any technical reference to the names of god after the 7th/13th century, such as in dūst muḥammad’s preface, can therefore be safely assumed to have a lettrist resonance.) as a consequence, the practice of magic overwhelmingly became the practice of būnian sufi-letter magic, focused in the first place on the divine names, and by extension the names of angels, jinn, or any other being or thing in existence; a given name is made operational by mathematically processing its letters in a magic square, which then becomes the engine of a talisman, to be engraved or written on an appropriate medium. a talisman, in short, represents the marriage of text and number, of celestial and terrestrial; it epitomizes ibn turkian walāya. it is thus hardly surprising that persian writers on writing increasingly cast their subject in magical terms. a representative example is, once again, qāżī aḥmad. in his work’s introduction he indites in praise of the pen: [the pen] is a skilled worker, and finely sees, accomplishing its work with the might of its right hand; its art is the miracle of a mage (muʿjiza-yi sāḥirī): it is now a moses, now a samaritan (sāmirī).164 ottoman and mughal receptions so far the aqquyunlu-safavid metaphysics of writing; to what extent did ibn turka’s lettrist system inform scholars in the broader persianate world? a considerable one, it would seem. two examples must here suffice, one ottoman, one mughal. as cornell fleischer in particular has shown, ottoman imperial culture under sultan süleymān kanuni (r. 926-74/1520-66) was profoundly occultist in orientation, and especially lettrist. this outlook was rooted in the first place in the voluminous occultistapocalypticist corpus of ʿabd al-raḥmān al-bisṭāmī of antioch, ibn turka’s fellow heir of akhlāṭī and contemporary cognate in anatolia. most notably, al-bisṭāmī’s key to the comprehensive prognosticon (miftāḥ al-jafr al-jāmiʿ) appears to have served as ur-text in the construction of ottoman imperial identity; it is primarily on its basis that the ottoman self-understanding as last world empire was formed.165 given the great currency of bisṭāmian lettrism, then, we may assume there was a eager market for ibn turka’s lettrist works as well; and indeed, the latter’s claim that his writings were popular in anatolia is borne out by the presence of many surviving copies thereof in ottoman archives—the mafāḥiṣ chief among them. while al-bisṭāmī was rather more prolific on topics occult, his 163. see melvin-koushki, “the occult sciences in safavid iran.” 164. gulistān-i hunar, 9. in the quranic narrative, a samaritan was responsible for magically animating the golden calf for the israelites to worship in moses’s absence (q 20:83-97). 165. fleischer, “ancient wisdom.” 89 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) lettrism is equal parts ibn ʿarabian-būnian—that is to say, half theory and half praxis— and not philosophically systematic; his isfahani colleague’s magnum opus, by contrast, represents the first systematic treatment of lettrist metaphysics in the islamicate tradition, as well as the fullest expression of ibn turka’s signature tashkīk al-ḥarf schema. it is therefore striking, but not surprising, to find this schema adopted by muṣṭafā taşköprüzāde (d. 968/1561), the greatest ottoman encyclopedist of the 10th/16th century. his seminal arabic classification of the sciences, key to felicity and lamp to mastery (miftāḥ al-saʿāda wa-miṣbāḥ al-siyāda), is closely modeled on ibn al-akfānī’s irshād al-qāṣid, but expands on it massively—especially with respect to the occult sciences, including lettrism.166 it served in turn as model for ḥājjī khalīfa (d. 1067/1657) and other subsequent arabic encyclopedists.167 like āmulī, moreover, but unlike ibn al-akfānī, taşköprüzāde formally valorizes writing over speech as the foundation of all human knowledge by classifying it as the first science of the first section (dawḥa) of his work. also like āmulī, he adds to the core humanistic maxim as to the superiority of writing (to wit, that it trumps speech because the latter is fleeting and local but the former is durable and portable, and is the only means by which we can historically realize our humanity) a selection of standard traditional and rational proofs in corroboration: on the virtue of writing, our need for it and the circumstances of its invention as for its virtue according to tradition: [in the first place], the saying of the most high: recite: and your lord is most generous, who taught by the pen, taught man what he knew not (q 96:3-5). he further attributed the teaching of writing to himself, graciously bestowing it on his servants—which alone should suffice to prove its excellence: n. and by the pen, and what they inscribe (q 68:1). thus did he swear by what they inscribe. it is transmitted from ibn ʿabbās (god be pleased with him) that he explicated his saying or a trace of a science (q 46:4) to refer to writing (al-khaṭṭ). it is further transmitted that solomon (upon him be peace) asked an afrit as to the nature of speech. the latter replied: “a passing wind.” said solomon: “then what can bind it?” said he: “writing.” ʿabd allāh b. ʿabbās described it thus: “writing is the hand’s tongue.” jaʿfar b. yaḥyā: “writing is the string of wisdom (simṭ al-ḥikma): thereon are its pieces set off [to greatest effect] and its dispersed parts brought into order.” said ibrāhīm b. muḥammad al-shaybānī: “writing is the hand’s tongue, the mind’s glory, the intellect’s emissary, thought’s legatee, knowledge’s weapon; it confers fraternal intimacy during separation and 166. see melvin-koushki, “powers of one.” 167. interestingly, khaled el-rouayheb has shown that ottoman scholars of the 11th-13th/17th-19th centuries identified less with taşköprüzāde and his contemporaries and more with persian scholars like davānī (islamic intellectual history, 52)—a fact that may be significant in lettrist terms, given davānī’s status and safavid reception as an exponent of the ibn turkian brand of the science. that the shirazi philosopher’s reception was equally warm in mughal india during the same period suggests a continued familiarity with his lettrist writings there as well. more generally, el-rouayheb has argued for the emergence of a more impersonal, text-based transmission of knowledge in ottoman scholarly culture from the 10th/16th century onward (“the rise of ‘deep reading’”). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 90 allows brothers to speak over great distances; it is the repository of secrets and the record of all things.” as for [its virtue] according to reason: even were the excellence of writing to be testified to only by the fact that god most high revealed it to adam (or hūd, upon them both be peace), and that he sent down written codices to his prophets, and that he gave inscribed tablets to moses (upon him be peace), that would be sufficient. yet [its excellence as rationally construed is universal]: for anything that one can mention as to passing thoughts, intellectual inclinations, intimations of understanding, limnings of imagination or sensory perceptions can be entrusted to writing, which orders it and expresses it truly. nor can any community depend on another in this respect, or any nation exempt another [of the responsibility to patronize writing]. for writing allows us to realize our very humanity; it distinguishes us from all other animals, gives us the ability to preserve intact sciences over time, to transmit information from age to age, to transport secrets from place to place. furthermore, writing guarantees rights and discourages rebellion among rational individuals by compelling them with recorded testaments and correspondence between people over great distances, ensuring far more accuracy than can be attained by the bearer of a message or through an interaction in person even if the individuals in question remember perfectly and express themselves with the greatest eloquence. therefore has writing been declared superior to speech: for speech informs those present only, while writing informs those present and those not.168 taşköprüzāde’s treatment of writing would thus seem to be little more than a modest embellishment on arabic and persian bibliophilic precendent; needless to say, the simple fact that he is strongly pro-occultist does not necessarily entail a familiarity with high lettrist theory. but familiar he certainly was: for the ottoman scholar breaks with āmulī, ibn al-akfānī and every other exponent of the arabo-persian encyclopedic tradition to propose a radically new hierarchy of knowledge as his primary structuring device for the work as a whole—tashkīk al-ḥarf. the first four sections of his encyclopedia, of seven, are thus as follows: 1) on the sciences of writing (fī bayān al-ʿulūm al-khaṭṭiyya) 2) on the sciences connected with speech (fī ʿulūm tataʿallaq bi-l-alfāẓ) 3) on the sciences that investigate mental objects (fī ʿulūm bāḥitha ʿammā fī l-adhhān) 168. miftāḥ al-saʿāda, 1/79-80. it must here be emphasized that in islamicate political theory the power to maintain personal connection despite absence is considered a primary foundation of social order—hence the great virtue and necessity of adab, simultaneously a system of writing conventions and a code of ethics (see kia, “adab as literary form and social conduct”). 91 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) 4) on the science connected with extramental realities (fī l-ʿilm al-mutaʿalliq bi-l aʿyān)169 this khaṭṭ-lafẓ-dhihn-ʿayn series, of course, is unmistakably ibn turkian. taşköprüzāde’s innovation here is his recognition of the inadequacy of the large set of traditionalist and rationalist proofs, relatively stable from the abbasid period onward, for the task of demonstrating the ontological supremacy of writing to speech. in the miftāḥ al-saʿāda, in other words, we have a conservative reiteration of the text-centric perennialisttraditionalist culture already long entrenched in the islamicate heartlands by the 8th/14th century—yet by the 10th/16th century its epistemological-philosophical context had profoundly changed. that is to say, taşköprüzāde does not flag the new lettrist context for his otherwise standard valorization of writing over speech; but he certainly expected it to be obvious to his fellow men of main and vision.170 what of mughal india? although much further research remains to be done on ibn turka’s reception in the subcontinent (not to mention his reception in general), it would appear his lettrist metaphysics of light received just as warm a scholarly welcome there as in the far west of the persianate world. certain safavid and ottoman scholars, as we have seen, drew eclectically on his lettrist theory, each to their own ends. the former emphasized his imamophilic doctrine of writing-number as vector of walāya, especially 169. the last three sections, in sequential order, are on practical philosophy (fī l-ḥikma al-ʿamaliyya), on the religious sciences (fī l-ʿulūm al-sharʿiyya) and on the interior or spiritual sciences (fī ʿulūm al-bāṭin). 170. in a recent article (“writing, speech, and history”), ali anooshahr has applied derrida to taşköprüzāde’s miftāḥ al-saʿāda to analyze the latter’s metaphysics of orality and writing; he argues that taşköprüzāde was responsible for overturning the initial valorization of speech over writing in ottoman historiography of the 9th/15th century. this suggests, in effect, that ottoman scholarship locally reprised the transition from speech-centric to text-centric that had already taken place centuries before throughout the islamicate heartlands. while a compelling thesis, it is unfortunately weakened by anooshahr’s failure to situate the miftāḥ al-saʿāda within the islamicate encyclopedic tradition itself, which leads him to claim a revolutionary status for taşköprüzāde on very different, and mistaken, grounds. that is, he presents the ottoman encyclopedist’s assertion of the superiority of writing to speech as being unprecedented, and describes his concluding statement—“therefore has writing been declared superior to speech: for speech informs those present only, while writing informs those present and those not”—as both “remarkable” and “outstanding” (59). as we have seen, however, this statement was already standard in arabic and persian encyclopedias both by the early 8th/14th century; it represents taşköprüzāde’s strict fidelity to precedent, and especially to ibn al-akfānī’s irshād al-qāṣid, and is not revolutionary in the slightest. as i argue, it is rather taşköprüzāde’s importation of ibn turka’s tashkīk al-ḥarf schema that is unprecedented in the tradition. in other words, anooshahr’s approach here shows the dangers of reading ottoman scholarship in isolation from its original arabo-persian context in general and its timurid-mamluk context in particular, as is still regrettably the rule. but the fact that taşköprüzāde found it necessary to import ibn turka’s metaphysics of writing to counter earlier ottoman historiographical trends only serves to strengthen anooshahr’s larger thesis, and especially his contention that the great 10th/16th-century scholar was responsible for reformulating ottoman history in a manner that destabilizes all dualisms, that obliterates all “binary opposite pairs” (44). which is to say: taşköprüzāde would seem to be applying the lettrist principle of the coincidentia oppositorum to dynastic historiography itself—a strategy that is indeed both remarkable and outstanding. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 92 useful to the safavid project of shiʿizing iran; the latter found his tashkīk al-ḥarf schema crucial for bringing a final ottoman organization to the great mass of human knowledge, the philosophia perennis, in preparation for the end of history. their mughal counterparts, by contrast, responding to different imperial needs, chose rather to highlight the postilluminationist tashkīk al-nūr component of ibn turka’s system. perhaps the most manifestly ibn turkian treatment of writing produced in india is that by abū l-fażl ʿallāmī (d. 1011/1602), vizier to emperor akbar (r. 963-1014/1556-1605) and chief architect of the new mughal imperial culture. the famous section on writing and painting in his monumental akbarian institutes (āʾīn-i akbarī) (which, like its safavid counterparts, treats the second as being strictly derivative of the first) opens as follows: in truth, [writing (khaṭṭ)] is for those who love beauty the site of manifestation of delimited light (nūr-i muqayyad), for the farsighted the undelimited world-reflecting cup (jām-i gītī-numā-yi muṭlaq). the talisman that is writing is a form of spiritual geometry from the pen of creation (ṭilism-i khaṭṭ rūḥānī handasaʾī-st az qalam-i ibdāʿ), a celestial writ from the hand of fate (āsmānī kitābaʾī az dast-i taqdīr). it is the secret-bearer of speech; it is the hand’s tongue. speech (sukhan) communicates the heart’s potency to those present only; writing informs those near and far alike. were it not for writing, speech would be lifeless, the heart ungifted by those who have gone before. those who see only bodies think [writing a mass of] mere inky shapes; but the servants of spirit (maʿnā) deem it the radiant lamp of knowledge (charāgh-i shināsāʾī). it is darkness despite its million rays for the pupils; it is a light with a black mole against the evil eye. it is the limner of intelligence, the loamy farmlands feeding the capital of meaning (savād-i shahristān-i maʿnā). it is a sun to nightpitchy [ignorance], a dark cloud heavy with [enlightening] knowledge. it is a mighty talismanic seal (shigarf ṭilismī) on the treasury of sight. though mute, it speaks; though immobile, it travels; though fallen, it soars. [the mechanics of its manifestation are thus:] from the fullness of divine knowledge shines a ray into the rational [human] soul (nafs-i nāṭiqa); the heart then communicates this onward to the realm of the imagination (khayāl), the intermediate plane (barzakh) between the immaterial (mujarrad) and material (māddī), where its immateriality is tempered with materiality and its undelimitedness with delimitation; and so it becomes manifest. if this occurs by way of the tongue, it enters the ear by aid of air; there it delivers itself of its burden, then flees back whence it came. but if that celestial traveler (musāfir-i āsmānī) journeys by aid of the fingers, traversing the lands and seas that are pens and ink visible to the eye (nūr-dīda), it finally sets down its burden in the pleasure-houses that are pages and retires from the highway of vision (dīda).171 this passage has been rightly celebrated by art historians: as a treatment of calligraphy it is unique in the arabo-persian encyclopedic tradition, for it adds to the standard tropes 171. āʾīn-i akbarī, 1.1/111-12. 93 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) and maxims a simultaneously poetic and precise metaphysics-psychology of light. what has not been recognized, however, is the fact that abū l-fażl is manifestly relying on a specifically timurid lettrist doctrine to this end.172 following ibn turka, either directly or via davānī, he asserts the letter to be a form of light emanated by the divine essence down through the four levels of being, from most occult to most manifest—the only cosmological model that explains the epistemological-ontological superiority of writing to speech: for only writing engages vision, that faculty of light, that highway to heaven. nor is his categorical equation of writing and talismans a rhetorical conceit, but rather a definition expressly scientific.173 as textual letter-magical devices based on number, talismans allow their maker to harness light at the celestial level for terrestrial purposes, to marry heaven to earth, to operationalize the cosmic aporia; this, abū l-fażl argues, is precisely what writing does—“though fallen, it soars.” the same applies to his bold oppositional light-dark imagery: the inky, calligraphed letter, deepest endarkenment, is the royal road of enlightenment. this, of course, is but a poetic expression of ibn turka’s signature doctrine of the letter as coincidentia oppositorum. abū l-fażl’s unprecedented modification of the euclidean dictum writing is a form of spiritual geometry, constantly repeated by encyclopedists from al-tawḥīdī onward, is thus of great philosophical-scientific significance; that is to say, it is surely the pithiest index of the intellectual and cultural seachange that transpired in the persianate world between the 8th-10th/14th-16th centuries, during which period muslim scholars began to take this ancient concept of writing—a spiritual geometry manifested by means of a physical instrument—very seriously indeed.174 “the talisman that is writing is a form of spiritual geometry from the pen of creation,” declares abū l-fażl, by which he means: written letternumber, simultaneously operative on the elemental and mathematical levels of being, can alone crystallize light, constellating the philosophia perennis; it alone is the gate of walāya, the ladder of theosis; it alone allows ascent back to the originary, all-writing one. and as for the imperial needs this indefatiguable mughal vizier was here serving: akbar understood himself as a talismanic being, a divine avatar of the sun, a holy body of light;175 what better prop to his claim to indo-timurid millennial kingship, then, than a timurid lettrist metaphysics of light? 172. it should be noted that blochmann’s own translation of this passage (the ain i akbari by abul fazl ‘allami, 1/97-98), frequently cited by specialists, is in places quite inaccurate, further obscuring its intellectual context. yael rice observes that overreliance on blochmann’s mistranslation has also given rise to the false notion that abū l-fażl deems writing far superior to painting (“between the brush,” 149). 173. abū l-fażl similarly calls painting (taṣvīr), an extension of writing in his treatment (if a lesser subset), a mighty magical operation (jādūkārī shigarf) (āʾīn-i akbarī, 1.1/116). 174. cf. the dictum attributed to apollonius (bālīnās) by al-tawḥīdī (and to plato by qāżī aḥmad), “the pen is the most powerful of talismans, and writing its product” (rosenthal, “abū ḥaiyān al-tawḥīdī,” 25). 175. moin, the millennial sovereign, 137-46; truschke, “translating the solar cosmology.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 94 conclusion being is a grammar; … the world is in all its parts a cryptogram to be constituted or reconstituted through poetic inscription or deciphering.176 —jacques derrida this article does not pretend to be an “islamic answer to derrida,” or deconstruct deconstructionism: that is the task it has set itself. my approach here has rather been strictly historiographical and philological.177 but any history of western grammatology that elides, that writes off, its mainstream islamicate formulations—as is still regrettably and perniciously the default—is at best half complete. to supply this major historiographical lacuna, i have therefore presented a range of textual evidence for the emergence and persistence over centuries of a systematic islamic metaphysics of writing, an alternative western grammatology, this in response to the great middle period burgeoning of writerly culture throughout the islamicate world—a phenomenon that has been studied to date in strict isolation from its original occult-philosophical context. such an occultophobic, vivisectionist strategy, i argue, has occluded connections crucial for understanding the cultural, political and intellectual transformation of islamicate societies between the 7th-11th/13th-17th centuries. but if we read it carefully, the world muslims so fully wrote into being in the post-mongol era appears to be far more interconnected—far more intertextual—than has yet been appreciated. hence the hegemony of commentary culture and encyclopedism on the one hand and literary ornateness and speaking the new on the other, hence the fateful push to read the two books, to mathematize the cosmos: all pivot on the supremacy of the written, not spoken, word in islam. while this basic principle was first formulated by the bibliomaniacs of the high abbasid period, they did not supply a metaphysics to sustain and enforce it; but the occult philosophers produced by the mamluk-timurid burgeoning of writerly culture did. the metaphysics of writing the latter developed seems to have spread like wildfire, moreover, such that by the 10th/16th century islamicate discourses on writing, however literary, scientific or art-historical their context, came to bear an unmistakable lettrist stamp. such is the narrative that must now be recuperated as integral to the history of western grammatology, which (post-enlightenment colonialist-orientalist chauvinism notwithstanding) has long been and continues to be hellenic and islamic, jewish and christian, in equal measure, and a primary basis for the metaphysics of early modernity, modernity and postmodernity alike. at the same time, it must be emphasized that this science, for all its coherence as a western tradition from pythagoras and plato to the present, was and is a hotly contested site of cultural convergence and divergence, a pendulumic barrage of conand contradiction, a permanent complexio of oppositions— 176. “edmond jabès,” 94. 177. cf. paul de man’s observation that deconstruction is simply a form of philology (“the return to philology,” 24): “[i]n practice, the turn to theory occurred as a return to philology, to an examination of the structure of language prior to the meaning it produces.” 95 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) making its comparative study equal parts hazardous and historiographically, even morally, pressing.178 to hazard a brief comparison of the science’s signal 15thand 20th-century iterations, ibn turkian and derridean respectively (assuming, for the nonce, that grammatologists as radically culturally different as ibn turka and derrida can legitimately and profitably be approached as members of the same western tradition): like derrida, it is true, if only terminologically, lettrists like ibn turka sought to prove writing’s superiority to speech;179 but unlike derrida, they hailed text not as tyrant but as theosizing talisman: inlibration as illumination, as salvation from the dark realms of matter and becoming.180 ibn turka’s doctrine of tashkīk al-ḥarf thus erects the neopythagorean ladder of return to the one. it is precisely this doctrine against which derrida categorically railed half a millennium later: the trace is the difference which opens appearance and signification. articulating the living upon the nonliving in general, origin of all repetition, origin of ideality, the trace is not more ideal than real, not more intelligible than sensible, not more a transparent signification than an opaque energy and no concept of metaphysics can describe it. and as it is a fortiori anterior to the distinction between regions of sensibility, anterior to sound as much as to light, is there a sense in establishing a “natural” hierarchy between the acoustic imprint, for example, and the visual (graphic) imprint? the graphic image is not seen; and the acoustic image is not heard. the difference between the full unities of the voice remains unheard. invisible also the difference in the body of the inscription.181 according to derrida’s aporetic logic, that is, there can be no ontological superiority of writing to speech as empirically construed; he collapses the hierarchy to make transcendence of the text—and hence a grammatological metaphysics—impossible. and number figures not at all, light is a mere thud on the sensorium. there is no one, only the many; and they babble (babel) on forever. yet he collapses this semiotic hierarchy of being precisely to confine us in text. is our french-algerian post-jewish deconstructionist then simply a latter-day renegade kabbalist? perhaps so.182 as that may be, however, ibn turkian deconstruction was itself rather 178. as christopher lehrich notes (the occult mind, 46): comparative methods, which always uncomfortably mingle the synchronic and the diachronic, are thus not only useful but necessary. there is no way to avoid them. when we study people of other cultures or times, we ipso facto make comparison to ourselves, if only negatively or under the aegis of translation. to be sure, the claim that comparison implies identity, the eliade-yates reactualization, annuls important difference. but the pseudohistorical claim against comparison as intrinsically bad method is bigotry masquerading as rigor. 179. with the proviso, again, that derridean écriture is not to be understood in an empirical sense (see n. 8 above). 180. the term “inlibration” was coined by harry wolfson (the philosophy of the kalam, 244-62). 181. of grammatology, 70. 182. elliot wolfson argues that the kabbalistic features of derrida’s work are a product of convergence, not al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 96 renegade in its own day, as we have seen, and like derrida’s attacked the very basis of western metaphysics. the former’s neopythagorean doctrine of letter-number as coincidentia oppositorum undercut and transformed neoplatonized aristotelianism like the latter’s hyperstructuralist-antistructuralist doctrines of écriture and différance undercut and transformed structuralism. whether performed in french or persian, hebrew or arabic, deconstruction, quite simply, seeks to marry all opposites through perpetual revolution, eternal textual play, universal aporia.183 derridean writing thus conceptually corresponds not to ibn turkian writing, but to the neopythagorean letter-number itself. so much for theory; what of praxis? unlike its poststructuralist successor, which has unaccountably disowned magic, lettrist-kabbalist deconstruction made the marriage of opposites experimentally operational (and thus perennially attractive to scholarly and ruling elites): the prognosticon, the talisman. that is to say: it is also reconstructionist, for in place of the physics-metaphysics terminally deconstructed it supplies a new one most useful for working in and on the world, especially imperially.184 to accomplish his subversion of the metaphysics of modernity, in sum, derrida took western language conventionalism—common from aristotle onward and embodied in the 20th century by saussurian linguistics—to its furthest extreme; his lettrist and kabbalist forebears went to the opposite extreme. not only did they posit a radically anticonventionalist theory of language (based in the first place on the traditionalist doctrine of the uncreatedness of the quran or the torah),185 but asserted that language, carrier of consciousness and body of light, constellates a metaphysics-mathematicsmagic continuum that marries heaven to earth and the one to the many. in practical terms, letter-number—because it alone constructs and orders every level of being eternally emanating from the one, thereby erecting time and space—must contain within it the knowledge of past, present and future (hence the prognosticon), must allow for the changing, by means of human consciousness, of physical reality itself (hence the talisman)—and that in measurable, falsifiable, scientific fashion.186 indeed, that magic— like islam—remains a stumbling-block for latter-day deconstructionism, wherein it figures merely as not-science and not-religion, of use only for mocking metaphysicians, direct influence (“assaulting the border”); moshe idel rather posits “a certain residue of kabbalistic thought” in deconstruction, and characterizes derrida as “a thinker who has been influenced by kabbalistic views of the nature of the text” (absorbing perfections, 77, 83). 183. a classic example here is derrida’s deconstruction of the term pharmakon in “plato’s pharmacy,” signifying both “poison” and “antidote” (as well as “charm” or “spell”), which he uses to symbolize writing as constituting “the medium in which opposites are opposed,” and therefore allowing for the exploding of plato’s construction of binaries (127). 184. on this theme see my the occult science of empire. cf. ian almond’s comparative study of derrida and ibn ʿarabī (the latter, of course, being a primary source for ibn turka’s lettrism), sufism and deconstruction. 185. see n. 88 above. 186. naturally, i here use “scientific” and “experimentalist” in the much broader early modern sense of these terms. 97 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) is strategically unfortunate.187 for to take the explicitly experimentalist claims of lettristkabbalist deconstruction-reconstruction seriously is to fatally subvert modernity in general and the scientistic disciplines of the modern academy in particular; it is to write a different west in a way that might fairly rejoice derridean cockles.188 derrida himself, of course, made no pretense of being a historian: thus his diagnosis as to the superiority of speech to writing in western culture—and crypto-kabbalistic, aporetic overturning thereof—is as historically inapplicable to islam as it is to judaism. this is despite the fact that islamicate civilization was, as it were, strongly western in its orientation; ibn turka styled himself a pythagoras redivivus, disciple of solomon and ʿalī. more problematically for his deconstruction of western culture, derrida’s diagnosis likewise elides the christian kabbalists of renaissance europe (and their jewish teachers), who from the late 9th/15th century onward sought to reconcile the socratic and the hebraic;189 their success in this project heralded in some measure “scientific modernity.” but a hundred years earlier, their lettrist peers to the south and east, living under the banner of post-mongol universalist-perennialist islam—the religio-imperial coincidentia oppositorum that had long since married hellenic and abrahamic, shiʿi and sunni, persian and arab, nomad and settled, east and west—, established lettrism as the occult-manifest center of islamic knowing, the solomonic-imamic pythagorean-platonic core of the philosophia perennis, constellatable only through writing. i must here again emphasize the astonishing degree of islamo-christianate intellectual continuity during the 15th and 16th centuries, and that largely in the absence of direct contact. equally astonishing is the fact that this phenomenon is still essentially unstudied. that the upshot of christians—relying on jews—reading the world as mathematical text was scientific modernity, but that of muslims doing the same was not, cannot be cited (though it continues to reflexively be) as proof of the decadence, the weak reading, of the latter, or the inherent, eternal medievalness of islam. to state the obvious, that is, this outcome was simply a consequence of different cultural priorities as pursued within the strictures of different sociopolitical structures. triumphalist, whiggish backreading, to be sure, posits a great divergence, at the culture-genetic level, whereby (in spenglerian 187. for derrida, magic, for all that it does haunt his discourse, in the end can but be “a cheap deconstructionism, an ill-informed derrideanism, a false show of deconstructive elegance and insight that blinds itself to its impotence … but it may nevertheless act as a liberator by its protest against the deceptive demand for presence and truth with which magic’s various opposites (science, religion) mystify their operations” (lehrich, the occult mind, 171, 176). 188. wouter hanegraaff in particular has argued for esotericism (including occultism in the sense i use it here) as the primary other upon whose undead frame western modernity has been and continues to be constructed (esotericism and the academy, passim; see also von stuckrad, locations of knowledge, 200). taking a more strictly theoretical-critical approach, lehrich holds that “magic may be seen as a kind of prophecy of a structural thought yet unborn”; while it “cannot be defined as differance,” magic “often plays the part of its sign or, to be more precise, coexists with the thinking of or toward differance ….” as such, and despite his own inadequate definitions of the term, “derrida offers us the best analytical tools for thinking (about) magic. it is by standing upon derrida’s perhaps unwilling shoulders that we can learn to evade through recognition the destructive effects of magic as an object of thought” (the occult mind, 166, 175, 177). 189. cf. derrida, “edmond jabès,” 89. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 98 terms) apollonian-faustian christian linearity, a genius for division, for rupture, outpaced magian islamic circularity, a genius for wholeness, for synthesis, for ambiguity, for continuity.190 yet for all europe’s infatuation with aristotle and his materialist creed (via arabic astrology, ironically),191 it was largely the disciples of a semiticized plato, a solomonic pythagoras, who emerged as the philosophical-scientific elite of early modern islamdom and christendom alike; and most espoused a constructionist ontogrammatology. newton’s principia mathematica, in other words, is as intrinsically an arabic text as it is a latin; and pico found he could only marry plato and aristotle via kabbalah. its irreducible islamicness aside, ibn turka’s book of inquiries would have been perfectly legible as a liber quaestiones had it made the further crossing from anatolia to italy. but there was no enlightenment in islam—and so no equal and opposed endarkenment—, which is to say: no divorce of reason from revelation, occult from manifest, magic from science, heaven from earth, mind from body, man from nature, man from man. for enlightened materialist-positivist europeans, writing, that talisman of light, now went dark—whence the endarkenment of the romantics, occultists all: the incoincidentia oppositorum. the same did not happen for muslims until much later, and then only in the wake of the largely externally-imposed cultural rupture that was colonialism (made possible by the collusion of muslim scripturalists, to be sure).192 manuscript culture, a significant subset of it lettrist, hence persisted in most parts of the islamicate world through the early 14th/20th century; it persists in pockets even now. ibn turka’s ontogrammato logy, his lettrist metaphysics of light, is thus emblematic of the cultural continuity, not rupture, that defined islamicate civilization from its inception.193 staunchly perennialist in its own right, this synthetic alid-pythagorean-solomonic doctrine became, as we have seen, broadly influential from the early 9th/15th century onward, from india to anatolia, and endured as a mainstream philosophical discourse in iran until at least the 13th/19th. so much for divergence; what of reconvergence? surprisingly, or perhaps not, forms of what may be styled neo-neopythagorean ontogrammatology are coming back into vogue in euro-american culture, high and popular alike, pockets of which have continued to have fits of pique with the enlightenment for locking it away in the prison of dark matter—and claiming to have thrown away the key. it was precisely the mid-20th-century linguistic turn in critical theory, moreover, culminating in derrida’s curiously kabbalistic hostility 190. the organic continuity of arabic literature, for instance, as well as other great literary traditions, including persian, sanskrit and chinese, stands in sharp contrast to the “catastrophic” and rupturous form of change unique to european literary history (bauer, “mamluk literature,” 112). expanding on this argument, bauer has recently shown that the synthesizing ethos of islamicate civilization also entailed a high tolerance for ambiguity—legal, social, sexual, philosophical, etc.—, this, again, in sharp contrast to christendom (die kultur der ambiguität). the same is a central thesis of shahab ahmed’s what is islam? 191. see lemay, abu maʿshar and latin aristotelianism. 192. for a case study see melvin-koushki and pickett, “mobilizing magic.” 193. islamicate civilization was not simply the greatest heir of late antique eurasian cultures, that is, and especially the hellenic, persian and abrahamic, but rather their direct continuation and culmination (bauer, “in search of ‘post-classical literature,’” 142; fowden, before and after muḥammad). 99 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) to and subversion of modern structuralist metaphysics, that effectively cleared the way for the emergence in the academy of a new-old western physics-metaphysics pivoting on language and consciousness. a number of recent developments are here especially suggestive: peircean semiotics— wherein every existent is a sign—has become a cottage industry in philosophy;194 geneticists persist in speaking of chemical life in textual terms;195 and some cognitive scientists have mathematically hypothesized a monistic-panpsychist conscious realism, whereby perception alone erects time and space and quantum-mechanically codes what we take to be physical reality.196 the latter trend in particular derives from the new discipline of physics—which long since displaced metaphysics, including its kabbalist/lettrist branch, as queen of the sciences in the west—now burgeoning: the physics of information.197 this ontogrammatological turn is epitomized by princeton physicist john wheeler’s famous 1989 dictum it from bit—that is to say, “all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe.”198 most strikingly, this emergent cosmology 194. as peirce (d. 1914) summarizes the central position of his pragmaticist semiotics (“the basis of pragmaticism,” 394): “the entire universe … is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.” 195. see e.g. von stuckrad, “rewriting the book of nature.” the american geneticist francis collins (b. 1950), past director of the human genome project and current director of the nih, is an avowed christian kabbalist; see e.g. his the language of god. 196. as donald d. hoffman, cognitive scientist at the university of california, irvine, and author of visual intelligence (1998), summarizes this model in his “hoffman’s law”: hoffman’s first law: a theory of everything starts with a theory of mind. quantum measurement hints that observers may create microphysical properties. computational theories of perception hint that observers may create macrophysical properties. the history of science suggests that counterintuitive hints, if pursued, can lead to conceptual breakthroughs. hoffman’s second law: physical universes are user interfaces for minds. just as the virtual worlds experienced in vr arcades are interfaces that allow the arcade user to interact effectively with an unseen world of computers and software, so also the physical work one experiences daily is a species-specific user interface that allows one to survive while interacting with a world of which one may be substantially ignorant. he elsewhere reiterates the planckian doctrine of mind as matrix of matter (“consciousness is fundamental”): i believe that consciousness and its contents are all that exists. spacetime, matter and fields never were the fundamental denizens of the universe but have always been, from their beginning, among the humbler contents of consciousness, dependent on it for their very being … if matter is but one of the humbler products of consciousness, then we should expect that consciousness itself cannot be theoretically derived from matter. the mind-body problem will be to physicalist ontology what black-body radiation was to classical mechanics: first a goad to its heroic defense, later the provenance of its final supersession. 197. see e.g. vedral, decoding reality. 198. “information, physics, quantum,” 5. the passage in full: it from bit. otherwise put, every it—every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself—derives its functions, its meaning, its very existence entirely—even if in some contexts indirectly—from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes or no questions, binary choices, bits. it from bit symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom—at a very al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 100 requires us to recognize the universe as a “metareality of information structures,” and the unidirectional flow of time and the strict limits of space as human constructs; hence the ability of human consciousness, logos processor that it is, to quantum-mechanically change physical reality by the mere act of observation, even in the past.199 information structures, of course, are embodied, are a form of writing; and observation is a vision of light. evolutionary theologians have seized upon this new physics of information in turn as the only workable means of reconciling the christian doctrine of creation with darwinian evolution (shades of pico’s embrace of kabbalah in pursuit of a project equally paradoxical): the universe as meaning-generating device.200 all of which sounds suspiciously talismanic; ibn turka would have grounds to be smug. pace derrida, then, western lovers of writing, muslim or christian, and however devoted to plato, have roundly called and do call foul on the phaedrus. deep bottom, in most instances—an immaterial source and explanation; that what we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions, and the registering of equipmentevoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe. echoing bauer’s observation as to a similar transition in mamluk literature (see n. 133 above), as well as hanegraaff’s theorization of a modern “disenchanted magic” (“how magic survived”), perhaps we can speak of a turn in physics from the cold representationalism of the newtonian model to the more intimate participationalism promised by the physics of information? 199. vallée, “a theory of everything (else).” 200. for examples see davies and gregersen, eds., information and the nature of reality; melvin-koushki, “the quest,” 447-48. 101 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) bibliography primary sources ʿallāmī, abū l-fażl, āʾīn-i akbarī, ed. h. blochmann, 2 vols., calcutta: asiatic society of bengal, 1869-72. ———, the ain i akbari by abul fazl ‘allami, tr. h. blochmann, 3 vols., calcutta: asiatic society of bengal, 1873. āmulī, shams al-dīn muḥammad, nafāyis 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