Damn fine clarification regarding the ireell. I'll be keen for summerizing 4 - it's where things start to get real interesting :D

Alright, nice. It seems like the stakes get successively higher with each section, though 6 and 7 are still beyond me ATM.

Reality in this first sense usually corresponds to the German Wirklichkeit or Realität, which means reality in a pretty unphilosophical sense: real stuff in the real world, things that have causal effects on one another, are concrete an manifest in space in time, and in short, partakers in efficient causation. — The Great Whatever

I do not think that this assumed category of "real stuff", as separate, transcendental "things", is justified. The world is psychical. If there is such stuff, it is transcendental. We cannot make any judgements whatsoever concerning the transcendental, because such judgements would be based on how the transcendental appears to us, as phenomena, and therefore not judgements of the transcendental itself, but of the phenomenal.

So this assumption, which Husserl makes, that there is a "really existent sign", is completely unsupported at this point in Derrida's book. There have been no principles presented which would warrant this assumption. When someone speaks a phrase, and I hear it, there is an appearance of the words within my imagination, as phenomena within my psychical world. But this is the only way that words exist to me, as phenomena within my world. No principles have been presented whereby I can assume individual objects within the transcendental.

OK. Catching up. Just finished chapter 4. Would be willing to do the next, chapter 5. (finally have the time to do it next weekend :) )

A terminological point – transcendent would be for objects existing beyond experience, transcendental for the conditions of possible experience.

And part of the phenomenological method is explicitly bracketing credence in transcendent objects in order to study the experiential structures of positing those objects. So we see the outside from the inside: in perceiving a transcendent object we note the way in which the perception itself requires positing a transcendent thing, without actually believing there is any such thing.

Thanks for the clarification on terminology. My point being that we haven't yet seen the justification for positing the word, or the sign, as a transcendent object. To do this requires justification for the notion that objects may be transcendent. To posit "a transcendent thing, without actually believing there is any such thing" is somewhat incoherent, and doesn't explain the necessity for positing transcendent objects. If perceiving a transcendent object necessitates that there is a transcendent object, then the positing is justified, and we should actually believe that there is such a thing, but the logic of this has not yet been explained.

whoa what a shift with this chapter - I take back what I said earlier about the soliloquy chapter in LI - I've read it 10x now and it really is a bottleneck where Husserl narrows in on what he sees as the purely expressive, in order to move on to more general concerns. It's just so subtle and almost insouciant, it's hard to recognize what's going on. I do think this imaginary communication falls apart for exactly the reasons Derrida cites. I look forward to Street's summary

The transcendent object isn't posited by the theorist – it's part of the structure of perception. When we perceive something, we perceive not only one side or phase of it, but it projects countless other sides or phases we know we could 'fulfill' by further perceptions (like walking around to the backside of a spatial object). But these projections are infinite and impossible to exhaust in principle, so the object confronts us as transcendent, a hidden 'X' behind all possible phases of it, we seeing those phases as identical, but knowing that no tallying up of them can possibly exhaust the object in experience. Thus the structure of perception itself posits this transcendent object, not 'we' the phenomenologists. All this is observed without 'believing' what perception tells us – we just note that perception is indeed 'positing' in this way, it takes there to be a real, transcendent object.

But the point about the words is that it takes place in imagination, which unlike with perception, does not involve a 'positing.'

All right, I'll go with that. The act of perception itself posits the transcendent object. The object is apprehended as possible phases, perhaps an infinity of possibilities. In what sense are the possible phases "identical"? Is this an equality, in the sense that numerous possibilities could have equal probability? If we cannot apprehend all possible phases, how could we divide probability equally?

But the point about the words is that it takes place in imagination, which unlike with perception, does not involve a 'positing.' — The Great Whatever

This is where I find the difficulty, the proposed distinction between imagined words and perceived words. In imagination, the words are apprehended as unities independent from each other, objects of the imagination. What does the positing here, to make them appear as objects? It doesn't suffice to say that the words were at some time perceived as objects (the positing occurred at this time), then they were recollected in the imagination, because words are artificial, so we must account for them coming into existence, being created as objects, units of identity.

In what sense are the possible phases "identical"? Is this an equality, in the sense that numerous possibilities could have equal probability? If we cannot apprehend all possible phases, how could we divide probability equally? — Metaphysician Undercover

There is no probability involved: the phases are perceived as noemata, but there is a kind of 'synthesis' that unites all of them to the same object, the same transcendent underlying object. There might even be cases where the difference between seeing two objects in virtue of seeing two phases, and seeing one, breaks down: suppose you're looking at a chair and it seems to 'blink' out of existence, for just a moment, then reappear. What happened? Did the 'same' chair come in and out of existence, and are you seeing two phases of it, or did one chair disappear and another coalesce? Here our positing intuitions break down, as can be seen in problems involving teleportation that people often discuss. Clearly we have robust but mysterious intuitions about which phenomenological conditions allow phases to be united in this way, and there are borderline cases.

What does the positing here, to make them appear as objects? It doesn't suffice to say that the words were at some time perceived as objects (the positing occurred at this time), then they were recollected in the imagination, because words are artificial, so we must account for them coming into existence, being created as objects, units of identity. — Metaphysician Undercover

Again, the words are not being recollected, since memory is a memory of something real that has past (or rather, memory presents what is being remembered as real in the past). Imagination is different: it doesn't posit because in virtue of imagining something, you do not take it to exist. This raises interesting questions about the identity conditions of imagined objects, which are different from those of perceived objects: for example, can two people phantasy the same imaginary centaur, if there is no common fictional character or anything like that for them to latch onto? If I make up a centaur, does it really have any other phases that I could fulfill, by seeing its backside, etc.? Surely I can make them up in my imagination, but it doesn't seem as if, with a real horse, say, they were already there – and so there seems to be phases uniting the imaginary centaur, but only insofar as the activity of my imagination holds it together, and so I take there to be no transcendent underlying object, and I do not take any actual centaur to exist.

What Derrida says in Chapter 4 here, as I understand it, that this distinction cannot holds for linguistic signs, since to use a sign in the imagination fulfills all the same indicative functions that constitutes its real, actual existence in discourse.

Again, the words are not being recollected, since memory is a memory of something real that has past (or rather, memory presents what is being remembered as real in the past). Imagination is different: it doesn't posit because in virtue of imagining something, you do not take it to exist. This raises interesting questions about the identity conditions of imagined objects, which are different from those of perceived objects: for example, can two people phantasy the same imaginary centaur, if there is no common fictional character or anything like that for them to latch onto? — The Great Whatever

With words though, different people do imagine the very same words. For example, you and I can both imagine "word". If this is not a case of us both recollecting that I just suggested the word "word", then why would we both be imagining the same word now.

What Derrida says in Chapter 4 here, as I understand it, that this distinction cannot holds for linguistic signs, since to use a sign in the imagination fulfills all the same indicative functions that constitutes its real, actual existence in discourse. — The Great Whatever

I believe it is claimed by Derrida that the sign is necessarily an instance of repetition. If it is not a repetition, then there is nothing that it could signify and therefore it could not be a sign. Since it is a repetition, then in relation to presence it must be a re-presentation rather than a presentation. The re-presentation is necessarily of the same thing, by identity, while presence itself consists of difference. This allows that the re-presentation, transcends presence, making the sign a transcendent object regardless of whether or not there is real physical exterior existence . If I understand correctly, it is this very same principle which gives us "the present", and "being" as transcendental to presence, and this allows for the possibility of death. Therefore "I am" is to place "I" in the present, instead of understanding "I" as presence, and this is an affirmation of mortality.

Righty-o, fourth chapter, where things get interesting. Derrida decidedly shifts from commentary to critique, and there's finally some payoff after the meticulous distinction-drawing of the first three chapters. A note of orientation to begin with: this chapter largely deals with questions of 'communication', which, as outlined by the previous chapter, belongs to the sphere of 'indication'. Derrida here follows Husserl in distinguishing - within the category of indication - two types of communication: actual communication and represented communication, or reality and representation. At stake in this chapter however, will be the breakdown of this distinction, and the consequences of this breakdown for 'internal discourse'.

So, this chapter begins with Derrida recalling that for Husserl, there is, strictly speaking, no communication in the 'solitary life of the soul'. Husserl: "In internal discourse, I communicate nothing to myself. I indicate nothing to myself." At best, I represent myself communicating to myself, I imagine that I do so. Putting this in the terms above: there is only 'represented communication', and not 'actual communication' in 'internal discourse'. Before we come back to this, it is important to emphasize that for Husserl, there is no necessary connection between actual and represented communication. That is, "representation is only an [exterior] accident added contingently onto the practice of discourse."

It is precisely at this point that Derrida will stage his intervention, asking whether or not this attribution of exteriority can really be sustained. In fact, this chapter will proceed by explicitly arguing that it cannot be: "there are grounds for thinking that in language representation and reality are not added together here and there, for the simple reason that it is impossible in principle to distinguish them rigorously." Derrida's argument will turn on the necessity of repetition as belonging inherently to any possible employment of the sign. That is, for a sign to be a sign, it must have an ideal, formal identity that persists throughout any one instance of it's employment. Derrida argumentation on this point is pretty clear, imo, so I'll just remark here that this necessity is why Derrida speaks of a 'structure of repetition'; and because it applies to any sign, Derrida will also specify that his argument applies 'prior' to the distinction between signs employed for communicative processes and those not.

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Before continuing, I want to expand upon a seemingly tangential remark that Derrida makes, which I think is easy to overlook, but vitally important for understanding his philosophy as a whole. It's this one, at the end of the second last paragraph on p. 42: "And no doubt we must not say that that impossibility [of distinguishing between reality and representaiton] is produced in language. Language in general is that impossibility — by means of itself alone." This is an incredibly curious statement insofar as it puts into question exactly what is meant by 'language' here. By defining language in terms of this 'formal' structure - whereby reality and representation cannot be properly discriminated between - Derrida throws open, in an incredibly wide manner - what it is we understand by language.

I mean, really think about it: if the impossibility of distinguishing between reality and representation just is language (rather than being a particular quirk of language), then what exactly is the scope of language? It's not 'just' representation, as classically understood (although it is not 'beyond' representation either). It is limited to the words that we exchange and the books that we read? Or is there, just as much, a language of gesture, a language of flowers, a language of... Where does language end and reality begin (which is not to say, as reductive, banal readings of Derrida will have it, that 'everything is language')? Is this an appropriate question? This is the germ of the distinction that Derrida will later make between 'writing' in it's 'restricted' and it's 'general' sense, where 'writing' doesn't at all refer just to empirical instances of marks of a page, but a general structure, no less than language is here a kind of 'mechanism independent' structure of it's own'.

I won't say much more about this because it's not strictly pursued in VP itself, but understanding this argument (or at least where it comes from) is vital to anyone looking to follow up on Derrida's other works, and just thinking a bit more deeply about what 'language' is in general.

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Anyway, back to it: if, on account of the necessity of repetition in ideality, we cannot rigorously distinguish between 'actual' and 'representative' discourse, then the very distinction between indication and expression is also threatened. Note the twisted topology here: although actual and representative discourse belong to the sphere of indication, by undoing a distinction internal to indication, this will have repercussions on the distinction ('external' to indication) between indication and expression. Basically, if 'actual communication' partakes of the order of ideality (which requires repetition), then to the degree that expression also partakes of this order, then expression must also be subject to the repetitions of the sign, and thus language (understood here in it's general sense mentioned above)

I'm skipping ahead a bit, but it's on p. 48 where all this is stated categorically: "Therefore, whether we are dealing with indicative communication or expression, there is no sure criterion by means of which to distinguish between an external language and an internal language, and even if we grant the hypothesis of an internal language, there is no sure criterion for distinguishing between an actual language and a fictional language. Such a distinction, however, is indispensable for Husserl in order to prove that indication is external to expression, and for all that this distinction governs."

I'm stopping here for now, but I'm not done with the summary just yet. In this post I mostly want to grasp the 'topology', the twists of inside and outside, that mark the argument here, as I think it's the best way to get a full picture of what's going on. I think if we can understand that, alot falls into place quite easily. The specific discussions - about imagination, fiction, death, presence, etc, will be dealt with in another post.

Basically, if 'actual communication' partakes of the order of ideality (which requires repetition), then to the degree that expression also partakes of this order, then expression must also be subject to the repetitions of the sign, and thus language (understood here in it's general sense mentioned above) — StreetlightX

I'm not sue that it follows necessarily that expression is subject to the repetitions of the sign. It might just mean that we have to go deeper within the psyche to find pure expression. What has been exposed is that expression is already contaminated at this level, the level of the sign, and the ideal. The repetition which gives identity to the sign is a sameness, and this is what enables memory, the recognition of a sameness which transcends the moment of presence, creating a temporally extended unity. But we can go beyond this, to look for pure expression in the difference of presence. This is what we find, for example, in music, difference from one moment to the next. Though I admit that there is an appeal to sameness in the overall structure of a piece of music, which makes it such that the artist can remember it, and also, acceptable to others, communicative, a non-repetitive piece of expression is not impossible..

On to some thematics:

Originality of the Sign

Part of what's at stake in Derrida's reading here is to affirm what he refers to as the 'originality of the sign'. As he notes, traditionally, the sign is often treated as derivitive with respect to 'presence', where in this case, presence refers to the presence of 'actual communication' on the one hand, or expressivity on the other. Derrida will have alot to say about presence in the upcoming chapter, but to prempt a little, one can correlate the distinction between presence and sign with the distinction between voice and writing. The voice being a kind of immaterial purity of sense, and writing being a kind of derivative material inscription of that purity.

Anyway, in making the sign derivative, Derrida claims that Husserl is basically following an ancient trope that has been in operation since the advent of philosophy itself: "The philosophy and history of the West ... has in this wayconstituted and established the very concept of the sign, this concept, at
the moment of its origin and in the heart of its sense, is marked by this will to derivation and erasure. Consequently, to restore the originality and the non-derivative character of the sign against classical metaphysics is also, by means of an apparent paradox, to erase the concept of the sign whose entire history and entire sense belong to the adventure of the metaphysics of presence."

One must be careful however, not to treat the notion of the orginality of the sign as a mere "reversal", where the sign itself takes on the status of presence. Part of what is at stake in Derrida's work is to divest the very notion of 'originality', and by reading the sign as origniality, the point is to cast suspicion upon all notions of orignality tout court. Derrida will begin to clarify this in the chapters that follow, but it's pretty important to keep this in mind, least we consider Derrida simply swapping out one notion of presence for another. In the last chapter, Derrida will make this point by referring to sign as a paradoxical 'originary supplement'.

Life/Death/Presence

Following the discussion of the presence of the sign, Derrida will further thematize what's at issue by mapping presence and sign onto life and death, respectively. As he writes, "It is therefore the relation to my death (to my disappearance in general) that is hidden in this determination of being as presence, ideality, as the absolute possibility of repetition. The possibility of the sign is this relation to death." In so doing, Derrida also brings to the fore the theme of mortality which underlies much of this work. For Derrida, there is no such thing as a life without a relation to death: all life - all presence - is marked by it's constitutive relation to death. Hence: "I am means therefore originarily I am mortal. I am immortal is an impossible proposition."

An interesting resonance with the theological tradition comes out here in the next line, when Derrida concludes that therefore, “I am the one who is” is the confession of a mortal. Although it is not mentioned explicitly, I'm almost entirely sure this is an allusion to God's declaration to Moses in Exodus that "I am who I am". I wonder if this allusion might be made clearer in the original French, which might accord better with the biblical line itself. In any case, if one were to extrapolate, the inference here is that not even a God could be immortal. If anyone's interested, Martin Hagglund more or less reads Derrida explicitly along these lines in his Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, which is one of the single best resources in coming to grips with Derrida in general.

Imagination/Fiction

Finally, Derrida turns to the notions of the imagination and to fiction to round out his thematization of these issues. As with Husserl's supposed continuity with the metaphysical tradition in treating the sign as a derivation from presence, so too does Derrida claim that Husserl's treatment of the imaginary also follows the same path. While acknowledging that Husserl "profoundly renews the problematic of imagination", and that there is much that is novel is Husserl's conception of the imagination, for Derrida, we must 'notice the inheritance' (of the tradition) at work in Husserl. Like the sign, imagination is derivative of presence "A reproduction of a presence", and "keeps within itself the primary reference to an originary presentation."

Noting Husserl's 'fascination' with Hume (the allusion here being to Hume's problem of induction, wherein it is imagination which ties together cause and effect), Derrida finally turns toward the idea of fiction, such that fiction itself becomes something 'originary', rather than derivitive: "If we admit, as we have tried to show, that every sign in general consists in an originarily repetitive structure, the general distinction between fictional usage and actual usage of a sign is threatened. The sign is originarily worked over by fiction". Note again the purposeful conflation of categories: 'original fiction' - again, this will later become 'originative supplement'.

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Derrida will also begin here to thematize things in terms of consciousness, proximity and experience, but these ideas are picked up with greater detail in what's to come, so I wont' say too much about them other than to note their presence at the end of the chapter.

Preempting a little, this 'digging deeper' is exactly what Husserl does in the Lectures on Internal Time Consciousness, which Derrida will shortly turn to. The example of music is an apt one, because music (or rather melody) is precisely the basis upon which Husserl will consider the notion of time. I don't remember if Derrida does talk about melody (a quick search says no), but it's good to keep in mind as you read on.

I'm not convinced that an idiosyncratic sign can't be a sign, and I think it shows some structuralist prejudices, which are plausible if we are sympathetic to Derrida to begin with, but won't be convincing.

I guess the question is: how could an idiosyncratic sign be a sign? That is, if a sign is in principle unrepeatable (and when I think about it, the only paradigm I know of this is divine revelation), in what way can it be properly called a sign? Or better, what kind of a thing would a sign be if it were in principle unrepeatable? And what would it not be? (what theory of the sign would be at work?).

I'm going to be a little reductive here and point out that analytic and continental philosophers, around this time (50s and 60s) were both going through a violent backlash against mentalistic pictures of meaning, and especially linguistic meaning. However, the general line of attack curiously tended to go in opposite directions between the traditions.

The analytic philosopher (exemplified by Wittgenstein) says: the problem with language being idiosyncratic is that would mean it couldn't suffice for communication. But, communication is essential for language; so language can't be idiosyncratic.

The continental philosopher (exemplified by Derrida) says: the problem with language being without communication is that then it would be idiosyncratic. But, a lack of idiosyncrasy is essential for language: so language can't be non-communicative.

Now it doesn't take a genius to see that there's a sort of circle of related concepts going on here. If we are a Husserl who is not within this circle, then something else is going to have to convince us to step into it.

So let's think about the way a sign might be idiosyncratic. Well, we know even from Derrida that indicative signs that are non-linguistic are only so functionally, given the lived experience that animates them. This means that what something indicates to someone depends on the experiencer. If I see food missing from the pantry, it might indicate the local rat has been about again; but to everyone else, not knowing about the existence of this rat, this is no such indication at all. Within this limited scope, then, the sign is idiosyncratic. So does Derrida mean by 'sign' only a linguistic, or expressive sign? Is it only these that cannot be idiosyncratic (note the strength of his claim: a sign cannot be idiosyncratic, essentially). He must mean something like that. But then, why is it important for him to cordon off language in this way, given his general desire to collapse expression and indication?

If we were to move into only expressive or linguistic signs, then we might think about empirical phenomena that sit uncomfortably with both the analytic and continental pictures, including twin languages, self-directed speech, child nonsense words, studies involving experimental subjects who learn on language fragments containing nonce-words, ephemeral names like 'Mr. I Don't Know What Time It Is,' which only require one tokening to be understood, and may never be used in a speaker's life again afterward, and so on. We might also with Quine question to what extent the forceful leveling of our linguistic practice to something common and repeatable really removes all of the inner kinks of each individual, and to what extent language actually is idiosyncratic, but the idiosyncrasies are just washed out by the needs of communication (and so communication shaves off, can never really capture all the nuances of, expression). To do this would be to accuse Derrida of a kind of blindness: he sees the ideality and repeatability of the sign as essential precisely because for him as a structuralist, this is the only thing that counts as 'signage' to begin with, and in fact, to turn his method around on him, there is no essential separation between the repeatable and the idiosyncratic, but they shade into each other.

But before going there, we would have to know what the generality of Derrida's claim is supposed to be, and what he thinks of idiosyncratic indications. As it stands there is a discomfort here, and he seems to be doing something like what he's accusing Husserl of doing: trying to sequester indication away, once we're to talk about 'signs' (where Husserl's 'slips of the tongue' according to Derrida went in the opposite direction in saying, 'signs, namely indications').

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I also wonder whether anyone would be interested in talking a little bit about the background involving Saussure. He was overtly mentioned last chapter, but this one seems to me to be where his influence is most obvious and crucial for getting at what's going on.

“I am the one who is” is the confession of a mortal. Although it is not mentioned explicitly, I'm almost entirely sure this is an allusion to God's declaration to Moses in Exodus that "I am who I am". — StreetlightX

I thought this too. It can't be an accident. Also, the footnote following this is funny.

I am basically on board with Derrida with these motifs. I agree about the possibility of death and the tradition's aversion to it through perpetual self-actualization and presence and so on. I have little to say in trying to critique them because they strike me as deeply correct in some way, and at this point they're more allusions than arguments.

If I see food missing from the pantry, it might indicate the local rat has been about again; but to everyone else, not knowing about the existence of this rat, this is no such indication at all. Within this limited scope, then, the sign is idiosyncratic.

...If we were to move into only expressive or linguistic signs, then we might think about empirical phenomena that sit uncomfortably with both the analytic and continental pictures, including twin languages, self-directed speech, child nonsense words, studies involving experimental subjects who learn on language fragments containing nonce-words, ephemeral names like 'Mr. I Don't Know What Time It Is,' which only require one tokening to be understood, and may never be used in a speaker's life again afterward, and so on. — The Great Whatever

I think these examples betray a misunderstanding. Idiosyncratic does not mean 'used only once'. The notion of idiosyncrasy at stake turns not upon matter of facts, but a matters of principle: is this sign, in principle, repeatable, even if it is, in fact, only ever used the one time? That is, if I notice the food missing from the pantry, then any one, in principle, could do the same. It is a matter for the capacity or the ability for repetition. Alphonso Lingis, whose wrote a stunning book on these matters (one that is easily as good, if not far better than VP), makes this clear in one of his passages, where he speaks of ideality in the Husserlian sense:

"The objects of the theoretical attitude are ever ideal objectives. An idea is an ideal object, a structure of factors or elements which cohere necessarily such that if anyone of them is there, all are there; ... It is an identity. If ever it should recur, it will recur with the same identity. If ever it could recur even once ... it could recur at any time, anywhere. This repeatability is not a property that follows from its ideal essence, but constitutes it; for Husserl, who is not a Platonic substantialist, ideal being insists not in intemporal subsistence but in unrestricted recurrability. The form of infinity - the ad infinitum - enters into the constitution of every idea." (Lingis, Deathbound Subjectivity, my emphasis).

Derrida himself is not exactly equivocal on this point either. Note the insistence on possibility in the following passage: "We come to make Vorstellung in general and, as such, depend on the possibility of repetition, and the most simple Vorstellung, presentation, depend on the possibility of re-presentation ... This ideality, which is only the name of the permanence of the same and the possibility of its repetition, does not exist in the world and it does not come from another world. It depends entirely on the possibility of acts of repetition. It is constituted by the possibility of acts of repetition. Its “being” is proportionate to the power of repetition. Absolute ideality is the correlate of a possibility of indefinite repetition." (p. 44-45). Everywhere it is a question of possibility. So long as that possibility exists, or rather, so long as that possibility insists, in principle, then the sign contaminates all presence.

Another passage, in the same chapter, for substantiation: "It is therefore the relation to my death (to my disappearance in general) that is hidden in this determination of being as presence, ideality, as the absolute possibility of repetition. The possibility of the sign is this relation to death. The determination and the erasure of the sign in metaphysics is the dissimulation of this relation to death which nevertheless was producing signification. If the possibility of my disappearance in general must be in a certain way experientially lived so that a relation to presence in general can be instituted, we can no longer say that the experience of the possibility of my absolute disappearance (of my death) comes to affect me, supervenes over an I am and modifies a subject." To put it as programmatically as possible: signs, to the degree that they are repeatable in principle (even if there is no 'actual' sign), are not - or rather cannot be - idiosyncratic.

That all said, I think you're entirely right to note the profound similarity between Derrida and Wittgenstein on these matters. I've always considered Derrida's arguments regarding repetition to be another - superior - way to pose the 'private language argument' that Wittgenstein advances in the PI. Henry Staten wrote a nice little comparative study (endorsed by Derrida in fact!), the imaginatively titled Wittgenstein and Derrida that addresses some of these proximities.

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I also wonder whether anyone would be interested in talking a little bit about the background involving Saussure. He was overtly mentioned last chapter, but this one seems to me to be where his influence is most obvious and crucial for getting at what's going on.

I'll see If I can conjure something up on this at some point if I can.

I'll put together a more thorough response later this evening, but, I don't understand how the possibility of indefinite repetition occludes my death. In the first part of LI, Husserl waxes a bit poetic (& I'm smuggling in later terminology to paraphrase) - but he speaks with a certain solemity about science as a project of preservation and transmission which allows the noetic acts of long-dead men to be repeated anew. Wouldn't the death of all rational beings be what's effaced here? It feels a little to me like Derrida's forcing Heideggerean considerations where they don't quite fit - as tgw says, whether you agree with the ideas or not, they're allusions here, not arguments, and I'm not sure how well they illuminate the text purportedly under discussion.

I wonder if the examples of exceptional words you cite points less to a problem with possible repetition and more to a problem of access. Certain people can repeat these, others cannot. This is especially clear with twin language. I have twin brothers and have witnessed some of this firsthand - it doesn't seem all that different from watching very close friends exchanging in-jokes or personally charged words. a close friend and I, in high school, built our own secret language referring to certain shared ideas - "fly fishing" "glitch lake" "the french thing" - which allowed us to communicate quickly based on all-night conversations we'd had - these conversations, so to speak, were taken as read. What's idiosyncratic isn't unrepeatable, I think, it's just not democratic. Husserl's own idiosyncratic terminology is a perfect example.

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I'm not really comfortable with the appeal to counterfactuality, because I think it will explode the thesis into triviality: talk of what could be repeated obscures important points about what it takes, empirically, for a sign to be part of a sign-system, and we could say for instance that a cloud could be a letter, and so on.

The point is that all that it takes for an indicative sign to function is to indicate once. So we're faced with a bit of a fork: either we admit it can be idiosyncratic, because counterfactually it would take a lot of strain to convert the indicator into an indicator for anyone else (and indeed, this will be more and more difficult the more we specify the specific act of indication, e.g. by specifying a time or circumstance under which it must occur in order to count as 'the same,' which is variable depending on what description of the indication you prefer), or in order to make it non-idiosyncratic we stretch the counterfactual conditions to such length that the could have clause becomes trivial, since anything 'could have' been anything in the widest possible sense. The semantics of counterfactuals are hard anyway, especially when it comes to things like signs that 'get essentialized.'

These aren't knock-down rebuttals, just concerns.

Also, just to make the scope of my concern clear, note that Derrida refers to 'absolute ideality.' The gulf between ideality and non-ideality is characteristic of structuralism. All I am saying is that ideality may be gradable, such that we could say something weaker like 'the less idiosyncrasy, the more ideality / the more signhood.'

I'd like to make it clear that Derrida is not really psychoanalyzing Husserl's concerns with death. Husserl was mystified by personal birth, death, and sleep, and the ways he thinks about them are fascinating, especially in his late career. There is even a place where Husserl claims that the primal ego (which in late Husserl looks like it's even deeper than the 'sedimented' transcendental ego!!) is immortal. Now, you can make of this enigmatic comment what you will. But damn.

As for the death of all rational beings, well I don't know. Certainly I think there's a sense in which, Schopenhauer-like, Husserl thinks the world would be destroyed in such a case. He also seems to think the world could be destoryed while the people survive (!!)

I feel good about the allusions to death and so on. He is hitting on a crucial nerve. All this stuff about classical voluntarism, immortalism, body-soul distinctions, and so on is not just hot air. (also, I think the repeatability reveals my own death rather than occluding it).

I'm not trying to say that Derrida isn't touching on things that are deeply part of Husserl's philosophy - I'm just trying to understand how the first 3 chapters bring us to the themes of chapter 4. If, in chapter 4, the tight - tho oft-interrupted - analysis gives way totally to a freewheeling impressionistic meditation on various phenomenological themes, well, I feel a little disappointed. It seems straightforward that the the possibility of indefinite repeatability, or iteration, has no bearing on my death, unless it's specifically the possibility of my iterating.

So, if Derrida wants more than to simply re-announce the relation that the metaphysics of presence has to one's own being-toward-death, thereby elucidating for the readers that he's read Heidegger; if, that is, he wants to make of iteration tout court a privileged window onto this relation (which he surely does, given the labor he's expended in the first 3 chapters setting up all the pieces); then I think he's failed to do so. The most one can say, at this point, is that the possibility of indefinite iteration evades the death of all rational beings.

(I am familiar with section 39 of Ideas but (one of) Derrida's aim(s), in chapter 4, is to show that the discussion of signs in the first LI occludes the inevitability of my death. It would be easy to show that section 39 of Ideas is super presence-y and very death-averse. All you have to do is quote it in full. But presumably the originality of the book is that it's not making the easy move of saying 'someone who thinks consciousness survives the destruction of the world probably has some death-issues.')

Isn't the point that philosophy has some death issues, though, not Husserl in particular? I think the point about my death is that the realization that everything I can express about myself, and what I am, is from something handed down from the past and that can be iterated indefinitely into the future. I mean, the extremity of Husserl's position on time-consciousness relates any kind of past- or future-hood to death, removal from presence (although I'm not sure I buy Derrida's take on this).

I also think this sprinkling in of large themes has been characteristic of Derrida's style so far, but before some of it was in footnotes.

I think the point about my death is that the realization that everything I can communicate about myself, and what I am, is from something handed down from the past and that can be iterated indefinitely into the future.

You may be right, but I haven't read beyond chapter 4, and can't find this idea there.

I also think this sprinkling in of large themes has been characteristic of Derrida's style so far, but before some of it was in footnotes.

That's true, but earlier they were more like coquettish teasers of what's to come, little flashes of the summit motivating the weary reader to continue to scale the monotonous lower cliffs . What feels different about chapter 4 is that suddenly - bam! - we're at the summit and seemed to have skipped 70% of the mountain. Kinda like 'ok we've proved we can do a little bit of climbing, call in the helicopter, let's get to the good stuff'

Do you get that sense at all? It feels a lot like that to me.

Do you get that sense at all? It feels a lot like that to me. — csalisbury

As I said, Derrida strikes me as impatient. Fine, it just means we have to read him less linearly. The best authors successively blow your mind in slow steps, with each step.

yeah, idk, I'm fine with nonlinearity -usually prefer it actually - but I look to literature or avowedly experimental philosophy when that's what I'm after. I feel kinda of annoyed at the idea of book that painstakingly draws all sorts of distinctions, progesses from one point to another, pretending it's linear, when it isn't (If you want to just go for the jugular, why waste all that time on the early chapters?.) I'm still trying to charitably read the book as what it pretends to be, and criticizing it from that standpoint.