How are we to think simultaneously, on the one hand, différance as the economic detour which, in the element of the same, always aims at coming back to the pleasure of the presence that have been deferred by (conscious or unconscious) calculation, and, on the other hand, différance as the relation to an impossible presence, as expenditure without reserve, as the irreparable loss of presence, the irreversible usage of energy, that is, as the death-instinct, and as the entirely other relationship that apparently interrupts every economy?
Jacques Derrida – Of Grammatology
Everybody demands the philosopher to be concrete. Every day he hears the same cry: abandon your ivory tower and descend to the real world! Even philosophers accuse each other of being abstract. Yet the “concrete” is always different. It shifts its content constantly. It changes its face. Even where we find it. Sometimes the concrete is decided by my day, and some other times by my whole life. The philosopher should think his time. Sure. But what is his time? We call it “the present”. But what is the present? An hour, a day, a year, a life? And there we go again, with another set of abstractions!
Let’s try to be concrete starting with an individual existing here and now. This is the very definition of presence: hic et nunc, i.e., a point in time, a point in space. An unequivocal location. Yes, but we have already exceeded the point. Saying that “here” and “now” represent a localization in a wider field, we accept, necessarily, that there are other possible points. There is an indeterminate set of other points, each capable of being called a here. There is a “here” because of a possible or actual “there”. And there is “now” only as long as there is “then”. We say: here, and there, and there, and there… until we have a space, or some sort of space where points live. The same thing happens with time: “now” needs a “before” and an “after”. This is the minimum structure of what we call time: a sequence. Of course, there are many kinds of spaces, and many possible arrangements of time, but the argument still holds. Let’s go back to the individual. We call it “this”. However, as before, there is no “this” without something else, namely “that”. There is, in general, this and another. One or many. They form a space or, if we want, a field.
So far, so good. However, someone might argue that these are “conceptual” and “abstract” relationships. The “real” is neither “one” nor “many”, nor “this” nor “that”. It just is. We often claim that the real is richer than concepts, more colorful and infinite or at least unlimited. Theory is like the Bed of Procrustes. However, this concrete man claims to see the world without perspective, without mediation, without delay and without any constrain whatsoever. He doesn’t seem to pay any attention to the space or field that structures time, space and individual beings. He finds some being here and takes it as an absolute. He is caught in an eternal present. He is unaware of how the “now” is always referred to a field of time, and the “here” to a field of time, and “this” to a field of existence. But when he says that the idea and the real do not correspond to each other it is because they are, after all, commensurable. We say: the map is not the territory precisely because there is something of the territory captured, reflected or projected onto the map. Discordance is neither (pure) difference nor (pure) identity. It is both at the same time and neither in isolation. In other words, it is a play of several logical possibilities, at least affirmation, negation, contradiction and tertium datur. Indian logic calls this catuskoti and we call it tetralemma.
The empirical man says: your map is not the territory. This claim demands the possibility of comparing the former and the latter. This is the whole point. The map and the territory are neither identical nor absolutely different. The first preserves (reflects, prolongs, projects) some structure of the former. This means that they both possess a structure. There is an arrow going from the territory to the map, a transformation. Arrows are directed relationships. When we project the surface of our planet, a sphere, onto a two-dimensional map, we lose information. If we go back, we cannot recover all the structure proper to the sphere. We have collapsed three dimensions into two. However, maps also add information; they are creative, not just capturing relationships. They are more and less than the territory.
In thought and in language, everything exists in a relationship. These are logical or syntactical. But if they refer to something else, if there is something more than language and thought, i.e., if they map a world, then the latter must possess relationships. World relationships are captured by language and thought. In this sense, language and thought are less rich than the world. However, every map introduces something new, and in this case, the new element greatly exceeds the “given” of the world.
We have paid attention to “big” arrows, those connecting maps and territories. But there are “internal” arrows. In language we have words as elements and relationships between them. Syntaxis is an order that makes signification possible. It consists of functions and positions. For example, in Indo-European languages, a common subject-verb-predicate structure can be found. This structure is combinatorial but also directed. It is not the same: “The wolf eats the lamb” as “the lamb eats the wolf”. Thought has representations as elements and logical connectors as relationships. This is how we construct judgments. These are just two known and basic examples. But language and thought exhibit several structures, with different elements and directed relationships. In every case we observe some individuals and directed relationships among them. These are formal relationships expressed in graphs. Nodes represent individuals, and lines represent vertices. These are diagrams. In a sense, every relationship is a map. A map is the general name for relationships. A relationship is as basic as the related nodes. There is no such thing as an individual before a relationship. But relationships do not exhaust individuals. Relationships enable and constrain individuals. This is what we call “conditions of possibility”: conditioning or limitation and possibility (both as actuality and radical future possibility). Real things also exhibit reciprocal relationships. Beings are never isolated: they exist in communities and interact with each other.
We have thus seen “local” arrows, linking words with words, thoughts with thoughts, and things with things. There may be maps between sets of words to sets of words, or from sets of thoughts to sets of thoughts. We saw too that there are sets of arrows linking words with the world and thoughts with the world. There are also, naturally, links between words and thoughts. It is undeniable that words and thoughts have meaning on their own, yet they can be empty. If there are arrows between words and a world, if there are maps, it is because relationships are not exclusive to language or thought. There are also “real” relationships. Thought relationships map real relationships. There is, again, a relationship.
We understand relationships in an ontological sense: as constitutive of being. The old Greek πρός τι acquires a new dignity. But we also conceive of relationships in a logical-metaphysical sense: as a germ of identity and difference. This leads us to the heart of metaphysics, the question of the “principles of being”. The term “principle” translates the Greek “arché”. Arché means government. Government is the pattern that rules beings. As we have stated, all beings, whether in thought, language, or nature, stand in relationships. These relationships are directed. They can be considered either as structures, that is, as space, or as processes, that is, as time. There is no access to time before time, nor space before space. We are always already in a web of relationships. There are never isolated atoms outside of every relationship. But relationships also emerge; they come to be. Individuals have a conditioned existence (what Buddhism has captured with the concept of pratītyasamutpāda) through relationships, i.e., arrows. If everything is transient, as everything comes into being, and being always requires a relationship, then genesis and structure are co-originary. This is also assured by the arrow: relationship and process, existence and coming into being. A “pure sequence” is already a structure, which inherently contains differences. Since no structure is necessary or eternal, it also involves the arrow of time. This is being as germ. The arrow does not represent the transit from nothingness into being, nor from chaos into order. Non-existence is alien to being; these two terms represent separate domains. For nothingness to evolve into being, it must already be in a process of coming into being. Less than something, more than nothing. If divinity creates out of nothingness, we must already suppose the existence of the former, even as the master of being. The same applies when moving from chaos to order. Chaos represents a pure, potential, unqualified matter. The demiurge introduces form. In the first case, there is no genesis, but an act of magic. In the second, form exists in the eternal and perfect mind of a deity.
Genesis, as we think it here, does not mean absolute creation or the introduction of form in chaos, but self-formation. Genesis involves the emergence of beings (individuals), but also of their relationships. There is the historicity of the arrow. This is why we can say with R. Lavendhomme that “in the beginning was the arrow”. Arrow as the beginning. It does not start from a zero-point. Nor as the first term of a series. Rather it is the transition from one to the other. This is why a relationship means “more than one and less than two”. Pure simple identity is “oneness”. Pure separation, i.e. disconnected elements, means either “dualism” or “disconnected multiplicity”. In trivial monism, in dualism and in indifferent multiplicity, there is no relationship whatsoever. We can see this trivial monism as identity: A=A. This means there is an arrow AA and an arrow AA. The starting and ending points are identical, indicating that the act of “going” and the act of “coming” do not entail change. This is the simplest arrow. As this is a directed relationship, it involves a path: . We can go with thought behind constituted things to the event of their constitution. However, not beyond this point. We assist at the moment when something is unleashed. This means that we can submit everything to its process of emergence, to becoming. There is a boundary, though: before everything fades into the primordial darkness, we encounter a proto-structure—asymmetry, space. Becoming takes place in space. Space and time are not only the “where and where” events happen; they are also subject to individuation. Genesis and structure are co-originary.
Dualism is a relationship that exists in a space distinct from the two separate elements. If we “lived” in one ontological island, isolated in an ontological archipelago, we would know nothing about the other islands. They would be nothing for us. If they constituted a trivial continuity, there would be no difference. Arrows work in a non-trivially connected world. There is only one world. But no simple pattern rules everywhere and always.
The impetus for any action or event can only be the initial moment itself, symbolized by an arrow. The point does not have to “come out” of itself towards the other; there is no totality that must be broken, nor unity that must be compromised for there to be a world; no “one that breaks into two”. Rather, from the outset, there is a relationship, a directed relationship. Such a direction may involve a static or a dynamic map. Identity is the path defined by two symmetrical arrows. But A as target is different to A as starting point. It has the more general form of ArB (A relationship B). As an arrow, it may mean AB, BA, or A↔B. The combination of these two possibilities, of something with itself and with another, is what we call becoming or transformation or change. We might then write something like: A(A’. But arrows never show the ultimate beginning nor the ultimate end. We find them in medias res. As they have direction, they always give a sense, but not a meaning. We can simply talk about sheaves of arrows. Locally, we can observe the relative identity of individuals as a path from itself to itself but being a part coming from and going somewhere else. The arrow “breaks” between the circle and the line, sameness and otherness, return and loss:
This is an ontology and ontogeny. Beings are connected to other beings, not all of them, not in the same way, and not in the same sense. They are only interconnected in one single world. Now, if beings emerge from other beings (in singular and in groups) and relationships (local and global), then they “disclose” other beings, not only human beings. Beings disclose, express and continue in all other beings. There are never atoms, isolated individuals. But there is also never a “totality” but a structure of connectivity, of paths running through spaces.
In other words, the subject-object correlation is only one arrow in a universe of arrows. We cannot step outside “our” relationship with the world. But it is not necessary to do so to do justice to both the real and the ideal. On the contrary, we have to radicalize correlationism into a hypercorrelationism, a jungle of arrows. Finally, a sagitology can also be considered as a diagramatology, an investigation of Being in terms of paths connecting beings and processes, i.e. as the spatiotemporal structures (chronotopes) that are inhabited by all sorts of individuals and their corresponding dramas.
References
Derrida, J. (1982). Margins of philosophy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Lavendhomme, R. (2001). Lieux du sujet. Paris: Seuil.
