Abstract
Derrida was long regarded primarily as a philosopher of language or deconstructor of other philosophical and literary texts. Closer examination of his writings reveals that his oeuvre of almost a hundred published works also contains countless examples of philosophical reflections on technology. This chapter seeks to illuminate the way in which technology appears in his writings. It offers an overview of the basic features of a deconstructive phenomenology of technology that extends the concept of technology to encompass the entire phenomenological field: the technological here is not the opposite term of the psychical but constitutes, rather, a close relation between two analogous apparatuses: the psychical and the non-psychical. I argue that Derrida’s understanding of technology in this way was the gradual result of his deep engagement with Edmund Husserl’s writings. Derrida’s “definition” of technology clearly does not accord with Martin Heidegger’s thesis of a sharp line of demarcation between thinking about essence and technology itself. Although Derrida acknowledges Heidegger as one of the first philosophers to carry out a fundamental enquiry into the great question concerning technology, he identifies serious problems in his later writings in particular.
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Notes
- 1.
The reasons for Derrida’s relative silence on political issues prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall are considered in Chap. 7.
- 2.
Derrida & Stiegler, Échographies de la télévision, p. 82.
- 3.
Derrida, “Nietzsche and the Machine”, pp. 247–249.
- 4.
Ibid., p. 245.
- 5.
According to Derrida, the future in its usual temporal sense can only “reproduce the present. Justice remains to come, it remains by coming [la justice reste à venir], it has to come [elle a à venir], it is to-come, the to-come [elle est à-venir], it deploys the very dimension of events irreducibly to come.” (Force of Law, p. 27).
- 6.
Derrida, “Nietzsche and the Machine”, p. 245.
- 7.
Derrida, The Problem of Genesis, p. xxxvi.
- 8.
Husserl, “The Origin of Geometry”, p. 158.
- 9.
Ibid., p. 178.
- 10.
Derrida, The Problem of Genesis p. 166.
- 11.
Ibid., p. 167.
- 12.
Ibid., pp. 168–169.
- 13.
Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, pp. 87–88.
- 14.
Husserl, “The Origin of Geometry”, pp. 164–169.
- 15.
Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, p. 50.
- 16.
Derrida, Limited Inc., p. 3.
- 17.
Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, p. 87.
- 18.
Ibid., p. 88.
- 19.
Derrida introduced the phrase “quasi-transcendental” in Glas (1974). The first explicit sign of a modification of the classical transcendental structure is to be found in the first section of De la grammatologie (1965), where Derrida introduces the concept of “ultra-transcendental” in order to underscore the “necessity of a pathway (parcours)” through the transcendental problematic (p. 90). He stopped using the term after the publication of Margue - de la philosophie (1972). Instead, he began using “quasi-transcendental”, which quickly became the dominant concept in his work. In broad terms, the prefix “quasi” means that deconstruction is a matter less of looking for a deeper transcendental origin (as the prefix “ultra” undeniably implies) than of showing that a given transcendental structure is always already contaminated by the empirical (the historical, the worldly, the temporal, etc). More specifically, the concept of “quasi-transcendental” expresses the idea that, beyond the notion of an absolute opposition between the empirical and the transcendental, the “condition of possibility” for any given structure is always already contaminated by the threat of its own impossibility or extinction. Although this formal law—the condition of possibility as a condition of impossibility—was only introduced as such after Rodolphe Gasché formulated it in The Tain of the Mirror (1986), it has been quietly at work in Derrida’s writings from the beginning. Indeed, a good example is Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, in which writing has a kind of quasi-transcendental status. The whole point of Derrida’s argument there is that Husserl’s demonstration of writing’s transcendental role in the constitution of ideal objects is only valid if we regard writing as an empirical fact whose possibility is always necessarily threatened by the possibility of its own extinction. In other words, writing functions simultaneously as a condition of both possibility and impossibility—which is to say, as a quasi-transcendental.
- 20.
Stiegler, “Derrida and Technology”, p. 247
- 21.
Derrida & Stiegler, Echographies de la télévision, p. 121. On the same page, Derrida adds that the lack of meaning in technology can leave us depressed and result in dehumanization and nihilism. Or, as he rather more forcefully puts it: “in itself, this non-sense is not an absurdity, it is not negative, but it is not positive either.”
- 22.
Bennington, “Emergencies”, p. 190 and Ben Roberts, “Stiegler reading Derrida”, p. 14.
- 23.
Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, p. 134.
- 24.
Derrida, Marges de la philosophie, p. 13–17.
- 25.
Derrida, De la grammatologie, pp. 203–234.
- 26.
Derrida, Marges – de la philosophie, p. 18.
- 27.
Derrida, “Freud et la scène de l’écriture”, p. 337.
- 28.
A word of clarification is needed with regard to the terms “technology”,“technics”, and “the technical”. The French term la technologie is generally translated as “technology”, while la technique has a broader designation and is usually translated as “technics” or “the technical”. For stylistic reasons, I will use both interchangeably.
- 29.
In “La pharmacie de Platon” (La dissémination, pp. 77–214), Derrida shows that Plato distinguishes between two kinds of memory: mneme and hypomnesis. The first, which lies in the human soul, is active and living and is characterized by the capacity for philosophical reflection, which, according to Plato, is the hallmark of all true knowledge. The second is an outer “memory”, a text, stored in a substratum or supplement (such as a piece of paper, a phone, or a computer). For Plato, this outer memory is secondary, technical, and dead. For Plato, mneme and hypomnesis represent a hierarchical binary opposition in which mneme is privileged and hypomnesis is devalued. For Derrida, this hierarchical opposition is the very archetype of all metaphysical thinking and is the driving force of an intense desire to eliminate the technological from the human soul.
- 30.
See, for example, Écographies de la télévision, p. 148 and “Nietzsche and the Machine”, p. 244.
- 31.
Derrida, “Nietzsche and the Machine”, pp. 244–245.
- 32.
Derrida & Stiegler, Échographies de la télévision, p. 149.
- 33.
Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, p. 4.
- 34.
Derrida, De l’espritt, p. 26.
- 35.
Derrida, Échographies de la télévision, p. 149.
- 36.
Ibid., pp. 133–4. The terms “pure”, “purification”, “and “purifying” are Derrida’s own, not Heidegger’s.
- 37.
Derrida, De l’esprit, p. 26. See also his “Nietzsche and the Machine”, p. 236 in which he claims that contamination is “inevitable” and “absolutely undeniable”.
- 38.
Derrida, De la grammatologie, p. 126.
- 39.
Derrida, De l’esprit, p. 75. As early as Being and Time, Heidegger claims that Dasein is spiritual (geistig) (see §70). In fact, he had examined the Pauline concept of spirit, pneuma, as far back as 1921, in lectures on the phenomenology of religion that were only published in 1994. This means that these early texts were unavailable to Derrida when he treated this subject in De l’esprit, which was published in 1987. Heidegger also returns to the concept of spirit in later texts such as Introduction to Metaphysics and in his readings of Hölderlin and Trakl. See Ruin, “Anxious Spirits: Pneumatology in Heidegger, Paul and Kierkegaard”, pp. 4–5.
- 40.
Derrida, De l’esprit, p. 11.
- 41.
Ibid. p. 26. On Derrida’s reading of spirit in Heidegger’s inaugural lecture as vice-chancellor of Freiburg University, see also pp. 63–5.
- 42.
Derrida, Mal d’archive, pp. 11–20.
- 43.
Ibid., p. 15.
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Sjöstrand, B. (2021). Derrida and the Phenomenology of Technology. In: Derrida and Technology: Life, Politics, and Religion. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83407-4_3
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