Abstract
The following pages can be read as a preliminary study on Derrida’s thought of the usure. The point of departure is the reading of Levinas’ treatment of the spatial metaphor (such as “the Most-High” and “absolute exteriority”) that Derrida mobilizes in “Violence and Metaphysics. An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas” (1964). What is at stake in this reading, I suggest, is not only the interpretation of Levinas’ metaphysics but also the formulation of another thought of the metaphor (of the metaphoricity of the metaphor) as the originary spatialization and inscription of language (and, as we shall see, of life in general). In tracing the metaphor of the usure across Derrida’s early writings, I aim to shed light on a path of thought that goes from the reading of Levinas’ spatial metaphors to that of Freud’s scene of writing.
How can we make this sensible except by metaphor? which is here the word usure. In effect, there is no access to the usure of a linguistic phenomenon without giving it some figurative representation. What could be the properly named usure of a word, a statement, a meaning, a text? (Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology”)
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Notes
- 1.
This article is a result of the research project CONICYT/FONDECYT INICIACION n.11140145, hosted by the Instituto de Humanidades, Universidad Diego Portales (Santiago, Chile).
- 2.
See Levinas 1969, 34–35: “Desire is desire for the absolutely other. […] A desire without satisfaction which, precisely, understands [entends] the remoteness, the alterity, and the exteriority of the other. For Desire, this alterity, non-adequate to the idea, has a meaning. It is understood as the alterity of the Other or the Most-High. The very dimension of height is opened up by metaphysical Desire. That this height is no longer the heavens but the Invisible is the very elevation of height and its nobility. To die for the invisible—this is metaphysics.”
- 3.
For the elaboration of this impossibility, with reference to Saussure’s concept of sign, see Derrida 1974, 44: “The very idea of institution—hence of the arbitrariness of the sign-is unthinkable before the possibility of writing and outside of its horizon. Quite simply, that is, outside of the horizon itself, outside the world as space of inscription, as the opening to the emission and to the spatial distribution of signs, to the regulated play of their differences, even if they are ‘phonic’”.
- 4.
For the use of exteriority, see, for instance, Levinas 1969, 35: “This absolute exteriority of the metaphysical term, the irreducibility of movement to an inward play, to a simple presence of self to self, is, if not demonstrated, claimed by the word transcendent”. In the same section, entitled “The Breach of Totality”, see also the treatment of the concept of site [lieu] (Levinas 1969, 37–38).
- 5.
For a philosophical version of this metaphor, see the passage from Nietzsche’s Wortbuch that is quoted in Derrida 1982, 217: “What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymics, anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which became poetically and rhetorically intensified, metamorphosed, adorned, and after long usage, seem to a nation fixed, canonic and binding; truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions; worn out metaphors which have become powerless to affect the senses (die abgenutzt und sinnlich kraftlos geworden sind), coins which have their obverse (Bild) effaced and now are no longer of account as coins but merely as metal.”
- 6.
For Polyphilos’ reverie, see Derrida 1978, 250: “Polyphilos: It was just a reverie. I was thinking how the Metaphysicians, when they make a language for themselves, are like [image, comparison, a figure in order to signify figuration] knife-grinders, who instead of knives and scissors, should put medals and coins to the grindstone to efface the exergue, the value and the head. When they have worked away till nothing is visible in their crown-pieces, neither King Edward, the Emperor William, nor the Republic, they say: ‘These pieces have nothing either English, German or French about them; we have freed them from all limits of time and space; they are not worth five shillings any more; they are of an inestimable value, and their exchange value is extended indefinitely.’ They are right in speaking thus. By this needy knife-grinder’s activity words are changed from a physical to a metaphysical acceptation. It is obvious that they lose in the process; what they gain by it is not so immediately apparent.”
- 7.
Derrida formalizes the absolute usure of a sign—that stands for metaphorization and philosophy at their limits—in the following terms: “For in dissolving any finite determination, negative concepts break the tie that binds them to the meaning of any particular being, that is, to the totality of what is. Thereby they suspend their apparent metaphoricity” (Derrida 1978, 212).
- 8.
See the following remark between parentheses in Derrida 1978, 211: “Later we will give a better definition of the problem of negativity, when we can recognize the connivance between the Hegelian rélève—the Aufhebung which is also the unity of loss and profit—and the philosophical concept of metaphor.” For the reading of Hegel’s text on the history of the concept of concept, see Derrida 1978, 224–226.
References
Derrida, Jacques. 1974. Of Grammatology. Trans. G.C. Spivak. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1978. Writing and Difference. Trans. A. Bass. London: Routledge and Keagan Paul Ltd.
Derrida, Jacques. 1982. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. A. Bass. Brighton: The Harvester Press.
Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity. Trans. A. Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publisher.
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Senatore, M. (2016). Syntax Is the Metal Itself. Derrida on the Usure of the Metaphor. In: Foran, L., Uljée, R. (eds) Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida: The Question of Difference. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 86. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39232-5_12
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