2.73
“It is precisely the force and the efficiency of the system that regularly change transgressions into ‘false exits.’ Taking into account these effects of the system, one has nothing, from the inside where ‘we are,’ but the choice between two strategies:
“a. To attempt an exit and a deconstruction without changing terrain, by repeating what is implicit in the founding concepts and the original problematic, by using against the edifice the instruments or stones available in the house, that is, equally, in language. Here, one risks ceaselessly confirming, consolidating, relifting (relever), at an always more certain depth, that which one allegedly deconstructs. The continuous process of making explicit, moving toward an opening, risks sinking into the autism [sic] of the closure.
“b. To decide to change terrain, in a discontinuous and irruptive fashion, by brutally placing oneself outside, and by affirming an absolute break and difference. Without mentioning all the other forms of trompe-l’oeil perspective in which such a displacement can be caught, thereby inhabiting more naively and more strictly than ever the inside one declares one has deserted, the simple practice of language ceaselessly reinstates the new terrain on the oldest ground. The effects of such a reinstatement or of such a blindness could be shown in numerous precise instances.
“It goes without saying that these effects do not suffice to annul the necessity for a ‘change of terrain.’ It also goes without saying that the choice between these two forms of deconstruction cannot be simple and unique. A new writing must weave and interlace these two motifs of deconstruction. Which amounts to saying that one must speak several languages and produce several texts at once.”[1]
— Is there a danger in my project of reintroducing colonizing logics? – I worry that there is. How? Well, insofar as we’re inclined to think that an assertion that is truthful must be so universally, for everyone everywhere all the time. I introduce signposts, but I also claim that each disclosure is localized: I assert something universal that underpins all disclosures. But ‘universals’ ride the wave of what is common (§2.62). Let’s not take ‘disclosure’ as some kind of a metaphysical thing or stuff that underpins different disclosures. Let’s hold tight to metaphoric ontology.
As Zwicky reminds us, a metaphor depends on dynamism: it “results from an over-riding of calcified gestures of thought by being.”[2] For Zwicky, humans are characterized by three styles of response: technological, lyric, and domestic. While we yearn for lyric experience (§2.8), we’re beings who must use language, tools, etc., and so we’re also beings with technological, logical, and analytic experiences. The key, for Zwicky, isn’t to deride our nature, but to ‘come home’ in the tension between our lyric and technological nature: we come home in what she calls the domestic.[3]
For Zwicky, metaphors result from wrestling with techno-linguistic modes to express lyric insights: this tension results in the domestic mode of expression that we call metaphor.[4]
While this is a kind of digression, it helps us here. The metaphoric can be part of the deconstructive strategy expressed by Derrida. Yet, it retains traces of ways of thinking from the master’s house while revealing the house to be on shifting tectonic plates. Metaphoric ontology aims to re-situate older colonial logics within a framework that changes their ‘essence,’ and even if it carries traces of these logics, it does so on condition that it reveals the metaphoric as a deeper ‘foundation’ and hence a subterranean shaking under all foundational moves.
My other point is that metaphors calcify. Our minds latch on: with time, we take them as solid and foundational. Even ‘metaphoric ontology’ is susceptible to this.
Why, if this may re-introduce colonizing logics, stick to such paths? How can this be ethical? — It seems to me there is no ‘pure’ path, nor could there be. It’s a question of better and worse, listening and response, solicitude and respect, and so this isn’t defeatist but it demands vigilance.
Colonization happens on an enactive, ontological level. It insists on and imposes a set of ontological stories, ontological decisions, and refuses to hear other voices, other beings. Colonization ‘knows’ what things and world are and it says this (which can include multiculturalism). It speaks this louder and more forcefully than other voices can speak, which it denies anyway.
I’m offering space in my thinking for other voices. But colonizing logics are on the verge of being reinstated if one thinks that my way of thinking is foundational, necessary, or universal. My path offers a way to try to walk ‘forward’ from the site of ongoing colonial devastation. How much of this legacy my walking carries on isn’t always easy for the one who walks to see.
[1] Jacques Derrida, “The Ends of Man,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 135.
[2] Zwicky, W&M, LH8.
[3] Zwicky, Lyric Philosophy, LH19, LH126, LH132–8.
[4] Zwicky, W&M, LH67.