2.85
The idea of neutrality is revealed to be its opposite: it’s to take up a position and perspective.
Neutrality doesn’t escape the game, but is a move within it. Consider a situation where skipping your turn would be against the rules of a game. In this case, it may indicate a ‘step back’: I’m no longer interested in playing this game. But we don’t thereby escape all play: this move steps back in another game (e.g., the negotiation over whether or not to play). The game we were playing included the possibility of quitting or committing infractions, for games always involve, and create, implicitly, exceptions and infractions.
The ‘view from nowhere’—a position of no-position—is an imaginative leap in which we shear our perspective. The resultant ‘perspective’ is none-too-human, and, for this reason, all-too-human. It seeks to do the impossible: negate our experience, the condition of its conception. It seeks what will remain and outlast our finitude, our demise; it’s founded on our death or disappearance and attempts to set up a field we can reach outside of ourselves and our mortality.[1]
The ‘objective’ ‘view from nowhere’ is nowhere humans could dwell, and yet, it’s precisely part of human dwelling: this is a sleight of hand, a move made within the context of play. It’s a way of play intended to secure against future moves and plays; it attempts to arrest its own flux: “The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere. […] The concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of a freeplay based on a fundamental ground, a freeplay which is constituted upon a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which is itself beyond the reach of the freeplay.”[2]
‘But you’ve spoken at length about the possibilities of imagining that which you aren’t. How is this different?’
With imagination (§2.6), one is perspectivally oneself. From there, one can begin to ‘see,’ in a sense, what other perspectives are. It is in heeding other perspectives that we come to see how things are. For them and for us. But we cannot open to our own negation, to a negation of all particular perspectives that somehow amounts to the positing of an all-perspective. Being-in-the-world cannot open to a disclosure-that’s-not-a-disclosure outside or beyond all disclosures. Any such ‘disclosure’ is merely a fantasy within a particular disclosure, a desire based on a particular onto-theological principle (§2.84).
[1] Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, p. 160.
[2] Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” p. 915–6. See §1.98.