Talk 6/15/06
So I wanted to quickly speculate on a couple of mysterious points related to the rehabilitation of the wheel within the framework of autoimmunity that Derrida sets up in the first chapter of Rogues. And I wanted to do it basically through a linking up of some very powerful concepts that Derrida brings up almost as a sort of shorthand, these are the notions of the metaperformative and of supersoverngty and then sort of drops without mentioning them again. I wanted to center these links and frame them as an attempt to achieve the mystery marriage of St. Catherine (perhaps ridiculously) to the baby Jesus. And then Maude’s going to do a quick thing on the thinking of Islamic fundamentalism as rogueish. So basically starting with the story of St. Catherine: she converted sort of the entire roman imperial court to Christianity under Maximillian and Maximillian pronounced that she should broken on the wheel (an image which is immediately important for derrida, although he does not mention st. Catherine, “The scene of torture was something else; I would compare it to being tortured on the wheel, since it too takes the form of a machine in the form of a circle, indeed a hermeneutic circle. Tied to the machine, bound hand and foot, I would turn, I would be exposed to a series of blows. Quartered.) The emperor is not able to carry out the sentence, for every time Catherine touches the wheel it shatters and disintegrates before her fingers. SO they use a sword instead and for some reason that works. St. Cathy more or less by a sort of act of divine violence against the wheel basically destructures the right of the powerful sovergn to be right, and thus places herself in so high an ontotheological position as to allow her to marry God. Derrida says there is always a wheel in torture. St. Catherine’s obliteration of the wheel rareifies the terrifying autoimmunity of the encircling violence and an insistent repetition, a relentlessness, the turn and return of the circle, leaving only the pure martyrdom of death, apotheosis, and marriage to the messiah. By breaking the wheel that would break her, she frees it from its relentless sovreinty, and appropriately, ever after, is cited as one of the fourteen most helpful saints in heaven, as the patroness of wheelwrights and anyone else whose trade depends on the wheel.
The question of return, of repetition, is immediately the play of autoimmunity involved in the notion of democracy. When considering democracy, when enacting it and most of all when defending it, one is always on the wheel, and involved in the torsion and alternation of an essential self-betrayal, and a becoming other. Democracy, derrida says, is always becoming not-democracy in order to defend itself – always turning on itsel f and attacking itself in the name of its own defence. While at the same time democracy’s essence is always to protect itself from its own self-negation – by negating itself. So Derrida gives the example of the 9/11 terrorists and how American democracy produced them and destroyed itself by immunizing itself against the democratic threat that it produces against itself. In this way, democracy’s essence is counter-essential: to always be what and where it is not, to declare its sovergn non-essential law and territory and then to find itself removed from itself. Again, another torture image from Italy, which their quite good at, of Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas, wherein Marsyas, for exceeding himself and his station by beating Apollo in a music competition, is literally skinned alive crying “why remove me from me?” Quid me mihi detrahis?
The question obviously becomes, for derrida, if democratic autoimmunity and the return of the wheel are inextrincibly linked by the self-same fiction of autoaffection, are both the wheel and democracy doomed to the tyrannical and even torturous return of ipseity, of relentless repetition? But even if we recognize in this wheel not the return of the same or of the qualitatively equal, noting that derrida states that even the notion of the equal is never equal to itself, has never happened the same way twice, and can never return, but an auto-immunity which is not quite truly auto, how does such a wheel become free and how can it then free democracy from the auto-immunity while at once preserving its essential betrayals, or to return to the central paradox, how does that which was always already aporetic become truly, ethically, justly or freely aporetic except by the betrayal of the very criteria we hope to establish by asking this question? So it is a question of how to find a freedom for the wheel which does not just free itself by betraying itself, but one which frees its circular motion from its winding axis and lets it wander? And I just want to hint that part of the answer to this would lie in what derrida calls the metaperformative, which he distinguishes from the constative, the non-performative, and the performative, First, a critique of the “pure” performative as the constitutive logic of the democratic wheel of autoimmunity, as the freeing power that jealously demands its own sovernty and proper spaces: (152) Now here a little earlier is the thought of something neither performative nor non-performative (91) and finally the location between and away from these of the metaperformative “This indecidiblity is , like freedom itself, granted by democracy and it consitutues I believe the only radical possibility of deciding and making come about performativley, or rather letting come about (metaperformativley). This metaperformative seems nothing less than the thought of a free wheel, democracy not bound on the axis of autoimmunity, a new re-public which frees up the very discretionary boundries of the public, which lets free rather than performativley freeing. “yes for democracy opens public space, the publicity of public space, by granting the right to a change of tone, to irony as well as to fiction, the simulacrum, the secret, literature, and so on. And thus to a certain non-public public within the public, to a res publica, a republic where the difference between the public and non-public remains an indicidable limit. “This metaperformative freeing which is in fact a letting be free describes nothing less than the task of republic or res-publica as spatializing lovingly and ethically. So as a notion of spatiality that constitutes world, the very spatiality of the wheel is changed in its freeing from the ipseity of the performative, by freeing the wheel from its axis and letting it travel freely through spaces which are both public
The question of return, of repetition, is immediately the play of autoimmunity involved in the notion of democracy. When considering democracy, when enacting it and most of all when defending it, one is always on the wheel, and involved in the torsion and alternation of an essential self-betrayal, and a becoming other. Democracy, derrida says, is always becoming not-democracy in order to defend itself – always turning on itsel f and attacking itself in the name of its own defence. While at the same time democracy’s essence is always to protect itself from its own self-negation – by negating itself. So Derrida gives the example of the 9/11 terrorists and how American democracy produced them and destroyed itself by immunizing itself against the democratic threat that it produces against itself. In this way, democracy’s essence is counter-essential: to always be what and where it is not, to declare its sovergn non-essential law and territory and then to find itself removed from itself. Again, another torture image from Italy, which their quite good at, of Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas, wherein Marsyas, for exceeding himself and his station by beating Apollo in a music competition, is literally skinned alive crying “why remove me from me?” Quid me mihi detrahis?
The question obviously becomes, for derrida, if democratic autoimmunity and the return of the wheel are inextrincibly linked by the self-same fiction of autoaffection, are both the wheel and democracy doomed to the tyrannical and even torturous return of ipseity, of relentless repetition? But even if we recognize in this wheel not the return of the same or of the qualitatively equal, noting that derrida states that even the notion of the equal is never equal to itself, has never happened the same way twice, and can never return, but an auto-immunity which is not quite truly auto, how does such a wheel become free and how can it then free democracy from the auto-immunity while at once preserving its essential betrayals, or to return to the central paradox, how does that which was always already aporetic become truly, ethically, justly or freely aporetic except by the betrayal of the very criteria we hope to establish by asking this question? So it is a question of how to find a freedom for the wheel which does not just free itself by betraying itself, but one which frees its circular motion from its winding axis and lets it wander? And I just want to hint that part of the answer to this would lie in what derrida calls the metaperformative, which he distinguishes from the constative, the non-performative, and the performative, First, a critique of the “pure” performative as the constitutive logic of the democratic wheel of autoimmunity, as the freeing power that jealously demands its own sovernty and proper spaces: (152) Now here a little earlier is the thought of something neither performative nor non-performative (91) and finally the location between and away from these of the metaperformative “This indecidiblity is , like freedom itself, granted by democracy and it consitutues I believe the only radical possibility of deciding and making come about performativley, or rather letting come about (metaperformativley). This metaperformative seems nothing less than the thought of a free wheel, democracy not bound on the axis of autoimmunity, a new re-public which frees up the very discretionary boundries of the public, which lets free rather than performativley freeing. “yes for democracy opens public space, the publicity of public space, by granting the right to a change of tone, to irony as well as to fiction, the simulacrum, the secret, literature, and so on. And thus to a certain non-public public within the public, to a res publica, a republic where the difference between the public and non-public remains an indicidable limit. “This metaperformative freeing which is in fact a letting be free describes nothing less than the task of republic or res-publica as spatializing lovingly and ethically. So as a notion of spatiality that constitutes world, the very spatiality of the wheel is changed in its freeing from the ipseity of the performative, by freeing the wheel from its axis and letting it travel freely through spaces which are both public
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