I’ve asked Matt and Adam and neither can confirm or dis-confirm my belief that Derrida said somewhere, “a culture has no origin.” Can anyone confirm or dis-confirm? If they can confirm, can they say where it is? Outside possibility that what I’m remembering is something like, “Derrida said ‘a culture has no origin.’” That wouldn’t be so great – but it’s the sort of thing he’d say. Isn’t it?
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This is the personal website of Craig McFarlane, a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Programme in Sociology at York University, Toronto and a lecturer in the Department of Law at Carleton University, Ottawa. I also contribute to The Inhumanities.
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5 Comments
It’s certainly the sort of thing he’d say, though I have no idea where he might say it. One of the central claims of (post)structuralist orientations of thought is that questions of origins or genesis are bracketed as they always “beg the question” or assume the very thing they’re trying to account for. Lacan says this apropos language much more directly in Seminar 17, and the same thesis can be found in Deleuze’s Logic of Sense in the series on language where he closely discusses Levi-Strauss.
I looked for a while and couldn’t find it, but I think you could legitimately paraphrase chapters 3-5 of Monolingualism of the Other that way, if that helps.
Thanks, guys. Adam also suggested Monolingism and Matt suggested either the book on Husserl or Acts of Religion. Thanks for the suggestion re: Lacan and Deleuze. I’ll make sure to review those.
Craig, there’s a passage in L’Autre Cap [pp.16-17]
Il n’y a pas de rapport à soi, d’identification à soi sans culture, mais culture de soi comme culture de l’autre, culture du double génitif et de la différence à soi. La grammaire du double génitif signale aussi qu’une culture n’a jamais une seule origine. La monogénéalogie serait toujours une mystification dans l’histoire de la culture.
Hi Craig,
That’s a marvelous question you’re posing, which has brought together some great Derrida passages – so thanks for that. Here’s another one, from OF GRAMMATOLOGY (267):
“This birth of society is therefore not a passage, it is a point, a pure, fictive and unstable, ungraspable limit. One crosses it in attaining it. In it society is broached and is differed from itself. Beginning, it begins to decay. (…) If culture is thus broached within its point of origin, then it is not possible to recognize any linear order, whether logical or chronological. In this broaching, what is initiated is already corrupted, thus returning to a place before the origin.”
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