The Speculative Body





Aufheben (to cancel, preserve, elevate; negate, conserve, supersede). The notion of "lifting up" as in "lifting off" can be seen as a kind of erasure and linked to the superseding of writing as materiality. "The Aufhebung -- la relève -- is constrained into writing itself otherwise. Or perhaps simply into writing itself. Or, better, into taking account of its consumption of writing" ("Différance" 19). Although the distinction between a restricted and a general economy succeeds as a critique of absolute knowledge and what it leaves out (leftovers, remains), I think that Derrida ends up valorizing a general economy, as exemplified in Bataille's writings, that seems to go too far in critiquing the Hegelian model; in fact, it is a model that Derrida himself has absorbed and continues to employ. Does one want to end up simply valorizing non-meaning, vacuolizing what is substantial by gesturing toward madness, laughter, superfluity and excrement as ways out of the closed circle of Hegelianism? Does one want to end up saying that Hegel leaves "this" shit and we by choice decide to take it up (and eat it) as a rebellious cause, or spit it back in his face as a form of active resistance, or as a negation of his negation? For Derrida to say that speculative idealism profits from all of its transactions is to misconstrue these transactions at his own cost. To his credit, Derrida does mention a similar caveat in his work on Hegel's prefaces in "Outwork":

But if something were to remain of the prolegomenon once inscribed and interwoven, something that would not allow itself to be sublated [relève] in the course of the philosophical presentation, would that something necessarily take the form of that which falls away [la tombée]? And what about such a fall? Couldn't it be read otherwise than as the excrement of philosophical essentiality -- not in order to sublate it back into the latter, of course, but in order to learn to take it differently into account? (Dissemination 11)

What seems most trenchant in Derrida's treatment is his insistence on the scriptability of the inscription and its re-inscription through the repetition of writing, as even in the model of the palimpsest there is no Œreal" erasure but a covering up of traces with more traces; and the idea of smoking out the Concept (Begriff) of the Aufhebung by making it write itself, inscribe itself into the same scriptural economy in which it would end up consuming itself (swallowing its own tail). There is still the concern for what exactly Derrida would preserve "for us," outside of his own negations of Hegel. If it were merely supplement, excrement, scored margins, is that enough (even though it is something)?





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