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"Balaji Srinivasan and the network state—let’s talk about that,” Steve Bannon, right-wing mastermind and former Trump advisor, told New York Times columnist Ross Douthat during an interview in April 2025. “They’re not weird. They’re radicals.” “All right, the network state, we can save that for next time we have you on,” said Douthat, cutting him off and changing the subject. This was a strange choice given Bannon’s unparalleled knowledge of right-wing politics and long relationship with Trump. Why interrupt the MAGA mastermind as he tried to expose the truth behind tech’s radical turn? Bannon, an overt racist and fierce enemy of democracy, did more than almost anyone to aid Trump’s rise to power. Yet even he seemed taken aback—and, perhaps, jealous—by the degree to which Silicon Valley oligarchs had absorbed Trump and his family. Maybe he wanted to hit the tech oligarchs where it hurt, by exposing the strange ideology underlying the tech moguls’ newfound love for Trump. Bannon was right to call them radicals. But what exactly do they believe? For decades, many described the anti-government politics of certain Silicon Valley figures as libertarian, portraying them as the eccentric beliefs of rich men who hated taxes but mostly wanted to build their companies without government interference. This framing is now dangerously obsolete. What began as libertarian-inflected fantasy among wealthy entrepreneurs and thinkers in the twentieth century has now curdled into something even more sinister: tech fascism. The sight of tech billionaires partnering enthusiastically with authoritarian regimes, providing technologies of control and surveillance while profiting from government contracts, clarifies the reality. Rather than opposing government control, they seek to enhance it. For decades, Silicon Valley had promoted libertarian fairy tales about freedom from government power. In fact, seizing that power for itself was the true goal."

"Benito Mussolini, the dictator who invented fascism and ruled Italy from 1922 to 1943, sought to bundle every institution of society under unified state authority. Italian fascism combined religion, the military, corporations, and media under state authority. Technofascism innovates on this model through technology, creating a system that seeks the “technicization of all aspects of government and society,” making technology the “driving force” of the authoritarian regime, historian Janis Mimura told The New Yorker in 2025. Tech fascism bundles powerful technologies—AI, crypto, defense tech, social media platforms, surveillance systems—toward authoritarian goals. These technologies are bound together under the control of a small, interconnected group of oligarchs who, simultaneously integrated into the highest levels of government, are creating an authoritarian infrastructure with boundless power. Its goal, like MAGA’s, is to privatize the public and eliminate democracy."

"The concept of the cognitive elite was lifted from The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, a highly controversial 1994 book by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray. The Bell Curve argued that intelligence was largely hereditary and that society was naturally stratifying into distinct classes based on IQ. The book was denounced by leading scientists and civil rights organizations as a work of thinly veiled pseudoscientific racism, particularly for promoting the discredited idea that racial disparities in intelligence are largely genetic."

"The fixation on cognitive superiority had deeper roots in American history. In the early twentieth century, the eugenics movement had promoted the idea that intelligence could be measured, ranked, and improved through selective breeding. Pioneered by figures like English polymath Francis Galton and others during the Victorian era, eugenics was carried forward in the United States by David Starr Jordan, the president of Stanford University, a fervent racist and believer in the notion that breeding and heredity were destiny. At Stanford, he “forged a eugenic university,” according to Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris. Believers in eugenics—a word coined by Galton to mean “well-born” in Greek—used flawed and unscientific methods to justify white supremacy and anti-immigrant hate, creating a movement that led to forced sterilization laws in dozens of states and fueled a broader campaign for immigration restrictions. The 1924 Immigration Act, which banned most Asians and drastically limited entry from Southern and Eastern Europe, was justified in part by the claim—later thoroughly debunked—that IQ tests proved these populations were genetically inferior."

"Overt racist eugenics mostly fell out of favor in the mid-twentieth century, after the Nazis carried its ideas to their most logical and gruesome conclusion. But the underlying ideology of supremacy proved more durable. It survived on one track through white supremacist and nativist movements that never fully disappeared and are now resurgent. On another track, it thinly disguised its racism behind the equally potent idea that certain individuals were simply too intelligent and exceptional to be held back from greatness by mass democracy. The years of the Great Depression saw the peak of a so-called technocracy movement, which asserted that democracy should be abandoned in favor of a society run by engineers and scientists. Supporters of technocracy—including Elon Musk’s maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman—argued that “scientific management” could optimize civilization the way it optimized factories. Howard Scott, the leader of Technocracy Incorporated, also argued for a new monetary system based on energy usage and proposed the creation of a new government called the “technate,” in which engineers would “optimize the use of energy to assure abundance.” The movement fizzled in the 1940s, but at its peak, Technocracy Incorporated had an estimated 500,000 supporters in California alone."

"Ayn Rand, an immigrant who fled Bolshevik Russia, came to the United States on a tourist visa, and became a Hollywood screenwriter, had a related idea. She wrote novels that celebrated the idea that individuals of superior intelligence—“men of the mind”—were the victims of an inferior, parasitic majority. In Atlas Shrugged, her most famous novel, a group of capitalist elites withdraw to a remote enclave where they stage a strike against society with the explicit aim of hastening its collapse and rebuilding it on their own terms. Rand preached capitalism, self-interest, and anti-government radicalism not as political preferences but as moral imperatives. Her philosophy, called objectivism, would give generations of aspiring entrepreneurs the philosophical permission to be exactly as ruthless and selfish as they wanted to be. Her books would help fuel libertarianism, a political movement that sought to slash taxes, gut regulation, dismantle the welfare state, and let the strongest survive without the constraints—or protections—of government. Rand rejected libertarians as “hippies of the right,” but despite her quibbles, her novels became their sacred texts."

"There are a lot of magazines about technology,” wrote Rossetto in a manifesto in the magazine’s first issue. “WIRED is not one of them. WIRED is about the most powerful people on the planet today—the Digital Generation. These are the people who not only foresaw how the merger of computers, telecommunications, and the media is transforming life at the cusp of the new millennium, they are making it happen."

"The following year, in 1997, tech critic Langdon Winner coined a term for this emerging ideology: cyberlibertarianism. He defined this as “a collection of ideas that links ecstatic enthusiasm for electronically mediated forms of living with radical, right-wing libertarian ideas about the proper definition of freedom, social life, economics, and politics in the years to come.” “The two prongs of this statement are crucial,” David Golumbia would later write in Cyberlibertarianism of Winner’s definition. “On the one hand, ecstatic enthusiasm for digital technology itself… and on the other, right-wing libertarian ideas about the proper definition of core terms like freedom."

"Into this already flourishing landscape of tech libertarian fantasy, Davidson and Rees-Mogg dropped their opus. The Sovereign Individual capitalized on tech libertarianism, fleshing out the stark vision of the information age ruled by techno-savvy elites. Davidson and Rees-Mogg argued that technological disruption would accelerate the sorting of humanity into inferior and superior people. Their cognitive elites would be investors and tech entrepreneurs with the skills and knowledge to prosper in the new decentralized tech economy. They would become a powerful new political force, a class of “sovereign individuals” whose intelligence and wealth freed them from democracy, nationality, taxes, and regulations. “Cybercurrency”—an early term for crypto—would aid their escape and fuel their rise."

"Western civilization will end with it. This book tells why. Like many earlier works, it is an attempt to see into a glass darkly, to sketch out the vague shapes and dimensions of a future that is still to be. In that sense, we mean our work to be apocalyptic—in the original meaning of the word. Apokalypsis means ‘unveiling’ in Greek. We believe that a new stage in history—the Information Age—is about to be ‘unveiled.’ ” For good measure, the authors included a Bible verse, Matthew 10:26: “For there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed, neither hid that shall not be known.” Despite these religious overtones, the book’s drastic conclusions found a receptive audience among some eager would-be visionaries in Silicon Valley. The prophesied future in which technology would fundamentally transform the world to benefit a select group of entrepreneurs had a natural appeal in the vicinity of Leland Stanford’s ranch-turned-university, where David Starr Jordan had sought to create a superior breed of men. But while the book’s admirers often portray it as a groundbreaking work, it simply tapped into a thriving anti-government vibe in Silicon Valley."

"In 2000, Wired writer and tech critic Paulina Borsook published Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech, a scathing takedown of Silicon Valley’s tech libertarian culture. She portrayed the various tribes of tech libertarians—Cato Institute goons, cypherpunks, anarcho-capitalists, extropians—as disconnected narcissists hooked on Ayn Rand’s escapist fairy tales and right-wing economist Milton Friedman’s “shareholder theory of value,” which argued that the sole responsibility of a corporation is to maximize profits."

"Then there was bionomics, a movement based on a 1990 book, Bionomics: Economy as Ecosystem, which portrayed markets as perfect by nature and government regulation as the parasitical bane of paradisiacal capitalism. Borsook wrote that bionomics used biological metaphors “to explain economic behavior, describing the way the world works in terms of learning, adaptation, intelligences, selection and ecological niches. It favors decentralization and trial and error and local control and simple rules and letting things be."

"Borsook was early in detecting the lurking political extremism of the techno-libertarian culture, describing it as “scary” and “psychologically brittle.” “It bespeaks a lack of human connection and a discomfort with the core of what many of us consider it means to be human,” she wrote. “It’s an inability to reconcile the demands of being individual with the demands of participating in society, which coincides beautifully with a preference for, and glorification of, being the solo commander of one’s computer in lieu of any other economically viable behavior. Computers are so much more rule-based, controllable, fixable, and comprehensible than any human will ever be. As many political schools of thought do, these technolibertarians make a philosophy out of a personality defect."

"He projected a future where the postwar order collapsed and uncontrollable digital superintelligence led to runaway economic growth, a rapid hierarchization of society, and the eventual rule of a transcendent force that he called ‘technocapital,’ or, simply, ‘Intelligence.’ "

"If you want to think big, if you want to think about things that are next, build technologies—as minimal or maximal as you want—for what the next society looks like. It could be as simple as allowing people—you know, the middle class—to make tax shelters. Apps that allow people to travel and relocate better… anything you can think of that reduces the barrier to exit, that reduces lock-in. If we work together, we might be able to build something like this."

"Dude, control the frame,” Yarvin wrote. “If you make a big thing of it, you prove their point.” He continued: “You and I have different vulnerabilities, you because you’re in the closet and I because I’m out of it. Our mission of the next few years is to drag sanity into the mainstream from opposite directions. It’s a long game which rewards patience…"

"We see states breaking away from the US federal government, at home and abroad. And we see the End of Power, the Revolt of the Public, the defeat of the military, the inflation of the dollar, and—looming ahead—an American anarchy.” This anarchy will result in the Second American Civil War, which Srinivasan says will be fought mostly through propaganda and polarization. “It’d be nothing like the movies, with huge movements of uniformed soldiers, tanks and planes,” he wrote, imagining a hypothetical societal breakdown triggered by a government effort to confiscate Bitcoin. “Instead, it’ll just be a continuation and escalation of what we’ve seen over the last several years: a network-to-network war to control minds rather than a state-to-state war to control territory."

"To invade the minds of the other side, and to control the digital networks—because the tech companies that greenlight transactions, communications, and online behavior have in many ways become the de facto privatized governments of the Western world. The power to determine what people can and cannot do in the digital world belongs to the people who run these networks. And so controlling these networks, by controlling the minds of people who run them, is the key to maintaining control over the US in a digital time."

"Transhumanists believe advanced technologies such as AI, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and cybernetics will transform people into superhumans with enhanced physical, cognitive, and sensory abilities. In essence, they wish to become post-human robots that transcend human biological limits and become immortal. “Transhumanism is this idea that we could create a kind of utopian world in which we live forever,” said Torres in an interview. “There’s no suffering, there’s radical abundance, and everything is awesome forever."

"Cosmists focus mainly on the vision of a future in space, from Mars to the farthest reaches of the universe. The modern version of cosmism comes out of Russian cosmism, a school of thought from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which fused technological fantasy with religious ideas of immortality from the Russian Orthodox Church. It asserts that humankind will use technology to beat death, becoming post-human beings of energy that spread throughout the universe to harvest the cosmos. “The cosmists’ original idea held that one could resurrect the dead by rearranging their atoms to the precise positions they were in while the person was alive,” wrote Douglas Rushkoff in Team Human, which examines the bizarre beliefs of tech elite. “But the cosmists were working on other solutions, such as perfecting humans through intentional evolution, moving human consciousness into the bodies of robots, conquering death, colonizing space, or uploading ourselves to computers.” Cosmist ideas captured the imagination of the West during the space race of the 1960s and ’70s, spreading through global New Age movements and informing the nascent transhumanism movement. “The cosmists convinced America’s LSD-taking spiritualists that technology could give them a way of beating death,” wrote Rushkoff. The world’s most prominent cosmist: Elon Musk, the SpaceX founder who has declared that “[b]ecoming multiplanetary is critical to ensuring the long-term survival of humanity and all life as we know it."

"Just as Yarvin remade fascism for the twenty-first century, TESCREAL remakes religion for the age of AI."

"wrote Catherine Bracy in World Eaters: How Venture Capital Is Cannibalizing the Economy."

"At the time, the government said Zhao had caused ‘significant harm to U.S. national security’ by allowing sanctioned Iranian crypto exchanges, Russian drug-traffickers, Hamas militants and other criminal groups to move billions of dollars through the exchange,” reported The Wall Street Journal. In a story headlined “How a Billionaire Felon Boosted Trump’s Crypto Company en Route to a Pardon,” the Journal stated that sometime around the election, “Zhao’s representatives began discussions with allies of Trump, saying they wanted to find a solution to Binance’s legal troubles in the U.S. and offering a deal with a Trump family business, according to people familiar with the discussions.” Binance had created a task force to “strike a deal with the Trumps’ nascent cryptocurrency venture, World Liberty Financial, that Binance could leverage into clemency for Zhao.” Binance then “took steps that catapulted the Trump family venture’s new stablecoin product, enhancing its credibility and pushing its market capitalization up from $127 million to over $2.1 billion.” (Stablecoins are digital products whose value is tied directly to the dollar.) Months later, Trump pardoned Zhao, paving the way for Binance to resume its operations in the US. “The pardon marks the most distinct instance yet of Trump using the powers of his office to benefit someone at the center of deals that have enriched his family,” reported the Journal."

"Hamas’s terrorism is fueled by cryptocurrency,” Brown wrote in a 2023 post. “We need to crack down on illicit crypto and stop terrorists from moving money around, evading sanctions, and funding their acts of evil. We must curb this emerging threat and protect our national security.” Stand With Crypto rated this Brown tweet, and many others, as “very anti-crypto.” Brown had backed Senator Elizabeth Warren’s call for hearings into links between crypto and terrorism, and he had called for strong crypto regulations to protect consumers from scams and abuses. So, as Brown sought a fourth term in 2024, the crypto industry decided to make an example out of him. Crypto carpet-bombed Ohio voters with ads in support of Brown’s opponent, Bernie Moreno. In total, crypto-funded PACs spent $40 million to elect Moreno, a largely unknown car salesman who had never held public office but enthusiastically supported Bitcoin. Brown had a cavalier response to the onslaught. “Bring ’em on,” he said. Unfortunately, the massive surge of crypto money worked. Moreno beat him by three points. “The crypto army is striking,” declared Tyler Winklevoss, one of the top crypto funders, labeling Brown a “crypto public enemy.” Meanwhile, in California, Fairshake spent $10 million to sink Democratic Representative Katie Porter, a crypto critic running for US Senate. Audaciously flipping reality on its head, the crypto ads accused Porter, an opponent of big money interests in politics, of being on the take from major oil and pharmaceutical interests. A fact-check by The Sacramento Bee rated these ads “mostly false,” but they did real damage. Porter had already been running behind Representative Adam Schiff, a more crypto-friendly politician, but crypto’s onslaught of negative ads finished her."

"The surge of energy consumption driven by AI marked a sharp reversal for Silicon Valley, which had trended toward efficiency, clean energy, and climate consciousness but now pivoted to absurd levels of energy guzzling. But nearly every aspect of the AI race appears to require the maximal exploitation of people, land, and resources. AI’s boosters pitch it as the solution to every problem imaginable, but the current approach seems destined to create more problems than it solves. “Essentially what we have in this generation of what is called AI is a business where there’s 10,000 mostly white men who are benefiting, and eight billion people around the world who are being either exploited, at a minimum, or directly harmed by the success of those 10,000,” said Roger McNamee, an early Facebook investor and billionaire turned Silicon Valley critic."

"Hitler stole the idea for a thousand-year “reich” from the book of Revelation, which claims that Christ and his saints will reign on Earth for one thousand years—a millennium—after Satan is captured and imprisoned. In the Nazi version of the myth, the Jewish people became the ultimate enemy, a cosmic threat and existential risk whose annihilation would purify the world. Like many who came before them, the Nazis projected warped scripture to provide moral justification for their horrors. They did this because, as masters of propaganda, they understood that apocalyptic thinking is a powerful technology for shaping political reality. Thiel, who framed Trump’s return as an apokálypsis, understands this dynamic as well. Nothing unites people like religion, especially when it allows them to portray their political struggles as a battle between good and evil. “The whole concept of the Antichrist or there being some satanic adversary… fosters a crisis mentality,” said Fuller, the Antichrist historian. “And with the crisis mentality, now we put aside all other differences. There’s a tribal cohesion, a tribal unity, and it justifies even immoral acts because to defeat an evil enemy, a satanic enemy, you must then do whatever’s necessary. So, it can therefore justify extremism and it can justify what would otherwise be reprehensible behavior [that] is now looked at as even holy, sacred and a duty for the true believer."

"Thiel’s lectures seek to articulate a problematic truth, one focused on the degree to which technology has created both the mechanism and the antidote for totalitarian control. While he could state these ideas plainly, he chooses to mask them as Christian eschatology. It seems like an odd decision given that Thiel—a gay man with a net worth of $27.5 billion, one who may not even believe in a literal God—is hardly a credible messenger in the eyes of many Christians. Yet here he stood in 2025, pontificating on scary doomsday themes like a fire-and-brimstone Bible-thumping Kentucky snake handler, taking it upon himself to warn against a mystical civilizational threat and impose an apocalyptic Christian extremist framework on godless Silicon Valley."

"Speaking to his tech brethren at an event hosted by Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society (ACTS 17), Thiel expressed paranoid worry about the rise of a one-world government aligned with Satan. Despite his own deep ties to intelligence and the military, he called out the strong link between “the military and financial and ideological superpower with the big tech companies,” adding that he had originally envisioned PayPal as an anti-government technology to “evade these policies of the world’s powers and principalities.” In essence, Thiel argued that Silicon Valley was building the very “Antichrist-like system” that would be used to control the world."

"During an interview in 2024, Johnson listed his five ambitions: “One is start a company. Two is start a country. Three is start a religion. Four: Don’t Die. Five: Become God.” Johnson’s admission is clarifying and stunning: He sees religion in clinical terms as a powerful way to influence behavior, and he explicitly states his desire to use it for that purpose. By making his aims explicit, he exposes a core truth about the TESCREAL bundle of beliefs. They serve as a placebo religion for otherwise godless techies, providing an identity based on irrational faith in the idea that technology will imminently allow them to transcend biological human limits. Johnson flamboyantly markets his products as portals to eternal life, false promises that also animate the transhumanist and extropian movements. Most religions promise transcendence over death, usually through a rebirth on a supernatural plane distinguished by access to the infinite abundance of God. Johnson overtly seeks to hack into this framework, but he is saying out loud what others prefer to communicate more subtly. His tactics are absurd and performative, but his belief in radical life extension is not unusual. Thiel, Andreessen, and Altman are major investors in life extension technologies."

"Johnson’s bold pursuit of a new religion reflects the true zeitgeist of AI-era Silicon Valley, where the possibility of a Thermodynamic God summoned through accelerated compute seems more rational than the superstitious expectation that a 2,000-year-old rabbi will return to Earth. The marketing of his Don’t Die cult as religion exposes an issue some prefer to deflect: Silicon Valley sees religion as an industry ripe for disruption."

"Like Johnson, Srinivasan compared his movement to a religion and views religion as a useful dynamic for channeling human belief. In The Network State, he wrote of the “Red God” tribe of religious conservatives with whom the Gray tribe would ally in a struggle to overthrow the Blue tribe of Democrats. He calls the network state “tech Zionism,” citing both the state of Israel and the Mormon religion as inspirations. Some religious Zionists (and evangelical Christians) believe the return of Jews to Israel will hasten the arrival of the Messiah and the resurrection of the dead. Early Mormons believed the establishment of a New Jerusalem in America would bring about the Second Coming, when Christ would reign on Earth during the millennium. As with the network state, both scenarios involve migration and settlement as sacred duties, making the conquest of territory the fulfillment of divine prophecy—reframing colonialism and displacement as cosmic destiny."

"In the old religions, those judged most faithful and righteous are the Chosen Ones who will be rewarded at the end of time. In the tech religion, the chosen ones are the cognitive elites and their acolytes, who will inherit the future through technological transcendence. Making it to that future utopia, however, requires surviving the trials and tribulations ahead. In the Bible, an entire generation of Jews who supposedly left Egypt died in the desert before reaching the Promised Land. Thousands died during the American exodus engineered by the Mormon Pioneer Companies—supported by something called the Perpetual Emigrating Fund—which sprang up to systematically ship human beings to over three hundred settlements Brigham Young had strategically founded in Western states. They died of accidents, disease, exhaustion, exposure, starvation, and violence. Death and purification paved the way to deliverance."

"TESCREAL and the network state echo this through the spiritual eugenics of its cognitive elite model, where a small group of people will be rewarded for their IQ, wealth, and wholehearted faith in technological salvation. As with the old religions, the tech religion offers an eschatology—an end-of-the-world theory—as part of its core narrative. The collapse of nation-states will create trial and tribulation, Silicon Valley versions of Armageddon and apocalypse, which the cognitive elites must survive to then be raptured into the network state settlements, from which they will merge with AI gods and chase eternal life across the stars. “There is an entire ideology at work here, sprawling and ill-defined,” wrote astrophysicist Adam Becker of the strange beliefs underlying a formidable swath of the tech world. “It’s fueled by a collection of related desires and shared by a set of influential individuals and communities in the tech industry and the San Francisco Bay Area. These groups—the longtermists, the advocates of the Singularity, the rationalists, and more—share deep connections. They’re connected directly by people—there’s a great deal of overlap in membership among these groups—and they’re connected by a set of common aims and beliefs."

"In 2014, Thiel had recommended running start-ups as cults. A decade later, Silicon Valley teemed with strange new cults that, like so many cults before them, fancied themselves as missionaries on a cosmic quest to remake the world. In true cultlike fashion, they anointed new messiahs and proposed new gods. Some planned to create new nations, live on other planets, and even make death obsolete. They would construct a new cathedral, a techno-capital machine so powerful it would run the planet—and other planets—from now on. Venture capital had evolved beyond its mafia phase. It had birthed its own cult religions, complete with prophets, prophecies, and promised lands."

"Evangelical Christians have long been a powerful constituency in Republican politics. They are highly organized, well-funded, and have built power over decades. In Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right, journalist Anne Nelson details the history of the Council for National Policy (CNP), one of the most powerful groups in Washington, DC. Starting in 1981, the CNP united evangelicals, oil barons, and media types in a campaign to capture institutions. The CNP built a political infrastructure that stacked courts, captured state governments, passed legislation, and created a right-wing media ecosystem to replace local newspapers with right-wing propaganda. If anything, Thiel and his fellow oligarchs are latecomers seeking to emulate the radical religious right’s political infrastructure, much of which was funded by oil money at the outset. But oil money is chump change in comparison to the resources commanded by the captains of the Dark Enlightenment."

"At their core, they embrace what cognitive scientist George Lakoff describes as a “strict father” worldview, a set of traditional hierarchies that they see as the rightful moral order of the world. It is a system of supremacies—mainly white supremacy, male supremacy, Christian supremacy, heterosexual supremacy, and wealth supremacy. It divides the world into the strong and weak, justifying colonialism, inequality, and oppression by framing them as natural triumphs of the strong over the weak."

"Boyle’s speech, depicting Silicon Valley as part of a far-right coalition to defeat the threat of government, was stunning for several reasons. For example, Boyle unveiled herself as a religious zealot opposed to centralized government. Yet her trademark venture capital strategy, known as American Dynamism, calls for investments in “patriotic tech” companies to bolster national security and federal power, and which depend largely on lucrative government contracts. Andreessen Horowitz’s American Dynamism portfolio includes flagship companies such as Anduril, Flock Safety, Palantir, and SpaceX, all major government contractors. Yet there she stood, at one of DC’s most influential right-wing think tanks, describing the state as a Christ-killing menace. Even more alarming than this glaring hypocrisy was the strategy outlined by her speech, which proposed the very alliance Srinivasan had theorized in The Network State: Silicon Valley’s Gray tribe merging with the Red tribe, speaking the “Red God” language of the evangelical and fundamentalist Christians at MAGA’s core. The transhumanists who believe they will build God through AI and achieve eternal life, who calculate that billions of deaths are acceptable losses, who imagine humanity morphing into energy machines that harvest the cosmos, joining forces with Christian nationalists who seek theocracy, speak of spiritual warfare, and see Trump as God’s chosen instrument to replace the USA with a religious kingdom. Boyle laid out the most explicit playbook yet: 1. Frame democratic government as the enemy of “the family.” 2. Position tech companies as champions of “decentralized authority.” 3. Unite these movements in a moral war against the “authoritarian state."

"A few months later, in January 2024, Thiel and Palantir CEO Alex Karp visited Tel Aviv to announce a strategic partnership with the Israel Ministry of Defense. “No further details on the arrangement were disclosed, including what technology would be provided,” reported Bloomberg. “Palantir last year introduced its AIP, or Artificial Intelligence Platform, an intelligence and decision-making system that can analyze enemy targets and propose battle plans."

"Albanese said there were “reasonable grounds to believe Palantir has provided automatic predictive policing technology, core defence infrastructure for rapid and scaled-up construction and deployment of military software, and its Artificial Intelligence Platform, which allows real-time battlefield data integration for automated decision-making.” Some Palantir employees quit in protest, and Norway’s largest asset manager, Storebrand, divested $24 million in Palantir shares. But Palantir remained undaunted. Michael Steinberger, who wrote a biography of Palantir CEO Alex Karp, said the goal is to make Palantir an essential part of government. “I think part of the reason that Karp is on board with Trump is that he sees a huge opportunity here,” Steinberger told Politico. “Palantir’s software is already widely used, obviously on the military side, but [the Trump administration] is an opportunity to become even more deeply entrenched"

"Meanwhile, Thiel seemed to say the world-historical events that were most important were happening in the City by the Bay rather than the Holy Land: “I’m supposed to do some kind of advertisement for ACTS 17,” he said at the conclusion of his San Francisco lectures. “The non-egalitarian, very heretical thought I’ll give you is: Perhaps, you know, whatever you’re doing here in San Francisco is more important than everything everybody’s doing in Christian work in the rest of the world combined.” Such an assessment might surprise Christian missionaries working in poor countries where death and suffering have surged thanks to Silicon Valley’s other genocide, the one caused by Musk’s USAID chainsawing. In addition to co-opting Christianity to suit tech’s goals, Thiel arrogantly declared that tech Christians in San Francisco were more important than everyone else."

"Not everyone believed tech’s Christian schtick. Steve Bannon accused AI developers of “summoning the demon” and railed against tech oligarchs, comparing them to “atheistic 11-year-old boys who are kind of science fiction and Dungeon & Dragons guys” whom he accused of plotting a return to “feudalism.” “In technofeudalism, you’re just a digital serf,” he said. “Your value as a human being, as someone built and made in the image and likeness of God and endowed with the life spirit of the Holy Spirit—they don’t consider that. Everything is digital to them. They are, at the end of the day, transhumanist. And what is transhumanist? Transhumanist is somebody who sees Homo sapien here and Homo sapien plus on the other side of what they call the singularity. And that’s why they’re all rushing—whether it’s artificial intelligence, regenerative robotics, quantum computing, advanced chip design, CRISPR, biotech, all of it—to come to this point of which the oligarchs are going to lead that revolution. And why are they going to do it? Number one, when you get to know them and see where they’re spending the money, it’s because they want eternal life.” A return to feudalism, Bannon said, is what “[t]heir business model is based upon."

"Unlike the polite theologians of Innsbruck, Rome issued a harsh rebuke. Paolo Benanti, a Franciscan priest who serves as AI advisor to Pope Leo, called Thiel a “political theologian acting at the very heart of the Silicon Valley ecosystem.” “Both enigmatic and influential, his figure is not like that of a simple entrepreneur but as that of a thinker who has woven a complex ideological framework from very diverse sources: from René Girard’s mimetic philosophy to the anarcho-capitalist prophecy, to recently lead to a theological-apocalyptic framework as disturbing as it is structured,” wrote Benanti in an essay titled “American Heresy: Should Peter Thiel Be Burned at the Stake?” “Thiel’s entire action can thus be read as a prolonged act of heresy against the liberal consensus: a challenge to the very foundations of civil coexistence, which he now considers outdated.” Benanti called out Thiel’s weaponization of Girard’s mimetic theory, condemning Palantir as “a planetary management system for the scapegoat,” describing the PayPal Mafia as Thiel’s “operational structure,” a “concrete illustration of network theory: a small group of men who, thanks to strong links and a common vision, manage to exert a disproportionate influence on the entire system,” naming Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, and others as Thiel’s intellectual fellow travelers."

"The priest cut even deeper, attributing Thiel’s ideas not to Christianity but to The Sovereign Individual. “His vision, nourished both by René Girard’s anthropological pessimism on the violence of crowds and by the prophecy of the end of the nation-state formulated in the book The Sovereign Individual, which he prefaced, has led him to see technology not only as an instrument of profit, but as a tool for managing the decline of liberal democratic institutions,” wrote Benanti. “If democracy is exposed to the irrational excesses of mimetic violence, then technology offers, in this perspective, an alternative: an order based on data control, algorithmic forecasting and technocratic management of the masses. “This text, revered in Silicon Valley as a founding script, announces the inevitable decline of the nation-state, destined to dissolve under the effect of the digital revolution and cryptos. According to this vision, violence would no longer pay off as before, while capital, which had become fluid and without territorial anchorage, would escape the tax takeover of governments,” he continued. “A neo-medieval future is then emerging in which democratic politics is no more than a vestige and where all the services essential to life in society—including security—are privatized and administered by corporate entities. In this universe appears a new aristocracy of ‘sovereign individuals’: a cognitive elite detached from geography, operating in a cyberspace freed from jurisdictions, leaving behind a mass of individuals who have become superfluous. Thiel adopts this perspective not only as a diagnosis, but as a program, financing technologies that accelerate this dissolution while paradoxically building the instruments intended to control its effects.” The billionaire desired to be heard in Rome, but instead he was seen. Benanti sidestepped Thiel’s theological pretensions to expose the core of a new tech theocracy driven by a belief that “the only alternative to the apocalypse would be a technocratic order imposed by an elite of sovereigns"

"In The Doctrine of Fascism, Mussolini wrote that his ideology was more than just a political idea. It was an all-encompassing ethical, moral, and spiritual doctrine guiding every aspect of a person’s life—not just ideology, but something close to religion. “Fascism is a religious conception in which man is seen in his immanent relationship with a superior law and with an objective Will that transcends the particular individual and raises him to conscious membership of a spiritual society,” he wrote. “Whoever has seen in the religious politics of the Fascist regime nothing but mere opportunism has not understood that Fascism besides being a system of government is also, and above all, a system of thought.” In The Anatomy of Fascism, scholar Robert O. Paxton defined it as “[a] form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."

"In How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, Dr. Jason Stanley condensed fascism to ten key characteristics. The MAGA movement checks all ten boxes, melding an authoritarian cult of personality with religious symbols and narratives of grievance, along with a demand for strict hierarchy, a reliance on absurd but effective propaganda, and the ritual purification of society through the purging of demonized scapegoats. On the most basic level, Thiel’s ideology is fascist because it has fully aligned itself with the MAGA movement. Trump’s fascist cult of personality has emerged as a key political technology for challenging American democracy. This was true during his first term, and it has become undeniably clear during his second. Trump and his henchmen openly violate the law and erode the Constitution."

"Tech fascism updates this ideology for the AI age. Where analog fascism promises a return to a mythical glorious past, tech fascism promises to engineer an abundant and immortal future. Where traditional fascism asserts a natural hierarchy derived from God, tech fascism cements hierarchy through bogus race science and code. Where twentieth-century fascism manipulates language to destroy truth, twenty-first-century fascism controls reality through algorithms and through the outright purchase of media properties to bring them under fascist oligarch control. It does all of this while accusing its victims—those it seeks to eliminate or oppress—as the perpetrators of the very crimes that fascism itself openly conspires to commit. Tech fascism is the product of a venture capital system that has run out of unicorns and must now hunt Antichrists to meet its unquenchable thirst for acceleration. Artificial intelligence companies hype the coming of a “godlike” force capable of wiping out most jobs and, perhaps, all of humanity. Crypto companies peddle fantasies of digital salvation, shilling tokenized scams supposedly designed to survive the impending collapse of the US dollar and the liberal democratic order. Elon Musk, declaring Earth obsolete, hallucinates a new promised land on the dead waste of Mars. New crops of biotech start-ups promote delusional notions of eternal life while others launch the next generation of killer robot drones."

"Among the loudest advocates for multipolarity: Aleksandr Dugin, a fascist propagandist and theorist known as “Putin’s Brain.” In a stunning coincidence, Dugin is the only person who talks about the Antichrist more than Thiel. He claims the United States—the “country of apocalypse”—is building the “Kingdom of the Antichrist” through globalization, with the “evil” goal of creating a “unipolar” world. “The current world is unipolar with the global West as its centre and with the United States as its core,” wrote Dugin in The Fourth Political Theory, his 2009 treatise on the future of politics. “When there is only one instance to decide who is right and who is wrong and who should be punished and who not, we have a form of global dictatorship,” Dugin continued. “I am convinced that this is not acceptable. Therefore, we should fight against it. If someone deprives us of our freedom we have to react. And we will react. The American Empire should be destroyed. And at one point it will be.” Thiel’s lectures echo this logic, railing against a “totalitarian” Antichrist threat. Coincidentally, Dugin’s Antichrist rantings also hinge on the ideas of Carl Schmitt. Dugin argues, as did The Sovereign Individual, that nation-states will become obsolete, replaced by new spheres of influence controlled by futuristic empires. It’s a Russian version of white Christian nationalism, an ideological movement known as Russian Traditionalism, which emphasizes right-wing values rooted in a religion-inspired cult of supremacy. “His conviction that the Russian Federation’s destiny is to become a holy empire along tsarist lines, a notion that he has been promoting for more than three decades, has been adopted by much of the Russian political élite—including Putin himself,” wrote James Verini in The New Yorker in 2025. Dugin’s vision fits into a greater political framework called Project Russia, which lays out a strategy to transform the world order and make Russia great again. “Between 2005 and 2010, a set of books called ‘Project Russia’ was distributed to high-ranking officials in the Russian government and other influential thought leaders,” wrote independent researcher Dave Troy in The Washington Spectator in 2024. “The books offered a detailed program of spiritual warfare against Western democracies culminating in ‘controlled global collapse’ and the establishment of a ‘supranational’ state headed by a Prince-Monk who ‘best understands the world.’ The plan described is ultimately a program for subjugating the world, which would also be united together in a single religion."

"We must also hold ourselves accountable for the degree to which we have ceded our freedom and lost our way in exchange for technologies that mask danger as convenience. Not all technology is bad, but things have clearly gone off the rails. Today, it is being used to harvest our data, influence our behavior, polarize our society, supercharge our economic inequality, blur our reality, and dull our humanity. Consumer AI apps, the supposed saviors of the human race, are already being used to drive people into psychosis, talk children into suicide, and produce synthetic child sexual abuse material. Its masters promise it will also kill most of our jobs and replace human existence and experience with synthetic algorithmic realities. And all of it to create a fascist crypto casino that turns billionaires into trillionaires and turns ordinary people into their data-producing herd cattle."

"In The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley, Marietje Schaake tells the story of how technology companies have effectively seized control and influence over functions traditionally held by governments all over the world. Schaake argues that this undermines accountability, sovereignty, and the rule of law, creating a dangerous imbalance that must be fixed with urgency. “This is a tragedy for citizens; ultimately, if things go wrong, they will be left picking up the tab,” wrote Schaake. “When tens of millions of jobs end up displaced by AI, shareholders of companies will benefit, while the price of unemployment or reeducation will fall to societies to shoulder. The moment those negative externalities inevitably do emerge, the public purse will be emptied."

"As soon as intelligence becomes artificial, that is, as soon as it is made possible by artefacts and makes these artefacts possible – due to that astonishing faculty of dreaming which, according to the palaeo-anthropologist Marc Azéma, characterizes the human being: he posits that man dreams, as do animals, but that he also does so by producing, drawing and writing, by day-dreaming, such an ex-pression being the beginning of a process of exo-somatization by which man realizes his dreams. The faculty of dreaming is, then, here the faculty of the realization of dreams, and such is noetic intelligence according to Paul Valéry."

"In order to precisely distinguish (without opposing) the organic (vegetative and sensible) forms of intelligence from the organological (noetic) forms, we must firstly recall what Aristotle remained unaware of, namely that, some three million or so years ago, there arose the conditions for what would later, some forty thousand years ago, become noetic intelligence, in which Georges Bataille would recognize himself, and in relation to which he said: here it is we who begin, those who painted these animals are our ancestors, our father, this is evidently so, it is obviously so, and recognizing this evidence is a key feature of noesis itself. Here is exactly what he writes in Lascaux, or The Birth of Art:

    It is ‘Lascaux man’ about whom we can surely say, and for the first time that, making     works of art, he evidently resembled us, he was one of us, our fellow man."

"Having said this, we can begin to understand why what we today refer to as artificial intelligence is a continuation of the process of the exosomatization of noesis itself, such as it begins firstly with fabricating exosomatization, making things by hand, and continues with hypomnesic exosomatization, as that which makes it possible to access lived experiences of memory and imagination, which have accumulated since the origin of the play of works, as Bataille considers them, and which engender, in passing through writing, instruments of observation, calculating machines whose principles were established by Leibniz, and analogue technologies, which form the basis of the culture industries – and here the question of their role in the ‘post-truth era’ arises as never before. All of this then, writing, telescopes, calculating machines and the analogue recording technologies of the culture industries, all of this has generated a perpetual and techno-logical evolution of what Kant called the faculties – whether they are lower, that is, functions of noesis, or whether they are higher, and thereby constitute faculties in the sense we refer to them in universities, and which regularly enter into conflict."

"What we today call artificial intelligence is not what was on the horizon of the Macy conferences, the project of which was formulated in Dartmouth by Marvin Minsky with Claude Shannon, Allen Newell, Herbert Simon, and so on. It is a reticular AI, based on what Clarisse Herrenschmidt has called reticular writing, which is linked to the networking together of three and a half billion individuals – via an apparatus that becomes exosopherical, constantly evolving, and now based on the ‘platform capitalism’ described by Benjamin Bratton – and that makes possible the production and exploitation of what I call ‘digital pheromones’. The possibility of such digital pheromones was in a way already raised by Norbert Wiener in 1948, when he worried about the possibility that cybernetics could give rise to what he called a ‘fascist ant-state’.3 That the human could regress to the stage of the ant is a possibility contained in the fact that this human abandons his knowledge – his knowledge being the path by which he must struggle against entropy."

"What then should be the function of what is today called ‘artificial intelligence’, where this refers to a technology of reticular, ubiquitous super-computing that automates the majority of processes by which behavioural flows are managed, where this has fundamental effects on both modes of production and modes of exchange in all their forms, and where, in its current stage, these have been transformed into functions of consumption?"

Exteriorisation of intelligence is exosomatisation 

"Two years ago in Nanjing, I tried to show [...] that what Kant called the lower faculties – intuition, understanding, imagination and reason, which are put to work by the higher faculties that are those of knowing, desiring and judging – are functions that are produced through the process of their exteriorization, which Hegel was already able to see, but without truly seeing it. It is Marx who will be the first to understand this, and it will then be reformulated by Lotka, who will do so from a biological standpoint and by coining a new term: exosomatization, or exosomatic evolution and exosomatic organs. Here, the intelligence of the body is produced in being supplemented, inasmuch as it makes possible an exteriorization of experience, and the constitution of what I call (using Husserlian terminology) collective secondary retentions: the latter are retained in individual memories, but they are retained there collectively, forming what we also refer to as knowledge, which can be transmitted from generation to generation, and which metastabilizes the conditions of life – these conditions of life being negentropic, that is, struggling against the entropic effects of human behaviour, which is something we discover in the Anthropocene, through the analysis of what the IPCC calls anthropogenic forcings, which fundamentally threaten life, and in particular noetic life – life that is worthy of being lived by a noetic soul. All of this is what leads to a life that is unworthy of noesis – and ultimately becomes incompatible with life as a whole, as the 15364 signatories of a recent scientific text declare"

"This third world, however, is the world of what I call hypomnesic tertiary retentions, a world composed not just of exosomatic organs but of retentional accumulations, and where Lotka shows that these are orthogenetic, that is, bearers of non-Darwinian selection processes, making possible the establishment of scalar relations between different orders of magnitude, something completely different from, for example, relations between cells, organs, bodies, milieus and so on"

"Your calculator is a genius in math; Google’s memory is already beyond our own in a
certain dimension. We are engineering AIs to excel in specific modes." (Kevin Kelly, Wired)

But these specific modes are only functions. It is not just a question of functions,
but of faculties – if we take it as given that we must rethink the concept of faculty
from the exosomatic perspective.

 -> the faculties are social, and not just psychic, and that is the whole issue involved in the conflict of the faculties."

"More importantly, and while the notion of tertiary retention—which defines the retention of memory into an artificial device such as a notepad or a camera—was mainly understood from the point of view of the human deliberately exteriorizing data via a technical supplement for the purpose of recollection, the digital has produced a new form of tertiary retention where machines exteriorized data for other machines to use. Such a shift forces us to acknowledge that there are at least two types of hypomnematon. One type that is human-generated, as when we write down a note in the form of orthographic writing where both writer and reader are “the bearers of knowledge that they necessarily embody.” This type of hypomnematon is the condition of possibility of knowing understood as a process of sedimentation. The other is generated by machines, as when applications collect data that are being analyzed by computers. By recognizing the different functions of these two types of tertiary memory, one can comprehend algorithmic procedures of extraction that strip subjects of their agency. The question of the proletarianization of the mind thus becomes the question of the future of knowledge formation as it depends on the memory that is now being automatically obtained from individuals whose data are being collected before they are recognized as information by individuals."

"The automatized entropy of knowledge and thought occurs at two different scales of operation. First at an algorithmic level, industrial automata runs beyond and below human perception. According to Mark B. N. Hansen, the impact of media technology in the twenty-first century “affects the materiality of experience at a level more elemental than perception”. [...] these technologies now perform tasks at an algorithmic level, below the perceptive domain of human perception. The algorithmic scale of AI operations transforms the traditional mode of representation, the craft and know-how, into what Parisi calls a computational architecture of thought. Algorithm’s step-by-step procedure for calculation leads the programmable orientation of knowledge that Vilèm Flusser defines as modelling relations to the real. As such, AI-driven technologies are instructional programs designed to produce meaning through “a-significative units”, as Antoinette Rouvroy neatly calls them."

Shifting where knowledge 'exists'

My focus here is on beliefs, but note that the use of AI might also create problems for taking responsibility for our actions – a possibility that also relates to the concerns of epistemology. For example, if we are not able to explain how an AI system (in particular, a deep learning system) formulates its outputs, we suffer from a particular type of ignorance: we don’t know why we are doing what we are doing. This is not only a problem for accepting responsibility for our actions, but also makes it more difficult, if not impossible, to act responsibly towards others (Coeckelbergh 2020)

Clowes, Gärtner, and Hipólito (2021) have argued that we now face a mind-technology problem, as a successor of the mind-body problem: new conceptualizations about the nature of mind and its relationship to artefacts have given rise to ‘a new constellation of basic philosophical problems about the very nature of mind’. For instance, today computers and AI challenge us to reframe and rethink what human minds are. If AI can carry out tasks that previously were seen as belonging to human thought, what does that mean for our understanding of ourselves? Do minds work like computers or not, and why? For example, are minds computational? If not, is it nevertheless a productive metaphor or not? How, exactly, should we conceptualize the relationship between humans and their artificial creations? Are we becoming cyborgs? How are our minds changing as a result of our interactions with the technologies? And what kind of knowledge and self-knowledge does AI create? Does AI distort our epistemic environments? Is knowledge in crisis?

"An interesting exception in recent work in epistemology that addresses these issues and cites some works in philosophy of technology is Freiman’s (2023) paper: in order to analyse how conversational AIs may influence people’s beliefs, Freiman proposes the conception of ‘technologybased belief’, which is meant to acknowledge that non-human agency can function as the originator of our beliefs and their content (without assuming that the technology has human-like agency). He argues that technology-based belief is different from testimony-based beliefs, which have a human as the source of knowledge, but also different from instrument-based beliefs, since in the case of conversational AI, the content is delivered in natural language. This is an example of how conceptualizing the influence of technology – here AI – can be integrated with (social) epistemology"

"Assuming that we wish to be epistemic agents and that epistemic agency is influenced by the social, in this paper, I am interested in analysing and understanding cases in which an agent is, in principle, free to form her beliefs, but in which this formation is rendered more difficult because of technologically shaped conditions. In other words: I’m interested in cases in which epistemic agency is compromised and diminished due to the use of AI.

To ask this question regarding technology is important as discussions in epistemology usually ignore the fact that most of our epistemic lives take place in environments that are very much mediated by digital technologies, including AI and data science. Our acquisitions and constructions of knowledge is not only a social matter but also often takes place via search engines, in social media environments, via the use of electronic devices, and so on. It is therefore advisable to analyse the epistemic consequences of the use of digital technologies for the epistemic work individuals do within social-epistemological environments such as digital social media. Epistemology can learn here from philosophy of technology, media studies, and related fields"

"In any case, whether we as a matter of fact have full voluntary control over our beliefs or not and regardless of the implications for responsibility, it is clear that as human beings we have the capability to detach ourselves from our beliefs to some extent and to reflect on them, and that most of us tend to value reflective knowledge (Sosa 1991). Most importantly, we like to take an active role in belief acquisition: we wish to be epistemic agents"

Excellent intro - What are humans today? What can be 'computed'?

"In 1935, Michael Polanyi, then holder of the Chair of Physical Chemistry at the Victoria University of Manchester, England, was suddenly shocked into a confrontation with philosophical questions that have ever since dominated his life. The shock was administered by Nicolai Bukharin, one of the leading theoreticians of the Russian Communist party, who told Polanyi that "under socialism the conception of science pursued for its own sake would disappear, for the interests of scientists would spontaneously turn to the prob- lems of the current Five Year Plan." Polanyi sensed then that "the scientific outlook appeared to have produced a mechanical conception of man and history in which there was no place for science itself." And further that "this conception denied altogether any intrinsic power to thought and thus denied any grounds for claiming freedom of thought."

I don't know how much time Polanyi thought he would devote to developing an argument for a contrary concept of man and history. His very shock testifies to the fact that he was in profound disagreement with Bukharin, therefore that he already conceived of man differently, even if he could not then give explicit form to his concept. It may be that he determined to write a counterargument to Bukharin's position, drawing only on his own experienceas a scientist, and to have done with it in short order. As it turned out, however, the confrontation with philosophy triggered by Bukharin's revelation was to demand Polanyi's entire attention from then to the present day."

After ELIZA, several psychiatrists believed it would automate psychotherapy. . . 

A number of practicing psychiatrists seriously believed the DOCTOR computer program could grow into a nearly completely automatic form of psychotherapy. Colby et al. write, for example,

"Further work must be done before the program will be ready for clinical use. If the method proves beneficial, then it would provide a therapeutic tool which can be made widely available to mental hospitals and psychiatric centers suffering a shortage of therapists. Because of the time-sharing capabilities of modern and future computers, several hundred patients an hour could be handed by a computer system designed for this purpose. The human therapist, involved in the design and operation of this system, would not be replaced, but would become a much more efficient man since his efforts would no longer be limited to the one-to-one patient-therapist ratio as now exists. "

The psychiatrist views himself merely as an information processor, rule follower (re. above)

"What can the psychiatrist's image of his patient be when he sees himself, as therapist, not as an engaged human being acting as a healer, but as an information processor following rules, etc.?

Such questions were my awakening to what Polanyi had ear- lier called a "scientific outlook that appeared to have produced a mechanical conception of man."

"3. Another widespread, and to me surprising, reaction to the ELIZA program was the spread of a belief that it demonstrated a general solution to the problem of computer understanding of natural language. In my paper, I had tried to say that no general solution to that problem was possible, i.e., that language is understood only in contextual frameworks, that even these can be shared by people to only a limited extent, and that consequently even people are not embodiments of any such general solution."

"Ultimately a line dividing human and machine intelligence must be drawn. If there is no such line, then advocates of computerized psychotherapy may be merely heralds of an age in which man has finally been recognized as nothing but a clock-work. Then the consequences of such a reality would need urgently to be divined and contemplated."

By in fullness I mean that even for tasks that would seem to be ideal use-cases for LLMs, e.g. coding, cannot be reduced to its outcome. The greater effects on how it makes coders view code differently, grow tired of their craft, gradually de-skill, etc. must all be taken into account - not to mention impact on society.

"3. It is perhaps paradoxical that just, when in the deepest sense man has ceased to believe in—let alone to trust—his own autonomy, he has begun to rely on autonomous machines, that is, on machines that operate for long periods of time entirely on the basis of their own internal realities. If his reliance on such machines is to be based on something other than unmitigated despair or blind faith, he must explain to himself what these machines do and even how they do what they do. This requires him to build some conception of their internal "realities." Yet most men don't understand computers to even the slightest degree. So, unless they are capable of very great skepticism (the kind we bring to bear while watching a stage magician), they can explain the computer's intellectual feats only by bringing to bear the single analogy available to them, that is, their model of their own capacity to think. No wonder, then, that they overshoot the mark; it is truly impossible to imagine a human who could imitate ELIZA, for example, but for whom ELIZA's language abilities were his limit. Again, the computing machine is merely an extreme example of a much more general phenomenon. Even the breadth of connotation intended in the ordinary usage of the word "machine," large as it is, is insufficient to suggest its true generality. For today when we speak of, for example, bureaucracy, or the university, or almost any social or political construct, the image we generate is all too often that of an autonomous machine-like process."

Even more saying today? LLMs are inherently unpredictabl given their black box nature, and with their sycophantic responses they further delude theirs users into a sense of knowing what is going on when using them. Everything becomes an autonomous machine-like process.

"It may appear at first glance that this is an in-house debate of little consequence except to a small group of computer technicians. But at bottom, no matter how it may be disguised by technological jargon, the question is whether or not every aspect of human thought is reducible to a logical formalism, or, to put it into the modern idiom, whether or not human thought is entirely computable. That question has, in one form or another, engaged thinkers in all ages. Man has always striven for principles that could organize and give sense and meaning to his existence."

Science has made other means of understanding the world be seen as insufficient.

""They were not just intelligent, but prided themselves on being 'rational' . . . They were eager to find formulas, preferably expressed in a pseudo-mathematical language, that would unify the most disparate phenomena with which reality presented them; that is, they were eager to discover laws by which to explain and predict political and historical facts as though they were as necessary, and thus as reliable, as the physicists once believed natural phenomena to be . . . [They] did not judge; they calculated. . . . an utterly irrational confidence in the calculability of reality [became] the leitmotif of the decision making.""

Quoting Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic (192, pp. 1)

The numbers will always say something, because we will see something, even if it is not adequately describing the real world.

"It may be that human values are illusory, as indeed B. F. Skinner argues. If they are, then it is presumably up to science to demonstrate that fact, as indeed Skinner (as scientist) attempts to do. But then science must itself be an illusory system. For the only certain knowledge science can give us is knowledge of the behavior of formal systems, that is, systems that are games invented by man himself and in which to assert truth is nothing more or less than to assert that, as in a chess game, a particular board position was arrived at by a sequence of legal moves. When science purports to make statements about man's experiences, it bases them on identifications between the primitive (that is, undefined) objects of one of its formalisms, the pieces of one of its games, and some set of human observations. No such sets of correspondences can ever be proved to be correct."

"Perhaps we can vaguely understand it by contemplating, say, the great fugues of Bach. But a special form of contemplation is required of us: we must not think in the modern manner, i.e., of Bach as a "problem solver," or of each of his opera in his Art of the Fugue as being his increasingly refined "solution" to a problem he had originally set himself. Instead we must think that Bach had the whole plan in his mind all the time, that he thought of the Art of the Fugue as a unified work with no beginning and no end, itself eternal like the cosmos, and like it enormously intricate in its connections, circles within circles within circles. We might then find it possible to think of life as having been not merely punctuated but entirely suffused by this kind of music, both on the grand cosmological-theological scale and on the small day-to-day level. Such"

"It is important to realize that this newly created reality was and remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality. The feeling of hunger was rejected as a stimulus for eating; instead, one ate when an abstract model had achieved a certain state, i.e., when the hands of a clock pointed to certain marks on the clock's face (the anthropomorphism here is highly significant too), and similarly for signals for sleep and rising, and so on."

"aid of computers"

"putting muscles on it—contributes nothing to its validity. For example, there are computer programs that carry out with great precision all the calculations required to cast the horoscope of an individual whose time and place of birth are known. Because the computer does all the tedious symbol manipulations, they can be done much more quickly and in much more detail than is normally possible for a human astrologer. But such an improvement in the technique of horoscope casting is irrelevant to the validity of astrological forecasting. If astrology is nonsense, then computerized astrology is just as surely nonsense."

"That is not true for astrology, but may well be true of, say, numerical weather forecasting. For the latter, the number of data that must be taken into account, and the amount of computation that must be done on them in order to produce an accurate weather forecast, may well be so large that no team of humans, however large, could complete the computations in any reasonable time whatever. And any simplification of the technique sufficient to reduce the computational task to proportions manageable by humans would invalidate the technique itself. In such cases the computer may contribute to making a hitherto impractical technique practical. But what has to be remembered is that the validity of a technique is a question that involves the technique and its subject matter. If a bad idea is to be converted into a good one, the source of its weakness must be discovered and repaired. A person falling into a manhole is rarely helped by making it possible for him to fall faster or more efficiently."

"particular technique requires an enormous amount of computation and if only a limited computational effort can be devoted to it, then a failure of the technique can easily be explained away on the ground"

"What is less often said, however, is that the society's newly created ways to act often eliminate the very possibility of acting in older ways."

"In order to understand how the computer attained so very much power, both as an actor and as a force on the human imagination, we must first discuss where the power of the computer comes from and how the computer does what it does. That is what we shall turn our attention to in the next two chapters." Chapter 2: Where the Power of the Computer Comes From

"We set a punch press into motion, and it mangles the hand of a worker who gets too close to it. The very regularity of the machine is its most fearsome property. We put it to its task and it performs, regularly to be sure, but blindly as well."

"Machines, when they operate properly, are not merely law abiding; they are embodiments of law. To say that a specific machine is "operating properly" is to assert that it is an embodiment of a law we know and wish to apply. We expect an ordinary desk calculator, for example, to be an embodiment of the laws of arithmetic we all know. Should it deliver what we believe to be a wrong result, our faith in the lawfulness of the machine is so strong that we usually assume we have made an error in punching in our data."

"Indeed, we are often quite distressed when a repairman returns a machine to us with the words, "I don't know what was wrong with it. I just jiggled it, and now it's working fine." He has confessed that he failed to come to understand the law of the broken machine and we infer that he cannot now know, and neither"

"First, it testifies that the folk wisdom recognizes the essential characteristic of the machine to be its relentless regularity, its blind obedience of the law of which it is an embodiment."

"The blueprint of a machine is not its design. If it were, then the design would change whenever the blueprint is enlarged or redrawn in another color. No, a design is an abstract idea, just as is a functional specification. And ideas, say, the idea of a perpetual-motion machine, are not bound by the laws of physics."

"To the contrary, they command precisely what he must do to make that transition. Such a set of rules—that is, a set of rules which tells a player precisely how to behave from one moment to the next—is called an effective procedure. The notion of an effective procedure, or "algorithm," as it is also called, is one of the most important in modern mathematics."

"For if an agent competent in only one language were given a procedure written in a language strange to him, together with rules that dictate precisely how to interpret statements in the strange language, then he could imitate what the behavior of a speaker of the strange language would have been had that speaker followed the given procedure. We need therefore some absolutely unambiguous language in which we can write effective procedures and in terms of which we can state rules for interpreting statements in other languages."

"A formal language is (again!) a game. Let us return briefly to a consideration of the game of chess. It consists of a set of pieces, a board having a certain configuration, a specification of the initial positions of the pieces on the board, and a set of"

"My task is therefore reduced to showing that a unique alphabet, and a language on that alphabet, can be found in which we can indeed describe all languages in which we may want to write procedures."

"Turing answered that question as well: a Turing machine can be built to realize any process that could naturally be called an effective procedure."

"Such a way of knowing is very weak. We do not say we know a city, let alone that we understand it, solely on the basis of having a detailed map of it. Apart from that, if we understand the language in which a procedure is written well enough to be able to explicate its transformation rules, we probably understand what rules stated in that language tell us to do."

"Turing's thesis tells us that we can realize, as a computer program, any procedure that could "naturally" be called an effective procedure. Therefore, whenever we believe we understand a phenomenon in terms of knowing its behavioral rules, we ought to be able to express our understanding in the form of a computer program. Turing proved that all computers (save a few special-purpose types that do not concern us here) are equivalent to one another, i.e., are all universal. Hence any failure of a technically well-functioning computer to behave precisely as we believe we have programmed it to behave cannot be attributed to any peculiarity of the specific computer we have used. Indeed, the fault must be that we have been careless in our transcription of the behavioral rules we think we understand into the formal language demanded by our computer, or must be in the initial explication, in any form, of what we had in mind when we believed we understood, or must be that our understanding is defective. The last is most often the case. I shall say much more about that later. For now, we need note only that the defect in our understanding can take two forms:"

"First, although our theory may be on the whole correct, it may contain an error in detail. We wrongly assert, for example, that if this and that is true, then so-and-so follows. Our mental processes, lulled perhaps by the sheer eloquence of the argument we make to ourselves, often permit us to slide over such errors without the slightest disturbance. The computer is, however, very unforgiving in this respect. It follows the logic we have given it. That logic may lead to very different consequences than do mental processescontaminated by wishes to reach certain outcomes. Indeed, one of the most cogent reasons for using computers is to expose holes in our thinking. Computers are merciless critics in this respect. Second, the defect in our understanding may be that, although it is true that we understand, we are still not able to formalize our understanding. We may, for example, be able to predict with very great confidence what an animal will do under a large variety of circumstances. But our predictive power, great and reliable as it may be, may rest on intuitions that we are simply unable to adequately explicate. Yet we may be driven to force our ideas into a formal mold anyway. A computer program based on a formal system so derived is certain to misbehave. The trouble then is not merely that the theory it represents contains certain errors in detail, but that that theory is grossly wrong in what it asserts about the matters it concerns. It is not always clear which defect one is confronted with when a computer one has programmed misbehaves. There is usually enormous motivation to believe that one's theories are all right on the whole, and that, when they don't work well, there must be some error in detail that can easily be patched up. I shall have more to say about such matters later."

"Consider the English sentence: "I never met a man who is taller than John." It may be transformed into "I never met a taller man than John." This transformation clearly preserves the meaning of the original sentence. But if we apply the same transformation rule to "I never met a man who is taller than Maria," and get "I never met a taller man than Maria," it no longer works. The rule we have applied is not purely syntactic. It concerns itself not merely with the form of uninterpreted strings of symbols, but with their meanings as well."

"If we wish to continue to identify languages with machines even when discussing natural language, then we must recognize that, whatever machines correspond to natural languages, they are more like machines that transform energy and deliver power than like the abstract machines we have been considering; i.e., their laws must take cognizance of the real world. Indeed, the demands placed on them are, if anything, more stringent than those placed on mere engines. For although the laws of engines are merely subsets of the laws of physics, the laws of a natural-language machine must somehow correspond to the inner realities manifest and latent in the person of each speaker of the language at the time of his speaking. Natural language is difficult in this sense because we have to know, for example, to what "values" of X and Y we can apply the transformation rule that takes us from "I never met an X who is taller than Y" to "I never met a taller X than Y." It is clearly not a rule uniformly applicable to uninterpreted strings of symbols."

"What is so remarkable is how incredibly few things we must know in order to have access, in principle, to all of mathematics. In ordinary life we give each other directions, i.e., describe procedures to one another, that, although perhaps technically ambiguous in that they are potentially subject to various interpretations, are, for all practical purposes, effective procedures. They rest at bottom on extremely widely shared vocabularies whose elements, when they appear in highly conventionalized contexts, have effectively unique interpretations. Most professional and technical conversations avail themselves of such vocabularies almost exclusively. The problem of converting such procedures into effective procedures in the technical sense, i.e., into programs for Turing machines, is fundamentally one of formalizing the knowledge base that underlies the conventional interpretation of their vocabularies. The more highly standardized these vocabularies are, and the more restricted the context in which they are used, the more likely that this problem can be solved. For, after all, if each symbol of a set of symbols has an effectively unique interpretation in a certain context, and if strings of such symbols are transformed only by rules that themselves arise out of that context, then no question of giving each symbol an interpretation arises in any formal sense at all. A language so constrained is effectively a formal language. Its rules are therefore potentially realizable by a Turing machine."

"We join Michael Polanyi in saying that we know more than we can tell."

"The chess master knows more than he can tell. I am not saying here (although I believe this to be true) that we can never find a way to explicate the whole of his knowledge of chess; I say only that we have in this an example of knowledge that is effective even though not presently tellable. Were it true that no chess master's knowledge of chess is fully tellable, would that imply that no computer could ever play master-class chess? Not at all. We shall, as I have said, deal with such questions in what follows." Chapter 3: How Computers Work

"view, modern computers are simply Turing machines that operate on an alphabet consisting of the two symbols "0" and "1" and that are capable of taking on an astronomical number of states. But this is like saying that, because both bicycles and modern passenger aircraft are vehicles for transporting people, they are formally identical. The modern computer differs from the Turing machines we have been discussing both in the way it is constructed and the way it is instructed"

"In a very real sense, every freedom an author exercises in making a choice is one he has usurped from the programmer who is to use his product. Consider"

"The recent history of the behavioral sciences has shown us how deeply the success of mathematics as used in physics has affected disciplines quite far removed from physics. Many psychologists and sociologists have for generations discussed their subject matter in terms of differential equations and statistics, for example. They may have begun by believing that the calculi they adopted were merely a convenient shorthand for describing the phenomena with which they deal. But, as they construct ever larger conceptual frameworks out of elementary components originally borrowed from foreign contexts, and as they give these frameworks names and manipulate them as elements of still more elaborate systems of thought, these frameworks cease to serve as mere modes of description and become, like Maslow's hammer, determinants of their view of the world. The design of a public language, then, is a serious task, one pregnant with consequences and thus laden with extraordinarily heavy responsibility. I shall have more to say about that later."

"Lest this be thought a "merely" philosophical point of little practical consequence, I must say immediately that not only do most of today's programmers think of the languages they use as being their machines, very nearly literally so, but many, perhaps most, have no knowledge whatever of their computer's machine language or of the content and structure of the translators that mediate between them and their computers. This observation is not made as a criticism. After all, a higher-level formal language is an abstract machine. No one is to be faulted for using a language or a machine more congenial to his purposes than is some other machine, merely because the other machine is somehow more primitive. But the observation does raise an important question: If today's programmers are largely unaware of the detailed structures of the physical machines they are using, of their languages, and of the translators that manipulate their programs, then they must also be largely ignorant of many of the arguments I have made here, particularly of those arguments concerning the universality of computers and the nature of effective procedures. How then do these programmers come to sense the power of the computer?"

"The idea that a person can write a program that embodies anything he "thoroughly understands" is at least equally problematical. Understanding something always means understanding it at a certain level. An actuary uses some fairly sophisticated mathematical tools whose fundamentals he almost certainly doesn't understand or care anything about. Everyone who makes change uses arithmetic, but very few people know or care much about the beautiful axiom system on which arithmetic is based. In effect, we all constantly use subroutines whose input-output behavior we believe we know, but whose details we need not and rarely do think about. To understand something sufficiently well to be able to program it for a computer does not mean to understand it to its ultimate depth. There can be no such ultimate understanding in practical affairs. Programming is rather a test of understanding. In this respect it is like writing; often when we think we understand something and attempt to write about it, our very act of composition reveals our lack of understanding even to ourselves. Our pen writes the word "because" and suddenly stops. We thought we understood the "why" of something, but discover that we don't. We begin a sentence with "obviously"; and then see that what we meant to write is not obvious at all. Sometimes we connect two clauses with the word "therefore," only to then see that our chain of reasoning is defective. Programming is like that. It is, after all, writing too. But in ordinary writing we sometimes obscure our lack of understanding, our failures in logic, by unwittingly appealing to the immense flexibility of natural language and to its inherent ambiguity. The very eloquence that natural language permits sometimes illuminates our words and seems (falsely, to be sure) to illuminate our undeserving logic just as brightly. An interpreter of programming-language texts, a computer, is immune to the seductive influence of mere eloquence. And words like "obviously" are not represented in the primitive vocabularies of any computers. A computer is a merciless critic. Therefore the assertion that one understands a thing sufficiently well to be able to program it is, first of all, an assertion that one understands it in very particular terms. In any case, it can be no more than a boast that may well be falsified by experience."

"Indeed, many professional programmers believe that their craft is difficult because the languages with which they must deal have rigid syntactical rules. There is therefore a persistent cry for natural-language, e.g., English, programming systems. Programmers who hold to this belief have probably never tackled a truly difficult problem, and have therefore never felt the need for really deep criticism from the computer. It is true that in order to write one has first to master the syntactic rules of one's chosen language. But then one must also have thought through what one has to say."

"A real reason that programming is very hard is that, in most instances, the computer knows nothing of those aspects of the real world that its program is intended to deal with. It is in a position analogous to, say, that of a teacher of English grammar who has been given an airplane pilot's manual and left at a plane's controls in midair. He may be a very skilled grammatical faultfinder, but as to how to fly an airplane, he knows nothing."

"But we mustn't make too much of this. A lazy student's list of useful physics formulas may enable him to solve many schoolbook problems in physics, but will still not give him an understanding of physics, a theory he can think about. Just so, a set of assertions of the kind we have shown may enable a computer to solve certain problems. But this says nothing of a programmer's or of a computer's mastery of a theory or of either's understanding of anything more than how to use a group of "facts" to arrive at certain conclusions. A computer's successful performance is often taken as evidence that it or its programmer understand a theory of its performance. Such an inference is unnecessary and, more often than not, is quite mistaken. The relationship between understanding and writing thus remains as problematical for computer programming as it has always been for writing in any other form."

Welch, R. B. and D. H. Warren, 1980, “Immediate perceptual response to intersensory discrepancy,” Psychological Bulletin, 88(3): 638–667.

"This poses the question of the usage of the word “supplement”: of Rousseau’s situation within the language [langue] and the logic that assures to this word or to this concept sufficiently surprising resources so that the presumed subject of the sentence should always say, using the “supplement,” more, less, or something other than what he would wish to say [voudrait dire]. This question is therefore not only of Rousseau’s writing but also of our reading. We should begin by taking rigorous account of this being held within [prise] or this surprise: the writer writes in a language [langue] and in a logic whose proper system, laws, and life his discourse by definition cannot dominate absolutely. He uses them only by letting himself, in a certain way and up to a point, be governed by the system. And the reading must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of the language that he uses. This relationship is not a certain quantitative distribution of shadow and light, of weakness or of force, but a signifying structure that critical reading should produce.

What does produce mean here? Attempting to explain that, we would initiate a justification of our principles of reading. A justification, as we shall see, entirely negative, outlining by exclusion a space of reading that we will not fill here: a task of reading."

"Derrida argues that ‘grammatology’ offers us an insight into a much bigger set of philosophical assumptions, namely, the ‘metaphysics of presence [la métaphysique de la présence]’ (p. 49/71). What exactly does this forbidding term mean? It is generally understood that ‘metaphysics’ is the name for a specific branch of philosophy that seeks to locate an ultimate ground, essence or foundation of reality that lies beyond the physical or empirical world: the classic example of such a position would be Plato’s idealism which argues that our world is merely the imitation of a pre-existing world of permanent, unchanging Ideas or Forms. However, Derrida has a much more ambitious understanding of ‘metaphysics’ that encompasses the entire history of western philosophy from Plato to the present day. For Derrida, the western philosophical tradition in its entirety can be described as ‘metaphysical’ in the sense that it all seeks to establish an essential foundation for reality and, in his view, that foundation is something called ‘presence’. If western philosophy has developed in many different directions over the last 2,500 years, what all these movements have in common is an attempt to posit a full or pure ‘presence’ as the supreme value by which all reality can be judged. From the spatial presence of something we can see, hear or touch, through the temporal presence of the ‘here and now’ in which we live, up to and including the absence of some presence that has been lost (such as an Edenic state of nature) or which may be achieved in the future (such as the return of God), western thought consistently comes to the same conclusion: what is most real, true or important is what is most present. In Derrida’s view, the ‘metaphysics of presence’ historically operates by erecting a series of binary oppositions between concepts, values or terms where, in each case, one concept is identified as the bearer of presence itself whereas the other is identified with the falling away, or loss of, that presence: Introduction 7 the transcendental is privileged as more ‘present’ than the empirical, the ideal is championed over the material, the soul over the body, the masculine over the feminine and so on ad infinitum"

"whatever we perceive or experience as fully ‘present’ – the sound of my own voice, the wooden desk that I can touch in front of me, the thoughts that are running through my head while I read or write, even the ‘here and now’ of space and time in which I exist – is actually shot through with an infinite, and almost imperceptible, number of differences, delays or spaces. Quite simply, Derrida argues that every apparently pure, stable or self-identical presence is nothing more than an effect generated by a prior series of differences: nothing is ever purely or simply ‘there’."

"Derrida shows that the supposedly primary, dominant or superior value implicitly relies on the supposedly secondary, different or inferior value in order to achieve the presence that it should achieve all by itself: the masculine depends upon the feminine in order to define its own identity in the first place. What form does this process take in the Grammatology?"

"For Derrida, Of Grammatology takes the form of an extended analysis of the metaphysical opposition between speech and writing. It focuses on what the philosopher takes to be a defining form of what we have called the metaphysical search for ‘presence’: logocentrism (p. 3/11). According to the etymology of the term, ‘logocentrism’ 8 Derrida’s Of Grammatology signifies the philosophical attempt to find what the Ancient Greeks called the logos: a term which can be literally translated as ‘word’ but also carries within it the larger sense of ‘logic’, ‘reason’ or ‘meaning’."

"logocentrism might even be described as the most ‘original and powerful ethnocentrism’, he writes in the ‘Exergue’, because it violently privileges and imposes the values of western culture over all others (p. 3/12)."

"Derrida challenges the logocentric attempt to champion speech over writing by arguing that all language – whether spoken or written – might be described as ‘writing’: writing is another name for language itself."

"Derrida does not propose that we can ever simply overcome logocentric or metaphysical assumptions. We cannot simply establish some new, more accurate theory or system of knowledge to replace the metaphysics of presence ( Positions, p. 12). If Derrida’s work is a thoroughgoing interrogation of metaphysics, the fact remains that he is deeply sceptical of any attempt to get ‘beyond’ it for the very simple reason that we have no way of thinking, talking or writing that is not dominated by the metaphysical tradition: ‘[w]e have no language – no syntax and no lexicon – which is foreign to this history’ he writes in a contemporaneous essay.3 To reject metaphysics tout court, in other words, is to reject language and thought itself."

"‘The movements of deconstruction do not destroy structures from the outside. They are not possible and effective, nor can they take accurate aim, except by inhabiting those structures’ ( Grammatology, p. 24/39)."

"For Derrida, all language – whether spoken or written – exists in an irreducible state of mediation: we cannot simply return to the animating intentions, consciousness or ‘presence’ of the user, speaker or author. From the moment we begin to speak or write, in other words, we set in motion a complex linguistic machine that has a ‘life’ quite independent of our own: what we call Of Grammatology is a cog in that mechanism. If we cannot return to the true, original or intended meaning of Derrida’s text, this means that there can be no end to the process of reading, analysing and interpreting it: the meaning of the text does not lie behind us in some distant past, in other words, but in front of us, in the future, as something that is yet to be decided. In all these senses, I think the task of reading Derrida’s Of Grammatology can only be an endless one, but let us at least begin." Chapter 1: Historical Context

"If the essential metaphysical question still remained the same – what is? – the answer changed from ‘the ideal’, ‘substance’ or ‘god’ to the ‘thinking or knowing subject’. For the seventeenth-century rationalist philosopher Descartes, the ego cogito or thinking subject provided the only firm foundation upon which knowledge could be grounded and this position is pursued and refined in different ways by such figures as Kant and Husserl.2 The last decades of the nineteenth century, however, saw the emergence of a new, more radical critique of metaphysics in the work of such seminal figures as Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. This so-called ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ is what lays the groundwork for Derrida’s own attempt to question the grounding assumptions of western metaphysics ( Writing and Difference, p. 280). In Derrida’s own view, deconstruction is heavily indebted to this larger tradition of ‘anti-metaphysical philosophy’ but, as we will see, his philosophy remains deeply sceptical about the possibility of ever simply getting ‘beyond’ metaphysics."

"Karl Marx sees all our Historical Context 17 metaphysical ideas about reality as nothing more than imaginary expressions of the processes of life, nature and history. Quite simply, our view of reality is upside-down: we must understand consciousness from the perspective of life, rather than life from the perspective of consciousness.3 According to Marx’s philosophy of historical materialism, what defines ‘life’ in this case is not biology but history: being alive is not something we are so much as something we do, the way in which we work or labour, how we organise our existence socially, materially and economically ( German Ideology, p. 48)."

"Friedrich Nietzsche famously sees the production of metaphysical belief systems as an attempt to repress the dynamic processes of life itself: the ‘other’ world of metaphysics is the product of this world rather than its cause or foundation. Proposing 18 Derrida’s Of Grammatology what he calls a ‘genealogy’ of metaphysics, Nietzsche shows how apparently timeless, unconditioned values arise out of the very history they are supposed to explain in the first place. Quite simply, we must see concepts like ‘truth’, ‘being’ or ‘consciousness’ less as descriptions of ‘what is’ and more as misleading linguistic abstractions of a flux of historical, physiological and affective forces. For Nietzsche, metaphysics is the product of what he calls an ‘ascetic ideal’ that leads human beings to renounce ‘this world, our world’ in favour of ‘ another world’.6 Yet, it is impossible to reach this other world because it never existed in the first place and so humanity falls back into ‘ ressentiment’: a sense of permanent guilt that finds its apex in the Christian view of human existence as ‘fallen’. What lies beneath the metaphysical ‘will to truth’ of the ascetic ideal is the ‘will to power’: the capacity to liberate ourselves from the pursuit of the timeless other world of ‘truth’, and affirm our place within, and as a product of, the endlessly creative becoming of this world."

"Sigmund Freud’s pyschoanalysis intensifies this critique of the rational thinking or knowing subject which had become the last refuge of metaphysics in modernity: psychoanalysis ‘put[s] consciousness into question in its assured certainty of itself ’ Derrida writes ( Margins, p. 17). To Freud’s way of thinking, what we call the rational or self-conscious ‘I’ is the meeting point of a range of different, competing and often unconscious forces, desires or principles: ‘consciousness may be, not the most universal attribute of human processes, but only a particular fraction of them’.8 What is ground-breaking about psychoanalysis for Derrida is precisely this insight into how apparently simple, identical and present points of origin – such as the consciousness of the subject – are actually the product of an originary and unthought network of differences: ‘The putting into question of the authority of consciousness is first and always differential’ ( Margins, p. 18)."

"The psychoanalytic system may well call into question the self-presence of consciousness but it does so at the cost of turning the unconscious into a ‘hidden, virtual, or potential self-presence’. This means that Freud risks establishing a metaphysics of the unconscious whereby our drives and instincts become a new metaphysical basis for truth (pp. 20–1)."

"The crucial thing to grasp about Derrida’s readings of the history of philosophy, in other words, is that he is neither seeking to score points off metaphysics itself (as if anyone who believed in it were stupid or erroneous), nor to establish some new anti-metaphysical system (which would somehow avoid, or correct, the errors of its predecessor), so much as articulating this larger, and more complex, dilemma. There is an unavoidable sense in which every attempt to overcome metaphysics cannot help but repeat the language, discourse and assumptions of metaphysics, Derrida argues, because there is quite simply no other vocabulary available to us ( Positions, p. 12). This is why Derrida admits right from the outset of his work that his own critique of metaphysics must necessarily work within the very system of ideas it wishes to contest even, at the risk of simply replicating it ( Grammatology, p. 24/39)."

"The Being of entities “is” not itself an entity’.10 To introduce the thesis of his seminal work Being and Time, Heidegger argues that the basic question ‘What is Being?’ has been largely forgotten by western philosophy because the latter focuses exclusively on beings or entities ( Being and Time, p. 2). Heidegger seeks to recuperate the meaning of Being itself by focusing on a particular kind of being and the one he chooses is human being or, as he famously calls it, Dasein (‘there-being’). For Heidegger, what defines Dasein is that it is not a being or entity that exists in time (like a rock or an animal) so much as a being who exists as time, whose being is essentially temporal: we are quite literally nothing other than the accumulation of our past experiences, on the one hand, and what we have the potential to ‘project’ out of those experiences into the future, on the other."

"For Derrida, both traditions par-ticipate in the championing of speech as the true bearer of presence and the repression or marginalisation of writing as a base or empty vessel that is the logocentric gesture par excellence."

"It focuses on the essence of these particular ‘intuitions’, in other words, what your experience of them says about the way in which consciousness works more generally. According to Husserl, the defining characteristic of consciousness is that it is intentional, by which he means that it is always directed towards objects. To put it simply: consciousness is not an empty box into which objects are subsequently placed, but always the consciousness of some object."

"For Husserl, intentionality contains two, intrinsically linked, sides: the noesis, or intentional act of consciousness that is directed towards an object, and the object, or noema, towards which that act is directed. If this argument goes some way towards breaking down the subject/object dualism that has plagued philosophy since Descartes, it is important to bear in mind that Husserl’s phenomenology remains at all times a theory of consciousness: what concerns him is purely that which presents itself to our conscious experience – a phenomenon – and he is careful not to make any presumptions about what may or may not lie behind that appearance. The intentional act can only be understood as what it is if Historical Context 25 we suspend or ‘bracket’ off – the key term Husserl uses here is ‘ epoché’ – all our everyday assumptions about the empirical existence of external objects (what he calls the ‘natural attitude’), together with any prior philosophical assumptions or prejudices we might have about essence, existence or substance. This ‘transcendental’ attempt to clarify the pure or essential structures of consciousness by rigorously suspending or ‘reducing’ any presumption of the existence of the empirical world is increasingly criticised by Husserl’s successors. In the view of later figures like Heidegger, Levinas and Ricoeur, Husserl’s focus on the purity of consciousness risks becoming too abstract and theoretical in approach: phenomenology must take account of the context – linguistic, existential, ethical – in which consciousness is embedded."

"Second, though, Derrida observes that Husserl goes on to associate expression with speech and indication with writing: speech is expressive because it necessarily entails the presence of the speaker, whereas writing is indicative because the writer is absent and substituted by a graphic inscription or mark. Unfortunately, though, things are not quite this simple because, as Derrida shows, the boundary between expression and indication, speech and writing and, more generally, presence and absence, constantly needs to be re-drawn. Straightaway, Husserl is forced to concede that not all s peech is expressive: when we speak in order to communicate with someone else, our 26 Derrida’s Of Grammatology words merely indicate our inner experience for the other person because, of course, they are not directly experiencing what we are experiencing."

"It is Husserl’s contention that objects are immediately present to consciousness in both the spatial and the temporal senses of the word. When I ‘intend’ a certain object, it is present here and now to my consciousness: ‘[f]or the acts in question are themselves experienced by us at that very moment in the blink of an eye [ im selben Augenblick]’ ( Logical Investigations, p. 280). Once again, however, Derrida uses an example from Husserl’s own phenomenology – in this case his lectures on internal time consciousness – to show that the present moment in which perception takes place is in fact anything but ‘present’. To clarify what might seem at face value to be a paradoxical argument, Derrida argues that what we perceive as the Historical Context 27 ‘now’ or present moment is in fact a synthesis or composite of memory and expectation, retention and protention. Derrida notes how Husserl himself shows us in The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness that when we listen to a piece of music we retain the memory of the note just played, we hear the note currently being played, and anticipate the next note in the sequence, all at once. For Husserl, in other words, retention – the memory of what has just passed – is the ‘tail’ that always follows the ‘comet’ of primary impression.13 If perception of the present is thus shot through with absence – what has just past and what is about to come – then Husserl’s theory of consciousness is once again shown to be always and already conditioned by the kind of mediation that he brackets off as external or inessential to his phenomenology. Just as the space of consciousness is mediated by things that are not fully present – linguistic signs – so the time of consciousness is structured by what is temporally absent: the past and the future. In this sense, Husserl’s metaphysics of ‘presence’ is once again forced to rely on the very thing it seeks to exclude: ‘This alterity is in fact the very condition for presence’ ( Speech and Phenomena, p. 65)."

"Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) was a linguist but is now commonly held to be the ‘father’ of the modern movement called structuralism. He focused his research less on particular units of language – what he calls ‘ parole’ or speech – so much as on the underlying system of language ( langue) in which those units exist. He famously argues that individual units of language acquire meaning from their relative position within the linguistic system as a whole: a word like ‘cat’, for example, has no meaning outside the system of the English language."

"For Saussure and his followers, in other words, consciousness is always mediated through a prior network of signs, concepts, and values which enable us to make sense of our experience and, in this respect, at least, it would seem to confirm Derrida’s own critique of phenomenology. More generally, as we will see in Part 2, structuralism institutes a differential and relational theory of meaning that will be an enormous influence upon Derridaean deconstruction. Just as a single chess piece only makes sense in the context of the other pieces on the board, so no individual unit within a network has meaning in itself but rather achieves meaning in relation to all the other units within the system."

"Derrida begins this essay by effectively seeking to turn the tables on structuralism itself: what, he asks, structures the search for structures of language, culture and society? As we have already begun to see, his answer to this question is that structuralism is characterised by the attempt to identify a fixed point or centre at the heart of every structure ( Writing and Difference, p. 278)."

"For Derrida, then, it becomes clear that structuralism is curiously self-exempting: everything has a structure – a relative place within the play of the system – except the centre of the structure itself where that play comes to a stop (p. 279)."

"Quite simply, structuralism’s attempt to just stop doing philosophy and begin again with something more ‘scientific’ and ‘objective’ like anthropology, linguistics or history leaves its own deepest metaphysical assumptions unquestioned. If structuralism continually throws up new scientific methodologies – Saussure’s linguistics, Lévi-Strauss’s ethnography, Michel Foucault’s archaeology or Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology – in order to get around old metaphysical problems, Derrida argues that all these supposedly original approaches actually presuppose some of the most ancient philosophical oppositions imaginable: speech and writing, nature and culture, the transcendental and the empirical, and so on."

"for all his scientific credentials – Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist anthropology remains ‘caught . . . within the metaphysics – logocentrism – which at the same time [he] claims rather precipitately to have “gone beyond” ’ ( Grammatology, p. 99/148): Lévi-Strauss, like Husserl before him, takes a more or less arbitrary decision that truth will equal presence which, in turn, will be equated with speech."

"For Derrida, in other words, what Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism teaches us is that even the most rigorous disciplines outside the province of philosophy remain caught within the foundational incoherence of the metaphysics of presence because, once again, their sponsorship of truth, presence and speech is bought and paid for by the repression of mediation, difference, writing. In this way, Derrida’s critique of metaphysics inevitably takes us beyond the domain of structuralism as well as phenomenology."

"Derrida’s critique of metaphysics is in many ways an attempt to reveal what we might call the radical historicity of the present. As he consistently argues, what appear to be timeless or natural ideas – ‘being’, ‘truth’ etc. – are actually anything but. Yet, this argument also applies to the philosophical idea of ‘history’ itself, our very understanding of what history is and how it works."

"If what we understand as ‘history’ depends upon a metaphysics of presence, Derrida’s aim is once again to show how that idea of history is itself a historical construction: it cannot be taken as truth. Finally, then, Derrida’s critique of the philosophical concept of ‘history’ seeks to do what he does to any other metaphysical idea, namely, to reveal the open-ended network of differences on which it resides: no historical moment, body of thought, epoch or tradition, is ever wholly at one with itself because it inevitably contains the traces of what precedes and follows it. In Derrida’s hands, what we might call the metaphysical concept of history – where a succession of present moments are strung together like pearls on a neck-lace – begins to unravel into a more complex, plural or differential set of relations between past, present and future: ‘there is not one single history, a general history, but rather histories’ (p. 58" Chapter 2: A Guide to the Text

"Finally, and most importantly, Derrida will propose that the metaphysical or logocentric commitment to speech depends upon a foundational contradiction or tension: all language – both speech and writing – is characterised by the essential mediation that metaphysics historically assigns to ‘writing’ alone. If the guarantee of truth – speech – is already contaminated with ‘writing’, we will also begin to see that this has important implications for our concept of a pure and unmediated ‘presence’ itself: we cannot gain access to a presence – a ‘there’ – that exists wholly independently of linguistic mediation. For Derrida, as 42 Derrida’s Of Grammatology we will now see, the theory of the linguistic sign represents a privileged symptom of this entire problematic: it is the sign – more than anything else – that is the site of his questioning of logocentrism. What, then, is Derrida’s argument?"

"To introduce his own reading of logocentrism, Derrida somewhat mysteriously says that what is required is ‘not the demolition, but the de-sedimentation, the deconstruction’ of the logos’ (p. 10/21)."

"For Derrida, what deconstruction attempts to do is to articulate the – often hidden or repressed – conditions according to which it is possible for any structure to be constituted in the first place. In Derrida’s own words, deconstruction signifies the ‘undoing, decomposing and de-sedimenting of structures’ in order to ‘understand how an “ensemble” was constituted and to reconstruct it to this end’."

"It is also important to stress that ‘deconstruction’ is not a new theory, technique or methodology that we can simply apply to particular texts in the way that we might, for example, do a Marxist or a Freudian ‘reading’ of a novel. As we have already begun to see by looking at the way in which Derrida reads Husserl and Lévi-Strauss, deconstruction is not something we do to a text from the ‘outside’, so to speak, so much as something that we reveal about the way in which any text is internally constructed. If Derrida’s reading of the privileged texts of logocentrism has a purpose, it is not to establish some superior position of knowledge or authority so much as to tease out the immanent contradictions within the texts themselves: Husserl is criticised by none other than Husserl and Lévi-Strauss by no one but Lévi-Strauss."

"For Derrida, then, the process of reading is not a question of actively ‘deconstructing’ logocentrism so much as showing that the metaphysics of presence is already in a process of what we might call ‘self-deconstruction’ insofar as it has a ‘self ’ at all: it has no full or ‘present’ ground or foundation on which to base itself and so it exists in a permanent state of instability or contingency."

"It establishes an absolutely fundamental point about the sign that will endure all the way up to the present day: a sign is always a sign or re-presentation of some pre-existing idea or mental experience."

"If speech directly signifies the ideas or intentions of the person speaking, in other words, writing only has a second-hand relation to thought because it is nothing more than a sign of a sign. The written signifier is merely the sign of the spoken signifier, in other words, whereas the spoken signifier is the sign of the signified idea or thought"

"If Saussure and other modern linguists obviously dispense with any belief in a creator god lying behind the sign, Derrida has little difficulty in showing that they still retain a residually theological investment in what he calls a ‘transcendental signified’ – an ultimate presence – which anchors all meaning in itself: the presence of God is merely replaced by the presence of the speaker, of his or her thoughts and feelings, and so on. In this sense, Derrida argues that the age of the sign is essentially theological: ‘the sign and divinity have the same place and time of birth’ (p. 14/25)."

"However, we will see later on that all signs are characterised by this state of mediation – which makes it impossible for them to directly relate to a ‘present’ meaning or signified – and so what logocentrism attributes to ‘writing’ actually describes the state of language as such."

"For Derrida, as we will see in the next section, every signifier can be seen as a mere ‘a signifier of a signifier’ – to quote the famous logocentric dismissal of writing – as opposed to something that relates directly to a present signified: what we call ‘writing’ is another name 50 Derrida’s Of Grammatology for the original condition of language as a whole (p. 7/16). Finally, then, it becomes clear that what enables us to ‘close the book’ on logocentrism is this recognition of the inescapably mediated status of all signs: we cannot gain access to a full or present signified, meaning or logos. The ‘death’ of the civilisation of the book, then, signifies the growing awareness that writing cannot be traced back to a pure or unmediated presence, in the way that we can trace the words of a book back to the author who wrote them. This new concept of writing, and indeed language as a whole, has been emerging for a long time, Derrida argues, but it is now beginning to manifest itself in the form of a series of contemporary developments in post-war philosophy, science and thought (p. 6/15–16). Enter grammatology."

"On the contrary, language is a defining condition of everything that we understand as constituting the sphere of the human: consciousness, thought, expression, culture.6 Martin Heidegger, for instance, famously argues that it is language that ‘speaks’ man – rather than the other way around – in the sense that it names or calls into existence the things that constitute the world of Dasein.7 Now, this concept of language as something that does not merely describe the world, but actively constructs the way in which we experience it, is intensified by the structuralist revolution."

"For Ferdinand de Saussure, linguistic signs give shape and clarity to what would otherwise be a shadowy flux of impressions in the same way that a pair of glasses gives definition to the sight of a myopic person: it is only because I have the sign of a ‘table’ – both the signifier and the idea or concept signified by it – that I am able to make sense of the real, actual object in front of me. If Saussure is concerned with how language mediates or constructs our experience of the real world, his structuralist successors go on to extend his principles from language to reality itself: our engagement with the real world itself – the world that supposedly lies beyond language – is structured according to models of signification drawn from Saussure’s linguistics."

"For Derrida, however, this ‘linguistic’ turn is in the process of being superseded by what we might call a ‘scriptural’ turn. It is now writing, and not language in general, that has become the dominant means of explaining consciousness, culture, the psyche and so on: ‘[n]ow we tend to say “writing” for all that and more’ (p. 9/19)."

"Derrida’s concept of an ‘originary writing’ is not an attempt to establish a new point of origin – as if it would be plausible to say that writing really did evolve before speech – but a way of calling into question the very idea of an origin, an absolute beginning, a pure historical, theological or philosophical point of ‘presence’ to which everything can be traced back."

"writing cannot be the object of a science, Derrida argues, because it is what makes scientific study possible in the first place. Why is this? For Derrida, as we saw in our discussion of Husserl, writing is the sole means by which we can record, preserve and transmit our thoughts and thus establish something as ‘truth’, ‘knowledge’ or ‘objectivity’ in the first place: the written text is what enables the objects of geometry to transcend the mind of the 58 Derrida’s Of Grammatology first geometers, for instance, and become universal objects for everyone"

"For Saussure, as we will see, the signifier and the signified – the physical mark and the concept it refers to – are inextricably linked to one another like two sides of the same sheet of paper:"

"According to Saussure’s structure-based approach, language is not a nomenclature, that is, a series of names for pre-existing objects in the outside world. On the contrary, it is a system that acquires meaning through its own internal structure and relations."

"To introduce another important point, however, Saussure argues that the relation between any given signifier and signified is arbitrary. It is motivated by tradition or convention, in other words, rather than by any perceived ‘natural resemblance’ between sound and concept. If I use the sound ‘cat’ to refer to the concept of a cat, it is not because there is any natural relation between this particular signifier and signified but rather because it is accepted that the two go together within the conventions of the English language: the convention is very different in the French and Italian languages, for instance, where other signifiers (‘chat’ or ‘gatto’) relate to the signified."

"Finally, and most importantly, however, Saussure also argues that any linguistic sign only acquires its meaning through its difference from other linguistic signs rather than through any ‘positive’ value it might possess in itself. The meaning of any sign is determined by its difference – both phonic and conceptual – from other signs within the system. This complex linguistic system – arbitrary, conventional and differential – is the basis for our experience of the world outside language."

"Intriguingly, he is especially worried that writing may displace speech from its position at the centre of language and reverse the natural order of the spoken and the written word. What concerns him is that the written word – because it seems to represent a more durable, lasting mode of signification than speech – will gradually come to be seen as representative of language as a whole. Now, this would be an absolute disaster, in his view, because writing mediates, or even breaks, what he sees as the ‘natural bond’ between sound and sense. If writing is taken to represent language as whole, Saussure predicts, all sorts of apocalyptic catastrophes will ensue. The spelling of a word will come to influence, and even modify, the way in which that word is said, he says, and even in his own time this is leading to terrible mispronunciations. This scenario will not strike many readers as particularly awful though – is mispronunciation really such a disaster"

"The idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less importance than the other signs that surround it. ( Course, pp. 117–18) What exactly is Saussure saying here? If any one sign has meaning, it is not because it possesses any content or substance in itself but because it differs – both phonically and conceptually – from other signs within the linguistic system. The sign ‘cat’ (regardless of whether we see it from the perspective of the sound or the concept) exists within a prior network of relations to other signs (‘hat’, ‘bat’ and so on). There is a paradoxical sense in which the idea of a singular or unique sign is, then, something of a contradiction-in-terms. This is because any apparently singular, ‘present’ and independent sign necessarily contains within it the traces of other signs within the system against which it is to be defined. In Derrida’s view, as we will A Guide to the Text 67 see in a moment, this theory has radical implications for the logocentric theory of the sign."

"The fact is that every signifier might best be described as a ‘signifier of a signifier’ because, according to Saussure’s own theory, every sign works by referring to other signs within the system rather than to some positive content of its own. There is an important sense, then, in which the lowly position of writing – inferior, derivative, always at one step removed from the main action – accurately describes the position of language as a whole. This means that writing is not so much ‘comparable’ to language as the other way around: language might even be described as a species of writing (p. 52/75)."

"Derrida’s contention is that the position historically attributed to ‘writing’ in western culture actually describes the condition of all language whatsoever: what is called ‘writing’ names the framework ‘common to all systems of signification’ (p. 46/68) whether they be spoken, written, drawn, electronically recorded or transmitted. Indeed, he goes to great pains to distinguish this ‘originary’ concept of writing from what he calls the ‘vulgar’ or conventional idea of writing as a set of empirical marks, letters or inscriptions (p. 46/68)."

"To put it simply, what Derrida calls the originary trace represents his most systematic attempt to articulate this central point in the Grammatology: mediation goes all the way down."

"To recall Saussure’s argument, linguistic signs are not constituted by any intrinsic phonic or conceptual substance – a particular sound or idea that is inherent to that sign itself – but by their difference from other signs in the system. If every sign in the system obtains its identity through its difference from all the other signs, then this means every sign is intrinsically marked by what it is not. Every sign must retain the traces of the other signs against which it is to be defined, in other words, in order to have any meaning at all."

"‘ the (pure) trace’ he declares, is différance [ la trace (pure) et la différance]’ (p. 62/92)."

"says this: ‘[w]e shall designate by the term différance the movement by which any language, or any code, any system of reference in general, becomes “historically” constituted as a fabric of differences’ (p. 141)."

"However, what the originary trace shows us is that every sign first refers to other signs, as opposed to some ‘present’ concept that is not itself a sign. We can see, then, that the originary trace throws the whole logocentric concept of the sign into crisis by proposing that we never arrive at a simple or unmediated meaning: nothing is unmediated. For Derrida, every signifier relates to other signifiers that surround it in space and time and so we can never reach a pure thought or concept – a signified – that exists in and of itself independently of all signifiers: what is supposedly beyond language is plunged back into language. If we take a very simple example of this, it becomes much clearer: every time we look up a word in the dictionary – ‘love’, for example – what we find is not the meaning of that word but merely other words that act as synonyms for it (‘love’ means ‘adoration’ or ‘desire’) or even antonyms (‘love’ means the opposite of ‘hate’)."

"In Derrida’s account, all thought remains caught with the network of spatial and temporal differentiation that is the ‘trace’: ‘ We think only in signs’ (p. 50/73, English in original)."

"According to the same logic, the trace is neither sensible nor intelligible. It is not something that can be recognised by our senses (like a sound or smell), in other words, nor something that can be conceived within our minds (like an idea or concept). On the one hand, we cannot see or hear it because, it is nothing but the difference between spoken or written marks. On the other, we cannot quite think it either 74 Derrida’s Of Grammatology because, once again, the difference between ideas or concepts cannot, strictly speaking, itself be a concept (p. 62/92–3)."

"In Derrida’s readings of Husserl, for example, we saw how the supposed purity of our interior consciousness requires the traces of the ‘external’ world (communication, indication, writing) in order to relate to itself in the first place: what is apparently ‘outside’ is already ‘inside’ (p. 44/65)."

"For Derrida, the trace cannot be traced to any point of simple spatial or temporal presence – whether a present that is now past or one that is yet to come – because it is the underlying differential condition of any ‘presence’ whatsoever. In Derrida’s own paradoxical phrase, the originary trace can never be ‘there’ because it is ‘always-already-there [ toujours déjà-lá]’: it both recedes into an infinite past and projects itself into an infinite future (p. 66/97)."

"the logic of metaphysics? In simple terms, the trace is prior to every metaphysical concept because it is the movement of différance – of differing and deferring – that allows them to appear as concepts in the first place: ‘[ t] he trace is in fact the absolute origin of sense in general’ (pp. 62/95)."

"Quite simply, the whole point of the trace is that it is an orginary condition of mediation, synthesis or complexity rather than a present being, thing or entity: ‘[t]he trace is nothing, it is not an entity, it exceeds the question What is?’ (p. 75/110)."

"To declare that ‘everything begins with the trace’, then, is not an attempt to posit some new, even more fundamental point of origin, in other words, but to assert that there is no pure, simple or present origin in the first place (p. 65/95). For Derrida, that is to say, any origin is always multiple: what claims to be a singular point of origin must always define itself against something that it is not, dividing itself in at least two, multiplying itself like a cell through a process of infinite differing/deferring"

"What should be opposed and hierarchised terms presuppose one another. To Derrida’s eyes, any value that metaphysics posits as ‘present’ – speech, nature, consciousness – is thus always already spreading or dispersing outwards into a network of traces, differences and mediations: nothing is ever purely present or absent."

"In what is now a A Guide to the Text 77 famous argumentative move, Derrida contends that the originary trace thus places every metaphysics of presence in a curious double-bind: it is both what makes the desire for presence possible in the first place and what makes the fulfilment of that desire impossible."

"Now, Lévi-Strauss himself portrays writing as something that arrives to violate a place or moment of pure presence from ‘outside’, but what Derrida is once again going to show is that this foreign body is already intrinsic to language itself: we must articulate the ‘originary violence of a language which is always already a writing’ (p. 106/156)."

"all language – whether it be the ‘speech’ of the Nambikwara or the ‘writing’ of Lévi-Strauss himself – is already a species of a more originary and generalised ‘writing’ and this compels him to re-think the Rousseauean mythology of a fall from a prelapsarian utopia. In Derrida’s words, we are not dealing with a fall from nature into culture, peace into violence or speech into writing so much as a fall within nature itself, which is thus revealed to be never quite ‘natural’ in the first place."

"As Derrida argues, what seems like an innocent anecdote actually belongs to an eighteenth-century A Guide to the Text 85 tradition of confessional writing whereby autobiography is the basis for a philosophical reflection upon the relation between nature and society, between an ‘ideal’ society and ‘real’ society or, to put it more bluntly, between ‘us’ and ‘them’ (pp. 113–14/166)."

"For Derrida, the larger Rousseauean agenda of this narrative is also clear: Lévi-Strauss is not so much seeking to discover the way of life of any particular people but the ideal basis of human society as a whole (p. 115/169–70). In fact, Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology might be suspected of a kind of reverse ethnocentrism: what begins as an almost Marxian critique of attempts to impose western culture on other peoples as if it were a universal standard ends up setting up a thoroughly romanticised version of non-western culture as the ideal by which all humanity is to be judged."

"According to Saussure’s differential theory of language – which, as we have seen, heavily influences Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology – a proper name can only be proper if it exists in a relation to other proper names: ‘Peter’ is only meaningful because it is different from ‘Mary’. Now, the upshot of this position is that no name can ever be ‘proper’ in and of itself – in the sense that it refers solely, directly and uniquely, to what it names – and this leads Derrida to speak of the ‘death’ of absolutely proper naming (p. 109/164). To Derrida’s eyes, in other words, it thus becomes possible to speak of an ‘originary’ violence at work in the act of naming because the very structure of language itself violates the supposed propriety, the supposedly unique status, of the proper name: ‘Anterior to the possibility of violence in the current and derivative sense’ he argues, we find ‘the violence of the arche-writing, the violence of difference, of classification, and of 88 Derrida’s Of Grammatology the system of appellations’ (p. 110/162). For"

"To put it in a word, then, Derrida argues that the second level of violence is the institution of law. However, once again this seems a somewhat strange move to make: law is commonly seen as that which puts an end to violence, that which restores or protects a state of peace, so why see it as representing a new form of violence? Quite simply, the answer is that what we call the ‘law’ can only meet violence with violence. The institution of law by the Nambikwara cannot actually restore an original state of peace in which all proper names are respected, for no such state ever existed, so all it can do is more or less violently suppress the violence of language itself under the guise of ‘justice’ ‘morality’ or ‘society’. This apparent attempt to preserve the so-called ‘proper’ names by forbidding their disclosure is, Derrida argues, thus actually what makes those names proper in the first place. For Derrida, then, it is the identification of, and prohibition against, something called ‘impropriety’ that produces the illusion of a pre-existing state of ‘propriety’. In other words, the institution of law manufactures the very state of original ‘propriety’ it claims to protect: ‘the so-called proper, substitute of the deferred proper, perceived by the social and moral consciousness as the proper’ (p. 112/165)."

"For Derrida, this story reveals that the violence of writing – the network of differences, relations and mediation which interrupts every pure, unique or self-identical meaning – is at work within Nambikwara society long before the advent of writing in the accepted, empirical sense of that term: what Lévi-Strauss persists in calling ‘peace’ is already a state of violence. In the next part of the chapter, Derrida pursues this insight into a reading of another pivotal scene in Tristes tropiques called the ‘writing lesson’."

"For Derrida, in other words, an ‘originary’ writing appears well before writing in the narrow sense: it is ‘already in the différance or the arche- writing that opens speech itself ’ (p. 128/186)."

"If the epoch of writing is characterised by anything, it is less the advancement of knowledge than the extension of power, domination and segregation through political, economic and administrative elites: the historic function of writing has been to reinforce the power of the few rather than to bring knowledge to the many."

"grammatology, properly understood, is the study of what writing is, when and how it originated, and the ways in which it differs from other forms of communication like speech. For Derrida, the study of writing goes as far back as Plato but, strictly speaking, the science of ‘grammatology’ itself is a more modern one"

"However, we have already seen in the last chapter that, if anything, the exact opposite is the case. For Derrida, scientific knowledge is contingent upon the invention of writing: any objective or universal truth that remains the same for everyone, everywhere throughout space and time is only possible on the basis of it being preserved, recorded and transmitted through writing."

"Derrida agrees that this claim may well be historically incontestable: the invention of writing undoubtedly makes possible both the concentration of power in the hands of a small elite and the delegation, deferment or stockpiling of power. Arguably, Lévi-Strauss has not gone far enough in asserting the relation between writing and power: Derrida would say that even the most primitive agricultural societies begin to possess a kind of arche-writing from the moment they begin to organise themselves in a economic way by deferring immediate consumption of their harvests, putting produce into reserve for the next season and so on (p. 130/190). Moreover, Derrida questions what he sees as an uncritical tendency in Lévi-Strauss’s work to simply equate the establishment of political hierarchies with political exploitation and domination: ‘[p]olitical power [for Lévi-Strauss – AB] can only be the custodian of an unjust power’ (p. 131/191)."

"Derrida’s attempt to posit an originary violence within the primitivist utopia occupied by the Nambikwara is not to deny the violence that western colonialism has wreaked upon them, nor to imply a moral equivalence between coloniser and colonised, but it is a way of calling into question the possibility of any pure or absolute moral good: whatever we call ‘peace’, however desirable or justifiable it may be, always contains the traces of violence."

"‘There is no ethics without the presence of the other but also, and consequently, without absence, disimulation, detour, différance, writing’ (p. 140/202)."

"Rousseau argues that the spoken word naturally expresses our present thoughts whereas the written word erects an unnecessary material barrier between thought and expression. For Rousseau, predictably, writing starts to become dangerous when it does not merely mediate thought but comes to substitute for it: what begins as merely a representation of something ends up becoming confused with the thing itself"

"Now, we have already seen that this is a recurring fear in the history of logocentrism: Saussure, for instance, is just as fearful of a modern, decadent, culture where the signifier is becoming confused with the signified, the representation with the real presence (p. 42/62–3)."

"In Derrida’s account, then, Rousseau’s theory accomplishes almost the exact opposite of its apparent intention: what is revealed is less the destructive impact of writing than the fallibility of speech."

"This creates a paradoxical situation within Rousseau’s thought whereby his philosophy of education comes into conflict with his political critique of civil society. In other words, the very thing that makes human progress possible – the supplement – is also the beginning of humanity’s fall into the corruption of civil society (p. 147/211)."

"In Derrida’s paradoxical terminology, then, we can begin to speak of a ‘natural’ supplement in the same way that we have spoken of an arche-writing or an ‘originary’ trace: ‘the supplement comes naturally to put itself in Nature’s place’ (p. 149/214"

"Quite simply, Derrida argues that Rousseau’s masturbation begins to assume a role that is greater than that of a mere ‘supplement’ to nature: what should be an inferior substitute for a more complete and satisfying form of sexual experience actually becomes the only means of experiencing satisfaction completely and directly. If Rousseau prefers to give up sex for masturbation, Derrida contends that it is because auto-eroticism appears to enable the philosopher to ‘make present’ a string of absent love objects in imaginary or symbolic form: Rousseau’s memories, desires and wishes about the various women in his life can be instantly activated, and satisfied, in auto-erotic fantasy in a way that could never happen in real life. For Derrida, in other words, it is clear that what we generally take to be the sign of the futility of onanism – the fact that it never involves anyone from the world outside the subject – is rather the guarantee of its total fulfilment (p. 154/221)."

"Yet, it remains the case that Rousseau is still sexually frustrated despite this retreat into the world of pure auto-affection. As Derrida goes on to argue, the reason for this is that the immediate ‘present’ delivered to him in the form of auto-erotic fantasy is, of course, nothing but an illusion: Rousseau realises that the signs that substitute for the absence of real women in the philosopher’s sex life remain just signs (p. 154/221). So, upon Derrida’s reading, Rousseau’s auto-erotic experience epitomises what he calls the logic of the supplement: what arrives on the scene to add to, or enrich, a supposedly pure presence also reveals – by virtue of its very necessity – that pure presence has never existed. If masturbatory fantasy is the only way of experiencing the pure pleasure that can never be delivered up by real life, this is another way of saying that there is no pure pleasure as such. In other words, the very thing that appears to give access to pure and immediate presence – the supplement – is also what ensures that presence will never be given as such: ‘something promises itself as it hides itself, gives itself as it moves itself away, and strictly speaking it cannot even be called presence’ (p. 154/222, translation modified"

"Finally, however, Derrida argues that masturbation plays one more unusual role within Rousseau’s life and text: what starts out as a dangerous supplement to the full presence of sex with women paradoxically ends up as a form of protection against a certain danger within this form of presence itself. It is revealing that Rousseau ultimately comes to see auto-eroticism less as a waste of natural energy and more as a means of safeguarding his hypersensitive nature against the dangerously unmitigated pleasure of sex with women: self-abuse turns out to be a form of self-preservation. According to his Confessions, the philosopher abstains from ‘cohabitation with women’ altogether in his middle age on the grounds that the intensity of the experience might damage his fragile health or even kill him.18 For Derrida, Rousseau’s recourse to masturbation as an act of protection against the perils of a real, live sexual encounter with another person once again reveals a certain frailty or insufficiency within pure, unmediated ‘presence’. What is supposedly ‘natural’ or ‘healthy’ is actually a form of sickness that we need to immunise ourselves against. Yet, why is pure presence equated with sickness, or even death, as opposed to life, fullness or plenitude? To embrace presence is to reject life itself. If we could ever really experience pure presence as such – something that was absolutely and unchangingly present in space and time – Derrida argues that this could only be because that thing was entirely lacking in duration, movement, difference, in short, life: this is why Rousseau himself recognises that ‘presence’ is merely another name for death (p. 155/223)."

"‘reality’ can only be experienced at one remove through the auto-erotic supplement: ‘hetero-eroticism . . . can be lived . . . only through the ability to reserve within itself its own supplementary protection’ (p. 155/223)."

"Derrida’s proposition is that the supplement does not add to what was once a pure or complete presence but rather compensates for a ‘presence’ that never actually existed in the first place. To put it in a word, Derrida’s now very familiar argument is that the ‘supplement’ is originary: what A Guide to the Text 109 appears to be a pure or complete moment of presence once again depends for any identity it may possess on its relation to other elements that are not simply present. If such a pure, self-sufficient moment of presence – whether we call it nature, or speech, or sexuality – ever existed, there would no need to produce endless chains of supplements to compensate for its deficiencies."

"For Derrida, the problem with psychoanalysis and any other reading that seeks to refer to the world ‘beyond’ the text is that it flies in the face of what we have seen to be the inextricable relationship between the signifier and the signified: we can never gain access to a ‘transcendental signified’ – a mythical beyond – that exists in and of itself independently of all signifiers (p. 159/229). In other words, everything that psychoanalysis and other such methodologies presumes lies outside language – the unconscious, sexuality, history, the real world – cannot be divorced from language itself."

"‘ there is no outside-text [ il n’y a pas de hors-texte]’ (p. 158/227, translation modified)."

"Derrida’s claim that ‘ il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ is neither an attempt to assert that language is the only reality nor to deny the existence of reality per se but rather to stress the impossibility of gaining access to any pure or immediate presence that exists wholly independently of the processes of difference and deferral: Rousseau was never purely or simply ‘there’ in the first place."

"what philosophy derides as ‘empiricism’ is not actually non-philosophical at all because it only has meaning within the conceptual oppositions determined by metaphysics itself: the rational versus the empirical, the theoretical versus the practical and, more generally, the ‘philosophical’ versus the ‘non-philosophical’. If it seems that empiricism is somehow ‘outside’ metaphysics, in other words, it actually remains a metaphysical concept through and through: empiricism is philosophy’s own idea of what non-philosophy should look like"

"For Derrida, his inability to offer an absolute justification for his own reading is neither a rejection of theory nor an embrace of practice but rather the upshot of his attempt to question the metaphysical desire for an absolute ground, origin or foundation on which to base all knowledge. In the absence of any true point of origin, we must begin ‘ wherever we are’ he writes, because the thought of the ‘originary’ trace has already taught us that it is ‘impossible to justify a point of departure absolutely’ (p. 162/233)."

"For Derrida, then, we might say that the ‘supplement’ is exorbitant in every sense of the term. It is a kind of structural ‘blindspot [ tâche aveugle]’ that resists every attempt to explain it with reference to the categories of metaphysics (p. 163/234). Accordingly, we can see the supplement as neither an addition nor a substitute, neither good nor evil, neither passive nor active, neither a conscious theme in Rousseau’s text nor a manifestation of the unconscious of the author, neither within the enclosure of the text itself, nor ‘outside’ it in some, supposedly extra-textual, ‘real’ world."

"writing buys a greater precision but only at the expense of the immediacy and expressiveness of speech."

"Again, Rousseau draws an important distinction, but this time it is between languages of the north and south. On the one side, ‘southern’ languages are said to spring from passion: the warm climate, fertile soil and conditions in Southern Europe and Africa provide man with everything he needs to subsist so he only has to use language in order to express his desires. On the other, however, ‘northern’ languages are deemed to be the result of direct physical need: the cold climate, poor earth and meagre conditions in northern Europe mean that language developed first and foremost as a way of surviving. In Rousseau’s pithy summation, the first words of southern man were ‘love me’ ( aimez-moi) whereas the first words of northern man were ‘help me’ ( aidez-moi) (p. 279)."

"Rousseau makes an important distinction between two different modes of music: melody and harmony. If melody is the pure expression of our passions, the evolution of harmony introduces a fatal complexity, abstraction and artificiality into music. Just as the written word sacrifices the passion of speech for greater precision of expression, so harmony surrenders the pure and immediate expressiveness of melody in favour of elaborate but lifeless harmonic arrangements (pp. 295–8)."

"the originary presence of speech is supplemented by writing, nature by culture, interiority by exteriority, sex by masturbation and so on endlessly. For Rousseau himself, of course, each supplement is nothing more than a pure addition to an origin that is already fully present in itself: what is added is quite literally nothing – a spare part – because the origin itself does not need anything to complete it (p. 167/238). However, the obvious question that follows from here is – if the origin requires no supplement and the supplement adds nothing to the origin – then why does the supplement ever come into existence, why is it necessary?"

"On the contrary, it is the ‘major preoccupation’ of Rousseau’s text (p. 195/279) because the story of language is intimately bound up with the story of music: both begin as ways of giving voice to our passions. To put it in Rousseau’s own words: ‘passion rouses all of the [vocal] organs’ and so song and speech have ‘a common origin’ ( Discourses, p. 282). If language and music have the same origin, however, they also share the same fate: what begins as a simple expression of passion quickly degenerates into a cold, abstract and expres-sionless form."

"Upon Rousseau’s reading, then, the first form of music can only have been melody. It is melody, as a monophonic sequence of pure sounds, that is closest to the cry of passion that, for the philosopher, represents the origin of language: ‘melody expresses plaints, cries of suffering or of joy, threats, moans’ ( Discourses, p. 287). Inasmuch as it involves a complex interplay of sounds, harmony is obviously at one remove from this state of nature: ‘what have chords in common with our passions?’ he rhetorically demands (p. 287)."

"In Rousseau’s tragic account, contemporary music has lost all connection with the passions that originally gave it life and degenerated into pure harmony (p. 298)."

"In Derrida’s account, of course, the answer is by now obvious: the supplement does not add to nature but reveal a lack – an originary difference – within the natural itself ( Grammatology, p. 214/308)."

"To put it in a nutshell, what Rousseau calls ‘nature’ is not complete in itself but is rather an originary deficiency – a non-identity, mediation or différance – that demands supplementation by imitation: [I]n every imitation, some sort of discourse must always complement the voice of nature. A musician who tries to render noise with noise errs; he knows neither the weaknesses nor the strengths of his art; he judges of it without taste or insight; teach him that he must render noise with song, that if he wished to make frogs croak he would have to make them sing; for it is not enough for him merely to imitate, he must do so in a way that both moves and pleases, otherwise his dreary imitation is as nought, and by failing to arouse anyone’s interest, it fails to make any impression. ( Discourse, p. 288) For Derrida, then, it is clear that everything Rousseau seeks to oppose to the pure and unmediated voice of nature – harmony, imitation, culture, society – exists in order to supply, correct, or compensate for, what increasingly looks like an inherent deficiency, which in the above passage is figured as a rawness, ugliness or noise, within that voice that calls for supplementation: what seems to belong outside nature is, as we have seen throughout this book, always already working within it in order to make it what it should be in the first place. What implications, then, does this ‘becoming-supplemental’ of nature itself hold for Rousseau’s theory of the origin of language?"

"Once again, what Derrida is trying to do here is to identify a point of A Guide to the Text 127 ‘exorbitancy’ in Rousseau’s text where the philosopher’s declared aims or intentions are overtaken or surprised by larger forces. For Derrida, it is this gap between what Rousseau declares and what he actually describes – what he means to say and what he cannot help but say – that is the site of his own reading."

"Yet, Rousseau’s account of the origin of language tries to freeze this essential relativity and variability into a set of static, absolute differences. Every language is assigned an absolutely fixed position on the globe – either the North Pole or the South Pole – as if no position between these two extremities could possibly exist! For Derrida, in other words, Rousseau’s attempt to claim that the true origin of language lies in a so-called absolute South is at odds with what it describes: we cannot say that any language is absolutely ‘northern’ or ‘southern’ because languages have, at best, a relative position in the world. If Rousseau seeks to distinguish categorically between northern and southern languages, Derrida’s argument is that this distinction is rather a question of degree: we can speak of languages that are more ‘northern’ and less ‘southern’ – more passionate and less necessary – but we cannot make any absolute distinction between the two. In this sense, what Rousseau’s attempt to distinguish between north and south actually describes is not a polar opposition between two diametrically opposed kinds of language but a more subtle, less clear-cut distribution of forces within every single language: every language contains elements of both north and south, passion and need ( Grammatology, p. 217/310)."

"Derrida goes to great lengths to show how the language of need is ‘forever related’ to the language of passion ‘persevering in it, submitting to it or controlling it’ (p. 223/319).22 In this sense, we must see the language of need as a supplement to the language of passion in the full sense of that term: what Rousseau calls the ‘North’ is not somewhere that exists at the furthest remove from the one true origin of language, in other words, but is rather the outworking of ‘another origin’ that compensates for what the first origin lacks (p. 224/319)."

"Derrida once again seeks to question this mythological account of a fall from a pure, self-present and undifferentiated state of nature into the atomised, divided and unequal world of modern, civic society. If Rousseau typically presents articulation as a degeneration or catastrophe that affects the original condition of language from without, as if the peoples of the northern hemisphere were not human beings at all but aliens from another planet, what his own account again reveals is that the apparent ‘supplement’ is essential to what it supplements. Just as melody is harmony, south is north, and passion is need, so we will discover that language is always already articulate from the very beginning (p. 229/325)."

"Derrida’s account, as we will see later on, this insight has important knock-on effects for Rousseau’s theory of writing as well because, for the latter, the defining quality of the written word is nothing other than this articulacy: the claim that all ‘language is articulate’ is thus another way of saying that ‘all language is writing’ (p. 229/326)."

"For Rousseau, the origin of human language does not lie in any particular organ, such as the larynx or vocal chords, so much as in the acquisition of the necessary signs, symbols or conventions that enable us to communicate ideas in the form of sounds: ‘[c]onventional language belongs to man alone’ ( Discourses, p. 252). If human beings must first acquire a repertoire of complex cultural conventions in order to express even our most basis passions – love, anger, pity and so on – then it becomes difficult to see how Rousseau can speak of a ‘natural’ language at all: the use of conventional language is, on the contrary, precisely what distinguishes human life from the natural world. The argument that the pure, inarticulate cry of nature is not yet language in any meaningful sense of the term leads us to the conclusion that what characterises language is nothing other than articulation. This capacity to articulate sound, to cut up the cry of nature up into what Saussure would call a series of phonic signifiers, is the basis of all human language whether northern or southern, passionate or necessary. So, in a paradoxical sense, then, what Rousseau presents as the ruination of language – the intervention of difference, spacing, supplementarity in the form of articulation – is actually its condition of possibility: ‘ language is born out of the process of its own degeneration’ Derrida writes ( Grammatology, p. 242/344)."

"As we know, Rousseau’s text understands the history of language as the progression, or rather regression, from one supplement for the origin to another: harmony supplements melody, articulation replaces accent, etc. To Derrida’s eyes, however, it is writing that is the supplement par excellence in the Essay: what happens when the written word comes on the scene is the final triumph of difference over presence, mediation over immediacy, coldness or death over the life and warmth of speech."

"If all language is articulate from the very outset, however, and all articulation just as inevitably leads to writing, then it logically follows that all language might just as easily be called written: what the historical invention of the written word comes to replace is, paradoxically enough, not speech or expressiveness but a version of itself A Guide to the Text 135 (p. 315/443)."

"We have no choice but to employ metaphysical language even if what we are attempting to articulate or designate – arche-writing, originary trace or supplementation – is impossible or nonsensical within those terms (p. 314/443)."

"Derrida’s own words, deconstruction escapes the metaphysics of presence by nothing more than a ‘hairsbreadth’ ( une pointe) (p. 315/443), but arguably the major achievement of the Grammatology is to define, map and exist within this vital critical space."

"what Derrida calls ‘writing’ is not simply the condition of language because it also describes the field of consciousness, perception and our experience of ‘reality’ in general. In this sense, what is called ‘grammatology’ is not merely the science of writing but the science of everything: we cannot experience anything in an unmediated way."

"Levinas’s way of thinking, we only begin to acquire our own sense of subjectivity through a feeling of being indebted or responsible to an ‘other [ autrui]’ that exceeds any idea we might have of it.27 For Derrida, it is clear that the logic of the originary trace has profound ethical implications in the manner proposed by Levinas: the structure of ‘the trace’, Derrida says in the Grammatology, is also the structure of the relation to ‘the other’ (p. 47/69). To understand the structure of the originary trace, in other words, is to be aware of the constancy of something or someone absolutely ‘other’ within the order of the ‘same’. Every apparently single, autonomous or self-identical element only acquires its identity by reference to some other element that differs from it in space and time. If we translate this logic into more explicitly ethical terms, we gain a radical new vision of our relation to the world around us, to other people and things, to other ways of living, being or thinking. In Derrida’s account, we do not pre-exist the other as if we all lived in our own private universes and only later decided to enter the outside world: our own identity, subjectivity or sense of self is originally and essentially constituted by a relation to a potentially infinite number of others."

"For Bernard Stiegler, a contemporary philosopher of technology, Derrida’s critique of a real, natural or unmediated ‘presence’ in the name of an originary supplementarity makes possible a new and more radical understanding of the role played by technology in the formation of human life: what is traditionally seen as a mere tool or supplement to nature is in fact the condition of life, thought and our experience of time." Chapter 3: Study Aids

"First of all, deconstruction is not a philosophical destruction or demolition but an affirmative process that seeks to reconstruct a given system or structure otherwise: it is the ‘undoing, decomposing and de-sedimenting of structures’ in order to ‘understand how an “ensemble” was constituted and to reconstruct it to this end’ (‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’, p. 272)."

"To Derrida’s eyes, however, what really defines logocentrism is that it always privileges speech ( phone) over writing ( gramme) as the means by which the presence of the logos is expressed: ‘the history of truth has always been . . . the debasement of writing and its repression outside “full” speech’ (p. 3/12). If logocentrism is so deeply ingrained within western thought and culture that we might think it merely describes ‘the way things are’, Derrida shows that it is in fact the product of a set of highly problematic assumptions about presence, speech and particularly writing."

"According to Derrida, the western philosophical tradition from Plato to the present day dogmatically posits a pure, full and unmediated presence as the supreme value. To Derrida’s way of thinking, this ‘presence’ Study Aids 149 can take many forms: the presence of the subject to itself in thought, sight or touch, the presence of something in space and/or time, even a presence which has now been lost or which may be gained in the future. For Derrida, the metaphysics of presence expresses itself through the institution of a series of binary oppositions and hierarchies whereby a superior term will be identified with pure presence and an inferior term with the mediation or loss of that presence: speech versus writing, nature versus culture, the masculine versus the feminine and so on. In the Grammatology, Derrida seeks to deconstruct these binary oppositions by articulating a logic of mediation, difference and deferral that makes them possible in the first place."

"The Supplement ( le supplément) This is a key term that appears in Derrida’s reading of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is one of the various ways throughout the Grammatology in which Derrida articulates the logic of difference, deferral and mediation that undercuts the metaphysics of presence. According to Derrida, the figure of the supplement performs two irreconcilable roles within Rousseau’s text. On the one hand, Rousseau continually presents it as an addition to something that is already full, present and sufficient in itself. On the other, Rousseau’s text consistently reveals that it is a substitute, or compensation for, something that is essentially lacking, insufficient in itself (p. 145/208). For Derrida, then, the logic of the supplement becomes a means of deconstructing Rousseau’s logocentric commitment to presence: what should be fully ‘present’ in itself is revealed to contain an essential lack or absence that always calls for supplementation in the first place. In Derrida’s account, we can thus speak of an ‘originary’ supplement in the same way that we would speak of an originary trace, writing or difference."

"Derrida argues that every sign can only obtain meaning in itself by differing in space and time from other signs in the linguistic system. To Derrida’s eyes, this means that every sign must originally retain the traces of the other signs against which it is to be defined if it is to achieve any meaning at all. For Derrida, however, this ‘originary’ trace becomes the means for deconstructing not simply Saussure’s theory of the sign but the entire edifice of the metaphysics of presence: it re-describes ‘the entire field of being [ étant], which metaphysics has defined as the being-present [ étant-présent]’ (p. 47/69, translation modified). In Derrida’s account, every supposedly ‘present’ element originally and essentially contains the traces of other elements that are supposedly ‘absent’: nothing, there-fore, is ever wholly present or absent"