Postmodern

Posthumans

Foucault | Derrida | Cixous

Dawn (Butler) | Blindsight (Watts)
Foucault
Foucault, 1438

It would be quite wrong to see discourse as a

place where previously established objects are
laid one after another like words on a page.

And how can one speak of a “system of

formation” if one knows only a series of different,
heterogeneous determinations, lacking
attributable links and relations?
Foucault, 1440

These relations characterize not the

language (langue) used by discourse,
nor the circumstances in which it is
deployed, but discourse itself as a
practice.
Foucault, 1441

A task that consists of not—of no longer—

treating discourses as groups of signs
(signifying elements referring to contents or
representations) but as practices that
systematically form the objects of which they
speak […] It is this more that renders them
irreducible to the language (langue) and to
speech.
Watts, 117

The system understands. The whole

Room, with all its parts. The guy who does
the scribbling is just one component. You
wouldn't expect a single neuron in your
head to understand English, would you?
Foucault, 1444

I shall abandon any attempt, therefore, to see

discourse as a phenomenon of expression—the verbal
translation of a previously established synthesis;
instead, I shall look for a field of regularity for various
positions of subjectivity. Thus conceived, discourse is
not the majestically unfolding manifestation of a
thinking, knowing, speaking subject, but, on the
contrary, a totality, in which the dispersion of the
subject and his discontinuity with himself may be
determined.
Watts, 115

People simply can’t accept that patterns

carry their own intelligence, quite apart
from the semantic content that clings to
their surfaces; if you manipulate the
topology correctly, that content just
comes along for the ride.
Foucault, 1460

Thus the statement circulates, is used,

disappears, allows or prevents the
realization of a desire, serves or resists
various interests, participates in
challenge and struggle, and becomes
a theme of appropriation or rivalry.
Foucault, 1460

Thus there would be no beginning,

and instead of being the one from
who discourse proceeded, I should
be at the mercy of its chance
unfolding, a slender gap, the point
of its possible disappearance.
Bulter, 76

What is frightening is
the idea of being
tampered with.
Foucault, 1465

what he writes and what he does not write,

what he sketches out, even by way of
provisional drafts, as an outline of the
oeuvre, and what he lets fall by way of
commonplace remarks—this whole play of
differences is prescribed by the author-
function, as he receives it from his epoch,
or as he modifies it in his turn.
Foucault, 1469

Ever since the sophists’ tricks and

influence were excluded and since their
paradoxes have been more or less safely
muzzled, it seems that Western thought
has taken care to ensure that discourse
should occupy the smallest possible
space between thought and speech.
Watts, 288

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If

self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies.
Stops noticing-irrelevant things. Truth never
matters. Only fitness. By now you don’t experience
the world as it exists at all. You experience a
simulation built from assumptions. Shortcuts. Lies.
Whole species is agnosiac by default.
Foucault, 1470

Yet it seems to me that beneath this apparent veneration

of discourse, under this apparent logophilia, a certain
fear is hidden. It is just as if prohibitions, barriers,
thresholds, and limits had been set up in order to master,
at least partly, the great proliferation of discourse, in
order to remove from its richness the most dangerous
part, and in order to organize its disorder according to
figures which dodge what is most uncontrollable about it.
It is as if we had tried to efface all trace of its irruption
into the activity of thought and language.
Watts, 324

The signal is an attack.

And it’s coming from right about there.

How do you say We come in peace

when the very words are an act of war?
Derrida
Watts, 325

We were the flightless birds lauding our own mastery

over some remote island while serpents and
carnivores washed up on our shores. Susan James
could not bring herself to concede the point—because
Susan James, her multiple lives built on the faith that
communication resolves all conflict, would then be
forced to admit the lie.
Derrida, 1475 Blindsight

It seems self-evident that the

ambiguous field of the word
“communication” can be
massively reduced by the limits
of what is called a context.
Derrida, 1476

But are the conditions [les réquisits] of a context

ever absolutely determinable? […] Or does the
notion of context not conceal, behind a certain
confusion, philosophical presuppositions of a
very determinate nature? […] I shall try to
demonstrate why a context is never absolutely
determinable, or rather, why its determination
can never be entirely certain or saturated.
Derrida, 1476

How to style this absence?

Derrida, 1476

This breaking force [force de

rupture] is not an accidental
predicate but the very structure
of the written text.
Derrida, 1476

Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or

written (in the current sense of this opposition), in a
small or large unit, can be cited, put between
quotation marks; in so doing it can break with every
given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts
in a manner which is absolutely illimitable. This does
not imply that the mark is valid outside of a context,
but on the contrary that there are only contexts
without any center or absolute anchoring [ancrage].
Bulter, 34

No. only different.

Derrida, 1476

In other words, does the quality of risk admitted

by Austin surround language like a kind of ditch
or external place or perdition which speech [la
locution] could never hope to leave, but which it
can escape by remaining “at home,” by and in
itself, in the shelter of its essence or telos? Or,
on the contrary, is this risk rather its internal and
positive condition of possibility?
Bulter, 36

Do you remember your homeworld

itself? I mean, could you get back
to it if you wanted to?

Go back? His tentacles smoothed

again. No, Lilith, thats the one
direction thats closed to us. This
is our homeworld now.
Watts, 48

He’s aware, all right. Those

things are so fast it’s scary.
You know they can hold both
aspects of a Necker cube in
their heads at the same time?
Derrida, 1476

Différance.
Watts, 48

I am the bridge between the bleeding edge

and the dead center. I stand between the
Wizard of Oz and the man behind the curtain.

I am the curtain.
Derrida, 1476

given that structure of iteration,

the intention animating the
utterance will never be through
and through present to itself
and to its content.
Derrida, 1476

Yes, of course, every day. Effects of signature are

the most common thing in the world. But the
conditions of possibility of those effects of
simultaneously, once again, the condition of their
impossibility of their rigorous purity. In order to
function, that is, to be readable, a signature must
have a repeatable, iterable, imitable form; it must
be able to be detached from the present and
singular intention of its production.
Watts, 313

All those theories, all those drug dreams

and experiments and models trying to
prove what consciousness was: none to
explain what it was good for.
Cixous
Cixous, 1524

Women’s imaginary is
inexhaustible, like music,
painting, writing: their stream
of phantasms is incredible.
Cixous, 1525

I, too, overflow; my desires

have invented new desires, my
body knows unheard-of songs.
Bulter, 16

Tell me something now,

whether I understand it
or not.
Cixous, 1527

But only the poets—not the novelists, allies

of representationism. Because poetry
involves gaining strength through the
unconscious and because the
unconscious, that other limitless country, is
the place where the repressed manage to
survive: women, or as Hoffman would say,
fairies.
Cixous, 1527

An act that will also be marked

by woman’s seizing the occasion
to speak, hence her shattering
entry into history, which has
always been based on her
oppression.
Cixous, 1528

She doesn’t “speak,” she throws her

trembling body forward; she lets go of
herself, she flies; all of her passes into her
voice, and it’s with her body that she vitally
supports the “logic” of her speech. Her
flesh speaks true. She lays herself bare. In
fact, she physically materializes what she’s
thinking; she signifies it with her body.
Bulter, 248

Home? she thought Bitterly. When had she

last had a true home. When could she hope
to have one.

She considered resisting, making it drug her

and carry her back. but that seemed a
pointless gesture. at least she would get
another chance with a human group. a
chance to teach them . . . but not a chance to
be one of them. Never that. never?

Another chance to say, Learn and Run!

Cixous, 1528

Because no woman stockpiles

as many defenses for countering
the drives as does a man. You
don’t build walls around
yourself, you don’t forego
pleasure as “wisely” as he.
Bulter, 203

Look at things from curts point of view,

Gabriel said. He is not in control even of
what his own body is does and feels. he
is taken like a woman and . . . No, dont
explain! He held up his hand to stop her
from interrupting. He knows the oolio
arent male. he knows all the sex that
does on is in his head. it doesnt matter.
It doesnt fucking matter! Someone else
is pushing all his buttons. he cant let
them get away with that.
Cixous, 1529

To admit that writing is precisely working (in) the

in-between, inspecting the process of the same
and of the other without which nothing can live,
undoing the work of death—to admit this is first
to want the two, as well as both, the ensemble of
the one and of the other, not fixed in sequence of
struggle and expulsion or some other form of
death but infinitely dynamited by an incessant
process of exchange from one subject to another.
Bulter, 39

you are intelligent. That is

the newer of the two
characteristics.

You are hierarchical. that is

the older and more
entrenched characteristic.
Cixous, 1533

Her language does not contain,

it carries; it does not hold back,
it makes possible.
Bulter, 5

alive!
Still alive.
alive . . . again.
Cixous, 1536

Other love.—In the beginning

are our differences. The new
love dares for the other, wants
the other, makes dizzying,
precipitous flights between
knowledge and invention.
Cixous, 1536

When I write, it’s everything that we

don’t know we can be that is written
out of me, without exclusions, without
stipulation, and everything we will be
calls us to the unflagging, intoxicating,
unappeasable search for love. In one
another we will never be lacking.