Purloining Derrida?

Authority, materiality and the right to philosophy in Argentina

Francis J Jervis

Thesis submitted in fullment of the requirements of the Preliminary Examination, PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology, UC Davis, Spring 2012

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

Abstract This paper examines the prosecution of an Argentine philosophy professor, Horacio Potel, for sharing a number of texts by Jacques Derrida online. By reading his own critique of copyright and the charges brought against him in conjunction with Derridas own work, I consider how Potel challenges understandings of authorship, law, and the ethics of copying, and how it has inuenced popular discourse on copying. I also examine how his critique of the printed book as technology of transmission, in contrast to the liberatory potential of digital technologies, complicates our understanding of the materiality of cultural forms in resistances to neoliberalism in Argentina. Potels project can best be understood, I argue, as the construction of a reading subject whose orientation to the author and text is radically distinct from those seen either in other forms of piracy or liberal discourses of open access or fair use.

Due to their high cost in printed form, many works of philosophy and critique are practically inaccessible the global South. Horacio Potel, professor of ethics and methodology at the Universidad de Lans, Buenos Aires, who identies himself online as a profesor y difusor de losoa, found the possibilities offered by the internet to afford widespread access to these texts irresistible. The steps he took towards making the works of rst Nietzsche, and then Derrida and Heidegger available to the Spanish-speaking world, and Latin American scholars in particular, were, however, to lead to criminal charges of piracy. At the same time, thanks to the high level of interest in his case, they led to the entry of a politics inuenced by deconstruction into Argentinian copyleft activist rhetoric, and even popular online discourse not to mention the establishment of a de facto, if still contested right for Argentine citizens to share content online. Potel dreamed of
una biblioteca total en la casa de cada uno, una biblioteca que no necesita traslados ni esperas; cuyos libros pueden ser prestados a miles a la vez, y buscados y encontrados en instantes 1 (Potel 2010: 46).

However, the creation of such a universal library is a goal which, as he was to discover, is one which is actively opposed by a range of forces acting to support the liberal logic of intellectual property law2 . As Biella Coleman observes in her review of ethnographic approaches to digital media,
Digital piracy in its totality partly interferes with the smooth functioning of capitalist and liberallegal imperatives, tearing into what Derrida [in Force of Law] calls the mystical foundation of authority and inducing a moral panic in the copyright industries. (Coleman 2010: 495)

While it is arguable that, from a strictly legalistic perspective, these questions of discursive authority are marginal to the reality of copyright enforcement, I propose that in order to understand el caso Potel fully, we need to adopt an interpretative approach which is sensitive to the cultural context of practices of copying and dissemination. The fact that Potel was prosecuted for

sharing texts which, in their semiotic content, themselves offer a critique of copyright and the author function determines the need for an interpretative position which is sensitive not only to the textuality of the books at the centre of the case, but also to the materiality of the forms in which they circulate in the social life of Potel and others in Argentina. As Rosemary Coombe points out,
The resistances, imaginative strategies, and creative reappropriations enacted by subjects alienated from networks of public expression and representation are potentially political practices to the extent that relations of social production and cultural reproduction are thereby challenged (Coombe 1998: 298).

Potels response to the exclusionary force of copyright is one in which the appropriation of Derridas political ethics, along with his later observations on digital media and their relation to paper, I argue, constitutes a political, as much as a critical or even public pedagogical project. In this essay, after briey reviewing a selection of the ethnographic literature on piracy in Latin America and elsewhere, I will rst consider how Potel constructs his position as professor y difusor de losoa in relation to normative liberal notions of the author, publisher and pirate. Next, I will examine how Potels project can be considered as a political deployment of both technologies of communication and a distinctively deconstructive approach to their relationship to the paper book and the materiality of writing and printing. Can we, I want to ask, see in this case the emergence of a new relation between the subject and texts as cultural goods as the formerly treasured printed book becomes for some no more than an encumbrance? How, more broadly, can we understand this case as a moment in the reconstruction of the relationship between authors and readers at this moment of transition between the technology of print and digitality? The Charges - and their Dismissal The charges against Potel were instigated by the Paris-based publisher of a number of Jac-

ques Derridas works, Les Editions de Minuit (EdM), who made a complaint via the French cultural attach in Argentina to the Camara Argentina del Libro (CAL), the national publishers trade association which, like other rightsholders groups such as the MPAA and BSA, initiates prosecutions against alleged pirates. The case itself, however, was brought as a criminal charge by the state. The publisher claimed that
En sept ans, Horacio Potel a mis en ligne gratuitement et sans autorisation des versions compltes de plusieurs ouvrages de Jacques Derrida, ce qui est nfaste la diffusion de sa pense. 3 (Saez 2009)

That he had made the texts available was unarguably true: through a site accessible at jacquesderrida.com.ar, Potel offers the reader access to both HTML versions of a selection of Derridas work in Spanish, and downloadable scanned PDF facsimiles of the a number of original French texts. He makes no attempt to conceal his identity as its creator. Indeed, he even makes a number of his articles available alongside Derridas own, in which, as we will see, he develops a sophisticated critique of the book as technology of public form (Gaonkar and Povinelli 2003); it is important to note that perhaps the most signicant of these, Nietzsche y Derrida en la Red (Nietzsche and Derrida in the Network), a commentary on the potential of the digital text which effectively articulates his position on digitisation, authorship and other topics, pre-dates his prosecution by around three years 4. Although the charges were laid late in 2008, Potel was unaware of them on 16th February 2009, when la polica vino en medio de la noche a golpearme la puerta para vericar mi domicilio. Una situacin horrible: los policas slo me decan: usted sabr en qu anda 5 (Potel 2010: 47). The law under which the prosecution was brought, Ley 11.723 de Propiedad Intelectual, of which article 72 provides for the punishment of El que edite, venda o reproduzca por cualquier medio o instrumento, una obra indita o publicada sin autorizacin de su autor o derechohabientes, 6 has been extensively criticised in Argentina for its failure to make even basic
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provisions for the copying of works in the normal course of research or teaching or even archival preservation, some of the basic elements of fair use in copyright law in the US and elsewhere (Busaniche 2010). Potel soon learnt of the charges through his lawyer and that he faced up to three years in prison for the alleged offences. On 13th November, however, the charges were rejected by the court, to considerable acclaim from the Argentinian public. The judge found that while la trasformacin de los textos originales al formato digital por parte de Potel, podra estar comprendida en el precepto de reproduccin, 7 the act of reproduction necessarily required the presence of a reader, for
sin perjuicio de lo cual no sucede lo mismo en relacin al ofrecimiento desde las paginas de Internet del incuso...la accin de crear una nueva copia, es producida por quien accede al sitio e inicia la descarga del archive informatica. 8

In this respect, the judgement followed the actual transfer doctrine which has been upheld by a number of US courts (Patry 2010), and which requires that evidence be presented that copies have in fact been made of a work made available through a peer-to-peer network or other medium. As such the courts nding in Potels case was not exceptional; however, it is notable that the making available doctrine (under which Potels actions would have been illegal outright) is enshrined in both the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) Copyright Treaty and the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty. As the transnational legislative instruments underlying the neoliberal regime of copyright enforcement in which the rights of users/readers, particularly in the global South, are largely disregarded in favour of the absolute maintenance of hegemonic control over content these treaties construct a regime which, although genealogically related to the classical liberal ideology of the authors right, arguably denies the need for the competing rights of authors and readers (or other producers and consumers) to be adjudicated through public debate.
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The judge called into question the proportionality of the prosecution to any damages inicted on the publisher, noting that la insignicante afectacin que podra resultar al patrimonio del titular de la obra, no habilita al severo reproche de esta justicia represiva. 9 It is this adjudication of the competing, but nonetheless equally inalienable rights of the subject to both enjoy the usufructs of their creative works as author and as reader to participate in society and culture, which characterises liberal discourse around access to knowledge and copyright more generally. However, as we will see, there are signicant discrepancies between the judges rationale for dismissing the case, and Potels ethical case against the hegemonic copyright regime. Although the case did not establish a formal precedent in Argentine law, Potel was able to restore all three sites (which remain active today), and the high-prole dismissal of the charges appears to have established a de facto extended principle of fair use regarding the online distribution of books sufciently rmly, indeed, for a spokesman from the Ministry of Justice to discuss it at length in a presentation to CAL at their annual feria de libros (book fair) (Diz 2011). The Response Potels prosecution was widely reported in the Argentine national media as well as being covered by newspapers in France and Spain, and the president of CAL was forced to defend the action while it was still pending to a journalist writing for the Argentine daily newspaper Clarin:
"Esa ley [11.723] existe para proteger la produccin cultural. La Cmara tiene una accin continua de defensa del derecho de propiedad intelectual. Sin derecho de propiedad intelectual no existe edicin posible. Y creo que menos la posibilidad de produccin intelectual."10 (Hax 2009)

The well-worn argument that copyright is essential for a ourishing cultural and intellectual sphere11, and thus that CAL and organisations like it are acting in the public interest by suppressing the free circulation of cultural material, is, as we will see, in absolute opposition to the posi7

tion taken by Potel and, I argue, an increasing number of people in Argentina who have been inuenced by coverage of the case. The same article included a comment left on Potels Facebook page by an incensed supporter: Lo que esta sucediendo es un atropello a la cultura como derecho humano. Una muestra obscena de los mecanismos de control, vigilancia y castigo. 12 This statement broadly reects public sentiments about the case, and the shows how it stimulated a popular critique of the institutions of power surrounding copyright. Despite the dismissal of the case against Potel, the inexibility of Ley 11.723, which has been used to compel Argentine universities (including Lans) to pay royalties to CAL based on their number of students and the number of photocopiers they own (Reinoso 2009), remains the subject of widespread concern (Pelaya and Sanllorenti 2010). For an intellectual property case relating to such rareed content to attract such broad attention in Argentina shows, I argue, the emergence of a discourse of cultural access as fundamental right which goes beyond either traditional ideas of fair use, or contemporary constructions of open access in academic publishing. Potels case gave rise to an online Derecho a Leer (Right to Read; derechoaleer.org) campaign closely allied to the free/open source software movement in the country, with the Fundacion Via Libre13 (FVL) organisation taking a leading role in the campaign for the charges to be dropped. To grasp the signicance of this support, it is useful to compare Potels position on the distribution of copyright works without their creators or publishers consent with that of Lawrence Lessig, for whom the elimination of piracy which replaces purchases is broadly a desirable goal (if it can be achieved without too adverse an impact on more economically benecial forms of sharing), and whose argument is situated rmly within the liberal tradition of an essentially inalienable right for creators to control the circulation of their works (Lessig 2004). As the image

below shows, FVL was willing to directly advocate the sharing of untransformed copyright materials (mere scanning, one might say in Fichtean terms) a position unlikely to be adopted by any major free software lobby groups in the US or Europe given their commitment to the maintenance of at least some form of authorial copyright in most circumstances.
Insert Figure 1: Give a book to the internet: scan it and upload it to the network. Internet banner, Derecho a Leer

Along with coverage in the countrys newspapers at the time, the case was discussed extensively online and even became the focus of a television program broadcast in 2011. A dramatised rendering of the case, accompanied by a panel discussion including Potel and other major gures in the copyleft movement such as Beatriz Busaniche, Evelin Heidel and others, was shown on the Ministry of Educations Canal Encuentro service in the series Filo, crnicas de universidad14 (Filo, chronicles of the university) bringing discussion of las problemticas del copyright, la criminalizacin del acceso a material educativo por parte de estudiantes y profesores, las nuevas tecnologas que facilitan la circulacin del conocimiento 15 into what is effectively ofcial public discourse. Potels case was discussed on the Taringa!16 web forum under the rubric of En Argentina, es legal subir archivos sin derechos; 17 having reproduced the entire text of the sobreseimiento (dismissal), with discussion of how the outcome served to protect those sharing les for free in Argentina, the post concluded with the exhortation to acordate que Compartir Cultura no es un Crimen, la cultura no es un bien de consumo, ni pertenece a nadie 18 (user GabehBra 19). It was, ironically, also subject to legal action by CAL in 2011, which was withdrawn when the site agreed to take more stringent steps to remove links to pirate books and other content although not before the board of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at the University of Buenos Aires had expressed its unanimous opposition to the charges, making reference, furthermore, to
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its earlier expression of support for Potel and his project20 . Ethnographies of Piracy Having considered the facts of the Potel case and public response to it in broad terms, it will now be useful to consider it in the context of a number of recent ethnographies of piracy, which describe the formation of pirate (and consumer) subject positions in reference to the (neo)liberal order of copyright and other hegemonic regimes. As Coleman points out, ethnographies of online communication, both piratical and otherwise, have become a site through which the ways these technologies have become centrally implicated in centuries-old debates, such as those surrounding liberal rights, personhood, and institutional governance can be examined; as she goes on to note, Much of this scholarship is concerned with transformations as well as continuities within liberal and Enlightenment ideals (Coleman 2010: 493). Although there are signicant differences between the practices which the existing ethnographies of piracy describe and Potels project, a critical reading of this literature which is attentive to the ways in which its authors often remain within the dominant liberal logic of intellectual property despite their often critical orientations to the (neo)liberal project at a broader level is essential to understanding the particular qualities of the Potel case. The pirate has for some time been a signicant gure in anthropological approaches to the relationship between the subject and technologically mediated cultural forms: from the designation of the maritime pirate as humani generis hostes (the enemy of all mankind) and early modern criticisms of pirate printers (Johns 2009: 36), through the importance of the pirate in discourses of circulatory legitimacy today, the gure of the menacing pirate has emerged in recent decades as a trope which allows a virtuous consumer to take shape, in turn suggesting that the pirate has become the consummate pariah neoliberal subject (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001:

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20). In this vein, Dent usefully notes that

understanding piracy is important because its emerging centrality to neoliberalism claries recent deep-seated transformations in economics, law, and governmentality. It claries the forms of subjectivity available to producers, distributors, and buyers who participate in consumer economies. (Dent 2012: 30)

It is the ways in which Potels project can be seen as a contribution to this repertoire of subjectivities that will be the focus in this paper. The ethnographies which will be considered in this review can all, I think, be located within a liberal discourse in which the illegitimacy of unauthorised copying is, to a greater or lesser extent, implicitly accepted by, it should be borne in mind, both the ethnographers and their subjects. These studies address two distinct forms of piracy: the politics of peer-to-peer le sharing, specically the popular Swedish-run BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay, on one hand, and on the other the relationship between the trade in pirate media and the legitimate market. I nd, however, that neither of these emphases is entirely appropriate in a reading of the Potel case which is sensitive to both the political quality of his project, and the revision of the ethics of copying which he proposes. The unauthorised dissemination of books has been the subject of rather less discussion than music piracy. Stobart, discussing the transformations which have been seen in the Bolivian music industry involving both the emergence of a transnational trade in pirated media and the democratisation of access to music production facilities, observes that among his informants music piracy was presented in terms of access to knowledge and culture, and related to book and software piracy, on which the national economy and education system are highly dependent (Stobart 2010: 50). The practices he describes are centred on the reproduction of copies of local music for sale in the region; while there is clearly a political dimension to this form of piracy, it

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is primarily in the negotiation of national identities in the cross-border trade Stobart describes. Perhaps due to the demotic character of the media in question and thus the lack of transnational enforcement efforts, there is little discussion of the global copyright regime in his article. This form of relatively small-scale commercial music piracy has little in common with Potels project; the relationship between pirate and content seen here is perhaps more analogous to the situation described by Lawrence Liang in India, where, as has historically been the case in Argentina and throughout much of the global South, the photocopying of textbooks and other works (and the production of pirate editions of books) is driven by the same economic factors that Potel cites as at least part of the rationale for his activities, but centres on the reproduction of works for the prot of the copier (Liang 2010). Piracy in the developing world is frequently characterised as an apolitical phenomenon, as we saw in Colemans observation above. Larkin, in his ethnography of video piracy in Nigeria, claims that Piracy is nonideological in that it does not represent a self-conscious political opposition to capitalism it is not a kind of tactical media (Larkin 2004: 298). Insofar as the form of piracy he describes is interwoven with the postcolonial market economy in Nigeria (rather than constituting a commons arguably outside the capitalist order) and those engaged in the trade do not construe their activity as a form of opposition to the established regime of copyright (or, indeed, bourgeois property in general), this is clearly true. However, I propose that a more expansive denition of the political necessarily includes these (and, indeed, all other) forms of cultural reproduction and dissemination as inherently political insofar as they are constitutive of new forms of social relation between the actors involved, as they are in the critique of reproducibility traceable to Walter Benjamin (1936). In a passage which is illustrative of the dualistic schema of legitimacy underlying most stud-

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ies of piracy, Larkin compares the unauthorised copying of video works to the 419 fraud schemes for which Nigeria has become infamous, claiming that Like 419, piracy operates as a corruption of communications infrastructures that develops its own circuits of distribution using ofcially organized media (293). He explains that by corruption he means the pirating of a systems mode of communication the viruses that attach to other kinds of ofcial or recognized movement. While this may be a fair description of the perception of piracy by ofcial or recognized institutions (including, one might expect, CAL or EdM), it is clearly at odds with the portrayal of the relationship between the publishing industry and public intellectual life including the institution of the university which we nd in Potels discourses. Dents study of piracy, circulatory legitimacy and neoliberal subjectivity in a Brazilian interior town can also be located within this dichotomous logic of legitimacy. As with Stobart and Larkin, his focus is on the subjectivities possible within the contemporary capitalist economy, rather than on understanding unauthorised copying as a political response to dominant regime of intellectual property law, its colonial associations notwithstanding. Dent claims that the investment of the pirate with a vital (if negative) role in the making of the virtuous consumer produces a distinct form ofsplit subjectivity in which a neoliberal ethic of accumulation exists in contradictory relation to the market in pirate physical copies of digital goods. Neoliberal subjects, Dent asserts, are required to permit commodities to signify only in terms of their circulatory legitimacy. At the same time, however, they are asked to buy as cheaply as possible (Dent 2012: 45). By this account the central problem of piracy is the question of which of two bourgeois imperatives should be given priority. Ultimately, couched as it is in these terms of rational economic choices, Dents portrayal of the dialogic relation between pirates (and buyers of pirate media) and state/NGO actors (on behalf of rights holders) is, I nd, somewhat

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limiting in its dependence on such manifestly ideological constructions of legitimation. The role of piracy in a market economy, in this account, is essentially to reinforce the hegemonic logic of circulatory legitimacy. Thus far, the forms of piracy which have been considered have been what I would term indirectly political in recognition of the inadequacies of relegating them to the apolitical. In sharp contrast, the activities of the Swedish group responsible for The Pirate Bay (TPB) have, not surprisingly given the groups entry into parliamentary politics in Sweden and elsewhere, been considered as a more explicitly, if not entirely conventionally political force21 . The terms in which their agenda has been characterised are, nonetheless, progressive rather than radial insofar as ethnographers have described the site as a locus of the discursive contestation of liberal ideas of freedom and personal autonomy. This is clear from the claim that
In providing platforms for sharing and for voicing dissent towards the established entertainment industry, the increasing autonomy gained by these piratical actors [i.e. the administrators of The Pirate Bay] becomes more akin to the concept of positive liberty than to a purely negative, reactive one. (Andersson 2009: 64)

This focus on questions of liberty and agency on the part of sharerconsumers and activists is generally in accord with the discourse of the peer-to-peer movement; while these issues are undoubtedly also vital for Potel, the critique of copyright offered by the activists behind The Pirate Bay typically connes itself to demands for the reform of IP law (up to and including, it must be said, the abolition of much or all of the current structure of IP regulation), rather than the relationship between authors/creators and their works at a metaphysical level. For Andersson, the politicality of engaging in le sharing as a user (as opposed to administrator) is ambiguous:
Users who might not agree on the political agenda come to use their platforms simply out of

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convenience and personal gratication, yet the individual agency of these users becomes usurped as part of the wider, accumulated operations in these macro-actors strategic games. (93)

Although it may be treated as equivalent in law, in my analysis the differences between the political signicance of copying in this scenario and the Potel case are, as this statement makes clear, profound: unlike the distributed and generally anonymous sharing of BitTorrent networks, the work of dissemination Potel engaged in was both clearly traceable to him, and did not require the participation of (or risk usurping the agency of) those who accessed the texts. The form of engagement with the political described in the case of TPB is, however, quite different from that seen in the forms of commercial piracy described by Dent, Stobart and Larkin. While the vast majority of the millions of users who share les using TPB do not dene their activity in explicitly political terms, threats of action against the site, or attacks on internet freedom in general, nonetheless tend to promote occasional activism (72) when the site comes under legal attack. Ultimately though, in Anderssons analysis, it is not an anti-commercial or even anti-corporate operation: it is rather an alternative means of utilising the new potentialities in the infrastructures our computers are enmeshed in (80). In this respect, I argue, the subject position of those involved in peer-to-peer networking is rather dissimilar to that taken by Potel (or, for that matter, users of his site), although there are some obvious similarities in the way digital technologies are constructed in both discourses. Potel has an explicitly anti-corporate (publishing) agenda, as we will see, and users of his sites are not, like the members of the swarms of TPB, subject to the co-optation Andersson describes. The form of strategic sovereignty which Andersson associates with TPB is, as we will see, distinct from the role which Potel, following Derrida, envisages for the university or, indeed, other sites of cultural circulation, and Potels critique of the publishing industry is perhaps even broader in its implications than the peer-to-peer movements assault on the music, lm and software industries.
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Deconstruction, hegemony and the critique of copyright Derridas work has exerted considerable inuence in some spheres of radical political theory most prominently, perhaps, through the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, but also in the work of contemporary critical legal theorists, including Drusilla Cornell. It has, it should be pointed out, also been roundly dismissed by others as ephemeral and inadequate as a basis for political action (Negri 2005)22. Although Potel himself makes no reference to Laclau and Mouffes work, the characterisation of copyright as a hegemonic regime (the subject of much of their work), as in a number of the ethnographies discussed above and in the work of all but the most conservative scholars of intellectual property law, is overdetermined. Rosemary Coombe makes explicit the repressively conservative telos which has characterised this regime from its inception in early modern Europe:
Copyright and its aesthetic discursive supports were techniques for managing the subversive potential of print technologies and for maintaining bourgeois hegemonies in the face of the opportunities textuality afforded for the expressive articulations, aspirations, and antagonisms of others. (Coombe 1998: 257)

Thus the control of the circulation of ideas through the control of the circulation of their material public forms by the discursive regime of copyright and authorship has always had a place, alongside the more ostensibly benign motives of promoting the creation of new works and the development of the publishing industry (as identied with literary culture), in the logic of liberal intellectual property law. To the extent that any breach of these bourgeois hegemonies enables the Other(ed to gain articulatory agency, it should, I propose, be seen as political. In order to grasp the potential for the logic of deconstruction to serve as a tool by which these structures and the inequalities they produce can be effectively critiqued, we should rst recall

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that Laclau and Mouffe themselves stress that

In order to have hegemony, the requirement is that elements whose own nature does not predetermine them to enter into one type of arrangement rather than another, nevertheless coalesce, as a result of an external or articulating practice. The visibility of the acts of originary institution - in their specic contingency - is, in this respect, the requirement of any hegemonic formation. (Laclau and Mouffe 2001 : xii; emphasis added)

Laclau suggests that there are two dimensions of contemporary discussions of the political in which the method of deconstruction is particularly productive: the notion of the political as the instituting moment of society (49) and, at the same time, the incompletion of all acts of political institution (50). Thus, for Laclau, that which makes the political possible the contingency of the acts of institution is also what makes it impossible, as ultimately, no instituting act is fully achievable (50). I propose that, in order to fully grasp the signicance of the Potel case, we must consider how it lays bare both the foundational violence of copyright (in a political rather than a textual sense) and the emptiness of the author function on which the logic of copyright is founded, bringing to the surface the acts of originary institution which underlie the modern (neo)liberal copyright regime to enable a re-reading, with Biagioli (2011) and Silbey (2008), of the myth of the individuated creative genius and their inalienable relation to the text which lies the root of the logic of copyright. Digitization and the Death of the Author Following the liberal logic from Fichte (1793) to Lessig (2004) that only those who produce at least derivative (but nonetheless somewhat original) works based on the work of others can claim a legitimate right to appropriate or distribute such material, it is a premise of the distinction between pirate and publisher that the right to copy can derive only from the authors transferable but inalienable right to at least some degree of control over the circulation of their work. What-

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ever their justication, according to this logic pirates who merely reproduce without producing are unable to shed the illegal excesses to enable them to play a role or become a part of the reconstituted public domain (Liang 2009: 15). Potels project is, in these terms, undeniably piratical23; however, the relationship which he posits between the subject and the reproducible text a cultural form which by its culturality has, in Potels logic, no author is one which is quite distinct from those seen between producers and consumers of pirate goods or online le traders in the ethnographies reviewed here. The question of authorship and piracy has been addressed through an extended development of the Foucauldian critique of authorship by Kavita Philip, who proposes an analysis centred on the so-called pirate function, analogous to the author function Foucault describes (Foucault, 1984). She argues that
At this historical moment, a particular conuence of digital copying, its afliated modes of creativity, a crisis in bourgeois legalities and culture apparently precipitated by the telecom and digital revolutionscreates the conditions for the public recognition of the fragmented author functions that Foucault identied. (Philip 2005: 205)

Philip suggests that the historical death of the author has been made an everyday reality through the remediation of the printed text through digital technologies; she draws a distinction between Lessig and Liangs positions in terms of the difference which the identity of the speaker makes in the circulation and reception of the text, characterising Liangs position (and presumably that of pro-piracy activists in general) as a celebration of piracy as death-of-author (205). However, the relationship between author, text and reader which Potel constructs is considerably more nuanced than the simple erasure of the ction of authorship which this phrase suggests. Given that Potel describes his site as un sitio pblico y gratuito de diseminacin de las huellas de Jacques Derrida,24 and, furthermore, as essential to the survival of Derrida, the question

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of whether the site was harmful to the dissemination of Derridas thought is obviously intensely contested given EdMs explicit claim that the site was harmful to the diffusion of Derridas thought. I will, however, consider the broader implications of this dispute somewhat later. It is nonetheless useful to note at this point that in his later (2010) essay Cuestiones de Herencia, Potel argues that EdMs argument, which we may see as exemplary of (neo)liberal logic in his eyes at least, is based on a conception of The Thought of Jacques Derrida as a unitary object which, although defended by the forces of law, is under threat from its uncontrolled diffusion. For Potel, this constriction and localisation of Derridas thought denies the possibility of his survival:
Porque en esos textos, a los que nos negamos a llamar obras, est la survie de Jacques Derrida, el lugar de donde salen todos sus fantasmas, el lugar de la infeccin, el medio de transmisin de tantos y tantos fantasmas acosadores todos llamados Jacques Derrida y ninguno igual al otro. 25 (2010; emphasis added)

In his emphasis on the need for these texts to circulate and, crucially, to be open to recoding and the proliferation of difference in order for Derrida to survive, Potel makes an ethical claim one aspect of which could be seen as somewhat similar to the defence made by acionados of other cultural forms who copy them without authorisation, in order to preserve them for posterity26. This construction of Derridas presence in and through these texts is as distinctive in comparison to other defences of piracy as it is aligned with Derridas own positions. It is moreover typical of Potels appropriation of the deconstructive method to demonstrate the absurdity of the charges he faced based on the invalidity of the hegemonic premises of the inalienable rights of the author to the inheritance of their work by taking Derridas critique of copyright further, as we shall see, than Derrida himself. It is important to note that it is certianly not my purpose here to evaluate Potels project

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against a Derridean ethics (indeed, no faithful reading of Derridas work would encourage such an endeavour), nor to engage in an extended exegesis of the divergences between Derridas own diverse commentaries on the digital text, copyright and so forth and Potels own. Only through an attentive reading of Derridas work alongside Potels autocritique, however, can we discern the points at which Potel undertakes what I understand as often highly politically strategic diversions from Derridas positions27. Policing the scene of reading
I will not claim the copyright because ultimately [en derniere instance] there is always a police and a tribunal ready to intervene each time that a rule [constitutive or regulative, vertical or not] is invoked in a case involving Signatures, events, or contexts... If the police is always waiting in the wings, it is because conventions are by essence violable and precarious, in themselves and by the ctionality that constitutes them, even before there has been any overt transgressionI shall therefore not claim a copyright because this entire matter of the police must be reconsidered, and not merely in a theoretical manner, if one does not want the police to be omnipotent (Derrida 1977: 105; insertions as in Webers translation)

Insert Figure 2: Copyright notice from Limited Inc

Derridas refusal to claim the copyright to the arguments, made in Signature, Event, Context, which he accused John Searle of purloining an article which Searle subsequently refused to allow Derridas publishers the right to reprint28, is based on his critique of the immanence of state force to any case involving Signatures. Yet, as the actual copyright notice from Limited Inc shows, Derridas own critique of copyright did not extend to a willingness to abdicate his own droit dauteur29 in a legal sense: the Signature of the author continues, in the material dissemination of this Work at least, to call the police to the scene of reading to preserve the violable and precarious convention of copyright. Potels critique of intellectual property law has its basis in the claim that copyright necessar20

ily implies an immanent threat of violence, for the structural undecidability and volatility of the author function in relation to the text demands the backing of the signature by the very foundational violence Derrida exposes in Force of Law. In this essay, Derridas reading of Benjamins Critique of Violence, Levinas ethical philosophy, and the modern European liberal legal tradition brings the distinction between droit (right/law) and justice to the fore; in simple terms, his position is that
To be just, the decision of a judge, for example, must not only follow a rule of law or a general law but must also assume it, approve it, conrm its value, by a reinstituting act of interpretation, as if ultimately nothing previously existed of the law, as if the judge himself invented the law in every case. (1992: 961)

It is in revealing the fact that the restrictive regime of copyright (droit dauteur) particularly in Argentina, where as we have seen the law makes no exceptions for fair use cannot be just according to this standard, that Potels own deconstructive strategy is perhaps most effective. If the presence of the police, the unquestioning enforcers of law, in the wings of the scene of reading is critical to the maintenance of the order of copyright, it is clear that the legal force of the author function depends on a justice that is not just: as the publishing industry, in Potels reading, seeks to impose singularity on The Thought of Jacques Derrida, so the hegemonic regime of copyright seeks, with increasing vigour, to forestall any re-evaluation of the justice of the established liberal order. Responsibility after law: Potels ethics of reading In somewhat caustic terms, Potel draws attention to the inconsistencies between the postmodern critique of the author function in French critical theory on one hand, and the neoliberal insistence on the persistence of the authors commercial rights which characterises the rhetoric (not to mention legal strategies) of publishers of their work, situating his political critique in di-

21

rect conjunction to his most unambiguous (and one might, given its adoption by Argentine internet users, even argue populist) redenition of cultural authority:
La cultura, el conocimiento, la tradicin, no son la obra de autores. Es curioso que los mismos seores que han terminado con las ideas ilustradas del sujeto libre y soberano, para vendernos el sujeto sujetado al consumo, apelen a la metafsica de la subjetividad a la hora de buscar ms dinero. Es curioso que lo hagan en este caso ya que tanto Heidegger como Derrida se han opuesto a esta idea de una subjetividad creadora como origen y causa de la Obra o El Libro. 30 (Potel 2010)

This exposure of the contradictory nature of the neoliberal negation of individual sovereignty (at least for those excluded from the circuits of global capital) in the face of the persistence of the metaphysical author-subject in the logic of intellectual property law encapsulates the explicitly political dimension of Potels critique. Clearly, he makes much of the irony of the fact that he was charged with sharing works which themselves critique both authorship and copyright. Indeed, the interplay of the semiotic content of the texts, Potels distributive remediation of them, and his defence of this action, is to a great extent the source of the singular quality of this case as a highly productive site of discursive reconstructions of the subject in relation to knowledge and the structures of power which control access to it. From a strictly legal perspective, given that questions of authorship (in metaphysical as well as practical terms) were excluded to the decision to dismiss the case, this point is arguably marginal if not moot; considered in isolation from Potels construction of the sites and response to the charge of piracy, the relationship between the case and the content of the texts is, it must be conceded, merely coincidental. I propose, however, that this reading fails to address the way in which the case has effectively been re-coded by Potel as a demonstration of the ethical limits of liberalism and, more vitally, as the locus of a re-fashioning of the social subjectivities of authors and readers.

22

In Potels deconstructive response to his case both the instability of the relationship between Derrida himself and the publishing industry, and the dialectical relation between sharing and the authors inheritance are brought to the fore. In his reference to Derridas reading of one of Paul Celans most enigmatic poems, Potel proposes a deeply personal relationship between the reader and author, one in which bearing the traces becomes not an act of expropriation, but one of love and dedication:
Die Welt ist fort, ich muss dich tragen, je dois te porter, il me faut te porter, debo, tengo, es necesario llevarte en brazos, cargarte, portarte, hacerme cargo. Este tragen no es apropiacin ni expropiacin, y responde a la delidad inel que nos ha sido exigida, llevar al otro como la madre lleva a su hijo por nacer, hacerse cargo de las cenizas pero para que la huella siga su trazo sin n 31 (2008: 15).

In these words Potel proposes a renegotiation of the relationship between the writing and reading subject (and, of course, the difusor who takes on the charge of keeping the author, in a sense, alive through their textual traces) in terms which cannot be equated with progressive demands for the reform of copyright law. Just as for Derrida, Celans text
[entrusts] itself to the care of the other, to our care, and put[s] itself secretly within the range of the other [and to] bear this poem is to put oneself within its grasp, to put it within the others grasp, to give it to the other to bear (Derrida 2005a: 159)

so too, for Potel, the reception of Derridas traces imposes an obligation of caring which, in opposition to EdMs claim of copyright, implies acts of dissemination and recirculation. While Philip claims that although
a pirate-standpoint epistemology might offer a seductive critique of corporate systems of power that seem to operate ever more oppressively through global networks of trade and legality, it would limit us to a simple, pre-Foucauldian model of power as transparently and monolithically repressive, (Philip 2005)

I argue that by taking seriously Potels deconstructive critique we can, in fact, arrive at a post-Foucauldian critique of not only the author function, but also of the discourses of power and
23

legitimation that shape the formation of cosmopolitan literary subjects in Argentina. Potels critique of the author function is perhaps at times naive, yet the relationship he posits between author and reader, mediated through the changing materiality of what Derrida terms the support of the text is clearly one which is more than a simplistic attempt to dispose of the ethical problems of copying by erasing the name of the author. Page and Screen
The page remains a screen It is primarily a gure of paper (of the book or codex), but the page nowadays continues, in many ways, and not only metonymically, to govern a large number of surfaces of inscription, even where the body of paper is no longer there in person, so to speak, thus continuing to haunt the computer screen and all internet navigations in voyages of all kinds. Even when we write on the computer, it is still with a view to the nal printing on paper, whether or not this takes place. (Derrida 2005b: 46)

It is crucial to my analysis that the digital text, along with the printed book, should be understood as one of the vehicles for cultural signicance and the creation of group identities to which, Appadurai and Breckenridge contend, every society appears to bring its own special history and traditions, its own cultural stamp, its own quirks and idiosyncrasies (1998: 5). Taking this statement as their point of departure, Povinelli and Gaonkar call for an engagement with
these forms as mobile vectors of cultural and social imaginaries [which does not rely] necessarily on methods of reading derived from the traditions of the book; or if [it retains methods] derived from the traditions of the book, [which can] to readapt those traditions so as to foreground the social life of the form rather than reading social life off of it. (2003: 387)

It is with this in mind that I wish to approach the problematics of materiality in Potels surprisingly political critique of the book form. As such I wish to both place his project in its historical context, and to foreground the critique he proposes of the highly restrictive social life of the paper book form contra the transformative possibilities of the digital text. Potel describes the excitement he felt at the time he started to create the sites in vivid terms:
24

El 22 de diciembre de 1999, naci Nietzsche en castellano, hace ya 10 aos; toda una vida en estos tiempos de mutaciones ultra aceleradas. No haba banda ancha, ni blogs, ni Facebook, ni siquiera Google, pero yo poda por primera vez acceder a una serie de contenidos que jams pens que podra disfrutar y para colmo gratis!La de Nietzsche fue seguida por Heidegger en castellano en 2000 y Derrida en castellano en 2001. 32 (2010: 45)

Perhaps remarkably, he does not discuss the birth of these sites in reference to the historic events taking place in Argentina over this period. The history of the piqueteros has been told elsewhere, and I certainly do not aim to connect Potels actions with those of activists who, in some cases, appropriated distinctly material goods in the course of the struggle (Aufheben 2003); however, I propose that the special history and traditions which these events inscribed in Argentine culture over this period constitute a vital dimension of the context in which his own critique of the traditions of the book must be read. The exclusion of the Argentine people from global society as a result of a nancial crisis was felt to be largely provoked by external forces, and the economic isolation brought about by the turmoil affected both the newly-precarious (if not outright proletarianized) middle classes who joined the pickets, and the domestic academic elite who were almost as effectively isolated from traditional global cultural networks as the nations poor. It is in this historical setting that we must consider Potels sometimes savage critique of the printed book as an essentially hegemonic technology of cultural transmission. Philosophers against Publishing Potel, at times, comes close to making a moral argument against print publishing in general, so forceful is the rhetoric he deploys in his characterization of the misers against philosophy, as he terms them in his 2010 interview on the case:
Los libros de losofa en papel, publicados por corporaciones internacionales, son caros y suelen tener una vida brevsima; se publican muy pocos ejemplares de los cuales llegan a nuestro pas an menos. 33 (2010: 46)

25

His characterisation of the materiality of philosophy books made of paper as culturally and spatially distant produced by anonymous international corporations and facing a perilous journey to the periphery contrasts acutely with his vision of the immanent possibilities of the digital text as an emancipatory technology of dissemination. Potel later posits the transformatory force of digitization as an ethical claim to a cultural inheritance which resists and transcends specication and institutionalization:
la web nos d la posibilidad de independizarnos de tutores y encargados y poder as escoger nosotros mismos nuestra herencia es algo que pone tan nerviosas a las corporaciones de los antiguos distribuidores de la cultura 34 (2010: 48).

The critique of the role of corporations in the dissemination of culture which characterises his discourse goes considerably further than any offered by Derrida himself. By highlighting the industrial quality of the paper book, Potel seeks to heighten the difference between author and publisher which, through the processes of the publishing industry, becomes obscured in the legal realm as shown so clearly in the incongruous status of Signature, Event, Context. Following Povinelli and Gaonkar, I read Potels critique of the book form as a strategic reguring of the status of the book in the Argentine social imaginary which, through the act of creating the site and populating it with Derridas work, immanently displaces the possibility of understanding his project through either the tradition of the book sensu stricto, or through an exegetic rather than ethnographically situated reading of these digital texts. In Potels rhetoric, the elimination of the trace of the book form from the culture of circulation is a rather more explicit goal than in Derridas own critique. He asks
Una vez identicada la naturaleza del libro como objeto industrial, el nombre libro electrnico, que hasta recin noms nos sonaba perfectamente natural, se vuelve muy disonante. Cmo puede ser electrnico un libro, si la esencia misma del libro es ser tangible, concreto, industrial, escaso? Por qu mantener la palabra libro en el nombre de algo que elimina al libro mismo de la ecuacin? 35

26

(2010: 96)

That Potel wishes to take the book out of e-book shows not only the depth of his disdain for print as a technology which, due to the inevitable scarcity of its output, produces inequality of access, but also the importance of the separation of the material and semiotic in his critique of copyright and the publishing industry. In doing so, he both strips the printed book of its highly invested auratic quality and emphasises the tendency of the (over)valuing of the presence of the tangible form of the book to reinforce hegemonic restrictions on access (a critique which clearly echoes Benjamins characterisation of mechanical reproducibility as at least a potentially liberatory force)36. For Potel, the computer screen is a support for the text which is freed from the regime of printing: his case can, I argue, best be seen as a moment in the continuing negotiation of the legal and ethical aporias, in Derridas terminology, experienced in the transition from the book as principle vector of literary culture to a post-printing era. Copyright and Censorship
No debemos imponer nuestra autoridad al texto que producimos y al mismo tiempo no debemos permitir que se le imponga una interpretacin que cierre toda interpretacin en un sentido nico. Pero este ejercicio de responsabilidad sobre lo dado, este tratar de evitar que se lo convierta en un presente envenenado, no es y no se debe confundir con el copyright, el paradjico derecho de copia, como si alguien pudiera ser dueo de la iterabilidad maqunica, esta pretensin atae a los que viven de vender libros de papel y es un problema de ellos, problema de corporaciones internacionales que dicultan nuestro derecho al archivo... algo debern cambiar las editoriales, algo debern incorporar de la Red, si no, la pura reaccin inmunitaria del nada con el otro, la pura defensa legal de unos derechos inecaces y divorciados de la justicia no los lleva ni los llevar a ningn sitio.37 (Potel, 2008; emphasis original)

If digital piracy genuinely threatens the mystical foundation of authority by exposing the dependence of the producers of an essentially material industrial product on a hegemonic logic of circulatory control, it is the repressive effects of the immanent threat of state violence (which un-

27

derlies every claim of copyright on the universities of the global South) that is perhaps the greatest threat, in Potels rhetoric, to the moral legitimacy of the neoliberal IP regime. Copyright law, as applied in this case, and as a restriction on the circulation of philosophy more generally, is by this reading nothing less than an exercise of censorship 38. As Derrida puts it,
The moment a discourse, even if it is not forbidden, cannot nd the conditions for an exposition or for an unlimited public discussion, one can speak of an effect of censorship, no matter how excessive this may seemCensorship exists as soon as certain forces (linked to powers of evaluation and to symbolic structures) simply limit the extent of a eld of study, the resonance or the propagation of a discourse. (Derrida 2004: 46-7, emphasis added)

It is the powers of evaluation andsymbolic structures of copyright a logic which, as we have seen, he rejects on a metaphysical as well as a political level that Potels critique seeks to undermine, to an extent not noted in other discourses of piracy, digital or otherwise. The right of the subject to freedom from censorship, while a fundamental tenet of liberalism is, as we have seen, entirely subordinate to the bourgeois logic of intellectual property in Argentine law. Thus Potels project arguably along with that of BiblioFYL should be understood as an attempt to re-make not only the position of the individual subject who shares culture (the difusor de losoa, as Potel terms himself), but also the institutions, real and imagined, through which such knowledge is carried and disseminated, and to reorient them with respect to the (neo)liberal order through the articulation of a new of ethics of responsibility. Conclusion: The University without Copyright As one Argentinian activist, writing about the BiblioFYL project, put it, digital technologies offer the chance to
acceder a cantidades de informacin inconcebibles apenas aos atrs, sino a informacin indiscriminada por parmetros como el pas de origen, el contexto ideolgico del autor o el lector, la religin, el sexo, la edad, o la identidad. 39 (Mizzoni, et al. 2010: 67)

28

I propose that we should understand the process of subject formation in which Potel is engaged as not merely the legitimation of the sharing of cultural resources, within the structures of the university, as a desperate response to economic exigencies. Rather, what he proposes can better be understood in terms of Derridas call for a University without conditions. Let us consider Derridas formulation of this University:
Je me rfre donc ici une universit qui serait ce qu'elle aurait toujours d tre ou prtendu reprsenter, c'est--dire, ds son principe, et en principe, une chose, une cause autonome, inconditionnellement libre dans son institution, dans sa parole, dans son criture, dans sa pense. Dans une pense, une criture, une parole qui ne seraient pas seulement des archives ou des productions de savoir, mais, loin de toute neutralit utopique, des uvres performatives. 40 (Derrida 2001: 33)

Unconditional freedom of speech and writing and, by extension, of both thought and copying are, as Derridas critique of copyright suggests and Potels experience illustrates, quite incompatible with the (neo)liberal regime. Here once again, Potels rhetoric of making ourselves independent of teachers has a more anarchic bent than Derridas more measured call for intellectual liberty within the precincts of the institutional university: in the cultural context of horizontalidad, the ethos of decentralisation and anti-hierarchical sociality which has been described in post-crisis Argentina (Sitrin 2006), Potel calls for an openness of access and circulation which erodes the boundaries between public educational institutionality and a more private practice of philosophy and cultural engagement. Insofar as the rivalrous nature, in economic terms, of the paper book tends to maintain what are now unbearably articial restrictions on access to the archive, it is clear that the ceding of the power to censor the circulation of philosophical discourses university to the industrialists of the publishing industry is the hegemonic formation which Potel seeks to challenge above all. Indeed, it is perhaps possible to see Potels entire project as a performative work of philosophy

29

in the sense Derrida calls for: one which, through the conjunction of the semiotic content of Derridas texts, the recoding of the materiality of the book and rearticulation of textuality and authorship in the digital age, and the contestation of the legitimacy of Potels remediation and diffusion of them, has brought a deconstructive critique of copyright out of the university and into the public sphere in Argentina. Both Potels decision to embark on his project of dfusion and his response to the charges brought against him have contributed to the development of a uniquely oriented culture of copying in Argentina. By emphasising the incompatibility between the liberal order of copyright (and, indeed, the liberal author function tout court) and intellectual freedom in the global South, Potel has both provided a radically embodied critique of the violence which always stands ready to enforce restrictions on the circulation of cultural goods. This position is one in which the pirateconsumer dichotomy is rendered irrelevant, and a new opposition between those who contribute to the spreading of culture, and those who inhibit it, is posited as the central problem of the politics of intellectual property. At the same time, Potel solicits from the reader as recipient of the gift of culture a profound commitment to both the text and its author. The stark choice presented to academics in Argentina and elsewhere in the global South to break the existing laws governing the reproduction of texts, or to be excluded from access to them is, following Potels deconstructive logic, an illusory opposition: copyright, as his case makes clear, has nothing to do with justice, at least as Derrida understands it. Accepting that to restrict the circulation of philosophical discourse within the university, or elsewhere, is nothing less than an act of censorship subjects copyright law to a uniquely acute critique. As Potels critique shows, the right to philosophy is one which is imperilled by copyright: in Argentina, at least, his case has re-asserted the right to cultural participation with remarkable force.

30

Figure 1

31

Figure 2

32

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Notes
1 A complete library in everyones home, a library which doesnt need translation or waiting; whose books can be lent to thousands at a time, and searched for and found in an instant.
2 Philip, in adopting the term bourgeois law in her discussion of the pirate function, cites Collier, Maurer and Suarez-Navaz:
We choose this term in order to call attention to the deep historical connection between the development of capitalism and the development of a legal system designed notas under feudalismto enforce Gods laws on earth but to enforce the rule of laws created by men for men. Although other scholars, particularly those in critical legal studies . . . have used terms such as liberalism or liberal legalism, we prefer the Soviet scholar Pashukanis term, bourgeois law, because it identies the primary creator and beneciary of law as an individual who owns property. . .. Moreover, the term bourgeois law encompasses such possible opposites of liberalism as conservatism, libertarianism, and socialist legalism, even as it includes variant traditions such as Common, Civil, and Socialist legal systems.

While the term bourgeois law and its cognates will be used occasionally here to denote instances where the productive value of intellectual properties is particularly salient, I will generally refer to the liberal regime in recognition of the signicance of this aspect of copyright in my analysis of what Coleman terms the transformations as well as continuities within liberal and Enlightenment ideals.

3 For seven years, Potel put online, free and without authorisation, complete versions of several of Jacques Derridas works, something which is harmful to the diffusion of his thought. 4 The paper was rst delivered at the Alliance Francaise, Buenos Aires on 20th October 2006. However, in the spirit of Potels wry commentary on the bibliographic primacy of print, the version referred to in the text is the one published in Por Amor a Derrida in 2008. 5 The police came in the middle of the night, banging on my door to check my address. A horrible situation: all the police said to me was youll know what this is about. 6 Anyone who publishes, sells or reproduces, by any medium or instrument, an unpublished work or a published one, without the authorisation of the author or rights holders. 7 The transformation of the original texts into a digital format by Potel, could be understood under the rubric of reproduction. 8 Without prejudice to that which does not follow in the same relation to an offering from the internet pages of the accused, the action of creating a new copy is produced when someone accesses the site and initiates the download of the digital le. 9 The insignicant damage which could result to the property of the owner of the work does not equate to the severity of the punishment of this repressive justice. 10 This law exists to protect cultural production. The Chamber maintains a continual action to defend intellectual property rights. Without intellectual property rights, the possibility of publishing would not exist. And, I believe, even less the possibility of intellectual production.

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11 The stimulus to creativity argument for copyright can be traced to the Statute of Anne, the law which inaugurated the modern regime of copyright when it was passed in 1709 (Davies 2002: 11-16) 12 What happened is a violation of culture as a human right. An obscene demonstration of the mechanisms of control, surveillance and punishment. 13 This organisation is closely aligned with the liberal creative commons movement, and is the equivalent of the US Free Software Foundation; as such, the adoption of what is, in the terms of mainstream discourse on the politics of copying, an anti-IP stance with respect to books is an unusual departure compared to the progressive/libertarian agenda of groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation. 14 http://www.encuentro.gov.ar/Event.aspx?Id=338 15 The problematics of copyright, the criminalisation of access to educational materials on the part of students and teachers, the new technologies which facilitate the circulation of knowledge. http://www.derechoaleer.org/2011/08/horacio-potel-en-canal-encuentro.html 16 Taringa!s motto is, signicantly, Intelligencia Compartida (Intelligence Shared): the site can be seen as another aspect of the culture of sharing which appears to be emerging in the country and of which Potel has become the far from unwilling intellectual gurehead. 17 In Argentina, its legal to upload les without rights. 18 Remember that sharing culture is not a crime, that culture is not a consumer good, and that it doesnt belong to anyone. 19 http://www.taringa.net/posts/info/10658142/En-Argentina_-es-legal-subir-archivos-sin-derechos.html 20 Resolutions 873723/20111 and 855.653/2009. 21 At the time of writing, the Pirate Party had just recorded signicant gains in regional elections in Germany. 22 Although it is not my main objective here, the way in which Derridas thought has come to inuence attitudes to copyright in Argentina through the Potel case has the potential to serve as the basis for a re-evaluation of Negris statement. 23 Potels republication can, in a conventional liberal analysis, not be justied as either fair use (as the works were available in their entirety for all, whether students, educators or others), even by recourse to Fichtes now surprising allowance for the work of translation (Biagiolis elegant complication of the cosmogeny of copyright notwithstanding). Furthermore, we should note that he was not the translator of the Spanish versions of Derridas texts which are available on the site.
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24 A public site for the dissemination of the traces of Jacques Derrida. 25 For in these texts, those which we refuse to call works, is the survival of Jacques Derrida, the place from where all his ghosts go out, the place where the infection, the medium of transmission of so many pursuing phantoms all called Jacques Derrida and none the same as another. 26 Potel is not alone, historically speaking, in presenting his work of difusin as distinct from that of mere piracy on the grounds that it is essential to maintaining the circulation of the cultural form in question. In some respects his defence is analogous to that of the home tapers of jazz recordings (in the early era of tape recorders) who, according to Johns, constructed their activities as a tactic of opposition to the hegemony of the music industry insofar as the business practices of the labels threatened the very survival of recordings:
a perception [emerged] among a small but dedicated community that the industry was hopelessly addicted to big business practices, and that those practices endangered the creation, circulation, and above all preservation of art. [Acionados] had made piracy an exercise in conservation, sanctied by the amateur virtues of dedication and disinterest. {Johns, 2009 #37: 435}

I read these amateur values as quintessentially liberal in the stress they place on, rstly, the right of individuals to a cultural heritage, broadly understood, and as a corollary their right to take steps to preserve this heritage, and second by the requirement that such an endeavour be motivated by the disinterested claims of aesthetics and archival rather than personal material gain. However, this practice cannot properly be understood as a challenge to the bourgeois law of copyright itself: rather, I understand this form of piracy as a consumption of last resort in which subjects who are denied the right to buy products they feel should be available, and who would prefer to purchase these recordings legally were they available, feel they have no option but to engage in a form of what might be termed cultural disobedience. The appeal to the liberal virtues of the amateur does not, I think, sit easily alongside Potels broader argument for the legitimacy of sharing cultural materials: in contrast to these amateur archivists, he adopts a position which, although in clear opposition to the publishing industry on a political, raises somewhat more profound theoretical questions about the legitimacy of the hegemonic logics of authorship and law. 27 Needless to say, to characterise these points as misreadings motivated by the desire to justify piracy would be to erase their discursive signicance in Potels project (in terms of both self-formation and his political agenda) and, furthermore, would be to engage in precisely the kind of exercise of closure that he, rightly following Derrida, so strongly critiques. As such I propose a generous reading of Potels texts, and have not presented challenges to his readings of Derrida in most instances.
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28 Derridas critique of Searle, whom he refashions as SARL, or Societe Anonyme a Responsibilit Limit (Anonymous Society with Limited Responsibility, a common French misinterpretation of the acronym SaRL, the equivalent of a public limited company), itself offers a devastating critique of the author function in relation to copyright. While this critique might well be applied in the case of Derridas claim of copyright to the essay discussed here, Potel does not do so, and therefore I will not consider it here. 29 Copyright; literally authors right. The French droit has, however, the dual sense of law and right; thus, the term, in a Derridean reading, invokes the suggestion of a law of the author. 30 Culture, knowledge, tradition, are not the work of "authors". It is curious that the same gentlemen who have nished with the enlightened ideas of the free and sovereign subject, to sell the subject attached to consumption, [thenceforth] appeal to the metaphysics of subjectivity when the time comes to look for more money. It is curious that they do so in this case, as both Heidegger and Derrida have opposed this idea of a creative subjectivity as the origin and cause of the Work or The Book. 31 The world has gone, I must carry you [German], I must carry you, I have to carry you [French], I ought to, I have to, it is necessary to lift you in my arms, carry you, bear you, make myself in charge. This carrying [tragen] is neither appropriation nor expropriation, and responds to the unfaithful delity which has been demanded of us, to take up the other as the mother bears her son to birth, to take charge of the ashes but so that the trace continues its line [trazo] without end. 32 On 22nd December 1999, Nietzsche in Spanish was born, ten years ago; a whole lifetime in these times of ultra-accelerated change. There was no broadband, no blogs, no Facebook, not even Google, but I was able for the rst time to access a series of content which I never thought I would be able to enjoy, and whats more, for free! The one for Nietzsche was followed by Heidegger in Spanish in 2000, and Derrida in Spanish in 2001. 33 Philosophy books on paper, published by international corporations, are expensive and tend to have a very short life: they are published in very short runs, of which an even smaller number reach our country. 34 The web gives us the possibility of making ourselves independent of tutors and ofcials, and to be able to chose our inheritance ourselves is something which makes the corporations, the old distributors of culture, nervous.

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35 Once the nature of the book has been identied as that of an industrial object, the name electronic book, which until just recently sounded perfectly natural to us, becomes highly dissonant. How can a book be electronic, if the very essence of the book is to be tangible, concrete, and scarce? Why keep the word book in the name of something which has eliminated the book itself from the equation? 36 In more explicitly Marxist terms, this discourse can also be seen a process of de-fetishization in which the commodity form of the book is stripped of the mystied qualities of both value and propriety within the bourgeois liberal order. 37 We should not impose our authority on the text which we produce, and at the same time we should not allow anyone to impose an interpretation which closes all interpretation in a single direction. But this exercise of responsibility over the gift, this is about preventing it from becoming a poisoned present, and must not be confused with copyright the paradoxical right of copy, as if someone could be the master of machinic iterability, this pretension is the business (atae) of those who live by selling paper books and is a problem for them, a problem for the international corporations which obstruct (dicultan) our access to the archive; it is they who need to nd a way to survive, and this will certainly happen by some autoimmune mechanism, the publishers will have to change something, they will have to incorporate something of the Web, if not, the pure immune reaction of nothing against the Other, the pure legal defence of some rights that are ineffective and divorced from justice has not and will not get us anywhere. 38 Here Derrida follows an explicitly Enlightenment tradition: The Kantian denition of censorship is simple: a critique that has force (Gewalt) at its disposal. Pure force in itself does not censor and, moreover, would not apply to discourses or texts in general. Nor does a critique without power censor. Evoking force, Kant is obviously thinking of a political force linked to the power of the State. Gewalt is legal force. (Derrida 2004: 48) 39 [Not just] access to quantities of information which were inconceivable only a few years ago, but to information without discrimination on the grounds of country of origin, the ideological context of the author or reader, religion, sex, age or identity. 40 So I refer to a university which would be everything that it always should have been, or pretended to represent, that is to say, from its principle, and in principle, a thing, an autonomous cause, unconditionally free in its institution, its speech, its writing, its thought. In its thought, a writing, a speech which would not only be archives or productions of knowledge, but, far from any utopian neutrality, performative works.

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41 It seems to be the dream of many digital journals to take the step to paper, to the real world and this step is generally announced with reworks and cymbals like a birth, no matter that the real journal has a run of 50 copies and ends up stuck in a real library where no-one will see it, whereas its virtual sister will be consulted by 5000 readers a day. And very likely, a great number of these users, when the time comes to cite these texts as precedents, will invent a paper book, a virtual phantasm that has never been seen.

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