Sailing by the Stars: Constellations in the Space of Thought

Auch die sternische Verbindung trügt.Doch uns freue eine Weile nunder Figur zu glauben. Das genügt.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonette an Orpheus, XI.

I.

In a footnote to his early essay "Force and Signification" from 1963, Jacques Derrida considered the contemporary vogue for the notion of "structure" in the following terms. "In order to assess the deep necessity that underlies the undeniable phenomenon of fashion, one must proceed initially by the 'negative path,'—the choice of the word is initially a—structural, of course—ensemble of exclusions. To know why one says 'structure' is to know why one ceases to say eidos, 'essence,' 'form,' Gestalt, 'collection,' 'composition,' 'complex,' 'construction,' 'correlation,' 'totality,' 'idea,' 'organism,' 'state,' 'system,' etc. One must understand why each of these words revealed itself to be insufficient, but also why the concept of structure continued to borrow certain implicit meanings from them and allows itself to be inhabited by them."¹

Though Derrida has conceded the relevance of the term "structure," a term that, particularly in its contrast with "genesis," has a central importance for this phenomenological phase of his theoretical career, the "negative path" of the footnote that passes through this remarkable chain of substitutions, the Greek transliterated, the German italicized, the French (original, here translated) in quotation marks, calls into question the ultimate adequacy of any theoretical term. The metaphor of a path, the notion of revealed insufficiency, the suggestion of continued borrowing all lend to what might at first be understood as a synchronic differential paradigm an implicitly diachronic dimension. Not that the series as such is to be understood as a chronological or even logical sequence; what substitutes for what, when, and why, this is all left indeterminate by the path, surrendered to the closing "et cetera" and the invisible principle toward which it gestures. One might say this indeterminacy is its "negative" character. And yet the ideal of knowledge proposed here, an ideal in which why one says one thing and why one does not say another both converge in a decision, is exposed to an irreducible historicity. The renunciation that jettisons these alternative philosophemes in favor of "structure" does not simply cast them into oblivion but relegates them to a partially superseded history of prior statements. The choice in favor of "structure" is an historical choice, and draws its significance from its contrast and continuity with the entire historical tradition within which it occurs.

The striking heterogeneity of these terms, in which the inclusion of Gestalt, organism, state seems designed to interfere with any straightforward reduction of the chain to the Husserlian tradition from which Derrida is emerging, raises the question of what encompassing tradition might be at stake in the choice. If eidos, essence, form, construction, complex, system, totality and idea all seem to echo Husserl's analyses, none of them could be called uniquely Husserlian coinages, and the absence of such terms as "monad" or "Existenzial," indigenous to particular philosophies, reinforces the sense that this path traverses nothing less than the anonymous terrain of western philosophical reflection. But at this level of generality, how are we to understand the "et cetera" that gestures toward that terrain? What else does it include, and in particular, could we locate within it the word that interests us here, and that is conspicuously absent from Derrida's list? What sort of a philosopheme is "constellation," and what relation does it have to the quasi-synonyms for "structure" that Derrida identifies? Could we call this series itself a constellation? And if we did, to what would we have committed ourselves?

As an expository term, the word "constellation" serves to hold a set of disparate elements provisionally in place, without attributing to their assembly or conjunction any positive meaning. When we speak of a "constellation" of factors or a "constellation" of texts, we imply merely their simultaneous presence for reflection in some context we intend to illuminate, but the scientific anachronism of the term serves to suspend any prior reasonable characterization of that context. If the meaning of "constellation" in a theoretical context is...