Introduction: Of Biodeconstruction (Part I)

Of Biodeconstruction is an invitation to an ongoing event, one that "precedes" even Jacques Derrida's announcement that "the trace is the opening of the first exteriority in general, the enigmatic relationship of the living to its other" (Of Grammatology 75), and one that speculates on the day deconstruction's "own historico-metaphysical character is … exposed" (9). The term biodeconstruction can be understood to include not only the already extensive writings about deconstruction and biopolitics, autoimmunity, nature-culture, the body, pharmakon, hospitality, death, vitalism, the question of the animal, survival, posthumanism, and the philosophy of life, but also a more recent emergence just as deconstruction is perhaps reaching its historical limits: for Catherine Malabou and others, contemporary biology brings deconstruction to these limits. This tension, if it is one, concerns in general the relation between philosophy and positivist-empirical science and in particular the critique of Derrida's mobilization of biological discourses that deploy genetic, informatic, and cybernetic paradigms.

In the opening section of his 1967 book Of Grammatology, Derrida asserts: "today the biologist speaks of writing and of pro-gram for the most elementary processes of information within the living cell. And, finally, whether it has essential limits or not, the entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be the field of writing" (9). This mobilization both supports Derrida's signature elaboration of arche-writing and the trace as "prior" to writing in the narrow sense—a "priority" that extends beyond the human being, the living, and the animate—and at the same time draws attention to the vestigial logocentrism of genetic and cybernetic discourses:

To suppose that the theory of cybernetics can dislodge by itself all the metaphysical concepts—all the way to concepts of soul, of life, of value, of choice, of memory—which until recently served to separate the machine from man, it must conserve, until its own historico-metaphysical belonging is also denounced, the notion of writing, trace, grammè [written mark], or grapheme.

(9)

Cybernetics, it appears, does not overturn certain metaphysical conceptions of human and animal being, not only because it has not evaluated the way in which arche-writing and the trace are the conditions of its own (im)possibility, but also because it cannot make legible the critical difference, or better, the différance, between writing and arche-writing, code and trace. If Derrida directs us to understand "the history of life—of what we here call différance—as the history of the grammè" (91) or to see that "cybernetics is itself intelligible only in terms of a history of the possibilities of the trace as the unity of a double movement of protention and retention" (84), this directive occurs, perhaps, not so much as a zany repositioning of genetics and cybernetics within the history of deconstruction, but as the troubling dehiscence in play and at work in any reading or writing. And yet: just as we enter the postgenomic era, which puts into question the informatic paradigm in genetics, so too might we repose Derrida's question concerning the historico-metaphysical limits of arche-writing and the trace.

Although biodeconstruction has come into its own in recent conferences, articles, and books, just as the linguistic paradigm in genetics has run its course—or, at least, has been challenged by epigenetics, systems theory, and research into the plasticity of the genome—Derrida's engagement with biology, the life sciences, and the philosophy of life dates back to his earliest publications. For instance, in the 1963 Critique article "Force et signification," he discusses epigenesis and preformationism as part of his critique of structuralism: we have here, avant la lettre, a preemptive strike against reified or formalist misreadings of Derrida's emerging concept of writing—which might include "genetic writing," given his familiarity with François Jacob and Jacques Monod's 1961 article, "Genetic regulatory mechanisms in the synthesis of proteins," which likens the workings of genetic material to cybernetic controls and linguistic operations. Derrida's early books—Speech and Phenomenon, Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference—developed his signature concepts of arche-writing, trace, and différance alongside his critique of the living presence...