Signatures of Life: Thinking the Logos of Life After Biodeconstruction

Despite or, perhaps, thanks to its supposed break with the philosophical tradition, biological discourse risks repeating and thus confirming the metaphysical matrix that has grounded and organized the definition of the essence of life across our tradition …

—Vitale, Biodeconstruction

Laying out a latent thread in Derrida's writings, Biodecontruction thematizes what is at stake in maintaining the scientific approach to understanding "life" through the discourse of the material science of biology and, at the same time, on the front of "consciousness" or the human psyche. Vitale takes his reader through Derrida's texts, from the first commentaries on Husserl to the detailed engagement with psychoanalysis, uncovering the moments in which he finds Derrida's formulations imply an explanation for what, despite the greatest successes of modern science, still remains humanity's most unanswerable question, "what is life?" No doubt the attempt is complicated by the very rules of its engagement, by the consideration that the understandings of each epistēme¹—"science" and/or "philosophy"—can only ever be grasped conditionally, as fractured and incomplete. Biodeconstruction outlines how, after deconstruction, the dynamic of nature that is "life" can no longer continue to be thought of as remaining solely within the domain of science, cloistered under the rubric of the "biological." The reading of the making "enigmatic what one thinks one understands," of the "deconstruction of presence," of "the deconstruction of consciousness" (Derrida 1997, 70) that organizes Biodeconstruction thus opens a horizon from which to reexamine a set of questions that emerge from the juncture of the scientific understanding of the natural processes of living things and the philosophy of nature in the wake of deconstruction.

To consider the "after" of Biodeconstruction then is to reckon with a double wake. The first, the irreducibility of deconstruction from any attempt to generate sense or meaning is a legacy that critical philosophy and literary studies has been contending with since at least 1967 and will continue to grapple with well into the twenty-first century. Biodecontruction attests to this. The second is to account for the explicit rendering of the relevance of Derrida's "deconstruction" of the philosophical tradition of metaphysics, from his introduction to The Origin of Geometry (Derrida 1989) through the seminar La vie la mort (Derrida n.d.) to Rogues (Derrida 2005), to the development of a knowledge of "life." "After" Biodeconstruction Derrida's distinctions—the law of iterability and the clarification of meaning as given by the operation of arche-writing and the structure of différance—are inescapably tethered to the formal understandings of the processes of nature and, I would add, to the discourse "biology" that renders these processes as scientific². Vitale writes:

the aim of Derrida's analysis is clear: the definition of the notion of programme, as it is formulated by Jacob, imported by cybernetics and transplanted at the heart of the living, is unconsciously overdetermined by the programme of metaphysics, with its fundamental logocentric and humanistic legacy …

(Vitale 2018a, 89)

The implications of Biodeconstruction then must be considered on several fronts: (1) on the relation between the processes of nature as understood through the discourse of biology and the attempt to understand conscious life both in the fields of psychology and phenomenology; (2) on the scientific (empirical) understanding of the process of nature "biology," which remains the established dominant narrative of the "natural" process of living; and (3) on the oeuvre of deconstruction and its legacy. Vitale's careful rendering of Derrida's writings on "the programme," Freud, and the seminar, La vie la mort, demonstrates how inseparable these three elements are from one another:

The tropes of writing—analogies, metaphors, images, and so forth—through which it is possible to describe and explain the text as well as the living, the one in relation with the other, are not mere illustrations of pedagogical nature, external to so-called scientific discourse, but contribute to the construction of that discourse by orienting the latter and the sense given to the text and the living

(Vitale 2018a, 111).

When Vitale brings Derrida's demonstration...