Schizoanalysis 1: Infancy, Ancestrality, and the Non-Signifier

A child is born into language, and is from the outset a speech-being, a speaking thing. The child is not without language, and does not have to be led to language, taught to acquire language, nor does it have already the innate capacity for language that has only to be activated. The child is already a speaking thing, not by virtue of speaking or being able to speak, but by already being claimed by language and in language, by belonging in language, having a place there for it. The name, but also the very noun - a child, a life - impregnates language with the child, and language will carry it to term, developing it in all of its unique predicability.

The paradox is that the child already belongs to and in language, it is already spoken of and awaited as the absent partner of a conversation. The child does not acquire language, we do not acquire language: language has already acquired us from birth. The trauma of this claim of language on the child is that there is no opportunity, no possibility of the pure incarnation of biological life, an unqualified, bare life; life is qualified from its outset, and biological life is overdetermined from the instant of conception by symbolic life, as its mere occasional cause and support.

Ancestrality, as the dimension of an existence unqualified by givenness in language, unfettered by the trappings of the symbolic, is nonetheless held hostage by its pre-appropriation in language. Yet we can say that the ancestrality of a life is, if not pre-given and auto-donated, certainly taken, taken over by and taken over to language, it is stolen, mis-taken and held inappropriately. It inheres in language as the inappropriate, the inappropriateness of language. Not the inadequateness of a representation to its object, but the fact that language now possesses the ancestral as its property, and yet it is not properly of language, it is wrongly taken by language or taken to be of language.

As a dimension not attributable to a relation to language, but that dimension existing absolutely independently of such relation, radically indifferent to such a relation, foreclosed to language, radically left out of and even inexistent for language, it would seem contradictory to call it a 'property' of language, even if this is an illegitimate propriety, a theft. Yet this means precisely that the foreclosure of the ancestral necessary for langauge nonetheless inheres negatively in language, as a hole in the very fabric of the symbolic (differential relations between signifiers). The ancestral inheres in language, but this inherence must be enacted through the circulation of some non-signifier, a symbol deprived of any possible signfying relation (direction toward a concept - signified - even if it be indeterminate or displaced), purely embodying the hole in this fabric, not only 'standing in for it' but enacting it. The hole is not something that cannot be signified by any signifier, but rather, a signifier that cannot signify anything, nor even appear to signify anything. The non-signifier simply explicates this hole of the foreclosure that is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition of the symbolic, radically psychoticizing the symbolic itself. It is the signifier of the fact that it is not a signifier, a kind of symbolic ouroboros.

The ancestral dimension of life, when seized upon by the symbolic, interpellated by it, decided upon by it, devolves into creaturely life (Santner), that life held in exception in law, subject to the force-of-law but unqualified by law. This is, we might say, the ancestral as such, distinct from the ancestral itself (Brassier, Laurelle). What law/language cannot speak to is the indistinction itself, it cannot think the creature/ancestor without its distinction and separation from the legible/legitimate. In other words, the ancestral itself is posited as unthinkable, only thinkable as such, that is, as distinct from the symbolic. It cannot think the radical expropiation undergone here: the ancestral no longer has a proper owner, being stolen and now owned inappropriately by language. We directly posit this necessary expropriation, this foreclosure of propriety to language. This is not to say that there is a proper being of the ancestral apart from language - this is the very decisional operation of language. Rather, what we are saying is that propriety itself is dependent upon determination by langauge, and at the same time the ancestral is necessarily determined in langauage by expropriation, determined as inappropriate.

This expropriation or foreclosure to language of the ancestral is enacted in language through the circulation of non-signifiers, or a-signifying signs that are not signifiers of a loss, even of something that exists qua signified/signifiable only as lost (the signified lost-object is the ancestral itself, the signifier of loss the ancestral as such); rather, the (non)-signifier is directly the loss itself, it embodies the foreclosure of the ancestral, and the hole this leaves in the symbolic, or rather, it enacts them, it brings them into (linguistic) being. This enacting of foreclosure, refusing to forget/overlook it and retaining it as unforgotten, repeating the founding decision of a linguistic social bond and recovering it from abandonment in an eternal past - this is the elementary task of schizoanalysis as an applied non-philosophy. Schizoanalysis accomplishes this task through the proliferation and circulation of non-signifiers or a-signifying signs.

We should see how, in the infant's appropriation by language, we nonetheless can identify a dimension of ancestral time, the time of an absolute anteriority, a time foreclosed to thought. We can take here as our model what Giorgio Agamben calls, in The Time that Remains, operational time. If we only ever experience time as schematized and organized into a past, present, and future, operational time is precisely the time it takes to apply this schema to intuition and hence experience time as such. Because this time is necessarily anterior to schematic time, it is foreclosed to schematic time, but nonetheless inheres negatively within it. The infant, who exists only as already symbolized, nonetheless is submitted to the operation of symbolization, and hence embodies a residual anteriority to the symbolic schematism. This is not pre-symbolic any more than operational time is pre-temporal. It is rather the symbolic itself as separated-without-separation from the symbolic schematized as such, which is to say, in thought.

Here we have, directly embodied in the infant (though negatively embodied), the ancestral dimension of language - the hieroglyph. This is a sign that acts a cipher, a code, but which obscures not some hidden content, but the very fact that nothing is hidden. It is a cipher of a cipher, a sign that disguises the very fact that it is a sign, or disguises the fact that it says anything (or nothing). This is a ruin of language, an artifact, a language without any connection to its ability to communicate. This hieroglyphic character is the original character of infant-speech, which only secondarily gives way to communication. Rather, the infant says language itself, as a pure impartibility without object. It is this character that we seek to recover through the use of the non-signifier, or the transfiguration of signifiers into non-signifiers.

For Example

Para-ontology. This is the methodological/epistemological basis of Giorgio Agamben's research, which weaves through fields as diverse as juridical theory, poetics, philosophy, and theology. More than that, it is the orientation of thought regarding itself, the thought of thought or the thought of the power of thought, thought to the second power, it is the meta-thought that thereby, paradoxically, seizes upon the being without thought, outside of thought and without relation to its being-in thought or being-thought. The recent trend in ontology of 'speculative realism' (see the excellent post by Nick of The Accursed Share, "On Contemporary Materialism", and his new collaborative blog devoted to the topic, Speculative Heresy) primarily concerns itself with this paradox - how can thought think that which has no relation to thought, that which cannot be thought, that which must remain outside of thought? I would like to hear how Agamben's para-ontological approach to the problem relates to that of the speculative realism.

To expose this approach, we need only refer to Agamben's definition of paradigm, or example. The lecture "What is a Paradigm?" is available in video on Youtube here, and transcribed by the EGS here. Anyone familiar with Agamben's lauded work on the juridical and politico-theological concept of exception will recognize it as an 'inclusive exclusion', an operation by which the outside of law, that which is excluded from the domain of law - bare life, without political qualification - is nonetheless included in law through this very operation, in which the sovereign declares the very point where the law is suspended, that is, the state of exception. The outside of law becomes part of the law's functioning, the source of its consistency, as it is able to rule over not only its own domain, but also over the operation defining its domain against its outside.

The example or paradigm functions in an opposite way, and hence has the contrary function of 'deactivating' law within itself. "If we define the exception as an inclusive exclusion, in which something is included by means of its exclusion, the example functions as an exclusive inclusion. Something is excluded by means of its very inclusion." What does this mean? An example is a part of a set, one particular member of a general category, or instance of a universal concept. And yet, as an example, it does not obey the law defining its set, it does not function according to this law, but rather, it indicates or exemplifies this law, and in doing so, stands outside of the normal set.

To demonstrate this, Agamben cites the example of performativity. A performative statement, such as "I swear...", is one which does not refer to given state of affairs, but creates a new state of affairs in its very utterance. This statement creates a 'promise' that did not exist before its declaration. Yet it is evident that in this case, as an example, the utterance "I swear..." did not actually perform this function, Agamben did not actually swear or promise anything. Hence, the rule does not apply to this statement as an example, as it would to a normal case of swearing. Yet the utterance must still be included in the category of performatives, it is still a member of the set. As an example, it stands beside the set, steps outside of it, but must still be a member in order to properly function as an example. Quoting Agamben:

What an example shows is its belonging to a class, but for this very reason, it steps out of this class at the very moment in which it exhibits and defines it. Showing its belonging to a class, it steps out from it and is excluded. So, does the rule apply to the example? It’s very difficult to answer. The answer is not easy since the rule applies to the example only as a normal case and not as an example. The example is excluded from the normal case not because it does not belong to it but because it exhibits its own belonging to it.

What the example shows is not the rule or normal function of the rule, but rather, its shows, exhibits, exposes, its very membership in its class, its submission or subjection to a rule, the force of the rule's application without actually applying the rule. It is the force-of-law subtracted from the actual law. And in so exposing this force, it deactivates the law, subtracting itself from law. It would be a fruitful course of research to compare the split between law and its force in the two modalities of exception and example, and how this bears on the debate between Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin, a debate that so often surfaces in Agamben's work.

In any case, as Agamben so often reminds us, his research is not simply confined to the given field of juridical theory, political philosophy, theology, or whatever, but is genuinely ontological, using these cases to expose the being of law, the being of politics, and so on. So let us return to the question of thought and its relation to being, to a being outside of thought. This is the very problem that Kant insists upon as the new ground of a critical philosophy. For a para-ontology, which is concerned with the exemplary being, the being that, in-itself, steps outside itself and deactivates itself, the problem is reoriented. It is no longer, 'how do we think a being which cannot be thought, which is not in-thought, but in-itself?' Rather, the thought of this being must become the example of this being, it must become the stepping-outside-itself of being in-itself. Thought must become no more than the outside of thought, and that most intimate outside, that alterity of a being that, in-itself, is no longer its own, deactivating itself. Thought of a being-outside-of-thought, thought as being-outside-of..., is that of a being in-and-not-itself, exclusively included in itself, that most intimate outside.

(Notes for research: Derrida's intimate Other, Lacan's ex-timacy, spectulative realism, Deleuze and Guattari's 'thinking the unthought' in What is Philosophy?...)