The Scandal of Thought

Last night in class, I asked you to think about three “scandals” or “crises” that Jacques Derrida discusses in Part II of Of Grammatology: motherhood, masturbation, and Levi-Strauss’ writing lesson.

First, what do I mean by “scandal?” Consider Derrida’s reading of Rousseau’s thinking about the child:

Childhood is the first manifestation of the deficiency which, in Nature, calls for substitution. Pedagogy illuminates perhaps more crudely the paradox of the supplement. How is a natural weakness possible? How can Nature ask for forces that it does not furnish? How is a child possible in general?

Derrida goes on to note about [Rousseau’s] thought:

Without childhood, no supplement would ever appear in Nature . . . The supplement will always be moving the tongue or acting through the hands of others. In it everything is brought together: progress as the possibility of perversion, regression toward an evil that is not natural and that adheres to the power of substitution that permits us to absent ourselves and act by proxy, through representation, through the hands of others. Through the written. This substitution always has the form of a sign. The scandal is that the sign, the image, or the representer, become forces and make “the world move.”

That is, the scandal of childhood happens when the child--naturally weak; that is: lacking--initiates a chain whereby the child learns to scorn nature. That is, by using his own weakness to manipulate and control others. Nature furnishes her own corruption. Within the western metaphysical enclosure, this is a scandal--a thought that Reason forbids us to think (and not because it is irrational, but because it escapes the rational/irrational binary!).

In what follows, I will attempt, in relatively plain language, to describe what I think Derrida locates as the crisis for thought in each of the three areas we examined last night. Please compare your own thoughts to my own!

The scandal of motherhood. The scandal of motherhood is that the mother is never fully present. Is there any image of fuller presence than that of the child at the mother’s breast? Infant-mother, not yet, at the least in the eyes of the child, two distinct beings. 

Yet in the Oedipal drama, it is the Father who comes to “possess” the mother, interrupting the mother-child relationship, and bringing the order  of the law (of language, of prohibition). If the mother becomes pregnant again, the infant is “replaced” at the breast by brother or sister. Even if there are no more siblings, every child is nonetheless weaned. The crisis of substitution. 

And of course, the notion of the mother’s full presence is itself a fiction, a masculine phantasy. Mothers always have other things on their mind in addition to their children (and thankfully so!). Mothers are articulated within chains of signification that go beyond anything the man/child may do to try and “fix” or “capture” her.

The scandal of masturbation. The scandal of masturbation is that our spouses, our partners, are never fully present to us. 

In masturbation, we attempt to “possess” the other through appropriation of their image. This is what bothered Rousseau so much (yet clearly intrigued him as well). We refuse the thing itself for a substitute experience of it. 

But of course, there is no “thing itself” to possess. Chains of signification. Ultimately, the crisis of masturbation is that we are unable to think the other’s pleasure, unable to integrate the pleasure of the other into our own pleasure. 

The scandal of Levi-Strauss’ writing lesson. The scandal of the writing lesson is that there are no innocent cultures, no golden eras to which we can return. The scandal of the writing lesson is that power has always already traversed through every society, that there is no community founded upon a contract of radical equality.

Levi-Strauss attempts to paint a picture where a corrupt “west” brings writing to a “colonial other.” This writing, as does the road and the telegraph wire which are its supposed correlates, are meant to signify the coming destruction of an innocent and unsuspecting interior by a corrupting exterior force.

Yet these societies that Levi-Strauss wishes to valorize are themselves written--such societies, such cultures, indeed, all cultures, are arche-written, they are articulated, they are literate. The scandal is that all culture, all social groups, are founded by means of an exclusion (I am not you, you are not me). Levi-Strauss is guilty of a reverse ethnocentrism.

In each of these examples, we see that the origin is itself derived from something else--a lack, a moment of exclusion, an inability.  One wishes to go back from the supplement to the source: one must recognize that there is a supplement at the source. Can thought extricate itself from reliance upon sources, upon representations, upon Truth as a notion of correspondence between a presence and a sign? That is what Derrida wishes us to consider.