The Ethics of Technological Effects: Derrida and Stiegler

Abstract

Put very simply the reading strategy which Derrida pursues in Spectres of Marx attempts to expound the internal logic of historical materialism (the primacy of the economic base, use value, organic labour and class identity), and to configure the possibility of revolutionary politics around the spectral transformations by which capital has expanded its performative regime. This strategy has a long history in Derrida’s writing, and so I propose to look briefly at what has become its canonical application: the reading of Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages¹ in Of Grammatology. There is in Rousseau’s account of the birth of society a moment at which humanity hangs between the natural and the social; a time before historical time when human beings were both naturally desirous and freely social and when the law proscribing incest was present but not felt as a restraint upon an uncorrupted human nature. The essence of this moment is narrated by Rousseau in his account of the festival (fâte); the gathering of freely desirous human beings which has yet to require the law that it has, never the less, founded. Derrida’s argument is that this account of the origin of society is contradictory; for it posits the prescription of incest as that which is present in and absent from the founding configuration of language and desire. The law, in other words, has to have been present in order for ‘incest’ to be named and proscribed, but has to have been absent from the free expression of desire which brings forth the ‘golden age’ of pre-technological civilization (Derrida, 1976: 242–68).