McCoy: Reticulation as a 'writing from out of the death of the father'

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I’ve always been struck by this phrase ‘from out of’ in the translation. Clunky, probably infelicitous, it seems to convey a prepositional vector that is not easily expressed, which I feel is rather provocative in its implicit deflation of the exteriority of the ‘out of’ at the hands of the ‘from’. There is a subtle but powerful qualification of the outside when it is immediately mapped back onto its origin. The outside comes to appear as a place the outsider/innovator never really left.¹

I think, too, about the way that the ‘father’, is an ideal, allegorical figure. It is a certain kind of ‘play’ that transpires between the newcomer and history, a historicity that inheres behind the back of the revolutionary, that folds or flattens everything back and in upon that from which it endeavored to escape. Or, that innovation is nothing more (but also nothing less) than creative citation — that originality is the artifact of creative citation.²

This familiar, familial line, is picked up by Derrida in Archive Fever and mapped onto Yerushalmi’s reading of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism. It is an elaboration of the idea, already explicit in the earlier text, that that which issues ‘from out of the Father’ applies equally to His remains, the works left behind, which beckon and defy us to move beyond, knowing full-well that no one surpasses ‘daddy’ if simply because of those trauma bonds that comprise the very sinews of his text. Far from existing in spite of this fact, it is because the father is, historically at least, a piece of shit, that his works prove timeless classics: because they are, de facto and de jure, insurpassable from the within the consciousness that regards them as something to be surpassed in the first place.

Insurpassable because these are works of evil in the more technical, Nietzschean sense.³ They are guided by laws that are irreconcilable with what the antecedent is capable of regarding as ‘good’ and, hence, structurally insurpassable an unhealable trauma by dint of the fact that it is regarded as something worthy of being surpassed, honored despite being critiqued, picked at for any number of reasons, from any number of perspectives. In brief, you can only be better than those who believe in betterment, you cannot be better than ‘the worst’ because the worst, that which is truly, that is, allegorically, that which ruffles the feathers of history, is not something that exists ‘in’ history but, rather, something that ripples through it as (un)predictably as the tides.

There is something surreal and perhaps a little traumatizing about writing ‘from out of’ an archive, a database such as this, where the finest granules of history do not slip conveniently from one’s mind or through one’s fingers but, rather, fill every crack and crevice, swallowing one up like quicksand. The reticulum is a medium in which one has lost that power of creative destruction — the active forgetting, that Nietzsche thinks is necessary “for life” (life!). One might easily find one’s self flattened, desiccated, deprived of that mana of originality for want of which the creative ego struggles to get out of bed in the morning. It is to feel one’s self, one’s word, mummified by the text of the Other — the father that must have existed so that we can continue to measure ourselves by his negation, so long as his absence, his death, was, in fact, a negation, determinate and determinable, terminable, not interminable. Or, rather, that his ‘life’ was something tangible, historical or negatable from the start and not a stillbirth, an originary afterlife, an axiom so fundamental that even the ‘greatest’ of men gets a little hysterical when one even mentions the idea of proving it.

There’s something about this home-spun reticulum — this private reading room with its big bay windows overlooking all of history — that feels more uncanny even than our first encounter with the web, if we’re ancient enough to recall such things. That feeling of travelling through the night by the glow of a CRT and a meager thread of copper⁴ through that vast and rising sea of everything one could ever want to know. What exactly this difference is something I will not pursue here. Perhaps I may pick it up later. I can return here, to this exact juncture, this exact line, nearly instantaneously or by retracing its citational tissue. More than likely though, I will forget about it and end up tripping over it down the line. Perhaps that’s it: the way one can’t write for any length of time here, in this way and in this medium, without tripping over everything everyone’s already said.

Footnotes

1. Which is, I realize, a truism of the likes of which one may find in the Cliff Notes to Derrida, poststructuralism, postmodernity, etc. ↩

2. Many (including myself) have said essentially this. Kant, Borges, Barth, Bush, Lessig… the list runs on. It could be seen as a slightly more critical take on Lessig’s well-known but, for me, rather vanilla formulation of remix culture: ‘everyone tuning in and singing the songs of the day’ (or what was that incredibly hokey, lame ass quote he keeps coming back to?).x18.addendum It’s actually not that hokey, I see why it stuck in my memory ↩

3. See On the Genealogy of Morals, On Truth and Lie in a Super-Moral Sense, etc. ↩

4. None of that fiber optic shit we got now ↩