Scott on Wood

presented at the Vanderbilt Philosophy Colloquium, September 24 2004

As I hope many of you have discovered, a conversation with David Wood can be a memorable experience with lasting, sometimes interruptive impact. I remember the specific settings of talks with him, not because the surroundings were exceptional but because the intensity of our engagement gave indelibility to its site. Those occasions have a common aspect in my experience: a drawing movement into a conversation that feels open and exploratory with shifting boundaries and a sense of new and undetermined territory. At first in these engagements I am tempted to squint as though I were being drawn with increasing velocity into a space that can't quite see. Not so much like driving at night and attempting to see in advance of my headlights as like having a new region open up before me with things coming into view that I haven't seen before. David's imaginative thought often draws me into such regions, and draws with a peculiar kind of force that does not require conformity or concession or agreement so much as it provides an impetus to play with options, to consider alternatives to favored concepts, and, if truth be told, to break a few rules of good sense and see if something usually obscure comes more clearly in view.

I remember one conversation we had on translation. We talked about carrying over, carrying away, tradition, repetition and replacement, reading and remembering. We began looking up words and their histories, words that speak of "trans-" —transmute, for example, (change from one form or substance to another) transform (metamorphose), transcend (to cross over or ascend beyond), transgress (to go beyond limits, to overpass boundaries, to break or violate a command, such as transgressing the limits of forms and meanings of a language in translating it), transient (ephemeral, passing beyond itself, which seems to describe the act of translating). In the process we came full circle to the word, translate, which is a translation of the Latin transferre. Transferre is a translation of the Greek, Metaphero. These three words may be translated as meaning to carry across an interval or divide, to transfer something, to move it to a difference place or to move it definitively into a different being — something that is translated, whether a word or a person, never remains unchanged. Translating persistently and strangely opens up differences in efforts to establish sameness of meaning. It brings with it slippage and departure as well as communication. And usually if people know what is being translated, there is a sense of loss in translated presentation. We wondered in the midst of thinking of these things how our thinking of translation is itself a translational event, an event that carries over and communicates more than a repetition, one that communicates, perhaps, something untranslatable, like transferring a Greek text into English does on good translation days.

I face a similar situation now as I address David's book. With all of its interest in liminal interrogations, dangerous intersections, and unlimited responsibility, his book is about experience as it carries over into ways of thinking that occur in the impact of Heidegger's work. It is a regional study in the sense that it focuses on a specific region of experience and thinking in the 20th century. It makes no claim to universality and shows no intention to elevate its region over other philosophical regions and traditions. If you have no interest in Heidegger and the lineage in which his thought occurs there is no reason for you to read this book. David says, however, that those who are engaged by this lineage are in engaged by a complex group of experiences that are as vital as they are elusive and difficult to translate. They are not, in fact, translatable — at least not responsibly translatable — by the unaltered language and conceptual structures that define much of our canonical, Western philosophy. David's descriptive claim is that with Heidegger and the phenomenological lineage comes a decisive turn of experience which Heidegger opened up and with which people are still attempting to come to terms. When I address David's book I am not only addressing that claim. I am addressing also the experience of thinking after Heidegger that he attempts to translate into the words and interpretations that composes his own thought. I will remain mostly on the fringes of David's thought, not translating it so much as commenting on it. But should this turn out to be a good translation day, you and I might occasionally participate in what I am talking about, namely the experience of David's thought. In such an eventuation we would also be thinking with him after Heidegger, and as I will try to show, we would be in the midst of a translational occurrence that intends to be alert to itself.

When we talk about thinking after Heidegger, what are talking about— "Liminal interrogations" is the name of David's beginning in addressing this question. This term "liminal interrogations" means activity that forms a threshold for thought and knowledge, something like an initial uncertainty that is carried by conceptual orders of recognition and reasonable certainty. David describes the activity of liminal interrogations with such words as probing, poking at the lines we have drawn on [conceptual] map[s], and disruption. (1) His thinking after Heidegger begins with a sense of limit, limit not outside of our thought and knowledge but intrinsic to them, intrinsic to the clarity and familiarity that compose our thought and knowledge. "The task of philosophy is to disrupt any and every naturalization of the conjunction of the concept and world." (1)

David's place of beginning for thought is one where concepts translate "the world". His initial sense is doubt about the adequacy of the translations and this doubt is due not only to the difference between the medium of concepts and what they translate, viz. "the world" — the world which the medium carries over to forms of recognition and familiarity. David's doubt is also informed by the "naturalization of the conjunction of the concept and the world." I take "naturalization" to mean here a process by which people begin to assume that there is adequacy of translation where non-conceptual occurrence is transferred to conceptual occurrence. When the attitude, naturalization, informs the nativity — the beginning — of human recognition and thought something basic in the translational occurrence is lost. An interruptive activity is called for, because this attitude of complacency appears to be an intimate part of what people call knowing and thinking, and David finds that when that happens the translational event is obscured. People are unable to respond with intelligent alertness to the transitional threshold where meaningful human engagements begin. Thinking in ways that displace the images and conceptual structures of familiar, often passionately held certainties thus forms a threshold of thought after Heidegger. It's the strange limits of translation — of transgression, transferal, transmutation — that compose what David refers to as liminal. "Interrogations" names a response to this unstable liminality that he finds appropriate. In the phrase, liminal interrogations, we have an initial form of the site and context of responsibility that defines the ethical and passional center of this book. How might people come to think with the eventuation of meaningful occurrences — with the translational nativity of these occurrences — without projecting onto the always liminal eventuation the frames of reference that present it and lose it at the same time? (see 15ff)

In articulating his move into liminal interrogations David makes a claim that persists throughout the book: "Insofar as the world is calculable, and boundaries are fixed, there is no place for philosophy." (16) Calculations are appropriate in many situations, but thinking after Heidegger — and this is a second major claim in the book — has to do with the limits of determination, with incalculability and incompleteness. That means that "thinking" names an activity or movement of mentation comprising alertness and attention that are not completely contained by the limits of representation and meaning. Or, to state the claim negatively, intelligence that remains comfortably within the boundaries of meaningful representation irresponsibly misses the life — the being — of whatever is meaningful: the lives of everything we experience are in excess of their meaningful and represented presence. To lose touch with the incalculable dimension of conceptual translations is to lose touch with the lives of what we experience and know. "The alterity of the other," David writes, "has nothing to do with my understanding of the other's qualities, and everything to do with the interruption wrought by his or her [would David also say "its"??] existence to a narcissistic world". Although I think that the alterity of the other has everything to do with people's understanding of the other's qualities no matter how inadequate the understanding is, and that the interruption of lives is not primarily into narcissistic worlds of desiring individuals — this is a far too subjectively stated interpretation of experience for me — and although I think that in this instance David has projected rather too much ethical meaning and, in a sense, ethical calculation onto liminal beginnings, I want now primarily to notice that David is addressing a way of thinking that is not under the complete jurisdiction of meaning or desire.

Consider, for example, the way David understands repetition in Heidegger's thought. You might recall the importance that Heidegger gives to Wiederholung and Wiederkehr (or retrieve and return). He engages philosophers in his lineage in order to think with them as far as he can, to find the beginnings — the liminal beginnings — and the trajectories in their thinking that best figure more than they can say directly or represent. Those are beginnings and trajectories that convey the lines of translations from non-thought to thought. At his best Heidegger's engagements compose an exchange in which his thought and another's thought translate into an encounter that is not reducible to either thinker's position or a combination of their positions. The engagement composes a determination in which "something" else might be traced, "something", as it were, that seems to manifest itself indirectly in excess to representations. David uses the word, "given", in this context: something outside of representation is given, or gives itself, to be thought. Such an occurrence is similar to a conversation the experience of which gives a transformation for the participants, however slight, of how they were or of what they knew or believed when the conversation began. If I were careful I might be able to call such an experience a transference of what can not be said directly but appears to be traced in the life of the exchange. And traced, perhaps only in the exchange. On Heidegger's terms some people attempt to retrieve or recover such occurrences, not by imitating them or ritualizing their memory but by repeatedly engaging those philosophers whose thought is considerably in excess to what can be re-presented about their thought.

In Chapter Four David engages Heidegger in Heidegger's retrieve of Nietzsche's thought of revenge. David calls it a "return" — Heidegger's return to Nietzsche's thought of revenge. At this point I will report in a representing manner what David does in this part of his book. After noting Heidegger's appropriation of Nietzsche's showing that one kind of pervasive revenge arises from a sense of time as a series of nows in which the past appears as always lost; and after noting the limits of Heidegger's analysis and critical observations: David does some performative repeating of his own. He not only says that Heidegger's process of engaging Nietzsche "demonstrates" a "repetition of [Nietzsche's] singularity" by the way he rethinks the account of time that underlies Nietzsche's thought. He also shows that Heidegger returns to Nietzsche in a way that performs an overcoming of the experience of time that determines the spirit of revenge. As David shows that Heidegger's thought in a spirit of renewal turns beyond the force of revenge, he — David — opens the way for a repetition of Heidegger's thought. It is a translational repetition and way that are informed by David's engagements with Derrida above all but also by Blanchot, Levinas and many others. David's engagement with Heidegger is attuned to the way Heidegger's thought moves — to the way it lives — in its enactment, attuned to its performative and I would add translational dimension. David brings thought in the aftermath of Heidegger's thought to bear in his retrieval of Heidegger. To Heidegger's thought of retrieval, in other words, David gives a transformational dimension that is informed by Derrida's, Levinas' translations of Heidegger's thought. That kind of retrieval is like Heidegger's retrieval of Nietzsche. In both instances something past is translated in the force of its aftermath into something that opens out to a non-determined future.

So we have three aspects of retrieval going on at once: 1) Heidegger's retrieval of Nietzsche that David follows; 2) Nietzsche's retrieval of revenge in Western culture, a retrieval that Heidegger translates in the work that David brings forward; and 3) David's retrieval of Heidegger in a translation that comprises thinking in a lineage that comes after Heidegger. In all three instances the issue concerns a kind of vengefulness, a pattern of inflicting injury on lively events, a pattern that arises from a sense of time without attunement to the continuous opening our of time, its always providing translatability for events in their passage. Time's mortality gives possibility and transfiguration: revenge as Nietzsche thinks of it arises out of a profoundly hampered sense of futurity and death. And it is the transformation of this hampered sense that David finds in Heidegger's engagement with Nietzsche's thought. The transformation of the spirit of revenge also happens in the form and movement of David's retrieval of Heidegger. It's not correctness or the knock-down of Heidegger's or Nietzsche's thought by critical blows that really count for thinking. It's encountering the life of a way of thinking, hearing it, experiencing it, carrying it forward by translational thinking; and, above all for David, what counts is paying attention to the transformative dimensions of thinking: because affirmation of continuing transformation composes a friendly environment for the lives of thought as well as for the lives of other kinds of things. For David, it's as though time with its continuous transmutational futurity is at once a gift and a giver. The gift of time, when it is well thought, translates revenge into life affirmation.

In this context of performativity and transformation David is able to zero in on his book's dominant thought: responsibility.

Life, David says, does not have an extra-temporal end. (76) There is an important sense in which human activity occupies what he calls a "frame" that is an end-in-itself. (76) I am not entirely clear about the meaning of frame in this phrasing but in the context I believe he means that the importance of every practical moment in human lives happens in that moment and not by virtue of an end that has meaning outside of the practical situation. It is not a question of bringing to realization a transcending end. "Rather," he says, "it means that we embody a responsive relation to the impossibility of such completion," completion that the realization of a transcending end would presumably provide. David makes the descriptive claim that there are no definitive grounds by which we can intelligently refer to an authoritative conclusion or fulfillment of a life. The gains and losses, the justice and harm that happen, happen in complex practical situations and are defined, I take it, by specific lineages and values specific to such lineages. Renewal and renewability, not definitive completions or grounds, are what are important. By virtue of the temporality of our lives, David says, "we embody a responsive relation to the impossibility" of definitive completions of events. (76) They are always subject to renewal, retrieval, and transformation. In this groundlessness people can find that they are always in a responsive relation to others, to death, and to the unrepresentable dimension of space-time. (76)

These factors — groundlessness, other, death, and the unrepresentable dimension of space-time — come together in David's thought of performativity. I turn to that thought now in order to consider his thought of responsibility: in a philosophical context performativity and responsibility are not properly separable in David's work. For him, we have seen, thinking is living and hence temporal occurrence that composes a way of life (an ethos). I believe he might call it a lively frame of connection. It begins in response to the four factors of life I just enumerated. Any theoretical distance that a way of thinking might take in something's regard begins in liminal, historical, and disclosive connection with it. So we can say that for better or worse thinking is a practical happening and that abstraction, like personal distance or stand-offishness, is itself a response to the presented world. The point is not that abstraction is bad. The point is that abstraction is a way of responding in connections with things, that theorizing without a sense of performativity amounts to truncated thought. Thought is performative because we are alive in our thinking. David wants to cultivate alertness to this dimension of thought in this dimension of thought. Attention to that kind of responsibility constitutes one part of the constructive agenda in this book.

David says that attention to performativity "to the life of one's thinking" allows life-enhancing renewal. (see 167) "Performativity" names a process of continuous transformation, a "space" David calls it, where there is no definitive finality, where future-oriented retrieval is available, where clutching truths as though they were complete comprises refusal of thought's own temporal life. This is a space of temporal happening where projects of mastery and conclusive calculations are displaced by what I think we can call transitional open-mindedness. Anticipation of renewal trumps a tragic sense of life. Reticence before the future and its lack of determination accompanies assertions. And most apparent is thinking's vital connectedness with living events — its liminal "response-ability." 9168)

You can see the positive interplay among the words vital, temporal performitivity, transformation, and responsibility. They describe a space of translation where past events come to future orientation, where the seemingly dead hand of "it was" and the draw of extremely stable values and conceptual schemes can be changed into ways of thinking that are alert to their own temporal lives and those of whatever appears. David's accepted responsibility is to "reinscribe a dimensionality [of thinking] in which mastery is shown to be conditioned" by ungrounded time and the living impacts of others. (169) The sentence I just quoted from David's book applies to Heidegger, and I believe that it applies equally well to David. His project is like Heidegger's in this respect: he intends to transform representational, i.e. mastering thought by the ways he represents it, by inscribing in it temporal performativity, by showing how representational thought happens non-representationally, by finding in the very life of representational thinking a draw — David calls it an imperative — to an ungrounded, historical, environmentally formed space of mortal temporality. This space composes in David's terms a "transformative resistance to mastery" at the heart of reflective life. (170) He intends for his thought to intensify the question of representation by its force in his discourse. He intends to intensify senses — not only concepts — sense of groundlessness, relation to other, death, and the non-representable dimension of space-time. His responsibility is not to totalize representation in his account of it, not to crystalize its life in a critical schema. He is to intervene in representational presentations of representation, to break into them, retrieve them in their own anticipatory sensibility. He intends to find their own traces of non-representable dimensions, their own pre-representational and liminal engagements. He wants to retrieve representational presentations by means of their own translational events, their figurations of what comes to them transfigured.

In his efforts to find ways to make visible possibilities of transformation David will emphasize in publications since Thinking After Heidegger a movement of stepping back in which a philosopher finds recessive and interruptive dimensions in dominating structures of thought and evaluation. [See his forthcoming book, The Step Back.] In all instances of retrieval and interruption he is looking toward thought as "re-eventing, re-inaugurating" major conceptual operations in our lives. (175) It is an effort that he describes in Heidegger's thought as "animation of the unrepresentable, not its incorporation into a whole." (176)

In a phrase, David is focused by the performative phronesis of thinking. He wants transformations that change the ethos of thinking and thereby change the ways people live — the ways we remember, recognize, anticipate, use, connect with each other, and understand. The change begins with a recognition that thinking is alive and that its life is found in temporal movement. "Such thinking," he says, "has to be able to reopen possibilities, respond to the call of the uncanny, risk unintelligibility, and set aside any assurance of success." (188) We have seen David's efforts to retrieve the meaning of responsibility in this context, his effort to translate it in a performative medium without a primary image of a desiring self or a substantival will. He finds in his encounter with Heidegger a way of thinking that translates Heidegger — a new lineage of Heidegger translation — into a bridge that reaches an ethos based on alternatives to instrumental mastery of selves and worlds. For David, I believe, it is also a bridge to new ways of being religious as well as to recognitions based on what he calls alterity as distinct to calculable identity.

Here I am, going on about David's performative thinking, not asking him even one question in this forum. I have not addressed his encounters in his book with Kierkegaard and Derrida, or those with Hegel, Husserl, and Adorno. I have not probed or criticized the way he comes to and employs his thought of Other. I have not asked him about the abstractness of his thinking, his ways of incorporating aspects of the Anglo/American tradition, or his use of such words as horizon, frame, model, systematic, grasp, and set. Nor have I critiqued his interpretations of Heidegger. Those omissions are informed by more than the temporal limitations of this occasion. They are informed by my intention to place more emphasis on translation than on critique. I cannot translate David well in these few pages, but had I succeeded his thought would have been transformed and transformed in a complementary way by the momentum of his own discourse and by the evidence in it of what he cannot think. I am also informed by my appreciation for the kind of thinking that he is carrying out, by his open-mindedness, and by a shared conviction that developing alternatives to theory and critique is culturally as well as specifically philosophically valuable. Thinking After Heidegger is an excellent, performative experiment that reflects itself though its commentary.

I might, however — I say this to you not to David — try to tempt him to come into territory that could be dangerous for him. That would be a site in which the impact of liminal dimensions does not compose a call to interrogation or responsibility. Liminal dimensions might not call or play or speak or give. They might just happen. And if a further direction were to take place people would have to do something with them. One kind of thing would be to treat liminal dimensions in an anthropomorphic manner and say that they do something like call and give. Or we could capitalize them and translate them into something that deserves capitalization. Or we might attempt to come to terms with their mere indifference and turn away from a deep desire in our lineage for some kind of basis for being ethical other than the ways we live and the consequences of those ways. But this, as I said, would be dangerous territory for David. In it he would probably need to re-think the value of "responsibility" as such however variously it is conceived. And he might also need to rethink the value of capitalization. Those two efforts could challenge the definitive intentions of his thinking. He is presently doing so well in his trajectories and values that we probably should not disturb him in those ways. His performance of responsibility after Heidegger is enough in its excellence. He is indeed an ethical and religious man and translating him otherwise could be a disservice to philosophical life as well as a considerable disturbance to his own. So I propose that we remain silent on these matters and not push him too far — not push him beyond responsibility and capitalization — and not ask him to perform his own self-overcoming.

Click here to see Wood's response.