Nothing Exists Like THAT

My, that's a heavy set of criteria for existence Kotsko has there. Of course we wouldn't want that. We'd be lumped with one solid unchanging entity forever. To forestall this monster people often go to the other extreme: nihilism.

Nihilism is a common misinterpretation of Derrida's view. This would be far too onto-theological a position for him to have taken himself. I've never advocated that he claims that nothing exists or that nothing means anything. Those are just rookie undergrad mistakes. So yeah, Kotsko and I can't be saying that.

No: meaning exists because of unmeaning, because of différance, the trace structure, whatever. That does imply an ontology, perhaps, but it's not a nihilist one. If "nothing exists" is all Hägglund means, then I'm afraid it's back to the drawing board for him.

What I suspect is that the opposite is the case—not learning well the extraordinary advances of phenomenology, as didn't I until recently, Hägglund regresses to a pre-Derridean view that does sound awfully like Iser or Heidegger: it's not uncommon to assert that time is nonselfidentical in phenomenological thinking. You can easily be a theist within this tradition. You certainly don't have to be an atheist to believe in nonselfidentical time.

It could also simply be that Hägglund is not advocating a true middle way between theism and nihilism, and is simply proposing a form of atomism, a kind of compromise between something and nothing. Moments are atomic pieces that are constantly “referring to both a past and a future moment” like a moving cursor, as Kotsko puts it.

This would be the basis of my first criticism. I haven't yet seen any evidence that Hägglund's time is truly deconstructive—reversibility would be high on my wish list if it were, along with retroactive positing of the past by the present. Maybe also some nice alluvial leakage in all directions. Hägglund's trace structure simply shifts forward. It's impermanence. Then “radical atheism” is just Holbach style materialism, Enlightenment fashion.

The real trouble with atomism is that it doesn't solve theism or nihilism. What are these atoms, little bits of nothing or little bits of something? Atomism just postpones having to worry about it. As quantum theory has discovered, you could decide that there was nothing underneath subatomic particles but fluctuations in the void. Or you could decide that those particles were reducible to a more basic physical form.

Let's however give Hägglund the benefit of the doubt and assume with Kotsko, who now aligns himself with the commenter, that there is something truly radical going on in Hägglund's temporality.

But if "nonselfidentical" truly means "not present in any sense whatsoever," then I'm afraid we're simply saying that "there is no such thing as time"—Plotinus would dig that, I suspect, and a host of Abrahamic theologians.

For the record I'm not a theist, but I'm not a nihilist. I'm a non-theist, perhaps in the way Laruelle is a non-philosopher. Although to be honest theists are a lot more sophisticated than nihilists (yes you heard that right).

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Actually if we apply the view of nonselfidentity to existing rather than meaning, it implies that everything is irreducibly unique, hence Derrida's arrivant, which becomes my strange stranger. Beings that are not present, even to themselves—yet there they are, scuttling around. There's a rich line of thinking here that includes Darwin, for whom there is no "species" that "survives." To survive you have to have some minimal self-identity. The "survival" issue that Kotsko brings up isn't my problem: it's Hägglund's.

Of course this assumes that it's not just some idealist observer who sees present beings as an "effect" of a trace structure. If that really is what Derrida means I want nothing to do with it. Again, I'm not convinced Derrida wanted to push any kind of -ism at all. He was into undermining things, period. Kind of a Pyrrhonian skeptic.

But if Kotsko agrees with the commenter on that (that beings are an effect of a trace), he's just an idealist, and this conversation is only a disagreement.

Let's assume then that you can build an ontology out of the wreckage, moving forward from Derrida, not backwards. There is not even nothing outside the configuration space in which entities come to be. Hence "ecology without nature." So there are only entities, no totality that can overmine them. Undermining discovers only more and more unicities, so nothing is really "broken down" either. Hence strange strangers.

When we push this a little more, it becomes an ontology of discrete nonselfidentical unicities, which for short I'll call objects. What's that called again? Ah, it's on the tip of my tongue: OOO.