Originary Humanicity: Locating Anthropos

Vicki Kirby

philoSOPHIA, Volume 8, Number 1, Winter 2018, pp. 43-60 (Article)

Published by State University of New York Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/phi.2018.0002

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/694761

Access provided by Goldsmith's College, University Of London (16 Jul 2018 23:50 GMT)
 Originary Humanicity
Locating Anthropos

Vicki Kirby

First of all, I didn’t say that there was no center, that we could get
along without the center. I believe that the center is a function, not
a being—a reality, but a function. And this function is absolutely
indispensable. The subject is absolutely indispensable. I don’t
destroy the subject; I situate it. That is to say, I believe that at a
certain level both of experience and of philosophical and scientific
discourse one cannot get along without the notion of subject. It is
a question of knowing where it comes from and how it functions.
—Jacques Derrida Structure, Sign, and Play in the
Discourse of the Human Sciences. Discussion

The need to understand human behavior will all too often make a quick
appeal to individual intention and personal motivation as the explanatory cause
of conduct. However, within certain areas of Western academic thinking,
especially over the last forty years, the assumption that the individual authors
his own life, or that “the agential subject” is, indeed, an autonomous individual
whose decisions are properly her own, is significantly compromised. Close
analysis of the agential subject through psychoanalysis, poststructuralism,
various forms of discourse and media theories, or even classical sociological
methodologies that focus on the problematic relationship between the indi-
vidual and society, discover a subject whose identity is more conceded than

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 substantive. However, as this agent/subject has continued to function as an
anchor for social and political analysis despite myriad revelations of its inherent
fragility, and for some, impossibility, we need to ask what might be going on in
its preservation. The mystery of agency—what it is, if it is, how and when it can
be relied upon, why it fails, or even if it ever fails completely—exercises all of
us because these are existential questions about what it means to be . . . oneself.
Given the vagaries and even failures of willpower, the common perception
of the agential subject goes something like this: a subject-self can exert power
over an object-self who, or is it which, appears powerless. This representation
sits well with an everyday understanding of motivation lost or gained, as we see
in self-help books that equate personal application with control and potential
success in life. Such readings in popular culture assume that an individual
possesses an enduring ability to express and realize an intention even when
evidence to the contrary is in abundance: it seems that a sense of personal
autonomy and a capacity for self-direction operate as organizational and judg-
mental touchstones in everyday experience and belief. But are more nuanced
analyses of the subject that operate as a vernacular in critical and social theory
so very different from quotidian understandings, and does the latter’s reliance
on the individual’s foreclosed identity, and its corollary—the assumption that
agency is an isolatable capacity, a self-possession—reappear surreptitiously as
fact rather than analytical necessity in the former?
If we concede that the integrity of the subject and the very notion of agency
are undeniably slippery in both everyday understandings as well as more theorized
elaborations of the problematic, then the danger of the subject’s dissolution is
surely minimized if we represent the problem as one of splitting, division, or
vacillation between two alternatives. There will be less risk that the self/individual
is confounded if the constitutive disunity within the subject is read as a play
between two different states of being (for example, passive or active, submissive
or purposeful). Although the conundrum involves the subject being both, we
content ourselves that if we could stop the clock and freeze-frame a particular
moment then we would see that the subject is only ever one at a time. Unity
restored. Importantly, to suggest that the subject is both at the same time undoes
any sense of option or even splitting, for the difference between these states of
being disappears, as does the identity of someone who chooses between them.1 In
response to this terrifying prospect, an admission that the subject “wobbles,” or
vacillates, can effectively retain a conventional notion of agency as an authoring
force: although the direction and expression of personal intention may flip-flop
in unpredictable and even contradictory ways, the subject can nevertheless appear
to be at one with her intention, even in the act of equivocation.
Common sense tells us that we are the author of our behaviors, that what
we experience is individual and unique, that we are witness to our own lives
and can be made accountable for our actions. Indeed, the courts assume as

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 much, dispensing judgments in the conviction that the individual is a sovereign
subject, responsible for his conduct and culpable if he abrogates his social
obligations. However, common sense also tells us that our behaviors are not
straightforwardly self-directed, that many of our actions reflect an inherent
incapacity to remember, to read a situation sensibly, or even to acknowledge the
effects of our behaviors and perceptions on others, and even on ourselves. The
courts also recognize that sovereignty’s self-determination can be compromised,
and barring mandatory sentencing, a judge can exercise her discretionary power
and consider the context of an act, or even a life, in terms of the aggravating
or mitigating circumstances that might render an outcome more likely. As a
consequence, society holds to the view that the individual is more or less capable
of self-determination unless deemed mad.
It is perhaps inevitable that jurisprudence should rely on the self-awareness
of the Cogito—I think therefore I am—as the comparative reference point for
these adjudications about agency, apportioning blame accordingly. And yet
surely this is done with a degree of cynical apprehension because such assump-
tions cannot withstand critical scrutiny. 2 My point here is that the agential
subject is rarely installed without caveat, indeed, even television programs
whose redemptive appeal to save the obese, the depressed, the hoarder, or the
unfit, only “work” because the subject is unashamedly incapable, split before
she can be made whole—always on the precipice of falling, failing, and coming
undone. To return to Descartes, although there is a tendency to interpret the
Cartesian subject as synonymous with the capacity to know and to realize an
intention—something of which the body/nature is presumably incapable—we
can also read these meditative lessons as an acknowledgment of the claim’s
impossibility. We need to remember that despite applying a veritable blowtorch
to the question of the subject through his methodological skepticism, and
despite the conclusion that a subject with the power to analyze, to reflect, and
to survive its own self-interrogation does exist, the self that Descartes discovers
is almost a mirage. The product of inference and conjecture, Cartesian self-
certainty retains an uneasy fragility when the statement “I think I am” resolves
its tautological ambiguity with the conjunctive adverb “therefore.” As a proposi-
tion, its truth one way or the other requires an antecedent proposition about
the indubitable and circumscribed nature of existence itself: thinking alone
can’t resolve the matter, and Descartes admits that what we mean by thought
isn’t at all clear. Importantly, Descartes doesn’t feel the need to provide another
round of logic to explain what is an even more preliminary existential quandary,
because for him, the truth of Being is, without doubt, guaranteed by God’s
existence. The philosopher’s belief in First and Original Cause, coupled with
his faith in intuition, or instinctual knowledge, mean that the drama of his
inquiry becomes an elaboration of trust and religious conviction that requires
no further explanation.

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 And when I said that the proposition “I am thinking, therefore I exist” is
the foremost and most certain of all those that could occur to anyone who is
philosophizing methodically, I did not thereby deny that, prior to that, one
needs to know what thought is, what existence is and what certainty is; also,
“that it is impossible that that which thinks does not exist,” and similar things.
But because these are very simple notions and, on their own, provide no
knowledge of anything that exists, I therefore did not think that they should
be mentioned. (2003, 115)

The Cartesian subject is very much a conceded entity, discovered in the

bewildered disorientation of a style of reasoning that finds certainty in uncer-
tainty and truth and resolution in doubt, fear, indecision and ultimately, faith.
As I have suggested above, if Descartes’s attempt to prove the existence of
the subject, or self, enjoys a certain theological imprimatur in the prior exis-
tence of God, the assumption that the existence of the Cogito can be resolved
one way or the other remains implicated in this same transcendental appeal.
Not surprisingly, because of its foundational importance for so many argu-
ments about the self and what it means to be human, the Cartesian Cogito is
routinely attacked or defended—either there is no self-certain subject or there
is. However, without a divine being whose existence, or self-presence, secures
the very terms of the debate, the difference between “I think I am” and “I think
I am not” remains moot.
I have suggested that the subject’s agential capacities are more misplaced
than lost in the admission that identity is split; and this is because any acknowl-
edgment and consequent analysis of the subject’s incoherence must already
assume the very thing (the identity of a subject, albeit a precarious one) whose
constitution it claims to investigate. The division or split within the subject is
often figured as a matter of options—alternative behaviors, comportments, or
attitudes that a subject might enact. However, there is another related assump-
tion about the unassailability of identity (personhood, meaning, being human)
that this same logic perpetuates, albeit covertly. To explain this, let’s begin by
assuming that to differentiate is to posit two or more entities that are separated
from each other, in other words, there is a space between them. A consequence
of this is that what at first appears as a constitutive flaw or internal rupture of
the self, something that would sabotage what we conventionally mean by a self-
determining ego whose intention is coherent, is spatially maneuvered to appear
outside the self; that is, outside the defining skin within which the agential
subject and the integrity of intention is secured. What is outside the self is
non-self, here, the corporeal support of the individual whose material nature,
by definition, is incapable of intending anything. Put simply, what is special
and uniquely human about the subject is locatable, identifiable, circumscribed,
and these special capacities can be pared away from what surrounds them. For

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 example, we seldom suggest that bones, blood, skin, or muscle are cognizant
and responsible. And by implication, we do assume that the individual is a
composite, or assemblage of different parts, and that there really is such a thing
as “the body” whose components can be disaggregated, just as the individual
combines a body and an agential self (which is not brute matter).
As I’ve tried to suggest, identifying the agential self, or subject, can prove
elusive for those who presume its existence, and uncannily persistent for those
who don’t. Lacanian psychoanalysis is exemplary of how the recuperation of
the Cogito can enable an argument that hopes to counter its possibility, even if
we grant that the itinerary of the subject’s return is convoluted and potentially
pathfinding for recasting the question’s terms of reference.3 As time prevents a
detailed explication, what follows is very much an edited summation that will
at least set the scene for further inquiry.
Lacan argues persuasively that the subject is divided from itself in a way
that will never be reconciled, despite a Sisyphean attempt to resolve the
difference throughout life. The analyst reminds us that the child is naturally
social because born dependent and incapable, and Lacan will document the
inevitable breach with nature that becoming a functioning human demands.
In his influential article, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of
the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” ([1949] 1977), we learn of the
baby’s primordial apprehension of “itself ” as an all-over-the-place, a wobbly,
runny “hommelette,” as Lacan calls it elsewhere (1998, 197–98). Within this
blurry confusion the baby is caught in the irresolution of merger with and as its
surroundings because the sustained differentiation of figure from ground has
yet to occur. The child’s mother, as well as surrounding objects, are with/in the
baby until Desire’s fascination with an “Ideal-I” begins a process of qualified
resolution—identification through separation. 4 Within the mirror the outline,
or imago of the child, has an apparent stature, and the infans “ jubilates” as he
assumes, or “puts on,” this specular reflection.5 As Lacan explains it, the child
will identify and forever strive to reconcile the felt disunity, or failing aspects,
of his reality—originally, “his motor incapacity and nursling dependence”
([1949] 1977, 503) —with the fictional image of coherence and control that
the mirror and its reflecting substitutes promise. Most important in Lacan’s
representation is the insistence that “the agency of the ego” is oriented “in
a fictional direction which will always remain irreducible for the individual
alone, or rather, which will only rejoin the coming-into-being (le devenir) of
the subject asymptotically . . . he must resolve as I his discordance with his
own reality” ([1949] 1977, 503).
Lacan argues that “the mirror-image would seem to be the threshold of the
visible world” ([1949] 1977, 504), and by this he means that perception is always
interested, subjective, interpreted, and in a way “that decisively tips the whole
of human knowledge into mediatization” (emphasis added ([1949] 1977, 507).

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 As a consequence, Lacan will conclude that “human knowledge has greater
autonomy than animal knowledge” ([1949] 1977, 505) because it is a comparative
solipsism, an invented and psychologically inflected reality where “the world
of his own making tends to find completion” ([1949] 1977, 504). In sum, Lacan
enjoins us not “to regard the ego as centered on the perception-consciousness
system, or as organized by the ‘reality principle,’ a principle that is the expres-
sion of a scientific prejudice most hostile to the dialectic of knowledge. Our
experience shows that we should start instead from the function of méconnais-
sance that characterizes the ego in all its structures” ([1949] 1977, 508).
For Lacan, the motor of subjectivity, or what enables the appearance of a
self, is misrecognition, because the human subject is incapable of perceiving an
unmediated world. Unsurprisingly, “mediatization” mandates a world that is
uncannily human—a self-reflection of sorts. Accordingly, Lacan will translate
the centrality of a rational Cogito through the cipher of a willful Desidero, a
transformation that renders the substance of a nonhuman world inaccessible
and the difference between self and corporeal extension, absolute.6 As a conse-
quence, there can be no integration, no gesture of unifying resolution if human
reality is a “fiction” and access to an outside is the constant of failed hope—the
“asymptote.” No longer a mere animal subject to the vagaries of a capricious
nature (and we should appreciate why Lacan will always qualify this term,
nature, “in so far as any meaning can be given to the word” [(1949) 1977, 505]),
these animal origins are both lost and yet phantasmatically reinvented. Lacan
presents us with an aggregation of competing corporeal sensations and percep-
tions as well as a battery of perspectives and motives—a surreality—whose
interpretive irresolutions and compromises we attribute to the workings of
mind, culture, or the social—the “Functional I.” Indeed, Lacan will argue that
the child’s “captation” with/in the mirror image has the power to transfix and
delight because the act of looking, or perceiving, will incorporate the identifica-
tory paradox of an “I am there (and that)” with “I am here (and this).” Unlike
the animal, whose use of the mirror is purely instrumental because reflection
represents no existential paradox, perception for the human child will become
an interested and psychologically motivated act.7 For Lacan, the container of
these dynamic energies is a transcendental subject who remains empirically
grounded and situated, albeit in a body that is comprehensively phantasmatic.
Lacan provides us with an I whose “situation” is precarious because the
very production of identity is dynamic, always on the move, and subject to
myriad external forces that entirely exceed the subject’s ability to control
them. Indeed, the subject is an effect of these forces and not a cause or
agent of its coming into being. In other words, this is not a subject whose
stability and sense of self preexist the vagaries of these potentially erratic
forces, and this is why Lacan describes the subject as “more constituent than
constituted” ([1949] 1977, 503). The stability of the subject’s “being itself ”

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 proves elusive in this moving jigsaw puzzle where “ego identity” is forged
relationally, remains context dependent, and is inherently discordant. In
short, nothing is given or straightforwardly self-present because the process
of identification is an inherently dynamic one.
And yet there are problems with this logic, which should interest us if we
are to subject the subject to further scrutiny, even a subject whose precarity
we understand as constitutive. We can assume, for example, that precarity
acknowledges the threats and misfortunes that befall a subject, such that its
comparative stability and well-being can never be maintained. However, such a
reading can interpret the problematic of the subject as the failure of a particular
state of being, one which already exists, to maintain itself into the future against
the forces of transformation.
If explanations about subject formation uncover what is effectively a belief
in the entity’s enduring existence and self-generation despite assaults from the
outside (and the inside), then it follows all too easily that this same logical
sleight will encompass human species being and the identity of the anthropo-
logical as exception—as an entity surrounded by an ecology of nonhumans who
might affect us, but who are not us. But can we remain confident that the logic
of the Cogito will secure the identity of human species being against its others
as if no further justification is required? Or indeed, on what might seem a more
insignificant version of the question, can we continue to place our faith in the
identifiable being of anything simply because we can relate it to something
purportedly other—the fragment as opposed to the whole, the constituent
defined against the constituted, primordiality as “the before language” that is
brutally severed from what follows, the symbolic order of mediatization (and
transcendence) of what came before, and so on? If identity (existence), here,
human identity, is an absolute given—irreducibly itself, not despite but because
of its complexities—then this faith-based reasoning recovers the existence of
God in the figure of Man.
There is something both desperate and amusing about this secret merger
that discovers the theological with/in the secular, especially when discourses
that make a virtue of their secular credentials rely on a God-given break/
brake to stop the slide into the unmanageable and unthinkable (indeed,
unthinking). In other words, it is axiomatic that the preservation of identity
as self-referential and the bar of prohibition as a no-go border will automatically
discover and defend what is human against its others, just as it will isolate the
scene of productive complexity—culture—from what precedes it. It then goes
without saying, literally, that this absolute limit is not forfeit to the description,
“more constituent than constituted,” as its “being itself ” is antecedent to the
question of existence. It seems that being human, or the “Function of the I,”
is motivated by a force field that is already and only human, “given” as if by
divine fiat and exceptional for that!

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 A Derridean Intervention

At this point it might be salutary to return to the opening citation from Jacques
Derrida, especially the final sentence, where Derrida refuses to reject outright
the notion of a subject or center, and by implication, the assumption that the
subject is centered, or individuated. “It is a question of knowing where it comes
from and how it functions” (1970, 271). Interestingly, both Lacan and Derrida
make explanatory appeal to this notion of “function,” and we could be forgiven
for assuming that their respective differences converge in this word. However,
this is not the case, as Calvin O. Schrag’s clarification of its use in the Derrida
passage makes clear.

It is a long-established habit of thought to think of a function as always being

a function of something—either an underlying substrate or a formal structure.
The former use of function is present in the traditional substance/function
distinction; the latter is exemplified in the structure/function polarity of
structuralism. But surely neither of these distinctions can find a happy home
in Derrida’s deconstructionist project. They would simply catapult us back into
either a metaphysics of presence or a formalism of structuralist science—and
it is precisely from these that Derrida has sought to deliver us. (2004, 44)

Schrag goes on to explain that “function,” for Derrida, is interpreted

grammatologically, wherein—and this is very much my gloss—the subject
is a performative outcome of the system’s interior involvement; its ability to
hail itself into “being subject” to and as the system that it always/already
will have been. Schrag himself doesn’t appreciate the comprehensive dimen-
sions of this genetic convolution (which excludes nothing) because he reads
“textuality”—here, “pantextuality”—in terms of words, language, representa-
tions, and discourse. And given this reductionist understanding of Derridean
“textuality” he inevitably concludes that the subject of such a system would be
“existentially deprived . . . thin and bloodless” (2004, 44). Although Schrag
goes on to repair what for him remains a lifeless and abstract textual avatar
by reconfiguring the subject in terms of responsibility, I prefer to stick with
this sense that the subject is “thrown” or “articulated,” by and as the force of
“textuality,” différance, “writing in the general sense.” For me, what Schrag
wants to add is already at work in the complex and counterintuitive notion of
textuality that Derrida gives us. In what may seem like a stubborn tactic—
I am often challenged for hanging on to these old terms which are regarded by
some as “inappropriate”8 —the point of the exercise becomes twofold.
First, as Derrida concedes no exteriority to this “system,” the notion of an
interiority is actually misleading as it can’t be configured in opposition to an
outline. Similarly, what is internal to this “system” could not be an aggregation

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 or assemblage of different entities if difference isn’t itself identifiable as an
“in-between” entity—something that either separates or adheres. Even the
allowance that the subject is porous, context dependent, affected, and affecting,
is inadequate to Derrida’s evocation of systemic interference with/in which the
subject, or indeed, any entity, appears in/as différance. This riddle of identity
returns us to our musings about the sovereign subject and the vagaries of
agency that began this argument. However, the situation has changed quite
radically, even as it appears to conform to its original appearance. If “purpose”
is now systemically directed, then the authoring “who” could be regarded as
Life writ large. As I read Derrida, vital intentions 9 and complexities cannot
be foreclosed (identified) by a reductionist conflation of agency with human
subjectivation, unless we read “the human” as a diffractive expression, authored
by the system itself. 10
Second, and not unrelated, just as we saw that “function” usually implies an
explanatory precedent unless grammatologically understood, in other words,
a “something” that has a function—non-concepts such as “originary writing,”
“orginary technicity,” or “textuality” are complacently interpreted in terms
of human capacities and achievements, their implications restricted to the
workings of human cultural and social activity alone. Consequently, Derrida’s
famous aphorism, “there is no outside text; il n’y a pas de hors-texte” (1976, 158)
is easily confused with Lacan’s attribution of language and re-presentation
(misrecognition) to being human. Recall Lacan’s insistence that what makes
the human condition remarkable is mediation—being cut adrift. Lacan’s sense
of “origin” is therefore a back projection, a phantasmatic re-presentation of
what cannot be retrieved because it is lost to us. And although at this point
Lacan and Derrida might look uncannily similar, we need to remember that
Lacan’s focus on the human subject as identifiably different from the nonhuman
is never in question. For Derrida, however, language didn’t arrive as Claude
Lévi-Strauss describes it in a related context: “in one fell swoop . . . crossing
over . . . from a stage where nothing had a meaning to another where every-
thing possessed it” (1970, 263). 11 Derrida argues against this fetishization of
mediation (in the form of human language and representation), where an
atomic sense of identity sits in isolation from the ongoing dynamics of its
own appearing. Within Derrida’s more involved reading of individuation, the
subject, or Cogito, cannot be understood as precarious because it is subject to
an external threat, another force or more alien context that has yet to arrive.
We are left with a question: Can the determination of the Cogito’s existence,
one way or the other—a question which already installs existence, or “being
this,” as its unequivocal reference point—acknowledge that the subject is a mess
of undecidables, an incoherence that is not an entity, an atom? Although Lacan,
for example, will “oppose any philosophy directly issuing from the Cogito”
([1949] 1977, 502), it is clear that the analyst’s own certainty that there can be

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 no self-certainty endorses the Cogito in the very argument that discounts its
possibility. Or to put this another way, when Lacan argues that the technology
of consciousness is actually ego-free, its appearance a phantom effect of the
Symbolic order, there is surely a ghost in this machine that can transcend its
own production and give an account of itself.
If we return to Descartes and humanism we see a man of his times who
relied heavily upon the existence of God to validate the terms of his inquiry.
But do we covertly recuperate this divine “backstop” in a godless universe when
we explain human existence in terms of an immaculate conception, where
human species being is exceptional because it breaks with all precedent, all
natural and (therefore) instinctual or programmatic processes? Can antihu-
manism justify its faith in the subject who appears as First and Final Cause of
his own ability to self-author, a subject whose unique capacity to make moral
and ethical judgments, however misguided, forms the basis of both secular and
theological interpretations of what it means to be human?
I want to open this question about identity and intention in a different
political arena, one in which human exceptionalism and its responsibility for
anthropogenic climate change, ecological degradation, and species loss, is
now in review. How should we answer the increasingly urgent question: is
someone responsible . . . sometimes, never, always? And can we give a more
nuanced, albeit more troubling account of what might be at stake in the rush
to judgment, as if agency and its requisite, culpability, are specifically human
properties which can be exercised well or poorly?

Intelligent Design Revisited

To consider the question above I want to recontextualize its terms of refer-

ence by returning to a debate that has generated considerable heat in recent
decades. Intelligent Design (ID) referred to a movement by creationists to
explain religious faith in terms that, at least on a first look, were not entirely
incompatible with science. It was a canny response to a 1987 legal ruling in the
United States that denied creationist arguments any place in the public-school
curriculum because they were not evidence-based. In response, creationism’s
rebranding in terms of Intelligent Design made it more difficult to exclude
faith-based queries and propositions from interpretive debates within science,
a situation with implications that exercised scientists as prominent as Richard
Dawkins, Stephen J. Gould, and Daniel Dennett.
The softer face of ID is represented below in a citation from the plethora of
websites that continue to tout the movement’s legitimacy.

Intelligent design refers to a scientific research program as well as a commu-

nity of scientists, philosophers and other scholars who seek evidence of design

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 in nature. The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the
universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an
undirected process such as natural selection.12

The justification for this conclusion usually makes reference to the English
cleric, William Paley, who recounts a hypothetical scene: when out walking on
a heath he discovers a watch on the ground and ponders its origins. 13 Given its
intricate mechanism he argues that we would surely attribute its manufacture to
someone. “There must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other,
an artificer or artificers, who formed [the watch] for the purpose which we find
it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use”
(2009, 3–4). If the complexity of the watch presumes a designer, then Paley
argues that the complexity of nature should lead us to the same conclusion.
“Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed
in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side
of nature, of being greater and more, and that in a degree which exceeds all
computation” (2009, 19). 14
Two things should be underlined here. The first is that human beings
are defined tautologically; put simply, the Cogito equates intelligence with
self-possession—a subject is one who thinks and to think is to be a subject, a
human subject. As we saw above, the truth of the self, the subject’s existence
as the repository and definition of intelligence, is guaranteed by faith in a
pre-existent, absolute deity—omniscient, omnipresent—who can turn doubt
into certainty. If to be human is to be intelligent by default, to be purposeful
and accountable for one’s actions because God exists, then Paley’s equation
makes a lot of sense, at least, for believers. And yet nonbelievers can be just
as persuaded that the identity of the agential subject is necessarily human,
as if what makes this identity and its capacities identifiably special requires
no further justif ication. We might recall that despite Lacan’s elaborate
explanations about the subject’s necessary denials and disavowals of its own
fragility, his faith that this state of affairs discovers what is uniquely human
is never in doubt.
What I have tried to argue is that a belief in haecceity—“the thisness of
things” as fundamental and given—is essential to both religious and secular
argument. This need for an entity, a process or capacity, to operate as First
Cause is prerequisite to this logic making sense, regardless of an argument’s
content or direction. We see this in Lacan’s appeal to an absolute, a bar of
prohibition that contains and defines human complexity in terms of intellectual
curiosity, a fascination with paradox and willful self-deception. Importantly,
although Lacan will question the manufacture of human identity, the focus of
his interrogation is confined to the internal structuration of the human mind.
Consequently, a belief in the self-evident existence, identifiable autonomy, and

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 unique capacities of the human, are antecedent to Lacan’s interrogation of what
being human involves.
To return to the claims and counterclaims that swirl around Intelligent
Design, ID equates First Cause with God’s existence. Consequently, the
infinite regress of questions about the how and what of existence—the “who
made God?” questions—have no working leverage and therefore stall with
rejoinders such as, “He just is.” I want to suggest now that secular arguments
can recuperate this same mode of reasoning in the form of human excep-
tionalism, wherein Man’s authorship of his own life and his unique ability to
design his world are read as species specific. This goes some way to explaining
why the question “where did human consciousness and intelligence come
from?” is answered in terms that can sound very like the appeal to spontaneous
generation that Derrida has previously criticized: “Intelligence and an ability
to design our world and make deliberate, thoughtful choices begins with us.
This is just the way it is!” Interestingly, evidence that nature involves intricate
engineering, that it is technologically complex and mathematically informed,
may be conceded by believers and critics of ID. However, as both secular
and religious understandings of creative design are predicated on conscious
intention—an original purpose, an A/agent capable of forethought—nature
will always fail in this regard. To explain this, for ID advocates, nature is an
object whose apparent intelligence and implicate design are the results, or signs,
of God’s authorship. In short, nature is designed and not designing. Avowedly
secular arguments that eschew divine explanation will focus on the difference
between a self-organizing system and a (human) self; a difference between
the sometimes random, sometimes overdetermined configurations of life and
the sense of decision which a human subject can choose to exercise. In sum,
nature is mindless and has no goals, no purpose, whereas human beings have
self-awareness and can anticipate and decide their futures. What is at stake
here resides in the foundational prerequisites, inevitably propositions of faith
that are seldom questioned, that shape claim and counterclaim about the nature
of humanity and its others. The identification of the human as isolatable and
significantly different because thoughtful and calculating, goes without saying.
When this argument was at its height in my own university—the University
of New South Wales, Sydney—I was intrigued to see that a coalition of more
than 70,000 Australian scientists and science teachers had mobilized against
the perceived threat to their practice from ID.15 On the face-page of the School
of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences at UNSW Sydney, we were
told that ID “fails to qualify on every count as a scientific theory.” Although I
have no issue with practitioners of science defending their methodologies and
would be troubled if creationism’s answers to what is marvellous and intri-
cate came to rest in an “Intelligent Designer,” I did wonder if the scientific
method’s reprisal of such an entity—the human as First Cause—could also be

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 questioned. For example, when we automatically locate agency and curiosity in
the scientist we exile the “self-organizing” invention of nature (in authoring
the authority of the scientist) from what now becomes an identifiably local
expression of creativity in the form of the scientist’s experiment and her capacity
to consciously design it. Whereas authorship in nature could be regarded as
dispersed and local at the same time, the tripartite parsing of inquiring subject,
object, and mediating apparatus, precludes such a possibility. In this scene of
scientific inquiry the one who initiates the question, by definition, cannot be
the object or the apparatus. To suggest that the object inquires of itself or that
the apparatus is agential, intending, is as odd a suggestion for scientific research
as the one I posed earlier in this article, namely, that it would make little sense
to suggest that bones, blood, skin, or muscle are cognizant and responsible.
However, it is this surreal possibility where “purpose” is strangely displaced
(rather than misplaced) that I want to explore further.
If we return once more to the opening epigraph and the earlier discussion
of “function,” and by implication, causality, we noted that Derrida’s way of
addressing the question was to render the production of identity as a systemic
“outcome.” And yet it would be misleading to assume that deconstruction’s
apparent liberation of “method” from its instrumental reductionism—a
mediating third term that secures the difference between subject and
object—enacts a non-method. Derrida questions the investment (common
to both the sciences and the humanities) in this tripartite configuration
because the subject’s identity is made exterior and precedent to the field of
investigation, whereas for Derrida, inquiry is considerably more involved, and
yet not capricious. In a description reminiscent of the notion that nature is
self-organizing, and in answer to a question about how deconstruction should
determine its object, or point of intervention, Derrida responds,

The incision of deconstruction, which is not a voluntary decision or an abso-

lute beginning, does not take place just anywhere, or in an absolute elsewhere.
An incision, precisely, it can be made only according to lines of force and
forces of rupture that are localizable in the discourse to be deconstructed. The
topical and technical determination of the most necessary sites and operators—
beginnings, holds, levers etc.,—in a given situation depends upon an historical
analysis. This analysis is made in the general movement of the field, and is
never exhausted by the conscious calculation of a “subject.” (1981, 82)

If this sense of precision, intervention, or inquiry is a historical determina-

tion, a point of entry within a field of forces that is subject to those same
forces, then the isolation of agency and even human identity as its unique
repository or cause is questionable. And yet, if we are to appreciate identity
as systemic-appearing, what do we do with politics and ethics—questions

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 about how we humans should act—if this scene of life’s involvement is one
of nonhuman agency? Does this render conventional political action pointless
because “what will be will be”? In other words, is life predetermined because
outcomes are naturally prescribed? The question is especially important when
read against growing concern and even alarm about the excesses of human
exceptionalism and the hubris and myopia that have enabled the exploita-
tion and destruction of animals and habitat with seemingly blithe disregard.
Interventions against anthropocentrism tend to answer the problem in terms
of inclusion. Consequently, animal studies argues for a more empathic and
protective relation with nonhuman species and has increasingly documented
the detail of animal behaviors and capacities as a way to validate the right of
other creatures to exist in and for themselves, rather than for human use and
exploitation. More recently, this move to bring more creatures into the ark
to secure a collective and sustainable future has even embraced vegetal life,
providing scientific proof that forms of cognition and agency can be found
in plants. 16
It is easy to become disoriented in such debates about the what and where of
cognition and agency because one position can suddenly switch and appear as
another. For example, it strikes me as inevitable that if we look very closely at
nature we find ourselves. Lacan insisted as much, claiming that we humans are
deluded, projecting our needs and desires onto nature and then misrecognizing
the former as the latter. As scientific research is uncovering human capacity or
complexity in the most unlikely places, even as it struggles to describe these
behaviors in strictly nonhuman terms to preserve the difference, we again have
to ask if such observations reflect the solipsism of being human—something
to which both humanism and antihumanism remain committed—or some-
thing whose dispersal might encourage us to consider nature as diffractively
anthropocentric.
In keeping with this gesture, I have for some time glossed “no outside text”
as “no outside nature” because in such a reading there can be no absolute
prescription, no before writing (systemic entanglement), before technicity, before
the human that isn’t already writing, technicity, human (in a grammatological
sense). For this reason, I want to mobilize anthropocentrism because to engage
its very appearing as the center/the exception requires more than a moral
judgment or an act of faith about its rightful place. This is not to reaffirm
anthropocentrism’s haecceity as unequivocally circumscribed, self-defined, and
self-important, as if its identifying attributes—whether a specific morphology
or material appearance, or the determination of what will count as language
and recording (writing) or technical capacity—can continue to be tautologically
defined as intelligent because this is what a human does, or is. And here we
return to debates over Intelligent Design, where both theological and secular
perspectives concur that nature can have no agential or intentional capacity

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 of its own, for these attributes are the unique property of God and/or Man.
To reconfigure textuality as “no outside nature,” in other words, to marry
a dynamic sense of process within and as firstness, the notion of first cause
returns, as does agency, the subject, and even theological mystery, but now as
an involved transubstantiation of possibles whose differences remain entangled.
Here, anthropocentrism is a “function” whose force field is comprehensive, not
because it relates to, or includes, something other than anthropocentrism, but
because it involves “the how” of anthropocentrism’s appearing. Without an
absolute referent in God or Man as the ultimate deciding A/agent, or in the
Good as straightforwardly self-evident, the very terms of what will constitute
ethical and political debate exceed the theatre of an agonistic face-off. If
the imperative that motivates ethico-political considerations is an enduring
epistemo-ontological complicity, then “originary humanicity” acknowledges
the ecological nature of what it is to be human.
University of New South Wales, Sydney

Notes

1. To be fair, the proposition that the subject can only occupy one position or the
other at any one time is further complicated by the necessity for a transcendental
subject who can discern the difference between them such that the notion of
“choice” can retain any purchase. If this isn’t the case, then we have no way to
explain how a subject “decides” to be indecisive, or to put this another way, how a
subject who appears to lack all motivation can change her ways. How is the switch
triggered? Indeed, is there a switch? If the subject is an empirico-transcendental
phenomenon then the source and site of agency and intention is unclear.
2. The Innocence Project’s website, https://www.innocenceproject.org/, provides
ample information about the injustice of such assumptions. For example, juries
are most persuaded by what they perceive as the truth of an eye-witness testimony,
and yet, even when this evidence is provided in good faith it remains profoundly
unreliable. The harsh lesson is that for all of us, memory is a pastiche of retrieved,
reconstructed, and even invented images and experiences. If the subject’s appearing
is one of dynamic fabrication, then the weight of guilt and personal culpability
may be felt by those who did not commit a crime, and not at all by those who did.
3. Although Lacan’s thesis entrenches the nature/culture split, his elaboration of
culture as techne and the sense that the subject is ego-free represent a significant
assault on humanism and its accompanying investments. We could certainly
reroute this argument through “originary technicity,” wherein the machinic, or
cybernetic, would not be a break, or supplement, to what supposedly came before.
For an excellent introduction to such themes in Lacan, see Bradley (2011).
4. There is a problem in describing what comes before the image, or gestalt, of the
“Ideal-I.” Because Lacan assumes that difference is oppositional, a “not this,” he

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 counters the baby’s prior perceptual state in terms of a “body in bits and pieces,”
a corps morcelé (1953, 13). The sense that a whole is made up of little wholes,
separate entities that are divided from each other like the individual parts of a
jigsaw puzzle, begs the question of how the part, or fragment, is itself identifiably
different from its adjacent parts. This is a question we could also ask of Donna
Haraway’s cyborg. Does the cyborg address the problematic of identity through a
disaggregation into different, even if seemingly incompatible, parts?
5. For an amusing illustration of the baby’s erotic relationship with the mirror, see
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7Box3Yp1Yk.
6. To be precise, inasmuch as we interpret the body through a cultural cipher that
determines significance, the body is also a phantasmatic projection according to
this view, even as it appears as culture’s other. However, the difference between
the material and inaccessible “something” that subtends this cultural, ideational
overlay remains absolute.
7. For a fascinating account of the ways in which animals, even insects, exhibit an
awareness of the mirror’s self-reflecting paradox, see Jacqueline Dalziell (forth-
coming 2018). She researches Lacan’s references to other creatures in the “Mirror
Phase” article, leaving us to wonder if the analyst actually read the literature he
cites as evidence for human exceptionalism.
8. See Kirby (2016). The argument is intended to complicate Catherine Malabou’s
assertion that Derrida’s notion of “writing,” or the “graphematic structure,” is no
longer appropriate in an age when “plasticity” (her replacement term) would be
more fitting, given neurological insights about brain communication. As Derrida
explains that “[t]he expansion of the concept of writing is not necessarily, or not
uniquely, a graphic gesture” (2016, 14), my own persistence with such terms is to
explore their undecidable dimensions, not to make an accurate representation.
9. See Vitale (2014) and Lynes (2018) for examples of how such questions might be
explored more rigorously. Both arguments rest heavily on Derrida’s work for their
insights.
10. I use the word “diffraction” here to evoke Karen Barad’s discussion of Werner
Heisenberg’s commitment to an entity that precedes its measurement (such that
the act of measurement interferes and changes an original state) contra Bohr’s
appeal to an onto-epistemological “apparatus” wherein the subject/scientist/object
already involves entangled patterns of diffraction. I agree with Barad that we
can read différance as diffraction, and this is an important intervention because
it complicates the presumed separation between the human and its others, and
by implication, the belief that technology is something external to a subject who
chooses to use it. See Barad (2007).
11. Derrida cites Lévi-Strauss as exemplary of a more general tendency that he also
discovers in Husserl and Rousseau. “Like Rousseau, [Lévi-Strauss] must always
conceive of the origin of a new structure on the model of catastrophe—an over-
turning of nature in nature—a natural interruption of the natural sequence, a

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 brushing aside of nature” (1970, 263); in other words, the “new” for Lévi-Strauss
is something identifiably other which breaks with what was. In the discussion
that immediately follows this argument, see how Jean Hyppolite understands the
arrival of human species being (intelligence and writing) as a break with nature,
an aberration (1970, 265–57).
12. A Google search of “Intelligent Design” discovers myriad sites and articles, some
with philosophical complexity, http://www.intelligentdesign.org/whatisid.php.
13. Although Paley wasn’t the first to make the watchmaker analogy, he is the most
cited today.
14. It is sobering to think that Charles Darwin was impressed by Paley’s argument
before he wrote On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection.
15. The face-page I am citing from http://w w w.science.unsw.edu/news/2005 /
intelligent.html no longer exists; however, I retain a downloaded copy, accessed
July 3, 2006.
16. The recent book by Jeffrey Nealon, Plant Theory: Biopower & Vegetable Life (2016)
is an excellent introduction to the field. See also Gagliano (2012) and Marder
(2012) for arguments about plant cognition.

Works Cited

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Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement
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Bradley, Arthur. 2011. Originary Technicity: The Theory of Technology From Marx to
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