The No of Thought
Derrida’s First Lectures at the Sorbonne
Sven-Olov Wallenstein
Penser, c’est dire non
(ed. Brieuc Gérard, Seuil Bibliothèque Derrida, 2022)
”Penser, c’est dire non” was the first course given at the Sorbonne in 1960-1961 (the exact dates remain uncertain) by the 30-year-old Jacques Derrida.[1] The title comes from Alain, the philosophical essayist who would subsequently play little or no part in Derrida’s work. In four sessions he explores the ramifications of this formula, garnered from Alain’s Propos sur les pouvoirs (a series of short texts written between 1906 and 1936; the title comes from the 1985 re-edition).[2] The political aspects of Alain’s work and its intellectual context in the interwar period are however not what is at stake in Derrida’s reading, but rather the no itself, the gesture of refusal in the face of any given reality, which is the origin of consciousness and conscience alike.
But if thought is unavoidably a quest for truth, must it not end up in a final affirmation? For Alain, any such affirmation however always harbors a complacency of a thought too content with itself; thought must remain in a state of agitation and anxiety, on the way towards the unknown, if it is to fulfill its essence, which is to be incomplete. Affirmation ultimately means that thought would “surrender” (se rendre), “surrender its arms” (rendre les armes) (21), which is what happens when it says yes and assumes a state of passivity. Instead, thinking is a struggle, a battle for independence (and we should bear in mind that this was also the time of the independence wars in Algeria, Derrida’s place of birth, even though this connection never surfaces explicitly in the text), first and foremost against its own lassitude.
As the editor Brieuc Gérard notes,[3] the relation between yes and no, the positive and the negative, appears to have been one of Derrida’s pervasive interests in this early phase. Other lecture courses (still unpublished) given at the Sorbonne deal with the negativity in appearance (1961-62), whether we can say yes to finitude (1962-63), the problem of nothingness in Bergson (1963-64), and the same academic year, the origin of refutation, where Derrida investigates the role of negation and nothingness in Sartre, and all develop themes that are sketched out in the first course.
Noticeable is the relative absence of references to Hegel, Husserl ,and Heidegger—above all Husserl, who had been the theme of Derrida’s “doctorat de troisième cycle” in 1953-1954, Le problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl, and that would be followed by the lengthy introduction to Husserls “The Origin of Geometry” in 1962, as well as a series of important essays from the first half of the 1960s, subsequently collected in L’écriture et la différence (1967). Derrida seems to have been testing different paths, and even though some of the conceptual and writerly moves that would later become essential in deconstruction (a term that in 1960-61, it must be remembered, is not yet part of Derrida’s vocabulary) can be detected here and there, this is still Derrida in the making, which is what gives the text its charm and specific interest.
Senses of the No
In the course, Alain’s phrase becomes the point of departure for four extended meditations on the significance of the no that attempt to excavate the foundations of his claim, both with an against the predecessor, and eventually takes us beyond him and addresses a larger philosophical framework. In Alain, the couple yes-no points to the very origin of thought, which, as Derrida notes, can be approached in two ways: either substantially (in search of a truth hidden behind its various manifestations), or as a totality, in which one of the specific acts shows thought to be truly itself, both of which however, fusing ontology and phenomenology, amount to the same. Whatever way one chooses they appear to lead to the same destination: to be able to finally say yes, to have attained truth and overcome the discord not just between thought and world, but also within thought itself. But Derrida asks, following Alain: to reach this end, this telos, does it not also amount to abandoning thought, a final acquiescence in belief, a passing over from a state of critical wakefulness to one of sleep? For Alain, this means that thought remains itself only as long as it is bound up with negativity, as long as it remains on the way (another sense of se rendre) to truth.
Alain (Emile-Auguste Chartier).
This negativity is also what preserves the link between consciousness and conscience (two terms that are homonyms in French), which gets lost as soon as thought is absorbed by science and technology and opts for a kind of servitude: “it is subjected, it has found a master.” (24) This vocabulary indicates that subjection just as much has a moral and political side—it sacrifices autonomy to another subject or thing, whereas saying no introduces vigil, waking up as a gesture a refusal. In this it also breaks with the body; it is a “jump” (sursaut) (25) more Cartesian than anything Descartes would have proposed (who in fact, from the sixth Meditation onward, was just as much, or even more, concerned with exploring the multiple connections between soul and body than with asserting a simple dualism), which shows consciousness and conscience to be not only two facets of the same movement, but that moral conscience comes first. “[E]very conscience [conscience; the play on the French homonymy is lost in English] is moral,” Alain states, “since it always opposes that which ought to be to that which is. Even in the simplest perception, what awakens us from the habitual is always a scandal of sorts, and an energetic resistance to the simple fact.”[4]
Rather than as a no to any given reality, Derrida underlines that negation in Alain must be understood as intransitive. It is the very “project of conscience/consciousness” (27), and Alain claims that the object is only a pretext for the subject’s self-negation, a combat against itself, an auto-contestation, before it engages the world, the tyrant, and the preacher, which are the three mediated forms in which thought as it were sedates itself.
Perception of the world, so Alain, is already a critique, a form of the skepsis and the epoche that, while rooted in ancient philosophy, would become crucial for modern though, from Hegel to Husserl; seeing is a selection that cannot but do violence to the inertia of my own intuition, which would remain blind, as Kant says, without the categories. Spontaneous consciousness is naïve and falls prey to its own phantasms and illusions, and in giving imagination free rein, unchecked by the understanding, it deceives itself by an act of will that is far from innocent (here too, Alain is a Cartesian: it is judgment as an act of will that leads us into error, not understanding as such).
In the case of the tyrant, respect takes the place of critical examination. The tyrant needs my consent, my yes, to turn me into a slave, which applies both to the political level and to the sphere of individual passions. The preacher, finally, is the proponent of belief and opinion, of a doxa to which one adheres without any further questions, which for Alain is always opposed to faith (foi). The preacher’s arguments are always based in authority, and they remain at the level of the sign, whereas faith seeks the true sense and says no to the outward appearance.
Negation says no to the given, to belief, but, as Derrida remarks, also to the body and nature, in order to attain the freedom of spirit. Rather than a possible adequation to an object and to truth, thought is defined by its authenticity and freedom, which is the precondition of truth, not inversely. For Alain, all belief is naïve, even if it happens be true, since it takes away our freedom—which, as Derrida underlines, is also the case in teaching: if it is reduced to a transmission of a content already given, by way of a “technique of truth,” without allowing for any participation in the very movement of thought, it falls prey to “two falsifications of thought, seemingly distant from each other and even mutually contradictory, but whose affinity is no doubt profound: sophistry and dogmatism.” (37)
With Descartes, Alain puts doubt at the center of thought; against Descartes, he rejects the idea that it would ever come to an end, as well as the idea of a proof that could be conclusive, and in this sense, as Derrida notes, he pushes Cartesianism beyond itself toward an “ultraradicalism of doubt” (39), to be sure still a method of sorts, yet without a defined goal. And, more specifically, it is a Descartes without a God who would provide a natural light that reveals our innate ideas; it is a God who remains at the stage of the Deus deceptor, which in fact would deprive Descartes of the essential conceptual resources that allows him to regain the world. For Alain, on the other hand, disbelief is “without measure, immeasurable, immoderate, and it is according to the measure of this excess (à la mesure de cette démesure) that truth is measured.” (40)
But at the same time, doubt requires that a truth be there, no matter how provisionally, for doubt to take hold; waking presupposes sleep, and the two moments, the yes of sleep and the no of wakefulness, cannot be understood in term of a simple externality: “The putting to sleep of doubt is not a simple passion of the soul, i.e., an action of the body, as in Cartesianism. It is the very breath of thought, a rhythmic phase of thought, a necessary period of thought.” (43)[5] The no to oneself is always bound up with a yes to oneself, and the no to belief with the yes to faith, understood in a strictly non-confessional sense, which produces a paradox: one must decide to doubt, there needs to be a yes to the will to say no: “the axiological yes is fundamental.” (44)
The Other Yes
But what is this other yes, the yes of faith that must precede belief? A yes, Derrida suggests, cannot be entirely naïve, first simply because it is said, and must introduce a break with the natural to accede to language; if the no opens the space of axiology, the first yes of faith is what founds it. Without a first adherence to the value of truth in general, as opposed to error and illusion, no rejection of belief is possible.
The reference to axiology introduces a practical dimension: to will the truth there corresponds a will to the good. i.e., a moral implication. This is a good that (just as in the case of truth) cannot be one of its particular instances but is analytically part of the will—if I want the bad, it is because I perceive it to be good, which is how Derrida sees Socrates’s argument against Callicles in Gorgias: no one can desire what is bad knowing that it is bad.
But if this is the case—and the first position that gives priority to the no seems appears overthrown—what is then origin of the no, and how might the claim “to think is to say no” at all be defended? First, Derrida notes that the problem of the negative as different from limit, absence, privation etc. is a modern issue, from Kant and Hegel onward. Logicians (Derrida refers us to Christoph von Sigwart and William Hamilton, both today sunk into relative obscurity) have tended to place negation in the sphere of judgment and reduced the problem to a simple reversal of an affirmation: the sky is not blue does nothing but invert the copula in the sky is blue, which assumes that the origin of negation does not as such constitute a problem. And yet there is something mor to say, and appeal to the form of judgment cannot be the final word.
It is precisely this that Bergson tackles in L’Evolution créatrice in way that Derrida deems “both classical and revolutionary” (60)—classical in assuming the plenitude of being, revolutionary in suggesting that only duration can allow us to understand plenitude and negation. In Bergson’s perspective, to ascribe something like a presence, a positivity, to nothingness is not only illusory, but even the very source of philosophical illusions. In fact, Bergson proposes, negation comes out of action, when we seek to attain something that is not there, but then mistakenly proceed to substantialize this absence. We should not conceive of a first nothingness that subsequently would be filled with something (as is presupposed in Leibniz’ famous question why there is something rather than nothing, given that nothing is simpler than something), since in fact there is more in the idea of nothing than that of something, i.e., a more consisting of the idea of a subtraction of entities, or of all entities. The Whole is however precisely what allows for particular entities to be abolished, but cannot itself be abolished, since there will always be someone for whom this emptiness is. Furthermore, on the level of judgment, negation is always an incomplete act: this table is black is an affirmation of what I perceive and a perception of my affirmation, whereas this table is not white is not a perception of not-black, but an act by which I remove an affirmation without substituting it with something else; it is, as Bergson writes, an “affirmation in the second degree.”[6]
Jacques Derrida at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, 1949-1950.
For Bergson, negation’s bond to language shows that it is related to a dialogue, between self and other, or self and self, and as such it points to a “beginning of society”[7] and to dialectics, but it should not be hypostatized, since this blocks access to a philosophy of duration which shows that being is not logical, static, given all at once in eternity (as in the passage from nothing to something), but something that lives with and in us, that has duration and “in a certain sense is psychological,”[8] as Bergson writes, whereas the negative enters through discourse.
These lengthy references to Bergson should neither lead us to believe that Derrida follows him, nor that he criticizes him; instead, what he purports to do, in a gesture that would become crucial in deconstruction, is to repeat him, even though the ramifications of this are left undeveloped: “It is not a question of ‘criticizing’ Bergson. And moreover, to criticize a philosopher is a lamentable gesture that has no sense and necessarily takes place in the sphere of inintelligence. What we can do here is to repeat Bergsonism, asking three questions that take their cue from him.” (66)[9]
The questions, which takes us into the fourth and final part of the course, bear on whether the asymmetry of negation and affirmation can be taken as the final word; if discourse is a fall, an external accident, that occurs to action,; and, finally, whether being can be thought through psychology.
In fact, Derrida notes (following Jules Lachelier) against Bergson: if, as the latter appears to imply, I engage in an exchange or dialogue when I say the table is white, I advance a thesis that can always be contradicted by the other; the negative and the affirmative are possibilities of language in general, none of which can be taken as preceding the other. If sprit and thought themselves indeed are something, Lachelier underlines, the refusal to pose existence is not a fall, but freedom itself.[10] If to be means to be posed by spirit, which does not mean created, but grasped in terms of sense, then this act must be free and possible to hold back in “something like an epoche (both in the sceptic and the phenomenological sense),” Derrida writes, which is “the highest freedom of spirit (72f). It is by negation—just as in Sartre—that spirit comes closest to itself, authenticates itself
Derrida here however turns to Husserl, and more specifically the latter’s Experience and Judgment. Husserl takes us down into the antepredicative layer, a passivity (though without the connotations of sleep that Alain ascribed to it) that precedes judgment, but steers clear of the psychology that still haunted Bergson. For Husserl, judgment is a secondary activity rooted in doxa (without the negative connotations this term has in Plato), a precritical attachment to things, to the presence of the world, or “lifeworld”, which is the basis of all knowledge; writing the “genealogy of the logic,” as the subtitle of Experience and Judgment reads, means to probe into a layer of experience that underlies judgment.
For Husserl, negation appears when our expectations are unfulfilled, and the red that I assumed to be the color of the thing’s other side is not there—an experience that unfolds through the temporal structure of retention and protention, in which the now is always a limit between two temporal extensions (backward-forward). Negation is thus not primordially a judgmental activity, but is rooted in antepredicative experience, and belongs to what Husserl calls the noema, i.e., neither to me nor to the world, but to the object as it is intended. In this context, Derrida finds Sartre’s critique misguided, when the latter suggests that Husserl makes negation into something purely subjective (i.e., neglects the specific status of the noema), and then takes intentions as empty receptacles that only eventually may be filled with content—in fact, Derrida underlines, nothing would be more foreign to Husserl.
If Husserl has many advantages over Sartre, in the final twist of the course Derrida nonetheless aligns them, in that both start out from consciousness and its intentional acts, from the divide between subject and object, even though the latter pair has been fundamentally rethought in different versions of phenomenology, from Husserl onward. But—and here Heidegger is the reference—is consciousness sufficient for grasping the negation that lets beings appear in their being? “In the the being of beings there occurs [happens, unfolds?] th nothinging of nothing” (“Im Sein des Seienden geschieht das Nichten des Nichts”), as Heidegger writes in “Was ist Metaphysik” (1929),[11] a phrase that has puzzled and annoyed readers from Rudolf Carnap onward, but which, regardless of how one interprets it, pulls negation away from consciousness and its acts, eventually towards the (ontological) difference between being and being that would become crucial in Heidegger’s later thought, and which will appear in many guises in Derrida’s subsequent development. Only this, concludes Derrida, “is what permits us to really understand Alain when he says that ‘to think is to say no’” (84); but in fact, Derrida has here already moved far beyond the Cartesian framework of Alain and is heading towards a thought of a difference and negativity not constituted by consciousness, but constitutive of consciousness.
[1] From 1960 Derrida was assistant in general philosophy and logic, until he joined the staff at the École normale supérieure in 1964. At the Sorbonne his lectures dealt with a wide variety of topics; at present the first series on Alain is the only one published. All page references above are to Derrida’s text.
[2] Propos sur les pouvoirs: Éléments d'éthique politique, re-ed. by Francis Kaplan (Paris: Gallimard, 1985).
[3] Gérard, ”Préface”, Penser, c’est dire non, 8-9.
[4] Alain, Histoire de mes pensées (Paris: Gallimard, 1936), 77, cit. in Derrida, 26.
[5] Belief and doubt are nothing but moments ”dialectically bound together” (43), Derrida writes. Perhaps it is not too far-fetched see this complexity of the origin at work here, where First and Second continually trade places in way that tends to undo the opposition and transforms it into a structure of supplementarity, as comes across in the year after in the introduction to Husserl’s “The Origin of Geometry.”
[6] Bergson, L’Evolution créatrice (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1907), 313.
[7] Ibid, 312.
[8] Ibid, 323.
[9] The idea of repetition is presumably derived from Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929). To repeat (wiederholen), Heidegger says, is not to reproduce or restate the same once more, but to let inner differences and cracks appear that allow us to uncover other possibilities lodged inside the original, and in this sense, it is closely related to terms like Destruktion and Abbau that Heidegger uses in the same period.
[10] Lachelier, article ”Néant,” in André Lalande (ed.), Vocabulaire téchnique et critique de la philosophie (Paris: PUF, 6. ed, 1950), cit. in Derrida, 72.
[11] Heidegger, Wegmarken, Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2004), 9:115.
