AUT: Something the ghost of Derrida has whispered in my ear about reading Spinoza

[andrew robinson <ldxar1@xxxxxxxxx>]

My suggestion would be, that the purpose of reading
must be to reproduce the machinics of thought which
are produced by the author (whether in order to
assimilate, dissect, apply, or whatever).  The
words/concepts function as aspects of a machine of
thought, defined in part by their relation to the
other words/concepts in a theoretical assemblage,
which function in certain ways to produce meaning
within the theory.  This kind of machinic operation
(including aspects such as the construction of
particular binaries, of positive and negative
attachments of valuation/desire, of repeated patterns
and refrains/ritornellos, etc.) is not necessarily
conscious on the author's part, though it may be; it
operates at the level of the text, as an assemblage of
aspects which "work" to produce meaning.

This machinic aspect of a text can be interpreted
accurately or inaccurately, because its operation is
interior to the text.  (I should emphasise that I do
not have in mind authorial "intent" here; not only
because one cannot determine from the operation of a
meaning-producing machine that it was inserted on
purpose rather than being unconsciously operative in
an author's thought, so the author her/himself could
only discover it by "interpreting" her/his own work;
but also because the machinics of a text operate
beneath the surface of the text, not at the level of
the meaning which is consciously conveyed; they are
productive of this meaning and thus not identical with
it).

But on the other hand, there is a "differance"
haunting the text, which is the attachment of the text
to wider assemblages, and, indeed, the libidinal
assemblages which make a particular text relevant -
which make it, for instance, worth reading, or worth
attaching oneself to as a matter of
politico-theoretical commitment.  Not only is this
irreducible to the text, but it is largely irrelevant
*to the reader* what it might happen to be.  Or
rather, it is no more inherently important why some
"great" author wrote some text, than why any of the
billions of other historical authors/agents performed
innumerable other "textual" acts which are lost in the
midsts of time.  Because this is not the reason why a
text has persisted.  A text persists either because it
enters into articulations with desiring-machines other
than its author's, or because it involves an unusual
and therefore intriguing machinics which breaks with
the repetitions pervasive in everyday "textuality".

So it is its machinics which should be studied as an
exercise in critical theory; its wider connections are
relevant only if one's purpose is social history.  The
only exception is where the machinics of the text
overlap with a wider social text which haunts them or
which they haunt (the social minoritarianism of Kafka,
the disability-induced outsider's thought of Gramsci,
the revolutionary madness of Nietzsche...).  This too
is not an issue of authorial intent, but rather, of
the social unconscious expressing itself through the
individual unconscious, as an urgent imperative to
theorise motivated by a blockage in the social text,
the set of symbolic meanings, in which one is trapped.

Andy


		
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