Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper argues that insofar as the ‘translation’ of deconstruction in America has become a discourse on the sacred, it mis‐recognizes what Derrida calls the trace, and identifies it as the radical outside to thought, or as ‘God’. The ‘trace’ on Derrida's account is indeed unknowable, but it is not the radical outside of thought. Rather, it is a disruptive force that is internal to thought. Reconstructive analyses investigate (among other things) the way that thought is breached, and necessarily so, by what thought cannot think. This breach, this unsignifiable opening, is intolerable to philosophical undertakings because philosophy must totalize; this is what philosophy does. Following Walter Benjamin, I argue that translation is possible, precisely because of this breach. Thus, just because this breach or opening is intolerable to thought or to philosophy does not prevent it from happening. On Jacques Derrida's analysis, this opening has a name: it is deconstruction. To this extent, those variants of ‘deconstruction in America’ which misrecognize the trace as God, miss the very political force of deconstruction in the first place, which is to say, a philosophical undertaking which thematizes the intolerability of refusing what philosophy does and must do. The breach in thought (or language) is precisely what Walter Benjamin suggests is untranslatable. It cannot be communicated by any sign. Notwithstanding the great difference between Benjamin and Hegel's political commitments, comparing Benjamin's work on the untranslatability of language's ‘languageness’ to Hegel's semiological theory (which requires that we forget’ this very uncommunicableness at the heart of language) is instructive. It establishes that both thinkers argue that the practice of language should be the practice of learning each word as though it were a proper name. Each argues in their own way that the practice of language should erase the trace. It is precisely this erasure — the identification of the trace as radically exterior to thought ‐ that covers over what is at stake, not simply philosophically, in an investigation into the breach of language, but what is at stake politically. What is at stake politically is what Derrida calls the ‘risk of absolute surprise’ which is nothing less than the risk of a political philosophy with no guarantee.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".