L’existence prépositionnelle by Irving Goh (review)

In the concluding stages of Le monolinguisme de l’autre, Jacques Derrida remarks that

what remains insurmountable in [the monolingualism of the other], whatever the necessity or legitimacy of all the emancipations, is quite simply the “there is language,” a “there is language which does not exist,” namely that there is no metalanguage, and that a language shall always be called upon to speak about the language – because the latter does not exist. It does not henceforth exist; it never exists yet. What a time [temps, meaning tense and also weather]! What sort of weather it is; what the weather is like in this language that fails, lastingly [à demeure], to reach home.
(Derrida 69)¹

It is within the givenness of any given language, through its contingencies, that it falls to us to think of our linguistic condition and to hypothesize an operation of language per se. There is hence a dislocation, a non-arrival at the place of dwelling or full self-identity (à demeure) – that imaginary space most intimately vehiculated in the myth of the native/mother tongue. One is called to speak of language (la langue) in the given language (une langue), because the former does not exist – other than as a horizon within the latter.

Irving Goh’s L’existence prépositionnelle could be read as the outcome of a wager in the face of this limit. One element of this wager is contained in his opening proposition: “That thinking is always a matter of preposition” (11). The essay takes as its starting point a recognition of the perilous non-identity of thinking as open-ended process and of thought as a realized, textual gesture. This recognition involves an awareness of the tension between philosophy as a practice of opening up the real and the philosophical utterance as constituting, inevitably, a kind of limiting – and hence deforming – enclosure. Noting Derrida’s references to a pensée en papier² (“paper thought”) with respect to the written outcomes of thought-process, Goh’s inaugural concern is with the integrity and open-endedness of the process itself: “thought in the act of thinking or of ‘making’ itself, which could, before and after all, be termed pre-positional” (12).

A commitment to thinking thus demands unrelenting attentiveness to the mobile, inchoate quality of thought in its present unfolding and calls furthermore for an understanding that this attentiveness both shapes and informs any purported outcome (what we might call the [End Page 127] philosophical utterance). In this respect, as in the dislocation that occurs in the given language, the reflection opened up here is in sympathy with a rich vein of poetic and broader experimental textual practices, ranging from oeuvres such as that of Henri Michaux, via Deleuzian thinking on minor literature and deterritorialization, to contemporary practices such as those of Dominique Fourcade.³

It is, however, as an engagement with a specifically philosophical subcontinent of French writing that Goh’s essay pursues its wager. That corpus includes the work of Derrida, and also comports reference, to a lesser degree, to thinkers including Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, Luce Irigaray, and Emmanuel Levinas. But Goh’s primary focus and textual engagement is with the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy, with whom his dialogue was clearly a close and formative one. Identifying a form of “prepositional” thinking across that thinker’s wider corpus, Goh sees Nancy as “the great thinker of the preposition” (15) – something performatively underlined by the work done by that grammatical category as a whole in Nancy’s writing, but more specifically (if not exclusively) by the preposition à. Goh cites Nancy as he reworlds being (être) via this preposition, opening the perspective of a new ontological thought informed by the question of community, a being-together that is first and foremost a being-toward or –to: “[I]t still remains for us to think being-to, or the to of being, its ontologically worldly or worldwide trait” (Nancy 8).

The essay’s wager thus assumes a specifically grammatical or morphological dimension, vis-à-vis the given language, in that Nancy’s mobilization of the resources of French to revisit a historically pluri-lingual philosophical site is taken to underwrite the problem as a philosophically “prepositional/pre-positional” one. Moreover, the reworlding (mondain/mondial) of the ontological problem (the subject of section 1 – “L’ontologie : Être-l’à (ou à force d’exister)” links it to henceforth inseparable considerations of ethics (section 2 – “L’éthique, ou c’est à vous”) and politics (the concern of section 3 – “L’à politique, encore un effort!”). This threefold development – whereby ontology leads us on to “the ethical and political potentialities of the à” (17) demarcates the essay’s overall purview of “existence,” through which the recurrence of the “à” in titles and conceptual coinages acts as a fil conducteur, a throughline of sorts for a “pensée de la préposition / pré-position” [“pre(-)positional thought – or a thinking of (the) pre(-)position”] (14).

It is difficult in the present context to give a full sense of the work done by this single preposition in the essay’s engagements across the ontological-ethical-political spectrum. What seems central is that it aligns with an account of “existence” where this precedes metaphysical “being” – and in relation to which it acts as a marker of the tense conjoined [End Page 128] imperative of directionality and openness (of which towards/toward-ness is arguably the most accessible rendering in English, even though it lacks the [somewhat problematic] linguistic ubiquity and pragmatic versatility of the French preposition à). Thus, for example, in touching upon the Derridean idea of écriture, Goh sees this as giving “to that which wants to be meant, to that which wants to mean […] the strength to trace itself, to constitute itself” (30). This would align écriture with a “prepositional” logic, given that “existence, through the strength of its écriture, or else from writing itself as écriture, is always pre-positional with respect to the being of metaphysics” (30) – a stance whereby existence as open-ended process is thought both to elide and meaningfully supplement the positionality of metaphysical “being.”

The supplementary value of the discussion undertaken is presented by Goh in terms of reinforcement. An example:

[W]hat I would like to do here is simply to offer to that notion of strength (force) a minor clarification which would make it perhaps more of a fit than Derrida’s écriture or trace. […] Having earlier used expressions such as “at every time” (à chaque fois), “to-come” (à-venir) and “being born to presence” (naître à la présence), in relation to strength, I would propose to think that strength in terms of the preposition à.
(30–31)

This philosophical intention builds upon a programmatic idea of transformative utterance, which is not simply a linguistic feature, but a reformed practice of “speech,” understood broadly. The conjunction of the literally and structurally prepositional is, for Goh, the subject of an aspiration to direct effect, in a global context of spiraling conflict and negation of the other even more apparent now than at the time of initial publication:

We thus have need of a politics that could fight against this new violence and/or this forgetting, and in my view that politics could draw up or even constitute itself from a new idiom which would attend to the “à” in all of its senses – ontological, ethical and political; an idiom which, it would be my wish, might develop from out of the present work.
(18)

This “real-world” horizon of the intervention is both suggestively timely and potentially problematic, not least with respect to the linguistic specificity of the “prepositional” construct. Does the “idiomatic” aspiration translate in any way reliably beyond the very specific linguistic and discursive milieu of reference? What would a “prepositional” idiom look like in Chinese, in Russian, in Arabic, in Swahili, in Irish? What would it require to think ‘prepositionally’ in these, or any other, given language? The singlemindedness with which the French-language defense and illustration of the “prepositional” wager is conducted suggests that the linguistic problem is in fact secondary, or incidental, to the philosophical insight that the author seeks to amplify. But that problem does not go away as the “idiomatic” aspiration bookends the work, reappearing at [End Page 129] the conclusion of the essay with an evocation of “the desire to see linking up from out of this work an idiom that would not only recall our ontological ‘à’ but would also underline ethical and political potentialities of the ‘à’” (109–10).

In such uncharacteristically frontal passages, Goh’s work reinvests the public-facing terrain of the existential discussions of a generation preceding his explicit philosophical interlocutors while it positions “existence,” the essay’s ultimate ambit, in a very different way. To recall a well-known passage addressed to a general readership, where Jean-Paul Sartre outlines what he terms “the existentialist conception of man”: “What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards. If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and he will be what he makes of himself” (Sartre 28). Though very much not the continuation of a dialogue with Sartre, Goh’s exploration of an existence prépositionnelle implicitly enacts a sundering of Sartre’s existential arc, one that is relieved of its definitional “afterwards” within the course of an actual existence, if not of its ability to modify real-world causalities. The Sartrean rien (“nothing”), preceding the assumption of positionality, becomes here the key theatre of existence-as-openness and the pre-existing site of an authentic human commonality, as it underpins the possibility of an overcoming of actual human conflicts.

This almost complete inversion of values in relation to existence attains full dramatic relief in the context of our algorithmic present,4 in which the discursive positionality of subjects is exacerbated – and conflict maximized – by an evolving technosphere. Discursive positionality, evermore entrenched, is no longer, even for philosophy, a paper-born affair.5 The frequently cited lines from W. B. Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming” seem apposite as a description of the space of public discourse, in this context. To resist positionality, they suggest, is an ambivalent marker of virtue in times of general crisis:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
(Yeats 91)

The figure of a positioned existential subject is further problematized with the arrival of AI, in which the ability to produce positional interventions may no longer be predicated on a pre-positional (human) thought process. As such, it seems the Sartrean terra nullius of the as-yet un-made subject has taken on renewed value as a stake of philosophical action. To [End Page 130] cite “Que Faire?,” a late text from Jean-Luc Nancy:

How can we not recognize that we have made – or rather made ourselves into – subjects of a production that surpasses us, both in that it evades the schema of its realization and in the fact that it replicates itself according to the autarky of a “doing” that has surrendered to its own development? Savoir faire – and pouvoir faire (being-able-todo), which is, after all, the meaning of “technics,” merges with, then replaces, devoir-faire (having-to-do). However, knowing, being-able-to, and having-to, leave intact something of “doing”: the efficacy, which is not the efficacy of an object, nor of an active or passive power nor of the effect of a cause, but the efficacy that lies in the fact (le fait) of an existence.
(100–117, 113; my emphasis).

In its attentiveness to the often disappearingly thin margins of possibility opened up by the verbal – and in particular, prepositional – play of his tutelary figure(s), Goh’s essay carries its complex wager through to a form of realized assertion, the success of which is perhaps primarily in the invitation it provides to further questioning. The proximity to currents in artistic thought is again apparent in the concluding, almost mischievous, scenario of an infinitely re-tweeted “à” circling the world. Here, philosophy’s final retrenchment would appear to lie in a form of radical, assumed vulnerability or exposure. As a political gesture, this “à-parition” (i.e., an appearance of the “à,” punning with “apparition”) can be interpreted as an act against “a forgetting of our ontological à and of the ethical à” (18), even as it appears to sublimate in a closing pirouette some of the contradictions of the broader démarche. Just as a theoretical metaphor integrating one aspect of a feature of the given language with a general philosophical schema can be read as something of an overreach, an account of existence that is both committed to action in the world and constructed in distinction from the idea of philosophical position can on occasion feel as if it has run out of road. An example of the potential limits of the idiom en devenir (in the process of becoming) becomes apparent in the third “political” section of Goh’s discussion (related in Nancy’s own writing to the figure of an actually shared space). It is at such points that the imperative of idiomatic coherency and the vanishing point of a philosophical way forward can appear, however fleetingly, to have become indistinguishable:

Does a pre-positional politics not seem to take a position precisely in holding to the pre-position (and thus finding itself in the trap of a position of the pre-position)? But let us consider that an absolute non-position is never possible, that it is impossible to never assume a position; even a pre-position is nevertheless a position, however momentary or mobile it might be. […] To refuse any position, indeed, implies an abandonment of all politics (since all politics is irreductibly the taking of a position), including that which seeks to affirm a space where all [End Page 131] difference is respected, where each existant has their freedom to exist. […] In recognizing the minimal position, or the undeniable positioning of the political à, it is perhaps better to say that what is at stake in the political à is a position without a position.
(103–05)

Notes

1. Translator’s note on temps (Mensah) in original. Except where otherwise indicated, subsequent translations – including citations of the reviewed work – are my own.

2. On this theme see, for example, Jaques Derrida, Marc Guillaume and Daniel Bougnoux, “Le papier ou moi, vous savez … (nouvelles spéculations sur un luxe des pauvres).” Les cahiers de médiologie, 1997, no. 4, pp. 33–57.

3. See, for example, Daisy Sainsbury’s Contemporary French Poetry. Towards a Minor Poetics (Legenda, 2021).

4. See, for example, Eric Sadin’s La Vie algorithmique. Critique de la raison numérique (Éditions l’Échappée, 2015) for an early contribution to what is now a burgeoning literature on the topic.

5. See Yuk Hui’s On the Existence of Digital Objects (University of Minnesota Press, 2016).