Jacques Derridaâs âAdvancesâ is a consequential text for thinking through the relation between the mimetic and the posthuman. This chapter offers some thoughts on how and why that consequentiality arises. It does so with a touch of unorthodoxy in its structure and style. This is not an affectation or an indulgence. The mode is, it could be said, inevitable. It is hard for any commentary on âAdvancesâ not to find itself coming over all imitative of the singular pitch and tones of that essay, or at least patterned by them, even if only to a degree and in inevitable inadequacy in the comparison. Perhaps the patterning is also entirely fitting. âAdvancesâ is, after all, as will be shown, about âthe absolute antecedent,â in relation to which everything cannot but be âafterâ (in the sense not only of subsequence but also of being âin the mannerâor in the castâofâ).
But first, some context, which will take up almost all of this opening section. A key point to flag at the outset is that âAdvancesâ is one of Derridaâs most compact essays. In the 2017 English translation by Philippe Lynes, published by the University of Minnesota Press under the Univocal imprint, the essay takes up just over 50 pages of the small sextodecimo-sized volume, itself called Advances, of which it forms the second part. It is barely longer than Lynesâs important introduction, strikingly titled âAuparadvances.â Two years later Lynes translated, also with Univocal, Serge Margelâs The Tomb of the Artisan God, which is an extended commentary on Platoâs Timaeus.1 The original of that, Le tombeau du dieu artisan, was published in 1995 by Editions de Minuit, and it was there, as an introduction to Margelâs book, that the French original of Derridaâs essay, âAvances,â first appeared.2
The discomfiting sense in the face of all that âeverythingâ is of unavoidable inadequacy, even absurdity, in attempting to respond in one short book chapter to Derridaâs compact thoughts on anachronies at the beginning of things, to which philosophy and religion are âcountertimesâ (A, 23 and passim). And indeed, where to begin? How, possibly, can anything on the anachrony of being, on âthe absolute antecedentâ that âwould precede even ⦠provenanceâ itself, be begun (A, 4; emphasis in the original)? Especially in relation to a text on speculativeness, on beginnings and creditings and prospects (âadvancesâ as a term also has that connotation; see A, 5)? One might as well assay nothing.
To make things more awkward and incongruous still, there is going to be a situational irony in any attempt to closely read âAdvances.â It arises because this English translation of a text that was prefatory to anotherâs study, Margelâs, is out of (its) place (and not only because a translation can never
Perhaps the most readily logical line of argument for the Anglophone reader and commentator might run with rereading Timaeus first; then âKhÅra,â Derridaâs prior engagement with Platoâs work; then Margelâs commentary on Timaeus, to which âAdvancesâ is prefatory and consequent; then Lynes on âAdvances,â for the scholarly contextualization; then âAdvancesâ itself. That would be one way to do it. Or not, because there will always have been vexing differences and (in)determinations in and over translation(s); other precedences of, advances on, any commentary, in the long and never-ending tradition of reception and interpretation of Timaeus. In reading âAdvances,â there would always be something to do first: before. As a result and as will be indicated in later sections, to meaningfully do anything with this (inter)text that opens onto everything can have implications for reflection on mimetic relation, or modeling relatingâand hence for (p)(re)thinking the posthuman.
It might therefore be best to set the frame in a decontextualizing way: narrowingly, omittingly. It will never be possible to provide enough context to everything anyway, not when the context is, literally, everything. This chapter will in contrast be rather breezier, rather more liberties-taking. It will look âonlyâ at âAdvancesâ: not entirely without reference to Timaeus or âKhÅra,â but almost as if Derridaâs essay were a self-contained commentary (which it isnât, quite) on the former. Admittedly, this is a little suspect, possibly unfair, in
In grounding that relevance, this chapter does nothing more ambitious than pulling from the text of âAdvances,â with âKhÅraâ alongside, just a few observations of Derridaâs that weigh upon the theme of posthuman mimesis, offering some initial reflections. To do moreâfor instance, building on the reading line anticipated aboveâwould need a much longer study. There is some decorum in keeping things tight instead: compact, emulating Derridaâs essay. The imitating carries through to the structure. âAdvancesâ has seven sections, running from 0âthe digit signifying nothing or the unbegunâto 6. The reflections in this chapterâs own imitatively numbered and irregularly sized sections (this current section, in imitation, would need to be numbered â0â) will be fragmentary, unresolved (somewhat like those in Derridaâs, it is perhaps not unseemly to say, though there the incompletion is of a different key and import altogether). It is all that can be offered in a chapter of this kind: bitty reflections on what Plato and thence Derrida speculatively advance on the beginning of everything.
1
The (non-)space for posthuman mimesis lies there: in the prehuman fashioning, with and without the assurance of model, of what Plato terms âthe universe.â
I donât mean any disrespect to poets in general, but itâs obvious to everyone that while imitators as a breed have the greatest facility and expertise at reproducing things theyâve been brought up on, none of them finds it easy to reproduce on stage anything that falls outside his experience, and they find it even less easy to put such a thing into words.6
What is it that always is, but never comes to be, and what is it that comes to be but never is? ⦠anything created is necessarily created by some cause, because nothing can possibly come to be without there being something that is responsible for its coming to be. Also, whenever a craftsman takes something consistent as his model, and reproduces its form and properties, the result is bound in every case to be a thing of beauty, but if he takes as his model something that has been created, the product is bound to be imperfect.
T, 16, 28a
What we have to ask is, again, which of ⦠two kinds of model the creator was using as he constructed the universe. Was he looking at what is consistent and permanent or at what has been created? Well, if this universe of ours is beautiful and if its craftsman was good, it evidently follows that he was looking at an eternal model, while he was looking at a created model if the opposite is the caseâ though itâs blasphemous even to think of it. Itâs perfectly clear, then, that he used an eternal model, because nothing in creation is more beautiful than the world and no cause is better than its maker. The craftsman of this universe, then, took as his model that which is grasped by reason and intelligence and is consistent, and it necessarily follows from these premises that this world of ours is an image of something.
T, 17, 29aâ29b
The father-creator ⦠determined to make his creation resemble its model even more closely. ⦠But the being that served as the model was eternal, and it was impossible for him to make this altogether an attribute of any created object. Nevertheless, he determined to make it a kind of moving likeness of eternity, and so in the very act of ordering the universe he created a likeness of eternity, a likeness that progresses eternally through the sequence of numbers, while eternity abides in oneness. This image of eternity is what we have to come to call time.
T, 25, 37d
It thereby follows that âthe model exists for all eternity, while the universe was and is and always will be for all timeâ (T, 26, 38b).
In the beginning, then, was mimesis.
In the Timaeus Plato presents an elaborately wrought account of the formation of the universe and an explanation of its impressive order and beauty. The universe, he proposes, is the product of rational, purposive, and beneficent agency. It is the handiwork of a divine Craftsman (âDemiurge,â dêmiourgos, 28a6) who, imitating an unchanging and eternal model, imposes mathematical order on a preexistent chaos to generate the ordered universe (kosmos). The governing explanatory principle of the account is teleological: the universe as a whole as well as its various parts are so arranged as to produce a vast array of good effects. For Plato, this arrangement is not fortuitous, but the outcome of the deliberate intent of Intellect (nous), anthropomorphically represented by the figure of the Craftsman who plans and constructs a world that is as excellent as its nature permits it to be.7
The Demiurge would be, from the beginning, a sort of survivor, thus a dying being who writes the world in the instance of his death, his own or the worldâs. He haunts a memory, but the memory of a promise. The last will of a testament opens the chance of the future.
A, 11
For Derrida, Margelâs Demiurge is âan inactive, finite subject, powerless and subjected to laws as contradictory as they are implacable, a central but also passive subject.â He is fore-lorn, in âa silent dramaturgy before the first act of the worldâ (A, 6; emphasis in the original).
KhÅra ⦠in Greek simply means âplace,â âplace in general, the residence, the habitation, the place where we live, the country.â In Timaeusâs fable of the Demiurgeâs creation of the sensible world, however, âkhÅraâ for Derrida comes to designate the precise site of resistance to Platonic metaphysics as that which gives place, or as spacing. It ought already to be noted that Timaeusâs account belongs to no assured opposition between logos or muthos; it is rather a âbastard,â âimpure,â or âhybridâ account, a preorigin to philosophical discourse. KhÅra must likewise be grasped âas in a dream.â8
And indeed, Derrida had already emphasized that khÅra is a âmythemeâ that is a âprephilosopheme,â as he calls it (K, 100â1). It is âalien to the order of the paradigm,â âgenre beyond genreâ (K, 90â91). If it can be described at all, its attributes are âtwo types of oscillation: the double exclusion (neither/nor) and the participation (both this and that)â (K, 91). âThe thought of the khÅra would trouble the very order of polarity, of polarity in general, whether dialectical or notâ (K, 92); it âno longer belong[s] to the horizon of sense, nor to that of meaning as the meaning of being. It does not designate any of the known or
KhÅra receives, so as to give place to them, all the determinations, but she/it does not possess any of them as her/its own. ⦠she is not the subject or the present support of all these interpretations, even though, nevertheless, she is not reducible to them.
K, 99
Derrida deconstructs Platoâs metaphors for khÅra. âAlmost all the interpreters of the Timaeus gamble ⦠on the resources of rhetoric without ever wondering about them,â he notes (K, 92). He sees Timaeus, interestingly, as âa narrative but it is a narrative of the going outside of narrative. It marks the end of narrative fictionâ (K, 101).
It never is anything other than what it is; it only ever acts as the receptacle for everything, and it never comes to resemble in any way whatsoever any of the things that enter it. Its nature is to act as the stuff from which everything is moulded ⦠And whatever enters it and leaves it is a copy of something that exists for ever, a copy formed in an indescribably wonderful fashion.
T, 42, 50c
The âmoulding stuffâ that is khôra, âif it is to be the receptacle of all kinds, ⦠must be altogether characterless.â It is as if this cannot be emphasized sufficiently; hence, for good measure: âthat which repeatedly has to accept, over its whole extent, all the copies of all intelligible and eternally existing things: if it is to do this well, it should in itself be characterlessâ (T, 43, 51a).
2
How does the above bear upon the posthuman?
In what follows, the posthuman is understood not in the key of the usual associations, many of which speculate (as in, wager) on urgent futurity. Instead, a little counter-intuitively, the posthuman is here seen as that which is before the human. âBeforeâ is understood here in two senses. The first is of antecedence, echoing the phrase quoted in this chapterâs title. This opens up the idea of the prehumanâand of prehumanism, talk of which is not more glib than posthumanismâs predilection for critical rhetoric about what might be imminently impending or immanent. The second sense is that of âbeing in front of,â as when one says, âI stand before you.â Hamlet, he of âto be or not to beâ fame, a homo mimeticus all too conscious of the figure and name of he who comes fatheringly before him, asserts this kind of being-before in the graveyard scene in Act v, an artist (more than artisan) prince coming out from behind the tombstone: âIt is I, Hamlet the Dane.â To be before in this sense is to con-front and also, as with Hamlet, to seek to understand self and situation, thrownness and (non-)being: before the selfsame, before filiation, before others, before the Other. These and other senses of before and their import for posthumanist thinking are studied with greater expansiveness in Herbrechterâs Before Humanity, referred to earlier. Here, to keep things compact, the idea of ancestrality developed by Quentin Meillassoux in After Finitude is pertinent. Meillassouxâs discussion of correlationism is here suppressed in order to draw attention to this passage:
What is it exactly that astrophysicists, geologists, paleontologists are talking about when they discuss the age of the universe, the date of the accretion of the earth, the date of the appearance of pre-human species, or the date of the emergence of humanity itself? How are we to grasp the meaning of scientific statements bearing explicitly upon a manifestation of the world that is posited as anterior to the emergence of thought and even of lifeâposited, that is, as anterior to every form of human relation to the world?
⦠I will call âancestralâ any reality anterior to the emergence of the human speciesâor even anterior to every recognized form of life on earth.9
The pre-dis-position of this kind of questioning to all kinds of creation narratives, of which Timaeus is of course itself one, hardly needs pointing out. Or the pre-dis-position to theology. Derrida notes in âAdvancesâ how the matters at issue hinge on âA question of what comes before everything [avant tout] (ante, abante), of the absolute antecedent, an ageless forbearerâ (A, 4; emphasis added). And across âKhÅraâ and the Timaeus, this will always turn back to âthe question of anthropomorphy,â that there is everything rather than nothing, that there is the human in the midst. Also, to quote Christopher Fynsk, âthat there is language.â10 And that there is a pleasant game to be played when looking at any posthumanist inquiry. The game that asks, âHow long into it will it be before the question, âWhat does it mean to be human?â is askedâor before the question âWhat is âmanâ?â
This is all quite posthumanist enough already.
3
But what about the mimeticâand thence, homo mimeticus? To reinforce what was anticipated above, here are just a few points that anchor the relevance, for thinking posthuman mimesis, of Derridaâs re-encounter through Margel with Timaeus. Already, in âKhÅra,â Derrida had noted:
if Timaeus names it as receptacle (dekhomenon) or place (khÅra), these names do not designate an essence, the stable being of an eidos, since khÅra is neither of the order of the eidos nor of the order of mimemes, that is, of images of the eidos which come to imprint themselves in it.
K, 95
In the shadows, the Demiurge prepares an artifact, deep in a workshop or a back room. He always stays in the back, behind, and thus before [avant et devant] everything. Calculation and magic, ratiocinating alchemy, dangerous alliance of technology and occultism, indeed spiritism. ⦠At the origin of the world, or rather the order of our cosmos, before it, the Demiurge is especially not a creator God, some maintain, the Demiurge can only contemplate intelligible structures that have preceded him since forever, eternal paradigms. His gaze thus fixed on the model before him in front of him, this contemplator only has eyes for this model. With a draftsmanâs or sculptorâs skill, however, he inscribes, he imprints directly upon the âsite.â Directly there on a support that is in no way substantial, in the impassive receptacle called khÅra, he engraves, as if by hand, images or copies. But the artist-artisan has no more created the space within which this printer imprints images by means of âtypographyâ than he has created or invented their models. Everything is before and in front of he who finds himself before [devant] his model, before what is to be done, before his judges and heirs: the immortal gods, the intelligible paradigms, the khÅra and the representations he inscribes upon itâand us. The Demiurge is before [devant] these, already owing [devant] them everything, but also before and in front of us.
A, 13â14
A very different angel, or agent, of history then. And whatever the angel, or the angle or approach of reading, the relation is always one of mimesis, a be-fore and an owing, the current between an âêtre avantâ and an âêtre devantâ (A, 7).
4
None of this is inconsequential (how could it be?). Yet Lynes notes that âAdvances,â âdespite serving as a frequent point of reference in Derridaâs own work, remains rarely studied in English-speaking deconstructive scholarship.â11 Clearly, this is anomalous. As Lynes writes, âAdvancesâ can âimportantly contribute not only to Derridean scholarship, particularly regarding
Safely addable to that list is posthumanismâindeed, posthuman mimesis. A posthumanist reading of mimesis will find, as the previous sections will have intimated, inexhaustible pertinence in âAdvancesâ and the texts it positions itself before, devant. As well as discussing and elaborating evident posthumanist motifs in texts contemporaneous with the paradigm, a posthumanist reading can tease out crypto- and proto-posthumanist concerns in canonical works. The intention would not be merely to show how earlier texts, including those from antiquity, have amenabilities to posthumanist capture. That is already interesting, but the work of rereading and reinterpretation becomes more critical when it is discovered that the text in question may offer ground for posthumanismâindeed, for ideas on posthuman mimesis, in this caseâto look back at themselves, to re-theorize on that basis. To reaffirm the opening of this chapter: What Derridaâs âAdvancesâ rediscovers is that few texts may be as consequential or revealing in that effort as Platoâs Timaeus.
There has been, as is well known, excellent work done on, for instance, medieval posthumanisms and Renaissance posthumanisms. If the Timaeus ought to be central to any work on posthumanism in antiquityâon Ancient posthumanismsâit is because, in Derridaâs words, it is âthe Greek book on which we have no doubt written the most since there has been philosophyâ (A, 18). Timaeus, Derrida writes, is âa book anterior and undoubtedly foreign to every Bibleâ (A, 18). It stands us, indeed, before time. Posthumanist reading will henceforth know where to (re)start.
5
We have seen already how Derrida speaks of âkhora as pandekhes,â âkhora as receptacle,â and, crucially for posthumanist discourse, as âbeyond all anthropomorphyâ (K, 111). But it does not take longâand this is revealing for posthumanism, for posthuman mimesisâfor anthropocentrism to reassert itself in Timaeus. For, Derrida writes on the basis of his critique of Timaeus, âin order to think khÅra, it is necessary to go back to a beginning, namely, the birth of the cosmos, just as the origin of the Athenians must be recalled to them from beyond their own memoryâ (K, 126). Inheriting the Earth, the tomb
a finite promise of the world, as world: it is up to âusâ to make the world survive; and we cannot say this question is not urgently important today; it always is and always will have been, any time it can be a matterâor notâof giving oneself death; it is thus up to âusâ to make what âweâ inadequately call the earth survive, an earth that we know is finite, that it can and must exhaust itself in an end.
A, 47â48
Anthropocentric, true. Human exceptionalism, that too. But perhaps politics is always so, ineluctably, even when and in the very act of professing to place the nonhuman other more centrally in the frame.
6
As was said at the start, âAdvancesâ contrives to be one of the most compact essays Derrida ever wrote, even while being an essay on cosmogony, comprehending everything in its beginning, open to the âparadoxopoetic anachrony,â as Derrida calls it, of the promise (A, 51). The advances are of and on the promise of another figure of the posthuman that this compact, open essay holds out: âIn order for something to come and that the future of the promise remains open, the horizon itself, in the figure of its end, must be lackingâ (A, 50). In what could almost serve as a definition of posthumanism, in that openness âthere is only calculation, program, anticipation, providence, foresight, prognostic: everything will have happened, everything is beforehand [auparavant]â (A, 52; emphasis in the original). âEverything,â then, is appropriately the
It would need more than the space available here for even the start of an adequate reading of the âeverythingâ parodoxopoetically gestured toward there, which could again only poorly imitate Derrida. But, one final thought, a provocation that proffers itself, is irresistible. Grand and grandiose, magnificent and ridiculous, responsible and overreaching, intent on beginning and ends, on deep space and deep time, on entanglings with animal, plant, mineral, on being beyond the human, posthumanismâwhich has an ethics, a politics, arguably an aestheticsârisks becoming a theory of everything. It advances on everything in conjunction with Timaeus-referencing mimetology, unsettling âany theory, any knowledge of what is, any ontical, ontological, anthropological, or theological scienceâ (A, 37; emphasis in the original), to appropriate Derridaâs words as he compares the promise of the Christian God, which is âkeepableâor rather ⦠not unkeepable,â and that of the Demiurge, which is âunkeepableâ (A, 37â38). And we see what Derrida said, in âAdvances,â when he set to deconstruct some first and last-ing words on everything. He cannot help himself, he cannot resist writing more than once: âWhat the hell!â (A, 3, passim). Posthuman mimesis: imprecation-occasioning, inscrutable, (trans-)earthly, apprehending and apprehensive of the (un)doing of the human, of the being of homo mimeticus, even as it advances the inimitable, mythomimetico-graphic absolute.
Serge Margel, The Tomb of the Artisan God: On Platoâs Timaeus, trans. Philip Lynes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019).
Jacques Derrida, âAvances,â in Serge Margel, Le tombeau du dieu artisan, précedé par Avances de Jacques Derrida (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1995), 7â43.
Timaeus is in some commentaries prefaced by the definite article, so that it is referred to as âthe Timaeus.â That convention is not followed in this chapter.
Jacques Derrida, âAdvances,â in Advances, trans. Philip Lynes (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2017), 1â54, 6; Jacques Derrida, âKhÅra,â in On the Name¸ ed. Thomas Dutoit, trans. David Wood, James P. Leavey, Jr, and Ian McLeod (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 87â127, 94. Page references to these two works, which will be abbreviated as A and K respectively, are hereafter given within parentheses in the main text.
See Stefan Herbrechter, Before Humanity: Posthumanism and Ancestrality (Amsterdam and New York: Brill, 2022).
Plato, Timaeus, in Timaeus and Critias, trans. Robin Waterfield, introduction and notes Andrew Gregory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 1â99, 6 (19dâ19e). Further page references to Timaeus (abbreviated as âTâ) are provided in the main text.
Donald Zeyl and Barbara Sattler, âPlatoâs Timaeus,â The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Summer 2022 Edition,
Philip Lynes, âIntroduction: Auparadvances,â in Jacques Derrida, Advances, trans. Philip Lynes (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2017), ixâxlviii, xxiâxxii.
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008), 9â10 (emphasis in the original).
Christopher Fynsk, Language and Relation: ⦠that there is language (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996).
Lynes, âIntroduction: Auparadvances,â xiâxii.
Lynes, âIntroduction: Auparadvances,â xviiâxviii.
References
Derrida, Jacques. âAdvances.â In Advances. Translated by Philip Lynes, 1â54. Minneapolis : Univocal, 2017.
Derrida, Jacques. âAvances.â In Serge Margel, Le tombeau du dieu artisan, précedé par Avances de Jacques Derrida, 7â43. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1995.
Derrida, Jacques. âKhÅra.â In On the Name, edited by Thomas Dutoit. Translated by David Wood, John P. Leavey, Jr., and Ian McLeod, 87â127. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995.
Fynsk, Christopher. Language and Relation: ⦠that there is language. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996.
Herbrechter, Stefan. Before Humanity: Posthumanism and Ancestrality .Amsterdam and New York: Brill, 2022.
Lynes, Philip. âIntroduction: Auparadvances.â In Jacques Derrida, Advances. Translated by Philip Lynes, ix-xlviii. Minneapolis : Univocal, 2017.
Margel, Serge. The Tomb of the Artisan God: On Platoâs Timaeus. Translated by Philip Lynes. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.
Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Translated by Ray Brassier. London: Continuum, 2008.
Plato. Timaeus. In Timaeus and Critias. Translated by Robin Waterfield. Introduction and notes by Andrew Gregory, 1â99. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Zeyl, Donald, and Barbara Sattler. âPlatoâs Timaeus.â In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. Summer 2022 Edition. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2022/entries/plato-timaeus.