The Animality of the Letter-Matter. Auto-hetero-affection as the defining characteristic of a deconstructive positive conception of materiality

In his Perjury and Pardon seminar Jacques Derrida outlines a positive conception of materiality. He does so while criticising Paul de Man’s textual conception of it. For Derrida, this is too linguistic, too formalist, and thus incapable of accounting for a bodily quality of matter. But Derrida also criticises a secure referentiality from before spoken language as is entailed by a pre-critical recourse to ordinary language. Between these two options, he seeks for a third definition of materiality, whose main characteristic is auto-deixis. In turn, this characteristic is formulated by Derrida as coincident with auto-hetero-affection, which, according to him, is the attribute that defines finite animality. The introductory part of the paper shows how this late definition is enrooted in Derrida’s early development of a grammatological project, which implied a critical consideration of the confluence of cybernetics, semiotics, and life sciences. The central part of the paper demonstrates how Derrida’s definition stems from a close reading of De Man’s texts. The last part analyses the meaning of this definition and develops its epistemological consequences.