Chapter 8 - Opacity

Summary

In Chapter 7 we focused on questions of the will as they are arrayed across a number of philosophical and literary instances, some of them setting the will in contrast to reason, others arguing for a settlement between the two. But there nonetheless comes a point when neither reason nor the will seems able to lend itself to further scrutiny. Our actions and our values seem to be driven by something inscrutable or opaque. Poe’s “Imp of the Perverse” gives us one insight into just that possibility.

In this chapter, we will look at three different ways in which opacity, rather than transparency, seems to govern questions of human action and value as they range across literature and philosophy. These views are anchored (1) in desire, (2) in ideology, and (3) in writing. In approaching these matters through the works of Freud, Marx, and Derrida (who will be our primary points of reference), we shall consider them as philosophers. We will take Marx as a philosopher of history and of ideology, Freud as a philosopher of the unconscious, and Derrida as a philosopher of writing. None of these categories corresponds to the more traditional domains of philosophy, in ways that have direct consequences for literature. Moreover, their own work is quite often literary in significant ways: Freud works through narrative accounts, Derrida focuses on texts, and Marx’s view of history is narrative in its shape. The question of opacity is at issue in all their writings. Freud suggested that consciousness and the will are not fully in command of themselves, and that we are moved to act by motives that may be largely opaque to us – opaque because they are repressed rather than simply unknown. Marx took the true conditions of our existence as distorted by ideology; indeed, much contemporary Marxist thinking holds that there is no getting “outside” of ideology because there is no getting outside of the effects of power that are produced by the organization of productive forces in society. Derrida holds (in La Carte Postale) that there is no communication without miscommunication, that a condition for any message to be delivered is that it can and does go astray. Writing is, moreover, a system of tropes and deferrals in which there is no foundational or fundamental sense to be discovered (“White Mythology”).