The Trace in Derrida and Levinas Bettina Bergo Université de Montréal 1

Canadian Philosophical Association, London, Ontario, May 2005

for Nadia Sahely

Foreword
In this paper I want to follow the career of the trace as it unfolds in selective writings of Levinas and
Derrida.1 It will be impossible in this kind of presentation to give a complete panorama of the functions
and meanings of the trace; besides, Paul Ricoeur suggested classifying traces according to the neuro-
cerebral (“mnesic traces”), the conscious-unconscious (“mnemonic traces”), and the written or inscribed
trace (“historic traces”). A clean, rather general classification—valid until we enquire about types of
memory or until we expand the concept of inscription or arche-writing.2
Now, if the trace, for Levinas, refers to what cannot appear—glory, the face of the other, a dynamic
collection of aphanological conditions—then it is also tied up with the complex of memory, affectivity,
and the birth of signification. In Derrida, the trace begins its career in the critique of Husserl and the
immediate self-presence of the inner voice; that voice which is supposed to dispense with those traces
called Anzeigen or indications. But the trace, in Derrida, continues its path between phenomenology and
aphanology, opening the question of the possibility of enlarging the meaning of writing to processes of
inscription, whether social, cybernetic or natural. In Derrida’s conference “Éperons,” the trace is tied to
the signifying complex of veils, veil-rendings (with the instantiations of “Éperons” from stone spurs,
daggers, Nietzsche’s umbrella and the trace or Spur), and femininity. In later writings like Le
monolinguisme de l’autre and Contre-allées, traces are approached in their cultural ambiguities and their
ability to be inscribed on, or introjected into, bodies. In this brief sketch, we can see that the career of the
trace in Derrida perspectival: it crosses disciplinary boundaries while making the work of inscription,
identification, but most importantly, ambiguity, possible. I am interested, in a broad sense, in the spread
of this concept in 1960s French thought. That is, in its sources and, in Levinas’s case especially, its
connection to sensuous or affective memory? Thus, I begin by discussing Levinas but will have Derrida
in mind at all times.
1. The Trace and Repetition
In his collection of essays Noms propres,3 Levinas asks whether the work of Derrida does not
represent a line cutting through the history of philosophy, like the Kantian revolution did. Levinas’s
question is put in slightly bad faith, given Derrida’s debt to Heidegger. The essay devoted to Derrida
presents his 1960s work in broad strokes, to come to the conclusion, just a year before the publication of
Otherwise than Being (1974), that Derrida’s trace-like conditions of possibility of language and writing
invite the Levinasian question of whether incipient inscription in all its forms, is not rooted in affective
traces which Levinas calls, variously, recurrence, sincerity, the Saying, etc. In short, Levinas uses
Derrida’s reflection on the trace to pose the question of the origins of intersubjective responsibility;
according to Levinas, affective traces thus construed would ground any speaking or writing as their
transcendental condition. As we know, Derrida was characteristically generous in his response to
Levinas’s query.
The later work of Levinas identifies human sensuous vulnerability as its site of predilection for the
trace. Privileging the sensuous trace goes some way toward addressing why face to face responsibility
repeats and increases. This is because the question of repetition, enormously difficult for
phenomenology, implies a relationship between traces, a memory of the flesh that can be forgotten, and
the conscious-unconscious structure of sensibility. That same question returns in Derrida’s later work in
the form of ‘hauntings’ and fragments of autobiography. Thus two questions form the leitmotiv of this
paper: the first concerns the relationship between traces, memories, and sensibility; the second concerns
the proliferation of French discourses on the trace in the 1960s, a proliferation I will try to illustrate here.
Can we speak of an inscription that is purely affective, or again: of sensuous memory? Strange
questions these, if we acknowledge that we do not remember pain though we admit that trauma leaves
 The Trace in Derrida and Levinas Bettina Bergo Université de Montréal 2
Canadian Philosophical Association, London, Ontario, May 2005

an impression on the body, accompanied by psychic manifestations. Now, the onset of the other,
according to the later Levinas, is described as traumatic. And responsibility belongs to an economy, or
aneconomic order, of repetition. It does this uniquely, as I am not responsible in the wake of other
signifying traces, say, in nature—even if they could traumatize me. Many things can be understood as
inscriptions or take the form of a trace, and never produce trauma or responsibility. Some memory of a
sensation must lead us to infer the presence, sporadically forgotten then recalled, of some sensuous
alterity-in-the-same. That memory should allow us to infer that responsibility intensifies even as it
repeats, which means that it repeats in and as difference. Again, what is a memory of a sensation of a
‘presence’ that is excessive? Levinas compares it with being “mal dans sa peau.” Translated by “too
tight in its skin,” “mal dans sa peau” is constitutional, existential, almost irremediable, like the poetic
“mal de vivre.” Yet this figure gives way, in Levinas, to an emphasis on intensification, recurrence, and
repetition, which means that some inscription of the sensuous excess passes through the irrecuperably
lost time-space that consciousness must reconstruct as representation. This time-repetition conundrum is
why Levinas likens the ‘otherwise than being’ to an adverbial inflection of the verbal ‘essance’, or what
usually carries on in Being. But that implies that we should be concerned with the way bodily memories
congeal into dynamic states, with or without the de facto presence of the other person, and thanks to the
strange effectivity of traces. Is there a way of speaking non-mechanistically about the form of sensuous
or bodily memory, without recurring to “abnormal psychology”? Such a memory, in becoming
conscious, would have to abbreviate or congeal impulses and sensations otherwise irrecuperable to us.
Because metaphoric nexus between the conscious and non-conscious sensation, affect and memory
is tied to the aporias of conceptualization, which reifies what it represents, we can only offer analogies
for this memory of sensation. Perhaps it is like the odd recognition we have sometimes when, drifting
into a dream, we half realize that we are returning to an already familiar dream problem or dream
universe. Whether it comes before or after the unfolding of the dream situation, this recognition
disappears almost immediately, and so, always seems somewhat suspect. But this is only a search for an
analogy to illuminate the unconscious-conscious dynamic of sensation and memory. For Husserl as for
Freud, sensation existed only in becoming-intentional, in being-represented. Indeed, Husserl came
closest to sliding into psychology when he advanced an explanation of recollection on the basis of what
he called a phenomenological theory of association. All that lacked him was an unconscious, a fantasy
life defined by repression, displacement or temporal condensation, as well as the associative powers of
phonemes or words said. Husserl insisted that recollection be transparent in and to itself, like all the
other acts of consciousness, and therefore, true material for phenomenological description. And we
know that Levinas followed him up to one important deviation: Levinas’s repetitions are possible,
thanks to traces, and it is an otiose question to him whether these traces are inscribed in the flesh, or in
some kind of memory. What is important for Levinas is that the trace ‘is’ as it is enacted as sincerity, and
this, out of a site that is neither conscious nor precisely unconscious. In this enactment, expressed as
“here I am,” the self becomes a signifier, he says. Contrasted with the ego or representation, the self thus
exists originally as repeating, non-identical signification. The self is passive production of difference,
thanks to what inhabits it but is not it.
2. The trace as inscription
What is a trace for Derrida? Where does the trace begin, where does it end? In his early study of
Husserl, Speech and Phenomena,4 Derrida sets the trace in the laps of space-time that is inassimilable to
representation. “…We should be able to say a priori that their common root [that of retention and
representation]—the possibility of re-petition in its most general form, that is, the constitution of a trace
in the most universal sense, is a possibility that must not only inhabit the pure actuality of the now but
must constitute it through the very movement of differance it introduces. Such a trace is...more
 The Trace in Derrida and Levinas Bettina Bergo Université de Montréal 3
Canadian Philosophical Association, London, Ontario, May 2005

‘primordial’ than what is phenomenologically primordial,” he argues (SP, 67). Is this not the same non-
structure, or non-site with its non-event, whose strange effectivity amounts to the condition of possibility
of the repetition of responsibility? The only question in the matter of their rapprochement is whether a
factical other need be there for Levinas’s trace to make itself felt. It would appear not.
In Of Grammatology,5 the trace provides the ground for an extension of the notion of writing to
include those marks, visible and invisible, that differentiate and unify ideas, intuitions, signifiers. Traces
here are originary cuts. Speaking of Lévi-Strauss’s “penetration” into “the lost world” of the
Nambikwara of Brazil, whose massive territory was covered by bush, “traversed by a picada or crude
trail whose track is not easily distinguished from that bush.” Derrida observes, “one should meditate
upon all of the following together: writing as the possibility of the road and of difference, the history of
writing and the history of the road, of the rupture, of the via rupta, of the path that is broken…of the
space or reversibility and of repetition traced by the opening…the silva is savage, the via rupta is
written…and inscribed violently as difference, as form imposed on the hylè in the forest…it is difficult
to imagine that access to the possibility of a road-map is not, at the same time, access to writing” (OG,
107-108).
The entire critique of Lévi-Strauss’s Rousseauism, by which “petites peuplades sans écriture”
replaced the noble primitives “sans civilisation” in the Parisian academy, is predicated on Lévi-Strauss’s
metaphysics of the living presence of human to human in primeval goodness, without technical
intermediaries like writing. Absent an expanded economy of the trace as genetic, repetitive, and ex-
centric to any economy, Derrida’s critique of the metaphysical in politics, history, and ethnography could
not proceed. As we know, Of Grammatology shows painstakingly that the Nambikwara inscribed and
carried within themselves traces equivalent to an arche-writing. However it is Derrida who understands
better than Lévi-Strauss what it means when, having handed out paper and pencil to this “illiterate”
group, Lévi-Strauss describes them as drawing lines, waves, connections, which he will ultimately
acknowledge refer to kinship structures, clan belonging, and social hierarchies. Yet this writing activity
was not what Lévi-Strauss anticipated, much less grasped, when he praised a pure people possessed of
an “animal satisfaction as ingenuous as it is charming” (OG, 122). What gives Derrida’s critique its
pathos, is the paradox that Lévi-Strauss constructs for himself. He comes to admit that the Nambikwara,
at work with their pencils, were not just imitating the ethnographers. They were “making diagrams,
describing, explaining, writing, a genealogy and a social structure” (OG, 124). To which Derrida adds,
“It is now known…that the birth of writing (in the colloquial sense) was nearly everywhere…linked to
genealogical anxiety” (OG, 124). But genealogical anxiety echoes a question that repeats obliquely in
Levinas’s work: Who am I? Whence do I come? What is my inner nature? Whether these questions are
formulated or enacted, they concern the other. And this, even if the other can not confer an essence on
us, but only makes us aware of our irreplaceableness. Our irreplaceableness, of course, recalls the Proper
Name and, as we know, Derrida has argued that writing—understood as infinite and even indeterminate
iterabilities—is possible only with the erasure of the proper name. If we combine Levinas and Derrida,
we discover the strange but plausible circumstance that the proper name, as essence, is always already
crossed out, always already replaced by political or cultural place-holders, and yet, it is diversely
restored in the enactment of accounting for oneself to the other and in kinship traces. If the birth of
writing enacts the insistence of anxiety as an affective, sometimes material, trace; if writing broadly
construed makes possible the repetition and combination with other traces, their parceling and
distribution in cultures, then we must add to this that the birth of speaking for Levinas is connected also
with the insistence of anxiety, once again as an affective trace. Together, writing and speaking configure
laws—at least, laws of combinatorials, laws of differences, laws as differences—even as they
continually encourage new laws or norms, whether these are prohibitions or commandments. The trace
 The Trace in Derrida and Levinas Bettina Bergo Université de Montréal 4
Canadian Philosophical Association, London, Ontario, May 2005

as inscription is thus always generative. The stranger question is whether identity and culture are always
political in some sense. When he reads Lévi-Strauss’s account of the “writing lesson,” Derrida shows us
that one can read traces even without being able to read words—and one can read them in an
immediately political and economic perspective. According to Lévi-Strauss, the Nambikwara Chief
imitated the transcriptions of the ethnographers, producing a full page of incomprehensible wavy
scribbles. The Chief then proceeded to read these scribbles as though they were words, says Lévi-
Strauss, to the assembled members of his clan. The resulting speech called for distributions of gifts and
fulfillment of duties. Whether these acts are already inscribed in the memories of the assembled or not
represents a problem that goes unsolved. Following the Chief’s discourse, however, a strange political
violence took place in perhaps the least violent of forms. The chief’s followers drifted away, and for
good. “Those who moved away from him after he tried to play ‘the civilized man’…must have had a
confused understanding,” says Lévi-Strauss, “of the fact that writing, on this its first appearance in their
midst, had allied itself with falsehood” (OG, 134).
It was never clear what was the transgression that provoked the clan’s flight from their Chief. There
is reason to doubt that it was set off by the play at “civilized manhood” or some perceived pretense at his
reading from the whites’ paper. Can we really believe that writing in this particular form provided a
greater legitimation for commands whose content was already implicit? The question should be
rephrased: What happens in the pencil-on-paper explicitation of those immanent inscriptions of implicit
norms; what takes place in the phenomenalization of internalized and forgotten traces—is an other
transgression enacted thereby? Or again, does everyday writing intensify inscriptions that were implicit
but already cultural or economic? If so, then writing in the colloquial sense must suppose a deeper
concept of inscription and with it, the affectivity tied to traces. I suspect that that is at least the case with
monotheistic religions…
Something of this episode cast Lévi-Strauss himself into a profound anxiety, an anxiety so
uncharacteristic that the spirit and value of his investigations—notably, the purity of writing-free
humanity—seemed threatened for a time. He “found…himself alone, and lost, in the middle of the
bush…demoralized…agitated by dark thoughts” (OG, 126).
4. Tachet
When Derrida traveled to Algiers with Catherine Malabou, he pointed out the sign of a lithography
shop that stocked wholesale wines, inscribed on the white-washed stone of the old capital’s arcades
fronting the Mediterranean. It looked like this:
LITHOGRAPHIE
JOURDAIN
VINS EN GROS
TACHET
Below the sign, and inscribed like a legend on a map, stood the graffito: “Tachet.” Not a noun one
finds in the dictionary, “Tachet” is like the truncation that allows us to form the participle “tacheté”—
speckled, splattered, or spotted with brown; or the noun “Tache”—spot. “Tachet” with a “t” sounds both
like a state and an action. What it leaves in its imaginary wake is a dark trace, some besmirchment, like
the material graffito under the commercial insignia. In “Ce corps extranjuif,” 6 Hélène Cixous recently
remarked that, in his later writings, memories of sensations and scenes, fluids, sounds, residues—
passional, almost immemorial traces—often constituted the core of Derrida’s reflections.7
It is as though he were working through the gamut of those traces that precede the memorial, the de
facto versus the de jure, the imaginary versus the fulfilled evidence. “Sense, being temporal in nature…
is never simply present. It is always already engaged in the ‘movement’ of the trace,” Derrida wrote
already in 1967, before following those traces from his autobiography. 8 With a certain psychoanalytic
 The Trace in Derrida and Levinas Bettina Bergo Université de Montréal 5
Canadian Philosophical Association, London, Ontario, May 2005

lightness, Cixous argues that the autobiographical trace mixes with growing urgency with Derrida’s
philosophical themes. But then, so do themes that took shape in his long discussion with Levinas. Thus,
in the Monolingualism of the Other, he acknowledges a further fold in his thought:
“One is going to accuse me of mixing all this up. But no! Or, yes; one may and one must, taking care
over the most rigorous distinctions,…not lose sight of that obscure shared power [obscure puissance
commune], that colonial drive that will have begun by insinuating itself, but is never slow to invading, in
what they call, using an expression worked to death: ‘the relation to the other!’”9
That strange noun-participle, “Tachet,” would have been the first thing one saw from the boat, like
an arrow drawn over the aerial photo of someone’s house; or like Derrida’s reading of Abraham
responding to the divine call with Kafka’s terrible question: “Who, me?” What is more, “Tachet” would
have been an original signifier on Derrida’s body, attesting Lacan’s claim that the register of the
phonetic stands apart from the ‘reign’ of sense and signification in the unconscious. Connected by
homonymy to “taché,” stained, or “tacheté”—the erroneous graffito, “tachet,” with its inaudible “t,”
recalls the a insinuated into “différance,” whose presence one only ‘reads’ but does not hear. One will
accuse me of mixing all this up, says Derrida, because, he adds: “All these words: truth, alienation,
appropriation, habitation…ipseity, place of the subject, law…remain problematic to my eyes….They
carry the seal of that metaphysics imposed precisely through that language of the other, that
monolingualism of the other. So much so that [my] debate with monolingualism will have been nothing
other than a deconstructive writing…all the way to the distinction between transcendental universality or
ontology¸, and phenomenal empiricity.”10
Functioning in the Anzeigen, ignored by Husserl’s transcendental subject, or in those black traces
that together form one trace or stain, traces represent in all their forms the “incidences of [a] primordial
non-presence.”11 It has not been noted often enough how this original thinking—which Levinas
compared to a line cutting across the history of philosophy—how it arose in a context of thinkers intent
on exploring the meaning of the aphanological, of repetition, trace, event, and background. Around the
same time that Derrida published Voice and Phenomena, Deleuze was rethinking the concept of
difference in itself, (1968). In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze argued that difference is not just a
matter of a demarcated, dark trace, but also of the strange relationship that insists between the ground
and the event; or the abyss, the surface, and its floating traces—and there are always traces, for Deleuze,
who writes:
“Indifference has two aspects: the undifferentiated abyss, the black nothingness…but also the
white nothingness,” (think of the white arcades of Algiers). He adds, “the white nothingness or the once
more calm surface upon which float unconnected determinations like membra disjecta: a head without a
neck, an arm without a shoulder…The indeterminate is completely indifferent, but such floating
determinations are no less indifferent to each other. Is difference intermediate between these two
extremes (of ground and determinations)? Or is difference not rather the only extreme, the only moment
of presence and precision? Difference is the state in which one can speak of determination as such.” On
this he and Derrida are in full agreement—provided we realize that determination is never simple
adequation or identification.
“The difference ‘between’ two things is only empirical…However, instead of something
distinguished from something else, imagine something which distinguishes itself—and yet that from
which it distinguishes itself does not distinguish itself from it.” (DR, 28)
Having said this, Deleuze offers an empirical example: Nietzsche’s lightning, flashing across a
dark sky, to illustrate the process or event of difference-creation, accompanied by its ‘own’ ground of
non-difference and non-distinction: the dark sky. The crucial thing that Deleuze observes, and which
recalls the hauntings increasingly present in Derrida, is that the that from which difference distinguished
 The Trace in Derrida and Levinas Bettina Bergo Université de Montréal 6
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itself also rises up and clings to the event of difference, itself, as it ‘flashes’. Thus, adds Deleuze, “There
is cruelty, even monstrosity, on both sides of this struggle against an elusive adversary, in which the
distinguished opposes something which cannot distinguish itself from it, but continues to espouse that
which divorces it…Recall Artaud’s idea: cruelty is nothing but determination as such, that precise point
at which the determined maintains its essential relationship with the undetermined.”12
If cruelty were only determination; what we need to understand is how what is determined, or
receives a trace, either opens outward, as in Levinas’s thinking of the Saying and of glory, or shuts down
on itself, as “taché” becoming the inert or troubled support of “letters on the body.” This question is
difficult because the violence of the trace, in each case, holds such different consequences, and there
remains the problem of levels of discourse and investigation. Such a host of traces throng in the late
1960s and ’70s! Conceptually innovative, they laid claim to every level of reflection and object, arising
after failed efforts at recovery and restoration, as Cixous observed of the worlds shattered between 1933
and, say, 1954.13 But we no longer insist that continuities unite these traces, forging historical grammars
for them as structuralism said. As Derrida put it recently, “beyond memory and lost time. I am not even
speaking of an ultimate unveiling, but of what will have remained, for all time, foreign to the veiled
face, to the very face or figure of the veil itself…I know, ultimately, that I need no longer discern
between the promise and the terror” (MA, 135-36). This was also why he observed, in regard to Levinas,
that at the heart of responsibility abides also the greatest of betrayals. Cruelty, as Deleuze said, is
determination, a “tachet”—but a different cruelty lurks in the bathos of the ground rising up and sticking
to the lightning-event, the way Levinas’s il y a adheres to the insomniac.
5. The Trace and the Logics of Difference
Against both Hegel and Levinas, Deleuze adumbrated a logic of difference that anticipated
Derrida’s explorations of haunting. For difference to enter representation, Deleuze proposed not dialectic
or the ‘other’, but four Aristotelian categories: identification, analogy, opposition, and resemblance. But
he added, immediately, that “Difference in general [must be] distinguished from… otherness. For two
terms differ when they are other, not in themselves, but in something else; thus when they also agree in
something else…” (DR, 30, emphasis added). Now, if the category of opposition restores Hegel’s logic
of the negative, Deleuze insists that as complete difference, opposition understood as contradiction
finishes by eliminating the subject or substance in which it occurs. By contrast, what he calls
“contrariety,” in the matter or the genus, “alone expresses the capacity of a subject” (he does not mean a
psychological subject) “to bear opposites while remaining substantially the same”—at least in the case
of modifications to “matter.” At the level of “essences,” contrarieties appear as though they were
opposites: like “having feet” versus “having wings.” But here, difference produces what is
incommensurable, unlike yet related, feet or wings provide mobility, in different manners and different
matters (earth, air). Deleuze’s argument brings us back to the route, the picada, which Derrida highlights
as he reads Lévi-Strauss—not to mention returning us to the verb-noun, “Tachet,” imposing an
incommensurability without destroying the substance on which it is inscribed as difference. Deleuze
writes, “Contrariety in essence or in the form gives us the concept of a difference that is itself essential”
(DR, 30). This is because, without undermining the so-called medium, “contrariety” undoes dialectical
progressions and structural holism, in the form of a negative that may either ex-ist or in-sist. This is
weak difference. Yet it inheres in a genus or subjectum as maximal difference (because it does not
destroy the concept) and as specific difference between substances. “Such a synthetic and constitutive
predicate, attributive more than attributed, a veritable rule of production, has one final property: that of
carrying with itself that which it attributes” (DR, 31).
Beyond contrariety, difference becomes sheer otherness and “risks escaping the concept” of
difference itself, and generic difference, says Deleuze echoing Aristotle, is simply “too large, being
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established between uncombinable objects which do not enter into relations of contrariety” (DR, 30).
Difference as contrariety is mediated, by insisting in some genus without abolishing it. Better,
contrariety “is itself mediation,” because genera are themselves “divided by differences” (DR, 31). Is
this not also the trace abiding in the living present, which, Derrida writes, “must, in order to be a now
and to be retained in another now, affect itself without recourse to anything empirical but with a new
primordial actuality in which it would become a non-now…this process”—why not call it “of
contrarieties”?—“is [one] in which the same,” says Derrida, “is the same only in being affected by the
other” (VP, 85). Here may lie a way toward thinking sensuous memory.
Recall the picada traced by the Nambikwara. Productive, like a proto-writing, ‘provisionally
indelible’ like all inscriptions, this quasi-line is the empirical and symbolic difference that combines and
unites the terrain, giving rise to the cultural and proto-political designations that divide and unite the
Nambikwara in relations of contrariety, both among themselves and in regard to the Portuguese. Beneath
this traced line—which, as Descartes first realized, would be the very (non)entity that transformed
“natural space” into “mathematical space,” whose “matter” became the letters of analytic geometry—
beneath the Nambikwara line lay the mnemonic and fantasmatic immanences that the Nambikwara all
knew. And, when obliged with paper and pencil, they proceeded to map out and compare them: we call
this “kinship structures,” but that is a simplification. This immediate, half-intuitional knowledge
corresponds to Lacan’s 1960s concept of the “sign on the body” or the “letter on the body.” Invisible,
without requiring a literal line, the letter on the body traces boundaries, incipient form, and foreclosures.
Its effectivity shows itself in human behaviors, moods, and the way ‘subjects’ ‘communicate’ their
unconscious. “Tachet” and “taché.”14
7. The Trace and the Signifier on the Body
Traces are. Or, as Aristotle-Deleuze argued: Being is not a genus because differences are (DR,
32). But traces ‘are’ in ways we cannot simply attribute to individuals or genera. We consider them
relations or mediations because we consider ‘mediational’ any movement from, or transformation of,
one thing into another. But, as Deleuze points out, traces denote “specific difference.” We consider
traces differentiating but not oppositional, though oppositions readily grow from them when the trace
slides from indication, inscribed or phoneticized, to erasure or antonomasia. We understand traces as
inscriptional, because they persist and engage memory and phantasy—and these, in different ways. Like
a primal scene traces collect phantasy and anguish in repeating a memory that cannot be represented
because it keeps changing or better: it repeats-as-difference. Like Levinas’s responsibility-psychosis of
reason,15 traces as inscriptions endure as if “in us,” as though we were engravable surfaces. This kind of
recipience has the ‘arbitrary’ quality to it of arising unpredictably, even cruelly, like an other in the same
—as though Deleuze’s ground heaved up one day in us, stuck fast to the event that tried to set itself apart
from that ground. The monstrous is the contrariety of difference versus non-indifference. But the
monstrous can be seen on both sides—that of the ground and that of the differentiating event. Cixous
insists, speaking of Derrida and circumcision: “One cannot tell me that at eight days old the child is not
present to his fate. Like the dead he lives everything and undergoes, but hasn’t the force then to say it.
He will say it later on. Likewise one remembers events whose inheritor one is, even though they took
place in a ‘before’ us.”16 This is the monstrousness of ‘revenance’.
“But there is no ego there at eight days old!” protest some Freudians. “There is no-thing that
could remember!” Is that not just like the anxiety, which Freud discovered in the 1920s, always
preceding, always deeper than those factical reminiscences that the patient supposed were the cause of
his trouble? A regressus of sensuous traces antedates ego formation. And if such a trace remains a
question for us, was there not a body, or body-ground, mute at first “like the dead,” said Cixous, were
there not events? Inscription is not causality; it inflects, differentiates. The trace inscribed is like
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Deleuze’s contrariety, which does not destroy the substance. And the trace is always caught up in a
process of reformations, with losses and gains, like the footprint of which Lacan speaks famously.
Remember that he says that, if we approach the unconscious as having one side concerned with
meaning, with sens, the other side is tied up to the trace, to sound, and homophony. Psychoanalytic
listening must therefore be double, with emphasis displaced to the trace, and to its transference. Thus,
for example, I see a trace in the sand. What is this, I must ask: an image, or a figure of a foot that is no
longer there? Is it a non-figural trace, or an indexical of the passage of a person? The question Lacan is
proposing is this: it is up to us whether we take this trace as a sign of a thing, or not.17
Because, as Derrida understood well, we are always in language as inscription, we may then
utter: “footstep,” or “pas!” before this trace. In so doing we are already forgetting that the trace stood in
for the entities “foot” and “person,” earlier on. Thus the attribution of “pas” is not so much identificatory
as it gives voice and creates a sound that ties up with other sounds. Like a new event, lifting off from its
dull ground and becoming autonomous, “pas” is a creation in sound and therewith, a loosening of sense.
But if we return to the trace, now, the sound “footstep” or “pas” no longer represents the step, or the
trace of the step. It has “transformed the trace of a step or passage into a letter (a “sign” if you prefer)
that bars” (PLL, 149) and separates from the initial event-encounter. Lacan names this transformation,
ironically, the “pas-de-trace.” Thanks to the voice, which is not Husserl’s pure immanence, and “through
the [ineradicable] phoneticism of writing, there is a transformation of a trace into something traced
(tracé), of a sign into a letter” (Ibid.). But this process sets a border or barrier between the signifier and
the signified; so the moment of phoneticization—which made possible the separation of the letter that
reveals and forecloses—does not exhaust the function of the thing traced (du tracé). “[B]y the third
moment there appears in the thing traced something that escaped the order of words (l’ordre de la
parole). The letter (as Lacan called it, echoing the imaginary space that Descartes designated by letters)
—the letter is not a pure and simple transcription of sound.” And Derrida understood this. There exists
another order, a supplement comes to light: “that which, in the letter, draws a border [and a shore line], a
littoral, as it inscribes itself, something which is not read…Pure litura, which is the literal” (PLL, 150).
[In the interest of time I will close here, saying simply that this sums up Derrida’s concept of
trace and writing, even as it argues that the sensuous and affective trace, despite its ostensible priority,
cannot be separated from inscription or arche-writing and Deleuze’s concept of ‘contrariety’. Both of
these blur the boundaries between the ‘natural’ and the ‘cultural’, the psychological and the material.
Such a project of surpassing enlivened post-structuralist thinking even as it unsettled its insights. …] =
Conclusion for CPA.

Derrida has often spoken of the impact of psychoanalysis on his thought. I am using Lacan’s
process of off-lifting, by which one leaves the interrogative order of meaning in the wake of that which
we feel compelled to interpret as a sign, and moves toward the sonorous trace in the word, called
“letter” by Lacan, toward a different order of unconscious combinatorials of sound. Letters on the body
are, for Lacan letters the way Descartes assigned letters to the mathematical space he helped to create.
Letters on the body recreate the body imaginary. Literally a letter as determination and trace that stands
in, the so-called letter on the body is not so much of the order of meaning as it is moveable associability,
like Deleuze’s floating members on the white surface of indetermination. But these traces are not
indifferent to each other. Thus, “tachet” becomes a “letter on the body.” And Derrida’s reflections on
blood, circumcision, daggers and lancets move between the metonymic (blood as who, as whose? Blood
as histories lost, as spots when spots stand in for abjection) and the memorial. “Tachet,” that letter that
 The Trace in Derrida and Levinas Bettina Bergo Université de Montréal 9
Canadian Philosophical Association, London, Ontario, May 2005

no doubt went forgotten, yet moved or thrust Derrida forward. Tachet, that letter that changed the
Lithographer’s shop into a site foreclosed and a specific difference. All this despite the fact that in
becoming conscious of a letter on the body, one represses or confers it, or thrusts it elsewhere. At the end
of “Monolingualism of the other,”18 Derrida asks, “a Judeo-Franco-Maghrebin-Genealogy does not
explain everything, far from it. But could I explain anything without it, ever? No, nothing, nothing of
what occupies me and keeps me in motion….again a scene. I just made a scene” (MO, 133-134).
Another other scene.
8. The Memory of Sensation ‘bis’
A longer essay would have to show how the logic of traces arises from at least four disparate
sources: first, older themes from Jewish mysticism such as the letters that come into existence and go
out of them with new generations; second, the evolution of phonetics and linguistics away from
historicism toward a thinking of the effectivity of the double articulation of difference, phonemic and
morphemic; third, the development of vitalism through Nietzsche, and psychoanalytic logics of the
symptom, the connection of words to memory, as well as theories of energetics and neural inscription.
That discussion exceeds the scope of this paper. However, because I began with a discussion of the trace,
sensation, and memory—a theme that brings Levinas and Derrida together—I now return to that theme.
If writing occurs in and as the effacement of the proper name, as Derrida wrote in 1968, the
effacement of the proper name is neither an event nor an archaic transgression. Effacement of the name
is the inevitability of ‘iteration’, the iteration and configuration of traces. If this seems to have little to do
the memory of sensation, we should remember that the ‘discovery’ of this iteration begins with the
discovery of the body, and its intelligence, in Leibniz, Schelling, and Nietzsche. The mature work of
Nietzsche, dating from 1885 through 1888, appears to present different ‘projects’. However, the most
intriguing seems to me the development of a massively expanded semiotics of unconscious traces and
forces in bodies, natural life and the inorganic. Pierre Klossowski and Gilles Deleuze discussed this
extensively between 1962 and 1968.19 The Nietzschean deconstruction of the “I” or ego unfolded in
tandem with the perspectival exploration of the nervous system, bodily but also social energies urging
that it is because consciousness ‘takes charge’ of the body—interpreting those of its events to which it
accedes, and positing itself as indispensable to that body—because consciousness monopolizes
production of meaning about ‘its’ body, that the body as site of interacting inscriptions and intensities
was overlooked by most of Western philosophy. It was Nietzsche who thus proposed three level
semiotics of 1) traces and signs of unconscious acting forces; movements of mood and affect that simply
suggest deeper events to which we cannot accede completely through linguistic-conceptual structures
(cf. Nietzsche’s remark, “the lightning does not flash”); finally, those conscious traces from which
meaning and intentionality arise. These levels are not hierarchized by Nietzsche; one is not truer than
another. But they dissolve the subject as proper name, arguing that what takes itself as a name or an
essence, is epiphenomenal (CV, 83); Moreover, language, whose grammars and signs lead us to suppose
that life consists of substances like nouns and actions performed by those subjects, is but an endpoint, a
sort of abbreviation of multiform events, even physio-chemical movements, which pass incompletely
into the consciousness that interprets them. This is not materialist reductionism; this dimension of
Nietzsche’s perspectivism concerns what Derrida would call inscription. The shattering of a mono-logic
of natural forces, modeled on language, is the thinking of the erasure of the proper name, as much as it is
the pluralization of sensation, sensibility, and memory. It is here, I believe, that we find the most radical
approach to semiotics and ‘structuralism’ before the age of Roman Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss. It is also
here that the surprising later work of Levinas on the other-in-the-same, the trace, and on repetition finds
an equally surprising precedent. If there was a thinking of traces rooted in the body that did not situate
itself in ‘being’ understood as intentionality or its conceptual conditions of possibility, that thinking can
 The Trace in Derrida and Levinas Bettina Bergo Université de Montréal 10
Canadian Philosophical Association, London, Ontario, May 2005

be found in the later work of Nietzsche. Who, if not Levinas and Derrida, would have failed to hear a
real effort to think beyond being in the following words:
“All movement is to be conceived as gesture, a sort of language in which (impulse) forces agree.
In the inorganic world misunderstanding is absent, communication seems perfect. In the organic world
begins error…The contradiction is not between ‘false’ and ‘true’ but between ‘abbreviations of signs’
and the ‘signs’ themselves. What is essential is this: the creation of forms, which represent numerous
movements, the invention of signs for whose species of signs. All movements are signs of some internal
event; and each internal movement is expressed through similar modifications of forms. Thought is not
the internal event itself, it too is but a semiotics corresponding to the compensation of power of the
affects.” (Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, cited by Klossowski, CV, p. 73).
1
Heartfelt thanks go to Gabriel Malenfant, Andréanne Sabourin-Laflamme, and Roseline Lemire (Université de Montréal, Département
de Philosophie) for their research and criticism, which made this paper possible.
2
And, of course, Ricœur realizes that his three “distinct realities” are heuristic. But proceeding on the indifference of neuro-science to
phenomenology and that of the latter toward “the brain”, he is justified in speaking of distinct realities. Given his reading of the work of
A. Leroi-Gourhan, however, Derrida seems to occupy a subtler position when he considers an expanded concept of the trace in archè-
writing, whether this is natural inscription, social, or psychological inscription. Both positions entail difficulties, that of Derrida, toward a
perspectival pluralism that strives to include all concepts of the trace under his archè-writing. For Ricœur’s remarks on traces, see La
Mémoire, l’Histoire, l’Oubli (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2000), pp. 538-39; also see Jean Greisch’s critical engagement with Ricœur’s
topography in « Trace et oubli : l’effacement et l’ineffaçable » in La Trace, entre absence et présence. Actes du colloque international de
Metz, Pierre-marie Beaude, Jacques Fantino, and Marie-Anne Vanier, eds., (Paris : Cerf, 2004), esp. Pp. 271-293.
3
Emmanuel Levinas, Noms propres (Montpellier : Fata Morgana, 1976; republished in the « Livre de Poche » format. Hereafter
abbreviated in the text as NP.
4
Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, David B. Allison, tr., (Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press, 1973; first published in French in 1967).
5
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak, tr., (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, reprint edition,
1998). Hereafter abbreviated in the text as OG.
6
Hélène Cixous, « Ce corps extranjuif » in Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly, eds., Judéités: Questions pour Jacques Derrida
(Paris: Galilée, 2003),
7
Hélène Cixous, « Ce corps extranjuif ,» Op. cit., p. 61. Cixous writes, « De plus en plus de revenance insiste un peu partout dans les
textes de Jacques Derrida, comme si leur nature d’ancien jardin bombardé, maintes et maintes fois bombardé, et plus souvent que nous le
savions, s’exprimait d’une voix impossible à ignorer. »
“More and more revenance, returning, insists almost everywhere in the texts of Jacques Derrida,” she reminds us, “as though their nature,
like an ancient bombed garden, bombed over and over again and more often than we knew, were expressed in a voice impossible to
ignore.”
8
See Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, Op. cit., p. 85.
9
Derrida, Le monolinguisme de l’autre, ou la prothèse d’origine (Paris : Galilée, 1996), p. 70. Hereafter abbreviated in the text as MA.
10
Ibid., p. 115.
11
Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, Op. cit., p. 82.
12
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, Paul Patton, tr., (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1994; first appeared in French
with Presses universitaires de France, 1968), p. 29.
13
When the anti-colonial revolution triumphed in Algeria, only to drift toward war with Marocco.
14
How not to think here of Derrida’s extraordinary critique of Husserl’s indications or Anzeigen, those marks, gestures, or silences, that
enable movement from idea to idea, signifier to signifier? Husserl’s transcendental subject, speaking and listening to itself without
indications, should be compared to Deleuze’s white ground, present to itself, indeterminate, and indifferent to all the fragments “floating
on it as on a surface.” The inner monologue, said Husserl, never says anything new to itself, as though it were some God. To which
Derrida responds, “A voice without difference, a voice without writing, is at once absolutely alive and absolutely dead” (SP, 102). The
subject without revenance would be absolutely alive in timeless immobility.
15
Levinas uses “psychosis” in 1974. It works in Otherwise than Being like a metonym, referring as a part to a whole, responsibility, that
is never assembled in representation—much less in enactment; hence it too repeats.
16
Cixous, Op. cit., p. 68.
17
Philippe Julien, Pour Lire Jacques Lacan, (Paris: Seuil, 1995), p. 149. Hereafter abbreviated in the text as PLL.
18
Jacques Derrida, Le monolinguisme de l’autre, ou, la prothèse de l’origine (Paris: Galilée, 1996). Hereafter abbreviated in the text as M
19
Deleuze in his 1962 Nietzsche et la philosophie. See, for the English, Nietzsche and Philosophy, Hugh Tomlinson, tr., (New York, NY:
Columbia University Press, 1983). Later on in Difference and Repetition (first published in 1968). Klossowski published Nietzsche et le
cercle vicieux: Essai, in 1968, dedicated to his friend Deleuze. See Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, Daniel W. Smith, tr., (Chicago, Ill:
University of Chicago Press, 1998), our pagination comes from the French second edition (Paris: Mercure de France, 1991).