3 - Philosophy in Erection: Derrida’s Columns

Summary

I had thought initially that situating myself between two columns or two erections would be a most pleasurable position, but I discovered that it was not so simple – too many erections transcendentalise erection itself, thus paralysing desire. ‘A scandalizing question traverses the text’, Derrida writes. ‘How can one be the father of two phalli, erected one against the other’ (1986: 175a)? This question immediately raises another one: how is it possible to write two texts at the same time? How is it possible to stay here, in the middle, between two phalluses and two texts? Not so simple, as I said, but perhaps even more pleasurable, for that very reason.

I

The question is how to avoid falling, how to prevent the object from falling, and what should we do with what falls down nevertheless? This question is one of desire, how to prevent desire from falling, how to prevent the object of desire from falling, and what we can do with fallen objects of desire? How is it possible to keep desire alive, to preserve it in its full force and energy?

Two sides of Glas, its two columns, Hegel and Genet, provide two different answers. Each time, the issue of the transcendental is addressed, even (more) where the text seems as far as possible from it.

There seem to be two main ways of preventing something from falling. First, by maintaining the object in connection with other things, so that these other things hold it, secure it, bind it. Such a totality forms a system. Second, by cutting the whole structure into small pieces, like a sheet of paper, so that everything – that is, nothing in particular – falls down. If everything is cut or torn into pieces, then everything, that is, nothing in particular, falls.

Philosophy on the one hand: Hegel and his system. Literature on the other: Genet and his pieces and fragments. Attachment and detachment.

Of course, while reading Glas, we constantly find something from the right side sneaking on to the left side and vice versa. As opposed as they may seem in the first place, the two processes – systematisation and fragmentation – are versions of the same problem: erection.