Philosophy of Play (8): Derrida's Wrong Sort of Play

This is me playing with Derrida's Force of Law. 

Begin with a wager about value, not a doctrine about method, because the word play is usually reduced to a technique that lightens labour or a psychological garnish for motivation, while in Bataille it names a sovereign expenditure within immanence, a release of surplus that does not answer to a higher court. In the opening pages of his meditation on Nietzsche, Bataille speaks of ardour that refuses moral ends, of a burning that is not redeemed by utility, of an aspiration that seeks a summit beyond service to God or to any civic good, and he links this to laughter and to the sacred intensity that exceeds results. To remove obligation and to keep the flame is to risk unintelligibility, he writes, since common speech expects every blaze to power a machine, yet the point is precisely to defend a consummation without profit and a joy without owner. The general economy he evokes begins from excess and asks how it is to be spent, in festival, in tears, in useless community, and not only in the restricted economy of measures and returns. When play is understood in this register, it is not an instrument that improves performance, it is a sovereign act that justifies itself in the present. 

Read Derrida’s Force of Law by the light of this wager and a stark difference appears, not because Derrida cannot write about free play elsewhere, but because in this juridical meditation he binds deconstruction to justice in a manner that subordinates play to seriousness. He starts with obligation, I must address myself to you in English, I must speak the language of the majority because it will be more just, and he turns a scene of hospitality into a scene of duty, translating courtesy into a juridical logic of address and response. The emphasis is not on gratuity or on the sovereign hour that belongs to no end, it is on the rightness of making oneself answerable within a given order of speech. This small beginning matters, since a discourse that opens under the sign of devoir already narrows the field in which play could appear as more than style. 

Derrida then fixes the hinge that will carry the whole essay, the enforceability of law is internal to the concept of law, there is no law without force, no applicability without the authorisation of a power that can act. He lingers over Pascal’s fragment in which justice without force is impotent and force without justice is tyrannical, and he reads the famous line on the mystical foundation of authority in Montaigne and Pascal as a sign that every institution is founded in a silence that walls up violence, a silence that is not exterior to language. 

From here the text turns on the difference between droit and justice, the first being deconstructible and bound to the performative force of institutions, the second being undeconstructible and inaccessible to calculable rule, the result is to make deconstruction itself the movement that attends to justice as that which cannot be reduced to law. This reframing is decisive. Once deconstruction is justice, the free play - often associated with deconstruction - is explicitly displaced by a demand for vigilance around force, authorisation, and aporia. 

Bataille would mark this displacement as a passage from summit to decline. "Summit" names moments in which expenditure is an end, in which laughter and tears are not subordinated to an ulterior good, while "decline" names the routines that keep beings intact. Law belongs to decline by nature because it conserves, it compels, it binds, it speaks in the name of a future order, and it treats intensity as a potential threat to order. Derrida does not deny this, he deepens it. What he calls the mystical origin of authority is a way of saying that every founding is violent and without ground, yet he does not permit that recognition to become a licence for festival. Instead he places the recognition under an ethic of infinite responsibility, which is to say under an ethic that cannot be completed and so can never relax into sovereign waste. In Bataille’s vocabulary, the general economy is thereby tamed, its surplus channelled into an austere watchfulness that forbids the ecstatic spending that would risk the order of rule. This is the Puritan move everywhere. 

This taming becomes most explicit when Derrida lays out his three aporias, and especially the third, which he names "the urgency that obstructs the horizon of knowledge." A just decision must come immediately, it must decide in the night of non knowledge and non rule, it cannot wait for the fullness of information, and it must both conserve the law and suspend it in order to reinvent it in each case. The register here is not play, it is ordeal, it is a rushed and trembling responsibility that marks decision as a madness that admits no sabbath. The rhythm is of emergency rather than festival, of interruption under pressure rather than of gratuitous creation. In such a scene, the very time in which play could unfold is foreclosed in principle, because justice does not wait, and because the instant of decision is always a finite precipice that leaves no room for the useless hour. 

Derrida insists as well that justice is undeconstructible and that deconstruction is justice. This double claim draws a hard boundary around whatever might be called free play. In earlier writings the play of signifiers could be heard as a salutary loosening of mastery, a release of the metaphysical demand for presence, yet in this juridical key the same loosening is reinterpreted as the necessary exposure of rule to the singular other in each case, which exposure binds the reader to a discipline rather than liberating them into joy. The play that remains is internal to aporia, it is the strained oscillation between calculation and the incalculable, an oscillation that demands decision, responsibility, answerability. It is not the expenditure without reserve that Bataille defends. It is a seriousness that cannot admit to itself that it has become ascetic, because it calls its asceticism justice. 

Return now to Bataille’s language of chance, of will to chance as the animating principle that breaks the service of moral ends, and to his confession that the extreme aspiration is unintelligible in the grammar of utility and yet is the very condition of a life that is not servile. Here play is near to risk, to laughter that affronts the solemnity of transcendence, to the immediate "yes" that Nietzsche figures as the child. It receives its dignity from immanence, not from a tribunal outside the moment. To this measure Derrida’s juridical writing appears as an anti play, not because he despises play in the abstract, but because he systematically relocates it inside obligation, inside the structure of enforceability, inside a temporality where the instant is consumed by the command to decide. The sovereign waste of time that Bataille would protect is recoded as dereliction, as a failure to respond, and therefore as injustice. 

One might object that Derrida cultivates a different sort of play, a play of differences that keeps the law open to what exceeds it, and that this openness offers a release from rigid rule. The reply is that in Force of Law this openness is framed by a permanent vigilance toward violence, toward the founding silence that both legitimates and corrupts, toward the Pascalian knot of justice and force. To keep faith with the undeconstructible, the interpreter must pass through undecidability, must suffer urgency, must assume responsibility for a reinstitution of rule that is never innocent. In other words, the practice is a doubled tightening, both ethical and temporal, that does not leave the interval in which useless play could be an end. The horizon is not festival but the to come of justice, an avenir that refuses present enjoyment except as the tremor that attends a decision that can never be fully justified. 

Bataille’s critique of transcendence makes this refusal visible. He warns that when a society cannot spend its surplus in immanence, it will seek redemption in abstractions, in gods, in nations, in the sanctity of law as an idol, and it will celebrate sacrifices by conferring noble ends on acts that are in truth destructions. In such climates laughter is condemned as frivolity and play is tolerated only if it can be counted as preparation for service. Derrida does not invoke the nation or the god, he opposes such invocations, yet he invents a new sanctity, undeconstructible justice, to which he binds the reader in a mode of life that does not permit the summit to be more than a momentary and guilty flash. The difference is not trivial, it is the difference between a politics that demands blood and a discourse that demands sleeplessness, but from the perspective of play the effect is analogous, the present is not allowed to be an end. 

It may help to state the contrast in the grammar of economy. Derrida never denies excess, he describes the founding of law as violent and without ground, he describes decision as an excess over the calculable, yet he manages this excess through a discipline of interpretation that is always under threat of force, always oriented by enforceability, always measuring itself by the impossible demand of the other. Bataille asks a different question, he asks how to give the excess to a use that is no use, how to protect spaces in which exchange loosens its hold, how to laugh without contempt and to cry without turning tears into evidence, how to risk chance without a manager and without a judge. If play means sovereign expenditure, then one must say that in Force of Law Derrida is against play, because he refuses expenditure that is not accountable to justice, and because his entire argument performs accountability by converting every opening into an aporia that must end in decision. 

Even Derrida’s chosen idioms confirm this tendency. He thanks his translator in the very passage that makes obligation to the majority language a condition of justice, he draws attention to idioms like enforce the law that reveal how force is interior to legality, he teaches that applicability is not a supplement but part of the very concept, and he refuses to grant any comfort to a reading that would separate law from violence. The rhetoric is exacting and it serves a high aim, namely to disarm the pieties that would hide the power of institutions behind moral scenery, yet it is inhospitable to the smile of the child in Nietzsche that Bataille loved to defend, the smile that begins again without reason and without debt. If there is play here it is the strained play of an argument that discovers a margin in which calculation fails and then immediately fills that margin with a duty that excludes festival. 

None of this implies that Bataille would have counselled irresponsibility in the face of injury, nor that Derrida celebrated asceticism for its own sake. The point is subtler. Bataille’s general economy pleads for forms of life that can contain the summit without recruiting it for a cause, so that a share of our time is not spent in anxiety for a future verdict. Derrida’s legal meditation pleads for forms of reading and deciding that never cease to expose themselves to judgment, so that nothing in the present can claim the dignity of an end. The former keeps open a path to play understood as sovereign waste, the latter closes it in the name of justice understood as an undeconstructible claim that must interrupt every horizon. If the question is whether Force of Law can welcome play as a public good, the answer is no, not because Derrida forgot play, but because he disciplined it into an ethic of aporia and urgency. In that precise and demanding sense, Derrida is anti play.

Sollers calls grammatology the place where questioning and ignorance connect. One already feels a classroom in which the question cannot be simply what is writing. The very form of what is would betray the excess it pursues. The paradox is delicious; it is also appointed to work. The game’s rules are principled abstentions. Delight is converted into method. This is play but the wrong sort, a play that takes attendance at the start and submits a report at the end. In Bataille’s terms it is a restricted play; not the sovereign expenditure he defends. His laughter seeks an end without an end; his festival leaves nothing to verify; his yes does not become a programme. Derrida’s book, alas, is too intelligent to pretend spontaneity. It announces its treadmill from the start: a doubled necessity that will produce brilliance. The brilliance is a lamp at a desk rather than a fire in a field. One can be grateful for the desk; one can still notice what kind of play it admits. It admits only play that works under a lamp: play that is already useful.

The preface insists that this reflection meets the specific obstacle that writing is. Writing is an obstacle that distances knowledge from its operations. Verification doubles the need for dismantling and for construction. The theatre of the text is presented as obstruction overcome through craft. This is not a fault. Yet for a Bataillean ear it is wrong  for play. Play here is a technique that renews the workshop; not an immanent blaze that wastes itself for nothing. The room is ready for labour. The body puts on its coat. The sovereign hour remains outdoors; uninvited. The rhetoric beckons to the moon and to myths. The invitation deposits the reader in a laboratory or a seminar: precise and sleepless; not a festival. All this is announced before the first chapter unfolds its programme. The end of the book is declared. The beginning of writing is called to the floor. 

Bataille would call this admirable and suspect: admirable because it refuses stupidity; suspect because it refuses joy.The first chapter names its ambition in a proverb. "The end of the book and the beginning of writing." The phrase is not a gesture of destruction for its own sake. It marks a slow necessity. What for at least twenty centuries gathered itself under the name of language begins to shift and is summarised instead under the name of writing. Derrida calls the displacement almost imperceptible. He describes a programme within which even the domains scanned by cybernetics and information theory will show up as a field of writing. The point is not an idle flourish. It is a claim about the extension of script beyond alphabets: toward codes; toward programmes; toward the inscriptions of cells. Again the word is programme. The horizon is total. The task is long. The reader is invited into a new universality that tracks every system of marks under the rubric of writing. The game will now be played everywhere. There will be no outside of the workshop.

Bataille would acknowledge the brilliance of this widening; then he would ask whether such totality cancels the possibility of sovereign waste. If every domain is legible as script and if legibility binds to critique and to method, what hour remains in which a sign can be let go without being called back as evidence. Derrida does not call for letting go. He calls for a reading that answers to an enlarged rationality. It is no longer the reign of a logos as presence; yet it is still a rationality that directs, dissects, and constructs anew. The book enacts a restless and skilful play. But it is a play that never arrives at a useless end. Ends are replaced with more work. 

Bataille would see in this the mark of the restricted economy. The book keeps surplus in circulation as material for analysis. The blaze is managed. The glow lights a bench. The programme is candid and unflagging. It is a jewel of vigilance and a refusal of negligence. It is therefore a refusal of the only play he would call sovereign: the play that ends in itself.

Derrida insists that the rationality that now directs the enlarged concept of writing does not arise from a logos. He says this rationality inaugurates destruction. Not demolition; de sedimentation. It is a deconstruction of significations that have their source in the privilege of presence. The sentence is a hinge. It turns the first chapter. It offers a joy that is intense in the manner of an experiment that succeeds. The joy is the joy of method. It is a happiness of exactness. The play at work is finesse rather than festival. It removes encrusted certainties instead of risking an overturning in the square. One can admire the self control of such play. One can admire its ethics: it refuses to perform rebellion as spectacle; it breaks idols quietly. 

Bataille would remind us that a culture which never permits itself a spectacle that belongs to no cause will pour its excess into causes anyway; and then into war. He would add that the labour of de sedimentation must somewhere be paid for by hours that simply burn. He would ask where, in this first chapter, such hours could live. He would not find them. Derrida’s play remains tethered to the project of thinking without metaphysical supports. The tiny ecstasies of this reading are recuperated by the workshop. Every smile buys a concept; every concept buys a further reading. The programme continues. The end of the book is not a bonfire. It is a new library. Libraries are not festivals. They are vows.

The chapter turns to the pair that rules the history it would unwind. The signifier and truth. The writing of the truth in the soul which Plato opposes to written marks on wax and stone. The long primacy of meaning as thought spoken. The immediate relation of meaning to logos and the mediated relation to the exteriority of writing. Derrida does not merely restate the tradition. He names the mediation that has simulated immediacy. He tightens the hinge at which metaphysics forgot its own metaphor. He begins to pull it loose. This is a delicate play. It is a play of a certain kind. It takes its thrill from exposure rather than risk, from satisfaction rather than expenditure. Bataille depends on exposure yet asks for a different act after the seam is shown. He asks for a yes that is not a method. He asks for laughter that does not arrest itself as critique. He asks for a loss that is not repaid by knowledge. 

In this portion of the chapter Derrida refuses that request; and he refuses it coherently. He remains within the discipline that sustains his wager. If truth has been written in the soul as a metaphor of presence, the task is to undo the confidence that the metaphor abused. The reward is to relieve the soul of a false intimacy with itself. Nothing useless happens. Because nothing useless happens, Bataille’s sovereign time is denied entry. 

Where he asks the reader to accept collapse as one of the prices of freedom, the chapter trains the reader to remain upright, to sleep lightly, to read again.The chapter then carries the word being to the margin of writing. It does not evacuate the word. It sends it through Nietzsche and through Heidegger. Nietzsche wrote that writing, first of all his own, is not originally subordinated to logos and to truth. Heidegger’s meditation dislocates the unity of the word being and loosens the bond between sense and voice. The voice of being is said to be silent: without sound. This description breaks the complicity between meaning and phoné. These revisions matter for everything the book will do. 

They are not a carnival. They are a refitting of an engine in the dark. The game is exact and immense. It is sometimes exhilarating in its stringency. It keeps the same ethic: a forbidden joy. Joy must always pay for itself by clarity. A smile that is not an inference is not admitted. The Nietzschean flash is subjected to a protocol of legibility. The Heideggerian risk is translated into a rule. Bataille is not against rules in the workshop. But he asks that the workshop not be the whole of life. He asks that the flash enjoy an hour without being put to work as a lesson. He asks that some losses remain losses. 

In Derrida losses are converted into prizes. The prize is a reading that allows the book to speak of trace and of arche writing without returning to metaphysics. Prizes belong to a restricted economy. Sovereign play has no prizes because it has no judges. This is why Nietzsche, in Bataille’s grammar, writes peaks. Derrida makes Nietzsche into an instrument of sobriety: a guide for a better workshop. The guide may be necessary. It remains the wrong kind of play if one hoped for a fête rather than a syllabus.

Pause over Derrida's promise. The end of the book and the beginning of writing. The phrase tempts a misreading. One imagines a pyre of covers and spines, a night of burnt catalogues, a morning of chalk and slate. The chapter does not authorise that picture. It pictures a patient ending. The end of the book is the end of a metaphysical model that understood meaning as presence and writing as a mere copy of speech. The beginning of writing is the generalisation of inscription beyond phonocentrism and beyond the consolation of presence. There is a kind of play here. Borders are loosened. The end of the book is loosening, not closure. Being itself comes under the sign of spacing and of marks. The joy is cerebral and clean. But this is not Bataille’s joy. His joy is neither clean nor cerebral. It is in tears, in laughter, and in the scandal of spending without profit. Derrida’s cleanliness is steadfast and morally serious. It never wants to cheat. It never wants to lie to itself with a new transcendence. This is a rare virtue. It also produces a climate that cannot let the present be an end. It converts the end of the book into the beginning of more work. 

Work is fine; except when it claims all time. The wrongness of this play does not lie in a mistake of argument. It lies in a refusal of uselessness. The refusal is so consistent that free play can only be the play of a system that continues. A free play that frees nothing from the duty to be read and taken up. Sovereign play does not ask to be taken up. It is spent. Derrida cannot bless spending. It is devoted to accountancy at the highest pitch. Accountancy may save us from frauds but it keeps us from feasts.

One can mark the step by watching how Derrida treats Saussure. Saussure’s condemnation of writing’s prestige is read as a moralising trace inside a scientific programme. It is a residue of old fear. Derrida exposes how a stratum of discourse had to remain inherited in order to rule writing as exterior to speech. The move is sober, exact, and bracing. The energy is that of a court that never rises. Every exposure produces a new sitting. The light never goes out. Bataille would accuse this light of exhausting the eyes. He might grant the victory against phonocentrism. But he would close the book and look for a square where music can be wasted and no one asks what it is for. He would say that unless such squares are defended with conviction, the city will pour its excess into spectacles of power: parades and cruelty. That is the heart of the quarrel. Derrida’s play is Roman: elegant and exact; making space in the law by delicate arguments. Bataille’s play is plebeian and sacred: a hole in the wall for a day; wine for the hole. Neither refutes the other. Both know the same darkness. They answer it with different hours.

In the introduction Sollers stages a recurrent temptation. Readers treat grammatology as an expedition to the moon: a mythic crossing; a delight in the new machine of reading. Sollers writes of a text that anticipates the misunderstanding it will receive and verifies that misunderstanding in the very act of writing. The rhetoric glitters. It is also a confession of method. Your astonishment will be folded back into the workshop. Your resistance will be recycled as proof that the workshop must work. The discipline is magnificent. It is also the end of sovereign frivolity. 

Bataille’s frivolity is the most mindful of frivolities. It is a decision to spend attention on delight that purchases nothing. It cannot be justified by any project. Even a project as generous as the liberation of writing from metaphysical hierarchy will not suffice. This becomes the wrong kind of play for him. Not because it is playful but because it never lets go. The hand does not open. The coin is never thrown into the sea. Instead, the coin is invested. Investment will make futures possible. It will not make joy. A culture that postpones joy forever for reasons of principle will teach itself to despise the bodies it pretends to protect. This is a judgment in the spirit of Bataille's accursed share. It is a warning rather than a refutation. It reminds us that libraries alone cannot keep cities from war.

Derrida's vocabulary confirms the diagnosis. Programme. Field. Rationality. Destruction as de sedimentation. Signifier and truth. Being written. None of this is theatre. None of it pretends to be. The book will be loved by those who cannot stand consolation and who are prepared to give up many lights to avoid a false sun. They will find an ethic of caution and an art of courage. They will find a play that is never idle: always instrumental in the best sense; always a turning of screws that rusted for centuries; always the return of a machine to the world from which metaphysics tried to abstract it. In that sense Derrida is generous to life. It returns writing to bodies and to codes and to marks. But the generosity is formal. It does not crown the day with useless time. 

Bataille would ask for both: rigour and the useless crown. The refusal of false transcendence and the feast of immanence. The method and the waste. Derrida grants the method and denies the waste. He warns that any feast threatens to smuggle transcendence back under the name of presence. The warning is not the whole of wisdom. Wisdom must protect the useless as a condition of decency. Decency is the true object of both writers. They differ about how to secure it. One scours language and refuses its pretences. The other allows an hour when language is not a pretence because it is not an argument. An hour when a song is a song and not a sign.

One last concession is required. Derrida’s expansion of writing toward cybernetics and biology does more than broaden a discipline. It cuts a path for intimacy with the non human and with machines. It helps us notice the price that metaphysics charged to bodies that did not fit its voice. This is humane and brave. It remains a play that door keeps. The door opens into laboratories and courts and schools. It does not open into squares with music and bread. Bataille would say that a city must keep more than one door. If only one is kept, the city dies. Derrida would say that one door at a time is safer; that safety may be the better word for justice. He would be consistent with the ethic that moves this chapter. Bataille would be consistent with the economy that moves his own. A reader who loves both will build a house with two doors. On some days one door must be bolted to protect the other. Within Derrida, however, play belongs only to the workshop and is fierce and witty and unsentimental. It's pretty much a traditional masculinity. 

This is precisely the wrong sort of play if one hopes for sovereign expenditure. A useless yes. Tears that do not return as arguments. Laughter that is not an index pointing to a note but an end that justifies itself by happening and then vanishing. Derrida cannot bless the vanishing. He has trained himself to retrieve every trace. Retrieval is his virtue and his cost.

If a conclusion may be ventured before Rousseau appears and before the supplement forges its chain, it is this. The introduction and opening chapter enact a rigorous mischief: a play that snaps threads cleanly and displays their old knots. It is the happy labour of a mind that refuses transcendence and laziness. The wrongness of this play in a Bataillean key is not moral; it is economic. The energy that sparkles is never allowed to be wasted. Splendour is harnessed. Argument forbids itself the luxury of being an end. The reader is forbidden the same luxury. Useful and severe. Exhilarating and airless. Derrida teaches us how to read and how not to feast. 

Derrida cannot afford to forget. Remembering is his justice and its joy. It is not the joy that Bataille means when he calls a summit a consummation rather than a means. It is not the joy that ends when it ends. It is not the joy that refuses every programme for one hour and saves a city thereby by letting it breathe.

Derrida opens the next chapter of De la gramatología by staging an intimate theatre of inside and outside. He shows how the metaphysics of the West degraded writing as a sinful intrusion. Plato’s Phaedrus is invoked as the primal scene. Writing appears as a violent cut that enters the soul from without. Saussure repeats the gesture in scientific guise. He calls writing a mask that veils and corrupts the life of language. Derrida reconstructs this archive and then pivots. He declares that the outside has always already been inside. The relation is not simple exteriority. The sense of the outside was imprisoned within the inside and reciprocally. He insists that any science of language would have to re-find the natural relation between speech and writing only by traversing the history of their perversion. He names and unmasks the old oppositions that enabled the exclusion of writing. Image and representation. Sensible and intelligible. Nature and culture. Nature and technique. 

This is the Derridean play. It is exacting. It is careful. It is patient. It is relentless in its allergy to the purity of origins. Yet it is also a play that remains under the sign of law. It is a play that polices itself with a puritan vigilance. It is a bourgeois asceticism that never risks the loss which Bataille demands as the truth of play. 

When Derrida glosses Saussure’s claim that the only true natural bond is that which ties sense to sound he shows how this so called nature produces the idea of world by distinguishing the mundane from the non mundane. Interior from exterior. Ideal from non ideal. The piety of phonocentrism is laid bare. Writing becomes a costume of perversion that must be exorcised by the good word. Derrida patiently loosens this theological grammar. He shows that the appeal to natural bonds is itself the metaphysical machinery that banishes writing. He lets the exclusion expose itself. He lets the outside leak in. But the manner of this letting in matters. The leakage is administered by method. The eroticism of contamination is translated into conceptual hygiene. The sacred fear that trembles at the threshold is metabolised into a rule of reading. This is where the paths of Derrida and Bataille fork with real consequence. Where Derrida remains the scrupulous guardian of a restricted economy of play. Bataille answers with sovereign waste, with laughter that bursts its conceptual corset and with sacred moments that exceed every end the moralists can set.

Bataille writes from an ardent aspiration that hurts. He confesses a fever that resembles the passions of Sade’s heroes and approaches the raptures of martyrs and saints. He admits that common moral ends look faded and deceitful beside the moments of glory that expose the incommensurable. The sacrifice which morality situates on the same plane as its ends is torn open by excess. The sought results are exceeded. Laughter presses near. It is  a convulsion of sovereignty. It is play that risks combustion. A warning is uttered at the threshold. Come close to my fire if you wish. Do not come too close or you will scorch your hands. This is not the caution of prudence. It is an invitation to burn. To enter a region where calculation ceases. To dwell where use is suspended. Play lives there as a sovereign expenditure. It is not a reversible tactic within discourse. It is a festivity that bleeds into the sacred. It is a glare that refuses the cool light of method. I've seen infants dwelling here and can't help laughing out loud when I do.

Derrida exposes how the concepts that justify the expulsion of writing march in phalanx. Nature against technique. Presence against representation. Subjective interiority against exterior inscription. He does not leave them in peace. He takes each term to its limit and lets it turn against its partner. He says that the outside is the inside. He stages an inversion that drains the purity of either pole. The play here is diagnostic. It multiplies the joints in the hinge. It refuses the comfort of origin tales. Yet the game is refereed by fairness. The text insists upon equity between terms. No eruption is allowed to run wild. No laughter is permitted to scandalise the tribunal. This is a play that remains accountable to a tribunal of justice understood as textual responsibility. It is a righteousness of method. A moralisation of reading that Bataille would find anathema. The very move that liberates writing from metaphysical captivity reinscribes the liberated force within a catechism of care. The sovereign contagion is quarantined by the rules of analysis. 

Bataille demands a different seriousness. His seriousness takes the form of gaiety. His laughter is not a joke. He tells us he burns. He tells us the moral object beckons only as a decoy. It may sometimes lead by roundabout paths to the summit. Yet the summit is not the success of the moral enterprise. The summit is the incommensurable that the moral end cannot absorb. The moment of glory is sacred because it breaks utility. It is the time of festival. It is play as sacrifice. In this region there is no tribunal that can judge without becoming ridiculous. There is only the radiant expenditure that leaves the subject empty and the world unaccounted for by ends. The grammar of inside and outside dissolves in laughter. The soul is not invaded by writing. The soul itself is a wound that writes. The hand that scorches itself does not err. It completes the movement of play by accepting the burn as truth.

Derrida is often praised for giving play its rights. Yet the play he grants is the play of differences that remain legible. It is a play whose risks are mitigated by a continuous attention to the law of the text. He shows that the so called outside is consubstantial with the inside. He insists that the vocabulary through which linguistics expelled writing must itself be deconstructed. This is deeply temperate. Bataille would call it chaste and boring. He would say it abolishes scandal by absorbing it into a pedagogy. He would say that the patient redistribution of oppositions honours the very bourgeois virtue whose domination it seeks to unwind. He would ask where the loss is. He would ask where the ruin is. He would look for the part that has no part in the account. He would not settle for the knowledge that every inside is already outside. He would require the experience in which the inside explodes and the outside is ecstasy. He would insist on the convulsion that cannot be domesticated as a lesson.

Read again the hinge of the chapter where Derrida names the false natural bond of sound and sense. The claim that voice grants us presence without worldliness. He exposes the fantasy. He rewinds the metaphysical film that invented the world by separating the ideal from the non ideal. He gives the reader a toolkit to disarm phonocentric piety. Then he returns the reader safely to reading itself. The ritual is complete. The outside has been reintegrated under the sign of the text. The result is an ethical modesty that admires its own restraint. It is deeply puritan in spirit. It treats scandal as a resource for subtle lessons. It treats sin as a metaphor to be made legible. It treats violence as a grammar. It refuses play that cannot be supervised by lucidity. Precisely here the distance from Bataille becomes irreducible. 

Bataille’s theatre is not one of subtle lessons. It is a theatre of hazards. He names his project voluntad de suerte. Will to chance. He speaks of a desire that never finds rest. He confesses a disequilibrium that empties him. He testifies to sacred instants that do not deliver results. His pages do not exorcise masks. They wear them to dissolution. They push beyond the point at which the question of correctness can be posed. They challenge the reader to accept a sovereignty that is identical with loss. This is not carelessness. It is devotion to what cannot be kept. It is the highest seriousness of play. A seriousness Derrida’s chapter cannot admit without evacuating its own scruple. 

The opposition can be sharpened by looking at how each writer treats sin. In Derrida’s retelling of the myth writing has always been treated as the sinful body of language. The exterior garment. The mask. The costume. He shows how this sin talk polices the border between voice and inscription. He subverts the policing by demonstrating the complicity of inside and outside. Sin remains a figure to be read. It is a motif that must be sent back to the archive from which it claimed divine standing. In Bataille. sin appears as a name for sovereignty’s nearness to transgression. It is not demystified. It is not rationalised. It is intensified to the point of laughter and tears. The body that writes is a burning body. The burn is not a trope. The burn is the event through which play discovers its truth.

Derrida’s insistence that a science of language would have to recover a natural relation between speech and writing, but only by passing through the history of their corruption, retains the fantasy of youth and purity in order to disarm it. He acknowledges that appeal to origin is itself a symptom. He turns the symptom into a text to be read. His is a science of contamination tempered by ethics of responsibility. Bataille has no patience for the dream of a recovered natural relation. He would hear in that very conditional a nostalgia for innocence. He would cut it open with laughter. He would say that language is born at the altar. It begins as sacrifice. It returns as festival. It does not need rehabilitation. It needs to be risked. It needs to be spent without reserve.

Derrida’s central maxim that the outside is the inside looks liberating. It is. Up to a point. It grants writing a structural dignity. It erodes hierarchies that kept speech as master and writing as servant. It relocates agency within the weave of traces. Yet it refuses the limit experience in which the weave tears. It keeps its hands clean. Its play is Brylcreemed. Its sobriety is immaculate. Bataille would reject this spik slick cleanliness. Not out of contempt for thought. Out of loyalty to life. He would say that thought which will not risk its own bankruptcy is a theology in disguise. He would say that a play which always returns to legibility is a catechism of cleverness. He would prefer a laughter that cannot be cited without trembling.

If one asks whether this judgement treats Derrida unjustly   return to the text. He is explicit that the very conceptual pairings that fortified the expulsion of writing are solidarities of a metaphysical conceptuality. He is explicit that their naturalist and objectivist determinations must be interrogated. He does this work with unmatched finesse. The question is not whether the finesse is valuable. The question is whether this finesse can meet the demand of play that Bataille names. The answer is no. Derrida’s play remains a function of critique. Bataille’s play remains a function of sovereignty. One can survive Derrida’s play with one’s dignity intact. One cannot survive Bataille’s play without losing face. That is the cut. That is why Derrida’s approach amounts to a puritan moralisation of play. A totalising justice against life disguised as textual liberality. A theology of scruple that lets everything move except the one thing that matters. The burn.

The strongest defence of Derrida from a Bataillean vantage might say: he prepares the ground. He disarms the apparatus that forbids the burn. He shows the trap. He loosens the hinges. He lets air into the tomb. Perhaps. Yet a preparation that never yields its sovereignty to chance is a vestibule without a sanctuary. The sanctuary is where laughter interrupts knowledge. The sanctuary is where results fail. The sanctuary is where the sacrificial gift is squandered and not returned as profit. Derrida returns everything as profit in the form of understanding. Bataille would smile sadly and walk out into the sun.

If one then asks what it would mean to read Derrida in a Bataillean key. The answer is stark. Read the catalogue of oppositions not as items to be redistributed. Read them as tinder. Light them. Do not systematise the flame. Risk the argument to the point of comedy. Refuse the tribunal that requires reasons for laughter. Accept the emptiness that follows the expenditure. Admit that the most just thing a text can do is sometimes to stop meaning and start burning. Derrida’s text will not go there. It courts heat only so it can report on temperature. It prefers the pure economy of the classroom to the impure economy of the feast. In that preference it reveals its ethic. Chaste. Bourgeois. Puritan in the deepest sense. Polite to the end. And for that very reason. From Bataille’s vantage. Against play.

Derrida’s second movement circles the opposition of outside and inside, then tries to dissolve it with the patience of a grammarian. The title announces itself with the dryness of a departmental seminar. Linguistics and grammatology. The outside and the inside. The outside is the inside. The joint. The sequence is meticulous. The tone remains controlled. One feels the ascetic rhythm of a method that distrusts ecstasy. A method that postpones the very intoxication it continually evokes. When he turns to Saussure to show how writing has been cast as the mask that corrupts the living body of speech, his examples are sharp and even mordant. Saussure calls writing a disguise that veils and tarnishes the life of language. Not a garment but a costume. Something to be exorcised by the good word. Derrida quotes the judgement and reverses its economy. He says the outside was always in the inside. The inside was always already outside. He turns the border into a fold. He unveils the theatre beneath the robe. He calls this deconstruction. The rhetoric is agile and ironic. The affect is sober. The play is supervised. When the argument gestures toward the festival of impurity, the lights are suddenly switched on and someone takes measurements of the confetti. 

Saussure’s moralised disgust at writing as sensual adornment is presented as a sin of structuralism. Derrida’s reply promises emancipation from this guilty piety. Yet the form the reply takes is a new piety. It is the piety of indefinite postponement. The ethic of deferral. The saintliness of the seminar.

Bataille recognised the same moral sickness in modern theory. He gave it another treatment. He did not invert disgust into a tempered acceptance. He wanted to burn it out with laughter. He speaks in On Nietzsche of the fear of going mad and of the blaze he barely keeps within his skin. He says his ardent tension cannot find rest in good ends. He says that the sacred moments exceed the results sought by morality. 

The very language is feverish. It is a vow to replace the calculus of reasons with the sovereign waste that both sanctifies and ruins the subject. He describes that pull toward delirium. He couples it to laughter that grazes martyrdom. He binds decision to risk and chance. He names it voluntad de suerte. The will to luck. It is not gamble as technique. It is not a prudential hedge. It is the wager that wants to lose the wager. The wager that wants to open the wound and keep it open. In this Bataille locates the very movement by which language passes into sacrifice and returns as a scar over meaning. In this he invents an ethics of play that is not the lightness of polite irony but the heavy levity of expenditure. He wants a language that goes past itself into the moment where speech stumbles and the body takes over. He wants writing that participates in the rite and does not merely annotate it. His sentences keep threatening to fall apart. 

This is method as scandalled devotion. It is the patient refusal to let analysis annihilate the tremor that made analysis necessary.

Derrida traces the old hierarchy. Speech as inner truth. Writing as exterior supplement. He runs through the Platonic fable of Theuth that marks writing as the pharmakon. He listens for the metaphysical chorus in the linguist who insists that the only natural bond is the sound. He hears the tone of confession and sin in Saussure’s warnings about the corruptive costume of letters. He brings forth the sentence in which writing is a disguise. He comments that the outside has never been merely outside. He insists that the outside was always held captive within the inside and vice versa. The border is internal. The impurity is constitutive. The purity that dreams of restoring an original interior is already broken by the trace. 

The movement is brilliant. The logic is exact. The style keeps a tight rein on ecstasy. If we take that style as innocent, we miss the deeper ethic that rules it. The ethic is puritan in a bourgeois way. The body is finally admitted, yet only as a concept. The riot is described, yet only as an example. The scandal is citable, indexed, secured in a system that protects the reader from expenditure. The sacred is sorted into typologies of contamination that never risk the scorching Bataille promises when he cites the warning not to come too close to his fire. Derrida’s outside is a rigorous lemma. Bataille’s outside is a wound.

Derrida says the outside is the inside. He intends to break the metaphysical tyranny of presence. He wishes to free us from phonocentric prudery. He insists that writing is not a secondary image of the spoken soul but the very condition of any signifying event. He draws the lesson that the sign always already writes and effaces itself in its own appearance. He wants to show that the ideality of meaning is an effect of spacing. He insists that the inside lives only by its opening. This should be the site where play erupts. 

Yet in De la grammatología, play remains an abstract noun. The doctrine of the trace here substitutes for the mess. The operation is a nurse’s clean bandage on what, for Bataille, must be kept raw. The phrase outside is inside is not a provocation to festival. It is the last word that lets the classroom exhale with relief. Nothing unseemly will happen. There will be no spill. The reactionary priesthood that treated writing as a fallen ornament is dismissed. Another priesthood administers the rite of endless citation.

To see the difference, do not confuse Bataille’s laughter with frivolity. He calls it sovereign because it resists use. It is not a decoration on the discourse of ends. It is a rupture of ends. He admits the danger. He refuses to frame the danger as a manageable supplement. He writes that the sacred moments exceed the results sought. He speaks of sacrifice without redemption. He links ecstasy to ruin and calls it human. This is not anti-conceptual rage. It is a critique of the economy that must decide in favour of life spent over life preserved. It is a decision against the careful accumulation of meaning for the sake of progress. In a word, it is play that consumes knowledge. The consumption is not nihilistic. It is the condition for a different community. Community as sharing of loss. Community as laughter that knows its own cruelty. Community that disciplines itself not by rules but by the tact that comes when nothing useful remains to be won.

Derrida asks us to revalue writing. He wants to liberate it from the status of costume and mask. He quotes the sentence about disguise and insists the representation is not innocent. He lectures the tradition about its repetitive slavery to a natural bond between sense and sound. He shows that the metaphors of nudity and dress already betray the presence of an aesthetic policing. He insists that the supplement is origin. This should crack the Puritan shell. Yet the prose of this liberation is a technical prose. It fears the heat it describes. When it comes near, he steps back into a parenthesis or a footnote. The chapter titles, the calibrated transitions, the careful heartbreaks of the middle pages, all betray the ethic of control. Even his most radical claim that the outside is the inside arrives like an axiomatic line. It lands without blood. 

Bataille’s correction is immediate. If the outside is the inside, then the school is the cave and the festival must be brought in. But the festival inside the school is no longer a festival. Derrida’s institution swallows it. The event becomes curriculum.

The test case is the figure of sin that Derrida finds in Saussure’s disgust. He is right to hear in that disgust an old theological trope. He is right to push it against itself. He is right to show that the interior purity that feels violated by writing has already been written by time and habit. Yet Bataille would ask another question. Why rescue the sinner by making sin structural. Why not risk the sin. His is not a moral indifference. It is a moral sacrifice. He throws away the perfection that theories of language try to secure. He honours the wound. He insists on an excess that will not be turned back into method. He writes an ungrammatical grammar in which the point of theory is to know when to stop theorising. Derrida’s ethos says never stop. The play must go on as deferral. The puritan bourgeois ethic shows itself here. It forbids the feast even as it parses the menu.

Derrida’s chapter works in three steps. First, he gathers the classical and modern loci of the prejudice against writing. He makes a dossier of inside images. Soul. Voice. Presence. Then he cites the canonical characterisation of writing as external sign. Image. Body. Costume. He draws out the moral tone. He registers the word sin and the inferential structure that turns description into reproach. Finally, he installs the counterprinciple. There is no pure inside. The inside is a function of spacing. The outside names that spacing. The outside is thus the inside. He concludes by showing how a science of language that pretended to restore a natural relation between speech and writing would be a fiction. This is a strong set of moves. It remains a moral discourse of reassurance. It announces emancipation from guilt and tutoring. It offers a sophisticated equality of the senses. It even permits limited irony. Yet the whole is bound to a regime of mastery. The very cadence embodies a control Bataille refuses.

Consider the small line where Derrida notes that the representation is not innocent. That should be the cry that opens the theatre to sacrificial risk. It becomes a warning to avoid naive aesthetics. It remains forensic. Bataille hears the same line and steps into the danger. He wants a representation that tears itself. He wants the scene in which the actor drags the altar through the house. He wants the sacred to show itself as waste. Not as a concept of waste. As the act of wasting. His writing enacts this. It leaves syntax ajar. It repeats itself until it comes apart. It sings until the song is stutter. It invites laughter that will burn the hand. The reader is not reassured. The reader is implicated. There is no later section that will file the experience under a subheading.

This contrast sharpens if we look at how each writer treats the limit between inside and outside in relation to the body. Derrida’s body is the body as example. It reveals through analogy the conceptual stiffness of a tradition. The body is there to remind us that an inner life already presupposes an exposure. The argument then returns to language proper. It abstracts the lesson. It turns the body into a light metaphoric instrument. Bataille begins from the body as the site of knowledge against mastery. The body interrupts writing. The body forces the pen into the tremor that reason cannot convert into doctrine without lying. The body laughs. The body yields. The body makes a community that is not gathered by belief but by the experience of disindividuation. Derrida’s community is the community of the responsible reader. Bataille’s community is the community of shared tears after the bull bleeds.

Some will say there is a real courage in Derrida’s insistence that nothing sheltering itself under the name of origin has the right to remain untouched. His reading is an assault on the safe house of presence they'll say. Still, the manner remains respectable. It is the respectable courage of a professor who will not smash the window but will demonstrate that glass was always already broken by light. Bataille smashes the window. He insists that the pieces must be touched. He demands that the cut be owned. He knows that the wound does not translate into a concept. The difference is not that one is intelligent and the other reckless. The difference is that Derrida ends with mastery. Bataille begins where mastery ends.

Derrida says the outside is the inside. This is true as a description of how meaning happens. It is not enough for a philosophy of play. Bataille’s play is not the free play of signs in a neutral medium. It is the free expenditure of life that uses signs until they cry out. It is sovereign because it is useless. Derrida’s play returns to use. It serves critique. It supports pedagogy. It legitimates a new sobriety. It promises the abolition of metaphysical guilt and ushers in a conscience of form. In the very moment he corrects Saussure’s moralism, he codifies his own. The writing is modestly ecstatic. The ecstasy is tamed. The taming is called justice. The justice is universal because it avoids the violence of decision. This universal is bourgeois. It protects the subject who wishes to remain at the table and not dance on it.

Someone will say this is unfair to Derrida’s later insistence that justice is what cannot be deconstructed. One may say that in other texts he faced the impossible. One may say that he did not mystify law but exposed its violent foundation. One may say that he refused calculus in certain decisive places. Maybe. But the ethical tonality remains as a prohibition against sovereign waste. It remains a long sermon for scholars. It remains a tutelage by irony. 

Bataille’s counsel remains the scandal at the door. He does not ask for a polite hospitality that would seat him at the end of the colloquium. He wants to destroy the furniture. He wants to spend the money. He wants to exhaust the reasons and then admit what the reasons always knew. There is no good end for thinking about play. There is only the risk of playing.

If we read the three subheadings of the chapter as a drama, Derrida writes a tragedy that refuses catharsis. The outside and the inside. The outside is the inside. The joint. The title of the third part promises contact. The joint is where bones meet. In the chapter, the joint is the hinge where the oppositions fold. It is well crafted. It shows how the same matrix of distinctions sustains the exclusion of writing. It shows how the concepts of image and nature and culture mutually support a metaphysics of presence. It asks us to imagine a discipline that would not restore a natural bond but work from the fracture as condition. 

This is ultimately antiseptic. The joint is not allowed to ache. The pleasure of the joint is not permitted to swell. The reading is a surgery without blood.

Bataille would have us linger in the joint until we hear the obscene comedy of the bones. He would make the joint sing. He would teach the joint to dance. He would require of the theorist that he pay for the analysis with his own composure. He would ask the teacher to weep. He would strip the seminar of its fineries. He would declare that if writing is a mask then we must wear it until it bites the face. He would accept sin as the name of the moment when the concept interrupts itself in laughter. He would call the laugh sovereign because it does not return to the course outline.

There remains one obvious objection. Is not Bataille finally romantic in a decadent way? Is not his sovereign play merely another form of metaphysical absolutism? Does he not fetishise ruin? Does he not despise the labour that keeps a community alive? This objection has force. It is also the objection of the bourgeois ethic that cannot imagine care beyond use. 

Yet Bataille’s sovereign moments do not cancel labour. They remove from labour the shame of not being ecstasy. They release labour from the cure of salvation. They allow knowledge to know itself as serviceable and still bow before the useless feast that made knowledge possible. Derrida thinks he has preserved that feast by naming the differential spacing that makes meaning possible. He has preserved a diagram. Bataille preserves the noise.

I return to Saussure’s line as Derrida cites it. Writing is not a garment. It is a disguise. Derrida adds that the representation is never innocent. He shows that the inside and the outside never were apart. He gives us a beautiful correction. Bataille would let the disguise remain a disguise. He would put it on and tear it. He would stain it. He would force writing to reveal the mimetic rage that makes it dangerous. He would not rehabilitate it into a universal condition. He would let it stand as a local rite that may cost a life. This is the choice Derrida will not allow. He keeps us from choosing by dissolving choice into structure. The resistance to choice is called prudence. Prudence is the last virtue of the puritan bourgeois conscience.

A final scene. Derrida’s classroom at the moment he pronounces that the outside is the inside. Students write it down. They feel the release of an old myth. They feel in their notebooks the thrill of a new vocabulary. The air clears. The festival that had been barred by the long vigilance against writing seems to have been admitted as concept. Then the bell rings. The class files out. Nothing is burned. Bataille in the corridor hears the sentence and laughs. He invites the class to come to a field. He says there will be nothing to learn. He says there will be a bull. He says there will be a song that goes on too long. He says there will be a point at which you cannot tell whether you are trembling with fear or with joy. He says that you will not be able to write a paper about it. He says that if you try, your language will break. He says that this breaking is the only pedagogy worthy of the word. Derrida hears this and replies that the breaking is already a structure of writing. He is right. He is wrong. He is right within the purification that keeps the world from catching fire. He is wrong if what we need is a fire.

Derrida makes an honest inventory of the concepts that prohibited writing from joining knowledge as its condition. It equips readers with instruments. It breaks a superstition. It does not break the will to conserve. Bataille’s pages do not provide instruments. They provide a wound one may consent to carry. A wound is not a superstition. It is the trace that bleeds. The trace here is not a concept. It is the thing we must not suture. The thing we must expose to night air. The joint where laughter comes. The place where we stop reading and begin to risk. If modern theory wants to recover play, it must pass through the door Derrida unlocks. It must then refuse the room he has so carefully made. It must go outside. It must not return. It must not ask permission. It must not take notes. It must not accept the consolation of being right. It must accept the luck that is not a method. 

Only then will the outside be the inside in a sense that cannot be said. Only then will writing cease to be a disguise in order to become a mask worn to the point of tears. Only then will justice cease to be a puritan alibi for the refusal of life and become the simple tact of not extinguishing another person’s fire.If we wish to cite texts, we can point to Saussure’s disdain for writing as mask and to the way Derrida folds outside into inside to expose the prejudice. We can point to the passage that names writing a disguise and insists that representation is never innocent. We can also point to the opening confession in Bataille where he aligns his ardour with a laughter close to martyrdom and admits that sacred states exceed moral results. 

Derrida’s ethics wants form without festival. Bataille’s play wants a festival that ruins form. If one wants a theory that keeps its shirt clean, one knows where to go. If one wants to be singed, one must move. Derrida invites the mind to a kind of sobriety. Bataille invites the body to a risk that may make thought possible. In this difference, the fate of play is decided. Derrida’s play remains wrong for a Bataillean ethos because it preserves the subject from loss. Bataille’s play removes the subject so that something like community can begin. The rest is commentary.

The third chapter of De la gramatología polices the temperature of its own discoveries. The rhetoric names the impurity of origins then immediately purifies it through method. The effect is an ethic of concept over combustion. It is an ethic of control over sovereign risk. The chapter exhibits precisely the puritan bourgeois reflex that  Bataille taught us to distrust. The reflex that rehabilitates the dangerous into curriculum. The reflex that encircles play with procedures and calls that enclosure a science.

Derrida opens the chapter by insisting that interest in writing has taken the form of a history. He adds that science requires more than description. He wants a theory of writing to orient the facts. He asks for a grammatology that orders the archive and does not merely catalogue it. The sentence that announces this is calm. The tone is administrative. The aim appears innocent. Yet in the very moment of this appeal the temperature drops. Writing is invited to the laboratory. It is told to submit to a new discipline that will prevent both myth and nostalgia. It will be a positive science. It will be rigorous. It will cleanse the inquiry of superstition. The danger that Saussure moralised and that Derrida previously unmasked returns here in a sanitised form. The sacrificial and sovereign powers of writing are acknowledged only to be domesticated by the promise of conceptual mastery. The laboratory replaces the festival. Derrida writes that a mere history of writing is not enough and that a theory must orient description. The line is precise. It is also the signature of a will to govern the very play that deconstruction had seemed to liberate. The passage is explicit about the need to theorise beyond naive empiricism. It is equally explicit about the confidence that a theory can be neutral in its mastery of play. The neutrality is a fiction of decorum. It is the old ethics of propriety returning under the banner of scientific lucidity. 

Bataille hears the same call to theory and laughs. Not because he despises knowledge. Because he refuses to let knowledge abolish the tremor that made it necessary. He frames the project of On Nietzsche with a warning. Do you want to warm yourselves by me. Do not come too close. You will scorch your hands. He confesses that he writes out of fear of madness. He describes an ardent aspiration that exhausts him. He links his urge to laughter near martyrdom and sainthood. He declares that sacred moments exceed the results sought by morality. The sentences do not relieve the reader. They do not offer a method to handle the fire. They stage the risk. They bind knowledge to a will to chance. They refuse to exchange this chance for a technique of purification. This is the difference that matters when the word science appears beside the word grammatology. Derrida makes of writing a positive object and of grammatology a transparent discipline. Bataille makes of writing a risk and of theory a service to risk. The one relieves. The other exposes. The archive is not the same after this choice. 

The title itself stages a dilemma that a puritan conscience loves to resolve. Algebra is arcane. Algebra is transparent. The chapter revisits a modern dream of universal writing. It turns to the projects that wanted a perfectly legible calculus. It inventories suspicions about mysteries and initiations. It notes the disdain that rationalists expressed for the word arcanum. It recounts how a dream of clear signs gathered energies from philosophy, mathematics and colonial philology. The dossier is excellent. The twist is familiar. The arcane is not abolished. It is incorporated as material for transparency. It is resolved as a pedagogical challenge that grammatology can meet. Derrida is not naive. He knows that transparency is a metaphor. He knows that the arcane is not simply superstition. He knows that every system of signs carries a remainder. Yet the chapter labours to guarantee that remainder a respectable place under the auspices of a science to come. What was once a secret is now a case study. What was once a rite is now an example. The algebra is purified of the fervour that gave it birth and arranged as a page in a Saturnine ledger.

Bataille would refuse this conversion. He wants the arcane to remain arcane enough to scandalise utility. He wants the transparency that comes only when one risks losing the very reason for clarity. His admonition is not childish. It is ethical. It insists that the community founded by writing cannot be sustained by transparency alone. It needs nights. It needs ceremonies without instruction. It needs expenditures that do not pay back into knowledge. His lines about the sovereign moments that exceed the results sought by morality are a program. They direct a reading that will not grind the secret into the flour of a new method. They demand a grammatology that knows when to fall silent and when to sing past its proofs. This is not a cult of ignorance. It is a defence of dignity against the bookkeeping of spirit. The algebra of signs must sometimes be allowed to burn. The page must sometimes be allowed to stain.

The second subsection intensifies the drift toward a puritan ethic under the name of science. Derrida gathers anthropology, psychology and prehistory. He summarises the great theses about technics and inscription. He considers the hand and the eye. He places writing at the centre of the constitution of ideal objects. He states that no theory of objectivity can ignore the charges that writing carries. He adds that writing confers the force without which objectivity would not be possible. This is a hard claim. It is also the charter for a new prudence. The force that writing contributes is now the servant of objectivity. The ambiguous energy that infects law, worship and war is placed in the service of a transcendental economy of truth. Writing becomes the catechumen of a new church. The ethos is bourgeois in the strict sense. The unruly power is enrolled under the sign of order and progress. 

The chapter even notes the structural solidarity between writing and the processes of capitalisation, clerisy and hierarchy. It records that writing participates in treasuries, sedentary power and class. It warns that a non linear reappearance of writing in modern technics will transform this solidarity rather than interrupt it. This is accurate. It is also the place where a writer faithful to play would choose sides. Derrida declines. He observes. He catalogues. He prepares a new neutrality. A neutrality that announces itself as vigilance against metaphysical contamination and ends as complicity with a managerial image of knowledge. 

Bataille’s answer is a frank recognition that the human appears where use is suspended. His talk of laughter that approaches martyrdom is not an ornament of style. It is the insistence that a community which denies the need for sovereign expenditure will devour itself in the routines of production. The sovereign is not a tyrant. The sovereign is the one who knows how to waste without calculation. The name of the human cannot be guaranteed by a science of writing that measures everything. It must be risked in the very act of play. The anxiety that Derrida’s chapter holds at bay with admirable composure is the anxiety that Bataille accepts as the price of being human. He writes that his ardent tension deprives him of rest. He writes that the states of glory exceed the ends sought. He writes that the delusion points to the very nature of the human. This is not romantic self intoxication. It is an answer to the question of what binds us once we have understood that objectivity depends on writing and writing depends on loss. We bind ourselves by admitting the loss. We bind ourselves by making room for fire in the house of knowledge.

The third subsection performs a conceptual coup that seems at first to welcome play and ends by supervising it. He names the complicity among the origins of technics, law, agriculture, diplomacy, number and cult. He insists that a myth of pure origin must be surrendered. He suggests that the rebus, the picture that writes and the sign that shows, exposes the false innocence of beginnings. He writes that the name of origin is already a citation. He writes that the origin is an effect of the very marks that claim to express it. These are crucial exposures. They open a space in which the idol of purity may be shattered. Then comes the supervisory move. The complicity is immediately gathered under the name of archi escritura as a general structure. The rebus becomes an exhibit. The scandal of mixed origin is reconverted into a regulative insight. The act of naming archi escritura is not itself wrong. It is the tone that matters. The tone is the tone of a new catechism. One will learn to repeat that there is no simple origin. One will learn to cite the complicity. One will learn to pass the examination. The wildness of the scene that the rebus records is archived and domesticated.

Bataille would leave the complicity of origins in its scandal. He would call it sacred not because it is pure but because it is impure beyond use. He would refuse to transform the insight into an administrative rule. His practice would be to let the rebus bite the hand that draws it. His thought would be to keep the origin as an open wound in the concept. He would insist that the pedagogy of the rebus is not a list of results but a rite of implication. When Derrida writes that the myth of the simplicity of origin must be relinquished, he gives us a password. When Bataille writes that sacred moments exceed results, he gives us an ordeal. The difference is decisive for any philosophy of play. The password admits you to a seminar. The ordeal admits you to a community. 

One might say that I caricature Derrida by translating analytic vigilance into a bourgeois morality. The objection would carry weight if the chapter did not itself keep returning to the promise of transparency. Look again at the dialectic of arcano y transparencia. The arcane is tolerated as long as it declares itself a moment on the way to clarity. Look again at the gesture of la ciencia y el nombre del hombre. The name of man is protected by a regime that insists on the cleansing of the conditions of objectivity. Look again at the elevation of archi escritura into a regulative schema. The lesson is true. The tone is corrective. The correction is endless. The play becomes a technique of endless deferral. The ethics becomes the saintliness of postponement. This is puritan because it refuses the decisive expenditure. It refuses to lose. It prefers the infinite task to the finite risk. It converts even its most radical exposures into assignments. It promises justice at the price of appetite.

Bataille answers by setting appetite where justice pretends to sit. He does not dissolve justice. He refuses to make justice a reason to cancel play. In him the sacred does not redeem law. It interrupts it. It strips law of its claim to exhaustion. It reminds the law that the force which gives it life is older than any code. Bataille writes in On Nietzsche as someone who accepts that his language will break when it approaches what matters. He is not ashamed of the break. He does not hide behind a science to come. He does not attempt to legislate the excess under a new name. He confesses that he writes because he fears madness. He confesses that he is too ardent. He invites the reader and warns the reader. He does not offer a method to avoid the burn. He does not call the scorch a preliminary step toward lucidity. He calls it the condition for truth without property. 

There is a sentence in this chapter of Derrida that tempts one to praise his courage. He writes that the constitution of ideal objectivity must pass through the written sign. He adds that writing both obscures and liberates ideality. He adds that writing confers the force without which objectivity would be impossible. That sentence is brave. It admits a dependency that metaphysics denied. Yet in the logic of the chapter the confession is instrumentalised. Writing is acknowledged in order to be harnessed. The aletheia of the archive becomes a justification for a new discipline that will assign to writing its place in the economy of reason. The fire is valued as energy for light. The heat is unwanted. The scorch is proscribed. The grammar of the prohibition is not shouted. It is whispered as prudence. It is exactly the tone by which a bourgeois morality excuses itself from passion while borrowing its powers. 

Bataille would tear the sentence out of its comfort zone and return it as a riddle. If objectivity depends on writing, then every object depends on a wound. If writing liberates ideality by obscuring it, then the clarity of the object is the scar of a cut. If force enters objectivity through inscription, then truth owes its dignity to a risk. The problem is not that we do not know this. The problem is that we do not act as if it were true. We run from the risk into management. We run from the scar into plastic skin. A Bataillean grammatology would insist that scholarship must sometimes accept the loss of mastery. It would require of the reader not only intelligence but expenditure. It would reconnect grammar to rite. It would refuse to let the science of writing become the last alibi of a culture that cannot play.

Derrida’s admirers will say that this is all answered in other books and that justice for him is precisely what interrupts calculation. They will point to his analysis of foundations as mystical and violent. They will note his refusal to reduce decision to knowledge. These points have weight. The rhetoric of this chapter still forms habits. The habits are managerial. The bibliography is deployed like an army. The quotations pacify scandal by presenting it in a correct frame. The inventions are folded into structures with clear names. The result is an anthropology of writing that feeds an institutional appetite for mastery. The play remains supervised. The risk remains described. The ecstasy remains circumscribed. The subject remains secure in the knowledge that the most violent insights have been archived without requiring a wound.

Bataille compels another discipline. A discipline that is not a method but a pledge. It asks that we approach writing with the tact of someone who knows that the sacred burns and that this burn is not a metaphor. It insists that a genuine science of writing would allow for silence where silence is due. It asks us to relinquish the fantasy of transparency when the object is born of obscurity. It asks us to resist the bourgeois need to reconcile all differences in the economy of improvement. It proposes that reading itself is a minor rite of sacrifice. You accept to lose time. You accept to lose ease. You accept to lose your insulation from laughter. You accept to read with the risk that the sentence will return as a fever. This is not anti intellectualism. It is a demand for an intellect that does not despise its own vulnerability.

Derrida speaks of facts and method. It speaks of the elimination of metaphysical residues. It speaks of the salute of order. Derrida means to displace that history. He thinks he can make a positive science that remembers that writing always already interrupts purity. He thinks he can turn positivity against itself. He succeeds at the level of analysis. He fails at the level of ethos. The chapter trains the body to sit still. It trains the ear to recognise only the kinds of noise that can be returned to clarity. It dislikes the arcanum as much as the rationalists he criticises. It only differs in that it names the arcanum another way and files it in a drawer called structure. The action is the same. The drawer closes.

Bataille would leave the drawer ajar. He would let the moths in. He would allow algebra and rebus to be more than content. He would treat them as events. He would demand that the scholar confess where the event touched him. He would refuse to let the confession become another trope of professional modesty. He would call for a knowledge free enough to be humiliated by its object. He would couple this with an art of measure. Not the measure that counts goods. The measure that knows when to stop explaining in order to let the fire speak.

This is the test of a philosophy of play. Can it survive its own intelligence. Derrida’s third chapter puts intelligence to work against idols. It is an indispensable act. It is also an act that stops short of the courage that play requires. The courage is not theatrical. It is not cruelty for show. It is the willingness to spend without resentful accounting. It is the willingness to publish pages that do not protect their author from the charge of excess. 

Bataille models this. He keeps the tone of someone who knows that he is too ardent and that this ardour is the only honour thought can claim in a world where clarity is often the garb of timidity. He knows that laughter is close to martyrdom. He knows that the sacred exceeds the results sought by morality. He accepts the shame and the pride of this knowledge. He does not launder it in a science to come.

One can still learn from Derrida in this chapter. One should. He shows how myths of origin continue to rule even within disciplines that call themselves scientific. He shows how the figure of man is smuggled into technical accounts of sign systems. He shows how dreams of transparency depend upon forgetting the very marks that make knowledge possible. These lessons serve any reader who wishes to resist naivety. My argument is not that he is wrong. My argument is that his manner converts the achievement into a habit of control that is hostile to the very play he elsewhere invokes. He already knows that mechanised transparency is an idol. He still dreams of cleanliness. He builds a science that curates the dirty secret and calls the curating a liberation. The result is a puritan grammar of deconstruction. It polices appetite. It distributes permissions. It is bourgeois because it keeps the subject safe from loss while praising loss as a concept.

A Bataillean counter chapter would keep the archive open and hot. It would write about algebra with reverence and mischief. It would face the name of man with tears and a smile. It would let the rebus deliver the shock that no concept can carry without lying. It would concede that community needs uselessness. It would accept that justice without play is a clerical resentment dressed as virtue. It would teach by ordeal rather than by catechism. It would ask of science that it stop where celebration begins. It would declare that to be positive is to be generous with one’s composure.

If we must choose a sentence to carry away from the confrontation, choose the one in which Bataille announces his fever and warns against coming too close. The sentence contains the pedagogy that a grammatology worthy of the name needs today. It reminds theory that distance is sometimes cowardice. It reminds analysis that it must consent to the crack in its own voice. It reminds a culture of method that life does not ask permission to exceed its results. There is every reason to refuse the puritan discipline that neutralises it. Read the chapter as a map of concealed pieties. 

Read Bataille as a manual for breaking them. Then choose play. Choose the play that costs. Choose the play that frees knowledge from the bourgeois wish to be right without risk. Choose the play that gives science back to life.

Derrida’s dossier on algebra and on the name of man and on the complicity of origins remains a resource for any critic of naive transparency. It deserves our attention. It also deserves our disobedience. To serve writing is to let it spoil the appetite for mastery. To serve play is to protect the space in which knowledge can blush. The third chapter of De la gramatología wants to protect us from superstition. Bataille wishes to protect us from purity. The century has suffered more from purity than from superstition. The choice should be clear. The future of play depends on it.

Derrida claims that before the obvious violences of conquest and bookkeeping there is the violence of arche writing. A violence of difference. A violence of classification. A violence of the system of appellations. The scene of proper names among children becomes the emblem. The ethnographer arrives. Secrets are betrayed. Innocent complicities are broken. The camera eye itself already violates. The point is clear. Writing and the outsider’s gaze together form the laboratory in which native play is turned into legible matter and therefore subjected to force. This is not a neutral description. It is a moral framing that centres guilt. The entire scene is told so that play appears as that which must be mourned and the letter as the instrument of that loss. 

In this way Derrida inaugurates a puritan ethic under the sign of critique. He marks the body of play with original sin and appoints writing as the fateful Fall. Even when he shifts blame from intentional cruelty to the structural necessity of the letter, the effect is the same. What is joyous is said to be already violent. What is free is said to be always already captured. The scene closes like a sermon. It warns us that to see is to violate. It allows no festival without a confessor. It allows no laughter without a ledger.

Bataille would not accept this juridical aura as the horizon of thought. He would say that if there is a primordial scene it is not the scene of violated names. It is the scene of sacred excess. It is the shiver of proximity when discontinuous beings seek continuity. It is the leap across the interdiction that binds and excites. Eroticism for Bataille is the approval of life all the way to death. It is not the forensic reconstruction of a wound by the archivist of difference. It is the suspension of utility. It is the festival wherein expenditure is sovereign. When Bataille describes eroticism he refuses the posture of a police procedural that arrives after the event in order to classify it. He insists on lived risk. On sacrificial intensity. On the dangerous joy that dissolves the separate self into continuity. He ties eroticism to poetry. He ties both to the bursting of the useful frame. 

There is law in Bataille. There are taboos. Yet the point is that taboo only exists so that transgression may blaze. In this blaze there is something like knowledge but it is the knowledge of losing what knows. It is not a bookkeeping of guilt. It is a release into the sacred. In this release eroticism and death fuse. The experience is not accounted for by a logic of prior violence. It is rather a sovereign excess that rescinds all calculation.

Derrida’s scene of the children and the ethnographer can be read as a prophylaxis against play. The moral undertone is unmistakable. The ethnographer is almost an accomplice to defilement. The proper name is a sanctuary that must not be entered. The child’s game is a fragile Eden. The letter and the stranger are snakes. Hence the conceptual victory announced in the phrase the violence of the letter has a pastoral price. To recognise writing as the prior condition of violence is to place a puritan stigma upon the very possibility of games. Games become pretexts for guilt. The ethnographer becomes the figure of the fallen Adam whose very attention is a trespass. One hears the alarm bell of conscience but not the drum of the feast. One hears the whisper of interdiction but not the roar of expenditure. The analysis is exacting and brilliant. Its pathos is certain. Its ethos is bourgeois. It elevates endless vigilance over the peril of rapture. It endlessly postpones the moment of sovereign waste. It refigures play as a procedural problem that must be ethically administered rather than lived to the point of incandescence.

When Derrida turns from Lévi Strauss to Rousseau the pastoral becomes explicit. The dangerous supplement enters. Rousseau laments the supplement that seduces and unravels. The example of solitary pleasure becomes the paradigm. The supplement satisfies while betraying the law of nature. The supplement compensates for absence while deepening it. Derrida’s move is to show that the supplement is not an accident added from the outside. He shows that the supplement constitutes the origin as such. He reverses the hierarchy. He argues that there is no pure source before supplementation. Yet the moral atmosphere of danger remains. The rhetoric lingers over images of seduction. It keeps the atmosphere of warning. It makes of the supplement something to be handled with endless suspicion. Even when neutralised as structure the supplement remains tinged with censure. It is as if the logic of the supplement cannot rid itself of the tone of the sermon. There is a puritan shadow that haunts the deconstructive light.

Bataille’s counter moves are stark. What Rousseau calls a dangerous detour he would call the path itself. The so called supplement is the festival of presence in its only available form. It is the permission to burn what we have saved. It is the ludic eruption through which life exceeds the function that guards it. When Bataille writes of continuity he means a passage beyond the discontinuous limits that structure profane labour. In eroticism the subject risks dissolution. This risk is not a flaw in a grammar. It is a desired loss without which there is no sovereignty. Sovereignty is not mastery. Sovereignty is the refusal to reduce life to survival. It is the right to pure expenditure. It is the liberty of laughter in the face of conservation. If there is danger it is the danger of joy. To denounce the supplement is to forget that only expenditure opens the gate to the sacred. To redescribe the supplement as structurally necessary but ethically suspect is to deafen one’s ear to the call of sacrifice.

Lévi Strauss is cited to the effect that writing is associated at its origin with societies founded on the exploitation of man by man. Derrida shows care here. He notes how this thesis slides between empirical accusation and structural claim. He presses the difference between soft historicist blame and a deeper implication. Yet his rhetoric never releases writing from the aura of crime. The letter appears as sly and perfidious. Infiltrating. Destabilising. The more rigorous the analysis becomes the more inescapable the suspicion grows. Hence the ethical temperature cools desire. Hence the body is managed by textual piety. The scholar at his desk becomes a priest quietly moving incense over the files of the oppressed. The book becomes a tribunal. The tribunal becomes permanent. Joy is arraigned. The verdict is life with parole. Library hours.

Bataille interrupts this tribunal with a flame. The preface to On Nietzsche warns the reader not to come too close. You might scorch your hands. He confesses that he can hardly prevent his fire from blazing out of him. This is not metaphor-only exuberance. It is a philosophical programme that makes sovereign waste the heart of thought. The writer is not a registrar of guilt. The writer is a torch. He risks delirium. He refuses repose. He seeks an object of such value that all moral ends fall short in comparison. In that refusal the bourgeois ethic of management collapses. The ethic that seeks to calculate costs and to preserve itself answers to the office of law. Bataille serves a different altar. He serves the altar where the victim is consumed. He serves the moment when the useful burns away and the sacred appears briefly in pure loss.

Derrida will say that he is not managing guilt but exposing the metaphysics that authorises it. He will say that to find violence at the origin is not to condemn play but to displace every claim to innocence. He will say that he draws play away from the fetish of presence and sets it at work in the trace. He will say that his is a more radical affirmation because it refuses the pure source. Yet the ethos of his writing bends in another direction. The relentless exposure of violence becomes a hygiene. It becomes an unending purification that admits no positive feast. The analysis becomes a method for keeping life at the threshold of the sacred without allowing the step. The rhetoric of interruption replaces the spasm. The signature replaces the cry. The ethical audit replaces the carnival. Thus the play Derrida allows is the play of postponement. It is the play of the apparatus that never risks its own dissolution. It is the game that prefers infinite deferment to one decisive throw. It is a clerical play. It is an office hour vitality.

Consider again the war of proper names. Derrida notes the sequence. The outsider arrives. The secret is pried loose. The children’s game is contaminated by adult names that weigh like epithets. The foreign eye violates simply by looking. The ethnographer first watches. Then he listens. Then he excites the children. He induces speech. He obtains the precious names. The scene is written to make the reader feel complicit. This is not wrong. The historical scene is soaked in devastation. Yet the framing reduces the children’s play to a puritan relic that must be preserved rather than repeated. It elevates secrecy over shared ecstasy. It denounces the breach without asking whether breach is what opens the sacred. 

In Bataille’s logic secrecy and breach are the twin poles of the same sacred field. The secret binds because the transgression electrifies. The very game of names would be a rehearsal of transgression. The right response is not to immobilise the scene in a vitrined innocence. The right response is to recognise that sacred play lives by risk. To remove risk is to kill the game. Derrida’s analysis removes risk in theory. It allows no gambling with one’s own concepts. It forbids the philosopher to stake himself. It replaces the stake with vigilance. It is a purity that disdains the wager.

Derrida’s treatment of Rousseau’s supplement reveals the same ethic. He traces how the supplement fills and corrupts. He shows that origin and supplement form a system. He dislodges the myth of presence. Yet he preserves the moral charge of danger. He keeps the vocabulary of seduction and loss. He ventures a structural reversal that leaves the affect intact. The reader is taught to keep the supplement at arm’s length. To use it but not to be used by it. To analyse it rather than to be carried away. The responsible reader remains sober. The festival is cancelled in favour of a conference about festivals. Bataille and his Nietzsche would call this the triumph of reactive life over active life. They would call it a spiritual economy of fear. They would ask what thought becomes when it refuses to burn.

Eroticism gives the decisive counter thesis. For Bataille taboo and transgression are not enemies that should end in reconciliation by rules. They are the alternating pulses of sacred time. Profane time belongs to useful work. Sacred time opens when usefulness is suspended. Erotic practice is the privileged experience of this suspension. It is a consent to lose the separate self in a continuity that involves the risk of death. Erotic knowledge is not the knowledge that calculates this risk and thereby neutralises it. It is the knowledge that only losing oneself knows. 

There is an obvious social danger here. Bataille neither denies it nor moralises it. He arranges concepts so that danger is the point. He judges bourgeois purity not for its cruelty but for its timidity. He sees in the respectable management of desire a refusal of sovereignty. He calls the refusal a fall from the sacred into servility. The policy of careful supplements is the policy of a life that cannot affirm itself beyond conservation. The critique of the letter’s violence here becomes a screen for the fear of ecstasy.

One might respond that Derrida is all play. He writes of games. He writes in games. He multiplies puns. He juggles languages. He dances with quotations. Yet this play is not Bataille’s. It is administrative play. It is the infinitely careful handling of danger by relocating it into grammar. It is play that never pays with life. It is play without stakes. It is wit that refuses to become intoxication. Bataille’s play is not witty. It is ruinous and holy. It thinks with expenditures that do not return. It binds itself to the possibility of death because only there does continuity blaze. If Derrida’s play is the revolving door of the trace. Bataille’s is the door torn from its hinges. If Derrida’s is an ethic of infinite responsibility that infinitely delays the feast. Bataille’s is an ethics of sovereign generosity that risks everything in a single offering. The first is the ethos of a university that apologises for all its crimes while renewing its endowments. The second is the ethos of a solar festival that throws wealth into the sea.

Return to the phrase writing and the exploitation of man by man. Lévi Strauss hints at it. Derrida pursues it. He asks if this is a Marxist thesis or a broader critical motif. He shows how writing facilitates domination by enabling bureaucracy. He notes how literacy can make people vulnerable to printed lies. The warning is sound. The history is real. Yet the constant lodging of guilt in the form itself is a piety of suspicion. It is a moral insurance that purchases innocence by refusing ecstasy. The argument against exploitation is made to serve a metaphysical asceticism. The reader who internalises this asceticism becomes distrustful of every festival. He becomes chastened by the knowledge that every feast has a ledger and a police. He says better to remain vigilant than to risk sacred crime. He keeps his hands clean. He keeps his life cold.

Bataille’s fire will not cool. He would say that exploitation is not undone by vigilantly tracing violence to the origin. Exploitation is undone only by squandering the very principle of utility that sustains it. He would say that a society that never plays at risk cannot become just. Because justice without play is only regulation. Because equality without feast is only rationing. Because freedom without sovereign waste is only permission to work. His eroticism makes this point in the most intimate register. It is not the study of sex. It is the unveiling of an economy. It is a pedagogy of loss. It defends the right to lose. It defends it as the only right that redistributes power at the root. Since to lose what you are is to break the calculus that binds you. Since to risk oneself is to refuse to be merely counted. The bourgeois ethic of deconstruction counts everything. It counts even its own refrains against counting. It monitors itself with an anxious grace. It will not leap.

The question of names clarifies the opposition. For Derrida the proper name is already a structure of difference. As such it belongs to a system whose inaugural act is violent. For Bataille names belong to the profane order of work. The sacred appears when names burn. Not because a theory of arche writing commands it. But because the festival consumes the very signs of identity. Because the victim is anonymous at the limit. Because ecstasy occurs when the one who says I cannot finish the sentence. Derrida would reply that this unnameable event leaves traces that always already return to grammar. Bataille would not argue. He would light the torch.

Here one can see why Derrida’s ethic earns the epithet puritan and bourgeois. Puritan because it centres the moral experience of guilt and converts it into a permanent practice of suspicion. Bourgeois because it refuses expenditures that are not recuperable as intellectual capital. The brilliance of the apparatus keeps life safe from the dangers it catalogues. The book remains untouched by the fire it describes. The career remains intact. The body remains in the chair. Meanwhile Bataille writes like one who expects to be consumed. He writes as one who cannot prevent his fire from blazing out of him. He writes to risk madness. He writes to stake serenity on a single hazard.

Rousseau’s scenes of education and solitary habit are reread by Derrida as symptoms of a deeper economy. The key move is still structural. The supplement is constitutive. There is no pure origin. Yet the scene of shame is preserved as tone. The supplement is dangerous. It deceives nature. It rescues the young at the expense of their health and sometimes their life. The vocabulary retains the pastor’s cadence even when the metaphysics is reversed. The reader learns how to live in a state of permanent caution. To labour in interpretations that never reach the feast. To accept that the only safe way to speak of pleasure is to speak of it with gloves on. The supposed anti puritan sees everything as already contaminated and then builds an ethic of endless care upon this view. The result is a totalising of justice against life. Not because justice is unworthy. Because justice becomes the permanent alibi for refusing ecstasy.

Bataille’s approach to eroticism makes this refusal visible. He refuses the consolation of purity. He knows that every feast can be cruel. He knows that transgression is not automatically emancipatory. He does not therefore trade the feast for the book. He instead seeks forms of sovereign expenditure that answer cruelty with generosity. He insists that poetry leads to the same place as eroticism. To the blending and fusion of separate beings. He speaks of continuity through death. He does not abstract this continuity into grammar. He sings it. He trembles before it. He grants that such trembling cannot be saved. He writes for its loss. He does not ask the festival to justify itself to the court of law. He asks the court to justify itself to the sun.

The result of placing these two projects side by side is not that one must be rejected as useless. It is that their ethical centres diverge. Derrida’s centre is vigilance. Bataille’s centre is sovereignty as generosity. Derrida wants a justice that polices the possibility of presence. Bataille wants a joy that risks its life in the open. Derrida’s rhetoric preserves institutions by obliging them to endless confession. Bataille’s rhetoric threatens institutions by inviting them to give without return. Derrida’s play is the cleverness of the seminar. Bataille’s play is the intoxication of the feast. Derrida says that violence is inscribed before we act. Bataille says that expenditure is demanded before we count. These are not fine philosophical disagreements only. They are two ways of living.

If one objects that Bataille’s programme is irresponsible then one finally names the point. Responsibility in the puritan bourgeois sense is the refusal of sovereign waste. It is the refusal to let play reach the sacred. It is the will to survive at any cost. Bataille offers another responsibility. The responsibility to lose. The responsibility to keep the possibility of the sacred alive in a world that would reduce even critique to office work. The choice is not between innocence and guilt. It is between accountancy and generosity. Between permanent audits of violence and temporary risings of joy. Between play that never risks its stake and play that spends itself without measure.

Read again the opening of the violence of the letter. The analysis is subtle. The words are exact. Yet the vision of play is nostalgic and forensic. Read again Eroticism. The words are often wild. The reasoning is elemental. The vision of play is forward and sovereign. Derrida will say that Bataille’s sovereignty risks complicity with horror. Bataille will say that Derrida’s ethics risks suffocating life. The text of our time shows which risk we have chosen. It shows societies that endlessly confess their structural violences and then return to work. It shows cultures that will not astonish themselves. It shows letters that mourn more than they ignite. The case for Bataille is not a rejection of justice. It is a charge that justice without play will become a puritan totalisation against life. It is a charge that deconstruction’s cleansing vigilance has become a velvet angel of conservation.

Where Derrida hears the siren of the dangerous supplement and says caution, Bataille hears the drum of the feast and says risk. Where Derrida frames the ethnographer’s seeing as an unavoidable violation, Bataille would ask whether to see is sometimes to enter the game so completely that even seeing burns. Where Derrida allows play only as an endlessly deferred possibility within the apparatus of the trace Bataille wagers play as the sovereign act that breaks apparatus in order to give. The former ethic cannot be finally reconciled with the latter. The temperaments will not converge. The letter is not the last word. The last word is given to the fire that words never quite contain.

I conclude with a judgment that is not neutral. Derrida is playful in the wrong way for Bataille. He arranges language like a meticulous steward of conscience. He handles danger like a museum curator. He keeps everything. He vitrines transgression. He monitors joy. He totalises justice against life because he cannot affirm any sacred expenditure that is not already folded back into an ethics of infinite responsibility. Bataille laughs and burns. He says that a thought that will not risk itself is a thought that has allied with the lowest prudence. He says that the only justice worthy of the word is one that knows how to give. He says that the letter may be violent. The feast is violent too. Choose the violence that gives rather than the vigilance that withholds. Choose play that spends itself rather than play that supervises. Choose continuity rather than bookkeeping. In that choice the text opens onto something beyond text. Not a pure origin. Not a metaphysics of presence. A moment of sovereignty that no seminar can keep. A moment of life that shows the limits of the ethic that would police it forever.

The argument must be sharpened until it cuts, and from the cut we must watch what bleeds, because what bleeds reveals what has been disavowed. In the next movement of Derrida’s De la grammatologie the itinerary bends from the scandal of the supplement toward a genealogy of Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages. After the chapter on the violence of the letter and the interlude on the dangerous supplement comes the long inquiry titled Genesis and structure of the Essay on the Origin of Languages, followed by From the supplement to the source. The theory of writing. The itinerary is not accidental. It is a teleology of recuperation. The supplement is first named as danger, then chained into a series, then methodically subsumed under the name of genesis and structure, finally escorted to a source. 

The structure of this path matters, for it is the diagram of a bourgeois ethic that pretends to liberate play while fixing it under the sign of intelligibility. Derrida’s philology is impeccable. His rhetoric is a patient vigilance. His watchword is responsibility. Yet the vigilance is not that of a festival guard who keeps the torches burning through the night. It is the punctual sobriety of a prefect. The supplement is allowed to dance but only inside the cordon, and only until the moment when the origin is reinstalled under the guarded label of theory and source. 

Derrida moves from scandal to theory. The movement is sound, yet its soundness is the problem, because it subdues the dissonance that Bataille calls life on the edge of death. The supplement is dangerous in Rousseau and in us, but under Derrida’s method the danger is neutralised, domesticated, administered by care, converted into a lesson. That conversion is the puritan moment: a moralisation of play that leaves play intact as a signifier while scavenging the very expenditure that makes play sovereign. The structure of De la grammatologie shows the work to be in love with limits. It is proud of its self restraint. It speaks with the sobriety of a law that has already excused its own ferocity by calling it responsibility. The book claims to unearth the violence of the letter. It does so, then it files the violence in a drawer labelled genesis and another labelled source, then it locks the cabinet and pockets the key. The itinerary itself can be verified in the book’s internal map. The relevant chapters and their order are explicit in the printed index, including the Rousseau block and the final theoretical consolidation that moves from supplement to source and elaborates the system of script and the ideal of absolute representation. Internet Archive+2Internet Archive+2Derrida’s chapter on Genesis and structure returns to the Essay in order to situate that unruly pamphlet within a logic of emergence. He will not leave the Essay to flutter at the edge of music, climate, passion, and voice. He needs to pin it to a sequence. He needs to describe its placement, its internal economy, its imitative thread, its articulatory law. The index tells us how he partitions the labour. First the placement of the Essay. Then imitation. Then articulation. The very cadence spells out an ethic of instruction, as if Rousseau’s wavering text must be marched back into a classroom and forced to stand straight until it confesses that its deviations obey a higher alignment. The Essay will be granted its pathos, yet that pathos will be rationalised as the symptom of a structure. In the earlier chapter the supplement was catalogued as dangerous. We find a terse gloss of Rousseau’s warnings: that dangerous supplement corrupts the natural order. The chain of supplements follows. Writing and onanism are said to be allied in their transgression of prohibition. The economy of difference is invoked to show that the transgression confirms the law it violates. The supplement is named as seduction, as funesta ventaja, as perilous advantage, which secures desire by steering it out of the good path and back into the confession that the path was needed in the first place. The argument is elegant, yet it carries a scent of moral bookkeeping. Play is tolerated in so far as it proves that prohibition stands. Pleasure is authorised in so far as its guilt is instructive. Transgression is interesting in so far as it can be metabolised as pedagogical yield. The dangerous supplement is thus staged as a mise en scène of fault and recall. The book even offers a crystalline formula: one goes from blind spot to supplement, the blindness to the supplement is the law. That sentence is programmatic. It grants law a transcendental privilege. It makes the supplement the child of a necessary ignorance. It converts the entire domain of play into an annex of a law that precedes it and will outlast it. This is the soft face of puritanism: law speaks in the voice of compassion, yet it insists that the excess that gives life its lustre must appear as hazard, as a momentary lapse that confirms the rule. The relevant placements and formulations are traceable in the book’s own text, where the sequence from blindness to supplement is stated, where the dangerous chain pairs writing with solitary vice, and where the pedagogy of prohibition is spelled as a paradoxical economy that both forbids and allows under licence. 

Bataille would not accept this economy. He would not accept play as a supervised transgression that pays its debt to law by demonstrating the necessity of a law that never blushes. In Sobre Nietzsche the temperature is different from the first page. It is the voice of an ardent risk, a self declared fire barely restrained from flaring beyond the body. You want to warm yourselves at my fire, do not come too close, you might burn your hands. The ardour is confessed as an ongoing derangement, at once comic and sacred. He speaks of a fever that cannot be answered by any defined action. He speaks of glory states and sacred moments that exceed the results sought by moral ends. He speaks of sacrifice as a summit that disgraces the instrumentality of purpose. In these lines the sovereign expenditure is not a pedagogical device. It is the very criterion of life. It is what makes a life worthy of a song. The postures of law do not contain it. They do not even understand it. They confuse it with crime because they cannot bear a use without end, a loss without recompense. From this perspective Derrida’s caution looks like a temperance pamphlet. It is a skilful system for sterilising risk. It secures the supplement by transforming it into a diagnostic sign within a prior economy. It admires transgression for its didactic value. It admires the wound the way a medical textbook admires a lesion. Bataille asks us to risk the lesion as a form of speech, and to accept that the speech may have no audience but the night. He presents the fever and the sacrificial vector without apology. He refuses to translate ecstasy into an effect of rule. He asserts that the human is disclosed in the very devastation that leaves one empty after intensity of this sort. The refusal is steady, and it is a rebuke to any moral discourse that mistakes its own care for wisdom. Bataille shows the heat, the confession of a moral search that finds its object beyond defined ends, and the diagnosis of common morality as petty and misleading when measured against the incommensurable. 

The contrast becomes sharper if we shift the axis from transgression to eroticism. Bataille names eroticism as the assent to life to the point of death. The definition is not a metaphor. It is a scale. It names how far life must go to be life rather than routine. The point of death is not a suicidal fantasy. It is the threshold where discontinuous beings tremble into continuity. The logic of reproduction and the logic of sacrifice intersect here. The desire that lives at the lip of its own annihilation is not a pathology to be managed. It is a revelation that the sober day cannot hold. In this light play is not a didactic supplement. It is the sovereign operation in which expenditure is the meaning of wealth. The day world treats wealth as accumulation. Bataille treats wealth as splendid waste. The erotic definition gives us the scale by which to judge any purported liberation of play. If play is rendered harmless, if play is kept at a safe distance from death, if play is conscripted into the work of demonstrating law, then it is not play in Bataille’s sense. It is a decorous mimicry. It is what a serious society offers on weekends so that Monday will not be unbearable. Bataille’s phrase returns as a refrain  because it condenses the entire sacrificial anthropology of his work. To assent to life unto the point of death is to reclaim the sacred without God, to accept that rapture without utility is the highest figure of a human truth. The scale of the claim does not vanish when repeated. It insists. It makes a demand on every discourse that pretends to ring fence play in the name of a justice that never risks anything.

Return now to Derrida’s pages where the supplement and onanism are twinned as peril and transgression. We find again the thinking of guilt, the ritual of prohibition, the economy of difference that turns transgression into the confession that the law holds even when violated. The writing hand is brought into proximity with solitary vice to mark a shared logic of substitution and fantasy. Desire is confirmed as dangerous, and its management becomes the paradigm for the treatment of letters themselves. Yet nothing in this tableau allows the sovereign expenditure to appear. The danger is rhetorically severe, but it is policed. It has a place. It furthers the argument. It leads toward the chapter that will convert the supplement into a source by re describing it as a step in the history of representation. The chain of supplements is put to work like a series of exhibits. Each exhibit testifies to the inevitable detour by which presence returns to itself through writing and its phantasms. Imitation is thematised. Articulation is thematised. The long detour is given its chart, and a lesson in method closes the section as if the scandal had been a draft for a treatise. The endurance of this writing is remarkable. The patience is admirable. The moral stench is unmistakable. It is the smell of cold incense in a juridical chapel. The letters have been absolved, provided they accept the conditions of their parole. It is to Derrida’s credit that he shows his hands. It is precisely why we can read the hands as instruments of a will to supervise. 

In his  theory of writing  the moral signature grows brighter, not because Derrida becomes a catechist, but because the theoretical language tightens around its object until the object becomes an alibi for a final purification. The subchapters are explicit: the original metaphor, history and system of scripts, the alphabet and absolute representation, theorem and theatre, the supplement of origin. The line runs from metaphor to system to alphabet to absolute. The rhetoric is exact, yet the arc repeats the old desire to convert play into law by writing its logic into a semi theological account of origin. There is the familiar post structuralist scruple here. There is its finesse. There is also a re appropriation of the very scandal that was supposed to open the field beyond presence. If the supplement is the revelation that the origin is already multiple, already traced, already contaminated by difference, then to move from supplement to source is to perform a ritual reconsecration. Derrida knows this. He labours to show that the source is not a pure well but a site where representation folds upon itself. He invokes cycles where images represent their own representers, where the sovereign mirrors itself by erasing the mediator or by substituting a comedy of representation for presence. The remarks on the representation that either effaces the representative or absolutises the representative’s image, and the musings on capitals, centres, and usurpations, are acute and attempt to dazzle. Yet none of this alters the ethical posture. The teleology remains. The supplement has been pulled back into an origin that is now called theory. It is a baptism by method. It is a civic ceremony for the unruly child who has to  learn table manners. These placements are not conjecture. The tinerary is a moral technique that polishes transgression until it shines as a mirror. 

Bataille would simply laugh, but not just with contempt. He would laugh the way a sacrifice laughs. He would laugh as one who knows that a theory of writing that forbids the festival to spill over its barriers is not a theory of writing at all. It is a philosophy of work in which every expenditure must be redeemed by meaning. The sovereign operation of play has no such need. It does not desire absolution. It does not ask to be translated into the sober light of a source. It demands a night in which the alphabet burns like straw and words join the dance because they are tired of standing in line. This is not a romantic negation of method. It is an insistence that method is not the last word when what is at stake is the threshold where life is at once most lucid and closest to its own eclipse. The erotic definition returns here as a compass. A writing that refuses the assent to life at the edge of death will reduce itself to clerical neatness. It will cite the law and patrol the premises. It will call this vigilance justice. It will call it responsibility. It will call it the ethic of reading. Bataille recognises the ethic for what it is: a dread of expenditure. A terror of uselessness. A hatred of luxury. A suspicion of laughter. An allergy to tears that are not arguments. His pages do not offer exemptions. They offer experiences that cannot be adjudicated and should not be. He refuses to let the sacred be reduced to case study. He recognises the link between laughter and sacrifice, between eroticism and death, between the useless gift and the only wealth that matters. Derrida’s long method will have none of this. It will speak of play. It will not permit play to exceed the cordon.

It will be said that this charge is unfair to Derrida’s most radical intuitions. But when the book names a dangerous supplement and immediately sets about chaining it, when it plots genesis and structure to house Rousseau’s unruly Essay, when it marches from supplement to source under the banner of theory, it performs a guardianship that is inconsistent with any thorough redemption of play. The guardianship is velvet. It is even gentle. It covers its severity with the language of care. That is precisely how bourgeois puritanism works. It restrains without appearing to restrain. It calls its aversions sobriety. It treats risk as a case of imprudence. It keeps a polite distance from eroticism as if death could be nodded at across a parlour without getting any ash on the carpet. The displacement from scandal to source is not a neutral movement of research. It is an ethically freighted migration from the scene of loss to the archive of justified reasons. The rhetoric never says so. The structure shows it.

Consider a single sentence in the supplement chapter, already noted: one goes from blindness to supplement, the blindness to the supplement is the law. The sentence is brilliant. It maps a transcendental ignorance that produces the instruments meant to remedy its own lack. It names an economy of compensation. It also crowns the law. If blindness to the supplement is the law, then the scene of play is established within a jurisdiction from which there is no appeal. This is not emancipation. It is the most refined form of custody. Compare that to Bataille’s maxim of erotic assent. There the law is not crowned. It is suspended. Not in the name of caprice. In the name of a deeper measure of truth in which life is not counted by the sum of its prudences. The difference is not academic. It is existential. It is ethical. It is political. A culture that treats play as a supplement that confirms the law will tolerate festivals and never be changed by them. A culture that learns erotic assent will discover that its work has no ultimate title to the day. It will discover the curse of wealth. It will learn to waste magnificently. It will accept the sacrificial limit as the signature of a dignity no code can delimit. The law may still speak. It will not be a final court.

A defender of Derrida will object that the very phrase dangerous supplement shows that he refuses the piety of presence. He does. He refuses a crude metaphysics. But he does not refuse the guardianship of method. He does not refuse the conversion of scandal into theory. He does not refuse the gentle path from risk to burgher calm. The Essay is placed. The imitative regime is reconstructed. The articulatory sequence is named. The source is theorised. The alphabet is weighed as the machine of absolute representation. There is Calvinistic brilliance at every step. There is also a Calvinistic chill. The temperature drop is the moral fact. Bataille’s texts never let us forget that the heat is the only proof that we are alive. If you do not risk burning your hands, you do not know what fire is. The preface that warns the reader to keep a distance is not a metaphor. It is a test of posture. It is a summons to decide whether you will live on the safe side of the rail or whether you will cross into the blaze. The law cannot advise you here. It can only punish you afterward. The guardian of the archive will be careful not to be singed. He will write diligent reports about the blaze. He will teach the blaze how to spell itself. He will remind the blaze of its obligations. He will praise the blaze for having taught us so much about heat. He will, in short, have never been warm.

It might be said that the last part of De la grammatologie recognises theatre alongside theorem. That word appears precisely to suggest that representation is not purely calculative. The pairing is shrewd. It suggests that the scene is part of the law of the letter. But what theatre is at stake? Is it the theatre in which an actor effaces himself so that presence speaks. Is it the theatre in which representation becomes a sovereign image that no longer points beyond itself? Derrida notes these options in order to mark the aporias of representation. He knows how the representative may either vanish into presence or inflate into hollow spectacle. He annotates the trope with his learned caution. He keeps the stage under lights that never go out. Bataille would prefer a theatre in which the curtain stays stuck to the floor with wine, in which the props are stolen by the audience at dawn, in which the play ends with a laugh that no one can explain. That theatre is not an allegory of method. It is a risk to a city that thinks of itself as the owner of meaning. The city invariably calls that risk obscenity. Bataille calls it knowledge. Erotic knowledge perhaps. Sacred knowledge without theology. A knowledge that costs, because all knowledge that matters costs. Derrida’s theatre is a demonstration that costs nothing more than paper and time. He would hate to hear that. The sentence is unkind. It is also faithful to the difference in temperature.We must not pretend that Bataille supplies a programme. He supplies a measure. The measure burns. It tells us what our speech is worth. It does not abolish structure. It subtracts the piety that makes structure into an idol. In education, politics, law, the same difference holds. There is a way to cite play and keep it at a safe distance. There is a way to let play undo the habitus and leave us without reasons for a while. Derrida mastered the first. He dedicated his mastery to justice. He meant it. He did not lie. He simply mistook the supervision of play for responsibility toward play. Bataille never made that mistake. He never pretended that life could be lived responsibly if responsibility meant refusing the sovereign waste that establishes our dignity without any tribunal. When Bataille writes of tears and laughter, of sacred moments that exceed ends, of a moral search that finds its object beyond moral ends, he does not neutralise the claim by suggesting that the supplement be integrated into a theory of origin. He does not convert expenditure into a code. He leaves it costly. He leaves it undecidable in the sense that matters: not as a technical motif, but as a lived risk that has no promise of redemption.

We return, finally, to Rousseau as he appears in Derrida’s chapters. The Essay on the Origin of Languages is a text in love with music, with tears, with climates, with the voice that trembles because it sings before it speaks. Derrida honours this love by locating it in a sequence where feeling precedes reason, where song precedes calculus, where metaphor precedes concept. He quotes and paraphrases with a scholar’s tact. But he makes the Essay legible to those who fear its unruliness. He offers it a civic identity card. He recovers its scandal as a phase in the rise of representation. He then proceeds to show how the alphabet refines the economy of the sign until absolute representation makes a bid for perfect presence. The critique is incisive. The nerve is cool. The effect is a closure. The Essay has been saved for the archive. It can be taught. It can be quoted. It can be used as evidence in the case against metaphysical presence. It has become a document. Bataille does not save documents. He burns them to see what light they give. He might copy a line before the flame takes it. He will not ask the line to testify for the law. He will ask it to justify the night. That is the part of Rousseau that belongs to play. That part is not safe with Derrida. It will always be admitted on condition that it pay for its seat by helping philosophy set the courtroom in order.

If the choice must be forced, I choose the laugh that makes law stutter. I choose the kind of play that answers to nothing but its own sovereign cost. I choose against the puritan ethic that never names itself as such because it lives in the comfort of its reasonableness. I choose Bataille’s risk over Derrida’s gentle custody. A culture that replaces sovereign expenditure with the pedagogy of the supplement will inherit a desert of prudent pleasures and venerate an index where a festival should have been. A culture that accepts erotic assent will accept the danger that words may not always serve governance and that writing may at times be a sacrifice rather than a proof. The former culture will call itself mature. The latter will be alive.

There is a decision, and it is a decision about whether play is to be administered or lived.