afterthoughts

"The difference that shows itself as creative is the passage that leads the nightmare back to the dream, and the dream to a project (which is fully aware of the difficult and limitation) of life. If difference is resistance, the dream can live its historical projection in a fully aware and conscious manner. If difference is a mode of life, it identifies the mode of life as productive. No one here is putting critical and transcendental action into question: but we should pity it, comprehend it in the radical aporia that gives rise to it, and which does not allow it to take root in the only natural and temporal difference that counts: that of power. As a matter of fact, in the theory of creative difference there is something like an extremely strong return to an origin that is not burdened with nightmares and repressive violences. This is not an illusion but the very thing which is here at stake. Difference does not become creative when it identifies itself with an origin (burdened by the past), but when it confounds itself with a power that is always new open onto what is to-come. Difference destroys every determinate ontological foundation because it is the creative determination of an ontology of freedom."
Antonio Negri, The Italian Difference. P.22.



"In some sense the eidos, which is the cause of the being of entities, is made of the substance of the ideal, or at least exists in a medium homogeneous with soul or mind. Aristotle himself suggests as much in De Anima 3.8, where he writes that 'in a way the soul [psyche] is all existing things' because the faculties of the soul must be 'identical' with the forms of things. The intellect (nous) is the form of forms (eidos eidon). The homogeneity of intellect and being is also suggested by the way in which Aristotle sometimes uses logos interchangeably with eidos (Metaphysics 1039b20 ff; De Anima 412b10-413a3), so that entity seems to be not just correlative with logos but in some way the same as logos.
The intraphilosophical question of being with respect to Plato and Aristotle addresses the relations between the intelligible form and the sensible thing; what is significant from a deconstructive viewpoint is that the sensible thing, even in a 'realist' like Aristotle, is itself unthinkable except in relation to intelligible form. Hence, the crucial boundary for Aristotle and for philosophy in general does not pass between thought and thing, or between word and thing, but, within each of these, between form and formlessness or indefiniteness.
All of philosophy works on the other side of the line that separates being according to the logos from the indeterminate, and for Derrida the full weight of this separation comes to rest on the role within philosophy of the third-person present infinitive of the verb 'to be'. The word 'is' speaks the being of the thing, and so marks the relation of language to what is outside language (Margins p.183); it is on the linguistic passageway between form as what is knowable and speakable and form as the presence of the entity. Though it is still a word, the 'is' seems to be the thinnest membrane, offering almost no distortion or deformation of the being it brings to expression, so that thought by its means could come into the closest relation with being. But thought and being have already been teleologically predestined to meet, since they are part of the same mutually determined circle of concepts: 'One might think then that the sense of being has been limited by the imposition of the form which, . . . since since the origin of philosophy, seems to have been assigned to Being, along with the authority of the is, the closure of presence, the form-of-presence, presence-in-form, form-presence. . . . on the other hand, that formality . . . is limited by the sense of Being which . . . has never been separated from its determination as presence' (Margins, p.172)."
-p.7-8 in Henry Staten's Wittgenstein and Derrida. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1984.