Responses to Dominic Fox, discussion here.
[Dominic Fox]:” I used to be quite fond of arguments from etymology, but I’m not so enthused about them now. What I would say about “identity” is that, once again, the mathematical treatment of identity is not a simple thing; to say that mathematics is contingent on identity is to beg some very important (mathematical) questions about how identity is established in different domains – it’s not so much presupposed, as defined and defined again at different levels of abstraction.”
{AK}: Derrida again:
“Grammatology, the general science of the ‘archi-trace,’ presents itself as an explicating thought of the myth of origins. It is a search not for ‘historical origins,’ but for the original, the true, the authentic etymon always already present which obscures it.” [E. Roudinesco, p. 223.]
Here, misunderstanding takes on grandiose proportions.) Wherever the values of propriety, of a proper meaning, of proximity to the self, of etymology, etc. imposed themselves in relation to the body, consciousness, language, writing, etc., I have attempted to analyze the metaphysical desire and presuppositions that were at work. (Derrida)
{AK}: ” I haven’t “redefined” anything. I’ve merely located everything, in its allegedly ‘proper’ place, or ‘topos’, without undeclared elisions.”
I excavate etymological proprieties, as it were, to prevent the closures of disciplinary insularity. Either that, or drive the line of disciplinary inquiry, according to its own internal procedures, to its limit, & into areas which it lacks the resources to enclose.
I used “identity” as an interchangeable synonym. I could have used “specification”, “reification”, “entity”, “object”, or whatever.
I’m not necessarily arguing about the specific ‘internal’ procedures of Mathematical definition, but rather, at the points where it intersects with wider or other concerns (pick a rubric – in this thread, it’s the ‘ontological’), about what common factors it shares with those concerns, mutatis mutandis, likewise with ‘identity’, too.
It doesn’t really matter, because the logic I’m always implicitly critiquing, is that of conventional determination (or ‘definition’?) ‘itself’.
The critique seeks no justification, though all justifications are available to it. It is carried out under no sign in particular, but it can create one if the need so arises. It can know all things, even though, classically, there isn’t anything to know.