in the world and will never belong to the world. If sin is a rupture in wholeness, what is ruptured is not in the social space but in what this space has lost in constituting itself, the “Great Time” that is only a has-been and a to-be but never a present.
This is where Derrida pinpointed the flaw that will never leave any system that tries to define itself. If language as representation is the site where it all “begins,” then in language the efforts to define anything within strict limits appear as necessarily doomed to failure. Representation places everything in the space of its own potential, as representation cannot exist without contamination—but a redeemable contamination. For Derrida, contamination is language itself. This “grand Parasite” that prevents any discourse from being pure, or “serious,” is the very condition of possibility of the functioning of language, or of its iterability. In Limited Inc, he maintains that iterability is the ability of language to be disseminated and, in the process, of losing its initial message, which becomes only a trace, instead of a presence. Contamination is at the heart of the transmissibility of language.
The system functions in view of a purpose projected from a misrecognized past, and fallenness is all that has not yet reached the goal of wholeness. For this reason, it is not enough to function within the system, and not against it, but the subject of language must serve the purpose of language.
A system, language, the symbolic: these terms already imply an (ideally) ordered interaction between their subjects, or rather, those who have chosen to belong to these realms. The reason why every participant (even unwilling participants) sustains this ordered interaction is related to lack and desire. These two concepts condition the individuals, and individuals condition one another, based on their need to fulfill their own definition through the Other, who has given them a glimpse at themselves from the very start. In other words, participation is a function of the desire for recognition, identified by Hegel, for whom the Other is only a mediation between self and self, or the negative of self. The self and the Other are entities who “recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another.”16 The concept of recognition is refined by Alexandre Kojéve, who points out that desire is directed toward another desire, so that “human reality can only be social …. If the human reality is a social reality, society is human only as a set of Desires mutually desiring one another as Desires.”17
What this would mean as far as identity is concerned is that every subject desires to possess an identity that is desired by an Other, but both the self and the Other remain at the level of desiring, because the recognition of their identity cannot be fully realized. Lacan brings this line of thought to further refinement by shifting the discussion to language. Here, desire has no object, but involves a movement from signifier to signifier, where every subject becomes a signifier for another signifier precisely because every Other whose desire is desired is a mirror reflection of a mirror reflection, a remainder (what he called objet petit a) of a hypothetical lost unity, or territory.
The connection between the concept of desire and fallenness should be clear by now. An organizing system in itself does not offer innocence (the lost perfection) except as potential, and as something lost and to be retrieved only in death. It follows that there is no ultimate signifier that can be possessed in actuality, during one’s life. The search for innocence is a death sentence. It brings death to those who refuse to partake in its potentiality and it structures individuals around the pursuit of death. Take the Judeo-Christian model, where wholeness is achieved post-mortem, after a life of imperfection improved by sacrifice. Last but not least, the pursuit of innocence also excludes certain people from the search for innocence: the uncivilized, the enemy, the Other.
We can say, therefore, that the fall from and toward innocence is a mythical concept in the sense that it is an organizing principle. It is always present through its absence, so it is needed in order to define a system unstable without it. Innocence is a stake, while being fallen is a momentum solidified into law. In the convenient example of Judeo-Christianity, humanity’s identity is defined through the loss of the territory of Eden, a loss solidified into the law of God that dictates that innocence has to be retrieved.
The system is unstable because it needs to define a stake, appealing to all the participants’ sense of having lost wholeness. As I explained before, social systems (particularly Western social systems) are organized as games to which the players are born subscribed. The theory that unifies civilization with the notion of game is nothing new in itself. What is important is that the game that the social system represents is not actually played, since it is itself deferred and its players are not real players, because of their fallenness. The child born into language begins to act in the social space through game. This is the first interaction outside of (but reenacting or reinforcing) the family hierarchy. The child learns that there are rules to go by, and that if the rules are not followed, the child as individual player will fall outside of the game. The difference between the game world and the social world into which the child grows is that the game is always perfect, and reenacted with different players. This is what is embedded into the unconscious of the child, for use in later life: the social system can become perfect if the game is played correctly by all participants. Famously, in 1938, Johan Huizinga developed a theory (in Homo Ludens) claiming that play is a civilizing factor. To him, play is a ritual prior to and superior to culture, ingraining in people a consciousness of being embedded in a sacred order of things” where, through play, consciousness “finds its first, highest, and holiest expression.”18
Huizinga seems to suggest that game pre-exists the social space. Since he equates the make-belief of the game with religious belief, the pretense is not that there is a game, in his theory, but that the player is worthy of the game that is received as a sacred inheritance. He also emphasizes the agonistic and competitive nature of the game, which suggests that there is an opponent against whom the player needs to prove superiority. It is inside the game that the child first learns that hierarchies are the way to perfection, so power and subjecthood as identity are learned through an ideal model that the game represents. In the game, the “other” is another person, but underlying that is the Other against whom the player will always need to compete. No matter how many opponents are overcome, there will always be other opponents, so that superiority is never absolute.
Derrida defines language and pharmakon19 as the prior medium where differentiation is born, as well as the opposition between the eidos and its other.20 What is missing in Huizinga’s model is the absence of the opponent, in the sense that Huizinga does not recognize that concrete opponents are as imperfect as the self. The ideal, or “real” opponent would be the perfect opponent, who is both innocent (because it is the Other, whole), and evil because the player’s fallenness is projected upon this opponent. This is why the pharmakon is both the poison and the cure, evil both internalized and externalized. The dynamic of difference is to be understood as the relation between presence and non-presence, both being the sites of truth, or the game. Dialectics, as play, especially in relation to truth (all the way from Plato), is also a deferred play.21
But players will not be satisfied to know that the game is deferred and that they are not playing in actuality. As they learned in childhood games, identity through the game is possible and it is also the only way to achieve social identity. They need to know that their belonging to language is governed by causality, and a confrontation “to the death” affirms them in their retrievable innocence. That is why the rule of the game must appear as stable. For this to happen, in societies for whom their own stabilization is at stake, the laws governing them are a result of the solidification or, rather, legitimization, of a tentative rule.
Lyotard’s contribution to a discussion of the game is to suggest that these rules stabilize into laws when the game becomes an obligation. And if we think about it, knowing that the boundaries are always contaminated
