​Chapter 22

Nāgārjuna is more honest than the philosophers of the One. The tetralemma takes each position and lets it fail — it is; it is not; it both is and is not; it neither is nor is not — four ways of grasping, each shown in turn to collapse under the weight placed on it, with nothing stitched closed and no Absolute in the opening. The reader is left without a position, which is what the method intends. The instrument remains logical throughout, since the tetralemma works by operators and an operator cuts: is separates what is from what is not, and joins two separated things, neither excludes both of them. The fourth position looks like the exit and is a fifth cut laid across the other four, for to say "neither this nor that" is to have separated the four positions from whatever lies past them, and that is a grasp, a word, performed with the instrument the position was supposed to escape. A knife cutting while it says it is no knife. Offered as therapy rather than doctrine, with the intention of dissolving positions rather than occupying a further one, the therapy still runs inside logic: the fourth position is logical in the extreme, a negation of negation, and doubling a cut cuts twice.

Derrida's différance comes from a different direction and reaches the same wall. The birth of a cut was already found to lie outside the fabric he splits. On its own ground it is right. Meaning is never present; every term defers to other terms; what looked like presence turns out to be an effect of difference and delay. Against a metaphysics of presence this is exact. Its result is a monism of the hole where Frank produced a monism of fullness — connection made negative rather than positive — and in both the joint is dissolved. Frank leaves nothing separate. Derrida leaves nothing present.

What is born at the joint is not a word. Words arrive far later, and cutting a tree need not produce a vocabulary. What is born is markability: the difference can be held and drawn again, something having been distinguished in a way that admits return. Signification comes later still, once the drawing has been repeated often enough by people merely carrying it out, until the mark answers on its own.

The operation runs in registers that can be told apart by what each accomplishes. A cut assigns sides. Where there was a field there is this and that, and the question of which side something falls on has a sense it did not have before — owes and does not owe, before anyone has been sorted into either. The same cut, taken along its own edge, gives a before and an after. Nothing further is introduced: the operation is applied to itself, and the result is that what preceded the drawing is now what could no longer be otherwise. Time is the cut in reflex.

A trace does neither of these. It is the cut applied to a cut across the border the second register instituted: one division held against another, and the holding is what yields the same. Sameness of a line is a result of that comparison rather than a property the line carried. Repetition begins here — before it, two occasions; after it, one distinction drawn twice.

This produces the objection. A thermostat responds differently to temperatures on either side of a threshold, and Luhmann's systems constitute themselves through distinction and go on distinguishing with no internal decider anywhere in them. If distinguishing were positing, thermostats would be free.

They cut along a line laid down in advance. The threshold arrived with the device, set by whoever built it or by whatever process fixed the value, and the distinguishing repeats a code rather than establishing one. That this difference, between these states, at this value, is the difference that matters — none of it is settled by the operation that carries it out. A trace in a machine is the third register hardened until it works alone, which is what a machine is. A cut is free when its line is not supplied by the sediment it inherits.