Derrida's Distinction between Who and What in Love and Being

I was interested in Derrida's distinction between the "Who" and the "What" in love and Being. Usually, when someone says they are in love without another person - let's call them Jack and Jill - one thinks that Jack loves Jill as Jill (her "self" or her "soul"). However, Derrida argues that there is no self to Jill, because a self would require a center, and the universe is 'decentred.' This is the "Who" that we take for granted; we falsely assume Jill has a static essence.

Obviously, Jill changes physically as she gets older, developing in many different ways, even regenerating completely new cells - physically, Jill is a continuous process of change; even mentally, things are in constant process and Jill is always thinking of different things or in different ways (which contributes to her changing interpretation of herself). But what makes Jill at five years old the same person as Jill at tweny-five? Physically and mentally, Jill is different. She may have memories of her past, but memories are vague interpretations of truth and are unreliable (which becomes a major criticism of the psychoanalytic process, because psychologists were creating memories in their patients mind of events that never happened). So what is it that stays constant? What is it that allows us to say young Jill and old Jill are the same Jill?

The self, of course. But remember, there is no self because there is no center. Jill is "always already" changing in fluid process, meaning that at any given moment she is not a thing, not a "Who." Rather, she is a process of becoming (Sidenote: I would argue that, at one single moment, if time were paused, Jill cannot be in process because process depends on causality, and both process and causality depend on the flow of time. So what is Jill in that frozen moment? She is Jill, technically with a center, yet that center is a "substitution" as Derrida would call it, and will be something different the next moment - maybe not vastly different, but different nonetheless. But in any case, in that frozen moment Jill as Jill, as a "Who," can be interpreted, but it's an inevitably faulty interpretation since it is a fleeting identity).

So how can Jack love Jill as a "Who"? The answer is he doesn't. What Jack is in love with is Jill as "What?" This means that Jack loves what he associates with Jill, not what is part of Jill's essence.

Jack loves Jill's fiery personality. He loves the way she acts towards him, the things she says to him, and how she says them. But all these things are not Jill. Because these things can change. Very often, it is because people change in different directions that their relationships fall apart. If Jill stopped acting compassionatley and lovingly towards Jack, then Jack would see Jill differently, and he would still be in love, but he'd be in love with his idea of what Jill was, not with how he sees Jill now. This is the "What" that Derrida talks about. Jack is in love with the "Whats" that he associates with his conception of Jill's "self." If those "Whats" change drastically enough and for a long enough period of time (which is what happens when people naturally change), Jack will eventually associate these new "Whats," these new personality traits with what he currently considers Jill's self. Thus, he will no longer love Jill (except in his memories, where he keeps alive the conception of what he used to associate with her - and even that is a love of "What" not of "Who").

About the Incest Taboo

In thinking about the incest taboo, it seems to me to be much more natural than cultural. Obviously, the incest taboo is a natural, universal human trait because it's in every culture, spanning the entire human-populated world. And most cultures (perhaps all) make incest even more taboo by making rules and laws against it.

However, there are exceptions to the rule; some people do engage in incestuous acts. And when I try to think about why, the answers seems to lean towards reasons of deviations from the natural norm. I mean, yeah, when a person engages in an incestuous act it is also a deviation from the cultural norm, but it seems that the cultural norm is only there because the natural norm is there. After all, why would a culture make incest forbidden? What's wrong with incest? The thought of it gives me the shivers, but that's because it's part of my nature to avoid it, plus it has been ingrained in me, through culture, as something horrible and disgusting. And the reason it's part of our culture is because it's maladaptive for our natures (the offpring of two organisms very close in DNA usually turn out to be sick, either physically, mentally, or both).

There are two ways I can understand how/why someone would engage in an incestuous act, one dealing with nature and one dealing with nurture (a binary opposition in psychology), yet both really go back to physical nature.

The first way is if the person has some sort of psychological disorder, which would be a result of a chemical imbalance or genetic mutation, or something of that sort; basically, the person's "nature" is messed up, deviating from the norm of the rest of the human population. This would explain why a person could/would defy a universal human trait.

The second way is if the person was conditioned by some traumatic life event (or many) to either become habituated to incest, or to associate it with positive emotions -- in either case this changes the brain's neural networking (the brain has quite a bit of plasticity), making the incestuous acts a result of physical deviations from the normal/average human.

So it seems that nature has much more to do with incest, both in upholding the taboo and in explaining those who engage in incestuous acts. Culture adds to nature, but it doesn't seem to carry enough weight to oppose nature in a true binary system.

What is Reality?

I'm intrigued with (though I disagree with) the post-structuralist notion that the universe is "decentred" and therefore, "inherently relativistic." I mean, yeah, it's true that relativity is a crucial factor in perception, but perceptions are not necessarily truths.

Standing on the side of the road, a car driving by at 60 mph appears to be zooming; yet, that same car from the perspective of a car driving parallel with it, and at the same speed, appears to be standing still. So how fast is the car actually going? Is it going? Are there multiple answers because there are multiple perspectives?

A post-structuralist would say that there is no answer because the answer you give depends on the point, the center, of perception that you argue from - and there is no correct point because the universe is decentred.

But how is the car even going at all if there is no answer? At one moment it is at Emmanuel College, and a few moments later it is at Star Market. No matter what perspective you take, the car still traverses space and time.

I don't know if this is true, but the post-structuralist may argue that space and time are an illusion and there is no space nor time (since there is no center of anything). But if this were the case how does anything happen at all? Causality (cause and effect) depends on time: one thing cannot cause another unless the first thing happens before the next (otherwise, how could it be considered the cause?). Further, how could there even be existence in the first place?

Everything falls apart unless the answer is that the car is going 60 mph, and it only appears to be standing still to the other car because the other car is also going 60 mph. So, yes, relativity plays into the appearence of reality, but there is still a real answer outside of perspective.

The Function of Signs

Saussure points out that language is basically arbitrary; it is a tool that humans use to communicate, but does not supply a one-to-one correlation between word and thing. He says, "in language there are only differences without positive terms" (40). The word "book" is not a positive term; it is not the thing itself nor is it the way of naming the thing; it is a sign used to describe the thing, an object consisting of a front and back cover with multiple pages of paper inbetween, held together by some sort of binding. In other words, the thing itself is not a book; book is simply what we call it. If language perfectly described reality, then all languages would be the same; in fact, there would only be one language, the language. But this is certainly not the case. In Italian, "libro" is used to describe the object we call a book. Libro and Book are not even close to sounding or looking like the same word, but they mean the same thing. So, the way we use language determines how we create meaning of reality. For example, we have the general word book. But we also have notebook, journal, diary, ledger, tome, etc. These different words all contain different specific meanings, even though they all fall under the same category of book. Diary means to us something different than does journal, notebook, or just book. The difference gives it its unique meaning. We can use a word like diary and understand that it is not quite the same thing as a notebook or a journal; and even though it is a type of book, it holds a different meaning than does the word book.

This seems like common sense. Of course a diary isn't a notebook. But what about snow? How many different words for snow do we have? Just a handful: snow, sleet, hail. Eskimos have something like 50 different words for snow (I've heard different numbers; someone even claimed it was over 100). Eskimos see differences in types of snow that we either don't pay attention to or don't see at all. They have words that cannot be translated into English. It would be like if someone saw a diary and called it a book; yes, it is a book, but it's specifically a diary. Yes, that stuff is snow, but it's specifically a certain type of snow. Since we don't have a language for it, we don't have a conception of that specific element of reality. It makes me wonder how much I am limited in understanding about the world not only in terms of not knowing other languages, but in what has not, or perhaps cannot, be expressed linguistically.