Here are some dictionary provided synonyms for “defer”: postpone, put off, adjourn, delay, hold off, hold over, shelve, suspend, delay, hold in abeyance, stay, prorogue, pigeonhole, mothball. None of them quite get at how minimal “deferral” is, conceptually, and how central it therefore is to the specificity of the originary hypothesis, and to GA’s decisive break with metaphysical forms of thinking. I won’t go through all those synonyms one by one, but all of them involve a level or mode of intentionality that can’t be attributed to “defer”—they all present a completed decision to not do something now, but rather to decide whether to do it later. If you’re deferring, you’re too much in the midst of things to make such a clear-cut distinction. Only “deferral,” that is, allows us to defer thinking as if we could step outside of the situation, and get a non-participatory spectator’s perspective of a completed event. On the originary scene, a distinction is constructed by all of the participants: a distinction between the convergence on the central object, on the one hand, and the renunciation of that object., on the other This is like a line is drawn through the gesture of each participant. So, the question is, who is best able to draw that line in an actionable manner: the one on the scene, who is actually trying to draw it, or someone outside of the scene, who could abstract from the event and reduce it to an external model, or a set of rules. In that latter case, it would be possible to reduce the renunciation to a formal, generalizable rule in advance of any particular act of renunciation. It would be possible to find a “cause” leading to the act of renunciation, and this cause would then be found in our biological or some other pre-existing “equipment,” in which case the sign would itself simply be a “superstructural” reflection of some more foundational “infrastructural” reality. The singularity of the scene would be denied. “Deferral,” meanwhile, perfectly captures the position within the act itself, along with its fundamental contingency, between the convergence heading toward destruction and what will perhaps be no more than the mere delay of that tendency. One can’t know–one can’t know any more than that whatever gesture one puts forth might subtract from rather than accelerate the momentum dragging us along toward the catastrophe. (Even this is not really “knowledge”; rather it is slight injection of “hope” into the situation.) Instead of preventing imminent destruction, we have really done no more than make it “imminently imminent,” and that imminence of imminence gives us a little space within which to work. We can’t even think in terms of whether the “problem” has been “genuinely solved,” or “kicked down the road,” trivialized or covered up, or, for that matter, irresponsibly avoided and thereby intensified, to reappear even more menacingly tomorrow–the categories which enable us to make even these distinctions are after the fact, metaphysical accretions, even if we couldn’t really avoid using them to describe what seem to be more or less effective gestures of deferral (and even this “seeming” is itself taking place on some mimetic scene, upon which the projected “seeming” itself defers some crisis). What, then, is the horizon of any act of deferral? What is its “reach”? Once we’ve deferred something, for how long have we deferred it? It seems plausible to suggest that it impossible to “invest” in any act of deferral while dwelling on, or perhaps even entertaining the possibility of, its fallibility–in other words, I have to completely believe my act of deferral will succeed, at least for that period in which I am enacting it; which would further imply that I must exclude from consideration all the indications which suggest that it might not, in fact succeed. I can and must recognize and assimilate those indications, but only in the form of those unavoidable immediate modifications in my act of deferral as I articulate it—I can’t imagine them as fully imagined forces which might render the act of deferral useless. The fact that I can look back afterward and note how risky the whole business in fact was can’t, then, provide any knowledge that would be useful in the midst of the next act of deferral except insofar as the very act of looking back, itself, guided by an interest in preserving the sign, sharpens my sensitivity to the immediate appearance of counter-indications. (But it might just as easily dull my sensitivities to unprecedented indications.) Our horizons, though, can be progressively extended insofar as any act of deferral leaves behind it a sign, which can be repeated by someone other than myself, and provides a starting point for the next act of deferral: to defend that sign. Defending the sign against attempts to undermine and circumvent it, attempts made possible by the new configuration produced by the sign itself, provides for the capacity for ever increasing foresight, especially insofar as cultural signs become increasingly complex, deferring (through a kind of ethical and esthetic economy) a range of rivalries and crises simultaneously. In that case, though, the real threat to the sign is not so much direct attacks on it or attempts to evade its strictures, but the rivalries the sign itself instigates over who represents or embodies it. So, one has to reproduce the sign in such a way as to defer conflicts generated by the previous iteration of that sign. What I’ve been trying to show so far is that “deferral,” far more so than any of its near synonyms, keeps us always inside the scene, so that knowledge of the scene is always a part of concern for sustaining the scene. The concept of deferral also means we cannot really say what exactly, is being deferred—no one could know that violence has been deferred, because no one can know what would have happened without the sign of deferral. Maybe it just would have been a harmless little skirmish. Implicit in an iterable sign of deferral is a worst-case scenario imaginary, albeit one that cannot be articulated. We can talk about “imagination” on the originary scene insofar as we understand “imagination” as nothing more than a widening of the scene so as to include something the scene will have retroactively appeared to have been constituted by: if you see two figures converging on a part of the object that can accommodate only one you can extend the scene to include some version of irreconciliability which can be taken to inform the convergence itself. I said last week that I would like a more precise term for the specific kind of annihilatory violence that is imagined here. It might help to remember that Gans took the notion of “deferral” from Derrida’s “differance,” which includes both the word deferral and the word difference which, at bottom are the same word. So, let’s set aside “violence” for now, and think in terms of the limits of sameness. The rush to the center abolishes the pre-human differences, which we can refer to as the “pecking order”—suddenly everyone is the same, and sees each other becoming even more the same. The consequence of this indifferentiation is that anyone can do anything—the only check on what I might do is the difference of others, which limits and gives meaning to whatever I want or do. In myself, taken singly, I can have no constraint on desire, no “project.” If everyone is the same as me, no order or relation is possible—forcing some kind of response so as to make the other “other” so that the self can be the same as itself, is, then, the only conceivable form of action. So, what the gesture of deferral does is create an other for all of us, so that we can oscillate between same and other to each other. Now, the concept of deferral also has the feature of never being completed—it has no expiration date. When, after all, is the originary scene over, or “closed”? There seem to be several, complementary answers, depending on what we want to bring into focus: the scene is closed when everyone has put forth the sign and shared the differentiating hesitation before the central object; the scene is closed once the central object has been consumed; the scene is closed once some ritual gesture, repeating the originary gesture itself, is issued. All good, but everything I just listed comes from a perspective from outside the scene, as if these events, or this “tripled” event, were witnessed. But from where? Only from upon another scene. But any scene can only emerge from within a previous scene, from something resisting closure within that scene—for example, some emergent struggle over proximity to the center in the ritual gesture that promises closure. Each scene is, then, built from within a previous scene, while also being a guarantee of that previous scene’s closure. But this really means that the same gesture of deferral, in all its different forms, is carried from one scene to another, while it also means that we are still on the originary scene, cognizant of its urgencies while representing its possible closure. So, we have never left and will never leave the originary scene, or its worst-case imaginary, which is the very thing which makes deferral possible and must also be deferred—as soon as one takes the worst-case scenario imaginary literally, one is compelled to enact it. This also means that everything we do is a gesture of deferral, even the most unrestrained and violent acts—simply by being formed, and therefore differentiating, anything we do conjures a scene by introducing some difference or some other that can sustain it. In the kind of absolute immanence I am suggesting is implicit in the gesture of deferral, what then distinguishes one gesture from another is a greater extension of the horizon of deferral, which itself implies a more formative recall of previous gestures. How do we know which gesture extends the horizon further? Obviously we can’t make a rule here—it will be a question of which gestures provide the form around which more sustaining scene will be created. One final word: the literary aesthetic of deferral would be a single, neverending sentence, that propels itself forward by referring back to itself—there have actually been at least a couple of novels written this way—and it may be that my talk sounded like that at least t some points, but I did rein it in, which may itself be a gesture of deferral.