Famously, the French Academy of the Sciences in 1866 banned all discussion of the origin of language. They must have determined that since nothing could be proven one way or the other on this question, all you could get would be arbitrary versions of some creationist myth. But it’s not just linguistics—the prohibition on talking about origins extends across the social sciences—it’s part of the founding self-distinction of the social sciences from religion, and its modeling on Newtonian physics, with eternal laws of nature which presumably don’t require any positing of an origin. Thinking in terms of origins marks one as introducing theology into rational discussions, and therefore as fanatical or crazy—origins are not subject to the methods of scientific thought. And I don’t think things are any better in traditional history, which just goes back to the earliest remembered or recorded event, without being able to claim that it’s really the origin—in fact, that’s when one usually claims things trail off into myth. Derrida, of course, wanted to deconstruct all originary claims, but at least Derrida recognized that we seem to be incapable of thinking without positing origins—hence the need for constant deconstruction. But if the positing of origins needs to be constantly “refuted,” shouldn’t the difficulty or even impossibility of thinking without doing so be explained? In fact, one interesting thing about the social sciences themselves is that every discipline seems to have a fairly universally agreed upon origin, usually marked by a proper name: Durkheim for sociology, Adam Smith for political economy, Freud for psychoanalysis, Marx for—Marxism. It’s the same for philosophy: the field is marked by proper names—Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, Hegel, Derrida, etc. Not all of these names are equally universally agreed upon as points of origin, but if you dispute one it’s just to put another name in its place. Foucault referred to these names as the “initiators of discursive practices,” one of whom was in fact Foucault himself, and this was in his essay “What is an Author” which, on the one hand wants to figure out why we even need to refer to author’s at all, while implicitly recognizing that it’s impossible to make any progress within any human science without some kind of “return to an origin.” It’s always possible to say, well, the proper name “Marx” is really a tissue of heterogeneous discourses that just contingently came together in that particular name, and the subsequent uses of the name “Marx” are not intrinsically connected to anything about Marx himself but are themselves just a heterogeneous array of differentiated discourses—but why, then, is it so hard to get rid of the name itself; why, in fact, do deconstructions of the “author-function” just end up elevating the names of those who authored the deconstructions? So, instead of taking originary thinking as some inexplicable and infantile defect of serious thought and taking all proper precautions to quarantine it, it may be better to take the unavoidable pull of the origin as the origin of thinking. This reverses everything—rather than origin marking the point at which our thinking reaches its limits, and, like good Kantians, noting and remaining aware of those limits, everything is an origin, origins lie in front of us everywhere, what we are doing right now is an origin. Now, an origin in the strong sense, the sense we can’t avoid thinking, is not just the first thing that happens but the first thing that happens without following necessarily from what preceded it and without which everything that happens subsequently is unthinkable; even more strongly, it’s what happens and has never stopped happening. So, if everything is an origin, every origin also points us to an earlier origin. The most obvious example is language—every word we use, someone must have been the first to use it in a way that stuck—not only every word, but every specific use and meaning of every word. And the origin of a particular word points us back to previous words it presupposes and ultimately back to the first word, which we are therefore still uttering. So, how was it possible for anyone to say a word, and others to “understand,” a word for the first time? This question is then the starting point of all inquiry—there may be other origins, but not of the inquiry into origins. So, the question of how a word could have come into being is itself an origin which tells us something about how that word or any word comes into being. But we still have the problem—what justifies any claim to locate an origin of anything? And, even more terrifyingly, how do we deal with competing and incommensurable claims to originarity? That must be the real reason for the prohibition of talking of origins in modernity—claims to an origin are especially intractable, and if you’ve got competing ones, it seems impossible to avoid irreconcilable conflict. But these questions need to be taken into the thinking of origin itself, and we could say that whatever is at the origin must have been a way of preventing or controlling precisely the consequences of just such irreconcilability. Since we can’t really “prove” an origin on the terms of the modern social sciences (what are the origins, we might ask, of those terms of “proof”?), any positing of an origin must be hypothetical, but what makes for a good hypothesis must, then, be, that it offers the possibility of resisting the collapse into irreconcilable struggle. Even if both sides are completely committed to armed struggle until the annihilation of either or both sides, they then find in the origin of social order the control and use of force by one part of the community to quell and over-awe the other. That’s the hypothesis of origin both sides are working with, and that will tell them when the struggle must be declared over; in the course of the struggle other hypotheses may emerge, especially if there is communication, even tacit between the two sides, in which case a hypothesis of some form of communication at the origin will be constructed. Once some hypothesis of origin, say, one based on “agreement” or “pact,” is arrived at and enacted, that becomes the new origin and the source of hypotheses regarding previous origins. The more minimally, punctually and singularly any hypothesis can account for these successive hypotheses, the better the hypothesis—and the better the community that comes closest to enacting it. So, as we go forward, we keep reaching back into the past and aim at making the chain of hypotheses leading back to an origin beyond which we can’t go tighter. And what origin can we not go back further behind—well, whatever would precede whatever it is that makes it possible to generate hypothesis of origin which, again, must have something to do with that problem of irreconcilability.