Möbian Nights: Reading Literature and Darkness 1501326937, 9781501326943

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Möbian Nights

Violence, Desire, and the Sacred Series Editors: Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming, and Joel Hodge Volumes in the series: Vol. 1. Girard’s Mimetic Theory Across the Disciplines edited by Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming, and Joel Hodge Vol. 2. René Girard and Sacrifice in Life, Love, and Literature edited by Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming, and Joel Hodge Vol. 3. Mimesis, Movies, and Media edited by Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming, and Joel Hodge Vol. 4. René Girard and Raymund Schwager: Correspondence 1974–1991 edited by Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming, Joel Hodge, and Mathias Moosbrugger Vol. 5. Mimesis and Atonement: René Girard and the Doctrine of Salvation edited by Michael Kirwan and Sheelah Treflé Hidden Vol. 6. Möbian Nights: Reading Literature and Darkness by Sandor Goodhart

Möbian Nights Reading Literature and Darkness Sandor Goodhart

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Sandor Goodhart, 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Goodhart, Sandor, author. Title: Möbian Nights : reading literature and darkness / Sandor Goodhart. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. | Series: Violence, desire, and the sacred ; 6 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017002516 (print) | LCCN 2017021566 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501326943 (ePub) | ISBN 9781501326950 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781501326936 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Criticism. | Disasters in literature. | Crisis in literature. | Death in literature. | BISAC: RELIGION / Philosophy. | PHILOSOPHY / Metaphysics. | LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory. Classification: LCC PN81 (ebook) | LCC PN81 .G627 2017 (print) | DDC 801/.95--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017002516 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-2693-6 ePub: 978-1-5013-2694-3 ePDF: 978-1-5013-2695-0 Series: Violence, Desire, and the Sacred Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com. Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events, and the option to sign up for our newsletters.

For my children, Joshua, Noah, and Jonah; my grandchildren, Ethan, Benjamin, Aaron, Gabriel, Sarah, Stella, Max, Sophia, and Brandon; and in memory of my mother, Evelyn Love Goodhart, and my father, Abraham Goodhart —in abiding love, zikhronah v’zikhrono livrakha

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Contents Preface and Acknowledgments Introduction: Möbian Turns: Difference as Continuity 1 After The Tragic Vision: Krieger and Criticism, Lentricchia and Crisis 2 Disfiguring de Man: Literature, History, and Collaboration 3 Witnessing the Impossible: Laub, Felman, and the Testimony of Trauma 4 Documenting Fiction: Kolitz, van Beeck, Levinas, and Holocaust Witness 5 “And darkness upon the face of the deep”: Counter-Redemptive Hermeneutics in Wiesel, Mauriac, Blanchot, Levinas, and Genesis 1 6 “All the story of the night”: Criticism, Literature, and the Möbian 7 “I died in Auschwitz”: Literary Reading, the Möbian, and the Posthumous

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25 45 87 111 135 203 263

Conclusion: Versions of Night: Reading Literature and Darkness

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Works Cited Index

297 319

Preface and Acknowledgments The book that follows was born from a conversation I had in the Temple of Zeus. “Zeus” was a coffeehouse concession that operated in the basement of Goldwin Smith Hall at Cornell University in the 1970s where students, faculty, and assorted others gathered before, after, and sometimes during classes to hash out the burning issues of the day. Having landed at Cornell in the mid-1970s as an ABD from Buffalo (where I attended courses given by René Girard on literature and sacrifice, and studied structuralism and poststructuralism with Eugenio Donato), I spent a lot of time in Zeus.1 Steve Knapp had the reputation of being the brightest graduate student of his class, and I took a certain mischievous pleasure engaging him about the deconstructive ways of thinking then making their importance felt at Cornell and elsewhere.2 “Not every difference can be deconstructed,” Steve asserted one day. “Name one distinction with regard to a literary text that cannot be,” I challenged. “The inside and the outside,” he replied. “How do you deconstruct that?” It was a complicated moment. Steve was right, of course, to insist that deconstruction had its limits, although it took its practitioners (including Derrida himself) some twenty years more to acknowledge them. And I was probably closer to Steve’s position in those days than I would have allowed, although I would eventually learn those limits myself the way Kant was reputed to have learned about the noumena—by bumping up against them.3 I had already been “ABD” was of course the lingo for “all but dissertation” and Buffalo refers to the State University of New York at Buffalo (where I did graduate work in English from 1968 to 1977). I completed a dissertation with René Girard on Sophocles’ Oedipus in 1977 (Who Killed Laius? Sophocles’ Mythic Arithmetic). Girard and Donato had recently arrived in Buffalo, fresh from the 1966 conference at Johns Hopkins that the two had organized with Richard Macksey, and at which Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and a relatively unknown Jacques Derrida had lectured, and the names of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Michel Foucault were very much in the air (see Macksey and Donato, 1970). 2 Steven Knapp went on to become, of course, one of the major players in the discussion of deconstruction in this country. For examples of his own writing on literary theory, see his essay with Walter Benn Michaels, “Against Theory,” Critical Inquiry 8 (Summer 1982), 732–42, and his duly celebrated volume Literary Interest: The Limits of Anti-Formalism (1993). He is currently the President of the George Washington University, a position he accepted after teaching at the University of California at Berkeley, and then serving as Dean, Provost, and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at (ironically enough) the Johns Hopkins University. 3 See, for example, Specters of Marx (1993), where, in context of a discussion of Fukyama’s reading of Hegel and of the messianic promise, Derrida talks about the limits to deconstruction which he identifies among others as justice, democracy-to-come, and deconstruction itself. 1



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aware of them from my work with Girard on what he called “the scapegoat mechanism” and the violent genesis of cultural differences from the “sacrificial crisis,” and would articulate those boundaries for myself more fully at the School of Criticism and Theory at University of California at Irvine in 1977 in courses with Murray Krieger, Stanley Fish, and Edward Said, and through my subsequent reading in the early 1980s of Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot, who were among Derrida’s acknowledged teachers, and, like their younger French contemporary, somewhat critical of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology.4 But whatever the limits of deconstruction, the difference between the inside and the outside, I came to understand, was not among them, and in that regard the book that follows is something of a protracted answer to Steve’s question, a renewal, or perhaps even a continuation, of that coffeehouse discussion. It may be, in other words, that the distinction between the inside and the outside is not only capable of being deconstructed, but in fact must be deconstructed if we are to understand the relation between the literary and the critical over the past two millennia, that its dismantling holds the key to the category of the literary as such, which is to say, to any text saying more than is said, that engages (to borrow Levinas’s language) “the more within the less,” the container within the contained, the infinite within the finite, that constitutes itself, in short, as a questioning of its own performative capabilities. For a time, I considered calling the book “Inside Out” before I encountered other volumes by that name serving very different ends.5 The deconstruction of the inside and the outside that follows, however (if it is still appropriate to use this characterization), differs I suspect from the Cf. Levinas’s remarks in the conclusion of Existence and Existents (1978) on the “scission of being into an inside and an outside”: “The affirmation of the ego as a subject has led us to conceive of existence according to a different model from that of ecstasy [which is the model that Heidegger uses]. To take up existence is not to enter into the world. The question ‘what is it to exist?’ truly distinguished from the question ‘how is the object which exists constituted?’—the ontological problem—arises before the scission of being into an inside and an outside. Inscription in being is not an inscription in the world. The way that leads from the subject to the object, from the ego to the world, from one instant to the next, does not pass through the position in which a being is placed in existence, and which is revealed in the disquietude which his own existence awakens in man, the strangeness of the hitherto so familiar fact that he is there, the so ineluctable, so habitual, but suddenly so incomprehensible necessity of taking up that existence” (100). It is interesting in this connection that Derrida has begun to examine the limits of deconstruction. See, for example, John Caputo’s engagement with Derrida in Deconstruction in a Nutshell (1997). 5 See Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, edited by Diane Fuss (1991), and Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific, edited by Vilsoni Hereniko and Rob Wilson (1999). A film with the title Inside Out has appeared from Disney Pixar. For Levinas’s remarks, see Hand, The Levinas Reader (1989), 208, and Levinas, Totality and Infinity (1969), 50. 4

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deconstruction that Derrida or even Paul de Man would recognize as familiar (at least in the early days) since it has less to do with either the self-disqualifying conceptualization of the problem or with rhetorical trope than it does with its material extension and metonymic structure, with the diachronic that Levinas speaks about in “Diachrony and Representation,” or the “scission of Being” he describes in Existence and Existents.6 And in any event, the connection of this distinction with the Möbius strip came later. The real leap came for me in my conversations with Arnold. I owe “Arnold” an enormous debt of gratitude where ever and whoever he is. It was in my discussions with him that the importance of the Möbius strip occurred to me, both as a theme of the work I was doing, and in a strange way as a description of the life he was living and its relation to mine. I met Arnold in the late 1980s as did others at Cornell. He was brilliant, devastatingly smart. He had the maturity of individuals twice our age although he dressed in the manner of someone who had come directly from Haight Ashbury in the 1960s. Perhaps he had. None of us knew who he was or felt confident we could talk about his origins. A white male, Jewish by birth, he appeared at Cornell one semester, a self-described refugee of the killing fields of Pol Pot. Was he also perhaps a refugee of the madness of the student protests of the 1960s, an individual “on the run” like so many others who had been active in the turbulent political climate of that era (one thinks of Abby Hoffman), one who found refuge among the self-styled intellectuals who roamed the academic and social service landscape talking Marxism with Continental inflections? Or was his madness of a more personal nature? We never learned. He spoke to us of his fascination with China. He wore exclusively blue and pale green sweat suits the first two years that I knew him. Born in California, he said, living his childhood as a Beverly Hills brat, and running since then a multimillionaire business in the Far East (an alternative life to his one in Ithaca, the details of which, he said, he had to keep hidden from us and that he conducted in the middle of the night), Arnold dazzled us with his tales of corporate power and oddly unexplainable “differentiating sorting machines.” He had been a filmmaker, he said, a close friend of film stars (he mentioned Richard Dreyfus by name), and later, of members of the student leftist movement of the 1960s See “Diachrony and Representation” (in Entre Nous, 1998 or Time and the Other, 2002), and Existence and Existents (1978).

6



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(he claimed Angela Davis and Abby Hoffman among them), perhaps even one of them himself. I remember that when Abby Hoffman’s death was announced, he appeared to experience the news as a personal loss. He attended my classes and whatever other gatherings I convened (usually around the French critical thinking of the time), and conversed with me in office hours frequently about course materials, and more generally about the thought of the day in academic humanities circles at Cornell—Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Girard, and Levinas and their connections to anthropology, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and philosophy and the important nineteenth-century thinkers who were associated with those fields (principally Durkheim, Freud, Saussure, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger). He knew what he was talking about. As far as I could tell, he was never formally enrolled at Cornell. But he had audited a wide variety of courses that I gave and that were given by others (I think he also attended the lectures of Susan Buck Morse and Dominick LaCapra), and seemed to absorb the material—especially the philosophic ideas—fairly easily. We spoke often about the Möbian and about its value for understanding the poststructuralist scene. He thought the idea unlike any he had encountered, one of enormous explanatory power. His flattery aside, I was struck by his candor and his intelligence, feeling at once his life and thought to be both inside my own thought and outside of it, clearly different from mine in all sorts of ways and yet curiously continuous with it, like a road that I had not taken, and like the Möbian structure we were discussing. He disappeared from Ithaca one spring day just as inauspiciously as he had appeared with a mate with whom he lived, a female law school graduate, who was off to assume a job in a prosecutor’s office somewhere in New England. I never saw him or heard from him again. In the wake of the filming of John Nash’s story in A Beautiful Mind, it occurred to me that Arnold’s descriptions of his past and of his alternate life (maintained he asserted through lengthy late-night phone calls to “China”)—whether built from real activities, delusional episodes, or deep political cover—were profoundly enriching to all of us. While many of us lived within the safe confines of suburban academia, this sweat-suited Elijah lived on the margins—one way or another—and survived masterfully, whatever the nature of the battles he was fighting. His path was an admirable one. He was a good person, a mensch. I hope that he is alive, that he is healthy, and that he is enjoying himself. I owe him a lot. *****

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A great many other individuals also deserve my gratitude for their help and inspiration in the course of writing the essays that provide the foundation for this book. I dedicate the first chapter of my book to the memory of Murray Krieger—may his name be for a blessing. I first heard Krieger’s name as one of the architects of literary theory within the formalism of the 1960s. I was introduced more fully to his work, however, only in the 1970s at the School of Criticism and Theory at the University of California at Irvine (where I took his course on literary presence). I subsequently spoke about him at a session of the Modern Language Association devoted to his work, and was asked to write an essay on his work (from which the essay below is taken) for a Festschrift in his honor. His persistence in arguing for the importance of literary theory throughout his career—long before it was fashionable to do so—remains an inspiration. He was indeed a “warrior.” The last time I saw him was at an airport in Michigan where he was departing from a colloquium on critical theory at the University of Michigan to which Ira Konigsberg and I had invited him, and where he inscribed for me a book he had written. His faith in the value of the written word and its capacity to conjure up literary presence remained undaunted. The second and third chapters were also written during my years at Cornell and in that regard I thank Neil Hertz for his friendship, intelligence, and support, for his savvy advice on all things academic, and for kindly encouraging me to join the project that eventually became the Responses volume (I thank Tom Keenan for his judicious editing of my text in that connection). I would also like to thank Jonathan Culler, Richard Klein, and Cynthia Chase for their support and encouragement of projects on Derrida and de Man that were both like and unlike their own. I would like to thank Josué Harari, who I met at Buffalo, and who, while still a graduate student himself, first introduced me to continental thinking. His continued friendship during the years I worked at Cornell remained a source of inspiration. His untimely passing in 2014 was for me like the passing of an older brother. It was also through Josué that I met Eugenio Donato, whose courses I took and with whom I later developed a friendship shortly before his own untimely death in 1983. Chapters 2 through 5 were also written in context of my burgeoning awareness of all things Jewish and in particular of the Holocaust and of its significance for contemporary theorizing. I thank Steven Katz for his kindness toward me when he was chair of the Near Eastern Studies Department at Cornell, and for permission to republish portions of the essay that appeared



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under his editorial guidance in Modern Judaism (as well as for encouraging me to publish the essay with him in the first place). I also thank Gerd Korman for introducing me to the subtleties of the idea of churbn in Jewish history. I thank Geoffrey Hartman for opening the Holocaust Video Testimony Archive to me at Yale and for our discussions of trauma and witness vis-à-vis the Holocaust both at the Archive and elsewhere. I was never formally Geoffrey’s student. But he confirmed for me the importance of bringing Judaism into the critical discussion and took part in the Holocaust study group I formed with Tony Brinkley, Steve Youra, Herman Rapaport, Ellen Fine, Carolyn Forché, and Peter Balakian. I would also like to thank Howard Feinstein and George Miller who made the trek from Ithaca to New Haven one wintry morning to establish the archive. At Yale, I thank Dori Laub, who welcomed us to the Archive in New Haven. In this connection, I also thank Lawrence Langer, whose ideas about the “afterdeath” in Holocaust studies permeate these pages, and Berel Lang, whose sensitivity to Holocaust matters as always kept me honest. I would like to thank the participants in and organizers of the yearly Jewish American and Holocaust Literature Symposium meeting at Boca Raton, later in Provo and then Miami—especially Alan Berger, Gloria Cronin, and Dan Walden—where I first developed my work on Zvi Kolitz and “Yosl Rackower,” and more recently Vickie Aarons, Holli Levitsky, and Ezra Capell who welcomed my work on midrash into the seminar. My encounters in Boca with Melvin Bukiet and Thane Rosenbaum were especially helpful. My understanding of Levinas’s work and of Judaism more generally was greatly enhanced by my contact with the Hansel family—Georges, Simone, David, and Joëlle—and I thank them for their ongoing support in connection with my work on Levinas and with regard to the North American Levinas Society, in which they are honorary lifetime members. A book about the Möbian, which is to say, about the deep structure of difference, is inevitably a book about sacrifice, of which difference is but an everyday extension. More than others, and apart from René himself, it has been from those with whom I have worked within the Girardian community that I have learned the most about the sacrificial. In that connection, I would like to thank the members of the annual Colloquium on Violence and Religion for their engagement with me about Girard’s thought over many years, and in particular Charles Mabee whose discussions with me of the prophetic have remained of lasting value. Jim Williams’s comradeship in Girardian studies from the outset has been a constant inspiration. The names of many other individuals deserve

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mention for their generous and ready support over the years: Rebecca Adams, Jeremiah Alberg, James Alison, Mark Anspach, Judy Arias, Vanessa Avery, Gil Baillee, Cesáreo Bandera, Maria Stella Barberi, Tony Bartlett, Benoît Chantre, Diane Culbertson, Bob Daly, Hubert Darthenay, Bob Doran, Paul Dumouchel, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Joachim Duyndam, Michael Elias, Johann Elsen, Giuseppe Forari, Eric Gans, Bob Hamerton-Kelly, Michael Hardin, Billy Hewitt, Hans Jørgen, Lundager Jensen, Bill Johnsen, Rosemary Johnsen, Britt Johnston, Jørgen Jørgensen, Roel Kaptein, Cheryl Kirk-Duggan, Michael Kirwin, André Lascaris, Paisley Livingston, Norbert Lohfink, Andrew Marr, Marie-Louise Martinez, Andrew McKenna, Trevor Merrill, Bill Mishler, Mathias Moonbrucker, Bill Morrow, Jozef Niewiadomski, Susan Nowak, Therèse Onderdenwijngaard, Jean-Michel Oughorlian, Wolfgang Palaver, Sonja Pos, Petra Pösel, Vern Neufeld Redekop, Dietmar Regensberger, Martha Reineke, Aat van Rhijn, Suzanne Ross, Keith Ross, Richard Schenk, Raymund Schwager, Julie Shinnick, Toby Siebers, Simon Simonse, Thee Smith, Susan Srigley, Williard Swartley, Niki Wandiger, Bruce Ward, Hans Weigand, and Susan Wright. The sheer size of this list is an index to the warm welcome my work has received within this vibrant community. The Australians deserve being singled out. Joel Hodge, Chris Fleming, and Scott Cowdell (who were strangers to me and to each other before meeting for the Girardian project) took it upon themselves to construct the infrastructure—yearly conferences, management of the newsletter, development of a publication series with Bloomsbury Press—necessary to develop understanding of Girard’s ideas on a new continent. I remain profoundly grateful that they have chosen to include my book in their prestigious series. I also thank Peter Thiel for his generous support of all things Girardian and the individuals with whom he executed these projects: in particular Lindy Fishburne, Jimmy Kaltreid, and currently Trevor Merrill. I have been teaching at Purdue University since 1997 and I thank the members of the English and Philosophy Program at Purdue before whom I presented portions of this work in the “Illuminations” series. I also thank my colleagues in the English and Philosophy Departments at Purdue with whom I discussed these ideas over the years, especially Tom Adler, John Duval, Wendy Flory, Bob Lamb, Maren Linett, Martin Matustik, Bill McBride, Arkady Plotnitsky, Tom Rickert, Sharon Solwitz, and Dan Smith. I thank the many graduate students in the English Department at Purdue with whom I worked over the years, and who in some instances have developed these ideas into shared projects. In that connection, I thank Justin Jackson, whose brilliant work on medieval literature and its relation to the prophetic, the ethical,



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and literary reading is already changing the way we think in that domain; Brent Blackwell, who wrote perhaps the first dissertation on literature and topology; but as well Monica Osborne, Sol Neely, Kathryn Ludwig, Rebecca Nicholson-Weir, Tavi Gabor, and Andy Ball whose own discussion of midrash and the prophetic in literary writing continues to enrich our national and international discussion. Two other individuals deserve special mention: my former colleague in the English Department at Purdue (currently in the Department of Theology at Notre Dame University), Ann Astell, in whose English 501 course (“Introduction to Critical Methodology”) I repeatedly introduced students to the Möbian, and with whom I co-edited a volume of essays on sacrifice, substitution, and the prophetic in Biblical scripture; and Tom Ryba, the Theologian-in-Residence at St. Thomas Aquinas Center in West Lafayette, with whom I also co-edited a volume of texts on René Girard, whose unfailing generosity and personal support of my life and work (and whose own combination of ethical and intellectual drive) remains for me a model. I feel blessed by my friendship with both of these individuals. Together they display all the qualities of true colleagues in our common intellectual, ethical, and spiritual endeavors. Despite the obvious differences in our origins and life choices, they remain my intellectual family. I thank Haaris Naqvi, my editor at Bloomsbury, for agreeing to publish this writing and for his suggestions regarding how most effectively to do it. I also thank his editorial staff in New York, and especially Katherine De Chant, whose suggestions have been invaluable to me. I also thank James Tupper, Kim Storry, and Rosemary Morlin at Bloomsbury in London and elsewhere in the United Kingdom, who have graciously guided me through the copy-editing and production process, and I thank Kate Kent for her efforts in the construction of the index to this volume. Finally, I thank René Girard. His relation to this work is like that of Franz Rosenzweig to Emmanuel Levinas. His presence in this writing is too pervasive to cite individually. Every page could be dedicated to him. It is from him that my intellectual being took its decisive turn and the continuities between his work and my own are evident everywhere. I also owe a debt to his family—to his wife Martha, and to his children Martin, Daniel, and Mary—all of whom have graciously welcomed me into their home (long after other guests had left) and have been unfailingly supportive of my work and of me personally. René’s passing is an irreparable loss to all of us. Lafayette, Indiana

March 5, 2017 / 7th Adar 5777

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Introduction: Möbian Turns: Difference as Continuity

A dog came in the kitchen And stole a crust of bread. Then cook up with a ladle And beat him till he was dead. Then all the dogs came running And dug the dog a tomb— And wrote upon the tombstone For the eyes of dogs to come: A dog came in the kitchen And stole a crust of bread. Then cook up with a ladle And beat him till he was dead. Then all the dogs came running And dug the dog a tomb— Samuel Beckett1 Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall part William Butler Yeats2 The thesis of the following book is that a new understanding of the literary has appeared in European and American critical thinking in the last seventy years or so—roughly since the Holocaust. For lack of a better term, I have dubbed this Beckett, Waiting for Godot (1954), 37a–b. In the Grove Press edition, pages on which the play is printed are numbered at the bottom of the left hand page only. Accordingly, I have numbered references on the left side of the page 37a and those on the right 37b. The opening song of Act 2 is sung by Vladimir. For the complete song, see below, Chapter 7, Part 5. 2 “The Second Coming,” ll.1–3. See Ferguson (2005), 1196. 1

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theory (or understanding) the “Möbian,” although I could well have named it otherwise. The idea it designates, however, is less easily dispensable. Why the Möbian, and why since the Holocaust? The word of course reflects the name of the nineteenth-century German mathematician—August Ferdinand Möbius—associated with the famed Möbius strip or Möbius band, a figure from the field of topology identified with the peculiar property of being “one-sided” and single-edged. The Leipzig mathematician is credited with having been the first to describe this curious object in a paper submitted to an essay contest in Paris (where else?) in 1858, and it has remained something of the darling of mathematicians ever since. It is easy enough to make one. Start with a paper cylinder.3 Cut it across or broad-wise. Then twist one of the severed surfaces once in either direction, and refasten the edges. The figure that results has only “one side” which means in effect that if you take a pencil and trace a line along a parallel relative to the edge, you will not only return to the place of origin (as you would with a cylinder) but you will have traced a line on the “other side” as well. It also means that if you cut the band along the same line, the result will be not two bands but one elongated figure. Here is a representation of a Möbius strip.

Figure 1.1

One of the things that fascinates about this figure is that if you consider only a small portion of the surface (say, for example, a segment from the back in Figure 1.1), it is hard to distinguish it from a segment of a cylinder. It looks two-sided You can also start with a rectangular strip of paper, prepare to attach the ends the way you would if you were trying to make a cylinder, and then twist one of the edges before you do. If you start with a cylinder, however, you may be able to see more clearly the differences between a two-sided and a one-sided figure.

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and appears to have two distinct edges that cannot be crossed. If you do the thought experiment of envisioning yourself standing on one side of the surface and peering over one of the edges to the “other side,” it is hard to imagine you could ever arrive there without crossing the boundary. You could walk the entire length of the surface, and that edge will always be there, always in the same direction relative to your walking, barring your passage. And what is already located on that other side will likewise always remain removed from you by a wall or barrier that cannot be transcended. But in fact you can get there. All you need to do is turn yourself ninety degrees and, registering the point from which you start, walk continuously in either direction. If you walk along the center of the surface (midway between the two edges), sooner or later you will arrive at the point that appeared to you when you started irrevocably remote. What looks like it is on the “other side” will turn out in fact to be the “future” or the “past” of where you are. What appears absolutely distant from you, separated by a non-traversable boundary, is really before you or behind you. You can reach that dislocated point without at any moment transgressing that boundary if you simply reorient yourself a quarter turn and follow the twisting path between your origin and your goal. Even the bounded space between the edges is something of an illusion. For, in a slightly different thought experiment, if you follow along the edge (either one; it doesn’t matter which), you will find yourself sooner or later following along the other edge in the same direction (again, a counter-intuitive result; it is easy to imagine that you would be moving in the opposite direction—if the surface on which you were walking, say, was circular and your walk brought you around to the other side—but not the same direction). And having “miraculously” traversed the surface separating the two, you will discover that there is no “other edge,” that what looked initially like two distinct edges is in fact the same continuous elongated path. As in the case of the two apparent sides, lines that appear parallel to each other (two edges, for example) on a Möbian surface are the future or the past of the line you are traveling. Mathematicians identify this quality of the Möbius strip as its non-orientability. These maneuvers work because what looks like a two-dimensional figure is in fact three dimensional. Unaware that you are passing through a third dimension (as far as you are concerned, if the surface is large enough or you are small enough, you are following a flat path), you progressively reorient yourself until you end up not only where you began (which you could do following a simple circular path) but you do so by passing through an area that previously

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appeared to you to be irrevocably foreign.4 Theorists have begun to develop out the implications of working with Euclidian geometries in non-Euclidean spaces and the singular importance of Bernhard Riemann in this domain.5 It occurred to me that here was the perfect graphic illustration of how thought works, a model for conceptualizing a difference or otherness that turns out also in fact to describe, paradoxically, a continuity or sameness. I am not speaking here only thematically. The theme of the Möbius strip has of course been around for some time. The surrealists employed it (think of the paintings of Escher and more recently of the drawings of Saul Steinberg).6 Among the poststructuralists and postmodernist theorists, it has become almost commonplace. Lyotard, Bachelard, Baudrillard, and Lacan all refer to it.7 It has been used widely in fiction and film. Borges, Barth, and DeLillo are some of the names commonly cited in this connection, as are the films of David Lynch.8 If you think conceptualizing a Möbius strip—a two dimensional figure that passes through a third dimension—is tricky, try grappling with the difficulties of thinking a three-dimensional figure that passes through a fourth. In that case, you are dealing not only with a one-sidedness that appears two-sided, but with an outsidedness that shows up as insidedness (or insidedness that shows up as outsidedness). A “Klein bottle” is an example of such a figure, and topologists describe others. See, for example, Paul Hoffman, Archimedes’ Revenge (1988). See also the work of Peircean linguist and mathematician Floyd Merrell who has written extensively about this figure. See, for example, Deconstruction Reframed (1985), Semiosis in the Postmodern Age (1995), Peirce, Signs, and Meaning (1997), and Sensing Corporeally: Toward a Posthuman Understanding (2003). 5 See for example, Arkady Plotnitsky’s recent work in this area, “Bernhard Riemann’s Conceptual Mathematics and the Idea of Space,” Configurations, 17, nos.1–2 (Winter 2009), 105–30. 6 Douglas R. Hofstadter’s book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979), is probably among the most famous treatments. Hofstadter’s subsequent books have moved in unexpected directions. See I Am a Strange Loop (2007) and Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (2013). 7 Lyotard cites it as an alternative model for understanding surfaces in the opening chapter of The Libidinal Economy (1993), 3. Bachelard refers to it as a way of speaking about insidedness and outsidedness in spatial dimensions in The Poetics of Space (1994), 211–31. Baudrillard refers to it in connection with simulacra in Simulacra and Simulations (1994), 84. Perhaps most famously, Lacan refers to it in his Baltimore lecture in 1966, as a way of describing the construction of the subject in psychoanalysis. See “Of Structure As an Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to any Subject Whatever” in Macksey and Donato (1970), 186–200. 8 John Barth’s story Lost in the Funhouse is identified explicitly as Möbian (1968). At least two movies with the title “Möbius” have been produced, as well as a recent animated film series, “Silent Möbius,” in which the name “Borges” plays a role. See Éric Rochant’s Möbius (2013) and Ki-duk Kim’s Moebius (2013). David Lynch’s films Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive seem to employ Möbian structure. For a dissertation on the Möbian connection in Lynch, Don de Lillo, and others, see Brent Blackwell, “Literary Topology: Modern Science and Contemporary American Fiction” (2004). On Don de Lillo, see also Jenn Brandt, “Don DeLillo and Topologies of 9/11,” Critique (2014). See also Elizabeth Grosz, who uses the category of the “Möbian” to characterize her work in gender studies. See “Criticism, Feminism and the Institution. An Interview with Gayatri Spivak,” Thesis Eleven 10/11 (1984/85): 175–89 (reprinted in The Post-Colonial Critic. Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ed. (Routledge 1990, 1–17); and in Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Academics, edited by Bruce Robbins (University of Minnesota Press 1990, 53–171). For her own work on the Möbian, see especially Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Subjectivity (1994), xii. Other scholars specifically use the language of the Möbian in literary studies without primary references to a general theory of the literary or any relation to darkness. See Alexandre 4



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But no one to my knowledge has offered the Möbian as a theory of difference itself, as a model for understanding the way thought operates. It has been used to talk about surfaces, to talk about spatial dimensions, to talk about simulacra, even to talk about the construction of human subjectivity—with successive cuts along its center path describing the neurotic and psychotic breakdown of subjectivity—but not to talk about the very constitution of rational differential thought. Some of the poststructuralists come close. Derrida’s analysis of the aporia in philosophic discourse (and his practice of deconstruction more generally) as the examination of a necessary and constitutive circularity, his demonstration of the ways in which in Western metaphysics thinking a philosophic project forecloses that project in advance, presumes from the outset the very assumptions it sets out to prove, and consequently renders all decision-making impossible to complete (and how it does so, moreover, not as a breakdown or flaw in the system, but as its proper exercise) is nothing if not a logic of difference that turns out to be a logic of continuity. But the Möbian structure of which I am talking is not an application of differential thinking as much as a new and expanded understanding of it. It is not an alternative to difference, not a metaphorical or any other figurative way of speaking about difference, not an application of difference in this or that concrete or abstract context, but a new approach to difference, to difference itself. A new approach to difference? A theory of difference itself? What could that mean? If the poststructuralists have taught us anything, it is that we cannot sidestep context, that there is no metalanguage, that there is nothing outside of the text (or more precisely, as Derrida says, that there is no “outside the text”), that it is always from within some perspective or contextual framework that we speak, even if we haven’t articulated that perspective very explicitly. And that such a context determines for us the outcome of our inquiry, not just in minor ways, but in the major and fundamental ones, in ways that determine the end to be less a discovery than a construction. There is no transcendental signified, no “thing in itself ” (no Ding an sich as the philosophers used to talk of it) apart Leupin, in “The Roman de la Rose as a Möbius Strip (on Interpretation),” in The Medieval Author in Medieval French Literature, edited by Virgine Green (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 61–77, makes extended reference to the Möbian, and Robert D. Stevick, in “Hunting the Anglo-Saxon Aesthetic in Large Forms: A Möbian Quest,” in On the Aesthetics of Beowulf and Other Old English Poems, edited by John Hill (University of Toronto Press, 2010), 135–60, uses the language of the Möbian to describe Beowulf.

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from the context in which it signifies, or rather (in the American literary critical vernacular of a theorist like Stanley Fish) there is always the “thing in itself ” but it is never the same one.9 But are we not, in making that argument, in raising that objection, committing the same transgression, so to speak, of which we accuse the others? In our Nietzschean enthusiasm to proclaim the inevitability of context, are we not obscuring the larger context from which we speak? Difference is not the only way of ordering things. The ancient pre-fifth century Greeks, for example, used arithmos, number, countability, rather than difference as a system of order and disorder. Think of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus and the dependence of the play in many ways upon the distinction between the many and the one, and of the paradigmatic example sustaining both.10 And are we not obligated, if we are to take seriously the deconstructive project (and the poststructuralist movement premised upon it—and we do) to interrogate difference to its historical and comparative origins, obligated, that is to say, not in spite of deconstruction but because of it?11 In asking, then, whether it is useful to consider differential thought itself as Möbian, we are speaking necessarily of Greek thought, of rational thought, of thought that depends upon differences or oppositions, upon a ratio or comparison, and that derives from Plato’s discussion of being—as filtered for us first through Aristotle, then through Kant and Hegel, and later through Nietzsche and Heidegger. Perhaps in the past half century or so, the unraveling by the poststructuralists of the historical critical method developed by the German romantic philosophers two hundred years ago, a method that postulated a subject of consciousness before an object of knowledge, has only made a little more evident a structural logic never not at its heart (if somewhat hidden from our view) and one that we need now to interrogate more fully. I am suggesting, in other words, that there may be something larger going on with difference today than we have allowed ourselves to imagine. What if difference as an idea is not comprehensive enough? What if what is at stake in This particular locution of course is a signature of Stanley Fish. See, for example, Is There a Text in This Class? (1982). See my own essay on that play in Sacrificing Commentary (1996), and my dissertation, Who Killed Laius? Sophocles’ Mythic Arithmetic (1977) in which arithmos plays a critical role. 11 How we do that is another story. Derrida’s calling to task of Lévi-Strauss on just this point is instructive. See, for example, “Structure, Sign, and Play” in Macksey and Donato (1970). But it may be that Lévi-Strauss has more to say to us—and to deconstruction—than we have hitherto allowed. A comparative study of rational Platonic thought may be possible in the same way that Lévi-Strauss founds comparative anthropology despite the rigorous and considered objections Derrida raises— and despite the shortcomings of Lévi-Strauss in other arenas—in the area of sacrificial genesis for example. On this point see René Girard’s essays on “Differentiation and Undifferentiation.” 9

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what we are choosing to call “the Möbian,” and what has been fomenting over the last several years, is something on the order of an Einsteinian expansion of our conceptualization of difference? Einstein showed that the laws of relativity yield results that are fairly indistinguishable from the results yielded by Newtonian laws of momentum in circumstances where the parameters are relatively large and constant—the size of an apple falling from a tree, for example. Perhaps what we have been thinking about as difference (or the differential) has sufficed until now because up until fairly recently the context that such difference has served has been relatively large and relatively stable, but that (for whatever reason) in the last sixty years or so all that has changed and a new explanatory paradigm is suddenly required.12 Structuralism and poststructuralism would not turn out, then, to be the cause of this shift as much as its symptom. Deriving from surrealism, and certain movements in writing in the 1930s in France (as, for example, the Collège de Sociologie), and displacing existentialist writers in France in the immediate post-war period, this intellectual movement would give expression to a disruption of rational reasonable discourse that has been brewing for about two hundred years in Europe and seems to have exploded at the end of the Second World War, a disruption of which the popularity of a thinker like Habermas is also a symptom rather than a counter-example.13 From the 1950s to the 1990s, the work of Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Kristeva, Girard, Levinas, Blanchot, and others in France, although pursued in very different fields and often contesting intellectual affiliation (think of Foucault’s insistence that he is not a structuralist), would share at least one commitment in common: the disruption of the primacy of Platonic representational differential thinking for an analysis of its own textuality, for the constitution of that textuality or difference (in context locally of power and more globally of the sacred), and for its ethical implications. It is what this structuralist or poststructuralist project allows us to see that I have tagged the Möbian and that I would link in the following book to the literary. Does this discussion of the Möbian extend to other types of thought? Prophetic thought, for example—whether considered among the ancient fifth-century Cf. Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos. Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality (2004), 10: “Ours is a relativistic reality. Yet because the deviation between classical and relativistic reality is manifest only under extreme conditions (such as extremes of speed and gravity), Newtonian physics still provides an approximation that proves extremely accurate and useful in many circumstances. But utility and reality are very different standards.” 13 See, for example, Denis Hollier’s The College of Sociology, 1937–39 (1988). 12

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Greeks (for example, in Greek tragedy), or among the ancient sixth-century Hebrew prophets (in Hebrew scripture and, as read of course, from within the Rabbinic tradition)—would seem to reflect a somewhat different structure. In prophetic thought, the passageway between a diachronic sequence (the continuous elongated “twisting” path), and synchronic relations (the non-traversable differences between one side and the other) is fully disclosed. If you continue along the path you have been traveling, sooner or later you will encounter the following inevitable consequences of your journey. But you need not continue along this path.14 Rational thought could be described in this context as prophetic thought with the winding road from the one side to the other suppressed. From the point of view of the prophetic, the Möbian would seem cognate in the secular tradition with the midrashic in the scriptural tradition.15 Is all rational thought Möbian? Are there forms of rational thought that are Möbian and forms that are not? What about other forms of thought? Should we proceed for the sake of rigor or thoroughness to examine Western religious thought in this connection, to determine its precise relation to Greek rationalism, to ask whether either (or both) are Möbian? Is Judaic thought Möbian for example? Is Christian thought? What about Islamic thought? Is Greek thinking prior to Plato Möbian? What precisely is the relation among these diverse traditions in this connection?16 Formulated in the nineteenth century as a trifle of intellectual curiosity, this prize-winning, one-sided single-edged figure that Möbius submitted to a Buber’s “Dialogue Between Heaven and Earth” (1967) is an example of this prophetic logic. See also his essay “Prophecy, Apocalyptic, and the Historical Hour” (2000). 15 For a book-length discussion of the prophetic in both secular and religious traditions, see Goodhart (2014). For a treatment of the prophetic in Jewish hermeneutics, see Goodhart, “Back to the Garden” in Duran (2014). 16 How far can we extend this line of thinking? Can all the fundamental relationships in which we function—all that we may describe as systems of differences—be rendered in Möbian terms? Are there any that may not be so defined? The physical universe “outside” of human communities would appear amenable to them. Talk of bounded or closed spaces, of multi-dimensional universes, of black holes, wormholes, and other galactic singularities and eccentricities that populate science fiction (and that would seem to depend upon the use of such topological distinctions) derives from physical science, even if that science has been popularized in these accounts. Is the logic of life Möbian? Is cellular construction at either an intercellular or intracellular level amenable to such discussion? Is the double helix that is at the root of our DNA—the basis of life itself—usefully described in this way? Molecules have been synthesized in the laboratory that have been said to bear a Möbian structure. See Paul Hoffman, Archimedes’ Revenge. Some of the work of Deleuze and Guattari on the “body without organs” tends in this direction. See, for example, A Thousand Plateaus (1987). Are there social uses for such a discussion? Could questions about the continuity of insidedness and outsideness have a bearing upon the discussion of gestation? Or its termination? Is the relation of a mother to her child through time an example of a three-dimensional space that has passed into a fourth? Would topological distinctions, talk of Klein bottles and the like, assist us here? 14



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Parisian mathematics contest has proved in the twentieth an heuristic device of considerable durability and potential. A book could well be written about the possibilities that are opened for us by these ideas, by the Möbian as a theory of difference. The place for such a consideration is mapped out in advance. It would examine all the ways in which, in our culture and our history, a logic of difference turns out to be embedded diachronically within a more comprehensive logic of continuity, and how these two together—these two seemingly independent logics—form in fact a single integrated coherent system. But this is not that book. This book asks a different question, albeit a more limited one, namely, to what extent this Möbian logic, this logic of difference that turns out to be a logic of continuity, can assist us in literary study. To what extent is the Möbian the structure of the literary? ***** For the literary would seem at a glance to lend itself readily to this kind of discussion. In literary study, numerous sets of distinctions are marked as inviolable. Three come to mind immediately—all versions of the inside versus the outside: the difference between the inside and the outside of a text; the difference between the historical moment in which the text was composed and the contemporary moment in which it is read; and the difference between one character in the text and another character. Every teacher of literature in the classroom knows these distinctions from practical experience. The fictional universe inside a literary text is irrevocably separated from the real world outside, from where we are as we read or examine it. Who but a mad person would believe that we resided within Shakespeare’s Hamlet and that we could move between the two freely? Hamlet’s world may be similar to ours, even analogous to it in minute details, but it is never the same world, never continuous with ours. Woody Allen’s film The Purple Rose of Cairo in which a woman moves in and out of a movie she is watching in the theater draws its comic premise from just this idea.17 The second boundary is thought to be equally inviolable. We may find Shakespeare’s historical moment similar to our own. Within the scholarly fashion of new historicism, for example, we may assure ourselves, Shakespeare’s Renaissance has many features that are like ours (in opposition to older readers The Purple Rose of Cairo, dir. Woody Allen.

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who saw in it a rebirth of classical culture previously obscured or the origins of modernity). But it is still not the same world. And no one, not even the most committed new historicist, would imagine we can jump the boundary between the two. Borges’s fantasy in “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” relies upon this premise in the case of Cervantes, as does the title of Jan Kott’s book, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, in the case of Shakespeare. Moreover, however much of a humanist we might still construct Shakespeare to be (and however universal we imagine that humanism), it is from the differences between his moment and ours that our comparisons begin. The question students raise (Do we read the Elizabethan Shakespeare or the Shakespeare of contemporary critical theory?) continues to find support in these founding distinctions. The third boundary is no more crossable than the others—between self and other. There is an extensive critical literature on the way in which characters are “foils” for or “doubles” for each other, and certainly the participation of critics in schools of critical approaches—within easy or anxious lines of influence—is a staple of classroom discussion. But no duplication is possible here anymore than in other cases. Hamlet may be like Claudius, or Laërtês, or Fortinbras, in this way or that way, but one character remains distinguishable from another one. These are not the same character any more than Shakespeare is Chaucer, by whom he was undoubtedly influenced. Dostoyevsky’s The Double plays upon these particular boundaries, as does Harlan Ellison’s story “Shatterday,” and René Girard has written extensively about them.18 How does the Möbian help us with these dilemmas? Structuralism and poststructuralism has accustomed us to think in terms of continuities. Take, for example, in the context of the first case, Euripides’ play Medea. Medea convinces the aging Aegeus that after her difficulties are over, once Jason has married Creon’s daughter, Glauce, and Medea has been abandoned, she may find refuge in his home city—the polis of Athens. His only stipulation to her is that she travel there on her own. Once there, he tells her, he will grant her the desired protection so she will not remain an exile, an individual without a city-state for the remainder of her life—a horrid fate for an ancient Greek. What she has not told him, of course, is that she will do so only after she has delivered her acerbic wedding “present” to the couple (and as it turns out to Glauce’s father), and after she has murdered her children, and greeted Jason on a fiery dragon-driven chariot when he comes to confront her about these events. Ellison (1980). See also Girard (1965) and (1997).

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So that the figure who is to be welcomed into Athens is not the poor orphaned and abandoned wife of a vain political opportunist but an individual guilty of murder and infanticide. What is our guarantee that she made it to Athens? Here we are in Athens, so to speak, putting on her play, memorializing the horror of her situation (both her circumstances and her response to it), “enjoying” its mimetic presentation to us, as Aristotle was said to remark. The production itself, in other words, by a prize-winning playwright, is the symptom of both the success of her flight (whether we imagine she made it or not) and of the Athenian character as Euripides understands it. The gesture on his part of staging the play at all is his own cynical commentary upon a city-state that would welcome such a monstrous and violent figure into its midst in the name of protection of the poor and the piteous. We are already in Athens, Euripides tells his audience, and what we are talking about here is our own common heritage, our own cultural memory, the unconscious symbolic structures by which we would organize our own polis-dominated lives—as defined, for example, in Pericles’ famous funeral oration (delivered around the same time period in which we date the performance of this play), as Nicole Loraux shows.19 Medea is not a figure of the past or a dramatic fiction so much as the symptom of what we continue to value in the world right before us in the ancient fifth century. The play itself is Athenian in the very way in which the play defines that term for us internally. Or take the second quandary. To the student who asks whether we read the Elizabethan Shakespeare or the Shakespeare of contemporary critical theory we may answer, as Leslie Fiedler does in The Stranger in Shakespeare, that we are reading Shakespeare’s us.20 The problem arose when we drew a line between Shakespeare and ourselves to begin with, when we started treating Shakespeare’s play as an object of critical study rather than attributing to Shakespeare’s play the same intelligence we permit ourselves—in which case we were then led to wonder whether to consider the modern setting or the historical setting as the appropriate one in which to determine its qualities. We did that in accord with our model of critical reading, a model of subject and object we inherited from the nineteenth century (from Matthew Arnold among others), one that regards the work of a writer like Shakespeare to be mute genius and the activity See, for example, Loraux, The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classcal City (2006). See Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare (1972).

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of criticism to be parasitic but alone able to speak, and so one that thereby allows us to sequester Shakespeare’s work at a sacred distance rather than read with it.21 But our designation of Shakespeare’s plays as a literary “classic” or masterpiece also offers us an escape hatch since it already guarantees that he continues to write about matters of interest to us, that his plays have already thought out problems we continue to engage. We would not be reading them if that were not the case. Shakespeare is already in the same room with us, we are fond of telling ourselves, engaged with us in an extended conversation, as E. M. Forster once remarked in Aspects of the Novel.22 And so there arises at least the potential for undoing that disequilibrium, for reading with Shakespeare rather than reading for him or, at worst, at him. A literary text that shows up as historical and thereby as removed from us by an unbreachable barrier (we cannot become Elizabethans any more than Shakespeare can become us) turns out continuous with us, in other words, if we but reorient ourselves slightly and follow a path to his work by a circuitous route. We haven’t simply found Shakespeare among the ruins. Shakespeare’s writing has been actively preserved within a long tradition of literary reading, first in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and then starting in the nineteenth with Coleridge. And we have done so because we found within his writing a form of commentary upon the deepest structures that animate our individual and cultural lives, a prophetic commentary (as I have argued elsewhere) upon the sacrificial and anti-sacrificial mechanisms by which we think out all aspects of our individual cultural existence. We have simply named that commentary that we continue to read “literature.” Our customary discussion of the hierarchies of influence might similarly be reversed. We could speak about the way that earlier poems are influenced by later ones, not as a violation of historical boundaries, but as an appeal to the wider boundaries of the meaningful, and a more subtle understanding of the way influence operates. We could speak, for example, of the way in which Shelley is influenced by Yeats, or Wordsworth by Shelley, or Milton by Blake and Wordsworth, or Shakespeare by Milton. This would lead us to understand aspects of the earlier writer only by virtue of later writers who have in fact already derived from those earlier writers. Each age reinvents itself and in doing Northrup Frye is one of our modern expositors of the tradition. See The Anatomy of Criticism (1957) and my discussion of this tradition in Sacrificing Commentary (1996). E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1955).

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so reinvents its etiology, reinvents the writers who led up to that age, and invests that reinvention with the status of a discovery rather than a construction. Or take an example of the third barrier that we feel cannot be traversed: the distance between oneself and another. Our relation to the past or to the inside of a text is one thing, we may say. Historical boundaries, literary texts— granted, these are, after all, only constructions, fictional products of our cultural imagination, products that can be—if the need should arise—reconstructed or re-imagined. But is there not an even more sacred boundary, one that cannot be so easily reconstructed—namely, the distinction between ourselves and other individuals? How could we speak of one critic in relation to another (or one writer in relation to another) except in terms of differences? There are schools of critical approaches of course, traditions of critical thinking, just as there are literary traditions, and sometimes a writer participates in a tradition whether or not that individual consciously chooses to do so. But what would it mean to find continuities in these particular cases? Or in the case of literary characters? In fact, of course, here again differences may give way to continuities. There is a large and growing literature for example in psychology on which ways in which topological explanations assist in describing such passages in the everyday contexts in which we function. Lacanian psychoanalysis, as we noted, is premised in part upon the idea that our construction of subjectivity may be described in these terms. Lacan’s famous schemata, for example—“schema L,” “schema R,” “schema I,”—seem increasingly to be understood topologically, as surfaces of a Möbius strip (see Lacan’s footnote to the 1966 publication of Écrits). Such schemata graphically reflect two distinct “others” in context of which the subject comes to be defined: the other (or object) that is not myself (autre in French, or autre petit a)—founded in part upon the figure or image I see before me in a mirror (and from which I build my sense of self or ego)—and the real other individual standing next to me (or behind me) who is doing the same thing (and from whom I appropriate my discursive life) and whom Lacan designates as Other (Autre or Autre grand a). 23 But what is distinctive about Lacan’s arrangement, among other things (in contrast with other psychoanalytic understandings—Freud’s, for example), is that the two—the other and the Other—are related: they occupy points on a continuous topological surface. I can trace my route to the Other, if not See Lacan (1977, 2007).

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through the imaginary, not through perceptual or through consciousnessbound paths (which is where we usually look for it), then through symbolic and real ones. And that continuity undoes the differential premise by which I would construct an opposition between myself and society or myself and other individuals. Lacan is not the only contemporary thinker to employ this distinction or to see a continuity between them. Emmanuel Levinas distinguishes between the other (autre) and the neighbor (autrui) and suggests that we construct our subjectivity as a “heteronomy” rather than an autonomy, a “hypostasis” in which my continuity with the Other (autrui) precedes and in fact determines my relation to myself, and to whom I am linked by an infinite responsibility for the other individual, a responsibility transmitted to me by the face of the Other?24 And René Girard, who also distinguishes between the other as non-self and the other as the real other individual doing as I am doing (he talks, for example, about self and other at the outset of his career in terms reminiscent of Sartre—who employs the distinction in Being and Nothingness), suggests that this other individual appropriates the desires of mediators or models in the same manner that I do. In Girard’s later work these others and myself are even more thoroughly linked by the interchangeability of one individual for another within a sacrificial crisis, a point of doubling and universal enemy twins they have reached by the paroxysmal spiral of mimetic violence which verges on the substitution of a unique scapegoat from which the whole process of differentiation can begin again. Like Girard, Lacan links them transferentially, mimetically, by imitative appropriation of the discourse of these Others who have become my models. Borrowing from Hegel the struggle for recognition of one self-consciousness with another self-consciousness, Lacan also borrows that mimetic gesture by which I take on the being of another.25 Working to empty Freud of biologism, Lacan embeds this Hegelian struggle within the Freudian typology to constitute a new version of psychoanalysis, while other thinkers, like Girard and Levinas, chart the conflict among these human doubles to its inevitable conclusion in literature and scripture (namely, sacrificial violence) and the possibilities for

See Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (1969), and Otherwise Than Being: Or, Beyond Essence (1981). 25 Cf. Alexandre Kojève’s discussion of this process in “In Place of an Introduction” in Introduction to a Reading of Hegel (1980). Girard utilizes Hegelian appropriative mechanisms but without the struggle for recognition. 24



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an ethical response to that crisis (namely, infinite responsibility for the other individual).26 For all three thinkers, in other words, differences are projective in the Freudian vocabulary or, in the Lacanian vocabulary, imaginary. At the social or symbolic level, the two—myself and real other individuals—are enchained to each other by either an appropriative or mimetic or transferential phenomenon (Lacan and Girard) or by an unlimited obligation or commandment (Levinas). Even if there are real distinctions to be sustained between myself and other people, even if two individuals embody absolute singularities (and none of these theorists deny that), the differences that I draw upon to found my subjectivity are entirely “in my head,” and the intersubjective or “inter-dividual” relations that do get established proceed in significant part through unconscious symbolic appropriations that are systematically regulated and repressed, and against which I define myself as a singular individual. Every great artist, Camus notes in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, begins by a romantic affirmation of his own individualism, by believing in his absolute difference from all others. But he ends, if he is worth his weight as a writer, by understanding that what sustains his writing (and this affirmation of difference) is his identicality with everyone.27 If mimetic appropriative phenomena and indissoluble ethical obligations are at work in cultural lives, is it any great surprise that we should find them within literature and within the professions that read that literature? The same appropriative transferential mechanisms are at work, Dominick LaCapra suggests, within the critical disciplines (for example, in historical studies).28 Real differences between critics undoubtedly persist here as well. But as before those differences are less significant than the appropriative contexts in which they function. And the differences between characters in a literary work can be seen to follow suit. Henry Bolingbroke, in Shakespeare’s Richard II, I have tried to show, effectively becomes Richard.29 And David Lynch’s films Mulholland Drive and In Girard’s work, the real (i.e. symbolic) others become enemy twins with me in the sacrificial crisis. See Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1965) and Violence and the Sacred (1977). 27 For Camus’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, see Camus, “Banquet Speech,” in H. Frenz, ed. Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901–1967 (1969), 524–7. 28 See, for example, Dominick LaCapra, “History and Psychoanalysis,” Critical Inquiry 13 (2) (Winter 1987): 222–51; and “Trauma, Absence, Loss,” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 4 (Summer, 1999): 696–727. 29 See my discussion in “ ‘Being Nothing’: Kings, Mirrors, and Subjects in Richard II,” in Sacrificing Commentary (1996), 42–95. 26

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Lost Highway visualize these shifts in an even more literal fashion, where one character shows up literally as another character (played by a different actress and actor). We may reduce the disorienting effect of these occurrences—as we can in reading Harlan Ellison or Dostoyevsky—by construing them psychologically and designating these characters as abnormal. But the fact remains that these characters are offered to us in these works as continuous with the characters they double. And yet having said all this, there still seems to be something lacking. We can show that we are continuous with the inside of a text in so far as we act out its internal dramas; that what we theorize as historical difference rests upon a cultural continuity hitherto obscured or we could not recognize it as such; that (as Plato suggested) we appropriate the speech, actions, and thoughts of others in the symbolic universe despite the differences we construct in the imaginary universe—which is all that matters for culture once real threats are subdued—even if differences remain unaffected within the impossible register Lacan identifies as the real. Structuralism and poststructuralism have taught us to think in these terms, in terms of the constructedness of all individual and social relations. And these modes of understanding language, or culture, or the bonds of sociality are certainly logics of continuity that subtend the logics of difference we customarily tout, and so qualify as Möbian in the way that we have been speaking about it. But how does that help us? The literary still seems somehow larger, more comprehensive than these structures, less limited to their form or logic. If the literary, for example, is a commentary as we have suggested elsewhere, then how are those logics of continuity we have identified forms of commentary? And if the literary is understood in particular as an ethical commentary, an antisacrificial commentary, a prophetic commentary, a prophetic reading, then that linkage—between that reading and that logic—is even more obscure. So, let us back up, therefore, and take a slightly different approach. Let us move from the inside out, from the concrete to the abstract (rather than from the abstract to the concrete as we have been doing). For we can certainly say what the following book is about more directly. ***** The book that follows may be read to some extent as a complement to the analysis I began in Sacrificing Commentary. In Sacrificing Commentary, I undertook to examine the relation between literature and criticism in order



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to discover the ways in which, on the one hand, criticism unwittingly plays out or repeats the dramas internal to the literary text it is reading, and, on the other, literature concomitantly stages—in advance, so to speak—the very dramas criticism comes along and duplicates, a fact that renders criticism’s repetition of them doubly blind. Literature is able to do this, I argued, in part because it derives from sacrificial structures that preceded the work, mythic differential structures that are in crisis the moment literature appears and of which such literary writing is the symptom (criticism simply acting as a cultural antigenic agent and replacing that damaged differential structure). Lodged within a “sacrificial crisis,” literature takes as one of its tasks—in the hands of the great writers (for example, Greek tragedy and Shakespeare)—to expose these sacrificial structures, to reveal the scapegoat mechanism, the mechanism of collective substitution that is its motor force. But it is also able to do this because it knows what criticism is up to, because it recognizes the dramas in which human beings are engaged and names in advance the end of those dramas in order that we may choose to go there or not, because it reads prophetically. Literature is smart, I argued; it knows where criticism is going. It recognizes the scapegoat mechanism not only at its origins but right before its eyes in the sacrificial gesture by which criticism would come along and reenact its dramas, and it stages in advance the limits of that gesture— its origins and its consequences. Why the scapegoat mechanism? The idea of course comes from René Girard’s work and, although no one has argued the case as explicitly, as fully, and as systematically as Girard has, is part of a thinking about literature inaugurated by Nietzsche and his reading of the Apollonian and the Dionysian.30 Girard’s thesis is that the scapegoat mechanism—the collective substitution of a surrogate victim—is at the heart of all cultural order and disorder in the primitive and modern universe. The mechanism is fully exposed, in Girard’s view, only in the Judeo-Christian scripture, but glimmers of it appear in Greek tragedy at moments when the mythic structure—the structure of differences—collapses. At such moments, difference gives way to undifferentiation, the good to the good gone wrong, and the crisis that once gave rise to cultural order now threatens to destroy it. But having exposed this sacrificial violence at its heart, literature necessarily closes that exposition down. Why? Because what we count as literature derives See, for example, The Birth of Tragedy (1967) and “Homer’s Contest” (1911).

30

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not from any unique anarchistic impulse or even from the talent of individual genius but from the commemorative logic of culture itself, from the mimetic reproduction of the crisis “up to a point and no further” in order to confer upon the community its beneficial effects.31 Having opened Pandora’s box, the mythic structure—that finally governs the literary no less than the ritualistic—shuts it down. And that gesture of closure is the first act of criticism proper, the gesture of critical thinking emulated or duplicated by criticism ever after. Criticism completes the work that literature inaugurates but necessarily leaves unfinished. The Möbian in this context is a way of talking about the relationship between the two, between the internal deconstructive critical impulse of the literary and its concluding differential aestheticizing gesture—which offers itself as a model of critical distance. Why is it left necessarily unfinished? Because it is Pandora’s box that literature opens. The literary as such, as distinguished from other belles-lettres-istic texts, as a category in the nineteenth century, may be defined by this remainder. Literature is belles-lettres-istic writing that leaves something to be desired, and criticism takes up this anti-genic task. The idea of a criticism designed to keep open the box is anathema. And it may be that that is what Gerald Bruns means when he defines Maurice Blanchot’s work as anarchistic.32 If the literary is commentary, I concluded, it is a commentary in which we may read at once our cultural origins and our ongoing cultural behavior, a smart commentary, in other words, an intelligent reading or thinking that since the nineteenth century (and the invention of the “literary” as a category) we have sacrificed or expelled by rendering it aesthetic. Recognizing within the literary a critical reading that exceeds the boundaries of our mythic conceptions, we sacralize it, substituting for the monstrous double in the mirror an anodyne aesthetic critical projection. Thus I examined texts by Sophocles and Shakespeare, passages from the Hebrew Bible, and a text written within the shadow of the Holocaust. And I tried to show that the same dynamics were at work in all three realms in slightly modified ways: in the relation between literature and criticism proper, in the relation between Hebrew scripture and the Rabbinic exegetical tradition that grew up around it, and in the relation between the historical catastrophe To say that literature derives from culture’s commemorative logic is not to discount, of course, individual genius as much as it is to say that what gets sanctioned as literary prizes the latter in so far as it coincides with the former. 32 See Bruns, Maurice Blanchot. The Refusal of Philosophy (2005). 31



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we designate the Holocaust and the tradition of reading that appeared in its wake. The second two, I suggested, provided something of a test case for the first. Were the same dynamics operative in the case where the primary text was all-encompassing and the connection of the critical response to the primary text (the midrashic response in the case of the Hebrew Bible) was superabundant? In midrash, the extensional and participatory nature of the secondary text is selfevident.33 Were they operative at the other end of the scale in the case where the text was non-existent, where the “myth” had become the “fatal” enactment of the aesthetic on the historical stage (to use Benjamin’s formulation), the “staging” of the myth had become its victims, and the secondary critical text had become (along with the survivors) the primary witness?34 In all three cases, I tried to show that “literature” challenged the mythic sacrificial structure from which it was born and in which we were attempting to read it, and that the only way out of this dilemma (if “out” indeed retains any meaning here) was to emulate the literary, to adopt the perspective of literature itself, a literary reading, an antimythic, anti-sacrificial, prophetic reading as literature demonstrated to us that capability to do so, to read modernity (or cultural history) from the perspective of the literary, the Hebrew Bible, or Auschwitz.35 In the current book, I shift gears somewhat and ask whether the same dynamics are at work within criticism proper. In the previous book, I looked primarily at literary writing—within the context of the masterpiece, religious scripture, and the cultural and historical imbroglio of a state sponsored violence enacted against a portion of its population and as part of a larger multi-national genocidal project. Germany’s attempt to kill the Jews was not limited to German Jews. When we considered critical writing at all, it was from the exegetical tradition that we took our cue. In the current book, I would like to reverse the procedure and while holding the category of the literary relatively constant, explore the variety of By midrash, I include Talmudic, esoteric, and later rabbinic response as well as what we customarily include within the category of midrashim. On this expanded conception of midrash as a characterization of rabbinic interpretation at large, see Geoffrey Hartman’s introduction to Midrash and Literature (1986). 34 On the notion of “fatal aestheticising,” see Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1969), 253–64. See also Geoffrey Hartman’s use of these ideas in “Blindness and Insight: Paul de Man, Fascism, and Deconstruction,” The New Republic (March 7, 1988), 26; 28–31; and that of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthes in Heidegger, Art, and Politics: The Fiction of the Political (1990). 35 This is an odd locution, to associate “reading” with the Holocaust or understand Auschwitz as a “site” of reading—although there is a book with the title “Reading the Holocaust”; see Inga Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust (1998). But is it any more odd, finally, than thinking of “the” Hebrew Bible in the same way, or “literature” in the same way? All three constitute perspectives from which things may be viewed. 33

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the modalities of the critical. Is the same mechanism at work when critics read other critics? Or, when critics are examined in the context of their own earlier work? Or, when critics read critical texts from other critical disciplines (or by researchers with whom they have a close professional or personal relationship)? What about when writers respond critically to an historical phenomenon? Or, when critical thinkers construct a literary work in another medium? Or, when writers write critically about their own personal experiences or about those of the communities from which they have come? If so, we may be able to learn something more about the literary by virtue of understanding criticism’s inner mechanisms. Thus in the first chapter I look at Frank Lentricchia’s work on Murray Krieger to ask to what extent Lentricchia plays out or repeats the dramas already at stake in Krieger’s work, dramas of which Krieger may or may not be aware. In Chapter 2, I look at the discovery of Paul de Man’s wartime journalism and ask to what extent that earlier writing qualifies his later deconstructive work. In the third, I look at a book by Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman to ask to what extent the theory of testimony they develop there reflects their own set of intellectual, professional, and personal commitments. In Chapter 4, I look at the curious reception afforded Zvi Kolitz’s fictional piece about a fighter in the Warsaw Ghetto (which was confused by others with documents recovered from the Warsaw Ghetto) and the ways in which these confusions at once reflect the larger historical dramas in which the piece was written and strangely persist even among those who would try to assist his efforts to bring such confusions to light. In Chapter 5, I look at Elie Wiesel’s memoir of his deathcamp experience and the relation of his narrative, in its extended form, to the prefatory text that introduces it (by his progenitor in the publishing world—François Mauriac) as well as to the philosophic work of his fellow student (of Jewish mystic Shoshani) Emmanuel Levinas, and others in the early 1950s writing about the “Lazarean” return from the dead by which the survivors were sometimes identified.36 But we could well have begun with rhetorical strategy rather than critical effect. Each chapter begins with the positing of a difference that turns out also to be a continuity. Frank Lentricchia would like to distinguish himself from Murray Krieger whose formalist critical perspective, he feels, has been superseded by the writers with whom he has identified himself—namely, See Shlomo Malka, Monsieur Chouchani: L’énigme d’un maître du XXe siècle (1994).

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Fredric Jameson, Stanley Fish, and Edward Said (among others). Hunting in a European library, a Belgian graduate student discovers a cache of papers written by Paul de Man (who is one of the writers Lentricchia identifies with Krieger as an “apologist” for literature) that identify him as a collaborationist with the National Socialist regime in the early 1940s. They offer a perspective that allows us to see de Man’s later work as attempting repeatedly to distance himself from such a troubled past, attempts that, in his own estimation, consistently turn to nought, a conclusion that the posthumous scandal would appear to sustain. De Man’s younger colleague, Shoshana Felman, and her co-author and mentor, Dori Laub, a local psychoanalyst in New Haven, a founder of the Yale Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, and a child survivor himself, attempt to formulate a new understanding of Holocaust witness on the basis of Freud’s theory of trauma and certain postmodernist renderings of witness, a formulation that allows them to distance themselves from more familiar ways of relating to the Holocaust, and that allow Felman in particular to rescue de Man from the collaborationist charges and align him with Walter Benjamin and Primo Levi as a Holocaust victim.37 A European émigré living in America writes a short story for a Latin American periodical about a Warsaw Ghetto resistance fighter intended to put to rest the recent past only to discover that his efforts strangely compound its influence (as it is mistaken for a found document), and that repeated attempts by others to assist his effort and reveal the error (and assert its authenticity as a fiction) similarly complicate it. Ten years after the events he recounts, a Jewish Romanian Holocaust survivor living in Paris and working as a journalist for an Israeli newspaper composes an autobiographical narrative of his wartime experiences that attracts the support of a prominent French Catholic writer whose preface to its French publication finds in it an instance of religious testimony, a testimony that the narrative—in its extended form—is already attempting to situate. A Lithuanian Jewish philosopher (also living in France after the war) sketches a philosophic approach founded on the theme used by Wiesel to discuss the Holocaust, a theme Heidegger excluded from his fundamental ontology. But having begun with the articulation of such a difference, each of these chapters then uncovers for us an unexpected continuity or filiation with the very perspective from which they would distinguish themselves. Lentricchia’s See for example Jean François Lyotard’s discussion of Holocaust witness in The Differend (1988).

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perspective turns out to be, at an extreme, a version of Krieger’s. De Man’s attempts to free himself from a collaborationist past turn out to extend that past. Laub and Felman’s theory of witness turns out to be a species of the kind of testimony they would construct that theory to describe. Conscientious attempts to rectify the error of authorship of Zvi Kolitz’s fiction turn out, in the hands of Jesuit Father Frans Jozef van Beeck, curiously to recreate that error and to embroil its author (and the theologian) more thoroughly within its intrigues. Mauriac’s prefatory reading of Wiesel’s narrative (and of the Catholic writer’s relation to it) reproduces the conflict central to its internal workings as Wiesel himself attests to that conflict in its extended version. Post-war Orthodox Jewish life in America continues in its domestic setting a trace version of the same dynamics to which this community was subjected. If we give a special name to these unexpected filiations—let us call them, after Wiesel’s usage, autobiographical—a curious thing happens. It becomes possible to understand in a new light the relations between the sacrificial dynamics we describe in Sacrificing Commentary and the Möbian dynamics we describe here. The relations we described previously were inter-personal, whereas these Möbian relations are intra-personal. When the dynamics show up within a group context, they appear sacrificial. The continuity operates within the group and among its members—the Chorus and the tradition of classical critical response, for example, in the case of our analysis of Oedipus. And when the dynamics show up within an individual setting, they appear autobiographical, concerned with naming and self-construction—individual and psychological matters rather than group dynamics (Lentricchia’s relation to Krieger, for example). But the relations are the same. In both cases we are dealing with sacrificial relations—self-sacrificial in the one case, and sacrificial of others in the second. And in both cases we are dealing with autobiographical relations—individual memory in one case, and social memory in the other. The difference is less one of substance than of emphasis. But having said as much, something else becomes immediately clear. Krieger’s reading is not the same as Lentricchia’s. The reading of the older de Man is not the reading of the younger de Man. The reading Dori Laub makes of trauma or of the historians of the Holocaust is not the same reading that he and Shoshana Felman articulate as their theory of the Holocaust. Levinas’s reading of Kolitz is not the same as van Beeck’s (or Kolitz’s own for that matter). Wiesel’s reading of the Holocaust (in the longer version) is not the same as Mauriac’s.



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How do they differ? What distinguishes Krieger’s work from Lentricchia’s, or de Man’s from his younger self (or his younger colleagues in literary study and psychology), or Levinas’s from van Beeck’s (or Kolitz’s), or Wiesel’s from Mauriac’s? Precisely, an awareness (implicit or explicit) of the autobiographical parameters of the project, the recognition of the testimonial nature of the literary and of literary commentary, an awareness of the literary as diachronic or prophetic or anti-sacrificial as opposed to the synchronic or representational or sacrificial— in short, differential and aesthetic—categories in which we have traditionally conceived of the literary act. It is that awareness that this book will try to articulate. This book, in other words, is no less about the literary than the last. More than a complement to the previous one, this book extends or continues the earlier analysis. The subtitle “literary reading inside out” suggests itself. In both cases, what I am looking for is the extent to which (and under what conditions) such critical interaction is itself already literary, already lodged within the text it reads, already an instance of the inside out. The literary is not a genre, I want to suggest, but a relationship, one between criticism or commentary and its staging. If Lentricchia acts as criticism to Krieger’s literature, and if we can show that Krieger already stages Lentricchia’s critical insight within his own position, then we are looking at the same dynamics about which we inquired previously. Looking at criticism (as we do here) and its capacity to stage itself (or failure to stage itself) is still looking at literature since literature as we understand it is already precisely the same tradition of auto-criticism. But what then is the relation of this literary, or literary critical, capacity we have identified, to the Möbian? Is the Möbian simply an individual variant for the sacrificial, the sacrificial when it is experienced autobiographically so to speak? And if so, should we look for a second term that corresponds to the Möbian as the anti-sacrificial does to the sacrificial? Or is the Möbian larger, comparable somehow not just with criticism or a critical structure, but with its critique, its literary staging, with literature itself? Why has the Möbian seemed such a useful way of talking about the literary? What is the relation of this literary critical understanding to the sacrificial analysis we made before in Möbian or autobiographical terms? Is the Möbian a form, a manifestation, or a logic, a structure? Or something else entirely? And why now? Why “since the Holocaust” as we said initially? What has made possible this particular understanding of the literary—this Möbian reading of the literary—at this particular juncture? Why has this understanding suddenly become available to us? A disproportionately high number of these

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studies concern the Holocaust in one way or another. Is that coincidental? Is that because of my personal affiliations or predilections? Or is it somehow endemic to the subject matter under discussion? Or is it unavoidably both? And finally, why “night?” We have named the book Möbian Nights and that title is also deliberate. Does the title describe the literary, the Möbian, reading, darkness, or somehow all of the above? How does the literary qualify to be described in this fashion? The only chapter that addresses night as a theme specifically (within the first five) is the last—on Wiesel, Mauriac, and company. What is the relation between the Möbian and night? Is night just one more theme of the Möbian? Or does night reflect some privileged status with regard to Möbian structure? Answering all of these questions at length could readily fill a volume of its own. But not attempting some kind of answer here would also seem neglectful of the analysis that these chapters invariably invite. And so the book that follows will contain two parts. In the first, I will gather some five chapters that in one manner or another seem to me reflective of the practice of a Möbian critical orientation: on Krieger and Lentricchia, on de Man, on Laub and Felman, on Kolitz, van Beeck, and Levinas, on Wiesel, Mauriac, Cayrol, Blanchot, and Levinas. And in the second, I will take up the question of the Möbian more theoretically: in its relation to the literary (and/or the critical), in its relation to competing theories of the Möbian (such as the aesthetic), and in the relation of both to death, a death or nothingness or darkness whose exposure at the heart of the literary is conveyed to us historically in the wake of the genocidal violence of the twentieth century—the slaughter of the Armenians, the Holocaust, the ravages of Pol Pot, Biafra, Rwanda, and numerous other atrocities—that effectively eradicates any distinction between war and non-war, and leaves us in a state of permanent warfare. To speak or write in order not to die (which is the hallmark aesthetic literary approach) becomes, in the wake of disaster, to speak or write in order to die, in order to live after or in the wake of death (the literary or literary critical approach), in order to live posthumously. Literature becomes a modality of posthumous thinking and feeling, whether it shows up in the familiar form since the nineteenth century of artistic endeavor, or more remote cultural domains like Greek tragedy or even Biblical scripture and commentary. And as such, the Möbian, as the structure of the literary, turns out to be the structure of the sacrificial in our culture, which is to say, the oldest form of the Möbian there is. To explain more fully, it is probably best that we turn at this point to the analyses themselves.

1

After The Tragic Vision: Krieger and Criticism, Lentricchia and Crisis

Hostile reviewers may blame their father for all failures. Frank Lentricchia It is probably not especially surprising, finally, that Murray Krieger turns out, in an early book by Frank Lentricchia, to be the primary object of attack. In After the New Criticism, Lentricchia undertakes to write a history of criticism in America since the New Critics.1 The task, he concedes at the outset, is beset with difficulties. In the first place, because New Criticism “was in fact no monolith but an inconsistent and sometimes confused movement; the differences among variously identified New Critics and their progenitors … are real.”2 And, in the second place, because the attempt to get beyond New Criticism—as reflected, for example, in the burgeoning of theoretical discussion in this country that has come to be known as structuralism and poststructuralism—succeeds, ironically, in Lentricchia’s view, only in extending it. “If my title suggests … that the New Criticism is dead … I must stipulate that in my view it is dead in the way that an imposing and repressive father-figure is dead. I find many traces (perhaps ‘scars’ is the word) of the New Criticism … in contemporary theory.”3 Such “traces” or “scars” are particularly troublesome for Lentricchia for whom a “fundamental concern” is to develop an historical methodology that gets beyond the “evasive anti-historical maneuver” of contemporary theory.4 Such New Critical remains “produce, in turn, another effect, not easy to discern:

Lentricchia (1980), xi. An earlier version of the essay that follows appeared in Bruce Henricksen, ed. Murray Krieger and Contemporary Critical Theory. Columbia University Press, 1986. 2 Lentricchia (1980), xii–xiii. 3 Ibid., xiii. 4 Ibid. 1

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an intertextual mingling among contemporary theorists,” a phenomenon which, Lentricchia feels, endangers his very project.5 I am arguing not only that the ruptures separating nineteenth-century aesthetic traditions, the New Criticism, and contemporary theory are not absolute but also that the difference among contemporary theories are not clean discontinuities. In my opinion it is the very condition of contemporary critical historicity that there is no “after” or “before” the New Criticism.6

In the middle of all of this confusion, for Lentricchia, stands Murray Krieger. Krieger is one of the four critics whom Lentricchia identifies as the “major theorists in America since about 1957” (the others on his list are Harold Bloom, E. D. Hirsch, and Paul de Man). But even within this grouping, Krieger is given special status.7 Soon after the publication in 1956 of The New Apologists for Poetry (a book that Lentricchia ranks, with another book by Gerald Graff, as “the most important scholarship done on the New Critics”), Krieger was “recognized as a pioneering figure in the United States for the discipline called literary criticism.”8 Three professional honors punctuate at once Krieger’s achievements and the “burgeoning prestige of theoretical study in this country.”9 “Krieger’s career,” Lentricchia notes, “becomes in a number of important ways a miniature history of what has happened theoretically in the contemporary scene.”10 It is not particularly surprising, then, that when Lentricchia comes to summarize Krieger’s achievement he does so in terms that reflect his assessment of New Criticism at large. In a chapter entitled “Murray Krieger’s Last Romanticism,” and with a nod to T. E. Hulme, whom Krieger admires, Lentricchia writes: Krieger will not be surprised by the title of this overview of his work. He might, however, be dismayed by the attribution of a romanticism that is not only unambiguous but also the desperate finish of a theoretical tradition opened by Kant, Coleridge, and company … . From the very beginning of his career Ibid. Ibid 7 Ibid., xii. 8 Ibid xii, 213. See also Krieger (1956) and (1978). 9 Ibid., 213. Lentricchia notes that Krieger was awarded in 1963 the first American chair in literary criticism at the University of Iowa, that in 1974 he accepted a university professorship for nine campuses of the University of California, and that in 1975 he founded the School of Criticism and Theory at the University of California, Irvine. 10 Lentricchia (1980), 213–14. 5 6

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… to the present, Krieger has been a self-conscious, agonized, and, in part, an unwilling connoisseur of postsymbolist aesthetic isolationism.11

Apart from the strangely forceful tone of Lentricchia’s remarks, the substantive claims that he makes—that Krieger carries forward a tradition of formalist aesthetics that has its roots in Coleridgean organicism and Kantian metaphysics—would not seem particularly unfamiliar. Has not Krieger himself alerted us increasingly in recent years (for example, in “an Apology for Poetics”) to the formalist origins of his current position?12 Was it not Krieger who stood up at the boundary 2 conference on postmodernism at SUNY Binghamton in 1978 to declare that formalism, if conceived broadly enough, could encompass all that we have identified as structuralist and post-structuralist invention?13 And if we continue today to take sides for or against Krieger’s work, do we not do so precisely on this same basis, embracing it to the extent that we value New Critical aesthetics, shunning it to the extent that, like Lentricchia, we feel the need to move beyond its borders?14 In short, of anyone on the contemporary scene, is not Murray Krieger the representative par excellence of New Criticism in America? At that level at least, Lentricchia’s position would make sense. But there is another level on which Lentricchia’s attacks against Krieger make sense and on which just what he means by such “intertextual mingling” may begin to become more evident, a sense that may have at least as much to do with Lentricchia’s professional or institutional affiliations as with his stated subject matter, and one, moreover, that may help to explain his fascination with the possibility (or impossibility) of succeeding New Criticism (and thus of writing his book). For it turns out that Krieger and Lentricchia are not unfamiliar with each other’s work. Krieger was, for example, for a number of years, Lentricchia’s senior colleague in critical theory at University of California at Irvine and the influence of the elder critic upon the younger, particularly in the present book, seems especially marked.15 Ibid., 214–15. Krieger (1981), 87–101. Krieger, “Poetic Presence and Illusion II: Formalist Theory and the Duplicity of Metaphor,” (1979), 95–121. The issue of Boundary 2 which contains this essay also contains an account of the proceedings of the conference. The essay was reprinted (with additions) in Krieger, Poetic Presence and Illusion (1979) and Spanos (1982). See also Krieger (1978). 14 For a bibliography of both Krieger’s writings and the critical response, see Yeghiayan 1983. The issue of New Orleans Review in which this bibliography appears is devoted almost exclusively to the work of Murray Krieger. 15 Soon after the publication of After the New Criticism, Lentricchia accepted a chair in literary criticism at Rice University and subsequently moved to Duke University. 11 12 13

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We have already noted that it is to Krieger’s work that Lentricchia defers for his primary scholarship, a phenomenon which is somewhat odd in the present context since, as Lentricchia has indicated to us, Krieger is in large part representative of the subject matter as well. But it is also marked in a number of smaller ways. Entitling a particular section of his book, for example, “A Critical Thematics,” Lentricchia borrows a particularly idiosyncratic use of the word “thematics” which Krieger has himself developed in The Tragic Vision.16 Or, dividing his overall treatment into two major parts, Lentricchia has in fact appropriated a structuring device that is not especially common to criticism in general in this country but is particularly common to Krieger’s works (see, for example, The Play and Place of Criticism and Poetic Presence and Illusion).17 Or, again, using the word “place” to help describe the work of Northrup Frye in the way that he does, Lentricchia employs a peculiar usage of the word that Krieger seems to have originated in The Play and Place of Criticism.18 The “intertextual mingling” of which Lentricchia spoke seems borne out bountifully in these and other ways in the book, as Lentricchia, no doubt, would be the first to acknowledge. But sometimes these traces of the elder critic crop up in Lentricchia’s work in ways that are less manageable, and perhaps it is in this way that “scars” might more aptly describe them, for example, in the title of his book. In an essay published in 1978 in The Massachusetts Review, which subsequently became the first chapter of A Window to Criticism, Krieger attempted to sketch a move beyond formalist organicist aesthetics, an essay which he titled “After the New Criticism.”19 It seems less important that Lentricchia seems to have borrowed Krieger’s title for his book without referring to it (although he does, in fact, play with the title of his book in the preface) than that he seems to have borrowed without reference to Krieger’s project, a borrowing, moreover, that takes Krieger as its primary object of attack. Lentricchia’s note, in his chapter on Krieger, that “Krieger will not be surprised by the title of this overview” acquires in this light an unexpected power. And perhaps in this same way we can begin to understand a certain excessiveness in Lentricchia’s tone when he writes about Krieger, a certain aggressive Krieger (1960). Krieger (1967, 1979). 18 Krieger (1967). 19 Krieger (1962) and Krieger 1964. I thank Richard Prystowsky, formerly of the University of California, Irvine, and currently the Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic and Student Affairs at Lansing Community College, for first drawing my attention to the earlier essay. Krieger has himself discussed this essay (and Lentricchia’s use of the title) in his interview with Richard Berg. See Henricksen (1986), 207–8. 16 17

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(Is it fair to call it pugnacious?) quality that surpasses the requirements of “historical” description. Referring, for example, to what he calls Krieger’s “romanticism” as “not only unambiguous” (a problematic claim a priori) “but as well the desperate finish of a theoretical tradition opened by Kant,” Lentricchia seems as much “out to get” (another meaning of “after”) Krieger as to describe the difficulties of succeeding him. Fredric Jameson, whom Lentricchia cites in the preface as one of his “mentors” in the historical methodology he envisions, draws our attention to this particular aspect of Lentricchia’s style in remarks reproduced on the jacket of the paperback edition of the book.20 Lentricchia analyses, Jameson writes, “draw blood, cause pain, spare no one … .” For Jameson these qualities are admirable and he calls Lentricchia’s book “brilliant” and “courageous,” adding, with something of the assurance with which older critics used to justify parody, that Lentricchia’s analyses are “always informed by a secret sympathy for the work and achievements of the master thinkers he here challenges.” Both Lentricchia’s “sympathy” and the necessity of its “secrecy” may be more complicated, I would suggest, than Jameson has indicated. Krieger, of course, himself has been very much concerned with relations to literary and literary critical ancestors, both as a professional critic—in his relations to Eliseo Vivas, for example—and within the subject matter of his criticism—in The Theory of Criticism, for example.21 And so it is hardly surprising on general grounds alone that the kinds of struggles that would be familiar, say, to readers of Freud should surface here. Has not Lentricchia himself described his attempt to get beyond New Criticism (a movement which he identifies preeminently with Krieger) as like trying to shake off an “imposing and repressive father-figure,” an attempt, that is, that always leaves “traces” or “scars” and an “intertextual mingling,” with the result that the “differences among contemporary theories are not clean discontinuities”? In a book that opens with a deposition of “fresh evidence for Harold Bloom’s theory of the ‘anxiety of influence’ ” or that concludes its chapter on Krieger with the somewhat lugubrious declaration that Krieger is not “beyond criticism,” some such suggestion seems not entirely unwarranted. To suggest, however, that there are age-old parameters to Lentricchia’s position, or that in trying to get beyond Krieger he appropriates him and extends him is not, of course, to devalue Lentricchia’s achievement as much as See Lentricchia (1980), paperback edition. Krieger (1976).

20 21

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it is to place it, especially when we remember that it is such ironic extension that Lentricchia finds at the root of the contemporary scene. What may also help us to locate Lentricchia’s work and what may, indeed, take us by surprise, is that the very same dynamics of displacement and repetition are internal to Krieger’s own work, even organizing that work. Although it is true that Krieger often embraces a position that with certain qualifications can more or less be identified with Coleridgean organicism, at other times he takes a position fundamentally at odds with what he then identifies as New Critical or formalist aesthetics, a position which stages the limits, the origins and the dangers, the romantic implications, of the organicist or pure contextualist position. For example, in The Tragic Vision.22 In Chapter 1 of The Tragic Vision, Krieger defines tragedy as a rendering asunder of the literary form we have come to recognize through Aristotle as tragedy before a demonic vision at its center, a vision that begins as the hero’s vision of the world—his “view and version of reality”—but ends as an all-encompassing moral and ethical absolutism that swallows up all it meets. In the face of this absolutism, the framing impulse of forms, the soothing aestheticizing, totalizing, and objectifying impulse of the ending can only engage itself by lying about the vision at its center. Backing off from its extremity, betraying it for the more illusory perspective of the everyday world, the ending of these works creates a difference between tragic form and tragic vision which it was the experience of that vision to have rendered impossible, the tragic vision itself being nothing other than such a distinction between form and content made monstrous and violent.23 And in the final chapter of the book, Krieger relates this view to formalist aesthetics itself.24 Borrowing the notion of “Manichaeism” with which Wimsatt, in the conclusion to his famous history of criticism, dismisses both organicism and Platonism before a perspective which, in his view, is more encompassing (namely, that of the Christian Passion), Krieger at once poses the limitations of organicism and specifies what would be necessary to supersede it.25 Making a breakthrough with the notion of contextualism, organicism finally stumbles, in Krieger’s view, before its romantic liabilities—aesthetic isolationism. Organicism can succeed only if it finds a way of linking art to the world, if it The Tragic Vision has been issued at least three times in English, the third time in a slightly different format from the other two. See Krieger (1960, 1966, 1973). See also comments below. 23 Krieger (1966), 1–21. 24 Ibid., 228–68. 25 Ibid., 240. 22

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finds an umbilical cord which Krieger spots in the notions of self-reflexivity, the Manichean “strife of principles,” and a certain logic of extremity which he will then develop.26 That Lentricchia in his chapter on Krieger seems less concerned with The Tragic Vision than he ought to be (if he is really on the track of New Criticism and out to challenge what he identifies as Krieger’s formalism) is less curious perhaps than the fact that Krieger himself at other points seems less interested. In the preface to The Classic Vision, for example, written ten years after the earlier book, Krieger writes: “I recall quite clearly my awareness, even before I had finished with The Tragic Vision, that The Classic Vision would have to follow it in order to right the balance.”27 And then later in the first chapter he writes: When I opened The Tragic Vision with the assertion that “the tragic is not the only vision projected by our serious literature and philosophy, nor is it necessarily the profoundist vision,” I was trying even then to leave room for the alternative of the classic. If much of the earlier volume concerned itself with distinguishing the tragic as an authentic vision from what I saw as aesthetically (and existentially) deceptive or self-deceptive pseudo visions, I must open this volume by preparing for a distinction between what I see as two authentic (if mutually exclusive) visions.28

But this later view is itself already an altered retrospective position. For in the earlier book there was no felt need to “right the balance,” the very idea of “balance” being already an aesthetic idea, issuing from the ending of tragedy. Krieger indeed spoke about “two authentic visions” but the other vision was the religious in the earlier book, a vision he developed around the work of Kierkegaard. “In the Kierkegaardian universe,” Krieger wrote, “there are two authentic visions—those I have termed the tragic and the religious—that can There is no place within the present context to elaborate the enormous complexity with which Krieger develops this notion. Suffice it to say that he plays intricately upon two meanings of extremity—as intensification and as extension—and combines them into a third in which one turns out to be a version, “an extremity,” of the other. The “tragic vision” (which is for Krieger a “literature of the extreme situation” and which concludes with an aestheticizing which backs off from the intensity of its center and yet remains an extension of that vision) is itself already an extremity of the “Manichaean strife of principles” which characterizes (in Krieger’s avowedly “Kierkegaardian” reading) the crises of our everyday lives. As such, this literature of the tragic vision offers us a way of envisioning the destructive consequences of our ethical absolutism within the safety net of fiction. This kind of art is in fact life itself in extremity. To conceive of art in this way, Krieger notes, “is not to deny the Manichaean face of reality” (as, for example, in his view the ending of tragedy does) “so much as to deny the need to confront it.” See Krieger (1966), 1–21, 246, 256, 266, and passim. 27 Krieger 1973, ix. The Classic Vision was also reissued in a slightly different format. See Krieger (1971, 1973). See below for discussion of these differences. 28 Krieger (1973), 3. 26

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be earned through crisis.”29 The Kierkegaardian universe being our universe, in Krieger’s view, the modern universe (“Kierkegaard,” Krieger writes, is “its spokesman”), it is clear from this context that the other vision referred to in the opening of the book (which Krieger quotes), the more profound vision for the “crisis-mentality of our time,” is also the religious.30 To say as much is not to suggest that the classic vision is absent from the earlier book. To the contrary, the classic vision is already present in The Tragic Vision; but it is introduced by Krieger in quotation marks as it were, as “authentic” only from within the self-assuring (and self-deluding) perspective of the ending of tragedy which expels “the errant tragic vision it contained within it.” In the first chapter of The Tragic Vision Krieger writes: from a less severely Protestant point of view, other “authentic” visions would be sanctioned. One that concerned me earlier is what I called the classic vision … . It is what I have tried to talk about in discussing the formal and thematic triumph of tragedy over the errant tragic vision it contained within it.31

From the point of view of the earlier book, that is, the classic vision could be read as something of an illusion, a hangover from an older world view that, in giving birth to the tragic vision, gave birth to something of a monster, an “agent provocateur,” as Krieger calls it, “rebellion incarnate.”32 It is as if, in other words, having written The Tragic Vision and having distinguished between the demonic center of the tragic vision and the illusory aestheticizing of its form, Krieger, in the later work, jumps into that aesthetic form and from that perspective rewrites his own earlier critical production. The recent reissuing of both The Tragic Vision and The Classic Vision from a different publisher in a new “balanced” and complementary format (the two books now form a “set”) may reflect a strategy which is not at odds with the very tension Krieger describes in the earlier book as constituting tragedy. The situation is even more complicated than it first appears. For, in reproducing the earlier book within the new format, Krieger has also altered its title. The full original title reads: The Tragic Vision: Variations on A Theme in Literary Interpretation. The new title of the set reads: Visions of Extremity in Modern Literature: The Tragic Vision, Vol. 1, The Confrontation with Extremity and Krieger (1966), 15. Ibid., 17 and 1. 31 Ibid., 17. 32 Ibid. 29 30

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Vol. 2, The Classic Vision: The Retreat From Extremity. Now, “the very notion of extremity,” Krieger writes, in the earlier book, bears “all the mystery” (and I have suggested above something of its intricacy for Krieger), and so it is not inappropriate that it makes its appearance in context of the new title. But the richness of the notion within the earlier context derives from its capacity for being understood diachronically (as extension), synchronically (as intensification), and in a unique combination of the two (in which art is the intensified extension of our common ethical crises). In the new format, if we are to consider for the moment only the title, this richness would seem to be diminished. Now it would seem to be the conflictual center of the work that is emphatic. Moreover, in submitting both volumes under the aegis of a new title entirely (“vision of extremity in modern literature”) the notion of confrontation would seem to be thoroughly contained by this new conception of extremity. In the earlier book, Krieger wrote that the “retreat from extremity” (by an outside observer, for example, the reader) was less a denial of “the Manichean face of reality” (as the ending of tragedy was) “than a denial of the need to confront it.” It is as if in passing from the first book to the second, Krieger has retreated from the fullness of the notion of extremity itself. In this regard, it is worth noting that the words excised from the original title of the second book when reproduced in the set (the words “in modern literature”) reappear in the set in the new title which now governs both. The dynamics complicating Krieger’s work lend to Lentricchia’s in retrospect a new dimension. Turning against Krieger, he has only appropriated him all the more profoundly. Lentricchia’s rebellion against the father is neither the forging of a genuinely independent path (the marks of Krieger’s influence are everywhere), nor even simply a negative imitation of the father (which reproduces Krieger’s work, if not directly, then in opposing it systematically), but an unwitting and undesired positive imitation as well. For Krieger himself has already turned against his own earlier work. The central tension of Krieger’s own work is already the battle between a violent and monstrous agent provocateur (“rebellion incarnate”) born in his midst (his conception of the tragic vision and of the Manichean) and a humanistic classical conceptualizing that is constantly trying to encompass it only to give birth to it once again. Lentricchia’s attempt to repudiate Krieger turns out to be a proper extension or extremity of the very drama in which Krieger’s whole corpus is critically engaged. Lentricchia’s negative imitation is a positive duplication of Krieger’s own negative imitation of the tragic vision. Even there Krieger has anticipated him.

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To assert as much is not, of course, to claim that Krieger and Lentricchia are doubles. To the contrary. The absence in Lentricchia’s work of any significant account of The Tragic Vision, the unwitting quality to Lentricchia’s duplication, is a particular blind spot that is itself absent from Krieger’s work. What is more, Krieger himself has already erected within his work the perspective by which the whole of his corpus may be read. There is a “Lentricchia” in Krieger in a way that there is no “Krieger” in Lentricchia, no “Tragic Vision” within Lentricchia’s work detailing the passage from rebellion and monstrosity to its aestheticizing resolution, only a “Classic Vision” (to borrow Krieger’s terms again) trying with increasing difficulty to encompass the “intertextual mingling” and “traces” from a source beyond itself. Krieger’s work, in short, is able to make a reading of Lentricchia’s in ways that Lentricchia’s is unable to make a reading of Krieger’s. If, to borrow the brilliant characterization of de Man of the relations between criticism and crisis, there are only two interpretations—those that are blind and those that are (more or less) aware of their blindness—then Krieger’s text is unquestionably the richer, more sensitive to the stumbling blocks which Lentricchia (in his work) persistently reflects.33 Both writers are performative of the work of the other writer, Krieger in relation to the work of older critics and his own earlier work, and Lentricchia in relation to Krieger’s work specifically. But in Krieger, that performativity is thematized a little more directly than it is in Lentricchia, for whom Krieger’s work remains somewhat scandalous. We should be careful, however, not to carry these distinctions—between Krieger and Lentricchia—to an extreme. Lentricchia may not be completely oblivious to these limitations. There may be traces of his awareness of them, for example, in the concluding paragraphs of his essay on Krieger, where he draws attention to a remark Krieger makes in an essay entitled “Theories about Theories.”34 “Somewhere in my argument,” Krieger writes, within the passage Lentricchia cites from his writing, “I have anticipated most objections by trying to include them too within my paradoxical contours in advance—if one can accept my tactic just at the outer edge of what may be permitted to argument.”35 For Lentricchia, of course, that inclusiveness is already going too far and he notes: “To accept the tactic is to grant Krieger’s later works the status of a De Man’s remarks on “blindness” are contained in Blindness and Insight (see de Man [1971]). See especially in this book his essay on Jacques Derrida, “The Rhetoric of Blindness.” 34 Lentricchia (1980), 254. Krieger’s essay appears in Krieger (1979). 35 Lentricchia (1980), 254. 33

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nondiscursive symbolist poem… . It is a grant, as I have not, that, in more than one sense, he is beyond criticism.”36 Apart from the playfulness with father-son relations in the final sentence (a kind of trace in itself given the situation), the appeal of Lentricchia’s rejection is to the old Platonic distinction between criticism and literature in which literature is considered inspired but mute and criticism parasitic but alone able to speak (this is an idea that Northrup Frye takes up in the opening polemical chapter of the Anatomy of Criticism).37 To grant Krieger the paradoxical inclusiveness he asks for would be to grant his work the status of literature (a “nondiscursive symbolist poem”), which is to say that he is “beyond criticism,” not responsible for what he says and therefore not able to be challenged. Lentricchia is too close to Krieger for that. He can see the oppositions, the contradictions, the monstrosity too clearly. There is nothing magical or mystical about it by which he could externalize it from himself or from Krieger’s background, by which he could “sacralize” or transcendentalize it. And yet Krieger’s argument has been—in The Tragic Vision, for example— that our literature is made up precisely of such demonic opposition, such Manichean and monstrous duality and, moreover that such opposition is none other than a form of criticism itself, the most profound criticism we have, a criticism of the very formal oppositions by which it is contained.38 In the face of Krieger’s demystification of literature, of his revelation of the Manichean criticism that makes up its center, Lentricchia’s undertakes the oldest move in the book: he remystifies it. He divides it. He invokes a distinction between literature and criticism which would reestablish “clean discontinuities,” barring criticism from literature and vice-versa. On the other hand, it is Lentricchia who has chosen to include this paradoxical literature from the Kriegerian canon, who has perceived these contradictions as “summarizing with sterling candor” Krieger’s position, who has perceived an identity between literature (a non-discursive symbolist poem) and a certain Ibid. Frye (1970), 5. “The axiom of criticism must be,” Frye writes, “not that the poet not know what he’s talking about but that he cannot talk about what he knows.” For a discussion of the ways in which these distinctions blind us to the criticism which is already constitutive of our greatest literature, see my essay on Sophocles’ Oedipus (1978). 38 See Krieger (1966), 228–68. In an essay on deconstruction, “Literature versus Écriture,” Krieger writes: “Whatever the mystifications of its idolatrous critics, literature itself is no enemy of the deconstructive impulse. Far from it. Indeed, one might well argue that in its reflexity and selfconsciousness literature not only deconstructs itself but is the very model for our use in the deconstruction of other discourse.” See Krieger (1979), 181. 36 37

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exceeding of the limits. Moreover, it is Lentricchia who in introducing the notion of “criticism” in a familial context would seem to call attention to the proximity of Krieger to himself. At one point in this final moment, he even calls Krieger’s ethical position “courageous” and although he backs off from the compliment (“he cannot earn his ethical spurs” he immediately adds), he does so in terms that could be taken as sympathy (“too much in his work gives aid and comfort to his enemies,” Lentricchia writes, as if he is on Krieger’s side, trying to shield him from attack).39 It is as if his hostility for Krieger or for his work originated less in a rejection of it than in a more profound admiration for it than has yet been acknowledged and that he feels in some way Krieger has blocked. The implications of these critical dynamics for the study of Lentricchia’s work may be far-reaching. Suddenly, they enable us to understand, for example, how Lentricchia’s entire project, his critical history or “thematics,” echoes Krieger not only when he is concerned with Krieger’s work specifically, but also when he is not, when he becomes unaccountably vehement about matters that seemingly have nothing to do with Krieger. For example, in his treatment of Paul de Man. Lentricchia incessantly condemns in de Man what he identifies as a “rhetoric of authority,” an “impression” that he feels de Man has “always given” of “having a grip on truth” (an attack he wages with the constancy he condemns in the supporters of de Man—among whom he counts Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller). De Man addresses us, Lentricchia asserts, from within a form of transcendental rhetoric that can be identified as essentialism.40 In speaking in the preface of the difficulties of superseding New Criticism, Lentricchia notes the existence of a “crisis” in its midst which contemporary theory “has not resolved but deepened and extended.” “The crisis is generated,” he remarked, by, on the one hand, a continuing urge to essentialize literary discourse by making it a unique kind of language—a vast, enclosed textual and semantic preserve—and, on the other hand, by an urge to make literary language “relevant” by locating it in larger contexts of discourse and history.41

Lentricchia’s appeal, of course, is to the traditional division of critical response into formal or generic approaches of historical approaches, approaches which Lentricchia (1980), 254. Ibid., 282–317. Ibid., xii.

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are often identified with Aristotle and Plato.42 Between these two alternatives, in Lentricchia’s view, de Man chooses to enclose literature within a privileged space, a choice which makes him a formalist and a literary apologist, which are, of course, the charges he also levels upon Krieger. In this vein, he might well have extended his list to include Geoffrey Hartman who, in Deconstruction and Criticism, identifies the attribution of a special status to literature as the common feature of each of the contributors to the anthology (the other contributors to the volume besides Hartman are Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Harold Bloom, and J. Hillis Miller).43 And presumably Lentricchia would identify support for his own position in a critic like Stanley Fish who, in his recent essay on language, would seem to wage the same anti-essentialist battle against literary apologists.44 Now, we may feel that Lentricchia is not wrong in identifying a certain apologism in the work of de Man, nor for that matter in the work of Krieger. In fact, in the case of de Man it might seem that this aspect of his criticism has been unduly underplayed in favor of his more ironic positions.45 In the case of Krieger, if there is any thread that spans the entirety of his career—from New Apologists for Poetry to the recent “New Apology for Poetics”—it is such a notion.46 Moreover, there may be important ways in which an anti-essentialist position is the more attractive of the two, the one that is more comprehensive and explains more than essentialist views. But it may turn out—and here is the point that Lentricchia misses—that it is de Man and Krieger who in their very apologism are the real anti-essentialists. For if they would confer upon literature a special status, it is not from within the Platonic-Aristotelian philosophic fortress that they would do so (theirs is no apologetics of the kind that M. H. Abrams so forcefully described some years ago in his introduction to Literature and Belief) but against that fortress, in an effort to turn the tables on a critical tradition that has always expelled literature for its dangerous mimetic properties, rewritten it according to idealist specifications that would deprive it of its Manichean and violent truths.47 For a discussion of the division of interpretative strategies within humanistic thinking into formalist and historicist camps, see Foucault (1972). Hartman (1979), vii–ix. 44 These essays are collected in Fish (1982). A battle against “essentialism” is pervasively (and persuasively) waged in these pages. There is, Fish is fond of putting it, always an essence, substantive core of truth, meaning, and value, but it is never the same one. 45 From his earliest essays on the romantic image and on the rhetoric of temporality to his most recent work, de Man’s constant theme has been the critical power of literature—of the texts that we have chosen (for one reason or another) to treat as cultural monuments. 46 Krieger (1981). 47 Abrams (1958), 2. “… [L]iterary theory has been maneuvered,” Abrams writes, “into a defensive 42

43

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Indeed, it may turn out (ironically enough) that it is Lentricchia and his allies who are the real essentialists. For if they oppose the essentialists for what they perceive as the assignment of an arbitrary privilege to literary discourse, it is not with the aim of reintroducing literature (the tragic literature that the PlatonicAristotelian idealist tradition has implicitly or explicitly expelled) that they do so but, to the contrary, with the aim of further developing the resources of philosophy’s expulsion of that literature, of reducing the discourse of literature to just another form of institutional practice. Far from undoing the distinction between literature and philosophy, from recognizing that literature is already philosophy, the aim of these writers is to bar forever from the philosophic fortress the kind of monstrous writing that within the framework of the old system became “literaturized.” If de Man and Krieger argue for literature, it is not on behalf of this “literaturization” (which is, in effect, only a transcendentalizing of its violence, its monstrous qualities) but precisely on behalf of exposing both the monstrosity (that gets aestheticized in this process) and this process of mystification or domestication or aestheticization itself. It is the avowed anti-essentialists (like Lentricchia and his allies) who would, in the face of the inefficacious domestication of violent writing, carry the sacrificial process to its logical extreme, complete the process by expelling the whole muddled corpus.48 But, and here is perhaps the most striking point of all in the present context, Lentricchia could have found precisely this argument in Krieger’s own work. For in the last chapter of The Tragic Vision, this is the very argument Krieger uses to disarm the detractors of contextualism—those who would claim that the New Critics have enclosed literature within an autotelic formalism and isolationism. Such detractors, Krieger argues, depend upon the very form–content dichotomy with which they would attack the New Critics for abandoning. They themselves are “so trapped,” Krieger writes, within the very formalism (or essentialism) with which they would confront a criticism which—through the notion of self-reflexivity—would uniquely relate literature to the existentialist complexities from which it has arisen.49 To suggest that Krieger is more aware of the limitations of his own work than some of his critics is not to claim that Krieger is immune from falling at times into the same trap himself, particularly when he encounters a critic of stance from which it has never entirely recovered. Alone among the major disciplines, the theory of literature has been mainly a branch of apologetics.” 48 For a discussion of the way in which contemporary theory rejects literature no less than the criticism it would replace, see Girard (1978). 49 Krieger (1966), 229–32.

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comparable insight. In a series of essays on deconstruction, and with particular reference to the work of Paul de Man, Krieger misses, it seems, the same point that Lentricchia misses in Krieger.50 He fails to see the ways in which both he and de Man place the same demystifying value in literature. Allying himself in one essay with Derrida (Derrida is doing in philosophy, Krieger feels, what he is doing in literary discourse), Krieger would charge de Man with the same misunderstandings that Lentricchia, in a much less sensitive way, would level upon Krieger in the present book.51 The richness of Krieger’s text does not hinder it from being blind to the same point in others any more, for example, than the richness of a writer like Dostoyevsky hinders him from missing the same kinds of insights that he is making when they appear in a writer like Cervantes. What is important is not whether or not a text is blind—there are no non-blind texts— but whether or not (and to what degree) it offers us a perspective from which that blindness can be read and taken into account. But the implications of these “Kriegerian” dynamics (“Krieger” in German means warrior) may be even more far-reaching for the study of Krieger’s own work. Future theorists of Krieger’s work will no doubt want to pay closer attention to The Tragic Vision and to the particular ways in which, already within its boundaries, Krieger engages in the kinds of self-distancing strategies that will characterize some of the tensions between that book and later theories. They will want to understand, to take just one example, how Krieger’s theory of the miracle of metaphor and duplicit illusion both completes and displaces an organicist project begun in The Tragic Vision around the notion of self-reflexivity, a notion which is initially attributed to the New Critics (it is, in fact, in Krieger’s view, the way the New Critics escape the charge of a “barren formalism” or aestheticism and make art responsive to the “phenomenological data of moral experience”) and subsequently reintroduced by Krieger in the face of a pure contextualism or organicism that has been abandoned by its practitioners for the “real dilemma” (isolationist tendencies) it promoted.52 But they will probably want to be most concerned with what I have called the See Krieger, “Literature versus Écriture,” in Poetic Presence and Illusion (1979), 172–4. For example, Krieger writes that de Man rejects “the humanistic claim about poetry’s unique power, seeing it as a mystification.” 51 See Krieger’s remarks on Derrida in Krieger (1976), esp. 224–33. 52 Krieger may be regarded from this latter perspective as the last organicist, the only one who carries the organicist project to the end. But organicism, then, would have to retain its formalism while making art responsive to the “phenomenological data of moral experience.” In light of this position, it is no small irony, then (and telling with regard to Lentricchia) that Krieger comes to be regarded by Lentricchia as failing “to earn his ethical spurs.” 50

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central tension in Krieger’s work, a tension between a tragic vision conceived as a critique of formalist aesthetics and the re-presentation of that vision from the less extreme position of an aesthetic closure, a duplication which both maintains the traces of that former vision and thoroughly represses it, which produces, in short, to borrow Lentricchia’s phase, an “intertextual mingling.” In the paragraph in which Lentricchia feels Krieger “summarizes with sterling candor” his position, something of this “mingling” may be seen. I have tried to hold and press simultaneously both halves of the following oppositions: both the poem as object and the poem intentional object; both the concept of a discreet aesthetic experience and a notion of all experience as indivisible and unbroken; both the discontinuity of the poem’s language system and the continuity of all discourse as a system; both spatiality and temporality, mystification and demystification in the work’s working upon us; both the poem as self-willed monster and the poet as a present agent subduing a compliant poem to his will… . Finally, then, both the verbal miracle of metaphorical identity and awareness that the miracle depends on our sense of its impossibility, leading to our knowledge that it’s only our illusion of identity held within an awareness that language cannot reach beyond the Structuralist principle of difference.53

From the perspective of The Tragic Vision these “oppositions” are not oppositions at all but the two “extremes” of one and the same conceptualization. They are not unlike the two apparent “sides” of a Möbius strip in which there is really only one continuous side, the other being always a future of a past of the same side, and the illusion that there are two sides being fostered by our obviating of the twisting path between them. From the point of view of The Classic Vision, however, Krieger is here attempting, from within a propositional Platonic matrix, to articulate a certain Manichean strife of principles with his critical practice which is not unlike the demonic Manichean dualism he has identified at the heart of the tragic, an articulation which can only present this “opposition” as a form of contradiction and monstrosity. Which is the more accurate account of what Krieger is up to in this passage? For Lentricchia, of course, there is no choice (although the mere inclusion of this passage may bespeak something of a fascination on his part for its confusions). He will reject the passage itself from within the confines of a traditional rigid Platonic distinction between literature and criticism. Krieger is either Lentricchia (1980), 245.

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literature or criticism but not both. And since Lentricchia will not allow him the status of literature, he must be criticism that does not succeed at what it attempts. For Krieger, on the other hand, at one moment in his career the first perspective dominates and at a later moment the second takes over and rereads the first. It may be however that in formulating the opposition between the two in this way we find the answer: to recognize the continuities between Krieger’s and Lentricchia’s text, whether within Krieger’s text or without. For it may turn out that all of Krieger’s work is engaged in a sliding from one option to the other, from an intertextual mingling to a differential expulsion—two options that may turn out, like the tragic vision and tragic form itself, to be really two extremes of the same option. And it may be that between these two choices—between “Krieger” and “Lentricchia,” between the new apologism and the new essentialism—all of contemporary theory in America writes itself. Which would only be to say, of course, in a way Lentricchia may not have anticipated, and for which Krieger may not wish to take credit, that Lentricchia is right. To the extent that it is between the extremes of Krieger and Lentricchia that we find ourselves, and that Krieger already contains within his work the extremity of Lentricchia, it is within Krieger’s text that we continue to theorize. Murray Krieger would be, then, something like the “father” (to borrow Lentricchia’s word) of contemporary theory in America, a father who is certainly not “beyond criticism” since it is he who would teach us, above all, that literature is already criticism, that our “greatest” literature is none other than our most profound staging of the limits of our perspective (although this criticism, can only appear—from within our Platonistic distinctions—as a “selfwilled monster”), but who, by the same token, in his very expansiveness, already includes in one form or another the debates in which we would now engage. Lentricchia himself may have said it best. In an unusually protracted note at the beginning of the “acknowledgement” section of his book, and offered as “fresh evidence for Harold Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence,’ ” Lentricchia relates the fantasy of his children that they wrote his book. They would like me “to credit them with writing” it, he tells us. Where did they get such an idea? “I can’t put their names on the title page,” Lentricchia concedes. “But I can say it here: Amy and Rachel wrote this book. Hostile reviewers may blame their father for all failures.”54 Ibid., ix.

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Where is “here”? Where is the space that allows children to be credited with writing their father’s book, a fantasy that deconstructs the book Lentricchia has just written and yet within which it is contained? Where else but in the margin, in the “acknowledgement” section, in an anecdote about a fantasy of appropriation—in short, within literature. And in Lentricchia’s decision to relate it to us, the comparison we have been developing is brought to completion. They are his “Lentricchias” before his momentary and fleeting “Krieger.” And all the themes we have noted suddenly reappear: imitative appropriation and rivalry with the father, self-creditation, hostility, misplaced blame, criticism, failure, and so forth. And between the two interpretative extremes to which the final sentence in his anecdote is subject— on the one hand, that the children didn’t do it, that they are innocent, that their father is responsible, and hostile critics (who would project upon others their own bad faith as reviewers and are looking for a scapegoat) may blame him if they like, and on the other, that hostile and critical children are entitled and justified in blaming bad fathers with hostile, angry children—Lentricchia traces out as he has in the book at large his relationship to Krieger. No wonder, then, that Lentricchia chooses the title that he does. “After” can mean “what follows,” “on the track of,” or “out to get.” And if we take the “New Criticism” in the familiar sense, then we can render the title to mean: (a) the criticism which historically succeeds the New Criticism—i.e., structuralism and poststructuralism; (b) the intertextual mingling between the New Criticism and its would-be successors—so that there is no “before” or “after” the New Criticism; or (c) the frustration that such a dilemma engenders. But by dint of the first rendering and the sense that contemporary theory has become the “new” New Criticism, the title comes in retrospect to assume a number of other possibilities which compound the difficulties for reading it: (a) the kind of criticism that can be written in the wake of contemporary theorizing—for example, Lentricchia’s own envisioned historical methodology; (b) the lack of clean discontinuities between contemporary theorist and the difficulty of tracing distinctly the current debate; (c) the frustration that this new dilemma poses. And, of course, if we add Krieger’s essay “After the New Criticism” or the name of Murray Krieger itself to this collection of referential matrices, then the difficulty of rendering the title has increased exponentially. What began as the designation of a piece of criticism has become the designation of a crisis. In displaying the full range of meanings and attitudes that we have noted within

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the book—varying from historical, objectifying, informative accounts to angry, subjugative, invectives—the title of Lentricchia’s book, like the anecdote that immediately follows it, traces out Lentricchia’s relation to Krieger. By the end of the book, “After the New Criticism,” whether understood now to issue from the pen of Krieger or Lentricchia, has become an impossible title—monstrous, out of control, in short, a piece of literature. And we are suddenly back where we started. “Krieger’s career becomes,” Lentricchia writes, “in a number of important ways a miniature history of what has happened theoretically in the contemporary scene.” Undoubtedly. No doubt, as well, many have felt as Lentricchia has, that Krieger’s criticism is a kind of tragic vision which Lentricchia’s would struggle to contain. But Lentricchia’s criticism is also an extreme of the same criticism, a monstrous agent provocateur born within its midst which would supplant its critical progenitor. And between these extremes, which pose for us at one moment the truth of monstrous writing (and “literaturization”), and at another dissolve “literature” before the analysis of institutional practices, within language and within history, we continue to find our own. In the curious mixture of gangsterish street talk and psychosexual metaphors by which a critic like Lentricchia can speak of being “forced to finger Paul de Man,” one may detect the traces of a sympathy, if not exactly with Krieger or de Man this time, then with a growing anti-intellectualism in this country (all the more punchy for having to be kept secret), a new turn of the Platonic essentialist screw, which, in the face of a progressive manifestation of violence and monstrosity from behind the mask of a domesticated “literature,” would rid us of the literary subject entirely.55 Romanticism, the denial of the blindness which is the condition of our possibility, the blindness to our blindness, continues to flourish in this country and to define the parameters of all our theoretical discussion. As Lentricchia put it so well, in a phrase that can serve as a motto for the whole endeavor, “hostile reviewers may blame their father for all failures.”

Ibid., 283.

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2

Disfiguring de Man: Literature, History, and Collaboration

I would never have by myself undertaken the task of establishing such a collection, and, grateful as I am to Bill Germano for his initiative, I confess that I still look back upon it with some misgivings.1 Paul de Man The “collection” to which de Man refers is, of course, The Rhetoric of Romanticism, published shortly after his death (containing some of the last texts he wrote— the epigraph, for example, is drawn from the preface), and the “misgivings” he speaks about concern what seems to him the book’s embarrassing failure to cohere in any recognizable dialectical form. Such massive evidence of the failure to make the various individual readings coalesce is a somewhat melancholy spectacle. The fragmentary aspect of the whole is made more obvious still by the hypotactic manner that prevails in each of the essays taken in isolation, by the continued attempt, however ironized, to present a closed and linear argument. This apparent coherence within each essay is not matched by a corresponding coherence between them. Laid out chronologically in roughly chronological sequence, they do not evolve in a manner that easily allows for dialectical progression, or ultimately, for historical totalization. Rather, it seems that they always start again from scratch and that their conclusions fail to add up to anything.2

De Man’s remark is, of course, itself ironic, since, beyond the familiar selfeffacement in which prefaces commonly engage (and in which his prefaces The Rhetoric of Romanticism (1984), viii. The essay that follows first appeared in Responses. On Paul de Man’s Wartime Journalism, edited by Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Keenan (1989), 226–45. The writings on which the thirty-eight contributors to the Responses volume comment were collected and published as Paul de Man, Wartime Journalism, 1939–1943 edited by Hamacher, Hertz, and Keenan (1988). 2 The Rhetoric of Romanticism (1984), viii. 1

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engaged increasingly—although pursued here with perhaps a bit more intensity than we might have expected), it replays what we will later come to recognize as his primary concern within the book—namely, the failure, in each instance where we might expect dialectical totalization (within or outside of literature), of precisely such ordering distinctions. The essay on Shelley’s The Triumph of Life, for example, at the book’s center, seems a case in point.3 De Man is concerned there to show the way in which the poem already dramatizes in advance as it were the very gestures by which the interpretative labor of critics regarding the poem (or regarding romanticism at large) would complete itself, a series of defragmentizing gestures which the poem is able to thematize as it found such labor already prefigured in the narrator’s haunting interlocutor, Rousseau, and his account of his own relation to predecessors. “What is the meaning of The Triumph of Life, of Shelley, and of romanticism?” de Man asks somewhat rhetorically at the outset of the essay, echoing the questions of the narrator to his ghostly companion.4 What shape does it have? How did its course begin and why? Perhaps the difficulty of the answers is prefigured in the asking of the questions… . Such questions allow one to conclude that The Triumph of Life is a fragment of something whole, or romanticism a fragment, or a moment, in a process that now includes us within its horizon. What relationship do we have to such a text that allows us to call it a fragment that we are then entitled to reconstruct, to identify, and implicitly to complete? This supposes, among other things, that Shelley or romanticism are themselves entities which, like a statue, can be broken into pieces, mutilated, or allegorized … . Is the status of a text like the status of a statue? Yeats, one of Shelley’s closest readers and disciples, wrote a fine poem about history and form called The Statues which it would be rewarding to read in connection with The Triumph of Life. But there are more economic ways to approach this text and to question the possibility of establishing a relationship to Shelley and to romanticism in general. After all, the link between the present I and its antecedents is itself dramatized in the poem, most explicitly and at greatest length in the encounter between the narrator and the figure designated by the proper name Rousseau, who has himself much to say about his own predecessors.5

De Man’s remark in the book’s preface, in other words, is another example of the same problem of demonumentalizing that he describes within it—within his “Shelley Disfigured,” The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 93–123. The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 94. Ibid., 94–5.

3 4 5



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essay on Shelley, within Shelley’s relationship to his predecessors (for example, Rousseau), and within, in his view, the work of those predecessors themselves, within, that is to say, the full range of the poem’s relation to antecedent versions. Shelley’s poem already “warns us,” de Man claims, of the fragmentary nature of all such hypotactic interpretative moves, “that nothing, whether deed, word, thought, or text, ever happens in relation, positive or negative, to anything that precedes, follows, or exists elsewhere but only as a random event whose power, like the power of death, is due to the randomness of its occurrence,” a warning, moreover, which fails to free us from performing such moves repeatedly since “it also warns us why and how these events then have to be reintegrated in an historical and aesthetic system of recuperation that repeats itself regardless of the exposure of its fallacy.”6 But if we allow the proper name in the first sentence of the epigraph to the current essay—which refers to de Man’s young editor at Columbia University Press—to drift a little, it is not hard to fantasize that de Man may have been thinking about another “collection” about which he may also feel some “misgivings,” a collection, moreover, which may indeed have constituted for the writer an even more “melancholy spectacle” and confer upon his fear that he always “start[s] again from scratch” and that his “conclusions fail to add up to anything,” an unexpected resonance (and thus help to explain its odd intensity). For the recent discovery by Ortwin de Graef and others of a cache of papers (290 texts by recent estimates) written by Paul de Man, published in Belgium during the years 1939 through 1943, for the socialist journals Jeudi and Les Cahiers de Libre Examen at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, then later during the war for the collaborationist publications Le Soir and Het Vlaamsche Land, and for the Bibliographie of the Agence Dechenne, when he was nineteen until he was twenty-three, would seem to suggest that at the outset of his career, these same concerns whose failure he now registers—namely, evolving dialectical progression, historical totalization, and the relation of these to the values of literature and literary analysis—were already his subject matter, although pursued there in strikingly different manner.7 Ibid., 122. Currently, these materials have been collected and published, as noted above, as Wartime Journalism, 1939–1943 (1988). At the time of the writing of this essay, what was available was a checklist of the texts from Le Soir compiled by Tom Keenan, entitled, “Texts by Paul de Man in Le Soir (Bruxelles, 1940–1942),” and some materials that were circulated privately from which I will be quoting, and which were available from Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, and Tom Keenan at the Humanities Center, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland. These materials included essays from Het Vlaamsche Land (ten) which have been translated from the Dutch by Ortwin de

6 7

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So different, in fact, is de Man’s position in the earlier essays, that it would be tempting to tell a story in which de Man begins with one position and turns to the other—were such a recuperative allegory not what he was already warning us against in the later essays. In the course, for example, of an essay entitled “Art as Mirror of the Essence of Nations: Considerations on Geist der Nationen by A. E. Brinckmann,” which he wrote for Het Vlaamsche Land, in which he is reflecting upon the values of a “national personality” for promoting the values of “Western culture,” de Man identifies an “indispensable” “lesson.” 8 What is proper to our time is the consideration of this national personality as a valuable condition, as a precious possession, which has to be maintained at the cost of all sacrifices. This conception is miles apart from sentimental patriotism. Rather, it concerns a sober faith, a practical means to defend Western culture against a decomposition from the inside or a surprise attack by neighboring civilizations… . The aim of [Brinckmann’s] work is not only to analyze the artistic activity from an aesthetic point of view, or to give an explanation of the phenomena of creation. Its effect leads to a different plane, which is also of a practical nature. It originated out of an attempt to ensure the future of Western civilization in all its aspects. As such it contains a lesson, which is indispensable for all those, who, in the contemporary revolutions, try to find firm guidance according to which they can direct their actions and their thoughts.9

That here at the outset of his career, the twenty-year-old journalist endorses a conception of a Europe that “can only be strong, peaceful and flourishing if it is governed by a state of mind which is deeply conscious of its national grandeur,” and that the derivation of “this endpoint” “from the history of art … proves how efficient the method of using works of art as study material for the obtaining of general knowledge really is” offers us a stark contrast with the older critic who would affirm the radical fragmentariness of history and the radically demonumentalizing nature of great literature, a contrast that would seem readily to Graef. Four of the ten essays were circulated as part of his essay, “Paul de Man’s Proleptic `Nachlass’: Bio-bibliographical Additions and Translations.” The other six were circulated separately. The materials also included essays from Le Soir (169, from December 1940 through November 1942) and from Les Cahiers d’Examen (three). These essays are in French and where I have cited them in English the translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. There were also seven articles in Jeudi, the newspaper of the Cercle du Libre Examen at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, and roughly 100 more texts published by Paul de Man in the Bibliographie of the Agence Dechenne from February 1942 through March 1943. 8 Het Vlaamsche Land, 29–30 March 1942, 3. 9 “Four Early Texts by Paul de Man,” in Ortwin de Graef, “Paul de Man’s Proleptic ‘Nachlass’: Bio-bibliographical Additions and Translations,” 1–42 (circulated privately), 27–9.



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lend itself to a narrative or allegory of disillusion.10 To the positive, substantive, essential value and knowledge of literature (and of the history of criticism which relates that knowledge and value to us), and the progressive, civilizing advance of Western history assumed in his earlier writings—no more contrastive position could be found. And, all other things being equal, were such examples of literary essentialism and historical progressivism all that were uncovered, we would have little difficulty, I suspect, charting that conversion. For we should be able then to identify such a pattern as precisely the blind spot in context of which de Man’s persistent warnings about it made sense. But all other things are far from equal. The political and social program of “this national personality” which the writer claims must be “maintained at the cost of all sacrifices,” and the precise nature of “the contemporary revolutions” then taking place in Nazi Germany and elsewhere, as well as the precise details of the “practical means to defend Western culture against a decomposition from the inside or a surprise attack by neighboring civilizations”—all these are known only too well. De Man himself further identifies such “decomposition” in another essay on literary trends in contemporary Germany which appeared in the same journal—“A View on [sic] Contemporary German Fiction”—in which he also feels “one can legitimately speak of degeneration.”11 When we investigate the postwar literary production in Germany, we are immediately struck by the contrast between two groups, which moreover were also materially separated by the events of 1933. The first of these groups celebrates an art with a strongly cerebral disposition, founded upon some abstract principles and very remote from all naturalness. They in themselves very remarkable theses of expressionism were used in this group as tricks, as skillful artifices calculated at [sic] easy effects. The very legitimate basic rule of artistic transformation, inspired by the personal vision of the creator, served here as a pretext for a forced, caricatured representation of reality. Thus, [the artists of this group] came into an open conflict with the proper traditions of German art which had always and before everything else clung to a deep spiritual sincerity. Small wonder, then, that it were mainly non-Germans, and in specific jews [sic] that went in this direction.12

The reference to Jews in relation to talk about “decomposition from the inside” by “foreign force(s)” is not capricious. In a special page of Le Soir devoted to “Four Early Texts by Paul de Man,” 28–9. Het Vlaamsche Land, August 20, 1942, 2. For the citation, see “Four Early Texts by Paul de Man,” 2. Het Vlaamsche Land, August 20, 1942, 2.

10 11 12

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anti-Semitism and “the Jewish problem” which appeared the previous year, de Man had pondered the consequences of the proposed solutions (vulgar or otherwise) to this concern.13 “Vulgar anti-semitism,” de Man writes, “is readily content to consider cultural phenomena of the post-World War One period as degenerated and decadent in so far as it is Judaized [enjuivé].”14 But, the young journalist counters, [We] should not formulate a great many hopes for the future of our civilization if it allowed itself to be invaded without resistance by a foreign force. In preserving intact, in spite of semitic interference [ingérance] in all aspects of European life, an originality and a character, it has shown that its profound nature is healthy. Moreover, we thus see that a solution to the Jewish problem, which would envisage the creation of a Jewish colony isolated from Europe, would not entail, for the literary life of the West, deplorable consequences. Europe would lose, all in all, a few personalities of mediocre value, and would continue, as in the past, to develop itself according to its own great evolutionary laws.15

It is hard to read this language without historical hindsight. We know, for example (as de Man presumably did not) that less than a year after these words appeared orders were issued by the German high command (and preparations began) for the murder of eleven million human beings at Auschwitz and other deathcamps in the East—although the deportations would not begin in Belgium until August of the following year (the same moment as the appearance of the above article in Het Vlaamsche Land).16 We also know—and this knowledge involves less Le Soir, 55:42, Tuesday, March 4, 1941, 10. Le Soir, March 4, 1941. “L’anti-sémitisme vulgaire se plaît volontiers à considérer les phénomènes culturels de l’après-guerre (d’après la guerre de 14–18) comme dégénères et décadents, parce que enjuivés.” 15 “Il ne faudrait pas formuler beaucoup d’espoirs pour l’avenir de notre civilisation si elle s’était laisse envahir sans résistance par une force étrangère. En gardant, malgré l’ingérence sémite dans tous les aspects de la vie européenne, une originalité et un caractère intacts, elle a montre que sa nature profonde était saine. En plus, on voit donc qu’une solution du problème juif viserait à la création d’une colonie juive qui isole de l’Europe, n’entrainerait pas, pour la vie littéraire de l’Occident, de conséquences déplorables. Celle-ci perdrait, en tout et pour tout, quelques personnalités de médiocre valeur et continuerait, comme par le passe, à se développer selon ses grandes lois évolutives.” My translation. These are the final three sentences of the article. See Wartime Journalism (1988), 45. 16 On the Wannsee conference, which took place on January 20, 1942, at which the “final solution” to “the Jewish question” was announced, see Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (1961), 264 ff. For maps of “Jews Marked Out For Death, 20 January, 1942” both within and outside of Nazi rule, see Martin Gilbert, The Macmillan Atlas of the Holocaust (Da Capo Press, 1982), Maps #99 and #100. For a map of “The Jews of Belgium and Luxembourg” who were deported, see Map #134. “The first deportations from Belgium,” Gilbert writes, “took place on 4 August 1942 … . Henceforth, over a period of two years, a total of 26 trains set off to the “unknown destination’ from the internment camp at Dossin, near Malines. The destination was in fact, Auschwitz” See M. Gilbert, Atlas of the Holocaust (1982), 110. 13 14



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hindsight—that by March of 1941 restrictive orders regarding Jews had already begun appearing in Flanders (some on the same page of Le Soir in which articles of this kind were published). Raul Hilberg notes that “by late summer [of 1942], Jews [in Belgium] went into hiding in large numbers, that nothing had been heard from the deportees, that efforts had been made to find out what was going on and that doubts about the fate of the Jews were rapidly dispelled, certainly in educated circles, before the end of 1942.”17 In light of such macabre details, the distinctions between vulgar and non-vulgar anti-Semitism begin to sound academic. The concern that this discovery has engendered is understandably widespread, for it seems to have implications, not just for the reputation of this particular scholar, but for the intellectual enterprise with which he had become (not without qualification—although finally with acquiescence) increasingly associated, perhaps even for the wider context of humanistic study in this country. Moreover, it is complicated by the fact that a concern with the relation of ethics to critical For example, on January 10, 1941, an article about “L’élimination des entreprises juives en France” appeared. On January 23, 1941, a photo appeared entitled “ENTRÉE INTERDITE AUX JUIFS” with the caption “Certains grands cafés de Bruxelles ont affiché des avis interdisant aux Israëlites l’entrée de l’établissement.” In September of 1941, an article entitled “Ordonnance portant limitation de la libre circulation des Juifs” appeared (a “communiqué” from L’Agence “Belgapress”) with the subtitle “Il leur est interdit de circuler entre 20 heures du soir et 7 heures du matin.” On September 8, 1941 there was a notice about the obligation in Germany for Jews to wear “Une étoile jaune a six pointes de la grandeur d’une soucoupe.” And so on. At the same time, essays were appearing in which antiSemitism was made thoroughly explicit. At the head of the same page of Le Soir (March 4, 1941), for example, on which de Man published “Les Juifs” (a page entitled “Les Juifs et Nous”), an article, entitled “Les Deux faces du judaïsme,” and signed by Léon van Huffel, appeared which began with the following paragraphs:

17



“En tête de cette page consacrée à l’étude de quelques aspects de la question juive, il nous paraît utile de souligner les éléments essentiel de notre antisémitisme./ Nous ne croyons pas qu’il suffit de justifier ce dernier par des raisons d’ordre social. Les Juifs ont commis socialement beaucoup de tort, c’est entendu. Par leur ruse et leur ténacité, ils se sont emparés des leviers de commande de la politique, de l’économie et de la Presse et ils ont profité de leur situation privilégiée pour s’enrichir au détriment des peuples qui les accueillaient et pour entrainer ceux ci dans une politique catastrophique dont l’issue ne pouvait être que la guerre. / Mais tout n’a pas été dit quand on a stigmatisé la nuisance du Juif. De plus, il serait téméraire de lui endosser toute la responsabilité des excès du régime capitaliste dont nous vivons aujourd’hui douloureusement l’écroulement. / Notre antisémitisme est d’ordre racial. Il voit, dans l’ensemble des Juifs, une vaste communauté d’individus reliés entre eux par un certain nombre de traits physiques et moraux communs. / En gros, les Juifs nous apparaissent comme d’une essence foncièrement étrangère et radicalement opposée à notre sang et à notre mentalité./ Nous croyons à l’existence d’un type juif, d’un génie juif. Nous sommes résolus à nous interdire tout métissage avec eux et a nous affranchir spirituellement de leur influence dissolvante dans le domaine de la pensée, de la littérature et des arts.”

“What is especially grievous,” Geoffrey Hartman writes, in a subsequent review of these matters, in “Blindness and Insight: Paul de Man, Fascism, and Deconstruction,” The New Republic, March 7, 1988, 26; 28–31, “is that de Man continued an association with overtly anti-Semitic and collaborationist newspapers to the end of 1942—well past the time when all but the “deliberately ignorant would have known that the persecution of the Belgian Jews, begun before the end of 1940, had taken a drastic turn” (26). Hilberg’s

remarks occur in a letter in The Nation, April 9, 1988, 482.

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reading (and with de Man’s work as a central figure in that concern) had already begun to make itself felt throughout the humanities before these writings became known. It is as if, not unlike the author of Shelley’s poem (whose death, de Man tells us, becomes readable within it), de Man has become through this discovery a figure of his own critical literature, a figure, moreover, “disfigured” in the same manner as the drowned poet, since he speaks to us now from a place where imaginary, symbolic, and real considerations have become fused. “[To] read,” de Man writes (in the essay on Shelley), “is to understand, to question, to know, to forget, to erase, to deface, to repeat—that is to say, the endless prosopopeia by which the dead are made to have a face and a voice which tells the allegory of their demise and allows us to apostrophize them in our turn.”18 How does the discovery of Paul de Man’s wartime journalism affect our reading of his later work? Are the two specifically anti-Semitic essays compatible with the rest of this early writing or are they isolated instances, aberrations, which might be dismissed as demanded by political or personal expediency? To what conclusions are we led as result of this discovery about the man himself or the intellectual movement with which in the 1970s and 1980s he became increasingly associated, a movement that has come in recent years increasingly to engage the question of ethics (which may be why their discovery today is so controversial)? These questions—and many others that we have not articulated—are likely to concern us for some time to come, and it seems hardly possible at this early stage to do more than make a few tentative and preliminary suggestions about a few of these early texts (their very compiling begins to look as if it will run to several hundred pages), even though it seems equally incumbent upon us to do at least that much. To begin to take stock, then, of the implications of this discovery (and the allegory or demise they apostrophize), I would like to consider three bodies of material. In the ten essays de Man wrote for Het Vlaamsche Land and the one explicitly anti-Semitic essay he wrote for Le Soir, de Man lays out what might be identified as a unified position. Then in 1966, in “The Literature of Nihilism,” which he wrote for The New York Review of Books, he articulates what might be thought of as a new position, one which rejects the Nazi enterprise but affirms the tradition of German literature and philosophy as distinguishable from it.19 And in the essays written in the 1980’s, for example, “Shelley Disfigured,” he reaches The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 122. See “The Literature of Nihilism,” New York Review of Books (June 23, 1966), 16–20.

18 19



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what by dint of his death became his final position, one which was different again from either of the earlier two. Now he sees words and action as intimately bound up with each other in the notion of a performative (the peculiar way in which language is figuration—at once constative and performative) and finds the value to be gleaned from literature about history to concern the fragmentary nature of any historical narrative, and the failure of any allegorical or aesthetic recuperation, in short, the defiguration or defacement that literature performs. Read in concert with the later material, these early essays may offer us a new coherence to de Man’s life-long project, a new sense of the man behind de Man, so to speak. They may also allow us to raise again some of the questions with which he was most concerned (for example, in The Rhetoric of Romanticism), even if those questions now include de Man himself as a stake—to ask, for example, whether from one body of material to another there is anything like dialectical progress, or whether in each case we are compelled to “start again from scratch.” Finally, they may enable us to raise some of the larger issues to which their discovery has given rise, questions about the intellectual movement with which he associated himself and whose fortune some recent commentators have felt to be in jeopardy as a consequence. ***** I am not given to retrospective self-examination, and mercifully forget what I have written with the same alacrity I forget bad movies—although, as with bad movies, certain scenes return at times to embarrass and haunt me like a guilty conscience… . Thus seeing a distant segment of one’s past resurrected gives one a slightly uncanny feeling of repetition. 20 Paul de Man

In “Art as Mirror of the Essence of Nations: Considerations on ‘Geist der Nationen’ by A. E. Brinckmann,” the first of the ten essays he wrote for Het Vlaamsche Land between March and October of 1942, de Man lays out a coherent position.21 The “ideal” is the “realization of pure science, which could succeed in establishing the eternal movements of nature in general laws.” But when applied to “the purely human problem” the goal is “not easy to reach.” The enterprise is worth undertaking, the writer feels, “if one could reach the Bindness and Insight, second edition, xii. “Art as Mirror of the Essence of Nations,” March 29–30, 1942, 3; in “Four Early Texts by Paul de Man,” 24–9.

20 21

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same stage in the study of man [as the physical scientist is able to obtain in his field].” In that case, “some individual reactions could also be foreseen. And if this knowledge were to be expanded from the study of the individual to that of society, then we would in a certain sense be masters of our historical future.” Political, social, economic events would no longer seem “adroit improvisations” but “applications of a generally holding system which is irrevocably stable.” Neither sociology, nor historical science, nor social psychology have yet been able to achieve such results because of the difficulty of setting up the conditions for “a strictly scientific investigation in this domain.”22 Creative art, on the other hand, offers us “the most fertile domain of research in relation to the knowledge of men and groups of men.” The creative artist who is intuitive by nature cannot himself offer us these laws which are “forced upon him via the mysterious way of the gift” (“He obeys the laws of an evolution of style completely unknown to him,” de Man asserts). But “a scientific history of art” can achieve that end since it “raises itself above the consideration of individual talents, and tries to explain why creative art does not run its course completely erratically and arbitrarily, but appears to arrange itself around certain forms—styles—which vanish and return in cyclical fashion” and thus is “more than an enumeration of individual particularities.” A. E. Brinckmann’s book, Geist der Nationen, excels in the writer’s view in this regard. He shows that Western art is a unity (distinguishable “from all other spheres of culture in form and in essence”) but within this whole “separate circles delineated themselves” corresponding to “the great European states.” “Nationalities as such,” de Man notes, “have always existed.” “What is proper to our time is the consideration of this national personality as a valuable condition, as a precious possession, which has to be maintained at the cost of all sacrifices.” “This conception … concerns a sober faith, a practical means to defend Western culture against a decomposition from the inside or a surprise It is interesting to consider the reasons de Man cites for the failure of results “in this domain”: “One has only got the confused and contradictory experiments which are derived from history at one’s disposal. A clear delineation of the operating forces, the first necessity of all scientific work, cannot be accomplished here. Neither can one dispose of a sufficient number of experiments in order to clearly and distinctly perceive the phenomenon one wishes to explain, which is absolutely indispensible for all statistical laws—and those are the majority” (25). Whatever else it is, we might say, Nazism seems to be the systematic breaching of these boundaries. In a sense, the death camps were precisely the places where the Germans granted themselves permission for such experiments to be performed. One need no longer be confined just to history. Social Darwinism offered a clear delineation of the operating forces. The numbers for the experiments were available. But to say as much, of course, is to say—as I have argued elsewhere—that Nazism is not an “aberration” but an extension of the projects—humanist projects as well as others—of the culture in which it is born. Ingmar Bergman’s much maligned film The Serpent’s Egg seems to me to make this point.

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attack by neighboring civilizations.” Such national peculiarities show up in art as “contrastive forces,” as “an opposition, a tension between the different elements that determine a style.” Thus “‘the spirit of the nation’ i.e. the dominating artistic tendency of a nation, is one of the main ingredients which made Western culture possible.” These conditions are not “an ideal wish, utopian and remote,” de Man affirms, “but … a concrete truth corroborated by a number of facts.” The fact that we can move “from the history of art, to the terrain of the major cultural and political problems, proves how efficient the method of using works of art as study material for the obtaining of general knowledge really is.” It helps to “ensure the future of Western civilization in all its aspects” and “as such … contains a lesson … for all those who, in the contemporary revolutions, try to find a firm guidance according to which they can direct their action and their thoughts.” Subsequent essays in Het Vlaamsche Land expand and refine these ideas. In contrast to national values, which base themselves upon infrastructural “almost personal” elements (“a railway system, a beautiful local folk-dance, a world record in sports”), the European idea (in “Content of the European Idea”) is “superstructural” with “a purely spiritual content.”23 Thus an important task falls to “today’s intellectual elite”: to “establish a synthesis,” “to unite the creative forces of all European states.” In “Criticism and Literary History,” de Man specifies the goal of all historical study which grounds such a synthesis: “to pass judgment upon what is happening around us now.”24 What we ask of history is not that it show us the picturesque and peculiar sides of a past civilization… . if we continually turn to the past, this is because we intuitively feel that our own personality and the surrounding world are, as it were, determined by this past. And that consequently we cannot acquire conscious control over our opinions—and, a fortiori, over our actions—if we do not take into account what has happened before us.25

Individual criticisms of art find their justification here only in function of a burgeoning general investigation. Two recent books, each tracing the history of French literature from 1870 to 1940, illustrate this point for the journalist contrastively. René Lalou offers us a simple “enumeration of talents,” while Marcel Raymond asserts “il m’a semblé qu’une ligne de force, dont le dessin apparait ici May 31–June 1, 1942; in “Four Early Texts by Paul de Man,” 30–4. 7–8 June 1942, 3; in “Four Early Texts by Paul de Man,” 35–9. “Four Early Texts by Paul de Man,” 35.

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de lieu en lieu, commandait le movement poétique depuis romantisme” [“it seemed to me that a line of force, the design of which appeared here and there, was governing the development of poetry since romanticism”]. “There is a certain homogeneity,” de Man writes, “a uniformity of actions and creations:” every generation of poets has an aesthetic discipline proper to all its members. On the other hand, there is a certain continuity, one generation ensues logically from the preceding one, in the sense that it gives more depth to the formulae of the precursors or, when these are completely exhausted, searches for an innovation and fights or avoids the old rules—which is after all still a means for those rules to exert a decisive influence, be it in a negative sense. In short, modern French poetry appears from this study as a well-rounded whole whose parts match each other, as a creative phenomenon with internal cohesion.26

It is this “impression,” de Man writes, and not that left by the book of Lalou, which “corresponds to reality.” The development of art does not depend upon arbitrary, personal decisions, but is connected to forces which perform their relentless operations across the doings of individuals… . There exists, to a certain extent, an aesthetic determinism of which the artist himself is not conscious, the same determinism that is expressed in the course of history, which, after all, does seem to move around a number of constants. It follows that we give a wrong impression of things if we do not allow these organizing evolutionary laws to speak clearly.27

“The failure of Lalou,” de Man writes, is that his “criticism is … not concerned about … enduring significance” but “becomes a helpless manifestation of feeling without significance.” “History,” as a result, “becomes a dead and boring enumeration.” In “Contemporary Trends in French Literature,” this enduring significance is clarified.28 Art proceeds according to its own evolutionary laws independent of even the most traumatic events (for example, the “current revolutions”). Speaking of French literature, the writer suggests that the “war has exercised no influence on artistic creation… . For this war is not the cause of changes, but rather the result of an already existing revolution… . a similar phenomenon, in a different domain, of the fermenting we find in the world of literature.” And what Ibid., 37. Ibid., 38. Het Vlaamsche Land, May 17–18, 1942, 3.

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is the content of that artistic creativity? The “bringing [of] the psychological analysis and the study of man’s inner essence to a nearly startling perfection.” And this “similar phenomenon” at work in both the war and literature is specified in another essay. The true artist, he asserts in “German Literature. A Great Writer: Ernst Jünger,” although destined to express national traits, should be open to other possibilities that alone will promote full development.29 “A sincere artist can never renounce his proper regional [character], destined by blood and soil, since it is an integrating part of his essence which he has to utter. But he systematically impoverishes himself, he refuses to make use of that which constitutes the vital force of our European culture, if he in order to remain true to his own people, does not want to become acquainted with that which comes into being elsewhere” which “is an exhortation to the full development of the proper personality.” In context of even this brief a survey—and there is a great deal more to say about even the few essays we have considered—de Man’s position is fairly clear. He attaches himself to an historical progressivism—the perfectibility of man in accordance with natural evolutionary laws through the intermediary agency of science and rational discourse—and to a literary and philosophic essentialism— the value of great literature (as interpreted for the masses by the intellectual elite) as a civilizing and reflective tool in this ongoing spiritual advance, this mastery of one’s historical destiny. But it also becomes clear that, far from aberrant, the anti-Semitic writings are endemic to that position. In “A View on Contemporary German Fiction” (cited above), for example, he further elaborates a situation in which he feels such Western values are ignored and as a consequence “one can legitimately speak of degeneration.”30 Speaking of “the postwar literary production in Germany” he identifies two groups—the first “cerebral,” “abstract,” “remote from all naturalness,” employing “forced caricatured representations of reality,” using “the very remarkable theses of expressionism” as “tricks,” which is to say, “skillful artifices calculated at [sic] easy effects” (“small wonder, then,” he writes, “that it were mainly non-Germans, and in specific jews [sic], that went in this direction”) and another which did not give in to “this aberrant fashion” but respected “the proper traditions of German art which had always and before everything else clung to deep spiritual sincerity.” And he concludes by urging Het Vlaamsche Land, July 26–27, 1942, 2. Het Vlaamsche Land, August 20, 1942, 2.

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Dutch publishers and translators to “offer their compatriots the possibility to get acquainted with authors who remained true to their natural disposition, despite the seductiveness of scoring cheap successes by using imported formulas.” “By not giving in to this temptation these writers have not only succeeded in producing an art of abiding value but they have also secured the artistic future of their country.” Or again in “Les Juifs dans la littérature actuelle,” [“Jews in Contemporary Literature”], the essay from Le Soir (published roughly a year before the essays from Het Vlaamsche Land) that has aroused so much consternation, he articulates a view which is entirely harmonious with the other essays he has been writing.31 He scolds vulgar anti-Semites for dismissing—through the blindness resulting from their hatred of Jews—the proper German literary and cultural tradition on display in contemporary artistic activity which prizes the inner psychological essence of man and proposes what amounts to a more sophisticated anti-Semitism. Vulgar anti-Semites, he says, are content to dismiss the whole of contemporary culture as Judaized [enjuivé] and therefore polluted and harmful. In doing so, he argues, they in effect give the Jews too much credit, since they buy into the notion of a Jewish takeover—a notion that Jews themselves have helped to spread. As a result, they in fact throw out in the process cultural productions which are far from degenerated, and thereby lose what is proper and important to the tradition—a result which is ironically as dangerous to German culture proper as the Jews. Take the case, for example, of literary artists. On the one hand, he says, we regard them as worthy of our praise. On the other, we regard them as imitators of a culture which is Judaized and therefore degenerated and decadent, a culture which in fact is foreign to them. Anyone who has looked deeply into such matters recognizes that aesthetic evolution obeys certain very powerful laws which are not disturbed even by events as otherwise disruptive as a world war. The artistic forms that we see are the continuation of traditions that are at least a century old. Novelists, for example, who pursue the inner psychological essence of man are following the great tradition pursued by Gide and Stendhal, among Le Soir March 4, 1941. This essay is widely available both in French and English. The French text has been circulating since the fall of 1987 with other essays from Le Soir. See Wartime Journalism edited by Hamacher, Hertz, and Keenan (1988), 45. For the English, see, for example, Jacques Derrida, “Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man’s War,” Critical Inquiry 14 (3) (Spring 1988), 624, 628–9, 630–1 and Responses (1989), 127–64 (translated by Peggy Kamuf); also Martin McQuillan, Paul de Man (2001), 127–9.

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others, a realist aesthetic that has been with us since the nineteenth century. The same case could be made for modern poetry—for surrealism and futurism. It is not, in other words, in order to attribute to the Jews an alternative significance to the importance with which vulgar anti-Semites would invest them that the young journalist would draw such a distinction between two components of contemporary literary activity but rather to specify their insignificance in that domain, a fact which he adds is actually surprising since the qualities displayed by their writing—cérébralité, coldness—seem ironically appropriate to the kind of precise analysis contemporary literature requires. Jewish writers are uniformly of second rank, in his view, and were they all to be deported outside of Europe the loss would be negligible and European literature would continue according to its own evolutionary patterns. The very fact, moreover, that in a domain of cultural activity as important as literature they would not be missed is a great tribute to that European tradition and a sign of its enduring vitality and health. Far from aberrant, in other words, the anti-Semitic remarks in these essays are critical to the position he has erected (whether or not the twenty-one-yearold journalist feels any conviction about it, which is another matter). They rely upon the same notions of evolutionary laws, the inner psychological essence of man, the value of national characteristics, and the study of literature as a means to ensure the future of Western values that the writer develops elsewhere. There is no evidence that we might suspect the writer to be concealing within them another view which would be independent (or even critical) of anti-Semitism, unless we are to consider the journalistic activity as a whole as opportunistic. They are of the same fabric as the perspective expressed, for example, in Brinckmann’s Geist der Nationen. Nor should that come as a surprise to anyone who studies the milieu in which de Man worked. On the other hand, what may surprise us is the proximity in spirit of the anti-Semitic remarks to the writing de Man undertook as late as the mid-1960s, a proximity which only becomes readable by virtue of their discovery. ***** In “The Literature of Nihilism,” a review which he wrote for The New York Review of Books (June 23, 1966), de Man takes to task two recent commentaries on German literature and philosophy from about 1870 through 1945 (Erich

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Heller’s The Artist’s Journey into the Interior and Other Essays and Ronald Gray’s The German Tradition in Literature 1871–1945) which uniformly condemn “German philosophy and literature, from the late eighteenth century on” as “having provided the intellectual basis for Nazism” by suggesting that the two activities—however lamentably—had very little to do with each other. Nazism was a “mistake,” a “catastrophe,” the “murder of [a] civilization.” But far from a source of that error, the intellectual tradition—which might been sought for counsel—was abandoned by it.32 The discrepancy between intellectual values and actual behavior has rarely been so baffling as in this case. No one could claim … that the Nazi movement somehow rooted itself in a venerable and mature tradition. It was, if anything, notable for its profound anti-intellectualism and the crude but effective manner in which it played on the most primitive mass instincts … . The Nazis received little support from German writers and intellectuals and were not very eager to enlist them in their ranks… . If Hitler triumphed in Germany it was in spite of the intellectual tradition of the country, rather than because of it. There was a trahison des clercs to the precise extent that literary thought and political action lost contact with each other. The problem is not that a philosophic tradition could be so wrong [as Heller and Gray claim] but that it could have counted for so little when it was most needed. The responsibility does not rest with the tradition but with the manner in which it was used or neglected… . It is not in the power of philosophy or literature to prevent the degradation of the human spirit, nor is it its main function to warn us against this degradation… . one should be careful about praising or blaming writers for events that took place after they ceased to exist. It is just as absurd to praise Rousseau for the French Revolution as to blame Nietzsche for Hitler.33

In context of the writing we have been studying, de Man’s position would seem eminently clear. His denunciation of Hitler and the Nazis would seem equally clear, and his defense of the independence of the German intellectual tradition before those who would currently see in it the roots of fascism contrasts sharply with the sentiments of the journalist of twenty years earlier who welcomed the partisans of just such “contemporary revolutions” with considerable enthusiasm. Moreover, within the liberal humanist mood of the mid-1960s in the American university, the position looks entirely familiar. The intellectuals, “The Literature of Nihilism,” The New York Review of Books, June 23, 1966, 16. “The Literature of Nihilism,” 17.

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who remain the bastion of good sense and rational discourse in a modern industrial democracy, have been betrayed once again. Politics and cultural concerns (like literature and philosophy) are mutually exclusive domains. The former concerns power and the latter knowledge and wisdom. But there can be dialogue between the two. Indeed, it is encouraged that politicians look to the intellectual tradition to inform its decision-making and things are thought to go especially well when such guidance is sought, though a continuity between the two is strictly forbidden. From this perspective, then, Nazi Germany cannot but be regarded as aberrant and degenerate. Far from employing the intellectual tradition, National Socialism decisively shunned it. And the disastrous consequences that accrued cannot but be laid at the doorstep of these decision-makers. It is not the intellectuals who failed—as the title that de Man borrowed from Benda’s book had come to imply—but those who failed to heed their advice. Were such a position, in other words, all we had—and it was for a long time—we should be hard put to distinguish it (at least in general terms) from so many others in the 1960s with which it collaborates and whose political posture it conserves. But the more precise the opposition to the earlier writing appears, the more in fact another scenario emerges. For in the earlier writing it was just such a continuity between the political and the cultural that the young writer advocated. Literary study is undertaken as a means of gaining knowledge beyond seemingly erratic and arbitrary individual styles or fashions, and that knowledge serves the larger scientific project of insuring the future of Western civilization by making us masters of our own historical destinies. The fact that we can move, de Man wrote, “from the history of art, to the terrain of the major cultural and political problems, proves how efficient the method of using works of art as study material for the obtaining of general knowledge really is.”34 Indeed, if there were aberrant tendencies into which matters degenerated, or if things decomposed into more primitive forms, such events could be attributed in cultural matters at any rate to non-Germans and “specifically jews [sic].” We are always, of course, the most critical of others who are now acting the way we did a moment ago and de Man is no exception in this regard. We should hardly be surprised that quite apart from his specific objection to the books of Heller and Gray there is a personal stake in this review that the discovery of “Four Early Texts by Paul de Man,” 28–9.

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the earlier position enables us to read. Moreover, there are other traces of the earlier writing that are of a similar sort. At one point, for example, de Man is taking Heller to task for “a certain oversensitivity to national characteristics.”35 “National categories applied to literary and philosophic matters always tend to miss the mark.”36 The aberration that led such a figure as Wagner … to adopt nationalistic attitudes can only be understood from a perspective that is no longer national. The confusion stems precisely from the fact that the nation, a perfectly legitimate concept in itself, acts as a substitute for something more fundamental and encompassing. Figures of the recent German past—[such as Walter Benjamin]—had already reacted against this confusion of values. The reaction continues in some of the most influential spokesmen of contemporary Germany—Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Gunter Grass, etc. Those critics actively engaged in “demythologizing” national values, have found powerful antecedents among writers who are [in Heller’s or Gray’s book], implicitly or explicitly, being attacked: Hölderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche… . Critical nationalism, rare in the United States, is a frequent sin among European critics.37

The critical nationalism which the journalist twenty years before had so prized now appears as a “confusion,” a “European” sin, and perhaps most interestingly, as a “substitute for something more fundamental and encompassing.” Moreover, the “demythologizing” that is taking place regarding this critical nationalism is at work in contemporary Germany in literature as well (“the reaction continues,” he writes, “in some of the most influential spokesmen of contemporary Germany”). In his discussion of Rilke, for example, he remarks that “the reasons [for Rilke’s withdrawal from the given order of the natural world to the self in its relation to this world] are lengthily and often convincingly stated.”38 They arise out of an essential awareness of the essential contingency of the human condition, coupled with the realization that many psychological, philosophical, and theological attitudes have no other purpose than to hide this contingency from our insights into ourselves. Rilke’s reassertion of the self does not occur as a proud, Promethean (or even Faustian) statement of the power of the mind over nature, but originates in a feeling of loss and bewilderment. The same is true of most of the major poets and thinkers of the period, although the “The Literature of Nihilism,” 17. Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., 18. 35 36



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form in which this bewilderment is experienced varies considerably of course from writer to writer.39

De Man’s formulations remain to some extent “existential” and reminiscent of the vogue for Continental phenomenological thinking in the 1960s—and instead of loss, bewilderment, or negativity, he will speak in his later work more of “failure,” “ineluctability,” and “impossibility.” But the challenge to the earlier positive investment in literary knowledge and national spirit has already been broached. But there are other ways in which traces of the earlier writing remain, considerations that cast a light of a different sort upon this work and that begin to confer upon de Man’s reference to concepts that “[act] as substitute for something more fundamental and encompassing” an unexpected resonance. The rhetorical structure, for example, of the current essay recalls the structure of “Les Juifs.” Within the American setting, de Man is explaining to presumably more sympathetic readers the general misunderstandings of his professional colleagues who would somewhat simplistically dismiss all of modern German literature and philosophy as polluted on the basis of the Nazi disaster. Once again, the less sophisticated practitioners of his craft—who would style themselves readers of the contemporary literary scene—would dismiss the entirety of a literary and cultural production because of the failure of a few aberrant and degenerate types whose contribution to it remains insignificant (even though this latter group has helped to spread the rumor of its own significance). Once again the tradition that has been obscured in this way remains in the writer’s view vital and healthy—proceeding according to its own developmental patterns—despite such nihilist historicizing. And once again the writer can envision the thorough removal of such foreign and primitive elements from the cultural scene with negligible loss to the tradition as a result. The similarity in argumentative structure is striking and here is probably a clear example of an insight that could not have been discerned apart from the current discoveries. Moreover, the constancy of his use of that rhetorical strategy enables us to observe an unexpected irony regarding the identity of the participants. For a substitution seems to have occurred. It is not just any group who appear where the Jews formerly appeared but those precisely who would be their most heinous adversaries. Has de Man in the middle of the 1960s become philo-Semitic? Have Jews now come to enjoy the positive endorsement that the practitioners of the Ibid.

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“contemporary revolutions” of the 1940s received? And is it in terms of this substitution that we should understand his alliance, for example, with Derrida whom he meets at the same moment? It would be prudent, I would suggest, in response to these questions, as in considering all matters pertaining to this affair, to be cautious. For there may yet be one more level in which traces of the earlier writing persist, a level perhaps more powerful than—even constitutive of—the others, and in context of which the substitution we have observed assumes a new importance. For the tone of his remarks about the Nazis and the substitution they imply is curiously insistent and seems somehow to exceed the text—as if across the distance of those years, and beyond any reversals that might have taken place, it is somehow the same discussion we are observing. The possibility of such a continuity remains somewhat obscured by a semantic shift that took place regarding words “Nazi” and “Hitler” after the war in English- and German-speaking countries. In the postwar American context, in the wake of the disclosures of the Nuremberg trials, and somewhat later, Hannah Arendt’s coverage of the Eichmann trial, these words had come to designate anti-Semitism itself, and it is understandable that in this context de Man’s anti-Nazism could have appeared to support that posture. But in fact, there is in “The Literature of Nihilism” not one reference to Jews or to anti-Semitism. And if the current narrator charges the Nazis with the attempted “murder of [a] civilization,” it is German culture (and not Judaism) that he is talking about. Moreover, these passages remain among the most straightforward that we have of de Man. The tentativeness and self-effacement that has become in recent years almost the hallmark of his style—and is already present to some extent in the earlier writing (and even present in the second half of this essay where he talks more specifically of literature)—is curiously absent in the passages on Nazism. And we would seem left to conclude either that de Man’s position really is harmonious with the surrounding intellectual climate—although de Man nowhere makes such a suggestion explicit and in fact such a determination would render this material incompatible with much of what he has written before or since—or there is another context in which that denunciation makes sense, one which we have not as yet uncovered, and that renders its appearance in this context responsive to demands of a different sort. It is to this second possibility that I would like to turn. For it may be that the substitution we have noted is not an invention of the 1960s—for reasons of liberalism or for any other reasons—or of any of the years intervening since the



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earlier writing but rather a rhetorical strategy which has already been operative from the outset, the remnants of an ongoing dialogue that has simply become a little more overt in the present context. For if we return for a moment to an essay like “Les Juifs,” we note that the same substitution is already at work. Consider, for example, the opening paragraph: Vulgar anti-Semitism readily contents itself to consider cultural phenomena of the post-World War One period as degenerate and decadent in so far as it is Judaized [enjuivé]. Literature has not escaped this lapidary judgment. It is sufficient that one discover certain writers to be Jewish under the cover of Latinized pseudonyms for the entire production of the contemporary scene to be considered polluted and harmful. This conception leads to consequences which are fairly dangerous. Above all, it causes us to condemn a priori an entire literature which in no way merits this fate. Moreover, it would hardly be a flattering appreciation for Western writers—the moment after we are content to grant them a certain merit—to reduce them to being simply the imitators of a Jewish culture which is foreign to them.

That the writer reflects an anti-Semitism that is shared with both the “vulgar anti-semites” with whom he would lodge this argument and the audience to whom he would appeal it goes without saying. The Jews are foreigners to German culture proper and have negligible influence upon it much as they would like to think otherwise. And it would be a misreading of the weight of the passage to shift attention from that common assumption in order to focus upon the particular bone of contention between the young journalist and his more militant colleagues. The crescendo to which this position leads in the final paragraph— where he asserts that the ability of Europeans to safeguard themselves from Jewish influence proves their vitality, that if European culture had allowed itself to be invaded by such foreign forces it might as well give up any hope for the future, that Semitic “interference” has been evident in all aspects of European life, that proposed solutions to “the Jewish problem” in which the Jews would be removed from Europe to a colony outside might proceed without deplorable consequences in his view—since only a few personalities of mediocre value would be lost—all of this language renders the objection that he makes to the vulgar anti-Semites of little consequence. Nor is it a great deal of comfort in this context that the phrase “vulgar anti-semites” could also be construed semantically to read as an attack against anti-Semitism, a proposition he nowhere else sustains.

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At the same time, in view of the turn that his writing does take later in his career it is worth noting that much of what he will later say of the Nazis is already present here in germ form. What is viewed as “dangerous” for example in this essay is not in fact the Jews—who are in his view without significant influence—but the consequence of misunderstanding their insignificance, a misunderstanding that his co-revolutionaries display. And it is dangerous in particular for the area of cultural life that de Man has spent so much of his energy defending—the German tradition of literature and philosophy. Moreover, there is an irony attendant to this particular misunderstanding since in assuming the Jews are influential and need to be eradicated from the contemporary scene, and then proceeding to condemn contemporary literature on that basis, the vulgar anti-Semites achieve ironically for the Jews the very influence that the Jews themselves have been unable to achieve. Already at the outset, I would suggest, a displacement has been at work behind more overt concerns and it may be this displacement that explains for us the insistent tone of his remarks in the later essay. Imagine the academic of the 1960s reflecting back upon his experience of the last twenty years. Despite his repeated admonitions, the vulgar anti-Semites undertook a project that was in significant ways destructive of the goals they both shared. The Nazi censors arrived and he was compelled to resign. Then having taken over the country, they proceeded to lose the war and he was compelled to leave the country. Twenty years later, he is safely ensconced within the American academic literary critical establishment and along came these two products of postwar liberalism to argue that Nazism had its intellectual basis in the German tradition, the very argument, that is to say, the Nazis were trying to proffer twenty years before and whose failure he has so egregiously witnessed. He is livid and his anger issues into some of the most forceful prose he has penned to date. It is not the German intellectual tradition that is to blame for fascism but the Nazis. The intellectuals would have urged an entirely different course but their counsel was abandoned. The claim that the German tradition—which the Nazis undertook in fact to destroy—was responsible for Nazism is a “warped” conception of history that can only be attributed to a simplistic response in the complex relationship between thought and action that such events should have taught us. It is a powerful scenario, attractive for reasons that probably exceed the confines from which they issue. But before acceding too quickly to its appeal, it might be wise to examine its costs. For it binds us to a particularly troublesome consequence: that de Man in the 1960s, in continuing the ongoing debate with



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the vulgar anti-Semites (who have now become indiscriminately “the Nazis” and “Hitler”), depends, at least in part, upon the same assumptions that formed the parameters of the earlier discussion—namely, anti-Semitism. Is it not, in other words, at least implicitly the case that in continuing to debate, de Man argues for a more enlightened sophisticated position which would not be incompatible on the one hand with the defense of German culture, but on the other with the exclusions of all foreign elements from it, “and in particular jews [sic]?” In short, is the 1960s essay read in this fashion—which is to say, from a position already at stake from within its subject matter, a reading strategy that psychoanalytic theorists would identify as repetition, and that de Man himself, from within the deconstructive context of his later writing, would designate a domestication and reenactment—not still, by implication if in no other fashion, anti-Semitic? Once again, it behooves us to be cautious. De Man’s anti-Semitism at its worst in the 1940s is a far cry from the demagoguery of a Léon van Huffel, whose essay framed the page on which de Man’s most disturbing essay appeared—and whose essays had been appearing regularly in Le Soir. And in the 1960s, de Man is infinitely more concerned with defending the German tradition and with the devastating effect wrought by those who, in the name of defending that tradition against its enemies, achieved their goal than he is in pursuing the exclusionary postulates that they share. So destructive, in fact, have these co-partisans been that de Man is even receptive to allying himself with their adversaries in the service of the cause that is of primary importance to him. And when he meets in 1966—the same year as the publication of “The Literature of Nihilism”—a young French researcher at the Johns Hopkins University conference on “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man” who is interested above all in German culture and thought, who had begun his thesis work in France on literature, who has been able to put aside his religious and ethnic origins (and seems equally content to remain at some distance from the fashionable psychoanalytic, anthropological, and Marxist currents of the times), and who has just published a series of essays on Rousseau in which he argued for the availability in Rousseau of a criticism of the very positions acted out by his critics, their encounter seems destined. If Derrida didn’t exist, de Man would have had to invent him. De Man’s 1966 essay, in short, is both more anti-Semitic than we might expect and less. It is more because it is not part of the liberal context in which it appears but reflects an anti-Nazism that in one fashion or another de Man has been arguing already for some time and which relies upon their identification

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of a common adversary. But it is also less since by the 1960s de Man is significantly more concerned with defending the German cultural tradition against those who attack it from within in the name of that defense than those who are genuinely foreign to it. Do we understand better in this context the reticence of the man we knew to speak after the 1960s of political matters? No doubt, if de Man had been called upon to express himself on Nazism, he would have denounced it. But might he then not also have been called upon to articulate basis for his denunciation and, as his reasons differed from those of others, might he not better have advised himself to eschew all such discussions? What in any case does seem clear—beyond all such risky motivational speculation—is that far from arbitrarily related to the rest of his corpus, far from harmonious with the writings surrounding it—and all appearances to the contrary—the essay is pivotal to both what preceded and what followed. It makes clear in no uncertain terms that de Man’s fundamental concerns remained constant. His advocacy remained the tradition of German literature and philosophy, whether he is defending it against foreigners such as the Jews, the vulgar anti-Semites who in the name of defending would destroy it, or in his final two decades university liberals who would collapse that tradition with its worst enemies—and thereby not only lose the advantage of its demythologizing force but enact the condemnation levied before by those who would destroy it. He will do battle with academic humanists who like Heller and Gray would distort that Germanic tradition often in the same breath as their discussion of the Jews (“We fight not Judaism but Destruktion,” E. R. Curtius is reputed to have written in 1932, “not a race but a negation… . Our Jews, it must regretfully be said … are self-devoted to skepticism and Destruktion”).40 But by the same token, it also makes clear against the register of that constancy, de Man’s successive strategies. De Man begins believing that he can move freely between politics and culture. But when the traumatic events of the war reveal to him that politics is no guarantee against decomposition from within, he retreats to a province safely removed from most social concerns—from politics, psychology, and anthropology (all of which he had previously engaged fairly freely). Within this new province, he will become proportionately more energetic in speaking about literary, linguistic, and philosophic matters and from within For the quote from Curtius, see Hartman, “Blindness and Insight” (1988), 28, and Hartman, “Looking Back” (1989), 17.

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that position he will launch in fact a profound criticism of precisely the literary essentialism and historical (and political) progressivism in which he himself began. In the battle from the 1960s onward between the academic humanists and the Continental philosophers, de Man will increasingly align himself with Heideggerian Destruktion even if it is disseminated in America as it was earlier in France primarily by Jews. It remains one of the minor ironies of this new alliance that it will lead him, once he has thought through the performative and rhetorical aspects of language more fully, to the very opinion about the mutual complicities of language and action in the world that in the 1960s essay, in the work of Heller and Gray, and with regard to Nazi Germany, he had so forcefully been denouncing. ***** [Aristotle] … cannot be separated from the “woes and wars” his pupil Alexander the Great inflicted upon the world. Words cannot be isolated from the deeds they perform; the tutor necessarily performs the deeds his pupil derives from his mastery.41 Paul de Man

It is not my intention here to trace de Man’s relation to Derrida or to deconstruction with which he has been associated (and with which he has associated himself)—interesting and important and ongoing as that engagement is—as much as to register the effects that the thinking of this French Jewish writer has had upon the latest body of de Man’s work in so far as those effects suddenly seem related to the writing we have been considering. For if de Man’s writing in the 1960s seemed at once like and unlike the earlier work, there is one more scene in this ongoing drama whose dimensions remain to be plotted, a scene in many ways more decisive than all the others, and which, after de Man, and for more than one reason, we might entitle the “madness of words.” The phrase itself occurs toward the end of his essay on Shelley’s Triumph of Life in which de Man is considering the relation of the poem Shelley left us to antecedent versions and concerns the “naive belief ” that insight or knowledge about the ways in which we “monumentalize” or construct recuperative allegories about our experience confers upon us no freedom from repeating it. The theme is not unrelated to earlier interests of de Man. Although “The Literature of Nihilism” contains a number of ideas which will gain increasing The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 102.

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ascendancy in de Man’s work—the demythologizing of national categories, the recognition that the value of literary artists consists not in their promotion of Western values but in their critical investigation of our promotion of them—it also reflects a number of ideas and energies that are continuous with the earliest writing and which the later essays will abandon. “It is just as absurd,” he writes in 1966, “to praise Rousseau for the French revolution as to blame Nietzsche for Hitler.” This does not mean that philosophers and poets have no moral or political responsibility even when their work is apolitical. But it means this responsibility should be evaluated within the full philosophical or literary context of their work, not their lives, still less the effect that their work may or may not have on other people. The real and difficult problems that the German tradition formulated during the last two hundred years cannot be dismissed because it is supposed to have led to a national catastrophe.42

Words, in this view, have an absolute and complete value to them—like precious possessions—which is separable from political action, and our ability to use these words to convince and persuade is premised upon this value and this distinction. Whether “the Nazis” and “Hitler” refer to anti-Semites (as opposed to moralists) or vulgar anti-Semites (as opposed to more sophisticated practitioners of anti-Semitism) this distinction remains constant. Such an idea in de Man’s work is about to be displaced entirely by another but its removal is somewhat concealed behind more thematic matters. In 1971, de Man publishes at Oxford Blindness and Insight, in which the demythologizing power of literary texts (in spite of the labor of critics who in the name of reading these literary texts would domesticate and reenact them) is given center stage. There are always only two interpretations of things, de Man says in this book, those that are blind and those that are aware of their blindness. There are no non-blind positions and insight in this connection must be understood as positions that are more or less aware of the blindnesses in which they (like every other perspective) inevitably participate. In subsequent essays, some of which were published in Allegories of Reading but many of which were circulated privately or in professional journals, de Man fastens upon the notion of a performative which was developed by J. L. Austin but given prominence in this country by John Searle and the debate between

“The Literature of Nihilism,” 17.

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Searle and Derrida (which showed up in Derrida’s work as “Signature Event Context” and “Limited Inc”). Austin’s most powerful insight in this connection was probably his recognition of the impossibility of sustaining the distinction between a constative and a performative, that all language was in one way or another a form of action (meaning is the force language exerts in a context) and thereby an exercise of power. The notion served de Man to expand his conception of the critical reading lesson that literature teaches from rhetoric to disfiguration, a critical investigation of the way in which language tropes, which is to say, constitutes at once metaphor and rhetoric, representation and persuasion. And it is this notion of disfiguration, or de-facement, which The Rhetoric of Romanticism above all pursues. As a kind of sequel to Blindness and Insight, its concern is no longer simply with the nature of literary insight (the recognition of blindness which is its condition of possibility) but the status of this recognition and in particular what, in another vocabulary, might be called the danger of the idolatry of the law of anti-idolatry or, in still a third vocabulary, the problem of transference: what happens when the fact of monumentalization itself has become a part of our consciousness (when Shelley discovers, for example, the same recognition in Rousseau)? If it is impossible for us to escape recuperative allegories in cultural life (any more than it is to stop breathing), is it possible at least to acknowledge the naiveté or evasive maneuvering of such a gesture? It is the naiveté of believing in even this possibility (any more than in the recuperative strategy itself), or that this naive belief will not itself be repeated endlessly in countless new forms of historicization or aestheticization that de Man takes up in this essay, a series of reflections that will enable us to close the circle we have been tracing, to complete the Möbian path, and offer de Man’s clearest perception to date on the position with which he began. Such monumentalization is by no means necessarily a naive or evasive gesture, and it certainly is not a gesture that anyone can pretend to avoid making. It does not have to be naive, since it does not have to be the repression of a selfthreatening knowledge. Like The Triumph of Life, it can state the full power of this threat in all its negativity; the poem demonstrates that this rigor does not prevent Shelley from allegorizing his own negative assurance, thus awakening the suspicion that the negation is a Verneinung, an intended exorcism. And it is not avoidable, since the failure to exorcise the threat, even in the face of such evidence as the radical blockage that befalls this poem, becomes precisely the challenge to understanding that always again demands to be read. And to

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read is to understand, to question, to know, to forget, to erase, to deface, to repeat—that is to say, the endless prosopopeia by which the dead are made to have a face and a voice which tells the allegory of their demise and allows us to apostrophize them in our turn. No degree of knowledge can ever stop this madness, for it is the madness of words. What would be naive is to believe that this strategy, which is not our strategy as subjects, since we are its product rather than its agent, can be a source of value and has to be celebrated or denounced accordingly.43

To read is “to understand, to question, to know, to forget, to erase, to deface, to repeat”; to complete, in short, the circular path that generates our world and populates it with things, people, and language, the “endless prosopopeia by which the dead are made to have a face and a voice which tells the allegory of their demise” and that thereby permits us to create of them an idol, a figment of the sacred, that “allows us to apostrophize them in our turn.” And having described this theory of reading—as monumentalization, as prosopopeia of the dead in the “madness of words”—he describes its implications. Whenever this belief occurs—and it occurs all the time—it leads to a misreading that can and should be discarded, unlike the coercive “forgetting” that Shelley’s poem analytically thematizes and that stands beyond good and evil. It would be of little use to enumerate and categorize the various forms and names which this belief takes on in our present critical and literary scene. It functions along monotonously predictable lines by the historicization and the aestheticization of texts, as well as by their use, as in this essay, for the assertion of methodological claims made all the more pious by their denial of piety. Attempts to define, to understand, or to circumscribe romanticism in relation to ourselves and in relation to other literary movements are all part of this naive belief. The Triumph of Life warns us that nothing, whether deed, word, thought, or text, ever happens in relation, positive or negative, to anything that precedes, follows, or exists elsewhere but only as a random event whose power, like the power of death, is due to the randomness of its occurrence. It also warns us why and how these events then have to be reintegrated in an historical and aesthetic system of recuperation that repeats itself regardless of the exposure of its fallacy. This process differs entirely from the recuperative and nihilistic allegories of historicism. If it is true and unavoidable that any reading is a monumentalization of sorts, the way in which Rousseau is read and disfigured The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 122–3.

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in The Triumph of Life puts Shelley among the few readers who “guessed whose statue those fragments had composed.” Reading as disfiguration, to the very extent that it resists historicism, turns out to be historically more reliable than the products of historical archeology. To monumentalize this observation into a method of reading would be to regress from the rigor exhibited by Shelley which is exemplary precisely because it refuses to be generalized into a system.44

Even within the context of the explosive and profuse insights deconstruction has accustomed us to expect, the passage, I would suggest, is dazzling in its range and its power. It is hard to imagine a more comprehensive, more critical, or more self-reflexive position. All that remains, in order for de Man to elaborate a full-blown theory of language (and of its monumentalizing nature), is to relate it to the other-than-human origins from which in his view it springs—an elaboration which he seems to have begun at the moment of his death and which others have taken up since.45 At the same time, no less astonishing—in light of the themes we have been pursuing in this chapter—is the directness with which it confronts the position of the journalist of forty years earlier, the naive belief in historical progress and in essential or substantive value. “The Triumph of Life warns us,” he says to the journalist who believes in the progress of evolutionary laws, “that nothing, whether deed, word, thought, or text, ever happens in relation, positive or negative, to anything that precedes, follows, or exists elsewhere but only as a random event whose power, like the power of death, is due to the randomness of its occurrence.” And to the literary essentialist he tells his “demonic” “ghost story,” that “to read is to understand, to question, to know, to forget, to erase, to deface, to repeat—that is to say, the endless prosopopeia by which the dead are made to have a face and a voice which tells the allegory of their demise and allows us to apostrophize them in our turn… . What would be naive is to believe that this strategy, which is not our strategy as subjects, since we are its product rather than its agent, can be a source of value and has to be celebrated or denounced accordingly.” Words, in this new view, rather than precious possessions (like national categories), are themselves possessed. The “madness of words” is at once our The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 122–3. See, for example, “‘Conclusions: Walter Benjamin’s “‘The Task of the Translator’” in Resistance to Theory, 73–105, and especially the discussion that followed de Man’s delivery of this lecture at Cornell (94–105). The question of the possibility for an ethics of reading in relation to de Man’s work has been taken up by Hillis Miller in The Ethics of Reading (1987).

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complete freedom to use them and the life they lead independently of us the moment we do so, the thoroughgoing arbitrariness of language at the moment of its deployment and its absolute necessity once it has been exercised, the way in which, in short, the very possibility of understanding rests upon a repetition that could not but occur and yet is undertaken in complete freedom. To monumentalilze is to construct an experience as a text, to aestheticize it, or historicize it, in order that we might derive some instruction from it or gain some mastery over it. But in telling the story of our experience in this way, we necessarily belie it since that experience always already contained within it (in so far as it was also an experience of such stories) the seeds of our current behavior, and if the experience was particularly complex—like literature, for example—the more knowledge we think we gain about it, the more we think we read it (the more mastery or instruction we derive from it), the more in fact we only play out or repeat the stories we have read and the more literature is reading us. Moreover, no “degree of knowledge [about this repetition or reenactment that we undertake] can ever stop this madness,” this compulsive transferential (or mimetic) behavior, since it “is not our strategy as subjects” (as “we are its product rather than its agent”). “What would be naive is to believe that this strategy [or repetition] … can be a source of value and has to be celebrated or denounced accordingly.” On the other hand, what we can do is “dramatize” it in all of its implications and complicities. That is the reading lesson that literature teaches us. Aristotle “cannot be separated from the ‘woes and wars’ his pupil Alexander the Great inflicted upon the world” not because Aristotle’s philosophy is imperialistic but because Alexander’s imperialism is also Aristotelian philosophy, a duplication (in a particularly graphic way) of the stories already contained within Aristotle’s teaching and precisely to whatever extent Alexander (or Aristotle) felt he had mastered that teaching. “Words cannot be isolated from the deeds they perform; the tutor necessarily performs the deeds his pupil derives from his mastery.” Aristotle is not responsible for Alexander’s reenactments—Alexander might have done otherwise—but neither are the actions of the two men separable. What Alexander plays out are always necessarily the dramas upon which Aristotle was already at work. The intellectuals are as implicated in Nazi thinking as the Nazis—whatever the degree to which either chose to act out that thinking in the world. The root of fascism is lodged not in our decision to aestheticize or romanticize our politics but in our decision to politicize our aesthetics. And as Aristotle to Alexander, so, we must assume, de Man would



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argue, Rousseau to the French Revolution, and Nietzsche (or perhaps more properly Hegel) to Hitler. Can we be sure that this latest phase of de Man’s work is not just a negative imitation of his earliest, a continuation of the old energies if expressed now only in completely negative or critical form? If it is no longer the Jews or the Nazis who are expendable as aberrant or degenerate from within the realm of Western values or within a Platonic conception of literature and philosophy, is it not possible that there is still another threat to be guarded against from within the notion of language as performative? Is it possible that as he retreated in the mid-1960s from what he perceived as the disturbing and degenerate mixture in Nazism between politics and cultural production (in which the Jew was the enemy, “nihilist allegories” were the order of the day, and true intellectuals were abandoned) to a perspective within the university and intellectualism (from which position political degeneracy could be denounced), so again in the 1980s he may only have retreated once more from the vicissitudes of intellectual activism (of the 1960s and early 1970s) to a notion of language which already contains within it both representation and action and from within which the primitivism of another enemy (old-guard humanism in its reaction to deconstruction?) could be denounced? Is there, in short, any guarantee that his position is not just another allegory by means of which he may retrieve or recuperate the native land from which he feels alienated? None. In fact, if there were such a guarantee things would be considerably more precarious than they are. But for the first time in the later work it would seem to be the failure of such a narrative that is as much at stake as its success and the limitations of any totalizing gesture as much as its benefits. What we may want to ask about this later view is not whether it is superior to the older perspectives—more insightful, less blind—but rather whether it delivers on its promise to offer us, in addition to the insights by which it establishes itself, a way of acknowledging the blindnesses in which it also inevitably participates and from which in fact those insights inevitably derive. If we understand what de Man is saying then the fact that we demonumentalize is no guarantee that we are freed from repeating that monumentalization at another level since it is not recuperative allegories—which we can never escape—which are the enemy but their appropriation within an absolutizing and totalizing framework. In this context, the “naive belief ” in such freedom or such insight may in fact constitute the most dangerous and egregious example of such absolutizing.

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***** … while digging in the grounds for the new foundations, the broken fragments of a marble statue were unearthed. They were submitted to various antiquaries, who said that, so far as the damaged pieces would allow them to form an opinion, that statue seemed to be that of a mutilated Roman satyr; or, if not, an allegorical figure of Death. Only one or two old inhabitants guessed whose statue those fragments had composed. Thomas Hardy, “Barbara of the House of Grebe,” quoted by Paul de Man46

Anti-Semitism is a disappointment whenever it shows up. It invariably drags along with it the sickening sense of having been here before, of its having lain dormant for a while but upon encountering the right combination of circumstances having come out of the woodwork. It is particularly disarming when it shows up in the university, which prides itself as an institution upon the free exchange of ideas within the environment of liberal humanist studies, and ironically so when it appears in the career of a scholar or critic who prides him- or herself (and even builds a career) upon uncovering such prejudicial cecity. The case of Paul de Man is no exception. The early works are an indelible moral blot upon an otherwise increasingly formidable intellectual presence and we can no longer responsibly read the later works without taking them into account. No amount of biographical, psychological, or historical research can ameliorate or extenuate the damage. The fact that he was under family or political pressure, that there were only one or two explicitly anti-Semitic essays (and that his version of anti-Semitism was far milder than that of others who also published essays—often in close proximity to his), that the journalist was only twenty-one when he wrote the majority of these texts, or that he may have had a friend in the resistance—all these “explanations” do less to soften the impact of the discovery than to situate it. The fact remains that the writer could have chosen otherwise and did not. Others who had a great deal more to lose than de Man at twenty-one chose very differently. To make such a comparison is certainly not to suggest that de Man should have chosen another course but to take stock of the course he did choose. At the very moment that he is writing the words we have been examining from Le Soir and Het Vlaamsche Land, the Nazis, who by this point have already murdered thousands of human beings, are constructing the procedures for the systematic killing of eleven million

The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 93.

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more in countries to the East. Long after anyone (except someone guilty of remaining in Hartman’s phrase “deliberately ignorant”) could see their practical effects, de Man wrote reviews in which he called for the success of the “current revolutions” at the “cost of any sacrifice” and reflected that the removal of the Jewish community to a colony outside of Europe would not have regrettable consequences for European literature, which would remain healthy. The consequences for those who were in fact removed some seventeen months later were less healthy. We all live with the consequences of our decisions—the bad ones perhaps even more than the good. But in Paul de Man’s case, the fact also remains that the burden of his particular past, the ineluctability of his special history, seems to have served—as it did, for example, in his characterization of Rousseau and of Shelley—to spur him on to his best insights about precisely such processes. Now more clearly than ever before it begins to look as if de Man’s later work was a prolonged meditation on just such earlier totalitarian complicities or collaborations. Read in context of the earlier writings, and in a profound continuity with them, the later essays seem almost obsessively concerned with undoing the notions with which he began—notions about the organic or unifying nature of art and its value as a civilizing force, and about the march of history as an advance toward a new spiritual order. His later work is an insistent refusal to grant this particular privilege to literature and this understanding of history, an unending demonstration that there where we believe literature upholds such values, it reveals in fact their collapse (and if we grant the monstrous and demythologizing critical writing we label “literature” any special privilege it derives from this particular revelation), and an incessant demonstration that there where we have so narrativized history socially or personally we have done little more than excuse ourselves before moments that by their radically fragmentary nature have no necessary relation to each other whatsoever, an incessant engagement, in short, with his own particular and peculiar past (and thus a symptom of its presentness and of the impossibility of its being mourned). Only those who refuse to read de Man or who read him poorly could see the earlier texts as a confirmation of his true position in the later ones since it is precisely against that perception that his later writing continued to work. It is probably not the smallest of ironies in this whole matter—and one that more properly illustrates his point than challenges it—that those critics who have not read the later writings or have not understood their demythologizing force (and think therefore that he has done little but play with words as a front for nihilist

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agendas) charge him with denying history or promoting rather essentialistically the value of literature. To what conclusions, then, do these newly unearthed fragments of de Man’s work lead us? “Whose statue” do they “compose?” Do we have any better sense in their shadow of the man behind de Man? It should be clear by now that “the difficulty of answering is prefigured in the asking of the question” and that the answer that we give to this question matters less than the way in which we use it. It is not as if we have a choice whether or not to invoke a conversion narrative—we cannot but do so; we do so all the time; we are bound to do so one way or another—but whether the conversion narrative we invoke contains within it—like Shelley’s Triumph of Life—the possibility of its own reading. To view de Man secretly as a nihilist or an anarchist and to see the recent discoveries as confirmations of what he really is (which was before only dimly perceived) is not distinguishable finally from deciding that he is really an iconoclast. The greatest obstacle to the understanding of his work, I would suggest, is to decide that he is either one or the other on the basis of that discovery rather than exploring with the increased corpus of de Man’s writings, in increasingly comprehensive ways, the limitations of such decision-making—its origins, its strategies, and its consequences. Nor would I suggest that these limitations should in turn to be pursued simply for their own sake. De Man’s statements about the radical fragmentariness of history or about the radically demonumentalizing nature of literature can themselves be made to appear uniquely valuable only if we essentialize or “freeze-frame” his thinking at any one given moment, even the moment interrupted by his death. We may feel such notions to be part of a prolonged effort to challenge his own initial positions. They have all the earmarks, Geoffrey Hartman writes, “of a belated, but still powerful, act of conscience.” 47 More importantly for scholarship and criticism, perhaps, they seem to us but the first step of an effort to clear the way for a more powerful account of literary and historical understanding, a “deepening reflection on the rhetoric of totalitarianism,” whether that rhetoric is observed within aesthetics or more ominously within the appropriation or “fatal aestheticizing” which Hartman suggests is politics itself and “which gave fascism its false brilliance.”48 But the forte of de Man’s work, I have suggested, like the forte of the literature he read (and in contrast to the nihilist allegories he denounced and which critics Hartman (1988), 31. Ibid.

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have seen fit to impose upon him), was that it was open-ended. How can we be sure that the latest efforts of de Man were a clearing of the way on the path to a new positive view and not a negative imitation of the older perspectives? We cannot—by virtue, moreover, of the very reading lesson de Man teaches us. There is in fact no way of deciding between the two possibilities since the evidence in either case would look the same. De Man himself may have continued in the direction of his later work, recognizing the dangers inherent in “the assertion of methodological claims made all the more pious by their denial of piety.” On the one hand, he tells us, “reading as disfiguration, to the very extent that it resists historicism, turns out to be historically more reliable than the products of historical archeology” although “to monumentalize this observation into a method of reading would be to regress from the rigor exhibited by Shelley which is exemplary precisely because it refuses to be generalized into a system.” On the other hand, he may have succumbed in his own terms to that “reliability” and that “regression.” What he left us is only the difference between the two, between an insight that totalizes itself and an insight that takes stock of its own inevitable totalizations. There is, of course, a long history in the West for such theorizing and it would be an extraordinarily ironic turn indeed for de Man, who began as an anti-Semite to have ended as philo-Semitic. And the temptation to see de Man’s final project as “Jewish” (and his critique of monumentalization as a critique of idolatry, or perhaps, more precisely, of the idolatry of anti-idolatry) may promise more than an ironic allegory of his personal fortunes here. For to identify de Man’s “reading lesson” as in some sense Jewish is to name the second step after the ground is cleared: the step which in fact since his death has been so much a part of our discussion (and may even explain why we are so upset when the credentials of the leading philosopher of reading turns out to be questionable) which is that a philosophy of reading is always an ethics; reading is a form of ethical practice. It would be prudent to be cautious in this domain as in all others. De Man himself steadfastly refused an ethical dimension to his work. In his discussion of “ethicity” for example in his analysis of Rousseau in Allegories of Reading he resolutely refused to see ethics as interpersonal or subjective in any fashion other than “linguistic.”49 If there is a persistence of the earlier work into the later “Allegories are always ethical, the term ethical designating the structural interference of two distinct value systems. In this sense, ethics has nothing to do with the will (thwarted or free) of a subject, nor a fortiori, with a relationship between subjects. The ethical category is imperative (i.e., a category

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it is probably this refusal to give up the humanistic grounding, the languagecenteredness, that World War Two exploded and rather to continue in the shadow of its scandal the possibility of a purely linguistic and rhetorical analysis, even if by “rhetoric” here we include the notion of a performative. The fact that he went further than many others in ferreting out within the literature he read the dangers of an aestheticizing or historicizing domestication or recuperation is no guarantee a priori that he would have pursued his project further—to pose, for example, other-than-linguistic relations—notions concerning for example infinite or unlimited ethical responsibility—as Martin Buber, Gabriel Marcel, and most recently Emmanuel Levinas among others have done. But since his death others have taken up that project, and who is to say finally he would not have collaborated in this effort as much as he did (or appeared to do) with liberalism in the 1960s, deconstruction in the 1970s, or with the romantic essentialism of National Socialism initially (“collaboration” in some sense seems to have been de Man’s theme throughout his life). Had these current discoveries come to light during his lifetime, can we really be sure that he would not have confronted them, for example, in the essays on religious and political discourse in Kierkegaard and Marx that he intended to write—now that he felt he had the performative apparatus of language under control, so to speak—and whose conclusions he suggested he knew as little about as anyone. “I have always maintained,” he told Stefano Rossi in the final interview he gave in 1983, “that one could approach the problems of ideology and by extension the problems of politics only on the basis of critical-linguistic analysis, which had to be done in its own terms, in the medium of language, and I felt I could approach those problems only after having achieved a certain control over those questions.”50 I feel now some control of a vocabulary and of a conceptual apparatus that can handle that. It was in working on Rousseau that I felt I was able to progress from purely linguistic analysis to questions which are really already of a political and ideological nature, so that now I feel to [sic] do it a little more openly, though in a different way than what generally passes as “critique of ideology.” It is taking rather than a value) to the extent that it is linguistic and not subjective. Morality is the same language aporia that gave rise to such concepts as ‘man’ or ‘love’ or ‘self ’ and not the cause of the consequences of such concepts. The passage to an ethical tonality does not result from a transcendental imperative but is the referential (and therefore unreliable) version of a linguistic confusion. Ethics (or, one should say, ethicity) is a discursive mode among others.” See Allegories of Reading, 206. 50 Resistance to Theory, 121.



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me back to Adorno and to attempts that have been made in that direction in Germany, to certain aspects of Heidegger, and I just feel that one has to face therefore the difficulty of certain explicitly political texts. It is also taking me back constantly to problems having to do with theology and with religious discourse and that’s why the juxtaposition of Marx with Kierkegaard as the two main readers of Hegel appears to me as the crux, as the problem, one has, in a way to solve… . I look forward to seeing what I will produce and know as little about it as anybody else.

So did we. The “melancholy spectacle” that he saw, in the posthumous preface to Rhetoric of Romanticism, as his life’s achievement on romanticism, is hardly the kind of epistle from Paul (to Jacques and others) we might have desired. And the fact that his life’s work should now once again be in danger of being discredited is probably an irony which he would have found sadly familiar. Moreover, unless some new texts turn up, matters are likely to remain roughly where they are and this discussion is likely to occupy the concern of critics of his work for quite some time. But there may at least be a way of formulating such feelings more concretely. In the middle of an essay in Het Vlaamsche Land on Max Dauthendey, “German Literature. A Great German Lyricist: Max Dauthendey,” he speaks of a writer he identifies as a kind of literary anthropologist who is able to feel especially well the sensibilities of the natives whose spirit he inhabits.51 Not only has he noticed their external, material appearance and life style, but he has also penetrated their temperament so profoundly that he can speak their language, interpret their mind, sense their drives. The achieved result is wonderfully beautiful, we are transported in a world which has nothing in common with ours any longer, not only because it offers an amazing wealth of colour and a changing splendour of landscapes, but most of all because it is governed by a state of mind which is that of the real native. 52

And in the midst of this essay, he offers a more detailed description of one of Dauthendey’s books which is extraordinary in any number of ways—not the least of which is stylistic (since this passage seems to be one of the few—perhaps the only—place(s) in the ten essays where de Man make available to us the plot of a literary work under discussion). “German Literature. A Great German Lyricist: Max Dauthendey,” Het Vlaamsche Land, September 6–7, 1942, 2. Ibid.

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The book is entitled “Raubmenschen” and the plot concerns “the theme of alienation.” “The suffering of a European who has been torn out of his own natural environment in order to live in a completely different atmosphere which, to him, is shocking, is depicted.” 53 The hero of the story is transported outside of his own ethical norms in a world where the holiest rules are not respected, where the most somber crimes can take place without anyone forbidding them. He consequently feels surrounded by mysterious, horrifying forces which try to attack him with all means and rob him of everything that is dear to him. An almost unbearable tension is thus achieved: one constantly feels the burden of a threat without being able to localize it, because it is in fact the entire country which attacks the foreign traveller and wants to master him. And here and there through this everincreasing atmosphere of anxiety shimmers the soft yearning for a distant native country, the sole place on earth where equilibrium and happiness can be found.54

The resonances of this passage in the present context are striking. In the light of the Holocaust and the deathcamps, does not the description of someone “transported outside of his own ethical norms in a world where the holiest rules are not respected, where the most somber crimes can take place without anyone forbidding them” sound ominously like the experience of the Jews? How are we to understand this “working through” of de Man’s, his fascination with this “exotic image?” Had he heard rumors of the camps or of the fate of the deportees during the previous month, and is this an expression of sympathy? Is it a personal expression which comes from his being thrust at twenty odd years into a project about which he has serious anxieties? Or, more ominously than either of these two possibilities, is it a Nazi fantasy, the dream of someone who longs for home and who will in fact construct the camps in order to act out those dreams in all of their complexity in the world—a kind of romanticism with a vengeance? Again, in light of the subsequent history of a man who has been displaced from the world he knew in the 1940s and forced to start again from scratch—in the face of the massive evidence of the failure of his earlier conclusions—could this image not also encompass the de Man of the 1960s, the 1970s, and 1980s who experienced “the suffering of a European who has been torn out of his Het Vlaamsche Land, September 6–7, 1942, 3. Ibid.

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own natural environment in order to live in a completely different atmosphere which, to him, is shocking?”55 But in what is no doubt the most ironic possibility, does not the passage resonate the most profoundly from beyond the grave? Is it not tempting to fantasize a de Man who is observing these current discoveries and the handling (or perhaps man-handling) of them by the antiquaries of our profession, a man who may constantly feel himself attacked by forces around him which are mysterious to him and which want to take from him everything that was dear to him, one who “constantly feels the burden of a threat without being able to localize it, because it is in fact the entire country which attacks the foreign traveller and wants to master him?” Does not the passage, in short, come to summarize (in the way images do—by collapsing consecutive sequences into a unique presentation) a life of alienation—of starting again from scratch, of being surrounded by massive evidences of the failure of one’s conclusions to amount to anything, and of the haunting return of these forgotten scenes like those from bad movies, repetitions which afflict like a guilty conscience? The narrative of disillusion is an attractive one. It seems to have attracted another de Man (who knew another Poulet and who also spent time in Switzerland), who also experienced himself as an exile from his native land as the result of political fortunes, and who took up residence in a foreign country after leaving Belgium. In the end, however, it became everyday clearer that this belief in progress rested on self-deception: however different things may be, they will not be better. One expects that the zone of catastrophe will give birth in suffering to all sorts of wonderful things that cannot be found in everyday life, but the miracle does not come to pass. The real product is only pains—and the regrets of the morning after. … By turning away from reality, that is, from the duties of the life placed before the individual, to the non-existent or the unattainable, the worst service to men that can be performed has been performed: the illusion that they are capable of shaping their own collective fate has led them to construct their own catastrophe.56 Ibid. “Four Early Texts by Paul de Man,” 6. De Graef cites another passage from Henrik de Man— from Après coup (Mémoires)—as the epigraph to his essay: “Certes, j’ai vécu à une époque où le mouvement auquel je m’étais donnée a traversé une phase de régression, de décadence, de décomposition. Qu’importe, puisque la douleur que j’en ai ressentie m’a poussé à repenser toutes

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In such a scenario of the good gone wrong, the “arch-debunker” turns out also to have been a self-deconstructor, a boa-self-deconstructor (to neologize from a name that was once attached to the “contemporary revolutions” with which he associated himself).57 And the “reading lesson” to be gleaned from this discovery of demonic collaboration turns out to be more about the “allegorical figure of Death” than any of the antiquarians suspected (although Derrida, who was perhaps closer intellectually to de Man than anyone, had already identified in the theme of an impossible mourning a critical path through his work). But as before there is no more (or better) reason to make this claim than any other. What is clear is simply the difference between the earliest and the latest work and the vastly more comprehensive stature of the latter. The conversion from Paul to Saul may be an unlikely theme for literary critical biography (and somewhat more than we bargained for). But perhaps today and in this connection especially it confers upon the haunting medieval anti-Semitic refrain “until the conversion of the Jews” (which Christians took, even through the end of the Renaissance, to be synonymous with “the end of time”) more resonance than we might have expected (or wanted). In the shadow of Hegel (who thought he was witnessing the end of history as he was completing his Phenomenology, and with whose totalitarian ideas we continue to struggle—via the story of Oedipus, the memory of the Holocaust, or Otherwise), perhaps a sentence which links the fate of the non-Jew irretrievably with the fate of the Jew is not inappropriate. Paul Adolf de Man begins as far from Jewish thought as possible and there are no signs that he was ever interested in Judaism religiously (“he didn’t seem to have a religious bone in his body” Hartman writes half-facetiously). But in his critique of monumentalism and the “madness of words”—and in his recent talk about the way in which language originates in the otherwise-than-human—it may be that those who would today mount an ethics of reading (Jewish or otherwise) will come to identify in his most mature work—as painful as it might have been for him to speak in these terms—an authentic support. The challenge we face on the basis of these new discoveries is whether we can continue to read that critique in de Man’s writing without defacing it once more, mes pensées, au point de me sentir aujourd’hui en contact plus réel avec les faits que quand j’ai commencé a vouloir agir sur eux.” It is interesting that the same words that Paul de Man has used— regression, decadence, decomposition—to identify threats from the outside are employed here to refer to the whole period. Paul de Man himself will, of course, make the same kind of metonymic shift in “The Literature of Nihilism.” 57 For an interesting discussion between Abrams and de Man, on the occasion of de Man’s last public lecture at Cornell, regarding the relation between the understanding of language that de Man is proposing and humanism, see Resistance to Theory, 99–102.



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without collaborating again in its misunderstanding (a misunderstanding which the work itself, taken in its entirety, has dramatized), or perhaps, more faithful to de Man, without remaining blind to the collaboration and defacement in which we will inevitably participate. “I feel myself compelled to repeated frustration,” de Man writes, in The Rhetoric of Romanticism, “in a persistent attempt to write as if a dialectical summation were possible beyond the breaks and interruptions that the readings disclose … . Such is the cost of discursive elegance, a small price to pay, perhaps, compared to the burden of constantly falling back to nought.” 58

The Rhetoric of Romanticism, ix.

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3

Witnessing the Impossible: Laub, Felman, and the Testimony of Trauma

At Auschwitz … ‘more was real than was possible.’ And the impossible was done by some and suffered by others. Emile Fackenheim1 Testimony is at once a very powerful and an exceedingly frustrating book.2 It is powerful because it articulates, for the first time, to my knowledge, a generalized theory of testimony (or of witnessing), and thereby addresses a need which has been felt in the humanities for some time now. Moreover, it applies this theory to a number of critical subject matters: to the historical upheavals by which our age has come increasingly to be defined (principally, the Holocaust), and to a series of postwar manifestations of such change in literature, literary criticism, pedagogical practice, and most recently, film. But it is equally frustrating because, while being very smart, at times dazzling in its insights, it leads the reader to conclusions that far from resolving the problems that it raises reproduce the very difficulties it highlights and as a result disappoints the expectations it encourages. A failure to provide an adequate theory of Holocaust witnessing is hardly itself a sin these days and may in fact prove more common and more telling of our predicament than their proposed solutions. But since these authors have consciously and designedly taken it upon themselves to offer such a theory, the fact that the result misleads, at a moment and in an arena where the stakes are increasingly high (and quite apart from the performative manner in which the book at times presents itself in the hands of each of these writers), renders that deficit somewhat more outstanding. Fackenheim is quoting Hans Jonas. See “Holocaust” in A. A. Cohen and P. Mendes-Flohr, eds. Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought (1988), 402. 2 The following essay is based upon a short review of Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (1992), that appeared in Modern Judaism 12 (1992): 203–17. It is used with the permission of the Johns Hopkins University Press. 1

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At the heart of the book is a notion of “impossible witness.” The notion derives from Dori Laub’s work—as psychoanalytic practitioner, as founder and interviewer of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale, and as child survivor himself of the camps—and refers to the silence that commonly envelopes the Holocaust survivor’s voice about the events to which s/he has been cognizant witness, and yet about which they have been unable to speak. The impossibility of this talk has issued from the overwhelming nature of the traumatic event itself—one which has structured and shaped the victim’s subsequent experience in a thousand ways and yet which has appeared up until now only in the displaced form of an uncanny repetition or acting out of its innermost conflicts. The situation Laub describes, of course, is not unlike the post-traumatic responses often associated in psychodynamic literature with other overwhelming events—those produced by warfare, for example, or prepubescent (and especially violent) sexual encounters with a parent or parent surrogate. Like such other traumatizing occurrences, Laub argues, the Holocaust has occasioned the disappearance of the real Other (the addressed ethical interlocutor, the “Thou” of Buber’s “I–Thou” relation) and as a result all that remains is a kind of black hole which swallows up any attempt to enter or even observe it. As a consequence, there are, in effect, Laub argues, “no witnesses” to these events: no outsiders or bystanders who might have described them from a distance; but equally no insiders, neither victims nor perpetrators, who might relate them from within. Not because the event did not occur (and both authors are careful to distinguish this argument from the revisionist position that the reality did not take place) but, to the contrary, because it occurred only too overbearingly. We can only bear witness to what we can bear to witness, these authors assert. To declare that you neutrally observed human beings being put into an oven at Auschwitz is to discredit that neutrality in the act of proclaiming it. On the other hand, to declare that you were either complicit with such monstrosity or its victim (or both) is to invalidate the cognitive witness—the detached observation—you would bear no less, moreover, in direct proportion to the intensity of your participation. No position, in this writer’s view, is “untainted” or “uncontaminated” and not the least the position of those who observed (or failed to observe) the horror close up. While Laub confines the illustration of his theoretical discussion largely to his analytic practice, his interview work at the Archive, and his engagement with professional historians at conferences about claims within survivor testimony



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that they would deem historically “inaccurate,” Shoshana Felman extends these considerations to her teaching at Yale, to two novels by Camus, to Paul de Man’s silence about his wartime journalism for the Belgian collaborationist newspaper Le Soir, and to Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah.3 Introducing two samples from the Video Archives in classes where formerly only “testimonial” literature was considered becomes the occasion for a “crisis of witnessing” within the confines of the course itself, one that requires the assistance of a professional counselor— in this case, Dori Laub.4 The famous French existentialist Camus, whose work has often been read in romantic and moral terms, must now be reinterpreted as transforming himself from a postwar liberal humanist—in The Plague—to someone for whom precisely such crippling assumptions and failed confessions have become his very subject matter—in The Fall. The silence of Paul de Man about his wartime writings—and especially about his participation in an anti-Semitic issue of Le Soir—must be understood, in Felman’s view, as the revelation of a similar autobiographical “fall” which would render any more “direct” confession necessarily inauthentic, the exposure and enactment of an “impossible witness” which aligns him, heroically it would appear, as a kind of “brother” to figures like Walter Benjamin (who took his own life trying to escape from the Nazis and who continued to fascinate de Man) and with those survivors of the Holocaust (described, for example, by Primo Levi in The Drowned and the Saved) who have similarly chosen not to speak. And finally Claude Lanzmann’s film gives voice, in the author’s view, in a breakthrough cinematic gesture, to the return of the possibility of testimonial discourse within the desacralized and desacralizing context of the one-on-one video interview. The “crisis of witnessing” which for this author constitutes the Holocaust, becomes in Lanzmann’s film, as in Laub’s practice and his interview work, visible itself, as the survivors—the bystanders as well as the participants—begin, in some cases for the first time, to speak about their experiences. These ideas are not to be treated lightly, if only because what is problematic about them is so thoroughly bound up with what is powerful and genuinely positive. Although it is by no means new, the idea that the Holocaust is a watershed event in modern European history, that all of postwar Western culture as a consequence needs to be reexamined in its light, and that the conflict Testimony, 59–60. Ibid., 48.

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is far from over, seems hard to overstate, and these authors do well to remind us of it. Moreover, the suggestion that in historical study we need to move beyond the claim that the Holocaust is simply “unrepresentable,” that perhaps this claim—which every survivor makes—should be regarded as a symptomatic rather than a representational assertion, and that in particular trauma theory— as outlined by Freud (for example, in his discussion of Nachträglichkeit) or more recently by the object relations theorists—is especially well suited to the problem, seems singularly powerful. In a public lecture, delivered originally at Cornell University, Holocaust historian Saul Friedländer, for example, draws our attention to both this methodological dilemma and the value of precisely such a psychodynamic psychoanalytic solution.5 And finally, the advent, on the one hand, of the use of video in the recording of survivor testimonies (as a powerful educational tool), and, on the other, of Claude Lanzmann’s film, Shoah (as a guide to help us recognize the aestheticizing and anaesthetizing effects of earlier representational treatments—for example, Night and Fog—as well as introducing us to the real archives, the “living documents,” whose words have been available to us since the event itself but of which we have chosen not to avail ourselves), are again matters about which others—Geoffrey Hartman and Lawrence Langer, for example—have written eloquently and extensively, and these authors do well, in my view, to lend their support.6 But the provocative, performative, and sensationalist manner in which these authors formulate their conclusions and the particular understandings at which they arrive seem self-defeating, and, as such, more reflective of the difficulties they describe than an adequate account of them. Dori Laub’s discussion is a case in point. Laub contributes two articles to the volume, one in which he comments upon his work with survivors and trauma victims in his analytic practice and the Archive, another in which in addition he expands upon his own status as a child survivor and offers a theory of testimony Saul Friedländer, “History, Memory, and Trauma,” lecture delivered at Cornell University, December 4, 1991. See Friedländer 1992 and 1993; also Hartman (1994), 252–63. For Geoffrey Hartman, see “Learning from the Survivors: Notes on the Video Archives at Yale,” in Remembering for the Future (1989), 1713–1717; “Preserving the Personal Story: The Role of Video Documentation,” Dimensions: A Journal of Holocaust Studies 1 (1) (Spring 1985): 14–18; “The Book of the Destruction,” in S. Friedländer (ed.), Probing the Limits of Representation (1992), 318–34; and “Learning from Survivors: The Yale Testimony Project” (1995). For Lawrence Langer, see Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (1991). Tony Brinkley and Steven Youra delivered a brilliant paper, “The ‘Alarming Nature of Darkness’: Witnessing Shoah,” at a seminar at the 1988 meeting of the International Association of Philosophy and Literature, which merits attention in this connection. See “Tracing Shoah.”

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in relation to the Holocaust. In the first article, he cites the relation between a listener and a patient in psychodynamic terms that seem entirely suitable as a potential model for discussion of the Holocaust. The listener to the narrative of extreme human pain, of massive psychic trauma, faces a unique situation. In spite of the presence of ample documents, of searing artifacts and of fragmentary memoirs of anguish, he comes to look for something that is in fact non-existent; a record that has as yet to be made. Massive trauma precludes its registration; the observing and recording mechanism of the human mind are temporarily knocked out, malfunction. The victim’s narrative—the very process of bearing witness to massive trauma—does indeed begin with someone who testifies to an absence, to an event that has not yet come into existence, in spite of the overwhelming and compelling nature of the reality of its occurrence. While historical evidence to the event which constitutes the trauma may be abundant and documented in vast supply, the trauma—as a known event and not simply as an overwhelming shock—has not been truly witnessed yet, not been taken cognizance of. The emergence of the narrative which is being listened to—and heard—is, therefore, the process and the place wherein the cognizance, the “knowing” of the event is given birth to. The listener, therefore, is a party to the creation of knowledge de novo. The testimony to the trauma thus includes its hearer, who is, so to speak, the blank screen on which the event comes to be inscribed for the first time.7

The absent memory of trauma, however, on the part of the victim, does not preclude the trauma from “showing up” in other ways. The continued power of the silenced memory of genocide as an overriding, structuring and shaping force, may be, however, neither truly known by the survivors, nor recognized as representing in effect, memory of trauma. It finds its way into their lives, unwittingly, through an uncanny repetition of events that duplicate—in structure and in impact—the traumatic past.8

And in fact it is upon this “uncanny repetition” of these events that the possibility of effecting a change—through transference—depends. To undo this entrapment in a fate that cannot be known, cannot be told, but can only be repeated, a therapeutic process—a process of constructing a narrative, of reconstructing a history and essentially, of re-externalizing the event—has to be set in motion. This re-externalization of the event can occur and take Testimony, 57. Ibid., 65.

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effect only when one can articulate and transmit the story, literally transfer it to another outside oneself and then take it back again, inside. Telling thus entails a reassertion of the hegemony of reality and a re-externalization of the evil that affected and contaminated the trauma victim.9

Thus far, Dori Laub’s argument seems to me trenchant, bound to offer us a helpful theoretical elaboration at once of the silence with which Holocaust survivors come to the interview (or analytic session), the stifled cognitive process in which it originates, and the possibility for its future transmission and transformation as conscious welcomed disclosure. It would seem relatively easy to move on this basis from the more localized contexts of the psychoanalytic session or testimonial interview to the more generalized historical context of the Holocaust per se. But for some reason when the shift occurs in the second article, curious things begin to happen. On the basis of the many Holocaust testimonies I have listened to, I would like to suggest a certain way of looking at the Holocaust that would reside in the following theoretical perspective: that what precisely made a Holocaust out of the event is the unique way in which, during its historical occurrence, the event produced no witnesses. Not only in effect did the Nazis try to exterminate the physical witnesses of their crime; but the inherently incomprehensible and deceptive psychological structure of the event precluded its own witnessing, even by its very victims.10

The shift is subtle but decisive. On the one hand, the scenario is familiar: the event precluded its own registration. On the other, something new has happened. For one thing, the formulation is different. In the earlier formulation, Dori Laub talks of the absent memory of the trauma victim. But to say there were “no witnesses” begins to sound as if either there was no one there at all (apart from the participants) or no one who was there was capable of reporting it—although nothing in Dori Laub’s earlier formulation suggested that bystanders or perpetrators to the trauma were crippled by it in the same manner as its victims. Let us accept the suggestion (which seems reasonable enough) that perpetrators and bystanders to traumatic events may be affected in ways that distort their ability to report what took place. To proceed on that basis to talk of such Ibid., 69. Ibid., 80.

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a massive mental blackout or “malfunction” on a planetary scale without more explanatory discussion seems at the very least odd. And even if we were to grant the appearance of such a world-historical collective amnesia (an event, that is, for which there were “no witnesses” either within or without), that would still not establish that the evidence for the trauma is lacking. Evidence of the trauma—in the modalities of displacement and repetition about which Dori Laub earlier wrote so compellingly—is available everywhere. It is one thing to say that things are not readable in the customary manner, another that they are not readable at all. The Holocaust is readable, witnessable, if not by taking cognizance of the event, then by taking cognizance of our behavior since, of the ways in which our behavior breaks down or fails us, the myriad ways in which the trauma repeats itself. “The real,” Lacan says, and Dori Laub reminds us, “always returns to itself.” Yet what follows makes clear that it is upon this later exclusionary formulation that the writer now wishes to insist. A witness is a witness to the truth of what happens during an event. During the era of the Nazi persecution of the Jews, the truth of the event could have been recorded in perception and in memory, either from within or from without, by Jews, or any one of a number of “outsiders.” Outsider witnesses could have been, for instance, the next-door-neighbor, a friend, a business partner, community institutions including the police and the courts of law, as well as bystanders and potential rescuers and allies from other countries. Jews from all over the world especially from Palestine and the United States, could have been such possible outside witnesses. Even the executioner who was totally oblivious to the plea for life, was potentially such an “outside” witness. Ultimately, God himself could be the witness. As the event of the Jewish genocide unfolded however, most actual or potential witnesses failed one-byone to occupy their position as a witness, and at a certain point it seemed as if there was no one left to witness what was taking place. (Italics added).11

These are very strange remarks. The “truth of the event could have been recorded in perception and in memory?” Wasn’t it? Wasn’t it recorded in both? In Adam Czerniakow’s diaries, for example—about which Raul Hilberg speaks in Lanzmann’s film, and in the memories of the seventeen hundred individuals whose testimonies are on file at the Video Archive of which Dori Laub is the

Ibid., 80–1.

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founder?12 Wasn’t it recorded, again in Lanzmann’s film, by Abraham Bomba, who cut the hair of the victims inside the crematoria at Auschwitz just before they were gassed, or by Filip Müller, who also worked within the same installation, as part of the Sonderkommando whose job it was to remove the bodies from the gas chambers once the killing operation had taken place? Or finally by Franz Suchomel, the Nazi camp officer who sings for Lanzmann the song he “taught” the victims to sing before they were whipped and beaten through the camouflaged funnel structure that led them to the crematoria’s inner chambers? And by “outsiders” as well, both Jews and non-Jews alike. Was it not registered by Jan Karski, the Polish official, who himself accompanied two Jews (who had escaped from the Warsaw ghetto) back into the ghetto where he experienced a universe which was “not a world?” Or by American journalists who published stories of the atrocities in no less a publication than The New York Times, albeit often buried within the newspaper rather than prominently displayed?13 Defenses against recognizing what is taking place around us when the cost of that recognition is too high are one thing. Filip Müller speaks of the experience of the “Czech family camp” which refused to acknowledge—in fact silenced—a woman who attempted to warn the group as they were undressing within the crematorium in Auschwitz of the impending disaster. But Dori Laub speaks in more categorical terms, as if in some way, for bystanders and participants alike, the task was theoretically impossible. There is another aspect of the passage that is puzzling. Dori Laub writes “at a certain point it seemed as if there was no one left to witness what was taking place.” “Seemed” to who? If there was no one there able to bear witness, to “whom did these events ‘seem’ anything”? The words begin to suggest (however slightly) that in fact a monitoring perspective remains, although the author has chosen for the moment (for whatever reason) not to reveal it, and yet about which there is clearly more to be said. After detailing these “failures,” Laub turns to the failure of “inside” witnesses. In addition, it was inconceivable that any historical insider could remove herself [sic] sufficiently from the contaminating power of the event so as to remain a fully lucid, affected witness, that is, to be sufficiently detached from Hilberg (1979). On the reaction of the American press to the Holocaust, see Deborah Lipstadt, Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933–1945 (1986). Raul Hilberg addressed this matter in an unpublished paper delivered at a public conference on “The Effects of the Holocaust on the Humanities” at the University of Minneapolis in March 1989.

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the inside, so as to stay entirely outside of the trapping roles, and the consequent identities, either of the victim or of the executioner. No observer could remain untainted, that is, maintain an integrity—a wholeness and separateness—that could keep itself uncompromised, unharmed, by his or her very witnessing. The perpetrators, in their attempt to rationalize the unprecedented scope of the destructiveness, brutally imposed upon their victims a delusional ideology whose grandiose coercive pressure totally excluded and eliminated the possibility of an unviolated, unencumbered, and thus sane, point of reference in the witness.14

No observer? All victims were delusional? A heterogeneity seems here to have been hammered into a uniformity. And in the following remarks we may begin to learn why. What I feel is therefore crucial to emphasize is the following: it was not only the reality of the situation and the lack of responsiveness of bystanders or the world that accounts for the fact that history was taking place with no witness: it was also the very circumstance of being inside the event that made unthinkable the very notion that a witness could exist, that is, someone who could step outside of the coercively totalitarian and dehumanizing frame of reference in which the event was taking place, and provide an independent frame of reference through which the event could be observed. One might say that there was, thus, historically no witness to the Holocaust, either from the outside or from inside the event.15

How are we to understand these remarks? The conclusion is the same as that of the formulation of the earlier article—the massively traumatic nature of the event precluded its registration. But where are the “ample documents,” the “searing artifacts,” the “abundant” “historical evidence” of the earlier formulation? We are left to conclude that either this time the situation is really radically different, a situation truly unprecedented on the world-historical scene—a collective amnesia on a world-wide scale. Or that something else has occurred. In the remarks by which Dori Laub concludes his argument we may get a glimpse of what this “something else” may be. Suddenly his words begin to exceed the boundaries of the context in which they are contained and earlier talk about “being inside the event” begins to take on new importance. After Testimony, 81. Ibid., 80.

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speaking of the radical abandonment of the survivor, the collapse of the possibility of appeal to any outside agency, of a “Thou” to whom one can address oneself, he remarks: when one cannot turn to a “you” one cannot say “thou” even to oneself. The Holocaust created in this way a world in which one could not bear witness to oneself. The Nazi system turned out therefore to be foolproof, not only in the sense that there were in theory no outside witnesses but also in the sense that it convinced its victims, the potential witnesses from the inside, that what was affirmed about their “otherness” and their inhumanity was correct and that their experiences were no longer communicable even to themselves, and therefore perhaps never took place. This loss of the capacity to be a witness to oneself and thus to witness from the inside is perhaps the true meaning of annihilation, for when one’s history is abolished, one’s identity ceases to exist as well.16

In other words, in the formulation within the second article, Dori Laub has adopted and applied globally the perspective he would identify within the first as “the victim’s narrative,” a position from which, until certain changes take place between the analyst and the analysand, no memory of the event is possible; memory of the event is absent. From within this “victimary” perspective, there are therefore in the wake of the trauma, literally “no bystanders,” “no perpetrators,” “no victims,” and we can understand how it may begin to seem to Laub as though the event “perhaps never took place.” And in this manner, then, we may understand why he wrote above “at a certain point it seemed as if there was no one left to witness what was taking place.” The “crisis of witnessing,” the “impossibility” of witness that the author articulates in the second article as his theory of the Holocaust (and of testimony) per se expresses most powerfully the child survivor’s own sense of the collapse of any independent parental monitoring framework from which the terrible things that were happening to him could be observed and to which he could appeal, or, perhaps, reading this last phrase “in which one could not bear witness to oneself” a little more openly, in which one did things which one cannot in retrospect bear witnessing. From one perspective, then, from the psychoanalytic perspective as defined for us in Dori Laub’s first essay, one which observes a child survivor (even includes a picture of him) who has lost the capacity to be a witness to himself and who grows into an adult who is able to articulately identify this loss, these Ibid., 82.

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words must be regarded as a therapeutic triumph. And in this context, the curious move that Dori Laub makes between the first and the second formulation of trauma theory, makes sense. The book itself, in addition to being about testimony, is an example of it, an elaborate evidentiary deposition at least in the case of one author, and with regard to one theoretical move—that of the child survivor who remembers a “holocaust” to which there were no witnesses, nowhere to turn, no one to turn to, no appeals to be made, and as a result who inhabited a world without parents and consequently without the equipment for self-construction. In this regard the essay itself has become a kind of scrapbook in which the author proudly displays for us an early photograph of himself.17 Does the same sequence—a move between observation and conclusion— follow in the second case as well? The personal history of Shoshana Felman is not given as it is in the case of Dori Laub. But at least in the case of Paul de Man, who is acknowledged as her mentor, teacher, friend, in the Comparative Literature Department at Yale, a possibility suggests itself. Is her essay on his silence, an essay in which the young collaborator is transformed into a “brother” of Walter Benjamin (who took his own life trying to escape from the Nazi persecution on the Franco-Spanish border), and his silence honored in the same manner as the silence of the survivors about which Primo Levi speaks, not itself at least in part a testimony to her loyalty to this deceased elder counselor? And is this very book, written in collaboration with analyst Dori Laub (to whom she turned as a counselor when a crisis threatened the continuation of her class (48)), in which she registers the resurrection of others who, having begun in silence about the horrific events taking place around them, finally expressed— in one manner or another—their complicity with them, the fruitful product of their joint labor, a birth (or rebirth) of sorts, a positive collaboration, in other words, in which past fathers are honored and new fathers embraced, a happy ending from which all may benefit? Her essay on the “necessary” silence of Paul de Man and the “impossibility” for him of any apologetic or confessional discourse, and, concomitantly, on the “task” of translation as his “positive necessity of accounting,” his “belated witness to the events of World War II,” allows us to make this point more fully.18 “It is not a coincidence,” Felman writes, “that de Man ends his career in Beneath the full-page photo on page 77, Laub includes as a caption some words which appear earlier: “This essay will be based on this enigma of one child’s memory of trauma” (76). Testimony, 152 and 153.

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a reflection not merely on translation and on silence but specifically on Walter Benjamin.”19 And its complex dynamics are articulated for us in its opening pages. In fact, if we had only her reflections on de Man’s silence (and “impossible” confession) and his interest in translation (or “accounting”) or only her reflections on de Man’s early intellectual life as a context for understanding his later critical positions, we would have less difficulty. It is the linking of the two— which she sees as one of necessity—that finally conflates and confuses matters. For it is hard to imagine her essay beginning more effectively. She opens with the astute observation that one of the first things de Man did after the war was publish a translation of Melville’s Moby Dick in which the narrator accuses a stranger of pretending to harbor a secret. “It is the easiest thing in the world,” she cites the narrator as saying, “for a man to look as if he had a great secret in him.” The irony here of course (to which she draws our attention) is double since the author of this Flemish translation of the American classic does guard such a secret: namely, that the “formerly unknown youthful activities of this man included writing, in 1941 and 1942, a literary column for Le Soir … that functioned … under Nazi supervision as a pro-German, collaborationist journal” (120). And in grappling with the implications of this discovery she cannot but reflect upon the retrospective reevaluation of de Man’s work that the unearthing of this autobiographical cache of texts impels. “I will suggest,” she concludes in the opening section, “that Paul de Man’s [later] writing is precisely motivated and informed” by the “central questions” these earlier writings raise for us, and that “the moral his writing implicitly propounds is that of an unyielding ethics, of a rigorous commitment to these questions in a constant intellectual and moral effort whose overriding concern is: how not to compromise a truth which, he now knows, no one can own but to which he can continue to wake up. How not to compromise the action and henceforth the endeavor, of awakening.” What are those “central questions” and how does his later writing articulate them? She begins with a reflection on Primo Levi’s notion of the difficulty of judgment with regard to the Holocaust. “It is a judgment,” she cites Primo Levi as saying, “that we would like to entrust only to those who found themselves in similar circumstances and had the opportunity to test for themselves what it Ibid., 154.

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meant to act in a state of coercion … I know of no human tribunal to which one could delegate the judgment.”20 Then she generalizes on that basis. The moral implications of the Holocaust are such that our task today is to find ways, precisely, to rearticulate the question of ethics outside the problematic— and the comfort—of a judgment that can be delegated to no human tribunal.21

And finally she applies this ethical dilemma to the specific case of de Man. The crucial ethical dimensions of a historical experience like de Man’s need to be probed by being measured up against the incommensurability of that experience. No doubt, in being taken in by the seduction and deception exercised by Germany at the beginning of the Second World War, the twentyyear-old Paul de Man made a grave mistake in judgment in failing to foresee and to assess the disastrous impact of the Nazis as soon as they took over Belgium. But the question is: given this fatal political mistake, given such a radical failure of vision, such a lapse of consciousness experienced early in one’s life, how can one wake up? What would waking up mean? And what can one consequently do, for oneself and for another, not simply with the deadweight of the past but, specifically, with the mistake and with one’s own awakening? I will suggest that Paul de Man’s writing is precisely motivated and informed by these central questions.22

It is clearly not, in other words, in her view, that de Man failed to engage these earlier matters, that he somehow “forgot” them or evaded them, as so many accounts in the popular press would have it, but on the contrary that he never stopped engaging them. His subsequent history in her view is a lifelong struggle with their profound moral ambiguities and ethical implications. On the one hand, her claim is hard to gainsay. The indomitable theorist of blindness and insight, of the inseparability of blindness from insight, of the former from the latter, is suddenly and fully exposed within the context of his own personal struggles, and that theoretical understanding he spent his subsequent life developing becomes compelling in an entirely new fashion in light of those prior autobiographical engagements. And had she remained within the purview of that conclusion, we would indeed have little with which to quarrel. De Man’s interest in romanticism is The Drowned and the Saved (1988), 44. Testimony,123. Ibid., 23.

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now readable in a powerful new way. All of the older terms by which Coleridge for example had defined (or redefined) a romantic sensibility in the Englishspeaking world—allegory, symbol, irony, and metaphor among others—could (and should) now in de Man’s view be reexamined, showing the ways in which the writers with regard to whom Coleridge (and others) invoked these terms already fully challenged such conceptualizations in their own work, and that the second generation of English romantics—Shelley and Keats, for example—built their writing careers upon precisely the continued pursuit of such challenges (in Wordsworth and Coleridge as elsewhere). The rhetoric of analogy and synchrony that dominated both that older writing and to some extent that of the romantics themselves was exposed for de Man as a moment in a more comprehensive “rhetoric of temporality,” which is to say, a more radical diachrony, and the consequent impossibility of generating any authentic narrative of history (Hegel or no Hegel) before the stark and disastrous reality to which they were now awakening. But the author goes on to make another claim and therein lay for us the difficulty. She argues that the very announcement of this prior claim and this larger context for de Man was untenable: that its ownership was impossible, that silence was “inevitable” (124) and that only within a displaced and dislocated occurrence (for example, in such writing on the romantics and in his essays on translation of the classical writers by some of the romantics—like Friedrich Hölderlin—and on the concept of translation itself—in a writer like Walter Benjamin) could the endeavor begin to be undertaken. “Paul de Man’s writing,” she notes, “implicitly propounds … an unyielding ethics, … a rigorous commitment to … questions … whose overriding concern is: how not to compromise a truth which, he now knows, no one can own but to which he can continue to wake up” (my emphasis). How does that follow? How does “he now know” that? Why is ownership suddenly impossible, silence inevitable, dislocation exclusively the road to articulation? The issue would appear to issue from ownership. If ownership is not possible, silence and alternative modalities of expression may become more attractive. In fact, in the above passage, I would suggest, two distinct notions of ownership seem to have become conflated and confused: one concerning propriety (whose is it? to whom does it belong?), and another concerning responsibility (who is answerable for it? culpable for it? willing to say “that is mine”?). In the first case, one imagines a “truth” (regarding the past) that one can own or not own (regard as my property or not regard as my property);



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which may be universal (in which case no one can own it) or particular (in which case I can own it) but to which one can in either event become increasingly aware. In the second, one imagines an historical event of the past for which one assumes (or does not assume) answerability. The confusion appears to derive from her introduction of Primo Levi and his caution against levying rash judgment. Do not judge the other individual, and especially the Holocaust survivor, until you have walked a mile in his or her shoes, Levi appears in effect to be saying. The idea is not unfamiliar to his readers from his writings on “the grey zone.” And Lawrence Langer, a literary scholar with interests in the Holocaust, introduces similar cautionary strictures in accounts of episodes in which behavior occurring in one setting is summarily judged from perspectives originating within another. It is hard to imagine any human tribunal from which such universal judgment constructed in accord with that condition would be possible, Levi concludes. And Felman agrees. “The moral implications of the Holocaust are such that our task today is to find ways, precisely, to rearticulate the question of ethics outside the problematic—and the comfort—of a judgment that can be delegated to no human tribunal” (123). And she applies the stricture specifically to de Man. “The crucial ethical dimensions of a historical experience like de Man’s need to be probed by being measured up against the incommensurability of that experience” (123). But it is one thing to offer a powerful motivator for what he did in his subsequent professional life—looking to romantic writers as repeating dramas familiar to him from earlier experience—and another to say that as a consequence it is impossible for him to talk authentically about what took place in his life or because his experience was incommensurable with that of others; and second, that if it did take place, such authentic talk would of necessity assume the form of a confession or mode of apology, in which case he would in effect “compromise a truth which, he now knows, no one can own but to which he can continue to wake up.” How does it come about, we may ask, that he “now knows” that? Why is it that because one’s experience is deemed “incommensurable” with that of others, “no one can own” up to, or take responsibility for, what they have done? And if that is in fact the case (and let us grant for the sake of argument that it is), then what precisely constitutes “waking up” to it? How can de Man continue to awaken to his own role, his own “failure of vision,” regarding the Nazis, and yet find it impossible to say so authentically because his experience is “incommensurable”?

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And finally, supposing that claim to be an accurate one, and that some impossible standard of authenticity were to kick in at any moment de Man tried to speak authentically about his past, to own his role in his failures, whether confessionally, or apologetically (they are not necessarily the same), or in some other manner, and that some such standard invalidated his talk, why does that leave us with silence as the only alternative? And conversely if ownership is indeed impossible, how does engaging the task of the translator effectively accomplish the action of awakening, assuming of course that ownership is something other than awakening? “Words cannot describe what took place, but I was there. I witnessed it.” That is, of course, the credo of every survivor, of every individual who has formerly been a victim and lives to tell about it. What happened to me is incommensurable with what you know in the outside world. Yet I know that it happened to me. Is that what Felman has done, cast Paul de Man as a Holocaust survivor who cannot speak about his experience, cast him as a victim of trauma? De Man may indeed have been a victim of trauma. It is hard to imagine, given what we now know about his relations to his brother (who, like Walter Benjamin, took his life) or his mother (who took hers a year to the day of the death of her son and was discovered by the young de Man hanging in the closet) prior to the coming of the Nazis, that he was not so traumatized. And it may in fact be that he found it impossible to speak about his experiences and that silence and translation turned out to be indeed the best he could do under the circumstances. It is not our place to judge him or his strategies in that regard. On the other hand, to say that de Man was a victim or a survivor of trauma or extremity does nothing to link the strategy of silence on his part with an awakening to the failures of the Nazi past, to a perfomativity that in the author’s view remarkably enough identifies that silence later in the essay with the assumption of full responsibility and ownership. Here is the culminating remark of the author on that silence. In the testimony of a work that performs actively an exercise of silence not as simple silence but as the absolute refusal of any trivializing or legitimizing discourse (of apology, of narrative, or of psychologizing explanation of recent history), de Man articulates, thus, neither—as some have argued—an empirical (or psychological) refusal to confess, but the incapacity of apologetic discourse to account for history as Holocaust, the ethical impossibility of a confession that historically and philosophically, cannot take place. This complex articulation of the impossibility of confession embodies, paradoxically enough, not a



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denial of the author’s guilt but, on the contrary, the most radical and irrevocable historical responsibility.23

When Shoshana Felman tells us that de Man’s silence implicates us, and even that his “incapacity to tell us more about it” implicates us, and even that “we are still wounded by the Holocaust” we can agree enthusiastically and embrace the expansion of our understanding of the importance and meaning of de Man’s later critical strategies vis-à-vis his own earlier experience. The reductive notion of the writing as a “cover-up” or as a psychological defense against the past paradoxically situates us outside these moral and historical implications. It thus fails to grasp what is essentially at stake: how de Man articulates our silence; how today we are all implicated in de Man’s ordeal and in his incapacity to tell us more about it… . The question that should be addressed in light of de Man’s history is therefore not how we can dismiss or forget de Man but why we must relate why we cannot escape from de Man’s writings. how his later writing, the mature work, is inextricably tied up with an historical event that whether we like it or not whether we have forgotten it or not is still a critical and immediate part of our present how both de Man’s silence and his speech articulate and thus can help is understand the ways in which we are still wounded by the Holocaust and the ways in which we harbor the unfinished business of this recent history within us.24

But when she explains that witness for him was impossible and silence was the only possible strategy, or, “how, having faced what he faced, de Man chose an inevitable syntax, and an inevitable understated (silent) language,” then it would appear something else has taken over. The reductive account, she writes, “fails to grasp what is essentially at stake: how de Man articulates our silence; how today we are all implicated in de Man’s ordeal and in his incapacity to tell us more about it.” But then she adds a clause that we removed from the above passage in order to separate our implication in de Man’s later writings from the “impossibility” in her view for him of its articulation: “how, having faced what he faced, de Man chose an inevitable syntax, and an inevitable understated (silent) language.” How does that third clause in the sentence simply expand what is said in the first two clauses? How does “facing what he faced” render silence “inevitable?” Is she claiming by further implication that others who faced what he faced Ibid., 52. Ibid., 124.

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and who chose unlike Paul to speak about it were somehow less authentic? Was his uncle, Henrik de Man, who clearly “faced what he faced” with regard to the Nazis, who in fact got him his job at Le Soir, and who chose to speak about it after the war (even to write a memoir about it), less authentic than his nephew who regarded silence as “inevitable”? If silence was inevitable for Paul de Man for psychological reasons, or for reasons associated with his own earlier traumatic encounters, does that mean silence was inevitable for everyone, or that somehow because the younger de Man was a theorist of the rhetorical at Yale his silence was superior to theirs, that his silence somehow performed acknowledgment and responsibility and waking up while theirs performed only cowardice or weakness? How do we come by the knowledge that de Man’s silence “performs actively an exercise of silence not as simple silence but as the absolute refusal of any trivializing or legitimizing discourse (of apology, of narrative, or of psychologizing explanation of recent history)”; that “de Man articulates” not “an empirical (or psychological) refusal to confess, but the incapacity of apologetic discourse to account for history as Holocaust”; that his “complex articulation of the impossibility of confession embodies, paradoxically enough, not a denial of the author’s guilt but, on the contrary, the most radical and irrevocable historical responsibility”? What if his silence really is just a “denial of the author’s guilt”—for perfectly understandable reasons, and as the result of extraordinarily traumatizing circumstances, and out of which he managed to construct some of the most astute and sophisticated and insightful critical methodology that we have, a methodology and an insight that founds itself precisely upon the degree to which we sustain an awareness of that guilt and that blindness? How can we be sure that it is not? Dostoyevsky was a raving anti-Semite and yet that does not prevent us from praising his novelistic writing as among the most searching and critically acute writing there is. Freud’s behavior with his colleague Wilhelm Fleiss was among the most flagrantly atrocious episodes in nineteenth-century medical history and yet that does not stop us from crediting Freud with discoveries that continue to enlighten our understandings of psychology in fundamental ways. If de Man was incapable of owning his own participation in a more expository fashion than silence and translation, that does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that we should praise that silence and that dislocation as the only thing he could do, as inevitable, and that anything else was impossible (and therefore that the behavior of others was inauthentic or weak), or even worse, that we should count that silence as a version of responsibility itself, even



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the most responsible thing he could do, so that those who own their responsibility are paradoxically (in Felman’s view) less assuming of their responsibility than he is. The book of these authors remains a tour de force in the field of Holocaust witness. Read itself as testimony, to the experience in one case of the child survivor (who as an adult analyst of survivors, and his own past), and, in the other, to an academic literary critic’s loyalty to her past and present counselors or collaborators in the project of deconstruction for which he (and in retrospect she) became most famous, the book makes sense of a kind we might not have anticipated. The book becomes in its own right a powerful version of the two statements that every survivor makes: namely, 1) that words are not adequate to describe what happened; and 2) I was there.25 The proclamation that trauma and a holocaust are at the origin, that at this origin there are no witnesses (whose independent observation might protect or parent the victim) or that witnessing is impossible or in crisis, and that self-annihilation and consequent loss of identity is, as a rule, the consequence, assumes here an extraordinary explosive power that shares something with the declaration of the survivor in Dori Laub’s anecdote that all the crematoria at Auschwitz blew (to the consternation of the attendant historians who argued that in fact only one installation exploded). Writing this book, in which the myths by which we have lived (in the shadow of Auschwitz) are exploded, is itself a little like blowing up Auschwitz. And if we take exception to their position, it is not because we would adopt the literal-minded perspective of the disputatious historians and say in response to them “But there were witnesses, both within and without; we know that historically” but rather because, like the psychoanalyst in Dori Laub’s anecdote who objected to this “historian’s controversy,” we would rather affirm or credit the testimonial power of their joint labors—which are pervasive in this book— than the representational claims they would ascribe to it. For in the context in which they have offered the book, not, that is, as Holocaust testimony, but as a theory of testimony, they confuse the former domain with the latter. In Dori Laub’s earliest formulation of the absent memory of the trauma victim, it was possible to define two kinds of witness: 1) the conscious voluntary cognizance of events (of which there was, admittedly, very little but which at least was theoretically possible); and 2) the unconscious involuntary “uncanny” repetition of those events (of which there was a great Hartman (1989), 1713.

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deal). In the later formulation, the definition of “witness,” and consequently of “testimony,” has been restricted to the cognitive variety exclusively, and involuntary witness, which was widespread and upon which the restorative transformation to one depends, has disappeared. The diachronic witness of representation, the symptomatic logic by which everything the patient does in the earlier mode testifies to the traumatic events, has been displaced in the later formulation by an exclusively synchronic witness of cognition—one deemed now possible or impossible, authentic or inauthentic, a witness, in short, which is subject to truth. “A witness,” Dori Laub writes in the later formulation (and Shoshana Felman, in her introduction to her essay on Lanzmann, echoes him), “is a witness to the truth of what happens during an event” and we must take these writers at their word (80; 204). But the “coercively totalitarian and dehumanizing frame of reference”—by which the Holocaust in the view of these authors is defined—explodes not only cognition but the very humanistic frame within which the possibility of an autonomous subject of consciousness before an object of knowledge or cognition can be thought at all. “The years we have gone through,” writes Camus, in the essay Felman cites, “have killed something in us. And that something is simply the old confidence man had in himself, which led him to believe that he could always elicit human reactions from another man if he spoke to him in the language of a common humanity” (199). As the result of that death, of the explosion of that “common humanity,” its fragments are now everywhere. Rather than a “crisis of witnessing” or a “collapse of witnessing,” in other words, it seems to me, we must speak of the proliferation of witness everywhere, of the collapse of the limitation of witness to the cognitive dimension. We cannot now but bear witness, we must say in modification of our earlier formulation—unconsciously, repetitively, as a version of acting out—to what we cannot (consciously) bear to witness. Contrary to the claim Laub and Felman would make, everything now is evidence for and testifies to the Holocaust, to the explosion of that humanistic framework. There is nothing that is not its document, the evidence for its continuation, the index of its pervasiveness, although the variety of its manifestation would also now appear to be inexhaustible. Revisionism, for example, is now as much its witness as the position of the survivor, although we can now distinguish between these two more radically than these authors (revisionism for them being only so much “noise”). Revisionism, we now understand, is not neo-Nazism but Nazism, the same Nazism that has



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been here all along. Likewise, Paul de Man’s silence about his collaborationist past is not a revelation of collaboration but the collaboration itself, the same co-laborious silence by which he earlier refrained from dissenting or declining when asked to participate in an issue against the Jews but chose rather—for good reasons or for bad—to work with his editorial ideologues. Paul de Man’s collaboration was certainly not of the ideologue variety, some examples of which appeared on the same page of the issue of Le Soir on which his own anti-Semitic article appeared (even if within that article he argued somewhat glibly against a vulgar anti-Semitic stance and—at least implicitly— for a more “refined” version). And it should not bar us from reading (or valuing) his later work (about which I have written elsewhere) any more than the discovery (or rediscovery) of Heidegger’s Nazi affiliations bars us from reading his writing.26 Moreover, in light of some new information about de Man’s young adulthood—which Neil Hertz supplies in the Responses volume and then develops brilliantly in an article in Diacritics—there may be a legitimate way in which one wants to speak of de Man, certainly not as a survivor of the Holocaust, but as a survivor of other more personal traumas.27 But in light of the discovery of these papers, the silence of this theorist of critical avoidance and duplication speaks to us now more audibly than ever before, whatever excuses these authors for whatever reasons would mount on his behalf. And it should at least compel us to distinguish carefully between his collaborative silence, the silence which interrupted the life of Walter Benjamin, and the silence of the survivors of which Primo Levi speaks. For theirs is also the same silence as before, that which the Nazis produced originally, neither heroic nor demonic, but the traumatically generated consequence of the experiences they suffered and, as such, radically different as silence from the silence of the perpetrator, collaborating bystanders, or the contemporary descendants of either. The Holocaust is, indeed, not over as Terrence Des Pres already remarked in 1982, in his shrewd introduction to an account of the work of Elie Wiesel.28 Sandor Goodhart, “Disfiguring de Man: Literature, History, and Collaboration,” Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, and Tom Kennan (eds.), Responses. On Paul de Man’s Wartime Journalism (Lincoln, 1989), 226–45. Also, above. 27 Information about Paul de Man’s early life was compiled by W. Hamacher, N. Hertz, and T. Kennan in “Paul de Man: Chronology, 1919–1947,” in Responses, xi–xxxi. It is also mentioned by Edouard Colinet in “Paul de Man and the Cercle Libre Examen,” in Responses (426–37), which assumes the form of a letter to Neil Hertz. See also Neil Hertz, “More Lurid Figures,” Diacritics 20 (3) (1990): 6–27. 28 Terrence Des Pres, “Foreword,” in Fine, Legacy of Night (1982), xi. 26

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But it is not over, not because, as these authors assert, we have not yet gained closure on these traumatic occurrences but rather because the possibility of closure has itself collapsed, and witness can no longer be limited (as these writers would have us believe) to the narrowly cognitive or juridical or artistic contexts in which they would confine it. Witness in this sense is larger than truth and that to which truth itself is subject. That is what the symptomatic logic, the diachronic and nonrepresentational logic, the evidentiary logic, of psychoanalysis (as these writers themselves present it) teaches us. When he writes as an analyst of Holocaust survivors, or as an interviewer for the Archive, or as a commentator on the act of listening to survivor narratives, Dori Laub does so with unmatched brilliance. His summaries of psychoanalytic notions of trauma and its aftermath, orthodox as they are, remain clear and effective, readily available to other professionals who would turn to trauma theory as a complement to their own approaches. His own childhood experiences in this regard cannot but be helpful and when he counsels future analysts or interviewers with a list of potential danger spots in listening to Holocaust survivor narratives or in moving from therapeutic contexts to educational contexts, he is breaking important new ground. But when he turns to address the historical phenomenon of the Holocaust, he would appear to confuse his survivor status with that of an analytic theorist and this confusion generates, I have tried to suggest, some of the odd (and unexpectedly testimonial) reflections he offers as historical observation, namely, that there were no witnesses—no victims, perpetrators, or bystanders who could count as witnesses—and therefore that the Holocaust, as an event without a trace, “without a record,” really was unique and unprecedented in ways barely short of the mystical. A theory of testimony, in other words, of the evidentiary, of witness, seems to me of extreme urgency today, moreover, along just the lines of development pursued by these authors: in relation to historical, psychoanalytic, philosophic, pedagogic, literary, literary critical, and cinematic study. But our starting point for such a theory must be the position to which Laub gives voice initially (if only to later displace and subvert it before another), namely, the psychoanalytic insight that the logic of witness is like the logic of the symptom, that there are consequently no true or false witnesses any more than there are any true or false presenting symptoms, and that while the Holocaust may indeed have exploded the modalities of assuming cognizance or consciousness about its occurrence in any but the most regressive and retrograde fashions (“At whatever date it



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might have been written,” Blanchot writes—with implicit reference to Adorno [in Felman’s citation and translation]—“each narrative henceforth will be from before Auschwitz” (201)), that fact in no way bars us from encountering it in another fashion or constrains us to limit witness to observation. The evidence for the Holocaust is today everywhere. All of modern life reflects its impact, is structured and shaped by it as these authors say, and as a result offers it to readability. As a consequence, our goal must be—in the face of this explosion—not to redefine a new pristine modality of witness which is finally “truly” limited to consciousness but rather to recognize—the way that psychoanalysis has taught us to do—the mechanisms by which traumatic experience reproduces itself in contemporary experience endlessly. The book of these authors, then, the book of Testimony, can be credited with opening the discussion. But we have a way to go before we get our bearings in a manner that does not fail us in just the ways that these authors warn us about (and then enact)—namely, continuing to speak the nineteenth-century language of consciousness and observability in a context in which that model egregiously no longer applies. We are not assisted in that endeavor by being encouraged to act in the face of such massive effects of trauma as if it did not exist, as if witness were “impossible” or in “collapse,” as if the evidence for the Holocaust were confined to the failed and failing cognition of a few lonely isolated aging survivors, whose suffering may soon be alleviated by further analytic treatment (if they live that long), and whose anguish is uniquely personal anyway. Limiting witness of the Holocaust to cognition is a new way of sacralizing it, of doing, that is, just what these authors say they oppose, if only by assuming the necessity of a reification or objectification of the event that in this case just doesn’t obtain. The real danger of this book, in other words, is that while writing about critically important subject matters in ways that avoid the traps of the past, it constructs for us new traps. Rather than “impossible witness,” I would suggest we need to speak more appropriately of “witnessing the impossible,” that which was previously deemed out of bounds, and yet which has become now, in the aftermath of the event, part of the fabric of our lives. “At Auschwitz,” Fackenheim writes (quoting Hans Jonas), “‘more was real than is possible’ and the impossible was done by some and suffered by others.”29 The Holocaust is unique, as these authors (and others before them) have suggested. But its uniqueness or Emil Fackenheim, “Holocaust,” in Arthur A. Cohen and Paul Mendes-Flohr (eds.), Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought (1988), 402.

29

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unprecedented status has less to do with the singularity of the suffering of the survivors as earlier views maintain (monstrous as that suffering was), or with the appearance on the world-historical stage of an event that defies notice as these authors argue (traumatic as that unmonitored event was for its victims), than it does with the collapse of the modalities by which we were accustomed in Europe to noticing human relations at all, and in particular the unpredictability of such massive premeditated infliction of categorical torment within a humanistic framework designed expressly since romanticism to exclude such onslaught. And as such it summons us to the elaboration of a new nonrepresentational prophetic understanding of our current situation, to trace the diachronic route of our implication in and complicity with such an event (and as a result its endlessness within our lives), and to the recognition of a post-Holocaustal condition in which torture, genocide, and the infliction of devastating trauma have become the new staples of contemporary relation. In this context, the recuperative endeavors on the part of these authors (or others writing in a similar vein) to limit our understanding of the explosion of humanism to the black holes it produced rather than seize the “window of opportunity” offered to us to examine either the history of the framework that exploded, the manner of its explosion, or the manner of the continued dispersal of its fragmentary remains, can only construct for us a new set of blinders which, however genuinely and powerfully they document the personal, academic, or professional triumphs of their authors, gain for us little ground in the ongoing struggle against a larger and worsening cultural predicament.

4

Documenting Fiction: Kolitz, van Beeck, Levinas, and Holocaust Witness1

Conscience n. f. Faculté qu’a l’homme de connaître sa propre réalité et de la juger; cette connaissance. I. Conscience psychologique. 1. Connaissance immédiate de sa propre activité psychique … Conscience de soi … II. (Conscience morale) 1. Faculté ou fait de porter des jugements de valeur morale sur ses actes … Avoir de la conscience. Le Petit Robert La conscience de soi se surprend inévitablement au sein d’une conscience morale. Celle-ci ne s’ajoute pas à celle-là, mais en est le mode élémentaire. Être pour soi, c’est déjà savoir ma faute commise à l’égard d’autrui. Mais le fait que je ne m’interroge pas sur le droit de l’autre indique paradoxalement qu’autrui n’est pas une réédition du moi; en sa qualité d’autrui, il se situe dans une dimension de hauteur, de l’idéal, du divine et, par ma relation avec autrui, je suis en rapport avec Dieu.   La relation morale réunit donc à la fois la conscience de soi et la conscience de Dieu. L’éthique n’est pas le corollaire de la vision de Dieu, elle est cette vision même. L’éthique est une optique. De sorte que tout ce que je sais de Dieu et tout ce que je peux entendre de Sa parole et Lui dire raisonnablement, doit trouver une expression éthique. Levinas, “Une religion d’adults”2 The chapter that follows was first conceived as a talk for the conference in England “Remembering for the Future” and was subsequently published along with other conference contribitions. See Goodhart, “Conscience, Conscience, and Consciousness” in Roth (2001), 98–113. I thank Lawrence Grob for selecting my essay to be delivered and later to be published. I also thank Claire Katz for reproducing the essay in another volume. See Katz (2005), 190–211. What follows is an expanded version of that publication. 2 “Self-consciousness inevitably surprises itself at the heart of a moral consciousness. The latter cannot be added to the former, but it provides its basic mode. To be for oneself is already to know the fault I have committed with regard to the other individual. But the fact that I do not question 1

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Dieu qui se voile la face … c’est l’heure où l’individu juste … ne peut triompher que dans sa conscience, c’est-à-dire nécessairement dans la souffrance.… La souffrance de juste pour une justice sans triomphe est vécue concrètement comme judaïsme. Levinas, “Aimer la Thora plus que Dieu”3

Prologue: Consciousness, Conscience, Conscience What is the difference between consciousness and conscience? The first, we say, is a matter of perception or awareness. In philosophy, for example, I am a subject of consciousness before an object of knowledge. The second is a matter of moral authority, the degree to which I am constrained or governed by a voice which speaks to me of what I should or should not do. In Freudian language (as opposed to Kantian language), the first would correspond to the scheme conscious, pre-conscious, unconscious, the second to the scheme id, ego, and superego where conscience would translate superego. In French, the same word, conscience, designates both. Could their conjunction be more than an accident of language? In the final pages of his introduction to Ellen Fine’s book on Elie Wiesel, Terrence Des Pres speaks of a “kind of consciousness identical with conscience” which would be necessary if we are to encompass the “enormity” of the “capacity for destruction” that the event of the Holocaust brings with it.4 A “French” consciousness we might say then, an awareness in which what we should or should not do is coextant (and coterminous) with awareness itself, an awareness, that is to say, in which it is no longer possible to separate ethical questions from perceptual ones,

myself about the rights of the other paradoxically indicates that the other individual is not a new edition of myself; as another individual he is situated in a dimension of height, of the ideal, of the divine, and through my relation with the other indivdual, I am in touch with God.   The moral relation therefore reunites both self-consciousness and consciousness of God. Ethics is not the corollary of the vision of God, it is that very vision. Ethics is an optic, such that everything I know of God and everything I can hear of His word and reasonably say to Him must find an ethical expression.” See Levinas 1983, 33 and 1990, 17. I have modified Seán Hand’s translation slightly. 3 “A God who conceals his face … is a way of talking about the hour when the just individual … can no longer triumph except in his own consciousness (conscience), which is to say, necessarily in suffering … The suffering of the just for a justice that is without triumph is lived concretely as Judaism,” Levinas 1983, 191. My translation. 4 For the remark by Des Pres, see Fine (1982), xi.



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in which both the detached observer and the isolated voice of moral authority are historical, psychological, or metaphysical fictions. An awareness in which the ethical results of my behavior, the suffering or injury they may cause, are known in advance, calculated into the very possibility of my behavior. An ethics that is also an optics. A testimonial or prophetic understanding, therefore, as opposed to a representational one, a factoring in of my responsibility for the origins and consequences of that behavior, for myself, and for others, an owning of the continuity of myself with those others from whom I would most want to detach or isolate my observation or my morality. In short, Judaism, as Emmanuel Levinas understands it. Is such a post-Holocaust perspective, such a conscience, or consciousness, or “conscience-ness,” possible? In the chapter that follows, I will explore this notion of such a Levinasian conscience-ness, an ethics that is also an optics, in three different registers. I will turn first to the work of Zvi Kolitz, a Lithuanian-born Jewish writer, theater (and film) producer, and political activist who writes a short story about the Holocaust shortly after the war that strangely takes on, as he describes it, a “life of its own.” Second, I will turn to the work of Jesuit Father Frans Jozef van Beeck. Father van Beeck is interested in Jewish-Christian relations (in particular Martin Buber) and happens upon the work of Emmanuel Levinas in this context, and through Levinas, upon the work of Zvi Kolitz, as the author of one of the texts upon which Emmanuel Levinas comments. Van Beeck puts the two of them, Emmanuel Levinas and Zvi Kolitz, side by side in a way that only complicates and compounds the problem he is trying to resolve, both when he tries to correct what he sees as a misunderstanding in the reception of Kolitz’s text, and again when he attempts to translate Levinas for a Christian audience. Finally, I will turn to the work of Levinas, who has written the text about Judaism and about the Holocaust that van Beeck finds so powerful, and which turns out to concern the Zvi Kolitz story (a fact apparently unknown to Levinas), and I will suggest some of the ways in which Levinas’s interpretations of Zvi Kolitz’s story (and through it of Judaism and the Holocaust) help us to develop insights about his subject matter that also enable us to read the gestures and the fortunes of these two other writers.

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Part 1: Zvi Kolitz Is a perspective that unites conscience with consciousness possible after the Holocaust? Zvi Kolitz’s story, “Yossel Rakover Speaks to God,” offers us an occasion for asking this question in some detail. In the summer of 1946, Zvi Kolitz traveled to Argentina to attend a meeting of the World Zionist Congress.5 Sitting in his hotel room in Buenos Aires (the City Hotel, we are told), he penned in Yiddish a short story to which he assigned the title “Yossel Rakovers Vendung Tsu G-ot” [“Yossel Rakover’s Appeal to God”].6 Later that fall, the story appeared in Di Yiddische Tsaytung (on Tuesday September 25, 1946), a Yiddish-language daily whose editor had in fact first requisitioned the piece.7 The following year, back at home in New York City, Zvi Kolitz had the story translated in an abbreviated form (by Sh’muel Katz so the story goes) into English under the title “Yossel Rakover’s Appeal to God” and he included it in a collection of short stories or short fictions he published with Creative Age Press, which he entitled (borrowing a phrase of Ury Zvi Greenberg), The Tiger Beneath the Skin: Stories and Parables of the Years of Death.8 The story seems to have been a smashing success. It was reprinted in a somewhat abbreviated form in 1968 by Albert Friedlander in Out of the Whirlwind: A Reader of Holocaust Literature.9 Friedlander notes in a brief introduction that it was circulated among students in typescript form during the High Holiday liturgy at Yale University.10 Zvi Kolitz himself revised and reprinted the piece in a new collection entitled Survival for What?11 The story also attracted a wide audience in Europe, and even in Israel. It was translated into French and drew the attention of Emmanuel Levinas, Jewish philosopher and teacher. Levinas made it the centerpiece of a radio broadcast, Écoute Israël, in 1955, which he included later in a collection of his essays on Judaism—Difficile liberté.12 It was translated into German in the 1950s by Anna Van Beeck and Mallow (1994), 373. Ibid., Badde (1995), 12. 7 Van Beeck and Mallow (1994), 373. Badde says the piece was requisitioned by a Señor Mordechai Stoliar (Kolitz 1995, 5). 8 See Kolitz (1947), vii. The quote from Greenberg reads: “For we are tired of bearing our sadness alone / And the secrets of tigers under the skin of a lamb.” 9 Friedlander (1968). 10 Friedlander (1976), 390. 11 Kolitz (1969). 12 Levinas (1983, 1990). 5 6



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Maria Jokl and attracted the attention of a number of writers, among them Rudolf Krämer-Badoni, Sebastian Müller, and perhaps most famously, Thomas Mann. It was translated into Hebrew and included in a volume entitled Ani Maamin [I Believe], and a version of it sparked discussion of the piece in Israeli journals.13 What is the nature of the story that garnered so much attention? The story assumes the form of a document, the last will and testament of a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising (a pious Hasidic Jew), written on the night before the final onslaught. The narrator describes the death of his children and other family members under conditions of atrocity, as well as the death of his eleven comrades, and he offers us his final thoughts upon the fate that has befallen himself and his people. What are those thoughts? A modern-day commentary on the Rabbinical theme “though He slay me, I will love Him?” In the face of the hester panim, the hiding of God’s face, as Deuteronomy describes it, I will love You all the more. No matter what You do to me, no matter how difficult You make it for me to accept You, I will repudiate your attempts to dissuade me and I will accept You that much more fully. I am proud to remain among the ranks of the Jewish people.” One thinks of the midrash about Rabbi Akiba, who was flayed and burned alive for teaching Torah, and who is said to have remarked, as his flesh was being removed from his body with an iron comb, “All my life I have said the words of the Shema [“Thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy might,” Deut. 6] and I have been troubled by the words ‘with all thy might.’ Now, at last, I shall have the opportunity to really fulfill them.” He is said to have died pronouncing the word echad (“one”).14 Zvi Kolitz could hardly have known, of course, that his little story about a pious Polish Jew, written by a secular Lithuanian-born Jew (living in Palestine during the war and America afterwards), would have such a strange itinerary. For after the Yiddish-language version appeared in the fall of 1946, another version surfaced in 1954, this one submitted to Abraham Sutzkever, editor of the Yiddish-language publication Di Goldene Keyt, in Israel. Slightly truncated and attenuated, this version did in fact generate something of an odd history—either See Eliav, Ani Maamin (1965) and van Beeck (1989). The opening six words of the shema are Sh’ma` yisrael Adonai eloheiynu Adonai echad (“Listen, Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is one”). The extension of the pronunciation of the initial ayin (concluding the word sh’ma) and the final daled (concluding the word echad) are gestures suggested by the Rabbis to produce in hearing the Hebrew word for witness, `eid.

13 14

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deliberately or inadvertently. For this version failed to include one salient detail: the name of the author—Zvi Kolitz. It was passed off as itself a Holocaust document, a diary, a last will and testament, found in the manner of so many other documents among the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto.15 In this form, it was translated into French by Arnold Mandel for the Zionist French periodical Le Temps retrouvée (where it drew the attention of Levinas—who later called his own essay, “Aimer la Thora plus que Dieu” [“To Love the Torah More Than God”]). And it was in this form—without authorial attribution—that it drew the attention of the German writers mentioned previously. Krämer-Badoni wrote a posthumous and effusive open letter to “Yosl Rackower.” Sebastian Müller wrote a similar piece. And Thomas Mann’s comment, given shortly before his death, has become legendary.16 On the surface, at least, it is not hard to see how such a text, such a fictional construction, may give way to misunderstanding. In form, the text may not appear significantly different from other texts that have been found (one thinks of Adam Czerniakow’s diaries upon which Raul Hilberg has commented, or of the diaries of Emanuel Ringelblum). One would think that a simple notification by the verifiable author of the fictional status of the text would be sufficient to set matters straight. But here is where the story begins to take an unexpected turn. As early as the1950s, Zvi Kolitz learned of the double history of the text and attempted to clear up the misunderstanding. To no avail, as it turns out. His attempts to claim authorship were met either with silence or, more interestingly, with the counter charge that he was attempting to usurp the rights of another, to claim authorship of a text that was not really his own and that in fact the text belonged to Yossel Rakover. An incident in the 1970s reflects this strange process. In 1972, Zvi Kolitz writes to the magazine Shedemoth the following letter. Dear Friends: A few months ago, my brother Haim Kolitz, who lives in Jerusalem, sent me issue No. 43 of Shedemoth, which contained a quotation from a story entitled Yosl Rakover Argues With His God, which the writer of the article uses as an authentic testament, allegedly found in the Warsaw ghetto. Now I want to draw your attention to the fact that this Yosl Rakover is not a will One thinks of the writings of Emanuel Ringelblum or Adam Czerniakow. See below, Kassow (2007) and Hilberg (1979). 16 According to Badde, Mann “praised it as a holy text, a ‘shattering human and religious document’.” See Kolitz (1995), 7–8. 15



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which was discovered in the ruins of the ghetto, but an original story which I wrote and published about twenty years ago in New York [...].   My attention has also been called to the fact that in a book, I Believe [...], to which the author of the article in Shedemoth was probably referring, this story of mine was published as a will. This error has apparently been repeated again and again, as has become known to me after the fact, ever since, in 1953, a great Yiddish poet, Avram Sutzkever, was misled by a Jew from Argentina, who had read the story in Yiddish and passed it on to Sutzkever as a “document.” Mr. Sutzkever published it as such in Die Goldene Kait [...].   Meanwhile the origin of this error has become clear, but errors like these have a life of their own. The refusal of this particular error to die, and the fact that many persons, and capable ones to boot, like Mr. Sutzkever, who were in the ghetto (which is not the case with me), saw Yosl Rakover as something that gives an authentic expression to the spiritual turmoil of a believing Jew in the last hours of the Warsaw ghetto—all of this is certainly a source of satisfaction to me. But there is a further testimony here. It is the testimony of my own spiritual turmoil, which did not subside with my giving it a fictional (and, I hope, artistic) expression; it went to the depth of the pain of a people that has the awesome right to take God to court.17

There is a great deal to comment upon in Kolitz’s letter. The “further testimony” about which he speaks, the fact that “errors like these have a life of their own”— these ideas are not entirely contained by the context on which they appear. It is as if the very attempt to manage these matters through language only makes them worse, even more in need of management, and as if that unmanageability is somehow at the very heart of the problem. Before pursuing these issues, let us continue sketching the curious double history of this text. For the strangeness of the story does not end even at this point. Enter Frans Jozef van Beeck. In the middle 1970s, Father Frans Jozef van Beeck, a member of the Jesuit order who had studied philosophy and theology for several years in Europe, and who happened to be interested in Martin Buber’s work (and in particular I and Thou) as a way of engaging Jewish– Christian dialogue, is given a copy of Emmanuel Levinas’s text on the Zvi Kolitz story. The text, he later reports, challenges his Christian faith. He decides that he needs to confront Levinas’s work if he is to maintain his Christian belief intact. He also discovers that the story upon which Levinas comments in French is well known in the United States as the fictional composition of Zvi Kolitz (through See van Beeck (1989), 86–7.

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the Friedlander anthology). He does a little research, finds the 1954 Yiddish version of the story published by Sutzkever, assumes it is an “expansion” of the English original of 1947, and decides to publish a translated hybrid of the two (the discrepancies of the 1954 version added to the 1947 text) in English, with authorial attribution, along with Emmanuel Levinas’s commentary (which he also translates into English), his own account of the implications of Levinas’s Jewish thought for a Christian audience, and an account of the circumstances surrounding Kolitz’s text and its double history. In 1989, he publishes Loving the Torah More Than God? Towards a Catholic Appreciation of Judaism.18 Van Beeck’s attempt to set matters straight, as it turns out, encounters some difficulties of its own, and is no more successful at first than Zvi Kolitz’s, though for very different reasons. As theology, Father van Beeck’s book is a wonderful volume for opening a serious discussion of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity and the possible implications of Levinas for Catholicism. Eugene Borowitz’s introduction. for example, is particularly helpful in that regard. Unfortunately, however, van Beeck gets the story of Kolitz wrong. Van Beeck assumes the original was the English-language version of 1947 and that the Yiddish version of 1954 was “pirated” from Kolitz’s original, “expanded” by an anonymous Yiddish speaker, and submitted in that form to Sutzkever to be published in South America. He makes this assumption, he reports later, on the basis of Kolitz’s statement in the above letter to Shedemoth where Kolitz writes “… this Yosl Rakover is not a will which was discovered in the ruins of the ghetto, but an original story which I wrote and published about twenty years ago in New York.” Some time after publishing his book in 1989, van Beeck has contact with Paul Badde, a journalist who had just interviewed Zvi Kolitz for a feature article in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Badde informs him of his error, and the fact that the original was indeed Yiddish, and in particular of the text Kolitz wrote in 1946 for Di Yiddische Tsaytung which appeared on Tuesday September 25, 1946. With effusive apologies to Kolitz, and with the help of a young colleague and Yiddishist at Loyola University of Chicago, Jeffrey Mallow, van Beeck now publishes a second version of the story in the journal Cross Currents, this one based on the Yiddish original of 1946. Billing this text as the “first complete English-language version” of Kolitz’s story, he follows it with an “Afterword” in which he explains the intervening events and in particular his error. See van Beeck (1989).

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But the story is not over even at this point. Some time before 1993, the text had attracted the interest of German journalist Paul Badde (mentioned above), who had read in German an earlier account of the story by Anna Maria Jokl— who had herself already published the story several times previously.19 Badde now flies to New York, conducts an interview with Zvi Kolitz, obtains a copy of the Yiddish original from the documentation center in Buenos Aires, the Asociación Mutualista Israelita Argentina (miraculously, from the same Oscar Lateur who a few days earlier could not find it), speaks with van Beeck about it, and publishes a feature article on the story and the man in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in April of 1993.20 In 1995, the text is reprinted once more (a fourth time) by Zvi Kolitz himself (who was still alive in New York City) in a volume entitled Yossel Rakover Speaks to God. Holocaust Challenges to Religious Faith. This volume includes a new English translation of the Yiddish original of 1946, the Levinas text translated by van Beeck, a new essay (his third) by van Beeck on the circumstances of the double tradition and his own misunderstanding of it, and the dossier of other essays (including those by Badde, Müller, and Krämer-Badoni) that were published in Germany, Israel, and elsewhere on the text. As a kind of coda, Kolitz adds another text of his own, “Requiem for a Jealous Boy,” concerning two boys named Mosheh and Akiba.21 The problem with this volume derives from van Beeck’s translation of Levinas. Van Beeck translates Levinas’s use of the word conscience as “conscience,” an idea that Levinas rarely uses (if, indeed, he uses it at all), and that vitiates the very argument Levinas is making in the essay vis-à-vis the piece by Zvi Kolitz, a gesture in other words that puts into Levinas’s mouth (since presumably van Beeck is translating and not interpreting his author, to whatever extent those two are separable) ideas that Levinas never expressed and moreover that are directly contrary to the ones he does express elsewhere in the essay (and in numerous other essays of his on similar topics). Not unlike Zvi Kolitz himself, in other words, van Beeck’s well-intentioned efforts achieve a contrary effect. Where Kolitz wants to write fiction (as a way of dealing with the realities he experienced) but finds that that fiction takes on a life of its own and is mis-taken According to Badde (Kolitz 1995, 7), the “‘discovered document’ is broadcast in the Germanlanguage version of Anna Maria Jokl by Radio Free Berlin” in January 1955. In October 1955, the text was broadcast again, this time “with the author’s full and correct name” (Kolitz 1995: 8). Jokl reports and comments on it later that year in the Tagesspiegel and again the following year in the Neue Deutsche Hefte. In 1985, Jokl published the text in a book with Kolitz’s name. See Kolitz (1985). 20 Kolitz gives the date of Badde’s story and article as “April 1, 1993” although van Beeck gives it as “April 23, 1993.” See Kolitz (1995), xviii, 51. 21 Kolitz (1995). 19

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for reality, so van Beeck wants to construct a document (as a way of dealing with his own interests and the realities he has experienced) that would move fiction back to reality but finds that that documentation in turn constructs a new fictional character—a Jewish “pirate” who has expanded Kolitz’s English text to Yiddish, a text by Levinas making the claims van Beeck says he makes— and that such fictional translations likewise assume their own role in the life of scholarship surrounding this particular story. The issues at stake in other words would appear to be the same both within the story and without. A final addendum. In 1995, a terrorist bombing hits the Jewish documentation center in Argentina housing the original document (from which Paul Badde obtained a copy), and the building along with its contents is severely damaged. An email note I myself received from the head of YIVO in New York (who had somehow learned about my intention to speak publicly about this text in Oxford) informs me that some of the “furniture” from the Center in Argentina survived. “Who knows,” the writer of my note quips, “perhaps among the ashes we may still find Zvi Kolitz’s original manuscript.”

Part 2: Frans Jozef van Beeck What is an author? Michel Foucault’s question from the 1970s resonates in this new context in a powerful and unexpected way.22 Foucault’s response—that the author is a function, an effect, the product of a set of social determinants—was an important correlative to the Anglo-American literary critical tradition in which an author was regarded as the set of intentional, rhetorical, and commercial relations a writer maintains with his or her text.23 But in the present context, other aspects of authorial attribution come into play. For although there may be more revelations to come (and there have been some twists and turns along the way I have not mentioned), a pattern is already emerging.24 A manifest confusion gives way to an attempted rectification. But For the Foucault essay, see Bouchard (1977). On the intentional and implied author, see Booth (1983). 24 For example, in Kolitz (1995), xviii, Kolitz notes that Paul Badde “wrote his comprehensive article, which was published in the magazine of the Sunday edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on April 1, 1993.” In the same volume (Kolitz (1995), 51), Father van Beeck writes that the first three pages sent by Oscar Lateur to Paul Badde were “sufficient to enable Paul Badde, a few weeks later, In [sic] the Frankfurter Allgemeine Magazin of April 23, 1993, to publish an almost complete German translation of the story based on the Yiddish, along with a moving feature article on Zvi Kolitz” (“April 23, 1993” is the same date van Beeck gives in his second article in van Beeck 1994, 22 23



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that rectification in turn, rather than put an end to the difficulty, serves only to compound it and lead to more confusion. Zvi Kolitz writes and publishes his piece in 1946 on a trip to South America. An anonymous individual gives the piece without authorial attribution to Sutzkever in 1954, an individual who, as a literary editor, is struck by its power and publishes it in his journal, and thus inaugurates the double tradition. Kolitz tries to clear up the matter, and is rebuffed either by silence or with the claim that he is usurping the text of “Yossel Rakover,” who is in fact his fictional character. The pattern is not limited to these kinds of exchanges and it recurs on other levels. Father van Beeck spots the problem of the two traditions and, trying to be helpful, compounds the difficulty. He writes a book in which he explains the anonymous transmission and assigns originality to the abbreviated English New York 1947 translation rather than the 1946 Yiddish version. The nature of the accident has shifted from omission to misunderstanding but the effect is the same. In a similar vein, Albert Friedlander, who anthologizes Zvi Kolitz’s text again in the 1960s, and who is aware that the text has been circulated without authorial attribution, writes that although “there is no actual document written by Yossel Rakover … there was a Yossel Rakover who died in the flames,” a claim that according to Paul Badde is also a fabrication (“None of this is true,” Badde writes).25 And as if history itself were collaborating with the confusion, the terrorist bombing puts an end—presumably forever—to the question of the original newspaper publication since henceforth all versions will be copies. What is going on? The motives of the participants are not to be impugned. Those who respond as if they are reading an actual will—Rudolf KrämerBadoni or Sebastian Müller or Thomas Mann, for example—feel (and express) a heartfelt connection to this lonely figure in the Warsaw Ghetto writing on the last night of his life. Kolitz has written a fiction which is part of a lifelong political and artistic activism in which he has served in the Irgun, and helped produce Hochhuth’s The Deputy (also an historical fiction) and other theater and film projects dedicated to exposing the horrors of the war years, and it is not unreasonable for him to claim credit for the story he has written (in addition to being flattered that it has been considered by its readers so authentically). Van 375). Is the article to which van Beeck refers another article by Badde on Kolitz written three weeks later? Has Kolitz gotten the date wrong? Again? Friedlander (1976), 390. For Badde, see Kolitz (1995), 8.

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Beeck is doing his utmost to bring the confusion to the light of day and clear it up, a gesture perhaps in his mind not unrelated to his furthering of better Jewish–Christian relations. But it remains curious nonetheless that accidents and confusions oddly proliferate around this story, and that despite all the good intentions a pattern emerges that has an uneasy familiarity to it. Kolitz is charged with theft, with usurping intellectual property that is not his own. The copy transmitted to Sutzkever is said to be “pirated” by an anonymous “Jew” and “expansions” are said to have been added to a smaller English-language version—charges of dispossession, in other words, that align themselves with traditional negative stereotypes of Jews and Judaism. The case of Father van Beeck is particularly interesting in this regard. Father van Beeck’s unimpeachable intentions are marked by a kind of hapless misfortune. He is confident that his Christian belief is intact and then he encounters Emmanuel Levinas. He thinks he has Levinas under control and realizes the “document” Levinas is working on is a fiction. He thinks he has the fiction/document issue resolved, and then he gets the account of the history of that confusion wrong. Does he at last get things right in his translation? He republishes the Levinas text in the Kolitz book—as he had published it in his own book—but he gets one more thing wrong: he mistranslates Levinas’s use of the word conscience for conscience, which might not be so bad if the word “conscience” in English were not precisely a Christian characterization of Judaism over the past two centuries (for example as “the conscience of Europe”), an idea about which Levinas had witten in the volume in which the piece containing the Kolitz text first appeared.26 Van Beeck translates the Levinas text in which he encounters Zvi Kolitz’s narrative, in other words, in a way that cannot have occurred, that is decidedly Christian, and that curiously reproduces the very structures of exclusion he is trying to undo in the process of trying to undo them. He makes interpretive choices that can only derive from a misunderstanding, even though such misunderstanding is precisely the one he trying foremost to avoid. Here is the French original of Levinas. Dieu qui se voile la face n’est pas, pensons-nous, une abstraction de théologien ni une image du poète. C’est l’heure où l’individu juste ne trouve aucun recours See, for example, Levinas’s early essay on “Ethics and Spirit” in Difficult Freedom (1990), 3–10.

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extérieur, où aucune institution ne le protège, où la consolation de la présence divine dans le sentiment religieux enfantin se refuse elle aussi, où l’individu ne peut triompher que dans sa conscience, c’est-à-dire nécessairement dans la souffrance. Sense spécifiquement juif de la souffrance qui ne prend à aucun moment la valeur d’une expiation mystiques pour les péchés du monde. La position des victimes dans un monde en désordre, c’est-à-dire dans un monde où le bien n’arrive pas à triompher, est souffrance. Elle révèle un Dieu qui, renonçant à toute manifestation secourable, en appelle à la peine maturité de l’homme responsable intégralement. Mais aussitôt ce Dieu qui se voile la face et abondonne le juste à sa justice sans triomphe—ce Dieu lointain—vient du dedans. Intimité qui coïncide, pour la conscience, avec la fierté d’être juif, d’appartenir concrètement, historiquement, tout bêtement au peuple juif. “Être juif, cela signifie … nager éternellement contre le crasseux et criminel courant humain … Je suis heureux d’appartenir au peuple le plus malheureux de tous les peuples de la terre, au peuple dont la Thora représente ce qu’il y a de plus élevé et de plus beau dans les lois et les morales.”27

Here is Frans Jozef van Beeck’s translation of these two paragraphs. God veiling His countenance: I think this is neither a theologian’s abstraction nor a poetic image. It is the hour when the just person has nowhere to go in the outside world; when no institution affords him protection; when even the comforting sense of the divine presence, experienced in a childlike person’s piety, is withdrawn; when the only victory available to the individual lies in his conscience, which necessarily means, in suffering. This is the specifically Jewish meaning of suffering—one that never takes on the quality of a mystical expiation for the sins of the world. The condition in which victims find themselves in a disordered world, that is to say, in a world where goodness does not succeed in being victorious, is suffering. This reveals a God who, while refusing to manifest Himself in any way as a help, directs His appeal to the full maturity of the integrally responsible person. But by the same token this God who veils His countenance and abandons the just person, unvictorious, to his own justice—this faraway God—comes from inside. That is the intimacy that coincides, in one’s conscience, with the pride of being Jewish, of being concretely, historically, altogether mindlessly, a part of the Jewish people. “To be a Jew means … to be an everlasting swimmer against the turbulent, criminal human current … . I am happy to belong to

Levinas (1983), 189–91.

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the unhappiest people in the world, to the people whose Torah represents the loftiest and most beautiful of all laws and moralities.”28

Many of van Beeck’s renderings are quite helpful. He avoids all jargon and his style is exceedingly clear. But he misses the mark on a crucial point: he translates Levinas’s use of the word conscience as “conscience” rather than as “consciousness.” Now, the French language is supple, and certainly the French word conscience can be translated as “conscience” in certain circumstances. The primary definition given the word in Le Robert (noted above) is “faculté qu’a l’homme de connaître sa propre réalité et de la juger; cette connaissance,” a faculty which is then divided into “connaissance immédiate” and “connaissance intérieure.” When the second usage is introduced, it often appears as la conscience morale to distinguish it from la conscience de soi which is its first meaning, although sometimes, it is true, the word conscience can be used to mean conscience alone. But Emmanuel Levinas almost never uses it in this fashion. And since he is working within phenomenological philosophic tradition specifically, “consciousness” would be his primary interest. And in those rare instances where Levinas does use conscience to mean “conscience,” he spells that out specifically, as he does, for example, in “Religion of Adults,” excerpted above, in an essay that we can be sure van Beeck knows about since he quotes it.29 Why is this matter important? Is it possible van Beeck is simply making a minor translational error? The matter is important because “conscience” differs from “consciousness” along precisely the lines argued against in Emmanuel Levinas’s essay. In representing Levinas as saying “conscience,” he represents him as arguing a different position with the effect that at least in English van Beeck can profit from that alteration. For what is conscience? We customarily think of conscience (as we suggest above) as a kind of inner voice guiding our moral decision-making, or perhaps our memory of such past decision-making. It is an important word for Christian theology—as the work of a nineteenth-century Italian theologian, Antonio Rosmini, who writes a full-length treatise on Conscience, suggests.30 Van Beeck (1989), 27–32. See epigraph. Rosmini (1989).

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But in Judaism, as Levinas argues, the entirety of consciousness is ethical. The Christian notion of a consciousness which identifies one part of consciousness as moral, namely, conscience, presupposes that there is another part which is not, which is free of its moral obligation to the other, and which can function as a “detached observer” to objective experience. The whole of Levinas’s argument is against such limitations. For Levinas, we are never finished with our ethical obligations to the other individual (autrui). As Buber (whom van Beeck has certainly read) argues, there no “detached observer” and to act as if there is one is to suppress the ethical from which human decision-making begins. Rather than argue against Levinas, van Beeck suppresses Levinas’s text so that Levinas already says what van Beeck would have him say. He rewrites Levinas in order to approve him—which of course is another form of rejecting what he does say. Moreover, Levinas makes his case for limitlessness of our ethical obligation to the other individual among other places in this very essay. If the narrator of the story feels so alone, it is in order to feel on his shoulders all the responsibilities of God, responsibilities such that I can never reach a point where I can say that my obligations have been completed, and responsibilities that only I alone can fulfill (which is how I am elected by this obligation and how paradoxically this infinite obligation determines my freedom). No one other than me can fulfill these obligations anymore than another can die in my place. Translating Levinas, van Beeck misses its import, even though he appears to appreciate Levinas’s work on many other levels. At the level of translation, he misses the forest for the trees. He is like the game player described by Dupin in Poe’s short story who cannot see the word Europe on the map before him because it is written too large. Why is van Beeck’s misrendering of conscience important in this context in which Zvi Kolitz’s text is misunderstood? Because the issue of conscience is not unrelated to readers who would like to think of Zvi Kolitz’s text as a document and of their reply to it as an act of conscience. To render Levinas as saying that suffering is a matter of conscience rather than one of consciousness is to put on the very “spectacle of the Passion” and render suffering “expiatory” in a way that Levinas explicitly refuses, and as such to participate in the very suppression of Judaism that van Beeck is trying so hard in other ways to dismantle.31 “Nous nous refusons à offrir en spectacle la Passion des Passions et à tirer un quelconque gloriole d’auteur ou de metteur en scènes de ces cris inhumain” (Levinas 1983, 189). [We refuse the option of offering as a spectacle the Passion of all Passions and of deriving any glory whatsoever as an author or director from these inhuman cries.”] Levinas may be referring to the responses

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To bring these matters together, let us turn to Levinas’s own account of Zvi Kolitz’s text, where he raises larger questions about Judaism and the Holocaust and Jewish–Christian relations, questions that are not unrelated to the dispossession of Zvi Kolitz’s text, or to van Beeck’s attempt to set matters straight, actions which issue only in factual and translational mishaps that we might justly characterize as a “further testimony.”

Part 3: Emmanuel Levinas Emmanuel Levinas has presumably no idea that the narrative before him upon which he comments in his radio broadcast in 1955 is written by Zvi Kolitz, although he raises the possibility that the text is fiction with an almost uncanny awareness.32 Whether fiction or non-fiction, however, it is in his view testimony and its testimonial or witness status is primary. It offers we may say a “further testimony” to the spiritual turmoil in which both its narrator and its author are immersed. Within it, Levinas notes, “each one of us who are survivors may dizzily recognize his own life.” I have just read a text that is both beautiful and true, true as only fiction can be. Published in an Israeli journal by an anonymous author, and translated under the title of “Yossel, son of Yossel Rakover of Tarnopol, speaks to God” for La Terre retrouvée—a Parisian Zionist periodical—by Arnold Mandel, it … translates an experience of spiritual life that is at once profound and authentic. The text presents itself to us as a document, written during the final hours of the Resistance of the Warsaw Ghetto. The narrator would have been witness to all the horrors; he would have lost his young children under conditions of atrocity. As the last survivor of his family and with only a few moments left, he bequeaths to us his ultimate thoughts. This is literary fiction, of course; but of Krämer-Badoni and Müller to Anna Maria Jokl’s broadcast of the story in German (on Radio Free Berlin) two months earlier, both of whom became effusive and saw the document as a call to conscience. 32 Jokl broadcast the story in German without authorial attribution in January of 1955. Levinas delivered his radio talk in April of the same year. Jokl rebroadcast the narrative with Kolitz’s name attached in October of 1955. Levinas published his essay “Aimer la Thora plus que Dieu” in 1963. He may not have known initially that it was a text by Kolitz, but upon learning in October of the same year that it was a literary fiction, he may have decided to add some remarks when he came to publish it later, and thereby generate the text we have now. What is important for him in any event is not whether it is a literary fiction or a document but its “further testimony,” its capacity to “translate an experience of spiritual life that is at once profound and authentic.”



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fiction in which each one of us who are survivors may dizzily recognize his own life.33

What is the theme of this turmoil? The impossibility once and for all of a God of children and the necessity of a God (and a religion) of adults. The abrogation of a Supreme Being and of a universe in which an all-powerful and all-knowing God punishes the bad and rewards the good, and the assumption rather of a God that is otherwise than being, and of human responsibility for human behavior, of infinite responsibility or obligation for the other individual. In short, the end of theodicy and the beginning of witness. What is the meaning of this suffering of the innocent? Does it not bear witness to a world that is without God, to a land where man alone measures Good and Evil? The simplest and most common response to this question would lead to atheism. This is no doubt also the sanest reaction for all those for whom up until a moment ago a God, conceived a bit primitively, distributed prizes, inflicted sanctions, or pardoned faults, and in His kindness treated human beings as eternal children. But with what narrow-minded demon, with what strange magician did you thus populate your sky, you who now declare it to be deserted? And why under such an empty sky do you continue to seek a world that is meaningful and good? Yossel ben Yossel reveals to us the certitude of God with a new force under an empty sky. For if he exists so alone, it is in order to feel upon his shoulders all the responsibilities of God. On the path that leads to the unique God there is a relay point that is without God. True monotheism must respond to the legitimate exigencies of atheism. The God of adults manifests Himself precisely through (par) the emptiness of the sky of a child. This is a moment when God withdraws from the world and conceals His face (according to Yossel ben Yossel).

And here, following these paragraphs, is the first paragraph of the same passage that van Beeck translates rendered somewhat differently. A God who conceals His face is not, I think, a theological abstraction or a poetic image. It is a way of talking about the hour when the just individual no longer finds any external recourse, when no institution protects him, when the consolation to be gained from perceiving divine presence within the religious sentiment of a child is similarly of no avail, when the individual can no longer triumph except in his own consciousness (conscience), which is to Goodhart (1996), 236.

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say, necessarily in suffering; moreover, a specifically Jewish sense of suffering, which never at any moment assumes the value of a mystical expiation for the sins of the world. The condition of being a victim (la position des victimes) in a world in disorder, which is to say, in a world where the good does not triumph, is suffering. The position of victims reveals a God who, renouncing all helpful manifestation, appeals to the full maturity of the integrally responsible man.34

And shortly after this passage, Levinas summarizes the idea in the conclusion of the following paragraph. “The suffering of the just for a justice that is without triumph is lived concretely as Judaism. Israel—historic and carnal—has become once again a religious category”35 (italics added). In the wake of the Holocaust, the idea that God has died or that God never existed at all might well seem the most natural (perhaps even the most reasonable) conclusion to reach. But we reach that conclusion only if we have held up until this moment a particularly childlike conception of God—of one who inflicts injury and awards prizes, a God, that is to say, of eternal children. On the other hand, if we expand our conceptualization of transcendence, alternative possibilities appear. God’s very absence may be taken, for example, less as a sign of our abandonment than an index of our own responsibility for (and implication in) human behavior. It may lead to the recognition that suffering is not an interruption of human experience from the outside (as if a condition independent of suffering were achievable under the right circumstances) nor an experience to which may be attached any symbolic value whatsoever (as if, for example, it were redemptive) but a given in consciousness, an inevitable extension of that consciousness in a disordered world where the good and the just do not triumph. Moreover, that in the face of such ineluctable suffering, what we can do is respond, trace the path of our own implication in the fortunes of the neighbor, the other individual, whose absolute alterity from us I have attempted to objectify and master. Discovering the suffering of the other individual, we discover the origin of our own subjectivity and the fact that Judaism has never been any other but the living of that discovery. “The suffering of the just for a justice that is without triumph is lived concretely as Judaism” (italics added). In another essay, “Useless Suffering,” Levinas makes the point even more directly.36 Suffering, he says there, is “unassumable” and “unassumability,” the My translation. Goodhart (1996), 237. See Levinas, “Useless Suffering,” in Bernasconi and Wood (1988), 156–67.

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collapse of the ability to appropriate. Suffering is “dans la conscience, une donnée,” a “given in consciousness, like the lived experience of color, of sound, of contact, like any sensation.” As such, it has no inherent meaning, no use; it is “intrinsically meaningless” and therefore when it occurs it is “precisely an evil.” Suffering is “pure undergoing,” a passivity “more passive than experience,” more passive that is to say than the opposite of active. On the other hand, since suffering is “pure undergoing,” it can open the possibility of a bond within the “inter-human,” the “between human beings” as Buber called it, das Zwischenmenschliche. In this perspective a radical difference develops between suffering in the Other (la souffrance en autrui), which for me is unpardonable and solicits me and calls me, and suffering in me, my own adventure of suffering whose constitutional or congenital uselessness can take on a meaning, the only meaning to which suffering is susceptible, in becoming a suffering for the suffering—be it inexorable—of someone else.37

Useless and of no value in itself, and unforgivable when it occurs in the other individual, suffering can acquire meaning in my own case as a suffering for the other individual, as an act of my “non-indifference” and “dis-inter-ested-ness” (the removal of myself from among others with whom I maintain an ontological identity). As such, it becomes a modality of my responsibility for the other individual and can provide an ethical foundation across human groups. It is this attention to the [suffering of the] Other [individual] which, across the cruelties of our century—despite these cruelties, because of these cruelties—can be affirmed as the very bond of human subjectivity, even to the point of being raised to a supreme ethical principle—the only one which it is not possible to contest—a principle which can go so far as to command the hopes and practical discipline of vast human groups.38

In this context, to wait “for the saving actions of an all-powerful God” is a form of “degradation” (déchoir) The Holocaust in this context is the paradigm of unmitigated and useless human suffering not because it is transcendental or transhistorical but because it is transhuman. “À la mémoire,” reads the French dedication (in contrast to the Hebrew) to Autrement qu’être, ou au délà de l’essence (the second of Levinas’s major philosophic treatises), “des êtres les plus Levinas (1988), 159. Ibid.

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proches parmi les millions d’assassiné par les nationaux socialistes, à coté des millions et des millions d’humains de toutes confessions et de toutes nations, victimes de la même haine de l’autre homme, du même antisémitisme.”39 Auschwitz, in other words, for Levinas, is an event in the history of the human. After the Holocaust, a conscience which unites consciousness and conscience, in which perceptual consciousness rediscovers itself at the heart of a moral consciousness, is not only possible but necessary. It has never in fact not been necessary. But after such a demonstration, the alternatives are unthinkable. To go on as if nothing has changed is monstrous. But it is equally monstrous to go on in such a way that claims to acknowledge Auschwitz and implicitly represses its evidentiary signs, a repression that in effect secures its perpetuation. How does Levinas escape such monstrosity? By recognizing, I suggest, the commentary and the witness implicit in the text before him, whether or not the text itself acknowledges such commentary or such witness. Levinas uncovers the anti-theodicial potential of Kolitz’s text whether or not the story’s narrator or Zvi Kolitz himself acknowledges that potential, and whether or not readers of the story such as Rudolf Krämer-Badoni, Sebastian Müller, or Frans Jozef van Beeck acknowledge or enact it. In fact, one of the reasons van Beeck may be so attracted to Levinas’s work is that Levinas manages to express the difficulty he finds with a Christian approach in a way that offers Christians a way out, a way to save face, a way to make oneself more fully Christian rather than less. The Holocaust, Levinas tells us, is the end of theodicy. Theodicy as a word entered the language as the title of a book by Leibnitz at the beginning of the eighteenth century. But as an idea, and in particular as the “vindication of divine justice in the face of the existence of evil,” it may be as old as Judaism.40 We find echoes of it in the Book of Ezra, for example, where the collapse of the Temple is justified as a divine punishment for the sins of the people. Theodicy is the continuation of mythic thinking into revealed religious thinking. Theodicy, in other words, was never a fact of life. But if we ever thought it was and needed a demonstration of its insufficiency, the Holocaust was such a demonstration with a vengeance. The Holocaust as an event for Levinas aligns itself with the deepest order of human catastrophe. It is the return of “To the memory of beings who were the closest to me among the six million assassinated by the National Socialists, alongside millions upon millions of other human beings of all faiths and all nations, victims of the same hate of the other man, of the same antisemitism,” Levinas (1978), my translation. 40 Morris (1975), 1334. 39



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the moment of the exile, the beginning of the first diaspora. All responsibility is in our hands, not because there is no God, or because God has concealed or veiled His Face but because, he tells us, there never was such a God to begin with, because the dream of such a God is the dream of children who would deflect human responsibility onto the divine. To become adult for Levinas is to assume a full responsibility for human behavior that is not the product of my freedom but ironically its condition, that is given in the created fabric of the world. And to become such an adult—infinitely responsible for the other individual (and here is really the second part of it)—is clearly in fact to engage God in relationship, a God who is otherwise than being, a God who demands of us nothing less than shouldering God’s own responsibility for others, for their lives, for their responsibility, even for their deaths. how does Judaism conceive of humanity? … by experiencing the presence of God through one’s relation to man … . The way that leads to God therefore leads ipso facto—and not in addition—to man … . The fact that the relationship with the Divine crosses the relationship with men and coincides with social justice … epitomizes the entire spirit of the Jewish Bible.41

The truth of testimony, for Levinas, is not the truth of representation. The inability of Zvi Kolitz’s readers to recognize themselves in Zvi Kolitz’s narrative itself bears witness to the truth of its claims, as Levinas reads them. The struggle to separate what is true from what is fictive about it continues the circumstances already internal to it and generates the problem to anew. Yossel Rakover finds himself in a circumstance in which the unthinkable has happened in the Warsaw Ghetto and to deal with it he relies upon the traditional Rabbinic theme of hester panim. Zvi Kolitz in 1946 finds himself in a situation in which the unthinkable has occurred in Europe and responds by invoking a traditional literary theme. He writes a short story about it in which heroism triumphs over adversity. Reading Zvi Kolitz’s text from 1946 to 1995, van Beeck finds both the circumstances internal to the narrative and the circumstances involving its transmission intolerable and responds by invoking a traditional rationalist theological schema to set things straight: whether the text is a “real document” or “only a fiction,” Zvi Kolitz deserves credit for having written it and Emmanuel Levinas deserves credit for having noticed its testimonial potential. Levinas (1990), 16.

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The subject matter of the unthinkable changes. In one case, it is the behavior of the Nazis and the world surrounding them. In another, it is the experience of a secular Yiddish writer living after the war in America reflecting upon his past. In still another, it is the experience of a writer living after the war in Germany, or a Lithuanian Jewish philosopher working after the war in France, or a Dutch Jesuit theologian doing work after the war on Jewish–Christian relations reflecting upon their own memories. But in each case the insupportability of the reality they encounter is noted and a traditional response engaged, and in that fashion the “same” situation continues. The internal narrative and the external narrative bear witness, finally, not to the heroism of Yossel Rakover or of Zvi Kolitz or of Krämer-Badoni or of Frans Jozef van Beeck (or for that matter of Emmanuel Levinas) but to the circumstances in which such judgment is rendered, circumstances in which a structure of possession and dispossession has the potential to unleash accusation, suffering, and theodicy—mythic, anthropomorphic, interpretative, sacrificial consequences that engender only more suffering and more evil. The suffering of the other individual is never redemptive in Levinas’s view, never forgivable. Only my own suffering may be assigned a meaning. And only on such a basis, Levinas asserts, in one of his very rare anthropological commentaries (and one undoubtedly he makes in response to Buber’s das Zwischenmenchliche, “the interhuman”) may we devise an ethical principle as a foundation for human groups that is unassailable. It is an insight that is hard to gainsay, and one whose resources may not yet have been fully developed.

Conclusions: Useless Suffering and the End of Theodicy We continue to live in the shadow of Auschwitz—all the more fully as we attempt to evade or deny that shadow. And we are likely to do so—Geoffrey Hartman observes—for some time to come.42 The literature of our age bears witness to that shadow whether we would present it or conceal it. We may act out that shadow in our fictions, in our literary criticism, in our theologies, in our philosophies, or in our day-to-day behavior. Or we may work through it, a working through that does not necessarily avoid acting it out (and may even require it), but that attempts at least to take stock of it, and in doing so binds us See Hartman (1986).

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to a tradition of scriptural exegesis which has also never not been thinking and acting along the same paths, a traditional Jewish Talmudic interpretative mode which, far from having ended in the second century of the common era (as is sometimes said) continues in this fashion in writers like Emmanuel Levinas as an ongoing available prophetic creative thoughtful possibility. A decade and a half after the turn of the twenty-first century, it might be more helpful for us to register the critical testimonial prophetic status of our most powerful writing and reading rather than try to determine what is true or untrue about it, fictional or non-fictional, decidable or (as much of avant-garde critical theorizing is wont to say) undecidable. Our most powerful writing, like our most powerful reading, is both/and and neither/nor, already otherwise entirely than the being within which we would struggle to discover and confine it.

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“And darkness upon the face of the deep”: Counter-Redemptive Hermeneutics in Wiesel, Mauriac, Blanchot, Levinas, and Genesis 1

When God began to create the heavens and the earth, And the earth [was] without form and void, And darkness [was] upon the face of the deep … Genesis 11 The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle. And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? William Butler Yeats2 When the forms of things are dissolved in the night, the darkness of the night … invades like a presence. Emmanuel Levinas3 Whoever devotes himself to the work is drawn by it toward the point where it undergoes impossibility. This experience is purely nocturnal, it is the very experience of night. Maurice Blanchot4

My modification of the JPS 1985 translation of Tanakh edited by Orlinsky.. W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming,” Ferguson (2005), 1196. 3 Levinas, Existence and Existents (2001), 52. 4 Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature (1989), 163–4. 1 2

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[T]he deportee has lived to the point of usury his death … . He has exhausted within one camp or another all the possibilities for dying. Jean Cayrol5 It was then that I understood what had first drawn me to the young Israeli: that look, as of a Lazarus risen from the dead. François Mauriac6 I had ceased to be anything but ashes … Elie Wiesel7

Prologue: The Middle of the Night In the middle of the book for which he is best known, in the middle of Night, Elie Wiesel describes the hanging of a young boy.8 The scene is Auschwitz, or, more precisely, Buna, one of the work details associated with Auschwitz, the death camp to which Wiesel’s family had been deported. Born and raised in the Transylvanian city of Sighet, the narrator has by this moment in the story already experienced the arrival of the Germans in his small town, their feigned friendliness, the sudden arrests and round-up of his family and others, the long and torturous journey in the cattle cars to the death camp, and his arrival in the camp and the disorientation of the first night there—in which he is separated from his mother and younger sister (who are taken directly to the crematoria), and from his two older sisters. Alone in the camp with his father, he is made witness to the following event. A well-loved prisoner of the camps, a large boned Dutchman (an “Oberkapo”) has been found with a stock of arms and charged with the attempt to blow up the power station at Buna. He is arrested, tortured, and sent to Auschwitz. His “little servant,” “a young boy under him, a pipel, as they were called—a child with a refined and beautiful face … the face of a sad angel” was left in Buna. The Jean Cayrol, “Pour un romanesque lazaréen,” Les Corps étrangers (1964), 214; my translation; see also Cayrol (2007), 811. 6 Elie Wiesel, The Night Trilogy (1990), 8–10. 7 Wiesel (1990), 75. 8 Concerning Night, Wiesel writes (“Preface to the New Translation,” The Night Trilogy [2008], 5): “If in my lifetime I was to write only one book, this would be the one.” 5



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child was tortured and scheduled for execution along with two other prisoners identified with the plot. One day when we came back from work, we saw three gallows rearing up in the assembly place, three black crows. Roll call. SS all round us, machine guns trained: the traditional ceremony. Three victims in chains—and one of them, the little servant, the sad-eyed angel. The SS seemed more preoccupied, more disturbed, than usual. To hang a young boy in front of thousands of spectators was no light matter. The head of the camp read the verdict. All eyes were on the child. He was lividly pale, almost calm, biting his lips. The gallows threw its shadow over him. This time the Lagerkapo refused to act as executioner. Three SS replaced him. The three victims mounted together onto the chairs. The three necks were placed at the same moments within the nooses. “Long live liberty!” cried the two adults. But the child was silent. “Where is God? Where is He?” someone behind me asked. At a sign from the head of the camp, the three chairs tipped over. Total silence throughout the camp. On the horizon, the sun was setting. “Bare your heads!” yelled the head of the camp. His voice was raucous. We were weeping. “Cover your heads!” Then the march past began. The two adults were no longer alive. Their tongues hung swollen, blue-tinged. But the third rope was still moving: being so light, the child was still alive… . For more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look him full in the face. He was still alive when I passed in front of him. His tongue was still red, his eyes were not yet glazed. Behind me, I heard the same man asking: “Where is God now?” And I heard a voice within me answer him: “Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows …” That night the soup tasted of corpses.9

The passage is justly famous. Ellen Fine, whose astute volume, Legacy of Night, has the distinction (among many others) of being the first full-length Wiesel (1990), 70–2.

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treatment of the body of Wiesel’s work, suggests it is critical to the narrative that follows.10 It is easy to understand why. The slaughter of innocent victims to which the narrator is continually made witness—in this case, literally, guilt by association—reflects for him in miniature the Nazi enterprise at large. What greater monstrosity could a young man of such circumstances imagine than this massive, systematic, categorical, and unprecedented violence of a national government against members of its own citizenry or those within its sphere of influence?11 And if we add that even after the treachery is disclosed, the National Socialist project remained unredressed—the onlookers remained silent—it is hard to conceive a more fundamental betrayal of the human, of the humanistic impulses we have rationalized for over two thousand years in the European West. One of the reasons for the difficulty in confronting the Holocaust, one scholar surmises, is that the rest of its citizenry endorsed it.12 The Hitler regime was stopped (when it was stopped) from the outside, not from within. Viewed historically and politically, in other words, it is not an exaggeration to say that radical and absolute evil, whether conceived in secular or religious terms, surfaced in modern culture in a brutal and unmitigated fashion, and that Western European ideals about morality lay shattered in its wake.13 That the means of delivery of this savage violence turned out to be among the most banal and quotidian of goods and services—railway cars, train schedules, delousing facilities, chemical agents, etc.—has troubled not a few commentators.14 The whole of modern industrialization would appear to have conspired in its production. Heinous as his public silence about the Holocaust was in See Ellen S. Fine, Legacy of Night. The Literary Universe of Elie Wiesel (1982), 27–9. Fine’s thoughtful study continues to inspire new critical readers. See also Ruth R.Wisse’s reading of this scene in The Modern Jewish Canon (2003), 212–16. 11 The “unprecedented” nature of the Holocaust has been developed at length by Steven T. Katz, and remains a constant theme in Holocaust studies. See The Holocaust in Historical Context (1994). See, also, the writing of Geoffrey Hartman (1994), Emil Fackenheim (1982, 1988), Lawrence Langer (1975, 1978, 1982, 1988, 1995, 2000, 2006, 2013), Saul Friedländer (1992, 1993, 1994, 1997, 2007), Raul Hilberg (1961), Christopher Browning (1991, 1992), and Yehuda Bauer (1978, 1982, 1989) on this idea. The idea of a government turning against its own citizens is taken up explicitly in Paul Dumouchel, Le sacrifice inutile (2012); translated in Dumouchel (2015). On the use of the everyday to instrumentalize this destruction, see Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1964) and Claude Lanzmann’s film, Shoah (1985). 12 Cf. Friedländer’s comments to this effect (1997). 13 The Yiddish title of the volume from which the French version of Night (La Nuit) was translated is Un di velt hot geshvign (And the World Remained Silent). See below. 14 The reference here of course is to the famous phrase assigned to the cover of Hannah Arendt’s book on the Eichmann trial, “the banality of evil”: Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil (1964). For recent qualifications of the thesis that Eichmann was a banal figure, see Bettina Strangneth’s Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer (2014). For more critical views of Arendt, see Deborah Lipstadt (2011). 10



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the 1930s and afterwards, and reductionist and callous as its intention appears to have been, Martin Heidegger’s notorious remark about the importance of agricultural industrialization in the manufacture of corpses seems eerily apt.15 In such a context, is not hard to understand how a passage such as this one (and the events at large it echoes) could lend a certain familiarity to eyes and ears accustomed to Christian interpretations. François Mauriac, for example, who wrote the “Foreword” to the French publication of this book (and was one of the first readers of the French manuscript), finds in it a confirmation of his faith. He refers to this passage when he describes his encounter with the young journalist who himself turns out to be (as he understands it) among the trainloads of Jewish children deported from Austerlitz station, a young man who, in Mauriac’s view, still bore the “look as of a Lazarus risen from the dead,” was “still a prisoner within the grim confines where he had strayed,” and yet “whose dark eyes,” Mauriac writes, “still held the reflection of that angelic sadness which had appeared one day upon the face of the hanged child” (9–10). For Wiesel, on the other hand, writing as if still from the narrative perspective of the fourteen-year-old, the episode has a different effect. For the young boy raised in a more or less orthodox Jewish environment in a shtetl in Europe, it is a challenge to his faith rather than a confirmation. Torn from his family, his home, his language, his religious affiliations, the young boy is forced to the realization that in effect no one will arrive to stop the disaster, that it constitutes the death of any possible “happy ending.” For the fourteen-year-old who witnesses it, and who has been something of the sidekick of his own father, his father’s pipel if you will (and who has benignly scoffed along with others in the community at the messengerial behavior of some of its members), it is the disastrous end of the boy’s “special treatment.” Here is the state to which the “little god,” has come. There he is; there is “God,” hanging on that gallows. In this sense, in the eyes of the fourteen-year-old, the pipel is Wiesel and his fate is Wiesel’s fate. And the “answer” given by the internal voice constitues for the young narrator less an assertion concerning the divine than a prophetic midrashic reading of his own personal experience, the death of all he has believed to that moment in his life. “Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps, the same thing as blockades and the reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.” These remarks were delivered by Heidegger in a lecture titled “The Enframing” in Bremen on December 1, 1949 and published in Four Lectures on Technology (1949). It is not without interest in the present context that their English language publication as “The Question Concerning Technology” leaves out the reference to “extermination camps.” Compare for example, Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology (1977), 15. See Heidegger (2012).

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The centrality of the passage, in other words, to both the autobiographical narrative Wiesel writes, and the theological framework in which Mauriac comes to receive it, is not in dispute. But in what follows my interest will be less in delineating their individual perspectives (Wiesel’s or Mauriac’s), or in interpreting the historical events they reflect, or even in assessing the Jewish, Christian, humanist, or other religious or secular structures in which those events have been interpretatively cast, than in what I might dub “counterredemptive hermeneutics,” a rhetorical strategy to which Wiesel’s book—in assembling these myriad views—opened the door as few others in the postwar era either before or since. I will consider first in some detail the contrast between Wiesel’s and Mauriac’s perspectives as they show up in the book the two of them publish— that the young journalist translates from an earlier version and for which the elder Catholic thinker writes a foreword—in the late 1950s. Then, in subsequent sections, I will attempt to contextualize their references a bit, looking at some of the thinking and thinkers in whose context in postwar France this writing emerges, identifying some of the primary intellectual landmarks in which such contrasts gather some of their impressive force—in the work of Jean Cayrol, Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas, and others. Finally, I will attempt to ascertain whether or not we, as readers of this modern scripture, are not obligated to take stock of our own responsibilities in relation to it more than seventy years later, to assess the continuities (and discontinuities) of our own post-Holocaust situation in America in the twentyfirst century (as heirs of such European events) within a logic or structure I have characterized here or there as Möbian. More specifically, I will ask with a recent historian of these events whether something like a “redemptive anti-Semitism” is at work here and whether something like a counter-redemptive hermeneutics needs to be constructed, as a response.16 Let me approach this project from still another angle. I wonder whether in constructing their volume (in which two such different notions of witness are contrasted), Wiesel and Mauriac have stumbled upon something considerably larger than they bargained for, an understanding of night and the posthumous more comprehensive and deeper than either they (or we) expected, and that may appear to us today substantively new, perhaps because we have been asleep See Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume I: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (1997), and Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume II: The Years of Extermination, 1939–1945 (2007). The reference to “redemptive anti-Semitism” occurs in Friedländer (1997), 3.

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for some twenty centuries as Yeats suggests, but that remains nonetheless the oldest in the book, a darkness and a deep from which in fact the book may veritably be said to have been written, and in which we, as readers, as “people of the book” within a Europe-based cultural setting, may continue to observe the foundations of our own contemporary human subjectivity.

Part 1: The Text A: Wiesel and the first night The passage about the hanging of the young boy is clearly critical in all sorts of ways. Suggesting it is germane to both of the book’s two fundamental themes— the theme of night and the narrator’s changing relationship with his father (both of which promote the development of the narrator as a witness)—Ellen Fine, for example, gives it prominence. The episode is structurally the book’s center. It confirms and extends the narrator’s comments about the first night in camp (offered just a few moments earlier), regarding in particular the death of children, their faces, silence, and soul murder. And it leads directly to the taste of soup (“That night the soup tasted of corpses” [72]). It provides the foundation for the book’s final pages, in which the role of the narrator as a subsequent witness is concretized. And it thereby links that ending with the beginning of the book in which an itinerant visitor to the village attempts to warn the community of the impending disaster without much success. Here, for example, is how the narrator describes the night of their arrival in camp.17 Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that has made of my life one long night and sealed it shut seven times. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into a curl of smoke under a silent azure sky. Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to the face of the desert. Wiesel (1990), 43.

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Never shall I forget those things, even if I were condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.18

How shall we read these words? The repeated incantatory phrase is spoken seven times. “Never shall I forget,” “never shall I forget,” “never shall I forget,” and so forth. As if to emphasize the words, in Marion Wiesel’s English translation, the first utterance is put into small caps which is not the case in the Rodway translation or the French original. And then comes the resounding repetition— “never”— summarizing the articulation. To literary ears, the English words cannot help but remind us of Shakespeare’s King Lear, who, bearing the limp body of his deceased daughter in the play’s disturbing conclusion, pronounces the same word five times, with similar insistence (V.iii.284). How do we understand such an utterance? The first time the words are uttered, they describe, pledge, and sequester. I remember clearly what happened. It has remained to this day indelible upon my consciousness. It is separated, set off from all else. My life has continued as if that night never yielded to day. I promise to continue to remember in the future, as long as I live. The second time through the sixth time, they repeat and detail. Never shall I forget the smoke, the faces of the small children, the flames, the silence, the challenges to my faith. The seventh time repeats the list as a whole— summarized as “those things”—and their indelibility. A litany, then; a sacred repetition. As if straight from the liturgy for Yom Kippur. One day for each day of creation, plus one day of rest, on which takes place a reflection back upon the whole, as if the process is a kind of countercreation.19 And, like the opening of the Bereishiyt, this is a poem. He pronounces it sealed shut seven times, performing what he says, saying the line seven times. But if we read the lines semantically, another line from Shakespeare also comes to mind. Does the narrator protest too much? Has forgetfulness already begun to set in for the narrator so that he needs to repeat the counsel not to forget? If it is indeed “indelible” (and a contention of this chapter is that it is, My translation. Here is the French original: “Jamais je n’oublierai cette nuit, la première nuit de camp, qui a fait de ma vie une nuit longue et sept fois verrouillée. / Jamais je n’oublierai cette fumée. / Jamais je n’oublierai les petits visages des enfants dont j’avais vu les corps se transformer en volutes sous un azur muet. Jamais je n’oublierai ces flammes qui consumèrent pour toujours ma Foi. / Jamais je n’oublierai ce silence nocturne qui m’a privé pour l’éternité du désir de vivre. / Jamais je n’oublierai ces instants qui assassinèrent mon Dieu et mon âme, et mes rêves qui prirent le visage du désert. / Jamais je n’oublierai cela, même si j’étais condamné à vivre aussi longtemps que Dieu lui-même. Jamais.” See La Nuit (1958), 58–9. 19 There are traditionally seven services on the day of Yom Kippur. 18



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and in fact increasingly so as time passes), does he really need the constant reminder? If it is ritual, okay. Ritual repeats itself. But if it is story, narrative account—to himself about himself? Does the former serve the latter, the ritual repetition serve the story-telling? Fine notes that many of the themes announced in this list—the smoke, the faces of the small children, the flames, the face of the desert (dust, ashes), the nocturnal silence, the challenges to his faith—reappear in the narrative that follows shortly. The scene with the pipel for example reflects numbers of them: the face of the child, the silence, the challenge to God, and the indelibility of it all. There is also a distinct ordering to the references. He won’t forget the first night. Why? Because of the smoke. Why the smoke? Because it is in fact the transformed faces of the children. How so? Because of the flames. And those flames consumed more than the children. They consumed God and any trust in God. Why? How do we know that? Because of the silence. However outrageous it was—the smoke of the faces consumed by the flames that belied God—were observed in silence.20 Why continue to live in such a world? Why not interrupt that biological momentum? God and my connection to God—my soul—were consumed in those flames every bit as much as the children. And if I were imprisoned and condemned to live in such a world, never could I forget those flames, its surrounding effects, and that silence. The first night in camp has become now every night. And not only of the time spent in the camp. That first night lingers on afterwards, in the ongoing life of the survivor. The writing of Night is itself an example. Ten years after the conclusion of these experiences, the writer is still within their grip, perhaps more so than ever. There are other resonances. The word “never” suggests time has vanished. Terrence Des Pres has written compellingly about the significance of that temporal loss.21 In a surprisingly concrete way, Des Pres argues, what the Jews lacked was time. As a result, they also lacked death as a source of meaning. Emil Fackenheim opened this second discussion with his famous pronouncement about “planet Auschwitz.”22 If time disappears, so does death, since time, we may say, is the distance between death and now.23 My capacity to die confirms the fact that I am still alive. On “Planet Auschwitz,” however, there is neither Cf. the Yiddish title of Wiesel’s volume: Un di velt hot geshvign (And the World Remained Silent). See Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor (1976). 22 See Fackenheim’s entry “Holocaust” in Cohen and Mendes-Flohr’s Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought (1988), 399–408. 23 Wordsworth, for example, understood time in this fashion. See “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” in Ferguson et al, eds (2005), 796–801. 20 21

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time nor death since death has in effect already occurred. “[T]his is the drastic guilt of him who was spared,” Adorno writes. “[The survivor] will be plagued by dreams such as that he is no longer living at all, that he was sent to the ovens in 1944 and his whole existence since has been imaginary, an emanation of the insane wish of a man killed twenty years earlier.”24 Here is another way to say it. The negative consequence of the fact that the Messiah is always “to come” in classical Judaism, always “soon, but not yet,” is that this suffering we currently endure is likely to continue. The positive side is that responsibility, the infinite responsibility that I bear for the other individual according to some modern thinkers, continues to fall upon my shoulders, so that I have more time left in which to complete my task, my partnership with God in the creation of the world.25 But in the circumstances of the Holocaust, there is no more time. Time has run out. However far we have gotten in the task of shouldering our infinite responsibility for the other individual is as far as we are likely to get. There is at least one more interpretative potential to be developed from this first scene. “Never” implies at no time, not ever, at no moment, does the thing in question present itself. The phrase “never shall I forget” would have to mean semantically among other things at no point in the future will I forget. And this idea has been linked with the famous rabbinic dictum: “in memory lies redemption.” But the Talmud also teaches, ironically, that we live only by forgetting. If we literally remembered everything that occurred, we would succumb after only five minutes from a surfeit of information. Forgetting ironically allows us to continue, to live on, to survive, in a neologism developed at some length by a contemporary thinker.26 So the potential for challenging the Talmudic tradition is also present. How do the rabbis reconcile these two competing perspectives? We might be tempted to say of remembering what is often said of completing creation. We are not obligated to complete the work of creation (in our partnership with God), but neither are we free not to undertake it at all. Similarly, we might say in this instance we are not obligated to remember everything that happens, but neither are we free not to remember it at all. What then about the situation of extremity in which to live, to survive, is to remember, but to live is also necessarily to forget; in which re-membering is also a form of forgetting? Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (1987), 363. On the idea that my relation to the other individual is governed by my unlimited responsibility for him, see Emmanual Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (2000). 26 Jacques Derrida, “Living On / Borderlines,” in Bloom, Deconstruction and Criticism (1979), 75–176. See also “Demeure. Fiction and Testimony,” in Blanchot, The Instant of My Death (2000). 24 25



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One way of understanding the logic of witness is to say that it embodies both apparent “sides” of this contradiction. After the Holocaust, we must remember. But to live is necessarily to forget. One solution, therefore, is to live the contradiction precisely as witness. Words cannot describe and I was there! These are two ideas that Geoffrey Hartman informs us every survivor expresses. Wiesel’s book begins this particular discourse about necessity and impossibility in a concrete fashion. ***** The hanging of the pipel, then, displays in manifest form what the words describing the narrator’s arrival in the camp suggest more obliquely. To some extent, the first night has never been in fact entirely the first night. In a parody of the opening of Genesis—where the beginning or bereishiyt turns out not to be in fact the absolute beginning because some things before creation were already in place (the earth, darkness, the waters, the wind from God)—the “first night” sets in motion the series of events that defy description and that in retrospect lend force to its memory some ten years after they occurred. What actually takes place for the narrator on the first night in his memoir? He arrives with his family—father, mother, and sisters—from the train. He and his father are separated from the rest—as result of a few words by a camp administrator and later a gesture of the camp doctor with his baton (Doctor Mengele)—and he is marched along with his father next to a fire pit. He hears murmuring about rebellion (that never comes to fruition). He sees people shot, flames and smoke rise from the crematoria, and little children deposited directly into the fire near which they are marching. And he hears forecasts from other prisoners about their own future in the flames. He settles with his father into the bunk a changed human being in just a few hours. But if the first night was not the first, what preceded it? Precisely, the hanging of the child, the death of the pipel before his eyes: For more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look him full in the face. He was still alive when I passed in front of him. His tongue was still red, his eyes were not yet glazed.27

Wiesel (1990), 72.

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How so? The hanging galvanizes everything that the first night comes in retrospect to start, and so is what gives that first night something of its extraordinary and surreal force. The death of the child is in effect as we noted above the death of everything special about the narrator in his own eyes, everything and everyone who protects him from harm in the outside world and maintains his uniqueness: his family, his religion, his relation to God. But in addition to constituting an event in its own right, it confirms what the first night promised—abject horror—and confers upon it in turn its indelible status. The first night is indelible because of the death of the pipel later whose conseqences in part it already elaborates by way of the narrator’s memory of those events. In that way it forms a loop. The Holocaust is concretized for Wiesel in the hanging of the child. The hanging of the child makes explicit what the first night promises. But the first night promises what follows (namely, the hanging of the child) because Wiesel is writing about it ten years later having already gone through it ten years earlier and the narrator remembers what followed. The “never shall I forget” resonates so powerfully for him not only because of what happened at that moment but also because of what happened after that moment that both confirms what happened earlier as real and renders what follows that much more powerful as an experience. Holocaust survivors commonly report that the worst moments for them were not what went on in the camps but what happened after liberation when they realized what happened in the camp really had occurred. In that way, we could say that the hanging of the child is both before and after the first night and the result is a narrative effect that duplicates the narrator’s actual experience (to the extent that any narrative effect can even faintly echo the horrors the narrator went through), and the episode becomes indelible— and Mauriac picks up on this indelible quality of it in reading the book—since what the speaker cannot forget is not only what happened that first night, but also what followed. As a consequence, the hanging also does something else in Wiesel’s book. It forms the basis for the episode on the final page when the narrator looks at the mirror, also hanging in front of him, and sees his own reflection as the face of a corpse, and that is the image in which he will spend the rest of his life. In the hanging he has moved from life to death. One day I was able to get up, after gathering all my strength. I wanted to see myself in the mirror hanging on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto.



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From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me [son regard dans mes yeux ne me quitte plus].28

Much has been written about this final passage and Naomi Seidman’s commentary is perhaps one of the more famous, if not more infamous, accounts.29 Here is Seidman’s commentary from her 1996 essay. In the final lines of Night when the recently liberated Eliezer gazes at his own face in a mirror, the reader is presented with the survivor as both subject and object, through his inner experience and through the outward image of what he has become. And while the emaciated boy who sees a corpse in the mirror may have changed, the man he becomes has never forgotten this deathly reflection (in the original French, the sense that this gaze of the corpse, remains within the survivor is even stronger). Precisely because the image of the corpse in the mirror is so unfamiliar, so inassimilable to the living consciousness of the survivor, that image must live on; the survivor will always be, in some sense, a corpse. 30

Seidman’s observations to this point are trenchant. The boy has assumed the imago of a corpse. And ten years later the man who remembers this scene retains that identification. In a sense, his current writing in 1956 is simply an extension of that observation in 1946. But somewhat curiously, Seidman proceeds to utilize the contrast between these lines and the earlier Yiddish version to the detriment of the French manuscript. She contrasts this ending with that of the earlier 1956 Yiddish version which “does not end there as Night does.”31 Three days after liberation I became very ill; food-poisoning. They took me to the hospital and the doctors said that I was gone. For two weeks I lay in the hospital between life and death. My situation grew worse from day to day. One fine day I got up—with the last of my energy—and went over to the mirror that was hanging on the wall. I wanted to see myself. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the mirror a skeleton gazed out. Skin and bones. I saw the image of myself after my death. It was at that instant that the will to live was awakened. Without knowing why, I raised a balled-up fist and smashed the mirror, breaking the image that lived within it. And then—I fainted… . From 30 31 28 29

Ibid., 119. See Naomi Seidman, “Elie Wiesel and the Scandal of Jewish Rage” (1996), 1–19. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 6. Cf.  Un di velt hot geshvign (And the World Remained Silent). See below.

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that moment on my health began to improve. I stayed in bed for a few more days, in the course of which I wrote the outline of the book you are holding in your hand, dear reader.32

Upon viewing himself in the mirror with the imago of a corpse in this earlier Yiddish version of the text, the emaciated boy smashes the mirror before him and his writing begins within context of that gesture of rebellion. Moreover, the Yiddish narrative does not conclude even with that gesture. It issues into two additional paragraphs musing on European culture since then, paragraphs that end by thinking back upon that gesture of smashing. But—now, ten years after Buchenwald, I see that the world is forgetting. Germany is a sovereign state, the German army has been reborn. The bestial sadist of Buchenwald, Ilsa Koch, is happily raising her children. War criminals stroll in the streets of Hamburg and Munich. The past has been erased. Forgotten. Germans and anti-Semites persuade the world that the story of the six million Jewish martyrs is a fantasy, and the naive world will probably believe them, if not today, then tomorrow or the next day. So I thought it would be a good idea to publish a book based on the notes I wrote in Buchenwald. I am not so naive to believe that this book will change history or shake people’s beliefs. Books no longer have the power they once had. Those who were silent yesterday will also be silent tomorrow. I often ask myself, now, ten years after Buchenwald: Was it worth breaking that mirror? Was it worth it?33

Seidman draws our attention to the differences between the Yiddish and the French version that reflect for her larger considerations. By stopping when it does,  Night  provides an entirely different account of the experience of the survivor. Night and the stories about its composition depict the survivor as a witness and as an expression of silence and death, projecting the recently liberated Eliezer’s death-haunted face into the postwar years when Wiesel would become a familiar figure. By contrast, the Yiddish survivor shatters that image as soon as he sees it, destroying the deathly existence the Nazis willed on him. The Yiddish survivor is filled with rage and the desire to live, to take revenge, to write. Indeed, according to the Yiddish memoir, Eliezer began to write not ten years after the events of the Holocaust but immediately upon liberation, as the first expression Ibid., 6–7. The passage, from Un di velt (245–6), Seidman tells us, is partially reproduced, although translated somewhat differently, in All Rivers (1995), 320. Seidman (1996), 7.

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of his mental and physical recovery. In the Yiddish we meet a survivor who, ten years after liberation, is furious with the world’s disinterest in his history, frustrated with the failure of the Jews to fulfill “the historical commandment of revenge”, depressed by the apparent pointlessness of writing a book.34

Seidman views the opposition as one of Yiddish to French, naked rebellion to polite conversation, the furious frustrated fist to the survivor’s death-haunted face. In the latter, the mournful image of the silent zombie-like Lazarean figure dominates. In the former, the rage is still percolating just beneath the thinly veiled surface. There are two survivors, then, a Yiddish and a French—or perhaps we should say one survivor who speaks to a Jewish audience and one whose first reader is a French Catholic. The survivor who met with Mauriac labors under the selfimposed seal and burden of silence, the silence of his association with the dead. The Yiddish survivor is alive with a vengeance and eager to break the wall of indifference he feels surrounds him… . Wiesel found the audience he told his Yiddish readers he wanted. But only, as it turns out, by suppressing the very existence of this desire, by foregrounding the reticent and mournful Jew who will speak only when [and] at the urging of the older Catholic writer.35

Seidman verges on declaring that Wiesel has sold out to his older French Catholic interlocutor.36 And she feels that subsequent writing about the book, and about Wiesel, has appropriated this mournful image unduly, as if what needed to be said about his experience is indeed sayable, but Wiesel simply chooses—for reasons she will surmise for us—not to say it.37 … And the myriad works of commentary on Wiesel have seized upon this theme, producing endless volumes on the existential and theological silences of his work, on the question of what has been called “the limits of representation.” What remains outside this proliferating discourse on the unsayable is not what

Ibid., 7. Ibid., 8. 36 Seidman herself seems to have modified her position somewhat in her own rewriting ten years later. See Naomi Seidman, Faithful Renderings: Jewish–Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation (2006), 216–36. For other readings of the differences between the Yiddish and French versions, see David Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Culture (1984), Ruth Wisse, The Modern Jewish Canon (2003), and Ruth Franklin, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction (2011). 37 The idea that a writer who is a member of the Yiddish-speaking Jewish community in Europe would sell out to foreign influences is no stranger to its history. Think of Marc Chagall and the charges levied against him after the war, a scandal that novelist Dara Horn has made in part the subject of her book, The World to Come (2006). 34 35

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cannot be spoken but what cannot be spoken in  French. And this is not the ‘silence of the dead’ but rather the scandal of the living, the scandal of Jewish rage and unwillingness to embody suffering and victimization. The image that dominates the end of Night—the look, as Mauriac describes it, “as of a Lazarus risen from the dead, yet still a prisoner within the grim confines where he had strayed, stumbling among shameful corpses”—is precisely the image that Wiesel shatters at the end of his Yiddish work. And resurrects to end the French one.38

Seidman stops little short of saying Wiesel is a self-hating Jew (in the sense of Jewish self-hatred described by Sander Gilman and others), as if “the scandal of Jewish rage” is Wiesel’s “resurrection” of an image previously shattered.39 But what if what is now sayable (or unsayable) in French is precisely what needs to be said (or unsaid)? Seidman’s assumption is that Wiesel had to suppress the more unadulterated truth (at once recognizable to Yiddish audiences in her view) for a more anodyne version of it, one more palatable to French cafés and patisseries (perhaps frequented by Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, or by Albert Camus, to whom Wiesel with his own sparse style has often been compared), that the image the emaciated young man encounters in the camp was rightfully smashed and he was appropriately constructing another image in its place.40 Put slightly differently, what if what the young French-speaking journalist/ writer saw was in fact for him the truth, the new real Historishe status of the man and the subject in the eyes of others after the Shoah and if the French revision is not a sell-out for the benefit of a French Catholic theological audience but an appropriate, penetrating, realistic, insightful, assessment given the full dimensions of the situation at hand? What if, in other words, the Yiddish view articulated by Seidman is indeed in this case the more reactionary one, the less expansive one, the one written by the young journalist on a boat in haste without the benefit of other available reflections, and without the chance for revisions he might have made if he had the opportunity for readers and revision? And what if, it turns out, a few years later, when the book has indeed appeared in Yiddish in Buenos Aires, and the writer has had a chance to think about it, and recognize the merit of reducing the eight hundred page effusive and sentiment-laden manuscript to some two hundred Seidman (1996), 8. Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred (1986). See also Paul Reitter, On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred (2012). 40 Is it worth observing that 1958 is also the year Camus wins a Nobel prize for his writing, a body of writing that begins most prominently with The Stranger (1946) and its especially sparse and ironic literary style? 38 39



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more piercingly ironic pages, that he changes his mind, that he concludes that the experience is indeed larger than the younger narrator was (or is) capable of grasping in its immediate aftermath, one that indeed tests the limits of the capacity to represent and the ability to say (as not only Adorno, but the entire tradition of survivors and their commentators have observed), one that may in fact demand in the future new testimonial modes? Or what if finally Seidman’s view reproduces the very perspective Wiesel’s book challenges? The idea of a rebellious fighter who is strengthened by expressions of anger is hardly her innovation. She would seem in fact to have borrowed it from Wiesel’s subsequent book, Le Jour (Day), in which a character named Elisha (himself a Holocaust survivor) joins the Israeli underground and kills a British agent. She would appear to read back Elisha’s attitude into the young Eliezer’s. Or from the Yiddish book itself. Smashing the image of Wiesel, she finds on the wall of our cultural perceptions of him, she would seem to duplicate what she understands as his very gesture. But Wiesel has made it clear that Day is fiction and Night is reality, that Elisha is what he might have become not what he did. Seidman would appear to reproduce and “resurrect” the very heroic and redemptive narrative structuring to which Wiesel’s book would call a halt, all the while accusing Wiesel of doing as much. Adopting a “pre-Holocaust” traditional (and non-Yiddish) outlook, Seidman would appear to endorse that kind of rebellious spirit that a writer like Victor Frankl so faithfully embodies and that Lawrence Langer’s entire body of writing so thoroughly and categorically dismantles.41 Denouncing in Wiesel the failure of a redemptive perspective, Seidman constructs that redemptive anti-heroic perspective herself. But perhaps with Wiesel and Langer it is to a counter-redemptive perspective that we should turn if we wish to appreciate the differences between the French and the Yiddish writer. It is hard, in other words, to deny the stylistic differences between the two endings, one dominated by voiced argument and abundant detail, the other by a kind of metaphysical silence. But it would seem Seidman takes precisely the opposite approach from one that would recognize the importance of the writer’s growth. Where she sees the Yiddish writer on the theme of vengeance suppressed before the prospect of writing for a French Catholic audience, scandalously selling out to that Catholic French audience, we would suggest See for example “The Dilemma of Choice in the Deathcamps,” in Rosenberg and Myers, eds, Echoes from the Holocaust: Philosophical Reflections on a Dark Time (1988), 222–31.

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it is the French writer in this case (and not the Yiddish writer) who perceives the new status realistically, the new subjectivity with which we will now be invariably burdened, a subjectivity, that, it would appear, the iconoclastic young Yiddishist would rather not engage. But Seidman is undoubtedly right about one thing. The “original French” is at stake here in other ways. For example, in the question of translation. The final words of the French edition of La Nuit of 1958 are ne me quitte plus (175), which translates literally as “no longer leaves me,” as if to say, some time ago, the image in the past would come and go, but now it no longer goes; it remains with me without let up. Standard English translations of the passage would appear to have missed some of the subtlety of the French. The French, Du fond du miroir, un cadavre me contemplait./ Son regard dans mes yeux ne me quitte plus (175), gets rendered for example by Rodway as: “From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. / The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me” (119). Rodway’s translation retains the back and forth of the look (his look gazes at me; my look gazes at him; but since his look is also my look, my look gazes at his look gazing at my look, and so forth without limit), and brings us up-to-date with the use of the perfect tense in English for the recent past (“has never left me”). But it implies that that look has remained constant from the moment of its inception, abandoning the idea that the thought at one point came and went and only now no longer leaves, a shifting history that the movement from the Yiddish to the French would seem to validate.42 ***** Perhaps there is another structural reason for the revision. Perhaps the most important function of the passage however is that it completes the movement from the very opening of the book to the end, the transition from Moshe the Beadle (who is described as having returned from the dead), to the young narrator, who at the book’s conclusion finds himself in the role of the new posthumous prophet in his capacity as witness. Here is Moshe at the beginning. “You don’t understand,” he said in despair. “You can’t understand. I have been saved miraculously. I managed to get back here. Where did I get the strength from? I wanted to come back to Sighet to tell you the story of my death. So that Ellen Fine also comments upon the French ending. See Fine (1982), 25.

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you could prepare yourselves while there was still time. To live? I don’t attach [much] importance to my life any more. I’m alone. No, I wanted to come back, and to warn you. And see how it is, no one will listen to me.”43

The “story of my death” could very well become the title of the book Wiesel has written, indeed, even the title of this chapter. By the book’s end, the narrator will come to assume Moshe’s role in his own subsequent community: one of the living dead, come back to tell the tale to deaf ears; our guide or usher to the demonic inverted synagogue of the Holocaust dead. Like Moshe Rabbeinu, another unlikely prophet, the narrator is compelled to assume a mantle for which he never applied.44 But unlike Moshe Rabbeinu and in a demonic parody of the Biblical figure, our narrator, after the these experiences and the transformations they wrought, a new cogito has been rendered operative : “I died; therefore, I am.” In his “plea for the dead,” each one survivor has become Lazarus.45 How does that happen? How is the transition made from the passage on the hanging to the book’s ending? The idea becomes emblematic of his state of mind. Shortly after the hanging, we read the following regarding the narrator’s encounter with prayer. Once, New Year’s Day had dominated my life. I knew that my sins grieved the Eternal; I implored his forgiveness. Once, I had believed profoundly that upon one solitary deed of mine, one solitary prayer, depended the salvation of the world. This day I had ceased to plead. I was no longer capable of lamentation. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes were open and I was alone—terribly alone in a world without God and without man. Without love or mercy. I had ceased to be anything but ashes, yet I felt myself to be stronger than the Almighty, to whom my life had been tied for so long. I stood amid that praying congregation, observing it like a stranger.46

God has not disappeared from existence in these passages. It is, after all, God with whom he compares himself. Rather the writer adopts an attitude Wiesel (1990),17. Night has been read as an anti-Exodus narrative by Irving Greenberg (see “Dialectic Living and Thinking: Wiesel as Storyteller and Interpreter of the Shoah” in Katz and Rosen [2013], 173–89). 45 It is ironic that the person of Wiesel has been conflated in the mind of some readers (who have as their goal to discredit him) with one “Leiser Wiesel” (reputed to have been a fellow inmate of Auschwitz and to have written a manuscript that appeared “in France” with the title Un di velt hot geshvign [And the World Remained Silent]) since, whether or not there was such an individual, Eliezer within the narrative and without has taken on the role of the Biblical Lazarus. Ellen Fine has recently confirmed that Wiesel adopted this nickname himself. See Fine in Katz and Rosen (2013), 137–8. 46 Wiesel (1990), 75. 43 44

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something like that of Job: who never challenges God’s existence, but impugns God’s interest in, or perhaps capacity for, justice. In the following passage, the author does that explicitly. Some talked of God, of his mysterious ways, of the sins of the Jewish people, and of their future deliverance. But I had ceased to pray. How I sympathized with Job! I did not deny God’s existence, but I doubted His absolute justice.47

At still others, he appears to revert to full prayer and thanksgiving. He thanks God for the mud concealing his new shoes. I thanked God, in an improvised prayer, for having created mud in His infinite and wonderful universe.48

Even as late in the narrative as the march to Gleiwitz, when the narrator recalls how Rabbi Eliahou’s son had earlier abandoned his old and weakening father, he says “in spite of myself, a prayer arose in my heart, to that God in which I no longer believed. My God, Lord of the Universe, give me strength never to do what Rabbi Eliahou’s son has done” (97). And the image of “corpses” with which the passage of the hanging child concludes is echoed in the final passage of the French edition (as we noted above). One day I was able to get up, after gathering all my strength. I wanted to see myself in the mirror hanging on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, no longer leaves me.49 (My translation)

The passage on the young boy and the subsequent question to which they lead has occasioned some additional response on the part of Wiesel that may help us understand it. There is a passage in Night—recounting the hanging of a young Jewish boy— that has given rise to an interpretation bordering on blasphemy. Theorists of the idea that “God is dead” have used my words unfairly as justification of their rejection of faith. But if Nietzsche could cry out to the old man in the forest that God is dead, the Jew in me cannot. I have never renounced my faith in God. I Ibid., 53. Ibid., 47. Ibid., 119.

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have risen against His justice, protested His silence and sometimes His absence, but my anger rises up within faith and not outside it… . As I have said elsewhere, Auschwitz is conceivable neither with God nor without Him. Perhaps I may someday come to understand man’s role in the mystery Auschwitz represents, but never God’s… . I will never cease to rebel against those who committed or permitted Auschwitz, including God. The questions I once asked myself about God’s silence remain open. If they have an answer, I do not know it. More than that, I refuse to know it. But I maintain that the death of six million human beings poses a question to which no answer will ever be forthcoming.50

Some of that “rebellious spirit” remains evident in Wiesel’s famous conversation with the Lebovitcher Hasidic Rebbe. “One day in Brooklyn, I asked a question of the celebrated Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneersohn of Lubavitcher.” “Rebbe,” I asked, “how can you believe in God after Auschwitz?” He looked at me in silence for a long moment, his hands resting on the table. Then he replied, in a soft, barely audible voice, “How can you not believe in God after Auschwitz? Whom else could one believe in? Hadn’t man abdicated his privileges and duties? Didn’t Auschwitz represent the defeat of humanity? Apart from God, what was there in a world darkened by Auschwitz?” The Rebbe stared at me, awaiting my response. I hesitated before answering, “Rebbe, if what you say is meant as an answer to my question, I reject it. But if it is a question—one more question—I accept it.” I tried to smile, but failed.51

In a curious way, a way that is not entirely unlike the position of Mauriac (for whom Auschwitz—as symbolized in the hanging of the young boy—seemed a confirmation of his faith), the Rebbe finds in Auschwitz “the defeat of humanity” or humanism, “man” in any event (in Wiesel’s telling). It is the defeat of any hope that that human beings can “rise to the occasion” in acts of justice and responsibility (and any faith in a philosophy of the human that sustains such failure), a defeat concomitant with a renewed trust in God. “Who else could one believe in?” the Rebbe asks. As an “answer,” Wiesel tells us, he rejects it, just as (he informs us) he started to walk out on his interview with Mauriac the moment he realized that his interviewee could read only via Jesus. But posed by the Rebbe as a question, Wiesel tells us, he was able to accept it. All Rivers Run to the Sea (1995), 84–5, 402–3. Ibid.

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The experience of the Holocaust for the young narrator is, then, one of abject loss. In its wake, he will assume the imago of the figure in the mirror—that of a corpse.52 He is now among the dead. But he is also, of course—remarkably enough—still alive, and it this zombie-like state, this condition of being one of the dead who also speaks for the dead, that will constitute for him the nature of his witness. The plot of Wiesel’s book, as Terrence Des Pres noticed, was the construction of the witness. The “plea for the survivors” that he will construct is also necessarily a “plea for the dead.” It is in this messengerial role, this new “evangelic” capacity, that he will henceforth speak, and in which he will bear witness to what happened. The “ashes” (cendres) of which he speaks above (“I was nothing but ashes”) is now his new enabling condition. Here is an exchange from The Accident in which the weight of the past for a Holocaust survivor is given additional clarity.53 Although the book, the third in the “trilogy,” is fiction (in contrast to Night which is assigned by Wiesel the category of memoir), the narrator of The Accident (whose name is Eliezer) articulates for us a position that may also serve to clarify Wiesel’s at the conclusion of Night.54 Kathleen and the narrator, Eliezer, have been fighting. “You claim you love me,” she says, “but you keep suffering.” You say you love me in the present but you’re still living in the past. You tell me you love me but you refuse to forget. At night you have bad dreams. Sometimes you moan in your sleep. The truth is that I am nothing to you. I don’t count. What counts is the past. Not ours; yours. I try to make you happy; an image strikes your memory and it is all over. You are no longer there. The image is stronger than I. You think I don’t know? You think your silence is capable of hiding the hell you carry within you? Maybe you also think that it is easy to live beside someone who suffers and who won’t accept any help.55

And surprisingly perhaps the narrator agrees with her. I could feel how heavy my heart had become, as if it were unable to contain itself. She had guessed correctly. You cannot hide suffering and remorse for

Naomi Seidman’s criticism of this image (and by implication of Wiesel) misses the point. Whether he feels enraged or not, whether it is flattering to second-generation writers like Naomi Seidman, the image with which he concludes is that of a corpse. See “Elie Wiesel and the Scandal of Jewish Rage” (1996): 1–19. 53 Translated in the 2008 edition of The Night Trilogy by Marion Wiesel as Day. 54 Ruth Franklin discusses this problem in A Thousand Darknesses (2011). 55 Wiesel (1990), 302. 52



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long. They come out. It was true: I was living in the past. Grandmother with her black shawl on her head, wasn’t giving me up.56

And later he acknowledges the emptiness, the utter futility, of any assertion of love he could offer her. “With us—those who have known the time of death—it’s different.” The survivor of the camps “poisons the air.” He is the “incarnation of time that negates the present and the future, only recognizing the harsh law of memory.” (304) Poor Kathleen! I thought. It’s too late. To change, we would have to change the past. But the past is beyond our power. Its structure is solid, immutable. The past is Grandmother’s shawl, as black as the cloud above the cemetery. Forget the cloud? The black cloud which is Grandmother, her son, my mother. What a stupid time we live in! Everything is upside down The cemeteries are up above, hanging from the sky, instead of being dug in the moist earth… . Everything has taken refuge above. And what emptiness here below! Real life is there. Here, we have nothing. Nothing, Kathleen. Here, we have an arid desert. A desert without even a mirage. It’s a station where the child left on the platform sees his parents carried off by the train. And there is only black smoke where they stood. They are the smoke. Happiness? Happiness for the child would be for the train to move backward. But you know how trains are, they always go forward. Only the smoke moves backward. Yes, ours is a horrible station.57

The image of the train and the children at the station is important and will resurface in a moment in our discussion of his interview with Mauriac. And we understand that this third book in Wiesel’s trilogy is after all a “novel” (not a memoir like the first book in The Night Trilogy). And yet, the smoke which is left when the train moves forward, and stands in for anything that has been transferred to heaven—”love, happiness, truth, purity, children with happy smiles, women with mysterious eyes, old people who walk slowly, and little orphans whose prayers are filled with anguish” (305)—this “true exodus” cannot but clarify for us the images in the first book of the trilogy. We are still talking about the “harsh law of memory.” The ending of the first book is confirmed by the ending of the third. It is now as “ashes,” literally as smoke, that he reenters the human community, a messengerial function not unlike that of Moshe the Beadle and with the identity of a Ibid., 302. Ibid., 305.

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shell. The Holocaust confers upon him a new kind of shell game, one involving exclusively (and in an unexpected way) smoke and mirrors. The reference to ashes here, in other words, is not primarily to the victims of the crematoria (as we might expect reading the passage out of context) but to the voiding of all connection to human community (“without God, without man. Without love or mercy”). It is to the Biblical setting, the “flesh and blood” individual, who is independent from his relationship with the divine, and therefore enters into it freely (“everything is given to God except the fear of God,” the rabbis say). Severed from his relationship with God, the narrator identifies this trace, these ashes, the dead, as all that remains. And it becomes his new starting point. For Wiesel, the hanging of the young boy is critical. It opens and completes the articulation of what was hinted on the first night. And in a sense it leads him to his own testimonial role, one that will continue after the events the book describes (and in a sense shows up as the book). In place of the certainty of his youth, he now confronts (in the wake of the death of the young man hanging on the rafter) a new project, namely, to speak as witness, as witness to the impossible. In something of a parody of the famous passage from Isaiah (“You are my witnesses,” (43.10)), Night is Wiesel’s way of answering God: hineini; me voici, “here I am.” Is François Mauriac in this connection a father for him? Ellen Fine notes that the other theme of the book (apart from the encountering of night) is the development of his relation with his father.58 There are in fact a number of fathers in this book and all of them are problematic in their relation to him in one manner or another. There is his own father who is initially remote and in the camps weak, needy, and finally dying. There is God who appears to be unavailable to him or perhaps simply uncaring. There is the man who teaches him Talmud, Moshe the Beadle, whom the community discredits to some extent (no doubt from fear of the consequences if he is right). And there is Mauriac, the man they respectfully call “maître.” In the gap created by failed or weak or absent fathers, the narrator would appear to search for replacements. Is Mauriac one of them? If witness continues after the ending of the book (until it manifests itself as the book), is it possible that the search for an effective father does so as well? Let us turn to his relation to Mauriac to explore what some readers report to be the other half of the narrative. Fine (1982), 11.

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B: Mauriac and “that other Israeli” For Wiesel, then, life after the war is a kind of shell game, a play of smoke and mirrors in a manner hardly suspected, a matter of playing with ashes. But the importance of these passages of Wiesel’s early book is not limited to its internal dynamics. They reproduce themselves in the external drama in which the development of Wiesel’s book manuscript is caught. Most of these elements—the image of Lazarus returned from the dead, the angelic face of the young survivor, the young victim hanging before him in the throes of death but not actually dead, the “dark night of the soul” experienced by the narrator witnessing these events, the story of all of this—resonate with the experience of the Catholic thinker François Mauriac, to whom (and with whom) Wiesel eventually submits his Yiddish (become French) manuscript for rewriting, translation, and publication. The two meet at a party. The journalist would like to interview “le maître” (as Wiesel notes they respectfully called him) with regard to Pierre MendèsFrance.59 Mauriac has been an active supporter of the French resistance during the war (when it was not an especially popular thing to do), and one of the lone voices protesting France’s involvement in the use of torture in Algeria; moreover, one of the staunch supports of the fledgling state of Israel. The two arrange to get together and the exchange quickly becomes personal. The Catholic theologian relates an experience described for him by his wife at Austerlitz station during the Occupation, in particular seeing little children being taken from their families. It was an image, he notes, that touched him deeply even before he learned their fate in the death camp crematoria. “I believe that on that day,” he writes later, “I touched for the first time the mystery of the iniquity whose revelation was to mark the end of one era and the beginning of another.” It marks for him the end of an era, the end of the era of reason and the dream of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. All the hopes for the Enlightenment ended “before those trainloads of little children.” (8) Even at this point, however, “I was still thousands of miles away,” Mauriac notes, “from thinking that they were to be fuel for the gas chamber and the crematory” (8). Then his young interlocutor (as he tells it) exclaims “I was among them. I was one of those children.” And his visitor proceeds to relate that he had recently published (in Yiddish) a lengthy manuscript about the experience, that the A French politician (1907–82), of Portuguese Jewish origin, who served as President of the Council of Ministers, 1954–55.

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manuscript involved the death of children to which the journalist was directly witness. The realization of this uncanny correspondence of memory and reality occasions for the Catholic writer a failure of nerve. The old theologian is led to weep and subsequently to spend considerable effort to seek publication for a translation of the Yiddish manuscript in France in a rewritten and slimmed down form. The manuscript involved the hanging of a young child who had the face of a sad angel, not unlike the angelic sadness in the Catholic thinker’s view of his young interlocutor, the image of a Lazarus rising from the dead. But what is distinctive for Mauriac about this account is not the tragic loss it details (which will fascinate the same readers, he says, who have been fascinated by the history described in the Diary of Ann Frank) but something else: namely, “the death of God in the soul of a child who suddenly discovers absolute evil” (9). He cites the words Wiesel writes about his first night in the camp when he witnessed the burning of children (considered above). He says he now understands why he was “drawn” to “that look, as of a Lazarus risen from the dead” (10) in his young interlocutor. He cites Nietzsche on the “death of God.” He cites the passage in the manuscript about the hanging of the child (to which we referred above) and notes that the child “had the sad face of an angel” (10), not unlike, in his view, the young interlocutor before him (11). And then he wonders what he might say to the narrator by way of answer. And I, who believe, that God is love, what answer could I give my young questioner, whose dark eyes, still held the reflection of that angelic sadness which had appeared one day upon the face of the hanged child? What did I say to him? Did I speak of that other Israeli, his brother, who may have resembled him—the Crucified, whose Cross has conquered the world? Did I affirm that the stumbling block to his faith was the cornerstone of mine, and that the conformity between the Cross and the suffering men was in my eyes the key to that impenetrable mystery whereon the faith of his childhood had perished? Zion, however, has risen up again from the crematories and the charnel houses. The Jewish nation has been resurrected from among its thousands of dead. It is through them that it lives again. We do not know the worth of one single drop of blood, one single tear. All is grace. If the Eternal is the Eternal, the last word for each one of us belongs to Him. This is what I should have told this Jewish child. But I could only embrace him, weeping.60

Wiesel (1990), 11.

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The experience is a powerful one for Mauriac, overwhelming on many different levels. He has heard an experience of his wife that involves the suffering of children and subsequently learned their mortal fate, a suffering that confirms for him the suffering of Jesus on the Cross, whose suffering “conquered the world.” The young Jewish journalist shows up at this door with his story. The story involves the death of children that the narrator has directly witnessed. In one particular instance, the death of a child is hanging before the narrator and it leads the narrator to examine his own relation to the divine. The hanging child has an angelic countenance not unlike the journalist who has appeared in Mauriac’s office. The story he bears in the manuscript he carries confirms the status of the narrator as a kind of Lazarus risen from the dead. It is not hard to see how Mauriac, with his particular background, could not fail to be struck by these elements. In his encounter in his office with Wiesel, several powerful strains of his experience converge: the memory he carries around of his wife’s direct experience at Austerlitz station; Wiesel’s direct experience of the Shoah; Wiesel’s own countenance (which is like the boy he describes); the Yiddish manuscript that Wiesel has already published in South America on the experience and that he carries around with him, so to speak; and Mauriac’s own relation to the drama of Christian salvation with the torture, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus. It is a little as if Jesus walked into his office one day in a second coming and handed Mauriac a new version of Holy Scripture. He will use his publication connections to transform the manuscript into a suitable presentation for a French audience and write a preface in which he testifies to all of this in depth. Mauriac’s response has long been regarded as something of a sacred realm of its own, although not without some reservations. Mauriac’s bravery in standing alone in defense of human rights in Algeria, in defense of the young state of Israel, in defense of France against the occupation forces (when so many of his compatriots took other positions) is not to be gainsaid. And his intervention to secure a French publication outlet in a difficult postwar market for the young survivor working as a journalist for an Israeli newspaper has been widely and duly hailed. Others see Mauriac’s interjection of a Christian theological view between himself and Wiesel as alienating and regard his allegorizing of Wiesel’s devastating account within a drama of grace as little short of scandalous, mildly duplicative of the radical distancing the National Socialists assumed with regard to their own victims whom they also compelled to perform for their delight

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cultural classics—Mahler’s symphonies or Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice.61 The heroic view with which he sees Israel rise “up again from the crematories and the charnel houses”—in which Israel, like Jesus, is “resurrected”—is taken as an affront in which meaning is derived from the suffering of others, in which some joy is to be had in the fact that through “its thousands of dead” “it lives again.” For Wiesel, the dimensions of the encounter are clear. “The problem,” Wiesel writes, later in his autobiography, “was that [Mauriac] was in love with Jesus.” He was the most decent person I ever met in that field—as a writer, as a Catholic writer. Honest, sense of integrity, and he was in love with Jesus. He spoke only of Jesus. Whatever I would ask—Jesus. Finally, I said, ‘What about MendèsFrance?’ He said that ‘Mendès-France, like Jesus, was suffering … . ’ “When he said Jesus again I couldn’t take it, and for the only time in my life I was discourteous, which I regret to this day. I said, ‘Mr. Mauriac,’ we called him Maître, ‘ten years or so ago, I have seen children, hundreds of Jewish children, who suffered more than Jesus did on his cross and we do not speak about it.’ I felt all of a sudden so embarrassed. I closed my notebook and went to the elevator. He ran after me. He pulled me back; he sat down in his chair, and I in mine, and he began weeping. I have rarely seen an old man weep like that, and I felt like such an idiot ... And then, at the end, without saying anything, he simply said, ‘You know, maybe you should talk about it.’”62

What are the dimensions of the encounter for Mauriac? Let us be a little more systematic in our treatment. The interaction with Mauriac takes place in at least seven different scenes: his office encounter with the journalist; his memory of his wife’s memory of the children at Austerlitz station; his own theological commitments (to the cross, to the Church, to Jewish scriptures); his perspective of the direct experience of the narrator/reporter of episodes of the Shoah; the writer’s Yiddish manuscript about his encounters; the manuscript that Wiesel will generate through translation and rewriting of the Yiddish text into French; and Mauriac’s gathering of all of these into his prefatory account that will be appended to the French publication of the book. Seven distinct contexts—no miniscule amount! And myriad interconnections between these scenes animate them for him (so that they are not just simply George Steiner has long observed the degree to which the Nazis ironically promoted the highest values of classical culture as they pursued their program os systematic annihilation. See for example, Language and Silence (1967). 62 Wiesel, All Rivers (1995), 325. 61



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analogues to each other). The journalist arrives in his office with a story (and a manuscript describing that story) similar to the one his wife told but that continues the account of their fate. The story relates in one instance the hanging of a young boy between two adults and the countenance of the young journalist in his office resembles in Mauriac’s view the young man on the rafters. The story of the boy on the rafters, the innocents at the station on their way to being slaughtered, the face of the journalist in his office, echo the man on the cross in his Christian experience. Moreover, these scenes and their interconnections are all distinctions, we should note, between the inside and the outside in all three of the realms in which we have been speaking in this book: the inside of the text and the outside (inside Wiesel’s text and outside); the inside of oneself and the other individual who is outside (the experience of Wiesel in the office before Mauriac); the present historical moment and the past (Jesus on the cross two thousand years ago and today). And all these differences turn out also to be continuities. The young man steps out of the manuscript he is carrying and into the room. The child hanging on the rafters in the camps comes down off of the rafters and into his office. The children at Austerlitz station in his memory of his wife’s experience return from the departing train and enter his sanctuary. And for Mauriac in all of these ways the man on the cross two thousand years ago enters the lives of each one of them on the contemporary scene. The effect for Mauriac is destabilizing. Learning that the three relations are not only parallel and structured by comparison or analogy, but also by continuity, these identifications become for him a swirl. He tries to stabilize them by referring to another man who was hanged on a wooden rafter twenty centuries ago, and whom he has learned to regard as a living presence in his life, by reference, in short, to the necessity of Christian faith. But that gesture only compounds the difficulty. He sinks into a paroxysm of tears. What are we to make of all this? In the interaction between Mauriac and Wiesel, it would appear that two very different versions of witness confront us: religious witness on the one hand, and secular humanist witness on the other. The witness to grace and the mystery of iniquity, on one side, and the witness to smoke, ashes, and a universe from which God has apparently turned away on the other. “All is grace,” Mauriac writes. And in Wiesel’s account: “Where is God?” someone asks in response to the hanging boy, and someone inside the narrator answers. “There. He is hanging on the gallows!” The stumbling block of one is the founding stone of the other. Described in this way, it is hard to

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imagine two positions more diametrically opposed vis-à vis any meaning we would wish to attach to the incident or derive from it. In some other ways, of course, the accounts are quite similar, so much so in fact that we might feel the rhetorical gesture of each in arguing his view is structurally more compelling than the differences they articulate. Wiesel sees a boy hanging on the gallows in the camps and it occasions men around him to weep. The eyes of the boy have the appearance of an angel and the event elicits for those attending a renewed connection to the divine—even if is a negative one. The formerly pious young man has witnessed an event of profound suffering and cruelty and ten years later he writes about it. Mauriac imagines the children at Austerlitz station (in the memory he has of his wife’s story) and it seems to fly in the face of all he values as a human being, as a French citizen, as a beneficiary of the French revolution. The dark and sad-eyed reporter shows up in his office one day. And for Mauriac, it is as if he has jumped out of his memory of the war (“resurrected,” we may be tempted to say). And once he hears the young man’s story, and is moved to tears by it (a response confirmed later he tells us when he reads the young man’s manuscript), he is led to seek out and secure publication potentials for it. The pious young man witnesses an event of profound suffering and cruelty and writes about it. The theologian witnesses an event of profound suffering and cruelty—or his wife witnesses an event and reports it to him—and when the reporter enters his office and relates that he was among the children at Austerlitz station, as if resurrected from the dead to tell his story, the theologian writes about it. And when the countenance of the young man resembles the countenance of the young man in the story, the parallel would appear complete. Are we dealing, then, with doubles, if not thematically, then perhaps structurally, rhetorically, so to speak? Let us not be hasty. Mauriac makes a number of mistakes and we may wonder how seriously to credit his remarks in light of those errors. Wiesel, for example, is not “Israeli” (whether or not Jesus was “Israeli,” which is another matter) as Mauriac says at least three times in the French original of La Nuit, and Wiesel has asserted in his autobiography and elsewhere (as noted above) that he never suggested to Mauriac that he himself was Israeli, only that he was writing for an Israeli newspaper. Is the term Israeli for Mauriac an epithet for Juif?63 Are Jews and Israelis one and the same, both descendents This issue is more than academic. The word “Israeli” (to which Wiesel will later object) has an

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of the ancient state of Israel? To say as much would of course mean that the distinction between the political and the ethical has been collapsed. There is a second error. Wiesel was never at Austerlitz station. He was taken from his home, along with his family, in the Transylvanian town of Sighet. And there is no indication that he told Mauriac he was at Austerlitz station, only that he was among the children who were taken to the concentration camps. Third, although it is true that Nietzsche is often credited in popular accounts with saying that “God is dead,” Nietzsche in fact never declares that “God is dead” but only that “the madman says that God is dead” (in aphorism #125 of The Joyful Wisdom or The Gay Science), a position which is somewhat different and with which Nietzsche may or may not identify. And fourth, whether or not Nietzsche declares that God is dead, the narrator of Night never does. Wiesel is adamant on this point. “Theorists of the idea that ‘God is dead’,” he writes, “have used my words unfairly as justification of their rejection of faith. But if Nietzsche could cry out to the old man in the forest that God is dead, the Jew in me cannot.”64 interesting history. The word appears three times in the French version of La Nuit in 1958. The word appears on page 7 of The Night Trilogy published by Hill and Wang (“a division of Farrar, Straus & Giroux”) in 1985 and thus our quote above. Curiously enough, it does not appear on page vii of the edition of Night which was published by Bantam books in 1982 “by arrangement with Farrar, Straus & Giroux” (iv), where instead of the phrase “the young Israeli” we read “the young Jew.” And it does not appear in the latest translation of Night by Wiesel’s wife, Marion, in 2006, where we also read “the young Jew” (xvii). Did Bantam employ a different translator for Mauriac’s “Foreword” when they republished Hill and Wang’s 1960 hardback edition from which, they assert, in caps, “NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED”? Was perhaps the change introduced by Wiesel himself? In the 1985 edition, both Night and Mauriac’s “Foreword” are said to have been “translated from the French by Stella Rodway” (5), while in the 1982 edition by Bantam, we read that Night by Elie Wiesel has been “Translated from the French by Stella Rodway” while Mauriac’s “Foreword” is given separate billing and the translation remains technically unaccredited—although the reader might understandably assume, without careful inspection, that Rodway translated both texts. The history of Wiesel’s manuscript before bringing it to Mauriac, also bears some attention. According to his own account, in 1954, ten years after his release, at the end of a journey on a ship to Brazil, Wiesel had an 862 page manuscript in written Yiddish that he called Un di velt hot geshvign (And the World Remained Silent), the only copy of which he gave to Mark Turkov (see Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea, 241). Within the year, a volume appeared as a 245-page book under Wiesel’s name in Buenos Aires, constituting volume number 117 in a 176-volume series of Yiddish memoirs about Poland during the war, Dos poylishe yidntum (Polish Jewry, 1946–1966). On this volume, see Jan Schwarz, “The Original Yiddish Text and Context of Night,” in Approaches to Teaching Wiesel’s Night, Alan Rosen (2007): 52–8; and by the same author, “A Library of Hope and Destruction: The Yiddish Book Series Dos Poylishe Yidntum, 1946–1966,” and “Appendix: List of 175 Volumes of Dos poylishe yidntum.” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 20 (2007): 173–96. Thus the version Mauriac received is presumably the third: not the first 862-page Yiddish manuscript, not the 245-page Yiddish manuscript published in Buenos Aires two years earlier, but Wiesel’s French translation of the second of these volumes. Hill and Wang’s 1960 and 2006 English translations are then the fourth and fifth versions. 64 Wiesel, All Rivers (1995), 84.

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In fact, the narrator’s thoughts on this idea are fairly variegated as we suggested above. Upon his arrival in the camp, it could be argued, the narrator appears to take something of a “Nietzschean” view, one that could give his interlocutor cause for lament. Never shall I forget that night, the first night in  camp, that has made of my life one long night and sealed it shut seven times… . Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever… . Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to the face of the desert.65

And on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, for example, the narrator reports a crisis of belief: This day I had ceased to pray. I was no longer capable of lamentation. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes were open and I was alone—terribly alone in a world without God and without man. Without love or mercy. I had ceased to be anything but ashes, yet I felt myself to be stronger than the Almighty, to whom my life had been tied for so long. I stood amid that praying congregation, observing it like a stranger.66

But at other times, the narrator sounds more like Job than Nietzsche. Some talked of God, of his mysterious ways, of the sins of the Jewish people, and of their future deliverance. But I had ceased to pray. How I sympathized with Job! I did not deny God’s existence, but I doubted His absolute justice.67

At still others, he appears to revert to full prayer and thanksgiving, even if that prayer can be understood as somewhat parodic or sarcastic. He thanks God for the mud concealing his new shoes. “I thanked God, in an improvised prayer, for having created mud in His infinite and wonderful universe”(47). Even as late in the narrative as the march to Gleiwitz, when the narrator recalls how Rabbi Eliahou’s son had earlier abandoned his old and weakening father, he says “in spite of myself, a prayer arose in my heart, to that God in which I no longer believed. My God, Lord of the Universe, give me strength never to do what Rabbi Eliahou’s son has done” (97). Far from a double of Mauriac’s view, in other words, and by contrast with it, the narrator’s attitude toward God would appear to run the gamet. On the other Wiesel (1990), 43. Ibid., 75. Ibid., 53.

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hand, what does seem constant throughout these multifarious approaches to God is the maintenance of some divine relation. The narrator may be in awe of God or angry with God (even to the point of denying God’s presence or power in the world) but it remains with God that he is angry and with God as his interlocutor that he converses. Moreover, whatever Wiesel’s attitude toward God—which demonstrably varies in the course of the narrative—his attitude toward scripture does not. Whatever the fortunes of his faith in God, his faith in the Bible and the classical Jewish texts of Talmud, Midrash, Kabbalah, and the later rabbis (Rashi, for example)—both during and after the experience described here—seems constant and unabated. There is also something else, a fifth qualification to Mauriac’s summary. This is probably not the first time Mauriac had been led to think about the image of a “Lazarus risen from the dead” since the poet Jean Cayrol (among other writers) had been writing about “the Lazarean hero” at least since the beginning of the 1950s. In fact la nuit, night, had been a theme of that discussion throughout the period (which may be why the publisher of Wiesel’s book, at Éditions du Minuit, suggested it—if indeed it did not already occur to Wiesel or Mauriac). The word occurred not only in Jean Cayrol’s work (Cayrol wrote the voice-over for Alain Resnais’s film Nuit et brouillard, a title recalling the National Socialist directive allowing the seizure of people and/or goods under cover of night and fog independently of formal charges, and a novel with the word nuit in the title) but also in the work of Blanchot, Levinas, among others in the late 1940s. How then are we to view the encounter, the conjuncture of these two very different forms of witness? I would suggest a view having to do with redemptive and counter-redemptive narratives. Mauriac reads the incident in his memory (or recalls the memory of the war) and finds God’s hand in it. What looks as if it is happening before us is a disclosure of God’s handiwork. Reality is meaningful for him in context of a divine script, one that has an independent narrative coherence, a kind of modern-day theodicy, one that explains personal suffering and political fortunes. But as we move into new realms of our understanding of the Holocaust in European history, in human history, perhaps we need to ask whether the two versions of witness before us are precisely the same, and to interrogate the relation of each (whether one of distance or proximity) to what we might call “the redemptive.” Wiesel witnesses the hanging of the pipel and it challenges everything he thinks he knows to that point in his life. “There. God is there, hanging on

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the gallows!” a voice within him declares. But it is not precisely his voice that speaks, he tells us, only a voice within (and because of the way Wiesel has described his boyhood, we are led to wonder if the interest may be as personal as it is theological). Later, when he observes others in prayer, and declines to participate, he doesn’t denounce the enterprise at large, only its efficacy for him. Even in the final passage of the book, when he looks in the mirror and sees a corpse staring back at him, it is as if he is a stranger to himself. God continues to exist, as Wiesel describes the situation at the conclusion of Night, although Wiesel feels he is no longer under His control. He might have thought otherwise. He might, for example, have decided that the figure in the mirror was his own imago and, speaking from within that perspective, declared God weak or dead or an illusion or in some other way “not great.”68 Naomi Seidman we have suggested above would like him to do as much and is sorry that he did not pursue the view she imagined as more powerful. In that event, he might have rendered meaningful the world around him in context of another governing structure. For the divine universe, he might have substituted for example the existentially human one. He might have located meaning within the translation of one into the other, dissolving obstacles of the world around him into the negative strictures concerning God or divine intervention. Writing in the 1950s, Wiesel’s contemporaries on the French intellectual scene, we recall, were Sartre, Camus, and Beckett, among others, and a criticism of the divine for something of a Nietzschean or nihilist perspective might not have fallen on deaf ears. If we name as “redemptive” the meaningful translation of what is encountered into some other coherent narrative perspective (whether positive or negative) that confers upon our own perspective a “happy ending,” then the “counter-redemptive” is any effort that works against such a redemptive or meaningful conclusion. Mauriac’s position from this view would appear more straightforwardly redemptive and Wiesel’s distinctly counter-redemptive. Why is this assessment important? Among other reasons because it is the same opposition that is being played out within the book. The drama within the book is played out in this connection as the book, in the role it plays in the relationship between Wiesel and Mauriac. It is important to be clear on this point. We are not asserting in any way that Mauriac was sympathetic to Nazism. He was not. He resisted National Socialism Cf. Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great (2007).

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and all it stood for at every turn. And not just for French nationalist or legalistic reasons. His position was governed by religious, moral, and ethical—in short, humanitarian— considerations from the outset. But Mauriac’s opposition to Nazism, we are forced to conclude, was no less sacrificial in its structure, no less redemptively organized, than Nazism’s own position. He encounters the young man both within the story and without— within memory, within narration, and within history—and it proves decisive for his belief. It confirms that the Holocaust was just one more deviation from what Jesus was teaching, a deviation that occasioned the loss of salvation by the Jews to begin with. Couldn’t the Jews see that this is what Christianity has been saying all along? If only they had given up the Mosaic law for the cross in the ancient world, all of this might have been prevented. Mauriac’s tears would appear in this regard to reflect an overflow of emotion at the consequences of the Jews not recognizing Jesus in their midst. The historical point to be made here of course is that National Socialism saw itself no less as a “page of glory” on the human landscape, a religious adherence to secularism. Jews, like the physically disabled, homosexuals, and other groups, were regarded as more than expendable. Their removal was the very goal of Nazism in the eyes of many Holocaust scholars, a national movement which was a movement of purification, a species of social Darwinism, designed to rid the world of those elements deemed socially less desirable. Here is another way of saying it. The problem with Mauriac’s response in the view of some of the book’s readers is that in the attempt to be kind, in the attempt to tell the young man’s story, to get it published for all to hear, he reenacts to some extent its innermost monstrosity. Although he loses his language in tears and cannot say the words, what he would like to say, what he feels he should say, is in effect “See! This is because you are Jewish! Two thousand years ago another man who was Jewish went through a trial of the kind you have gone through. If nothing else teaches you the necessity for Christian faith, for giving up this foolishness of denying the divinity of Jesus, this experience should have taught that to you.” Complete denial, in other words, of everything the young man has gone through, complete denial of the Holocaust, the denial which has been at its origin. Is Nazism at the extreme anything other than the same denial, the same denunciation? To say as much is not to say of course that Wiesel’s position does not entail some complications of its own—for example, in his decision to include Mauriac’s “Preface” with the publication of his book. A preface from Mauriac may well

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have been one of the terms of its original publication. If the grand master of political activism and Catholic religious thinking in postwar France is willing to endorse it, others may do so as well. But Wiesel includes a dedication to Mauriac in the second book. Is that gesture a matter of the customary deference or politeness to the man who so assiduously assisted with the publication of an earlier volume? Or should we not read it more comprehensively as an inclusion of the dimensions of the disaster with which we are dealing in this book, a subtle index of the crisis that shows up in the very course of representing it? And to be fully candid about the matter, is not the heroic stance that Wiesel takes at one point or another in his book equally redemptive? The redemptive can easily assume the form of the negative imitation. The rebel, the iconoclast who challenges God’s universe (as he learned it in his youth) is no less a child’s dream, the loss of innocence lamented just before one assumes the full obligations and maturity of “a religion of adults” (to use Levinas’s phrase). Does not Wiesel’s position within the narrative at points echo the nihilism of some of his existentialist anti-heroic counterparts? Or is there not also a third way to read it? The redemptive as a structure of interpretation forecasts a happy ending. But in that regard, it is not a matter of forms. Mauriac reads through the drama of grace and that reading has a redemptive structure for him. The suffering of others is meaningful to him as a sign of Jesus’s presence in his life. But to some extent Wiesel also reads redemptively. It is not enough for him to challenge traditional forms in which God is to be understood. He flirts with a heroic perspective of the kind that early commentators on the Holocaust often applauded. “I felt myself to be stronger than the Almighty, to whom my life had been tied for so long. I stood amid that praying congregation, observing it like a stranger” (75). Both writers, in other words, we have to assert if we are to be honest about our reading, are ready at points to adopt a redemptive position. And in that minimal regard they both echo the sacrificial drama taking place within. But both also at crucial points also back away from it. At moments, Mauriac is ready to read all that has happened as a matter of the drama of grace. At moments, Wiesel is ready to sever all connection with the Catholic thinker who seemingly cannot get beyond the suffering of Jesus. But then when push comes to shove Mauriac’s determination collapses in a pool of tears. And whatever his momentary disdain with his elder’s reading, Wiesel reenters the office, begins speaking aloud about his private hell, and dedicates his subsequent publication (after the current one) to the man who brought him to that point.



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Why do they back off? Do they react that way because they are overcome with emotions and the biological imperative kicks in whatever course of action their intellect would counsel? Or is there something else going on, something we have named the “counter-redemptive” (which is not a matter of alternative forms but of simply backing away from the redemptive form) and in which a new post-Holocaust hermeneutics may be glimpsed? To be more explicit, has relationship itself—simple relationship between the two of them—proved unexpectedly an answer to redemptive structures? In this case, is the father–son relationship that Fine suggested was at least as important in the book as the narrator’s encounter with night suddenly operative here? What are the implications of saying as much? In that regard, of course, these writers differ profoundly from the redemptive structures at work within the history they engage. The National Socialists it would be an understatement to say have no such relationship with their victims except as a demonic parody. Is something else at stake for Mauriac and Wiesel? To take up that question, I would suggest, we need to address another to which we alluded above—namely, that this is probably not unfamiliar territory for Mauriac, and that he has undoubtedly encountered the image of a “Lazarus risen from the dead” prior to this moment. The theme of night (and of Lazarus in that connection) permeated the intellectual airwaves in the late 1940s and early 1950s in France. Wiesel’s use of the metaphor of night as a way of talking about the Holocaust reflects this language. We recall that the title of the published Yiddish version differed and referred to the lack of bystander intervention.69 Whether it was Wiesel who introduced the new title, La Nuit, or Mauriac, or because they both happened upon it together in conversation about the manuscript (perhaps in conjunction with the French publisher), the event is fortuitous. The idea has a history in France: in religious discourse, in the popular media, in film, in literary study (and poetics), in philosophic study (especially phenomenology), and in Biblical study. Moreover, the theme of night alone is not sufficient. The first night in camp, Wiesel said, has become now every night. Even after the sun came up, it remained dark.70 Even after the war was over, it remained dark, black in fact.71 Un di velt hot geshvign (And the World Remained Silent). Cf. Julia Kristeva’s remarks in Black Sun (1992) and Charlotte Delbo’s in None of Us Will Return (1978). 71 Cf. Paul Celan’s poem, “Deathfugue”: “Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening / we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night / we drink and we drink /we shovel a grave in the air there you won’t lie too cramped / A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes / he 69 70

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If we are to take seriously the narrator’s claim, it has remained dark ten years later, to the moment in fact, the narrator writes the story in French (“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that has made of my life one long night”). By accident or design, in other words, the reference to night, even one that continues “after” the Holocaust, is also a reference to one that does not end, to one that came before, to another night, one that came before the first, before the beginning, and out of which the first in fact was fashioned. What other night?

Part 2: Context C: Blanchot, Cayrol, the Lazarean, and the other night In his writings in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Maurice Blanchot has recourse to a notion he names “the other night,” and an exploration of that idea may help us to understand the importance of the scandalous discovery at the heart of Night. The notion appears extraordinarily close to (perhaps even derivative of) some ideas expressed in the work of Emmanuel Levinas somewhat earlier, an individual born in Kaunas, who recently immigrated to France, whom Blanchot met at Strasbourg, and with whom he maintained a life-long friendship. But in Blanchot’s writing, the idea is associated primarily with the literary rather than the philosophic (which is the context in which Levinas speaks of similar notions).72 Before turning to Blanchot, perhaps a word more about Jean Cayrol would be in order. Why? As a conduit between Blanchot and Mauriac. The idea of night when it appeared in the title of Wiesel’s book in 1958 was hardly unique. In fact, in the early 1950s, the idea was fairly pervasive in France. Cayrol’s work mentioned above with Alain Resnais in providing the voice-over for Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog) is fairly well known to a more general audience, a narrative that has come under sharp criticism for his exclusion of any mention of Jews from the account.73 Somewhat less well known is that he is a survivor writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margareta / he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are all sparkling, he whistles his hounds to come close / he whistles his Jews into rows has them shovel a grave in the ground / he commands us to play up for the dance,” lines 1–10 of a 38-line poem. See Celan (2001). 72 On the opposition between the philosophic and the literary in Blanchot’s work, see Gerald Bruns, Maurice Blanchot. The Refusal of Philosophy (2005). 73 Cf. André Pierre Colombat, The Holocaust in French Film (1993). For the voice over of Jean Cayrol



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of the camps himself (a prisoner of Mathausen, where he appears to have been tortured), that he was a literary writer (a poet) of some renown before the war, that he continued writing poetry after the war and added a series of long prose fictions to his repertoire, that he was well known as a Catholic thinker (and so someone available for Mauriac to read), and most interestingly, for our purposes, that he developed a series of proposals for what he imagined as a novelistic poetics based upon survivors returning from the deportation camps.74 “We are for the most part,” he writes, “subjects of the Lazarean universe, in all its forms. We are devoured by a fire that we have not illuminated.”75 The deportee has lived to the point of being worn out his death, his condemnation, his damnation—we must not forget that. The solitude in which he encloses himself—is it not there in order to resolve this frightening interrogation which leaves him sometimes without sensitivity to the problems of his everyday and familial life? He has exhausted within one DP camp or another all the possibilities for dying, all the means of entering into agony, and once he has come back, he has perceived the astonishing liberty that his death has left him, this independence that he guards vis-à-vis his own end. Upon his return, he clashes with the traditional limits of a man’s existence: old age, accidents, illness. That is why this isolation is inseparable from every Lazarean personality. All is a pretext for his solitude, for nourishing it, for stocking up on it… . We are for the most part subjects of the Lazarean universe, in all its forms. We are devoured by a fire that we have not ignited … In short, the Lazarean hero is never there where we find him. He is obligated to complete an immense work of reflection, to think incessantly that he is there and not elsewhere; for he has lived within a world not found anywhere and whose frontiers are not marked since they are those of death.76

The word “hero” here is admittedly odd. And Lawrence Langer is right in our view to challenge the framing of Holocaust narratives in “heroic” terms when they appear in Victor Frankl’s or Bruno Bettelheim’s accounts.77 But if we read the word here exclusively as generic (and ironic), as a place-holder or ghost referring always and only to the deportee, then the description shares with Mauriac and Wiesel certain qualities. The deportee is Wiesel entering Mauriac’s office or Moshe the Beadle returning from the slaughter in the 75 76 77 74

in the film, see Cayrol (2007), 991–1028. For Cayrol’s commentary, see Cayrol (2007). Jean Cayrol, “Pour un romanèsque lazaréen,” (1964). Ibid., 225. Ibid., 214. See Lawrence Langer, Admitting the Holocaust (1995) and Preemtping the Holocaust (2000).

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neighboring town. Death for him, as it is for Wiesel, is a premise rather than a danger. And La nuit et brouillard is not the only time la nuit shows up in Cayrol’s work.78 The word “Lazarean” is hard to miss in the present connection. The idea of a Lazarean poetics, of an understanding of the literary founded upon the return of an individual from the land of the dead, could hardly fail to enter Mauriac’s consciousness: as Wiesel enters the door, the Catholic thinker imagines a Lazarus returning from the dead, and eventually offers to help get the manuscript of this “Israeli” journalist published in France. Perhaps Mauriac had been reading another renegade writer (whose affinities with Christian thinking became manifest only later in his life), T. S. Eliot: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead, / Come back to tell you all” the English poet and scholar writes in one of his most famous (and most iconoclastic) poems.79 Whatever the practical consequences of Cayrol’s program—some writers attribute the subsequent vogue in France for the nouveau roman to his influence—here is a robust articulation of the importance of the death camps for ongoing fiction. The details with which Cayrol describes the deportation camp survivor rivals at points Dostoyevsky’s characters, although the relation to desire—that René Girard for example is able to designate in Dostoevsky’s work—has been suspended.80 The deportation camp “hero”—if that word still retains any value—might offer an approach to some of Beckett’s characters. Cayrol’s “Lazarean” program deserves further consideration within Holocaust literary studies. Study of his work to date has been hampered by the contribution he made to Alain Resnais’s film Nuit et brouillard, in which not once in the film—in his voice-over and in the on screen language—is the word juif (Jew, Jewish) in evidence. Scholars have wondered whether a certain humanitarian impulse has dissolved the specificity of Jewish victimage within the larger movements of people and things and the Nazi intention to destroy. In our postShoah age, Cayrol’s work may come to serve as a signpost for a new thinking about the relation between fiction and disaster. But Mauriac needn’t have turned only to Cayrol for a reference to the relation between literature and death after the Holocaust. The “work of fire” has other markers after the war in France. In Blanchot’s work, for example, night is everywhere. One of the earliest instances is “Literature and the Right to Cf. L’Éspace d’une nuit, roman (1954). “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” 95–6. See, for example, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1965) and Resurrection from the Undergound (1997).

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Death” published in The Work of Fire in 1949.81 On first glance, Wiesel’s writing in Night and Blanchot’s in this essay could not be farther apart. Wiesel’s writes autobiography, a recollection of what happened to him refracted through his conscious memory. Blanchot writes an essay about literature, a universe that is he concedes in its entirety made-up, imaginary, a product of the infinite because it is devoid of any trace of the finite, and a universe that operates largely independently of the artist’s (or writer’s) conscious intention, an intention about which the artist or writer may (or may) not be aware. It is a universe founded on nothing and no one. And if the theme of night seems shared, the appearance may be no more than an illusion. In Wiesel’s work it is treated with intense and concrete realism, while in Blanchot’s it is treated as a species of myth or abstract speculation. Literature for Blanchot is comprised of a question. It is precisely language challenging itself, negating itself, a gesture Blanchot borrows from Hegel. Blanchot compares the literary gesture to the French revolution. Like revolution, the literary gesture insures absolute freedom for the artist, which is indeed its benefit, the infinite without the finite, the thoroughly imaginary. Literature does nothing, means nothing, and is written by no one. Therefore it can do, and does do, anything. This is how Blanchot concludes the first half of his essay. Blanchot’s polemical interlocutor here is clearly Sartre, for whom literature has a specific relation to engagement. In the second half, he draws its implications. “Give me liberty or give me death,” may be a bit heavy handed but the famous American revolutionary cry has resonance here. Death and absolute freedom curiously share the same status in literature in the way Blanchot defines it, less as a choice than as appositives to each other, as participants in a synonymy. There is an equivalency between the two. Because it is absolute freedom, a world fabricated and dissolved in an instant, literature speaks from a place in which death—or, more precisely, dying—has already begun. In literature, death speaks through me as me, or more precisely as my writing, Blanchot claims. Words can kill. As soon as we say something, nothing speaks in place of whatever was there. But death, the nothing that is now there in the place of what was alive, now insures meaning. To challenge meaning is now also to challenge death. The title La part du feu is not without difficulties of its own. The phrase is sometimes used in the sense of “fighting fire with fire” (or “the part fire plays in fighting fire”) and so a translation such as “the role of sacrifice” is not an impossible one. See Blanchot, La part du feu (1949) and Blanchot, The Work of Fire (1995).

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Death alone allows me to grasp what I want to attain; it exists in words as the only way they can have meaning. Without death, everything would sink into absurdity and nothingness.82

Unlike the existentialists (one thinks here immediately of Camus), death for Blanchot is not an instance or certainly the pre-eminent instance of absurdity, but its very opposite, the guarantor of meaning. Literature thus involves us within the hermeneutic circle. We are unable to discover who we are or what we are doing until we write, until the text is written. But we are unable to write until we discover who we are and what we are doing. Thus every gesture of necessity both requires and negates itself. Literature is the onset of not only the night that follows day, but of the night that precedes the creation of the world. “The language of literature is a search for this moment which precedes literature” (327). Literature now dispenses with the writer … That is why it cannot be confused with consciousness which illuminates things and makes decisions; it is my consciousness without me; the radiant passivity of mineral substances, the lucidity of the depths of torpor. It is not the night; it is the obsession of the night. It is not the night but the consciousness of the night … . It is not death either because it manifests the existence without being, existence which remains below existence like an inexorable affirmation without beginning or end—death as the impossibility of dying.83

Later, in the early 1950s, Blanchot publishes an essay that identifies some of the same ideas with the myth of Orpheus. Here is Blanchot’s commentary on “night” in the latter work: When Orpheus descends toward Eurydice, art is the power by which night opens. Because of art’s strength, night welcomes him; it becomes welcoming intimacy, the harmony and accord of the first night. But it is toward Eurydice that Orpheus has descended. For him Eurydice is the furthest that art can reach. Under a name that hides her and a veil that covers her, she is the profoundly obscure point toward which art and desire, death and night, seen to tend. She is the instant when the essence of night approaches as the other night.84

Here the literary for Blanchot, which he calls simply art, has the power to “open” night. Night becomes in its wake a “welcoming intimacy” rather than either

Blanchot, “Literature and the Right to Death” (1995), 325. Ibid., 328. Blanchot, The Space of Literature (1989), 171.

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an obstacle or an end. This idea would seem comparable to “the first night” of Wiesel’s narrative, the moment of his arrival in Auschwitz, for example, before the narrator realizes what is going on there, before the night has become, so to speak, indelible. But once this night has opened in Blanchot’s narrative, new things occur. The “essence of night” takes on a life of its own. Suddenly, it approaches as “the other night.” However, Orpheus’s work does not consist in ensuring this point’s approach by descending into the depths. His work is to bring it back to the light of day and to give it form, shape, and reality in the day. Orpheus is capable of everything, except of looking this point in the face, except of looking at the center of night in the night. He can descend toward it; he can—and this is still stronger an ability—draw it to him and lead it with him upwards, but only by turning away from it. This turning away is the only way it can be approached. This is what concealment means when it reveals itself in the night. But Orpheus, in the movement of his migration, forgets the work he is to achieve, and he forgets it necessarily, for the ultimate demand which his movement makes is not that there be a work, but that someone face this point, grasp its essence, grasp it where it appears, where it is essential and essentially appearance: at the heart of night.85

For Blanchot, the literary writer in these passages is an adventurer. His goal is to make a journey, like Odysseus, to go and return. Or like Jason, to capture the golden fleece and return with it to the point of origin. He has been granted an extraordinary power through his art to enter the night. He would like to capture his quarry, to grasp hold of the night, and return it to the light of day. He knows that he has the power to draw his quarry out—”by indirection to find direction out,” as Hamlet might say. But the artist is constitutionally a bit greedy and wants more than that. He wants to “face” the night “dead on,” as they say, as night. In that regard, he is like the Greek heroes. “The ultimate demand which his movement makes is not that there be a work, but that someone face this point, grasp its essence, grasp it where it appears, where it is essential and essentially appearance: at the heart of night.” And this demand that the artist requires of himself determines for him as well the project’s necessary failure. This is the lesson the artist is condemned to learn. It turns into a reflection on “the deep.” Ibid.

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The Greek myth says: a work can be produced only if the measureless experience of the deep—which the Greeks recognized as necessary to the work and where the work endures its measurelessness—is not pursued for its own sake. The deep does not reveal itself directly; it is only disclosed hidden in the work. This is an essential, an inexorable answer.86

Art however refuses to obey this law. But the myth shows nonetheless that Orpheus’s destiny is not to submit to this ultimate law. And, of course, by turning toward Eurydice, Orpheus ruins the work, which is immediately undone, and Eurydice returns among the shades. When he looks back, the essence of night is revealed as the inessential. Thus he betrays the work, and Eurydice, and the night. But not to turn toward Eurydice would be no less untrue. Not to look would be infidelity to the measureless, imprudent force of his movement which does not want Eurydice in her daytime truth and her everyday appeal, but wants her in her nocturnal obscurity, in her distance, with her closed body and sealed face—wants to see her not when she is visible, but when she is invisible, and not as the intimacy of a familiar life, but as the foreignness of what excludes all intimacy, and wants, not to make her live, but to have living in her the plenitude of her death.87

And that—to see “her in her nocturnal obscurity, in her distance, with her closed body and sealed face,” to “see her not when she is visible, but when she is invisible”—turns out to be the unexpected key to art. That alone is what Orpheus came to seek in the Underworld. All the glory of his work, all the power of his art, and even the desire for a happy life in the lovely, clear light of day are sacrificed to this sole aim: to look in the night at what the night hides, the other night, the dissimulation that appears.88

“To look in the night at what the night hides, the other night, the dissimulation that appears.” Why is that a requirement for the literary writer in the first place? What more is there to say about this other night? Elsewhere Blanchot describes it more fully. He links it with the dark, with the deep, and with horror. It is what one cannot cease to see, the incessant making itself felt. Whoever devotes himself to the work is drawn by it toward the point where it undergoes impossibility. This experience is purely nocturnal, it is the very experience of night. Ibid. Ibid. 88 Ibid. 86 87



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In the night, everything has disappeared. This is the first night. Here absence approaches—silence, repose, night. Here death blots out Alexander’s picture; here the sleeper does not know he sleeps, and he who dies goes to meet real dying. Here language completes and fulfills itself in the silent profundity which vouches for it as its meaning. But when everything has disappeared in the night, “everything has disappeared” appears. This is the other night. Night is this apparition: “everything has disappeared.” It is what we sense when dreams replace sleep, when the dead pass into the deep of the night, when night’s deep appears in those who have disappeared. Apparitions, phantoms, and dreams are an allusion to this empty night. It is the night of Young, where the dark does not seem dark enough, or death ever dead enough. What appears in the night is the night that appears. And this eeriness does not simply come from something invisible, which would reveal itself under cover of dark and at the shadows’ summons. Here the invisible is what one cannot cease to see; it is the incessant making itself felt. … The first night is welcoming. Novalis addresses hymns to it. Of it one can say, In the night, as if it had an intimacy. We enter into the night and we rest there, sleeping and dying. But the other night does not welcome, does not open. In it, one is still outside. It does not close either; it is not the great Castle [of Kafka], near but unapproachable, impenetrable because the door is guarded. Night is inaccessible because to have access to it is to accede to the outside, to remain outside the night and to lose forever the possibility of emerging from it… . In the night, one can die; we reach oblivion. But this other night is the death no one dies, the forgetfulness which gets forgotten. In the heart of oblivion, it is memory without rest.89

The other night is the death no one dies. It is in the heart of oblivion, and yet memory without rest. What could that mean? If Wiesel gives an autobiographical reading to night, Mauriac a theological reading, Cayrol a quasi-sociological reading, Blanchot constructs a literary reading. Night is what opens when we approach it indirectly, namely, by turning away, by failing to face it. But the literary artist is never successful at that project, even, that is to say, at failing. He never fails to fail at it, we may say. He always attempts to treat night as a face, as a gateway, as something precisely through which he may encounter the infinite within the finite, the more within the less, the container within the contained. When the night is treated as a face, as what may show up within Ibid.

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the realm of appearance, even if it is not appearance itself (for the face is never either appearance or the object of appearance), what shows up necessarily is the “failure to appear,” so to speak. “… when everything has disappeared in the night, ‘everything has disappeared’ appears. This [Blanchot affirms] is the other night.” How does Blanchot’s analysis help us to read Wiesel? Is not, in Wiesel’s narrative, what Blanchot calls the “other night” a way of talking about what Wiesel calls the “kingdom of night,” the inside that is also in fact the outside, what happens when the “first night” becomes “every night?” What happens when we enter what a writer like Emil Fackenheim would call “planet Auschwitz”? Wiesel’s book traces the development of the witness or témoin to the Shoah. But that witness status, unlike the witness to a juridical transgression of some kind, is a new kind of witness, a witness with the imago of a corpse. If Wiesel becomes in effect Moshe the Beadle by the book’s conclusion, if he takes on that role with regard to the larger community, he does so only in so far as he has entered another world, an alternate universe, and somehow managed to return from it, in so far as he has become in fact, like Lazarus, a returnee from the dead. Wiesel’s cogito, henceforth, the cogito of the messengerial model he adopts (or in which he finds himself, hanging on the wall before him, perhaps not unlike the pipel in his story), is necessarily a cogitation on mortality: “I died; therefore, I am.” Where does Blanchot get the locution that he uses? What does it mean to say that the “other night” is “what opens” when the “first night” becomes every night? How does saying that enhance our understanding of Wiesel’s narrative (or Mauriac’s interpretation of Wiesel’s narrative)? To complete our analysis— which is already over long—we will turn to two final sources: to Emmanuel Levinas, and to the Hebrew Bible.

D: Levinas, nocturnal obscurity, and the “there is” The “other night” is already a curious locution to begin with. We construct a synchronic distinction—not this night but that night—when what we mean in fact is a diachronic distinction, the night before the current day, or the night before that one. In Levinas, we read of something he calls the il y a or the “there is,” which might help us to understand Blanchot’s notion of the other night, which he distinguishes from the generosity of the Heideggerian es gibt, and locates



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somewhere between Heidegger’s being and Heidegger’s nothingness. Not yet being, and yet no longer nothingness or void, the “there is” is neither object nor subject and so prior to experience as such.90 Let us imagine all beings, things and persons, reverting to nothingness. One cannot put this return to nothingness outside of all events. But what of this nothingness itself? Something would happen, if only night and the silence of nothingness. The indeterminateness of this “something is happening” is not the indeterminateness of a subject and does not refer to a substantive. Like the third person pronoun in the impersonal form of a verb, it designates not the uncertainly known author of the action, but the characteristic of this action itself which somehow has no author. This impersonal, anonymous, yet inextinguishable “consummation” of being, which murmurs in the depths of nothingness itself we shall designate by the term there is. The there is, inasmuch as it resists a personal form, is “being in general.” We have not derived this notion from exterior things or the inner world— from any “being” whatever. For there is transcends inwardness as well as exteriority; it does not even make it possible to distinguish these. The anonymous current of being invades, submerges every subject, person or thing. The subject– object distinction by which we approach existents is not the starting point for a meditation which broaches being in general. We could say that the night is the very experience of the there is, if the term experience were not inapplicable to a situation which involves the total exclusion of light.91

This night is immediate, Levinas tells us. It is presence, but one that is unavoidable and invasive, and so not welcoming at all. As a consequence, it is engaged as horror. When the forms of things are dissolved in the night, the darkness of the night, which is neither an object nor the quality of an object, invades like a presence. In the night, where we are riven to it, we are not dealing with anything. But this nothing is not that of pure nothingness. There is no longer this or that; there is not “something.” But this universal absence is in its turn a presence, an absolutely unavoidable presence. It is not the dialectical counterpart of absence, and we do not grasp it through a thought. It is immediately there. There is no discourse. Nothing responds to us, but this silence; the voice of this silence is understood and frightens like the silence of those infinite spaces Pascal speaks Levinas, Existence and Existents (1978), 51–2. Ibid., 52.

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of. There is, in general, without it mattering what there is, without our being able to fix a substantive to this term. There is is an impersonal form, like in it rains, or it is warm. Its anonymity is essential. The mind does not find itself faced with an apprehended exterior. The exterior—if one insists on this term—remains uncorrelated with an interior. It is no longer given. It is no longer a world. What we call the I is itself submerged by the night, invaded, depersonalized, stifled by it. The disappearance of all things and of the I leaves what cannot disappear, the sheer fact of being in which one participates, whether one wants to or not, without having taken the initiative, anonymously. Being remains, like a field of forces, like a heavy atmosphere belonging to no one, universal, returning in the midst of the negation which put it aside, and in all the powers to which that negation may be multiplied.92

Anonymous, impersonal, invasive, the “there is” in Levinas’s view is therefore a nocturnal space. But it is not an empty space. It has a content, so to speak, namely, darkness. There is a nocturnal space, but it is no longer empty space, the transparency which both separates us from things and gives us access to them, by which they are given. Darkness fills it like a content; it is full, but full of the nothingness of everything. Can one speak of its continuity? It is surely uninterrupted. But the points of nocturnal space do not refer to each other as in illuminated space; there is no perspective, they are not situated. There is a swarming of points.93

Nor is it the absence of light. It is not in opposition to light but before the opposition since the paired opposition of light to dark or day to night has not yet been created. Yet this analysis does not simply illustrate … that night is the absence of day. The absence of perspective is not something purely negative. It becomes an insecurity. Not because things covered by darkness elude our foresight and that it becomes impossible to measure their approach in advance. For the insecurity does not come from the things of the day world which the night conceals; it is due just to the fact that nothing approaches, nothing comes, nothing threatens; this silence, this tranquility, this void of sensations constitutes a mute, absolutely indeterminate menace. The indeterminateness constitutes its acuteness. There is no determined being, anything can count for anything else. In this ambiguity the menace of pure and simple presence, of the there is, takes form. Before this Ibid., 52–3. Ibid., 53.

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obscure invasion it is impossible to take shelter in oneself, to withdraw into one’s shell. One is exposed. The whole is open upon us. Instead of serving as our means of access to being, nocturnal space delivers us over to being.94

What it is, what night is, in other words, for Levinas, is horror. Horror is our intimation of the rustling of the “there is.” The things of the day world then do not in the night become the source of the “horror of darkness” because our look cannot catch them in their “unforeseeable plots”; on the contrary, they get their fantastic character from this horror. Darkness does not only modify their contours for vision; it reduces them to undetermined, anonymous being, which sweats in them. The rustling of the there is … is horror.95

Wiesel’s night, in other words, opens him (and through him, and his relating of it, us) to a more primal nocturnal silence and obscurity that Levinas describes more fully in philosophic language and that Blanchot describes more fully in literary language. The Holocaust as Wiesel describes it for us in testimonial language is the tapping into the horror and the anxiety of that other night. Part of the horror of the Holocaust of course is that it is more than violence. It is a species of betrayal. If you walk outside after hearing a university lecture and are hit on the head by a rock thrown by an individual on the roof of a building (who is randomly lobbing rocks at passersby), that is clearly an example of violence. But if you look up at the individual who is tossing the rock and it is your father and he is aiming at you that is worse. That is betrayal, the turning against you of one who should protect you. Wiesel’s book is a search for a suitable father among the various candidates—his own father, God, Mauriac— and in the wake of the collapse of a political regime presumably set up to protect its citizens. The world the survivors enter is a world without fathers. In a sense, all his “fathers” have failed him—some by physical weakness, others by more active betrayals. But all have failed without exception. But there is something deeper, still more fundamental A betrayal reflected in scripture from the outset. Stripped of all human references, the Holocaust victim has been opened to something deeper and more comprehensive, something that pre-exists the construction of the subject and the object, that predates, in some very real fashion, the creation of the world as he will or already has come to

Ibid., 54–5. Ibid.

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understand it. After the Holocaust, the other night has become every night, and that that other night is indelible. We now learn something new. What “new thing” do we learn from learning about the other night, from the indelibility of night? The night of Wiesel, Mauriac, Cayrol, Blanchot, or Levinas? The night studied in autobiography, in Christian religious discourse, in poetics, in literary theory, in phenomenology? Why is this night different from all other nights?

E: Genesis and the name for a darkness older than the opposite of light What we learn is that the other night may not be all that new after all. These two notions may not be unrelated. Levinas’s understanding of night, darkness, and the there is, the ground of being in general, as he calls it, finds an unexpected harmony in Genesis I. In Genesis 1, for example, we read of a night which names a darkness that is older than the opposition of day to night or light to darkness. bereishiyt bara elohiym, eit hashamayim v’eit ha’aretz (At the beginning of God’s creating of the heavens and the earth,) v’ha’aretz haytah tohu va vohu (when the earth was unformed and void,) v’hoshech al-p’naiy t’hom (darkness over the face of the deep,) v’ruach elohiym merachephet al-p’naiy hamayim (the rushing-spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters—) vayomer elohiym y’hiy or vay’hi-or (God said: Let there be light! and there was light.) vayar elohiym et-ha’or ki-tov (God saw the light: that it was good.) vayavdeil elohiym beiyn haor uveiyn hahoshech) (God separated the light from the darkness.) vayikra elohiym la’or yom, v’lahoshech kara laylah (God called the light: Day! and the darkness he called: Night!) vayhi-erev, vayhi boker: yom echad (There was setting, there was dawning: one day.)96 Bereishiyt, 1.1–9 Genesis 1:1-9. The translation is adapted from Everett Fox’s Five Books of Moses (1997), with modifications.

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To readers unaccustomed to encountering Hebrew scripture, these words must seem rather strange. Is not the opening passage of Torah to be rendered by some version of the familiar sentence from the King James Version: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth”? Some version of what Christians call the “Old Testament” would seem ingrained within our cultural consciousness of this text. How does our rendition of this foundational scripture, “when God set about to create the heavens and the earth,” a rendering that relies upon Rashi’s reading, differ significantly from the traditional reading? Is the difference more than semantic? In fact, it changes everything. The shift is comprised specifically of a move from an absolute beginning to a relative beginning, from a translation of the opening word bereishiyt as the form of an “absolute” state to the translation of the same word as a version of what is called grammatically a “construct” state, a word that “leans” upon what follows as in the phrase “at the beginning of.” In the first instance, we are at the absolute outset or outside. At the beginning of time, here is what happened. In the second, we are in medias res, so to speak. When God set about to do this particular act, here is what happened. If the writer had wanted to refer to an absolute beginning, a chronological beginning, he might have written berishonah. What are the implications of the shift? Principally three: a glimpse of the conditions of creation, of its strategies, and of its consequences. We get a vague glimpse of what things were like before creation. When God set about to create, here are the conditions in which he worked. The world was wild and waste; darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters. Second, we learn how that creative act took place, the manner of its commission according to Hebrew scripture. Given such conditions, here is what God did. Namely, four things: he said; he saw; he separated; and he summoned. And we see four consequences of those acts. He said and there was; language leads to being. He saw that it was good; aesthesis leads to value. He separated or divided the light from the darkness; boundary making leads to difference. And he summoned or called, day and night were designated. Summoning leads to naming. And within the Rabbinic universe, of course, there is a third consequence: the act of creation in the Hebrew conception is ongoing and requires our participation in partnership with God in order that the process of creation be completed and that the messianic days might begin. By virtue of the fact that the Messiah has not yet arrived, that fact confers upon us a new appreciation our role

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in the scheme of things—in the ongoingness of creation. The work of creation is renewed every day, the liturgy tells us, as Franz Rosenzweig points out. Thus the Messiah is always “to come,” always a matter of the future. And within Hebraic thinking, the coming of the Messiah has always a double edge: it is at once guaranteed—he “will come”; and it is always delayed, it is always a “not yet.” The two senses are combined in the expression “soon, but not yet.” None of these understandings of the opening words of Genesis of course enters into the familiar Christian rendering of those words as “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” What happened at the outset? We have no idea. God created the heavens and the earth. That’s it. It’s over. Done. What was it like before creation? What was the means by which God undertook the project of creation? What is our role, our set of ongoing obligations, on the basis of these opening words? We have no way of talking about it, or no way of talking about it with divine authority. The act of creation is rendered mysterious, mystified. Why would Christians want to do that? Why mystify creation in that manner? Is it just a matter of philology, the fact that the translations of the Septuagint did not sufficiently understand the Hebrew? The Greek Septuagint, the Latin Vulgate, and the English tradition of Biblical translation from the earliest English Bibles to the KJV in 1611 form one unbroken tradition in this regard. Or does the reason reside elsewhere? For example, in the idea that if we render the bereishiyt as a construct state, something is challenged in which Christian investment is high? In fact, the Christian tradition in this regard finishes creation. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. It’s over and done with. Why? Because our present concern is different; not the ongoingness of creation (or its completion by virtue of our action) but the development of the messianic age which in fact has already begun for the Christian through the passion: the crucifixion, death, and resurrection of Jesus. If creation is not over, the coming of the Messiah remains in the future. If creation is over and done with, mystified, tucked away in some obscure past event of the primeval past, then the ongoingness of the messianic age makes sense. Why is this discussion important in the current context, in context of our reading of Wiesel and Mauriac? Torah alerts us to a darkness prior to the creation of the world, a darkness already in place, “over” (hovering over? covering over or concealing?) the face of the deep. Berishiyt bara elohiym eit hashamayim v’eit ha’aretz: “at the beginning of God’s creating of the heavens



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and the earth” or “when God set about to create the heavens and the earth,” we learn the conditions in place prior to creation: the earth was unformed and void; darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the breath of God hovered over the face of the waters. How many darknesses does scripture enumerate? How many versions of hoshech are there in this opening chapter? There are, in fact, I would suggest, at least five. How so? There are at least three darknesses specified here in the opening verses. There is one that precedes the creation of “the heavens and the earth” (and of light) and that is said to lodge “upon the face of the deep.” There is a second one that remains “separated” from the light after the light has been removed and that is summoned by God to be named. But by virtue of that second one, then, a there is third one that contains light mixed up with it and from which light is in fact straightaway separated. But there are others. There is the darkness that now gets named night (that is not identical to the primordial darkness, the darkness mixed in with light, or the darkness separated from the light, but as yet unnamed). And there is the darkness that is associated in evening and morning in the passage of time. Are we playing word games here? Is it a matter of semantics? Think of the stages we may specify for the life cycle of a relationship. There is a time before the partners meet. There is a time when they are mixed up with each other. There is a time when they separate from each other but without the ability just yet to say what happened. There is a time when everything finally gets named and differentiated. And there is a time when everything fits into the passage of time, when it becomes as quotidian as night and day. In other words, the darkness that stands in opposition to light, the rabbis tell us, and that is named night is not necessarily the same darkness that precedes the separation of light from darkness, a certain anterior darkness that somehow already contains light within its domain. Nor are either of these two darknesses necessarily the same as the darkness that was there before creation itself and with which light once it is created will subsequently be mixed up. Five distinct stages or sequences in fact are discernible in this genetic process: one in which darkness precedes light; one in which darkness contains light or is mixed together with it; a third darkness which is separated from light (or from some of the light); a fourth darkness that word night (layla) comes to name (and which may or may not be identical with any of the other three darknesses); and a fifth and final darkness that comes to designate the passage of time as evening or morning (erev or boker).

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Is Yhvh (the tetragrammaton read as Adonai—“the Lord”—or Hashem—“the Name”) related to yhi-or v’yhi-or, to the the act of creation in Rashi’s interpretation of the bereishiyt? In other words, is not Yhvh the one who says “let there be” and then “there is”? To whom is God speaking in the opening words, we might ask? To Himself, of course. But what if we say (as the rabbis do) that darkness is also created by God (for example, through tzimtzum, contraction, coagulation) and so in fact a “piece” of God? Then we may say that God is speaking to that one part of the divine self that is the most newly created, namely, hoshech, darkness, and that He is saying to that darkness specifically “let there be” and in this case “let there be light.” “Reading darkness” in other words may be precisely what God is doing in Genesis 1, saying to darkness, before Him, “let there be light.” Let us bring these strands together. In Maurice Blanchot’s account of art, in his description of the gaze of Orpheus, we hear of “the other night.” In Emmanuel Levinas’s account of subjectivity, in his formulation of the il y a as a kind of halfway point between consciousness and nothingness in Heidegger’s analysis of being, we come to understand consciousness as an elaborate and systematic response to the il y a, as an “understanding” or “hypostasis” of conscious being at every moment. And now in Genesis, we learn of the connection between the two, between night and darkness: that night is in effect the name for a darkness older than the opposite of light and that in the midrashic language of the rabbis precedes the creation of the world. How does this contextualizing of night in Wiesel’s book and Mauriac’s promotion of Wiesel’s book offer us a new insight on that book or on the Holocaust?

F: Friedländer, the redemptive, and counter-redemptive reading The Holocaust is then as close to Biblical darkness (or hoshech) as one can come. It is a reduction by the Nazis to the il y a, to the ground zero of being, to the place from which responsibility originates. Yhvh would be then a kind of nickname for elohiym, for “our God,” for eloheinu. “Reading darkness” is doing what God did in the face of “black fire” (Maimonides’ name for hoshech): pure consuming, without light. Compare by contrast as an image of God the bush in Exodus 3 which burns without being consumed. Night offers an account of the Holocaust, in other words, we might say (following Levinas), in so far as the Holocaust is our entrée in the modern



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context to the il y a. Nazism would be, then, the attempt to return in the case of the Jews to the horror of the il y a, the attempt to suppress the creation of light entirely, the attempt to return the Jews to the “there is,” to the darkness that is older than the opposition of light to darkness, along with the attempt to suppress the tradition that preserves the thought of that darkness. Nazism would be the attempt (in a sense Sartre never imagined) to be God, to say to the darkness “let there not be light!” It would be the suppression from the point of view of light and consciousness of everything preceding it. As such, Nazism would be the sacrificial logic par excellence (to borrow René Girard’s language) in context of a tradition that is anti-sacrificial from the outset, from its origins first in Judaism, and then in Christianity. And our response in the face of that darkness would be necessarily responsibility, “dis-inter-ested-ness” thought in a new manner from Kant, thought as non-indifference to the other individual, as the possibility of substitution. The writing of Elie Wiesel and of Emmanuel Levinas, these two latter-day students of Shoshani, the itinerant Jewish mystic, rumored to have met his students on occasion on the platform of the Paris metro, would converge in this haunting nocturnal reading. After the Holocaust, all reading (if we trust Wiesel, Blanchot, or Levinas) is necessarily nocturnal reading. Why is this passage—the opening of Bereishiyt—important to this present chapter? The Holocaust may be the surfacing of a darkness so deep, so primal, that we have long ago given up suspecting its existence. Geoffrey Hartman says that the Hebrew Bible already contains traces of a “Book of Destruction” that preceded it that has vanished.97 What if the hoshech that preceded creation reflects already a violence at the origins of all that everyone considers modern? The Holocaust then will be the reappearance of an earlier violence. The Holocaust will not be new. Or rather it appears new only because it is so old, so buried. And thinking that it is new is testimony that we have forgotten it! All of Judaism would be then a response to that primal darkness, a darkness the rabbis are quick to identify with evil (and with black fire), although not the opposite of light, the absence of light but not the opposite of light. Are we justified in reading Wiesel’s work so metaphysically, even metahistorically? Mauraic of course does as much. And so in some manner we are simply following in the footsteps of his first French reader. Hartman, “The Book of Destruction,” in Freidländer Probing the Limits of Representation (1992), 318–34.

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But some more recent historians would appear to think we may do the same with the historical circumstances reflected in Wiesel’s book. How seriously can we consider the Holocaust in the hands of the Nazis as a redemptive gesture (and consequently Wiesel’s book as a counter-redemptive gesture)? Here is Saul Friedländer, for example, on Hitler. “In The Years of Persecution,” Friedländer writes, “I defined Hitler’s brand of anti-Jewish hatred as “redemptive antiSemitism” (xviii). in other words, beyond the immediate ideological confrontation with liberalism and communism, which in the Nazi leader’s eyes were worldviews invented by Jews and for Jewish interests, Hitler perceived his mission as a kind of crusade to redeem the world by eliminating the Jews. The Nazi leader saw “the Jew” as the principle of evil in Western history and society. Without a victorious redeeming struggle, the Jew would ultimately dominate the world. This overall metahistorical axiom led to Hitler’s more concrete ideological-political corollaries (xviii, my italics).98

Friedländer is one of the very few historians who have laid claim to offering us a global account of these events. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Lucy Dawidowicz’s account dominated the scene of historical studies of the Holocaust from a Jewish perspective in the English-speaking world.99 The Nazis attacked the Jews from the moment the assumed power in 1933 and were relentless in their pursuit of a program they had announced as early as 1919, just after the end of the First World War. The Holocaust in this view was nothing either more or less than the implementation of a pre-imagined program. Then, in the mid-1980s, the writings of Raul Hilberg gained significant exposure largely through the impact of Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah in which Hilberg appears repeatedly as historian of the German regime.100 Hilberg argued that if we start with large questions we would only end with large answers and proposed we examine the National Socialist regime on a more progressive stepby-step basis. The Holocaust in his view was significantly less of a systematic affair, and significantly more a matter of political bricolage. In their overall program, no doubt, Hilberg told his readers, their approach was deeply enmeshed in a history of anti-Semitic measures. From the middle Lawrence Langer also talks about the importance of eschewing redemptive approaches to Holocaust studies. See, for example, Preempting the Holocaust (2000). 99 See for example Lucy Dawidowicz, The War against the Jews: 1933–1945 (1975). 100 See The Destruction of the European Jews (1961). Hilberg had actually published his book in the 1960s but it was Lanzmann’s film that inspired widespread interest in it. 98



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ages to the nineteenth century, they told the Jews, in Hilberg’s narrative, “you can’t live among us as Jews.” Thus, the policy of forced conversion. Then in the nineteenth century, a new policy emerged. “You can’t live among us.” Thus, the policy of forced extra-territoriality, forced exclusion. What was new in the twentieth century was only that they extended this policy to its logical conclusion. “You can’t live.” Forced extermination policy. The final solution. The solution to end all solutions. In that way, Hilberg asserts, they were unique. But on a day-to-day basis, the extermination policy evolved from the collapse of the planned removal to Madagascar, the failure of the Wehrmacht on the Russian front, and a series of other political and or military setbacks. Christopher Browning describes this process in detail.101 Friedländer alone takes the inevitable third step: proposing an account of the perpetrators that includes one of the victims and the survivors. What he discovers is redemptive anti-Semitism. How seriously can we take the idea that the redemptive is at the heart of the matter for the perpetrators as much as for the victims? Here for example is Heinrich Himmler’s speech to his troops in Poznań, Poland on October 6, 1943, in which the extermination is explicitly mentioned. I also want to speak to you here, in complete frankness, of a really grave chapter. Amongst ourselves, for once, it shall be said quite openly, but all the same we will never speak about it in public. … I am referring here to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. This is one of the things that is easily said: “The Jewish people are going to be exterminated,” that’s what every Party member says, “sure, it’s in our program, elimination of the Jews, extermination—it’ll be done.” And then they all come along, the 80 million worthy Germans, and each one has his one decent Jew. Of course, the others are swine, but this one, he is a first-rate Jew. Of all those who talk like that, not one has seen it happen, not one has had to go through with it. Most of you men know what it is like to see 100 corpses side by side, or 500 or 1,000. To have stood fast through this—and except for cases of human weakness—to have stayed decent, that has made us hard. This is an unwritten and never-to-be-written page of glory in our history … We had the moral right, we had the duty towards our people, to destroy this people that wanted to destroy us. But we do not have the right to enrich ourselves by so much as a fur, as a watch, by one Mark or a cigarette or anything else. We do not want, in the end, because we destroyed a bacillus, to be infected See Browning, Fateful Months (1991) and The Path to Genocide (1992).

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by this bacillus and to die. I will never stand by and watch while even a small rotten spot develops or takes hold. Wherever it may form we will together burn it away. All in all, however, we can say that we have carried out this most difficult of tasks in a spirit of love for our people. And we have suffered no harm to our inner being, our soul, our character.102

“This is an unwritten and never-to-be-written page of glory in our history.” “We had the moral right, we had the duty towards our people, to destroy this people …” Statements like these are of a wholly different order. The Jews are to be killed in the name of “glory,” in the name of what is good, noble, noteworthy. And we will do so as a matter of duty, as a matter of redemptive obligation. The Jews are a disease, a bacillus, an infection, and we need to act as we would with any other infection: eradication. Hitler’s speeches to the Reichstag on humiliation would add another dimension to this discussion. This is a position that has stepped outside of the human community, outside of the world as constituted from Plato to the humanistic philosophers. Only a position of comparable dimension, may hope to address it.

G: Why is this night different from all other nights? What, then, does reading Wiesel’s memoir gain by putting it in conjunction with Mauriac, Cayrol, Blanchot, Levinas, Friedländer, and Genesis 1? The above question opens the encounter in the Passover Haggadah between the child and the leader of the seder (ma nish ta na halayla hezeh mikal halaylot). And the answer follows: “on all other nights, we eat leavened or unleavened bread; on this night, we eat only unleavened bread” and so forth. But the night of Wiesel’s book is about a night of another order, a night perhaps new to a contemporary consciousness (“T’is new to thee,” Shakespeare’s Prospero says to his beloved daughter, Miranda), but also in fact there all along, prior to the light. Reading Wiesel’s book, reading his autobiographical account of night in context of Mauriac’s Lazarean theology, Cayrol’s Lazarean poetics, Blanchot’s See http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/himmler-on-the-8220-evacuation-of-the-jews-8221 (accessed April 6, 2017). Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler was reputedly “the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany” after Hitler. In this speech, he “speaks to SS officers for three hours in a secret meeting.” Himmler’s recording has survived the war. It is now in the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. Saul Friedländer has commented at length on this speech in Probing the Limits of Representation (1992), and as well in Memory, History and the Extermination of the Jews in Europe (1993).

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anti-Hegelian posthumous literary theorizing, Levinas’s anti-Heidegerrian phenomenology and rabbinic hermeneutics, Friedländer’s counter-redemptive historical studies, or scriptural readings from Genesis 1, we gain a new perspective on the multifarious contexts in which it is embedded. Concern with darkness (hoshech), or the deep (t’hom), or night (layla) has been a part of our cultural heritage for as long as we have felt there to be a heritage. It was there in the beginning, so to speak, which is to say, therefore, already, and necessarily, before the beginning, and it shows up at the moment when that heritage comes into some significant jeopardy, in Hitlerism, for example, and the hands of its perpetrators in the twentieth century. What is new now is that in addition to the redemptive, the counterredemptive is perceived to be as much a part of our legacy as other strains. Hebrew scripture is no less post-Holocaustal than any book we would write after the Second World War. In addition to the legacy of night that followed Wiesel’s book, or the immediate events it registered, are legacies of night prior to Wiesel’s book, legacies of which the book itself is already an extension. The polemic of Wiesel’s book, in other words, like the polemic of Emmanuel Levinas’s account of night in his earliest works, is that night is not simply an absence of light but something older, something larger. The legacy of Night, like the legacy of the darkness the word names, is its endlessness, its “incessance,” to invent a neologism derived from the French, its continuation without interruption. If after the Holocaust, as we have tried to show, everything has become a witness of the Holocaust, we must now go a little farther. The nature of that post-Holocaustal witness is darkness itself. Witness has become of necessity a witness to darkness. The “first night” Wiesel described has become now every night. It is as if the nocturnal silence that greeted Wiesel upon his arrival in the camp opened into another night, a night before the first. There is another way of putting it. The Holocaust, Levinas says, is “the end of theodicy.” That means that in some way it is not new. It is simply the end, the final collapse, of the structure of theodicical thinking by which we have forgotten it, by which we have convinced ourselves that God is here among us watching our every move with the eye for justice (and presumably mercy), a construction that then allows us to blame God for not intervening at the appropriate moment. “But with what magical demons, with what child-like perspectives, have you thus populated your sky,” Levinas asks, “that you now declare it empty and void?” The Holocaust reminds us of the necessity for

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human assumption of responsibility for human violence, the assumption of the full maturity of a “religion of adults.” The Holocaust is not over, in other words, because in some sense it never started, because it has been with us all along. It is at least as old as Biblical scripture. And if we assume Biblical scripture was canonized hundreds of years after the collapse of the first Temple (perhaps even in the wake of the Second Temple), then it is considerably older still. The flare up of violence that the term reflects simply demarcates the collapse of the structure of denial and as a consequence the availability of the violence on a more regular and clarified basis. The Holocaust, we are saying (and this may turn out to be our most polemical claim), is not new. It has never not been with us. It is as old as the West, the oldest story in the book. Indeed, it may very well be the basis of the West and of the book, the very foundation upon which all we know as the West and the book was constructed. And to the extent that we have read Wiesel’s book through the contest of exclusively redemptive narratives (for example, Mauriac’s—that this is all God’s grace—versus Wiesel’s—that this is a sign of God’s abandonment of the world and the need for our own independent strength) rather than their mutual backing away from redemptive narratives within a more productive relationships, we have subjected the victims to what Alvin Rosenfeld called some years ago “a double dying;” we have engaged the very opposition the book is challenging; we have denied the Holocaust in our very attempt to remember it or laboring to “admit” it.103 Lawrence Langer has spent most of his academic career saying as much. His titles alone give us the clue. The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination was his first book, quickly followed by The Age of Atrocity, Versions of Survival, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory, Admitting the Holocaust, Preempting the Holocaust, Art from the Ashes, and Using and Abusing the Holocaust, among other volumes.104 Do we spot a pattern? We need to stop preempting the Holocaust by such redemptive narratives, Langer’s books tell us, we need to “admit” the Holocaust, both allow it to enter (which we have not been doing), and confess that it has happened (which we have not), and give up the denial that our books argue for—substituting for the realities of killing six million people dramas of As in John Donne, the word means both confess and grant entrance to. See Langer (1975, 1978, 1982, 1991, 1995, 1995a, 2000, 2006).

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moral courage and humanitarian endurance. We need to stop preempting it, either explicitly like the Nazis and the Holocaust deniers or more subtly in our construction of critical interpretations that do the same, memorializations that pose as forms of remembering but that are in fact forms of forgetting. The suffering of the other individual is never redemptive, Levinas writes.105 The only suffering to which a meaning may be assigned is my own. The writing that redeems is always the writing of the disaster, writes Blanchot. We are all guilty before everyone for everything and me more than anyone, Levinas writes (echoing Dostoyevsky), and although he explicitly disavows this thought, Wiesel’s books support that contention. The form of our guilt is the assignment of meaning or value to the suffering of the other. We are infinitely responsible for the other individual—responsible for the other, for his responsibility, for his death. A world in which each of us endorsed that set of ideas would be one in which the Holocaust could not happen. From the perspective regarding social institutions and their relation to violence as defined by René Girard or Emmanuel Levinas, we may add that the attribution of value or meaning to the suffering (or victimization) of the other individual is in extreme cases the very definition of the sacrificial. If Judaism has any value to be offered to the world, if Christianity (which in the first centuries of our era is a species of Judaism) has any value to be offered to the world, from a Levinasian perspective, it can only be founded on the rejection of the attribution of value or meaning to the suffering of the other individual, and on the rejection of the sacrificial when the suffering of the other individual comes into play. Only my own suffering is legitimately capable of being assigned a meaning or a value, and only on the basis of such an autoassignment—and never on the basis of the assignment of value to the suffering of the other individual—can a viable foundation for inter-human groups be identified. The essence of the Holocaust is its incessance, so to speak, its endlessness, its ongoingness both before the event and after. The Holocaust is l’incessante, par excellence, the end of theodicy. It should remind us once and for all—as if we needed the reminder—of human responsibility for human violence. The responsibilities of God with regard to the suffering of the other, responsibilities we have always projected onto the divine, are ours alone to shoulder. Admitting the Holocaust means refusing to exclude it either physically or mentally, historically “Useless Suffering,” Entre Nous (1998).

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or interpretatively. The newest thing to be said about the Holocaust is also the oldest: vehyeiy berachah, “be a blessing” (Gen. 12:2). Give up the idolatries by which we have lived (in which the sacrificial becomes conflated with violence, in which the divine becomes conflated with the human), and do as God said to Avram to do: lech lechah, which may be translated “Get gone, and I mean you!” (Gen. 12:1).106 “How can you believe in God after Auschwitz?” Wiesel asks the Hasidic Rebbe, and he receives the reply: “Who else are you going to believe in? Everyone else has been discredited.” Ellen Fine, then, turns out to have been right all along. Night is about the development of Wiesel as a witness (10). But witness, here understood as messengerial (we recall the Greek word angelos meaning the messengerial), could have been defined differently (think of Primo Levi’s work). The hanging of the young boy with the face of a sad angel and the death of his father enacts the “nightmarish” journey of the narrator from his hometown in Sighet to Auschwitz and thus the Holocaust in miniature. The Holocaust at stake for him turns out to be much older, “pre-creational” according to the rabbis, and the father–son relationships are multiple—both within the book and without. There are at least a trinity of fathers with whom this son is engaged within the book: the biological father (with whom he has a warm if remote relationship), God (with whom he has a troubled on again, off again relationship), and Moshe the Beadle, his teacher (with whom he has an iconoclastic and then later a pitybased relationship). And outside of the book, there are more: his mentor and patron Mauriac (with whom he has a nurturing relationship) for one. Mauriac is missing a child (his memory of the children is borrowed from his wife’s memory). Wiesel is missing a father (his father was absent before on community business (which is why he turned to Moshe and others earlier) and his father was missing during the camp experience for reasons of health (the son tends the father but not much “fathering” of the son goes on). There alone is a match, we may say. And both testify to the transformative power for them of a young man dying upon the gallows before their eyes: Mauriac in the manuscript he reads and the young man who walks through his door bearing that manuscript and bearing the same countenance; and Wiesel in the narrative he tells of the young man whose death he was literally forced to watch, face to face. That is how Jonathan Bishop, my colleague in English at Cornell University, translated the phrase for me in our discussions.

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And the relation between these two themes—between night on the one hand, and the father–son relationship on the other—defines for him his temoinage.107 The latter becomes the context in terms of which the former can be survived. Wiesel becomes a witness, a witness to the Holocaust, to the darkness of Biblical proportions, and the aftermath or “afterdeath,” in context of his warm (and reciprocal) reception within the relationship with Mauriac.108 And that fortuitous contextualization allows for what we have dubbed counter-redemptive hermeneutics. Both Mauriac’s and Wiesel’s positions are potentially redemptive in structure. Wiesel’s rebellious attitude toward God threatens to find “a happy ending” in God’s rejection. “I had ceased to be anything but ashes,” he tells us, “yet I felt myself to be stronger than the Almighty, to whom my life had been tied for so long. I stood amid that praying congregation, observing it like a stranger.” And Mauriac’s notion of grace could well reduce the specificity of Wiesel’s experience to just one more commonality with his ancient “Israeli” brother. But what Mauriac feels he “should” have said he did not, and could not, and his efforts dissolve in a paroxysm of weeping. And whatever strength Wiesel might have derived as a younger man from rebellion against God he derives now from other sources closer to His affirmation, dedicating the second book “to François Mauriac,” and repudiating critics who would find in his work an instance of “the death of God.” And it is as a function of their relationship to each other that each may now take the steps he takes. Their relationship drives Mauriac’s efforts to secure for the manuscript a hearing, and (it would appear) to dedicate a subsequent book to “E.W.” And their relationship drives Wiesel to rewrite his manuscript in French from the Yiddish original to the dismay of some younger postwar readers, a reconstruction that now borrows (in its use of the notion of night) from writers like Cayrol, Blanchot, and Levinas in whom such counter-redemptive approaches already show up and in whom Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish religious orientations already to some extent converge. How is Wiesel’s reading to be reconciled with Mauriac’s? How is reading from the “after death” (which is Langer’s expression) to be reconciled with Mauriac’s reading via grace? They are not. They are understandable only from within the relationship in which they back off from their independent and mutually exclusive redemptive perspectives regarding each other. Temoinage is the French word for witness. For the use of this term, see Langer’s essay on Wiesel in Katz and Rosen: “Whose Testimony? The Confusion of Fiction with Fact” (2013).

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The other night has become now every night. After the Holocaust, all serious witness has become of necessity witness to darkness, to black fire on white, to invoke the language of the Kabbalaists. But as a consequence all serious witness is then of necessity witness to the posthumous, and there are always two versions of the posthumous: those that are redemptive and those that work against their redemptive potentials and that we have named the counter-redemptive. The polemic of Wiesel’s book is that night is not simply an absence of light but something older, something larger, more primal, and as a consequence as if the legacy of night is a darkness that will not easily be shaken off. The words from the Passover Haggadah with which we have titled this seventh section are curiously binding. Nathan Englander’s question—namely, “Did we die during the night?”—resonates beyond the boundary of this book.109 Yes, if what we mean by “we” is the humanist subject. The humanist subject has died. The world in which we now live is a veritable no-man’s land in which we meander aimlessly, waiting for something to happen, waiting like Beckett’s hobos, for the event that will save us.110 Beckett’s writing in that regard was prophetic. Although he may or may not have known it, the Holocaust and the specter of night it opened was always his subject matter. The entire Western world has become a group of wandering vagabond Jews, posing as acrobats, passing as parodies of their former religious selves.111 By way of such Holocaust acrobatics, the importance of night and of darkness at the outset of creation has reappeared. But no, if the question itself continues to be a viable one. Judaism after the war may considered by some to be a parody of its former self. Scattered pockets, in which sparks of the Judaism of former times continue to thrive, alone survive the devastation. The Judaism of the past appears to be gone. On the other hand, the larger world may have taken on its burden. It is possible today for us to ask this question. “What strikes me,” Elie Wiesel said to Ted Koppel, at a televised meeting on nuclear disarmament, “is that all the world has become Jewish.” Free markets, the globalization of the economic village through the internet, has changed things in a way that may offer new possibilities for the future. Zygmunt Bauman asserts the importance of globalization and the Holocaust to our conceptions of modernity.112 And Claire Katz asserts the Jewish and specifically See Nathan Englander, “The Twenty-seventh Man,” in For the Relief of Unbearable Urges (1999). Cf. Heidegger’s remark in his final interview in 1966, with Der Spiegel: “Only a god can save us.” 111 Cf. Nathan Englander “The Tumblers” in For the Relief of Unbearable Urges (1999). 112 See Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (2001). 109 110



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pedagogical foundation for all future humanistic study.113 It is all now a matter of teaching and reading. “After the end of the Second Temple,” the rabbis are said proverbially to affirm, “after the end of sacrifice, we pray and read.”

Epilogue: One Long Night Is it entirely surprising finally that Yeats should turn out one of our prophets? The Holocaust is not over. “What is past is not dead,” Christa Wolf writes, echoing Faulkner’s remark some years earlier; “it is not even past.”114 Our age is post-Holocaustal, a term that identifies both where we are and where we are likely to remain for some time to come. All writing in this era, whether it takes stock of that fact or not, is “the writing of the disaster”—which is to say, both about disaster, and from disaster, to annotate Blanchot’s use of the French word de.115 Or perhaps, following Geoffrey Hartman’s emendation on Smock’s familiar translation of Blanchot’s title, we might say all writing in this era is the “notebook,” the daily scripture or testimony or cahier, of the disaster. But Yeats also makes clear what Levinas also taught us: that this is not the first time. We seem to have been asleep for some twenty centuries or more. That the “original” darkness (if indeed that phrase makes much sense here) occurred sometime before the birth of the modern world, sometime, that is to say, between the already unspeakable catastrophes of the ancient sixth century, and the dawn of modernity. The sleep, Yeats tells us, has been “vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,” a cradle of catastrophe, one is therefore tempted to say, a cradle that opens into the other night, in a sleep reminiscent of the famous nursery rhyme, in a reading worthy of a poet like William Blake. Rock-a-bye, baby, on the treetop, when the winds blow, the cradle will rock. When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall. Claire Katz, Levinas, Pedagogy, and the Crisis in the Humanities (2013). Christa Wolf, Patterns of Childhood (1984), 1. Cf. Faulkner’s remark, “The past is never dead; it’s not even past.” The remark occurs in Requiem for a Nun (1951), a book dramatized by Albert Camus in 1956. Did Wolf, who writes in German, borrow it from Camus’s French rendition or read it in Faulkner directly? Europeans would seem as capable of borrowing from Americans as Americans from Europeans. If she does borrow it from Faulkner, she is of course performing or enacting what she is saying. 115 The Writing of the Disaster (1986), translated by Ann Smock from L’écriture du désastre (1980). 113 114

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And down will come baby, cradle and all.

The baby and the cradle. The content and the vehicle. The descriptive and the performative. The human subject and the material object. Subject at once to the elemental forces and the inherent weakness of our own support structures, the ravages of wind and wood, and the bough’s collapse under its own weight, built, that is to say, upon an idolatry, our “baby”—in the prophetic account Yeats offers it—has come crashing down. And with it, the destruction of all it touches. A “rough beast” now “slouches” toward birth in the city where the last happy ending was conceived. Elie Wiesel describes Night as a matter of “testimony,” a first-person autobiographical account of his experiences during and after the war, the account of un témoin, a witness.116 Emmanuel Levinas lodges night (la nuit) at the root of phenomenological philosophy (in his critique of Heidegger’s “fundamental ontology”) and of subjectivity and responsibility in relation to the anonymous rustling he has named the il y a (“there is”). “Refusing philosophy,” Maurice Blanchot endorses Levinas’s criticism, and takes up night (la nuit) as the foundation for a new demystifying reading of literature and of literary thinking based upon a notion of the posthumous (that he finds in Kafka and others) or of living beyond death. The Hebrew Bible, Genesis, Bereishiyt, read through the interpretative commentaries of Rashi, opens with the naming of night (layla) for a certain darkness (hoshech) older than the opposite of light (or) that is already in place. In scripture, literature, literary critical thinking, philosophy, and witness testimony or memoir, night would appear decisive. And Mauriac finds in this experience of the “Israeli” journalist “with the eyes of a sad angel” a witness or testimony to the man on the cross two thousand years ago. Is the “kingdom of Night” (Wiesel’s phrase), just one more theme of the Holocaust? Or is night privileged in some way, a theme in which the status of the Holocaust itself is posed, in which the relation of the Holocaust to the postwar structure of critical reading, as well as to the “Book of Destruction” and lamentation that has marked our history since the ancient sixth century in a differentiation that is also a continuity, is made explicit?117 In the studies we have examined in this book, from journalism, to politics, to personal trauma, to religious faith, to critical film studies, to literary critical poetics, to literary study, to philosophy, to scripture, to historical study, night as the “Lazarean,” as the The Night Trilogy (1990), 3. Night is La Nuit in French. Cf. Hartman’s essay, “The Book of Destruction,” in Probing the Limits of Representation (1992).

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survival of death, as a “living on” after death (survivance in Derrida’s language), as the posthumous, as the return from the dead, as the post-mortal if not the post human, remains a constant. Continuing to deny the Holocaust at the heart of our texts or at the heart of our lives, continuing to refuse it admission, either explicitly or implicitly, either by saying it did not occur (or is not occurring) in the manner of the Holocaust deniers, or more subtly by domesticating its occurrence within a critical thinking of the last seventy years that at once acknowledges and excludes (or remembers and forgets) the disaster, perpetuates its damaging effects. If for the word “redemptive” in this study we were to substitute the word “sacrificial,” and for the word “counter-redemptive” we were to substitute the word “anti-sacrificial,” this study could well appear a continuation of one pursued in Sacrificing Commentary in which the writing of René Girard offered an understanding of the stakes of literary reading.118 The Möbian as we described it there, and as we have taken it up more systematically in this book (namely, as a version of the literary), would then explain for us the mechanisms by which these redemptive or sacrificial exchanges operate, and darkness would appear to designate a Holocaust or disaster at the root of all scripture or writing in our culture, indeed, at the root of all subjectivity. It is in the end with Prospero’s remark at the conclusion of The Tempest that all bets in this chapter have been placed. The line that Shakespeare assigns to Prospero (in the bard’s “final” play) as the character gives up his “magic wand” (by which, we have come to understand in the course of the drama, his own reality has been constructed and his isolation on his island sustained), resonates here more broadly: “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.” Propsero says, and perhaps through him Shakespeare says as well.119 What remains to be seen is whether that acknowledgment and assumption of ownership suffices to effect a shift in our behavior or at this late hour comprises just one more moment of the ever-burgeoning and ever-convoluting disaster.

Goodhart, Sacrificing Commentary (1996). The Tempest (5.1.276). Does the fact that this remark is directed by Prospero toward Caliban, who has been his servant/slave throughout this drama, and whom he has treated very badly, diminish its importance? Does it undermine his taking ownership of an internal (and infernal) darkness that he still refers to Caliban as “this thing” or still regards him as his “possession?” Or should we understand his acknowledgement as the dismantling of an egoistic/imperialistic subjectivity that in other circumstances would see the threat of darkness as external? It appears to be a signature of Shakespeare’s genius that he offers us at once both options.

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But all the story of the night told over, …………………………… More witnesseth than fancy’s images William Shakespeare1 [The survivor] will be plagued by dreams such as that he is no longer living at all, that he was sent to the ovens in 1944 and his whole existence since has been imaginary. Theodor Adorno2 I died in Auschwitz but no one knows it. Charlotte Delbo3 outside there’s a dark highway and on the highway there is a truck and the driver of the truck for some reason releases two blasts of his horn into the miles of night… . Mark Halliday4

Hippolyta to Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (V.i.23–7). Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 361. 3 Delbo, Auschwitz and After (2014), 267. 4 “The Miles of Night,” in Selfwolf (1999), 3–4. 1 2

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Part 1: Criticism, Literature, and the Möbian What, then, have these five chapters allowed us to observe? In each case, a difference is articulated that turns out to be continuous with the very position from which it would radically separate or remove itself. One literary critic reads another. Frank Lentricchia sets out to read Murray Krieger’s work, thinking his own poststructuralist interpretation supersedes that of his formalist critical predecessor. But we can show that everything Lentricchia does to construct his perspective derives palpably from Krieger’s, and that far from displacing his teacher (and colleague at the University of California at Irvine), Lentricchia succeeds primarily in extending Krieger’s position that much more fully, an extension, moreover, ironically reflective of Krieger’s own continuation of the formalist position of his New Critical teachers, endeavoring as he did as well to free himself from his critical progenitors, all the while succeeding only in strengthening their hold upon him and rendering him as a result their most vocal and accessible expositor. Despite all efforts to the contrary (or perhaps, more precisely, because of those efforts), Lentricchia’s supersessionist project (if we can speak in such customarily religious language) turns out a virtual extension of Krieger’s own, and he remains most “Kriegerian” when most opposing him. Nor is the situation significantly different when a critic sets out to read his own earlier critical output. Paul de Man attempts repeatedly to put the past behind him (attempts disclosed only in retrospect and only posthumously—in the wake of new discoveries about his earlier work). But those attempts turn out curiously only to have extended the hold of that past upon his current work, conferring upon his work as a whole the status of a persistent organicism functioning one way in the earliest journalistic context, another in the intervening “existentialist” years, and a third in his deconstructive phase, all the while remaining consonant with the same original “aesthetic” project throughout. The fact that in the latest work we may observe (by dint of the recent discoveries) a persistent dismantling of the earliest assumptions does less to persuade us of his later independence from them than ironically of their continuity with more contemporary concerns, an insistence, moreover, that may even strengthen the case for those assumptions—namely, that aesthetic endeavors remain governed by an organic “life of their own,” by “evolutionary laws” or natural patterns in artistic and critical matters all the more expansively as we attempt to resist them—although perhaps in a way the youthful writer might never have expected.



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Nor does the situation change fundamentally when the teacher–student relation is a sympathetic one. Unlike Lentricchia, Shoshana Felman would like to endorse the deconstructive position of her critical forbearer, defending her teacher against the perceived ravages of hostile anti-deconstructive critics. Engaging the help of her colleague and mentor, Dori Laub, she constructs a theory of witness or testimony that would render de Man’s silence about his earlier work the mark of his identification with writers like Primo Levi or Walter Benjamin. But as with the other cases, her defensive efforts succeed only in thwarting her goal, in constructing a theory of testimony or witness that reinstalls the very representational framework from which such attacks against de Man have been launched and that de Man himself would oppose. As a theory of Holocaust testimony built upon the deconstructive insights garnered from de Man and trauma theory, their results prove more testimonial than the account of testimony they would endeavor to offer. Laub articulates a general theory of trauma and Felman articulates a much needed trauma-based theory of Holocaust testimony.5 But each theorist practices the very distortions from which the general theory would so carefully delineate itself when individual texts or circumstances come into play. Once again a theory that offers itself as an outside independent perspective turns out to work from within and extend the very domain from which it would substantively remove itself. Nor is the dilemma we face limited to formalist or deconstructive or psychology-based literary readers. Theatrical producer and creative writer, Zvi Kolitz, undertakes to distance himself from his own past vis-à-vis the Holocaust by means of a creative literary gesture that succeeds only in drawing him further within it. Living in America after the war, Kolitz composes a piece of creative fiction regarding human experiences during the Holocaust, designed, it would appear, to gain for himself some closure on a series of events from which he was more or less removed. He travels to Argentina and writes in Yiddish a piece subsequently published in a South American literary journal that he himself then republishes in English in the United States. The effort boomerangs. Learning that the piece is being touted in Europe as an instance of eyewitness testimony (competing with other circulating eye-witness accounts), he attempts to set the record straight, an effort that Since the publication of the essay on which this chapter was based (in 1992), this need has been addressed. See, for example, the work of Saul Friedländer in Holocaust studies—in Hartman (1994)—and the work of Cathy Caruth in psychoanalytic studies (1996).

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only garners for him new attacks—as a would-be usurper of such a firstperson autobiographical narrative. The contours of this boomerang effect are highlighted when a well-intentioned Dutch theologian (whose own predilections for Jewish-Christian dialogue are in evidence) undertakes in turn to set the record straight about the documentary status of this piece (namely, that it is a fiction), only to compound the confusion by declaring the Yiddish original to be a “pirated” fiction that has usurped the stage from the author’s “original” New York publication. And that same theologian then compounds the confusion through yet one more turn of this burgeoning spiral. Upon learning of the error, and in an effort to correct his former mistakes, he gathers (and publishes in English) a dossier on the matter that includes Kolitz’s subsequent English rendering, the commentator’s own account of this affair (the circumstances of its circulation in Europe as testimony, his misapprehension of the original, and his newly found understanding of the relation of the Yiddish original to the English translation), and an essay by a French philosopher and Jewish studies thinker whose own commentary in France upon the “authorless” version circulating there astutely identifies the writing as testimonial and relates it to the Holocaust in a way that the American theologian would approve, an essay that the Dutch theological commentator interestingly mistranslates to fit the heroic mold he would like Kolitz to emblematize. Thinking himself outside the maelstrom, Kolitz turns out to be all the more squarely within. Thinking himself outside the maelstrom, Franz Jozef van Beeck turns out equally within its grasp, all the more so by virtue of his efforts to escape it. The dizzying effects of this literary, documentary, theological, philosophic, and religious studies affair in which such confusions get repeatedly played (and replayed) suggest that the limits of this ironic doubling recede proportionately with every attempt at clarification. Are we dealing here with something stranger than we initially imagined? Is the Möbian for example some kind of insidious irrational effect that overtakes rational judgment when it is introduced in certain concrete circumstances, inducing in the participants a reproduction of the very errors they would counteract? Edgar Allen Poe, of course, built a literary career upon such “horror stories.”6 Or is the Möbian, in some as yet undisclosed way, a logic endemic to the critical process we have been examining, endemic perhaps to the nature of literary critical discourse more generally? Compare, for example, the plot of Edgar Allen Poe’s “William Wilson.” See Thompson (2004).

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Such ironic doubling of the inside of a given text in the external circumstances of its production, of showing with telling, so to speak, is in no way hampered when the stakes are even more personal (or testimonial), and in fact seem often to surface the most clearly in texts that concern some of the most violent episodes of our cultural history. Ten years after the events to which they refer, a young journalist of Eastern European origin who is living in France and who survived the death camps writes (and publishes in South America) a memoir about his wartime experiences. Shortly afterwards (and while working in Paris for an Israeli newspaper), in the course of interviewing a French Catholic thinker (François Mauriac) concerning the French theologian’s own wartime activities with the French resistance, the journalist (Elie Wiesel) mentions the published (Yiddish) memoir and his interlocutor expresses interest in helping him publish a French translation of it. After some false starts, the effort succeeds and the prominent Catholic thinker composes a preface expressing his desire to understand the young man’s witness to the devastating annihilation (of his family and the Jewish people) within a theology of grace. The situation bears all the earmarks of the kinds of Möbian dynamics we have been describing. Impressed by the appearance of the journalist in his office (“like a Lazarus returned from the dead,” he notes), by the manuscript he bears (in which a young boy with dark searching eyes is publicly executed), and by the memories the theologian himself carries of his wife’s experience (watching young children snatched from their parents and deported to their deaths at Austerlitz station in Paris)—and, undoubtedly, with the best of humanitarian intentions—Mauriac would sacralize the work (and the writer) before him in a fashion that eerily duplicates in a miniscule way the very sacrificial processes the journalist’s narrative so sensitively examines. But the irony of the disparity—between Mauriac’s sacralization and Wiesel’s de-sacralization—does not stop there. It is heightened when we recognize that the intellectual climate in France in which they now both work already includes an extensive discussion of la nuit (night) along just the same lines. Jean Cayrol, Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas, among others, in poetic, literary critical, and philosophic fields, in various ways, and to varying degrees, already engage in full the same kind of counter-redemptive hermeneutics the journalist and the theologian would deploy, the kind that would question the version of happy endings to which such a witness to grace would remand such violence, a questioning or challenge whose traces already inhere in the view of some of these writers in the

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recesses of the sacred text—the Hebrew Bible—at the origin of all such religious concerns if read carefully enough. And that wider cultural expression of the extensive performative Möbian logic we have observed in individual works raises a new issue for us. Is it only ironic that these writers (Cayrol, Blanchot, Levinas, among others) write about night, darkness, and the Holocaust in ways that unexpectedly complement Wiesel’s writing (and Mauriac’s writing about the “Lazarean”), and that the same French philosophic writer—Emmanuel Levinas—also writes without recognizing it about the work of Zvi Kolitz? The triangular relationship between Wiesel (who was raised in an observant Jewish setting in central Europe and is drawn away from it as a result of his experience), Levinas (who was raised in a liberal Jewish setting in Lithuania and drawn back toward Judaism as a result of his experience), and Mauriac (who sacralizes at once the innocent child and the tortured adult he finds displayed in Wiesel’s manuscript and in his office encounter)—reminding him of his own investments in the Christian Passion— demarcate for us the dimensions of a tension at the center of our experience in the twentieth century from which all our behavior—sacrificial, countersacrificial, and anti-sacrificial alike—may derive. If we designate as “Möbian” all such attempts to remain outside the crisis that inevitably lodge their agents within its maelstrom—within the world from which they would sequester themselves and over which they would exercise a modicum of control—then this Möbian dynamic would seem fairly pervasive in critical writing. It would seem to show up more or less intact whether we are talking about formalist literary criticism, rhetorical criticism, psychological critical theorizing (or psycho-historical critical theorizing), literary memoir, or literary writing proper. And it would seem heedless of disciplinary boundaries, making its appearance identically in psychology, historical study, theology, religious studies, autobiographical memoir, and philosophy alike, and for that matter even other media—in popular American musical theater, for example.7 In all these domains, the Möbian would seem less the logic of one particular genre than the structure of continuity within any critical or literary endeavor that offers itself as structure of differences, a structure in which one starts with an inviolable distinction or non-traversable boundary only to discover an Apart from the experience of theater producer Zvi Kolitz, is Stephen Sondheim’s experience in composing book and lyrics for the musical Passion entirely remote from the Möbian dynamics we have raised here? See my essay “‘The Mother’s Part’: Love, Letters, and Reading in Sondheim’s Passion” in Reading Stephen Sondheim (2000), 221–58.

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equally clear and unobstructed path to the region that formerly counted as “the other side” of that boundary, a structure of representation that turns out in fact to be a partial view of a more comprehensive structure of extension, a structure of showing that is not simply paralleled by a structure of telling but its veritable extremity (and vice-versa). And yet not all these literary critical discourses are Möbian in the same way. Murray Krieger’s reading is not Frank Lentricchia’s. The reading of the elder deconstructionist de Man is not that of the younger journalist writing for Le Soir, who would endorse an “aesthetic determinism.” Dori Laub’s reading of trauma (and of the historians of the Holocaust) is not the same as his reading with Shoshana Felman of the testimony of Holocaust survivors. Emmanuel Levinas’s reading of Zvi Kolitz is not identical to Kolitz’s reading of himself or of the Holocaust, or Frans Jozef van Beeck’s reading of either. Elie Wiesel’s reading (and Levinas’s reading) of night and of the Holocaust are distinct from François Mauriac’s reading. To say as much is not to construct (or even envision) a new criterion of value. The difference between these readings is less one of substance than of levels or degrees of critical awareness and understanding. In this realm as in so many others, there would seem to be in fact only two possible interpretations: those that are blind and those that are aware of their blindness. There are no non-blind readings; only those that participate in a Möbian structure of continuity (whose logic we can discern even if the participants cannot), and those that are aware of the continuity in which they cannot help but participate and endeavor to take stock of its origins, strategies, and limitations in its moments of greatest intensity. It is as if, in other words, in some ways, we were once again contrasting Sophocles’ reading of the Oedipus myth with Oedipus’ reading. The same relationship we noticed in Greek tragedy and which formed the basis of the opening essay of Sacrificing Commentary shows up in all of these more recent critical discourses.8 If we turned from a largely literary discussion in the earlier book to a largely critical discussion in this one in order to ask ourselves whether the same dynamics are at play in the critical as are at play within the literary, our gambit would seem to have paid off handsomely. But in the present setting, that insight is expanded in countless unexpected ways. As before, criticism’s attempt to master the writing before it (from Goodhart (1996).

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which it thinks itself separated) succeeds only in extending it, constituting a drama about which that writing has already provided an extensive antisacrificial commentary and whose course that writing has already considered and prophetically registered. Now, however, that observation pertains whether we are speaking of the relations between the critical and the literary or about either domain individually. The literary and the critical would appear in fact to be less different realms than different orientations with regard to the same realm, and the relationship between them less generic than strategic, less a matter of discerning any core literary or critical essence, than of one’s approach or perspective with regard to any particular style or subject matter with which one happens to be confronted. The literary in this context would turn out—to use a Nietzschean phrase—the critical commentary that wins, that gets to call itself literary and everything else critical. Or, to approach the distinction from still another direction, a critical approach may be said to adopt a sacrificial orientation toward its subject matter and a literary approach may be said to take stock of the sacrificial structure it cannot help but also adopt. If we designate as “literary” such awareness of the insidedness or continuity of thinking others would determine as outside, as radically external or separate, then the literary and the Möbian would display close affinities. There is always a distinction we may say (in echo of Stanley Fish’s way of talking about these matters) between the literary and the critical—even an absolute distinction (and one defined along the lines we have suggested)— but it is never the same one. There is no way of telling in advance what will count as the literary and what will count as the critical “this time,” no independent transcontextual perspective from which all would be relatively clear. One moment Sophocles’ play looks like an example of the literary and the tradition of classical criticism looks like an example of the critical. The next, Sophocles’ play may be said to constitute a critical commentary (that we define as literary) and the tradition of classical criticism a subject matter that operates in much the way we traditionally understand a literary work to operate. And as with literature, so with criticism. One moment both the writing of Murray Krieger and the writing of Frank Lentricchia look like pieces of literary criticism defined in the customary fashion. The next moment, the critical writing of Murray Krieger begins to assume all the critical capability we are identifying with the literary (and for example with the writing of Sophocles) and the writing of Frank Lentricchia looks as if it plays out what we would designate as the critical (and like the writing that traditionally reads that Sophoclean



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writing). One moment Zvi Kolitz’s writing looks like an innocuous and familiar piece of literary journalism, Father van Beeck’s emendations and translations read like a simple critical addition to Kolitz’s (and Levinas’s) writing, and the writing of Emmanuel Levinas reads like a familiar essayistic commentary on Kolitz’s story. The next moment, Levinas’s writing may be seen to stage the very processes in which Kolitz’s narrator (and Father van Beeck) would indulge themselves, quite beyond the capacity of that narrator, Kolitz as an author, or van Beeck in his ecumenical dialogism, to grasp what Levinas is up to. The Möbian names in a more precise way the structure of insidedness/outsidedness presented in Sophocles’ play, in Krieger’s critical writing, in Levinas’s occasional Jewish studies commentaries, and in the literary in general. Both the literary and the critical in other words are effectively “Möbian.” The Möbian, then, in our reading, would characterize the structure of differences itself (rather than any particular mode of difference) as a logic of continuity that shows up as a difference when viewed partially. The literary would designate an increased awareness of that Möbian structure while the critical would designate its practice independently of any specific awareness, which is to say, when the twisted path between them is obscured. Or, to view it from another perspective, when looked at through a familiar Euclidian geometrical perspective rather than a non-Euclidian perspective that the Möbian demands of us.9 Nor are we talking here about generic form. The literary and the critical need not look alike. The literary may still look like a story and the critical may still show up in the form of an expository analysis. Our point is not to identify the ways an expository analysis tells a story (though no doubt it also does that), nor the ways a story constitutes a critique, a critical commentary upon the subject matters it engages (though likewise it may do that as well), but rather to show how the literary functions as a capability for critical commentary regarding the Möbian whether that commentary assumes the generic form of the literary or some other form, and how the critical functions as the practice of the Möbian independent of any special capability with regard to it, again, whether it assumes the generic form of the critical or some other form. The literary and the critical that show up as parole, we may be tempted to say, as manifestation, using the Saussurean vocabulary, give us little clue regarding the On the difference between Euclidean and non-Euclidean perspectives and especially the implications of the work of Bernard Riemann in this regard, see the brilliant recent work of Arkady Plotnitsky. See, for example, “Bernhard Riemann’s Conceptual Mathematics and the Idea of Space” (2009), 105–30.

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langue or system of differences of which they are the execution or expression— although we recognize, as soon as we say as much, that even langue or “system of differences” may not suffice as a concept since the Möbian logic is prior and more comprehensive than even difference itself. If we were concerned only with comparing and contrasting the literary and the critical, our task would appear to be just about complete.

Part 2: The Möbian and the Aesthetic Have we described, then, the dynamics of the Möbian in full? In fact, there is one other aspect to the Möbian, or the Möbian comme literary, to which these reflections lead us that we may want to consider before bringing this study to a close. “Not marble nor the gilded monuments / Of princes shall outlive this pow’rful rhyme,” proclaimed our most famous English poet-dramatist.10 However seriously we are inclined to regard the self-critical bard of Avon about the survival of his own poetic output, the sentiment his sonnet articulates remains a Renaissance commonplace. Art transcends time, we are encouraged to believe, in all the humanistic textbooks that address artistic endeavor. Artistic making survives the onslaught of the great leveler. The idea of course is as old as the Greeks, perhaps as old as language itself. Plato, it is true, assigns a fairly diminished role to the mimetic artist in Book X of The Republic, not only because of its status in that Book as a third order duplication of the truth but also because of the danger of runaway mimesis for which, in his own view, knowledge is not an effective antidote. And if Aristotle agrees to expand that role in the Poetics, he does so only formally (by getting rid of the runaway mimetic material that Plato so dislikes) and only in order to make it safe for tragic narration as Plato defines it to enter the well-ordered state. But the festivals performed in the century before Plato wrote and Aristotle taught (and that Socrates presumably attended) were still considered to bear the traces of religious worship. Ti dei me choreuein? (“why should I dance?”), the Chorus asks, in one of Sophocles’ most celebrated contributions to the City Dionysia, and the question considers the making of the dance, the making of the festival at which dramatic plays were performed, and religious worship all William Shakespeare, Sonnet 55. See Stephen Booth, Shakespeare’s Sonnets (2000), 48.

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part of the same semantic vortex, a sacred vortex with an ongoing and active relation to violence (think of the relation of story-telling to violence and death in Euripides’ The Bacchae). And in Homer, story-telling and death are linked even more fundamentally, as part of the epic fabric itself, a fabric woven both within the contexts (and contests) of home and warfare and about them. One tells stories during the night that are themselves about the night (understood as the kingdom of the dead) as a way of staving off its ravages. Think of the story of Odysseus’ encounter in Hades with the prophet Tiresius, sung by Odysseus as a prelude to acquiring a ship and provisions that will enable him to return home in Book XI of Homer’s epic. Even the language by which we have titled this current book retains by design a whiff of that identification. The phrase “Möbian Nights” inevitably suggests to an English-speaking audience the “Arabian Nights” which names the famous translation that Sir Richard Burton made in the nineteenth century of the Persian classic, Alf Layla We Layla (A Thousand and One Nights), a work often regarded as something of a shorthand for literature as a whole.11 Indeed, as a shorthand for the literary, the Arabian Nights (and perhaps the Persian in general within the history of Western Europe) has come to stand at once for the literary in its capacity as the aesthetic or shape (as it comes to us through the infinite variety of the sensory), and for the literary in its capacity as ornate and decorative language that supersedes mortality. What is the origin of this linkage? In the modern age, the immediate predecessor of the division of the literary into two parts, into an essence and a function, is Immanuel Kant, and the subsequent Kantian–Hegelian historical critical heritage that sustains it. Kant’s analysis of the critical as cognition on the one hand and aesthesis on the other has deep cultural affinities, continuing the long tradition—from the Romans through the eighteenth century—of reading Aristotle through Horace’s formulation of dulce et utile. It is a tradition that no doubt originates itself in Aristotle’s Poetics and his idealizing transformation of Plato’s more realistic assessment of the danger of tragedy’s runaway mimesis into form and function, into a mimesis that ends in a catharsis, a representation that succeeds in warding off the threat to the group or the individual (by a vaccination with a little bit of the poison so that we may throw off a lot of it), a gesture on Aristotle’s part that, we may say, makes tragedy safe for Plato. The I am grateful to Wendy Stallard Flory for her insightful discussion with me of this connection between the “Arabian Nights” and “Möbian Nights” at an early stage of the development of this chapter,

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aesthetic (or the beautiful) within this history concerns shape, place within the relation of whole to part or of container to contained, which is to say, to frame, and the capacity of the constancies of such “fearful” symmetries to withstand the vicissitudes of outrageous fortune, to survive (whether in memory or lived experience) the inconstancies and ravages of the slings and arrows of accident and design. It is, in other words, as if the motivating premise of the frame story of the Arabian Nights, the story of Scheherazade in which a young girl is committed to tell stories in order not to die, were in our popular minds at least the premise of literature itself, as if by telling stories, we forestall, postpone, or even thwart the inevitable. One envisions the medieval knight in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal seated in a chair in the sand along the edge of the sea, playing chess with death, confident that as long as he keeps playing, death will not take him.12 But is it an effective strategy? Is such story-telling literature’s motivating premise? To speak (or write) in order not to die—is that the secret heart of literature? Is that the promise literature makes to us, the premise upon which it is founded, that so long as we speak (or write) we will not die? Or, perhaps alternatively, if we concede that we are of necessity to die, then will such death not necessarily be conclusive but something more akin to the passage through a gateway to a more transcendental existence, to the passage of love through death to a higher beauty as the neo-Platonic thinkers express it? And if we are willing to claim that the literary makes that promise to us, does it not align itself more broadly at least with the religious in so far as we have known that religious within a Western Christian framework, one that is to say, dominated, by Platonic reason and Aristotelian formalism, or, in short, by representation? Poets love the elegiac. Milton, Pope, Wordsworth—the evidence would seem overwhelming.13 The elegiac would seem less one modality of poetry among others than its very foundation. The transcendence of loss, the movement from acting out to working through in Freud’s vocabulary, or from “x is dead” to “life goes on” more prosaically, finds comfort in the dismissal of responsibility for death—the devil did it—or its reduction. He is not really dead. He has passed from love through death to higher beauty. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” Keats’s ancient Grecian urn is given to proclaim.14 But then the poem’s See The Seventh Seal (1957). Cf. “Paradise Lost,” “Lycidas,” “Rape of the Lock,” and “Ode: Intimations of Immortality.” See Ferguson (2005). 14 See “Ode on a Grecian Urn” in Ferguson (2005). 12 13



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speaker adds (or the urn adds, since the words could also be construed through punctuation to have issued from the mouth of the urn), “that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” In the midst of other suffering and other woe, is art but a “friend” to man? And if we say as much, then is the homophonic phrase we have chosen to title this book, among other invocations, simply a reference to literature, to literature conceived aesthetically and/or transcendentally, and to a relationship—preventative, promotive, projective, or otherwise motivated—that literature maintains (or that literary language maintains) with death? Death has hardly been the central theme of this book to this point, although it has surfaced in almost every essay, and especially in the chapters in which discussion of the Holocaust becomes more pronounced. Is it not at least odd to speak now—at the eleventh hour, as it were—of language (and especially literary language) in such general and popular terms? What of its relation to this curious logic of continuity, this autobiographical extensional Möbian logic, that we have so assiduously pursued throughout this volume and that we have suggested may be endemic to all arenas in which critical thinking is employed in our culture (a culture constituted historically within a strategic relation to the tradition of Platonic humanism) and about which we certainly have been speaking? How does the aesthetic theory of the literary compare or contrast with the Möbian theory of the literary we have proposed? The question is one of context. The literary—this book maintains—is structured in accord with a logic of continuity (between the inside and the outside) that subtends any system of differences but that the literary makes a little more explicit than elsewhere. The literary is the name of the category we assign to the writing that tends to expose the Möbian structure that subtends all systems of difference. We need to ask, however, about the origin of this structure, about its relation to its own “outside.” Is there an outside to the literary? And if so, is death that outside? Given what we have said about the relation of inside to outside, it would appear difficult (if indeed even possible) to sustain such a conceptualization. If we take the Möbian seriously, are we not committed to asking whether death, like any other potential outside, is to be considered just one more false exterior, a way of giving context to the literary that in effect aestheticizes or transcendentalizes it? Is not the idea that art survives death, in other words, finally itself an aesthetic idea, the product of the same aesthesis moreover in which over the past two millennia the entirety of the archaic sacred has been subsumed?

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The Möbian and the aesthetic are in any event markedly different accounts of the literary and its relation to death. And if we were compelled to choose between them, aesthetic survival, we might well wish to argue in everyday parlance, leaves much to be desired. “Would you like to live on in the hearts and minds of your fans?” Woody Allen is often said to have been asked. And his imagined response cuts to the chase: “Actually, I would like to live on in my apartment in New York City.” The Möbian is doggedly counter-aesthetic.15 The aesthetic is based on difference as if it were absolute separation, a symbolic system interrupted only from without, while the Möbian is based upon difference that is the expression, in limited dimensionality, of a structure of continuity, a structure of witness and of interpersonal implication in which interpretation is “built in,” so to speak, as a kind of unconscious passageway between the inside and the outside, a symbolic system with an unconscious “umbilical cord” not only between the imaginary and the symbolic (to use Lacanian psychoanalytic language) but, if we push the matter far enough—as we suggested above in the introduction—between the symbolic and the real. Aesthetics is a structure of analogy. The Möbian is a structure of extension. Is there anything that compels us to subsume the literary within aesthetics? The literary as a category has been with us since the eighteenth century. It begins as a reference to literacy, to the ability to read, to understand letters or litera.16 It is in this sense, for example, that we speak still of the “literature” regarding one treatment or another in a doctor’s office, or that Freud referred to it when he quipped that he “invented psychoanalysis because it had no literature.”17 With the advent of Kantian thinking (within German philosophy) and German romanticism (Goethe, Schiller, the Schlegels, among others), the term came to assume the sacralized status which is the more familiar sense today, in which form it was linked to art in the English tradition by Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Keats, among others (think of the “Ode on a Grecian Urn”), subsequently Should we see a parallel in Nietzsche’s distinction between the Dionysiac and the Apollonian, or the distinction in structural linguistics between the diachronic and the synchronic? Those comparisons are helpful so long as we recognize that the difference between the Dionysiac and the Apollonian is already itself an Apollonian distinction, and what is at stake here is a more radical “dionysiac,” one that precedes this distinction and registers for us the continuity in context of which the distinction Dionysiac/Apollonian is formulated. Or, similarly, as long as we recognize that the distinction between the diachronic and the synchronic is itself already a synchronic distinction, and what is at stake in the Möbian is a diachrony that is considerably more radical and in context of which the distinction diachronic/synchronic itself comes to be articulated. 16 On this point, see Raymond Williams’ Keywords (1983). 17 See Neil Hertz’s brilliant article on this idea in “Freud and the Sandman” in Harari (1979), 296–321 and later Hertz (1985). 15



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developed by Matthew Arnold in relation to religion and criticism, and constructed as a possible object of cultural study finally in our own age by T. S. Eliot, Lionel Trilling, and other avatars of the “culture wars.”18 But the question returns. Is the “infinite variety” by which we more customarily speak of the literary (after Coleridge’s reading of Shakespeare and in honor of both) a metaphor or a metonymy? It is sometimes said that Coleridge invented our appreciation of Shakespeare—contributing to a Shakespeare “bardology” far beyond the efforts of Dryden and even Pope—and perhaps of the reading of the literary as a sacred activity with Shakespeare as a centerpiece. Is the word “infinite” in this phrase a synonym for “very large,” “countless,” so to speak (and therefore a species of representation)? Or is it a term in a series in which the infinite plays a more distinct and rigorously defined role within a sacred economy? Is the literary cognate with what Emmanuel Levinas would call the face (le visage) in philosophy or in more religious studies language the “the infinite within the finite”? Is it possible that our rediscovery in the past two hundred years of the sacred status of the literary, and our conscious and deliberate linkage of it with Christian scriptural history and all the apparatus of Christian biblical exegesis— regarding the intentions of the author, the meaning of the text, the instruction of the reader, and so forth—is both a retrieval of a linkage that is age-old in our culture and as well its renewed suppression, a linkage that was severed when Plato (and later Aristotle) eschewed sacrificial ritual for representation, the sacred at large for reason and decision-making, and the gods (who had been the hallmark of tragedy and epic for at least four hundred years) for the true (as a way of distinguishing that which has being, or ontos, and that which does not have being)? Is it possible that at the same time it is one that is restored the way Michel Foucault speaks of the liberation of the mad from their place in the asylum in the eighteenth century and their restoration to society in the nineteenth—in the hands of the medical establishment? Is it possible, in other words, that the history of Platonic humanism is a history of the suppression of ritual and the sacrificial that the philosophic category of the aesthetic only partially undoes, that it both retrieves the literary within a more comprehensive context and in a curious way continues to contain it, as one might a contagious I am thinking of Geoffrey Hartman (1991, 1986, 1998), Walter Benjamin (1969, 1978), Lionel Trilling (2008), and Theodor Adorno (1967, 1987), among others, who have identified their writing with the “culture wars.” See also Gregory Jay, American Literature and the Culture Wars (1997).

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virus that one wishes to study within a scientific laboratory cognizant that it also may offer beneficial effects? To put it more bluntly, what if, in other words, in speaking of the literary as aesthetic, we have gotten it wrong all these years? Could we have unwittingly been serving a history of Platonic humanism that has its own investments in suppressing the more prophetic propensities of literary reading (which is how we defined them in the previous essay), its capacities in particular to tell the story of death, and even of aesthetics and of the transcendental itself? Could the last two hundred years of discussion of the literary within the province of the historical critical method inaugurated by Kant and Hegel (and continued by Coleridge, Arnold, Eliot, and others into our own day) have constituted more a testimony to its own romantic secularist exigencies than an accurate reflection of the writing Plato thought dangerous to the city (for its anticathartic capacities as a runaway mimesis to which he made in The Republic his famous exclusionary gesture), and that Aristotle could integrate only by stripping it of all but an idealized form, in a way that made it safe for his Greek master?19 In short, is literary language Möbian, an opening beyond itself, an access point to the beyond of difference, to the “thought of the outside,” as Michel Foucault might term it (invoking Blanchot’s work and employing the language of difference)? Or is it aesthetic after all, purely differential, sensorial and thought-laden certainly, but finally an instrumentality, a matter of discreet compartmentalizing, with the personal and the subjective at one end, social morality in the middle, and death at the other? And if it is the former, if the literary is an awareness of the Möbian and, as such, counter-aesthetic, then what is the relationship between the Möbian and the prophetic which is the way we qualified the literary (in contrast with representational accounts) in the earlier book? What is the relationship between the Möbian and the sacrificial as Girard would speak about it? What is the relation between the Möbian and the literary vis-à-vis death? These are the questions we have yet to ask and with which we need to grapple if we wish to provide (as we would like to do in this chapter) an alternative theory of the literary to the one bequeathed to us by our Platonic humanist and Aristotelian formalist critical heritage, a theory of the Möbian as the literary. On the invention of the literary as a sacred category, see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthes and Jean Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute (1988).

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Part 3: The Song of the Abyss In “Language to Infinity,” Michel Foucault addresses at least one formulation of the first question and his commentary may prove a useful point of departure.20 The theme of the opening to his essay is the relationship between language, death, and the infinite. Writing so as not to die, as Blanchot said, or perhaps even speaking so as not to die, is a task undoubtedly as old as the word. The most fateful decisions are inevitably suspended during the course of a story. We know that discourse has the power to arrest the flight of an arrow in a recess of time, in the space proper to it. It is quite likely, as Homer has said, that the gods send disasters to men so that they can tell of them, and that in this possibility speech finds its infinite resourcefulness; it is quite likely that the approach of death—its sovereign gesture, its prominence within human memory—hollows out in the present and in existence the void toward which and from which we speak.21

A relationship between language and death, Foucault tells us, is probably as old as language itself. Language has the power to arrest death: not to cancel it, not to annul it perhaps, but to delay it, to put it off for a time. As long as Scheherazade tells stories to the ruler, she remains alive. Borges writes a story in which a bullet fired at the protagonist is stopped midflight in order that the protagonist have time to finish some writing he has been doing. It may even be—we learn from Homer—that the gods send us disasters in order that we may speak of them, that disasters do not just occur, but are designed by those who monitor our progress in order to allow us the opportunity to develop the resources of language; that the approach of death—governing gesture that it is, so prominent a part of human memory—hollows out a void within us and within the world in which we function and that it is from this void and in response to this void that we speak. Shakespeare’s Richard II would understand this mortal approach. And those resources? Precisely, infinite resourcefulness. … The Odyssey, which affirms this gift of language in death, tells the inverted story of how Ulysses returns home: it repeats, each time death threatened “Language to Infinity.” See Faubion (1998), 89. For the scene to which Foucault refers, see The Odyssey, Book VIII.22–95. 21 “Language to Infinity,” in Faubion (1998), 89. Foucault’s reference to Homer’s suggestion that “the gods send disasters to men so that they can tell of them” is to The Odyssey, Book VIII.603–4 (Mack 1992: 310): “Tell me why you grieve so terribly / over the Argives and the fall of Troy. / That was all gods’ work, weaving ruin there / so it should make a song for men to come.” 20

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him and in order to ward off its dangers, exactly how (and by what wiles and intrigues) he had succeeded in maintaining this imminence that returns again the moment he begins to speak, in the form of a menacing gesture or a new danger.22

Foucault’s reference to Homer is not capricious. The Odyssey reflects both this mortal approach and the response of language. Every time Odysseus is threatened with death, he repeats his story—how he kept it at bay in the past— and that allows him to triumph this time. It is a story of rescue that reminds us of Jonah in the belly of the dag gadol (“big fish”), a biblical figure who also reflects upon a previous occasion in which he was in such desperate straits and how God rescued him.23 And when, as a stranger among the Phaiákians, he hears in another’s voice the tale, already a thousand years old, of his own history, it is as if he were listening to his own death: he covers his face and cries, in the gesture of a woman to whom the dead body of a hero is brought after a battle. Against this speech which announces his death and arises from deep within the new Odyssey as from an older time, Ulysses must sing the song of his identity and tell of his misfortunes to escape the fate presented to him by a language before language. And he pursues this fictive speech, confirming and dissipating its powers at the same time, into this space, which borders death but is also poised against it, where the story locates its natural domain. The gods send disasters to men so that they can tell of them, but men speak of them so that misfortunes will never be fully realized, so that the fulfillment will be averted in the distance of words.24

Odysseus among the Phaiákians, in other words, is a primary example. The protagonist hears the story of his own battles as if he is not there, as if he is dead; and the tale inspires the telling of his own story, a story that similarly raises the specter of death and dispels it in the “distance of words,” and a gesture that will eventually take him home—to the defeat of his rivals and the solving of the riddle of the marital bed.25 24 25 22 23

“Language to Infinity” in Faubion (1998), 89. See “The Book of Jonah” in the JPS Tanakh edited by Orlinsky (1985), 1037–40. “Language to Infinity” in Faubion (1998), 89–90. Here is the passage in Homer—Book VIII.518–58 (Mack [1992], 308–9)—to which Foucault refers when he remarks that Odysseus “covers his face and cries, in the gesture of a woman to whom the dead body of a hero is brought after a battle”: “The minstrel stirred, murmuring to the god, and soon / clear words and notes came one by one, a vision / of the Akhaians in their graceful ships / drawing away from shore: the torches flung / and shelters flaring: Argive soldiers crouched / in the close dark around Odysseus: and / the horse, tall on the assembly ground of Troy. / For when the Trojans pulled it in, themselves, / up to the citadel, they sat nearby / with long-drawn-out and



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Before the imminence of death, language rushes forth, but it also starts again, tells of itself, discovers the story of the story and the possibility that this interpretation might never end. Headed toward death, language turns back upon itself; it encounters something like a mirror; and to stop this death which would stop it, it possesses but a single power—that of giving birth to its own image in a play of mirrors that has no limits. From the depths of the mirror where it sets out to arrive anew at the point where it started (at death), but so as finally to escape death, another language can be heard—the image of actual language, but as a minuscule, interior, and virtual model; it is the song of the bard who had already sung of Ulysses before The Odyssey and before Ulysses himself (since Ulysses hears the song), but who will also sing of him endlessly after his death (since, for the bard, Ulysses is already as good as dead); and Ulysses, who is alive, receives this song as a wife receives her slain husband.26

Such “averting” of misfortune through the “distance of words” assumes the form for Foucault, in other words, of a “mirror” or “double” or linguistic “selfrepresentation,” the “story of the story” that he names “language to infinity,” and in which language exercises its “single power.” In language’s “power” to give “birth to its own image in a play of mirrors that has no limits,” Foucault discerns its “infinite resourcefulness,” its capacity to serve as a kind of literary mise en abyme. And at the root of this resourcefulness is song, a song within the song, a song within the very song in which it is contained and which announces the hero’s death, and which is witnessed curiously by the hero himself. Death approaches. Its approach hollows out a void in us and in the world we experience. Out of that void (and in response to it) we find speech. And that hapless argument— / favoring, in the end, one course of three: / either to stave the vault with brazen axes, / or haul it to a cliff and pitch it down, / or else to save it for the gods, a votive glory— / the plan that could not but prevail / For Troy must perish, as ordained, that day / she harbored the great horse of timber; hidden / the flower of Akhaia lay, and bore / slaughter and death upon the men of Troy. / He sang, then, of the town sacked by the Akhaians / pouring down from the horse’s hollow cave, / this way and that way raping the steep city, / and how Odysseus came like Arês to / the door of Deïphobos, with Meneláos, / and braved the desperate fight there— / conquering once more by Athena’s power. / The splendid minstrel sang it. / And Odysseus / let the bright molten tears run down his cheeks, / weeping the way a wife mourns for her lord / on the lost field where he has gone down fighting / the day of wrath that came upon his children. / At sight of the man panting and dying there, / she slips down to enfold him, crying out; / then feels the spears prodding her back and shoulders, / and goes bound into slavery and grief. / Piteous weeping wears away her cheeks: / but no more piteous than Odysseus’ tears, / cloaked as they were, now, from the company. / Only Alkínoös, at his elbow, knew— / hearing the low sob in the man’s breathing— / and when he knew, he spoke:” 26 Faubion (1998), 90. Foucault’s reference to the bard “the song of the bard who had already sung of Ulysses before the Odyssey” appears to be a reference to Odysseus himself who once “contended” with Akhilleus before Agamémnon as “marshal” at and earlier “godfeast.” See Book VIII.77–102 (Mack [1992], 297–8).

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speech suspends it. And what is the nature of that speech? Infinite repetition: the container containing itself within the contained. Foucault’s language about the literary here (and its relation to being and to death) is borrowed, as he points out, in part from Blanchot, and Blanchot’s engagement with the philosophic style made famous by Heidegger. We can confirm Foucault’s insights in more familiar literary narrative terms. All of Odysseus’ projects have failed. He has lost his entire crew, his ship, all his goods, even his clothing. He has left behind the comfort of the island of Kalypso only to be buffeted on the open sea. Clinging at last to a single plank of wood, fearing that at any moment the storm might dash him on the rocks, he appears on the verge of losing his life. And then as a kind of grace or resurrection, he washes up (by “chance”) on the shore of the land of the Phaiákians, where he falls into a deathly sleep. He awakens to the call of a young girl (Nausika), who takes him to the court of the king of the Phaiákians (Alkinoös), where he hears a song sung by a bard (Demódokos) that brings tears to his eyes—the tale of the history of Odysseus himself, the story of the flesh and blood man standing there unrecognized before him. And that performance enables him to complete his project, to return home: to give others his own real name, defeat the suitors for his wife and material goods, and unravel the riddle of the marital bed. What is going on? One thing going on is the doubling within the work of its representation without. As Odysseus hears a song—even the song of his own history—and learns to speak better and act more effectively in its shadow, so Homer is undoubtedly reminding us that the song we hear may be our own and that we might similarly speak and act better as a result. Odysseus learns to read himself and the world from a number of new perspectives: from Penelope’s perspective (covering his face and crying, “in the gesture of a woman to whom the dead body of a hero is brought after a battle”), from the perspective of the general populace (who “loved” to hear these heroic tales and have the capacity to say “that’s not me”), and perhaps as well from the position of a stranger to these Phaiákians.27 He learns the perspective of the widow, the orphan, and the dispossessed. We are reminded of Eric Havelock’s famous argument in Preface to Plato that it is in the context of education or paideia that Plato offers his boldest challenge to Homer, not in his discussion of dikē or justice.28 In Foucault’s reference to the “gesture of a woman” is to Book VIII.546–8 (Mack [1992], 309). See Havelock (1963).

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learning to say his own name, he learns the difference between language and violence. He moves from “Nohbdy” (which is the name he gave to the Kyklopes) to “Odysseus.”29 And that lesson will allow him to separate violence from his household and marriage in Ithaka, to reestablish the distinction between husband and wife, and between host and guest, that the Trojan war has vitiated. But we feel that Homer does something more than construct for us a structural analogy to our own situation or the work would not command our attention as “infinite” in its capacity. It exceeds the finite, and as Foucault reads it, it contains the “more within the less,” not because the song the bard sings is similar to the song in which it is contained but because it is veritably the same song, because the bard’s performance is an early version of the same epic tale to which we ourselves are currently witness.30 The bard’s performance is a popular version no doubt, one that the Phaiákians “loved” to hear, and one that will not flesh out all the details of the history that Odysseus will subsequently live through as we will understand them, but one that is constructed nonetheless of fundamentally the same body of epic material, a body of material that is told and retold until Homer hears it, and that is passed down—first through the oral tradition and later through the Western literary tradition—until we hear it.31 The correspondence is even more perfect than it might at first appear. For there are in fact two tales that Demódokos sings and to which Odysseus responds. The second (VIII.518–58)—to which Foucault appears to refer initially—tells the story of Odysseus’s role in the fall of Troy, and so is a kind of Odyssey in miniature. But the bard tells an earlier story at VIII.77–102 in response to which Odysseus also weeps, and which recalls an earlier “godfeast” at which Odysseus was himself the singer and “contended” with Akhilleus before Agamémnon as “marshal,” one that took place “in the old days when grim war lay ahead / for Trojans and Danaans.”32 And the reference to this earlier story Book IX.382 and IX.19. The definition of the infinite as the “more within the less” is of course from Levinas. See Totality and Infinity (1969), 50. 31 In saying as much, of course, we are not making any claims about the historical origins of The Odyssey, only about the structural connection of the bard’s tale to ours, the diachronic relation of the outside to the inside. 32 Here is the earlier story, the first that Odysseus hears from the bard about himself—in Book VIII. 77–102 (Mack [1992], 297–8): “In time, when hunger and thirst were turned away, / the Muse brought to the minstrel’s mind a song / of heroes whose great fame rang under heaven: / the clash between Odysseus and Akhilleus, / how one time they contended at the godfeast / raging, and the marshall, Agamémnon, / felt inward joy over his captains’ quarrel; / for such had been foretold him by Apollo / at Pytho—hallowed height—when the Akhaian / crossed that portal of rock to ask a sign— / in the old days when grim war lay ahead / for Trojans and Danaans, by God’s will. / So ran the tale the minstrel sang. Odysseus / with massive hand drew his rich mantle down / over his brow, 29 30

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(whether the bard sings “about” that song or the song itself—the Greek appears to admit both possibilities) reproduces exactly what is taking place before us. As we discover Homer’s tale to be the same as the one the bard tells Odysseus and the Phaiákians, so Odysseus discovers the tale he hears to be continuous with that told within the bard’s recitation. The correspondence between the two perspectives—between Odysseus’ on the one hand (and the impossibility of his separating what he now hears from the bard from his own memory of such past performances), and ours on the other (and the impossibility of our separating what we now hear from Homer from our cultural “memory” of such past performances)—is exact. As if to make the point even more poignant, Homer tells us that the earlier “pre-Trojan war” song was itself already foreknown by Agamémnon, who remembers hearing it from the Pythian oracle of Apollo at Delphi (VIII.84–5). What Foucault has identified, in other words, in the first instance, in his “language to infinity,” is the very sequence from which the kind of Möbian continuity of which we have been speaking is developed, a sequence moreover that is a central—if not the central—moment of literary importance in this work (since it is from this sequence that Odysseus’s tale—which tells the story of The Odyssey—will spring). Recall our reference earlier (in the introduction) to the moment in Medea in which Medea proclaims to Jason that she will leave for Athens, and we know that in one manner or another she is successful because here we are “in Athens,” in the hands of Euripides, viewing the play. Do we not have here, then, in Foucault’s commentary on this scene in Book VIII, the perfect context in which the kinds of questions we want to ask—and in particular the relation of the Möbian to the literary—may be posed? Let us not jump the gun. The Odyssey is Foucault’s primary example, and perhaps the one that speaks most readily to an English-speaking audience. But Foucault gives others in his essay. He cites, for example, Borges’s protagonist in “The Secret Miracle” for whom a bullet is stopped mid-flight so that he can finish a play he has been writing in which the same drama is recounted in another setting and in which we learn that it is an endless repetition.33 Similarly, he cites an episode in Diderot’s La Religieuse (The Nun) in which a cloaking his face with it, / to make the Phaiákians miss the secret tears / that started to his eyes. How skillfully / he dried them when the song came to a pause! / threw back his mantle, spilt his gout of wine! / But soon the minstrel plucked his note once more / to please the Phaiákians lords, who loved the song; / then in his cloak Odysseus wept again, / His tears flowed in the mantle unperceived: / only Alkínoös, at his elbow, saw them, / and caught the low groan in the man’s breathing.” 33 Borges (1964), 88–94.



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letter-writer recounts to a correspondent the history of another letter which turns out to be the same one she is writing. And perhaps most interesting for our purposes, he cites an episode reputedly in the middle of the Thousand and One Nights in which the frame story of the Nights—“The Story of King Shahryar and his Brother” (which of course contains the Thousand and One Nights)—suddenly begins again and which would commit the narrator to an infinite loop. What are we to make of such violations, such transgressions of the inside and the outside, of such conflations of saying and being? Are they mistakes? Would Diderot have changed the references had he noticed the confusion? Did some inattentive copyist forget that the story he assigned to Scheherazade on a given night within the work frames the Nights as a whole? Or are these gestures “calculated,” a form of literary “disinformation” for which perhaps Borges is the most famous? Foucault’s examples owe much to Borges here and elsewhere, and it is worth noting that it is Borges who identifies the “lapse” in the Nights, about which he is quite specific (it occurs on “night 602” he says, although Italo Calvino reports that he was unable to find it).34 To Foucault’s list, Borges adds others. Borges speaks, in “Partial Magic in the Quixote,” of Cervantes’ narrative in which the legendary hero encounters, in the beginning of Part Two, Don Quixote, Part One.35 In another essay (“When Fiction Lives in Fiction”—where Foucault may have found some of his examples—but they are also elsewhere in Borges), he reminds us of the scene in Hamlet in which the prince encounters a play in which the drama he finds around him is echoed, and as well to Velázquez’ painting Las Meninas which includes within its representation a portrait of the painter painting the royal family (as we learn from the mirror in the background) and which therefore could be Las Meninas itself.36 He makes references to Josiah Royce’s fantasy of a map before him of the The reference to the lapse in the Nights occurs (among other places) in “When Fiction Lives in Fiction” in Weinberger (1999), 161. The story of Calvino’s search for the strange night (and his charge that Borges invented it) is told by Robert Irwin in The Arabian Nights (1994), 283–84. 35 Borges, “Partial Magic in the Quixote,” in Yates and James E. Irby (1964), 194. 36 Foucault uses the Cervantes and Velázquez references in critical moments of The Order of Things (see 3–16 and 46–50). For the Borges essay, see “When Fiction Lives in Fiction” in Weinberger (1999), 160–2. Here are the lines from Don Quixote, Part Two, Ch. 3 (p. 1903 in the Norton edition, 1992): “O mighty Don Quixote de la Mancha, give me your hands; for by the habit of St. Peter that I wear—though I have received but the first four orders—your Grace is one of the most famous knights-errant that ever have been or ever will be anywhere on this earth. Blessings upon Cid Hamete Benegeli who wrote down the history of your great achievements, and upon that curiousminded one who was at pains to have it translated from the Arabic into our Castilian vulgate for the universal entertainment of the people.” / Don Quixote bade him rise. “Is it true, then,” he asked, “that there is a book about me and that it was some Moorish sage who composed it?” / “By way of 34

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plot of land on which he is standing which if it is to be entirely accurate would have to include itself in the drawing. Foucault’s reference to Borges’s fantasy of a certain “Chinese encyclopedia” which contains among its elements “this list itself ” (a text Foucault uses as a basis for asking what is possible and impossible to think in The Order of Things) would seem to exemplify this “infinite resourcefulness” of language in a particularly egregious way.37 And one could adduce still others as well. Recall the scene early in Virgil’s Aeneid when Aeneas enters with his friend Achates the city of Carthage (a city which is in the midst of urban renewal), and sees his own story plastered on the billboards before him.38 Or recall the scene in Beowulf, after Grendel has been killed, in which Beowulf (and the Geats) are returning from the battle, and a bard sings the story of “Beowulf ’s bravery” and the monster he has just defeated.39 Or finally, recall in Gilgamesh, one of the oldest literary documents we have (dating a thousand years before the Hebrew Bible), how the story of the hero is repeated in the character of Enkidu, who is described as a mirror reflection of him (“You made him, O Aruru, now create his equal; let it be as like him as his own reflection, his second self, stormy heart for stormy heart”)

showing how true it is,” replied Sansón, “I may tell you that it is my belief that there are in existence today more than twelve thousand copies of that history… . In short, I feel certain that there will soon not be a nation that does not know it or a language into which it has not been translated.” 37 See Foucault (1972), xv. 38 Here are the lines from Virgil’s Aeneid, Book I, 595ff. (lines 847–8 in the Norton edition, 1992): It was while he walked / From one to another wall of the great temple / And waited for the queen, staring amazed / At Carthaginian promise, at the handiwork / Of artificers and the toil they spent upon it: / He found before his eyes the Trojan battles / In the old war, now known throughout the world— / The great Atridae, Priam, and Achilles, / Fierce in his rage at both sides. Here Aeneas / Halted and tears came. / “What spot on earth,” / He said, “what regions of the earth, Achatës, / Is not full of the story of our sorrow? / Look, here is Priam. Even so far away / Great valor has due honor; they weep here / For how the world goes, and our life that passes / Touches their hearts. Throw off your fear. This fame / Insures some kind of refuge.” / He broke off / To feast his eyes and his mind on a mere image, / Sighing often, cheeks grown wet with tears, / To see again how, fighting around Troy, / The Greeks broke here, and ran before the Trojans, / And there the Phrygians ran, as plumed Achilles / Harried them in his warcar. / … / He himself he saw / In combat with the first of the Achaeans, / And saw the ranks of Dawn, black Memnon’s arms; / … / Now, while these wonders were being surveyed / By Aeneas of Dardania, while he stood / Enthralled, devouring all in one long gaze, / The queen paced toward the temple in her beauty, / Dido, with a throng of men behind.” 39 Here are the lines from Beowulf (ll. 854–74, page 50 in the Raffel edition, 1963): “The old and young rejoiced, turned back / From that happy pilgrimage, mounted their hard-hooved / Horses, highspirited stallions, and rode them / Slowly toward Herot again retelling / Beowulf ’s bravery as they jogged along. / And over and over they swore that nowhere / On earth or under the spreading sky, / Or between the seas, neither south nor north, / Was there a warrior worthy to rule over men. / … / And sometimes a proud soldier / Who had heard songs of the ancient heroes / And could sing them all through, story after story, / Would weave a net of words of Beowulf ’s / Victory, tying the knot of his verses / Smoothly, swiftly, into place with a poet’s / Quick skill, singing his new song aloud / While he shaped it and the old songs as well.”



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and how the “whole story” is “engraved on a stone” by no less than Gilgamesh himself—who turns out to be a writer.40 What are we to make of such reflections, of such instances of language mirroring itself, of such confusions of the inside with the outside? Is such selfrepresentation, the exercise of language’s “single power” as Foucault calls it, a quality of all language, endemic to its very nature, perhaps duplicated already with the birth of linear writing (as Foucault suggests)? Is such mirroring characteristic exclusively of literary language (and especially of classical literary language), of the language we have deemed (since the end of the eighteenth century) “literary” or “literature” and which commonly tells its own story? Is the stake that we need to consider here sacralization and anti-sacralization, the sacrificial and the anti-sacrificial, the mythic and the antimythic as we have examined it elsewhere?41 What is its peculiar relationship to death? Is such exhibition of language’s infinite resourcefulness undertaken as an aversion to death, a way of staving off its potential ravages, a question that the Thousand and One Nights seems to ask explicitly? Is The Arabian Nights, with its insides out and its outsides in, finally, the structure of the Möbian Nights? These questions are a bit overwhelming. It’s hard to imagine where to take our bearings. But there may be a way to put our feet on the ground. For as soon as we examine this body of literature more closely, we notice some distinctions that immediately apply. These texts are of two very different types. There are those instances of “language to infinity” that violate reality—Borges’ “Chinese encyclopedia,” for example, the Thousand and One Nights (as Borges reads it)— and others that do not violate reality (which is by far the larger group): Odysseus before the Phaiákians, Aeneas before the panels in Carthage, Beowulf on his way home after defeating Grendel, Don Quixote discovering Don Quixote Part One, Hamlet producing “The Mousetrap,” Velázquez including within his painting a painting by Velázquez, Gilgamesh discovering in Enkidu his own reflection, and so forth. Here are the lines from Gilgamesh (p. 59–60 in the Sandars edition, 1960): “O Gilgamesh, lord of Kullab, great is thy praise… . He went on a long journey, was weary, worn-out with labor, and returning engraved on a stone the whole story. / … / When Anu had heard their lamentation the gods cried to Aruru, the goddess of creation. “You made him, O Aruru, now create his equal; let it be as like him as his own reflection, his second self, stormy heart for stormy heart. Let them contend together and leave Uruk in quiet.” / So the goddess conceived an image in her mind, and it was of the stuff of Anu of the firmament. She dipped her hands in water and pinched off the clay, she let it fall in the wilderness, and noble Enkidu was created.” 41 See Sacrificing Commentary (1996). 40

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Odysseus is able to hear “his own story” before the Phaiákians because it has become a public story, a popular account which refers not any longer to the flesh and blood man standing there hearing it (Borges takes up this distinction in “Borges and I”) but the cycle of oral epic narratives so critical to Greek education and from which Homer’s Odyssey has undoubtedly come.42 Aeneas can view his story before the panels in Carthage because they depict a popular account, a civic representation germane to the transformations the city is currently undergoing. Beowulf hears his story after defeating Grendel as an instance of how his story will be told and new links and cultural networks forged. Don Quixote discovers Don Quixote Part One as a part of his own stocktaking, a process that will culminate in his defeat by the “Knight of the Mirrors” and his abandonment of his peculiar madness. Hamlet produces “something like the murder of my father” as a way of gaging both his own and the king’s response to such a drama in an age in which revenge plots were everywhere. Velázquez can include the painting by the artist as any other self-portrait as a way of seeing everything the artist cannot otherwise see. Gilgamesh can discover in Enkidu his own reflection without violating any sense of our reality as a way of approaching the limits to his own personality. Borges’s “The Secret Miracle” may take place not because time can stop (we can always specify a universe in which such fantastic events are able to happen) but because the infinite repetition in the play within its contents (like the infinite repetition of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot for us) can be contained by the story that reads it and the audience that views it. On the other hand, there is no space where Borges’s “Chinese encyclopedia” may exist apart from the page on which it is written (since the inside of that list contains as one of its members the list itself which is thus not completed yet), or where the Thousand and One Nights (as Borges reads it) may exist or where Josiah Royce’s map may exist for the same reasons.43 And so our questions need to be refined. What is the function of those instances of infinite mirroring in works in which reality is not violated? What is the function of those instances of infinite mirroring in works in which our sense of reality is indeed violated and which cannot exist except in the space of the language in which they are formulated? What conclusions if any are we entitled to draw from these observations about the relationship between language and death in the way in which we have spoken about it? What of the implications of See Borges Labyrinths (1964), 246–7. See Borges, “The Analytic Language of John Wilkins,” (1999). See also Sterne (1999).

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this material for the Möbian structures we have been studying throughout this book? Or for the study of literature? Or for the progress of this book itself— which appears to move from essays concerning criticism (Chapter 1), to essays concerning violence (Chapters 2, 3, and 4), to one concerning testimony and religious study (Chapter 5)? Or finally, for any general statements that we might want to adduce about literature or criticism? Is this book finally a defense of literature, a defense of criticism, an account of death (or night or darkness) in relation to the literary, an account of the literary as the Möbian, an account of the literary (or the Möbian) as the testimonial or the scriptural? Or what? Have we then identified in this expanded discussion of the “language to infinity” a conceptual basis on which we may unlock the mystery of the Möbian as at once an alternative mode to the aesthetic as a way of talking about literature and as well a larger context in which that aesthetic formulation maybe understood? Again, let us not get ahead of ourselves. For the infinite reverberation of this tale-telling language to which Foucault alerts us, its formal mise en abyme quality, is only one part of his insight about this encounter. “… when, as a stranger among the Phaiákians, [Odysseus] hears in another’s voice the tale, already a thousand years old, of his own history, it is as if he were listening to his own death,” Foucault writes, “… since, for the bard, Ulysses is already as good as dead.” The encounter is also an existential one. Whether or not the games language plays are successful in their project of averting mortality, their motivating premise is Odysseus’s eerie encounter with the possibility of his own demise and the posthumous perspective it confers upon him. And it is perhaps in this latter more ghostly sense that the continuity of the bard’s tale with the one we witness is the most resonant, the possibility that in encountering Homer—or the literary tradition with which he is credited as progenitor—what we are encountering is the tale of our “own death.” What if, in other words, the most unnerving part of the Möbian structure of our encounter with the literary, its most disturbing stake, is not simply its disclosure of the continuity between the outside and the inside, the autobiographical discovery that we are not outside the drama it presents to us but within it and an extension of it (important as that discovery is), or the fact that the language of this literary exchange is infinitely variable, but rather that the “content” of that internal and traceable encounter may be our own mortality? What does it mean to say as much? What does it mean that the story that Odysseus hears is in some manner the story of his own death? Let us turn then to this more existential dimension.

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Part 4: The Sirens and the Posthumous Listening to the minstrel’s earlier tale, Odysseus hears in an uncanny way his own future. This is how we will remember you, the song says to him in effect. This is what your life will come to. Then he hears—amidst the lavish and home-like hospitality of Alkinoös’ court, and after the games of athletic competition—the bard’s second tale, the adulterous tale of Arês and Aphroditê caught in the net of Aphroditê’s lamed husband, Hephaistos, in which, Homer tells us, Odysseus finds “sweet pleasure” (VIII.385). Finally, after an additional contest or two, some more entertainment and giftgiving (in which Odysseus fastens the lid of a chest given to him by Alkinoös’ queen, Arêtê, “with a lightning knot / learned, once, long ago, from Lady Kirkê” [VIII.464–65]), he makes a request of the blind minstrel—as if hearing his own future reminded him of an earlier episode in his life in which his future was invoked, one that also involved suffering, knowledge of the ways of the gods, and the promise of homecoming: Odysseus spoke again to the blind minstrel: “Demódokos, accept my utmost praise. The Muse, daughter of Zeus in radiance, or else Apollo gave you skill to shape with such great style your songs of the Akhaians— their hard lot, how they fought and suffered war. You shared it, one would say, or heard it all (VIII.504–10).

Standing before Demódokos, in other words, Odysseus is standing once again before the Sirens.44 And as he begins to imagine himself from point of view of the minstrel singer (“Now shift your theme, and sing that wooden horse / Epeios built, inspired by Athena— / the ambuscade Odysseus filled with fighters / and sent to take the inner town of Troy. / Sing only this for me, sing me this well, / and I shall say at once before the world / the grace of heaven has given us a song” [511–17]), he will transform his encounter with the Sirens this time from hairbreadth escape into the genuine possibility of homecoming. How does that happen? What in the first place are the Sirens? Foucault says they are “nothing but song,” “pure appeal,” the “promise of a future song.”

I discovered Pietro Pucci’s wonderful essay on “The Song of the Sirens” long after writing these words. I thank Jack Peradotto for pointing me to Pucci’s article. See Pucci (1995), 209–13.

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The Sirens are the elusive and forbidden form of the alluring voice. They are nothing but song. Only a silvery wake in the sea, the hollow of a wave, a cave in the rocks, the whiteness of the beach—what are they in their very being if not a pure appeal, if not the mirthful void of listening, if not attentiveness, if not an invitation to a pause? Their music is the opposite of a hymn: no presence shimmers in their immortal words; only the promise of a future song accompanies their melody.45

The secret of their allure is their transformation of the hero’s past into his future, the promise to him that he will become a name, Odysseus, and his story an epic tale, The Odyssey, and the content of that story, the suffering, knowledge, and homecoming of Odysseus. What makes them seductive is less what they make it possible to hear than what sparkles in the remoteness of their words, the future of what they say. Their fascination is due not to their current song but to what it promises to be. What the Sirens promise to sing to Ulysses is his own past exploits, transformed into a poem for the future: “We know all the suffering, all the suffering inflicted by the gods on the people of Argos and Troy on the fields of Troad.” Presented as though in negative outline, the song is but the attraction of song; yet what it promises the hero is nothing other than a duplicate of what he has lived through, known, and suffered, precisely what he himself is.46

Thus their appeal could appear to be based upon a trick or an illusion. Odysseus has already imagined himself this way once before; for example, in the episode of the Kyklopes, where such a self-understanding was the premise of his final encounter with the monster. The Sirens appeal to something already a part of Odysseus’ history. But Odysseus has learned since that episode, and in particular from the goddess Kirkê, the truth of the Sirens’ promise.47 Faubion (1998), 160. Foucault’s text on Blanchot, “The Thought of the Outside,” is contained in Faubion (1998), 147–69. 46 Ibid., 160. 47 Here is Kirke’s advice in Book XII.40–62 (Mack [1992], 360): “Listen with care / to this now, and a god will arm your mind. / Square in your ship’s path are Seirênês, crying / beauty to bewitch men coasting by; / woe to the innocent who hears that sound! / He will not see his lady nor his children / in joy, crowding about him, home from sea; / the Seirênês will sing his mind away / on their sweet meadow lolling. There are bones / of dead men rotting in a pile beside them / and flayed skins shrivel around the spot. / Steer wide; / keep well to seaward; plug your oarsmen’s ears / with beeswax kneaded soft; none of the rest / should hear that song. / But if you wish to listen, / let the men tie you in the lugger, hand / and foot, back to the mast, lashed to the mast, / so you may hear those harpies shrilling voices; / shout as you will, begging to be untied, / your crew must only twist more line around you / and keep their stroke up, till the singers fade.” 45

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[It is] a promise at once deceptive and truthful. It lies because all those who surrender to seduction and steer their ships toward the beach will only meet death. But it speaks the truth in that it is death that enables the song to sound and endlessly recount the hero’s adventure.48

And that prophetic knowledge of the future of this song, of the future that is this song (and especially of its mortal dangers), will enable him—once he has escaped its lure again—to be able to tell his story. He will learn as he did before either to pass it by, or to trick it, to live on the edge of the abyss while yet tied against the prospect of falling in, bound to the rectitude of the mast of the prowling ship, and in that way to live beyond death. To survive it, Foucault writes, … one must refuse to hear this song so pure—so pure that it says nothing more than its own devouring withdrawal—that one must plug one’s ears, pass it by as if one were deaf, in order to live and thus begin to sing. Or, rather, in order for the narrative that will never die to be born, one must listen but remain at the mast, wrists and ankles tied; one must vanquish all desire by a trick that does violence to itself; one must experience all suffering by remaining at the threshold of the alluring abyss; one must finally find oneself beyond song, as if one had crossed death while still alive only to restore it in a second language.49

But how specifically does one do that? How does one “find oneself beyond song”? This is not the tale of Orpheus (who indeed “crossed death while still alive” to retrieve his beloved Eurydice) but the tale of Odysseus. It is fine to say “don’t listen” or “remain tied to the mast of your ship” but how does one translate that instruction into practical terms? How does one move “as if one had crossed death while still alive?” And how does one “restore it in a second language?” Perhaps we need to take a closer look at this episode. What in the first place is the nature of the encounter with the Sirens? Blanchot (whom Foucault cites) addresses this question more specifically in remarks that may in fact have inspired Foucault’s. The Sirens: it seems they did indeed sing, but in an unfulfilling way, and that only gave a sign of where the real sources and real happiness of song opened … . What was the nature of the Sirens’ song? Where did its fault lie? Why did this fault make it so powerful? Some have always answered: It was an inhuman song—a natural noise no doubt (are there any other kinds?), but on the fringes Faubion (1998), 160. Ibid.

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of nature, foreign in every possible way to man, very low, and awakening in him that extreme delight in falling that he cannot satisfy in the normal conditions of life. But, say others, the enchantment was stranger than that: it did nothing but reproduce the habitual song of men, and because the Sirens, who were only animals, quite beautiful because of the reflection of feminine beauty, could sing as men sing, they made the song so strange that they gave birth in anyone who heard it to a suspicion of the inhumanity of every song.50

There are, for Blanchot, two traditions of explaining the story, and their capacity to drive to madness and death those who listen to them and heed their call. The first is that the sound they make is other-than-human (however natural), and upon hearing that sound, human beings are driven mad since they find now perpetually that they have either overshot their mark or stopped short of it. The second is that the sounds they make are entirely human and that, since they are “sung” by other-than-human creatures (whether animals or others), human beings are driven to despair in search of their meaning. Is it through despair, then, that men passionate for their own song came to perish? Through a despair very close to rapture. There was something wonderful in this real song, this common secret song, simple and everyday, that they had to recognize right away, sung in an unreal way by foreign, even imaginary powers, song of the abyss that, once heard, would open an abyss in each word and would beckon those who heard it to vanish into it.51

It is as if we were one day to encounter words that are of utmost importance to us being spoken by life forms (or mechanical devices) for whom such value is constitutionally impossible.52 One thinks of the doll Olympia in Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” and the madness (and eventual death) to which it drives the protagonist, Nathanael, when he discovers the woman with whom he is in love to be an automaton.53 Or perhaps in a more recent popular cultural setting of The Terminator trilogy, in which human beings are pitted against cybernetic machines that act in all apparent regards as human beings act with the exception that they are entirely mimetic of the programs of their designers.

See Maurice Blanchot, “Encountering The Imaginary,” The Book To Come (2003), 3–4. Ibid. 52 See Blanchot’s essay on the Sirens in Blanchot (2003). 53 See Hoffmann (1969), 93–125. 50 51

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In what way, then, is it fair to say that Odysseus’s encounter with the minstrel in Book VIII is a reproduction of his encounter with the Sirens in Book XII? Here is their song in E. V. Rieu’s prose rendition: Draw near, illustrious Odysseus, flower of the Achaian chivalry, and bring your ship to rest so that you may hear our voices. No seaman ever sailed his black ship past this spot without listening to the sweet tones that flow from our lips, and none that has listened has not been delighted and gone on a wiser man. For we know all that the Argives and Trojans suffered on the broad plain of Troy by the will of the gods, and we have foreknowledge of all that is going to happen on this fruitful earth.54

The song contains at least four distinct elements: a) the promise of home or rest; b) the assurance that everyone does it and is wiser for it (and so the appeal of mimesis); c) the promise of an understanding of the suffering the Trojans and the Argives have experienced; and d) the promise of complete foreknowledge of human affairs. The promise, in other words, of home, of social approval, of an appreciation of suffering, and of prophetic knowledge of the future. What Greek could ask for more? And Odysseus is able to triumph over the song by listening with a deliberate deafness in accord with the advice he received from Kirkê (a “surprising deafness of one who is deaf because he is listening,” Blanchot says): sailing past it, but tied to the mast, having his orders to be released countermanded, and having with his ears stuffed with beeswax.55 Rieu (1991), 161–2. Here is Fitzgerald’s verse translation of the same lines, XII.204–29 in Mack (1992), 364–5: “This way, oh turn your bows, / Akhaia’s glory, / As all the world allows— / Moor and be merry. // Sweet coupled airs we sing. / No lonely seafarer / Holds clear of entering / Our green mirror. // Pleased by each purling note / Like honey twining / From her throat and my throat, / Who lies a-pining? // Sea rovers here take joy / Voyaging onward, / As from our song of Troy / Greybeard and rower-boy / Goeth more learnèd. // All feats on that great field / In the long warfare, / Dark days the bright gods willed, / Wounds you bore there, // Argos’ old soldiery / On Troy beach teeming, / Charmed out of time we see / No life on earth can be / Hid from our dreaming.” 55 See 2003, 5. Here is Odysseus’s description of what transpired as he and his men arrived at the island of the Seirênês. See Book XII.170–203 (Mack [1992], 363): “`Dear friends, / more than one man, or two, should know those things / Kirkê foresaw for us and shared with me, / so let me tell her forecast: then we die, / with our eyes open, if we are going to die, / Or know what death we baffle if we can. Seirênês / weaving a haunting song over the sea / we are to shun, she said, and their green shore / all sweet with clover; yet she urged that I / alone should listen to their song. Therefore / you are to tie me up, tight as a splint, / erect along the mast, / and if I shout and beg to be untied, / take more turns of the rope to muffle me.’ // I rather dwelt on this part of the forecast, / while our good ship made time, bound outward down / the wind for the strange island of the Seirênês. / Then all at once the wind fell, and a calm / came over all the sea, as though some power / lulled the swell. // The crew were on their feet / briskly, to furl the sail, and stow it; then, / each in place, they poised the smooth oar blades / and sent the white foam scudding by. I carved / a massive cake of beeswax into bits / and rolled them in my hands until they softened— / no long task, for a burning heat came down / from Hêlios, lord of high noon. Going forward / I carried wax along the line, and laid it / thick on their ears. they tied me up, then, plumb / amidships, back to the mast, lashed to the mast, / 54



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How is this current scene in Book VIII another version of Odysseus before the Sirens? How does this scene echo those four promises? Odysseus is at once irrevocably drawn to the scenes the bard’s song recalls (to which he was witness, in which he participated, and in which he lost so much) and yet constrained from announcing his participation in those scenes without identifying himself as their subject. We know it touches him because his response to both songs is tears—which suggests that the songs elicit from him pity for the suffering experienced. Is the song one that others liked? The Phaiákians (who are famed as sailors) are said to have “loved” the story and so we can be confident that its appeal is widespread. Odysseus praises the blind bard for his astute knowledge of these matters (“You shared it, one would say, or heard it all”). And insofar as it reminds Odysseus that he too is a singer who can also tell tales, and therefore establish his identity (which will enable the Phaiákians—who “love” this tale— to help him), it will assist in his return home. But there is a difference. Rather than lead to simple escape, the encounter this time leads Odysseus to tell his own story, the story of his identity, and that gesture will encourage a considerably more positive outcome than before. It leads him to further success in his project, one that ironically assumes the form of an appropriation of the very gesture he is presumably escaping: he becomes himself a bard. Unlike his counterpart in Greek mythology, unlike that other Greek bard Orpheus, who goes off in search of his bride Eurydice in the underworld, and upon finding her, loses her on the return trip by stopping to gaze at her directly, Odysseus ironically gains all the promises of the Sirenic sisters—an awareness of suffering, oracular foreknowledge, a wisdom shared by everyone, and home—ironically by rejecting their appeal, by holding fast to the masthead, by remaining focused on his task. What is the source of his new success, we are led to wonder. What enables it?56 Moreover, this scene with Demódokos is not the only repetition of the episode of the Sirens. For, if we include his tale-telling (which will begin and took themselves again to rowing. Soon, / as we came smartly within hailing distance, / the two Seirênês, noting our fast ship / off their point, made ready, and they sang:” And here is his description of what transpired after the song. See Book XII.230–8 (Mack [1992], 365): “The lovely voices in ardor appealing over the water / made me crave to listen, and I tried to say / ‘Untie me!’ to the crew, jerking my brows; / but they bent steady to the oars. Then Perimêdês / got to his feet, he and Eurylokhos, / and passed more line about, to hold me still. / So all rowed on, until the Seirênês / dropped under the sea rim, and their singing / dwindled away.” 56 Compare the Greek story of Perseus who captures the Medusa by not looking at her directly. Compare also Levinas’s remarks in “Diachrony and Representation” that the time of promises fails what the service without promises ironically accomplishes. See Entre Nous (1998).

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momentarily) and what will happen in Ithaka later, there are in effect no less than six different “episodes of the Sirens” to which we are made witness in the course of the epic. We will learn shortly (in Book IX) of Odysseus’s response to the Kyklopes which inaugurates all the difficulties he had at sea. We will learn in Book XII of his encounter with the Sirens proper (in context of Kirkê’s advice). We witness before us his encounter with Demódokos in Book VIII. We will witness shortly his extended telling of his own tale in the wake of hearing the bard’s songs (in Books IX through XII). In the wake of his telling of his own tale and departure for Ithaka, we will witness (in Books XIII–XXIV) his homecoming and the new engagements it inaugurates (the defeat of the suitors and the undoing of his distant relationship to Penelope), engagements that may themselves be mapped upon the episodes of the Sirens preceding it. And, of course, as readers we remain witness to Homer’s tale of The Odyssey throughout, an extended narrative of its own in which the themes of homecoming, of the mimetic contagion of the power of songs and tale-telling, of the sufferings of all sides in the war, and of various modalities of foreknowledge play the prominent role. Moreover, the protagonist’s success against the Sirens in all these episodes seems to be in direct proportion to his growing rectitude, his growing ability to remove himself from the individual who simply responds to their appeal and his gradual reacquisition of the skills of acculturation, the separation of the contests of warfare from the contests of the hearth (that the ancient eighth-century Greeks imagined the Trojan war to have thoroughly confused). The first time as an adventurer, he uses cunning and strategy alone to battle Polyphemous, and his long odyssey home is the result. The second time, as a sailor on a ship, he appropriates the advice of the goddess Kirkê, tying himself to the mast, and this time he is more successful, able to escape their dire appeal (if by no other means than physical restraint) and approach his goal, but still he is left to wander the seas and experience many adventures before returning home. The third time, as a stranger and a guest in a foreign land, he has learned hospitality, the proper execution of the host / guest relationship (a relationship missing, for example, from the episode with the Kyklopes) and this lesson will enable him to garner from Alkinoös a ship and men to sail it, although battles at home remain to which he himself is subject. And in each of the succeeding episodes, we will see the same process at work. Upon hearing the second tale of Demódokos, he will reassume his former role as a tale-teller and the performance of his own tale and origins will confirm to



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the Phaiákians that they have made the right decision in assisting this curious stranger. Disguised as a skill-less beggar back in Ithaka, he will use disguise to strategic advantage—for the purpose of plotting the way to set his house back in order. And Homer of course uses all of these qualities in constructing for us his Odyssey. It is not difficult to imagine, in other words, an account of the structure of the work that would move successively through six degrees of separation of the hero from his Sirenic adversary, six “versions” of the episode in which Odysseus increasingly removes himself from the scene: first from the monstrous Kyklopes in the figure of the adventurer, next from the Sirens in the figure of the sailor, third from Demódokos in the figure of the stranger, fourth from his own past in the figure of the tale-teller, fifth from the chaos left behind him in Ithaka in the figure of the master of the house, until he becomes in the sixth version Homer, the teller of The Odyssey.57 And six is here a somewhat arbitrary number. Could we not include the episode with Kirkê herself as structured in a similar way, or his encounter with Kalypso or others along the way? The import of Blanchot’s comment that the Odyssey “is heroically and pretentiously the narrative of one single episode, that of Ulysses’ meeting and the sufficient and magnetic song of the Sirens,” is evident.58 To hear the Song of the Sirens, he had to stop being Ulysses and become Homer, but is it only in Homer’s narrative that the actual meeting occurs in which Ulysses becomes the one who enters into that relationship with the power of the elements and the voice of the abyss.59

Nor finally that the effect of this structure of building the Odyssey around at least six episodes of the encounter with the Sirens is to play havoc with narrative time. As a result of its repetition and progressive reappropriation, the narrative of the episode of the Sirens (and of the madness and death it harbingers) may genuinely be said to both precede and follow the present encounter. It precedes it because in a literal sense (among others) Odysseus has already experienced the Sirens’ song on his way from Troy, and encountering it now once again in Compare Blanchot’s remark on this sequence: “What would happen if, instead of being two distinct people conveniently sharing their roles, Ulysses and Homer were one and the same person? If Homer’s narrative were nothing other than the movement completed by Ulysses in the heart of the space that the Song of the Sirens opens to him? If Homer could narrate only when, under the name of Ulysses, a Ulysses free of shackles but settled, he goes toward that place where the ability to speak and narrate seems promised to him, just as long as he disappears into it?” See Blanchot (2003), 7. 58 Ibid., 6. 59 Ibid., 7. 57

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the land of the Phaiákians, in the tales of Demódokos, he is moved to tell the story of his experience which includes it. But it also follows in that now the story of it that he tells (and that follows upon the encounter with Demódokos and the posthumous perspective it confers upon him) constructs the story. “Narrative is not the relating of an event but this event itself,” Blanchot writes. “[That] is the secret law of narrative.”60 Narrative in this way becomes witness. That is one of the strange qualities, or should we say one of the aims, of narration. It “relates” only itself, and at the same time as this relation occurs, it produces what it recounts, what is possible as an account only if it actualizes what happens in this account, for then it possesses the point or the framework where the reality that the narrative “describes” can endlessly join with its reality as narrative, can guarantee it and find in it its guarantee.61

Recalling that “Homer’s” narrative is present throughout—created by the compilation of these five others—the distinction we customarily draw to create clock time (between past and present, and between present and future) is vitiated. Standing before the minstrel who sings first the pre-war song Odysseus himself once sang (or a song about that contest), and later the story of the fall of Troy he engineered, the events recounted are offered to him at once as a past, present, and future.62 As nostalgic accounts of persons and places now past, they recall events that have already occurred, in which capacity they elicit from him tears for the sufferings endured—his own and those of others. As a performance of the same song Odysseus himself once sang, they relocate him within the story being sung (since he can remember it), which is why it brings tears to his eyes. And as a recitation of disasters—of Odysseus’ stories, and of stories about Odysseus as if he is not there (and therefore as a witness to the future of all such stories by and about Odysseus)—they prophetically enact that future. This is how you are to be remembered, they tell him in effect. This is what will have been said about you. Like the oracle of Apollo discovered by Agamémnon from the Pytho at Delphi, they open the individual who hears them to the dramas in which those individuals are engaged, and name in advance the end of those dramas. Tied as he is to the mast of his own current Phaiákian ship, clock time has been replaced for Odysseus with another temporal schema, one that we may want to designate literary time or prophetic time. Ibid., 6–7. Ibid., 7. 62 “Always still to come, always already past, always present in a beginning so abrupt that it cuts off your breath,” Blanchot says of it. See Blanchot (2003), 10. 60 61



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But the question that prompted our inquiry still lacks a response. “One must experience all suffering,” Foucault writes, “by remaining at the threshold of the alluring abyss; one must finally find oneself beyond song, as if one had crossed death while still alive only to restore it in a second language.” How? How does one do that? How does one “find oneself beyond song”? How does one live beyond death? How are these six (or more) encounters meetings of language with death, and how does each encounter lead gradually and progressively to its own improvement? How does one live posthumously? How does one “stop being Ulysses and become Homer?” How does one move between episodes so that each time one is replayed, the hero is a little more removed from its enigmatic draw—barely distinguishable as an adventurer from the monster in the first sequence, then at some distance from the Sirenic sisters in his capacity as a sailor, then in a clearly distinguished position as a guest, then separated from his own past as a bard, then in context of his environment as a household monarch, then finally—if we allow this final transformation—the master of the entire universe in which the song occurs as Homer, a path, thus, of increasing responsibility? It is one thing for us to see the poem—The Odyssey as a whole— as a series of transformations of the episode of the Sirens in which Odysseus increasingly removes himself from the scene and in which the episodes both follow and precede each other. It is quite another to say the logic by which Odysseus moves from one to the other has been specified. Foucault’s observation that “before the imminence of death, language rushes forth, but it also starts again, tells of itself, discovers the story of the story and the possibility that this interpretation might never end” seems apt as an account of what happens in The Odyssey but elusive as a detailing of why or how it happens.63 What is decisive for Odysseus in the current scene—and for us as we hear Homer’s tale—is the means by which he gets from hearing the tales of Demódokos to the telling of his own, the gesture that genuinely begins his homecoming, and that means hinges upon his awareness of the possibility of overcoming the “song of the abyss that, once heard, would open an abyss in each word and would beckon those who heard it to vanish into it.” It is the possibility, to put it succinctly, of living posthumously.64 What in other words is this “abyss” at the heart of song that “would beckon those who heard it to vanish into it”? Is it akin to Emmanuel Levinas’ notion “Language to Infinity”; see Faubion (1998), 90. Blanchot (2003), 3–4.

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of the il y a or “there is” that he finds at the ground of being, at the foundation of our infinite responsibility for the other individual and consequently of the possibility of the ethical?65 Or to Blanchot’s notion elsewhere of the “other night,” which is the source for him of the literary (and that may in fact derive for him from Levinas’s analysis of the il y a)?66 What is this voice in which one must “find oneself beyond song” and that becomes progressively more thematized as we move from one episode to the other, and appears to offer us the hinge upon which Homer’s narrative—and perhaps all narrative inherited from the Greeks—turns? And how is Odysseus able to be successful against the appeal of these beguiling voices? How does the hearing of Demódokos’ song impel him to tell his own? Beyond the autobiographical logic of Homer telling his own story of separation from the Sirenic enchantment, what enables Odysseus’ homecoming? We get in fact nothing like a direct existential reflection on these matters either on Odysseus’s part or on Homer’s. The closest we come to anything like their explicit examination is the sequence just before Odysseus falls asleep on the Phaiákian shore, when he speaks of his body’s capacity to “suffer” and fears that in his insomnia he might “succumb” to “the night’s damp and hoarfrost of the morning.” What more can this hulk suffer? What comes now? In vigil through the night here by the river how can I not succumb, being weak and sick, to the night’s damp and hoarfrost of the morning? The air comes cold from rivers before dawn. But if I climb the slope and fall asleep in the dark forest’s undergrowth—supposing cold and fatigue will go, and sweet sleep come— I fear I make the wild beasts easy prey.” (486–95)67

Odysseus imagines his body, his “hulk,” as a kind of passivity, a radical succumbing or subjection or undergoing to the persecutory forces around him. He has to choose between two dangers facing him: “the night’s damp and hoarfrost of the morning” if he stays by the river; and the “fear [he would] make the wild beasts easy prey” if he climbs the hill and falls asleep, prey to On Levinas’s il y a (“there is”), see his discussion in Levinas (2001), 51–60. On Blanchot’s notion of the “other night,” see, for example, The Space of Literature (1989), 163–76. Mack (1992), 278.

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the elemental universe or prey to the animal universe. Although the setting is somewhat different, we are not far in this passage from Blake’s “forests of the night” and the “fearful symmetry” of the “tyger” for which the poet has difficulty imagining a framer, for which beauty and the aesthetic does not supply the requisite assistance. Tyger, tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fear symmetry?68

Or, by the same token, perhaps, from Maurice Sendak’s reflections on night in Where The Wild Things Are and other works derived from his experience of Eastern Europe and the war years, books which oddly enough have seen their fame as “children’s literature.”69 At this precise moment, Homer offers us a rare and enigmatic commentary— that where others hide “a fresh brand … to keep a spark alive for the next day,” “Odysseus hid himself.” A man in a distant field, no hearthfires near, will hide a fresh brand in his bed of embers to keep a spark alive for the next day; So in the leaves Odysseus hid himself, while over him Athena showered sleep that his distress should end, and soon. In quiet sleep she sealed his cherished eyes. (510–15)70

Alone, outside of both the field of warfare and home, in a place where others might hide a bit of fire, an ember, a spark not fully extinguished, Odysseus “hid himself.” Do we hear in these words (in the Fitzgerald translation) a glimmer of the distinction by which Odysseus removed himself gradually from himself over the course of six versions of the episode of the Sirens? Is it possible that the power of the posthumous perspective for Odysseus lies in his capacity to see from Penelope’s view, from the perspective, that is to say, of another weaver of words? “When … he hears in another’s voice the tale … it is as if he were Reference to William Blake’s poem “The Tyger.” See Ferguson (2005). Sendak’s work had something of a revival when it was discovered that many of the images he employed in his children’s books derived from family memories of the Eastern European stetl before the Holocaust. Viewed in this post-Holocaust perspective, his work acquires an additional dimension. See, for example, Dear Mili (1988) for which Sendak did the pictures. 70 Mack (1992), 277. 68 69

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listening to his own death: he covers his face and cries, in the gesture of a woman to whom the dead body of a hero is brought after a battle.” Experiencing the possibility of his own death in the words of Demódokos, he becomes Penelope. Is it a matter of seeing oneself as another, something he begins to do when he weeps as a woman might before her dead lord? “Know thyself,” the signpost on the door of the oracle at Delphi proclaimed, which could mean “recognize your limitations,” the distance between your capacity and that of the gods (who are “deathless”), or the Socratic dictum “the unexamined life is not worth living,” or perhaps equally “recognize yourself in another,” in the perspective of the other individual when you happen to show up that way. Or should we consider the possibility that Foucault’s observation that Odysseus must learn to live “beyond song,” or Blanchot’s reference to a “relationship with the power of the elements and the voice of the abyss,” can only be adequately addressed in a context that exceeds the boundary of Homer’s culture, one that lives within (or in the wake of) our Judeo-Christian tradition, a context we may identify even more specifically as post-Holocaustal, and one of which we have, in the literature that remains from ancient Greece, only the faintest trace? Is that the limitation that impels Blanchot to shift his concern for Odysseus to Orpheus when he takes up the question of literary writing in general, to give up the primacy of Odysseus before the Sirens and turn instead to the story of Orpheus (another singer of tales) and to his voyage into darkness as the more profound commentary on the nature of the literary and of literary space?

Part 5: The Promissory and the Prophetic Whatever motivates the shift in Blanchot’s work, it feels somewhat facile to say that we cannot approach this question until we arrive at our own cultural setting. What if we approach this matter somewhat differently? What if we argue that there may be a way of saying more about the problem if we come at it from a slightly different angle? Odysseus washes up on the shore of the land of the Phaiákians exhausted and near death. But the performance by the bard enables him to complete his project—to return home. How does it do that? And what’s death got to do with it? The answer to the first question we have suggested is a complex one. It happens because in the first instance the experience is embedded in the



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episode of the Sirens and in that context it becomes increasingly successful. He learns more and more to resist the allure of song, first by identifying the other as monstrous, then by holding fast to his own navigational vehicle, then by accepting the limitations of being a guest before a host, then by learning to view his own history from a certain distance, then by learning to use violence and cunning appropriately in both his household and his marriage, and finally by learning to tell his own history as the history of another, of Odysseus rather than Homer, of the adventurer rather than the bard. But what precisely is the internal mechanism of that repeated scenario? What propels it forward? What enables his success in one version of the episode to translate into the next version in which he is even more successful? Here is where the threat of death seems to play a role. In the first sequence, the threat is painfully real. He could be devoured at any moment by the Polyphemic monster. In the second, death is the inevitable future of those who succumb, but he learns that he need not succumb, albeit by restraining himself artificially. In the third, death is a possible outcome should he give up the host/ guest relationship he has established at court, although he will in all likelihood be successful if he does not relinquish that contract. In the fourth, death has become the threat to his former self which he can now recount from the point of view of its singer. Singing has thus turned out to hold for him an unexpected mastery, a mastery over death. It is a submission to a possible dying that enables him to share that lesson with others. In the fifth episode still to come, death will be the outcome should he lose the battle with the suitors, but here again he will be able to rely on all his old strategic skills, all the skills of warfare for which he was trained and at which he was especially successful. So that in the sixth and final episode—The Odyssey as a whole—Homer can tell the story of his encounter with death but as a tale precisely about learning to tell an autobiographical story. The mechanism by which he moves from one episode to the next, in other words, concerns his increasing capacity to stage the potential for his own death within the story, the degree to which, as we saw before, he is able to remove himself from himself and tell a story about that former self, the degree to which he is able to construct himself as a another. Perhaps that is why his sudden discovery that he is in the same position as Penelope—a wife before her dead lord—or a member of the populace hearing a story that others “loved” to hear is so powerful for him. It promotes this selfdistancing, this self-dramatizing at the heart of story-telling.

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Are we in a position to answer the question we posed initially about storytelling language and death? In some way it would seem we have arrived at the opposite conclusion from the one to which Foucault urged us. Far from it being the case that Odysseus has learned to speak in order not to die, it would seem he has learned to speak in order to die, in order that dying might be imagined in advance as it were as a way of becoming increasingly successful in his project to become integrated with the household of his origins, a tale that Homer then shares with us in its final version.71 One of the reasons, therefore, that Odysseus may respond as he does to the posthumous position in which he is cast by the bard’s story of him is that he sees in the bard’s capacity to tell that story a way out of the dilemma with which he has been wrestling. Mimetically appropriating the role of story-teller, he can tell the story of all his near-death experiences—as perhaps the bard himself has already been doing. The prophetic position in which he is put by the bard’s story of Odysseus’ earlier adventures and story-telling—seeing his own future—can itself be appropriated if he himself once again becomes the story-teller, if he tells stories not simply that people “love” as the Sirens do—and which inevitably lead sailors to death, to crash upon the unanticipated rocks beneath them—but prophetic stories, stories that do not promise (as Foucault says the Sirens do constitutionally) but perform, stories that deliver in Levinas’s words “a service without promises.” Levinas’s remarks, although occurring in a very different context, may help us to clarify this point. In “Diachrony and Representation,” Levinas has been speaking about a “deformalization of time” based upon notions we have inherited from Aristotelian thinking and proposing alternatives based upon the face of the Other individual. He notes the difference between a conception of messianic time founded upon promises and another not founded upon promises. He speaks of a time and a religion that is not linked to representational understanding, and of a “theology without theodicy.” What seems in fact to be opened, after the steps attempted to think time starting from the face of the Other, where “God comes to us in the idea,” as an authority that there commands indeclinably, but also refuses to compel and commands entirely while renouncing the all-powerful, is the necessity to think time in the devotion of a theology without theodicy. To be sure, this religion is impossible to propose Foucault has borrowed this assertion of course from Blanchot, and Blanchot, we will see later, makes both claims. See below.

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to the Other, and consequently is impossible to preach. Contrary to a religion that feeds on representations, it does not begin with a promise. Is it necessary again to recognize in it the difficult piety—all the certainties and personal risks—of the twentieth century, after the horrors of its genocides and its holocaust? To be sure one can ask if the time of promises ever stands at the beginning elsewhere than in pedagogy, and if the service without promises is not the only one to merit—and even to accomplish—promises. But these two questions already seem suspect of preaching.72

Is Levinas echoing Foucault’s critique of Derrida in his reference to pedagogy? Recall that Foucault’s reply to Derrida’s review of his book on madness turns upon the extent to which Derrida in his review has “textualized” Foucault’s attempt to think a history of madness not defined as unreason but rather on specific practices of exclusionary behavior.73 I will not say that it is a metaphysics, metaphysics itself or its closure which is hiding in this “textualization” of discursive practices. I’ll go much farther than that: I shall say that what can be seen here so visibly [in Derrida’s analysis] is an historically well determined little pedagogy [une petite pédagogie]. A pedagogy that teaches the pupil there is nothing outside the text, but that in it, in its gaps, its blanks and its silences, there reigns the reserve of the origin; that it is therefore unnecessary to search elsewhere, but that here, not in the words, certainly, but in the words under erasure, in their grid, the “sense of being” is said. A pedagogy that gives conversely to the master’s voice the limitless sovereignty that allows it to restate the text indefinitely.74

Beyond the confines of Derrida’s specific reading of Foucault’s book on madness, Foucault is responding, of course, to Derrida’s early articulation of deconstruction more generally and to the kind of claims that Derrida made in Of Grammatology that “there is nothing outside the text” or “there is no ‘outside the text,’ ” in which his preoccupation with Heidegger’s “fundamental ontology” is still very much in evidence, a project at odds not only with Foucault’s “archeology” of discursive practices, but as well with Levinas’s life-long criticism of such fundamental ontology, and his substitution instead of ethics as first philosophy.75 Time and the Other (2002), 120. Derrida’s review, “Cogito and Madness,” appeared in Writing and Difference. Foucault’s reply was included in the re-publication in 1972 of Histoire de la folie. 74 “My Body, This paper, This Fire,” in Faubion (1998), 416. 75 For Derrida’s claims, see Of Grammatology (1972). For an articulation of Foucault’s archeology, see The Archeology of Knowledge (1972). For Levinas’s criticism of Heidegger, see, for example, “Is 72 73

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But not much changes even in the later work that Derrida does in which the affirmative side of deconstruction is expressed, in which the notion of a messianic eschatology is made explicit (along with other things deconstruction affirms—like justice, democracy-to-come, deconstruction itself). The same gestures may be observed there. And it is hard to hear his words in this context and not see parallels. Levinas may or may not have had Foucault’s response in mind in 1983 when he delivered the lecture “Diachrony and Representation” on the first day of a conference on the work of Paul Ricoeur. But there can be little doubt that when Derrida delivered his remarks on Specters of Marx at a conference in 1993, the thought of Levinas is close at hand. Nor is Hegel far behind. The specific occasion for the essay is Francis Fukyama’s book on Hegel’s notion of the “end of history,” a lecture that must inevitably have raised in Derrida’s mind the specter of Kojève and his postwar reading of his version of Hegel’s notion of the end of history, an echo in Fukyama’s work that seems more observed in the breach than in the observance.76 Hegel is the messianic figure of philosophy, the “Don Quixote of the philosophic” as Foucault characterizes his apocalyptic fervor. In the following passage it is Walter Benjamin who is Derrida’s primary reference. Drawing upon Benjamin’s notion of a “weak messianism” (and other notions he finds in speech act theory), Derrida defines the messianic, or more specifically, a “messianic without messianism,” as the promise, the promise of a promise, a specifically Derridean messianic, therefore, and one that some of his expositors will confuse with other Judaic biblical modes. If the analysis of the Marxist type remains, then, indispensable it appears to be radically insufficient there where the Marxist ontology grounding the project of Marxist science or critique also itself carries with it and must carry with it, necessarily, despite so many modern or post-modern denials, a messianic eschatology. On this score at least, paradoxically and despite the fact that it necessarily participates in them, it cannot be simply classified among the ideologems or theologems whose critique or demystification it calls for. In saying that, we will not claim that this messianic eschatology common both to the religions and to the Marxist critique must be simply deconstructed. While it is common to Ontology Fundamental?” in Bernasconi, Critchley, and Peperzak, eds. Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings (2008). See also Levinas, L’Éthique comme philosophie première (1998) and Peperzak, ed. Ethics as First Philosophy (1995). For an interesting discussion of the ways in which Foucault’s project may have relations to Heidegger’s, see Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (2013). 76 See Fukyama, The End of History and the Last Man (1992).



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both of them, with the exception of the content [but none of them can accept, of course, this epokhē of the content, whereas we hold it here to be essential to the messianic in general, as thinking of the other and of the event to come], it is also the case that its formal structure of promise exceeds them or precedes them. Well, what remains irreducible to any deconstruction, what remains as undeconstructible as the possibility itself of deconstruction is perhaps a certain experience of the emancipatory promise; it is perhaps even the formality of a structural messianism, a messianism without religion, even a messianic without messianism, an idea of justice—which we distinguish from law or right and even from human rights—and an idea of democracy—which we distinguish from its current concept and from its determined predicates today.77

Who more than Derrida articulates on the contemporary European intellectual scene the voice of the Sirens? Embracing the messianic (and in particular a “messianic without messianism”) as not reducible “to any deconstruction,” and defining this messianic as “a certain experience of the emancipatory promise,” the promise of a promise, therefore (since, as he says elsewhere, a speech act is already a promise), Derrida articulates the appeal of the philosophic song itself, the appeal, in Foucault’s words, of the “pure promise.” Is deconstruction thus expressed, in other words, not a version of the Heideggerian formulation of death as the possibility of an impossibility, a formulation that both Blanchot and Levinas explicitly reject and thus a promise that is identical, in the way in which Foucault and Blanchot have spoken about the song of the Sirens, with death itself?78 It is not by embracing deconstruction, a justice-to-come, a democracy-to-come, or any other promissory structure, Foucault, Blanchot, and Levinas warn us, that we shall guarantee ourselves protection against the dangers of the “song of the abyss that, once heard, would open an abyss in each word and would beckon those who heard it to vanish into it.” Nor against the misunderstanding of Derrida’s own gesture. John Caputo’s otherwise brilliantly clarifying analysis of Derrida seems to falter on just this point. Confusing Derrida’s messianic with the Judaic prophetic, Caputo writes: For whatever parts of Judaism Derrida has deserted (or have deserted him) and let die away, he has been engaged all along in reinventing a certain Judaism, Specters of Marx (1994), 59. The bracketed remarks in this paragraph are Derrida’s. See Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell (1997). See Levinas’s essay “Mourir pour …” in Entre Nous (1991)—translated as “Dying for …” in Entre Nous (1998)—and Blanchot’s in The Writing of the Disaster (1986).

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let us say, a prophetic Judaism, the Judaism that constitutes a prophetic call for justice, but not the Judaism of religious ritual and sacrifice or even of specific doctrines.79

Now Caputo is quite right to associate the prophetic with a call for justice. But there has been in Judaism such a prophetic anti-sacrificial movement for some time now. Rabbinic Judaism in the eyes of some commentators has been just such a development, and it is the foundation of the renewalist movement that first Buber and Rosenzweig, and later Levinas, have actively engaged. Saying as much, identifying Derrida’s messianic promissory mode as prophetic, Caputo would appear to miss the distinction Levinas invokes between the promissory and the prophetic, a distinction that Derrida for one (who does not insist upon characterizing his messianicity in this fashion) retains.80 The difference is an important one. Levinas’s critique of the promissory rests upon its link to Aristotelian time, a foundation at the heart of Levinas’s criticism of Heidegger as well. Radicalizing philosophy in many other ways, Heidegger failed (in Levinas’s view) to radicalize the temporality from which limit he spotted the horizon of being. The “deformalization of time” that Levinas envisioned based upon Rosenzweig and others (and upon which he was working in his last essays) links temporality rather to the biblical, but to a biblical not conceived as another mode of the Aristotelian and for which Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption provides the primary articulation.81 The essential theme of my research is the deformalization of the notion of time … . Franz Rosenzweig, for his part … thought the past in terms of the idea and religious consciousness of creation; the present in terms of listening to and receiving revelation; and the future in terms of the hope of redemption, thus raising those biblical references of thought to the level of the conditions of temporality itself. The biblical references are claimed as modes of original human consciousness, common to an immense part of humanity. Rosenzweig’s philosophical audacity consists precisely of referring the past to the creation and not the creation to the past, the present to revelation and not revelation to the present, the future to redemption and not redemption to the future.82 See Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell (1997), 172. For the origin of Levinas’s understanding of the prophetic see for example Buber’s “Dialogue Between Heaven and Earth” (1967) and “Prophecy, Apocalyptic, and the Historical Hour” (2000). 81 See Levinas’s essay in the introduction to Stéphane Mosès’s book on Rosenzweig, System and Revelation, in Entre Nous (1998). On this interregnum period in Jewish life in Germany, see also Mosès, The Angel of History (2009). 82 “The Other, Utopia, and Justice,” in Entre Nous (1998), 232–3. 79 80



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A Judaism based upon such a radical reorientation is, Levinas admits, a “difficult piety,” or, in another context “a difficult freedom.”83 And its misunderstanding as a version of the promissory (or a religion that “feeds on representations”) may well attend all the horrors of our century. But it may be that our only way out of those horrors (if indeed one is to be had) lay within its province, and, ironically, that the only way of making good on the promises such a messianic eschatology would offer us is by means of its rejection. “… one can ask if the time of promises ever stands at the beginning elsewhere than in pedagogy, and if the service without promises is not the only one to merit—and even to accomplish—promises.” Thus there are, we may say, finally at stake two very different songs in The Odyssey: the songs of the Sirens and the song of Homer. What is the difference between them? And what enables Odysseus to move between them? By contrast with the song of the Sirens, is not the Homeric song, the story-telling Odysseus learns from the Phaiákian bard, at odds with its counterpart on just this point, on the difference between the promissory and the prophetic? Does not Odysseus succeed in overcoming the Sirenic songs which are founded upon promises precisely by telling a prophetic story, by recognizing the posthumous prophetic gesture of the Phaiákian bard and mimetically appropriating it? There would thus seem to be two kinds of story-telling in The Odyssey: those that relate suffering, oracular foreknowledge, the desire for home, mimetic desire, and the minute details of hairsbreadth encounters with death, and those that take stock of their own implication in such encounters and, as a result, tell “the story of the story and the possibility that this interpretation might never end.” And in this latter mode, in this service without promises, in this story-telling about such Sirenic promises and the death that is their consequence, do we not find the means by which one may “find oneself beyond song, as if one had crossed death while still alive only to restore it in a second language?” Is such a “second language” not precisely the account of the way “Ulysses becomes the one who enters into that relationship with the power of the elements and the voice of the abyss?” And finally do we not find the mimetic appropriation of such a prophetic perspective at the heart of this relation of language to death (or of this “second language” to the voice of the abyss) and is not Homer encouraging us to undertake the same gesture? Like Oedipus in Sophocles’ play some four See Difficult Freedom (1990).

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hundred years later, does Odysseus not appropriate the view of the blind storyteller before him, an appropriation that confers upon him a similar capacity to tell a story of suffering, oracular foreknowledge, the desire for home or family origins, mimetic desire, and the minute details of near-death experiences? In other words, if we do not ask finally why Oedipus appropriates the oracular view, and we simply register the fact that Sophocles’ play shows that appropriative gesture to us, can we not do the same with The Odyssey?84 Can we not show that Odysseus appropriates Demódokos’s view of himself and that Homer has done the same? And does that reading not give us a way of validating Plato’s remark that tragedy is epic without the Homeric voice so that what we discover is the continuity between Oedipus and Sophocles? Perhaps Foucault has in fact hinted as much all along? “Headed toward death,” Foucault writes, “language turns back upon itself.” it encounters something like a mirror; and to stop this death which would stop it, it possesses but a single power—that of giving birth to its own image in a play of mirrors that has no limits. From the depths of the mirror where it sets out to arrive anew at the point where it started (at death), but so as finally to escape death, another language can be heard—the image of actual language, but as a minuscule, interior, and virtual model; it is the song of the bard who had already sung of Ulysses before The Odyssey and before Ulysses himself (since Ulysses hears the song), but who will also sing of him endlessly after his death (since, for the bard, Ulysses is already as good as dead); and Ulysses, who is alive, receives this song as a wife receives her slain husband [my italics].85

In this new context, Foucault’s talk of “mirrors,” “models,” and “images” takes on new and exceptional meaning. The most common contemporary significance for the mirror today is of course reflection. But the word can also mean a model, a sense of the word that is still present in the Renaissance, and one that seems to derive from the idea that what we call a reflecting glass can also be conceived as itself a light source.86 Has Odysseus not encountered in the bard, in other words, a mimetic model? And in his appropriation of the bard’s perspective, a perspective that tells the story of the possibility of Odysseus’s death, and thus the story of the story, do we not find the means by which Odysseus’s homecoming Compare my analysis of this play in these terms in Sacrificing Commentary (1996), 13–41. Faubion (1998), 90. 86 On the relevance of this idea to Shakespeare’s Richard II, see “‘Being Nothing’: Kings, Mirrors, and Subjects in Richard II,” in my text, Sacrificing Commentary (1996), 42–95. See also Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text (1996). 84 85



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is assured? The movement from bard, to warrior, to odyssean adventurer, to sea captain, to guest, to bard again—who is able now to tell stories, to use his warrior skills appropriately and to reestablish domestic relations—would thus appear complete. And in so far as Odysseus’s encounter with Demódokos and his history is continuous with the tale we witness, the Sirens we encounter in Homer’s epic (and as Homer’s epic)—and which we have dismissed and escaped only by putting beeswax in our own literary critical ears—now confer upon us the same capacity for being a witness to our own history—our own origins, our own strategies, and the future of our own actions (which is premised upon our own demise)—as they do for Odysseus, the same possibility, that is to say, of an impossibility, one that we are encouraged to imagine (if we follow Blanchot) that Homer already anticipated and for whom this Odyssey is also his own. The formulation Heidegger (and perhaps Derrida) apply to death, Levinas reverses and Blanchot applies to literature and literary reading.

Part 6: Homecoming, Hospitality, and Hostage Status But we still have the sense that there is one final dimension to which we have not yet paid sufficient attention, another demonstration which Homer offers us beyond the mimetic appropriation of prophetic or non-promissory modes. And for this demonstration we turn again to Levinas. In Chapter 4 of Otherwise Than Being (the chapter Levinas designates as the book’s centerpiece), Levinas suggests that the means by which we may shift from a psychic economy based upon the round-trip journey of the ego from the same to the other to another economy based upon the ethical, from the conception of an ego that is the agent of a subject of consciousness before objects of knowledge (a journey from which self and identity is born) to the conception of a subjectivity based upon unlimited responsibility for the other individual, is defined by substitution, a relation involving for oneself the status of a hostage, obsession, and death. The ego is not just a being endowed with certain qualities called moral which it would bear as a substance bears attributes, or which it would take on as accidents in its becoming. Its exceptional uniqueness in the passivity or the passion of the self is the incessant event of subjection to everything, of substitution. It is a being divesting itself, emptying itself of its being, turning itself

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inside out, and if it can be put thus, the fact of “otherwise than being.” This subjection is neither nothingness, nor a product of a transcendental imagination. In this analysis we do not mean to reduce an entity that would be the ego to the act of substituting itself that would be the being of this entity. Substitution is not an act; it is a passivity inconvertible into an act, the hither side of the act–passivity alternative, the exception that cannot be fitted into the grammatical categories of noun or verb, save in the said that thematizes them. This recurrence can be stated only as an in-itself, as the underside of being or as otherwise than being. To be oneself, otherwise than being, to be dis-interested, is to bear the wretchedness and bankruptcy of the other and even the responsibility that the other can have for me. To be oneself, the state of being a hostage, is already to have one degree of responsibility more, the responsibility for the responsibility of the other.87

“To be oneself ” as synonymous with “the state of being a hostage,” with a radical “passivity” or radical undergoing, and to understand subjectivity as a hypostasis or “underside” or zero degree of abiding, substitution rather than in-stitution, does this not sound like Odysseus on the beach of the Phaiákians? And does it not describe Odysseus’ encounter with Demódokos? Odysseus appropriates the bard’s perspective at the moment of his perception of his own annihilation, at the moment when the self by which he has constructed his identity for all these years is unavoidably shaped by the forces over which he has no control, forces by which his own life, even his own death, is capable of being told by another, and it is as if, as Freud says, in defining the end of a psychoanalysis, this could go on forever. “To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, / creeps in this petty pace from day to day,” Macbeth learns. All promises are illusory. All our self constructions are “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” And at the moment of that pronouncement Macbeth can act. Rewrite the story. Tell his own. It is not a positive course that Macbeth takes in deposing the king, not an admirable one. But it is a new one. And does not this view give us a new view of Oedipus? We have suggested the way Sophocles stages Oedipus’ appropriation of the Tiresian view. “The child’s mother had the heart?” (to consent to the murder of the infant Oedipus), Oedipus asks the Theban shepherd, and the Herdsman replies: “she was afraid of evil oracles.” And at that moment, Oedipus blinds himself and assumes the mythic guilt.88 Is it not his awareness of substitution, Levinas, Otherwise Than Being (2000), 117. “What oracles?” Oedipus asks. And the Herdsman replies “It was said that the child would kill its father.” “Then how came you to give the child up to this old man?” Oedipus asks. The Herdsman: “I was sorry for it, master, and I thought he would take it away to another country, where he came

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of complete and thoroughgoing subjection, on the one hand, and his sense of substitutability for everyone on the other, that allows him to mimetically appropriate the Tiresian view? The movement from epic to tragedy would seem to be among other things the move to making explicit this substitutional structure. If Sophocles has a different response—telling the story rather than reconstructing it—and if Odysseus anticipates the path of Sophocles rather than that of Oedipus, the thematizing of the subjectivity at its root would appear to be the same. To our questions—how does Odysseus move from the episode of the Sirens to the moment he has a provisioned ship ready to depart with him for Ithaka? What is at the heart of his Odyssey? What allows Odysseus’s homecoming? What allows him to move from adventurer to king, from hero to subject of responsibility? What corresponds in Homer to what Levinas names the logic of substitution, the status of being a hostage without oppression? What allows him to change his name from “Nohbdy” to “Odysseus,” to make his language answerable, and to separate language from violence?—we would appear to have an answer. Odysseus recognizes his hostage status with regard to the Phaiákians and that recognition—which confers upon him substitutability for anyone—opens him to the possibility of moving on, of mimetically appropriating the position of the bard and returning home. Odysseus can come home if he can move from adventurer to story-teller. He can make that move if he can tell the story of his own death. He can tell that story (in other than imaginary fashion) if he embraces his status as a hostage by which he learns his substitutability for anyone, and thereby his responsibility for everyone before everyone, as Dostoyevsky might say. What allows him, in short, to make the move are the laws of hospitality. The Odyssey is dominated by the system of hospitality. Hospitality is more than welcome to the stranger. Hospitality is one half of the sacred distinction by which all of Greek life is divided, the contest Nietzsche understood so well, the contests of the home in contrast with the contests outside of the home, and in particular on the field of warfare.89 It is not insignificant that Homer is from; but he saved it for the most dreadful destiny. For if you are the man / he says you are, know that you were born to misery.” And now Oedipus issues his last word before fleeing the stage: “Alas, alas! All fulfilled, all true! O light, let me now look on you for the last time, I who have been revealed as born from whom I ought not [to have been born], associating with whom I ought not, and having killed whom I should not.” See Vellacott, Sophocles and Oedipus (1971), 78. 89 See Nietzsche’s essay, “Homer’s Contest”; in Levy (1911), 49–61 and Kaufmann (1954), 32–9.

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remembered for two epics—for one describing warfare and for one describing homecoming. The distinction between the home and the fields of war is fundamental. The distinction is between two modalities of the sacred: the home fires (the hearth), and the fires of battle. Gender is apportioned accordingly. The place of the woman is in the home. The place of the man is in the field of battle. Both are forms of contest. But for the pre-fifth century Greek, the two should never be mixed. The rituals of warfare should never be confused with the rituals of the home. The contests of war—hand-to-hand combat, combat with weaponry—are never to be confused with the contests of home—bard with bard singing, athlete with athlete struggle, dancer with dancer body movement, etc. Into this conceptual matrix arrives the Trojan war. The Trojan war was conceived by the Greeks as fundamentally a matter of the violation of hospitality. Paris was invited for dinner and left with dessert. And so all the Greek heroes—Agamémnon, Odysseus, Achilles, and so forth—rallied to the side of Menelaios. For ten years, the Achaian forces besieged Troy without success. And then the idea came to them. They could win only by doing to the Trojans what the Trojans did to the Greeks: by betraying them in the realm of hospitality, by giving them a house gift they would never forget. And so the Trojan horse was conceived, the gift that keeps on giving, the poisoned gift, the gift gone bad, the gift employed “when givers prove unkind.” Even the wiles of Helen against her own countrymen—beseeching them nightly in Sirenic voice to reveal themselves and be slaughtered—did not prevail. The Greek forces under cover of night slipped into the city, and took King Priam and all his forces. How did the homecoming of others fare? The most famous story, the background against which The Odyssey was played out, was of course the history of Agamémnon as dramatized later by Aeschylus. Agamémnon returned home to a situation in which his wife, Clytemnestra, had become a warrior, and whose response to her husband’s sacrifice of their daughter, Iphigeneia, is to give him a bath he will never forget, to wash him in such a way that he never needs cleaning again, to toss out the baby with the bath water: to wrap and garrote him in the bath robe used for sacrificial victims. Against Agamémnon’s homecoming, Homer tells the story of Odysseus. How does it differ? It differs precisely in so far as Odysseus is able to reestablish the system of differences destroyed by the Trojan war. Foremost among those differences at home is the presence of suitors who have undone the protection a house



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customarily provides. They have brought warfare into the home. And with it all the contests normally associated with home assume a perverse air. Against that invasion little is effective. As time creeps on its petty pace, Penelope begins to despair and announces she will marry and move on, although each night she undoes that resolve. Telemachus reaches a similar conclusion. He gains the wisdom (through Athena) to set a limit, to seek for his father with deliberate and stepped up effort, but after set a time to give up the project, bless his mother’s marriage to someone other than his father, and move on with his life. So the main activity of homecoming for Odysseus will be the reestablishment of the difference that has been violated, the shutting of the doors between the inside and the outside, the home and the marketplace or agora, the bed and the field of warfare, to reestablish himself as king and citizen of Ithaka, to reestablish him as father and husband and master. This he will do with the help of his son, Telemachus, in battle, with the help of his servant, Eumaios, in the shepherd’s shanty, with the nurse in the scene with the scar, with Penelope in her bedroom, with his father Laertes, and even with his mother in Hades the underworld. The demands of the orphan (Telemachus without a father), of the widow (Penelope without her husband), and of the disenfranchised poor (Eumaios, the serving woman [Eurýkleia], his mother, his father without his mastery of the house), will all be answered. The prophet’s task, we read in the Hebrew Bible, is to respect the demands of the orphan, the widow, and the disenfranchised poor of all varieties. But there is one more demand to which he will respond. What makes all of this possible for Odysseus—all of this reestablishment of order at home, the closing of the doors and reestablishment of differences—is his experience among the Phaiákians. For it is as a stranger in a strange land that he is met by them on the shores of the kingdom. And it is in context of the host-guest relationship that he relearns hospitality and from which all else will follow. There is a model for this relationship the reader has already experienced. In Book IV of The Odyssey, we watched it occur with Telemachus upon his arrival in the house of Nestor and subsequently that of Menelaios. First you rest. Then you bathe. Then you eat. Then you are entertained. Then you eat again and rest again. And then, and only then, someone says “So, why have you come?” The scene at the court of Alkinoös is similar. Odysseus is fed. He is offered a place to sleep. He is offered a song by the bard and when he weeps, that is cut off so as not to displease him. He is offered a competition to stir his

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adventurous spirit. He is offered household tasks—the tying of the chest, the stringing of a bow, etc. He is offered a second tale, about a lame husband who is able nonetheless to triumph over his warlike adversary—Hephaestos over Ares and his affair with Hephaestos’ wife, Aphroditê. He is offered a third tale of Odysseus and the Trojan war. And finally, and only then, does Alkinoös say “Okay, so what’s the deal? Why have you come? What do you want? Who are you?” Why is Odysseus now able to tell them his tale while he was unable to do so before? Because he has been treated hospitably. There is a story told by Claude Lévi-Strauss, in an essay called “The Sorcerer’s Cure,” that demonstrates this idea.90 A woman is not able to do what is necessary to do to bring about childbirth. The shaman sings her a song, and afterwards, she is able to bring her childbirth to a conclusion: she is integrated into the community and becomes a part of it. What is the nature of the cure? She has become integrated into the community from which she was alienated by appropriating the song of the shaman that describes that path, a song that puts everything in order. In the same way, Odysseus is treated hospitably and mimetically appropriates not just the song of Demódokos but the entirety of the hospitality system. The Phaiákians sing for him the entirety of their culture. And as a result he is cured. He gives up the Trojan war. He has not been able to return home because he has not given up the war to this point. He can do so now because the community endorses his appropriation of the hospitality system. The system of hospitality is a sacred system. If we are hospitable to strangers, who knows but that the gods may be hospitable to us. Think of Abraham at the oaks of Mamre, and of the three strangers to whom he showed hospitality (although in the Hebraic setting other considerations come into play).91 In the Greek setting, the stranger is always potentially a god in disguise. Only if you show hospitality to the stranger (and equally to any and all strangers) can you insure that you have done all you can do. Greek culture in the ancient fifth century is a system of city-states, not of cities. There is the polis and outside there is a “no man’s land.” Travel between city-states is always treacherous at best—think of Oedipus and Laius. The inside is the place of spoken Greek and the language of reasonable exchange. Outside is the place of barbarism, intrigue, and violent assault. See Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (1967). Goodhart, “G/hosts, Guests, Strangers, and Enemies: The Promise of Hospitality” (2013), 90–105.

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Odysseus is treated hospitably and responds in kind. He recognizes in the hospitality of the Phaiákians (his hosts), his own status as a hostage, a hostage status without persecution; the logic of substitution, a radical passivity before, interchangeability with, and responsibility for everyone around him; and the language of answerability, of naming, since it is upon him (and him alone), that these things are incumbent if his life is to change. He will once again make good his boast (with Seareach, for example). He will recognize that he could as easily be discarded by them (his hosts) and he would have no recourse (hosts can quickly become enemies, and hostage status can quickly convert to hostility). He is hostage to his hosts and to the host–guest relationship, which is the sacred relation to the gods and he is interchangeable with anyone else. ***** What propels Odysseus from one episode of the Sirens to another, in other words, from Polyphemous to the Sirenic Sisters, to Demódokos, to become himself a singer of tales, to sing the song of difference between the inside and the outside of his own house, to take on yet one more new name and to tell the story of his own odyssey as Homer, is the perspective of hospitality in its entirety. The Sirens are the singers of the songs of hospitality gone wrong. They promise hospitality that is not hospitality, that leads the consenting recipient to crash upon the shores. They are the false prophets who denounce sacrifice only to destroy it further, not in order to encourage a new anti-sacrificial system, but rather to lead to destruction those who adhere to its voice. They are the advocates not of remedy but of crisis. What Odysseus discovers among the Phaiákians is true prophecy, the songs that prophesy rather than promise, songs that are based upon the dramas in which human beings are engaged and that name in advance the ends of those dramas in order that human beings may choose to go there or not, rather than songs that minister to immediate desires or fears. He learns that there are good bards and there are bad. Homer and Demódokos are good bards; Polyphemous, Kirkê, the Sirens, and Kalypso are among the bad, although sometimes the two groups can be interchanged—the bad can do good and vice versa. He will learn to turn to the good ones rather than to the bad ones, and to the power of the gods rather than to the sacralizing power of the aesthetic, which is to say, that which delights the eyes, the ears, the touch, the taste, and the smell. And at the heart of this prophetic and anti-sacrificial account? The posthumous. The story of my death. Recall the words of Foucault.

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And when, as a stranger among the Phaiákians, he hears in another’s voice the tale, already a thousand years old, of his own history, it is as if he were listening to his own death: he covers his face and cries, in the gesture of a woman to whom the dead body of a hero is brought after a battle. Against this speech which announces his death and arises from deep within the new Odyssey as from an older time, Ulysses must sing the song of his identity and tell of his misfortunes to escape the fate presented to him by a language before language. And he pursues this fictive speech, confirming and dissipating its powers at the same time, into this space, which borders death but is also poised against it, where the story locates its natural domain.92 (my italics)

Foucault’s articulation of the posthumous perspective from which Odysseus speaks offers us an opening to the literary, to a theory of the literary as the Möbian, and the Möbian as specifically the posthumous, as a “language before language.” The “language to infinity” he identifies within Homer’s epic, the fictive language that with its long descriptions and twenty-four books constitutes the The Odyssey, confirms and dissipates death. Language’s capacity to repeat itself indefinitely, without limit, in response to a perceived threat to its continued existence from the hollowness or void perceived around it and encroaching upon it, constitutes its saving grace. Language turns its mirror toward itself and the mise en abyme effect it engenders stops, paralyzes, the external threat in its tracks, stabilizing that threat, neutralizing its dangers. Confronted with his own death as a past event, Odysseus tells his own story, filling the night with talk. He identifies the character within the story as himself—the flesh and blood man standing there before them—and takes the story on as his own. Not unlike Scheherazade, although with more initial reticence, he speaks in order not to die. And that appropriative and acknowledging gesture does for him what in all previous episodes with the Sirens he could not do. It confers upon its user a strange power. It engenders possibility—and in this case, in particular, homecoming. The doors to the danger without can now be shut tight. The laws of hospitality return with a new and unexpected force. The Phaiákians arm the story-teller with a ship, sailors, and provisions, and send him contentedly on his way. He will proceed to reenact that shutting of the doors in his own world as his language—posthumous and Möbian in the sense that we have defined it—has already performed the same for them. In a sense, he will simply follow the script Foucault, “Language to Infinity,” in Faubion (1998), 89–90.

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already mapped out for him in advance, mapped out by his taking ownership of the name and the story they have been fictionalizing together. How has he come to assume that position? That assumption of ownership has itself been premised upon his trip to the underworld, to the world beyond the shades (the domain of the dead, and his encountering there of his mother, the prophet Tiresias, and fellow soldiers, among others). Listening to his own history as if he were listening to his own death, he discovers the possibility of hearing from the point of view of an other, of Penelope before the news of her dead lord, or of his mother Antikleía, whose life ebbed away from the anxiety of abandonment, or of the Phaiákians who loved and thrived upon these stories of human heroism. In other words, he hears as if he is listening to his own death. He responds with “language to infinity.” His “language to infinity” recounts his own history which includes his death. This doubling back of language upon itself, which takes as its premise its own mortality, this “language before language,” we dub the Möbian. And we indentify the Möbian structure of language as the literary. Does Odysseus, then, simply return to the home he left? Before the Trojan war, the laws of hospitality governed. With the coming of the Trojan war, those laws were abrogated. Has he now simply returned to them? If that were the case, how could he guarantee that the laws would work this time around? Who is to say that another Trojan war would not come along and destroy things once again? In fact, he has acquired a new weapon, the power of the literary. The Odyssey has gained in Homer’s hands a new portability. Culture itself has become instrumentalized, a moveable feast. The tale of Demódokos is like the tales he has heard before, and unlike them. The tale of Demódokos is sung the first time; Odysseus weeps, the tale is stopped, and he retires. But then he experiences the athletic games, the entertainments with the dancers, and other assorted similar activities, and what happens? He requests of Demódokos to sing. You sing well—as if you yourself were there, or heard the story from one who was. So now, sing again of Odysseus and the wooden horse. “Sing only this for me,” and “sing me this well,” and I will proclaim before all the divine origin of your skill.93 This time, it is the divine origin of your skill, the “song of songs” so to speak, I request, and as if you yourself were there. The posthumous has been subsumed within the hospitable, and the old hospitable has been replaced by a new hospitable. If he can no longer be a hero (or weep over that loss) he can in fact weep Cf. VIII.505–17, Fitzgerald translation, cited above.

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“the way a wife mourns for her lord,” dying there on the field of battle. He can become a king who can reclaim his rightful place as citizen, husband, father, son, and as master of his household and his fate. At the center of that new responsibility, that new assumption of an old responsibility (one that was always there waiting for him), is a new identity: the announcement of (and answerability for) his name, the singing of his story—from Kyklopes to Kalypso, from one Siren to another Siren—and the preparations for his trip home. I can recognize my infinite responsibility for the other, a responsibility that is my only possible response to the il y a, in so far as I recognize my status as a hostage (before my host) and accept the logic of my radical passivity and thus substitutability for anyone else in the kingdom (and consequently my responsibility for everyone else in the kingdom); for a woman without a husband, for the disenfranchised, and for the orphaned. In so far as I recognize the needs of my wife, my son (and other members of my family), and my household (and its larger place in the community), I can return home. Can we confirm this strange “power of the posthumous” outside of the context of The Odyssey? Is there a way in which this encounter is paradigmatic of what occurs elsewhere in literature, in other writing we have chosen to call the “literary”? Or to employ a less representational vocabulary in posing the question, is there a way in other works we locate within the category of the literary there is something like the mise en abyme that Foucault has identified in The Odyssey? And if we name in particular this “infinite” or unlimited capacity of language to bend back upon itself, to double itself from within in the face of a mortal nocturnal threat, the “Möbian,” then is other literary writing able to be appropriately dubbed Möbian as well? In fact, we are not there yet. The structure of hospitality that informs The Odyssey is not identical with the understanding of hospitality that informs the Hebrew prophets or even Greek tragic writing. Homer opens the door to the literary. The structure of the literary, he teaches us, is necessarily autobiographical. The heroic adventurer becomes the bard-like story-teller and the change enables his homecoming. But even within Homer, he is restless and does not remain at home. Odysseus will leave again and in fact his death will occur later, after other journeys, and once he has planted his oar in the ground, and made ceremonious sacrifice to Poseidon, in an episode Homer has chosen not to represent, and to which he refers only obliquely.



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Death will come to you from the sea, in some altogether unwarlike way, and it will end you in the ebbing time of sleek old age.94

The movement from The Odyssey to “The Song of Songs,” so to speak, has not yet been accomplished. What would it take to accomplish that passage? We know the answer in outline. What it would take is a movement from the sacred to the holy, du sacré au saint (in the French), from the sacrificial to the ethical. A full account of the literary would require that we consider its Möbian structure—its posthumous structure—in all three of its manifestations: as epic, as tragedy, and as scripture; or, in other words, as structured autobiographically, anti-sacrificially, and in the manner of prophetic midrashic revelation. It is time, in other words, to return to the questions with which we opened this inquiry. How does this account of Odysseus’s homecoming answer the questions with which we began? How does Odysseus’ learning to identify episodes of the Sirens and to accept with renewed enthusiasm the laws of hospitality—to separate in short, the promissory from the prophetic—enable us to bring to the discussion and the book of which it is the final chapter to a close? How can what we have said so far provide a basis for a general theory of the literary, one that clarifies the problems we have tried to raise, and in particular the relation between the Möbian, aesthetics, and death?

The Odyssey, Book XI.120–37, Richard Lattimore translation (1967).

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“I died in Auschwitz”: Literary Reading, the Möbian, and the Posthumous I heard a Fly buzz—when I died— Emily Dickinson1 I am Lazarus, come from the dead, Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all— T. S. Eliot2 I have done it again. ................... Dying Is an art, like everything else. Sylvia Plath3 “Rabbi, have you noticed we are without a sun today?” …   “My shutters are closed against the noise.” “Did no one else mention it in morning prayers?”   “No one else arrived,” said the rabbi, continuing to study.   “Well, don’t you think that strange?”   “I had. I had until you told me about this sun. Now I understand—no sensible man would get up to greet a dawn that never came.” “This is all very startling, rabbi. But I think we—at some point in the night— have died.” Nathan Englander4

3 4 1 2

“I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—” in Ferguson (2005), 1121. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” ibid., 1340, ll. 95–6. “Lady Lazarus,” ibid., 1843. Nathan Englander, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges (1999), 21.

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Part 1: Beckett Two hobos enter the stage at the beginning of Samuel Beckett’s most famous play.5 Our expectations of them are high, and their expectations of themselves equally so. They have met a character named “Godot,” who suggested they meet him (as one of them tells the story) on a certain day at a certain time in a certain place.6 They will wait for him for most of the play, and we will wait for him along with them. There is little else on the stage to divert their (or our) attention. Before the play’s conclusion, both their expectations and our expectations will be met, although not necessarily in the manner we (or they) expect. Two series of things happen in the course of the first act. The characters talk, they eat, they philosophize, they joke, they struggle with their clothing (boots, hats, pants, etc.)—they pass the time, doing all the normal everyday things one would expect them to do while waiting for something to happen, waiting for this one character, with the slightly odd name of “Godot,” to appear. And in the course of that passage, some other, less everyday, more accidental things occur. Two other characters, Pozzo and Lucky—ebullient and excited with their own internal dramas—happen by, and much stage time is spent following their relationship, both with each other and with our two attendant protagonists. Finally, a fifth character appears. A boy, presumably an individual who works for this mysterious Godot, arrives to say that Godot will not come this evening. Instead of the traditional structure of meaning we expect, in other words, it seems we will observe a different structure, a more “absurdist” drama in which we will learn more about what does not occur than what does, less about the missing arrival than about the energy they (and we) have invested (and continue to invest) in attending it. Godot will turn out—whatever else the name signifies—to be the name attached to their expectations. “He said we were to meet him here on this day in this place,” one of them notes at some point.7 We will learn along with the characters what it means to say as much. Act Two thus opens with a heightened sense of expectation. It begins with a kind of prelude—the poem (or song) we have cited at the outset of this

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot. Translated from the original French text by the author (1954). Beckett (1954), 10a. 7 Cf. “Vladimir: We’re waiting for Godot. Estragon: (despairingly). Ah! (Pause.) You’re sure it was here? Vladimir: What? Estragon: That we were to wait. Vladimir: He said by the tree. (They look at the tree.) Do you see any others?” (Beckett [1954], 10a). And then later: “Estragon: You’re sure it was this evening? Vladimir: What? Estragon: That we were to wait. Vladimir: He said Saturday.” 5 6



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present book—which is built upon an internal infinite loop.8 A transgression leads to a retribution that outdoes the original transgression and then tells the story of that transgression and heightened retribution, and that story includes relating the transgression, the retribution, and the story—ad infinitum. The character singing the song—Vladimir—stops for a moment, befuddled, before he continues. Begun as a kind of entertainment, the song assumes a more serious weight for its singer as its infinite or endless quality progressively dawns on him, a movement that may presage in turn what is about to occur in the play at large. And then a curious thing happens. The characters in Act Two—the same as those we saw in Act One—start repeating more or less conversation for conversation, gesture for gesture, all that happened earlier. Again the two lead characters talk, eat, joke, argue, struggle with their clothing, and philosophize. Again they find ways to pass the time. Again Pozzo and Lucky arrive. Some changes have admittedly occurred—between the acts, so to speak. Pozzo is now blind and Lucky is now mute. And one or two new ideas are introduced in the course of Act Two. But by and large, the same drama ensues. Again the boy arrives, again to say that Godot will not come this evening, but surely tomorrow evening. And again Godot does not arrive. Life’s a bitch, it would appear, as the play ends. And then you die. Or do you? In fact, precisely to the extent that Act One does repeat itself in Act Two, I would suggest that we begin to understand something new, an understanding that assumes in general terms the form of what Freud identified as the conclusion of an analysis: namely, that this could go on forever. So much in fact is everything that happens in Act Two like what has happened in Act One that we are led to wonder whether what happened the first time was really “the first time” after all, whether, to the contrary, what we presumed (and what the characters presumed) to be the first time was already in fact a second time from some other previous “first time” now mired in obscurity. And this new insight leads us quickly to another. If Act One was never really “Act One” (but “Act Two” to some previous lost Act One), what gives us confidence that that earlier Act Two was ever really Act Two to begin with? We begin to wonder whether what happened last time was in fact already the nth time, a repetition of some “first” time now lost forever in the immemorial past Beckett (1954), 37a–b. For a partial citation of this passage, see the Introduction above. For a more thorough analysis, see Part 5 below.

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(if in fact there was ever anything like an original event), in a structure that moreover will repeat itself forever, and thus a structure not unlike the poem marking the interval between Act One and Act Two, cited in our head note to the introduction to this book. Or to put it in still another way, what gives us confidence that what happened “yesterday” happened yesterday and not eons ago, that “Act One” and “Act Two” are connected in some temporal contiguity, and not simply lodged as two arbitrary diachronic moments in such larger drama that has been unwittingly repeating itself incessantly? And the idea of that second repetition, that potentially nth repetition, then, in turn and as a consequence does something unexpected. It curiously confers yet a new meaning upon all they have experienced—perhaps the very meaning they have been awaiting, the meaning of the vague sense of meaninglessness they have been experiencing (and that we have been experiencing along with them) in “Act One” while waiting for meaning to arrive. Or more precisely, what begins to dawn on them (and on us) is that that earlier meaninglessness may in fact have been entirely meaningful although in an entirely unexpected fashion: that we have been dying while waiting for meaning to arrive, when in fact all we ever needed to do is stop. Like Kafka’s “man from the country” who comes before the guard to beg admittance to the law, what they begin to suspect (and what we begin to suspect) is that all they needed to do, at some point along the way, was, precisely, something else. What has effectively passed them by, while they were waiting for Godot to appear and their lives to begin, has been their lives.9 This potential—to stop, to give up the procedures under way—is made clear within the play itself as the end of Act Two approaches. “And if we dropped him?” one of the characters muses, and the other quickly retorts, “He’d punish us.”10 They protect themselves against exiting with a non-sequitur that may prove more symptomatic of their dilemma than a commentary upon it. Beckett’s play in that way is not unlike Sartre’s No Exit; and this play is in some ways Beckett’s version of his contemporary’s drama. The characters cannot leave the theater they have created for themselves, even if the door stands wide open for them. The hell in which they are locked, in which they continue to exist even after death, is an inferno of their own making, an inferno they constructed and now are condemned to live out. Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories (1995). Beckett (1954), 59b.

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On the other hand, by virtue of that lack of freedom, if they cannot leave, we have the capacity to do so. We can leave the theater, we who have after all also freely attended this scene. The whole thrust of Act Two in fact is, I would suggest, upon the potential for freedom, upon what we as audience can do that they cannot, or upon what they can do that the individuals they meet along the road can no longer do. As they say “Let’s go” and do not move in the play’s final sequence (in a gesture that repeats a series of similar gestures throughout the play), so we are capable of leaving the theater, recognizing in the process that we have had the capability of doing that all along. In some productions I have attended, the final curtain does not in fact fall upon the actors, and the audience is compelled to exit the theater (and the drama it stages) self-consciously, to “walk out” on the actors, so to speak, if only to exercise the capacity to do so. The idea of this Godot who never arrives continues to fascinate us long after we make our exit. Is there some trick solution to this conundrum that we have missed, we sometimes wonder? If the character they have presumably met never returns, is there a way in which there are some other “secondary” Godots available on the scene for our intellectual employment? What, after all, is the significance of the name? Is it a combination of “Gogo” and “Didi”—Go(go) plus Di(di) —with the second syllable altered to match the first? Does it mean “God” or “small God,” containing as it does the English word God within it? If we await Godot, and if Godot will let us know when he arrives where we stand (as one of the characters suggests at one point), then is Godot not something like a minor deity? One of the innovations of a recent production in English (influenced by the production Beckett himself directed later in his life) was the pronunciation of the word “Godot” which was made to sound like “God-oh” with the accent on the first syllable, perhaps an echo of the American appellation “Daddy-oh” used in the 1950s in the Bohemian language circulating for example in and around New York City.11 Or, to take still another approach, do not each of the characters in some sense play “Godot” for each other? Vladimir for Estragon (and Estragon for Vladimir)? Pozzo for Lucky (and Lucky for Pozzo)? The name “Pozzo” in Italian, which means “well” or “shaft,” can be pronounced in a way that sounds like “pazzo,” meaning “mad” or “crazy.” “Lucky” was a name also used in the 1950s in America assigned to a carefree happy-go-lucky guy—an ironic appellation used, for example, in See “Beckett Directs Beckett” at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqpjddXaw4E (accessed April 6, 2017).

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the naming of a figure of the American Mafioso mythology—Lucky Luciano. Is not “playing Godot” for each other in fact precisely what defines relationship in this play? Does not “Godot” mean in the simplest sense that which will save us? Is that not what René Girard has been writing about with regard to mimetic desire in the nineteenth-century novel—namely, the way in which the romantic heroes of our most famous novels enchain themselves to others in a manner that a reader of Hegel’s Phenomenology would recognize as slave to master, a relation signaled in the quote from Max Scheler that Girard places as a head note to his essay?12 And so in that sense, Godot has never stopped appearing. What is missing is only something like a transcendental signifier. None of these characters, of course, are “the” Godot. The vague sense that someone may have said he would meet us here at this place at this time on this day, plus the boy’s daily characterizations, are presented credibly enough. But they are about all we learn regarding the arrangement with Vladimir and Estragon. Perhaps there was a Godot and we (or they) missed him entirely. “Godot,” we gradually begin to realize, may constitute somewhat metaphorically an enigmatic reference to whatever reality gives meaning to their lives and lets them know where they stand. The arrival of Pozzo and Lucky is insufficient to accomplish that task for Vladimir and Estragon, although Pozzo and Lucky have their own sources of meaning—derived from their relationship with each other. The name “Godot” that Vladimir and Estragon recite means little to Pozzo and Lucky. And the boy retains his own Godot—presumably, the same one they await—but by the end of Act One, he has still failed to appear. Godot in short will turn out to be the name attached to an imagined (if not imaginary) individual, a force, an idea—serving as an interlocutor, or conversation partner—from whom in their view they have derived the structure that governs their current predicament. Our expectations about what constitutes reality in the Platonic–Aristotelian West are based upon a notion of time conceived in a very specific way, and in particular upon a set of immutable assumptions: that what has occurred in the past really has already occurred; that what will occur in the future really has not yet occurred (and that once it does it will look in retrospect reasonably like the René Girard’s Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1965) originally appeared in France in 1961. On page 33 of De la violence à la divinité (2007), at the beginning of the section on Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque, we read “L’homme possède ou un Dieu ou une idole” (“Man possesses either a God or an idol”) and the citation is assigned to “Max Scheler.” For Hegel’s work, see The Phenomenology of Spirit (1977) and especially the reading of Chapter 4 by Alexander Kojève in his influential Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1980), “In Place of an Introduction,” 3–30.

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past); and that what occurs in the present really is occurring now somewhere, if not immediately before us, then within a reasonable proximity, and that it is fundamentally distinguishable from past and future. Moreover, that this time or temporality is linked in an important way to death. Time, in the English poet William Wordsworth’s conception of things, for example, is often said to be “death minus now”—and “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” is cited as a primary example. Time in this context is something like the filler between the two certain realities available to us, our death and the present moment. Time describes the interval between the two, the distance between death and now. What if time has stopped for these characters? “But I must really be getting along, if I am to observe my schedule,” Pozzo says at one point. And Vladimir straightaway answers him: “Time has stopped.”13 If that is true, if time has stopped, then what we imagine to have occurred may or may not have occurred. And what we imagine as yet to happen may or may not happen (what is past may for example not yet have happened, and what is yet to occur may already have occurred). And what if it has stopped because for all intents and purposes they are dead? They imagine a future with a Godot (or God-oh, in Beckett’s pronunciation) who will arrive based upon their imagination of a past with a Godot who did arrive and has spoken with them. But what if that formulation only obtains when time is intact, when death remains a “viable” future potential so to speak? The possibility of death ironically offers the possibility of a future.14 But if that possibility has been abrogated, then the future in which Godot will arrive may never occur, not because there is a future and Godot will not arrive in it (for whatever reason) but because there simply is no future (and is no past). All that remains is the present. Godot has said to them he would arrive And all things being equal, we have no reason to think he would not have done so, no reason to challenge their account of him or his account to them. But if time itself has stopped, then whatever future drama might have played out has stopped as well. All that remains is the elemental. Cultural constructions of time and space have in effect evaporated. Beckett (1954), 24b. What is absurd for Blanchot is not the appearance of death in the face of life (which is in fact the guarantor of meaning) but its absence. “Death alone allows me to grasp what I want to attain,” Blanchot writes. “[It] exists in words as the only way they can have meaning. Without death, everything would sink into absurdity and nothingness.” See “Literature and the Right to Death” in The Work of Fire (1995), 324. Cf. also Adorno’s remark on “the annihilation of death”: “In the camps, death has a novel horror; since Auschwitz, fearing death means fearing worse than death.” See Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (1987), 371. Adorno’s remark is cited by Fackenheim and others as the foundation for “planet Auschwitz.”

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“Everything’s dead but the tree,” one of the characters observes at some point, and Beckett’s play seems to have worked out in full the literal consequences of that insight.15 Like Sartre, what Beckett understands, in other words, is that in the shadow of the devastations of the early twentieth century, something else is lost beyond the possibility of relying upon liberal humanism. It is death itself that is no longer meaningful, death which has been the very foundation of our conception of time, that has gone missing from its customary place in the future. We often identify this period in literary study, after Martin Esslin’s enigmatic phrase, as “Theater of the Absurd.” Sartre, Camus, Anouilh, Genet, Beckett, Artaud, Ionesco—all the noted writers of the early postwar period in France, we say—share in this one idea, that there is an absurdity or meaninglessness at the heart of our human experience that is in some way linked to death. But what if we have misunderstood what that means? What if it is not death that is absurd but its absence? As long as we have a way out, as long as we feel there is a future, we may engender meaning—even if it is the anticipation of death. On the other hand, what happens if we take away that anticipation? What if death is no longer an obstacle because it has already occurred? What if time, as we have constituted it in the Aristotelian West, has been an elaborate ruse? Then the only possible recourse is to face what we have been avoiding by means of that excuse, a predicament that at least one postwar French thinker identifies as full responsibility for the other individual, for the neighbor, and by extension for human relations at large. In other words, what if Vladimir and Estragon are locked in here (wherever “here” is) forever? We do have the sense that for them it is already too late, that this play has begun after the capacity to get out has expired, that we have understood their freedom relative to Pozzo and Lucky even if they have not. What if we eliminate the object of desire, not because it is no longer desirable, or because it is no longer available, but simply because it is just out of reach forever? What if we find ourselves like the lover on Keats’ Grecian urn? What if art has eliminated death from the equation, if it begins with the premise that death has already occurred, and what remains is simply our dying? What if our “arrest” and the beginning of the process of our inevitable demise—“like a dog”—inaugurates the account of our experience rather than constituting an “Estragon: And if we dropped him? (Pause.) If we dropped him? Vladimir: He’d punish us. (Silence. He looks at the tree.) Everything’s dead but the tree. Estragon: (looking at the tree). What is it? Vladimir: It’s the tree. Estragon: Yes, but what kind? Vladimir: I don’t know. A willow. (Estragon draws Vladimir towards the tree. They stand motionless before it. Silence.).” See Beckett (1954), 59b.

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articulation of our dreaded future? The world imagined by Kafka in The Trial may not be as far off the mark as it is sometimes thought to be. It may describe not only the prewar period and its anxieties but those born of the disaster as well.16

Part 2: Literature and Afterdeath In other words, Beckett’s play enumerates for us in the modern setting what Foucault and Blanchot make available to us in Homer’s Odyssey, what we might dub its four dimensions: (1) the nature of the literary as autobiography and performativity; (2) the nature of the Möbian as the logic of the literary, a counter-representational and counter-aesthetic logic of continuity between inside and outside; (3) the nature of disaster as the enabling condition and referential source of that literary writing; and (4) the nature of the posthumous or “afterdeath” or dying, as its necessary consequence.17 If we accept this characterization, then it would seem we have misapprehended the literary for a very long time. Blanchot for example acknowledges the “generally accepted ideas about art and the work of art,” ideas that, for example, he says “André Gide, in the wake of so many others, called upon.”18 The reasons which lead me to write [Gide asserts, in Blanchot’s citation] are many, and the most important are, it seems to me, the most secret. Especially, perhaps, this one: to shelter something from death.19

Blanchot comments. We render death vain, in the story we tell ourselves, through the work we do, which in this case is the act of writing: to write is in order not to die, to entrust oneself to the survival of the work: this motive is apparently what keeps the artist at his task. Genius confronts death; the work is death rendered vain, or transfigured, or, in the evasive words of Proust, made “less bitter,” “less inglorious,” and “perhaps less probable.” Perhaps.20

Franz Kafka, The Trial (1964), 229. I borrow the term afterdeath gratefully from Lawrence L. Langer although I use it somewhat differently. See “Seeing the Holocaust: How Testimonies Fill the Vacant Spaces of Atrocity” (2012). 18 Blanchot (1989), 94. 19 Gide’s words, from Journals, July 27, 1922, cited by Blanchot in The Space of Literature (1989), 94. 20 Ibid., 94. 16 17

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And yet, however often we say it, and however celebrated the artists who affirm it, this solution quickly ceases to be satisfying. “Do you want to live on in your films?” the filmmaker is asked, and replies, “I want to live on in my apartment in New York City.” “Death, be not proud,” John Donne strategically asserted some four hundred years ago, “though some have called thee / Mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so;” One short sleep past, we wake eternally, And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.”21

The problem with the standard argument, in other words, is that it is selfdefeating. It depends upon the very structure it would thwart. In an effort to defeat death, to take it down from its puffed-up heights, the argument relies upon death’s invincibility. “Death, thou shalt die,” it says. Or, put the other way around, in an effort to extol life as a triumph over death, we exhibit its idols; its unchanging stylized manifestations, ironically at odds with the very life and change we would extol. Blanchot readily attests to his dissatisfaction with this kind of explanation. We will not rebut these traditional dreams attributed to creators by remarking that they are recent—that, belonging to our modern, occidental world, they are connected to the development of humanistic art, where man seeks to glorify himself in his works and to act in them, perpetuating himself in this action. All this is certainly important and meaningful. But art, at this juncture, is no longer anything but a memorable way of becoming one with history.22

It is not a matter of refuting these popular notions of art, which after all (Blanchot affirms) probably derive from the thematizing of the secular and the human in art history. It is not much more than a projective and ego-based rationalizing attempt to align oneself with historical process. And this rationalizing process applies to great historical figures as well as creative artists. Great historical figures, heroes, great men of war no less than artists shelter themselves from death in this way: they enter the memory of peoples; they are examples, active presences.23

Holy Sonnet #10. Ferguson (2005). Blanchot (1989), 93. Ibid.

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But our interest in such a strategy quickly wanes once we recognize it is not serious thinking and in fact defeats its own purpose. This form of individualism soon ceases to be satisfying. It soon becomes clear that if what is important is primarily the process which is history—action in the world, the common striving toward truth—it is vain to want to remain oneself above and beyond one’s disappearance, vain to desire immutable stability in a work which would dominate time. This is vain and, moreover, the opposite of what one wants, which is not to subsist in the leisurely eternity of idols, but to change, to disappear in order to cooperate in the universal transformation: to act anonymously and not to be a pure, idle name.24

And as a result, Blanchot is led to reject it as an error. If triumph over death is the goal, there are other ways to effectively pursue that goal. From this perspective, creators’ dreams of living on through their works appear not only small-minded but mistaken, and any true action, accomplished anonymously in the world and for the sake of the world’s ultimate perfection, seems to affirm a triumph over death that is more rigorous, more certain. At least such action is free of the wretched regret that one cannot be oneself for longer.25

But something interesting then appears. Projective and faulty as they are, these popular dreams reveal a real concern with death that is shared with more serious writers: in both, death is a requirement. … . these dreams, then, are striking in this: they show “creators” engaged in a profound relation with death. And this relation, despite appearances, is the one Kafka pursued also. Both he and they want death to be possible: he in order to grasp it, they in order to hold it at a distance. The differences are negligible. They are set in one perspective, which is the determination to establish with death a relation of freedom.26 Ibid. Ibid., 93–4. 26 Ibid., 94. Jorge Luis Borges reminds us just how unsatisfying this form of transcendence of death may be—and how unchanging, stagnant, and ironically un-lifelike such an image is—in his parodic version of a conflict between the flesh and blood human being and the known public figure. “The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to,” Borges writes, in “Borges and I (1984).” (Yates and Irby [1964], 246–7). “I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor… . I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me… . I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, … Thus my life is a flight and I lose 24 25

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The reference to Kafka in this connection is not capricious. For the young Blanchot, this interregnum Jewish writer offers an alternative and viable approach to the literary. “I do not separate myself from men in order to live in peace, but in order to be able to die in peace.” Kafka writes in his Diary. “If I do not save myself in some work, I am lost.”27 Living for Kafka is already dying. And writing is dying as well. But at least in writing, Kafka surmises, he can explore that dying. He can die in tranquility, “in peace.” “Here death, tranquil death [Blanchot writes], is represented as the wages of art; it is the aim and the justification of writing.” The writer, then, is one who writes in order to be able to die, and he is one whose power to write comes from an anticipated relation with death. The contradiction subsists, but is seen in a different light. Just as the poet only exists once the poem faces him, only after the poem, as it were—although it is necessary that first there be a poet in order for there to be a poem—so one senses that if Kafka goes toward the power of dying through the work which he writes, the work itself is by implication an experience of death which he apparently has to have been through already in order to reach the work and, through the work, death… . One can even suppose that the particularly strange relations between artist and work, which make the work depend on him who is only possible within the work—one can even suppose that such an anomaly stems from the experience which overpowers the form of time, but stems more profoundly still from the ambiguity of that experience, from its double aspect which Kafka expresses with too much simplicity in the sentences we ascribe to him: Write to be able to die—Die to be able to write. These words close us into their circular demand; they oblige us to start from what we want to find, to seek nothing but the point of departure, and thus to make this point something we approach only by quitting it. But they also authorize this hope: the hope, where the interminable emerges, of grasping the term, of bringing it forth.28

“The writer … is one whose power to write comes from an anticipated relation with death.” Suddenly Foucault’s analysis—upon which we have relied throughout these two final chapters—returns with a new vitality. “And when, as a stranger among the Phaiákians, he hears in another’s voice the tale, already a thousand years old, of his own history, it is as if he were listening to his own everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him. / I do not know which of us has written this page.” 27 Cited in Blanchot (1989), 93. 28 Blanchot (1989), 93.



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death.” From Homer to Kafka, the concern of the literary remains the same: learning to read from the posthumous. The forms may change. The autobiographical structure of The Odyssey may give way to the more prophetic and crisis-centered structure of Greek tragedy. The tragic prophetic structure of ancient fifth-century Greek drama may give way in turn to the midrashic and revelation-based structure of scriptural writings (in Hebraic and Christian varieties). The scriptural midrashic writings may eventually give way in the West to the more familiar novelistic productions of the European nineteenth century, these strange hybrid forms of a “comic epic in prose” in which the same themes worked out in Homer, Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Hebraic and Christian scripture are passed through the prism of these generic anomalies. But the Möbian structure, the inside/outside logic, the logic of difference (that is really a logic of continuity or extension) behind all of it, remains constant. And with it, concomitantly, the posthumous. “And when … he hears in another’s voice the tale … of his own history, it is as if he were listening to his own death.” Or, as Foucault remarks later, with regard to encountering the Sirens, “one must experience all suffering by remaining at the threshold of the alluring abyss; one must finally find oneself beyond song, as if one had crossed death while still alive only to restore it in a second language.”

Part 3: A New Understanding of the Literary We need, then, I would argue, to expand our consideration of the literary, to understand more fully its Möbian structure, and especially the understanding of the posthumous at its core. We need to look at its double origin in the West; arising as a term in the eighteenth century out of a concern with both less and more than what we mean by the literary today (from sheer literacy on one hand, for example, or from polite learning on the other); and arising as a practice out of the long tradition of Aristotelian poetics, one that begins in the ancient fourth century as a response to Plato, passes through Horace, Longinus, and the Romans, and then reappears later in the European Renaissance through a series of writers that includes Scalinger, Sidney, and Boileau, among many others. We need to look at the theorists in whose hands the idea of literature and the idea of literary criticism is invented in the wake of the meeting of these two cultural traditions; first, in the writings of the German philosophic thinkers in the last decade of the eighteenth century—Schelling, Hegel, the Schlegel

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brothers, Schiller, and others; ten years later in the writings of the English poets and essayists—Wordsworth, Coleridge—and their descendants—Arnold in the end of the nineteenth, and Eliot and Trilling in the beginning of the twentieth, Wellek, Warren, and others after them. And we need to look at its institutional status, its status as sacrificial or anti-sacrificial vis-à-vis the differential structures it is given to regulate. And in all these instances, what we need to zero in on is the posthumous, the role that death plays in this writing, and the extent to which this writing is written from a perspective in which the “story of my death” refers to events that have already occurred. The literary is a practice of the anti-sacrificial, we have argued, in the previous book, and our view on that claim has not changed. By the “logic of the sacrificial” I continue to refer to the extraordinary work of René Girard, who offers us a theory of the genesis of difference via the scapegoat mechanism, with the primary examples being for Girard Greek tragedy, and the tradition of the great European novel, from Cervantes to Dostoyevsky. But the anti-sacrificial as a distinct modality in our culture would appear to have at least three separable stages (if not more): (1) a proto-literary stage represented by the examples of primary and to some extent secondary epic, a stage in which the work remains governed by a Möbian structure that shows up as autobiographical; (2) a central stage often regarded as the literary proper and represented by the examples given above of Greek tragedy (and often echoed later by the European novel); this stage is governed by a Möbian structure that Girard describes as the “sacrificial crisis,” and that moves in his work through a variety of stages itself, from difference and social harmony, to the breakdown of difference or “undifferentiation” and the threat of war of all against all, to a paroxysmal moment of collective lynching or sacrificial exclusion and the war of all against one, to new differential order, new harmony, and the ability to tell the story of the process (from the perspective of its successful conclusion); but a stage that also may be described as working in accord with a Möbian logic that shows up as Greek prophetic reading; and finally (3) a late stage governed by the midrashic and by revelation, where in our culture the primary examples are Hebraic and Christian scripture, but here as well the exegetical texts (the Talmudic, midrashic, Kabbalistic, and later Rabbinic traditions in Judaism, and the writings of the Church Fathers in the Christian tradition). As instances of the anti-sacrificial, all three stages continue to reflect (in common with all sacrificial and anti-sacrificial structures) a Möbian logical organization, and all focus upon, among other things, the relation to death and



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especially the posthumous. Epic poses the story of the last good man and alternates between adventures and narrative story-telling as its mainstay. Tragedy poses the question of the sacrificial in relation to the anti-sacrificial. Scripture poses the ethical response to the question posed by tragedy. But all follow the logic of the Möbian. In this context we have read the autobiographical logic of Homeric epic with the help of Foucault and Blanchot, the oracular logic of Greek tragedy (and the comic fictional logic of the novel that will imitate it later) with the help of Girard, and the midrashic and prophetic logic of Hebrew and Christian scripture with the help of Buber, Rosenzweig, and Levinas. Reading epic autobiographically, reading tragedy anti-sacrificially, reading scripture midrashically and prophetically, is synonymous in our view to reading in accord with the literary, a literary governed in this case by the Möbian, and a Möbian governed by the posthumous. Reading literature is reading from a literary perspective, reading as literature reads. And reading as literature reads is reading the Möbian and the posthumous.

Part 4: Post-Holocaust Reading Why? Why do we need to read according to the Möbian? Why do we need to read the Möbian according to the posthumous? We promised an answer to this question (at least in its first formulation) in the introduction and before closing the current inquiry, we need to address it more forthrightly. Why now? Why has this understanding of the Möbian and the posthumous surfaced just now, right after the end of the Second World War (so to speak)? Why does this account of the literary—the literary as the Möbian and the Möbian as the posthumous— speak to us so powerfully? The answer to that question is contained, I suggest, within the posing of the question. The answer concerns the Holocaust and the particular legacy it bequeaths to us: namely, the legacy of night. Is it really any wonder that after the war, after the Shoah, the ideas of Blanchot (about Kafka, for example) should acquire such renewed potency? If Kafka’s words are readable today (and Blanchot’s commentary on Kafka suddenly resonates so substantively for us), it can only be because something has happened in the interval, something that renders them readable—legible—in an entirely new fashion. Jean Cayrol spells it out for us. Some died in the camps and did not return. Others survived the camps and returned. And still others died in the camps

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and came back nonetheless.29 It is the member of this last category—those who died in the camps and returned despite their demise—who grant us access in this netherland to this new contemporary version of the posthumous, the posthumous as the return from the dead, or in Cayrolian language, the Lazarean. Recall the words we read earlier in connection with Wiesel’s writing. … the deportee has lived to the point of being worn out his death, his condemnation, his damnation—we must not forget that. The solitude in which he encloses himself—is it not there in order to resolve this frightening interrogation which leaves him sometimes without sensitivity to the problems of his everyday and familial life? He has exhausted within one DP camp or another all the possibilities for dying, all the means of entering into agony, and once he has come back, he has perceived the astonishing liberty that his death has left him, this independence that he guards vis-à-vis his own end. Upon his return, he clashes with the traditional limits of a man’s existence: old age, accidents, illness. That is why this isolation is inseparable from every Lazarean personality. All is a pretext for (protecting) his solitude, for nourishing it, for stocking up on it … . We are for the most part subjects of the Lazarean universe, in all its forms. We are devoured by a fire that we have not ignited … . In short, the Lazarean hero is never there where we find him. He is obligated to complete an immense work of reflection, to think incessantly that he is there and not elsewhere; for he has lived within a world not found anywhere and whose frontiers are not marked since they are those of death.30

“We are for the most part subjects of the Lazarean universe, in all its forms.” In this new universe, a strange new cogito would seem to be warranted (indeed, it is already under foot), a new way of constructing our identity or subjectivity vis-à-vis others, a new way of assuring ourselves of our existence: “I died; therefore, I am.” The more familiar cogito has been with us for some time now, its most famous formulation deriving from the seventeenth century. “Je pense donc je suis,” René Descartes wrote. Or, in Latin, cogito ergo sum. Or, English: “I think; therefore, I am.” Anglo-American philosophic traditions have readily dismissed it. Let us say the claim is true, one analytic tradition argues. That doesn’t mean there are any. We may very well prove the necessary “existence” of the thinking Cf. Elie Wiesel’s remark upon learning of the death of Primo Levi (reported, for example, in “Primo Levi’s Last Moments,” by Diego Gambetta, in The Boston Review, June 1, 1999): “Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years later.” 30 Jean Cayrol, “Pour un romanèsque lazaréen” (1964, 2007).

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subject (within certain specified logical constraints); that doesn’t compel us to think the category “existence” has any members. Or, approaching the formulation from a different direction, theorists working within the continental tradition and concerns with language, have pointed that the first I and the second I are not necessarily the same reference. The first I, the thinking subject, the subject of the sentence or utterance, may very well exercise his (or her) capacity for thinking. But how does it therefore follow, this tradition reasons, that the speaking subject, the creature uttering the sentence, the individual self-identifying in such a manner, must also exist? I think. Therefore, I who speak, must reside somewhere in the world? Why? What if the “I think” occurs in a piece of writing? Is it not possible to say “Oh my God, I am dead!” as a character in a story by Edgar Allen Poe suddenly exclaims? Does the subject of the opening sentence of Emily Dickinson’s famous poem, “I heard a fly buzz when I died,” have any necessary connection to the existence of either the character within this fiction or its maker? “Je pense; donc, moi (qui pense), je, suis”? Why? And yet, it is not hard to appreciate how radical Descartes’ formulation must have appeared in its own moment. Historically, it topples the medieval understanding derived from a certain kind of theology. St. Anselm, for example, could readily argue for our existence in context of God’s. God has all the perfections, Anselm famously proposed. Existence is one of the perfections. Therefore, of necessity, God has existence; or, more colloquially, God exists. And because God exists, I exist. God thinks (or creates or exists); therefore, I (who am God’s creature) think, create, or exist. Descartes’s arrival changes that surety. I assure myself of my existence, Descartes tells us, not because God exists, but because I think. That idea is new and disturbing in its own time. His formulation besieges medieval scholasticism at its core. Foucault’s famous reflection in the opening chapter to his history of madness links it to the history of “unreason.” “I may think I have a body made of glass,” Descartes writes. “I may even think that I do not exist. But I cannot doubt (when that happens) that I who am doing the thinking exist (if only to be doing that thinking).” Thinking is the signature, the sign, the index if you like, of my rationality, of my capacity to reason; it is what separates me from those people who are mad. As a result, “I think; therefore, I am” becomes the byword, the password, the shibboleth, for those who speak rationally, for those who are not mad. Descartes’s strategy challenges scholasticism. Then Kant comes along and a new way of thinking about my consciousness, my subjectivity, emerges—from

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which the above philosophic criticisms derive. Goethe in Germany, Rousseau in France, Wordsworth in England—all of them, in one fashion or another, articulate its credo: “I feel; therefore, I am.” “I feel—I feel it all,” Wordsworth writes, for example, in his famous “Intimations of Immortality” ode. You can tell me what I say is not true. You can even tell me that God does not exist. But what you are not permitted to say to me (within the bounds of legitimacy), is that I do not feel this way or that. Scholasticism, Cartesianism, romanticism; “God thinks; therefore, I am;” “I think; therefore, I am.” “I feel; therefore, I am.” I assure myself of my existence by virtue of the fact that God thinks, that I think, or that I feel. Then, suddenly, Europe explodes.

Part 5: The Posthumous Cogito The decisive event is the deportation camps, the death camps, the concentration camps—Auschwitz. Something happened there that changed everything. And its history continues to be written: the history of what led up to it, of the strategies deployed there, of what happened in its aftermath. But what has not yet been written, what is only now beginning to be imagined as a possibility for writing, is the history of what could be called “personhood”: the history of identity, or identification, or, perhaps more generally, subjectivity. How do I construct myself as a subject, a subject of consciousness before objects of knowledge? What relation does that construction have to the ethical, to my responsibilities for others, to my freedom? How do I assure myself that I exist? What words do I say to myself that give me the confidence that my words are meaningful, that I am not simply babbling to myself, after a disaster of such unprecedented proportions? These are some of the questions regarding the formation of the subject with which Foucault was working at the moment of his death in 1984. “The disaster ruins everything,” Blanchot writes in his famous opening aphorism in The Writing of the Disaster, “and at the same time leaves everything intact.” Nothing changes and yet everything changes. Perhaps that is why it has taken us so long to acknowledge it, because it looked as if so much was simply the same, as if we could return to “business as usual.” In this country it seems to have taken a second explosion, a mini devastation, for the larger disaster to come more clearly into focus.



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But now that it has, new parameters are forming and new dimensions being registered. “I died; therefore, I am.” What could that mean? All of the major writers in France in the early 1950s speak in such terms. Blanchot in his writing about the literary—for example, in “Literature and the Right to Death;” Beckett in his literary productions—for example, in Waiting for Godot; Sartre in his literary productions—for example, in No Exit; even Camus, in certain of his later literary writings, may be read in this fashion. Or Levinas in his philosophic writing—for example, in Existence and Existents; or Wiesel in his memoir writing—for example, in Night; or Mauriac—in his writing as a Catholic thinker, for example, his famous preface to Wiesel’s book. It could well be that we need to rethink postwar writing in France in this connection in its entirety, that “existentialism” as an intellectual movement, needs to be recast outside of the customary parameters defined for us by media representations of it that privilege absurdity among other ideas. Perhaps what was absurd was not death but its absence. And, perhaps above all, we need to reread Jean Cayrol. Novelist, poet, tortured camp detainee, and in the above cited passages, theorist of the “Lazarean”: the concentration camp “hero,” the figure of the “le monde concentrationaire” itself. The word “hero” here of course is a gross misnomer as a scholar like Lawrence Langer would immediately affirm. There is nothing heroic about any of these characters in any capacity. To the contrary, it is the very demise of the idea of the heroic (and the idea of a “human spirit” it entailed) that is put on display and acquires a new focus. But the context in which Cayrol writes is important. Something akin to a paradigm shift has occurred “I died; therefore, I am.” What could that mean? Since the beginning of the nineteenth century (if we follow Foucault’s analysis), “Man,” humanism, has been defined within a Kantian language as an “analytic of finitude,” an examination of limits. And those limits have been specified as desire and death. My relations to the other individual are circumscribed by the points beyond which I cannot go, the guard rails or third rails, so to speak, of my venturing out. I cannot become another. I can be like another. But I cannot become that other. Similarly, I cannot come back from having died. Whether or not one man did so two thousand years ago remains a matter for theologians. But I cannot do so in my everyday Western European or Anglo-American existence, which is to say, within our customary historical interactions. And those who make such claims are subject to characterizations as mad or lying; as perpetrating, in other words, a deception, either upon others (in the second case) or upon themselves (in the first).

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But after Auschwitz, all this may change once more. “The Holocaust,” Levinas writes, “is the end of theodicy.” It is the end of the usefulness, the utilizability (to invent a neologism from the French l’utilité ), of the idea (if indeed we needed further demonstration of it) given form by Leibnitz in the seventeenth century, that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the human world and the divine, between human justice and divine justice. “God died at Auschwitz” is a formula of those who still believe God could have intervened prior to the disaster but chose not to. “But with what kind of childlike magician have you populated your skies,” Levinas asks, “that now appear so empty and so desolate?” A “God of adults” confers responsibility upon the shoulders of the fully mature individual, even the responsibilities of God, a God with whom one is in an ongoing partnership in the “ongoingness of creation.” The emptiness of the skies of the child is ironic proof of this appeal to the full responsibility—for violence and its termination—of the consenting adult. So what, then, could the Lazarean cogito mean in this context? Precisely, that neither death nor desire remain any longer the limitations they were, that the subject after Auschwitz will have to be reconceived within a larger framework. That a subject of a more expansive understanding of death will have to be conceived, as well as a subject similarly of a more expansive notion of desire. In these regards, the writing of Emmanuel Levinas and René Girard have been attempting precisely that project. Levinas’s notion of the ethical subject, the subject of full responsibility for the other individual (for autrui rather than autre), of infinite or unlimited responsibility, has been attempting to conceptualize such a subject. Death is not a limit in Levinas. Our responsibility for the other individual is infinite, without limit, beyond death, the place or non-place, where the ego meets its end. I have three “infinite” responsibilities, Levinas is fond of saying, what I like to call “the three R’s”: responsibility for the other individual (autrui); responsibility for the other’s responsibility; responsibility for the other’s death. And Girard’s notion of mimetic desire, as a collapse of the sacrificial scapegoat mechanism by which all cultures organize themselves in the archaic universe by the exclusion within a crisis of a double or enemy twin of each member of the community, an inefficaciousness revealed to us by Jewish and Christian scriptural writings, does the same. Desire is not a limit in Girard. All of our greatest literature, from the tragic writing of the Greeks, to the writing of Shakespeare, to the writing of the great European novelists, says the same thing. We can (and do) become the other individual all the time. Not biologically of



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course (although there has of late been speculation about “mirror neurons” in this connection), but in so far as we construct in categories ourselves in relation to others, as much of the “other individual” as we are able to identify socially as “other individuals.” But this new formulation goes farther. The Lazarean cogito postulates not only that I may not be barred by death or desire in my relation to other individuals. More than that, it asserts that my existence depends upon, even derives its authenticity precisely from, that extra-mortal and extra-desirous perspective, that my condition as subject is, precisely, posthumous. Beckett’s words, the words that mark the boundary between Act One and Act Two in Waiting for Godot, the words that we have inscribed as the head note to the opening chapter of this book (and to which we referred earlier in this chapter), say it all. Vladimir: A dog came in— Having begun too high he stops, clears his throat, resumes: A dog came in the kitchen And stole a crust of bread. Then cook up with a ladle And beat him till he was dead. Then all the dogs came running And dug the dog a tomb— He stops, broods, resumes: Then all the dogs came running And dug the dog a tomb And wrote upon the tombstone For the eyes of dogs to come: A dog came in the kitchen And stole a crust of bread. Then cook up with a ladle And beat him till he was dead. Then all the dogs came running And dug the dog a tomb— He stops, broods, resumes: Then all the dogs came running And dug the dog a tomb—

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He stops, broods. Softly. And dug the dog a tomb–31

It’s all there: need (or hunger) on the part of a marginal figure (a dog) impels a transgression (theft of food), that is met with violence, escalation, and death (beat him til he was dead). And that scene in turn is memorialized and commemoration is begun. In more familiar Girardian terms, the sacrificial scapegoat mechanism in all its stages is on display. A system of differences leads to a crisis of differences which leads in turn to a breakout of violence that escalates into a sacrificial expulsion and paroxysmal murder, a new sacralizing of the victim, a ritual commemoration of the event, and its mythic inscription. Moreover, what is also there is the anti-sacrificial gesture that tells the story, linking the account of that mechanism to its inefficaciousness as if from an independent vantage point (since the song is sung by a character who begins dimly to appreciate its relevance to his own predicament). And finally, what is on display there is the infinite repetition to which the relating of that sacrificial mechanism within that anti-sacrificial narrative inevitably leads. In other words, difference, sacrificial crisis, communal murder and substitution, new sacrificial difference, and the telling of the entire process (in an attempt to manage it) from the perspective of its successful conclusion—an attempt that in this case fails and leads only to the impossibility of distinguishing the inside from the outside, the past from the present, the present from the future, and the future from the past. In short, in the terms we have been developing, the Möbian as such, a Möbian we have come to designate as the literary, a Möbian that in its own turn is described in existential and phenomenological language (within the setting of disaster) as the posthumous because in doing away with time it does away as well with death. Vladimir sings the song as if to bide the time, to cheer himself up as a new day dawns and he continues to wait for Godot. Then he “stops” and “broods,” as if something has caught his attention. Then he “resumes,” singing the song once more. Then he stops and broods a second time and again resumes. Then finally, he stops a third time, and broods a third time, and says (“Softly”): “And dug the dog a tomb.” As if the difference within the song between the future and the past, between what is genuinely new and what continues or repeats what has already occurred, or perhaps what is within

Beckett (1954), 37a–b.

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the song and outside of it (from its own historical perspective), is gone, and as if that repetition could go on forever. Or as if the infinite repetition within the story—of the story being told within the story indefinitely—were not unrelated to, were in fact continuous with, the experiences he was witnessing or attending in his own life in the passage from the events of Act One to the events of Act Two, a passage in which he considers briefly, indeed “broods” about, the possibility of stopping, of giving up waiting for Godot (“what if we dropped him?” one of them later asks) and then similarly “resumes.” Or like the play itself (Beckett’s play) within our own life (which is a third setting), which we a theater-going audience attend as a performance to pass the time, and which invites us to consider briefly the possibility of stopping the theatrical drama we are witnessing, of vitiating time, a possibility we are both compelled to enact (by being urged to leave the theater at the play’s conclusion) and encouraged to domesticate and forget (by aestheticizing the social event within the popular philosophic interpretation of it as “existentialist drama”). “Like a dog,” in Kafka’s novella, or like the dog in the song in Beckett’s play within the play: victimized, beaten to death, executed, sacrificed, as a premise rather than a dreaded conclusion; in short, as the “Scapegoat’s Agony.”32 The Möbian as the logic of continuity that subtends difference; the literary as the Möbian; the literary and the Möbian, revealed in a time of disaster, in the dead of night, as a matter of living from death rather than before it, as the posthumous; and as the literary, as the condition of difference, the Möbian thereby as a result the logic of the sacrificial and of substitution, the logic, if René Girard is right, of all cultural order and disorder in the archaic and modern universe. The posthumous subject, the subject after the Shoah, the subject of the “afterdeath” whose credo or cogito is “I died; therefore, I am”—how does that change things?

Part 6: Dying Is an Art “Dying is an art,” Sylvia Plath wrote in the early 1960s, in a poem entitled “Lady Lazarus.” And her most direct reference in the word “dying” is to her three attempted suicides (a fourth was successful soon after the publication of her Beckett (1954), 27a.

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volume Ariel, in 1965).33 But, given the title, and the content, it is not a stretch to hear in her words the reverse: that art is a practice of dying. Ash, ash— You poke and stir. Flesh, bone, there is nothing there— A cake of soap, A wedding ring, A gold filling. Herr God, Herr Lucifer Beware Beware. Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air.34

What would it mean to take this insight as the foundation, not just for literature after the war in Europe and America, but for literature in general? Literature as dying, as the appearance of the disappearance of being, as night, as the possibility of the happening of impossibility, in short, as the posthumous—could such an idea form the basis for a conceptualization, not just for the universe following Auschwitz and Hiroshima, but for all writing we have tagged with the sacralizing name of the literary? Would we be imposing a modern—or postmodern, or post-secular—conception upon other eras if we did so? And what is the value of doing that in this context? How would such a conceptualization advance our understanding vis-à-vis the Möbian or the literary as the Möbian? After Auschwitz, death may not be just one more obstacle—like so many others—with regard to the consideration of the literary as the Möbian. It may not be just one more non-traversable boundary but rather its very condition. To write may be to assume a position as if death has already occurred. And the premise of great writing may necessarily be that all great writing is posthumous. Far from an obstacle to literary understanding, in fact, the dawning awareness inculcated here may be not only that death is not an obstacle to literary She put her head in an oven and turned on the gas, one cold winter morning when the heat was not working in a house once owned by William Butler Yeats that she and Ted Hughes had been renting. 34 Cf. Paul Celan’s Todesfuge (Deathfugue): “Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening / we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night / we drink and we drink.” In Felstiner, Paul Celan, Poet, Survivor, Jew (1995). Celan’s poem finds its corollary in Plath’s. 33



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consideration but that literary consideration may be founded upon it. Samuel Beckett may have had it right all along. Living beyond death, living as if death as an event has already occurred, may be the very premise of the literary, of our age or of any age. Beckett’s play suggests that the sacred status in which (according to Foucault) we have long understood the literary, a status in which death plays a curiously double role, at once transgressive (in the sense in which all writing is an attempt to stave off death and in which we speak in order not to die), and at the same time beneficial (in the sense in which writing is also the beginning of its potential transcendence as the entry to higher beauty), may have been right all along, although in a manner little suspected. Writers like Homer and Beckett, read through readers like Foucault and Blanchot, confirm what we have suspected. The literary discloses its structure to be Möbian. At the heart of that Möbian structure is disclosed the posthumous. The particular form of the posthumous that we experience today (and which has allowed us to recognize these dimensions) is the Lazarean. Such considerations might profitably form the basis, in our view, for any serious discussion of literature and literary criticism of the future.

Part 7: The Literary, the Möbian, and the Lazarean We started with the articulation of differences across non-traversable boundaries that turned out to be a structure of continuity and extension, continuous with (and an extension of) the very elements those differences were opposing. And we dubbed the non-Euclidean logic and vocabulary that described that continuity the “Möbian.” We suggested, moreover, that both critical and literary discourses were structured in accord with such a Möbian logic, and that the difference between them, between the literary and the critical, had less to do with any particular manifestation—whether a particular text “looked” literary or looked critical—than it did with an awareness of this Möbian structure. Then, in this conclusion, we expanded our inquiry to ask whether this Möbian logic could be applied to the one non-traversable boundary in which we all live as a consequence of our historical birth—namely, the limitation introduced by human mortality. And again the answer appeared, perhaps somewhat surprisingly this time, in the affirmative. Speaking from beyond the grave, it would appear, has been a part of our culture since its inception. From formulas

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defining Protagorean humanism in the ancient sixth century (for example, that “the gods are deathless”), to ongoing Rabbinic conversations with the divine (in scripture and the exegetical traditions), to formulations of the literal resurrection from the dead articulated with regard to one particular Rabbinic teacher (and discussion of its theological implications by the Church Fathers), the posthumous would appear to have been constitutive of our understanding of the universe in the West now for over two millennia. Seventy-five years after the ending of the Second World War, a new expansion is suddenly on the horizon. The posthumous in Europe has assumed the form of the Lazarean.35 Although there is no place here to elaborate the idea at any length, it would appear we have reached what might be dubbed a fourth stage in our response to the particular disaster of the Holocaust. The first was relative silence. The survivors tried to speak shortly after the war but few wanted to hear them. Then in the early 1960s, the identification of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders gained a foothold on our awareness (in part through the trials then taking place). Then again in the mid 1980s, co-extant with the release of Claude Lanzmann’s film, Shoah, a new discourse began: the discovery of the vagaries of memory. Collective, personal, unclaimed, traumatic, historical, and other variegated modalities of memory (and the forms of witness deriving from those modalities) were elaborated (and no word was more widespread in Holocaust studies than memory). Then, finally, with the turn of the millennium (and perhaps related in this country to the events of 9/11), a fourth stage became manifest, one in which we remain lodged: the omnipresence of shadows, ghosts, gaps, absences, haunted legacies, and the posthumous.36 Voices from beyond the grave may or may not assume bodily form. Our access to the posthumous as a conception, whether found in sacred or secular contexts, has been facilitated by the reappearance of the Biblical figure of Lazarus in writers like Jean Cayrol. But from whatever the source, now that we have identified it, the “Lazareans,” those who have returned from the Kingdom of Death as well as those who written about them, would now appear to be everywhere. They are now perceived to be among us with a vengeance. And not just within popular American culture. Kafka, for example, is once more attractive to us (and newly legible) as a writer because we are suddenly reading I thank Wendy Stallard Flory for raising with me the issue from which in part this discussion has derived. 36 A podcast of my talk “The Fourth Stage in Holocaust Historiography,” delivered at a conference on Memory and Counter-Memory, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, November 6–8, 2011, is available on-line. 35



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him (or rereading him) through the Lazarean thinking that has emerged since the end of the war: in literature, literary criticism, philosophy, religious studies and elsewhere. We are accustomed, in other words, in the West to thinking that the inside and the outside of something are radically separable, that if the “outside” echoes the “inside” in one instance or another, it is a matter of service or instrumentality of some kind, that the outside serves to highlight the inside for example, or adorn it in some way, that the relation between them is at most, in other words, an analogy. It is the difference we may say between showing and telling, a distinction we learn to make in the first days of our public schooling. But the Möbian compels us to recognize that the two are veritably extensions or extremities of each other, and that what looks as if it is different is in fact the same thing at another moment along the same continuous path. My relation to the external world is not synchronic and analogous or representational but diachronic and continuous or extensional. The proverbial Biblical wisdom “There but for the grace of God go I” has its secular cognate in this fundamental serial and sequential connection. The other individual is an extremity of me, not by means of a projection, which is how we might customarily understand the relationship, but in accord with the inter-human described by Buber, one that might be described as the inter-subjective or inter-individual in other vocabularies. Moreover, that this relationship of sameness or extensionality remains intact even when the boundary is life and death—in which case, what looks as if it speaks to us as an “other” speaks to us in fact posthumously; and that we have access to this posthumous version of the Möbian because of our own particular historical circumstance, namely, that those who have died in the camps have in some instances come back, and so we are able to experience them, borrowing the language of Jean Cayrol, as “Lazarean.” The Lazarean is our access to the posthumous after the war in the returnees who are said to be the “survivors.” And that survivorship of the returnees from the death camps allows us to wonder to what extent all survivorship is Lazarean and to that extent posthumous, and to that extent, Möbian. It is not a matter of choosing the Möbian or not choosing it, as if the Möbian were a modality we could accept or reject. The Möbian is always already in place once there is thought since thought is founded on distinction and the Möbian in the way we have conceived it is the structure of difference or distinction itself. It is somewhat like representation in that regard. We can choose to own or not to own whether or not we partake in it, but we cannot choose not to partake

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in it. We partake in it whether we want to or not. Or it is like responsibility (as conceived by someone like Levinas), which is also a modality of the Möbian. Or like the midrashic, in religious studies contexts, in ways we have tried to elaborate it. Extensionality is just as much “there” in the structure of our thinking as responsibility is there and we may either choose to acknowledge it or choose to ignore it. Nor is there a choice between representation and the Möbian, only a choice between which of the two relationships—both of which are already in place—we will acknowledge at any given moment. Similarly, the Möbian and the midrashic are also one and the same in this regard, two different names for the same thing in different contexts. The midrashic functions the way the Möbian does within the context of narrative, and the Möbian functions like the midrashic in context of logical structure or distinction. The alternative conceptualization to the Möbian—though not an alternative reality of any kind—is the representational. From the perspective of the representational, the Möbian is the expression of a relationship perceived as one of analogy and difference, non-Euclidean as opposed to Euclidean, for example. But that is representation’s perspective alone. From the perspective of the Möbian, representation is not really an opposition at all since it is a moment of the Möbian itself folding back upon itself, but failing to account for that fold, regarding itself as if across an unbridgeable gulf, an arm regarding its torso without recognizing itself as an extremity or extension of the selfsame structure. The literary as the posthumous, as writing written from the point of view of a world in which death has already occurred, in which it is a premise rather than a future, a perspective that has become available to us since the end of the Second World War and in its wake, and to which we have assigned the name of the Möbian (as a registry at once of a logic of continuity between the inside and the outside and its link with darkness and night)—this idea is just beginning to gain a wider acknowledgement. The Holocaust has opened our eyes in this book to the myriad ways in which the disasters by which our lives have been plagued over the last seventy years confer upon us new understandings. Within Jewish experience specifically, the Holocaust was always there, throughout our history, since the beginning, since the collapse of the first Temple in Jerusalem in 586 bce. In that regard, the Möbian is a perspective whose time had already come twenty-five hundred years ago, in the midst of a darkness waiting for the creation of the light that would transform it into night (which, we have said, in a Levinasian vocabulary, is the name for a darkness older than the opposite of light). But it has taken the unprecedented state-sponsored genocide by a



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European nation against a group of its own citizens (along with those of other nations) to foster that awareness. The Holocaust, Levinas teaches us, is the end of the theodicy by which we would shield ourselves from our own responsibility. In this chapter, as in this volume more generally, we have identified that darkness and responsibility within the literary writing that would reveal it to us. Within literary criticism, theodicy is the means by which we would cut ourselves off from owning it, both the literature and the darkness, from its obligations, from accepting the obligations it commands of us, and from becoming answerable for it. In its wake, a new cogito has overtaken us: namely, the fact that “I died” will now and henceforth assure me of my existence, rather than God’s existence, my thinking, or my feelings. “I died; therefore, I am.” That is our new credo, the new basis on which certainty of my authenticity will be founded. The question of authenticity raised by Heidegger and Adorno in philosophy in the last century has been answered. It is not being-toward-death that clarifies things for us but being from death. Within the posthumous perspective we have tried to examine, death is henceforth a premise rather than a future. But now that it has shown up, even within the transformed version of the opening scriptural language of the Hebrew Bible for example, or a quixotic vocabulary drawn from nineteenth-century European mathematics, this new literary, this literary as the posthumous, opens new doors. Is it a hopeful sign? Hope is in relatively short supply these days. There is indeed a “scarcity of hope” as Martin Matuštik notes, so that it is important that we recognize and acknowledge all there is.37 We have already spoken of the way the impossibility of third-party forgiveness may constitute, ironically, one such resource in this domain. Perhaps the literary as the posthumous, the sudden appearance everywhere of “Möbian nights” (as well as the proliferation of autobiographical writing, prophetic thinking, and the modality of the midrashic that they invigorate) is another. Hope could be defined as what remains after we substract from the world its utter bleakness. The posthumous perspective from which I would suggest we now necessarily think, speak, and live neither confirms that bleakness nor supersedes it. The suffering of the other individual, Levinas reminds us, is never redemptive. But he still reserves a modicum of transformative potential or “negative capability” to be derived from my freedom and its capacity for creation, for partnership in the project of anti-idolatry. My own Martin Matuštik, Radical Evil and the Scarcity of Hope. Postsecular Meditations (2008).

37

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suffering may in fact for him be assigned a meaning. And on that basis—and exclusively on that basis in his view—may human community remain viable. Admittedly, it is not much. It is probably less “good news” than the first Christians thought they found in the teaching of a young rabbi from Nazareth regarding the Kingdom of God, a teaching he found no doubt in the book of Isaiah from which so much of his life story appears also to have been drawn, a book that took as its central task that of answering the critical question posed by the book of Job and that remained vibrant throughout the period of the Babylonian exile: namely, the relation between divine creation, human suffering, and the law of anti-idolatry.The battle against idolatry, against the confusion of the divine with the human, is going to take longer than expected. It would indeed be impressive if the Messiah comes—“in this generation,” as the leaders of Hassidic communities often assert—but it might be prudent not to give up one’s day job just yet. And in the increasingly commodified and consumerist economy to which the digital revolution appears to have committed us, in America as well as globally, a cultural climate drenched in two thousand years of European history, state religion, and empire, it would be easy to be pessimistic. On the other hand, it is probably better than nothing. A little literary reading, a little night music, so to speak, might be just the thing. As the proverbial beggar is reputed to have commented to a passerby, regarding his persistent attendance on a hillside in Jerusalem waiting for the Messiah, “the pay may not be great; but it’s steady work.”

Conclusion: Versions of Night: Reading Literature and Darkness

The preceding book has two parts. In the first, I gathered some five essays I have written over the years since the early 1980s that seemed to me in one manner or another reflective of the practice of what we might call a Möbian critical orientation: in the relation between two different literary critical writers; in the relation of one literary critic to his own earlier critical practice; in the relation of a student to her teacher (and a colleague) and a colleague to his subject matter; in the relation of a writer to his own missed experiences during the war; and in the relation of a journalist and Holocaust survivor to his own traumatic past and current testimonial realities. And in the second part (Chapters 6 and 7), I attempted to theorize that critical orientation (or non-orientation) a bit more systematically. In the sixth chapter, I examined the ways the Möbian worked in each of the five preceding chapters. I took up the question of the Möbian as a theory of the literary in relation to more traditional aesthetic theories of the literary, and the relation of both to death. I engaged Foucault’s suggestion that the literary, as an example of the relation to the infinite, is already at stake in Homer’s Odyssey (featured in that ancient epic, for example, in Odysseus’s relation to the Phaiákians, and within his autobiographical tale in the voices and songs of the Sirens), and I evaluated Blanchot’s suggestion (borrowed from Kafka) that at the heart of story-telling is already death and dying, so that to a certain extent the ancient epic is already constructed from the point of view of the posthumous. In the seventh chapter I compared that ancient treatment of the literary to Beckett’s treatment in Waiting for Godot in which the literary discloses at its heart an endless or infinite repetition in the absence of time. After the genocidal violence of the twentieth century—the slaughter of the Armenians, the Holocaust, the ravages of Pol Pot, Biafra, Rwanda, and countless other atrocities (violence that effectively vitiates any distinction between war and non-war)—a new relation to the literary would seem to have appeared on the horizon. Death or nothingness or radical emptiness or a darkness from “before

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creation” would now seem exposed at the heart of the literary. To speak or write in order not to die (which comprised the signature credo of the older aesthetic approach) has become now in effect, in the wake of such disasters (and following Kafka and Blanchot), to speak or write in order to die, in order to live in the wake of death, in order to live posthumously. “I ceased to be anything but ashes,” Wiesel writes in Night. The look in the eyes of the “corpse” gazing back at him (in the mirror in the hospital where he was recovering), he says, “no longer leaves me.” Henceforth, the survivor “will be plagued by dreams such as that he is no longer living at all, that he was sent to the ovens in 1944 and his whole existence since has been imaginary” Adorno notes. “I died in Auschwitz and nobody knows it,” Delbo asserts. Survivorship in the wake of disaster has assumed of necessity something of a new posthumous Lazarean dimension. And the literary in this context has acquired as a result its status as a modality of posthumous thinking and perception, whether it shows up in the form familiar since the nineteenth century of artistic endeavor or more remotely in cultural productions like Greek tragedy or even biblical scripture and commentary. As such, the Möbian in these contexts, as the structure of the literary, turns out to refine our understanding of the sacrificial in our culture, which itself turns out in this regard the oldest form of the Möbian there is. The literary, as the Möbian, as the posthumous, discloses itself finally as a version of the end of the logic of sacrifice on which our culture is founded, and as well the identification of that post-sacrificial logic (through a strategic diachrony and substitution—to use the language of both Girard and Levinas), with the position of the victim at the heart of modern subjectivity. Ethics, as Levinas likes to say, is already an optics. The literary, it would now appear, is a set of spectacles through which that ethical frame, that infinite responsibility or obligation to be the “redeemer” (ga’al in Hebrew, in the Book of Ruth, “answerable for”) for the other individual, comes into focus. Where do we go from here? How would our analysis of the Möbian (or the literary as the Möbian and the Möbian as darkness) offer a new perspective to the study of religious or scriptural commentary? As we moved initially from Sarificing Commentary to Möbian Nights, examining the relation of the literary critical to the literary proper in the earlier book, to an examination of the logic of continuity at the heart of both in the current book, can we similarly now move from Möbian Nights to a book on bibical reading in which the Möbian suddenly discloses itself at the heart of modalities we have identified as scriptural, or midrashic, or prophetic? “The Messiah will come when the tears of

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Esau will have been exhausted,” Kafka is reported to have said.1 Or, alternatively, “the Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary.” Or, in yet one more iteration, “the Messiah will come only on the day after his arrival.” Is that what literature will look like to us in the biblical setting? A midrashic prophetic account of the future in which the figure the rabbis identified as mashiyach or the Messiah plays a secondary or subsidiary or purely confirmatory role rather than a critical one? A “messianicity” (to employ Derrida’s neologism), a radical diachrony or future-looking, that eskews the philosophy of the messianic or of a messianism governed by the figure of the Messiah? Are we now ready to move from discussion of the literary in Möbian Nights to discussion of the biblical or scriptural in Tears of Esau? But are we sure, in the first place, that we understand the relation of the biblical to the literary? Harold Bloom titles a little read essay of his “Literature as the Bible.”2 If we have always imagined the literary to be an extension of the biblical, secondary and subservient to it, is it possible that we may have to reverse the two conceptually, to imagine the biblical disclosing at its heart the literary (rather than the opposite)? And if we can show that the literary is in fact already the Möbian, and the Möbian already the posthumous, then is the Möbian (and therefore the posthumous) not also necessarily at the heart of religious scripture? Is that what Christianity understood in its midrashic addition to Hebrew prophetic texts of the story of the resurrection from death of a young Rabbi (who identified his life and fate with that of Torah) as the foundation for life even apart from its hope for a future? But these questions of course open the door to an entirely different discussion.

Harold Bloom, “Introduction” to Buber’s On the Bible: Eighteen Studies (2000). Bloom, New York Review of Books, March 31, 1988, 23–5.

1 2

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318

Index The letter f following an entry indicates a page that includes a figure. Abrams, M. H.: Literature and Belief 37 abyss, the 239–40 Accident, The (Wiesel, Elie) 156–8 Adorno, Theodor 144, 294 Aeneid (Virgil) 226, 227, 228 Aeschylus 254 aesthetic, the 30, 58–9, 204, 212–18 “After the New Criticism” (Krieger, Murray) 28, 42–3 After the New Criticism (Lentricchia, Frank) 25–9, 41–3 afterdeath 271 see also posthumous, the Agamémnon 254 Akiba, Rabbi 115 Alexander the Great 74 Alf Layla We Layla (Thousand and One Nights) (story collection) 213, 214 Allegories of Reading (Man, Paul de) 70, 79 Allen, Woody 216 Purple Rose of Cairo, The 9 Anselm, Saint 279 anti-sacrificial, the 23, 201, 257, 276–7, 284 anti-Semitism 49–51, 55–7, 84 see also Holocaust, the Friedländer, Saul 190, 191 Hilberg, Raul 190–1 Hitler, Adolf 190 Man, Paul de 49–50, 52, 57–9, 63–8, 70, 76–7, 107 redemptive anti-Semitism 190–2 Apollonian 216 n.15 Arabian Nights (story collection) 213, 214, 227 see also A Thousand and One Nights Aristotle 74, 218 Poetics 212, 213 arithmos 6 art 54–7, 176–8 see also aesthetic, the literary artists 58–9, 176–80

“Art as Mirror of the Essence of Nations: Considerations on Geist der Nationen by A. E. Brinckmann” (Man, Paul de) 48, 53–4 Artist’s Journey into the Interior and Other Essays, The (Heller, Erich) 59–60, 62 ashes 157–8 Asociación Mutualista Israelita Argentina document center 119, 120 Auschwitz 105, 130, 132, 136–8 see also Holocaust, the Rebbe, the 155 Wiesel, Elie 155 Austin, J. L. 70–1 authors 120 autobiographical relations 22–3 Autrement qu’être, ou au délà de l’essence (Levinas, Emmanuel) 129–30 Badde, Paul 118–19 Bauman, Zygmunt 198 Beckett, Samuel 198 Waiting for Godot 264–71, 281, 283–5, 287 Beeck, Jozef van 22–3, 113, 117, 120–6 Loving the Torah More Than God? Towards a Catholic Appreciation of Judaism 118 “Yossel Rakover’s Appeal to God” (Kolitz, Zvi) 117–20, 121–5, 130, 131–2, 206 Belgium 50–1 Benjamin, Walter 89, 97, 246 Beowulf 226, 227, 228 Bergman, Ingmar: Seventh Seal, The 214 betrayal 183 Blake, William: “Tyger, The” 241 Blanchot, Maurice 172, 175–6, 195, 277 death 269 n.14, 271, 272–4

320 Index deep, the 177–8 “Literature and the Right to Death” 174–5, 281 narrative 238 night 174–80, 183, 200 Orpheus, myth of 176–8, 242 other night 177–80, 188, 240 Sirens 232–3, 237 Writing of the Disaster, The 280 Blindness and Insight (Man, Paul de) 70 Bloom, Harold: “Literature as the Bible” 295 Bomba, Abraham 94 Borges, Jorge Luis 219, 228 “Partial Magic in the Quixote” 225 “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” 10 “Secret Miracle, The” 224, 228 “When Fiction Lives in Fiction” 225 Brinckmann, A. E.: Geist der Nationen 54 Buber, Martin 125 Camus, Albert 89, 106, 281 Caputo, John 247–8 Cayrol, Jean 167, 172–4, 277–8, 281 night 179 Celan, Paul 171 n.71, 286 n.34 Cervantes, Miguel de: Don Quixote 10, 225, 227, 228 characters differences 15–16 doubling 10, 15–16 Christianity 117–18, 130, 139, 292, 295 see also God; Lazarus; Mauriac, François conscience 122, 124 consciousness 125 creation 186 death 214–15 literary, the 217 night 184–8 suffering 195 Classic Vision, The (Krieger, Murray) 31–3 cogito, the 153, 180, 278–80 see also afterdeath Lazarean cogito 282–3 posthumous, the 280–5, 291 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 100, 217

collaboration see silence commentary 16, 18 conscience 112–13, 124–5, 130 Beeck, Frans Jozef van 119, 122 Kolitz, Zvi 113, 114–20 Levinas, Emmanuel 119, 122–4 conscience 112–13, 119, 122, 124, 130 consciousness 112–13, 125, 130 Kolitz, Zvi 113, 114–20 Levinas, Emmanuel 123–5 suffering 128–9 “Contemporary Trends in French Literature” (Man, Paul de) 56–7 context 5–6 continuity 4, 20–2 literary studies 10–11, 16, 22 psychoanalysis 13–14 counter-redemptive, the 193, 197–8 counter-redemptive hermeneutics 140, 197, 207 creation 184–8 crisis 32, 36, 42 criticism 16–20, 23, 35–7, 208, 210, 275–7, 287 see also New Criticism Foucault, Michel 120 Krieger, Murray 40–3 Lentricchia, Frank 41–3, 204 Man, Paul de 80–1 Möbian theory 204–12 posthumous, the 276–7 “Criticism and Literary History” (Man, Paul de) 55 Czerniakow, Adam 93, 116 darkness 186–9, 193, 198 Dauthendey, Max 81 “Raubmenschen” 82 Dawidowicz, Lucy 190 death 175–6, 213–16, 282–3, 285–7 see also mortality; posthumous, the absurdity 270 Blanchot, Maurice 269 n.14 Foucault, Michel 219–20, 229, 239, 250 language 219–22, 227, 239, 250 literature 174–6, 213–16, 271–6, 280–7 Odyssey 219–21, 229–33, 239, 241–2, 243–4, 249–50 time 269–70

Index death camps 174, 280 see also Auschwitz death of God 160 death no one dies, the 179 see also Blanchot, Maurice deconstruction 6, 35 n.38, 245–7 Deconstruction and Criticism (Hartman, Geoffrey) 37 deep, the 177–8, 193 degeneration 49–50, 54–5 Delbo, Charlotte 294 deportees 50, 173, 278 see also Cayrol, Jean Derrida, Jacques 5, 67, 69 deconstruction 245–7 Foucault, Michel 245 Judaism 247–8 messianic, the 246–7 Of Grammatology 245 Searle, John 71 Des Pres, Terrence 107, 112 time 143 Descartes, René 278 diachronic, the 8, 23, 33, 216 n.15 “Diachrony and Representation” (Levinas, Emmanuel) 244–6 Dickinson, Emily 279 Diderot, Denis: Religieuse, La (The Nun) 224–5 differences 5–7, 20–1 characters 15–16 literary study 9–16 psychoanalysis 13–15 Dionysian 216 n.15 disaster 199, 219, 238, 271, 280, 290 see also Blanchot, Maurice disillusion 83 document 115, 120, 125, 126 see also fiction Don Quixote (Cervantes, Miguel de) 10, 225, 227, 228 Donne, John 272 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 104, 174 Double, The 10 Double, The (Dostoyevsky, Fyodor) 10 doubling 10, 14–16, 164, 221–2, 282–3 Messiah, the 186 Night 164 “Yossel Rakover’s Appeal to God” 116–19, 121, 206–7

321

Drowned and the Saved, The (Levi, Primo) 89 ego, the 251–2 Einstein, Albert 7 Eliot, T. S. 174 Ellison, Harlan: “Shatterday” 10 Englander, Nathan 198 epic 276–7 Epic of Gilgamesh 226–7, 228 essentialism 36–8 ethics 79–80, 98–9, 294 see also conscience Euripides: Medea 10–11, 224 Existence and Existents (Levinas, Emmanuel) 281 existentialism 176, 229, 240, 281, 290 extension 33, 289–90 extremity 31, 33 face (le visage) 217 see also hiding of face under God Fackenheim, Emil 143–4 Faulkner, William 199 Felman, Shoshana 89 Holocaust, the 98–9 Man, Paul de 97–104 Felman, Shoshana/Laub, Dori 20, 21, 22, 205 Testimony 87–8, 90–3, 94–106, 109–10 festivals 212–13 fiction 119–20 Fine, Ellen 143, 158 Legacy of Night 137–8 Fish, Stanley 37 formalism 27 Foucault, Michel 120, 217 death 219–20, 229, 239, 250 Derrida, Jacques 245 language 221 “Language to Infinity” 219, 224–9, 258 Odyssey 224, 229, 232, 239, 274–5 pedagogy 245 posthumous, the 257–8, 274–5 France 150 Freud, Sigmund 90, 104, 112 Friedlander, Albert 114

322 Index “Yossel Rakover’s Appeal to God” (Kolitz, Zvi) 114, 121 Friedländer, Saul 90, 191 Years of Persecution, The 190 Frye, Northrop 35 Fukyama, Francis 246 Geist der Nationen (Brinckmann, A. E.) 54 Genesis, book of 145, 184–8, 189, 200 “German Literature. A Great German Lyricist: Max Dauthendey” (Man, Paul de) 81–2 “German Literature, A Great Writer: Ernst Jünger” (Man, Paul de) 57 German Tradition in Literature, The (Gray, Ronald) 60 Germany 49–50, 57–8 see also Nazism nationalism 62 Gide, André 271 Gilgamesh 226–7, 228 Girard, René 14–15, 268 mimetic desire 282 scapegoat mechanism 17, 276, 282, 284 God 127–8, 131, 153–5, 183–9, 196 see also religion/belief death of 160, 165–8 existence 279–80, 282 hiding of face 112, 115, 123, 127 Wiesel, Elie 197 gods, the 219–20 Goodhart, Sandor: Sacrificing Commentary 16–17, 18–19, 22, 201, 208 grace 163, 170, 197 Gray, Ronald: German Tradition in Literature, The 60 Greeks, ancient 6 battle 254 gender 254 home, the 254–5 homecomings 253–5, 258–9 hospitality 253–4, 255–7, 258–9, 260 Trojan war 254 Greene, Brian 7 n.12 Haggadah, the 192 Hamlet (Shakespeare, William) 9, 10, 225, 227, 228

Hartman, Geoffrey 78, 189 Deconstruction and Criticism 37 Havelock, Eric: Preface to Plato 223 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 84, 246 Heidegger, Martin 107, 248 Holocaust, the 138–9 Heller, Erich: Artist’s Journey into the Interior and Other Essays, The 59–60, 62 Hertz, Neil 107 Hilberg, Raul 51, 190–1 Himmler, Heinrich 191–2 history 53, 54–5, 77 Hitler, Adolf 190 Hoffman, E. T. A.: “Sandman, The” 233 Hofstadter, Douglas 4 n.6 Holocaust, the 19, 50–1, 54 n.22, 107–10, 138–9, 194–5 see also Holocaust witnessing; Night Auschwitz see Auschwitz camps 174, 280 see also Auschwitz Cayrol, Jean 167, 172–4 conscience 130 darkness 189 denial 169, 194–5, 201 deportees 50, 173, 278 see also Cayrol, Jean documents 116–17 Felman, Shoshana 98–9 Himmler, Heinrich 191–2 Hitler, Adolf 190 horror 183 industrialization 139–40 Laub, Dori 90–3, 94–6, 108 Levi, Primo 98–9, 101 Levinas, Emmanuel 130, 193, 282 literature 172–5 Mauriac, François 159–62 memory 288 Möbian theory 290–1 night 200–1, 277 post-Holocaust readings 277–80, 282 posthumous, the 278, 294 religion/belief 128, 158, 160–1, 169 responses to 288 responsibility 195 suffering 129, 195–6 theodicy 130–1, 282, 291

Index time 143–4 Wiesel, Elie 136–8, 139–40, 146, 156–8 see also Night Holocaust witnessing 88–96, 105–9, 146 see also survivor testimony; Testimony darkness 193, 198 Mauriac, François 163 memory 144–5, 146, 156–7, 288 Wiesel, Elie 158, 163, 167–8, 180, 196–7 “Yossel Rakover’s Appeal to God” (Kolitz, Zvi) 114–27 homecomings 253–5, 258–9, 260 Homer: Odyssey see Odyssey hope 291–2 horror 183 hoshech 187, 188, 189 see also darkness hospitality 253–4, 255–7, 258–9, 260 hostage status 251–2, 253, 257 Huffel, Léon van 67 humanism 281–2 il y a 180–3, 188–9, 200, 240 impossible witness 88–9, 109 infinite within the finite, the 217 inside and the outside, the 9, 163, 225, 289 intellectual tradition 60–1, 66, 74–5 interpretation 70, 209, 216 “Intimations of Immortality” (Wordsworth, William) 269 Israeli 164–5 Jameson, Frederic 29 Jews 49–51, 63–4, 66, 82 see also anti-Semitism; Judaism Israeli 164–5 “Jews in Contemporary Literature” (Man, Paul de) 58 Jokl, Anna Maria 119 Jour, Le (Day) (Wiesel, Elie) 151 Judaism 122, 198–9 see also God Beeck, Frans Jozef van 118 consciousness 125 creation 184–8 darkness 186–8, 189 Derrida, Jacques 247–8

323

Genesis, book of 145, 184–8, 189, 200 Haggadah, the 192 Levinas, Emmanuel 113, 124 Night (Wiesel, Elie) 153–5, 165–7 promises 246–9 suffering 128, 195 Talmud, the 144 time 249 Wiesel, Elie 198 “Yossel Rakover’s Appeal to God” (Kolitz, Zvi) 115, 118 “Juifs, Les” (Man, Paul de) 63, 65 Kafka, Franz 274, 277, 288–9 Trial, The 271 Kant, Immanuel 213, 279–80 Karski, Jan 94 Katz, Claire 198–9 Keats, John: “Ode on a Grecian Urn” 214–15, 216 Kierkegaard, Søren 31–2 King Lear (Shakespeare, William) 142 Kolitz, Zvi 20, 21, 22–3, 113, 114–21, 205 “Requiem for a Jealous Boy” 119 Tiger Beneath the Skin: Stories and Parables of the Years of Death, The 114 Yossel Rakover Speaks to God: Holocaust Challenges to Religious Faith 119 “Yossel Rakover’s Appeal to God” 114–27, 130, 131–2, 205–6, 211 Kott, Jan: Shakespeare Our Contemporary 10 Krämer–Badoni, Rudolf 116 Krieger, Murray 20, 22–3, 26–7, 37 “After the New Criticism” 28, 42–3 Classic Vision, The 31–3 criticism 40–3, 210 essentialism 37 extremity 31, 33 Lentricchia, Frank 26–30, 31, 33–6, 39–43, 204 Man, Paul de 39 New Apologists for Poetry, The 26 New Criticism 38, 39 organicism 30–1, 39 n.52 Play and Place of Criticism, The 28

324 Index Tragic Vision, The 28, 30–4, 38–9 Lacan, Jacques 13–15 “Lady Lazarus” (Plath, Sylvia) 285–6 Lalou, René 55–6 Langer, Laurence 101, 173, 194 works 194 language 258–9 death 219–22, 227, 239, 250 infinite 221, 223–9, 258, 259, 260 Man, Paul de 71–5, 80–1 narrative loops 146, 225–9, 265 “Language to Infinity” (Foucault, Michel) 219, 224–8, 258 Lanzmann, Claude: Shoah 89, 90, 93–4, 190 Laub, Dori 20, 21, 22, 108 Holocaust, the 90–3, 94–7, 108 impossible witness 88–9 trauma theory 205 witness types 105–6 Laub, Dori/Felman, Shoshana 20, 21, 22 Testimony 87–8, 90–3, 94–106, 109–10 Lazarean cogito 282–3 Lazarus/Lazarean 153, 160, 167, 171, 173–4, 288–9 Cayrol, Jean 173, 278, 281 Legacy of Night (Fine, Ellen) 137–8 Lentricchia, Frank 20–3 After the New Criticism 25–9, 41–3 criticism 41–3, 210 essentialism 38 Krieger, Murray 26–30, 31, 33–6, 39–43, 204 Man, Paul de 36–7 New Criticism 36 Levi, Primo 97 Drowned and the Saved, The 89 Holocaust, the 98–9, 101 Lévi-Strauss, Claude: “Sorcerer’s Cure, The” 256 Levinas, Emmanuel 14–15, 22–3, 126–32, 172, 208 Autrement qu’être, ou au délà de l’essence 129–30 conscience 119, 122–4 consciousness 124–5 “Diachrony and Representation” 244–6

Difficile liberté 114 Existence and Existents 281 guilt 195 Holocaust, the 130–1, 193, 282 hostage status 251–2 il y a (“there is”) 180–3, 188–9, 200, 240 infinite responsibilities 282 Judaism 113 night 181–4, 189, 200, 208 Otherwise Than Being 251 pedagogy 245 religion 127–8 substitution 251–2 suffering 128–9, 132, 195 time 244–5, 248 “Useless Suffering” 128–9 “Yossel Rakover’s Appeal to God” (Kolitz, Zvi) 114, 116, 117–18, 119–20, 122–7, 130, 131–2, 211 literary, the 216–18, 275–7, 294–5 literary artists 58–9, 176–80 literary criticism see criticism literary studies 61 continuity 10–11, 16 difference 9–16 influences 12–13 literature 12, 18, 37, 216–18 afterdeath 271–5 see also posthumous, the Blanchot, Maurice 175–6 criticism see criticism death 174–6, 213–16, 271–6, 280–7 Holocaust, the 172–5 narrative loops 146, 225–9, 265 Literature and Belief (Abrams, M. H.) 37 “Literature and the Right to Death” (Blanchot, Maurice) 174–6, 281 “Literature as the Bible” (Bloom, Harold) 295 “Literature of Nihilism, The” (Man, Paul de) 52, 59–70 literaturization 38 Lost Highway (Lynch, David) 16 Loving the Torah More Than God? Towards a Catholic Appreciation of Judaism (Beeck, Frans Jozef van) 118 Lynch, David

Index Lost Highway 16 Mulholland Drive 15–16 Macbeth (Shakespeare, William) 252 Man, Henrik de 83, 104 Man, Paul de 20, 21, 22–3, 68–9, 77–84, 204–5 Allegories of Reading 70, 79 anti-Semitism 49–50, 52, 57–9, 63–8, 70, 76–7, 107 art 54–7 “Art as Mirror of the Essence of Nations: Considerations on Geist der Nationen by A. E. Brinckmann” 48, 53–4 Blindness and Insight 70 “Contemporary Trends in French Literature” 56–7 “Criticism and Literary History” 55 degeneration 49–50 Derrida, Jacques 67, 69 essentialism 36–7 ethics 79–80, 98–9 Felman, Shoshana 97–104 “German Literature, A Great Writer: Ernst Jünger” 57 “German Literature. A Great German Lyricist: Max Dauthendey” 81–2 Het Vlaamsche Land essays 47, 48, 50, 52, 53–5 history 53, 54–5 Holocaust witnessing 89, 102 “Jews in Contemporary Literature” 58 Judaism 84 “Juifs, Les” 63, 65 Krieger, Murray 39 language 71–5, 80–1 Lentricchia, Frank 36–7 “Literature of Nihilism, The” 52, 59–70 national personality/nationalism 48–9, 54–5, 62 Nazism 60, 63–4, 66, 68, 70, 75, 99 reading 71–4, 79 Rhetoric of Romanticism, The 45–7, 71–2, 81 Rilke, Rainer Maria 62–3 romanticism 46, 99–100

325

Shelley, Percy Bysshe 46–7, 52, 69, 71–3 “Shelley Disfigured” 53 silence 98–105, 107 trauma 102, 107 “View on Contemporary German Fiction, A” 49, 57 Wartime Journalism 47–9 Mandel, Arnold 116 Mann, Thomas 116 Marxism 246 Mauriac, François 22–3, 139–40, 159, 161, 281 Holocaust, the 159–62 Nazism 168–9 night 179 Wiesel, Elie 158–72, 174, 196–7, 200, 207–8 Medea (Euripides) 10–11, 224 memory 144–5, 288 Meninas, Las (Velázquez, Diego) 225, 227 Messiah, the 294–5 messianic, the 246–9 metaphor, theory of 39 midrash, the 19, 115, 290 mirror 250 Möbian theory 1–2, 4–5, 7–9, 23–4, 289–95 aesthetic, the 212–18 Borges, Jorge Luis 225–6 Foucault, Michel 224–5 Holocaust, the 290–1 infinite language 221, 223–9, 258, 259, 260 literary criticism 204–12 narrative loops 146, 225–9 posthumous, the 257–8, 275–7, 284–5, 287, 289 Möbius, August Ferdinand 2 Möbius strip 2f–4, 8–9 more within the less, the 223 mortality 229, 272–3, 287–8 see also posthumous, the Odyssey 229–30, 238 Mulholland Drive (Lynch, David) 15–16 Müller, Filip 94 Müller, Sebastian 116

326 Index narrative 238 narrative loops 146, 225–9, 265 see also repetition national personality 48–9, 54–5 National Socialism see Nazism nationalism 62 Nazism 54 n.22, 61, 76–7, 169 darkness 189 Friedländer, Saul 190 Hilberg, Raul 190–1 Himmler, Heinrich 191–2 Laub, Dori 96 Man, Paul de 60, 63–4, 66, 68, 70, 75 Mauriac, François 168–9 revisionism 106–7 New Apologists for Poetry, The (Krieger, Murray) 26 New Criticism 25–9, 38 see also After the New Criticism Krieger, Murray 38, 39 Lentricchia, Frank 36 Newton, Isaac 7 Nietzsche, Friedrich 165 night (la nuit) 24, 167, 171–2, 184, 198, 207–8 see also other night Blanchot, Maurice 174–80 as a face 179–80 Genesis, book of 184–8 Levinas, Emmanuel 181–4, 200, 208 Night (Wiesel, Elie) 179, 180, 183, 189, 192–3 Night (Wiesel, Elie) 136–8, 139–42, 145–6, 156, 175, 281 different endings 146–53 fathers 158, 171, 183, 196–7 hanging of the pipel 136–8, 145–8, 154, 158 legacy 193 Mauriac, François 160–5, 169–71, 207 redemptive readings 168, 170–1, 190, 194 religion/belief 153–5, 165–8 repetition 142–3, 146 Seidman, Naomi 147–52 translation 152 witnessing 167–8, 180, 196, 200 No Exit (Sartre, Jean–Paul) 266, 281 nocturnal space 192–3

nothingness 181 Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog) (Resnais, Alain) 90, 167, 174 “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (Keats, John) 214–15, 216 Odyssey (Homer) 212, 219–24, 227–8, 229, 236–7, 239–43 death 219–21, 229–33, 239, 241–2, 243–4, 249–50, 260–1 Foucault, Michel 224, 229, 232, 239, 274–5 homecoming 254–5, 258–9, 260 hospitality system 253–4, 255–7, 258–9, 260 hostage status 252, 253, 257 mortality 229–30, 238 narrative 237–8 posthumous, the 257–8, 259–60 Sirens 230–6, 237–8, 239–40, 249, 251, 257 songs 230–8, 243, 249, 257, 259 substitution 252–3 Oedipus Tyrannus (Sophocles) 6, 209, 249–50, 252–3 Of Grammatology (Derrida, Jacques) 245 organicism 30–1, 39 n.52 Orpheus, myth of 235 Blanchot, Maurice 176–8, 242 other night 177–81, 184, 188, 198, 240 Other/other 13–15 Otherwise Than Being (Levinas, Emmanuel) 251 “Partial Magic in the Quixote” (Borges, Jorge Luis) 225 pedagogy 245 performativity 34 Pericles 11 “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (Borges, Jorge Luis) 10 Plath, Sylvia: “Lady Lazarus” 285–6 Plato 213, 217 Republic, The 212, 218 Play and Place of Criticism, The (Krieger, Murray) 28 Poetics (Aristotle) 212, 213 poetry 12

Index politics 61 post-Holocaustal age 215 posthumous, the 257–8, 259–60, 271–7, 287–8, 293–5 see also mortality cogito, the 280–5, 291 Holocaust survivors 278, 289, 294 literature 286–7 poststructuralism 5–7, 16 Preface to Plato (Havelock, Eric) 223 promissory, the 248–50 prophetic thought 7–8 psychoanalysis 13–14 psychology 13–14 Purple Rose of Cairo, The (Allen, Woody) 9 rational thought 8 “Raubmenschen” (Dauthendey, Max) 82 Raymond, Marcel 55–6 reality 268–9 Rebbe, the 155, 196 redemptive, the 168, 170, 193, 194–5, 197–8 redemptive anti-Semitism 190–2 Religieuse, La (The Nun) (Diderot, Denis) 224–5 religion/belief 8, 115, 118, 122–5 see also Christianity; God; Judaism Auschwitz 155 creation 184–8 death 214–15 festivals 212–13 gods, the 219–20 Holocaust, the 128, 158, 160–1, 169, 282 Levinas, Emmanuel 127–8, 130–1 Mauriac, François 158–72 Messiah, the 294–5 Nietzsche, Friedrich 165 Night (Wiesel, Elie) 153–5, 165–8 promises 246–9 suffering 129 theodicy 130–1, 193, 282 time 248 witness 163 repetition see also narrative loops Night 142–3, 146 Waiting for Godot 265–6, 285

327

Republic, The (Plato) 212, 218 “Requiem for a Jealous Boy” (Kolitz, Zvi) 119 Resnais, Alain: Nuit et Brouillard (“Night and Fog”) 90, 167, 172, 174 revisionism 106–7 Rhetoric of Romanticism, The (Man, Paul de) 45–6, 71–2, 81 Richard II (Shakespeare, William) 15 Rilke, Rainer Maria 62–3 Ringelblum, Emanuel 116 romanticism 43, 100 Man, Paul de 46, 99–100 Rosenfeld, Alvin 194 Rosenzweig, Franz 248 Rosmini, Antonio 124 sacrificial relations 22, 276–7, 294 see also anti-sacrificial, the scapegoat mechanism 17, 276, 282, 284 sacrificial structures 17, 276 Sacrificing Commentary (Goodhart, Sandor) 16–17, 18–19, 22, 201, 208 “Sandman, The” (Hoffman, E. T. A.) 233 Sartre, Jean-Paul: No Exit 266, 281 scapegoat mechanism 17, 276, 282, 284–5 Schneersohn, Menachem Mendel 155 science 8 n.16, 53–4 scripture 186, 194, 220, 276–7, 294–5 ashes 158 Genesis, book of 145, 184–8, 189, 200 Haggadah, the 192 literary, the 217 midrash, the 19, 115, 290 Talmud, the 144 temporality 248 Torah 185, 186 Searle, John 70–1 “Secret Miracle, The” (Borges, Jorge Luis) 224, 228 Seidman, Naomi 147–52, 168 Sendak, Maurice: Where the Wild Things Are 241 Seventh Seal, The (Bergman, Ingmar) 214 Shakespeare, William 9–10, 212, 217 Hamlet 9, 10, 225, 227, 228 Macbeth 252

328 Index reading 11–12 Richard II 15 Tempest, The 201 Shakespeare Our Contemporary (Kott, Jan) 10 “Shatterday” (Ellison, Harlan) 10 Shelley, Percy Bysshe: Triumph of Life, The 46–7, 52, 69, 71–3 “Shelley Disfigured” (Man, Paul de) 53 Shoah (Lanzmann, Claude) 89, 90, 93–4, 190 Shoshani 189 silence 98–105, 107, 143 Sirens 230–6, 237–8, 239–40, 249, 251 hospitality 257 Sophocles 212 Oedipus Tyrannus 6, 209, 249–50 “Sorcerer’s Cure, The” (Lévi-Strauss, Claude) 256 Statues, The (Yeats, W. B.) 46 “Story of King Shahryar and his Brother, The” 225 structuralism 7, 10, 16 subjectivity 280 substitution 251–3 Suchomel, Franz 94 suffering 128–9, 132, 195, 291–2 survivor testimony 88–90, 93–4, 102, 105–9 see also Holocaust witnessing Felman, Shoshana 205 Laub, Dori 90–3, 94–7, 205 memory 144–5, 146 Wiesel, Elie 158 “Yossel Rakover’s Appeal to God” (Kolitz, Zvi) 114–26 Sutzkever, Abraham 115, 117, 121 synchronic, the 8, 23, 33, 216 n.15 Talmud, the 144 Tempest, The (Shakespeare, William) 201 Terminator, The (film trilogy) 233 Testimony (Felman, Shoshana/Laub, Dori) 87–8, 90–3, 94–106, 109–10 testimony, theory of 108 see also survivor testimony Theater of the Absurd 270 theodicy 130, 193, 282, 291

there is, the 180–3, 188–9, 200, 240 Thousand and One Nights (story collection) 213, 214, 225, 227, 228 Tiger Beneath the Skin: Stories and Parables of the Years of Death, The (Kolitz, Zvi) 114 time 143–4 death 269–70 Levinas, Emmanuel 244–5, 248 narrative time 237–8 reality 268–9 topology 13 Torah 185, 186 tragedy 30–2, 276–7 Tragic Vision, The (Krieger, Murray) 28, 30–4, 38–9 trauma theory 90, 97, 205 Trial, The (Kafka, Franz) 271 Triumph of Life, The (Shelley, Percy Bysshe) 46–7, 52, 69, 71–3 Trojan war 254 “Tyger, The” (Blake, William) 241 “Useless Suffering” (Levinas, Emmanuel) 128–9 Velázquez, Diego: Meninas, Las 225, 227 “View on Contemporary German Fiction, A” (Man, Paul de) 49, 57 violence 24, 183, 189, 213, 293 see also Holocaust, the Virgil: Aeneid 226, 227, 228 Waiting for Godot (Beckett, Samuel) 264–71, 281, 283–5, 287 Wartime Journalism (Man, Paul de) 47–9 “When Fiction Lives in Fiction” (Borges, Jorge Luis) 225 Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak, Maurice) 241 Wiesel, Elie 20, 22–3, 136, 139, 146, 208 Accident, The 156–7 fathers 158, 171, 183, 196–7 Holocaust witnessing 158, 163, 167–8, 180, 196–7 Jour, Le (Day) 151 Mauriac, François 158–72, 174, 196–7, 200, 207

Index mortality 180 night 179, 180, 183, 189, 192–3, 197 Night see Night witnessing see Holocaust witnessing; Testimony Wolf, Christa 199 Wordsworth, William: “Intimations of Immortality” 269, 280 Writing of the Disaster, The (Blanchot, Maurice) 280

329

Years of Persecution, The (Friedländer, Saul) 190 Yeats, W. B. 46, 199–200 Statues, The 46 Yossel Rakover Speaks to God: Holocaust Challenges to Religious Faith (Kolitz, Zvi) 119 “Yossel Rakover’s Appeal to God” (Kolitz, Zvi) 114–27, 130, 131–2, 205–6, 211