Shattering Biopolitics: Militant Listening and the Sound of Life 9780823294893

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S H AT T E R I N G B I O P O L I T I C S

fordham university press new york 2021

commonalities Timothy C. Campbell, series editor

S H AT T E R I N G BIOPOLITICS Militant Listening and the Sound of Life

naomi waltham- smith

Copyright © 2021 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other— except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Waltham-Smith, Naomi, 1983– author. Title: Shattering biopolitics : militant listening and the sound of life / Naomi Waltham-Smith. Description: First edition. | New York : Fordham University Press, 2021. | Series: Commonalities | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020058362 | ISBN 9780823294862 (hardback) | ISBN 9780823294879 (paperback) | ISBN 9780823294886 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Biopolitics—Philosophy. | Sound (Philosophy) Classification: LCC JA80 .W34 2021 | DDC 320.01—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020058362 Printed in the United States of America 23 22 21 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

for my mother, who never wanted to hang up The invention of writing is an urgent defense against pillaging, massacre, forgetting . . . You are dead. I snatch the world from you. I take your breath away. It’s over. Done for [ fichu]. Finished. Says mortality.—No! I cry. —Hélène Cixous, Ayaï

CONTENTS

List of Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Prologue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1 1 Shatter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Excursus 1: Calculation and Stricture in Mendi + Keith Obadike’s Numbers Station . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 2 The Rhythm of Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 Excursus 2: Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Phonetic Border-Crossings . . . . . . . . . . . . . .91 3 Mouth(piece) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 Excursus 3: Sharon Hayes’s Addresses . . . .145 4 A Use of Ears . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158 Excursus 4: The Drive to Listen in Ultra-red’s Militant Sound Investigations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209 Selected Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .233 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243

A B B R E V I AT I O N S

Existing English translations have been cited throughout, except where other wise noted. All translations of previously untranslated texts are my own, except where other wise noted.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. “L’amour en éclats.” In Une Pensée Finie, 225– 65. Paris: Galilée, 1991. “Shattered Love.” Translated by Lisa Garbus and Simona Sawhney. In A Finite Thinking, edited by Simon Sparks, 245–74. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003. An Cixous, Hélène. Anankè. Paris: des femmes, 1979. AS Derrida, Jacques. L’animal que donc je suis. Paris: Galilée, 2006. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Translated by David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. AVE Derrida, Jacques. Apprendre à vivre enfin. Entretien avec Jean Birnbaum. Paris: Éditions Galilée/Le Monde, 2004. Learning to Live Finally. The Last Interview. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. New York: Melville House, 2007. Ay Cixous, Hélène. Ayaï! Le cri de la littérature. With artwork by Adel Abdessemed. Paris: Galilée, 2013. B Derrida, Jacques. Béliers. Le dialogue ininterrompu: Entre deux infinis, le poème. Paris: Galilée, 2003. “Rams: Uninterrupted Dialogue—Between Two Infinities, the Poem.” Translated by

AE

Bor

BS1

BS2

CD

CF

CI

Cir

x

Thomas Dutoit and Phillipe Romanski. In Sovereignties without Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, edited by Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen, 135–63. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. Nancy, Jean-Luc. “Borborygmi.” Translated by Jonathan Derbyshire. In A Finite Thinking, edited by Simon Sparks, 112–29. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003. Derrida, Jacques. Séminaire La bête et le souverain, Volume I (2001–2002). Edited by Michael Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud. Paris: Galilée, 2008. The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Derrida, Jacques. Séminaire La bête et le souverain, Volume II (2002–2003). Edited by Michael Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud. Paris: Galilée, 2010. The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Nancy, Jean-Luc. La communauté desœuvrée. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1986. “The Operative Community.” Translated by Peter Connor. In The Inoperative Community, edited by Peter Connor, 1–42. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Agamben, Giorgio. Che cos’è la filosofia? Marcerata: Quodlibet Srl., 2016. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Lorenzo Chiesa. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2018. Agamben, Giorgio. Categorie Italiane: Studi di poetica. Venice: Marsilio Editori, 1996. The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999. Derrida, Jacques. “Circonfession.” In Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida. Paris: Seuil, 1991. “Circumfession.” In Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques

Abbreviations

CP

CV

D

DE

DH

DR

DT

E

Derrida, translated by Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Derrida, Jacques. La carte postale de Socrate à Freud et au-déla. Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1980. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Agamben, Giorgio. La comunità che viene. Turn: Einaudi, 1990. The Coming Community. Translated by Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Derrida, Jacques. La dissémination. Paris: Seuil, 1972. Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Derrida, Jacques. “Une certaine possibilité impossible de dire l’événement.” In Dire l’événement, est-ce possible? Seminaire de Montréal, pour Jacques Derrida. Paris: Hartmann, 2001. “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event.” Translated by Gila Walker. Critical Inquiry 33, no. 2 (2007): 441–61. Derrida, Jacques, and Anne Dufourmantelle. De l’hospitalité: Anne Dufourmantelle invite Jacques Derrida à repondre. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1997. Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond. Translated by Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000. Derrida, Jacques. With photographs by Marie-Françoise Plissart. Droits de regards. Paris: Minuit, 1985. Right of Inspection. Translated by David Wills. New York: Monacelli, 1998. Derrida, Jacques. Donner le temps 1. La fausse monnaie. Paris: Galilée, 1991. Given Time 1: Counterfeit Money. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Nancy, Jean-Luc. À l’écoute. Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2002. Listening. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. Abbreviations

xi

EAP Derrida, Jacques. États d’âme de la psychanalyse. Paris: Galilée, 2000. “Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul.” In Without Alibi (WA), translated by Peggy Kamuf, 238–80. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002. Eco Derrida, Jacques. “Economimesis.” In Sylviane Agacinski et al., Mimesis des articulations. Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1975. “Economimesis.” Translated by Richard Klein. Diacritics 11, no. 3 (1981): 3–25. ED Derrida, Jacques. L’écriture et la différence. Paris: Seuil, 1967. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. ES Nancy, Jean-Luc. Ego Sum. Paris: Flammarion, 1979. Ego Sum: Corpus, Anima, Fabula. Translated by Marie-Eve Morin. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. F Derrida, Jacques. “Fors: Les mots anglés de Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok.” Foreword to Cryptonymie: Le verbier de l’homme aux loups. Paris: Éditions Aubier-Flammarion, 1976. “Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok.” Translated by Barbara Johnson. Foreword to Abraham and Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word, translated by Nicholas Rand, xi–xlviii. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. FL Derrida, Jacques. Force de loi. Le “ fondement mystique de l’autorité.” Paris: Galilée, 1994. “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation’ of Authority.” Translated by Mary Quaintance. In Acts of Religion, edited by Gil Anidjar, 230–98. New York: Routledge, 2001. Four Derrida, Jacques. “Fourmis.” In Lectures de la difference sexuelle, edited by Mara Negron, 69–102. Paris: des femmes, 1994. “Fourmis.” Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Oxford Literary Review 24, no. 1 (2002): 17–42. xii

Abbreviations

FP

FS

G

G3

G4

GC

Agamben, Giorgio. La fine del pensiero/La fin de la pensée. Paris: Le Nouveau Commerce, 1982. “The End of Thinking.” Translated by Peter Carravetta. Differentia 1 (1986): 57–58. Derrida, Jacques. “Foi et savoir: Les deux sources de la ‘religion’ aux limites de la simple raison.” In Foi et savoir suivi de le siècle et le pardon, 7–100. Paris: Seuil 2001. Originally published in La religion, Séminaire de Capri, edited by Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, 9–86. Paris: Seuil, 1996. “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone.” Translated by Samuel Weber. In Acts of Religion, edited by Gil Anidjar, 40–101. New York: Routledge, 2001. Derrida, Jacques. De la grammatologie. Paris: Minuit, 1967. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1974. Derrida, Jacques. Geschlecht III. Edited by Geoffrey Bennington, Katie Chenoweth, and Rodrigo Therezo. Paris: Seuil, 2018. Geschlecht III: Sex, Race, Nation, Humanity. Translated by Katie Chenoweth and Rodrigo Therezo. Edited by Geoffrey Bennington, Katie Chenoweth, and Rodrigo Therezo. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Derrida, Jacques. “L’Oreille de Heidegger: Philpolémologie (Geschlecht IV).” In Politiques de l’amitié. Paris: Galilée, 1994. “Heidegger’s Ear: Philopolemology (Geschlecht IV).” Translated by John P. Leavey Jr. In Reading Heidegger: Commemorations, edited by John Sallis, 163–218. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Nancy, Jean-Luc. “Grondement commun.” Lignes 41, no.  2 (2013): 111–14. “Foreword: The Common Growl.” Translated by Steven Corcoran. In The Common Growl: Toward a Poetics of Precarious Community, edited by Thomas Claviez, vii–ix. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Abbreviations

xiii

Gl

H

HC

HQ

Hr HS

I

IS

xiv

Derrida, Jacques. Glas. Paris: Galilée, 1974. Clang. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and David Wills. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Hegel: L’inquiétude du négatif. Paris: Hachette Littératures, 1997. Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative. Translated by Jason Smith and Steven Miller. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Derrida, Jacques. H.  C. pour la vie, c’est-à-dire . . . . Paris: Galilée, 2002. H. C. for Life, That Is to Say . . . . Translated by Laurent Milesi and Stefan Herbrechter. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006. Derrida, Jacques. Heidegger: La question de l’étre et de l’histoire cours de l’ENS-Ulm (1964–1965). Edited by Thomas Dutoit. Paris: Galilée, 2013. Heidegger: The Question of Being and History. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Cixous, Hélène. Hyperrêve. Galilée, 2006. Hyperdream. Translated by Beverley Bie Brahic. Cambridge: Polity, 2009. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo sacer: Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita. Turin: Einaudi, 1995. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998. Cixous, Hélène. Insister: À Jacques Derrida. Paris: Galilée, 2006. Insister of Jacques Derrida. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. With original drawings by Ernest Pignon-Ernest. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007. Agamben, Giorgio. Infanzia e storia: Distruzione dell’esperienza e origine della storia. Turin: Einaudi, 1978. Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience. Translated by Liz Heron. New York: Verso, 1993.

Abbreviations

JA

KJA

LM

M

MA

MF

Neg

OG

OR

Cixous, Hélène. Jours de l’an. Paris: des Femmes, 1990. First Days of the Year. Translated by Catherine A. F. MacGillivray. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Derrida, Jacques. Séminaire Nationalité et nationalisme philosophiques: Kant, le juif, l’allemand. Unpublished seminar, Archive-Derrida, IMEC, 219DRR/230/2, 1987–1988. Agamben, Giorgio. Il linguaggio e la morte: Un seminario sul luogo della negatività. Turin: Einaudi, 1982. Language and Death: The Place of Negativity. Translated by Karen E. Pinkus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Derrida, Jacques. Marges—de la philosophie. Paris: Minuit, 1972. Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Derrida, Jacques. Le monolinguisme de l’autre: Ou le prosthèse d’origine. Paris: Galilée, 1996. Monolingualism of the Other; Or, the Prosthesis of Origin. Translated by Patrick Mensah. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998. Agamben, Giorgio. Mezzi senza fine: Note sulla politica. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1996. Means without End: Notes on Politics. Translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Derrida, Jacques. Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews. Edited and translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002. Derrida, Jacques. Introduction à L’origine de la géométrie d’Edmund Husserl. Paris: PUF, 1962. Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction. Translated by John P. Leavey Jr. Stony Brook, N.Y.: Nicholas Hays, 1978. Cixous, Hélène. OR, Les lettres de mon père. Paris: des femmes, 1997.

Abbreviations

xv

Oto

Derrida, Jacques. Otobiographies. L’enseignement de Nietzsche et la politique du nom propre. Paris: Galilée, 1984. “Otobiographies.” Translated by Avital Ronell. In The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, edited by Christie McDonald, 1–38. New York: Schocken Books, 1985. P Agamben, Giorgio. Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999. PA Derrida, Jacques. Politiques de l’amitié. Paris: Galilée, 1994. The Politics of Friendship. Translated by George Collins. London: Verso, 1997. Par Derrida, Jacques. Parages. Paris: Galilée, 1984. Parages. Translated by Tom Conley, James Hulbert, John P. Leavey Jr., and Avital Ronell. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010. Pas Derrida, Jacques. Passions. Paris: Galilée, 1993. “Passions.” Translated by David Wood. In On the Name, edited by Thomas Dutoit, 3–31. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995. PF Nancy, Jean-Luc. Une Pensée Finie. Paris: Galilée, 1991. A Finite Thinking. Edited by Simon Sparks. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003. PM Derrida, Jacques. Papier Machine. Paris: Galilée, 2001. Paper Machine. Translated by Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005. PM1 Derrida, Jacques. Séminaire La peine de mort, Volume I (1999– 2000). Edited by Geoffrey Bennington, Marc Crépon, and Thomas Dutoit. Paris: Galilée, 2012. The Death Penalty, Volume I. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. PM2 Derrida, Jacques. Séminaire La peine de mort, Volume II (2000– 2001). Edited by Geoffrey Bennington and Marc Crépon. Paris: xvi Abbreviations

Galilée, 2012. The Death Penalty, Volume II. Translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Psy1 Derrida, Jacques. Psyché: Inventions de l’autre. Paris: Galilée, 1998 [1987]. Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume 1. Edited by Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007. Psy2 Derrida, Jacques. Psyché: Inventions de l’autre II. Second expanded edition. Paris: Galilée, 2003 [1987]. Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume 2. Edited by Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008. R Derrida, Jacques. Résistances de la psychanalyse. Paris: Galilée, 1996. Resistances of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998. RA Agamben, Giorgio. Quel che resta di Auschwitz. L’archivio e il testimone. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1998. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone Books, 2000. RG Agamben, Giorgio, Il Regno et la Gloria: Per una genealogica teologica dell’economia et del governo. Milan; Neri Pozza, 2007. The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government. Translated by Lorenzo Chiesa (with Matteo Mandarini). Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2011. RRR Nancy, Jean-Luc. “Récit, récitation, récitatif.” In Bruno Clément and Clemens Carl-Härle, Aux confins du récit, 12–32. Saint Denis: Presses universitaires de Vincennes (La Philosophie hors de soi), 2014. “Récit Recitation Recitative.” Translated Charlotte Mandell. In Speaking of Music: Addressing the Sonorous, edited by Keith Chapin and Andrew H. Clark, 242–55. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. Abbreviations

xvii

RSV Derrida, Jacques, and Jean-Luc Nancy. “Résponsabilité du sens à venir.” In Sens en tous sens: Autour des travaux de Jean- Luc Nancy, edited by Francis Guibal and Jean-Clet Martin. Paris: Galilée, 2004. “Responsibility—Of the Sense to Come.” In Derrida, For Strasbourg: Conversations of Friendship and Philosophy, edited and translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, 56–86. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. S Agamben, Giorgio. Stanze: La parola e il fantasma nella cultura occidentale. Rome: Einaudi, 1977. Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Sch Derrida, Jacques. Schibboleth pour Paul Celan. Paris: Galilée, 1986. “Shibboleth: For Paul Celan.” Translated by Joshua Wilner. Revised by Thomas Dutoit. In Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, 1–64. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. SM Derrida, Jacques. Spectres de Marx. Paris: Galilée, 1993. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994. T Derrida, Jacques. Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy. Paris: Galilée, 2000. On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy. Translated by Christine Irizarry. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005. TA Derrida Jacques. “Le temps des adieux: Heidegger (lu par) Hegel (lu par) Malabou.” La Revue Philosophique, no. 1 (1998): 3–47. “A Time for Farewells: Heidegger (Read by) Hegel (Read by) Malabou.” Preface to Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic. Translated by Lisabeth During, vii–xlvii. New York: Routledge, 2005. TP Derrida, Jacques. Théorie et pratique. Edited by Alexander García Düttmann. Paris: Galilée, 2017. Theory and Practice. xviii

Abbreviations

Translated by David Wills. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. TR Agamben, Giorgio. Il tempo che resta. Un comment alla Lettera ai romani. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2000. The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Translated by Patricia Daily. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005. U Agamben, Giorgio. L’uso dei corpi. Vicenza: Neri Pozza Editore, 2014. The Use of Bodies. Translated by Adam Kotsko. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2015. UG Derrida, Jacques. Ulysse gramophone. Deux mots pour Joyce. Paris: Galilée, 1987. “Two Words for Joyce.” Translated by Geoffrey Bennington. In Derrida and Joyce: Texts and Contexts, edited by Andrew J. Mitchell and San Slote, 22–40. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013. “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce.” Translated by François Raffoul. Ibid., 41–86. V Derrida, Jacques. Voyous: Deux essais sur la raison. Paris: Galilée, 2003. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005. VeP Derrida, Jacques. La vérité en peinture. Paris: Flammarion, 1978. The Truth in Painting. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Ver Derrida, Jacques. “Un vers à soie (points de vue piqués sur l’autre voile).” In Derrida and Cixous, Voiles, with drawings by Ernest Pignon-Ernest, 23–85. Paris: Galilée, 1998. “A Silkworm of One’s Own.” In Veils, translated by Geoffrey Bennington, 17–92. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002. VLH Nancy, Jean-Luc. “La voix libre de l’homme.” In Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, Les Fins de l’homme. Abbreviations

xix

VM

VP

Voc

VV WA

xx

Paris: Galilée, 1981. “The Free Voice of Man.” In Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, Retreating the Political, edited by Simon Sparks. New York: Routledge, 1997. Derrida, Jacques. Séminaire La vie la mort (1975–76). Edited by Pascale-Anne Brault and Peggy Kamuf. Life Death. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Peggy Kamuf. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2020. Derrida, Jacques. La voix et le phénomène. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1967. Voice and Phenomenon. Translated by Leonard Lawlor. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2011. Agamben, Giorgio. “Vocazione e voce.” In La potenza del pensiero: Saggi e conferenze, 77–90. Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 2005. “Vocation and Voice.” Translated by Jeff Fort. Qui parle 10, no. 2 (1997): 89–100. [Not included in P. The first version of this text was published as “Heidegger–Hölderlin.” Alfabeta 69 (February 1985): 4–5.] Nancy, Jean-Luc. “Violence et violence.” Lignes 25 (1995): 293–98. Derrida, Jacques. Without Alibi. Edited and translated by Peggy Kamuf. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002.

Abbreviations

S H AT T E R I N G B I O P O L I T I C S

P R O LO G U E

Shattering Biopolitics: Militant Listening and the Sound of Life is staged as a scattered collection of overhearings, as if I were listening in on two or more thinkers eavesdropping on one another. Like any eavesdropper, they often fail precisely in trying to hear too much. They mishear one another and miss hearing one another altogether, not for want of aural attention but because of an excess of hearing—an over-hearing.1 The German false friend überhören, which means to mishear, betrays this irreducible lapse. To overhear, meanwhile, is mithören, which, rather than suggesting reciprocity, might point to the fact that I am never alone when overhearing but always already overheard by another. According to this logic, the book unfolds around a set of mishearings between and within two interrelated philosophical traditions, between French deconstruction, on the one hand, and Italian theories of biopolitics, on the other, and, specifically, between Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben. These two thinkers are frequently listening to one another, sometimes explicitly tracking each other’s thought, but oftentimes silently, even secretively, lending an ear to each other without giving away their proximity. There is an intensity of hearing between them—an excessive over-hearing— often disavowed on one side or vociferously rebuffed by the other, which descends into missing hearing or even willful mishearing (überhörenwollen). Kevin Attell’s impor tant work on the debates between Derrida and Agamben is attuned both to the explicit references (scant on Derrida’s part, more numerous on Agamben’s) and also to ellipsis and preterition.2 But this book is concerned not simply with the (mis)hearings that take place between deconstruction and its interlocutors but also with the ways in

which aurality is bound up with or binds itself to the thought of life—even is the very binding of life to itself and its unraveling. This book comes amid an upsurge in thinking about the notion of life in deconstruction, precipitated by the publication and translation of Derrida’s late seminars on the death penalty, sovereignty, and animal life, and more recently the much earlier seminar, La vie la mort.3 Shattering Biopolitics intervenes in this proliferation of bio- and eco-deconstructions with an otodeconstruction or echo-deconstruction.4 In what ways, though, is sound imbricated in life and its deconstruction? Sound might be described as what animates philosophy, provokes its desire, leads it on, and entraps it, but also unleashes its power. There is an intimacy between philosophy and aurality that is life-giving in the sense that it draws philosophy outside itself and thus exposes it to the chance of death—which makes it all the more alive. From this perspective, philosophers’ failures to listen to one another are not belated or accidental lapses but symptoms of the dispersive, sonorous force that philosophy tries to tame and eject as its external other—the inarticulate cry or raw noise outside the rational logos—but which is in fact its inner life force, the drive within that comes before and overpowers any drive to master the other. Sound is a name for the constitutive jeopardy that is philosophy. The more closely philosophy approaches its other with the aim of understanding it (entendre means both to listen and to understand in French), the more it risks mishearing—no longer hearing or hearing too much. This risk of over-hearing animates the continental philosophical tradition. Why insist on hearing and not the more habitual reading? This is not to restore some sense of immediacy or intimacy that is lost in the more predominantly visual practice of reading, for the kind of reading I have in mind exceeds any contradiction between audible and visible. Rather, reading is always an uneasy mix of reading-hearing, always tainted and made possible by a certain reading aloud. Inasmuch as the goal of reading can be said to produce a commentary—an Erläuterung—it is a matter of making it louder (lauter). Moreover, reading is always tending toward listening to the extent that it responds to an address, to an interpellative apostrophe that cries out for and animates the ear of the other, interrupting any supposed synchronicity between reading and text. A reading worthy of the name, moreover, is a matter of listening rhythmically or, to refer to a practice that garners Derrida’s attention as much as 2

Prologue

it does Michel Foucault’s, of auscultating. For example, in his introduction to the English collection of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s essays, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, Derrida urges: One must learn to read Lacoue-Labarthe, to listen to him, and to do so at his rhythm (learn to follow his rhythm and what he means by “rhythm”)—that of his voice, I would almost say his breath. . . . One must learn the necessity of a scansion that comes to fold and unfold a thought. This is nothing other than the necessity of a rhythm—rhythm itself. (Psy2 203/198) Such reading marks and re-marks the text, pointing it as one points a psalm and at the same time pointing to the time of reading itself—to the time it takes to read and thus to the rhythms of reading itself. This punctuating practice of reading, which Peter Szendy sets out under the theory of general “stigmatology,” modulates the text with hiatuses, inflections, hesitations, and emphases.5 Derrida variously describes this rhythm as a kind of typographic imprint, the stamping of a coin, or the beating of the ear’s tympanum—always multiple and always calling forth another stroke. It is as though reading were striking a bell with a hammer to set it vibrating and thus make it sound, though less regularly and sometimes with enough force to indent or even shatter it. Shattering Biopolitics is, among other things, about that force of listening—a listening that has the power to shatter into shards. It is about the violence of sound and listening—their power over life—but also their force of life—their life-giving power. Chapter 1 sets out this quasi-concept of shatter that sends aurality and biopolitics flying into deconstruction. It explores how the power of and over life, alongside and (right up) against (tout contre) its trajectory in Foucault and subsequent waves of biopolitical theory, may be thought through and as (the life of) deconstruction. The remaining three theoretical chapters tackle major points of contact between deconstruction, biopolitical theory, and sound studies: rhythm, voice, and listening. Within each of these categories, the chapters traverse a wide range of concepts and texts, consciously adopting a process of moving by analogical drift rather than teleological drive. Sound is what resists and disperses the headlong thrust of rational philosophizing. It is what separates poetry from prose. Here, too, this sonorous impulse infects the text such that writing performs the wayward, chancy life that it describes, resisting the control of Prologue

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theoretical exposition. If the themes of this book are a shattering of teleology, a suspicion of metadiscourse, a rejection of falsification, and a dispersal of meaningful signification, sound is the contaminant from which no pure writing can be extracted. It is the very life of writing and admits of no scholarly drive to mastery. With readings of texts by Derrida, Agamben, and Malabou, Chapter 2 on rhythm takes the figure of the bell prominent in Glas as a recurring motif or death knell for deconstructing various metaphysical themes from Hegelian Klang and timbre to industrial clock time. Chapter  3 departs from the conventional, overworked concept of voice to explore the pervertibility of speech in the broader context of nonverbal and nonhuman oralities, from biting and vomiting to animal cries and even telephones, and engaging with the significance of the call—as imperative, summons to response-ability, and recalling to life—in the thought of Derrida, Nancy, Agamben, and Cixous. The final theoretical chapter on listening examines the imbrication and displacement of psychoanalytical concepts during the course of the deconstruction of power, life, and aurality with a particular focus on the dialogues between Cixous and Derrida about the end of the world, before turning, via the usure (use or usage, but also wearing-out or exhaustion) of metaphor, to Agamben’s notion of a use of life beyond biopolitics as eternal life. Punctuating these theoretical interventions—marking and re-marking them, giving them a new modulation, auscultating them—is a series of excurses on examples of sound and performance art that grapple with the politics of sound and listening. Mendi and Keith Obadike’s Numbers Station series reveals the implication of aurality in counting and (ac)countability under neoliberal biopolitics, while Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s investigations into the role played by forensic audiology expose the implication of phonemes in the geopolitics of global migration. Sharon Hayes’s praxis of politicized speech acts raises questions of performativity, iterability, address, and apostrophe, and finally Ultra-red’s community-based practice of “militant sound investigation,” rooted in critical popular pedagogy, opens up the possibilities for fostering new uses of our ears beyond psychoanalytical and neoliberal modalities of listening. The component parts of Shattering Biopolitics may thus be read according to multiple rhythms: as singular points, in pairs of double strikes, or as a sequence of dottings, leaping from one chapter to the next or one excur4

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sus to another, with or without the splintering force of the introduction that is designed to shatter any possibility of gathering the thoughts of this book into a unity. Each possible path through the book leads in a different direction, some more directly and other more circuitously. You are invited to enjoy the detours and to break open new paths of your own, to turn back perhaps to read the excursus after the corresponding theoretical reflections or even, having charted the straight philosophical path through the book, to chart a winding course back through the excurses.

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1 S H AT T E R

S O U N D, F O R E X A M P L E

If today there is a generalization of war1—if neoliberal capital and the neofascisms it has spawned wage war on the poor, on immigrants, on refugees, on Muslims, on the autonomy of women, on labor, on democracy—then the blows and wounds this warfare inflicts are perhaps felt most intensely, most searingly—or, as the French idiom has it, most à vif (raw, skinned alive, nerves on the edge)—in the domain of aurality. Sound is exemplarily alive to biopolitics. I shall come to an example of this implication of sound in biopolitics in a moment, but let me preface it with some reflections on the exemplarity of the example, which, as Derrida tells us in Le monolinguisme de l’autre, “gives to be read in more searing, intense, even traumatic fashion, the truth of a universal necessity” (MA 49/26; trans. modified). What happens when someone comes to describe a supposedly singular “situation,” mine for example, by testifying to it in terms which go beyond it, in a language whose generality takes on a value that is in some way structural, universal, transcendental, or ontological? When the firstcomer implies: “What goes for me, irreplaceably, goes for everybody. Substitution is in progress, it has already operated, everyone can say the same thing for and about themselves. It’s enough to hear me.” (MA 40/19–20; trans. modified and my emphasis) What makes the example enough—enough that it alone be heard? It is precisely insofar as it is audible that the singular example can stand for any

other. If it’s enough that it be heard, I would venture that aurality is another name—not a proper name but a nonsynonymous substitution, as Derrida might say (M 13/12)—for substitutability, dissemination, différance. Derrida goes on to link the example’s power to its capacity to expose the structure of the universal like a raw wound, as if flaying it alive (for which the French say échorcher vif ). How to determine this, a singular this whose uniqueness depends on witnessing alone, on the fact that certain individuals, in certain situations, attest to the features of a structure that is nonetheless universal, reveal it, indicate it, give it to be read more “à vif,” as we say and because we say it especially of a wound, more à vif and better than others, and sometimes alone of their sort? (MA 40/20; trans. modified) A few pages later he takes up the metaphor of wounding and searing again to explain why the singular experience or subject that bears witness exemplarily is “no longer simply reducible to that of the example in a series” (MA 48/26). The structure of exemplarity, Derrida suggests, appears in the experience of wounding, of offense, of revenge, and of lesion. Of terror. A traumatic event because here the question is one of blows [coups] and wounds [blessures], of scars [cicatrices], often of murders, sometimes of mass murder. That’s reality, the carry [portée] of all férance, of every reference as différance. (MA 49/26; trans modified) The singular example thus moves from the experience of being heard in place of everyone to an experience of wounding through an escalating violence to an experience of genocide. It is this articulation of aurality with violent force that I want to tease out. Derrida implies that sound is always already caught up in power, that the possibility of a voice being heard in place of others is co-originary with the possibility of a bellicose violence— just as he also claims that “only the infinite possibility of the worst” can grant the possibility of the democracy to come (V 211/153). Or, as he puts it elsewhere, “An event always inflicts a wound in the everyday course of history. . . . Traumatism is produced by the future, by the to come, by the threat of the worst to come.”2 This exposure to the risk of violence is what makes the substitutability of the example possible. The singular example has the capacity to strike with particular force—even to flay the general structure alive, to make the general more raw, more vivid, more alive to pain—only 8

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because it can scorch the surface of the skin, skin it alive. (I recall here also Peggy Kamuf’s idea that there is an “afterburn effect of translating any text by Hélène Cixous and, differently although no less searingly, any text of Derrida’s [who] have always shared an acute ear for the idiom’s reserve stores of untranslatability.” Despite appearing to be above all a visual metaphor, “it is especially voice, always more than one, that bears out this undying principle”—afterburn as listening.3) The equivocation here lies in the fact that the example’s death blows are at the same time a life-giving power. This is because the specific example, in stripping the unconditional transcendental of its protective skin, exposes it to the conditioned. Without its prophylactic, vulnerable to the risk of trauma and death, it becomes alive, for a life without openness to chance is no life at all, but death. Again, it is the co-articulation of sound, exemplarity, and violent power that interests me. Derrida concludes, in the final, highly condensed sentence of the passage cited above, “That’s reality, the carry [portée] of all férance, of every reference as différance.” Elsewhere—for example, in the first year of his final seminar (BS1 46/23) and in the opening section of Geschlecht IV (G4 343–65/164–79)—Derrida elaborates this sense of carry (and of rapport, relation, reference) in the context of describing listening as the carry ing of the voice or “voci-feration.” The French for “within earshot” is à portée de voix and un porte-voix is a megaphone, a carry ing of the voice by ear that is intensely palpable in the people’s mic made famous by Occupy, for instance. Reading this allusion into the passage above, listening—between the carrying of the voice and the example’s being heard—becomes the risk of blows and wounds. In this way aurality is implicated in the life of the living and in the power over life—in the power to maim and to kill whose generalization we witness today. What I want to say is that sound “bears witness exemplarily” to—is a searing example of—the biopolitical imbrication of life and power. Sound is not reducible to one example among a series but is exemplarily exemplary—re-markably so because sound both is a case of exemplarity and, insofar as it has the structure of exemplarity, makes the example as a general category intelligible. There is an articulation between the politics of sound and the politics of life—between, on the one hand, the power of sound and the sound of power and, on the other, not only the power over life but also the power of life—life as power, as an “I can”—and even the life of power—its historical fate, which is to say the tendency of sovereign power Shatter 9

to unravel and expose itself to the im-possible other and to unpower [impouvoir], to happenstance, failure, and self-destruction. Sound is thus articulated with what happens to power. L I S T E N I N G F R O M AT H E N S

Over the pages that follow it will become clear why I dwell on the cutting, vociferous—we might say, brisk—quality of the example. Let us turn first to an example of sound standing in for the violence of biopolitics and making it audible. One of the works exhibited during documenta 14’s controversial Athens installment in 2017 broadcast a four-act “opera” recounting in speech and song the stories of long-walk migrations. The sound, amplified by two Long Range Acoustic Devices (LRADs) mounted on rooftops around the periphery of the ruins of Aristotle’s Lyceum, was the only material transformation of the site, but the theoretical and political stakes of this intervention by interdisciplinary arts collective Postcommodity are more complex to assess. First, there is the contentious decision to hold part of the annual art show away from its regular home in Kassel. Athens was chosen because Greece was the locus in Europe of a series of crises, not least of financialization and migration. “It’s like being in a war” was a frequently heard saying in July 2015 when Greece was exposed to the full violence of the IMF—to which Éric Alliez and Maurizio Lazzarato offer the corrective that “it is a war,” a war continued by means of debt.4 The organizers of the powerful German cultural institution were accused variously of crisis tourism, trauma exploitation, colonialism, and orientalism. The condescension of the show’s title, “Learning from Athens,” only added insult to injury amid complaints of poor communication with the city, exploitation of workers, and underrepresentation of local artists. A stencil began to appear on city walls: “Dear documenta: I refuse to exoticize myself to increase your cultural capital. Sincerely, oi ithageneis [the natives].” A more complex picture emerges from an anthropology of documenta’s discourses and practices, conducted by two Greek social anthropologists and self-consciously titled Learning from documenta.5 Mindful of asymmetries of power in the postcolonial art market, Eleana Yalouri and Elpida Rikou interrogate the extent to which documenta 14 risked homogenizing otherness and exceptionalizing the Greek situation without recognizing its global

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political-economic conditions and how the public programs tended to reify symbols of Athenian democracy without building sustainable relationships with grassroots organizations. They observe that documenta 14 “adopts a discourse of the oppressed other, of the refugee, of the trans subject, of the marginalized indigenous” without reflecting sufficiently on what happens when a powerful institution comes to a city in crisis and how that transforms the relationships between grassroots projects and the institutions that adopt the same language.6 Postcommodity’s intervention comes against this backdrop. A collective that is committed to exposing the violence of capital against Indigenous populations and that has frequently tackled questions of migration and border control, Raven Chacon, Cristóbal Martínez, and Kade  L. Twist also share an interest in making instruments; as well as politicized art, they make music together as a band. Sound and music assume varying degrees of significance in their artistic practice. The Athens installation, The Ears Between Worlds Are Always Speaking, took sound as its object and medium and was one of a number of interventions at documenta 14 to focus on the politics of aurality. Emeka Ogboh’s multichannel sound installation, The Way Earthly Things Are Going, subsequently exhibited in the Tanks at Tate Modern, involved a Greek choir performing a traditional song and texts addressing issues of wanderlust, yearning, survival, and the ravages of the economic crisis as the soundtrack to a real-time LED display of world stock indexes. Documenta’s public programming, a “Parliament of Bodies” curated by Paul B. Preciado (known for his work on the biopolitics of gender, sex, and pleasure), also sought to foreground listening as a method, asserting micropolitical self-organization against the origins, borders, and identities that condition whose voices are heard. A theoretically driven series of “34 Exercises of Freedom” (with a lineup including Toni Negri, Judith Revel, Regina José Galindo, Niillas Somby, and Jack Halberstam) aimed, perhaps overambitiously, “to write a queer anticolonial symphony of Europe from the 1960s, scripting dialogue and giving visibility to dissident, heterogeneous, and minor narratives.”7 In one of the exercises Stathis Gourgouris addressed the theme of “Transgressive Listening,” calling attention to “a condition of utmost listening” and radical receptiveness as the basis for democracy against the authoritarianism that structures much contemporary communication. Shatter 11

Listening, more than speaking, is essential to autonomous understanding— autonomous in its literally political sense. Indeed, more than a domain of free speech, democracy is a state of listening. From the outset, the social-imaginary of the democratic polity privileged speech metaphors— the explicit interrogation of written law, the free and fearless exchange of opinions in the marketplace (parrhēsia)—even if people oftentimes fell into the seductive trap of singular master-guiding oratory (demagoguery). Yet, without being configured as a space of listening, the Athenian dēmos would have been dysfunctional.8 Postcommodity’s The Ears Between Worlds likewise assumes a model of political representation based in being-heard that has a long history in political philosophy going back to ancient Greece and continues to inform diagnoses of the global situation today. This idea of politics as an unequal distribution of audibility finds a particularly clear articulation in the thought of Rancière, who explains in the afterword to the English edition of Le philosophe et ses pauvres that in La mésentente I wanted to highlight that the forms of the political were in the first place a division of the sensible. I understand by this phrase the cutting up [découpage] of the perceptual world that anticipates, through its sensible evidence, the distribution of shares and social parties. . . . And this redistribution itself presupposes a cutting up of what is visible and what is not, of what can be heard and what cannot, of what is noise and what is speech.9 This decision on who and what is (in)audible is thus simultaneously a decision on life—on the distinction between human life (with rational speech) and animal life (which emits only a noisy cry) and, by analogy, between the law-abiding, rational citizen, on the one hand, and the refugee, the Palestinian, and the criminal, whose only crime, perhaps, is to be poor or nonwhite, on the other—in the ancient Greek context, between the inside and the outside of the polis. Only once they demonstrate that their voices may be heard as articulate speech, Rancière observes, can the excluded claim their democratic right of participation. Man, said Aristotle, is political because he possesses speech, a capacity to place the just and the unjust in common, whereas all the animal has is a voice to signal pain and pleasure. But the whole question, then, is to 12

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know who possesses speech and who merely possesses voice. For all time, the refusal to consider certain categories of people as political beings has proceeded by means of a refusal to hear the words exiting their mouths as discourse. Politics happens when [people] demonstrate that their mouths can emit speech that articulates what is in common and not just a voice that signals pain. This distribution and redistribution of places and identities, this apportioning [découpage] and reapportioning [redécoupage] out of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of noise [bruit] and speech [parole], constitute what I call the distribution [partage] of the sensible.10 The politics of listening—a distribution that proceeds through a process of cutting and re-cutting (découper)—thus gets to decide whose life enjoys a protected status and whose is exposed to the full violence of the blows and wounds of state violence. Highlighting the often racialized character of this decision, Jennifer Stoever calls this “the sonic color line.”11 In this way, listening is intimately bound up with the power over life, with the power to makes some lives more or less livable than others. The tangent between these two unequal distributions—of audibility and of livability— is the sound of life. It is thus unsurprising that more radical forms of listening are often proposed as remedies or as forms of resistance against the wars of neoliberal capital. For Gourgouris, the “utmost listening,” with its somewhat idealistic roots in Athenian democracy, is a defense against demagoguery. Postcommodity, meanwhile, strategically reappropriates a device used to silence the voices of the purported enemy by sonically bombarding villagers in Afghanistan and protesters at Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock, and G8 actions in order to give a platform to the voices of migrants, who, during the course of their long journeys by foot, were at the mercy of unequal distributions between life and death. One of the texts in the libretto articulates the fear, triggered when coming across decomposing corpses along the route, “that your life is going to pass there,” while another again draws parallels between border crossing and the passage between life and death: “On one desperate day from so much war and poverty I crossed over to this side. . . . We moved more as the dead than the living.” These interventions seek to reappropriate aurality as resistance or as insurrectionary counterforce against the violence and suffering inflicted by capital. Shatter 13

Sound-studies scholar Brandon LaBelle has even argued that aurality is exemplarily suited to this task on account of its “condition of diffusion and dissipation.”12 Sound “is always moving on.” Leaving so many sources behind, from bodies and objects to things and events, sound picks up and goes, and yet such going is not without its baggage, or consequence. In pushing on sound collects a range of material elements—reflections, absorptions, reverberations. . . . These are pressed into the body of sound as it oscillates across and over so many surfaces. It is bruised by the environment, marked by the material features of surroundings around which it is shaped, impressed. As a sonic agent, this migratory figure is thus a product of its surroundings . . . a foreigner with multiple languages, embodying the potentiality of a certain cosmopolitanism, a radical form of globalism . . . a condition of postnationalism, evading the border patrol and weaving together a diversity of cultural matters.13 There is no shortage of rallying cries for a revolution in and of listening. Shattering Biopolitics challenges this faith in listening as a force for unalloyed good. The idea that aurality is in itself good or at least better than the alternatives of, for example, vision, theory, text, literacy, or Machiavellian politicking—that it represents a heroic stand against the ruin of democracy in our world today—has been a more or less explicit motivation for the sonic turn in the humanities. Without in any way stepping back from the condemnation of neoliberal capital and its effects, I want to challenge the imagined purity of aurality’s force. Such purity would be of a piece with biopolitical rationality. We need only observe, with LaBelle, that sound is “bruised” by the material conditions of its environment. More than this, though, I argue that sound is originarily implicated in the blows and wounds of capital. This is not simply because the purely sonorous—the nonsemantic, racialized animal cry—stands as the excluded victim of the originary violence of the logos. Rather, there was never any pure sound upon which logos then waged war. Similarly, it is less that power has stopped listening or has taken away the voices of the oppressed than that power always already tends toward an unequal distribution even if that tendency has accelerated in recent decades. That is its complicity with the sonorous. It is no coincidence that political philosophy mobilizes an entire aural metaphorics—of having a voice, going 14

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unheard, failing to listen, and so forth—to theorize democracy and the sovereignty of the people precisely when it is striving to think its aporias, its inexorable failure, and its collapse into marginalization and exclusion. This is why the sonorous, in its logic of exemplarity as dispersion, gives the universal structure of power to be read more à vif. Only because aurality is as capable of wounding as it is of exposing the wounds of capital does it also threaten to disperse such violence. Sound and listening are the guises in which philosophy, from Plato to deconstruction, engages with both the violence of sovereign power and also the trauma of the event of the other. These open wounds—the very conditions of the life of the living—are the subject of Shattering Biopolitics. THE SOUND OF LIFE

There were a number of alternatives candidates for the fourth word in this syntagm—the sound of biopolitics, biopower, biodeconstruction—and I shall return to that choice, but it is the third and shortest word that is most significant: the deceptively innocuous “of” that connects sound and life. The sound of life, as I understand it in this book, is both a subjective and an objective genitive. In the first instance, it names what life sounds like: its intonations, timbres, and rhythms. In the second objective sense, it is also what it means to sound life, to make it sound, to set it vibrating, such that, like a glass made to resonate at a certain frequency, it shatters. English, furthermore, uses the verb “to sound” transitively to refer to voicing written letters. This usage is typically negative, indicating, for instance, that one does not pronounce the silent “m” at the beginning of “Mnemosyne,” the Greek goddess who personifies the remembering of forgotten words. In this sense, the sound of life involves voicing something that usually goes unheard. What is heard is the sound, rather, of biopolitics: the cries of suffering, the screams of torture, the shouts of protest, the shattering of explosions, or the dog whistles of the far right, or perhaps, more prosaically, it is the sound of the tube gates opening to let precarious workers take the first train home in the morning or, more catastrophically, the pulses by which ocean tomographers “auscultate” the planet to reveal the negative impact of neoliberal capitalism on ocean temperatures and global climate change. These are the soundscapes of biopolitical times. Sound is also co-opted, mobilized, and wielded as an instrument of biopolitics, even weaponized: an LRAD forcibly Shatter 15

dispersing protesters on pain of hearing loss, the bangs of tear gas canisters that provoke gasps for air, or the relentless traffic noise that gnaws away at mental health. What Postcommodity demonstrates in its reappropriation of the LRAD technology is the proximity between the weaponization of the sound and its use as a tool of resistance, illustrating that listening is not necessarily a reliable way to discriminate between violence and counterforce. How to distinguish between the sound of a tear-gas grenade and a Molotov cocktail, between governmentality and la génération ingouvernable? These, though, are not my stories. They have been and will continue to be told by others, and they sound out a warning, like a tintinnabulum (an assemblage of small tinkling bells or wind chimes designed to ward off evil spirits).14 The sound of biopolitics sounds the death knell (un coup de glas) of what I am calling the sound of life. Biopolitics marks the boundary and passage between life and death, participating in a sacrificial economy. Sound is imbricated in biopolitics to the extent that audibility decides and distributes between life and death, with certain modes of listening that might be called “biopolitical” drawing the line between who survives and who does not. But biopolitics does not shatter life to pieces. Rather, my argument is that there is a biopolitical listening able to decide between life or death only because sound itself is divided into living sound of pure presence, dispersal, and vitality, on the one hand, and the dead sound of the letter and the mortified logos, on the other. Sound is always already shattering itself. Apportioning diverse and dispersed shards into the opposition between life and death is a way to pin down and contain sound’s shattering effects, which would otherwise be strewn hither and thither.15 The sound of biopolitics is thus the capture and reduction of what I dub the sound of life or, more simply, shatter. More broadly, we might think of the entire history of metaphysics in the West as an effort to contain what I want to call (with an ear to Plato’s critique of music in Book III of the Republic) life’s multifarious or “motley” (poikilon) character. For Socrates, this irreducible mixture and disorder has both superficial appeal (to women and children) in its multicolored variety and also associations with baseness, lack of virtue, and the chaotic nature of democracy and the democratic subject. Its gendered, infantilizing, even bestializing connotations paved the way for a long history of censuring sexual promiscuity, racial diversity, and unruly crowds.16 Decisively, aurality plays a privileged role in this division of life. Socrates speaks of purifying 16

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the polis of this motley music that nurtures in the soul anarchy rather than orderly life. Without meaning to, we have purged the city we said was wanton. . . . Let’s purge the rest of it. Our next concern after mode will be rhythm. We should not pursue complexity [poikilous], nor do we want all kinds of metres. We should see what are the rhythms of a self-disciplined and courageous life, and after looking at those, make the metre and melody conform to the speech of someone like that. (399e–400a)17 The biopolitical division of life into good and evil, worthy and unworthy, that of the citizen and that of the barbarian—between the purely sonorous and the rational speech of the logos—thus seeks to defend against this motley diversification. But this presupposition of an absolutely unruly difference that precedes the order imposed by the gathering of the logos is as much a fiction. The phantasm of a “pure” sonorous multifariousness is the retroactive effect of a life that is always already an irreducible mixture of logos and poikilos, of voice and noise—of life and death.18 It is a defensive gesture in which power seeks to immunize itself against the unpredictability of its multifariousness. In order to control the destabilizing effects of différance, power splits off something like a pure force of dissemination precisely so that it might then all the more easily reincorporate this resistance and thereby immunize itself against chance and the event of the other. The violence of the logos in gathering difference into identity seeks to ward off an even greater blow. This is how biopolitics dominates the life that is its condition of (im)possibility. Biopolitics aims to reduce life to what may be gathered under a concept or may be counted, and thus to contain what is most à vif in life, its chance, its unconditionality, its accidentality, its singularity. The sound of life lies in this second blow—coup-contrecoup, double whammy. Consider the death penalty, which, for Derrida, follows what I am characterizing as a biopolitical logic. If death is the event whose arrival we cannot exactly forecast and if death thus represents the possibility of chance and of the future as such, the death penalty injects life with a controllable dose of death, thereby rendering the incommensurability of the other calculable and containing its force. The insult, the injury, the fundamental injustice done to the life in me, to the principle of life in me, is not death itself, from this point of view; Shatter 17

it is rather the interruption of the principle of indetermination, the ending imposed on the opening of the incalculable chance whereby a living being has a relation to what comes, to the to-come and thus to some other as event, as guest, as arrivant. And the supreme form of the paradox, its philosophical form, is that what is ended by the possibility of the death penalty is not the infinity of life or immortality, but on the contrary, the finitude of “my life.” It is because my life is finite, “ended” in a certain sense, that I keep this relation to incalculability and undecidability as to the instant of my death. It is because my life is finite, “finished” in a certain sense, that I do not know, and that I neither can nor want to know, when I am going to die. Only a living being as finite being can have a future, can be exposed to a future, to an incalculable and undecidable future that s/he does not have at his/her disposal like a master and that comes to him or to her from some other, from the heart of the other. (PM1 347–48/256–57) What is thus attacked by the death penalty is not life as opposed to death but life as a force that exceeds the opposition between life and death—what Derrida since 1993 began to call in one breath la vie la mort, life-death, and also sur-vie, sur-vival, living on, an excess of life over life, over-living, a surplus (value) of life. This is the possibility not of immortality or life preserved in another world (PM1 375/278) but of a survival without (my) life that rises up beyond life (376/279)—that lives on, we might even say, in the space of testimony, for what I call my life always already refers to the other in me, the other greater, younger, or older than me, the other of my sex or not, the other who nonetheless lets me be me, the other whose heart is more interior to my heart than my heart itself, which means that I protect my heart, I protest in the name of my heart when I fight [en me battant] so that the heart of the other will continue to beat [battre]—in me before me, after me, or even without me. (PM1 348/257) This event of the other is a sonorous blow—a beating (batter). If life is to be any life at all, it must always risk being exposed to percussion, even (death) blows. Other wise, if the force of survival were to go unchecked, it would die immediately. Absolute life would be indistinguishable from death, for the motley unpredictability that makes life alive would be extinguished. As 18

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Geoffrey Bennington puts it, life is “alive only to the extent that it compromises its life with a principle of reserve.” In order to live at all without simply going up and out with a bang, life must die a little: life is life only to the extent that it is not purely or merely life; life inhibits itself as life, inoculates itself with death in order to be life at all. To anticipate on some later Derrida formulations, a life worthy of its name, digne de son nom, must fall short of itself, not quite be itself, hold itself back, be a little less than itself, in order to be itself. The life most worthy of the name “life” is a life that’s a little less than full or pure life: life must reserve itself in order to preserve itself, inhibit or restrain itself, and that inhibition, restraint or falling short involves already a relation to death. Life is, then, life-death, or else survival, living on.19 Likewise, différance, even while it desires untrammeled dispersal, is necessarily self-limiting because other wise, “if it became infinite—which its essence excludes a priori—life itself would be return to an impassive, intangible and eternal presence: infinite différance, God or death” (G 191/131). As Derrida explains a few pages later, in a description of what he would later call autoimmunity, the gap between life and death (and accordingly of phonē and logos) opens up only because différance is inextricably a condition of possibility and of impossibility: “Différance makes possible the opposition of presence and absence. . . . Différance produces what it forbids, makes possible the very thing it makes impossible” (G 206/143). This is why Derrida, in a canonical passage from Foi et savoir, will speak of a double gesture of protection, in which the division between life and death is a secondary immunitary reaction. Any indemnification or selfprotective immunity “maintaining its self-integrity intact” is always coextensive with a process of sacrificial self-destruction or autoimmunity that leaves it “open to something other or more than itself”—a process of indemnification (FS 78/87; cf. PM1 344/254). “All self-protection of the unscathed [indemne], of the safe and sound [du sain(t) et sauf], of the sacred (heilig, holy) must protect itself against its own protection, its own police, its own power to reject, its ownness in a word, i.e. its immunity” (FS 67/79–80). The logic of autoimmunity is thus always a double logic of immunity and autoimmunity. Metaphysics is the phantasm of this originary “safe and sound” that will have “rendered once again unscathed” or “reimbursed by the payment of a compensation” the singularity that is always already open to iterability, Shatter 19

the other, the future, technicity, prostheticity—in short, to life beyond life, to death. There is, though, “nothing common, nothing immune, safe and sound, heilig and holy, nothing unscathed in the most autonomous living present without a risk of auto-immunity” (FS 71/82). Life is not alive if it is not open to the possibility of chance, including death. This is what gives it its searing, skinning-alive quality—what makes it à vif. This is all to say that I am going to want to think a similar double logic of immunity and autoimmunity in the double genitive of the sound of life. When biopolitics sounds a death knell, it conforms to a “mechanics” of a “sacrificial vocation” by which the price of the human only acquires an absolute value by becoming worth more than “bio-zoological (sacrificeable)” life, “an excess above and beyond the living” (FS 77–79/86–87). Although Derrida does not use the term,20 this could easily be read as a definition of biopolitics in its continuity with sovereignty, and it certainly resonates with Agamben’s roughly contemporaneous elucidation of the life of homo sacer which “may be killed and yet not sacrificed” (HS 11/8). But Derrida immediately complicates this life beyond life by referring it to the death of the automaton, to a machinic technicity and prosthetic supplementarity that he associates with both a biological autoimmunity and the Freudian death drive. Any principle of self-protection, any effort to save life and make it inviolable, would already be compromised by a self-sacrificial tendency by which life in part tempers itself. One gives oneself (some) death (se donner la mort) to ward off absolute death. One survives not by saving oneself from death but by exposing oneself to the incalculability and undecidability of death. What biopolitics shares with sovereignty is that it puts an end to this indetermination of life-death. It wants to master death. One would want, then, to link the death knell that biopolitics sounds to the scene Derrida stages in La peine de mort in which an angel—“not an announcer or messenger of death”—tempts him with the “dream of deconstruction” (PM1 326–27/340). This temptation would be to “have done with death, to deconstruct death itself. . . . And with the same blow, to come to blows with death and put it out of action. No less than that. Death to death [Mort à mort]” (327/341). In putting death to death—donner la mort à la mort—biopolitics destroys the incalculable future that is life. Fortunately, for Derrida, he is visited by more than one angel—“the same other angel of deconstruction” since deconstruction has multiple guardian angels and is nothing other than the knowledge of this multiplicity. This angel—the one 20

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that speaks in the name of such multiplicity and differentiation—warns him, “You will not get off so easily,” for nothing, not even or especially not life, comes out of this deconstruction unscathed (indemne) (327–28/341).21 This does not mean that nothing is undeconstructible but that deconstruction necessarily limits and sacrifices itself so as to save itself from deconstructing every thing and thus putting an absolute end to deconstruction. This is why the shattering of this book’s title does not so much put biopolitics in deconstruction as recognize that it always already has been and thus dissolves ineluctably into what Francesco Vitale has labeled “biodeconstruction.”22 Vitale briefly invokes the thorny question of the gap between biodeconstruction and contemporary declinations of biopolitics in an extended footnote. Referring chiefly to biopolitics as it is formulated in Esposito’s work on immunity, Vitale explicates the debate as one over finitude. From the biopolitical perspective, death is an external limit to which one is exposed by virtue of being’s finitude, whereas for (bio)deconstruction, death is “an irreducible and internal condition for the life of the living, for its genesis as well as structure, before any contingent exposure to the otherness of the other . . . and as an irreducible condition for the exposure itself.”23 As Vitale recognizes, biodeconstruction does not mark an absolute limit to biopolitics. We might instead think of biodeconstruction as biopolitics’s condition of (im)possibility—as what opens up its division while shaking apart its consistency from within. S H AT T E R

I propose shatter as a name for the self-destructive tendency that is more or less secretly at work in power from the start—for conveying that power has disseminated itself into every corner of life because sovereign power was always already in tatters. Why shatter? I advance it as neither a proper name nor a privileged one. It may be heard as the rhyme and (palatalized) variant of Bennington’s “scatter,” which he proposes as an Anglo-Saxon translation of sorts for poikilon and as another nonsynonymous substitution in the series of quasi-transcendentals—différance, trace, writing, pharmakon, dissemination, and so on—that are familiar from Derrida’s writings.24 There are, for me, a number of reasons to like shatter (and even to prefer it over scatter). Intuitively it suggests a degree of forcefulness: the shattering impact of capital, as well as the idea of exemplarity and of listening as Shatter 21

battery and percussion. It tears lives asunder, wrecks livelihoods, frays nerves, and dashes spirits. It is the sigh or the cry that shakes the body’s frame. Dispensing with every hint of the patriarchal reproductive metaphor, it instead captures the violence of the blows and wounds inflicted by neoliberal hyperproductivity and insecurity. Shatter more intuitively than scatter does not so much indicate the falling short of some ideal as it affirms the ruin of sovereignty, of singularity, and of the transcendental position in general. I thus borrow “shatter” from a quotation from Heidegger’s Einführung in die Metaphysik that Derrida countersigns at the very end of his final seminar to the effect that, in Derrida’s reinscription, it is only against the unexpectedness of death that sovereign violence “shatters [scheitert]” into “the super- or hyper-sovereignty of Walten” (BS2 397/290). Scheitern, which, like shatter, is related to excrement (whence shit and shite in English), also means to shipwreck in German, so we can imagine the Gewalt-tätigkeit of sovereignty smashed on the shores of death or, as Derrida has it in the final sentence, met en échec, a French idiom in which the king is literally put in check. Fifteen years earlier, in the final year of the four-year seminar titled Nationalité et nationalisme philosophiques, there is a passage on the ruin of the Kantian transcendental where the meta- of metaphysics is said to disperse itself and the totality to be thought described as being zersplitterte (shattered, splintered), borrowing a word from Franz Rosenzweig’s Der Stern der Erlösung. Circled in the margin is a note in Derrida’s handwriting: “éclater en mille morceau” (KJA 10.9). Shatter also harks back to the shards, splinters, explosions, splatter, peals of bells, and eruptions of uproarious laughter in Glas where Hegelian metaphysics is volé en éclats (shattered, literally made to fly into pieces). It might also be heard as a quasi-translation of déchirure, which Derrida uses to describe a tearing, laceration, or wound in the weave of the text. Déchirement absolu is how Bataille and Kojève translate Hegel’s absoluten Zerrissenheit, but unlike “dismemberment” it does not break into preexisting and self-contained units. Even though one can easily motivate this choice of word from within Derrida’s corpus, it is with Nancy that we might find more cause to hook it out of these texts as a quasi-methodological term. It famously evokes the broken subjectivity described in “L’amour en éclats” (AE), translated as “Shattered Love.” Even more pertinent for the present discussion is a section he appended to written-up remarks he made at a roundtable devoted 22

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to the topic of violence and counterviolence. Rejecting the idea of opposing violence in the name of undisturbed peace and nonviolence, he insists on recognizing an originary, quasi-transcendental violence that would come before any violence done to or exercised by a subject—violence as the differential, self-differentiating force of the event, which (like life-death) would be strictly neither violence nor nonviolence. At this point, he speculates that this violence is “what I might perhaps provisionally call l’éclat, the shattering [l’éclat] and bursting [l’éclatement] of the relation [rapport] by which there is one and the other, in an unappeasable spacing [écartement]” (VV 297).25 Maintaining that there can be no “non-violence as the appeasement of all shattering [éclat],” Nancy argues that violence is, in fact, “a rage against shattering [rage contre l’éclat]” (298). My notion of shatter shares much with what Nancy formulates here except that I am at pains to steer away from any hint of its possibilization. Unlike Nancy’s definition of “l’effectivité même,” shatter cannot be reduced to a performative power or effectivity but is what precedes and makes (im)possible any effectiveness. Shatter has other virtues for a book on sound. It is onomatopoeic, perhaps more directly so than scatter. Like chatter and clatter, shatter is noisy. What shatter sacrifices, though, is the reference to scatting, a kind of improvisatory jazz singing that eschews words in favor of nonsense syllables, imitating instrumental solos with an emphasis on timbre and attack and sometimes even extending beyond musical sounds into sobs, screams, and chuckles. For Bennington (no doubt thinking of Plato’s poikilon) this “non-semantic vocalization, a scattering of melody into complex variations of pitch and rhythm,” is part of scatter’s appeal.26 But as I have already indicated, shatter occupies a complex relationship to the pure performative. The difficulty is twofold. First, asignifying sound is often heralded as an affective immediacy beyond the shackles of word and form, as a pure différance that should be exposed as mere fiction, although one could equally argue that scatting instead marks an ambiguous threshold between speech and sound. Second, insofar as scatting tends to grasp this dispersive force in virtuosic per formance, it makes it the possession of the masterful sovereign subject, thereby reappropriating what had been vaunted for its very impropriety (a criticism Derrideans make of Agamben). Rather than this possibility of seizing hold of and mastering a creative force, shatter suggests an unexpected force, a blow that takes us by surprise from behind, “no longer the power of a subject . . . Shatter

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something like a passive decision” (V 209/152)—punctured, winded, shattered, as the British say. Bennington observes that scatter intuitively resists teleology and absolutization. “Scatter is always somewhat gathered,” as he has it, because in Derrida’s quip “infinite différance is finite” (VP 114/87).27 Shatter shares these features. There be no an absolute shatter and no final atom of existence because the shards can always splinter into ever smaller pieces. Meanwhile, sticking them back together as good as new is impossible. Rather like the distinction that Catherine Malabou makes between elasticity and plasticity, shatter cannot undergo any number of deformations and still potentially return to its original form, for its shattering blow precludes the possibility of infinite modifiability and reversibility, that is, of infinite différance.28 Shatter is the self-de(con)structive impulse of power, but it too is self-limiting. It dreams of exploding every thing until nothing remains to split apart, but it holds itself back, refrains from exhausting its shattering force, compromises itself, thus always leaving even a speck of ember (escarbille) (Neg 104). In other words, shatter insists on the logical priority of autoimmunity and the chance of chance—in short, on the searing, à vif quality of différance and therefore on the unconditional affirmation “of the most intense life possible” (AVE 55/52) over the economy of death. S H AT T E R , I F T H E R E I S A N Y

Shatter, then, is another name for what Derrida calls deconstruction’s “undeconstructible” condition of (im)possibility. It is what animates it and jeopardizes it. I introduce this notion of shatter to show how the sonorous can help pinpoint what is at stake in the thought of the undeconstructible and how it may engage the issues raised in impor tant contributions on this topic by not only Bennington but also Alexander García Düttmann, Peter Szendy, Laura Odello, and Roland Végső.29 What these interventions reveal is the difficulty in resisting the lure of the infinite. To describe deconstruction as a shattering is not to imply that the undeconstructible is a shard or a speck that cannot be fragmented further, as if it were a final indecomposable particle. Rather, what remains of deconstruction is the force of a resonance—that which always already divides itself, vibrates against itself, displacing and replacing itself. In Force de loi, having just made two seemingly incompatible assertions that decon24

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structibility and undeconstructibility both make deconstruction possible, Derrida, now inclining toward the finite, asserts that “deconstruction is possible as an experience of the impossible.” One would have to say: deconstruction is possible, as impossible, to the extent (there) where there is X (undeconstructible), thus to the extent (there) where there is (the undeconstructible). (FL 35–36/243) If in his earlier texts Derrida was at pains to expose deconstructibility— iterability, technicity, metaphoricity, and so forth—there is arguably something of a shift in the later writings toward an insistence on the singular and irreplaceable. The temptation here, though— one which Derrida guards against, if not always as scrupulously as he might—is to hypostatize the undeconstructible, to submit the impossible to the sovereignty of “a potency, a power, an ‘I can’ ” (BS1 348/259) and thus to end up destroying every thing one wants to safeguard with the undeconstructible. This is why, for Derrida, the infinite must turn toward finitude. By contrast, he suspects Nancy is inclined toward the infinity of deconstruction—in motifs of touch, community, and fraternity, for example—which leads him to hypostatize impossibility. This has been a long-standing point of contention and apparent misunderstanding between them, which is why Derrida rolls his eyes when, in a conversation with Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy mischievously raises the issue of distinguishing his “infinite finitude” from Derrida’s “finite infinitude.”30 Even as one tries to think the deconstruction of the opposition between infinite and finite—something which Derrida, Nancy, LacoueLabarthe, and to some extent Agamben all strive to—there is always the risk of ontologizing deconstruction’s autoimmune condition of possibility. Agamben falls into this trap when he wants to seize hold of impotentiality and grasp inoperosity as such. And Végső’s other wise meticulous analysis, despite recognizing “the contamination of the transcendental and the empirical,” ends up describing the undeconstructible as the suspension or “sabbath” of deconstruction, alluding to the mixture of humility and mastery in Hegel’s “Sunday of Life” and with an unmistakable whiff of Agamben’s Il tempo che resta.31 The reference to “the simultaneous affirmation of absolute identity and absolute alterity beyond . . . negation”32 seems closer to Agamben’s zone of indistinction than to Derrida, who would surely object both to the absoluteness of the identity and alterity in question and to the simultaneity of their affirmation.33 Shatter

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As Odello observes, the idealization described in La voix et le phénomène inoculates itself with repetition and absence precisely so as better to reappropriate and master it.34 Similarly, the death penalty puts life to death to protect it against (uncertain) death. This self-differentiation risks becoming stabilized into a contradiction, all the more easily to be sublated. It is différance’s self-division that gives rise to this lure or ruse. The metaphysical phantasm consists in imagining that this alterity can be absolutely excluded—at which point it may be more readily reincorporated. In short, the temptation to resolve the self-differentiation of différance into the infinite or the undeconstructible is all about staving off the anxiety induced by the chance and unexpectedness of différance. There is nonetheless a distinction to be made between deconstruction’s self-shattering, which destroys and thus limits itself so as to preserve shattering chance, and the metaphysical ruse that excludes this condition of (im)possibility so as better to contain its shattering effect. Other wise put, the undeconstructible is not beyond, outside, or opposed to deconstruction—not an external limit—but the effect of deconstruction in its self-differentiation, of the movement of différance right up against (tout contre) itself. A glass shattering under the force of resonance does so because it vibrates at its own natural resonance frequency. Shatter, then, “takes place in the interval” between deconstructibility and undeconstructibility (FL 35/243), between the infinite shattering of deconstruction into ever tinier shards and the unconditional shattering force of a singular blow. This undeconstructible, shattering life cannot be made possible in the present, for that would immediately destroy the excess over life that it is. Rather, as Michael Naas notes, the unconditional only ever takes place in the conditioned, conditional, and hence infinitely deconstructible acts undertaken in its name, even if it is the only thing in whose name any act is done.35 Far from being an arcane philosophical problem, thinking these two together—the unconditional with the conditional—is arguably of the greatest political urgency today. Only by insisting on the chance of the undeconstructible is it possible to distinguish the self-destructive logic of deconstruction from that of neoliberal capital. As Szendy shows, the financialization that characterizes contemporary capitalism rests upon the autoimmune character of indebtedness.36 If an infinite différance would mean that there was nothing left of différance, likewise debt can neither be absolute (for then the debtor would not have anything left to repay) nor absolved 26

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(for then there would be nothing left for the debtor to repay). This logic is not restricted to financialization but extends to neoliberalism more widely, which continues to preserve itself not in spite of but precisely because of its self-destructive tendencies. The crisis within neoliberalism that we have been witnessing since the 2008 crash is symptomatic of precisely those things that were its strengths. Neoliberalism’s end, its goal, is its end, but that is why it always holds itself back from the brink so there is no end in sight. The resurgence of nationalist and racist politics should not be taken as a sign of the failure of or revenge against neoliberalism but as capitalism’s bid to displace its self-destructiveness onto a scapegoated other so as to manage its own runaway dissemination. Szendy observes that, as a consequence of its self-limiting logic of indebtedness, neoliberal capitalism cannot be fought in the name of an unconditional gift but only in the name of other debts “not to something or someone in the future, but to the possibility of future itself, as such”—that is to say, in the name of a shattering chance. Szendy then goes on to lament that Derrida seemed to hold back from a radical generalization of debt: “Even if a generalized and non-oppositional concept of debt is hinted at in some passages of Given Time [Donner le temps 1], Derrida does not seem to draw all the consequences of it.” Szendy finds Derrida’s notion of indebtedness overly caught in an oppositional logic with an overemphasis on the aneconomic and the impossible.37 The difficulty here has to do with the necessity of the unconditional. A more radical generalization of the necessity on which debt is predicated might instead allow one to think what Bennington describes as “a certain non-necessity of necessity.”38 Szendy argues that “what is most urgently needed is precisely a self-differentiation of debt, beyond its oppositional determinations. Not its powerless critique, then, based on supposedly higher ideals of generosity but precisely the auto-immune power that opposes it to itself.”39 Nancy makes a similar point with the notion of éclat in the short text on violence. Whereas Nancy elsewhere inclines toward an infinite deconstruction, an unconditional affirmation of the undeconstructible also risks extinguishing “the chance of chance itself.”40 There is tightrope to be walked here (and I’ll come back to Cixous’s funambulist) because Szendy, with a certain sympathy for Catherine Malabou’s project, at times risks downplaying the unconditional. This chance can only be held open and deconstruction’s force limited if deconstruction lets itself be exposed to itself. While Shatter 27

Végső maintains that “it makes no sense to speak of the deconstruction of deconstruction” (which is the impulse behind projects as varied as Malabou’s and Bernard Stiegler’s), I instead think of the undeconstructible as the effect of “the différance of différance,” as Düttmann puts it, the effect of deconstruction’s auto-hetero-affection, of its vibration and syncopation—its beating—right up against itself.41 If shatter and life-death are nonsynonymous substitutions for the undeconstructible and what is at stake constantly throughout this book is this unconditional limit of deconstruction, the sound of life should be appended with the little phrase “s’il y en a”—if there is any. Derrida appears to use this syntagma, as both a name for the undeconstructible principle of autoimmunity and, paradoxically, as an epithet that modifies the undeconstructible. In Force de loi, for example, Derrida asserts: “Justice in itself, if such a thing exist, outside or beyond law, is not deconstructible. No more than deconstruction itself, if such a thing exist” (FL 35/243). In the response he gave at the Montréal seminar in 1997 on the question, “Dire l’événement, est-ce possible?,” Derrida appends this qualification to a series of undeconstructibles that appear in his thought—event, gift, forgiveness, hospitality, justice, and so on. And in an interview from 1994 it is the undeconstructible that is qualified: “The undeconstructible, if there is such a thing [s’il y en a], is justice” (Neg 104; my emphasis). One of the clearest accounts of this syntagma, though, appears in Le toucher, where it is distinguished from an equally habitual turn of phrase in Nancy’s writings: I perceive that the syntagma that has imposed itself on me these past few years (or decades), even as I insisted on the multiplicity of deconstructions, hasn’t been “there is no ‘the’ . . .” but “if there is any” [s’il y en a] (the pure and unconditional in so many forms . . .). Each time, it was necessary to point to the possible (the condition of possibility) as to the impossible itself. And “if there is any” doesn’t say “there is none,” but rather there isn’t anything that could make room for any proof, knowledge, constative, or theoretical determination, judgment—especially not any determining judgment. It is another way of inflecting the “there is no ‘the.’ ” It isn’t the same, precisely, for here are two irreducibly different “deconstructive” gestures. The fact remains that this multiplicity announces itself as “deconstructive.” It is necessary to account for this analogy or affinity, to say deconstruction in the singular again, in order 28

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to say it in the plural, in the “singular plural”—and explain at least why in the two syntagmas, the “there is” turns to a conditional (“if there is any”) in one instance and to a negative modality (“there is no ‘the’ . . .”) in the other. (T 323–24/287–88) The Derridean variant of deconstruction is distinguished by inflecting the unconditional toward the conditional. Undeconstructible unconditionality does not exist as such but can come to pass only in conditional and conditioned, and hence deconstructible, acts. This is why “substitution is not simply the replacement of a replaceable uniqueness: substitution replaces the irreplaceable” (DE 98/452). The undeconstructible therefore always assumes the form of an echo, a double affirmation, oui oui. The undeconstructible is not an unrealizable Kantian idea; it arrives, befalls us, but does not exist as such, can never be present, for one is never able to say with any certainty that it has happened. Even when the undeconstructible arrives as something possible, it is always haunted by the fact that it will have been impossible. What is unconditional is this conditionality—this self-limiting or self-shattering of possibility. In this passage Derrida points toward a self-differentiation of deconstruction in its different modalities (negative, modal) as if such a shattering of deconstruction were an effect of the shattering of the undeconstructible, understood as a double genitive as both the unconditional force of the impossible and also the vibration between the unconditional and the conditional. And yet Derrida is surely at pains to show that his variant remains the most intense and searing example of deconstruction, more wounding to metaphysics than Nancy’s. One might even suggest that the speck or shard that remains in deconstruction’s self-shattering into the singular plural of multiple deconstructions is nothing other than this “s’il y en a”— this deflating, devastating blow that rattles any “there is,” coming up on it afterwards as if from the future and from behind, from the reverberation that follows it in the surprise of its shadow. BIOPOLITICS AND SOVEREIGNTY

The sound of life marks a limit, s’il y en a, to biopolitics. But can one so easily locate where biopolitics begins and ends? Biopolitics as it is understood in this book cannot in any straightforward sense be the end of sovereignty. Shatter

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It unsettles any easy periodization without surrendering to a transhistorical concept. Dimitris Vardoulakis distinguishes between a “typology” of sovereign power that “concentrates on the epochal differences that structure power” and a “logic” of power that, “without a reliance on chronological ruptures,” distinguishes sovereignty ontologically from its other, democracy, although scholars such as Alberto Toscano have argued that, especially in Italian post-autonomia, the metahistorical is one expression of the periodizing tendency.42 If Foucault is the foremost exponent of the first approach, Derrida and Agamben are held to be exemplars of the later strategy. And yet Derrida counters periodization precisely in the name of a struggle against ontologization. As Simone Regazzoni glosses Derrida’s position: Biopolitics is not a modern invention, the end of the paradigm of sovereignty in the history of politics. It is the articulation within the interior of a space—the space of sovereignty—that is always already concerned essentially not only with making live but also with saving and potentializing life—by giving it, by giving itself sovereignly sure enough, death, in the dream of giving death to death. Bio-politics, the politics of life, is a pleonasm, because politics, as the space of the One communal and sovereign, is from the start an immunitary space, or better—to use a Derridean formula—co-immunitary, aiming to safeguard life, a biothanato-political space.43 Whence Derrida’s mockery of Agamben who recognizes the arch-ancient status of biopolitics while still harboring a degree of ambivalence about Foucault’s thesis insofar as—like a sovereign (BS1 134–40/92–96)—he “wants to be twice first . . . the first to announce an unprecedented and new thing, what he calls this ‘decisive event of modernity,’ and also to be the first to recall that in fact it’s always been like that, from time immemorial” (439/330).44 To this extent I take Derrida’s side in the debate against Foucault and Agamben in the first year of Le bête et le souverain. All would, I think, agree, though, that nineteenth-century biopower is a novel intensification of a power over life that long predates those innovations. To that extent they are actually on the same side. This does not, however, explain away Foucault’s allegations that Derrida turns an historically specific concept of life into a transhistorical a priori. Where I do take Derrida’s side— or, rather insist, pace Foucault, that he is not in fact on the opposite side—is 30

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in insisting that life, for Derrida, is not a transcendental. Rather, unconditional life only ever takes place in the conditioned, specific, and hence limited lives lived in its name. Against appeals to sovereign inaugurations, Derrida’s analysis would show that what goes by the name of biopolitics is the effect of sovereignty’s autoimmunity. Its totalizing gestures exacerbate a symptomatic attempt to contain the self-destructive force of life-death and of a hyper-sovereign power by opposing the unconditional value of life to its biopolitical exclusion. In this context, one cannot simply put death to death (donner la mort à la mort) but must assert the idea of life, if there is any—of some life. Moreover, this ruin of self-presence ought to make one suspicious of any claim that epochs may be gathered together and identified as separate from one another. Biopolitics is not “a new mechanism of power . . . absolutely incompatible with relations of sovereignty,” as Foucault once claimed,45 but the unavoidable effect of power’s irreducible autoimmunity always already underway in sovereign power. It is in this logical rather than chronological sense that biopolitics marks the end of sovereignty—both its telos and its destruction. It neglects to register that there is no ontology, no potentiality, no power as such of life (as one finds in Negri or Agamben), only its selfinterrupting après-coup. Likewise there can be no power as such of death. This is the point Derrida makes when he asks at the end of the final seminar: If death is the one thing against which the hyper-sovereignty of Walten shatters, “to whom is this power [to limit Gewalt absolutely] given or denied? Who is capable of death, and, through death, of imposing failure on the super- or hypersovereignty of Walten?” (BS2 397/290).46 The difficulty is that sovereignty could only be limited sovereignly—by a power of which one is capable. Thinking of the call in L’université sans condition and in Voyous to dissociate unconditionality from sovereignty, a fragile distinction might be made between Walten and the unconditionality of the undeconstructible, which would escape no less absolutely but would be more susceptible to the “force without power” of the singular coming of the other (V 13/xiv). But, as Ronald Mendoza-de Jesús points out, this distinction would itself only be sustainable by way of sovereign exceptionality and hence cannot be absolute.47 To this extent Malabou is right to claim that “biopolitics is already, in itself, a deconstructive tool of sovereignty.”48 From this she concludes, however, that philosophy’s unfinished task is thus to “deconstruct biopolitical Shatter 31

deconstruction.” “Have we, after Foucault, after Derrida—and, I add, after Agamben—cut off the king’s head? My answer, here, is no.” Malabou’s argument is that the Derridean and Agambenian deconstructions of the deconstruction of sovereignty do not go far enough but instead perpetuate the logic of sovereignty by continuing to divide between symbolic and biological life. This is, in effect, a variation of the charge Agamben levels at Derrida: that deconstruction merely exposes and holds fast to the logic of presupposition. The Derridean retort is that power can never be purified of all traces of sovereignty, for infinite différance is finite—and likewise shatter is (unlike Humpty Dumpty) always somewhat put back together again. From this standpoint, Malabou’s plasticity, no less than Agamben’s impotentiality, risks substantializing and homogenizing the dispersive force behind sovereign power and thereby depriving it of any force. Sovereignty, on the contrary, cannot be abandoned once and for all. It can only be fought in the name of another hyperbolic force or “hyper-sovereignty” irreducible to life or death—the incalculable shattering of la vie la mort. The possibility of deconstructing sovereignty without absolutizing deconstruction itself is already suggested by Foucault’s archaeology of forms of power. The categories of sovereignty, discipline, and security are overlapping and intersecting strategies rather than distinct categories, and Foucault will later come to speak of biopolitics less as a separate form of power than as a nexus of dispositifs combining disciplinary practices of panoptical surveillance with the calculation and securitization of risk. At the beginning of Sécurité, territoire, population, though, he toys with a schematic triptych based on the response to three diseases: Whereas lepers were cast out of the city and plague victims quarantined within its walls, the response to smallpox was risk management through the weighing of probabilities.49 If there is any chronological or logical progression here, it lies in increasingly intensifying and exposing the autoimmune character of power. Sovereignty remains blindly wedded to its fiction of a pure outside (the purely sonorous, the barbaric noise, the external enemy, the all-bad leper, the ungovernable, the anarchic quality of democracy) without acknowledging the constitutive character of this exclusion. Discipline, meanwhile, in tightening its grip on this unruly other by reincorporating it through control and surveillance (this is Agamben’s inclusive exclusion) intensifies the domestication of alterity through a strategy of immunization or indemnification. Biopolitics, insofar as it can be distinguished, consists in generalizing this 32

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strategy (the Benjaminian-Agambenian state of exception becomes the rule). This becomes necessary because power’s grasp is always already coming undone and its only response to this self-limiting resistance is to persevere in its desire for expansion. Biopolitics is thus an effect of a counterforce that precedes power and that is both its condition of impossibility (resistance against power) and its condition of possibility (what drives power to expand). In Foucault’s analysis, “If there was no resistance, there would be no power relations. . . . Resistance comes first, and resistance remains superior to the forces of the process.”50 On Thomas Clément Mercier’s reading, Foucault seems to lay the ground for an ontological or pre-ontological definition of power as resistance, a form of fundamental or unconditional resistance of/to the other as condition for power, and thus precipitating all power relations into some sort of limitless “resistantiality”—an unrecognisable re sistance, before recognised or recognizable powerresistance categories.51 This follows from Foucault’s understanding of power as relational, as always two or more forces resisting one another. As Mercier observes, Foucault frequently associates this resistive force that precedes and interrupts power from the start with war (la guerre): “Power is war, the continuation of war by other means,” says Foucault, a phrase that Alliez and Lazzarato adapt, in their analysis of the “generalization and totalization of discipline and biopolitics,” into the notion that neoliberal economy is the continuation of war by other means.52 It is this bellicose quality of the im-possible that is heard in the searing blows of the sonorous. War, though, is perhaps already an attempt to contain the violence in an antagonism or contradiction—to reduce to pólemos (war, strife) the Walten that Derrida describes as “the exercise of an archi-originary force, of a power, a violence, before any physical, psychic, theological, political determination” (BS2 158/104). The generalization of power over life is a reaction to the attempt to stabilize the excess power of survival (survivance) into a contradiction between life and death which, according to Derrida’s reading of Hegel in La vie la mort, may then be dialectically sublated into the absolute sovereignty of life over death: “At this moment, the last moment, life no longer has any opposition, opposite; the opposition has taken place within it, in order for it to reappropriate itself, but life no longer has any other facing Shatter

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it” (VM 22/4). The proliferating character of biopolitics attests to the fact that life divides and defers itself as it expands. The more power tends toward infinity and absolutization, the more it unleashes its (self-)destructive, (self-)perverting impulse. If there is no force that does not always differ from, exceed, and interrupt itself, that means that force is, as Odello puts it, always “a coup,” “un coup de force,” literally a “blow” of force.53 This, as I suggest in the final chapter, is an overuse of power or a hyper- or catachrestic usure of power after Derrida’s discussion in “La mythologie blanche” of an usure that exhausts itself while generating a surplus (M 250/210). More (plus de) sovereignty means no more (plus de) sovereignty. This vibration of a self-reference is so intense that it is always already shattering itself into smithereens. SOUND

How exactly, then, are sound and listening implicated in this thought of sovereignty and its ruin? Following Derrida, Bennington’s Scatter project unearths and traces the poikilos, scattered character of sovereign power through the history of political philosophy. I leave it to others more able than I to offer new readings and correctives on this front. What Shattering Biopolitics does aim to add to this endeavor, though, is to offer some insight into how sound comes to be woven together with this motif. It is significant that sound appears with remarkable frequency in those moments when political philosophy aims to think the fundamental instability of sovereignty and of democracy and at those junctures when the continental tradition more broadly seeks to analyze the shattering impact of the other and to articulate the force of its incommensurability and unconditionality. In Plato, the link between the motley character of democracy and the sonorous is not limited to the proscription of excessively complicated rhythm or affecting melodies. Bennington furthermore discerns an affinity between the multifariousness of the mob and mimetic poetry, which, like certain musical modes, appeals to a fretful and variegated character (aganaktētikon te kai poikilon ēthos) and is aligned with the wailing, howling, and lamentation that give expression to this vexed element of the soul—all of which are to be excluded or contained in the city of words in the name of the stiff upper lip of reason.54 Socrates asserts—“briskly and, I have to say, sounding a little bit as though he were British,” in Bennington’s 34

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wry aside—that “in misfortune the best thing is not to be upset, but to be as calm as possible” (604b). Enjoining those in grief to get over it as swiftly and rationally as possible, Socrates goes on: “They shouldn’t spend their time howling, clutching hold the of the part which is hurt, like children who have fallen over. . . . They should use healing to do away with lamentation” (604c–d). Bennington connects this “tendentially animal value of howling” with “an animality of the letter [une animalité de la lettre],” which Derrida describes as “the primal and infinite equivocality of the signifier as Life . . . this super-power [sur-puissance] as life of the signifier” (ED 108–9/72–73), and also with what the subtitle of Cixous’s Ayaï! calls “the cry of literature [le cri de la littérature].” In other words, Bennington associates the animal howling with an animating power on the margins of language on account of which the sovereignty of language, as self-positing speech, is always compromising itself by becoming bête, which in French implies not only beastly but also stupid or even accidental. In the very first session of the first year of La bête et le souverain Derrida connects this inherent bêtise of sovereignty to listening when he leaves us “to muse on the ass’s ears on King Midas . . . the ass is thought, unfairly, to be the most stupid of beasts [la plus bête des bêtes]” (BS1 46–47/23). An excessively multifarious listening is also, for Hobbes, what makes democracy ridiculous. In chapter 25 of the Leviathan he argues that “a man is better counselled by hearing [his advisers] apart than in an assembly.”55 This enables him to examine “the truth or probability of his reasons, and of the grounds of the advice he gives” where in the assembly he is liable to be “rather astonied and dazzled with the variety of discourse” and, in a reference’s to Plato’s poikilon, by “motley orations, made of the diverse colored threads or shreds of thread or shreds of authors; which is an impertinence.” The problem with democracy is that its multifarious animality does not supervene on but constitutively precludes the ipseity of the sovereign subject from the start. Just as the sonorousness of poetry interrupts philosophy, this animality prevents sovereignty from coinciding with itself. This noncoincidence finds its expression throughout the history of political philosophy—in the king’s two bodies in Kantorowicz (split between the natural, mortal one and the symbolic one that survives his death), the social contract in Rousseau, whereby the people that enters into the social contract cannot be the same as the people that it produces, the split in classical political Shatter 35

philosophy between legislative and executive, constituent and constituted power in Negri, and potestas and auctoritas in Agamben, and so on. What all these figures show is that sovereignty can only be sovereign by supplementing itself with another power that, preceding and surviving it, founds and executes sovereign power, thereby always already giving away a little bit of its sovereignty. The link with aurality again becomes explicit in Bataille, who observes that the ipse “insists on communicating. . . . Only by this cry do I have the power to annihilate in me the ‘I’ as they will annihilate it in them if they hear me.”56 This disruptive quality of address and listening—of the appel—with its openness to the event of the other is then taken up in deconstruction (often against the backdrop of the Heideggerian call). It recurs in various places in Derrida certainly, but it also appears in Nancy’s theme of resonance as being-with, Lacoue-Labarthe’s echo of the subject, Peter Szendy’s surécoute, and Avital Ronell’s telephone or Cixous’s (it is not always clear whose, which is the point).57 Each time sound is invoked to describe a counterforce that precedes and interrupts the Husserlian figure of self-consciousness as hearing-oneself-speak. One difficulty with the ontological and ostensibly “materialist” impulses behind the sonic turn is that they are always looking for an exit from all sound or into absolutely pure sound, which would amount to the same thing.58 At stake in each of these texts is un coup de force—percussive, rhythmic, timbral, tympanic—that may subsequently be met either by a second, reactionary blow of the logos or with a rebounding affirmation. The first re-punctuation “stigmatizes” sound, “pins it,” “nails . . . rivets [it] to a meaning.”59 It is the biopolitical violence of the logos gathering différance as life into a point, making singularity conform to a norm. Szendy shows how this “stigmatology,” as he calls it, may be traced back to the Nietzschean practice of sounding out idols by philosophizing with a hammer to which Derrida alludes in his interrogation of philosophical listening at the beginning of “Tympan” (M I/x, III–IV/xii).60 Szendy, though, also connects this hammering with the practice of mediate auscultation outlined by RenéThéophile-Hyacinthe Laënnec in 1819, thus locating practices of listening in a history of discipline that is often conceived as primarily visual with the famed paradigm of the panopticon. As discussed in Chapter 2, however, a certain rhythmic and sonorous punctuation has been instrumental in the nexus of disciplinary and biopolitical dispositifs.61 36

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Szendy’s À coups de points develops a notion of punctuation that would not reduce différance to a single point or a dialectical contradiction. This alternative après-coup involves a punctuation that is always redoubled and is thus akin to Derrida’s double affirmation of the oui, oui. It is an “overpunctuation” that, in contrast to the Überspringen eines Punktes internal to the Hegelian system, “takes places with or by the point in its circulation within the system, and as what makes possible its phrasing.”62 The first aftereffect is the immunitary gesture by which a pure outside is posited retroactively (nachträglich after Freud) only for it to be (re-)incorporated to protecting the system against further blows. But Derrida also imagines another possibility: Is there any ruse not belonging to reason to prevent philosophy from still speaking of itself, from borrowing its categories from the logos of the other, by affecting itself [s’affectant] without delay, on the domestic page of its own tympanum . . . with heterogeneous percussion? Can one violently penetrate philosophy’s field of listening without its immediately . . . making the penetration resonate within itself? (M III/xii) Yes, yes. The double blows of overpunctuation open up the possibility of a double affirmation of life, of the most intense life possible. This coup de force has always already struck the first blow of metaphysical violence precisely in order to insist on a life that is open to further blows and to the chance event of the other. Shattering Biopolitics is organized as a series of double strikes—between biopolitics and deconstruction, between sound art and philosophy, and between these divisions and the altogether more shattering strike they seek to ward off. All these interventions exemplify how there is at once, d’un coup, the proliferation of blows under neoliberal capitalism that hammer in the nail, torturing life to the point of its exhaustion, and in a syncopation, the searing blows and wounds experienced in the name of “life beyond life, life more than life” (AVE 54–55/52). In short, they are singular examples of life as the im-possible shattering of all our expectations, hopes, and fears.

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Excursus 1 C A L C U L AT I O N A N D S T R I C T U R E IN MENDI + KEITH OBADIKE’S N U M B E R S S TAT I O N

At the Ryan Lee Gallery in Chelsea, Manhattan, in September  2015, Mendi and Keith Obadike are sitting across the table from one another, not directly across, but at each of two short desks placed end to end.1 Both are wearing 1960s KOSS headphones and speaking alternately into microphones. Mendi has a table lamp to illuminate her script, and next to her a radio transmitter. Keith’s pages are tucked behind a small mixer and a 1960s reel-to-reel recorder/player which he uses for additional processing and to pan a series of pre-generated sine tones. There are loudspeakers at opposite ends of the room, and the performance is being broadcast over a micro radio station in the gallery. The Obadikes are reading a list of seemingly arbitrary numbers, in clusters of three, going back and forth between them at a regular, steady pace, their unamplified voices bouncing back and forth against the opposite walls. The piece, titled Numbers Station 1 [Furtive Movements], references the form of the shortwave radio broadcast in which streams of numbers pronounced by synthesized voices or other sounds have been used since the Cold War to transmit encoded information to intelligence officers. The installation self-consciously points to the period around 1964, which saw the rise of clandestine radio transmission and surveilled sonic communication, including the bugging of civil rights activists. The performance plays on the secret significance of the numbers spoken. If you were to enter the gallery (or see the video footage online of one of the performances) without knowing anything else about the installation, there

FIGURE 1. Mendi and Keith Obadike, Numbers Station 1 [Furtive Movements], 2015. Photo by Imani Romney-Rosa. Courtesy of Mendi and Keith Obadike.

is nothing about the artists’ demeanor, the tone of their voices, or the rhythm of their speech that would make you suspect that these numbers are an index of violence. The series of numbers is in fact excerpted from the logs of self-reported stop-and-frisk data from 123 New York Police Department precincts, obtainable from the American Civil Liberties Union. Stop-andfrisk entered policing nomenclature around 1964, and this piece is the first in a sequence of three performance and sound installations to sonify data attesting to racialized violence spanning various historical moments. The second, performed in March 2016 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art alongside [Furtive Movements], draws its data from Ida B. Wells’s 1895 book The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching, while the data for the third, performed in July that year at the Fridman Gallery, come from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slave ship manifests. The Numbers series thus corroborates Achille Mbembe’s argument in Critique de la raison nègre that the subjection of life to calculation under neoliberal capitalism represents a generalization of the conditions long endured by people of African origin.2 These data are terrifying indictments of racialized Mendi + Keith Obadike’s Numbers Station

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violence, but in the Obadikes’ performances there is no expression of horror, no hint of outrage, scant trace of sadness. Neither despairing nor heroic in tone, they exhibit none of the pathos with which someone like Agamben mounts his attack on biopolitics.3 And this is precisely what makes the Numbers series a devastating denunciation of racialized insecurity under contemporary neoliberalism. The Obadikes’ attention to number as a power of abstraction and equivalence, rather than to the inequality typically (and rightfully) decried on the left and which is here only referenced clandestinely, gives these pieces an acute force. At first blush, the indifference of the stream of numbers, their seemingly apathetic tone and rhythm, appears to discount the specific violence inflicted upon bodies on account of their difference, as well as the second blow of a systemic failure to make the state accountable for the violence it sanctions—blows that, as was said of the death of Eric Garner’s daughter Erica, break the heart. As I write, it is the fourth anniversary of his murder. How, with the memory of this trauma so palpable, could numbers point to the violence just as, if not more, powerfully than the sight of Eric Garner’s body pinned down by five NYPD officers or the sounds of his gasping “I can’t breathe” under the strain of their deadly chokehold? The constriction of specific differences into more generalized categories is itself violent—a violence that continental thinkers including Derrida and Adorno have often figured through metaphors of the sonorous. In a perspicacious analysis of the Obadikes’ per formance, Soyoung Yoon argues that [Furtive Movements] “confronts the challenge of documenting not the finality of a death but instead the structural violence that caused it and other deaths, not a past event but a present and ongoing condition.”4 Besides carefully eschewing the spectacularizing of racialized violence, the Numbers series derives its critical force from the fact that it targets violence not as event but “at the level of habit.” This presents a challenge for our habituated practices of listening. Mendi reflects: There most certainly is a story there. But it is hard to get close enough to the numbers to feel them. Paring the text down to the numbers helps us get close to them, but we also lose ourselves in them, our minds also drift. The difficulty of staying with a way of listening, of attending to the data, is part of the work.5 40

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The rhythmic indifference—indifference as rhythm—in the reading of the numbers is decisive here. As Yoon writes: Our experience of listening to the numbers from one station to the next seems not to differ from one or the other, all eerily, awfully the same, as if the history of the violence that reduced black bodies to a matter of accounting was not so much a story as a static, unchanging condition of modern life: not history but still life.6 That racialized violence remains in America today a regular, quotidian series of punctuating blows without interruption is the scandal. There is seemingly nothing arrhythmic—no Hölderlinian caesura—in racialized capital and the ways in which it counts and accounts for lives, and the Obadikes’ performance captures something of the totalizing character of its calculation. Every thing is subordinated to the “despotism of number,” as Badiou puts it.7 Number, he observes, rules today in the bureaucratization of knowledge, advertising, viewing figures, and algorithmic rankings, as it does in the political sphere where every thing hinges on electoral majorities and opinion polls. Badiou was in LA at the time of the 2016 US presidential election, insisting that the choice between Trump and Clinton was simply no choice at all, and when he spoke in New York a few days later, he wryly pointed out that all the protestations about an undemocratic electoral college tended to distract from the way in which the tyranny of number forecloses the possibility of any real decision. I want, therefore, to extend Yoon’s analysis of the Numbers series to show how it serves as a critique of the generalization of calculation under neoliberalism. What marks the specificity of neoliberal biopolitics—what marks the  conjunction of biopolitical governmentality and neoliberal political economy—is the subordination of life to the logic of capital, as we painfully observe in right-wing reactions to COVID-19. An incessant (e)valuation of life coincides with a valorization of life as invaluable in the sense that all life is equally beyond value. “What counts—in the sense of what is valued— is what is counted,” quips Badiou.8 What we have, on the one hand, is a project to make all life commensurable, measurable, countable, and hence accountable, and on the other, the proliferation of philosophies, from Deleuze’s vitalist ontology to various Italian post-workerist configurations, that locate the source of insurgency in an invariant power of life, whether that be living labor, communicative capacity, or the potential not-to. There is, in this way, Mendi + Keith Obadike’s Numbers Station

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something of an alliance that the Obadikes invite us to ponder between the asymmetry and division of number and (ac)countability on one side and, on the other, an insistence on an infinite plane of incommensurability with which nothing is, by definition, incommensurable. The cruel reign of number—coextensive, on this reading, with the gathering constriction of the logos—thus consists in the suppression of the incommensurable or incalculable, and that is precisely what Badiou is aiming at with a new thought of number that allows for the possibility for event and decision. Julie Beth Napolin offers a more nuanced interpretation of the violence of impersonality by situating Mendi’s voice within a history of Black women’s voices giving testimony to Black death.9 Napolin’s analysis situates the numbers spoken by a Black female voice at the intersection of singularity and impersonality: The vocal style is impersonal, to be sure—the performer does not passionately react to the numbers. And yet, it is style that moves the voice into that region of the throat where Roland Barthes found the “grain,” where timbre most resonates. It burrows in the human capacity for timbre as the singularity of every voice that says, “ here I am.” When Roland Barthes asked the famous question, “who speaks?” in “The Death of the Author,” he delighted in the impersonal domain of the literary, wherein writing becomes “an oblique space” no longer tied to the physical voice of the body writing. We can say that a physical guarantee of white life, its freedom of continuation underwrites the death of the author. In other words, one can die into text, relinquish the tie that binds the first-person to the body writing, and survive those deaths. It was not impor tant for Barthes to ask, “who may die?,” as in who might have the freedom of impersonality. Napolin thus sees another side to impersonality—one that I want to read through Derrida’s reflections on repetition and the living-on (survie) of writing beyond its author in Schibboleth and elsewhere. The impersonality Napolin identifies does not simply subject Black bodies to the domination of equivalence but shows how the reduction of singularity in iterability and survival itself becomes a privilege accorded to white life. The Black female voice here tethers life to the body, denying it not simply the posterity of the white authorial voice but, in a more Derridean sense, the openness to the chance of death that makes life really alive. What makes neoliberal capital 42

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biopolitical is that it reduces this uncertainty of living-on by turning both living and dying into something calculable and subject to statistical prediction. Life becomes commensurable, exchangeable, only once it is devoid of chance and hence no longer life in Derrida’s sense at all. Yoon also begins to gesture toward such an analysis from a different angle when she argues that “difference becomes but a matter of spacing, of taking a breath” and what is “at stake is the capacity to breathe, that is, the rationality according to which the habit of breathing becomes a capacity to be measured, regulated, and controlled as a matter of race.”10 She thus rightly argues that the repetition of the breath passed between Mendi and Keith calls our attention to both the punctuating event of Garner’s ceasing to breathe and also the suffocating conditions under which he was forced to live day by day. I want to suggest that in this way Yoon shifts the emphasis onto the perversion of the sovereign right to kill not only into a power to make live or let die, as in Foucault’s formulation of biopolitics, but furthermore into a power that Jasbir Puar describes as a “will not let die.”11 Borrowing a term from Omar Jabary Salamanca that is equally apt for describing the control of breath in the Numbers series and in Garner’s death, Puar elucidates the calculus of an “asphyxiatory” colonial power that weighs up how much Palestinian vitality can be withered away through “chokeholds” on essential infrastructure and physical maiming short of exterminating the population.12 Outside the context of apartheid, though, I want to generalize this analysis to speak of an asphyxiatory capital incessantly calculating how much life can be constricted before it turns into death and therefore how much capital must constrict itself in order to survive. This also means thinking a self-differentiation of constriction. In an analysis of misogyny as efforts to repress refusals to conform to patriarchal norms, Kate Manne distinguishes between choking, as an internal obstruction of the airway, and strangulation, in which external pressure is exerted on the throat or neck.13 Observing its prevalence in domestic violence against women, she also notes its tendency to have further constricting effects, not least in what Kristie Dotson dubs “testimonial smothering,”14 which Manne graphically glosses: You can put words into her mouth. You can stuff her mouth and cheeks full of deferential platitudes. You can threaten to make her eat certain words that she might say as a prophylactic against her testifying. . . . You Mendi + Keith Obadike’s Numbers Station

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can train her not to say “strangle” but rather “choke,” or better yet “grab,” or best of all, nothing.15 Dotson attributes this constriction to a failure of listening to attune to the vulnerabilities of the speaker and to provide the condition of reciprocity necessary for linguistic exchange. Given, as I shall argue in the third excursus, such reciprocity is always already disrupted from the outset, I am more interested in examining under what conditions this constitutive fragility and betrayal of address and testimony elicits self-smothering. What Manne’s gloss amply demonstrates is the complex interweaving of external and internal constrictions—of choking, strangling, and self-smothering— and of the complex interactions between ingestion and speech that are explored more thoroughly in Chapter 3. This self-limiting logic—which I want to describe in Derridean terms as autoimmune—also militates against an excessive totalization of capital of the kind that abounds in accounts of neoliberalism’s extension to every corner of social reproduction and that ignores its contingent specificities and limits. The problem with appeals to an affirmative biopower or shared communicative capacities is that, in the absence of a theory of antagonism, they do not sufficiently explain what would secure the autonomy—the incommensurability if you like—of the insurrectionary multitude from a capital that survives precisely by commodifying the vitality of life in various capacities. At the same time, attempts to show the depths of hierarchization and inequality produced by contemporary configurations of capital overlook the fact that these asymmetries are symptomatic of a system that imposes equivalence and commensurability as the precondition for unfettered exchangeability. What pervasive neoliberal calculation and ontologies of insurrectionary potentiality share, despite their apparent opposition, is a tendency to strangle the incommensurable decision or the incalculable event against the despotism of equivalence. Mendi and Keith Obadike’s Numbers series invites us to reflect on these difficulties through the performance of indifference not simply in its rhythmic recitation or the abstraction of its content but, moreover, in its medium. I refer to the fact that the data are not simply spoken aloud but are also sonified as sine tones. What appears to be a direct one-to-one translation (135 searches become 135Hz) camouflages a more complex transformation whereby discrete digits are in this way converted into a smooth analog 44

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signal. I want therefore to read these works as meditations on the intersection between neoliberal calculation and digitality. In his book on François Laruelle, Alexander Galloway makes a clear distinction between digital and analog.16 If the digital means the one dividing into two, analog involves two merging into one. Whereas the analog is a smooth, continuous variable, the digital is discrete and hence on the side of binarism, division, distinction, and decision—which means that, in making the distinction between them, Galloway reinstates the priority of the digital. There is also a reference to the sonorous and to audio mixing here. In this schema Galloway is following a distinction that Deleuze makes between analog and digital synthesizers: Analogical synthesizers are “modular”: they establish an immediate connection between heterogeneous elements . . . Digital synthesizers, however, are “integral”: their operation passes through a codification, through a homogenization and binarization of data.17 Whereas digital filters work through addition, analog filtering is able to produce a continuous modulation. As counterintuitive as it might seem, integration is associated with the digital because to integrate involves slicing up the area under a curve into discrete segments, while to differentiate is to bring together heterogeneous spaces through the tangent. The digital thus posits an originary unity, whereas the analogous presupposes difference. Rather than argue that the Numbers Stations series somehow seeks to reverse the inequality and asymmetry of racialized calculation by converting the numbers into analog sound waves, I suggest instead that the ready convertibility of numbers into sound shows that the digital and analog are actually part of a binary machine working in tandem to reduce the incommensurable, incalculable quality of life. Both, in other words, are kinds of constriction. The digital is the constriction of the dialectic that reduces difference in general to determinate, productive differences, repressing multiplicity into contradictions which may then be sublated. The analog, meanwhile, capitalizes on difference’s desire to expand infinitely and in so doing destroys the difference it seeks to proliferate because then there would be nothing outside—nothing incommensurable with pure difference. In this way, difference and indifference are easily exchanged with each other. This is not, though, because capital is fundamentally asymmetrical (read: digital) but because it is a regime for producing equivalence. Mendi + Keith Obadike’s Numbers Station

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Inequality is thus a symptom of the fact that, much as any attempt to produce pure difference yields indifference, indifference cannot preserve itself without constricting itself (digitizing itself?) and thereby producing difference and division. That is why battling contemporary configurations of capital necessitates supplementing the discourses of domination and exclusion, which are deeply rooted in the Schmittian friend-enemy distinction, with renewed theories of exploitation that analyze the violence of abstract equivalence and pure substitutability—or, more precisely, understanding how the latter begets the former. Derrida may seem an unlikely guide for such an endeavor, especially as both his reading of Marx and the political force of deconstruction have come under heavy fire. Yet what makes Derrida’s an attractive orientation when it comes to thinking about the enumeration and evaluation of life is that he has always insisted on the co-articulation of calculation and incalculability—if not of incommensurability tout court for the reasons already given, then on the incommensurability of the commensurable and the incommensurable, on their irreducible contamination and the impossibility of sublating one into the other. And yet Derrida has been criticized for foreclosing the possibility of an incalculable event or decision by arguing that any such decision is a “passive” one that precedes anything like subjective agency or collective will. Peter Hallward, for instance, who is largely sympathetic to, though not uncritical of, Badiou’s theory of the event, accuses Derrida of “the dissolution of decision through its passive exposure to an ‘im-possible’ event, to a wholly secret and unrecognizable advent in a domain stripped of all anticipation or expectation.”18 Hallward goes on to argue that, like other thinkers who in various ways absolutize the power of life, Derrida loses the external vantage point and therefore resorts to “an effectively desperate politics” in which the decision is withdrawn from all activity and “promises can never be kept.”19 This seems like something of a stretched reading (an over-hearing?) of Derrida, for whom it is not so much that a promise cannot be kept than that it is always still possible that a promise, like a decision or an event, will turn out not to have been fulfilled even once it has happened. Derrida insists on this eventality of the event precisely so as to preserve the very incalculability that Badiou wants to think. In doing so, Derrida manages, to my mind, to fend off a related charge made by Bruno Bosteels, among others, of hypostatizing difference. Working on the assumption that différance is necessarily capable of making itself 46

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present in singular experiences such as art, literature, and political upheavals, Bosteels lands this seemingly fatal blow: Despite the obvious appeal of many of the politico-artistic instantiations that thus will have been invoked, the price to pay for this hypostasis of difference is an inability actually to change those structures of meaning that would be breached from within by the principle of an insuperable gap, dislocation, or discrepancy—a principle that is always and everywhere, without exception, affirmed as the quasi-transcendental law of the simultaneous manifestation and dissimulation of being.20 Galloway reaches a similar conclusion when he says: It would be tempting to say yes [there is an analog event], by explaining that events under the analog regime are simply smooth transitions between states. Simply replace the sawtooth wave of the digital with the curvilinear wave of the analog. But the more rigorous position is the correct one: for, properly speaking, there is no such thing as an analog event.21 The issue, though, here is whether Derrida can justly be said to be an analog thinker like Deleuze. On the contrary, Derrida evades any Deleuzian hypostasis of difference by insisting on the quasi-transcendental status of the event. He maintains the undecidability of calculable and incalculable. In an important passage on the justness of the decision, Derrida argues that “this decision as to the just, if it is to be one . . . must follow a law or a prescription, a rule” (FL 50/251; trans. slightly modified). And here, it seems to me, he gets far closer than Badiouians would acknowledge to the politics of prescription that Hallward advocates as a more relational version of Badiou’s event. If it is to enjoy autonomy, Derrida goes on, the decision must be able to be of the order of what is calculable or programmable, for example as an act of equity. But if the act simply consists in applying a rule, of enacting a program of effecting a calculation, we might say that it is legal . . . but we would be wrong to say that the decision was just. Quite simply because in that there was no decision. (FL 50/251; trans. modified) What destroys the possibility of event and decision and hence of changing the conditions in which we live is the reduction to calculation or to incalculability, thus rendering them indifferent—which is to say the imposition Mendi + Keith Obadike’s Numbers Station

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of equivalence by capital. If, for Heidegger, capital and metaphysics coincide, it is not, as Alberto Toscano argues, because the essence of capitalism is metaphysical.22 Rather—now tracking the argument of Alfred SohnRethel—it is because the material conditions of philosophy’s production are rooted in the real abstraction of monetary exchange that philosophy becomes a thinking of ahistorical forms and invariant transcendentals (though this argument does not obtain without itself courting the dangers of a transhistorical concept of exchange that would extend back to ancient Greece, thus turning capital into a kind of invariant). Toscano rightly points out, though, the irony that the metaphysical exclusion of the social is thus an effect of a social relation. Derrida in fact makes a very similar point in the fifth session of the Théorie et pratique seminar of 1976–77, in which he argues that the fiction of a pure theoreticism is the effect of a philosophy that has always already overflowed (débordée) its boundaries in the direction of praxis (TP 104–11/71–76). What is fascinating for our present purposes is philosophy’s tendency to invoke sound as a name for this other whose exclusion founds its sovereign autonomy. Robin James contends that “acoustic resonance (i.e., sound as a frequency or oscillating pattern of variable intensity) and neoliberal, biopolitical statistics . . . are two different ways of expressing the same kinds of relationships, two sides of the same coin.”23 The virtue of James’s analysis is that it illustrates how both partake of a politics of the exception. I call attention instead to the ways in which historical attempts to rationalize sound have consistently come up against the incommensurable, as Daniel Heller-Roazen’s exploration of the fate of Pythagoras’s fifth hammer shows.24 The incommensurable here is not an exception but the shattering force itself whose effect is a tendency to splinter between rule and exception, exception and example, and so forth. What Mendi and Keith Obadike invite us to ponder in their Numbers series is that sound is neither completely dominated by neoliberal calculation nor a pure incommensurability without reason. Rather, the calculus of its violence and suppression— of its constricting and being-constricted—must be decided each time in the name of a prescription of justice and always with the risk that the decision will not have been just.

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2 THE RHYTHM OF LIFE

THE RHYTHM OF THE BELL

And their king it is who tolls; And he rolls, rolls, rolls, rolls, Rolls A pæan from the bells! And his merry bosom swells With the pæan of the bells! And he dances, and he yells; Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the pæan of the bells— Of the bells: Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the throbbing of the bells— Of the bells, bells, bells— To the sobbing of the bells; Keeping time, time, time, As he knells, knells, knells, In a happy Runic rhyme, To the rolling of the bells— Of the bells, bells, bells— To the tolling of the bells, Of the bells, bells, bells, bells— Bells, bells, bells— To the moaning and the groaning of the bells. —From Edgar Allan Poe, “The Bells” (1849)

As Edgar Allan Poe’s poem turns away from a world of merriment foretold by the tinkling of silvery bells toward the death knell in its fourth and final stanza, there appears a king who tolls. This king of ghouls marks time to the throbbing, sobbing beat of the bells. He is a sovereign who both holds onto time—he “keeps” time—and also takes it away. In a passage of Glas to which I shall return in due course, Derrida reads this poem as a reflection on rhythm. At the same time it also anticipates a theme announced in Donner le temps 1: that it is the sovereign alone who can possess time. This, like all other appropriations, turns out to be pure fantasy. On the contrary, sovereignty, insofar as it keeps time and beats out its rhythm, announces its own ruin. It is his own death that the king marks with his tolling. It thus announces one of this book’s central points: namely that sovereignty, to the extent that it is secretly linked to a sonorous pulsation, brings about its own deconstruction and dissolution. The bell, writes Alain Corbin, in an early and now canonical soundstudies text on the nineteenth-century French village, “reinforced divisions between an inside and an outside.”1 In addition to its territorializing function, which implicated sound in a dialectic of spatial limit and transgression, the bell also played a role in the regulation of time. At a time when clocks of any kind were still rare, the bell mediated the experience of delay and haste. Moreover, Corbin also notes an ambiguity between the bell’s dual modes of temporal regulation at this point in history: between its articulation of cyclical ceremonies and its striking the hours, between liturgy and the incipient economy of industrial production. As Corbin explains, bell ringing partakes in a modulation of these rhythms: It is very hard for us to reconstruct the gradual transfer of emotion achieved at the expense of a cyclical notion of time . . . and to the advantage of remorseless, continuously flowing time. And yet in every case it was the signals emanating from the bell tower that at the same time reflected and shaped this virtually imperceptible process. A bell ringer had to avoid confusing the reiteration of signals evoking immobile time, which established a sacral ascendency, with the punctuation effected by the gong of a clock or the sounding of the alarm and making of public announcements—forms of bell ringing . . . driven on by the need to come to terms with all-embracing systems for the measurement and evaluation of time.2 50

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The interval between liturgical repetition and quantitative measurement marked by the bell might usefully be situated within the Foucauldian genealogy of power from sovereignty through disciplinary and biopolitical modalities to what Deleuze has called “societies of control.”3 Foucault gives a sense of how the temporal dimension of power evolves through disciplinarization in his analysis of the timetable. Noting discipline’s origins in monastic practices, Foucault observes that “its three great methods—establish rhythms, impose particular occupations, regulate the cycles of repetition— were soon to be found in schools, workshops and hospitals” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and military discipline was instilled by means of “a rhythmics of time punctuated by pious exercises.”4 Foucault then focuses his analysis on how the monastic-factory paradigm was refined through progressively smaller partitions of time with the aim of totalizing the usefulness of (labor-)time. He also argues that disciplinary power brought about both a hyperpunctuation and its interiorization: Rather than “an obligatory rhythm, imposed from the outside . . . time penetrates the body” and exerts control “from inside.”5 Even here, in the internalization of the bell-clock, discipline already paves the way for the dissolution under post-Fordism of the boundary between productive labor and social reproduction. As Michael Hardt and Toni Negri argue, the paradigms of immaterial and affective labor that predominate under the most recent modalities of capitalism erode the division between work and leisure time. Once the walls of the factory disappear, ideas come “not only in the office but also in the shower or in your dreams.”6 The sound emanating from the bell tower also offers a paradigm for thinking the inherent dispersal of sovereignty—for what, as I explain in Chapter 1, I am calling shatter. At once an external punctuation and an internalized beat, rhythm shows how power is not so much divided from without as it is always already in the process of fragmenting itself from within. The destruction of power takes place through a rhythmic vibration just as a glass made to resonate at a par ticular frequency can spontaneously shatter. The ambiguity Corbin discerns in the temporal function of the bell reflects not only the overlaps and intersections in Foucault’s typology but also the tendency for power in general to fracture and disperse itself. The rhythm of the bell is a sonic-temporal lens through which to discern how sovereignty—and biopolitics “after” it—has always already gone into deconstruction. The Rhythm of Life

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Like shards of glass, the chimes and jingles are the residue of the process by which sovereignty erodes its internal and external limits. The bell does not merely regulate the partition of outside from inside, as Corbin’s compelling analysis proposes, but is, moreover, the remainder of that division. As the constitutive exclusion that separates the village community from outsiders, this sonorous punctuation is produced as the remnant left over from that difference that has originarily withdrawn itself so as to open up the gap between inside and outside. In its pulsating and punctuating character, sound is caught up in the autoimmunity of sovereignty as the immanent pulsation by which the self divides itself, resonates against itself, and hence is inseparable from the excess of life—life as chance—against which the biopolitical exception immunizes. At stake in the deconstruction of biopolitics is the beating out of a rhythm—and what remains of sovereignty is this sounding beat. THE REST

But why this insistence on rhythm as what remains? In a tradition from Plato to deconstruction sound assumes the guise of the leftover—“the rest”—that philosophy excludes in its self-constitution. As such it is both that which makes philosophy’s sovereignty possible and that obstacle upon which that sovereignty founders. Sound, I seek to show, is the rhythmic interruption of the “I can” of power. But before returning to bells and their sonorous punctuations, it is necessary to take a detour through the co-articulation of sovereignty, time, and remainder and to explore the striking affinities and ultimate differences between the theorization of this articulation in Derrida and Agamben. This also requires examining the related philosophical issues of self-reference and Hegelian Aufhebung that are at stake in the debate between Agamben and Derrida. In the remainder of the chapter, I return to the question of sound to consider, via a close reading of Derrida’s Glas, how the rhythm of Klang is implicated in and also disrupts these figures of sovereign foundation. Derrida’s most succinct formulation of this articulation of sovereignty, time, and remainder occurs at the beginning of Donner le temps 1 where he describes a letter written by Madame de Maintenon, Louis XIV’s morganatic wife:

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The King takes all my time; I give the rest to Saint-Cyr, to whom I would like to give all. (Quoted as the exergue in DT 11/1) Derrida’s reading of this paradoxical bequest focuses chiefly on a double impossibility: first, the impossibility of giving or receiving what one can never possess and, second, the impossibility of there being a rest of which all time may be given. Derrida explicitly connects this deconstruction of the gift to the question of the end of sovereignty. Madame de Maintenon clearly intended to devote all her time to the charitable institution Saint-Cyr after the king’s death, which prompts Derrida to ask: “Would we say, then, that the question of the rest, and of the rest of given time, is secretly linked to a death of the king?” (14/4). Peter Szendy glosses this remark with the observation that “what is at stake is sovereignty, or the fantasy of sovereignty, as the ownership of time.” 7 If Poe’s king of ghouls keeps time and has the power to take it all, it is only with his death that this question of the rest of time and the all of this rest emerges. The possibility of keeping (one’s own) time—precisely in order to give all of it away—comes only in the wake of sovereignty. This leads to an aporia. If sovereignty consists in keeping (all) one’s time, then it is at once possible and impossible. The king never possesses all of time because there is this rest that survives him. And for the rest of us, so long as the king lives, it is impossible to keep one’s time—because he takes it all. The possession of time is equally impossible once the king dies because one only has the rest of one’s time to give away—and even then, it is unclear whether one has all of this rest to give regardless of how much one might like to. The rest thus becomes in Derrida’s thought the simultaneous condition of possibility and of impossibility of sovereignty. It is possible to argue that the rest is symptomatic of sovereignty’s constitutively divided character. There will always be something left over if power is divided into the power to create itself and the power to continue. This is Hardt and Negri’s position: that the creative, evental power of foundation always survives the power that conserves it and hence it is the locus of revolutionary rupture. Agamben’s and Derrida’s positions are more complex. And both involve a corollary: If sovereignty can never appropriate time, this is because power can no more coincide with itself than The Rhythm of Life

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any now-point in time can. From the perspective developed here and the one that Derrida develops in his remarks on Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s “L’écho du sujet,” it is because time, like the ostensibly sovereign subject, is always a rhythm—a sonorous pulsation beating against itself—that it is inappropriable.8 Returning to the temporality of bell ringing, I am inclined to compare the distinction Corbin makes between sacred time and continuous clock time with the opposition deconstructed in Agamben’s Infanzia e storia between ritual and play. Taking the opposition from Claude Lévi-Strauss (“rites transform events into structures, play transforms structures into events”), Agamben notes in a first analysis that “if ritual is therefore a machine for transforming diachrony into synchrony, play, conversely, is a machine for transforming diachrony unto synchrony” (IS 77/74). Insofar as the bells mark out the succession of instants according to the clock, they tend to fragment time, breaking it up into isolated points. But the village bells also tend to gather disparate moments together, conforming to a cyclical conception. The ambiguity that Corbin discerns in the function of the bells is not simply, therefore, a function of an epochal unfolding from liturgical to industrial time. Rather, it reflects the originarily dual character of punctuation, which at once gathers and scatters, collapsing multiple points into a single point and at the same time dispersing the point into an array of points. This double nature of punctuation is the subject of Szendy’s theory of stigmatology, which shows how philosophy has confronted the aporias of the nowpoint in its arrival and disappearance by oscillating between unifying and splintering tendencies, between simultaneity and succession. Ritual punctuation is like the Hegelian Sprung (leap) or the Lacanian point de capiton (button point) which in upholstery overstitches one point on top of the other, bringing them together into a single point.9 It is left to Derrida to “burst the punctiformity of the point,” though not in an unbridled pointillism.10 Agamben for his part demonstrates how ritual and play operate as two parts of the same binary machine that shuttles back and forth between synchrony and diachrony. He insists, though, that neither process can ever be accomplished completely, hence the system always produces a differential margin that he identifies with history itself. Agamben’s account of ritual echoes Derrida’s description of the anniversary as “the moment when the

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year turns back on itself, forms a ring or annulus with itself, annuls itself and begins anew” (Oto 53–54/11). A purely ritual function of bells would annul time, while an absolute clock time would be equally destructive of time by eliminating any connection between instances. If there is to be time and history, there can be neither absolute diachrony nor absolute synchrony. For Agamben, “inherent in both ritual and play is an ineradicable residue, a stumbling block on which their project is doomed to founder” (IS 82/78). This analysis thus far seems to be in keeping with Derrida’s and is strikingly similar to his notion of “the rest.” Like the Derridean quasi-transcendental, Agamben’s ineradicable residue is both what is left over as the remainder of a binary division and the condition of (im)possibility of that system. How, though, to relate to this remainder? This is precisely where Agamben and deconstruction, despite their extreme proximity, come to differ sharply. Derrida is adamant. It is impossible to appropriate the rest: Madame de Maintenon “never gets enough of giving this rest that she does not have . . . [she] lacks this leftover time that is left to her and that she cannot give” (DT 15/4). The now can be experienced only as a remainder. If it did not in some sense remain inappropriable, there would simply be coincidence and no possibility of relating to the remainder. If it were absolutely unrelated, the relation would again disappear. From Agamben’s standpoint (in what is undoubtedly a mishearing of Derrida) this undecidability amounts to this interminable oscillation of iterability between coincidence and noncoincidence and thus preserves the presuppositional (transcendental) logic of metaphysics. In contrast, in a move about which Derrideans have been no less withering, Agamben insists on the possibility of a messianic time in which we can seize hold [afferriamo] of time (TR 68/68). I do not wish to dwell unduly on this par ticular disagreement between Agamben and Derrida because it has already been much discussed within the literature, not least in Kevin Attell’s patient and clarifying examination of Agamben’s relation to deconstruction.11 I sketch out its contours sufficiently so as to identify points of contention that are implicated in the theme of rhythm and punctuation at issue in this chapter and also to extend the discussion to Agamben’s more recent L’uso dei corpi which lies beyond the time frame of Attell’s project. Agamben sets up his own concept of messianic, kairotic time in opposition to what he describes as an eschatological paradigm. In the latter, The Rhythm of Life

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supplementary time is tacked on to the end of chronological time so to defer the parousia (presence). Unlike this supplementary time that lies entirely outside chronological time, Agamben’s kairos is an immanent disjunction. To this point, Agamben’s analysis, notwithstanding the harsh words he later has for deconstruction, seems compatible with Derrida’s notion in Spectres de Marx of a time that is “out of joint” (SM 21/19) and of the deconstruction of teleology more broadly. Beyond this, however, Agamben’s notion of a disjoint time begins to assume a rather different character from Derrida’s. When Agamben speaks of this kairotic time as effectuating a “recapitulation,” for instance, he departs from a Derridean insistence on the inappropriability of time. Agamben’s chief paradigm for this messianic temporality is linguist Gustave Guillaume’s concept of operational time, which is the time it takes to form a representation of time. Operational time is an additional time, not tacked onto the end of a completed time-image but coextensive with the process of forming the representation to which it is irreducible: “It is something like a time within time— not ulterior but interior—which only measures my disconnection with regard to my representation of time” (TR 67/67). So far, so Derridean. But the conclusion that Agamben draws in the continuation of this sentence is anything but: “Precisely because of this, [it] allows for the possibility of my achieving and taking hold of it” (TR 67/67). Operational messianic time, then, is defined as “the time that time takes to come to an end.” From a Derridean perspective, the possibility of ending or “taking hold” of time is a suspiciously metaphysical appeal to a “present” now. Attell comes to Agamben’s defense, arguing that this deconstruction does not reckon fully with Agamben’s contention that metaphysics is defined not, as Derrida ostensibly has it, by presence but a negative ontological foundation.12 This, though, overlooks the fact that Derrida had already made the point about philosophy’s disavowal of the negative (ED 54–55n/308n4)—a point that Agamben claims “in princely and sovereign fashion,” as Derrida cuttingly puts it, to be “the first to notice and point out” (BS1 138/95). It is on the basis of this observation that Agamben first develops the idea, repeated throughout his oeuvre, that deconstruction exposes metaphysics, taking it to its limits without escaping its grasp (LM 53–54/39). Insofar as deconstruction denies the possibility of seizing hold of time, it is dismissed as “a thwarted messianism [messianismo bloccato]” (TR 98/103). 56

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Derrida’s published comments on Agamben are very limited, but his riposte may be reconstructed from an anecdote from Szendy, which reveals that Derrida wrote in the margin of his copy of Il tempo che resta the words “tu débloques . . .”13 This might indicate approval that Agamben does indeed unblock messianism, but the French is also slang for “you talk rubbish.” The other marginalia leave no doubt as to the correct interpretation. To which I might add that, from a Derridean standpoint, Agamben’s stupidity—with all Derrida’s caveats about bêtise never being solely that of the object of insult—lies in imagining that one can escape metaphysics by ontologizing its negativity (as impotentiality) when it is precisely the ontologization of absence or presence that constitutes metaphysics. This hypostatization curtails the power of différance by reducing it to presentist categories (by making impotentiality into something possible in the present). S E L F - P U N C T UAT I O N

On the way to his devastating diagnosis of deconstruction’s thwarted messianism, Agamben refers the reader to his own earlier discussion in Linguaggio e morte of deixis and of Hegel’s analysis of sense certainty, as well as to his reflections on the aporias of self-reference in deconstruction in “Pardes.” The affinities and differences between Agamben and Derrida come into clearer focus. Agamben reminds us that “the Aufhebung makes its appearance in the context of the dialectic of sense certainty and its expression in language via the ‘this’ (diese) and the ‘now’ (jetzt)” (TR 95/100). What follows is a highly condensed version of the reading that Agamben made many years earlier (LM 17–23/10–14) of this passage from Phänomenologie des Geistes: To the question: “What is Now?”, let us answer, e.g. “Now is Night.” In order to test the truth of this sense-certainty a simple experiment will suffice. We write down this truth; a truth cannot lose anything by being written down, any more than it can lose anything through our preserving it. If now, this noon, we look again at the written truth we shall have to say that it has become stale. The Now that is Night is preserved, i.e. it is treated as what it professes to be, as something that is [Seiendes]; but it proves itself to be, on the contrary, something that is not [Nichtseiendes]. The Now does indeed preserve The Rhythm of Life

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itself, but as something that is not Night; equally, it preserves itself in the face of the Day that it now is, as something that also is not Day, in other words, as a negative in general.14 Agamben draws out the paradox of sense certainty: The now is always in a different time than that to which it refers. In the attempt to indicate itself sense certainty is ensnared in contradiction. What sense certainty imagines it can grasp via indication turns out to be always already caught up in dialectical mediation and hence in a movement of negation. Like Nancy and Malabou, Agamben positions Hegel as a thinker of the negative.15 He also takes this passage as a springboard for an analysis of the problem of self-reference that, according to “Pardes,” finds its most radical expression in Derrida’s grammatology (P 213). As Hegel goes on to say, what is at stake in temporality is the (im)possibility of time pointing to itself—that is, of self-punctuation: The Now is pointed to, this Now. “Now”; it has already ceased to be in the act of pointing to it. The Now that is, is another Now than the one pointed to, and we see that the Now is just this: to be no more just when it is. The Now, as it is pointed out to us, is Now that has been [gewesenes], and this is its truth; it has not the truth of being. Yet this much is true, that it has been. But what essentially has been [gewesen ist] is, in fact, not an essence that is [kein Wesen]; it is not, and it was with being that we were concerned.16 Hegel’s analysis of sense certainty can easily be read as showing that what appears to be absolutely singular (this “now” here) turns out to be universal. This now, as soon as it is pointed out, becomes substitutable for any other and thrown into an infinite chain of substitutions. The aporia that Agamben, though, discerns here concerns deixis specifically: Language cannot refer to something and at the same time refer to the fact that it refers to it. In “Pardes” Agamben describes this using the terms of medieval logic as the distinction between intentio prima (whereby a sign stands for its object) and intentio secunda (whereby a sign stands for its intentio prima). He is thus interested in shifters such as “now,” “this,” and “I” because they exemplify the possibility that “a sign signifies itself only insofar as it signifies” (P 212). Shifters thus attest to the (im)possibility of pointing to pointing itself: “As language refers to its own taking place via shifters . . . language produces the 58

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sensible expressed in it as a past and at the same time defers this sensible to the future” (TR 95/100). Szendy’s deconstructive reading of the same passage in the Phänomenologie places the emphasis elsewhere, focusing on its continuation in which Hegel defines the Now as “an absolute plurality of Nows.”17 Moreover, “the pointing-out of the Now is thus itself the movement which expresses what the Now is in truth viz. a result, or a plurality of Nows all taken together.” Szendy, of course, takes issue with this “all taken together” in his gloss on this passage. The now’s “punctiformity explodes into a plurality,” he argues. “It splits precisely when it is pointed to, when it is shown in its unicity and supposed identity, as if it were precisely showing it that made it break into pieces.”18 The splintering is shown to be a symptom of the unifying gathering: If [the now] explodes from the blow of pointing, of its deixis, shattering into raindrops of [nows], this is not only because [the now] becomes iterable, capable of being repeated from this [now] to that one. It is also because the index that points to it in a sense returns upon itself; it rebounds from what it points to, sending its pointing back toward itself, overpointing itself.19 This clarifies the nature of deconstruction’s allegedly infinite deferral. Rather than tack an infinite succession of now-points onto the end of the succession of linear time (as a vulgar conception of time might have it), deconstruction’s interminability stems from the infinite substitutability of self-reference. Every pointing always points not only to another point but also to that other quasi-transcendental pointing. In Agamben’s account, “the aporia of Derrida’s terminology is that in it, one standing for stands for another standing for, without anything like an objective referent constituting itself in its presence” (P 212). At every point(ing), there is an undecidability between point and pointing that deconstruction maintains cannot be resolved. As Szendy later argues, deconstruction puts pointing both inside and outside the story such that punctuating is always already overpunctuating.20 Or, as Agamben puts it, for Derrida “there can be neither an intentio prima nor an intentio secunda; every intention is always secondo-prima or primosecunda” (P 212). Other wise put, deconstruction insists on the mutual interlacing of reference and self-reference, of pointing and overpointing. This, in a nutshell, is the sticking point of the dispute. The Rhythm of Life

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Between these two positions, a resolution (even if it were desirable) is forever deferred—blocked. And yet there is equally this sense that the debate between Agamben and Derrideans is always on the point of unblocking itself, if only one could unblock the deliberate mishearings, the hyperbolic rhetoric, the competitive intransigence. One of the difficulties is that each side of the debate sometimes appropriates the other to its position but also refuses to recognize the extent to which their positions are more or less tightly interlaced. On the one hand, “Pardes” makes it appear as if Derrida had himself both developed and impeded Agamben’s theory of potentiality, as if deconstruction were an exercise unmasking some earlier thinker as (almost) already Derrida. Szendy, on the other hand, without endorsing Agamben’s “unashamed historicization of deconstruction,” nonetheless wonders whether “he also might be said to further one of deconstruction’s constant concerns or efforts. And this should be a sufficient reason to try to take Agamben’s suggestion seriously, or at least take it as a sign, as a symptom worth analyzing, without procrastinating anymore.”21 The katechon, suspending and withholding the end [sospendendo e trattenendo la fine], inaugurates a time in which nothing can really happen [or occur: avvenire] because the sense of historical becoming, that has its truth only in the eschaton, is indefi nitely deferred [differito]. . . . Schmitt’s katechontic time is a blocked messianism [un messianismo bloccato]: but this blocked messianism reveals itself as the theological paradigm of the time in which we live, the structure of which is nothing else than the Derridian différance.22 Or perhaps it is the case that Agamben furthers the Derridean project by holding it in suspension. What Szendy goes on to describe as the “time in which we live” is a condition of indebtedness that can only sustain itself by suspending itself. Reading Derrida’s Donner le temps 1 alongside Benjamin’s “Kapitalismus als Religion,” Szendy observes, following the logic of autoimmunity, that capitalist debt can never become absolute lest it extinguish itself. The end of debt would be the end of debt, as Geoffrey Bennington might phrase it. If debt fulfilled its objective completely and became an absolute debt, it would no longer serve its purpose of profit because the debtor would always already be in default. The complete absolution of debt, for more obvious reasons, would likewise lead to capital’s ruin. The same logic explains why différance is likewise self-limiting so as to preserve itself. 60

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This is why elsewhere Szendy adopts the Derridean definition of usury as “selling time.”23 What the age of debt does is to lend more time, but far from being a free gift, this always exacts a high price. Following Derrida’s logic, this indebtedness is why Madame de Maintenon is constrained in giving all of the rest. Financialized, securitized capital works precisely because there is always a rest that one cannot take hold of or give because its expansion is never infinite. Szendy is able, therefore, to pinpoint exactly the difference that separates the bad eschatology Agamben criticizes from the deferral of deconstruction. Capitalism is not katechontic because, by alternating loans and debts and deadlines and new loans, it defers complete indebtedness and ruin, thereby deferring also the absolving or redeeming of debt. This would be the Paulinian katechontic logic, or the Schmittian one, for that matter. Rather, capitalism is katechontic because indebtedness defers itself as itself and for itself, because debt perpetuates itself by the very process of delaying itself, or vice versa. Christian eschatology introduced a sense and a direction in time: katechon and différance, suspending and deferring this sense, render it undecidable.24 Szendy makes this riposte to Agamben only at the expense of admitting a secret affinity between deconstruction and the time in which we live. On this reading, the quasi-transcendental logic of deconstruction, in which the ground is both the object of deferral and the deferring itself (“as itself and for itself”), coincides with that of the “ruthless forces of financial capital.” Szendy, for reasons that will become clear, homes in on Agamben’s use in the final sentence of the verb dilazionare with its overtones of extending credit (dilazionare un credito). From this analysis it is also possible to specify more precisely how the dispositif of securitized capital relates to the earlier paradigms of discipline and sovereignty and thereby to extend Foucault’s genealogy beyond the limits of its time. In this context, one can also imagine, provisionally, the modality of rhythmic punctuation—of bell ringing—that corresponds to financialized, cognitive capital. It is easy to see how the shift from liturgical to clock functions of the village bells corresponds to the passage Foucault outlines at the beginning of Securité, territoire, population from the exclusionary paradigm of leprosy to the more complex quadrillage or partitioning of The Rhythm of Life

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urban space demanded by the plague in which control, surveillance, and temporal regulation take place at the level of individual citizens.25 What Agamben does not consider in his analysis of these paradigms and what does not come into play in Corbin’s interpretation of the village bells is the distinctive temporal and spatial regulation demanded by the third of Foucault’s types, smallpox.26 No longer a matter of exclusion or quarantine, practices of inoculation against smallpox are concerned with mortality statistics at the level of the population and with managing that risk. If “sovereignty capitalizes a territory” and “discipline structures a space [producing] a hierarchical and functional distribution of elements,” “security will try to plan a milieu in terms of events or series of events or possible elements. . . . It refers to the temporal and the uncertain.”27 Although Agamben has neither addressed directly the risk management articulated by Foucault’s smallpox paradigm nor paid much attention to securitization and financialization as biopolitical functions, in an interview he connects the global debt crisis to an eschatological deferral of political decision. His response is worth quoting at length: GA: The concept “crisis” has indeed become a motto of modern politics, and for a long time it has been part of normality in any segment of social life. The very word expresses two semantic roots: the medical one, referring to the course of an illness, and the theological one of the Last Judgement. Both meanings, however, have undergone a transformation today, taking away their relation to time. “Crisis” in ancient medicine meant a judgement, when the doctor noted at the decisive moment whether the sick person would survive or die. The present understanding of crisis, on the other hand, refers to an enduring state. So this uncertainty is extended into the future, indefinitely. It is exactly the same with the theological sense; the Last Judgement was inseparable from the end of time. Today, however, judgement is divorced from the idea of resolution and repeatedly postponed. So the prospect of a decision is ever less, and an endless process of decision never concludes. Interviewer: Does this mean that the debt crisis, the crisis of state finance, of currency, of the EU, is never ending? GA: Today crisis has become an instrument of rule. It serves to legitimize political and economic decisions that in fact dispossess citizens 62

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and deprive them of any possibility of decision. . . . The citizens of Europe must make clear to themselves that this unending crisis—just like a state of emergency—is incompatible with democracy.28 Securitization and what Szendy describes (after Derrida’s generalized fetishism) as a generalized katechontic debt aim for a sweet spot: a maximum degree of indebtedness before repayment becomes impossible. The goal is not to take all or even all of the rest, but to let enough remain—even to produce this rest that has not yet been taken—so that it may be given “back” in the future. Recent work to extend the classic Foucauldian paradigm to contemporary conditions has focused on a similar temporality. Lauren Berlant, for instance, builds on Foucault’s classic distinction between sovereignty as “the right to take life or let live” and biopolitics as “the right to ‘make’ live or ‘let’ die”29 to describe an “authority to force living not just to happen but to endure” whose temporality is “that of ongoingness, getting by, and living on,” its condition “endemic.”30 Retaining the ordinary day-to-day temporality of Berlant’s “slow death,” Jasbir Puar reworks the Foucauldian formula to reflect a further perversion of power into a “will not let die,” exemplified in Israel’s strategies of shoot to maim and infrastructural warfare, the effect of which is to preserve Palestinians in a constant state of debility from which Israel may also then profit and maintain control in exercising a “right to repair.”31 This goes hand in hand with a will-not-let-default of a system of perpetual refinancing and bailouts. Recast in Agambenian terms, what Puar describes is a binary machine that oscillates between debility and capacity in order to capture life and render it precarious—which is why the right to maim can so easily masquerade as a policy of preserving life.32 The self-destructive tendency under neoliberalism toward the production of absolute impossibility and absolute possibility reveals why life is necessarily self-limiting—why capacitation is always already a little bit debilitating and debilitation never absolute but also open to repair and why life is always dying a bit to preserve itself. What Berlant overlooks in her haste to abandon the category of sovereignty, is that sovereignty is always already is the process of wearing itself out, of shattering itself. Sovereignty has greater “perdurability” than Berlant imagines provided that one recognizes that sovereignty is always already exhausting and dispersing itself.33 Sovereign agency, with its ability to act on its will and its autonomous self-assertion, was only ever a fiction designed The Rhythm of Life

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to guard against the more shattering reality that life is always already lifedeath [la vie la mort], as Derrida describes it in his seminar of 1975–76 of that title. I nonetheless have considerable sympathy with Berlant’s efforts to sever politics from the radical decisionism that has continued to dominate discourse on the left since May 1968 (think of Badiou’s event, for instance, which he characterizes as a rupture in “ordinary social hearing”).34 To this end, Berlant instead proposes a notion of “lateral agency” which, like the everyday wearing down it resists, is neither exceptional nor traumatic nor heroic but “can be an activity of maintenance, not making; fantasy, without grandiosity; sentience, without full intentionality; inconsistency, without shattering”35—something akin to what Emily Apter has recently theorized as an “unexceptional politics.”36 Berlant’s “self-abeyance, floating sideways” in “episodic intermissions” or “episodic refreshment” from “the capitalist subject called to consciousness, intentionality, and effective will” is seemingly closer on a spectrum to Agamben’s deactivating inoperativity than it is to Apter’s repertoire of obstructionism and impasse.37 These models also have something in common with Bennington’s advocating recognizing the importance of the small-p politicking of politics rather than yielding to heroic despair or moral dogmatism, but the virtue of his Derridean analysis is that it eschews the teleology and kairotic temporality that govern these forms of resistance even, or perhaps more forcefully, in their suspension. That power is always already in the process of shattering itself both makes it impossible to escape the everyday machinations of capital (there is no end to power) and also allows for the shattering eventality of the impossible (precisely because there is no absolute end to power). The subtlety of Derrida’s deconstruction of teleology is often missed, as illustrated by Agamben’s accusation of “thwarted messianism” and Apter’s equally misplaced complaint that Bennington’s demi-conditional “subsides all too easily into another aporia, into a promissory à-venir that, if not exactly futural or messianic, returns us to states of suspension, or the long wait.”38 Puar begins to isolate something like a nonteleological temporality of biopolitics when she describes maiming and stunting as “the stretching of the horizon of life . . . and the finality of death into perverted versions of life that look and feel neither like life nor death, not even attenuated death.”39 Death is no longer presumed to be “ultimate assault, transgression, or goal, and the biopolitical end point or opposite of life”; rather, “debilitation and the production of 64

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disability are in fact biopolitical ends unto themselves, with moving neither toward life nor toward death as the aim.”40 Neither is the unreachable telos toward which living might nonetheless asymptotically tend. If the upshot of this discussion is to suspect an affinity between such biopolitical maneuvers and deconstruction, what remains to be asked—the question I keep deferring—is whether one ought to aim for deconstruction of this deconstruction of sovereignty, if such a thing were possible. Is it possible to distinguish between the temporality of debilitation and that of life-death as survival (survivance) and living on? The former consists in “withholding death” without which life loses the very exposure to risk that makes it life and becomes nothing more than a living death. The latter, meanwhile, names an excess of life—as risk—that precedes and exceeds (the opposition between) life and death. The debate between Agamben and Derrida hinges precisely on this question of the future. Puar argues that part of what makes the Israeli attack on Palestinians so devastating is that it seeks to stunt the future capacity of the youth for resistance. Through prehensive time, it is not only that the terms of futurity are already dictated in the present, but the terms of the present are dictated through the containment of the terms of the future, in an effort to keep the present in line with one version of the future that is desired.41 I would argue, furthermore, that this destruction of the future is redoubled: it obliterates the future not merely by making (specific) future potentialities impossible but also by seizing hold of—apprehending—potentiality as such qua impotentiality made possible in the present. To modify Puar’s analysis, “we cannot get out of the present” not “ because we are tethered to the desired future” but because the future is tethered to the authority of the present. The continuity of biopolitics with sovereignty lies precisely in this safeguarding of the present from the future. Under contemporary capitalism, debt is generalized to such a degree that it no longer has an outside. One approach, as with the idea of combating violence with nonviolence, would be to fight debt with its complete abolition, with unconditional generosity. Just as Nancy cautions against opposing peace to violence for the éclat is unappeasable (VV 297–98), Szendy rejects unlimited munificence as a remedy. He worries that Derrida succumbs to this futile oppositionality in his emphasis on the aneconomic. For Szendy, financialized capital cannot be opposed by something other The Rhythm of Life

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than debt but can only be fought “in the name of other debts”—debts not merely “to the future” or “to someone or something in the future, but to the possibility of the future itself, as such.”42 With the imminent climate catastrophe he is surely correct, but at the same time he makes an arguably false distinction between the unconditional and dissemination, which rests on reading the undeconstructible as the other of deconstruction when it is in fact nothing other than this shattering force of dispersal, repetition, generalization. If biopolitics is the phantasm of the sovereignty of the present, with life-death the present is beating right up against (tout contre) itself, shattering itself. It is not so much a question of the future striking a blow on the present as it is that the very structure of the present is a violent syncopation—in short, rhythm. THE EVENT OF RHYTHM

At stake in these overhearings between Agamben and Derrida is the ontologization of life. There is a suspicion, shared by Derrideans and (post-) Marxists alike, that Agamben’s messianic now as the pure taking place of language amounts to a negative ontological substantialization, an arkhē every bit as negative as the one he locates in Derrida’s self-effacing trace (M 76/65). To grasp more precisely the stakes in these counteraccusations, let us consider more closely the passage leading up to Agamben’s dismissal of deconstruction as a “thwarted messianism” now from the perspective of eventality, which, I will show, is marked by a certain rhythmic propulsion. Building on his earlier reading of the Derridean trace in “Pardes” (P 209–19), the thrust of Agamben’s argument in Il tempo che resta is that the tracestructure remains as the undeconstructible residue of deconstruction, a degree-zero signification as the ultimate condition of possibility. Agamben begins from the observation that grammatology is “a radicalization of the problem of self-reference,” of the paradox that “a term cannot refer to something and, at the same time, refer to the fact that it refers to it” (P 213), that “what is unnamable is that there are names” (211)—whence Derrida’s insistence that différance is no more a name than the trace is a concept insofar as the trace-structure puts naming and conceptuality as such in jeopardy. Derrida’s error, from Agamben’s perspective, is to dwell resolutely in this aporia without resolving or dissolving it. Following the terminology of medieval logic to name the two types of reference here, Agamben maintains 66

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the distinction between an intentio prima, in which the sign stands for an object or concept, and an intentio secunda, in which the sign refers to the referring or standing-for in itself. “The aporia of Derrida’s terminology,” he continues, “is that in it, one standing for stands for another standing for, without anything like an objective referent constituting itself in presence” (212). The trace of the trace is always another trace. Derrida would not demur. The mistake, as Agamben sees it, is to turn this standing-for of signification into a negative ground—negative insofar as the trace by definition withdraws itself. On this reading, the trace names an “irreducible character of signification” (211) which turns every intentio into an object, an intentum. The insufficiency here consists in the fact that intentio secunda (the intention of a sign) is thought according to the scheme of intentio prima (reference to an object). . . . There is thus, properly speaking, no selfreference, since the term signifies a segment of the world and not intentionality itself. What is understood is not truly an intentio but a thing, an intentum. (P 211–12) If “there can be neither an intentio prima nor an intentio secunda [but] every intention is always secondo-prima or primo-secunda,” deconstruction cannot think the possibility that a term might “signify itself only insofar as it signifies” (P 212). In Il tempo che resta Agamben reprises this critique to argue that the trace-structure fails to “truly call into question signification in general” (TR 97/103). From this, he launches the final blow, showing how the persistence of an albeit interrupted teleology in deconstruction has its origins in the transcendental status of the trace: In radicalizing the notion of sterēsis [privation] and zero degree, these concepts presuppose both the exclusion of presence and the impossibility of an extinguishing of the sign. They therefore presuppose that there is still signification beyond presence and absence, meaning that nonpresence still signifies something, it posits itself as an “arche-trace,” a sort of archiphoneme between presence and absence. . . . In order for deconstruction to function, what must be excluded is not the fact that presence and origin are lacking but that they are purely insignificant. . . . A signification that only signifies itself can never seize hold of itself, it can The Rhythm of Life

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never catch up with a void in representation, nor does it ever allow anything to be an in-significance either; rather, it is displaced and deferred in one and the same gesture. In this way, the trace is a suspended Aufhebung that will never come to know its own plēroma. Deconstruction is a thwarted messianism, a suspension of the messianic. (TR 97–98/103; emphases mine) Without endorsing Agamben’s reading, it is at the same time important to hear him out, for the aporias he identifies are genuinely matters at stake for deconstruction. These are the difficulties that often lead to mishearings of deconstruction because they constitute some of Derrida’s most difficult thought. For that reason, it is also possible to find passages in Derrida’s own writings that appear to endorse this interpretation (as Agamben does). Sometimes it is as if those utterances were themselves mishearings—Derrida mishearing himself, missing hearing what he has said elsewhere about the trace-structure as that which ruins the teleology of the transcendental position from the outset. To the extent that these mishearings are necessarily possible—that there is an inextinguishable risk of mishearing in all hearing—they should be taken as evidence not of Derrida’s falling short of his own thought but of thought’s irreducible self-shattering. Agamben’s qualms alert us to significant difficulties in the temptation to denounce teleology, helping us understand the specificity of Derrida’s thought of the event. When Agamben translates the distinction between intentio prima and intentio secunda into the context of temporality, he by analogy draws a distinction between eschatological time, which is added on to defer the telos, and operational time, which is an internal ungraspability (l’inafferrabilità) of the now by which it becomes possible to seize hold of time (TR 96/100). Agamben warns against the interruption of teleology itself becoming another teleology, a kind of suspended, degree-zero Kantian Idea. If the interruption of teleology were to consist in coming somewhere short of the telos—somewhere still on the way to the telos—this interruption itself would become an ultimate horizon. The trace-structure, according to Agamben’s line of argument, would thus be the undeconstructible telos of deconstruction even as it interrupts the more thoroughgoing teleology of the Kantian Idea. This rather common mishearing misses Derrida’s insistence on the quasi-transcendental character of the trace which, as Bennington puts it, “is not a modest falling short of the transcendental but 68 The Rhythm of Life

the affirmed ruin of the transcendental position in general.”43 The irreducibility of the trace-structure does not mean that the trace becomes an invariant condition of possibility. On the contrary, it can never be a transcendental because it is always already interrupting itself from the outset. The irreducible contamination of the trace-structure guarantees the impossibility of the transcendental precisely because, pace Agamben, it means that the other of the trace—what Agamben calls the in-significant—cannot be a priori excluded. This is what I aim to get at with the concept of shatter. Agamben’s objection is to the supposed exclusion of the chance that there might be something other than language—a possibility that he repeatedly describes as the “event” or “experience” of language (experimentum linguae) or even “the event of matter” (P 217). Behind this lies the fear that the trace-structure forecloses the possibility of not merely the sayability or nameability of language (CF 57–122/35–90) but also eventality as such. Agamben worries that the unforeseeable event of the other (of language), whose possibility the trace structure is meant to secure, would be eliminated if there were to be nothing other than eventality. If this were the case, Agamben’s solution is for the other of language to be brought to speech as an event of language (P 217). It is difficult to see, though, how this construal of the event does not itself come up against the same difficulty. In a rigorous critique of Agamben’s “linguistic vitalism,” Lorenzo Chiesa and Frank Ruda argue that “language becomes itself a transcendental without emergence, which, at the same time, stands for, or better is, eventality as such.”44 When Agamben comes up against the problem of retroactive constitution elaborated in deconstruction, he proposes to displace the aporia with a theory of paradigmaticity or of the example. Like the deconstructive logic of iterability, the series of examples is potentially infinite. If the example is a case that steps out of the class to which it belongs in order to make it intelligible, it is endlessly substitutable. The series of examples of the example never ends because it is always possible to add another example. Through a combination of negation (the example’s constitutive exception) and privation (the example shows the possibility of not belonging to the class it grounds) Agamben attempts to avoid the ontological substantialization that he laments in the Derridean trace. Chiesa and Ruda argue convincingly, however, that the series comes to an end because it cannot retroact on the structure of language itself as the potentiality not to The Rhythm of Life

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(belong). The eventality of language that is the transcendental point of the series can only be presented in language through the chain of examples and hence cannot emerge as such in language. The consequences are fatal to Agamben’s project. If language is thus a transcendental possibility of evental emergences that is itself without emergence, Agamben then loses precisely what he wanted to think with the notion of potentiality, that is, the combination of the “not to” of negation and the insubstantiality of privation—the nontotalisability of the retroactive effect of a singularity on the series it sustains. It should be evident by now how this outcome necessarily implies a (negative) ontological substantialisation.45 Should one then also resist the temptation to speak of the “transcendental ‘perhaps’ ” or even of the “transcendental ‘perhaps not’ ” (which would be “a little more British, perhaps”)?46 As Derrida famously asserts in La carte postale, its “restante structure” means that “a letter can always not arrive at its destination” (CP 454/444), even once it has already arrived. This destinnerance follows from the trace-structure. It also means that there is nothing other than the event (chance, risk, unpredictability) but only on the condition that the event itself be subject to the same eventality and also at risk of not happening. With his notion of impotentiality as a simultaneous can be and can not-be, Agamben seems to be trying to get at something very similar to the “necessarily-possibly-not” that Bennington formalizes as a positive condition of possibility in Derrida’s thought. But Agamben then tends toward ontologizing this eventality by making impotentiality something of which one can be capable and by thus possibilizing it in the present, in the can not not-be. Put in the language of La carte postale, he wants to think a letter that can not not-arrive, flying in the face of Derrida’s many warnings about capacitation (e.g., 47/258). Whence Bennington’s insistence on the “solidarity” between possibility and impossibility which ensures that any hy pothetical transcendental is always already infected by the movement of the possibility-necessarily-not and no one modality can take priority over any other. It is also why Derrida prefers the logic of his “if there is any [s’il y en a]” over Nancy’s negative “there is no ‘the’ ” (T 324/288). Badiou makes a similar point about Agamben’s thought of the event as early as 1990 in an interview marking the publication in French of Agamben’s La comunità che viene (CV). In response to Agamben’s claim that a 70 The Rhythm of Life

community without condition can be thought on the basis of the event of language as such, Badiou responds unequivocally: I think exactly the opposite. I think that if there is an event of language [un événement de langage], it means that there is an arch-event [un archiévénement], i.e. that there is a transcendental of eventality as such [un transcendental de l’événementialité comme telle]. For if the fact that one speaks is as such in the figure of the event, it means in spite of every thing that it is given, as an arch-guarantee foundation of possible eventality, in the resource of language thus conceived. Now, I think that this reattaches eventality again to a figure of the origin or transcendental constitution and does not deliver it its radical contingent proposition. This, for me, is the crux of the matter. Now, if eventality lies in the transcendental guarantee of this arch-event that is the being of language, then there is no reason to think that that whose arrival you announce [que ce dont tu annonces que ça vient] will arrive any more than it arrives [viendra plus que ça ne vient], because it will always already have arrived so long as there is some original or founding event [ça aura toujours été déjà venu]. So there is something captive in your notion of the event.47 Another way to think of Agamben’s move here is as an indemnifying strategy that seeks to protect eventality from its own eventality. The reaction of metaphysics to this autoimmunity is to indemnify itself against and protect itself from this very self-protection by retroactively positing the fiction of two pure, contradictory terms that subsequently infect one another. When Agamben speaks of impotentiality “preserving itself ” in actuality (e.g., P 183), he rightly recognizes the logic of self-preservation at work here, but he also forces a decision between a pure origin that is later befallen by eventality or a pure eventality that thus becomes an origin and end—both of which subordinate the trace to the order of ipseity and sovereignty—of the “I can.” By contrast, Derrida’s thought of the event strives to imagine an unconditionality without sovereignty (V 204/149) or “the unconditionality of the incalculable” (203/148). Earlier in Voyous he explains: It is a question here, as with the coming of any event worthy of this name, of an unforeseeable coming of the other, of a heteronomy, of a law come from the other, of a responsibility and decision of the other—of the other The Rhythm of Life

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in me, an other greater and older than I am. It is thus a question of separating democracy and autonomy. (V 123/84) For this reason, the extensive exposition of the “perhaps” in the second chapter of Politiques de l’amitié, where he speaks of the “perhaps” as “the chance of the future as chance itself” (PA 68/50), proceeds from the observation that “there is no event, to be sure, that is not preceded and followed by its own perhaps” (86/68). Arguing that the sovereign decision implies a free and willful subject and hence neutralizes the event, which “must surprise both the freedom and will of the subject—surprise, in a word, the very subjectivity of the subject,” he proposes that there is another decision—“a passive decision”—that precedes any subjectivation and by which I am always already exposed to what happens, to the other who comes. “The passive decision, condition of the event, is always in me, structurally, another event, a rending decision as the decision of the other.” Then, in a remarkable passage that echoes Nancy’s description of the syncope in “L’amour en éclats,” Derrida goes on to figure this eventality of the event as rhythm: This heteronomy, which is undoubtedly rebellious against the decisionist conception of sovereignty or of the exception (Schmitt), does not contradict; it opens autonomy on to itself, it is a figure of its heartbeat. . . . [It is] “passive,” delivered over to the other, suspended over the other’s heartbeat. For a few sentences earlier on, “its heartbeat” had to be necessarily accorded thus: as the heartbeat of the other. Where I am helpless, where I decided what I cannot fail to decide, freely, necessarily, receiving my very life from the heartbeat of the other. We say not only heart but heartbeat: that which, from one instant to another, having come again from an other of the other to whom it is delivered up (and this can be me), this heart receives, it will perhaps receive in a rhythmic pulsation what is called blood, which in turn will receive the force needed to arrive. (PA 88/69)48 This reference to blood and its rhythmic pulsation is to be distinguished from the homo-hematocentrism that Derrida deplores in La peine de mort arguing that humanism merges with a history of cruel bloodletting and of the purifying staunching of bloody sacrifice (PM2 293–94/220). In a recent and incredibly timely book whose publication coincides with the horrifying 72

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resumption of capital punishment in the United States after sixteen years, David Wills takes inspiration from this passage to explore the relation between blood’s rhythmic pulsation and the temporalization of the human in an ingenious chapter devoted to what he dubs “bloodtime.”49 Although the nuances of Wills’s argument are too complex to reproduce here, it rests upon moving away from an Hegelian notion of blood circulation as a self-propelling and absolutely interior vibration whereby the interruption of blood flow by the heartbeat is sublated into an infinite fluidity. This renders the pulse of life appropriable and calculable, the heartbeat externalized as clock time, whence the logic of the death penalty that seeks to fix the chanciness of life-death by determining the instant of death. It makes death an instant rather than that with which every moment of life is always already shot through. Wills counterposes a notion of temporality coming from the outside which can never be mine to possess: an originary technologization of the human, an inanimate “prothesis in the blood, beating, pulsating, and flowing on the outside” so as to “syncopate Hegelian dialectics.”50 In a slightly different way, Derrida insists in the passage quoted above that the rhythmic pulsation of blood comes from “an other of the other,” thereby proposing a differential, rather than oppositional, logic of the heartbeat (much as La peine de mort will develop an account of cruelty as self-differentiating). One would also want to read the temporality of blood alongside the dizzying passage in Circumfession (to which Wills does not refer) about a scene from his Algerian childhood of drawing blood by syringe and also, more metaphorically, about “the crude word [le vocable cru],” Derrida now drawing out with his syringe-pen the manifold sense (sens—quasi-homonym of sang, blood) of cru (crude, cruelty, cruor, past participle of croire, to believe). It is a question of “expos[ing] outward, and thus to its death, what will have been most alive in me” (Cir 14/12–13), “the inside of my life exhibiting itself on the outside” (12/10). This externalization of the pulse of life, no longer an invisible, continuous flow, absolute and absolved, leaves Cixous “completely dizzy,” its “paroxysmized” precipitation—an unstaunchable effusion— destabilizing the rhythm of her reading (I 16–20/12–19). Strikingly, here and in La peine de mort this blood-flow, understood also as the flow of faith, will also be a question of listening to divine speech, of what “the crude word lets flow into him via the channel of the ear, another vein” (Cir 4) or of “unbelief or incredulity in a hollow [en creux], resonating spectrally in the shell or the hollow of the other’s ear” (PM1 238/168). The rhythmic flow of The Rhythm of Life

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blood/belief will thus turn out to be linked, as Derrida immediately goes on to note in the seminar, to the kind of telephonic listening that I discuss in the next chapter. And the headlong rhythm and force of this blood flow would thus be related to the great speed of the differential power (puissance)— “its pulse and heartbeat, its breathing or its tachycardia” (HC 66/73)—with which Cixous recalls life by the thread of the telephone line. Evoking the imagery of the shipwreck as anticipatory echo of the shattering at the end of the final seminar, Derrida’s reading of Blanchot’s L’arrêt de mort in “Living On” also links telephony to a dispersal of the heartbeat: Now, the telephone had hardly been hung up, the nurse will tell him later, when “her pulse [. . .] scattered like sand”: a sign of death, a death sentence, in an instant as elusive as the last grain of sand in the time of the hourglasses, death also as the result of the dissemination of the rhythm of life with no finishing stroke [coup d’arrêt], unbordered and unbounded arrhythmy on a beach that is a continuation of the sea. The themes of life, aurality, and rhythm are closely interwoven, threaded together with the bonds of telephone cords and friendship. The unexpected intrusion of rhythm in Politiques de l’amitié also echoes other rhythmic events in Derrida’s writings. Two other prominent mentions of rhythm occur when Derrida is engaging with the thought of two friends. First, several years beforehand, in his introduction to Lacoue-Labarthe’s Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, he observes that there is no rhythm without what Lacoue-Labarthe calls “the repeated difference-from-itself of the Same”—in Derrida’s gloss “and thus repercussion, resonance, echo, reverberation” (Psy2 228/222). A few pages later, he insists that this rhythm is likewise subject to eventality—it is necessary to “recognize in an arrhythmic caesura the respiration of rhythm” (231/225)—but he goes on to distinguish this arrhythmic rhythm from oppositionality: This interruption does not have the dialectical cadence of a relation between rhythm and nonrhythm, the continuous and the discontinuous, and so on. It interrupts alternation, “the constraint of opposition in general,” the dialectic and the speculative, even the double bind when it maintains an oppositional form. (Psy2 238/230) Then in a highly evocative concluding paragraph with resonances for Chapter 3, Derrida sums rhythm up in this way: 74

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Gap or hiatus: the open mouth. To give or receive. The caesura at times takes one’s breath away. When chance has it, it gives one speech. (Psy2 638/230) In this metaphorics of constricting and freeing the breath, it is a question of resisting any subordination to dialectical contradiction and of insisting on the irreducibility of the trace-structure of eventality. In Le toucher he takes up Nancy’s notion of syncope as a diastolic-systolic convulsion that has as much to do with expulsions from the mouth as it does with the heartbeat (T 46/33) and which interrupts the heart’s regular alternation and circulation (320/284). Derrida’s most striking passages about rhythm perhaps come, though, in Glas, especially when it comes to bodily spasms and ejaculation, but, before I turn to this text, it is worth examining how Agamben also takes up this notion of rhythm in his struggle against transcendentalism. In a pivotal chapter in L’uso dei corpi that sets out a “modal ontology,” Agamben makes a somewhat unexpected reference to a figure of aurality—specifically to the metaphor of the “echo”—in Leibniz to describe the relation between being and existence (U 196/149), to which he returns some pages later to flesh out the idea of a modifiability of being. Being does not preexist the modes but constitutes itself in being modified, is nothing other than its modifications. One can then understand why Leibniz could write . . . that the bond is something like an echo, “which once posited demands the monads.” (U 221/170). In this context Agamben also invokes Emile Benveniste’s notion of rhythm, which distinguishes pre-Socratic rhythmos from its schematic interpretation, as a paradigm for thinking being as its modifications. One of the fundamental meanings of “mode” is in fact the musical one of rhythm, just modulation (modificare means, in Latin, to modulate harmonically: it is in this sense that we have said that the “as” of being is the source of modifications). Benveniste has shown that “rhythm” (rhythmos) is a technical term of pre-Socratic philosophy that designates form, not in its fixity (for this, Greek prefers to use the term schema) but in the moment in which it is assumed by what is moving, what is mobile and fluid. . . . Mode expresses this “rhythmic” and not “schematic” nature of being: being is flux, and substance “modulates” itself and beats out its rhythm—it The Rhythm of Life

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does not fix and schematize itself—in the modes. Not the individuating of itself but the beating out of the rhythm of substance defines the ontology that we are here seeking to define. (U 224/172–73; my emphasis) Might this be an unacknowledged overhearing of Derrida’s “La double séance” in which he cites exactly the same definition of rhythm from Benveniste’s Problèmes de linguistique générale to describe the “measure and order of dissemination, the law of spacing” that characterizes archiwriting (D 204n3/178n4)? Modification, though, is not a term that Derrida singles out, and Agamben’s notion arguably has more affinity with Catherine Malabou’s notion of plasticity, with whom he also shares a desire to think beyond the horizon of writing. Reflecting on the grammatological project, Malabou argues that Derrida be taken at his word when he describes the generalization of writing beyond its narrow, vulgar definition as a “modification of the concept of writing” (G 81/55). If it is true that writing comprises language in its totality, can one argue, given the extension of the meaning of writing, that the passage from the common signification to its original signification may also be ascribed to the work of writing? Or to the contrary, is it necessary to think that an original modifiability, not reducible to the single operation of writing, is initiated from the beginning as well? It is this modifiability that I call “plasticity.” Plasticity designates the double aptitude of being able both to receive a form (clay is plastic) and to give form (as in the plastic arts or plastic surgery). Must it not be supposed, at the origin of all concepts, that there is a possibility of plasticity that allows for a change of meaning in history? That allows it to receive and to give itself new forms throughout time? The deformability of a concept would thus be older than the concept itself, and nothing says that this logic of form and deformation need be identical to the work of the trace and is mixed up with the work of rewriting. Plasticity, in this sense, is the threat to which the form subjects the trace. If this is true, then modification, the operation of enlarging the concept of writing, would escape the grammatological field: it would be impossible to produce, in the framework of the science of writing, the conditions of the possibility of the plastic re-elaboration of the concept of writing.51 76

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The extension of the category of writing to include other forms presupposes a possibility for modification that cannot be subsumed under the category of archi-writing itself. To the extent that this plasticity “escapes” grammatological writing, it risks becoming another quasi-transcendental. Derrida would surely protest that what remains beyond all ontology and all modifications of being is the trace. Setting aside this objection, there are certain affinities between Malabou’s concept of modifiability and Agamben’s account of rhythmic modulation. When Agamben characterizes the relation between substances and modes as a ductus, that is, “in the vocabulary of graphology . . . the tension that guides the hand’s gesture in the formation of letters” (U 223/171), one might hear in this passage a veiled reference to Derrida’s contemplation of a new “cultural graphology” in 1967 (G 131/87). Derrida later insisted that he had demonstrated the impossibility of founding any new science of writing bearing the name “grammatology” (R 71/52), and Agamben likewise observes that “grammatology was forced to become deconstruction” to avoid its aporias (P 213). What Agamben seems to be retrieving—albeit with a rhythmic modulation—is the project to which Malabou refers: not a generalized archi-écriture as transcendental condition of possibility but a “regional science . . . renewed and fertilized by sociology, history, ethnography, psychoanalysis” (G 131/86–87).52 This opens up the possibility that Agamben might think modifiability less as plasticity than as or in proximity to Derridean generalizability which, as David Cunningham argues, only takes place in more specific conditions, levels, and modes of generality.53 Agamben’s thinking approximates Malabou’s when he supposes that “mode adds nothing to substance and is only a modification or manner of being” (U 284/222)—being thought adverbially rather than substantially (214/164). Strikingly, Agamben describes the modifiability of modal being by analogy with rhythm. The form-of-life that is liberated from sovereign capture is a being that “beats out its rhythm.” But what exactly is this rhythm and what is its relation to the successive beat of now-points in the vulgar conception of time? Or to the messianic now? Agamben’s theory of rhythm here presents an important extension and clarification of his earlier reflections on temporality and as such points to the modifiability of concepts over time. Reflecting on the modern, Agamben argues that the adverb modo, which means “a short time ago, just now” in Latin, “indicates, in the ‘now,’ a small temporal gap, which is not a chronological past so much as a noncoincidence The Rhythm of Life

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of the moment with itself, which obligates it to stop and take itself up again” (224/173). He then goes on to redefine operational time as a rhythmic modulation: The temporality of the mode is not actuality; it is, in present existence or in the actual, the gap that impedes their coinciding with themselves— the operative time in which the flux of being pulsates and stops, takes itself up and repeats itself and, in this way, modulates itself in a rhythm. Insofar as it demands to preserve itself in its being, substance disseminates itself in the modes and can thus take form in time. The “being that it was” and its resumption in thought, existence and essence, substance and modes, past and present are only the moment or the figures of this rhythm, of this music of being. (U 225/173; my emphases) Derrida and Agamben draw very different conclusions from the rhythmic, disjointed character of temporality. If, like the swinging bell, Agamben’s rhythm consists in the “infinite series of modal oscillations” (U 223/172) by which the universal “disseminates and expresses itself in singularities” (226/174), it nonetheless (notwithstanding the talk of “dissemination”) comes far closer to an Hegelian notion of rhythm in which the dispersed pulses may be gathered up. It is in reference to Hegel that Malabou, without thematizing rhythm as such, speaks of the “rhythm of the concept” in Wissenschaft der Logik as one point of departure for theorizing plasticity. It is clear to me that the living grammar of the notion of plasticity was deeply at work in the speculative content, at once as its structure and as its rhythm. An integrating and informing power, an originary synthetic power, plasticity also requires a contrary power of dissociation and rupture. These two powers characterize perfectly the gait of the Hegelian text: gathering and splitting, both at work in the System’s own formation. They are two inseparable powers, allowing an idea of temporalizing synthesis and an idea of factual eruption to be articulated together. My whole work is invested here, as it tries to show that the Hegelian notion of temporality is located nowhere else but in the economy opened up by this articulation.54 For Malabou, rhythm is a question of holding together association and dissociation—of trying to make shatter cohere. Perhaps here she thus comes quite close to the thought that “all scatter is relatively gathered, all gather78

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ing relatively scattered,” which Bennington associates with the motif of rhythm.55 The right measure (the right rhythm) of this scatter and gather is never given—not given here and now, not given in advance, not even in the form of a regulative Idea, but has to be invented each time, singularly, necessarily playing with chance, as it comes.

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What would this right rhythm sound like? Bennington gestures toward string theory as a way to develop a rhythmic materialism in which matter is made up not of unsplittable participles of atomysticism but of oscillating strings. The oscillation of the bell-clapper, with its altogether more percussive resonance, with this timbral attack capturing something of the traumatic blow of the event, is another possibility. In Glas rhythm appears as a kind of sonorous shattering or voler en éclats that is at once a pealing of bells and an explosion of laughter. This highly virtuosic, literary text is often understood as a meditation on the problem of the transcendental with its two columns—Hegel and Genet—proffering alternative, yet arguably equally intractable responses to its aporias.56 It can also be read as a deconstruction of phallogocentrism with its reflections on sexual difference and castration. My alternative reading is that Glas, if not at bottom—for it is at pains to deconstruct any notion of foundation—then to an obsessive, compulsive extent, is a text about sound and rhythm. For a text that expressly negotiates the boundary between philosophy and literature, this makes sense. Sound has remained a privileged metaphor by which a philosophical tradition from Plato to deconstruction has figured its relation to its other. Sound recurs most frequently in Glas in the guise of the rhythmic repetition of the bell and of rebounding echoes and agglutinations of gl. The tolling of the bell is a metaphor for the oscillation between the two columns of the text and two modes of transcendentalizing, while also sounding the death knell of phallogocentrism. It is important to hold onto the forceful quality of the attack, because, when I pluck rhythm out of these texts, it emerges not merely as one term among others but, moreover, as an exemplary remarking of Derrida’s practice of reading—of the rhythm of reading, as he notes on multiple occasions The Rhythm of Life

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in Glas. In one of a number of quasi-methodological remarks, he notes: “That is where (coagulation of sense, form, rhythm) one must put one’s finger on the compulsional matrix [matrice compulsionelle] of writing” (Gl 219b).57 There is, I suggest, a rhythm with which deconstructive reading articulates sound and philosophy, the empirical and the transcendental, shattering and gathering. Even as there is a kind of rhythmic contagion between Derrida’s writing and the texts by Genet, Hegel, Freud, and so on that he is reading, Glas operates at a meta- or self-reflective level, with several striking passages that weave these quasi-methodological remarks out of intertextual reference, such as this one which invites to be read as a reflection on the arrhythmic rhythm of reading: The text is spat out. It is like a discourse whose units mold themselves in the manner of an excrement or secretion. And since we are here concerned with a glottic gesture, the work of the tongue upon itself, its element is the saliva that also glues one unit to another. Association is a sort of gluey continuity, never reasoning or symbolic appeal; sense is made by the glue of chance, and progress has for rhythm little staccato jerks [petites secousses], clutching and suction, veneering—in every sense—and slippery penetration. Into the embouchure or along the column. (Gl 161b) Reading jerkily grips and sucks on the text, at once gluing associations together and spitting them out in globules, choking or suffocating metalanguage: “The little spasms [petites secousses] mark the very rhythm of gl, the barely stifled emotionalizing of the text, the anguishing stricture of antherection, its staccato force of penetration, through cuts and thrusts [par coupes et à coups]” (162bi). This rhythm is counterposed to Hegel’s theory of Klang, which is treated extensively near the end of Glas (277–79a). Derrida glosses a passage from Hegel’s Naturphilosophie that passes from elasticity to heat via an extended discussion of sound (§§300–302).58 For Derrida’s Hegel, Klang is a vehicle of Aufhebung: In the process of subjective idealization punctuated by trembling (Erzittern) and vibration (Schwingen), the difference between nature and spirit corresponds to the difference between what does not resonate of itself— bodies (Die Körper klingen noch nicht aus sich selbst)—and what resonates of itself. This is the history of the Klang that reappropriates itself to the point of resounding with itself. (Gl 277a) 80

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Derrida goes on to sketch a tripartite process—a negation of the negation—through which noise becomes voice. Note how Hegel figures oscillation and vibration as a form of punctuation, so that, on Szendy’s reading, the dialectical negation of Klang consists in a punctuation of the punctuation, a rhythmic interruption of sonorous pulsation.59 Unlike the mediums of air and water, via which sound may be transmitted but which do not resonate spontaneously, Klang presupposes the determination of form: “Pure sound requires compact continuity and homogeneity of matter, and so metals—especially precious metals—and glass [Glas], give out a clear sound [diesen klaren Klang].”60 Only in the voice and listening is there an interior beating of the self as such. Klang was already recognized [in the Encyclopedia] as this singular repercussion of interiority in exteriority. Sonority in general (Der Ton), in the continuity of earthly bodies, has two and only two forms: noise (Geräusch) and resonance (Klang). Noise expresses only immediate, external continuity, constraint, friction (Reibung). Klang, on the contrary, expresses its internal continuity, especially in the case of metal and glass (Glas). But in spite of this difference (outside/inside), both of them, noise and Klang, are only set going by a percussion come from outside (nur außerlich angeschlagen). This is what distinguishes them from sense (Sinn), for example the sense of hearing; what also distinguishes them from the voice, and above all from the echoing internal couple formed by voice and hearing. . . . Through this couple the sensibility of the individual takes itself up again in itself, gathers itself, comes back to itself, contracts, passes a contract with itself (sich in sich zurücknimmt) and constitutes itself as universal. (Gl 278a) Klang thus occupies an intermediary position between mere senseless noise and the meaningful self-consciousness of hearing-oneself-speak. From this sonorous friction and clatter of bodies Hegel derives the phenomenon of heat: Within this convulsion of body within itself there occurs not merely an ideal sublation of matter but a real sublation of it by heat. . . . Heat is the consummation of sound, the manifestation in matter of matter’s negativity: sound itself can even shatter by a sharp cry. . . . If, for example, a bell is struck it gets hot; and this heat is not external to it but results from its own inner vibrations.61 The Rhythm of Life

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In Derrida’s paraphrase, Klang is an oscillation between “the alternation of the reciprocal exteriority of the parts of matter” (Gl 278a) and the negation of that alternation. Otherwise put, striking involves a noncoincidence of the parts that come into contact with one another and Klang subsumes this noncoincidence into a coincidence of two outsides, while hearing-oneselfspeak consists in the coincidence of that coincidence with itself. When a body is “struck, pushed, or pressed” there is, according to Hegel, “a negation of material asunderness” and also “a negation of this negation” in the reinstating of materiality—an “immanent elasticity.”62 For Szendy, this passage anticipates the Hegelian punctum saliens, “a point that pulsates or leaps.” From a point that “arrests and ruptures” it has turned into “a pulsating overpunctuation in which the abrupt interruption is itself interrupted.”63 If the voice is “a percussion of the self,” Hegel later describes the subject in its punctiformity as a “self-self [Selbst-Selbst],” the “pulsating [or leaping] point of selfhood [dem ‘springenden’ Punkte der Selbstheit].”64 Anxious to distinguish the quasi-transcendental logic of his elastic punctuality from Hegel’s dialectical mechanism, Szendy invokes the aural character of stigmatology: But if the leap is precisely merely another name for dialectical passage itself (. . . for clearing a path . . .), its movement remains strictly internal to the Hegelian system. It is merely another way of describing the hurdles or jolts in the movement of this system. . . . As for stigmatology, it cannot content itself with this. When it listens to overpunctuation in Hegel, it auscultates points of suture or overcast stitches of the text as places where its punctuation is at once intra- and metadiegetic, and as what takes place with or by the point in its circulation within the system, and as what makes possible its phrasing.65 Aufhebung and différance, taking hold and circulating, Agamben’s messianic now and Derrida’s “perhaps,” self-reference and the substitutability of the trace—Szendy insists on their irreducible contamination, their vibration and oscillation. He thinks their togetherness not in the manner of an Hegelian gathering but as the kind of elastic punctiformity in which the self strikes itself and resonates with itself. Szendy follows Hegel in contrasting elasticity (Elastizität) with brittleness (Sprödigkeit).66 What, though, if in order to imagine a rhythm of another order, we were to retain a certain fragility or destructibility—the risk of an accident? Derrida writes, glossing Hegel: 82

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If on the other hand a bell (Glocke) is cracked or scratched (einen Riss bekommen hat), one hears no longer only the pure swaying of the Klang, but the noise (Geräusch) of matter forming an obstacle, grinding, breaking, harming the equality of the form. Flat stones, slabs (Steinplatten) also produce a Klang even though they are hard, insensible, cold, brittle (spröde). (Gl 278a) Alternatively, what kind of sonorous pulsation would emerge, if instead of elasticity, Szendy were to be more inclined (as he is elsewhere) toward Malabou’s logic of plasticity?67 Plasticity is defined not as infinite modifiability but by the impossibility of reattaching the detachable part (one cannot reconnect the broken arm of a marble statue). “An elastic material is able to return to its initial form after undergoing a deformation,” Malabou observes. “Elasticity is thus opposed to plasticity to the extent that a plastic material retains the imprint and thereby resists endless polymorphism.”68 This is why plasticity is not simply the capacity to give and receive form but also the possibility of its destruction (think plastic explosives). A plastic modulation of the self would allow for an irreversible destruction and hence the impossibility of ever returning and coinciding with itself again. At the same time, the explosiveness of the event of plasticity is what makes new transformations possible. Hence Malabou will claim that plasticity is of the order of the chance and the accident. What little remains of this chapter traces the sound of this other bell in Glas—not the one whose pure resonance paves the way for the signifying voice as its a priori condition but the one that comes by surprise as singular events, in arrhythmic strikes of gl. To this end it revisits how Derrida and Malabou each configure the relationship between power and life. Among the many iterations of gl in Glas is the glossa, which in ancient Greek both refers to the physical tongue and takes it as a metonym for speech. It thus comes to mean a gloss, a foreign word that demands explanation and thence that explanation itself. Because the glossa is also a significant recurring figure in Agamben’s thought since Infanzia e storie (published in 1978 four years after Glas),69 it is tempting to read his reflections as a clandestine overhearing of Derrida’s text. Glossolalia exemplifies, for Agamben, the event of language. It is a cipher of the death of language in which language is diverted from its semantic dimension and returned to “the original sphere of the pure intention to signify,” suspended between the The Rhythm of Life

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raw sound of the phonē and the meaningful voice (CI 66/67). To speak “in glosses” is not to utter completely inarticulate sounds but to speak meaningful words whose meaning is unknown. Glossing Agamben’s glosses, Daniel Heller-Roazen likens the experience to hearing speech in a foreign tongue.70 Glossolalia interrupts the economic ends of language, rendering it inoperative. Following Agamben’s thesis that all potentiality is impotentiality, the exhibition of language as such is less metalanguage than a “gag”— something put in the mouth that impedes speech, or the subsequent improvisation to cover up for this lapse (MF 52–53/59–60). Heller-Roazen also compares the gloss to the Hebrew letter aleph which is unpronounceable because it represents no sound whatsoever.71 Originally thought to have represented the glottal stop produced by a rhythmic contraction of the larynx, the aleph is treated in modern pronunciations of Hebrew as nothing more than a silent support for the vowels it bears, without even the minimal nonsound of the glottal stop’s interruption.72 Like the gag, it inscribes a moment of forgetting and erasure into the act of speaking. Derrida understands glossa in multiple senses: as the foreign tongues of source and target languages glossing one another, as the linguistic in its opposition to the outside of language, and as the clapper or tongue of the bell that strikes the metal to make it ring. In Derrida’s hands, Poe’s poem, which he reads via Mallarmé’s translation into a foreign tongue, becomes a meditation on the relation between rhythm and the cadaver of the word—on rhythm as what survives the division between living and dead language. Without preserving Poe’s rhymes, Mallarmé does make the beats of Poe’s rhythms re(-)sound, replacing Poe’s “Runic rhyme” with “rythme runique.” Derrida argues that any potential semantic chain is carried off into indecision through the suspended swinging or beating, the oscillation of the clapper (the “true” impossible theme of the piece) being remarked or reverberating in the neither-nor of the ghouls (between man and woman, human and inhuman, language and nonlanguage, etc.). Semantic sense is struck by the rhythm of its other, exposing itself there, open, offered in its very hiatus. (Gl 177–78b) At the same time, what “one might be tempted to isolate as a concatenation of signifiers, of identities with arbitrary elements, is endlessly reused according to a mimetics that does not relate to a real sound, to a full content” 84

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(Gl 178b). Unlike Agamben’s messianic recapitulation of poetic rhyme (TR 77–84/78–87), the agglomerated gl that flies between the poem and its translation relates “to relational rhythmic structures without any invariant content or ultimate element” (Gl 178b). Insofar as glossa is the name for any tongue-shaped object, including the sharp head of a dart, it is also a point, but one that points to other ways of beating out its rhythm. At the beginning of Glas, Derrida points toward another kind of punctuating interruption, more explosive than elastic and one that sticks in the throat. Derrida speaks here of a cataglottism by analogy with catachresis (the diversion of a word from its proper sense to designate another thing with some analogy to the original object). Glossa is itself, he notes, already a catachresis. In the cataglottic abuse of words “the ALCs echo, clang, burst [sonnent, claquent, éclatent], reflect and overlap in every sense. . . . Concerning what clangs here [qui claque ici]—and decomposes the corpse of the word (balc, talc, alga, brilliance [éclat], ice [glace], etc.) in all senses—this is the first and last time that, to make an example, you are here as if forewarned by this text” (Gl 8–9bi). This cataglottism can be understood in relation to the asphyxiatory application of power captured in Mendi and Keith Obadike’s Numbers Station series, as elaborated in Excursus 1. Specifically, Glas speaks of the glottis and the glottal stop as a generalized (con)striction that comes before that of the dialectic.73 In short: can one think repression according to the dialectic? Does the heterogeneity of all the restrictions, of all the counter-forces of striction (Hemmung, Unterdrückung, Zwingen, Bezwingung, zurückdrängen, Zurücksetzung) always define species of general negativity, forms of Aufhebung, conditions of sublation? Repression—what is today imagined, still very confusedly, under this word—could occupy several places with respect to these re-strictions: 1. Within the series, the class, the genus, the type; 2. Outside: no longer like a case or a species but as a quite different type; 3. Outside inside, like a transcategorial or a transcendental of all possible re-striction. Can one think repression according to the dialectic? The answer is necessarily affirmative: if thinking means what thinking has always meant in the history of thought. And if thought is what forms the question in general, what imposes the questioning form of the question, the copulation question/response. This latter has an ontological, i.e. dialectical, “destination.” If one asks “what is repression?,” The Rhythm of Life

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“what is the re-stricture of repression?” in other words “how to think it?”, the reply is Dialectic. (Gl 214a) “Constricted” is likewise the word that Malabou reaches for when she asks: “The System: doesn’t it seem to be a tight loop which envelops everything—all exteriority, all alterity, all surprise?”74 For Derrida, though, the glottal stop is always already a cata-glottis—the constriction of constriction. He proposes choking Hegelian constriction in the name of another unconditional (con)striction. At one point, Derrida declares that “I don’t stop decapitating metalanguage or rather sticking its head back in the text, only to pull it out again regularly, long enough to take a breath” (Gl 132bi), as if subjecting it, in Bennington’s gloss, to the rhythmic torture of waterboarding.75 In other quasi-methodological notes affirming the inseparability of dispersal and (con)striction, Derrida observes a certain arrhythmic expulsion that bursts out of the strangulating “bottleneck” that is the rhythm of the concept (Gl 8ai, 27ai, 286bi), sputtering against and spitting itself out of its chokehold. What I am trying to write—gl—isn’t just any old structure, a system of signifier or signified, a thesis or a novel, a poem, a law, a desire or a machine, it’s what passes, more or less well, through the rhythmed stricture of a ring. (Gl 125b; my emphasis) The Genet column of Glas, then, is about what forces itself through this (con)striction, as if it were an arrhythmic striking of the bell, with, in words taken from Genet’s Letters to Roger Blin, “staccato force [force saccadée] . . . by cuts and thrusts [par coupes et à coups]” and “successive spasms” (Gl 162bi), in a viscosity that at once constricts its own passage as its seeps or sputters out, simultaneously holding back and bursting forth. Derrida is interested less in the dead language of glossolalia and onomatopoeia that interests Agamben (CI 74/70) than in the “life of language”—meaning here what he later calls life-death or survivance—which, in a reference to the bird ensnared by the lime-twigs in Hegel and echoed in Hobbes, “always flounders like a bird caught in a subtle glue (trap) [glu]” (Gl 148bi). A rather astonishing passage illustrates how this syncopated rhythm of the gl, with its belimed wings beating, is at once stricture and eruption, calcification and evaporation, congealing and liquefying, coalescing and flowing. Without ever becoming a general concept of an a priori glottal stop, gl materializes

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itself and slips unpredictably and arbitrarily through a multiplicity of singular events. Neither a definite whole or the detached part of some whole gl remains gl falls just right, a pebble into water—though not to be taken for an archi-gloss (because it is but a piece of a gloss, but not yet a gloss and hence, element detached from any gloss, much more and something other than the Urlaut), for consonants without vowels, “sounded” syllables, non vocalizable letters, according to some basic drive of phonation, a voiceless voice stifling a sob . . . or clot of milk in the throat, tickled laugh or gluey vomit of a gluttonous baby, the imperial flight of a bird of prey . . . swooping down all of a sudden [d’un coup] on the back of your neck, the sticky, frozen, cold piss name of an impassive Teutonic philosopher, with his well-known stammer, sometimes liquid and sometimes guttural and tetanic, with swollen or cooing goiter, every thing that rings strange in the tympanic pit or canal, spit or paste on the soft palate, orgasm of the glottis or uvula, clitoral glue, abortion cloaca, spermchoke, rhythmic hiatus of an occlusion, staccatodance spasm of an eruptojaculation, syncopated valve of the tongue and lips, or a nail falling in the silence of the milky voice [la voix lactée] . . . “bits of broken glass . . . or fragments . . . pieces of glass . . . shards . . . splinters [éclats].” (Gl 137–39b) Rather than reattach the gl to the sphere of signification, Glas instead gestures to the visceral animality of the mouth and of bodily openings, passages, and blockages whose dispersion is described as the shattering of glass (voler en éclats), the exploding of blood-splatters (voler en éclaboussures), and the pealing of bells (volée de cloches) (24b). The (a)rhythm of gl thus becomes the force of the oral—or better, buccal—apparatus. With a smattering of wordplay, Derrida quotes Genet: “utterly astounded [le souffle coupé, the breath taken away] . . . toppled into the water”: “And from their flowery mouths the big shots spat smacking [claquants] gobs of spit . . .” . . . the whole familial structure of the maternal tongue properly and lovingly sliced through [égorgée], deglotted [églottée], erected/excreted deep in a grotto or a forge (sound [bruits] of “sobs,” of “cloches,” of a “bugle” ringing out one page [claquer une page]. (Gl 84bi) The Rhythm of Life

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Here Glas anticipates the “open mouth” and rhythmic constriction that takes the breath way in Derrida’s reflections on Lacoue-Labarthe. We might also hear in this metaphorics of buccality a foresounding of the beastly devouring of sovereignty in the first year of La bête et le souverain to be taken up in Chapter 3: Might sovereignty be devouring? Might its force, its power, its greatest force, its absolute potency be, in essence and always in the last instance, a power of devourment (mouth, teeth, tongue, violent rush to bite, engulf, swallow the other, to take the other into oneself too, to kill it or mourn it)? But what goes via interiorizing devourment, i.e. via orality, via the mouth, the maw, teeth, throat, glottis, and tongue—which are also the sites of cry and speech, of language—that very thing can also inhabit that other site of the visage or the face, i.e. the ears . . . The place of devourment is also the place of what carries the voice, the topos of the porte-voix [megaphone, literally “voice-carrier”], in a word, the place of vociferation. (BS1 46/23) The mouth and the tongue, from this perspective, are the site and organs of interjection and other forcible expulsions, like laughter and flights of coloratura propelled from the rhythmic contraction of the diaphragm, and also of gobbling, scoffing, chewing, and in turn the regurgitating of wolfed-down indigestibles. Gl is but a morsel, “un morceau de glose” (Gl 137b), yet also “the vomit [vomi] of the system” (183a). The (a)rhythm of gl is always a matter of destabilizing the phantasm of sovereignty. Derrida, for instance, recounts a passage in Genet’s play Les Paravents where Mother takes the alarm clock into her stomach in a sovereign fantasy of taking time into herself: The word is detached, sounds [sonne] all by itself. The thing also. It is an alarm clock. In the swollen belly there was this ringing object of plastic matter carry ing in its own belly a little hammer, a mini-tocsin whose ringing can be triggered unexpectedly. Glug-glug/Tick-tock [Glou-glou/ Tic-tac]. (Gl 140b) As a little boy, the play’s main character, Saïd, had taken the clock apart completely, leaving scattered on the table all the springs, little screws, worms, and other inappropriable remnants (140b). Rhythm is not, then, a selfcontained category but is, on account of its irreducible arrhythmia, always 88 The Rhythm of Life

already ejaculating, sputtering, and shattering itself outwards: “There is— always—already—more than one—clang [plus d’un—glas]. . . . It has its shattering [bris] in itself, it immediately affects itself from this literal damage and echoes off it.” (170b). Rhythm is, in short, always already breaking out into the questions of breath, voice, and language that will be addressed in the next chapter. To conclude for now, however, this (a)rhythmic pealing of gl should be heard as a strike against the biopolitical capture of life that deprives life of its exposure to risk and chance. It does this by drawing attention to metaphoricity as the life of language that syncopates the Hegelian rhythm of the concept: The Idea, immediate natural life, sublates itself, cancels and preserves itself, dies in raising itself up to spiritual life. So life develops in contradiction and negativity; the metaphor between the two lives is simply this movement of sublating negativity. . . . In their ontological meaning, metaphors are always metaphors of life, they give rhythm to the imperturbable equality of life, of being, of truth, of filiation: physis. The Hegelian system thus demands that it be read as a book of life. (Gl 96a) This line of argument is fleshed out in La vie la mort, the seminar Derrida gave over the following two years in which he argues that Hegel, in determining death as that which is opposed to life, thus allows death to be sublated into the absolute life of the absolute Spirit.76 This contradiction between life and death, Derrida tells us, is (like any contradiction) not originary but the effect of an irreducibly contaminated force that comes before any division. The biopolitical gesture par excellence of partitioning life (into livable/unlivable, proper/improper, worthy/unworthy, native/foreigner and so forth) is a fiction designed to protect against the autoimmunity of life which means that it preserves itself only by dying a little to ward off the shattering power of life-death in its explosive rhythmic pulsation. In a striking passage that brings together the rhetoric of debt and economic risk with that of life and exposure to the risk of death, prefiguring biopolitics’ neoliberal variant, Derrida describes the Hegelian Aufhebung as an “amortization of death” (Gl 152a), arguing that life cannot indemnify itself and attempt to secure its sovereignty against risk by writing off debt/ death over the loan’s/one’s lifetime without at the same time losing the very risk and chance that makes life life. If life, according to “the logic of the The Rhythm of Life

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apotropaic,” seeks to escape its exposure to the chance of death, it is nothing but a “ruse” to “put in play . . . the very thing that one wishes to preserve; lose in advance what one wants to erect; suspend what one raises: aufheben” (56ai). Positing oneself (sich setzen) as a consciousness presupposes exposure to death, engagement, putting into play or wagering. . . . This putting (into play, into a wager) must, like any investment, be amortized and produce a profit; it works toward my recognition by the other, toward the positing of my living consciousness, freedom, mastery. Now because death is on the cards, in that I must actually run that risk, I might always lose the profit of the operation: if I die but also if I live. Life cannot last in the incessant imminence of death. So I lose every time [à tous les coups]. (Gl 158a) What the Hegelian rhythm of life sacrifices is its incalculable eventality— the very life of life, the life in life that survives itself—so that it might reappropriate absolute loss as absolute life, as life without death, which, on Derrida’s reading, amounts to death. Instead of this sublation and mastery of life’s rhythm and of the “perhaps” of the event—in the calculation of the bell tower, the clock, or big data—I want to suggest that we listen for the shattering peal of otoimmunity with which sovereignty has always already been sounding its own death knell.

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Excursus 2 L AW R E N C E A B U H A M D A N ’ S PHONETIC BORDER-CROSSINGS

Multimedia artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan has devoted a large part of his artistic and theoretical interventions—installations, documentaries, talks, essays—to investigating what might be called a biopolitics of listening. That is, his work sets out to excavate the various ways in which listening is instrumentalized in political decision-making over the relative livability of lives, including over the border between life or death. In this way, Abu Hamdan forcefully shows how listening comes to be implicated in the geopolitics of migration, in racialized violence, and other juridical strategies of exclusion and discrimination. Although Abu Hamdan is interested in how a variety of sounds is heard, his interventions demonstrate a marked preoccupation with the voice and speech. One of the biopolitical mechanisms that fascinates him is a kind of perversion of the voice whereby what is meant to be the support of political representation, self-expression, and agency is turned against the speaking subject. Giving the example of the warning issued to suspects at the moment of their arrest (known as Miranda rights in the United States), Abu Hamdan describes a certain travesty by which “anything you do say may be given in evidence” comes to be haunted by a secret supplement “including the way you say it.”1 This perversion of the speaking subject’s right to speak for themselves and to silence is generalizable beyond the arrest of citizens suspected of a crime to a multitude of other quasi-juridical situations, most notably the border where the voices of asylum applicants, migrants, and stateless people are subjected to this kind of listening.

FIGURE 2. Lawrence Abu Hamdan, The Freedom Of Speech Itself, 2012. Foam sculptures and a 30-minute audio documentary. Installation view: Kunsthal Extra City, Antwerp, 2012. © Lawrence Abu Hamdan, courtesy Maureen Paley, London.

This biopolitical listening, in determining livability on the basis of how one speaks, rests on making a division within the voice between its semantic and phonemic content, between the meaning of what is said and the pure, nonverbal sound of that saying—or, to put this in the more classically philosophical terms that dominate debates over the voice in recent European thought, between logos and phonē. Or it is at the same time a confusion of sound and sense insofar as biopolitical listening endows sound with meaning. It takes phonē as if it were logos—as if it were able to speak rationally for itself—and thereby allows speech to turn against itself in its pure sounding. What this demonstrates is that, far from being “pure” sound, the phonemic object of forensic analysis occupies a domain between the sound and signification—something like the pure intention to signify (vouloir-dire), no longer mere sound but not yet signification, that is at the root of Agamben’s critique of biopolitics. Intriguingly, though without mention of Agamben, Abu Hamdan describes this sphere of the voice as “paralinguistic,”2 as that which is not exactly outside or on the other side of language but rather coexists alongside it. Building on this, I want to think of this sonorous dimen92

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sion of the voice as a border or frontier of language—as language’s limit (approximately in the Kantian sense of Grenze). In his extensive work on the use of forensic speech analysis to determine asylum applications—in works such as the audio documentary and installation The Freedom Of Speech Itself (2012) and the voice-maps in the collaborative project Conflicted Phonemes (also 2012)—Abu Hamdan takes issue with this reduction on several counts. First, against the principle of habeas corpus, forensic audiology draws conclusions (in this case about ethnic and geographical origin) from the nonlinguistic “bodily excess of the voice . . . such as its pitch, accent, glottal stops, intonations, inflections, and impediments” but without the evidence that might be adduced from other aspects of the speaker’s bodily presence.3 Second, he disputes the validity of any approach claiming to be able to pin down the complex history of migratory lives and the equally multifarious ways by which accent is acquired and transformed within a specific place or community. In other words, the borders in the accent maps on which audiologists rely to adjudicate the speech of asylum seekers are inherently unstable, making their admission as evidence seriously flawed. The question, then, is: If going all the way back to Aristotle there has been an attempt to divide the voice between phonē and logos—or, as Abu Hamdan extrapolates, between “language and body, between subject and object, fiction and fact, truth and lie”4—in what sense is this biopolitical listening a distinctively modern practice or invention? In her article examining Abu Hamdan’s work on speech analysis, Emily Apter cites his claim that, with the mandating of audio recording rather than transcription of testimony in the Police and Criminal Evidence Act of 1984, “the law unintentionally catalyzed the birth of a radical form of listening that would over the next twenty-eight years transform the speaking subject in the process of law.”5 It is undoubtedly true that audio testimony represented a “new form of forensic evidence,” but whether it led to the invention of an entirely new form of listening is unclear. As soon as he has made this declaration, though, Abu Hamdan finds himself in the position of wanting to be the first to notice something unprecedented in listening practices and also the first to observe that this listening has a long history. To this extent he has something else in common with Derrida’s Agamben, besides a tendency to overstate the possibility of opposing semantic to phonemic much as Agamben imagines an originary division of zoē and bios (BS1 434/326). Abu Hamdan finds himself saying Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Phonetic Border-Crossings

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(to rephrase Derrida) that while there are incredible novelties in biopolitical listening, biopolitical listening itself is not new. Abu Hamdan, though, traces the origins of forensic audiology back not to time immemorial but, in a Foucauldian vein, to the more recent and modern practice of medical auscultation in which the doctor’s ability to listen directly to the sounds of  the body circumvented any reliance on the patient’s own testimony. I would add that this fantasy of gaining direct access to what lies beneath what is merely said has a much longer philosophical history and cannot be confined to a modern epoch, however defined. On the contrary, as some of Abu Hamdan’s other work amply demonstrates, the capacity for speech to dissimulate is a very old problem. Apter characterizes forensic speech analysis as a technological update to the shibboleth test administered in the Book of Judges whereby the leader of the Gileadites used the pronunciation of that word to distinguish his own men from enemy Ephraimites who pronounced the first syllable si instead of shi. This “unpronounceable name,” as Derrida puts it in his discussion of Paul Celan’s poem “Schibboleth,” was a matter of life and death: They said sibboleth, and, at the invisible border between shi and si, betrayed themselves to the sentinel at the risk of their life. They betrayed their difference by showing themselves indifferent to the diacritical difference between shi and si; they marked themselves with their inability to re-mark a mark thus coded. (Sch 45/22–23) Apter goes on: “Consisting of inflections, catchwords, expressions, or marks of dialect—differences, as Derrida puts it, that become ‘discriminative, decisive and divisive’ [Sch 50/26]—shibboleths function as aural biopolitical signatures.”6 With an exclusive focus on how “the phonemic difference . . . becomes discriminative, decisive, and divisive” (Sch 50/26), Apter does not, however, cite any of the discussion in Derrida’s essay about the use of such watchwords for the purposes of building and showing solidarity in political struggle. Derrida highlights the appearance of the phrase “no parasán” in Celan’s poem—a cipher for “la Pasionaria, the no to Franco, to the Phalange supported by Mussolini’s troops and Hitler’s Condor Legion” which then became a “rallying cry or sign, clamor and banners during the siege of Madrid, three years later, no parasán was a shibboleth for the Republican people, for their allies, for the International Brigades” (45/23). And later Derrida addresses the double-edged character of the shibboleth: 94

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Every poem has its own language; it is one time alone its own language, even and especially if several languages are able to cross there. From this point of view, which may become a watchtower, the vigilance of a sentinel, one sees well: the value of the shibboleth may always, and tragically, be inverted. Tragically because the inversion sometimes overtakes the initiative of subjects, the goodwill of men, their mastery of language and politics. Watchword or password in a struggle against oppression, exclusion, fascism, and racism, it may also corrupt its differential value, which is the condition of alliance and of the poem, making of it a discriminatory limit, the grillwork of policing, of normalization, and of methodical subjugation. (Sch 56/30) Here, then, Derrida speaks to the pervertibility of the shibboleth and, we might suggest, of community more generally, where the risk of membership and solidarity turning into division and exclusion is ever present. Similarly, Agamben argues that the shibboleth marks the point of indistinction between the exception, in which the one who is excluded from the community is still captive to its laws, and its inversion, the example, which shows belonging as such by stepping outside the class it exemplifies (HS 28/23). What Apter elides in her recourse to Derrida is the account of poetic singularity and iterability in the context of which his discussion of the shibboleth emerges, as the opening sentence of the passage just quoted illustrates. Even as she gestures rather briefly in her final paragraphs to the question of singularity and justice, one is left with the impression that any shibboleth is always a means of exclusion unless it were to be heard by the “responsive,” “sympathetic ear” of a “friend-translator-mediator.”7 Insofar as she equates this kind of listening with incalculable justice, in contrast with the law, Apter seems (for reasons about which one might usefully speculate) to overlook the point Derrida makes here, as throughout his life, that there can be no singularity that is not also repeatable, no incalculable without some calculation, and hence no unconditional justice that is not enacted in some conditioned, specific context and therefore not without risk of betrayal. A closer examination of these arguments will lead to a somewhat different understanding of shibboleth—one which is also revealed in Abu Hamdan’s broader project. Apter does not quote the immediate continuation of Derrida’s characterization of the shibboleth as “discriminative, decisive, and divisive,” but it turns out to be critical. Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Phonetic Border-Crossings

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The difference has no meaning in and of itself, but it becomes what one must know how to recognize and above all to mark if one is to make the step [pas], to step across the border of a place or the threshold of a poem, to see oneself granted the right of asylum or the legitimate habitation of a language. (Sch 50/26) The phonemic difference has no meaning itself but comes to acquire a determinate meaning. That is, it comes to function as opposition and contradiction insofar as there is a partial constriction of difference that gathers the multiplicity of difference into the dialectical division which may then be sublated (Hegel) or brought into a zone of indistinction (Agamben). The sense that Derrida gives to the shibboleth here—one in which it comes to be a nonsynonymous substitution for différance, dissemination, trace, and so forth— only begins to be comprehensible once it is situated within the context of the analysis of the date out of which it emerges. That is, Derrida’s idiomatic take on the shibboleth makes sense when one realizes that he is saying shibboleth and date in the same breath. The following rather challenging argument, completely elided in Apter’s reading, sets out the kind of paleonymy, so characteristic of Derrida’s reading practice, that is at work again here: Like the date, shibboleth is marked several times, several times in en une seule fois, in eins, at once [in English in the original]. A marked but also a marking multiplicity. On the one hand, indeed, within the poem it names, as is evident, the password or rallying cry, a right of access or sign of membership in all the political situations along the historical borders configured by the poem. This visa, it will be said, is the shibboleth; it determines a theme, a meaning, or a content. But on the other hand, as cryptic or numerical cipher, shibboleth also spells the anniversary date’s singular power of gathering together. This anniversary date gives access to the memory of the date, to the to-come of the date, to its proper to-come, but also to the poem—itself. Shibboleth is the shibboleth for the right to the poem that calls itself a shibboleth, its proper shibboleth at the very instant that it commemorates others. (Sch 49/25) In thinking the date with and through Celan’s poetry, Derrida notes that the external dating of the poem both marks the singularity of an unrepeatable occasion on which it was written and also thereby points toward the 96

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other dates to-come on which it will be read. Similarly, the dates in his poems refer both to singular, irreplaceable historical events and at the same time to the possibility of their repetition in anniversaries and commemoration and in the ability of a repeatable date to gather multiple historical events together under its sign and thereby to point to the date’s future repetition. In short, if the poem is marked by its singularity, it only becomes capable of crossing over to other times and places—only becomes readable, that is—by effacing and encrypting itself, “render[ing] itself unreadable in its very readability” (32/15). Similarly, the shibboleth becomes unproduceable in its very pronounceability. Only insofar as it becomes repeatable and hence able to gather together a speaking community is its phonemic difference singular. Derrida argues that this does not mean two things, one concerning the relation between poetic and historical events and the other that concerns us here: Nor does it mean, on the other hand, that to have the shibboleth at one’s disposal effaces the cipher, gives the key to the crypt, and ensures the transparency of meaning. The crypt remains, the shibboleth remains secret, the passage uncertain, and the poem unveils a secret only to confirm that there is something secret there, withdrawn, forever beyond the reach of hermeneutic exhaustion. A non-hermetic secret, it remains, and the date with it, heterogeneous to all interpretative totalization. Eradication of the hermeneutic principle. There is no one meaning, as soon as there is date and shibboleth, no longer a sole originary meaning. (Sch 50/26) The shibboleth, then, does not name a specific difference (“no meaning in and of itself”). Rather than herald the divisiveness and exclusion that Abu Hamdan and Apter associate with biopolitical listening, the shibboleth, in the transformed sense that Derrida is getting at here, aims at nothing other than the ruin of all hermeneutics. According to the claims in this passage, deconstruction would not authorize an “inexhaustible, infinite hermeneutics of signification” (P 213) or “an interpretative practice directed toward the infinite deconstruction of a text” (218–19), as Agamben contends. It likewise does not authorize an infinite listening that would, if sufficiently sympathetic or persistent, get to the truth of the speaker’s origin and migratory story in all its complexity. Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Phonetic Border-Crossings

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During the period in which Abu Hamdan was developing The Aural Contract archive, he risks placing too much faith in one of two forms of veracity. On the one hand, there is a veracity adduced by the tireless and rigorous exercise of the expert’s ear, as if justice were a matter of better trained listeners. Alternatively, even if it could not be heard, truth could nonetheless be articulated by the subject as agent and signatory witness of their own proper origin, marking its singular date and place.8 Appealing to a sufficiently “adept listener,” he argues that “for listeners who are not content with drawing a border around a single phonetic article, the accent should be understood as a biography of migration.” Through mimicry, contagion, and survival, accent is understood to be shaped by every other voice with which it comes into contact and not as “an immediately distinguishable sound that avows its unshakable roots neatly within the confines of a nationstate.” Without at the same time seeking biographically to “excavate the life of accent,” it is impossible for phonemic analysis to identify origin. Abu Hamdan’s evolving thought, though, more readily recognizes the inherent infidelity of the voice. This is especially evident in his work on the Druze practice of taqiyya by which dissimulation conceals religious belief in the face of persecution and even pronunciation of the word itself is used to reveal identity to listeners selectively. He describes what he calls “the freedom of speech itself” as a freedom not to say whatever one wants but to use speech to inhabit spaces between truth and lie, resistance and capitulation, subservience and subversion.9 This does not mean returning sound to the state of ungraspability that Abu Hamdan sees as predominant in sound studies and in contrast to its capacity to be forensically dissectible and replicable. Rather, the incalculable singularity of the phonē that Abu Hamdan and Apter want to respect, as well as the reductive calculation they bemoan, are both possible only because the sonorous is never pure sound but is from the outset always already passing over to other times and places. In this way, Abu Hamdan’s explorations and interventions into listening practices on the border tell us something about borders more generally as well as about sound’s transgressive, border-crossing capacity (which is perhaps what Brandon LaBelle is getting at when he speaks of sound’s promiscuous character).10 If the shibboleth is a border, it is neither the case that there is some beyond of pure unadulterated sound, which we would then have to give up knowing about and confine to the category of a fiction, nor that sound is knowable entirely on the basis of calculating reason, which 98

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would mean that there was no longer any border at all. Rather, the border is what is both already on this side and at the same time still on the other, which means that it is always to some extent redoubled against itself. In this way the border, rather that dividing on the basis of identity, undoes identity. At the border, there is no true identity that might be revealed. The secret is rather that all identity is always possibly fraudulent. So when philosophy repeatedly figures sound as the ciphered inaccessible beyond its knowledge, the rejoinder is that sound is not on the other side of philosophy’s borders but is the border itself. Both the reduction of sound and the declaration of its inaccessibility serve to indemnify against the inherently destabilizing effects of this phonē-as-border—of sound’s autoimmune tendency to dissipate in multiple directions, to shatter. It splinters between erecting more sturdy, impermeable borders (i.e., building walls) and reveling in open borders (i.e., celebrating the unbridled globalization of capital). One must confront the stakes of this irreducibility of the border. It is, I suspect, because of a certain hesitation about the politics of deconstruction that Apter refrains from endorsing Derrida’s argument in Schibboleth in full and instead stays firmly on the side of an unconditional, incalculable response-ability. Derrida’s point is that there is no absolute responsibility to the other that is not also an irresponsibility to other others and thus to the other in general—no justice without risk of violence, no truth without risk of dissimulation. This does not mean that decisions are never taken to distinguish between truth and lies, justice and violence, life and death. On the contrary, such decisions are being made on specific dates and in specific places in the name of a prescription of responsibility to the other but without that prescription being able to decide every decision in advance. This means that one is compelled to decide anew every time to whom one is responsible and to what extent. As her remarks elsewhere suggest, Apter finds this a politics difficult to swallow insofar as it seems to condemn justice to “the long wait.”11 Abu Hamdan, for his part, seems more ambivalent. Despite a strong interest in rights and legal frameworks, he also has an appetite for transforming speech and listening in ways that evade any law or rule set in advance and for the risk that entails. In his interventions, just listening is something for which we must time and again struggle in the name of the other who passes here.

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3 MOUTH(PIECE)

GROWL

The recent global upsurge of nationalist popu lisms and of xeno-racist and authoritarian turns within neoliberalism appears to pervert a notion that functions as a crucial support for appeals to popular sovereignty: the voice of the people. The conditioned and hence completely deconstructible perversion of the voice that we find in these developments, as in colonialism, should be distinguished from an irreducible, unconditional pervertibility that unsettles its political force from the outset. Understanding the relation between the two is essential for navigating the politics of voice as it is played out today around the world. The first, conditioned perversion typically shows up in ascriptions of barbarity or animality. Racialization and colonialization often include a certain bestialization of speech as the (bio)politics of the voice repeatedly re-draws the line between human and infrahuman life. Racism is an exacerbation of this strategy, which seeks to contain the inherent tendency of human speech to turn into a bestial cry by projecting this animality onto an externalized other. As such, in Étienne Balibar’s analysis, racism is a necessary and immanent supplement to nationalism’s inevitably incomplete project. Nationalism can only aporetically secure the unity of the nation, and with it the voice of the people, by projecting its own incoherence onto a bestialized other whose exclusion is the sole guarantor of totality and integrity.1 This projected bestiality is a matter of a less-than-human sound. In “Grondement Commun,” Nancy notes that “all forms of completeness or

of saturation engender inequalities—inhumanities, insensibilities, insanities” (GC 113/viii)—to which one might add asinanities. Locating revolt in this gap in totalization as a protest against its foreclosure of sense, Nancy concludes by lending this voice an animal character: Revolt does not discourse, it growls [gronde]. What does “growl” mean? It’s almost an onomatopoeia. It means to grunt, bellow, and roar. It means to yell together, to murmur, mumble, grouse, become indignant, protest, become enraged together. One tends to grumble alone, but people growl in common. The common growl is a subterranean torrent: It passes underneath, making every thing tremble. (ix) This suppressed force of the animal voice is the condition of possibility of popu lar sovereignty and its impossibility. When Aristotle imagines that he can make a clean distinction between the logos of the rational, articulate citizen and the mere noisy phonē, Rancière in La mésentente (literally meaning misunderstanding or mishearing) wonders if he might have forgotten Plato’s characterization of the people as a “large and powerful animal.”2 Book VI of the Republic actually takes pleasure in showing us the large and powerful animal responding to words that soothe it with a roar of cheers and to those that annoy it with a disapproving racket. The “science” of those animal tamers in charge of it who show themselves within the walls of its pen consists entirely in knowing what vocal effects make the great animal growl and those that make it nice and gentle. According to Rancière’s theory of the partage (partition, distribution) of the sensible, the metaphor of the animal “serves to rigorously reject as animals those speaking beings with no position who introduce trouble into the logos and into its political realization as analogia of the parts of the community.” Against this unequal distribution legitimated by the police (in the specific sense that Rancière gives to this term), “democracy is the regime— the way of life—in which the voice, which not only expresses but also procures the illusory feelings of pleasure and pain, usurps the privileges of the logos.” As such, democracy exposes the opposition between logical and phonic animals as contingent. To this extent, Rancière’s analysis shares a certain affinity with the deconstruction of sovereignty and of the voice at work in Derrida and Agamben, who in different ways grapple with metaphysics’s efforts to constrain Mouth(piece) 101

the shattering force of the voice into a contradiction. The Platonic association of democracy with an animal cry is also an impor tant reference for Geoffrey Bennington’s ongoing project on the autodeconstruction of the political.3 The affinities with deconstruction become more conspicuous in Rancière’s reflections on literature where he aligns writing with this democratic impulse to introduce disorder into the logos.4 Writing’s political potential lies in noisily disrupting the logic that determines the unequal partage of audibility. It “undoes any ordered principle that might allow for the incarnation of the community of the logos,” thereby introducing a “radical dissonance” into the “communal symphony” that, for Plato, harmonizes ways of saying with ways of acting and being.5 Even as Rancière appears to grant the “fundamental disorder” of writing an originary status, there is a significant disagreement between him and Derrida. Both situate writing within the order of speech rather than as an exteriority and agree that any division between the two is not originarily given, but Derrida’s enlarged sense of writing names an irreducible contamination of speech and writing. Writing—in Rancière’s hands already littérarité—is, for Derrida, not a belated intervention that disrupts an existing regime of living speech but a condition of impossibility that unsettles its possibility from the outset. By contrast, Rancière finds a “positive contradiction” and an agonistic “war of writings” in the history of literature.6 For Rancière’s taste, Derrida is too quick to “ontologize a principle of the aporia.”7 For Derrida’s no doubt, it would be Rancière who is too quick to dismiss it in favor of the logocentric phantasm. Rancière maintains that “the simple opposition between logical animals and phonic animals is in no way the given on which politics is then based [but] is, on the contrary, one of the stakes of the very dispute that institutes politics.”8 Politics becomes a matter of redistributing (in)audibility: “Those who do not count make themselves count and . . . blur the assigned distribution of speech and silence that constitutes the community as ‘living creature’ or organic whole.”9 Imagining the problem to be a deficit or deprivation of logos, Rancière reasons that it is enough for the subaltern to demonstrate their capacity to speak rationally. In this way politics reveals the contingency of a specific distribution of speech and its irrational other without exposing the contingency of oppositionality as such. It merely reapportions while leaving the possibility of division intact.

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The demand for recognition and inclusion presupposes that this disenfranchisement consists simply in excluding the inarticulate cry of the indigene, in silencing or turning a deaf ear to the voice of the subaltern, when in fact, in censuring it as noisy brouhaha, it aims to reincorporate this irrationality as an interiorized foreignness to contain its disruptive force, thus turning it into another form of silence. In his study of language’s imbrication in French colonialism, Laurent Dubreuil observes a number of overlapping strategies: the colonized were not only denied the faculty of language but, moreover, elements of indigenous speech—Maghrebi-Arabic loanwords or phonemes, nonconforming usages of French—were incorporated into the language of the metropole as exotic savageries and barbarisms. This position of being “one and the other,” “speaker and outsider,” is part of colonialism without being unique to it, Dubreuil argues.10 On the contrary, “so-called Western thought was never confined to an exclusively rational logic,” with the result that the cry or the scream, as much as they are “powerful signs of refusal,”11 in themselves do not disrupt logocentrism: “Its supposed irrationality is not productive in and of itself.”12 This is because the voice, far from being sovereign, is always already in deconstruction. The irrational cry posited outside the logos does not precede the deconstruction of the voice but is its effect. As Derrida sets out in La voix et le phénomène, there is no pure voice that is subsequently compromised by its other—which in that context means compromised by writing, by the repeatability of its transcription. Even though Derrida’s earlier writings tend to focus on the subordinated term in a series of metaphysical binaries, deconstruction is not a matter of inverting such oppositions—of preferring writing over the voice, for instance—but of destabilizing oppositionality through the irreducible movement of substitutability. The thought of a life no longer captured by logocentric metaphysics entails less a departure from or a destruction of the sounding voice, as a common mishearing of Derrida would have it, than it does a paleonymy of voice and of breath. If the grammatological project involves a generalization of writing beyond its narrow or vulgar concept, this notion of archi- écriture is inextricably caught up with the sounding voice. Those who do not read me reproach me at times for playing writing against the voice, as if to reduce it to silence. In truth, I proposed a Mouth(piece) 103

reelaboration and a generalization of the concept of writing, of text or of trace. Orality is also the inscription [frayage] of a trace.13 If the voice is part of a generalized writing, it is because, far from being an index of pure presence, it is always already turning into what it is not and hence becoming writing, différance, iterability. This is the paradox of the movement of différance: In what Derrida will later in his life call autoimmunity, it necessarily limits itself in order to survive. As Derrida explains it in La voix et le phénomène, insofar as presence desires to become absolute, it compromises itself. To think presence as the universal form of transcendental life is to open me to the knowledge that in my absence, beyond my empirical existence, prior to my birth and after my death, the present is. . . . It is therefore the relation to my death (to my disappearance in general) that is hidden in this determination of being as presence, ideality, as absolute possibility of repetition. (VP 60/46) Generalizing Edgar Allan Poe, Derrida argues that “the statement ‘I am living’ is thus no guarantor of presence or authenticity because it is accompanied by the possibility that I be dead” (VP 108/83). Living speech, phonē, and breath, Derrida declares, are “the ultimate form of ideality, the one in which in the last analysis we can anticipate or recall all repetition, the ideality of ideality is the living pre sent, the selfpresence of transcendental life” (VP 4–5/5–6). Is it not in language, is language itself not first of all the very thing in which life and ideality could seem to be united? Now, we must consider on the one hand that the element of signification—or the substance of expression—which seems best to preserve at once ideality and living presence in all of its forms is living speech, the spirituality of breath as phonē. On the other hand, we must consider that phenomenology, the metaphysics of presence in the form of ideality, is also a philosophy of life. (VP 9/9) This has led Derrida scholarship to suspect the voice and the breath and thus toward a certain wariness about sound and a predilection for silence, ellipsis, and blank spaces. And yet, following the sentiment in Derrida’s discussion with Cixous quoted above, I want in this chapter to explore how the 104

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voice is not silenced by writing but is made to sound through a metaphoricity and prostheticity that traverses it from the outset. The trace names, under the category of a generalized writing, the irreducible mixture of sound and writing, the impossibility of purifying one or the other. My argument is that this “ultra-transcendental concept of life,” which “perhaps calls for another name” (survie, la vie la mort, autoimmunity, even shatter), does not only mean that speech is always doubled by the dead letter. Rather, insofar as “it is its own division and its own opposition to its other,” it is always already turning into other others, including animality and even what David Wills dubs “inanimation” to describe various nonorganic and often technological forms of life-death.14 The irrational, animallike cry is not outside or before rational human being, or something to be overcome. On the contrary, the logos can only survive if it to some extent turns into the irrational scream, the animal yelp, the rustle of the wind in the trees, or choked silence. An absolute voice of unlimited force, eternally present, audible across time and space without dissipating, would either be the voice of God or a silent voice—which amounts to the same thing. And it is a reflection of this originary ruin of the voice that God is often said to speak in monosyllabic, quasi-animal interjections. Voice’s differential force means that it partially splinters into a bestial cry, on the one hand, and silence, on the other. Metaphysics, though, seeks to protect the voice from what it is not—from its descent into cry or silence, and thus stabilizes the self-differentiation of the voice into an opposition between pure logos and the nonsignifying phonē, positing pure sound or silence as an absolute exteriority—as the unsayable outside speech. This “outside,” though, does not pose a threat because it is already accounted for by the logos. In fact, this exclusion is what shores it up. Colonialism—to this extent an expression of metaphysical logocentrism—ejects the voice of the subaltern as cry or silence precisely so that, in its purified, exteriorized form, this voice might be more digestible by the hegemonic tongue. But this immunizing introjection is haunted irreducibly by the autoimmune, selfdifferentiating force of the voice that I call shatter. Projecting the bestial or inanimate inclination of human speech outside concedes a certain measure of refusal so as to stave off the more radical threat of the voice as selfdifferentiating force. Speaking up becomes a problem for the oppressor not simply by being audible but, moreover, by being taken up and relayed through the voices of other others. Mouth(piece) 105

E N C YS T E D I D I O M

Dubreuil uses a striking word to describe the condition of foreign idioms taken into and “acclimatized” in French: “encysted [enkystés].”15 Even without explicit citation, the word conjures up Derrida’s preoccupation with the concepts of the cyst or the crypt, together with the associated opposition between introjection and incorporation, which he adapts from the work of psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. First elaborated in “Fors,” the foreword he wrote to their Cryptonymie: Le verbier de L’Homme aux loups, the idea of the crypt is then encysted as it were in a variety of later texts, including “Cartouches,” “Circonfession,” Schibboleth, Spectres de Marx, Donner le temps 1, and Glas. The crypt or pocket of the cyst is a place for enclosing the other within the interior, for keeping the other safe but also hidden and unassimilated. The topology of the crypt complicates the opposition between interior and exterior. Derrida plays upon multiple associations of for intérieur, understood not simply as an inner forum or conscience but also as an inner safe and hence in the double-edged meaning of sauf as unharmed, safe and sound, but also save, except for (hors, hormis), that which is excluded, outside, or an opening onto the outside (Latin foris). The surfaces of the crypt “do not simply separate an inner forum from an outer forum. The inner forum is (a) safe, an outcast outside inside the inside” (F 13/xiv). Holding something squirreled away, the crypt is itself a secret that must be concealed from the self. Now playing on the double sense of secreted, depending on where one places the emphasis—secreted or secreted—Derrida develops an entire metaphorics of eating, digestion, and bodily secretion or excretion to explain the paradoxical topology of the cyst. Unlike introjection, which for Abraham and Torok consists in a complete assimilation of the lost object into the self and is said to constitute healthy mourning, the fantasy of what they call incorporation “involves eating the object (through the mouth or other wise) in order not to introject it, in order to vomit it, in a way, into the inside, into the pocket of a cyst” (56/xxxviii). It is thrown up so as to keep the voice of the other set apart (secernere). Derrida questions whether this distinction can be upheld, wondering whether incorporation, instead of being pathological, were in fact to describe the impossibility for any interiorization to completely absorb the other. As Werner Hamacher observes in his famed study of the motifs of incorporation and eating in 106

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Hegel, the other—“the vomit of the system,” as Glas has it (Gl 183a)—is spat out precisely in order to make it more digestible.16 “Exotic language,” suggests Dubreuil, “attempts to sublimate the unheard-of (the language of the other) in the recreation of a savage French.”17 And yet Hamacher hypothesizes that there is always an excess of nauseous disgust over ingestion that arises from a certain dispersal (shattering) of the oral function into various orifices and channels of excretion. If the encysted tongue thus marks the ruin from the outset of any internalization or idealization, it is because the mouth is not exclusively the locus of speech but also of what Derrida and Nancy will, after Bataille, describe as buccality: that is, the mouth as the site of howling, biting, crying, sucking, devouring, kissing, slurping, gagging, chewing, blowing, gnashing, spitting, tearing, sobbing, whistling, licking, stammering, spluttering, humming—a multiplicity of oral secretions in which Glas revels (cf. also T 85/70). As Derrida explains in response to Nancy, it is not a matter of blurring the boundary between, say, human and animal, by showing how the possibilities supposedly proper to the human are in fact shared, for metaphysics is already the experience of their entering, at their limits, into a zone of indistinction.18 Derrida calls into question the oppositional limit not, as Agamben does, to take hold of the threshold and to discover there the pure opening of (im)possibility but instead to multiply differences “in order to introduce a greater differentiation” and thereby to refuse any hypostatization of possibility. Shatter it, then.19 It will turn out that the barbaric or animal quality of the encysted idiom is less the bestial cry than the movement by which each of these oral and buccal modalities stands in for and takes the place of another. The object of the prepositional except for will thus transpire to be the for itself. And this for, I shall suggest, is that other force of the voice that must be put into play if we are to fight the political silencing and censuring of the voice of the other. But this is to get ahead of ourselves, to rush to swallow all the pages that follow in one fell swoop. To tease out this vocal power, this chapter examines various ways in which the voice is compromised at its origin, thus complicating the relation between voice and life. To sound biopolitics in the sense that I elaborated in Chapter 1 is not simply a question of making inaudible voices heard. It means shaking up the link between the voice and the oppositional limit between life and death that thereby contains the full unpredictable force of life. To this end, I shall track a number of themes Mouth(piece) 107

associated with the voice that challenge its supposed sovereignty and which all, in different ways, incline toward a sonorousness subtracted from—except for, save as—signifying. They brush up against the “anasemic translation” of Abraham and Torok’s cryptonymy, which Derrida elsewhere states “must twist its tongue to speak the nonlinguistic conditions of language” (Psy1 146/139). The idea of the cyst or the crypt points to various interwoven threads of deconstruction via which the voice is ordinarily frayed: speech compromised by myriad buccal acrobatics, the logos cut up by animal interjections, infection of the organ by an originary prostheticity, the voice diverted through the telephone, the breath thus haunted by inanimate machinations. As each thread unravels, it is a matter of life and death, of unpicking the unity of ideality and the living present. At stake is the voice of biopolitics— the one that, according to the analysis in La voix et le phénomène, safeguards living speech from the dead letter but only by cutting it off from the very chance, including that of death, that would make it truly à vif. As Derrida says of the crypt, it keeps it alive “as dead,” “intact in any way save of living” (F 25/xxi). Buccality, animality, technicity, prostheticity—each points toward this more alive life and does so by (in)animating the voice. Over the coming pages I follow each of these lines, these crossed wires, of deconstruction, pulling out one thread at a time. It will be a bit like walking a tightrope, trying not to take one side or the other (life or death) but instead to take the risk that I might fall from the high wire into the net of other gossamer strands and end up cocooned in this gauzy shroud. I refer here already, semisecretly, to the dialogue between Derrida and Cixous that will be the destination of this chapter (if I make there it alive!): their argument about who is on the side of life and who on that of death, her mixing telephony and funambulism, his reference to the silkworm in response to her veils. In their conversations there is a condensation of the themes of a buccal or asignifying vocality, animality, telephony, and life—and with it another way to think the power of the voice. But before going down these paths, I start from the place of the (living) dead and specifically along a thread that connects the crypt to digestion, the consumption of the animal, and even to cannibalism. What links them is not simply the possibility of absorbing the other into the depths of the body but also a certain carving off of the other within the interior. “The interior is partitioned off from the interior” (F 21/xix). The other is cut off—bitten off. 108

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Derrida’s repeated association of the crypt with this cut-bite shows the line between life and death to be caught up not only with the system of the mouth but more specifically with a phonemic carving up, a partitioning of language into bite-size sonorous fragments—the voice cut up, then, and cut off. The cut, especially in the guise of circumcision, is a recurrent theme in Derrida’s thought. At one point in “Circumfession”—a text whose title intercuts the words circumcision and confession—referring somewhat cryptically to the acronym Pardes used by medieval kabbalists to describe the four stages of biblical exegesis, Derrida glosses the second with the words “crypt, allegory, secret, diverted word” (Cir 107/110). He then goes on to weave together this secrecy with animality, telephony, noise, and the cut word, here characterizing the partitioned crypt as a honeycomb:20 I’ve got the PaRDeS of this partition “in my blood” . . . it was like a beehive sponge of secrets, the buzzing rumor, the mixed-up noises of each bee, and yet the cells near to bursting, infinite number of walls, internal telephone. (Cir 106–7/111) The multiplication of metaphors mimes the hypermetaphorization at stake in the incorporation of the sensible object. As Derrida describes the fragmentation of the crypt in “Fors,” this partitioning cannot be reduced to a single cut between introjection and incorporation, or between speech and buccality. Unlike the oppositional logic of metaphysics, the crypt “fractures the symbol into angular pieces, arranges internal (intrasymbolic) partitions, cavities, corridors, niches, zigzag labyrinths, and craggy fortifications. Always ‘anfractuosities,’ since they are the effects of breakages: Such are the ‘partitions of the crypt’ ” (F 22–23/xx). And these cuts that chop language up into the “anglish words [mots anglés]” of the subtitle are sonorous: “an internal labyrinth endlessly echoing . . . and yet somewhere inside all that noise, a deathly silence, a blackout” (67/xlv). This multiplication of cuts connects the ruin of the voice with the strikes and blows described in Chapter 1 as the singular force of a more alive life so as to think a shattering of voice. Echoing Abraham and Torok’s symbole éclaté, Derrida nods in this direction just as he is about to break off his foreword on the edge of language: “And then I can feel, on the tip of my tongue [langue], the angular cut [l’angle coupant] of a shattered word [mot brisé]” (73/xlviii). Mouth(piece) 109

ANIMAL SUBSTITUTE

If the spoken word shatters in various directions, the voice multiply shipwrecked, its running aground in and against its own animality has gained more attention in political philosophy, showing itself most prominently in biopolitical and (post)colonial discourses. This inclination toward a pre- or infralinguistic animality is also caught up in a related, though not coextensive, tension in the mouth’s threshold character between opening onto the outside and entry way to the inside. The first (fraying) thread to pursue is one that extends outside and deep into the alimentary canal and that connects the two functions of the mouth as the site of speaking and of eating. Derrida brings out in “Fors” how the emissions of the voice and the devouring of the other are not opposed processes—one going outward, the other inward—but that speech and ingestion share a similar relation to life. That is, both bury alive, keep alive as dead. The entire passage, during the course of which Derrida describes vomiting the object into the pocket of a cyst, must be read closely in order to understand why the ideality associated with living speech has its origins and limits in its specifically “oral moment” (F 55/xxxvii). In other words, both the idealization of the voice and its deconstruction follow from the rather more bodily, physiological aspect of the mouth—“a buccal orifice” (56/xxxviii). As Derrida observes, tracking Abraham and Torok’s account, “the mouth’s empty cavity begins as a place for shouts, sobs, as ‘deferred filling,’ it becomes a place for calling the mother, then, gradually, according to the progress of introjection or auto-affection, it tends toward ‘phonic self-filling, through the linguo-palato-glossal exploration of its own void’ ” (55/xxxvii). The mouth, once it releases from the mother’s breast, becomes an empty space to be filled by progressively more verbal sounds from cries and shouts to calls to the absent object they seek to replace, and finally to the sovereign inner monologue of hearing-oneself speak. A similar retelling of the Freudian narrative comes in the final pages of Nancy’s “Unum quid,” in which he makes a distinction between the mouth (“os, oris, oral”) as “the passageway for all kinds of substances, first of all the aerial substance of discourse” and the “more primitive” bucca which is “the puffed cheeks, the movement, the contraction/distention of breathing, eating, spitting, or speaking” (ES 162/111). For Nancy, the mouth as it detaches from the breast, now slightly ajar to begin to allow the sound of a cry to escape, is the opening 110

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of Ego which spaces itself out as exteriority without externalizing any preexistent interiority and therefore before any signification or any sovereignty of the voice. Speaking is an attempt to fill this gap, this gaping mouth. “To learn to fill the mouth’s void with words is actually a first paradigm of introjection,” argue Abraham and Torok, but Derrida stresses the point that this substitution is only ever partial (F 55/xxxvii).21 The idealization of voice and of introjection is always already in jeopardy precisely because the mouth was first buccal and not immediately oral. On the borderline between the outside and the inside, itself a system of edges, the buccal orifice plays this paradigmatic role in introjection only to the extent that it is first a silent spot in the body, never totally ceases to be silent, and only “speaks” through supplementarity. (F 56/xxxviii) This is why introjection is always in the process of turning, in a “catastrophic reversal,” into its aberration, which is to say into incorporation with its pathological mourning and failure to fully absorb the lost object. This is no simple return to a prelinguistic state, as if the (animal) cry straightforwardly came before articulate, meaningful speech. The relation between orality and buccality is complicated in Derrida’s analysis not least by a deconstruction of metaphoricity. Quoting from Abraham and Torok, he highlights how introjection is thought according to an oral metaphor of ingestion: Thus the absorption of food in a literal sense becomes introjection in a figurative sense. To pass from one to the other is to succeed in transforming the presence of the object into an autoapprehension of its absence. The language which is substituted in that absence, as a figure of presence, can only be comprehended within a “community of empty mouths.”22 This move from the literal to the figurative is the passage of metaphor which consists in a withdrawal of the sensible. But Derrida observes that, with incorporation, there is not simply a retreat of the sensible object but, moreover, a withdrawal—or, more strongly, an interdiction—of metaphor itself. That fantasy [of incorporation] transforms the oral metaphor presiding over introjection into a reality; it refuses to accept (or finds itself prohibiting), along with introjection, the metaphor of the substitutive Mouth(piece) 111

supplement, and actually introduces an object into the body. But the fantasy involves eating the object (through the mouth or other wise) in order not to introject it, in order to vomit it, in a way, into the inside, into the pocket of a cyst. The metaphor is taken literally in order to refuse its introjective effectiveness—an effectiveness that is always, I would be tempted to add, a form of idealization. (F 56/xxxviii) Incorporation stubbornly denies any figurative withdrawal of the object. This is the purpose of the cyst: not simply to keep a secret, but to keep the secret of the secret, to hide its hiding, or, in an archaic verbal form, to secret the secret itself away. As “Le retrait de la métaphore” poses it, the withdrawal of metaphor “into its crypt” (Psy1 81/66), understood as a double genitive, is both the withdrawal (of the sensible) that takes place in metaphorical transfer and the withdrawal of that withdrawal. In this way, incorporation involves a destruction of metaphor by other metaphors. It is a “demetaphorization” (which is to say that it exposes the impossibility of absolute metaphor) through “hypermetaphorization” (that is, through the multiplication of metaphors). If incorporation attempts to take the oral introjective metaphor literally, it thereby points to a limit of metaphorization. It shows metaphor to be mere metaphor that cannot name the thing itself, shows that it cannot fully take in the other, which is why speech is only ever a partial substitution for the object. If “no longer able to articulate certain forbidden words, the mouth takes in—as a fantasy, that is—the unnamable thing,” it is “only because the forbidden moment of the oral function had first been a ‘substitute’ for or a ‘figure’ of a wordless presence” (F 56–57/xxxviii). Only because speaking already partakes of metaphoric substitution is the crypt not something outside but is in fact made of language—what Derrida calls a “linguisticistic effect.” If some sort of metaphorization had not preceded it (in the body), the process of demetaphorization (which is also a hypermetaphorization) could not have pretended to ingest the unnamable thing—another way of getting rid of it. (F 57/xxxviii) Far from being outside or before language, any buccal, animal tendency is always marked by the substitutability and metaphoricity associated with a generalized notion of writing. The point is that both introjection and incorporation are symptomatic of this metaphoricity, which, in its desire to 112

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expand infinitely, destroys itself by turning against itself. This turning against is itself a trope and hence not other than metaphor. Rather, it is metaphor’s own autoimmune tendency—the fact that any trope is always on the way to becoming a cata-strophe. And yet Derrida invites us to consider demetaphorization as the possibility of expressly thinking the movement of substitution and metaphoricity as such. In the 1964–65 seminar he offers one of the earliest definitions of différance as the “vigilance” of “destroying metaphor while knowing what it’s doing” (HQ 279/190). What Derrida means by animality appears to be this de/hypermetaphorization that exposes metaphoricity as such. The essay on Edmond Jabès in L’écriture et la différence introduces the notion of an “animality of the letter” in a passage describing Jabès’s attention to how writing spaces itself out, thus exposing itself to the risk of death, which “strolls between the letters” (ED 108/71). This perilousness, though, turns out to be a more alive life than the one of living speech: “Absence, finally, as the breath of the letter, for the letter lives. . . . There is, thus, an animality of the letter” (108/72). The references to breath and animality do not so much appeal to an originary or immediate presence of metaphysics as yet untouched by language or death. Rather, in an example of Derridean paleonymy, they name an excess or “overpowerfulness” of life that renders the opposition between life and death undecidable. Much like the oral metaphor, that of the animal appears as just one among many others. But, above all, it is metaphor itself, the origin of language as metaphor in which Being and Nothing, the conditions of metaphor, the beyondmetaphor of metaphor, never say themselves. Metaphor, or the animality of the letter, is the primary and infinite equivocality of the signifier as Life. (ED 109/72–73) Later in “Ellipse,” the constellation of animality, life, and metaphor is framed in terms much closer to the introjective metaphor of filling the empty mouth with words. Here Derrida is speaking about the center as a hole—“an unnamable bottomless pit” (ED 433/297; trans. mod.)—that the book attempts to fill. The volume, the scroll of parchment, was to have insinuated itself into the dangerous hole, was to have furtively penetrated into the menacing Mouth(piece) 113

dwelling place with an animal-like, quick, silent, slick, shiny, slithering motion, in the fashion of a serpent or a fish. (ED 433/297–98; trans. mod.) Language is imagined to slip into the hole with the kind of animal stealth described at the beginning of La bête et le souverain where speech creeps up from behind “without making a noise . . . without warning . . . discreetly, silently, invisibly, almost inaudibly and imperceptibly, as though to surprise a prey” (BS1 21/2). The animal here is more reptilian than the lupine furtiveness of the final seminar, and yet every thing that will have been said there about bestiality’s irreducibly compromising sovereignty might already be inferred in this passage. This characterization of speech or the word as a quick, furtive, and almost inaudible movement—more retreat (into a hole or crypt) than the hunter’s pursuit of the final seminar—bears comparison with strikingly similar accounts by Agamben and Nancy. Each associates language’s condition of (im)possibility—or what Derrida is calling metaphoricity itself— with a quick, furtive animal movement and with a sonorousness at the margins of language. In the epilogue to Il linguaggio et la morte, having earlier taken issue with the Derridean notion of the trace as self-withdrawal (LM 53–54/39), Agamben speaks of this retreat as the almost inaudible sound of the animal escaping the march of anthropogenesis. When we walk through the woods at night, with every step we hear the rustle of invisible animals among the bushes flanking our path. Perhaps they are lizards or hedgehogs, thrushes or snakes. So it is when we think: the path of words that we follow is of no importance. What matters is the indistinct patter that we sometimes hear moving to the side, the sound of an animal in flight or something that is suddenly aroused by the sound of our steps. The animal in flight that we seem to hear rustling away in our words is—we are told—our own voice. (LM 138/107). We are only ever hunting down the retreating animal voice. This is not a silent withdrawal but a flight that becomes barely audible as it brushes against the undergrowth. We walk through the woods: suddenly we hear the flapping of wings or the wind in the grass. A pheasant lifts off and then disappears instantly among the trees, a porcupine buries in the thick underbrush, the dry leaves crackle as a snake slithers away. Not the encounter, but this flight 114

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of invisible animals is thought. Not, it was not our voice. We came as close as possible to language, we almost brushed against it, held it in suspense: but we never reached our encounter and now we turn back, untroubled, toward home. (LM 139/108) Nancy has this exact passage in mind in À l’écoute just before he launches into an interlude on mute music when he refers, now extending the sound of retreat beyond animal life, to the modulation of a voice in which the singular of a cry, a call, or a song vibrates by retreating from it (a “voice”: we have to understand what sounds from a human throat without being language, which emerges from an animal gullet or from any kind of instrument, even from the wind in the branches: the rustling toward which we strain or lend an ear). (E 45/22 and 75n44)23 To specify more precisely the gaps that separate Derrida, Nancy, and Agamben on these issues, consider Agamben’s unmistakably Heideggerian imagery of the footpath, the footsteps, the entire scene of a country path with a menagerie of escaping woodland animals. In Geschlecht III, now interwoven with the theme of the blow (coup), this striking out of a path (Weg einschlagen) is understood not only as nationalist homecoming but also as effraction and via rupta (G3 151–53)—a term that Derrida uses since the earliest writings to describe the violent breach of archi-écriture inscribing itself in savage nature, specifically the forest (silva). Agamben’s epilogue also anticipates Derrida’s preoccupation with the figure of the path and specifically the “step backward” (Schritt zurück) in the second year of La bête et le souverain. The footsteps, meanwhile, evoke the play on à pas de loup in the opening session of the seminar’s first year, where it is again a matter of salvaging (from) savagery (French sauvage deriving the variant salvaticus from Latin silva), of keeping safe from and save for the animal. Here the wolf’s steps are explicitly heard as a clandestine negation: In the silent operation of the pas, the word pas which implies, but without any noise, the savage intrusion of the adverb of negation (pas, pas de loup, il n’y a pas de loup [there is no wolf], il n’y a pas le loup [“the wolf is not here,” perhaps even “there is no such thing as the wolf”])—the clandestine intrusion, then, of the adverb of negation (pas) in the noun, in le pas de loup. An adverb haunts a noun. The adverb pas has slipped in silently, stealthy as a wolf, à pas de loup, into the noun pas [step]. (BS1 24/5) Mouth(piece) 115

This clandestinity of negation is what troubles Agamben. It is precisely against the slitheriness of Derridean undecidability that he wants to assert his own seizing hold of language’s condition of (im)possibility and of the possibility of an event of language. For Agamben, the human voice or logos consists first in removing and thereby superseding the mere sound (phonē) of the animal cry and second, following the Derridean logic of the withdrawal of the withdrawal, the forgetting of this very removal. The taking place of language between the removal of the voice and the event of meaning is the other Voice . . . that, in the metaphysical tradition, constitutes the originary articulation (the arthon) of human language. But inasmuch as this Voice (which we now capitalize to distinguish it from the voice as mere sound) enjoys the status of a no-longer (voice) and of a notyet (meaning), it necessarily constitutes a negative dimension. It is ground, but in the sense that it goes to the ground and disappears in order for being and language to take place. (LM 48–49/35) This latter withdrawal Agamben labels with the capitalized Voice to distinguish it from the animal voice, which itself is marked with negativity insofar as, in Hegel, the animal finds a voice only in its own violent death (LM 58/45). Voice, then, is doubly, if not triply, negative: dead, silenced, both forgotten. To the extent that he believes the Derridean trace to have this structure of double negation, Agamben condemns grammatology for remaining within the horizon of metaphysics. On careful consideration, though, Agamben’s conclusion would not be as fatal to the Derridean project as he might wish, for it rests on a misunderstanding as to the nature of the pas. As Derrida is at pains to point out in his essay on Blanchot’s Le pas au-delà, the kind of negation at work in the double-stepped gait of the pas is dispersive rather than oppositional. It always produces another pas within itself and as such is, in a reworking of Blanchot’s “X sans X” structure, a double pas without negation of negation and without denegation (Par 52/40). It explicitly excludes the dialectical determination of difference as contradiction, which, for Derrida, is merely a first step toward its sublation via the negation of negation (although one might note that this exclusion reproduces the very logic of the beyond that it wants to avoid). Rather, negation is always already in dissemination. This is why the phonē is not that which that lies before, outside, or beyond signi-

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fication, or an animality that is somehow beneath or other than the human, but is language’s self-shattering. The discussion of the pas de loup explicitly links this more differential model of negation to the substitutability that is at stake in metaphoricity and which in “Fors” disrupts from the logic of exclusion in the save, except for. This is what will repeatedly be in question as I continue to examine the role of the mouth in both its digestive and telephonic dimensions. In the first session of La bête et le souverain Derrida explains that there is no wolf (il n’y a pas de loup) or that there is perhaps even no such thing as a wolf (il n’y a pas le loup), because the wolf is only ever a projection, a phantasm, a fable. It is absent because it is never a real flesh-and-blood animal but always a trope, a figure, a metonymic substitution for the beast that is “ungraspable in person other than according to the words of a fable” (BS1 25/6). Derrida’s argument intersects with that in “Fors.” Like the lost object of psychoanalytic fantasy, the beast is made up of and by language. For this reason, though, like the fantasy of incorporation, it remains all the more “looming” in its absence: The wolf is all the stronger, the meaning of its power is all the more terrorizing, armed, threatening, virtually predatory for the fact that in these appellations, these turns of phrase, these sayings, the wolf does not yet appear in person but only in the theatrical persona of a mask, a simulacrum or a piece of language, i.e. a fable or a fantasy. The strength of the wolf is all the stronger, sovereign even, is all the more all-conquering [a raison de tout] for the fact that the wolf is not there were it not for a pas de loup, except for a pas de loup, save a pas de loup, only a pas de loup. (BS1 25/6) Many of Derrida’s reflections on the mouth as the dual site of speaking and eating and also about the telephone as an animating force will revolve around dispelling the phantasm of this except for and replacing it with the substitutability of the for. Another way to frame this is to note that sound enters the picture whenever the limits of deconstruction are in play, in the tension between the movement of différance and the undeconstructible, between iterability and singularity, and thus between a generalized resonance as the condition of possibility of all sense and sound as an irreplaceable, one-off event. In short, as I argue throughout this book, the metaphor of Mouth(piece) 117

sound tends to show up when philosophy grapples with the problem of the transcendental. Nowhere is this tension more acutely felt than in the voice and in the drive to purify it of its animal valence. The logocentrism that determines man’s political being by excluding the animal cry (phonē) from rational speech (logos) supplements a phonocentric exclusion of writing as derivative and thus relegated to the status of a phonetic dictation. Both are biopolitical mechanisms that seek to purify life. Once writing is divided from speech, this speech itself is then divided into animal sound and meaningful, articulate speech. In turn, animal sound divides into something like the (supposedly) pure phonē outside language and the animality of the letter—which Agamben figures as the distinction between the unsayable and the sayable. Pace Agamben, Derrida’s animality of the letter points toward a sonorousness that is on the side neither of speech nor writing, phonē nor logos, life nor death, but is rather speech-writing, lifedeath (la vie la mort)—what Bennington has wittily dubbed a “phoney” logos.24 As Bennington puts it (speaking now of Lyotard’s proximity to Derrida) “the ‘hearing-myself-speak’ that is part and parcel of logocentrism is doubled in a thoroughly creepy and unheimlich (uncanny) way by a hearingmyself-scream or at least hearing-myself-vociferate, my adult, reasoning, logos-producing self doubled from the start by my inner screaming kid or barking animal.”25 This buccal or animal supplement cannot simply be secreted away as an interior exteriority in the crypt of living speech, for it is precisely this animal différance that drives the desire to devour infinitely and that therefore threatens to devour even itself—autocannibalism as another nonsynonymous substitution for autoimmunity. If presence has the “vocation of infinity,” “a voice without différance, a voice without writing is at once absolutely alive and absolutely dead” (VP 115/88). T R A N S C E N D E N TA L M M M M M M M . . .

There has been intense philosophical interest in the animal cry as an experience of the limits of language, specifically as a threshold between sound and sense. Agamben’s Voice, for example, is no longer mere sound and not yet logical signification. More precisely, in a reflection on Giovanni Pascoli’s poetry, he locates the Voice at the intersection of two deaths: the death of the voice in onomatopoeia and the death of language in glossolalia (CI 75/71). Nancy, too, attempts to isolate this dimension where meaning dissolves 118

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into nonsensical sound and sound begins to show an intention to signify. He observes that the concept of onomatopoeia, as the creation of names, is contradictory for “either there is a noise, which is precisely not a name, or there is a name, which imitates a noise without being the noise itself” (Bor 113). Nancy therefore argues that onomatopoeia is a limit against which language constantly brushes. Agamben, for his part, approaches this contradiction by appealing to Latin grammarians who distinguish between those inarticulate sounds that cannot be written (such as the crackling of a fire) and those that can (including in particu lar the imitation of animal voices). Such onomatopoeias share something in common with glossolalia or xenoglossia, in which one speaks in glosses or in a “barbaric,” foreign, or dead language whose meaning is mysterious to the listener. Both point to a dimension of language that the listener knows to be meaningful without knowing its specific meaning. They mark “language in the instant that it sinks again, dying, into the voice, and at which the voice, emerging from mere sound, passes (that is, dies) into signification” (CI 74/70). In “Borborygmi” Nancy invokes Derrida’s timbral celebration of gl in Glas to exemplify this dimension of language on the threshold of meaning and cacophony, extending from literal onomatopoeias to words that advertise their sonorousness: The click of the trigger. “I cl.” He says: clack, lack, alc, gl, tr, infra-intraverbal phonemes, like the inaudible “a” of “differance” or such parentheses, onomatopoeias, such glup-glug, tic-tak, trrr, or words that might one call, in their way, phone-emphatic, wink, gul, hinge, thence, dike, tint, sing, an obsession with resonance and assonance, a poetic that is above all sonorous, infra-significant, where one blows out of all proportion sonorities slipping outside the sign, drawing out the sound of the sign, angiospermic, androeciumic, epigynetic, petroglyphic, heliotropic, and thus communication with a philosophical beyond of signification, portmanteau-words and concepts multiplied almost to the point of exhaustion, untenable yet retained, hurled, lost in the profusion, destinerrance, emasculation, peniclitoris, logoarchy, signsponge, the jerky spasm of an erutojaculation, logoroperatergo. (Bor 116–17) On this threshold between sound and sense are also located those singular events that we call exclamations, interjections, or ejaculations. Recalling the onomatopoeic imitations of animal and nonhuman sounds that Mouth(piece) 119

children make, Daniel Heller-Roazen argues that something of this impulse remains in the exclamatory utterances that adults make: “anomalous phonological elements,” such as phonemes borrowed from other tongues whose modification means they cannot be reduced to either language, the interjection ukh of disgust in English, the brrr of a shudder, or the trilled r that mimes the telephone’s ring.26 With an Agambenian inflection, HellerRoazen proposes that these elements, indispensable yet unrecognized, exist in a state of exception, “at once included in a language to the very extent that they are excluded from it.”27 Bennington makes a similar point about the exclusion from the Greek polis of the Cixousian cri de la littérature, but is careful to distinguish between exclamations, which can be of any word in a language, and interjections, which have no recognizable semantic content or syntactic form and thus sit on the margins of the phonemic range of a given language.28 Derrida dwells on a passage in which Cixous writes of God’s animal-like monosyllabic interjections as “divine yelps: the soul barks” (HC 74/82). In a similar vein, Lyotard speaks of the “affect-phrase” of vocalizations, which, like gestures, signal pain and pleasure without yet being articulated phrases and without relation to referent or address: “non-discrete inspirations and expirations of air,” “growlings, pantings, sighs.”29 This is the animal phonē yet to enter, or on the point of entering, the logos.30 Lyotard characterizes this communicability without mediation of the logos as a “mute” communication in the sense of a sound made with closed lips. From the same root comes murmur, mystery, the onomatopoeic moo, and even the French mot, he notes. Nancy takes up the same phoneme in the interlude on “musique mutique” in À l’écoute originally written for a book by artist Susanna Fritscher titled Mmmmmmm. Tracing the word mot back to its origin in Latin mutuum, defined as “an emitted sound deprived of sense, the noise produced by forming mu” (E 47/23), he notes that, for Lacan, this murmur is “what, in the saying, is other than what is said,” “the ‘saying [dire]’ as non-said [non-dit] and also as non-saying [non-disant]: noisy, noisy-making [bruyant, bruissant]” (54/28 and 76n4). In a formulation that comes very close to Agamben’s notion of the sayable (CF 57–122/35–90), this otherness then becomes “less of a non-said than that of a non-saying in saying or of saying itself, where saying can resound” (E 55/29)—in short, pure saying as the condition of (im)possibility conceptually prior to the division between voice and writing. 120

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Mmmmmmm continues: repeats its murmuring, mouth closed, not even Om, the holy syllable opening the jewel in the lotus of meditation that empties itself of itself: not even the muted utterance in which Hegel heard the lack of articulation between vowel and consonant, like the defeat of a night in which the cows are as black as from a blinding light, similar, yes, to the mooing of cows in the night, similar to the vagueness in which the concept loses its own differentiation . . . the withdrawal of the concept, by a vanishing of the difference that does not produce identity, but the buzzing, the humming, the muttering and borborygmus of the consonant that only resounds, articulating no voice. Mmmmmmm resounds previous to the voice, inside the throat, scarcely grazing the lips from the back of the mouth, without any movement of the tongue, just as a column of air pushed up from the chest in the sonorous cavity, the cave of the mouth that does not speak. Not a voice, or writing, or a word, or a cry, but transcendental murmuring, the condition of all words and all silence, a primal or archiglottal sound in which I give my death rattle and wail, death agony and birth, I hum and growl, song, jouissance and souffrance, motionless word, mummified word, monotone where the polyphony that rises from the bottom of the belly is resolved and amplified, a mystery of emotion, the substantial union of body and soul [âme], body and âmmmmm. (E 48–49/24–25) Nancy thus attempts to rethink the trace on the basis of sound—of this “transcendental murmuring” or sense (sens). Inasmuch as this resonance lets it “recite itself (make itself sonorous, de-claim itself or ex-claim itself, and cite itself (set itself in motion, call itself, according to the first meaning of the word, incite itself), send back to its own echo, and by doing so, make itself),” Nancy claims that “writing is also, very literally and even in the sense archi-écriture, a voice that resounds” (E 69/35–36). It marks “the most contemporary meaning of the word écrire . . . elaborated since Proust, Adorno, and Benjamin, through Blanchot, Barthes, and to Derrida’s archiécriture,” which is “nothing other than making sense resound beyond signification, or beyond itself” (67/34–35). Intriguingly, this sonorous redirection of the grammatological project borrows a distinctly Derridean formula. “Sense,” says Nancy, “if there is any [s’il y en a], when there is any, is never a neutral, colorless, or aphonic sense: even when written, it has a voice” (E 67/34). In Le toucher, Derrida had made Mouth(piece) 121

use of this exact syntagma—if there is any (s’il y en a)—to mark the space between him and Nancy whose “there is no ‘the’ [il n’y a pas ‘le’]” turns to a negative rather than Derrida’s conditional (T 323–24/287–88).31 With the idea of multiple deconstructions, Derrida is making the same point about negation that he sets out in “Pas”: namely, that, unlike a straightforward negation that remains confined within the logic of opposition, what he seeks to think with différance, trace, writing, and so on is their finitude and hence the shattering of the transcendental into multiple shards. This may be a subtle and difficult point, and yet, from Derrida’s standpoint, Nancy seems too quick to transcendentalize this sonorous writing and to give a certain priority to resonance and vibration, robbing of it the irreducible contingency of différance. Mutique is etymologically related to both mutus and mutilus in Latin, the later meaning “cut off” (whence mutilated). Nancy’s mmmmm is, in short, too cut-off, too separate. At stake in this idea of an animal-like or prelinguistic element in the voice is the relation to the singular. Without overdrawing this distinction, Derrida, especially later in his life, inclines toward mortgaging the logic of quasi-transcendentality to singularity (the undeconstructible, the unconditional, the aneconomic) rather than the self-differentiating generalization that I seek to emphasize with the notion of shatter.32 As Derrida argues in Le toucher, it is a matter of turning the unconditional to the conditional (T 324/288). Nancy’s adoption of the qualifying syntagm “s’il y en a” is surely significant. Insofar as the aim is to think the possible as impossible, the necessary as contingent, the transcendental as singular, the sonorousness of sense for Nancy is both the resonance of the transcendental murmur and timbre as “attack of sense . . . its send-off [coup d’envoi]” (E 52/27)—both vibration and syncopation. With one ear on Glas’s preoccupation with a sonorous poetics in “Borborygmi,” Nancy also addresses how, for Derrida, the singularity of the (barbaric) idiom is always haunted by iterability. “The idiom of a unique singular, one such, such a Derrida,” “a such that is not as such, a such which stands alone . . . without reference or referent, comparable only to itself and therefore incomparable, incommensurable” (Bor 115), “the proper of a voice . . . a unique resonance or an inimitable timbre, or that which wants to express itself as such” (121) is always already syncopated by the différance that disrupts every positing of the self and the proper. Again, a sonic metaphor is used to approach this thought of impossible, unconditional, singularity. 122

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But this same wanting-to-say-the-impossible makes the impossible itself snap or crackle, a barbaric idiom whose very barbarity can be heard at least by those with an ear for it. Against such a name, sense or truth itself resounds: its sound, its echo, its muffled cry, its rustle, its murmur or its shout. (Bor 115). A few pages later the metaphor of a scarcely audible or asignifying sound returns to figure the constitutive impossibility of sovereignty as a fizzling out. “But perhaps,” he remarks, “it’s precisely the sound of this fizzling out that it wants to be heard, even if that means bursting the ear drum or putting up with the echoing of the void” (Bor 120). Nancy refers here to the passage in “Tympan” where Derrida speculates that metaphysics could not hear what is outside its closed mouth-ear loop without rupturing its eardrum and thus rendering it deaf (M II–III/xii). This nonhuman element of the human voice is the sound of its touching its limit—of différance brushing up against the undeconstructible, not an external limit but an effect of the voice as différance. It is the sound of the voice’s autoimmunity and of its shattering into multiple varieties of vocality. Nancy speaks of the singular “burst apart, or cracked, each time, incessantly,” splitting and breaking into pieces (Bor 126–27), “a sonic rip” (128). It is the voice that shipwrecks itself: “Already and not yet language: the back of language, a barbaric glottal stop at the back of the throat, the rough crashing and the ending of a song, growling and grunting, a nonspeaking animal which gives voice” (128–29). At the end of the essay, a specifically oral metaphorics returns as Nancy turns, right up against or behind Derrida, to substitutability, exemplarity, and resonance characterizing the singular or without-example as a convulsion of the airway. Any such and any da, making any sound, indefi nitely substitutable, a simple exemplar at the heart of the unnamable: but at the same time, necessarily, not any one but this one alone, the unique and inimitable example of self, “Derrida” in this case then and behind Derrida still Derrida rather than a bottomless behind. There must never be an exemplarity: the unique must begin (itself) again each time. The example of the inexemplifiable must bury itself in and re-emerge from each uniqueness. Right at the insignificance of a name, in the vagaries of its assonances, and by their very coinage, is coined the absolute significance of one for Mouth(piece) 123

itself as much as for every other. It resonates dimly, it creaks or grinds, chokes even. It’s not something that can be heard, it hovers as if between unnamable sounds and the inimitable timbre of a voice, like the echo of one to the others, which a hiccup would suspend. This does not make itself heard, but the whole of the real resonates here. (Bor 129) Provocatively, Nancy reproaches Derrida for the “absolute realism of the pure real” (127) of which he himself stands accused. Even while Nancy’s “postdeconstructive” realism remains “irreducible to any of the tradition’s realisms,” Derrida describes it as both “absolute” and, more damningly, “irredentist” in reference to the nineteenth-century nationalist ideology of the newly formed Italian state, which called for the assimilation of territories immediately beyond its borders (T 60/46).33 Nancy’s articulation of the inexemplifiable with the buccal invites comparison with Derrida’s resistance to reincorporating the bitten-off exemplar. B I T BY B I T

Derrida will often speak of a “bit [mors],” which, as Elissa Marder points out, is understood in multiple senses: the past tense of “to bite [mordre],” the bitten-off “morsel [morceaux]” scattered throughout Glas as a metaphor for the process of reading (e.g., Gl 229b), the horse’s bit that holds back the beast (43b), and also this vocable’s homophone mort (death).34 Derrida even describes as morsels the sonorous fragments of words such as “gl” which “strike the ear” (106–7b). In the exchanges between Cixous and Derrida, the bite is both playful and significant. For her—and in this she is closer to Nancy, perhaps—it names a traumatic opening of writing (morsure), the teeth sunk into the flesh, piercing the membrane. For him, it is also a way of measuring the relation to exteriority, though this often takes the form of the coughedup, spat-out, or otherwise excreted morsel and the (im)possibility of its being ingested again into the system. Against an assimilationist introjection of the object that would be tantamount to killing it, Derrida insists that the injunction to “eat well” entails “respect for” and “offering infinite hospitality.”35 The measure of Nancy’s sonorous buccality must be taken against this prescription. The conclusion to Nancy’s “Borborygmi” might productively be read as a commentary on a passage in “Cartouches” where Derrida brings together 124

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the themes of the crypt, the bit in the mouth of language, and the limits of exemplarity. What is secreted (in the double sense of excreted outside and thus hidden or walled off) must be taken back inside, but “the introjection of the piece [morceau], in other words of the bit [mors], is interminable, it always ends up by letting drop an absolutely heterogeneous remainder of incorporation. Infinite analysis of mourning, between introjection and incorporation” (VeP 232/201). The bit also figures the tension between seriality and exemplarity. The bit, cut out of its orifice or its pit, is a remainder resisting complete reintegration into the series, and thus an exception to the substitutability upon which the logic of the example depends. By making an example of the without-example, he has shown in this exhibition that however much one multiplies approaches, assaults, attacks, however much one multiplies movements of appropriation, seduces the thing, tames it, domesticates it, tires it with one’s advances, it remains, as remainder (really beautiful), indifferent, cut off from the world, from production as from reproduction. (VeP 232/202) Immediately, though, Derrida announces: “But we’ll reconsider this cut, things always get complicated when the structure of a serial interlace [entrelacs] comes into play” (VeP 232/202). The argument in “Cartouches” by which Derrida complicates the cut-off, inexemplifiable bit in the mouth has important ramifications for the political recuperation of the voice. If, in Derrida’s eyes, “nothing is inedible in Hegel’s infinite metabolism,” this includes the unique and exceptional singularity cut off from the system—the vomit spat out that it might be all the more digestible.36 This interiorization is never as complete as the dialectic makes out. The expulsion of the bit is already necessary for the functioning of the dialectical system. As Derrida describes it, the process of ejection and reconsumption has the effect of “wearing down alterity [d’en user l’altérité]” (VeP 220/191)—here pointing to the usure that will be the subject of the final chapter. It is as if all the swallowing and regurgitation had the effect of smoothing and polishing off the bit, of making it into a more integral, self-contained whole without any splintering edges or protrusions. The prime number of the coffin thus resists all analysis, that’s what it’s for, it doesn’t resolve itself into phantasies, it does not divide itself, it does not split. At least no decomposition come from outside can affect it, save Mouth(piece) 125

its very own. Atomic armament. The coffin then becomes itself, indivisible in short, up to and including the dissemination of its lineage. Whole [integer] outside the series, whole once reintegrated or reinserted, unattackable from one place to the next, impassive, splendidly autonomous: sufficient [suffisant]. (VeP 239/209) The vomited morsel thus becomes more readily digestible the more it becomes an autonomous, indivisible atom—once it is “entirely truncated,” a “well-formed” “turd” (VeP 232/202). Reprising the argument in Glas and linking it to the concerns of “Fors,” Derrida argues that an entirely cut-off bit reinstates itself as the transcendental whose exclusion founds the system. The remainder remains entire, on condition that you deduct one, the paradigmatic coffin which belongs without belonging to the series it makes possible. It inscribes itself in that series but also leaves on it the mark of its subtraction, which defines the agency [instance] of the transcendental bit: an exceptional piece, bitten [mordu], torn off or held with the mouth, has a hard-on on its own (keeps aloof) [(fait) bande à part], but in order to make possible the articulated chain, the series of articles with respect to which it is an exception (every thing except it, save the bit [ fors le mors]) and in which, however, it reinscribes itself regularly. We shall say, indifferently, the transcendental mors or the transcendental fors. (VeP 239/208). This is the pitfall of thinking the sonorous as ground even in the guise of its withdrawal. In “Economimesis,” Derrida does allow for an “irreducible heterogeneity” that cannot be swallowed but only vomited; one cannot even bring oneself to mourn it (introject it). This, he says in an argument that will be advanced at length by Werner Hamacher in his monumental study of tropes of eating in Hegel, is a nauseating disgust (Ekel).37 Derrida, on the one hand, characterizes the disgusting not as a form of negation, which would imply sublation, but as “the absolute other of the system,” “the absolute excluded . . . unnameable in its singularity” (Eco 89/22). On the other hand, unlike the aloof, exceptional fors-mors, the disgusting is “the transcendental of the transcendental, the non-transcendentalisable” which by the end of the essay is associated with analogy, replacement, and prostheticity. 126

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More precisely, it turns out that it is not vomit as such that is thrown out but the possibility of its being replaced by anything else—what Derrida here calls its “vicariousness” (92/25). What is completely inassimilable is substitutability as such. Pace Nancy, one cannot even say this metaphoricity, for that is already to begin to eat it or—and Derrida insists that they amount to the same thing—to vomit it. Introjection or incorporation—with both there is no relation to the other as other, as alive, only complete fusion or cut-off. No less than digestion, vomit “arrests the vicariousness of disgust; it puts the thing in the mouth, but only for example, oral for anal” (93/25). It stops the movement of metaphoricity, of animality, in short, of life—arrêt de mort as death sentence. The rest is what brings to rest. This arrêt, however, also suspends death, suspends the decision that puts a stop once and for all, and thus reopens life to the chance that makes life worth living (Par 159–61/139–41). This blow to death does not come from without. Rather— and this sentence comes twice with added emphasis the second time almost like a heartbeat—“the arrêt arrests itself [s’arrête]” such that the decisive arrêt and the suspensive one each self-differentiate between life and death, each dispersing into la vie la mort or survivre. Something similar happens with the ruin of the voice. The bit in the mouth interrupts and limits interiorization and idealization not because, as Nancy thinks, it is entirely without example but because it de-limits, disseminates, shatters itself. That is the sound we hear. The ideality of the metaphysical voice is an effect of this self-shattering. Introjection takes the other inside so as to understand it ideally and yet, in the process of assimilating, digesting, and thus identifying with the other, interiorization loses the very understanding of the other as other that it seeks to gain.38 This is the result not of some external limit to understanding but of orality’s autoimmunity. The desire for infinite understanding tends toward destroying itself and thus, in order to preserve itself, holds itself back, chokes on itself. Nausea is an effect of orality as différance, but it is also its destruction to the extent that it stabilizes self-differentiation into opposition. But the point that Derrida is at pains to make is that the singularity that Nancy (or Lyotard or Agamben) want to protect is impossible without the iterability of metaphorical substitution. The exemplary example “must have been preceded by its following, by some anterior drawing or design inscribing it in advance in a serial filiation without beginning or end” (VeP 253/220). Mouth(piece) 127

The animal or nonhuman voice—the growl, the murmur, the crackle— is unthinkable apart from the animality of the letter. The movement of metaphoricity is stopped by any thought that would elevate the voice or sound into an exemplary example. When Nancy argues that resonance is the condition of possibility of all sense and sensation while nonetheless maintaining that “sonority, ultimately, is nothing but this reverberation” (E 56–58n/76–77n7), he succumbs to the kind of teleological thinking that Derrida dubs “exemplorality” (Eco 73/13), whereby any other perceptible system or orifice is subordinated to the oral metaphor and metaphoricity is thus frozen into metalanguage—analogy stopped in the embouchure of the log-os (85/19). The problem is Nancy’s “ultimately,” which safeguards the tel-os (cf. Eco 87/21) from contingency. He puts the end in his pocket for safekeeping. What does all this mean for the political stakes of the voice today? Is any continued adherence to a notion of political ad-vocacy only flogging the dead horse of exemplorality and its mouth-ear circuit? If I am always addressing myself to the other, is there any room for sound in the politics à venir or is it bound so tightly to the metaphysics of life that it must be left to fizzle out? Is silence the only possible relation to the other? Derrida suggests another path when in L’animal que donc je suis he dreams of a tonal inflection of animal sound. Instead of a key (clé) that could be unlocked so as to liberate the animal from confinement, Derrida wants a musical modulation to a flatside key. I wish only to indicate a tonality, some high notes that change the whole stave [portée]. How can the gamut of questions on the being of what would be proper to the animal be changed? How can a flat, as it were, be introduced in the key of this questioning to tone it down and change its tune? (AS 92/63) Why these notes should enter in a high register is unclear. What is specified is that this attunement to the animal must avoid both the Scylla of devouring and the Charybdis of vomiting. How to have heard here a language or unheard-of music, somewhat inhuman in a way, yet not so as to make myself the representative or emancipator of an animality that is forgotten, ignored, misunderstood, persecuted, hunted, fished, sacrificed, subjugated, raised, corralled, 128

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hormonized, transgenetized, exploited, consumed, eaten, domesticated; rather, to have myself heard in a language that is a language, of course, and not those inarticulate cries or insignificant noises, howling, barking, meowing, chirping, that so many humans attribute to the animal, a language whose words, concepts, singing, and accent can finally manage to be foreign enough to every thing that, in all human languages, will have harbored so many asinanities concerning the so-called animal. (AS 92–93/63) Neither internalized nor outlawed, the animal’s unheard-of music perhaps arrives in the manner of the ghost. In “Fors” Derrida describes a third relation to the lost object opposed to both introjection and incorporation, namely “ghost effects” (F 42n/118–19n21). Both involve buried secrets, but if the living dead in the crypt is the effect of “a repression ‘belonging’ to the subject that comes to haunt him with all kinds of ventriloquism,” the crypt from which the ghost comes back is instead someone else’s. Again, drawing upon an aural metaphor, “this heterocryptography calls for a completely different way of listening,” for it speaks from a “topography foreign to the subject.” In other words, it calls for radically displacing the opposition between the inside and outside of language, between human speech and animal voice.39 But gl? Its gl [son gl]? The sound gl [le son gl], the gl of “angle,” its gl. This barely pronounceable writing is not a morpheme, not a word if one restrains oneself (nothing authorizes this) from taking the step [le pas] of meaning. Gl does not belong to discourse. . . . What is suspended is not however an insignificant phoneme, the noise or shout naively opposed, as nature or animality, to speech. (VeP 182/160) The political consequences of this quasi-transcendental character of the voice should not be underestimated. It is less the threshold of human language, as in Agamben’s topology, than a kaleidoscopic multiplication, splinter, or fold (pli)—the “intestinal difference” (ED 364/248)—of any boundary between silence and animal cry. Insofar as one cannot seize hold of it or gather it up, the representative function of speaking-for is put in question. Notwithstanding Derrida’s reservations about Nancy’s inclination to hypostatize the limits of deconstruction in notions of community, fraternity, resurrection, and so forth, at other times he has stressed the common ground Mouth(piece) 129

between them. Both find themselves in a quandary, torn between singularity and generalization, or what, posing a series of questions to Nancy at a conference devoted to the latter’s work at the Collège International de Philosophie in January 2002, Derrida figures as the tension between the event, on the one hand, and the economy of responsibility and obligation, on the other. I find myself, as you do, constantly caught between two languages, and very often, too often, it happens that I put a great deal of emphasis on the responsibility to be assumed and then, at the same time, on the event, knowing quite well that the two types of discourses are, in some way, in an antinomic relation. (RSV 175/65). The appeal to singularity strikes at the conditions of contemporary capitalism in its indifference to individual differences—its deafness to different voices—but with the Derridean qualification that the dignity of and responsibility to individual differences is impossible without the substitutability that allows each and every voice to be heard in its irreplaceability. What Derrida calls “seriature” rejects both capital’s hierarchizing enumeration of voices and its leveling out of their differences in favor of the equality of self-differentiation. The reduction of any voice to an atom would amount to silencing. The politics of voice is fought on this terrain with the competing demands of individual and collective agencies, their autonomy from the capitalist system, and the thorny question of representation’s speaking for the other. Take, for example, the technology of the people’s mic necessitated by conditions at Zuccotti Park and then widely popu larized across the Occupy movement. At first blush, the chain of the voices, with its logic of prostheticity and supplementarity, seems to exemplify the kind of seriality without hierarchical enumeration Derrida describes in “Cartouches,” but it also illustrates the perils of the much-vaunted horizontality of social movements, highlighting exactly those metaphysical temptations Derrida seeks to avoid. At the start of Crowds and Party, Jodi Dean gives an account of a turning point for Occupy in October 2011 in which a single mic check ruptures a series of optimistic rallying cries of collective power. Each person has to make their own autonomous decision. Each person has to make their own autonomous decision. 130

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No one can decide for you. You have to decide for yourself. No one can decide for you. You have to decide for yourself. Everyone is an autonomous individual. Everyone is an autonomous individual.40 For Dean, this was the moment at which Occupy would begin to founder irreparably “against a contradiction at its core” between competing demands of individual autonomy and solidarity. Besides the individualized atomization that threatens the formation of a collective political subject, Dean observes the danger of “a nearly populist presumption of organic social totality.”41 The problem, as she sees it, is a failure to tolerate division. If solidarity risks refusing to recognize difference between individuals, autonomy overlooks the divisions within each subject. It is this self-differentiation that, for Derrida, promises to deconstruct the binary opposition of substitutability and singularity. For Dean, echoing a widespread suspicion of movements’ weak ties, it is the party form that operates as the “knot” to bind people together. While Derrida may not reach the same conclusion, the figure of the knot has a certain appeal to him. As another word for seriature, it allows him to think a stricture or “interlacing” (VeP 278–80/242–43) that is bound more or less strictly. Most striking is the way in which this figure of the knot invites a metaphorics that is multiply sonorous. There is a word that keeps coming back to me, and the image of the knot. Negotiation as a knot, as the work of the knot. In the knot of negotiation there are different rhythms, different forces, different differential vibrations of time and rhythm. The word knot came to me, and the image of a rope. A rope with an entanglement, a rope made up of several strands knotted together. The rope exists. One imagines computers with little wires, wires where things pass very quickly, wires where things pass very slowly: negotiation is placed along all of these wires. And things pass, information passes, or it does not pass, as with the telephone. Also, cables that pass under the sea and thousands of voices with intonations, that is, with different and entangled tensions. Negotiation is like a rope and an interminable number of wires moving or quivering with different speeds or intensities. (Neg 29–30). The entangled wires, neither bound with absolute rigidity nor completely undone, are “more or less tight” (30). Seriature names the necessity of linking Mouth(piece) 131

singularities. If each were absolutely irreplaceable in its singularity, there would be an absolute difference between them and hence an indifference and destruction of difference. Singularities cannot take place “at the same time,” “at once” (24). Rather, this “at once” and différance itself is always already decomposing into differential, crisscrossing forces and speeds. And yet one must be able to cut the Gordian knot to preserve the surprise of the event. Far from foreclosing this possibility, any negotiation worthy of the name (and not simply a decision already made or subject to calculable prediction) necessarily risks a broken connection. Equally—or, more accurately, unequally, more or less equally—what is cut off is “never detached, absolute, absolved” (30). Hence the absolute autonomy of individual voices silences difference no less than the unified communal voice. Derrida’s point that “tout autre est tout autre” (typically translated, with a hint of the oral metaphor, as “every other is every (bit) other”) explains why any responsibility to the equality of voices always answers to “a multiplicity of calls . . . not the call of the one, of a one, of someone, but of more than one, more than one at once. Or else it is each time one, of course, irreplaceably so, but more than one unique, more than one irreplaceable” (RSV 184/73). T E L E P H O N I C I M P E R AT I V E

In describing this “serial generality,” Derrida reaches, besides the metaphor of the cord or rope, for a sonic, even expressly vocal, figure, turning negotiation first into differential rhythms and vibrations and then into the voices and intonations that pass along the wires of the telephone network. It is the voice that travels more or less quickly, more or less forcefully, and that passes from one to the other along the line, or it does not pass. It might be cut off or diverted and shattered into hallucinatory echoes across the telephone network as wires get crossed but still represents the possibility for connection beyond physical limits. Here the voice once again becomes inseparable from the question of life. As Marder observes in her reading of Avital Ronell’s The Telephone Book—a reading that is itself a kind of relayed message with all the risks of mishearing and crossed wires that games of telephone entail—the telephone’s prostheticity is not just a matter of spacing, dispersal, and substitution but is also a phantasmic defense against separation and loss. The telephone—its receiver a prosthesis for the living ear and its inanimate mouthpiece a tech132

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nological supplement to the human os—makes the absent voice present where it is not via an illusory mouth-ear circuit, standing in for the lost maternal body: “This repressed mother (who is neither living nor dead) lies encrypted in the telephone system.”42 Ronell’s text plies between the notions of encryption, loss, orality, and technological prostheticity, tightening entangled threads that Derrida knots together in “Fors.” Highlighting the exemplorality at work in Alexander Bell’s understanding of telephonic listening, Ronell observes how the receiver becomes a secret crypt for an unassimilable loss, one too painful to swallow, now “preserved . . . like a mummy.” Even the ear opened for Bell like a hearing mouth. . . . The disaster of the mouth, the medusoid rift, reflects the implacable grimace of technology. It’s a mouth that twists along the umbilicus of loss. . . . As if something like a crypt had been inserted into the telephone’s receiver . . . always double and doubling, duplicitous like the ear, inhabiting the haunted telephone, operating the speaking automaton which was, as in the case of Frankenstein, a monument to an impossible mourning. In the particularized case of Bell, there had been something that he could not swallow, a death paired, impossible to assimilate or digest.43 The telephone thus puts the other in the ear-pocket-crypt (some mammals still have a small pouch known as a Henry’s pocket which is often home to parasites). In this way the ear is given over, lent, to the other, becoming the ear of the other in Derrida’s phrase (Oto 107/35). The telephone handset is imbricated in sovereignty and its deconstruction along two lines or somewhat crossed wires. In one hand, the tēle introduces différance and spacing into the phonē—or, more precisely, it makes palpable that every voice is always already tele-phonic, separated and divided from itself, its address always at risk of going astray and thus disrupting the sovereignty of the mouth-ear circuit. In the other hand, at the other end of the line, this receptivity to the other exposes the ear to the sovereign command, to being penetrated by the superegoic voice of the parent, the law, the state, or the university. The theme of telephony is intimately connected to the question of life. For example, the second session of Derrida’s recently published seminar, La vie la mort, takes a detour from the life sciences to examine the relation between a philosopher’s life and works, but it does so by focusing on the ear Mouth(piece) 133

(hence when this session was previously published separately, it was given the title “Otobiographies”).44 Reading the Fifth Lecture of Nietzsche’s Über die Zukunft unserer Bildungsanstalten Derrida suggests that “the umbilical cord of the university . . . has you by the ear . . . dictates to you what you are writing” (and Derrida has always suspected dictation of subordinating writing to the voice), keeping you on a “leash,” tied to the “paternal belly of the State . . . like one of those Bic ballpoints attached by a little chain in the post office” (Oto 109–110/36). In La peine de mort, the telephone, “like an umbilical cord of life or death” (PM1 84/49), links the death-row prisoner to the governor who can exercise executive sovereign power to grant a last-minute pardon. Life is literally left “suspended” from the telephone line (200/139). In this seminar, the conjunction of telephony and sovereignty gives rise to an extended digression, again via Nietzsche, on the sovereignty of music. In Zur Genealogie der Moral, Nietzsche observes how Wagner, following Schopenhauer, associates music’s sovereignty with the absolute power on the will. “Music speaking music to itself” (209/146) acquires a connection to the divine unrivaled among the arts, rising above sensuousness. Nietzsche puts the musician on the telephone with God, who “speaks metaphysics,” making him a “ventriloquist” and “mouthpiece” of the sovereign beyond. It makes the distant immediately close “as if the telephone then became portable and cellular,” quips Derrida; “telephony is metaphysics” (210/146). The reference to the mobile phone echoes a more extensive analysis of telephony in the 1995–96 seminar on Hostilité/Hospitalité in which language, specifically the mother tongue, is likened to that “most mobile of telephones” (DH 85/91–93) by which the home may be carried around with us. Infinite mobility in this way turns into its opposite: “Language resists all mobilities because it moves about with me.” Translating his early reading of Husserl into a constellation of telephony, hospitality, and its negation, he argues that hearing-oneself-speak is the most mobile of mobiles, because the most immobile, the zeropoint of all mobile telephones, the absolute ground of all displacements; and it is why we think we are carry ing it away, as we say, with each step [pas], on the soles of our shoes. But always while being separated from oneself like this, while never being quits with that which, leaving oneself, by the same step never stops quitting its place of origin. (DH 85/91–92) 134

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This fantasy of absolute immobility and sovereignty is only possible because language is a prosthesis, a dis/replacement, a step apart that disperses more than it straightforwardly negates. This call of language is figured as a responsibility (of hospitality) of which one can never acquit oneself (VLH 183/49) (“never being quits with [what] never stops quitting”). In an earlier session of the seminar, Derrida observes that hospitality is premised upon a sovereign ipseity or inviolability of the home which is breached by the telephone line. This sense of home is constituted by a conditioned and conditional (rather than absolute) hospitality which involves my deciding “to invite whomever I wish to come into my home, first in my ear” (DH 49/51; my emphasis). The increasingly pervasive interception of telecommunications, state surveillance, and censorship—with ears everywhere—multiplies this irreducibly violable character of the home (57–59/61). The deconstructive sense of telephony comes to the fore in Derrida’s reflections on Joyce, whose writing often wants to be read aloud. Ulysse gramophone proposes the originarily telephonic quality of speech as a paradigm for the deconstruction of presence: “In the beginning was the telephone” (UG 80/51). Attempting to track the many phone calls in Ulysses, Derrida takes Mr. Bloom’s phone call “from the inner office” as a springboard for a deconstruction of oral interiority. Long before the invention of such technology an originary “telephonic technē . . . at work within the voice” disturbs the Husserlian circuit of hearing-oneself-speak (82/52). The voice is always already distant, calling from afar: “a mental telephony which, inscribing the far, distance, différance, and spacing in the phōnē, at the same time institutes, prohibits, and disrupts the so-called monologue.” In French a phone call is un coup de téléphone (or un coup de fil) and the translator’s decision to keep the French word in places foregrounds its sonorous character, for the coup refers specifically to the ring (un coup de sonette is the ring of a doorbell, for instance). Un coup is also a strike, a blow, a shot. It could be translated with shatter. Derrida links this resounding ring to “the monosyllabic quasi-interjection of the ‘oui,’ ‘yes,’ ‘ay’” (82/52) and specifically to the function of such interjections as performatives. Due to the effects of telephonic spacing, this “yes” has always already turned into the double affirmation “yes, yes,” repeated by Molly in Joyce’s text—the yes in “differential vibration” against itself (137/79). The dispersal of the performative, the telephonic doubling of the divine Word, will take on further significance in Derrida’s conversations with Cixous where again monosyllabic Mouth(piece) 135

interjections not only respond to appeals or demands but may also have a jussive character of their own. In the form of an appeal, injunction, demand, command even, the voice’s political character becomes especially palpable. It evokes the sovereign command as much as the demands of those protesting. It furthermore raises the question of responsibility—the demand, obligation, and ability to respond. Even more fascinating is how, for Derrida, this telephonic imperative is imbricated with the question of life—with an appeal to life or a demand for it. Across a number of different texts, Derrida and Cixous figure the telephonic address as an apostrophizing demand that commands, appeals to, and thereby animates an addressee. The telephonic umbilical cord seeks to maintain a connection to life, to call back to life. Referring to the belief that a soul can be recalled “to this side” within the first days of mourning, coinciding with the period of shiva, Cixous writes that “it is necessary to catch the ghost by a wisp [mèche] of life,” by a lock or braid of hair—for which “vital bond” the telephone wire stands as substitute (OR 20–21; cf. HC 72–73/80–81). To this extent, the telephone call is an appeal to a sovereign power over life and death—a demand (to decide) for life. Derrida’s relationship with Cixous, played out vividly in their accounts of their many phone calls, itself assumes this structure of an appeal or “appellation” of life (HC 18/12), which, by force of repetition, leads her to receive it as a demand that she remain on the side of life. Each gives an account (in H. C. pour la vie and Hyperrêve respectively) of “an almost interminable argument,” as Derrida describes it (HC 10/2), in which the protagonists appear to take sides, maneuver one another into taking sides, dispute who is on which side, and resist taking sides between life and death: Does one, in the end, die too quickly or live too quickly? However much Cixous may doubt and drift over to Derrida’s side, to the side of death, he keeps calling her back “fifty or more times each year” (Hr 123/91) “up to three times a week” (120/89) to ask her to recall that he is on the side of death and she on the side of life—all this ostensibly in a bid to recall her to his side, to call her back to death when she has already gone ahead living “too fast” and left him behind.45 All is not as it seems, however. As Cixous shrewdly teases out, this is a ruse to get her to convince herself of what he cannot (consciously) believe, to hold unwaveringly to a belief he, already on the other side, feels duty bound to disavow—a belief that she increasingly comes to doubt she ever actually held. 136

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As Cixous recalls them, Derrida’s repeated appeals have an imperative quality that belies their surface claims. It is necessary that he convince himself that he has not convinced her and that she remains, despite his best efforts, for life. He constantly wields “the great authority he always exercised over me.” While Cixous appears not to respond to the conscious, stated imperative (she is not openly won over to his side), she is nonetheless “mandated by the violent pressure of circumstances,” pressured to introject-incorporate what he discards (Hr 123–24/91–92). He puts his own connection to life in Hélène’s pocket for safekeeping.46 There is here an entanglement of cryptic and ghost effects. He presses her to deny her secret suspicion that he might be right that one dies too fast. Caught up in this battle with herself, she is haunted not just by her own repression but by his, one threatening to substitute for the other: life for death, life save for death, even if Cixous claims to “have never been for life save against death” (123–24/92). She therefore takes to feigning a faith in nonbelieving what he believes, the “tenderness and respect” of friendship requiring her to counter words “so terrifying so terrified so authoritative so anxious to be contradicted and deauthorized” (125–26/93). In this way Cixous highlights the autoimmune character of the sovereign imperative which undermines itself even as it barks its orders. This self-destructive tendency provokes a redoubled fiction on Derrida’s part, at once fragile and powerful: “‘Would that I might [puissé-je] believe her, I wish I might [puisse], yes . . . Oh if only I could believe her, if . . . ,’ well, yes [si] maybe, maybe it is as if [comme si] I believed her already” (HC 10/2). “This slender if was like a wire,” observes Cixous, “to which he would cling in order to drift on the tenebrous tide of his belief that death in the end comes too fast, putting some minimal limit to the risk of drowning” (Hr 125/93). But if he convinced himself she was right (in her fictionalized belief, that is), he would be adrift “on the black tide of his unreason.” Madness either way. Cixous therefore dare not confess to “the least un-steadfastness of conviction without putting the whole lifeboat in danger.” She must not allow herself to be “shaken.” The shipwreck metaphors resonate with Derrida’s final seminar with its reading of Robinson Crusoe, which concludes with the passage on hyper-sovereign power from which I borrow the term shatter. The force of this “puisse” is a hyper-sovereign life force in which, rather like a therapeutic alliance, her life forces “joined with his own life forces against his death forces” (Hr 126/94). But this psychical struggle, far from Mouth(piece) 137

being a simple opposition, one side against the other, calls for a more complex calibration of these different forces. What I therefore want to add to Ronell’s and Marder’s brilliant analyses of the umbilical telephone cord is the sense of knotted intonations that Derrida associates with the bundles of telephone wires entangling the voices they carry. In addition to the modification of intonation that Benveniste associates with the jussive, as Nancy notes (VLH 179/44), there is a negotiation between multiple interwoven pitches, a kind of tuning of voices. With duty, obligation, and imperative there is always the “necessity of linking” (Neg 30) and interlacing. Far from being absolute, the bind is an obligation to negotiate—to bind more or less loosely what does not want to be bound—and is thus always in the process of unbinding itself without ever becoming fully undone. If the Kantian categorical imperative is thus self-dispersing and self-differentiating, it is because it has the form of a call. This imperative is vocal and the voice has always already gone into deconstruction, becoming animal, prosthetic, mad. There is, then, the imperative for an attuned response—attentive to the different rhythms, timbres, and intonations of the forces at play. Cixous describes it in strikingly aural terms: For years at every phone call I adjusted, I tossed in a pinch of light or semi-dark pragmatically, letting myself be guided by the thickness, the variation of rhythm, of the slowness-speed of the timbre of the brightness and vice versa of his second voice. . . . Naturally I trusted to his second voice in my super-sensitive groping, the way you tune a musical instrument better with your eyes closed, for years, I never stopped tuning I mean tuning and un-tuning several times a month the tone and tension of the arguments I tossed in the dispute relying on hints I noted at top speed, on the spot, as soon as I detected the first notes of the second voice, the telephone voice. (Hr 126–27/94) In short, the imperative of responsibility entails negotiating by ear the differential tensions among entwined voices—of the negotiation of sound. Despite what is often said of Derrida’s preference for writing, the telephone is a way of keeping the voice on hold and, with it, life still on the line—a lifeline by which he can hold onto life save for death.47 It is, moreover, as if the telephonic voice (and quite literally Derrida’s telephone voice in his many conversations with Cixous on this subject) were the means by

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which he could negotiate with life, bargain with it, and thus remain more or less tightly attached to it. Something similar could be said of Derrida’s relation to Nancy, of whose attachment to the themes of resurrection and anastasis he remains suspicious. According to this logic of negotiation, there could be no clean cut between Derrida and the post-deconstructive realism of Nancy—or, for that matter, Malabou’s biological plasticity of life or Agamben’s eternal life—just as deconstruction, as Derrida constantly reminds us, is not straightforwardly outside metaphysics. They are interlaced, more or less tightly. The imperative of the unconditional always demands conditioned and conditional entanglements. As Derrida puts it in De l’hospitalité, Even while keeping itself above the laws of hospitality, the unconditional law of hospitality needs the laws, it requires them. This demand is constitutive. It wouldn’t be effectively unconditional, the law, if it didn’t have to become effective, concrete, determined, if that were not its being as having-to-be. It would risk being abstract, utopian, illusory, and so turning over into its opposite. In order to be what it is, the law thus needs the laws, which, however, deny it, or at any rate threaten it, sometimes corrupt or pervert it. And must always be able to do this. (DH 75/79) Any imperative worthy of the name is an imperative to disperse and thus to pervert or transgress itself. It is incommensurable and incalculable—an infinite responsibility—not because it comes from an unadulterated sovereign voice beyond but because this call is multiple and “disseminated” (RSV 184/73). A number of consequences follow from this call that obliges its own transgression and corruption. It must always be possible that the call go unheard, that the address be un- or mis-addressed—the destinerrance that underpins the postal and telephone principles. This categorical imperative of “perhaps” also means that any response (to a friend) made out of duty or in conformity with duty would be a breach of (the) responsibility (of friendship) which instead demands something beyond the economy of calculable responsibility, a duty without duty (Pas 21–24/7–8; DH 77/81–83). The imperative is a shattering demand that shatters even itself, a call compromised from the very outset. This is why an infinite responsibility would be either a “duty” beyond all debt and duty or a complete dereliction of duty and absolute irresponsibility. Cixous’s quandary might be understood from this perspective. Mouth(piece) 139

RESPONSE-ABILITY

The challenging imperative to negotiate between the unconditional and the conditioned, between the singular and the replaceable, makes itself felt in the debates between Derrida and Nancy about the call and responsibility. Speaking at the first Cérisy conference in 1980, Nancy tracks the il faut in Derrida’s thought, linking this obligation to the Heideggerian call of conscience and the Kantian categorial imperative, which has remained an enduring touchstone for Nancy’s thinking about freedom. The vocality of the imperative is central to Nancy’s reading. What he dubs “the free voice of man” undoes all the phenomenological determinations of the voice. Tellingly, Nancy makes reference to that little phrase of Derrida’s that has provoked contention and confusion between them: “Infinite différance is finite.” This time Nancy seems clear about the priority of finitude over infinity, recognizing the autoimmune tendency of duty, whose telos is said to differ and defer itself, and crediting différance with bringing forth duty as such. Différance, he concludes, “has the structure and nature of an obligation,” but one that “obliges differently” (VLH 177/42). In the discussion afterwards, however, Derrida sounds a note of caution. “This voice is recognised as coming from the other to the extent that one cannot respond to it” (VLH 183/49). For him, the “sole imperative” is the impossibility of responding. A call worthy of the name, if there is any, as he might have put it later in his life, is one of which one cannot acquit oneself. It is not simply a matter of cutting the call because, far from being a contingent disconnection, the risk is there from the start of too much noise on the line or of a broken or missed connection. “You must” provokes a “you cannot.” Significantly, this “double bind” assumes a sonorous quality. It forms a “Stimmung,” which means mood, but in its derivation from Stimme (voice) is also the word for musical tuning. Invoking the language of “Tympan” (M I–XXV/ix–xxix), it “resounds like the inner hammer [of the ear], but one which hammers from the outside” (VLH 184/49). Derrida and Nancy took up these themes again over twenty years later during a conversation at the Collège International de Philosophie in January 2002. Nancy embraces the self-shattering character of the call but then moves to pin down what makes this impossibility possible. 140

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If the address probably can and even must always miss its mark, if it  is always destinerrant, as you say, then there can be this whole configuration—question-demand-address and response—only if the address has somewhere awakened the possibility of the response and thus if, behind the response, there is something that I would want to call resonance. (RSV 173/63) Nancy goes on to argue that while “I cannot be responsible, in the sense of a programmatic, calculated, and calculating appropriation . . . I am at least responsible for the capacity, for the condition of possibility, of the response that is found within the resonance.” The difficulty here is that responsibility, while still impossible, is nonetheless something of which one is capable— which defeats every thing that Derrida seeks to achieve with the idea of self-destructive responsibility. What is problematic is the possibilization of impossibility. It removes the chance, the imperative even, that it is possible I not respond. Derrida never tires of saying that the impossible, for him, “marks the limit of a possible or a power, more precisely, of an ‘I can’ or a ‘we can’ (WA xxxiii), and he affirms in his responses to Nancy in both 1980 and 2002 that the “you must, therefore you cannot” of the imperative (VLH 183/49) must be distinguished from the “performative power” of the “I can” (RSV 177–78/67). Whereas Nancy’s approach inclines toward an infinite responsibility that frees itself from responsibility—a demand for response-ability beyond and without responsibility—Derrida will insist on the imperative’s transgressive self-ruin as the only obligation. There would, of necessity, be no adequate response to an infinite call, and hence it would always already have ceased to call for an answer and ceased to be answerable. Still on the line, it would only provoke a busy signal. The call could only survive in re-calling itself in the sense of holding itself back, and in thus saving it from its destruction. The call from beyond and the beyond of the call are but phantasmic effects, psychological defenses against, this recall. The Derridean call is infinitely unanswerable because there is no end to the multiple disseminated calls, responses, callbacks, answering machines, crossed wires, and noisy signals. Likewise, the political appeal or demand is not something that we have in our power to voice. Its fragility and its infinite force derive from the fact that it is always from the start fragmented and compromised by a multiplicity of competing, entangled injunctions. Mouth(piece) 141

Nancy’s approach risks ontologizing resonance—a move that is prevalent in sound studies insofar as it tends to wager its ethical and political stakes on aurality’s transcendental condition. Much like the motif of community in Nancy’s thought, resonance does the work of making being-with a degree zero of existence, such that on one level Nancy thinks dispersal and spacing (in the guise of resonance) more exactly than the phenomenological tradition before him and yet on another level, subordinates shatter to the gathering of sonic dissemination into an undeconstructible condition. The Derridean response (if such a thing were possible) would be to insist on thinking sound, if there is any such thing. The same problem arises with Agamben’s recent interest in the concept of demand which, as noted in Chapter 2, he figures as an echo. Reversing Leibniz’s formulation that “every possibility demands to exist,” Agamben proposes instead that existence demands its possibilities. The demand thus consists in a possibilization of the actual not unlike the way in which memory appears to restore potentiality to the past. In Che cos’è la filosofia? (CF) he maintains unequivocally that demand is a category of ontology (rather than morality) and is therefore distinguishable from any imperative or must-be. So eager is he to flee necessity that he fails to notice the double bind that his ontologization of (im)possibility produces, leading him to lose the very contingency he sought to gain. For this reason, the differential re- and un-tuning of which Derrida and Cixous speak cannot be equated with Agamben’s understanding of Stimmung or attunement (LM 70–76/55–60; cf. Voc), which repeats both Heidegger’s anthropocentrism (only man has a Stimmung because he has no Stimme of his own) and his appropriation of the impossible (man is capable of not speaking, of in-fancy, of aphonia). If “the Idea can only be heard” (OG 156n2/142n170)— “heard, as a call,” as Bennington glosses it—it is only because the idea is always already shattering itself.48 Cixous’s puisse is a very different beast from this “I can.” It changes the tune of the voice completely, re-tuning, inflecting, and flattening the power of the performative. It obliges and binds differently—differentially. The bond, now a mere wisp of hair or the precarious wire of the trapeze, becomes, in a dazzling passage in which Derrida tracks the metamorphosis of the bond into a bondire or benediction, a bound or leap of grace in which the letter (or the call) arrives when it must, which is to say it “arrives just 142

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where not expected, when one no longer anticipates or calculates anything” (HC 110/126). What is necessary, imperative (the il faut is thrice announced in Cixous’s text) is this chance of the event. It is this grace that (for)gives life for life—not life for death like the governor who spares the death-row prisoner at the last minute, but life for life, in place of life. The bo(u)nd of puisse sounds in a telephone voice. Closely tracking a passage in Cixous’s OR, Les lettres de mon père, Derrida picks up on a reference to this “vital bond” among “the tribe of the connected,” who are connected by “this filiation of the thread [filiation du fil] of hair, of the telephone wire or the funambulist’s wire, and who are connected as one is connected to a writing line or a telephone line, connected to the ‘living telephone cord’ ” (HC 74/82). He then quotes the following passage culminating in a chain of animal interjections: This extensible hair, a kind of nerve, behaves like a living telephone cord. The essential orders, only imperatives, pass through this thread drawn between two souls, as if the thread only supported a few telegraphic injunctions. It is men who make sentences. God speaks in syllables like animals. Divine yelps: the soul barks the other soul reacts as if to an electric shock. Come! Be! Stay! Live! Derrida breaks off the quotation to observe that these imperatives are “might itself ”: “Each time these are short translations or, at an absolute speed, monosyllabic and metonymic equivalents of ‘might [puisse].’ ” These “telegraphic injunctions” are “electric,” one phoneme displacing and replacing another with such great speed, on the spot (67/73), like the instantaneity of telecommunications—a monosyllabic condensation “outspeeding speed” (75/83). It is this law of telephonic speed that explains Derrida’s peculiar insistence on the “for life.” Cixous can rightly be said to be “for life,” only to the extent that this power of life would not announce itself before what, grammatically, gives itself as a preposition, namely “for.” . . . This “for,” this pro- would become the prolegomenon of every thing, it would be said before any logos, it goes in all directions, that of finality or of destination, of the gift, donation and dativity, but also of substitution and replacement: this for that, this one in the place of the other. (HC 78/87) Mouth(piece) 143

With this puisse it is as if Cixous had to invent a new grammar, such that puissance, now derived and deriving its power from the jussive subjunctive, would no longer designate a potentiality—dynamis as opposed to energeia— but would be the trace that these other modalities and agencies presuppose (63–66/69–72). It would no longer have its origin in power, being, or having but would find its force in an order, wish, plea, or appeal: “ ‘would that you might live,’ . . . ‘would that you might hear me.’ ” The appeal to the ear is not trivial. Cixous’s “art of replacement” has a specifically sonorous quality. It is “a differential econohomonymy of the might [puissance]” in which a name, address, or meaning of a phoneme is dis- and re-placed on the spot at great speed (HC 67/73). In Cixous’s Anankè the quasi-homophonic effects turn the telephone into all kinds of fantastical, spectral creatures—(t)elephant, elephone, elephantom, telefaun—with cut-off “phoney connections [faux nœuds]” and “the ringing [sonnerie] of an olifant” (An 172). In Cixous’s writing, “animals are telephones and sometimes the other way around, and they multiply,” quips Derrida with more quasi-homophonic play, “in the prolifauny of all their animal, human, and divine metamorphoses” (HC 102). And in “Un vers à soie,” Derrida hears in Cixous’s “Savoir” a “braid of phonemes” that, if not always invisible, “primarily gives itself to be heard . . . knotted out of sight” (Ver 55/56). A series of vocables (voiles, voies, voix, voir, pouvoir, devoir, etc.) “set each other off endlessly along a chain of echoes.” In a phrase that, to my ear, communicates with the poikilon (multifarious, colorful, motley) character of democracy and thus highlights the differential, dispersive character of its vocality— these sonorous threads are described as “the warp of this text.” “Some . . . visible, others audible, in a skein of shards of words of all sorts” (38/35), there is an interlacing of shattered words. There is, in short, no pure voice (voix pure) (cf. Cir 80/83) that would then be excluded or assimilated—no voice except for, save for—but always multiple voices displacing and replacing one another—animal, inanimate, ghost, voice for voice (voix pour voix). Therein lies the power (pouvoir) of democracy.

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Excursus 3 S H A R O N H AY E S ’ S A D D R E S S E S

From August to November 1963, Pier Paolo Pasolini traveled the length of Italy from the industrial north to the rural south, microphone in hand ready to ask a wide range of people about their attitudes toward sexuality, posing questions about marriage, adultery, divorce, prostitution, homosexuality, and the “problems of sex,” somewhat ambivalently and ironically describing himself as “a kind of travelling salesman . . . not so as to launch a product but with the sincerest purpose of understanding and of reporting faithfully.”1 In his review of the resulting documentary, Comizi d’amore (Love Meetings), Foucault argues, on the contrary, that Pasolini apprehends a “premonitory and confused hesitation” around a new system of tolerance emerging in Italy at the time and thus sees Pasolini as a precursor to the political genealogy that occupied him during his last decade. A confessional subject is simultaneously interpellated and destabilized by Pasolini’s posture as an interviewer. The impertinence of his mercilessly intimate inquiries, the idiocy, as he sheepishly himself admits, of some of his questions, his evident boredom with trite responses, his impatience with reticent interviewees as he jumps in to offer them the right words, his struggle to be equanimous, his open mockery of those who, unlike the children who indulge in open games of dissimulation, take the invitation to confess at its word. Comizi d’amore shows Pasolini to be not simply a challenging interviewer but, more than that, a challenge to the logic of the interview itself, specifically to the supposed efficacy of the speech act that is here exceeded, contradicted even, by the gestures of the body. As Cesare Casarino argues, Pasolini’s fixation on the nonidentity of words and bodies, in its skepticism

toward the hegemony and transparency of the spoken word, leads him to capture a nondisciplinary eroticism incompatible with the confessional subject and which reveals itself most forcefully in the subalternity of children whose bodily gestures pervert the truth of the script they recite. Pasolini lovingly records the eroticism of those who have nothing at all to confess, of those whose truth will be no more than static interference in the voracious ears of confession.2 Casarino’s reference here to a certain voracity of listening might prick up any ears well attuned to Derrida’s description at the beginning of the first year of La bête et le souverain of the ears as the site of a voraciously devouring appropriation of the other: The beast is devouring and man devours the beast. Devourment and voracity. Devoro, vorax, vorator. It’s about mouth, teeth, tongue, and the violent rush to bite, engulf, swallow the other, to take the other into oneself too, to kill it or too mourn it. Might sovereignty be devouring? Might its force, its power, its greatest force, its absolute potency be, in essence and always in the last instance, a power of devourment? (BS1 46/23) The perversion of confession that Casarino discerns in some of Pasolini’s subjects is at once the disruption of sovereign listening. It is the “static interference” that interrupts the transparency of mouth-ear circuit that La voix et le phénomène exposes to exteriority. In other words, there is a noisy, sonic breach in the unbroken circuit of innermost living speech not simply because this confession is made to another but because the interior monologue is ruined from the outset. The work of artist Sharon Hayes, who has an ongoing interest in Pasolini’s Comizi d’amore, has repeatedly explored a twin strategy of destabilizing the position of the listening subject while meditating on an irreducible failure or inefficacy of speech acts. Known for working at the intersection of performance art and sociopolitical engagement, Hayes is constantly putting the performative in question in her street pieces and installations. What is of par ticular interest is the way in which she locates aurality at the center of these experiments, first and foremost the human voice but also the microphone as a prosthesis of the ear. With one ear on Casarino’s “interference” and the other on the author of La carte postale, I want to think of Hayes’s deconstruction of the political speech act as a quasi-telephonic 146

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address—one in which the transmission of a message and the connection between speaker and listener is always threatened by a noisy scattering of the signal or static on the line, as described in the preceding chapter. At the same time it has the kind of electric, reanimating power that Cixous associates with the telephone cord recalling the dead back to life. What makes listening such an appealing and equally fragile support for politics is that it is constantly in the process of scattering, much like the promiscuous dissemination of sound it wants to pin down. Derrida is getting at something like this irreducible dispersal of aurality whenever he speaks of “the ear of the other.” By this he means that my listening is never my own but is always already from the outset interrupted, penetrated, opened up to the other in a double sense. First, my listening always comes from the other, is summoned, called up by the quasi-telephonic address of the other. Second, as Peter Szendy points out, my listening therefore is always overheard, our call always under surveillance.3 I am unable to overhear my own listening without as it were borrowing the ears of the other, without a prosthesis like the microphone or a phone handset. When Derrida first introduces the notion in his reflections on Nietzsche’s ears, big and small, he associates the ear of the other with the state in what might be described as its interpellating function. You open wide the portals [pavilions] of your ears to admit the State, not knowing that it has already come under the control of reactive and degenerate forces. Having become all ears for this phonograph dog, you transform yourself into a high-fidelity receiver, and the ear—your ear which is also the ear of the other—begins to occupy in your body the disproportionate place of the “inverted cripple.” (Oto 107/35) If this attunement to the voice of the state or the Church turns the listener into a “long-eared ass” (and the reference returns just after the passage quoted above from La bête et le souverain), Derrida then seems to consider a more expropriative sense of this syntagma, now thinking of small, refined ears, rather than big, undiscriminating organs: “It is the ear of the other that signs. The ear of the other says me to me and constitutes the autos of my autobiography.”4 The sense of the ear of the other as the ear that I lend to and opens me to the other is situated here in a field of tension between two themes that are both of particular interest to Derrida and also prominent structuring elements in Hayes’s artistic praxis: address and performativity. Sharon Hayes’s Addresses

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The ear becomes “an organ for perceiving difference” (and not just a vehicle for ideological assimilation) because this listening is provoked by an address from or to the other. When, much later, the other will have perceived with a keen-enough ear what I will have addressed or destined to him or her, then my signature will have taken place. Here one may derive the political import of this structure and of this signature in which the addressee signs with his/her ear.5 The address calls for the signature of the addressee. The signature is a prominent theme in Derrida’s work for thinking about the deconstruction of sovereignty-as-authorship. Counterintuitively, the signature does not coincide with the time or subject of writing. Rather, it will have taken place much later, posthumously, on the side of the addressee, “on the side of him or her whose ear will be keen enough to hear my name, for example, or to understand my signature, that with which I sign.”6 Crucially, given Hayes’s commitment to testing the limits of performance and performativity, Derrida notes that what is at stake in the ear’s signing of the address is the performative efficacy of the signature and thus by extension of spoken address: The most impor tant thing about the ear’s difference, which I have yet to  remark, is that the signature becomes effective—performed and performing—not at the moment it apparently takes place, but only later, when ears will have managed to receive the message.7 In this way, the deconstruction of the ear’s sovereignty—its exposure to exteriority—is coupled with the deconstruction of speech as both sounding voice and performative. Hayes’s work puts pressure on both these notions to reveal the precariousness of the typical foundations of political agency. It complicates any straightforward faith in speaking up, having a voice, or being heard when both the voice and ear are shown to be always already compromised. One of Hayes’s video works titled Ricerche: three, which was shown at the Venice Biennale in 2013, explicitly models itself as a palimpsest over Pasolini’s exercise in cinema verité, taking its title from the four “ricerche” into which the film is divided. Emulating Pasolini’s interviewing style, Hayes asks a group of thirty-five students at Mount Holyoke, an all-women’s col148

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lege in Massachusetts, about their views and experiences of sexual expression and gender identity. Ricerche can be read from many different angles, not least how it interrogates group dynamics and collective agency, but what is especially intriguing is how, like Pasolini’s documentary, it poses questions about a certain mode of listening: that of passing a microphone around a group gathered outside, of an attunement to what is going on around and about in public space. This is a listening that specifically takes place via a technological prosthesis of the ears, which thus opens listening to another layer of exteriority or, more precisely, exposes the originary, irreducible prostheticity of a listening that has always already been supplemented and breached by the other. Hayes’s earlier work Parole, shown at the 2010 Whitney Biennial, puts the microphone as auricular prosthesis under even greater focus, evoking the opening voiceover from Chris Marker’s 1962 documentary, Le Joli Mai, cited by Hayes in another context: “This, the most beautiful city in the world. . . . One would like to track it like a detective with a telescope and a microphone.”8 Projected onto the wooden walls of a makeshift structure, Hayes’s four-channel video installation features as its protagonist a sound technician played by actor and performer Becca Blackwell—although “protagonist” and “played” are not quite the right terms here because Parole challenges traditional constructions of narrative and subjectivity. Writing about Katya Sander’s What Is Capitalism? (2003), Hayes announces her interest in a listening that destabilizes the position of the interviewer and the authority typically afforded by the microphone: When Sander takes the hand-held microphone . . . she does not assume the authentic identity of the interviewing subject and take the microphone as a tool of her trade but neither does she act the part of a character who interviews, carry ing the microphone as a prop. By taking the microphone . . . Sander activates a position, a form and a set of codes that lie beyond her—of any individual’s—embodiment.9 Something similar seems to be at work in Hayes’s Parole, except that the identity and character displaced is not that of an interviewer but of a sound technician who listens while remaining silent. Parole is an exercise in field recording rather than street interviewing, the microphone trained on a variety of sounds in often disconcertingly close proximity, such as when it tracks the movement of dancer almost to the point of obstructing Sharon Hayes’s Addresses

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her movement. If there is a recurring theme in Hayes’s work, it is the speech act as a site for the production of political agency, and yet here she displaces the focus onto ambient noise, such as the footsteps and breaths of the dancer, the whistling of a kettle, and the whirs and clicks of a cassette player as the technician listens to archival recordings, including Watergate testimonies about the sonic surveillance of the White House. In Parole we are listening to listening listening. The listener’s subject position unravels on account of this infinite regression of overhearing, which complicates the opposition between overhearer and overheard, thus leading to a generalization of overhearing in the sense that Derrida develops in Glas (Gl 234–35ai).10 At the same time, Hayes plays with an impossible placing of the ear. As she notes, the microphone enables the audience to get far closer to the source than the eye, shattering any consistent relation to space—an experience magnified in Parole by the impossibility of keeping track of each of the four channels as the narratives bounce between them with the video channels projected onto four walls. Speech nonetheless plays a decisive part in Parole. There is a lecture on sentimentality by Lauren Berlant, a theatrical reading by a trans man of a manifesto by radical feminist Anna Rühling, a speech by James Baldwin, and Hayes’s performance in Trafalgar Square of a “love address,” a genre that she has cultivated in a number of other works. The microphone also captures members of the queer community in Istanbul reading translations of Hayes’s address drawn from a site-specific collaborative action titled I Didn’t Know I Loved You for the 2009 Biennial. The speeches frequently overlap, producing a cacophony of voices, but the radical destabilization of speech and listening and of the mouth-ear circuit that takes place here cannot be fully grasped without understanding how Hayes challenges the supposed authority, transparency, and efficacy of the speech act in her body of work more broadly, not least in her signature love addresses. Many are spoken love letters she has composed herself, though drawing heavily on highly conventional rhetoric, but Hayes has also read or attempted to recite from memory a number of political speech acts drawn from history, including all thirty-six of Ronald Reagan’s addresses to the nation and Patty Heart’s radio addresses during her kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974. Related to these recitations, she has also stood on street corners in New York holding up placards bearing now-outdated slogans from protests in the 1960s and ’70s. Hayes distinguishes her practice 150

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of what she likes to call “re-speaking” from reenactment. If the latter is often reparative and restorative, with the goal of conserving or making something whole again, re-speaking works citationally, experimenting with the possibility of historical speech assuming new or renewed significance in the context of contemporary struggles. Hayes is upfront about the Benjaminian paradigm that inspires this practice, citing the “Über den Begriff der Geschichte” and arguing that the speeches she re-speaks rupture into the present like the flash of Jetztzeit (now-time).11 Hayes’s practice might also be associated with the citability of gesture that Benjamin names as one of the central achievements of Epic Theater in the 1939 version of his essay on that subject.12 It is no coincidence that Brecht is also an impor tant touchstone for Hayes. To sketch out Benjamin’s argument as Samuel Weber tracks it across the various versions of the essay during the 1930s, if the gesture in Brechtian theater is characterized by the interruption of action and teleology, Brecht moreover produces gestures insofar as they are citable.13 This citability, Benjamin argues, arises from the condition of gesturality itself which lies in iterability. Gesture does not simply interrupt something outside of itself but, crucially, “interrupts itself. ”14 Insofar as it thus differs from itself—insofar as it thereby consists in the possibility of being other than it is—gesture opens itself up to citation not as identical repetition but as the possibility of being transported elsewhere. Therein lies the political import of Hayes’s re-citations. The analysis of Hayes’s praxis of re-speaking may also be deepened by extending Benjamin’s notion of citability into deconstructive modes of thinking. Besides Derrida’s notion of iterability, Nancy, in an essay on narrative and music titled “Récit, récitation, récitatif,” develops a theory of recitation as this realm of self-differentiation that Benjamin locates in the gesture: Recitation is this hyphen [trait d’union], this little line drawn from before to after and from inside or in-self to outside or for-self that are the two poles of the infinite torsion by which “one” looks for oneself and without ever finding oneself still stretches out and draws itself out, outlines itself and withdraws, is inspired and expires. (RRR 24/250). Nancy goes on to remind us, as he does elsewhere in À l’écoute (E 69/36), that the word “citation” comes from the Latin citare, meaning to set in motion, to set vibrating even, as in incite, excite, or the sense of solliciter in Sharon Hayes’s Addresses

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French which means to shake the whole thing up. It “incites a ‘saying’ [that] is not content with ‘saying’ in the sense of uttering, expressing, telling events that took place. It makes them occur, it makes them come forth [évenir]” (RRR 24/250). Or, as Hayes will describe her work’s subtle departure from performance as such, re-speaking is “something like an enactment of a series of performatives rather than performance.”15 In the same email conversation with the dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer, Hayes cites Austin, but I want to suggest that the performative as it plays out in her work is rather more Derridean to the extent that it continually challenges the supposed efficacy of the speech act. The emphasis on iterability is part of a broader set of strategies that expose the performative’s self-de(con)struction, exhibiting its originary and irreducible tendency toward pervertibility and failure. This is of apiece with the mutual contamination of singularity and repetition in Hayes’s work. Even as she highlights the iterability of speech acts, she stresses their singularity as part of her commitment to the embodiment of the voice and listening. Hayes observes a provisional distinction between an actor whose character can be played by multiple others of whom no one is an original and the performer who is “singularly attached to the performance they enact.”16 Performance, she goes on to propose, is “a singular moment in time” that is “both irreducible and can also be understood iteratively” as “a coalescing of things,” of two moments “stuttering against one another.” For Hayes, it is always possible that what appears to be repeatable turns out to be unrepeatable, and yet her actions seem to suggest that the opposite is equally true, thus keeping the very undecidability between singularity and repetition that is at stake in deconstruction. Even or especially when she is reciting the love addresses that she composed, using a genre that strongly implies the production of spontaneous subjectivity, there is the sense, insofar as she is trying to recall from memory a precomposed text, that she is reciting someone else’s words, that even her “own” words come from the other. In re-speaking the historical speeches of others and also in inciting others to repeat them or her own speeches, Hayes shows that the singularity of the voice that she wants to uphold as the locus of political agency is thinkable only because of the iterability thematized so prominently in her practice. In this way Hayes’s work advances a strikingly similar point to the one that Derrida makes about the date in Celan’s poetry in Schibboleth where he argues that the unrepeatable singularity of the poem would remain 152

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mute and inaudible unless it risks losing itself in becoming readable and thus transcribed, exported, deported, and expropriated into other contexts (Sch 18–19/6). This has significant consequences for how we think about the politics of the voice and of listening. In the context of the current crises of  hegemony and political representation, the rhetoric of “speaking up,” “making one’s voice heard,” and “listening to the people” plays into the hands of the ruling capitalist class because it puts naïve faith in the efficacy of the speech act and in the voice as the transparent, self-sufficient support of political agency. It presupposes an unbroken circuit between mouth and ear and puts about the fiction that any disruption to this sovereignty is a belated accident: a failure to seize one’s voice or to listen to the other. But it is a mistake to imagine that going unheard is the falling short of an ideal of unconditional audibility. Rather, what Hayes’s practice demonstrates is that the voice, no less than the ear, is pervertible from the outset. The phantasm, in Derridean parlance, of an ear that would fully internalize what it hears is part of a strategy to safeguard sovereignty—whether subjective or popu lar—from the pervertibility that besets it from the start. A metaphysics of the voice consists in positing an outside to this digestibility and intelligibility—the silence or cry of the subaltern other which is excluded precisely so that it might be all the more readily incorporated and thus managed as an internal foreign substance. Hence it gives rise to such slogans as “shattering the silence” on the part of the oppressed or “hearing the cry” from the political class, both of which remain impotent because they fail to expose or challenge the underlying structure.17 This colonialism of the voice is an attempt to contain the originarily dispersive, pervertible character of aurality. What appears to be “my” voice or “my” ear is always already in the process of dissolving into a bestial cry, a tin ear, or muteness, and of scattering into distraction, repetition, substitution, or prosthesis. The exclusionary logics deciding whose voice gets heard and redrawing the limits of inaudibility are not distortions or corruptions of political speech but symptomatic reactions against the irreducible corruptibility and promiscuity of the sonorous. The voice is always already compromised. The deconstruction of the performative and of the sovereignty of the voice that takes place in Hayes’s work is not limited to its iterability. In moving beyond the confines of the theatrical performance genre and “into the streets”—a rallying cry uttered in one of her addresses performed over a series of occasions in Manhattan titled I March In The Parade Of Liberty, But Sharon Hayes’s Addresses

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FIGURE 3. Sharon Hayes, I March In The Parade Of Liberty, But As Long As I Love You I’m Not Free, 2008. Performance, The New Museum, New York, N.Y., December 1, 2007–January 27, 2008. Photo by Andrea Geyer. Courtesy of Sharon Hayes and Tanya Leighton Gallery.

As Long As I love You I’m Not Free (2007–8) shown in figure 3—Hayes also relinquishes the demand to entertain an audience or even to speak to one altogether. Her love letter is to an anonymous addressee drawing on generic rhetoric from that genre, but soon the language of street protest increasingly breaks in, leading to what Kris Cohen has described as a “broken genre.”18 Departing from the New Museum, Hayes then stops seemingly arbitrarily on random street corners and lifts the megaphone to her lips. Her words prick up the ears of the odd passerby, but with the exception of a small group who had followed her from the museum, her performances do not presuppose or interpellate an audience as such. These are letters both highly intimate in genre and directed at everyone and no one. They are addresses without an addressee. Cohen reads this as a kind of impersonality that reflects the increasing erosion of reciprocity in contemporary digital modalities of communication. Without flattening this historical specificity, I prefer to think of these performances as exposing the originarily aporetic character of address in general that is undeniably exacerbated and put to work under neoliberal capital. 154

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Derrida describes this adestinality of address according to what in La carte postale he dubs, in a riff on Freud, the “postal principle.” By this he means that “a letter can always not arrive at its destination” (CP 454/444) with the consequence that, even once it does arrive, it is always at risk of going astray, of being dispersed or scattered. At first blush this seems puzzling, but consider that the addressee might have died by the time the letter arrives, the postage might have been unpaid or, more mundanely, the message might be misunderstood. Moreover, following the logic of iterability discussed above, Derrida observes that the address is always in excess of the unique addressee insofar as, in order to be read by any one person, it is necessarily receivable by others; even if it were written in secret code it is still decipherable. This is why, for Derrida, every letter is a postcard and for Hayes by analogy, every love letter is always also protest talk. In fact, the public addresses are explicitly acknowledged to be last-ditch efforts after frustrated attempts to get through. They speak constantly of the aporetic character of address: In Everything Else Has Failed! Don’t You Think It’s Time For Love? (2007), she starts by saying, “I am worried that my letters are not reaching you or yours are not reaching me. It is making me anxious.” But they also profess an undiluted faith in the irreducible openness of the ears. Almost all the letters include a version of Lacan’s much-quoted quip that “the ears are the only orifice that cannot be closed,” which Hayes also reproduced in a limited-edition silkscreen print in 2008.19 Or, take, for example, the opening of the letter in I March In The Parade Of Liberty read on street corners of Manhattan. In the second letter of a two-part piece performed with a group of 100 people at the Republic and Democratic National Conventions in 2008, it is not simply that the emails and calls do not reach their destination but that the addressee herself dissolves into the crowd. Spoken aloud rather than written and ever desirous of keeping the connection alive, Hayes’s addresses might be described as telephonic in the sense developed in the conversations—many of them conducted over the phone— between Derrida and Cixous. Telephony in general, and not just the technological device, here appears as that which finds the waywardness or destinerrance of the postal principle right at the heart of what is meant above all to safeguard intimacy, directness, and authenticity: the voice. As Derrida puts it in an essay on Joyce’s Ulysses, Sharon Hayes’s Addresses

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a telephone interiority, then: for before any apparatus bearing that name in modernity, the telephonic technē is at work within the voice . . . a mental telephony which, inscribing the far, distance, différance, and spacing in the phonē, at the same time, institutes, prohibits and disrupts the so-called monologue. (UG 82/52). This telephony disrupts all properness and sovereignty—rupturing the inviolability of the home, for example, as Derrida notes in De l’hospitalité (DH 49–51/51)—in every instance ensuring that the subject cannot constitute itself except by way of the other’s non(presence), of the (im)possibility of their receiving the call. In short, there is no unique self-identical subject without an open connection to the other and to other others—no voice without the ear of the other. This connection to the other is itself at risk of corruption. Noting the resonances of telephony for psychoanalysis (Freud, for example, likened the unconscious of the analyst to the telephone receiver), Elissa Marder notes how the telephone represents a pathological way to remain connected to the maternal object whose originary separation and loss remains incompletely mourned, a way to keep mother infinitely on hold as if the telephone line were an umbilical cord.20 In Parole, the microphone plays this role of the telephone receiver, answering the call of the address, and in I March In The Parade Of Liberty, Hayes declares, “What holds me to this microphone is you.” A technological prosthesis for that lost relationship, telephony is a desire for and simulation of presence while also the dispersal and spacing that is the condition of (im)possibility of any connection with the other. The telephone allows one to regulate the distance of the other, avoiding the extremes of loss or fusion. For Freud, though, the inability to let go of the lost object foremost expresses itself as a desire to incorporate it by devouring it. (Recall Derrida’s fixation on the devouring ear.) Ingested as a foreign body, buried within a crypt within the psyche, the maternal other threatens to return in the guise of the superego. Perhaps this is how we might understand the breakthrough of protest slogans such as “Out of the closets and into the streets,” “ACT UP/FIGHT BACK,” and “What do we want? When do we want it?”—as injunctions that come from the other and as such have always already compelled and interrupted any address. For this reason, Derrida will at other times associate the telephone less with hospitality and the maternal lifeline 156

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than with the perils of censorship, control, and subjection (DH 47–49/49), or with the state’s power to pardon those on death row (PM1 84/49), now approaching from the other side of the line that links life and death. When the sound technician’s microphone in Parole hangs on Hayes’s voice, what is at stake is the possibility of a praxis of listening that would not subordinate the other to any kind of mastery. But Hayes’s work proposes that the voice be necessarily pervertible and that an address must be at risk of going unheard. Without that, there is no chance of letting the other be in its alterity. The voice on the telephone comes to the ear unseen—soundstudies scholars would call it acousmatic—but I want to think of it, more specifically as dorsal in the sense that David Wills uses this term, as a sound that takes one by surprise from behind, as if the sudden ring of the phone (“un coup de téléphone,” as Derrida says in Ulysse Gramophone) were to make the listener jump.21 To safeguard the singularity of this event of other, it is also necessary that they remain in some sense unreachable or that there be static interference on the line. Immediately after noting the telephonic technē at work in the voice, Derrida associates this telephonic interruption and polytelephonicity with a certain redoubling that inheres at the heart of performativity: with “the ‘yes, yes,’ that the theoreticians of the speech act propose as examples of the performative and that Molly repeats at the end of the so-called monologue” (UG 82–83/52). Hayes’s praxis of re-speaking, rather like this re-spoken “yes,” is less negation of the speech act than it is the double affirmation that both gives it its force and also threatens to shatter it. Yes?

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4 A USE OF EARS

EAR FOR EAR

When Derrida and Cixous are on the phone, they anticipate that there will be many others listening in on the line and overhearing their conversation.1 In Insister, Cixous recalls a prediction Derrida makes in H. C. pour la vie that the role of the telephone in her work will become the subject of academic theses. I imagine one day, he says, researchers, students will write theses on the telephone chez Cixous and chez Derrida, that is, in the texts, because there are many telephones in the texts, they are everywhere, everywhere, and thus I imagine when the telephone starts to become archaic, people will say: there, in the era of telephones those two wrote a lot on the telephone, he says this to me on the telephone. (I 99/149) These remarks can be understood in a general sense as reflections on the way in which sonic surveillance both conditions and penetrates the inviolability of the home via telecommunications technologies: From the moment when a public authority, a State, this or that State power, gives itself or is recognized as having the right to control, monitor, ban exchanges that those doing the exchanging deem private, but that the State can intercept since these private exchanges cross public space and become available there, then every element of hospitality gets disrupted. My “at home” was also constituted by the field of access via my

telephone line (through which I can give my time, my word, my friendship, my love, my help, to whomever I wish, and so invite whomever I wish to come into my home, first in my ear . . .) Now if my “home,” in principle inviolable, is also constituted, and in a more and more essential, interior way, by my phone line, but also by my e-mail, but also by my fax, but also by my access to the Internet, then the intervention of the State becomes a violation of the inviolable, in the place where inviolable immunity remains the condition of hospitality. (DH 49–51/51; emphasis mine) If inviolability is the condition of hospitality, it is also the case that there is no hospitality without an originary violation, without letting the other in and, before every thing else, into my ear. There is only the possibility of a home and of hospitality—of the proper—because the many cables under the sea have carried the voices of my friends into my ear. Moreover, only because there is always already this breach and penetration is there something that I call my ear. Which is all to say that the ear is, in Derrida’s phrase, always “the ear of the other” (Oto 177/35). The possibility of being heard comes to me from the other, who lends me their ear to listen to my voice on the telephone, and hence from other others who lend their ears in a chain or braid of ears, each taking the place of another. And my ear, which carries the voice of the friend at the other end of the phone line, is on loan to the other. It is not only that there is no voice without the ear of the other—that, as Derrida argues in La voix et le phénomène, there is no hearing-oneself-speak without deferral and displacement—or that there is no ear without the voice of the friend which, in an apostrophic interpellation, calls me to listen. Furthermore, there is no listening that would be mine without overhearing, for my “own” listening remains inaudible to me without the other lending their ear. This is the thrust of Peter Szendy’s argument in Sur écoute which extends the logic of autoimmunity to the field of listening. According to what I want to call otoimmunity, the expansion of the power of listening, like that of life and of différance (G 191/131), leads to listening restricting itself in order to preserve itself. As Szendy frames it, the more listening tends toward a total surveillance or an absolute “panacousticism” (after Foucault’s reading of Bentham’s panopticon), the more it comes up against a “punctum surdum” or mute point modeled on Derrida’s account of the quasi-transcendental as A Use of Ears

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a blind spot or point of optical powerlessness in Mémoires d’aveugle.2 The more powerful listening becomes, the more this overhearing surpasses itself and tries to hear too much, and the more it discloses its condition in unpower, in an impotence of listening or inaudibility. More hearing is no more hearing (plus d’écoute). That hearing is always this over-hearing means that it tends to wear itself out to the point of exhaustion. To extend Szendy’s analysis, I therefore borrow the notion of usure from Derrida’s “La mythologie blanche” to convey the coincidence of this erosion and bleaching of sensation with the usurious production of a surplus that occurs whenever we make use of our ears.3 This also allows me to connect this question of over(-)hearing—as surveillance and as excessive, worn-out hearing—both with metaphoricity, as the animal life of the letter, and also with Agamben’s (metaphorical) use of “use” to denote a relation to life beyond the horizon of biopolitics. One way to think of this intensification in use of the ears is to articulate a difference between hearing and listening. This tends to be somewhat obscured when overhearing in English (re)translates surécoute in French.4 It could be that we only begin to use our ears when we cross an almost imperceptible and mobile threshold between passive reception and active attention. Hearing comes first—is even unavoidable, for we have no earlids—and then we use our ears to turn it into listening. Alternatively, listening could be described as a predisposition to hear, a listener someone who is ready to use their ears, waiting for sound to come their way which they might then hear.5 Or listening (l’écoute) might turn into hearing (entendre) only once it begins to make sense of resonance.6 Weaving together these two interpretations, we might say that hearing is potential listening and listening potential hearing. An Agambenian reading might understand the use of the ears as a binary machine that transforms hearing into listening and listening into hearing, the potentiality of one turning into the actuality of the other. If hearing and listening are each in some sense an intensification of the other—a tightening, a sharpening of focus—the use of ears might be, thinking of the French idiom, to stretch the ear (tendre l’oreille). If the ears are always already straining to hear, there is a risk of an excessive intensification, of stretching the ear too far—of over-hearing. No wonder that in “Tympan” Derrida (M III/xii) wonders about the threat of perforation! This point of aural failure is listening’s condition of (im)possibility. One explanation might be that I hear only to the extent that I am capable of not 160

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hearing. Other wise I would be bound to hear. Only because it’s possible not to use our ears is there a gap between hearing and listening—and also between hearing and potential listening, and between listening and potential hearing. (I can be ill-disposed to listen but nonetheless exercise use of my ears on occasion, or I can be physiologically deaf and yet attend to your every word.) But Derrida rejects this Heideggerian-Agambenian appropriation and mastery of the impossible by an “I can.” If one takes seriously the discussion of Heidegger’s Walten (an untranslatable term whose chief meanings are to rule, govern, dominate, prevail over) as hyper-sovereignty in the final seminar to which I shall turn momentarily the only conclusion to be drawn is that the division between heard and unheard, between listening and hearing, is not preceded by any “I can hear,” not even in the form of “I can not hear,” but by a more radical inaudibility that is itself the effect of what I call otoimmunity. The possibilization of the impossible, no less than the phantasm of total surveillance, is an attempt on the part of metaphysics to master and contain the shattering, dispersive power of listening, with its multiple crossed wires and the potentially infinite drift of its prostheticity. It is to this power of replaceability and substitutability of ear for ear that Cixous refers with the notion of a mighty puisse, the power of this subjunctive would that I might. If I were to list the many scholarly ears overhearing Derrida’s conversations with Cixous, it would be less a literature survey than literature (as) surveillance. Footnotes would be the traces of writing as generalized wiretapping, the bugs punctuating the text. As discussed in Chapter  3, Cixous’s art of replacing at telephonic speed—not just one homonym or homophone for another, sound for sound, but listening for listening—points to the “for” that, in Derrida’s words, is the “prolegomenon of every thing” and that “conditions the meaning of ‘life’ ” without being an ontological or transcendental condition (HC 78/87). This is because Cixous’s “for life,” as Derrida reads her, is in no way a being-for-life on the model of Heidegger’s famous phrase. Cixous and Derrida’s reconfiguration of the relation between life and death, and of the relation to the Heideggerian question of being, must be analyzed carefully in order to imagine a use of ears that wears thin the biopolitical limit—which means beyond any Sein zum Todes (beingtoward-death) or any Todestrieb. To do this will require tracing patiently the connections and tensions between Derrida’s reading of Cixous’s mighty power of puisse, the hyper-sovereignty of Heidegger’s Walten, and Freud’s A Use of Ears

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Bemächtigungstrieb (drive to power and mastery) and then showing how the use of the ear is bound up with these powers of life and death by way of the replaceability and transferability or metaphoricity. WA LT E N

If for Heidegger, a certain being-for stands as an undeconstructible origin, Cixous’s for-life “is not a being for life symmetrically opposed to the famous Sein zum Tode, being-toward-death, as its other side” (HC 78/88). Here, Derrida apparently concedes the point of debate in their telephone conversations. It is not that she is on side of life and he on the side of death, with two opposing sides that one can move toward, but that there is only one side and “every thing happens on the side of ‘for.’” One must remain on this side from which emerges the opposition between this side and beyond, between life and death. Heidegger’s mistake, as Derrida sees it, is not to recognize that this side is life, “not life for life against death, life in exchange for death, life for death, but life for life” (112/129) “living death, living it for oneself, for the other, and for life” (79/89). This attempt in H. C. pour la vie to distinguish the power of this for-life from the antonym of being-toward- death is productively read alongside Derrida’s remarks on Walten and the death in his final seminar, especially the very final and at first blush perplexing questions with which he concludes: The question, that was the question of the seminar, remains entire: namely that of knowing who can die. To whom is this power given or denied? Who is capable of death, and, through death, of imposing failure [mettre en échec] on the super- or hyper-sovereignty of Walten? (BS2 397/290) The immediate context for this puzzling question is a comment made by Heidegger about “an absolute limit of Gewalt or of Gewalttätigkeit [force or violence]” (396/290). At stake, Derrida tells us, is what has been “besieging the seminar” throughout: “death itself, if there be any [s’il y en a].” Warning that he will not offer an interpretation that Heidegger would recognize as his own, Derrida turns to his comment: “Nur an einem [underlined] scheitert alle Gewalt tätigkeit unmittelbar. (There is only one thing against which all violence-doing, violent action, violent activity, immediately shatters.) . . . 162

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Das ist der Tod (it is death).” Derrida immediately homes in on the last word of the first sentence. For Heidegger, the limit or “outbidding” of Gewalt and of Walten, this shattering against death, is immediate (unmittelbar). Death thus appears as something unmediated, directly accessible, appropriable in the hand even—and this will form much of the problem. But what does Derrida mean when he asks who is capable of death and hence of putting the hyper-sovereignty of Walten in check? To tackle this, it is helpful to have some understanding of the significant role that the concept of Walten plays throughout the second year of La bête et le souverain. This difficult to translate term, which is typically rendered as “to reign, govern, rule,” or more forcefully, “to dominate or prevail,” denotes an absolute power or autarchic sovereignty, but it also has a diversity of meaning that Derrida explores. Extemporizing in the second session, he aligns Walten with force, power, potency, potentiality, authority, and violence (BS2 72n2/39n12) and, in improvised remarks in the fifth session, again explains that his interest lay especially in the “chain linking walten, können, vermögen” (184n/123n18). The second session endeavors to connect Walten to physis or nature, for which it is arguably a better translation than the typical Wachstum (growth), and to logos. Later sessions take up the complicated link to Austrag and to tragen more generally (a topic to which I shall return). There are a number of elements worth highlighting to aid in the interpretation of the final enigmatic question of the seminar. First, the link to physis in Heidegger’s Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik allows Derrida to read Walten as a “superhuman violence” over which the human has no power or mastery but which can in fact crush and dominate humanity (74–75/41). Second, it is described as “a force of which one can say neither that it bears life nor that it bears death,” although both force and violence are inadequate terms to the extent that they tend to turn Walten into a thing (147/94). Lastly, Derrida will locate Walten as an archi-originary force before any determination or opposition, including, for instance, any onto-theological-political determination (158/104). As to to the question of who is capable of death and hence of limiting this force, Derrida’s suspicions about potentiality and capacity suggest that there is a simple answer: There is no one capable of death and Walten therefore cannot be held in check.7 This would mean that Walten were absolute or infinitely infinite différance, surviving beyond death without end. But this absolute Walten, a force that would violently prevail and crush every thing, A Use of Ears

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would also have to prevail over itself, which would lead to its destruction. If it is to survive and prevail, it must necessarily keep itself in check and shatter itself. The force that makes it vibrate at its natu ral frequency and splinter into shards is its own self-resistance. This is why I describe the power of listening as otoimmunity. For any force of listening to survive it necessarily restrains itself from totalization, which means that it divides and disseminates itself across multiples prosthetic ears. It is because Walten, on Derrida’s reading, is, like Cixous’s puisse, not a thing; it is not. For Heidegger, the relation to death has the form of a “a being-able, a power (Können, Vermögen),” a “power to have access to the as such of death,” of nonbeing, nothingness, impossibility and so forth, a power that defines what is proper to human life and separates it from animal life. It is Walten that opens up the access to “Being as Being, Being as Being not being one ‘as such’ among others, but the possibility of the ‘as such’ in general” (183– 84/122–23). But death is the impossibility of any (more) relation, including and above all to the “as such.” This means that from a Derridean standpoint death is the impossibility of any relation “as such” and thus the impossibility of a relation to death “as such.” Whereas for Heidegger death is the ultimate possibility, it is for Derrida the impossibility of all possibility. It is the coup de force before any division between possible and impossible on account of which possibility dislocates, splinters, and shatters itself. There is not, then, another sovereignty beyond Walten. Rather, Walten is always already a hyper-hyper-sovereignty—an overuse of force, if you like, which necessarily wears itself out. Cixous’s mighty power of replacement should be understood from this perspective. If the power to replace is compatible with the irreplaceable (the unique, singular), likewise Cixous’s “I have the power” is inseparable from the confession of unpower that follows: “without being able to do anything” (HC 114/131–32). This mighty power is “omnipotence as impotence, the experience of the impossible” which arises “where I can do nothing, where the indicative power of the ‘I can’ risks the experience and experils its limit” (115/133). This puisse is always already lifted, volé in the sense of stolen and flown away (116/134). This is because the power of might is not mine but is given like grace such that “I myself am the unique substitute of a letter, of an order, of an injunction, of a responsibility, of a heritage that I am/follow to the letter” (114/132). The same should be said of the “metonymic braid” of ears, each of which receives listening like a bene-

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diction. Listening is in fact nothing other than this power of beneficence, which is also why it is so readily displaced. Addressing the question of sovereignty, Laura Odello observes that deconstruction turns on the interlacing of two enigmas: on the one hand, of life and, on the other, of “a power, a potency, an ‘I can’ ” (BS1 346/257).8 (And one ought not forget that Agamben has defined his project, in the shadow of deconstruction, as a bid to think the meaning of “I can” and of “I speak,” and that these two drivers may arguably be considered “in their deepest intuition, the same, as being different facets of a single question,” as Leland de la Durantaye proposed.9) Odello goes on to suggest that the twin imperative throughout Derrida’s oeuvre has been the deconstruction of life as power and of power as life. The increasing interest in the later texts in figures beyond sovereignty, of hyperbolic sovereignty—including the lexicon of Walten, which had already caught Derrida’s attention in Force de loi and “L’oreille de Heidegger” but comes to take over the final seminar in unanticipated ways—is vital to this project and specifically to the thought of the possible as im-possible or im-potent.10 Derrida emphatically situates Cixous’s mighty power within this horizon: Everywhere she assays a mighty power of the “might,” which might have nothing to do any longer with the possible and with power. It would at least be older and younger than them, taking them and raking itself beyond the possible, beyond power, and their dynasty. As if this omnipotence were in league with the im-possible. It would do the impossible. It would therefore attest to unpower, as well as to vulnerability and death—hence the magic of what, by a stroke of writing, does the impossible. (HC 94/107) In an earlier essay devoted specifically to Walten, Odello associates the hyper-sovereignty of Walten with the differential play of forces, which, like Cixous’s telephonic power of substitution, resists the notion of a unified or selfsame force without differences between forces.11 Linking the deconstruction of totality to that of power, Derrida says of Cixous’s for-life: “Whole” does not so much signify the whole totality or totalization as the event of this “taking place,” this substitution of the irreplaceable, this generative succession of the alliance or of “fiding [fiancé]” in all A Use of Ears

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the occurrences, all the times of the unique each time: here now, in the instant, on the spot, at this very moment for whoever gives themselves wholly or the moment [sur l’heure pour qui se donne toute à l’heure]. When it is “for life,” “life” is the whole of life or nothing, and this “whole” in the whole of life derives as little from a logic of totality or of totalization as the “mighty power” of the “might” derives from a dynastic logic of power, of the possible or of potentiality, of the “I may” or “it is possible” of this potentate. (HC 84/95) What is interesting in this passage is how the deconstruction of sovereign totality and power is addressed to the question of the irreplaceable, the singular, the unconditional, the undeconstructible. Odello is right to ask why the beyond of sovereignty should still be described as sovereign, especially since Derrida has spoken on multiple occasions of the need to separate, however intimately intertwined, “the drive of sovereignty from the exigence of unconditionality as two symmetrically associated terms,” and to deconstruct “sovereignty in the name of unconditionality” so as to arrive at a thought of “an im-possible that would not be simply negative” (V 197/143). This is what Derrida finds in Cixous’s puisse, which might be described as the unconditional and undeconstructible animating power in whose name conditional and conditioned displacements and differentials of life force take place. Unconditionality, then, would not be something other than sovereignty but the event that opens and gives (even forgives) place “through the replaceability of the irreplaceable” (HC 67/74). An alliance between sovereignty and unconditionality would be premised upon the indivisibility they purportedly share, but Cixous’s thought reveals that the “sovereign act of grace” is only sovereign insofar as this pardoning gift comes from the other and cannot be mastered, which is to say that it is already divided, shattered by its “own” force (HC 110/127). Similarly, sovereignty is not itself but “a hyperbolic and irrepressible upping of the ante,” and hence it only has potency to the extent that it is always already surpassing and replacing itself with something superior (BS1 345/256–57). In a passage from the first year of La bête et le souverain Derrida explicitly links this outbidding to a differential—or, more precisely, a transferential— model of power, suggesting that the idea of an absolute, unconditional sovereignty is only ever a phantasm, the power of fiction. “What is at stake in politics,” he contends, 166

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is not only an alternative between sovereignty and nonsovereignty but also a struggle for sovereignty, transfers and displacements or even divisions of sovereignty, then one must begin not from the pure concept of sovereignty but from concepts such as drive, transference, transition, translation, passage, division. . . . Rather than on sovereignty itself, which at bottom perhaps never exists as such, as purely and simply itself, since it is only a hyperbolic excess beyond every thing—and so it is nothing, a certain nothing (whence its affinity with effects of fiction and simulacrum)—[rather than on sovereignty itself], it is on these properly mediate words and concepts, impure like middles or mixtures (words and concepts such as transfer, translation, transition, tradition, inheritance, economic distribution, etc.) that we must bring the charge of the question and of decisions that are always median, medial transactions, negotiations in a relation of force between drives to power that are essentially divisible. (BS1 388/290–91) Indeed, the quasi-concept of Walten might also be situated within this transferential economy. Proposing that Walten be heard as another nonsynonymous substitution for différance, dissemination, autoimmunity, and so forth, Michael Naas reasons that “Walten, like différance, will have thus been open from the start to its own reinscription and replacement, a quasi-master term destined from the start to give way to the other, that is, to the movement of différance, to the reign or sway of the other’s Walten.”12 From this perspective Walten might also then be associated with Cixous’s Toutepuissance-autre, heard in counterpoint with the self-determining omnipotence (toute-puissance) of sovereignty (PM 345/118), where it is the self that is other than itself and thus prevailing over, resisting, and yielding to itself. This accounts for how the vocabulary of Walten not only proliferates in Heidegger’s texts but also disseminates in multiple directions (physis, logos, Austrag, polémos, and so on). To the extent that Walten is therefore an example of what it names, it re-marks itself. It is Walten, argues Odello, that “seems to produce a certain displacement, to open a certain gap in the very notion of sovereignty.”13 She compellingly links this differantial conception of power to the notion of stricture discussed in Chapter 3, where it was connected to the negotiation and retuning of more or less tightly bound telecommunications wires carrying voices under the sea. Odello also makes the impor tant connection between the deconstruction of sovereignty and the A Use of Ears

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Bemächtigungstrieb or drive to mastery, tracing this back to the much earlier “Spéculer—sur ‘Freud,’ ” in which, as Francesco Vitale and Mauro Senatore have shown, the figure of binding and unbinding (Freud’s Bindung) plays an impor tant role.14 It is doubtless the case that a surge in interest in Derrida’s relation to the question of life and to the life sciences and especially the publication of La vie la mort has prompted new readings of “Spéculer,” which is an elaborated version of the last four sessions of the seminar published earlier in La carte postale. There have also been renewed efforts to bring out the importance of Freud’s theory of the drives for Derrida’s reading of Foucault in “Être juste avec Freud” and the arguments about cruelty in États d’âme de la psychanalyse, as well as deconstruction’s relationship to psychoanalysis more broadly.15 Odello does not develop the connection between the deconstruction of sovereignty and the Bemächtigungstrieb but instead returns to the themes of phonologocentrism of Derrida’s early work. For the purposes of this book, however, this provides an important bridge for demonstrating aurality’s entanglement with debates around the drive to mastery, power, and domination, as the quasi-transcendental drive to drive of all drives. It would be a question of implicating sound and listening in the shift that Senatore advocates from sovereignty to a psychoanalytical struggle of the drives as the basis for developing political analyses.16 The final excursus explores how this intuition is at work in the sound activism of collective Ultra-red, but for now I want to observe that these are not on two opposing sides but on the same side insofar as sovereignty is already in a struggle with itself for hegemony—which is to say, to displace and replace itself. Furthermore, anticipating a detailed discussion of “L’oreille de Heidegger,” I want to touch briefly on Heidegger’s understanding of logos not simply as a prevailing or violent force but, moreover, as what discloses Walten—in short, as what makes audible this power before and beyond any determination of power. In the second session of the final seminar, Derrida reflects on how Heidegger does not exactly identify Walten with logos but instead defines the logos as that which reveals Walten as such, bringing it to speech (Anspruch), as a “self-authorizing performative” that “liberates this Walten—and this physis, this physis-as-Walten from its Verborgenheit, its hidden, dissimulated, silenced being” (BS2 75–76/42; emphasis mine). The logos gives access not merely to “what reigns or dominates (das Waltendende) but what reigns as such, inasmuch as it reigns: ‘sondern das Waltende in sei168

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nem Walten oder das Walten des Waltenden’ [but what prevails in its prevailing or the prevailing of what prevails]” (77/42–43). Revealed in the logos is the as such which is inaccessible to animals and whose deconstruction unfolds over the course of Derrida’s engagement with Heidegger and culminates in the final enigmatic question about the capacity for the impossible. Unlike the logos, Cixous’s puisse is an event in itself and dislocates any as such. It is “the performativity of a performative that precedes and conditions any other performative and therefore any event.” In an incredibly rich passage, Derrida continues: There is no performative that does not imply a “would that might happen/arrive,” “would it, he, she, might happen/arrive.” But there are events that are not connected to performatives, and these are even the most event-like events, those that happen or arrive to us, and the arrivants who happen/arrive to us where we do not perform anything any longer, despite any possible performative: such is the place of the necessary impossible, of anankè [the title of a book by Cixous on unconscious drives and transference] or of tukhè, of fate, of impotence, which is not the opposite of the possible and of potency. Neither a promise nor a messianic expectation, the un-formed, not even my monstrosity: life death, the exhaustion [épuisement] of the sun before its time or a definitive prosthesis of the sun. (HC 116/134) What is fascinating here is that the event is not death, and especially not the appropriable death whose possibility constitutes my proper being. Rather, it is life-death beyond appropriation, beyond even the monstrosity of the monster that is appropriated as soon as it is named as such,17 and hence beyond the sides (of life and death, of normal and abnormal/monstrous life) between which the logos and biopolitics distribute the dissemination of lifedeath. It is perhaps even beyond this beyond of life-death, with this idea of the exhaustion of the sun even before the daytime, the end of the world before any bringing into the world as such. I will strive to connect this substitution of prosthetic life for always already worn-out (usé) life to every thing that Derrida and Cixous will have said about tragen (to carry) and austragen (to bring to term) in relation of the archi-originary power of Walten and also in relation to the usure (effacement, épuisement, effritement) of metaphor (M 250/210), to the over-carrying (übertragen) of metaphor and to the possibility of carry ing the other after the end of the world (BS2 359/259–60), A Use of Ears

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after the exhaustion of a world that “is going very badly, it wears as it grows” (SM 129/130). Not only the performativity of the speech act but moreover the act of listening will have to be rethought along these (telephone) lines, for it is the ear that above all has a proper relation to the silenced violence of the “as such” and is first to breach the inviolability of the proper. D R I V E TO B I N D, B O U N D TO L I S T E N

Cixous, as we have seen in Chapter 3, figures the vital bond between life and death—the bond that recalls the dead to life—as a telephone line that carries the voice at great speed over extended distances (OR 20–21). Recalling how Cixous transforms this bond into a bound of grace, it will be necessary, moreover, to connect this binding and unbinding to the Freudian notion of Bindung that Derrida takes as a jumping-off point for his discussion of the Bemächtigungstrieb in “Spéculer.” Of this telephone bond, Derrida remarks: The thread of this “vital bond” is the mighty power of life, it is nothing else than life for life, in that it binds to life, which is nothing but this engagement that binds life to itself and to nothing else: the verb “bind” binds itself tautologically to life, it goes and has meaning only for life, it binds life, which binds itself to itself, at the very point where, in this power ful bond that it weaves with itself and which it therefore is, it is attached to itself [tient à elle-même] only by a hair—but by a hair of the other, who is none other than a mad trapeze artist, himself hanging [se tenant] above the abyss, without a net, by a thread or by a hair. (HC 73/81–82) This telephonic braid by which life binds itself to itself may be compared to Derrida’s translation of Freud’s Bindung with “stricture,” which is always as much as matter of destricturation, of unbinding, as it is of binding.18 This self-binding is never a pure auto-affection of life bound to itself— of hearing-oneself-speak—but is always threaded with the hair—and the ear—of the other, who in turn is left hanging on the line of another other without any assurance that the message will reach its destination. The force of stricture, the capacity to bind itself remains in relation to what there is to bind (what gives something and gives itself to be bound), 170 A Use of Ears

the power binding the binding to the bindable. One consequence of this among others, and it concerns every thing indicated in the figure of the “bond,” from the ribbon to the obligation of the categorical imperative, from the most physical strictions and restrictions to the most sublime alliances: a very free “set,” as unleashed as possible, can remain, account taken of the few forces that there are to bind, weakly erotized, weakly hedonized. And vice versa. . . . Every being together . . . begins by bindingitself, by a binding-itself in a differantial relation to itself. It thereby sends and posts itself. Destines itself. Which does not mean: it arrives. (CP 412–13/402) This is exactly what Cixous’s puisse does: It unbinds telecommunications and with it fate (anankè) and destiny from all destination, arrival, and telos, substituting drift for drive (HC 59/64).19 The logic of this mighty power is such that the message arrives since “it must [il faut] arrive, and when it must”—which it is to say that it arrives just when it is not expected like a bound of grace (110/126). The mighty power of puisse might be contrasted with the kind of mastery at work in and toward the Freudian drives. In the final pages of “Spéculer,” turning to the notion of Bindung, Derrida shows that the reality principle is not an external constraint on the pleasure principle but an effect of its autoimmunity—of the fact that the pleasure principle, if absolutely unbound and unleashed, would destroy itself unless there were a modicum of self-restraint. Now if Bindung is the violent replacement (banding, posting, supplementing, suspending) of the original by the supplementary, and if this deposition or transposition (Umsetzung) alone assures the mastery of the PP, then one comes to a highly paradoxical result. . . . It is by limiting the possible intensity of pleasure or unpleasure that the PP conquers its mastery. The PP takes its profits only from moderation. . . . It can fulfill it only by moderating force or intensity, the force or intensity of pleasure as much as that of unpleasure. It cannot master (and therefore weaken) the one without mastering (and therefore weakening) the other. If it is to assure its mastery, the principle of pleasure therefore first must do so over pleasure and at the expense of pleasure it becomes the prince of pleasure, the prince whose pleasure is the conquered, chained. bound, restricted, tired subject. (CP 410–11/400) A Use of Ears

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Its (appearance of) self-mastery is thus obtained at the expense of subordinating itself. But even if it produces dialectical effects, the economy of stricture does not proceed in the oppositional fashion of the master-slave dialectic. If the ego commands the pleasure principle into retreat by “leaving the reality principle in its place as a delegate, its courier, its lieutenant, or its slave” (CP 287/282), the one who disciplines remains in the ser vice of the master as disciple or envoy. Hence the master submits to himself. Stricture produces and increases pleasure only insofar as it binds itself. In this way, the pleasure principle encounters a more irreducible alterity: “It unleashes in itself the absolute other” (288/283). This absolute other is the effect of stricture which thus binds itself more or less tightly. If it were to either bind or master itself absolutely, there would be “absolute discharge, disbanding, nothingness or death” (412/401), just as infinite différance amounts to “God or death” (G 191/131). Cixous’s bo(u)nds of immortality effect a shift in the commonplace sense of immortality in that, like the differential logic of stricture, they point to a power that is beyond any opposition between life and death. What is called immortal is that life that takes place at the last minute “in the grace of the finite instant” (HC 73/81). This moment of grace involves “rendering oneself and surrendering [se rendre]” in all the myriad senses of this verb in French: to give oneself up, over, unconditionally, but also to betake oneself and thus to know where to go, “how to gain the address” (110/127). This surrender for usurious gain resembles stricture which “plays on two boards, band contra band, losing by winning and winning by losing” (CP 417/406). But what distinguishes this surrendering and the “subjunctivity” of Cixous’s puisse from the modalities of subjection and subordination involved in (sovereign) mastery? And from the Freudian Bemächtigungstrieb that Derrida will identify as the force behind and beyond all the other specific drives, including the pleasure principle? At one point in H. C. pour la vie, Derrida breaks off a discussion about Cixous’s relation to “nuncle Freud” and leaves him hanging on the line to ponder this question via the act of reading. He suggests how, in reading, one is to countersign Cixous’s puisse, “to accord/agree with it while subjunctivating for ourselves every thing it says or while subjunctivating to it, all(o)ying oneself to it according to the alliance or the alloy” (91/104). If reading demands the ana-lysis, the loosening or “the unbinding that unties, then to make or do, on the contrary, comes down to binding, to binding oneself and allying oneself [à se lier et à s’allier], 172

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to doing the contrary at the same time.” In reading one “unbinds the threads of the text, while weaving an alliance in the analysis or unbinding itself” (92/104). If the therapeutic alliance is always mediated by the ear of the analyst, then Cixous’s displacement of the psychoanalytic concept will send listening in a similar direction without destination. To begin to think this subjunctivating use of ears, it is necessary to continue to track Derrida’s reading of Freud. The tendency to binding and to mastering the drives is a more originary function of the psychic apparatus than either the life or the death drives which obtain their appearance of selfmastery only insofar as they bind themselves to Bindung. This drive to bind makes room for the pleasure principle “to bind the instinctual impulses [Triebregungen] which impinge on it, to replace [zu ersetzen] the primary process prevailing in them by the secondary process and convert their freely mobile cathectic energy into a mainly quiescent (tonic) cathexis” (CP 404/394). As both Vitale and Senatore observe, Derrida links binding to the Bemächtigungstrieb via the drive to the proper, which is “the most driven drive [la pulsion la plus pulsive]” (365/356). This tendency to reappropriate the self is “stronger than life and stronger than death . . . because, neither living nor dead, its force does not qualify it otherwise than by its own, proper drivenness [pulsivité], and this drivenness would be the strange relation to oneself that is called the relation to the proper.” Derrida locates in the Freudian corpus, “a guiding thread [fils]” (414/403) that leads the problematic of a drive before the life and death drives back to the Bemächtigungstrieb, or drive to mastery. Referring to the famous Freudian scene of the fort:da, Derrida speculates: One can envisage, then, a quasi-transcendental privilege of this drive for mastery, drive for power, or drive for domination [emprise]. The latter denomination seems preferable: it marks more clearly the relation to the other, even in domination over oneself. And the word immediately places itself in communication with the lexicon of giving, taking, sending, or destining that is inciting us here from a distance, and that soon will concern us more directly. The drive to dominate must also be the drive’s relation to itself: there is no drive not driven to bind itself to itself and to assure itself of mastery over itself as a drive. Whence the transcendental tautology of the drive to dominate: it is the drive as drive, the drive of the drive, the drivenness of the drive. Again, it is a question of A Use of Ears

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a relation to oneself as a relation to the other, the auto-affection of a fort:da which gives, takes, sends and destines itself, distances and approaches itself by its own step, the other’s. (CP 414/403) The kicker at the very end of the paragraph links the drive to drive to Cixous’s destiny without destination. I also want to associate this selfreflexive drivenness of the drive with the prevailing of what prevails, das Waltende in seinem Walten. Lest one were in any doubt, amid the discussion of the drives in the fourth session of the final seminar where he is discussing Heidegger’s notion of philosophy as “a drive to be at home everywhere [ein Trieb überall zu Hause sein]” (BS2 150/97), Derrida adds an unscripted comment: “What interests me is the relation between this Trieb and Walten” (156n2/102n20). Shortly afterwards he admits in the scripted text: “I am tempted to think that such a Walten . . . is perhaps indissociable from this Trieben” (158/104). As a force breaks open a path (the via rupta of which he often speaks), this drive “pushes [pousse], but where it pushes there is not yet either drive or push, or pulse, or being pushed, or a being doing the pushing” (156/102). Derrida goes on to associate this originary drive with the growth of physis and, in an important discussion to which I shall return, to tragen and to the carry ing of the other after the end of the world. It becomes clear from these connections that Walten, like the Bemächtigungstrieb, cannot be reduced to the death drive or an originary cruelty as the condition of human life. In “Être juste avec Freud” Derrida speaks of an interwoven braid or “spiral . . . of a drive duality (pleasure/power) that is without principle” (R 146/117). Speaking of Foucault, Derrida imagines that “he would have associated and yet also dissociated, he would have sent them packing back to back, mastery and death, that is, the same-death and the master, death as the master (146/118). “Spéculer” meanwhile makes it clear that the mastery bound to structure “would be neither of life nor of death” (CP 413/402). By contrast, Derrida wonders in États d’âme de la psychanalyse whether cruelty might not be the horizon reserved and most proper to psychoanalysis, even its “ultimate ground” (EAP 11/239).20 At the end of the essay when Derrida ponders death as the event that would defeat all power and performativity, he adds “perhaps, beyond cruelty” (87/278). If psychoanalysis were to go beyond (the beyond) of Freud’s Beyond, it would only be because of the unconditional hospitality it offers to the stranger in their suffering: “Without cruelty, with humble gratitude toward those who will have 174

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lent him an ear—and without alibi” (88/279). This suggests that it is first of all with listening that subject(ivat)ion is displaced into subjunctivation. By her own account in Insister, Cixous was always listening to Derrida’s voice, listening to “equivocal polyvocal you,” “your murmured self at the edge of yourself” (I 31/35), listening “to your thought weave itself” (63/84), listening “telephonidiomatically”—“every thing began by ear,” she confesses (65/87). Since forever I listen to him with head raised, my ear’s eyes never stray from the somewhat somnambulistic funambulist that he is, knowing very well that at every step he is running more than one language. Not only do I endeavor to allisten [toutécouter] to him, but also in good faith, I want to listen to him, yes, I make it my task to listen to him, in other words to obey his path markers. More than one listening in an I listen [plus d’un écouter dans un l’écoute]. And how to listen to him well and thereupon listen to him when he equivocates and acrobats in his other French? I do whatever it takes. (I 117/174) Quoting the line from the end of États d’âme, Cixous says he has put the flea in her ear (mettre la puce à l’oreille) in both the sense of giving a hint and also the older meaning of arousing suspicion, putting into question. With Molly’s double affirmation oui oui, you “doubtfulize [dubitatises] every thing,” she ventures. Moreover, she hears the homophone ouïe ouïe to indicate an omnipotent, mighty hearing that is at once impotent and that is always already differentiating itself into two pairs of ears and multiple hearings, hearing for and of you (25/26–27). All yes All hearing [Tout oui Tout ouïe], that is what we are, I am twice hearing, hearing for you and hearing of you, from the first day, before any face, before the very first, before, before, from the instant before the very first where without knowing or willing, on your part or on mine, without part therefore, your parole seized hold of my hearing without my ever saying no or yes to an address (I 26/28) No sooner has she lent him an ear than she feels “dislodged from any response [she] might think [she] was able to lodge, pushed [poussée] further, further and further” (25/27). Cixous thus describes a force or drive for listening that unbinds even as it binds. In English, as in French, there is an intriguing idiom: to lend an ear (prêter l’oreille). In summoning the other A Use of Ears

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to listen, I demand to make use of their ears and when I ask for this loan, they may well expect something in return—a salacious piece of gossip, sage advice, even just the return of the favor. Whatever it is, listening provokes obligation; it binds. And if I am bound to listen, you are bound to give me something back in return.21 Perhaps I even expect to be repaid with interest— use of ears as aural usury. Not everyone who lends their ears, it could be objected, is so demanding. The Italians are apparently more generous. Supposedly, they freely give their ears (dare udienza). But at the very least, you have to give me my ears back. And I expect to get them back in one piece (or two). I lent them on condition that you didn’t abuse them—at least not too much. And what would be “too much”? How much wear and tear might Cixous’s ears suffer before their investment deserves to be repaid with interest? The analyst has ears for infinite cruelty and suffering, it seems, bound, like Hamlet, to hear of atrocities and bloody revenge. Repeating a familiar trope about absent earlids, Kamuf observes: They have no membrane to lower over the orifice or muscle with which to activate closure or withdrawal. They thus remain open and receptive even when one intervenes to stopper them. Hamlet’s is a tragedy of the open ear, which is bound to hear, the ear open to the story of the father’s ear that is open to the poison of the world.22 Perhaps the mighty would-that-you-might-listen is that power of listening that Anne Dufourmantelle—who in De l’hospitalité lends an attentive ear to Derrida’s voice—describes with such poignant delicacy as the power of gentleness (puissance de la douceur). In Dufourmantelle’s book, the chapter “Écouter [Listening]” comes in sequence after “Cruautés [Cruelties]” and “En enfer [In Hell].” The analyst listens with gentleness, she claims, to the analysand’s lack of gentleness toward the self; he tries to hear differently, to drive away the ghosts.23 This would be a gentleness that, unexpectedly entering the heart of the master, “comes to rest in the interstices of cruelty and turns them inside out like a glove” without exactly being opposed to cruelty, for, having always sheltered horror, “gentleness is also the temptation of the executioner.”24 As with Cixous’s mighty puisse of listening, this power of listening visits us, like Derrida’s passive decision, before any appropriation or even subjectivation. “Isn’t listening,” wonders Dufourmantelle, “the gentlest expression of the unexpected, of chance, of encounter?”25 176

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S H O FA R T R A N S F E R

Cixous’s work points to a radical displacement of psychoanalysis and its concepts, especially that of listening. As Laurent Milesi argues in a reading of Anankè, Cixous “ ‘metaphorizes’ psychoanalysis . . . transports its transferences,” “giving free analogical rein to her plural drives rather than curbing them through a strictly analytic process.”26 Her thought operates, as she explains it, according to “translation of drives and drives of translation [traduction des pulsions et pulsions des traduction]” (An 121)—in short, a generalized transference. (Psychoanalytic) listening would need to undergo a similar generalization and metaphorization. Whence the importance of the term tragen, whose “lexical family,” like that of Geschlecht and Walten, is “very rich, differentiated, and difficult to translate, transport, transfer, übertragen, precisely, in Heidegger, where it is not merely a metaphorization (Übertragen)” (BS2 160/105). Tragen in this way re-marks itself, naming the movement whose (im)possibility it exemplifies. I shall return to the question of Übertragen as metaphor and thence as usure or over-carrying, but first I want to turn to another figurative sense of carry ing that preoccupies both Derrida in his final seminar and Cixous in Insister. Cixous imagines writing a “book of words,” “words of power, magic words, passwords,” in which one chapter will be devoted to portée in French, another to tragen in German (I 57/74). Straight afterwards, surely not by coincidence, she launches into a series of reflections on the semantic family of mögen, vermögen, Möglichkeit, unmöglich, and so on. So tragen and mögen, porter and puissance, and, as Derrida highlights in the last seminar, even more untranslatable Austrag and Walten—the relation between these two will be decisive. Cixous notes the reference to Heidegger, specifically to Derrida’s Geschlecht IV, which is titled “L’oreille de Heidegger: Philopolémologie” and takes as its starting point a phrase from Sein und Zeit: “Hören der Stimme des Freundes, den jedes Dasein bei sich trägt [hearing the voice of the friend whom every Dasein carries with it]” (G4 343/163). Geschlecht IV forges the connection between carry ing by ear and Walten, which will be developed further in the final seminar. As Cixous observes, tragen is also at the forefront in Béliers (B), an essay on mourning which commemorates the death of Gadamer via a reading of a line from a poem by Celan, a line that also comes to orient the second year of La bête et le souverain: “Die Welt is fort, ich muß dich tragen [The world A Use of Ears

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is gone/far off, I must carry you].” Listening, then, is the possibility and power of carry ing the other. In all these texts, Derrida emphasizes that to carry the other refers both to carry ing them after their death, to mourning, and also to the mother carry ing an unborn child to term (ausgetragenes Kind). On the one hand, there is the imperative to carry you now that the world is gone, far off, after the end of the world that every individual death is—not “a par ticu lar end of this or that world” but the end of the world in general, “of any possible world” (BS2 359/259–60). On the other hand, the “dich” can be addressed not to the dead whom we want to hold back and recall to life but to a living being to come, to be brought into the world, whose birth will mark the coming into the world of the world. When Cixous writes about her phone calls with Derrida, her writing is palpably working through her mourning and also resisting it. It is “an elevated protest, rage against the theateningness of a Verdict” (I 72/99), or what Bennington will call a “militant melancholia,” which is necessary lest one forget the other as other by introjecting them and keeping them in one’s own pocket, as discussed in Chapter 3 (B 73–74/160).27 No one writes about this “no!” to death, which anyone who has lost a loved one will surely have screamed into the dark— no one expresses this militant cry with greater poignancy or gentle consolation than Cixous: The invention of writing, is an urgent defense against pillaging, massacre, forgetting . . . You are dead. I snatch the world from you. I take your breath away. It’s over. Done for [fichu]. Finished. Says mortality.—No! I cry. (Ay 25/200–201) Cixous stares death in the face with such courage and insistence, and yet Derrida makes it clear that tragen is not merely a question of having the strength to bring to bear one’s mourning gaze on death (BS2 223–24/153–54). Such courage would confer, Derrida argues, a sovereign mastery. It would be a drive to master death and impossibility. The final paragraphs of Béliers point to an altogether different experience of the end of the world or of the without-world, and it is this experience of the Fort-sein or being-distant of the world that orients the final seminar. There Derrida is concerned with Heidegger’s anthropocentric distinction between man as worldforming, (weltbildend) the animal that is poor-in-world (weltarm), and the worldless stone (weltlos). Already at the end of Béliers Derrida is won178

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dering whether the world might be fort without answering to any of these categories: What if the Fort-sein exceeded them, from a wholly other place? What if it were every thing save deprived of the world (weltlos), poor in world (weltarm), or world-forming (weltbildend)? Isn’t it the very thought of the world that we would then have to rethink, from this fort, and this fort itself from the “ich muß dich tragen”? (B 79/163) The world or its lack would, starting from this tragen, be this imperative to carry the other, which thus points to an impossibility altogether more radical than the loss of a dear friend. What if, instead of my being obliged to carry you once the world is no longer here, there can no longer be any world as soon as I am responsible for and to you, as soon as I owe it to myself and to you to carry you (B 68–69/158)—as soon as, one might say, I am bound to carry you? As Derrida argues in the seminar, if I must carry you, it can mean only one of two things: either that I must carry you “out of the world” because there is no (longer a) world (or at least no phantasm of a common world) or that where there is no world I must carry you so as to make it as if there were a world, as if for you I were to bear and bring the world into the world (BS2 369–70/268). This latter hypothesis would be the meaning of the telephonic, apostrophizing address. This world, “before even going to go away, is going going away . . . has forever been going to leave and has just left” (370/268). Derrida challenges the phantasm of a shared world as a totality, arguing that it serves as a life insurance policy against the anxiety of solitude: “Perhaps there is too much world in the world, but who can assure us that there is a world? Perhaps there is no world. Not yet and perhaps not since ever and perhaps not ever” (367–68/266–67). Derrida has something like this experience of originary worldlessness in mind when he describes the mighty power of puisse in the passage quoted earlier as “the exhaustion [épuisement] of the sun before its time or a definitive prosthesis of the sun” (HC 116/134). The reference to an exhaustion of the world beyond “my monstrosity” would have be to heard alongside the evocation in the final seminar of a “feeling” between even those closest to us, those we foolishly call our own, “a feeling that the worlds in which we live are different to the point of the monstrosity of the unrecognizable . . . of the absolutely unshareable”—an exhaustion, then, beyond even this “solitude of worlds” (BS2 367/266). What is fascinating here—and only hinted A Use of Ears

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at in the seminar with the idea of “too much world in the world”—is the emphasis on exhaustion, as if the bearing of the world were always a matter of bearing too much, of carry ing too much and hence no more, of overcarrying—in short, the usure of the world as if the world as such were always over-bearing. What, then, would be the connection between this over-bearing and the dominating of Walten? On the one hand, there is a sovereignty so sovereign that it overruns any actual determined sovereignty (BS2 382/279) and, on the other, the fact that any world worthy of the name would always already be wearing itself out and at risk of going badly, even going to hell (357/258), lest there be “too much” world and hence “no world” at all. In the ninth and tenth sessions of the second year of La bête et le souverain Derrida investigates at length the link between Walten and Austrag touched upon in Geschlecht III and IV and in Béliers. Painstakingly parsing Heidegger’s text, Derrida observes that Austrag (typically though inadequately translated as (re)conciliation) between Being and beings is that in which the Walten waltet (353/255). It has to do with the dimension in which Being and beings are (and I translate very literally) “carried apart and toward one another [auseinander-zueinander getragen]” (quoted at 352–53/254).28 The Differenz of Being and beings as Unter-schied (dif-ference), Heidegger continues, is “the uncovering and sheltering Austrag of the two” (quoted at 353–53/255).29 At the very end of the session, Derrida directs the seminar to a slightly later passage in which Heidegger states (and I translate again very literally without quoting Derrida’s comments on the French translation): Die onto-theologische Verfassung der Metaphysik entstammt dem Walten der Differenz, die Sein als Grund und Seiendes als gegründetbegründendes aus- und zueinanderhält, welches Aushalten der Austrag vollbringt. The onto-theological constitution of metaphysics proceeds from the Walten of Differenz, which holds Being as ground and beings-as-grounded-andjustified apart and together with one another, which withstanding [or bearing] the Austrag accomplishes. (BS2 356/257)30 Derrida warns that, if Austrag refers to the ruling or agreement between contracting parties that brings a dispute to an end (hence the sense of (re) conciliation), it must also be understood in light of every thing that he will 180

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have said about Celan’s “ich muß dich tragen” and of bearing to term. In Geschlecht III, citing a related passage in Heidegger’s Unterwegs zur Sprache, Derrida simply describes Austrag as “a figure of carry ing as difference . . . a synonym of difference,” while also linking it to bearing the unborn (das Ungeborene) (G3 91/65). Pointing to the word in one of Trakl’s poems, Derrida remarks of that which is not yet brought to term (Unausgetragene) that it is translated into French as unexporté “and hence also not differentiated [différencié].” It is this differentiation that is at stake in Geschlecht IV where Walten and Tragen have again to do with the gathering and stabilizing of originary dissemination into the opposition of polémos (the politically charged Kampf or struggle). For all the tension that this term implies, Derrida argues that it already consists in a certain unifying, identifying polémos with “logos as gathering” (G4 398/201). Following Heidegger’s characterization of polémos as a “waltender Streit,” Derrida remarks: Dissociation, disjunction, scission, dissension, or secession: in this schiz, this split, of the Auseinandertreten or of the Auseinandersetzung are no doubt opened the faults, the intervals, the gaps, the distances but also are formed the joints or the couplings (Fugen). For the schiz produced by the polémos must also gather: join up, join together, ally, combine, hold together what it separates or spaces. This will permit concluding that polémos and logos, they are the same (dasselbe), the legein of logos always being heard and understood in its originary signification of gathering. (G4 410/209; trans. modified) It cannot be stressed enough that this all hinges on the aural attunement that the animal inasmuch as it is poor in world does not possess. It is carrying by ear that unites the diaphora into a silent, consonant unity. The voice of the friend keeps silent, and in Geschlecht III it is a “quieter quietude [waltenden stilleren Stille]” that prevails as the strike (Schlag) gathers dispersed difference into the unity of a silent fundamental or tonic (Grundton) (G3 147/126). Contrast this listening that silences with the noisy summons of the spiraled, labyrinthine shofar whose interruption of the animal cry traces the boundary “between life and death . . . between the world and the end of the world,” between being carried and not being carried (B 62–64/155–56 and I 98/148) and which is associated with atonement and forgiveness. This value of forgiveness, which Derrida discovers in the relation of Walten to the ontological difference, allows one to differentiate the event and A Use of Ears

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power of puisse from Walten as “the event, the origin, the power, the force, the source, the movement, the process, the meaning etc.—whatever you like—of the ontological difference, the becoming-ontological-difference of the ontological difference, of the supervening of Being and of the arrival of beings” (BS2 355/256). It is worth quoting at length Derrida’s commentary on Heidegger’s sentence specifying the link between Austrag and Walten as a power of giving, but also of misgiving and forgiving: Im Austrag waltet Lichtung des sich verhüllend Verschließenden, welches Walten das Aus- und Zueinander von Überkommnis und Ankunft vergibt [again vergibt]. Within the Austrag [ the regulation, the conciliation, within the term, in the terminating or determining range of the differend between the differents, between Being and beings, supervening and arrival], within the Austrag waltet [which I do not translate for the time being; the French translation says “prevails” [prédomine], but we must return to this later] a clearing (Lichtung) of what veils and closes itself off, which Walten vergibt [an extraordinary verb here that the French translation all but omits in saying simply, in place of “welches Walten [. . .] vergibt,” “it is by this prevalence that . . .”. But vergibt also means here “give” as much as “furnish,” “procure,” but also to deceive oneself in giving, misgiving, misgive and above all pardon (vergeben, “to forgive”), an important value and a non-negligible connotation here, where Austrag can also mean the settlement of a dispute or of a differend, conciliation, reconciliation: so, I resume,] which Walten vergibt [gives, misgives, forgives] the being-apart and being-related, the one to the other, of Supervening and Arrival [thus of Being and beings as such], welches Walten das Ausund Zueinander von Überkommnis und Ankunft vergibt. (BS2 355/256) Walten is what, in the Austrag, furnishes the difference between Being and beings, while at the same time giving rise to doubt, suspicion, apprehension, and also forgiving, pardoning, lifting the verdict. Recall that Cixous describes carry ing the voice of her friend such that it puts the flea in her ear—meaning to put into a state of doubt and to arouse suspicion—and also that, in Derrida’s reading, Cixous’s mighty power of puisse is associated not simply with giving life but also with pardoning and forgiving life, life for life. What, if anything, is there between these two kinds of listening, of carry ing by ear? Even though it arouses a certain suspicion, Derrida un182

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derstands Cixous’s (for)giving to deconstruct the sovereignty of donation and of the pardon in the name of the “unconditionality without sovereignty,” of “the unconditionality of the gift or of forgiveness” (V 205/149). What separates this unconditional (for)giving or (par)don from Walten’s relation to the as such, and specifically to death and impossibility as such, is that it lies beyond all calculation, anticipation, and (drive to) mastery. Cixous does not so much lend her ears, thereby extracting repayment with interest, as she gives her ears for Derrida’s voice, forgiving the debt, “not,” she says “that I wish ever to master it, not that I seek to understand it, but as if by force of reading it, that is, of being carried beyond myself by its current” (I 18/15; my emphases). This (for)giving power would be more powerful than the sovereign performative—so sovereign that it overruns its power to (for) give life and hence its power over itself, including any drive to mastery. Cixous’s mighty grace is not one, not a unified totality, but the effect of a multiplication and dissemination of graces: “Graces give or receive and hence they happen/arrive more than once” (HC 110/126). What Derrida finds is an “alliance” (a braid?) of graces—grace as unconditional hospitality to the gift of the other interwoven and alloyed with the grace of the sovereign that lifts the death sentence. In short, far from a Heideggerian capacity for the impossible, this is an alliance, more or less tightly bound together, of power and unpower—the alloy that Derrida calls life-death. Another way to put this would be to speak of the destruction of sovereign grace with the help of other graces or even the forgiveness of forgiveness by way of other pardons—the choreographic grace via which multiple other voices make the text dance. C ATAC H R E S I S

Finally, I want to turn to another sense of tragen as übertragen, meaning literally to carry over, and hence to trans-fer, and also to trans-late (from the same past participate of the same Latin verb, fero). It is beyond the scope of this chapter to offer a thorough treatment of Derrida’s complex and subtly evolving thinking about metaphor,31 but I want to touch on this material to the extent that hearing, and specifically carrying the voice of the other by ear, might be thought as an usure of the ear and as an overuse or exhaustion of metaphor. This also means that aurality is imbricated in the retrait of metaphor—that is, in the opening up of the difference between Being and beings that Heidegger calls Walten—and in the retrait of this retrait. A Use of Ears

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A footnote in “La mythologie blanche,” quoting Heidegger, expressly establishes the link between Übertragung and the usure of metaphorical transfer from sensible to intelligible: This explains the distrust that the concept of metaphor inspires in Heidegger. In Der Satz vom Grund he insists above all on the opposition sensory/nonsensory, an important, but neither the only, nor the first, nor the most determining characteristic of the value of metaphor. “But here, the following remark will suffice: Since our hearing and seeing are never a simple reception by the senses, it is not any longer suitable to affirm that the interpretation of thought as grasped by hearing (als Er-hören) and vision (Er-blicken) represent only a metaphor (Übertragung), a transposition into the non-sensory of the so-called sensory. The notion of ‘transposition’ and of metaphor (Metapher) rest on the distinction, not to say the separation, of the sensory and the non-sensory as two domains each subsisting for itself. This kind of separation between the sensory and the non-sensory, between the physical and the non-physical, is a fundamental characteristic of what is called ‘metaphysics,’ which confers upon Western thought its essential characteristics. Once this distinction of the sensory and the non-sensory is recognized as insufficient, metaphysics loses its rank as authoritative thought.” (M 269n19/226n29) Striking in the quotation from Heidegger is the association of Übertragung with hearing, which Derrida also unearths in Geschlecht IV, thus tying the power of aurality to the effacement of metaphor. In “Le retrait de la métaphore” Derrida corrects Paul Ricoeur’s (possibly willful) mishearing, clarifying that, “far from assuming,” he was in fact “calling into question” the metaphysical account of metaphor as erosion extended by Heidegger (Psy1 71/56). First, Derrida argues against constraining metaphor under the scheme of wear and tear, and instead brings out its other dimension of usury via recourse to the figure of the coin whose exergue has been gradually effaced precisely in the course of its circulation. This is “the double import [double portée] of usure”: Erasure by rubbing, exhaustion, crumbling away, certainly; but also the supplementary product of a capital, the exchange which far from losing original investment would fructify its initial wealth, would increase its return in the form of revenue, additional interest, linguistic surplus value, 184

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the two histories of the meaning of the word remaining indistinguishable. (M 250/210) What is more, as Derrida later clarifies, this production of surplus value proceeds “according to laws other than those of a continuous and linearly accumulative capitalization” (Psy1 71/56). If metaphor carries twice, Derrida disrupts this carrying-over at two levels. Usure highlights in metaphor what he calls a “continuist presupposition” at the level of carrying between proper and figurative and also at the level of the transmission of this concept of metaphor across the history of philosophy: The history of a metaphor would not essentially move along like a displacement with ruptures, reinscriptions in a heterogeneous system, mutations, digressions without origin, but like a progressive erosion, a regular semantic loss, an uninterrupted exhaustion of the primitive meaning. (M 256/215) Rather than being in continuity with the metaphysical tradition or a “continuous radicalization” of Heidegger, Derrida’s thinking of metaphor challenges this continuism at all levels. This is why would one have to exercise extreme caution before suggesting that the otoimmunity I have been exploring in this book could be assimilated to the schema of usure. Insofar as this continuism would foreclose the possibility of any unanticipated break or surprise, its deterioration and accumulation would thus become entirely amenable to calculation. In short, metaphor thus understood is a belated determination or phantasm that would submit the dispersive force of “metaphoricity as such” (HQ 323/223) to the drives of the proper and of mastery. In other words, an usure of listening would be an attempt to contain, master, make its own, the force of what I am calling shatter. If metaphor in its metaphysical interpretation rests on the opposition of the proper to the nonproper (M 273/229), its foundations are ruined as soon as it is shown that there is no originary proper with which metaphorical use contrasts. As a philosophical concept, metaphor cannot be mastered by a concept outside philosophy, but equally, for the same reason that total surveillance cannot overhear the point of listening itself, philosophy is unable to master its own concepts. This is why the quasi-transcendental is the autoimmunity or self-ruin of any transcendental position. The dissemination and generalization of metaphor—its usurious proliferation—ends up restricting and A Use of Ears

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indeed destroying metaphor, which is why Derrida can speak in the Heidegger seminar of 1964–65 of crossing out and destroying metaphor with the help of other metaphors (HQ 277/198). The effect is to jeopardize the propriety of any concept and radically put in question the proper in general—whence Derrida’s appeal to the idea of catachresis or the misuse, even abuse, of metaphor (M 304–7/255–57). To listen beyond (the beyond of) biopolitics demands something similar: a radical misuse or abuse, miscarry ing, of ears. Whereas metaphor generally substitutes for a proper sense which it carries over or translates into the figurative, catachresis is “a violent production of meaning, an abuse which refers to no anterior or proper norm” and hence “emerges at a given moment as a monster.”32 The forceful imposition of a new sort of proper meaning without propriety, this monstrosity is pure substitution, prosthesis, transfer, carrying without original. This metaphoricity as such before any actual metaphor— which Derrida also characterizes as the “animality of the letter” and the “super-power [sur-puissance] of life” (ED 108–9/72–73)—is the for which “is” nothing and is the prolegomenon to any life (HC 78/87), the high-speed, telegraphic, animal injunction of econohomonymy (67/73). It is the destruction of metaphors by other metaphors, piling up metaphor on metaphor, too much metaphor to the point of no more metaphor (plus de métaphore). It remains only to connect metaphor and the violence of this catachrestic destruction of metaphor to the force of Walten. If Walten is what opens up the ontological difference between Being and beings, it must be heard as another name for the retrait of Being that is the condition of (im)possibility of metaphor and the catachrestic or catastrophic violence of the retrait of metaphor. Derrida sets out how Being—inasmuch as it is nothing, is not a being, is what withdraws from beings—cannot be said metaphorically. This also means that there is no proper or literal meaning for which the metaphor substitutes, so that Being can no more be said metaphorically than properly or literally. Being can only be named “quasi-metaphorically” through the supplementary re-trait (re-tracing) of one metaphor by another metaphor (Psy1 80/66). To think beyond metaphysics would require the withdrawal of this withdrawal of Being, which is to say the withdrawal of metaphor and of Walten: In order to think Being in its withdrawal, it would thus be necessary to let produce and reduce itself a withdrawal of metaphor that, leaving all 186

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the same no room for anything that might be opposed, opposable to the metaphoric, will limitlessly extend and load any metaphoric trait with supplementary surplus value. Here the word re-trait (an added trait to supplement the subtracting withdrawal, re-trait bespeaking at once, at one stroke [d’un trait], the plus and the minus) designates the generalizing and supplementary return only in a kind of quasi-catachrestic violence, a kind of abuse I impose on language, but one that I hope is more than justified by the necessity of good, economic formalization. (Psy1 81/67) The word retrait itself is a catachresis because it does not serve as a familiar meaning from which to deduce the meaning of “retrait of Being” or “retrait of metaphor.” Instead, retrait has to be thought without an originary proper meaning and without the possibility of mastering is disseminating force. It is not at all the case that I am starting out from a word or a known or determinate meaning (retrait) to think about Being or metaphor; rather, I will come to comprehend, understand, read, think, allow the withdrawal in general to manifest itself only if I begin with the withdrawal of Being as a withdrawal/redrawing of metaphor in all the polysemous and disseminal potential of the retrait. In other words: if one wished withdrawal-of to be understood as a metaphor, it would be a curious, overturning metaphor—one might almost say catastrophic, catastropic: its aim would be to state something new, still unheard-of about the vehicle and not about the apparent subject of the trope. (Psy1 81–82/67–68). This catachrestic, catastrophic force is, I am suggesting, the one thing against which Walten shatters. USELESS HABITS

What, though, does this tell us about possible new uses of our ears beyond a biopolitical listening? As soon as one imagines the iterability of an allpowerful unpower, one is approaching the sphere of habit. Habit is always already a force of habit, drummed into us through repeated blows (of the tympanum). Is it, then, a question of quitting old habits of listening and A Use of Ears

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encouraging new ones? One would have to transfer to habit, though, every thing that Derrida will have said about the continuist interpretation of metaphor. Habit is a central pillar of Malabou’s rehabilitation of Hegel via the notion of plasticity in which she seeks to liberate habit from the schemas of automatic repetition and mechanistic compulsion and refocus it as an engine for change (one can pick up new habits or kick old ones).33 Malabou endeavors to show that “it is one and the same force, one and the same principle, which produces habit at once as grace (ease, facility, power) and as addiction (machinic repetition).”34 But it is precisely with this “one and the same,” this “at once,” that Derrida takes issue in his preface to Malabou’s book because it makes accident coincide with teleological necessity. The explosive disruptive force that Malabou wants to harness with her concept of plasticity coincides with continual, predictable transformation, with the result that one sees what is coming: This synthesis has already claimed the future anterior and the “to see (what is) coming [voir venir]” of anticipation, it has already called for the teleological structure which must dampen surprise itself or novelty in order to make it possible: as if it were a surprise without surprise. (TA xiii) Therein lies the danger in speaking of new uses of ears or habits of listening. This is also why one must distinguish the catachrestic strike and unpower of puisse from Agamben’s attempt to think life beyond biopolitics in the guise of a form-of-life as habitual use or chrēsis. Extending his familiar reading of Aristotle’s adynamis and taking a suitably musical example, Agamben writes: Glenn Gould, to whom we attribute the habit of playing the piano, does nothing but make use-of himself insofar as he plays and knows habitually how to play the piano. He is not the title holder and master of the potential to play, which he can put to work or not, but constitutes-himself as having use of the piano, independently of his playing it or not playing it in actuality. Use, as habit, is a form-of-life and not the knowledge or faculty of a subject. (U 92/61–62). At first blush it might appear as if Agamben were in agreement with Derrida, insofar as this use-of-oneself as habit is not a subjective capacity of power of which one is the master: “It never ceases to make shipwreck in

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the history of works and subjects” (U 95/64). And yet there is a subtle gap between them, for it turns out that Agamben’s habit, no less than Malabou’s, sees death coming. It should be recalled that, for Heidegger, man is not the subject of Walten either. Rather, Walten, is the force, the physis, that pushes itself up through man. Whereas it is impossible that Being appear as such, for it is nothing, the Walten of being—Walten in seinem Walten—appears as the being of Being precisely through these capacities (of speaking, of hearing, of living, and so on), which are not in fact human powers. Only because man, unlike animals, is capable of a relation to the impossible, only because man has a proper relation to the withdrawal of being—or in more Agambenian terms, only because man does not have a voice, is capable of this impotentiality and infancy, and has a relation to the inappropriable—is there this force of habit as something like the livability that precedes and exceeds any life. Agamben adopts the term chrēsis for this habitual use to describe its situation in the middle between being and act (U 96/65), evoking the idea of the Greek middle voice, which, neither active nor passive, dissolves the opposition between subject and object, agent and patient, such that use-ofoneself is always a matter of modifying the self (53/28). I want to suggest that this be heard as a silent, unacknowledged overhearing of a footnote in “La mythologie blanche” in which catachresis is characterized as a middle of sorts, but with an impor tant caveat: What is interesting to us here, thus, is the production of a proper sense, a new kind of proper sense, by means of the violence of a catachresis whose intermediary status tends to escape the opposition of the primitive and the figurative, standing between them as a “middle.” When the middle of an opposition is not the passageway of a mediation, there is every chance that the opposition is not pertinent. The consequences are boundless. (M 305–6n41/256n60) Only when this middle is no longer mediation, passage, transfer—in other words, no longer metaphor, destroyed by other metaphors—is the opposition between proper and improper called into question, and with it, that between possible and impossible, life and death. If Derrida is drawn to abuse, Agamben prefers to describe the absence of proper use as a uselessness out of which new uses can emerge. Observing A Use of Ears

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in Spectres de Marx that use-value is always already haunted by exchangevalue, Derrida warns: Just as there is no pure use, there is no use-value which the possibility of exchange and commerce . . . has not in advance inscribed in an out-ofuse (hors d’usage)—an excessive signification that cannot be reduced to the useless (l’inutile). (SM 253–54/200–1) There would only be a beyond of the beyond of Beyond, of the drive to the proper, and of Walten—a beyond of the biopolitical determination of life and aurality—so long as there were a mighty power of listening, without relation to impotence and uselessness as such, that would put our ears in check and out-of-use.

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Excursus 4 THE DRIVE TO LISTEN IN U LT R A - R E D ’ S M I L I TA N T S O U N D I N V E S T I G AT I O N S

It was dusk. Do you remember? It was dusk and the evening wind pulled at our banners. Our demand: __________ . What did you hear? For two hours the amplified speeches of movement leaders, representatives and those supposed to know better than we echoed through the towers downtown. When they gave the signal, five thousand moved through the avenues, our scripted utterances adhering to earlier statements. Our destination was another amplification system and another program of speeches. In an analysis of the echoes that we occupied, what did we hear?1 Where one might expect to see a demand there is simply a line and blank space waiting to be filled in. At first blush, it might appear as if this were a placeholder for any number of demands. What follows in Ultra-red’s 10 Preliminary Theses on Militant Sound Investigation is indeed part methodological handbook, part manifesto. But as is already suggested in this opening “Prelude” and will become clearer as the theses unfold, the force of this question, “What did you/we hear?” will be to displace the demand from its central position in activism and indeed to shatter many of the assumptions typically made about organizing. The most significant shift in this focus onto listening is to undo the teleological status of the demand. Organizing is not about coming together to formulate or to amplify a demand. Rather, listening is a process of inquiry through which a field of

tension of needs, desires, and demands is organized. What demand will emerge is unknown—that is the point of the blank—but its organization will constitute a “sonorous refusal” of activism in its conventional guise. The use of the microphone is key in this reconfiguration of organizing practices. Describing how militant sound investigation operates in the context of a protest, Ultra-red explain: The Militant Sound Investigation team will enter into this situation under cover of the public address system. The team will move through the crowd calling those around them to gather together. Questions will be asked: questions developed within the space and processes of their own engagements with communities in struggle. The questions in the score will resemble a composition founded on problematics enunciated in the course of investigations undertaken in another space and an earlier time. With microphones in hand, the team members will diligently record the group’s every reaction to the questions. Those reactions that analyze the questions as either prelude to or refusal of an answer will acquire significance. While the grand sound-system amplifies one speech after another, these groups will work through the score, teasing out the themes contained within the echoes.2 Ultra-red reappropriate the technology of the PA system to other ends, inclining it toward listening rather than vociferating and toward a set of potentially contradictory, intertwined themes. It serves the negotiation of struggle where it is not simply a matter of making a voice heard, of amplification, but of teasing out the various threads among the multiple voices. The form adopted to begin with is not the demand but the question (and one might wonder how this echoes or revises Derrida’s own move from the question to the call or demand, although the inspiration for Ultra-red’s notion of demand is clearly Lacanian).3 What is striking is that this question is not a starting point but is already the effect of multiple sound investigations, multiple listenings now folded into new acts of listening. The voice, far from being the origin, is always already an echo of other voices, or, even more precisely, the echo of other listenings—the ear of the other in every sense. Whereas activism presupposes preexisting voices, demands, positions, and subjects awaiting amplification, Ultra-red’s practice of listening aims to “enter a state of crisis at the loosening of coordinates provided by pre-inscribed demands.”4 Recording 192

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brings with it a responsibility that necessarily precedes any demand. Indeed, it would be a failure of listening and a betrayal of this responsibility only to record once a demand is formulated. This also means that the microphone does not occupy a disinterested or objective position no more than it produces a dispassionate representation. Rather, it is a part of the field that it organizes. Ultra-red’s reconfiguration of the microphone is more radical than debates between documentary and creative elements of field-recording practices. This prosthetic ear also has the ability to recall investigators to silence (Ultra-red describe themselves as “technicians of silence”). It can vacate any demands that are already audible and instead start from a “soundscape of struggle” in which participants experience being together in solidarity, friendship, and shared curiosity, before the unifying, identity-bestowing effects of a demand. In fact, the microphone does not serve to fix or unify what is heard, but rather fragments the sonic field into need, the demand remaining beyond need, and beyond that, desire. The silence of which Ultra-red speak moves in a similar trajectory to the shift from the silent Heideggerian Grundton that gathers dissonances into a harmonious unity toward a dispersive, splintering movement in which differential rhythms and intonations are woven together. Ultra-red’s practice gets at something like this sonorous negotiation without any explicit theoretical connection to deconstruction. Furthermore, their reuse of previous listenings to shape new stages of investigation has the effect of producing a chain of prosthetic ears. What constitutes an ear or a listening technology is broadly conceived, and this relay of ears extends and passes through other human ears to inanimate sound recording technologies: microphones, of course, but also flip-charts, paper, and marker pens (see Figure 4)—listening as writing in the generalized sense. Ultra-red’s praxis has evolved over two decades into its current form with a focus on conducting soundwalks and listening workshops for local community groups. Founded by two AIDs activists in Los Angeles in 1994, the collective had its roots in the intersection of music and social engagement, specifically the overlap between the ambient music scene and local struggles around public health, housing, and education. With members on both coasts of the United States, in the UK, and in Germany, their approach has gradually shifted away from compositional practices that take recordings as raw material to focus instead on the act of listening as a site of collective intervention and popular pedagogy. Field recording has been a mainstay of Ultra-red’s Militant Sound Investigations

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FIGURE 4. Ultra-red listening session set up for “On the Edgware Road,” Centre for Possible Studies, London, 2012. Photo by Chris Jones.

their work throughout, as have the influences of a theoretical cocktail drawn from the Situationists, Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy of the oppressed, the Italian autonomist journal Quaderni Rossi, and Lacanian psychoanalysis, placing listening in a nexus of power, space, and encounter with the other. Some of their earlier work, closer to the soundscape composition end of the spectrum, runs the gamut from ambient techno to unedited field recordings of, for instance, housing struggles in Los Angeles or the A16 IMF/ World Bank protests in Washington, D.C. Ultra-red, though, became increasingly frustrated with the political imbrications of aesthetic production and consumption, sparking controversy, for instance, in 2016, when, in solidarity with residents of Boyle Heights and members of Unión de Vecinos and the LA Tenants Union, the collective spoke out against the political economy of culturally oriented gentrification and artwashing. Even as early 2008 when the Preliminary Theses were published, a broadly Marxist-Situationist opposition to the commodification of culture and of struggle is prominent in their thinking and practice. They have consistently been interested in countersystemic aspects of urban space which go against the grain of capitalist theater, spectacle, and deterritorialization in which public space is manufactured and managed by real estate, finance, urban planning, and local government. Audio verité, as they see it, aims to listen for the sound of life and spaces produced in antagonism to this control and alienation: the soundscapes of struggle, survival, trespass, informal economies, and so on, rather than the ambience of the market.5 Their suspicion of commodification extends to their trenchant critique of what they call activism’s “value form of participation” in which participation itself becomes the site for the extraction of surplus value. Rather than a link in a relay of prosthetic listenings, in the value form of participation the microphone serves only “to amplify oneself,” gathering the differential character of multiple listenings into a preformed unity. It presupposes a preorganized field with predetermined analyses and a fixed “object/subject division: those who act as ideological patrons and those in need of patronage.”6 Situating the value form of participation within a (post-)colonial logic in which there is a “ritual solicitation” of oppressed subjects into “compliance with systems of administration and control” and in which capital extracts surplus value from the performances of participation, they characterize it via the metaphor of listening with a hammer: Ultra-red’s Militant Sound Investigations

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One can recognize ideological patrons by the echoes they conceal. In the value form of participation, the voice of the patron echoes pure and immutable. Heard thusly, the echo confirms that the ideological patron has invested the other with an analysis composed prior to their encounter. The echo of the patron’s voice affirms the other as lacking and requiring the intervention of a patron. In this social relation, the mallet-like microphone simply amplifies established terms of analysis, delivers demands without listening, and insists on only one form of intervention— the endless repetition of a sealed demand.7 Drawing on Lacan, Ultra-red think of the value form of participation in terms of the discourses of the master and of the university as “rituals of participation by which subjects identify with the will of the state, the nonprofit development corporation, the non-governmental organization, or the institution charged with administering crisis.” This analysis also chimes with the telephonic interpellations in Derrida’s readings of Nietzsche in Otobiographies and La peine de mort discussed in Chapter 3. Specifically, the metaphor of the mallet also echoes the reference to Nietzsche’s injunction to philosophize with a hammer that launches Derrida’s essay “Tympan.” What Ultra-red call “mallet-like” listening might thus be likened to the appropriating drive of the philosophical ear that Derrida likens to the beating of the (ear)drum. Derrida argues that the tendency to reduce to a philosophical type—to typecast the other according to the orientation of the ideological patron, if you like, or what he dubs “the law of the inner hammer” (M IV/xiii)—is disrupted originarily by a multiplicity of strikes, by the plural tympans of the printing press, and hence what in Geschlecht III he will describe—now connecting type to the Schlag (coup/blow) of Geschlecht (whose multiple meanings include race, people, sex, lineage, species, and type)—as the possibility of overprinting. Again, an aural metaphor is not far away. In Heidegger’s reading of Trakl’s poetry, the Schlag is associated with a consonance or unison (Einklang) whose unity stems from a silent Grundton (tonic or fundamental) that gathers together the poems and the poetic polysemy (G3 57/27, 107/82). Against this metaphysical reduction and the philosophical nationalism of Heidegger’s singular German idiom—“its silence is German, it speaks German” (102/76)—Derrida embraces the machinic perversion of the typewriter and the tape recorder (104/77). Instead of a single strike that imprints or 196

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stamps a national or other type, Derrida draws attention to the way in which typing is always already differential: Besides the value of impression, blow, strike, or inscription, our attention is here called back to that of regularity, iterability, thus of reimpression in the re-mark. A type is not only the moment or place of the strike, it already introduces the generality of the genus [genre], it remains or produces, it reproduces the same for a series of singularities that thus fall under the same type—which can only be typical on condition of the same. (38–39/6) As Geoffrey Bennington has demonstrated,8 this re-marking or overprinting, though, is precisely what distinguishes dissemination from a mere plurality of meaning or plurivocity, which multiplicity of tones may yet “harmonize in a unique resonance” (96/71)—that is, under a single, indivisible type. Not only does dissemination name an “irreducible polytonality” (99/74). It resists any drive to unify, moreover, insofar as it is both inside and outside the series it constitutes, an example of itself. Instead of a displacement from one singularity to another in the series, it displaces seriality by referring “to the absolute outside of the opposition” (D 31/25) without being “a simple exit out of the series” (118/104). In Ultra-red’s analysis, the microphone operates in this way. It folds back on itself, imprints on itself, for it is an example of the listening that it records. It recalls the research militants to silence—not the silence of an inaudible fundamental or tonic but the point of impossibility in the field of listening that organizes and makes listening possible. But does this mean that Ultra-red’s microphone is in the position of Peter Szendy’s surveilling microphone, whose overhearing is situated in the only point of the sonic field that cannot itself be overheard? Do Ultra-red’s technicians of silence occupy a deaf point, the quasi-transcendental of listening, even if Szendy might now recoil from that term?9 Ultra-red’s reflections and their dialogue with Lacan call for an engagement with the problematic of the quasi-transcendental and with the logic of generalization that holds much appeal to Szendy and which chimes with Ultra-red’s characterization of the sonic field as an interweaving of loosened coordinates and different levels of desire, demand, and need.10 What is at stake is a logic of substitutability, of prostheticity, of one listening displacing another. As Ultra-red describe it, the listening is motivated by the Lacanian “invocatory drive,” by Ultra-red’s Militant Sound Investigations

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“the object voice, the object cause of the desire to listen.”11 If the value form of participation is under the spell of Lacan’s discourse of the university, “resulting in a subject who is stamped with the imprint of that master signifier,” the militant sound investigation aims to pass via hysterical demands that interrogate and challenge knowledge to the discourse of the analyst. Thinking of dissemination’s overtyping and overstriking the ear, however, one might want to qualify Ultra-red’s Lacanian framing. It is with good reason that Derrida in “Pour l’amour de Lacan” states that “the discourse that was at the same time the closest and the most deconstructible, the one that was most to be deconstructed, was no doubt Lacan’s” (R 74/55). Radicalizing Freud’s understanding of the drive and deconstructing any categorical distinction between the life and death drives, Lacan associates the drive with the pure movement of displacement of the signifier which does not exist independently of the partial drives, such as the invocatory drive, through which the pure negativity of the drive manifests itself. And yet Derrida’s complaint is that Lacan ultimately remains within the horizon of metaphysics precisely because he hypostatizes this displacement itself as an undeconstructible principle. In La dissémination Derrida had insisted that the re-marks of dissemination, unlike polysemy, “cannot be pinned down at any one point by the concept or the tenor of a signified” (D 32/25). What interests Derrida in the Freudian death drive and the drive to mastery (Bemächtigungstrieb), as discussed in Chapter 4, is a movement within psychoanalysis “beyond the beyond” of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Jenseits des Lustprinzips) and hence not only as Derrida explains in États d’âme de la psychanalyse, a life “beyond the economy of the possible” (EAP 83/276), beyond the force of the performative, power, and even “perhaps beyond any cruelty” (87/278) but also therefore beyond psychoanalysis. But, as “Être juste avec Freud” makes clear, this is not just a beyond of pleasure, desire, and mastery. It is beyond any belief in “principality or principleness, in the problematic of the principle, in the principled unity of pleasure and power, or of some drive that is thought to be more originary than the other” (R 146/117). Invoking a figure similar to the “labyrinth of the ear” and its vertigo (UG 75/49; cf. M XIII/xviii) and opposed to Lacan’s circular drive, he continues: “The theme of the spiral would be that of a drive duality [dualité pulsionelle] (power/pleasure) that is without principle” (R 146/117). The thrust of Derrida’s resistance is that, instead of the “spiraled duality” of life-death (146/118), Lacan hypostatizes the drive as a transcendental, indivisible principle of displacement. 198

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The question remains whether psychoanalysis can offer a sufficiently differential and dispersive account of aurality adequate to the negotiation and struggle of organizing. Derrida finds in Lacan a series of undeconstructible motifs, not least an adherence to the phonocentrism priority of the voice over writing. If this also means that the listening of the analyst is inimical to the record and to recording, as Derrida suggests, preferring the immediacy of the psychoanalytic interlocution, then the centrality of field recording to Ultra-red’s practice marks a decisive departure from a commitment to living speech. The tape-recorded archivization of Lacan’s seminars is a point of fascination for Derrida in “Pour l’amour de Lacan” and Lacan’s relation to inscription and technologies of archivization is arguably more nuanced that this conclusion allows. Ultra-red’s praxis, though, insofar as it explicitly submits the invocatory drive to the microphone’s law of iterability, takes this step. To understand the differential effects of the microphone’s prosthetic character I want to return to the metaphor of the mallet and suggest that the “sonorous refusal” of the value form of participation comes not from an opposition to the hammer, from an opposing force, but from the autoimmunity of this hammering force. What leads to the destruction of the hammer is a multiplication of strikes—an overhammering, if you like. As I have suggested in the preceding chapter, what I have been calling shatter— as another nonsynonymous substitution for différance, trace, dissemination, autoimmunity, survie, and so on—can also be understood as usure. Destruction is not accomplished once and for all, in one fell swoop. It happens progressively, as an effect of multiple blows such that life shatters not by accident but by force of habit or overuse. As Derrida sets out in “La mythologie blanche” (M 250/210), this wearing out through the metaphoric substitution of one for another at the same time leads to the production of surplus value through usurious profit-making. “It wears, sir, as it grows,” quips Derrida in Spectres de Marx quoting the Painter in Timon of Athens, and this “wearing in expansion, in growth itself,” is associated here with the bleak picture—this time blackened rather than bleached—of the world under liberal capitalism (SM 130/97). Something similar is at work in the value form of listening tympanized by Ultra-red. Years earlier in “La mythologie blanche” Derrida had used the explicitly monetary metaphor of the exergue of a coin, effaced in circulation, to characterize the usure of metaphorical transfer. This process of wearing out, Ultra-red’s Militant Sound Investigations

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though, may begin even before coins leave the mint and pass into circulation. Sometimes coins suffer double or even multiple strikes to dramatic effect, the first image battered by subsequent decentered figures that move outside the exergue, or space of inscription. Coin collectors treasure these overhammered examples. Their effacement from too many faces means these coins far exceed their face value. In a similar way striking the tympanum of the ear too much is a kind of accumulation of aural or participatory capital. But I would like to press more on this metaphor of overstamping or overprinting—which to say that I want to overstrike metaphor and thus, as Derrida proposes in the seminar on Heidegger of 1964–65 anticipating “La mythologie blanche,” to “destroy metaphors with the help of other metaphors” (HQ 277/189). The kind of listening that Ultra-red associate with the refusal of its value form would then be linked to this destruction of metaphor that discloses quasi-transcendental metaphoricity as such before any opposition between the figurative and the proper. And the Lacanian drive that calls for this militant listening is a metaphor for this metaphoricity as the displacing movement or play of the signifier. Unlike Lacan, however, Derrida will resist the temptation to hypostatize this metaphoricity as a nonlinguistic force. To the extent that “metaphor” is a metaphor for writing and for life, as well as for aural transposition, both these terms and also metaphor itself are submitted to metaphorical drift. As Ronald Mendoza-de Jesús argues, “metaphor” is no  more metaphor (plus de métaphore) when it becomes—with an audible transfer—more (plus de) metaphorical, which is another way of saying that infinite metaphor would be the end of metaphor.12 This does not leave metaphoricity intact but rather transposes metaphor to an elsewhere that cannot be mastered metaphorically. Metaphor is thus always already differentiating itself. The disclosing of metaphoricity as such involves the “crossing out” of metaphors (HQ 325/224)—that is, of an overprinting (surimpression) of metaphors with multiple strikes of the typewriter’s hammer, as Derrida argues in a footnote in Geschlecht III (G3 8–9n10/41n). If “to press with questions [presser de questions] . . . is already to imprint another text, to cross the marks of multiple writings and languages, to make repetition into an overprinting [surimpression],” he speculates that there are at least two ways of writing on a text. The first abstains from re-marking so as to leave the text intact. After the words “the other consists in,” though, the typescript breaks off into barely legible handwritten notes and one can 200

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only wonder how exactly it might have continued.13 Ultra-red’s militant sound investigations, with their palimpsestic overlayering of multiple listenings disseminated across sites of intervention, offer one possibility for fleshing out this ellipsis, albeit one that Derrida would not have foreseen: If we take to the street it is not a closure but another site for investigation and an opportunity to listen anew. . . . When we have a record we compose with it. This is not a repetition of an analysis. Rather, it is a relistening inflected by a growing understanding of the conditions that define the sites and moments of our meetings. . . . These compositions are the questions and themes for the next phase of an investigation. We record again. We review this record. We record, compose, review. Each composition is a protocol for investigations to be conducted in organizations, homes, institutions, parks, plazas, and streets.14 This self-differentiating is, I suggest, the basis for the “sonorous refusal” of the value form. It is not a matter of resisting the drive to mastery (of the ideological patrons) because this refusal comes first. The self, made up of differential forces, is always already resisting itself, and this resistance comes before any opposition between forces, between power and resistance, between self (patron) or other. It is the interwoven negotiation—the struggle and usure of the self—that is always already in the process of unbinding itself and thus, before any demand to or from the other, is duty beyond duty, duty surpassing itself, over-duty (Pas 38/16). This experiment with a “dutyless duty” returns us to the problem of value form and of listening as exchange. In a reading of Baudelaire’s “La fausse monnaie” in Donner le temps 1, Derrida situates this experience in the context of the Aristotelian distinction between chrematistics and economy (oikonomia), noting that the family of words related to chrēma and chraomai carves out the entire sphere of “one must, to need, to lack, to desire, to be indigent or poor, and then owe, ought, duty, necessity, obligation, need, utility, interest, thing, event, fatality, destiny, demand, desire, prayer, and so forth” (DT 201/159). If the management of the oikos is restricted to the acquisition of those goods necessary to life, chrematistics refers to the unlimited and quasiautomatic accumulation of wealth for its own sake. Agamben, meanwhile, in L’uso dei corpi conceives of use in terms of chrēsis from the same root, and yet with some justification he stands accused of neglecting precisely this second, endless spiral of self-valorizing capital in his exclusive focus on oikonomia Ultra-red’s Militant Sound Investigations

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in Il Regno et la Gloria (RG). The opposition is doubtless overdrawn, and what Agamben neglects to register is that the restricted economy is unimaginable, as Derrida puts it, “without the least chrematistic vertigo” (DT 201/159)— whence also the “labyrinthic vertigo” of the ear (T XIII/xviii) that confronts philosophy whenever it seeks to master its other. This ought to be evident from the fact that the use of the self of which he speaks has already passed over into the uselessness of eternal life or form-of-life where more use— over-use—is not anymore (of) use (plus d’usure, to coin a phrase).15 But Agamben seems to imagine this life beyond life not as survie but as an ultimate acquittal that coincides with infinite use, demand, and so forth.16 In a similar way, the alternative modalities of listening Ultra-red oppose to the value form of participation whereby the “subject is stamped with the imprint of the master signifier” are unthinkable without the potentially infinite substitutability of one ear for another. This same substitutability gets exploited in neoliberalism’s commodification of listening through a combination of digital streaming platforms and affective surveillance technologies. There is a spiraled interweaving of power and unpower, force and resistance. This is why, to return once again to the metaphor of typing or imprinting, every thing Derrida has to say about the stamp (timbre) in La carte postale shows it to be pharmacological—both poison and cure.17 On the one hand, the stamp is a payment in advance and hence an exemption or acquittal from every charge and debt (CP 62/55–56). On the other, insofar as it has advanced the funds, it is the crushing tax of tradition or heritage, a subscription for which one pays automatically and increasingly the more one tries to liberate oneself. This stamp “imposes and is imposed everywhere, conditions every other type, timbre, or tympan in general; and yet, you can barely see it. It is minuscule, infinitely divisible, composes itself with billions of other obliterating positions, impositions, or superimpositions” (107–8/101). It is not that the stamp is a metaphor, but, “on the contrary, metaphor is a stamp [timbre]; the tax, the duty to be paid on natural language and on the voice. And so on for the metaphoric catastrophe” (52/46). “Chastised by metaphor,” as Malabou phrases it—or dare I say tympanized by metaphor—we are “passengers, not drivers, of the metaphoric vehicle.”18 What cannot be mastered by any drive, what resists any Bemächtigungstrieb (drive for mastery, pulsion de maîtrise), is the originary diversion and derivation—the contre-dérive—of the trace that taxes the voice from the outset.19 As with the destruction of metaphor by way of other metaphors, 202

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what is stake here is the destruction or impossibility of the proper—not so much, then, the use or the usure of metaphor as its misuse or catachresis, in the terms of “La mythologie blanche,” which consists in the violent superimposition of meaning without reference to proper sense. This metaphoric catastrophe, whose reversal consists not in inverting the priority of the proper over the figurative but in the drive to displace, derive, and differentiate that conditions and destabilizes that opposition, might just be the force of overprinting in the second sense to which the note in Geschlecht III refers. A consequence of this blow to the proper is that there is no principle before the metaphorical dérive. This means that, “far from knowing first what ‘life’ [means], . . . it is rather starting from the notion of a language and its ‘sur-vival’ in translation that we could have access to the notion” (Psy1 213/202). Likewise, far from first knowing what listening is, it is only starting from the drift and displacement from ear to ear that there is access to listening. In a set of Protocols for the Sound of Freedom created together with Fred Moten, George E. Lewis, and others for Arika’s weeklong performance at the 2012 Whitney Biennial, A Survey Is A Process of Listening, Ultra-red explicitly recognize the differential character of what is heard before any biopolitical exclusion: Every sound is a structure formed of many sounds. Every sound is an archive of echoes from spaces, encounters, voices, demands, desires, and the vibrations between. Echoing inside the word FREEDOM are scenes of learning listening organizing resisting20 “Do we know freedom when we hear it?” asks Lewis. “Can we tell the world how to hear the sound of freedom?” In these questions the possibility and indeed the power of listening arguably appear something of which I am capable. That “I can” listen, that I can make listening my own and master it Ultra-red’s Militant Sound Investigations

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FIGURE 5. “What do the blocks sound like?” 2017. Ultra-red poster for a soundwalk through the Florida blocks in Barcelona. Courtesy of Chris Jones.

perhaps remains insufficiently questioned. But if there is a listening beyond (the beyond) of biopolitics, it is not a possibility of which anyone would be capable. Rather, listening is always already displaced and transported elsewhere, exposed to unpower and death and thus resisting itself before any power or drive. In the passage just quoted, Ultra-red imitate the form and spacing of a poem by Audre Lorde titled “Echoes,” which begins “There is a timbre of voice that comes from not being heard.” “Timbre” here should be understood not as a property of the voice but as the over-stamp of metaphorical catastrophe. This means, moreover, that I am no more capable of this inaudibility—of the impossibility of hearing and of being heard which I recognize only insofar as it comes from the other, of this being dead to all the world except to those who share this vociferation, to those who thus collectively carry the voices of friends beyond (the beyond of) the world. As I argued about Derrida’s speculations about a power beyond hyper-sovereignty and Walten, what separates différance from Heidegger’s ontico-ontological difference is the catachrestic reversal of the possibility of impossibility into the impossibility of every possibility. If the blow of biopolitics destroys the possibility of life and of audibility, the sound of life, in its multiple strikes and overprints, superimposes these impossibilities. It franks impossibility and cancels the duty, putting impossibility in check and destroying it with the help of other impossibilities. What does this life, this sound of life, sound like? This is the question that has orga nized the field of inquiry in these pages, and yet it admits of no straightforward answers, instead tending to disperse itself. In a sense this book is an appeal—without expectation of anything that would be recognized as a response—for sound studies to up the theoretical and political stakes of its field of inquiry and for philosophy to give itself over to and forgive itself for the animating power of the sonorous that traverses and disrupts it. This book has hoped to show that philosophy is at its most sonorous and most politically resonant—and most philosophical—when it spreads beyond its bounds to touch on life, while experiments in sound and performance art can most vividly challenge the sovereignty of philosophy to theorize life. Even these are constraints that demand to be undone. And that would be the ambition for this book: that the sound of life and every thing that will have been thought under this category might continue to disseminate and to shatter the limits of aurality and of life. Ultra-red’s Militant Sound Investigations

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In a passage from Jours de l’an cited by Derrida in “Fourmis,” Hélène Cixous’s third-person author writes: I need to speak of these women who have entered into me, they have struck me, they have hurt me, they have woken the dead in me, they have opened [frayé] paths, they have brought me wars, gardens, children, foreign families, bereavements without graves, and I have tasted the world in their tongues. They have lived their lives in me. They have written. . . . They continue, not ceasing to live, not ceasing to die, not ceasing to write. (JA 162/107; cited in Four 102n3/42fn22 from which I take the translation) There are many voices woven through this text, more or less familiar, more or less strident. Perhaps you will hear your own. I owe my deepest gratitude to those ears and voices that have impelled, inflected, and auscultated what appears here as “my own” voice without, I hope, my having appropriated or usurped them in advance: Dina Al-Kassim, Nicole Anderson, Edward Arden, Karyn Ball, Rita Barnard, Jonathan Basile, Geoffrey Bennington, Željko Blacé, Andrea Bohlman, Emile Bojesen, Seth Brodsky, Zeynep Bulut, Melissa Burke, Nerea Calvillo, Timothy Campbell, Anita Carey-Yard, Delia Casadei, Juan Castrillón Vallego, Katie Chenoweth, Amy Cimini, Rey Chow, chukwumaa, David Copenhafer, Jessica Feldman, Ian Fleishman, Catherine Flynn, Paul Foley, Gwynne Fulton, Michael Gallope, Knar Gavin, Glenda Goodman, Sophia Guggenberger, Natasha Hay, Sharon Hayes, Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz, Oliver Jones, Carlo Lanfossi, Clara Latham, Thomas Lay, Edith Lázár, Marc LeMay, Lana Lin, Dzekashu Macviban,

Catherine Malabou, Elissa Marder, Luiza Margan, Ronald Mendoza-de Jesús, Chris Jones, Thomas Clément Mercier, Ann Morgan, Jairo Moreno, Maria Murphy, Chris Mustazza, Julie Beth Napolin, Andrew Niess, Julia Ng, Sarie Nijboer, Enos Nyamor, Mendi and Keith Obadike, Laura Odello, Benjamin Oyler, Dominic Pettman, María Puig de la Bellacasa, Pooja Rangan, Adam Rosenthal, Sophie Rosenzweig, Paul Saint-Amour, Alice Sarmiento, Martin Scherzinger, Mauro Senatore, Charlie Shrader, Avery Slater, Erin Soros, Peter Szendy, Philippe Theophanidis, Rodrigo Therezo, Sophie-Charlotte Thierof, Eszter Timár, Lynn Turner, Daniel Villegas Vélez, Francesco Vitale, Maureen Waltham-Smith, Dominic Zechner, Soyoung Yoon.

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Acknowledgments

NOTES

P R O LO G U E

1. See Peter Szendy, Sur écoute. Esthétique de l’espionnage (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2007); All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage, trans. Roland Végső (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). 2. Kevin Attell, Giorgio Agamben: Beyond the Threshold of Deconstruction (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). 3. Peggy Kamuf, Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018); David Wills, Killing Times: The Temporal Technology of the Death Penalty (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019); Kelly Oliver, Technologies of Life and Death: From Cloning to Capital Punishment (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013); Kelly Oliver and Stephanie Straub, eds., Deconstructing the Death Penalty: Derrida’s Seminars and the New Abolitionism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018); Mauro Senatore, Germs of Death: The Problem of Genesis in Jacques Derrida (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018); Dawne McCance, The Reproduction of Life Death: Derrida’s La Vie La Mort (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019). 4. Francesco Vitale, Biodeconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences, trans. Mauro Senatore (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018); Philippe Lynes, Futures of Life Death on Earth: Derrida’s General Ecology (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018); Matthias Fritsch, Philippe Lynes, and David Wood, eds., Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018). 5. Peter Szendy, À coups de points. La ponctuation comme experience (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2013); Of Stigmatology: Punctuation as Experience, trans. Jan Plug (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018).

1 . S H AT T E R

1. On the generalization of war and its continuation by other means (such as financialization, racism, endocolonization, and so forth) see Éric Alliez and Maurizio Lazzarato, Guerres et capital (Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2016); Wars and Capital (South Pasadena, Calif.: semiotext(e), 2016). 2. Jacques Derrida with Giovanna Borradori, “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides,” in Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 96–97. 3. Peggy Kamuf, “Afterburn: An Afterword to ‘The Flying Manuscript,’ ” New Literary History 37, no. 1 (2006): 49, 53. 4. Alliez and Lazzarato, Guerres et capital, 15/13. 5. For a summary of their initial findings, see Eleana Yalouri and Elpida Ripou, “Learning from documenta: A Research Project between Art and Anthropology,” On Curating 33 (June 2017), http://www.on-curating.org /issue-33-reader/learning -from-documenta-a-research-project-between-art-and-anthropology.html#_edn14. 6. Risa Puleo, “The Messy Politics of Documenta’s Arrival in Athens,” Hyperallergic, April 10, 2017, https:// hyperallergic.com /371252/the-messy-politics-of -documentas-arrival-in-athens. 7. “34 Exercises of Freedom,” http://www.documenta14.de/en/public-programs. 8. Stathis Gourgouris, “Mask Silence, Silence Masks, or A Condition of Utmost Listening,” South as a State of Mind 7 (2016). 9. Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor, trans. John Drury, Corinne Oster, and Andrew Parker (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 225. 10. Jacques Rancière, Malaise dans l’esthétique (Paris: Galilée, 2004), 37–38; Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 24–25; trans. modified. 11. Jennifer Lynn Stoever, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (New York: New York University Press, 2016). 12. Brandon LaBelle, “The Sonic Agent,” in Dirty Ear Report #2 / Sound, Multiplicity, and Radical Listening (Berlin: Errant Bodies Press, 2016), 48. 13. Ibid.; my emphasis. 14. On music’s use as an instrument of torture, see Suzanne G. Cusick. “ ‘You Are in a Place That Is Out of the World . . .’: Music in the Detention Camps of the ‘Global War on Terror,’ ” Journal of the Society for American Music 2, no. 1 (2008): 1–26. On sounds of political protests and social movements, see Noriko Manabe, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Protest Music after Fukushima (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Benjamin Tausig, Bangkok Is Ringing: Sound, Protest, and Constraint (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); Eric Drott, “Resistance and Social Movements,” in The Routledge Reader on the Sociology of 210

Notes to pages 7–16

Music, ed. John Shepherd and Kyle Devine (London: Routledge, 2015), 171–80. On the weaponization of sound, see Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010); J. Martin Daughtry, Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in War time Iraq (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 15. In her study of the anthropotechnologies via which a proper way of speaking was cultivated in nineteenth-century Colombia, Ana María Ochoa Gautier observes how eloquence, etymology, and orthography conspire in what she dubs a “eugenesis of the tongue” to “control language’s tendency, as a ‘living body,’ toward diversification” (Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014], 181). 16. In Voyous, commenting on Plato’s use of this word, Derrida refers to the “multicolored beauty of democracy” (V 48/26); see also in “Plato’s Pharmacy” where he glosses Plato’s use of to poikilon again in the sense of multicolored by describing democracy as “orgy, debauchery, flea market, fair, ‘a bazaar of constitutions’ ” (D 167/145). 17. Plato, Republic, trans. Tom Griffith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 18. Compare Derrida’s claim in the Théorie and Pratique seminar of 1976–77: “It is within that technical determination—which coincides with metaphysics itself—that the opposition between theōria and praxis is produced. . . . But that theoreticist reactivity then depends totally, in its very possibility, on a first destination or determination of thinking as praxis or poiēsis and, therefore, tekhnē. As a result, the theoretical is not a specification of the practical and, more generally, of the technical. The traditional theoreticism of philosophy is an effect of its practicism and not its opposite; a specific effect of its initial practicism and hence of its technicism” (TP 76/110–11). 19. Geoffrey Bennington, Not Half No End: Militantly Melancholic Essays in Memory of Jacques Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 10. 20. Derrida remains dismissive of the term “biopolitics,” wondering whether Agamben would not have preferred Foucault to have chosen zoopolitics (BS1 432–33/325), although, as will become clearer as the Homo Sacer series unfolds, Agamben intends bare life not to align straightforwardly with zōē but to indicate biological life to the precise extent that it is captured by the sovereign exception and hence enters into indistinction with bios. Derrida’s point—that there is no zōē that would not already be political and hence bare life in Agamben’s terms—stands. 21. On this “dream of deconstruction,” see also Elizabeth Rottenberg, “A New Primal Scene: Derrida and the Scene of Execution,” in For the Love of Psychoanalysis: The Play of Chance in Freud and Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 212–14. Notes to pages 16–21

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22. Francesco Vitale, Biodeconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences, trans. Mauro Senatore (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018). 23. Ibid., 234n36. 24. Geoffrey Bennington, “Scatter,” Oxford Literary Review 30, no. 1 (2008): 1–43. 25. Translation my own. I am very grateful to Thomas Clément Mercier for bringing this text to my attention upon reading a draft of this chapter—which, quite happily, confirmed my instincts about a Nancean motivation for my notion of shatter. 26. “Scatter 2.0,” invited talk at Texas A&M University, March 24, 2017; cf. also Bennington, “Scatter,” 3. 27. Geoffrey Bennington, Scatter 1: The Politics of Politics in Foucault, Heidegger, and Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 249. 28. Catherine Malabou, “Plasticity and Elasticity in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Diacritics 37, no. 4 (2007): 82. Derrida develops this idea of life’s self-reserve in a reading of the pleasure principle in “Spéculer—sur ‘Freud’ ” (CP). 29. Bennington, Scatter 1, especially 267–81, where he argues that “demi(dignity) just is the axiom of deconstruction” (279). This insistence on the irreducibility of autoimmunity—of the trace-structure—may be compared with Alexander García Düttmann’s argument that différance as a desire for a pure presence without ellipsis necessarily lets itself be restricted and that there is therefore always an irreducible “différance of différance” (“Ellipses of Grammatology,” Derrida Today 11, no. 2 [2018]: 134–43); Peter Szendy’s characterization of capital in “Katechon,” Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon (2017)—“indebtedness defers itself as itself and for itself, because debt perpetuates itself by the very process of delaying itself”; and see Laura Odello’s analysis of the lure of sovereignty (“ ‘The greatest possible mastery, the greatest possible self-presence of life’: Derrida and the Deconstruction of Sovereignty,” trans. D. J. S. Cross, CR: The New Centennial Review 17, no. 1 [2017]: 141–62, especially 160–61n45). Roland Végső offers an extensive and unabashed affirmation of the undeconstructible in “Affirmative Judgments: The Sabbath of Deconstruction,” parallax 16, no. 3 (2010): 74–84. 30. “Dialogue entre Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe et Jean-Luc Nancy,” Rue Descartes 52 (2006): 88; “Discussion between Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-Luc Nancy,” in Derrida, For Strasbourg: Conversations of Friendship and Philosophy, ed. and trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 18. I am grateful to Daniel Hoffmann-Schwartz for pointing out this passage and to Philippe Theophanidis for his insights in an email exchange about this issue. There is a long history to this “dispute” that Bennington traces (“Handshake,” in Not Half No End, 65–85) and that I won’t rehearse again here except to note that in a recent dialogue between Nancy and Badiou the former again twists Derrida’s phrase in 212 Notes to pages 21–25

the direction of the infinite: “infinite jouissance is finite,” echoing Le voix et le phénomène, is followed by, “The finite opens itself infinitely” (Alain Badiou and Jean-Luc Nancy, German Philosophy: A Dialogue, ed. Jan Völker, trans. Richard Lambert [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018], 28). Much earlier, before he misquotes Derrida’s slogan in Une pensée finie, Nancy was concerned with the articulation of the infinite with finitude in texts such as La communauté desœuvrée where he speaks of “the finite interruption of infinite desire, and the infinite syncope of finite desire” that takes place in community (CD 51/19), of “infinite birth of finitude” (70/28) and of community as “an infinite task at the heart of finitude” (89/37). 31. Végső, “Affirmative Judgments,” 83–84. 32. Ibid., 78. 33. On the question of the simultaneous, see Derrida’s preface to Malabou’s L’avenir de Hegel, where he suspects her of thinking repetition and accident “at once . . . at the same time” or “in the same stroke,” which thus tends to “dampen surprise . . . as if it were a surprise without surprise” (TA xiii). 34. Odello, “ ‘The greatest possible mastery,’ ” 161–61n45. 35. Michael Naas, Derrida from Now On (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 22–24. See also Bennington’s commentary on this passage in Scatter 1, 269–70. 36. Szendy, “Katechon.” 37. Ibid.; see my note 29. 38. Bennington, “The Democricy to Come,” Oxford Literary Review 39, no. 1 (2017): 129. 39. Szendy, “Katechon.” On the question of obligation and the undeconstructible, Szendy’s argument might usefully be read alongside Jean-Luc Nancy’s “La voix libre de l’homme,” 32–51 (VLH). 40. Bennington, “The Democricy to Come,” 129. 41. Végső, “Affirmative Judgments,” 82; Düttmann, “Ellipses of Grammatology.” 42. Dimitris Vardoulakis, Sovereignty and Its Other: Toward the Dejustification of Violence (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 1–2; Alberto Toscano, “Abstract Life: Biopolitics, Periodisation and the Critique of Political Economy,” Conference on “Italian Thought Today: Biopolitics Nihilism, Empire,” University of Kent, April 6, 2008. 43. Simone Regazzoni, “Au-delà de la pulsion de pouvoir. Derrida et la déconstruction de la souveraineté,” Lignes 47 (2015): 75 (trans. mine). 44. There would be a certain irony, though, that Derrida, having made these scathing remarks about Agamben in the first year of the seminar, in the second goes on to claim that he himself is drawing attention to a term (Walten) that has hitherto gone “unnoticed” (BS2 355/256)—and it would not be the first time that he has done so when it comes to spotting overlooked or avoided notions in Heidegger reception, such as the voice of the friend in Geschlecht IV. Notes to pages 25–30

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45. Michel Foucault, “Il faut défendre la société”: cours au Collège de France (1975–1976) Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 1997), 32; “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–76, trans. David Macey (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 35. 46. On the question of marking an absolute limit to Walten, see also Ronald Mendoza-de Jesús, “Being, Sovereignty, Unconditionality: Heidegger’s Walten in Derrida’s La bête et le souverain II,” Mosaic 44, no. 3 (2011): 99–113. See also Laura Odello, “Walten ou l’hyper-souveraineté,” in Appels de Jacques Derrida, ed. Danielle Cohen-Levinas and Ginette Michaud (Paris: Hermann, 2014), 135–46. 47. Mendoza-de Jesús, “Being, Sovereignty, Unconditionality,” 112. 48. Catherine Malabou, “Will Sovereignty Ever Be Deconstructed?,” in Plastic Materialities: Politics, Legality, and Metamorphosis in the Work of Catherine Malabou, ed. Brenna Bhandar and Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015), 37, 36. 49. Michel Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population. Cours au Collège de France (1977–1978) (Paris; Seuil/Gallimard, 2004), 11–13; Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 9–11. 50. Michel Foucault, “Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity” [1984], in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, Volume 1: Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), 167. 51. Thomas Clément Mercier, “Violence and Resistance beyond Pólemos: Foucault and Derrida between Power and Unpower,” unpublished paper at the Engaging Foucault conference, Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory of Belgrade, December 7, 2014. 52. Foucault, “Il faut défendre la société,” 16/15; Alliez and Lazzarato, Wars and Capital, 15, 21. 53. Odello, “Walten ou l’hyper-souveraineté,” 145. 54. Geoffrey Bennington, “Crying,” Cixousversaire, New York University, September 15, 2017. 55. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 181. 56. Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 116. 57. See Jean-Luc Nancy, À l’écoute (E); Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Echo of the Subject,” in Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, trans. Christopher Fynsk (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 139–207; Peter Szendy, Sur écoute. Esthétique de l’espionnage Paris: Minuit, 2007; All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage, trans. Roland Végső (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016); Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophre nia, Electric Speech (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989); and on crossed wires see Jacques Derrida’s H. C. pour la vie (HC), passim. 214 Notes to pages 31–36

58. Also see Robin James, The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2019). Whereas James sees a complicity between the statistical structure of acoustic resonance and the risk-managerial operation of neoliberal biopolitics, shatter is as irreducible to the biopolitical instrumentalization of sound as it is to the logic of securitization. The probabilistic character of biopolitical neoliberalism attempts to manage the unpredictability of the other’s eventality. 59. Peter Szendy, “Music and Torture: The Stigmata of Music and Sound,” trans. Allison Schifani and Zeke Sikelianos, in Speaking about Torture, ed. Julie A. Carson and Elisabeth Weber (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 204. 60. Peter Szendy, “The Auditory Re-Turn (The Point of Listening),” in Thresholds of Listening: Sound, Technics, Space, ed. Sander van Maas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 19–23. For his extended theory of punctuation, see À coups de points: La ponctuation comme expérience (Paris: Minuit, 2013); Of Stigmatology: Punctuation as Experience, trans. Jan Plug (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018). For the Nietzsche reference, see Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist, trans. Thomas Common (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover. 2004), 1. 61. Lauri Siisiäinen’s Foucault and the Politics of Hearing (New York: Routledge, 2013) offers a welcome corrective to the habitual focus on optical regimes, showing the importance of listening in “Message ou bruit?” and Naissance de la clinique where Foucault discusses Laënnec’s treatise. 62. Szendy, À coups de points, 107/71. E XC U R S U S 1 . C A LC U L AT I O N A N D S T R I C T U R E I N M E N D I + K E I T H O B A D I K E ’ S N U M B E R S S TAT I O N

1. I am enormously grateful to Mendi and Keith Obadike for generously agreeing to answer my questions and for providing such rich and ref lective responses, technical information, and the photo printed on page 39. I am also grateful for their questions and engagement at a panel organized by Julie Beth Napolin at The New School in April 2018 under the heading “The Sound of Biopolitics.” 2. Achille Mbembe, Critique de la raison nègre (Paris: Le découverte, 2014), 16–17; Critique of Black Reason, trans. Laurent Dubois (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017), 5–6. 3. I think here of Geoffrey Bennington’s observation: “By the time Agamben has worked through his thinking in Homo Sacer and State of Exception I would be close to agreeing with him. . . . But how much unhelpful pathos along the way!” (“Sovereign Stupidity and Autoimmunity,” in Derrida and the Time of the Political, ed. Pheng Cheah and Suzanne Guerlac [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009], 113n27). But I would be quick to urge that the force of this performance not be reduced to the British stiff upper lip in the face of trauma that Bennington is wont to lampoon. Notes to pages 36–40

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4. Soyoung Yoon, “Do a Number: The Facticity of the Voice, or Reading Stopand-Frisk Data,” Discourse 39, no. 3 (2017): 399. I am grateful to Julie Beth Napolin for organizing an event at The New School in April 2018 at which the three of us were able to present and discuss intersections among our research interests with a very insightful response and questions from Lana Lin. 5. Julie Beth Napolin, “On Blues Speaker [for James Baldwin]: A Conversation with Mendi and Keith Obadike,” Social Text, August 21, 2018, https://socialtextjournal .org /on-blues-speaker-for-james-baldwin-a-conversation-with-mendi-and-keith -obadike. 6. Ibid., 398; emphasis mine. 7. Alain Badiou, Le nombre et les nombres (Paris: Seuil, 1990), 11–14; Number and Numbers, trans. Robin Mackay (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 2–4. 8. Ibid., 12/2. 9. Julie Beth Napolin, “Scenes of Subjection: Women’s Voices Narrating Black Death,” Sounding Out! blog, December 19, 2016, https://soundstudiesblog.com/tag /julie-beth-napolin /. I am very grateful to Julie for the ongoing and highly stimulating conversations we have had over the last few years about this and other overlapping interests. 10. Yoon, “Do a Number,” 399. 11. Jasbir Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017). 12. Oma Jabary Salamanca, “Unplug and Play: Manufacturing Collapse in Gaza,” Human Geography 4, no. 1 (2011), 30. Puar writes: “While the West Bank is controlled largely through checkpoints, the Gaza Strip is suffocated through choke points” (The Right to Maim, 135). 13. Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 1–2n2. I thank Ann Morgan for drawing my attention to this text. 14. Kristie Dotson, “Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 26, no. 2 (2011): 236–57. 15. Manne, Down Girl, 4–5. 16. Alexander Galloway, Laruelle: Against the Digital (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). 17. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 95. 18. Peter Hallward, “The Politics of Prescription,” South Atlantic Quarterly 104, no. 4 (2005): 778. 19. Ibid., 781, 778. 20. Bruno Bosteels, “Who Is Derrida’s Nietzsche?” Nietzsche 13/13, Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought, March 25, 2017, accessed September 3, 2017, http:// blogs.law.columbia.edu/nietzsche1313/ bruno-bosteels-who-is-derridas -nietzsche. 216 Notes to pages 40–47

21. Galloway, Laruelle, 59. 22. Alberto Toscano, “Plasticity, Capital, and the Dialectic,” in Plastic Materialities: Politics, Legality, and Metamorphosis in the Work of Catherine Malabou, ed. Brenna Bhandar and Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015), 94. Toscano is referring to Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s Geistige und körperliche Arbeit: Zur Epistemologie der abendländischen Geschichte (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970); Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology, trans. Martin Sohn-Rethel (London: Macmillan, 1978). 23. Robin James, The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2019), 2. 24. Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Fifth Hammer: Pythagoras and the Disharmony of the World (New York: Zone Books, 2011). 2. THE RHYTHM OF LIFE

1. Alain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside, trans. Martin Thom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 95. 2. Ibid., 192. 3. Gilles Deleuze, “Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle,” L’autre journal, no. l (1990): 240–47; “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (1992): 3–7. 4. Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard: 1975), 151–53; Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 149–51. 5. Ibid., 152. 6. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 111–12. 7. Peter Szendy, “Usury,” Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon 3, no. 6 (2016). 8. Jacques Derrida, “Désistance,” in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, trans. Christopher Fynsk (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1989), 31; reprinted in Psy2 228–29/222: “ There is no subject without the signature of this rhythm, in and before us,” and a few lines later there is a reference to “the question of the autos and its self-relation as rhythm.” References hereafter are to the reprinted essay in Psyché II. 9. Peter Szendy, À coups de points. La ponctuation comme experience (Paris: Minuit, 2013), 55–57; Of Stigmatology: Punctuation as Experience, trans. Jan Plug (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 33–35. 10. Ibid., 35. 11. Kevin Attell, Giorgio Agamben: Beyond the Threshold of Deconstruction (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 213–54. Notes to pages 47–55

217

12. Attell, Giorgio Agamben, 286n26. 13. Peter Szendy, “Katechon,” Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon 3, no. 5 (2017). Derrida’s marginalia can be studied now that his personal library is held at Princeton. 14. G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt, 1971), 85; Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 60. 15. See Jean-Luc Nancy, Hegel: L’inquiétude du négatif (H), and Catherine Malabou, L’avenir de Hegel: Plasticité, temporalité, dialectique (Paris: Vrin, 1996); The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic, trans. Lisabeth During (New York: Routledge, 2005). 16. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 88/63. 17. Ibid., 89/64. 18. Szendy, À coups de points, 92/60. 19. Ibid. For the sake of continuity with the argument about time and rhythm, I substitute Szendy’s shifter “ here” with “now.” 20. Ibid., 105–7/70–71, 154–55/104. 21. Szendy, “Katechon.” 22. Giorgio Agamben, introduction to Carl Schmitt, Un giurista davanti a se stesso. Saggi e interviste (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 2005), 16–17; Szendy’s translation in “Katechon.” 23. Szendy, “Usury.” 24. Szendy, “Katechon.” 25. Michel Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population. Cours au Collège de France (1977–1978) (Paris; Seuil/Gallimard, 2004), 11–13; Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 9–11. 26. Giorgio Agamben, “Metropolis,” trans. Arianna Bove, http://www .generation-online.org /p/fpagamben4.htm. 27. Foucault, Securité, territoire, population, 22/20. 28. “The Endless Crisis as an Instrument of Power: In Conversation with Giorgio Agamben,” Verso Blog, June 4, 2013, https://www.versobooks.com/ blogs/1318-the -endless-crisis-as-an-instrument-of-power-in-conversation-with-giorgio-agamben; translated from an interview first published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 24, 2013; all emphases mine. 29. Michael Foucault, “Il faut défendre la société”: Cours au Collège de France (1975–1976) (Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 1997), 214; “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, trans. David Macey (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 240–41. 30. Lauren Berlant, “Slow Death: Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency,” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 4 (2007): 756, 759. On Foucault’s association of biopolitics with endemics, rather than epidemics, see “Il faut défendre la société,” 217/244. 218 Notes to pages 56–63

31. Jasbir Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017). 32. Ibid., 13, 139. 33. Ibid., 755. 34. Alain Badiou, Peut-on penser la politique? (Paris: Seuil, 1989), 96; Can Politics Be Thought? trans. Bruno Bosteels (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2019), 93. 35. Ibid. 36. Emily Apter, Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse, and the Impolitic (London: Verso, 2018). 37. Berlant, “Slow Death,” 779–80. 38. Apter, Unexceptional Politics, 34. 39. Puar, The Right to Maim, 139. 40. Ibid., xviii. 41. Ibid., 148. 42. Szendy, “Katechon.” 43. Geoffrey Bennington, Scatter 1: The Politics of Politics in Foucault, Heidegger, and Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 248. 44. Lorenzo Chiesa and Frank Ruda, “The Event of Language as Force of Life: Agamben’s Linguistic Vitalism,” Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities 16, no. 3 (2011): 167. 45. Ibid., 167. 46. Geoffrey Bennington, “Hap,” Oxford Literary Review 36, no. 2 (2014): 170. 47. Alain Badiou, “Intervention dans le cadre du Collège international de philosophie sur le livre de Giorgio Agamben: La Communauté qui vient, théorie de la singularité quelconque,” transcribed by François Duvert, http://www .entretemps.asso.fr/Badiou/Agamben.htm; my translation. 48. Speaking of jouir, Nancy writes: “The other cuts across me, I cut across it. Each one is the other for the other—but also for the self. . . . This is the syncope of identity in singularity. A syncope: the step marked, in a suspense, from the other to me, neither confusion nor fading, clarity itself, the beating of the heart, the cadence and the cut of another heart within it” (PF 271/262; trans. modified). 49. David Wills, “The Future Anterior of Blood,” in Killing Times: The Temporal Technology of the Death Penalty (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 87–118. 50. Ibid., 118. 51. Catherine Malabou, “The End of Writing? Grammatology and Plasticity,” trans. Annjeanette Wiese, European Legacy 12, no. 4 (2007): 434–35. 52. Also see Juliet Fleming, Cultural Graphology: Writing after Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 53. David Cunningham, “Logics of Generalization: Derrida, Grammatology and Transdisciplinarity,” Theory, Culture & Society, 32, no. 5–6 (2015): 79–107. Notes to pages 63–77

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54. Catherine Malabou, L’avenir de Hegel, 247/186; my emphases. This word “rhythm” crops up in her more recent Avant demain: Épigenèse et rationalité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2014); Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality, trans. Carolyn Shread (Cambridge: Polity, 2016): “Between an authentic temporality without maturation and a chronological vulgarity without ecstasy, epigenetic temporality unfolds at its own rhythm” (304/176). 55. Geoffrey Bennington, “The Democricy to Come,” Oxford Literary Review 39, no. 1 (2017): 129–30. 56. See Catherine Malabou, “Philosophy in Erection,” Paragraph 39, no. 2 (2016): 238–48; Sina Kramer, “Derrida’s ‘Antigonanette’: On the Quasi-Transcendental,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 52, no. 4 (2014): 521–51. 57. I am very grateful to Geoffrey Bennington and David Wills for graciously allowing me to make use of their new translation of the passages quoted here prior to its publication. Note that since the pagination in the new English edition is the same as the French only one set of page numbers is given. 58. G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Naturphilosophie als der Encyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse. Zweiter Theil, ed. Karl Ludwig Michelet (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1847); Philosophy of Nature, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 136–49. 59. See also Michael Gallope, Deep Refrains: Music, Philosophy, and the Ineffable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 77–78. 60. Hegel, Naturphilosophie, 139; §300 Zusatz. 61. Ibid., 147; §302. 62. Ibid., 135–36; §298. 63. Szendy, À coups de points, 100/66. 64. Hegel, Naturphilosophie, 353; §351 and §359; cited by Szendy in À coups de points, 97/63. 65. Szendy, À coups de points, 107/71. 66. Ibid., 99/65. 67. Peter Szendy, “Épilogue: L’écoute plastique,” in Écoute, une histoire de nos oreilles (Paris: Minuit, 2001), 155–71; “Epilogue: Plastic Listening,” in Listen: A History of Our Ears, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 129–43. 68. Catherine Malabou, “Plasticity and Elasticity in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Diacritics 37, no. 4 (2007): 82. 69. Agamben speaks of the gloss as a literary genre in S 86/74, and as a radicalization of the experience implicit in acts of speech of “an absolute desubjectification and ‘barbarization’ of the event of language” in RA 105–6/113–14. 70. Daniel Heller-Roazen, “Glossolalia: From the Unity of the Word to the Plurality of Tongues,” in Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, ed. Barbara Cassin; trans. Steven Rendall et al.; translation edited by Emily Apter, 220

Notes to pages 78–84

Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 594. 71. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 19. 72. Ibid., 20. 73. On stricture in Glas, see Marian Hobson, Jacques Derrida: Opening Lines (New York: Routledge, 1998), 158–69. 74. Malabou, L’avenir de Hegel, 15/4. 75. Geoffrey Bennington, “Notes Towards a Discussion of Method and Metaphor in Glas,” Paragraph 39, no. 2 (2016): 253. Geoffrey Hartman also speaks of “gl, particularly close to the throat on the point of throttling itself, or being throttled” in “Homage to Glas,” Critical Inquiry 33 (2007): 247. 76. For a discussion of the significance of Hegel in this seminar, see Francesco Vitale, Biodeconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences, trans. Maura Senatore (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018), 29–52. E XC U R S U S 2 . L AW R E N C E A B U H A M D A N ’ S P H O N E T I C BORDER-CROSSINGS

1. Lawrence Abu Hamdan, “Aural Contract: Forensic Listening and the Reorga ni zation of the Speaking Subject,” in Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, 65–82 (Berlin: Sternberg Press; London: Forensic Architecture, 2014), 74. 2. Ibid., 68. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., 65–66; see Emily Apter, “Shibboleth: Policing by Ear and Forensic Listening in Projects by Lawrence Abu Hamdan,” October 156 (2016): 107. 6. Apter, “Shibboleth,” 102. 7. Ibid., 114. 8. Discussing the method of forensic linguist Peter French who is the founder of the UK’s leading independent forensic auditory laboratory, Abu Hamdan writes: “Ironically, what allows French to maintain his credibility in a time in which law enforcement increasingly reaches out to forensic linguistics in odious forms of surveillance and profiling that target huge swathes of the population, is his ability to listen better. French understands the limits of what can be detected through the voice and therefore avoids exploiting the law’s generally increasing demand for the empty promises of forensic science and its ignorance regarding their practical capacity” (“Aural Contract,” 70). 9. Lawrence Abu Hamdan, “Truth Measures—Contra Diction: Speech Against Itself,” talk at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, April 15, 2016. Notes to pages 84–98

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10. Brandon LaBelle, Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life (New York: Continuum, 2010), xvii. 11. Emily Apter, Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse, and the Impolitic (London: Verso, 2018). 3. MOUTH(PIECE)

1. Étienne Balibar, “Racism and Nationalism,” trans. Chris Turner, in Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991), 54–61. 2. Jacques Rancière, La Mésentente: Politique et philosophie (Paris: Galilée. 1995), 43; Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Roe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 21–22. 3. Geoffrey Bennington, “Crying,” paper at Cixousversaire conference, New York University, September 15, 2017. 4. Jacques Rancière, La parole muette: Essai sur les contradictions de la littérature (Paris: Hachette, 1998)), 81–83; Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics, trans. James Swenson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 93–94. 5. Ibid., 83–84/95. 6. Ibid., 89/100. 7. Jacques Rancière, “The Thinking of Dissensus: Politics and Aesthetics,” in Reading Rancière: Critical Dissensus, ed. Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp (London: Continuum, 2011), 15. 8. Rancière, La Mésentente, 44/22. 9. Jacques Rancière, “Literary Misunderstanding,” trans. Mary Stevens, Paragraph, 28, no. 2 (2005): 98. 10. Laurent Dubreuil, L’Empire du langage: Colonies et francophonie (Paris: Hermann, 2008), 139–40; Empire of Language: Toward a Critique of (Post)colonial Expression, trans. David Fieni (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2013), 109–10. Also see Rey Chow, “Reading Derrida on Being Monolingual,” New Literary History 39 (2008): 217–31. 11. Laurent Dubreuil, “Notes towards a Poetics of Banlieue,” parallax 18, no. 3 (1998): 102. 12. Dubreuil, L’Empire du langage, 140/110. 13. Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous, “Du mot à la vie: Une dialogue entre Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous,” Magazine Littéraire 430 (2004): 22; “From the Word to Life: A Dialogue between Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous with Aliette Armel,” trans. Ashley Thompson, New Literary History 37, no. 1 (2005): 1. 14. David Wills, Inanimation: Theories of Inorganic Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). 222

Notes to pages 98–105

15. Dubreuil, L’Empire du langage, 133/104. 16. Werner Hamacher, Pleroma—Reading in Hegel: The Genesis and Structure of a Dialectical Hermeneutics in Hegel, trans. Nicholas Walker and Simon Jarvis (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998). 17. Dubreuil, L’Empire du langage, 133/104. 18. “Discussion between Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-Luc Nancy,” in Derrida, For Strasbourg: Conversations of Friendship and Philosophy, ed. and trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 29–30. 19. This does, though, tend to go against Derrida’s suggestion in Glas that “there would be enough to construct a ‘concept’ of fetish” from its generalization beyond the opposition between original and substitute—“perhaps, particularly in Freud, enough not to make it fly into pieces [voler en éclats]” or, in Peter Szendy’s modified translation, “enough not to shatter but to reconstruct” (“All the Marxes at the Big Store; or, General Fetishism,” boundary 2 42, no. 1 (2016): 215–16n7; my emphasis). 20. The metaphor of honeycomb—the honeycomb as a metaphor for metaphoricity—appears in “Plato’s Pharmacy” in a note on the metaphor of histos where it is likened to the weave of a loom and a spider’s web—to which might be added the cocoon of the silkworm (D 65n2). In the unpublished 1990–91 seminar on Rhétorique du cannibalisme Derrida turns to the metaphorics of honey as an animal secretion. See also David Farrell Krell, “All You Can’t Eat: Derrida’s Course, ‘Rhétorique du cannibalisme’ (1990–1991),” Research in Phenomenology 36 (2006): 130–80. 21. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, “Deuil ou mélancolie, introjecterincorporer,” Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse 6 (1972): 111–13; “Introjection-Incorporation: Mourning or Melancholy,” in Psychoanalysis in France, ed. Serge Lebovici and Daniel Widlöcher (New York: International Universities Press, 1980), 6. 22. Ibid.; quoted at F 55/xxxviii. 23. Nancy cites a bilingual Italian-French text that is very close to the epilogue to LM, bar the opening two paragraphs, which are omitted in the latter: La fine del pensiero/La fin de la pensée (FP). Derrida also cites this text without reproach (DR xxv/44). 24. Geoffrey Bennington, “Political Animals,” Diacritics 39, no. 2 (2009): 34 25. Geoffrey Bennington, “Opening Up,” Cultural Politics 9, no. 2 (2013): 207–8. 26. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 15–16. 27. Ibid., 17. 28. Bennington, “Crying.” 29. Jean-François Lyotard, “The Affect-Phrase,” in The Lyotard Reader and Guide, ed. Keith Crome and James Williams (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 109. Notes to pages 106–120

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30. Ibid., 108. 31. On this passage and the differences between Nancy’s and Derrida’s understanding of différance, see Geoffrey Bennington, “Handshake,” in Not Half No End: Militantly Melancholic Essays in Memory of Jacques Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 78–79. 32. David Cunningham makes a similar point in “Logics of Generalization: Derrida, Grammatology and Transdisciplinarity,” Theory, Culture & Society, 32, no. 5–6 (2015): 98. 33. Sarah Hickmott accuses Nancy of a “metaphysical sonotropism” that substantializes the sonorous or musical (“(En) corps sonore: Jean-Luc Nancy’s Sonotropism,” French Studies: A Quarterly Review 69, no. 4 [2015]: 493.) 34. Elissa Marder, The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Psychoanalysis, Photography, Deconstruction (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 229–30. 35. Jacques Derrida with Jean-Luc Nancy, “ ‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” trans. Peter Connor and Avital Ronell, in Who Comes after the Subject? ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (London: Routledge, 1991), 115. 36. Daniel Birnbaum and Anders Olsson, “An Interview with Jacques Derrida on the Limits of Digestion,” e-flux journal 2 (January 2009). 37. See Hamacher, Hegel: Pleroma—Reading Hegel, esp. 206–95. 38. Derrida, “Eating Well,” 115. 39. Already in the two essays on Artaud in L’écriture et la différence, the appeal to a threshold condition of vocality in Artaud’s “rigorous writing of the cry” is met with suspicion as the desire to save the purity of presence. “Glossopoeia, which is neither an imitative language nor a creation of names, takes us back to the borderline of the moment when the word has not yet been born, when articulation is no longer a cry but not yet discourse, when repetition is almost impossible, and along with it, language in general: the separation of concept and sound, of signified and signifier, of the pneumatical and the grammatical. . . . Thus, it is less a question of constructing a mute stage than of constructing a stage whose clamor has not yet been pacified into words. The word is the cadaver of psychic speech, and along with the language of life itself the ‘speech before words’ must be found again” (ED 352/240). 40. Jodi Dean, Crowds and Party (London: Verso, 2016), 3. 41. Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon (London: Verso, 2012), 227. 42. Marder, The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 117. 43. Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 340–41. 44. Also see Dawne McCance, “Speaking into a Dead Man’s Ear,” in The Reproduction of Life Death: Derrida’s La Vie La Mort (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 74–96. 224

Notes to pages 120–134

45. See Geoffrey Bennington, “Teleanalysis,” Paragraph 36, no. 2 (2013): 270–85. 46. One would also want to think this pocketing of life in relation to Cixous’s various fictionalized reflections on her internalized dead father and living mother in Hr 129/96 and in the passage from Jours de l’an that intrigues Derrida (HC 28–29/26–27, 37–39/37–39), as well as Genet’s pocket that features in Derrida’s “Cartouches.” 47. On the ligne de vie, see Michael Naas, “Lifelines,” in Derrida from Now On (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 214–26. 48. Geoffrey Bennington, Scatter 1: The Politics of Politics in Foucault, Heidegger, and Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 266–67. E XC U R S U S 3 . S H A R O N H AY E S ’ S A D D R E S S E S

1. Michel Foucault, “Les matins gris de la tolerance,” Le monde, March 23, 1977. 2. Cesare Casarino, “Can the Subaltern Confess? Pasolini, Gramsci, Foucault, and the Deployment of Sexuality,” in The Rhetoric of Sincerity, ed. Ernst van Alphen, Mieke Bal, and Carel Smith (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009), 127. 3. Peter Szendy, Sur écoute. Esthétique de l’espionnage (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2007); All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage, trans. Roland Végső (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). 4. Jacques Derrida, “Roundtable on Autobiography,” trans. Peggy Kamuf, in The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, ed. Christie McDonald (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), 51. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., 50. 7. Ibid., 51. 8. Cited in Sharon Hayes, “An Ear for an Eye and Vice Versa,” in Cata logue for Katya Sander: The Most Complicated Machines Are Made of Words (Vienna: Revolver, 2006), 77. On both Parole and Richerche, see also Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Sharon Hayes Sounds Off,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context, and Enquiry 38 (2015): 16–27. 9. Sander, The Most Complicated Machines, 79–80. 10. On the generalization of fetishism, see also Peter Szendy, “All the Marxes at the Big Store; or, General Fetishism,” boundary 2 42, no. 1 (2016): 215–16n7. 11. Sharon Hayes, “Speech Acts,” interview with Roger Cook, Frieze 129 (March 2010). 12. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 305. 13. Samuel Weber, “Citability—Of Gesture,” in Benjamin’s -Abilities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 95–114. Notes to pages 136–151

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14. Ibid., 103. 15. Sharon Hayes and Yvonne Rainer, “Familiarity, Irony, Ambivalence (and Love, Hate, Envy, Attraction, Revulsions, Hubris as Byproducts of the ‘Performance’ Act): An Email Conversation between Sharon Hayes and Yvonne Rainer,” in Work the Room: A Handbook of Per formance Strategies, ed. Ulrike Müller (Berlin: B_Books, 2006), 34. 16. Sharon Hayes, “Again, in Another Time and Space: A Conversation on Restaging, Reconstruction, and Reenactment,” with Patricia Lent and Richard Schechner, moderated by Shannon Jackson. FringeArts, Philadelphia, October 5, 2013. 17. Against certain readings of the subaltern voice, Laurent Dubreuil makes this excellent point in the context of French (post)colonialism in “Notes towards a Poetics of Banlieue,” parallax 18, no. 3 (2012): 98–109 18. Kris Cohen, “Broken Genres,” in Never Alone, Except for Now: Art, Networks, Populations (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017), 41–77. 19. Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire. Livre XI. Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1973), 178; The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (London: Hogarth Press, 1977), 195. 20. Elissa Marder, The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Psychoanalysis, Photography, Deconstruction (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 120. 21. David Wills proposes this notion in Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008) and unfolds its significance for listening in “Positive Feedback: Listening behind Hearing,” in Thresholds of Listening: Sound, Technics, Space, ed. Sander van Maas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 70–88. 4. A USE OF EARS

1. Among them Geoffrey Bennington, “Teleanalysis.” Paragraph 36, no. 2 (2013): 270–85; Éric Prenowitz, “Crossing Lines: Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous on the Phone,” Discourse 30, no. 1–2 (2008): 123–56; Lynn Turner, “Telefoam: Species on the Shores of Cixous and Derrida,” European Journal of English Studies 18, no. 2 (2014): 158–71. 2. Peter Szendy, Sur écoute. Esthétique de l’espionnage (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2007); All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage, trans. Roland Végső (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 32/16 (trans. modified) and 133/105. Jacques Derrida, Mémoires d’aveugle; L’autoportrait et autres mines (Paris: Editions de la Reunion des musées nationaux, 1990); Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993). 226

Notes to pages 151–160

3. “La mythologie blanche” is in Marges de la philosophie (M), 247–324/207–71. Szendy does not make the connection to Derridean usure even though in another context he uses the notion of usure to think about the future of deconstruction (“L’usure de la déconstruction,” Rue Descartes 82 [2014]: 136–39), and he has elsewhere explored the question of usury (“Usury,” Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon 3, no. 6 [2016], https://www.politicalconcepts.org /usury-peter-szendy). In this second essay, he describes the selling and giving of time as “the economy of a quasi-transcendental aesthetics.” 4. I use the word hearing throughout these paragraphs for the continuity it affords with the English overhearing that Szendy translates as surécoute. As his translator notes, it is no easy task to capture this French neologism in the reverse translation and there is a good case to be made for sticking with overhearing rather than inventing a new word such as overlistening, because Szendy’s act of translation has already had a retroactive effect on the source language (Roland Végső, Translator’s Note in All Ears, xiii–xviii). Szendy overinterprets the prefix such that surécoute means both eavesdropping and the excessive hearing that I designate with the hyphenated over-hearing. 5. David Wills, for instance, suggests that the distinction between listening and hearing only obtains when understood as a function of (im)mediacy in “Positive Feedback: Listening behind Hearing,” in Thresholds of Listening: Sound, Technics, Space, ed. Sander van Maas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 72–73. Wills then goes on to show listening thus conceived makes reception coincide immediately with perception, thus reinforcing the privilege metaphysics accords to sensorial immediacy. 6. In a reproach to philosophy (E 13/1), Nancy argues that it strives so hard to hear in the sense of understand (entendre) that it is incapable of listening (écouter) for the condition of possibility of all sense and understanding—what throughout his writings he has theorized as sens. 7. I am incredibly grateful to Thomas Clément Mercier for the conversations we have had on this question and for his sharing a portion of unpublished text that speaks precisely to this autoimmunity of Walten and the problematic of impossibility in Heidegger. 8. Laura Odello, “ ‘The greatest possible mastery, the greatest possible selfpresence of life’: Derrida and the Deconstruction of Sovereignty,” trans. D. J. S. Cross. CR: The New Centennial Review 17, no. 1 (2017): 153. 9. Leland de la Durantaye, “Agamben’s Potential,” Diacritics 30, no. 2 (2000): 5. 10. On Walten as an unforeseeable force that Derrida’s seminar cannot master, see Michael Naas, “ ‘World, Finitude, Solitude’: Derrida’s Walten,” in The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments: Jacques Derrida’s Final Seminar (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 142. Notes to pages 160–165

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11. Laura Odello, “Walten ou l’hyper-souveraineté,” in Appels de Jacques Derrida, ed. Danielle Cohen-Levinas and Ginette Michaud (Paris: Hermann, 2014), 145. 12. Naas, “ ‘World, Finitude, Solitude,’ ” 158. 13. Odello, “Walten,” 143–44. 14. “Spéculer—sur Freud” is in La carte postale (CP), 274–437/257/409. Francesco Vitale, Biodeconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences, trans. Mauro Senatore. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018), 136–42; Mauro Senatore, “Drive to Drive: The Deconstruction of the Freudian Trieb.” Derrida Today 12, no. 1 (2019): 65–72. 15. “Être juste avec Freud” is in Résistances de la psychanalyse (R), 90–146/70–118. Robert Trumbull, “Power and the ‘Drive for Mastery’: Derrida’s Freud and the Debate with Foucault,” in Foucault/Derrida: Fifty Years Later, ed. Penelope Deutscher, Olivia Custer, and Samir Haddad (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 151–65; Elizabeth Rottenberg, For the Love of Psychoanalysis: The Play of Chance in Freud and Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019). 16. Senatore, “Drive to Drive,” 60. 17. On the taming of monstrosities and the distinction Derrida makes between normal and monstrous monstrosities, see Thomas Clément Mercier, “Resisting the Present: Biopower in the Face of the Event (Some Notes on Monstrous Lives),” CR: The New Centennial Review 19, no. 3 (2019): 111–12. 18. My analysis is indebted to two rigorous readings of “Spéculer” that, with slightly difference emphases, trace the connection in Derrida’s reading between Bindung and the Bemächtigungstrieb: Francesco Vitale, “Between Life and Death: The Bond,” in Biodeconstruction, 127–65 and Senatore, “Drive to Drive.” I am also grateful to Francesco for sharing with me just as I was finishing writing this book an unpublished paper (“On the Other Side of the Drive to Power,” at “La Violencia/Violence,” Mexico City, July 25, 2019) in which he deepens and amends the reading he put forward in Biodeconstruction. 19. On replacing drive with drift, see Laurent Milesi, “Cixanalyses—Toward a Reading of Anankè,” Paragraph 36, no. 2 (2013): 298–300. 20. In Insister (I) Cixous discusses Derrida’s treatment of the theme of cruelty in this text. The gap is also noted by Vitale, whose revised reading of the drive to power (“On the Other Side of the Drive to Power”) also moves to mark the distance between Derrida and Freud on this point. See also Elizabeth Rottenberg, “Cruelty and Its Vicissitudes,” in For the Love of Psychoanalysis, 120–38. 21. See Peggy Kamuf, “The Ear, Who?” Discourse 30, nos. 1–2 (2008): 177–79, in which she discusses Hamlet’s response to the ghost “I am bound to hear” in a gloss on Derrida’s reading of the play in Specters of Marx (SM). 22. Ibid., 179. 23. Anne Dufourmantelle, Puissance de la douceur (Paris: Payots & Rivages, 2013); Power of Gentleness, trans. Katherine Payne and Vincent Sallé, with a 228

Notes to pages 165–176

foreword by Catherine Malabou (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 78–80/110–12. 24. Ibid., 93–94/65 and 105/74. 25. Ibid., 117/83. 26. Milesi, “Cixanalyses,” 288–89. 27. Geoffrey Bennington, Not Half No End: Militantly Melancholic Essays in Memory of Jacques Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). 28. Martin Heidegger, Identität und Differenz (Pfullingen: Verlag Günther Neske, 1957); Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 62–63/65. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 69/71. 31. See Geoffrey Bennington, “Métaphore, Méta-Force,” Rue Descartes 89, no. 2 (2016): 13–20, and “Metaphor and Analogy in Derrida,” in A Companion to Derrida, ed. Zeynep Direk and Leonard Lawlor (Oxford: Wiley/Blackwell, 2014), 89–104; Mauro Senatore, “Syntax Is the Metal Itself: Derrida and the Usure of Metaphor,” in Heidegger, Derrida, Levinas: The Question of Difference, ed. Lisa Foran and Rozemund Uljée (Dordrecht: Springer, 2016), 163–72; Ronald Mendozade Jesús, “Historicity as Metaphoricity in Early Derrida: From the History of Being to Another Historiography,” CR: The New Centennial Review 17, no, 1 (2017): 43–72. 32. Jacques Derrida with Richard Kearney, “Deconstruction and the Other,” in Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers: The Phenomenological Heritage (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1984), 123. 33. Catherine Malabou, L’avenir de Hegel: Plasticité, temporalité, dialectique (Paris: Vrin, 1996); The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic, trans. Lisabeth During (New York: Routledge, 2005). 34. Catherine Malabou, “Addiction and Grace: Preface to Félix Ravaisson’s Of Habit,” in Félix Ravaisson, Of Habit, trans. Claire Carlisle and Mark Sinclair (London: Continuum, 2008), viii. E XC U R S U S 4 . T H E D R I V E T O L I S T E N I N U LT R A - R E D ’ S M I L I TA N T S O U N D I N V E S T I G AT I O N S

1. Ultra-red, 10 Preliminary Theses on Militant Sound Investigation (New York: Printed Matter, Inc., 2008). 2. Ibid. 3. Responding to Nancy’s substitution of “order” for “question,” Derrida ventures: “Why wouldn’t I write like I had in 1964? Basically it is the word question which I would have changed there. I would displace the accent of the question towards something which would be a call. Rather than it being necessary to maintain a Notes to pages 176–192

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question, it is necessary to have understood a call (or an order, desire or demand)” (VLH 184/49). 4. Ultra-red, 10 Preliminary Theses. 5. Ultra-red, “Constitutive Utopias: Sound, Public Space and Urban Ambience,” 2000, https://temporaryservices.org/served/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/constitutive _utopias.pdf. 6. Ultra-red, 10 Preliminary Theses. 7. Ibid. 8. Bennington set out this argument in two connected papers at events marking the publication of Geschlecht III: “Geschlecht pollachos legetai: Derrida’s Heidegger and Aristotle,” Paper at “Reading Derrida’s Geschlecht III: Responses to an Archival Discovery,” Princeton University, October 12, 2018, and “Dissemination and Polysemia Again: The Place of Aristotle in Derrida’s Reading of Heidegger,” Paper at Sex, Race Nation, Humanity: Derrida’s “Geschlecht III,” Goldsmiths, University of London, April 8, 2019. 9. Peter Szendy, All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage, trans. Roland Végső (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), xi. 10. See Peter Szendy, “All the Marxes at the Big Store; or, General Fetishism,” boundary 2 42, no. 1 (2016): 215–16n7. 11. Ultra-red, 10 Preliminary Theses. 12. Ronald Mendoza-de Jesús, “Historicity as Metaphoricity in Early Derrida: From the History of Being to Another Historiography,” CR: The New Centennial Review 17, no. 1 (2017): 66. 13. Two translators (and editors) of Geschlecht III have both commented on this overprinting from different angles: Katie Chenoweth, “Faute de Frappe: Derrida’s Typos,” Paper at “Sex, Race Nation, Humanity: Derrida’s Geschlecht III,” Goldsmiths, University of London, April 9, 2019. Rodrigo Therezo, “Doublings: The Concept of Reading in Derrida’s Geschlecht III,” Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 23, no. 2 (2019). 14. Ultra-red, 10 Preliminary Theses. 15. This is in fact the title of a bilingual text by Laurent Milesi, “Plus d’usure: Dante, Shakespeare, Pound, Derrida,” in Usure et Rupture: Breaking Points, ed. Claudine Raynaud and Peter Vernon (Tours: Presses Universitaires François-Rabelais, 1995), 205–29. 16. On a certain Platonic impulse in Agamben’s project toward a spiritualization of bare life as “real life or life itself,” as distinct from Derrida’s life-death, see Michael Naas, Plato and the Invention of Life (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018). See also Catherine Malabou, “The King’s Two (Biopolitical) Bodies,” Representations 127 (2014): 98–106, in which she accuses Derrida of a similar partition between biological and symbolic life.

230

Notes to pages 192–202

17. On the autoimmunity of the stamp, see Eszter Timár, “Ateleia/Autoimmunity,” in Going Postcard: The Letter(s) of Jacques Derrida, ed. Vincent W. J. van Gerven Oei (Earth, Milky Way: Dead Letter Office/punctum books, 2017), 83–94. 18. Catherine Malabou and Jacques Derrida, La contre-allée (Voyager avec Jacques Derrida) (Paris: La Quinzaine Littéraire et Louis Vuitton, 1999); Counterpath: Traveling with Jacques Derrida, trans. David Wills (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 204/207. 19. Ibid., 46/42. 20. Ultra-red, Protocols for the Sound of Freedom (2012), https://issuu.com /arika/docs/procotolsforasoundoffreedom.

Notes to pages 202–203

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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Frequently cited texts by Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Hélène Cixous are listed under Abbreviations. Existing English translations have been cited throughout, except where otherwise noted. All translations of previously untranslated texts are my own, except where other wise noted. Abu Hamdan, Lawrence. “Aural Contract: Forensic Listening and the Reorganization of the Speaking Subject.” In Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, 65–82. Berlin: Sternberg Press; London: Forensic Architecture, 2014. Alliez, Éric, and Maurizio Lazzarato. Guerres et capital. Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2016. Wars and Capital. Translated by Ames Hodges. South Pasadena, Calif.: semiotext(e), 2016. Apter, Emily. “Shibboleth: Policing by Ear and Forensic Listening in Projects by Lawrence Abu Hamdan.” October, no. 156 (2016): 100–115. ———. Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse, and the Impolitic (London: Verso, 2018). Attell, Kevin. Giorgio Agamben: Beyond the Threshold of Deconstruction. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Badiou, Alain. Le nombre et les nombres. Paris: Seuil, 1990. Number and Numbers. Translated by Robin Mackay. Cambridge: Polity, 2008. ———. Peut-on penser la politique? (Paris: Seuil, 1989). Can Politics Be Thought? Translated by Bruno Bosteels. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2019. Badiou, Alain, and Jean-Luc Nancy. German Philosophy: A Dialogue. Edited by Jan Völker. Translated by Richard Lambert. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2018. Balibar, Étienne, and Immanuel Wallerstein. Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. Translated by Chris Turner. London: Verso, 1991.

Benjamin, Walter. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 4 vols. Edited by Michael W. Jennings et al. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996–2003. Bennington, Geoffrey. “The Democricy to Come.” Oxford Literary Review 39, no. 1 (2017): 116–34. ———. “Hap.” Oxford Literary Review 36, no. 2 (2014): 170–74. ———. “Metaphor and Analogy in Derrida.” In A Companion to Derrida, edited by Zeynep Direk and Leonard Lawlor, 89–104. Oxford: Wiley/Blackwell, 2014. ———. “Métaphore, Méta-Force.” Rue Descartes 89, no. 2 (2016): 13–20. ———. Not Half No End: Militantly Melancholic Essays in Memory of Jacques Derrida. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. ———. “Notes Towards a Discussion of Method and Metaphor in Glas.” Paragraph 39, no. 2 (2016): 249–64. ———. “Opening Up.” Cultural Politics 9, no. 2 (2013): 202–11. ———. “Political Animals,” Diacritics 39, no. 2 (2009): 21–35. ———. “Scatter,” Oxford Literary Review 30, no. 1 (2008): 1–44. ———. Scatter 1: The Politics of Politics in Foucault, Heidegger, and Derrida. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. ———. “Sovereign Stupidity and Autoimmunity.” In Derrida and the Time of the Political, edited by Pheng Cheah and Suzanne Guerlac, 97–113. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009. ———. “Teleanalysis.” Paragraph 36, no. 2 (2013): 270–85. Berlant, Lauren. “Slow Death: Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency,” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 4 (2007): 754–80. Bryan-Wilson, Julia. “Sharon Hayes Sounds Off.” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context, and Enquiry 38 (2015): 16–27. Cassin, Barbara, ed. Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon. Translated by Steven Rendall et al. Translation edited by Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014. Chiesa, Lorenzo, and Frank Ruda. “The Event of Language as Force of Life: Agamben’s Linguistic Vitalism.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 16, no. 3 (2011): 163–80. Chow, Rey. “Reading Derrida on Being Monolingual.” New Literary History 39 (2008): 217–31. Cohen, Kris. Never Alone, Except for Now: Art, Networks, Populations. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017. Corbin, Alain. Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside. Translated by Martin Thom. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Cunningham, David. “Logics of Generalization: Derrida, Grammatology and Transdisciplinarity,” Theory, Culture & Society 32, no. 5–6 (2015): 79–107. 234

Selected Bibliography

Cusick, Suzanne G. “ ‘You Are in a Place That Is Out of the World . . .’: Music in the Detention Camps of the ‘Global War on Terror.’ ” Journal of the Society for American Music 2, no. 1 (2008): 1–26. Daughtry, J. Martin. Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Dean, Jodi. The Communist Horizon. London: Verso, 2012. ———. Crowds and Party. London: Verso, 2016. De la Durantaye, Leland. “Agamben’s Potential.” Diacritics 30, no. 2 (2000): 3–24. Deleuze, Gilles. “Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle.” L’autre journal, no. l (1990): 240–47. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59 (1992): 3–7. Derrida, Jacques. “Roundtable on Autobiography.” Translated by Peggy Kamuf. In The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, edited by Christie McDonald. New York: Schocken Books, 1985. Derrida, Jacques, with Daniel Birnbaum and Anders Olsson. “An Interview with Jacques Derrida on the Limits of Digestion.” e-flux journal 2 (January 2009). https://www.e-flux.com/journal/02/68495/an-interview-with-jacques-derrida -on-the-limits-of-digestion/. Derrida, Jacques, with Giovanna Borradori. “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides.” In Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, 85–136. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Derrida, Jacques, and Hélène Cixous. “Du mot à la vie: Une dialogue entre Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous.” Magazine Littéraire 430 (2004): 22–29. “From the Word to Life: A Dialogue between Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous with Aliette Armel.” Translated by Ashley Thompson. New Literary History 37, no. 1 (2005): 1–13. Derrida, Jacques, with Richard Kearney. “Deconstruction and the Other.” In Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers: The Phenomenological Heritage, 107–25. Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1984. Derrida, Jacques, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-Luc Nancy. “Dialogue entre Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe et Jean-Luc Nancy.” Rue Descartes 52 (2006): 86–99. “Discussion between Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-Luc Nancy.” In Jacques Derrida, For Strasbourg: Conversations of Friendship and Philosophy, edited and translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, 17–30. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. Derrida, Jacques, with Jean-Luc Nancy. “ ‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida.” Translated by Peter Connor and Avital Ronell. In Who Comes after the Subject? edited by Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy, 96–119. London: Routledge, 1991. Dotson, Kristie. “Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 26, no. 2 (2011): 236–57. Selected Bibliography

235

Drott, Eric. “Resistance and Social Movements.” In The Routledge Reader on the Sociology of Music, edited by John Shepherd and Kyle Devine, 171–80. London: Routledge, 2015. Dubreuil, Laurent. L’Empire du langage: Colonies et francophonie. Paris: Hermann, 2008. Empire of Language: Toward a Critique of (Post)colonial Expression. Translated by David Fieni. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2013. ———. “Notes towards a Poetics of Banlieue.” parallax 18, no. 3 (1998): 98–109. Dufourmantelle, Anne. Puissance de la douceur. Paris: Payots & Rivages, 2013. Power of Gentleness. Translated by Katherine Payne and Vincent Sallé, with a foreword by Catherine Malabou. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. Düttmann, Alexander García. “Ellipses of Grammatology.” Derrida Today 11, no. 2 (2018): 134–43. Foucault, Michel. “Il faut défendre la société”: Cours au Collège de France (1975–1976). Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 1997. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76. Translated by David Macey. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. ———. Sécurité, territoire, population. Cours au Collège de France (1977–1978). Paris; Seuil/Gallimard, 2004. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. ———. “Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity.” 1984. In The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, Volume 1: Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth, edited by Paul Rabinow. New York: New Press, 1997. ———. Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard, 1975. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1977. Fritsch, Matthias, Philippe Lynes, and David Wood, eds. Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Philosophy. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. Gallope, Michael. Deep Refrains: Music, Philosophy, and the Ineffable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Goodman, Steve. Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010. Gourgouris, Stathis. “Mask Silence, Silence Masks, or A Condition of Utmost Listening.” South as a State of Mind 7 (2016). Hallward, Peter. “The Politics of Prescription.” South Atlantic Quarterly 104, no. 4 (2005): 769–89. Hamacher, Werner. Pleroma—Reading in Hegel: The Genesis and Structure of a Dialectical Hermeneutics in Hegel. Translated by Nicholas Walker and Simon Jarvis. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin Books, 2004. 236

Selected Bibliography

Hayes, Sharon. “An Ear for an Eye and Vice Versa.” In Catalogue for Katya Sander: The Most Complicated Machines Are Made of Words, 77–86. Vienna: Revolver, 2006. ———. “Speech Acts.” Interview with Roger Cook. Frieze 129 (March 2010). Hayes, Sharon, and Yvonne Rainer. “Familiarity, Irony, Ambivalence (and Love, Hate, Envy, Attraction, Revulsions, Hubris as Byproducts of the ‘Performance’ Act): An Email Conversation between Sharon Hayes and Yvonne Rainer.” In Work the Room: A Handbook of Per formance Strategies, edited by Ulrike Müller. Berlin: B_Books, 2006. Hegel, G. W. F. Vorlesungen über die Naturphilosophie als der Encyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse. Zweiter Theil. Edited by Karl Ludwig Michelet. Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1847. Philosophy of Nature, translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970. Heller-Roazen, Daniel. Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language. New York: Zone Books, 2005. ———. The Fifth Hammer: Pythagoras and the Disharmony of the World. New York: Zone Books, 2011. Hickmott, Sarah. “(En) corps sonore: Jean-Luc Nancy’s Sonotropism.” French Studies: A Quarterly Review 69, no. 4 (2015): 479–93. Hobson, Marian. Jacques Derrida: Opening Lines. New York: Routledge, 1998. James, Robin. The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2019. Kamuf, Peggy. “Afterburn: An Afterword to ‘The Flying Manuscript.’” New Literary History 37, no. 1 (2006): 47–55. ———. “The Ear, Who?” Discourse 30, nos. 1–2 (2008): 177–90. ———. Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. Kramer, Sina. “Derrida’s ‘Antigonanette’: On the Quasi-Transcendental.” Southern Journal of Philosophy 52, no. 4 (2014): 521–51. Krell, David Farrell. “All You Can’t Eat: Derrida’s Course, ‘Rhetorique du cannibalisme’ (1990–1991).” Research in Phenomenology 36 (2006): 130–80. LaBelle, Brandon. Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life. New York: Continuum, 2010. ———. “The Sonic Agent.” In Dirty Ear Report #2 / Sound, Multiplicity, and Radical Listening. Berlin: Errant Bodies Press, 2016. Lacan, Jacques. Le séminaire. Livre XI. Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse. Paris: Seuil, 1973. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. London: Hogarth Press, 1977. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. “The Echo of the Subject.” In Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, translated by Christopher Fynsk, 139–207. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1989. Selected Bibliography

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Lynes, Philippe. Futures of Life Death on Earth: Derrida’s General Ecology. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018. Lyotard, Jean-François. “The Affect-Phrase.” In The Lyotard Reader and Guide, edited by Keith Crome and James Williams, 104–12. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Malabou, Catherine. “Addiction and Grace: Preface to Félix Ravaisson’s Of Habit.” In Félix Ravaisson, Of Habit, translated by Claire Carlisle and Mark Sinclair. London: Continuum, 2008. ———. Avant demain: Épigenèse et rationalité. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. 2014)Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality. Translated by Carolyn Shread. Cambridge: Polity, 2016. ———. L’avenir de Hegel: Plasticité, temporalité, dialectique. Paris: Vrin, 1996. The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic. Translated by Lisabeth During. New York: Routledge, 2005. ———. Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality. Translated by Carolyn Shread. Cambridge: Polity, 2016. ———. “The End of Writing? Grammatology and Plasticity.” Translated by Annjeanette Wiese. European Legacy 12, no. 4 (2007): 431–41. ———. “The King’s Two (Biopolitical) Bodies.” Representations 127 (2014): 98–106. ———. “Philosophy in Erection.” Paragraph 39, no. 2 (2016): 238–48. ———. “Plasticity and Elasticity in Freud’s Beyond the Plea sure Principle.” Diacritics 37, no. 4 (2007): 78–86. ———. “Will Sovereignty Ever Be Deconstructed?” In Plastic Materialities: Politics, Legality, and Metamorphosis in the Work of Catherine Malabou, edited by Brenna Bhandar and Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller, 35–46. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015. Malabou, Catherine, and Jacques Derrida. La contre-allée (Voyager avec Jacques Derrida). Paris: La Quinzaine Littéraire et Louis Vuitton, 1999. Counterpath: Traveling with Jacques Derrida. Translated by David Wills. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004. Manabe, Noriko. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Protest Music after Fukushima. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Manne, Kate. Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Marder, Elissa. The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Psychoanalysis, Photography, Deconstruction. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. Mbembe, Achille. Critique de la raison nègre. Paris: Le découverte, 2014. Critique of Black Reason. Translated by Laurent Dubois. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017. McCance, Dawne. The Reproduction of Life Death: Derrida’s La Vie La Mort. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019. 238

Selected Bibliography

Mendoza-de Jesús, Ronald. “Being, Sovereignty, Unconditionality: Heidegger’s Walten in Derrida’s La bête et le souverain II.” Mosaic 44, no. 3 (2011): 99–113. ———. “Historicity as Metaphoricity in Early Derrida: From the History of Being to Another Historiography.” CR: The New Centennial Review 17, no. 1 (2017): 43–72. Mercier, Thomas Clément. “Pensées magiques: Retour sur le ‘retour du religieux.’ ” revue ITER 1 (2018): 1–41. ———. “Resisting the Present: Biopower in the Face of the Event (Some Notes on Monstrous Lives).” CR: The New Centennial Review 19, no. 3 (2019): 99–128. Milesi, Laurent. “Cixanalyses—Toward a Reading of Anankè.” Paragraph 36, no. 2 (2013): 286–302. ———. “Plus d’usure: Dante, Shakespeare, Pound, Derrida.” In Usure et Rupture: Breaking Points, edited by Claudine Raynaud and Peter Vernon, 205–29. Tours: Presses Universitaires François-Rabelais, 1995. Naas, Michael. Derrida from Now On. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. ———. The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments: Jacques Derrida’s Final Seminar. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. ———. Plato and the Invention of Life. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. Napolin, Julie Beth. “On Blues Speaker [for James Baldwin]: A Conversation with Mendi and Keith Obadike.” Social Text, August 21, 2018. https:// socialtextjournal.org /on-blues-speaker-for-james-baldwin-a-conversation -with-mendi-and-keith-obadike. ———. “Scenes of Subjection: Women’s Voices Narrating Black Death.” Sounding Out! blog, December 19, 2016. https://soundstudiesblog.com/tag/julie-beth-napolin. Ochoa Gautier, Ana María. Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in NineteenthCentury Colombia. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014. Odello, Laura. “ ‘The greatest possible mastery, the greatest possible self-presence of life’: Derrida and the Deconstruction of Sovereignty.” Translated by D. J. S. Cross. CR: The New Centennial Review 17, no. 1 (2017): 141–62. ———. “Walten ou l’hyper-souveraineté.” In Appels de Jacques Derrida, edited by Danielle Cohen-Levinas and Ginette Michaud, 135–46. Paris: Hermann, 2014. Oliver, Kelly. Technologies of Life and Death: From Cloning to Capital Punishment. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. Oliver, Kelly, and Stephanie Straub, eds. Deconstructing the Death Penalty: Derrida’s Seminars and the New Abolitionism. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. Prenowitz, Éric. “Crossing Lines: Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous on the Phone.” Discourse 30, no. 1–2 (2008): 123–56. Puar, Jasbir. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017. Rancière, Jacques. “Literary Misunderstanding.” Translated by Mary Stevens. Paragraph 28, no. 2 (2005): 91–103. Selected Bibliography

239

———. Malaise dans l’esthétique. Paris: Galilée, 2004. Aesthetics and Its Discontents. Translated by Steven Corcoran. Cambridge: Polity, 2009. ———. La mésentente: Politique et philosophie. Paris: Galilée. 1995. Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy. Translated by Julie Roe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. ———. La parole muette: Essai: sur les contradictions de la littérature. Paris: Hachette, 1998. Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics. Translated by James Swenson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. ———. Le philosophe et ses pauvres. Paris: Fayard, 1983. The Philosopher and His Poor. Translated by John Drury, Corinne Oster, and Andrew Parker. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004. ———. “The Thinking of Dissensus: Politics and Aesthetics.” In Reading Rancière: Critical Dissensus, edited by Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp, 1–17. London: Continuum, 2011. Regazzoni, Simone. “Au-delà de la pulsion de pouvoir: Derrida et la déconstruction de la souveraineté.” Lignes 47 (2015): 72–86. Ronell, Avital. The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. Rottenberg, Elizabeth. For the Love of Psychoanalysis: The Play of Chance in Freud and Derrida. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019. Salamanca, Oma Jabary. “Unplug and Play: Manufacturing Collapse in Gaza.” Human Geography 4, no. 1 (2011): 22–37. Senatore, Mauro. “Drive to Drive: The Deconstruction of the Freudian Trieb.” Derrida Today 12, no. 1 (2019): 59–79. ———. Germs of Death: The Problem of Genesis in Jacques Derrida. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018. ———. “Syntax Is the Metal Itself: Derrida and the Usure of Metaphor.” In Heidegger, Derrida, Levinas: The Question of Difference, edited by Lisa Foran and Rozemund Uljée, 163–72. Dordrecht: Springer, 2016. Siisiäinen, Lauri. Foucault and the Politics of Hearing. New York: Routledge, 2013. Stoever, Jennifer Lynn. The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening. New York: New York University Press, 2016. Szendy, Peter. À coups de points: La ponctuation comme expérience. Paris: Minuit, 2013. Of Stigmatology: Punctuation as Experience. Translated by Jan Plug. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. ———. “All the Marxes at the Big Store; or, General Fetishism.” boundary 2 42, no. 1 (2016): 209–18. ———. “The Auditory Re-Turn (The Point of Listening).” In Thresholds of Listening: Sound, Technics, Space, edited by Sander van Maas, 18–29. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. 240

Selected Bibliography

———. Écoute, une histoire de nos oreilles. Paris: Minuit, 2001. Listen: A History of Our Ears. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. ———. “Katechon.” Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon 3, no. 5 (2017) https:// www.politicalconcepts.org /katechon-peter-szendy. ———. “L’usure de la déconstruction.” In (In)actualités de Jacques Derrida, edited by Laura Odello. Rue Descartes, no. 82 (2014): 136–39. ———. “Music and Torture: The Stigmata of Music and Sound.” Translated by Allison Schifani and Zeke Sikelianos. In Speaking about Torture, edited by Julie A. Carson and Elisabeth Weber, 189–204. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. ———. Sur écoute. Esthétique de l’espionnage. Paris: Minuit, 2007. All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage. Translated by Roland Végső. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. ———. “Usury.” Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon 3, no. 6 (2016). https://www .politicalconcepts.org /usury-peter-szendy. Tausig, Benjamin. Bangkok Is Ringing: Sound, Protest, and Constraint. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Therezo, Rodrigo. “Doublings: The Concept of Reading in Derrida’s Geschlecht III.” Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 23, no. 2 (2019). Timár, Eszter. “Ateleia/Autoimmunity.” In Going Postcard: The Letter(s) of Jacques Derrida, edited by Vincent W. J. van Gerven Oei, 83–94. Earth, Milky Way: Dead Letter Office/punctum books, 2017. Toscano, Alberto. “Plasticity, Capital, and the Dialectic.” In Plastic Materialities: Politics, Legality, and Metamorphosis in the Work of Catherine Malabou, edited by Brenna Bhandar and Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller, 91–109. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015. Trumbull, Robert. “Power and the ‘Drive for Mastery’: Derrida’s Freud and the Debate with Foucault.” In Foucault/Derrida: Fifty Years Later, edited by Penelope Deutscher, Olivia Custer, and Samir Haddad, 151–65. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Turner, Lynn. “Telefoam: Species on the Shores of Cixous and Derrida.” European Journal of English Studies 18, no. 2 (2014): 158–71. Ultra-red. “Constitutive Utopias: Sound, Public Space and Urban Ambience.” 2000. ———. 10 Preliminary Theses on Militant Sound Investigation. New York: Printed Matter, Inc., 2008. ———. Protocols for the Sound of Freedom. 2012. https://issuu.com/arika/docs /procotolsforasoundoffreedom. Vardoulakis, Dimitris. Sovereignty and Its Other: Toward the Dejustification of Violence. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. Selected Bibliography

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Végső, Roland. “Affirmative Judgments: The Sabbath of Deconstruction.” parallax 16, no. 3 (2010): 74–84. Vitale, Francesco. Biodeconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences. Translated by Mauro Senatore. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018. Weber, Samuel. Benjamin’s -Abilities. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010. Wills, David. Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. ———. Inanimation: Theories of Inorganic Life. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. ———. Killing Times: The Temporal Technology of the Death Penalty. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019. ———. “Positive Feedback: Listening behind Hearing.” In Thresholds of Listening: Sound, Technics, Space, edited by Sander van Maas, 70–88. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Yoon, Soyoung. “Do a Number: The Facticity of the Voice, or Reading Stop-andFrisk Data.” Discourse 39, no. 3 (2017): 397–424.

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INDEX

accent, 93, 98 address, 2, 4, 136, 139, 141, 147–50, 154–57, 175, 192 aneconomic, 27, 65, 122. See also gift animality, 12, 14, 25, 100–18, 127–29, 143–44, 169, 178, 181, 186 appel, 36, 136. See also address; call apostrophe, 2, 4, 136, 179 Aristotle, 12, 93, 101, 188 attunement, 128, 138, 142, 147, 149, 181 Aufhebung, 52, 57, 68, 80, 89 auscultation, 3–4, 15, 36, 82, 94 autoimmunity, 19–20, 25–26, 28, 31, 44, 60, 71, 89, 104–5, 118, 127, 137, 185. See also otoimmunity Badiou, Alain, 41–42, 46–47, 64, 70–71 bark, 118, 120, 129, 137, 143 being-toward-death, 161–62 bells, 16, 49–55, 61–62, 79, 87 Bemächtigungstrieb, 162, 168, 172–74, 202, 228n18 bêtise, 35, 57. See also animality biodeconstruction, 15, 21 biopolitics, 3, 7, 15–17, 20–22; beyond, 169, 186–88, 190; and debility 64–65; and discipline, 51; of listening, 91–94, 187; as modern invention,

30–31; neoliberal, 41–43, 48; and sovereignty, 20, 29–33, 51–52, 65–66 bit(e), 108–9, 124–27. See also digestion blank, 104, 191–92. See also silence blood, 72–74, 87. See also cruelty; death penalty blow. See coup; death blow; percussion border, 11, 13, 74, 91, 93–99, 111, 224n39 breath, 43, 75, 86–88, 104, 113, 178; “I can’t breathe,” 40, 43 buccality, 87–88, 107–12, 124 bug, 38, 161 calculation, 17–18, 32, 39, 41–48, 73, 90, 95, 98–99, 139, 141 call, 4, 36, 115, 132, 135–142, 156, 192; telephone call, 135–38, 140, 156 See also address; appel; coup: coup de téléphone capitalism, 15, 26–27, 39–46, 48, 51, 60–65, 130, 184–85, 195, 199, 201, 203 catachresis, 34, 85, 183, 186–89 choke, 105, 124, 127; chokehold, 40, 43–44, 86, 216n12. See also breath; constriction; stricture chrematistics, 201–2 chrēsis, 188–89, 201. See also catachresis colonialism, 10, 43, 100, 103, 105, 153, 195

constriction, 40–48, 75, 85–86, 96. See also choke; stricture count, 41–42, 102 coup, 17, 23–24, 29, 59, 115, 122, 205; après-coup, 31, 37; coup d’arrêt, 74; coup de force, 34, 36–37, 164; coup de glas, 16; coup de téléphone, 120, 135, 157; Schlag, 196–98, 228n20 cruelty, 72–73, 168, 174, 176 cry, 12, 14, 81, 100, 103, 105, 110–11, 115–16, 123, 153, 224n39; cri de la littérature, 35, 178. See also phonē crypt, 97, 106, 108–14, 118, 129, 133, 156 cut, 13, 32, 108–9, 122, 125–27, 132, 144, 219n48 death blow, 18, 20, 40, 74, 127 death drive, 20, 173–74, 198 death knell, 4, 16, 20, 49–50, 79, 90 death penalty, 17–18, 26, 72, 134 debility, 63–64 debt, 10, 26–27, 60–63, 65–66, 89, 202, 212n29. See also duty; neoliberalism decision, 12, 24, 41–42, 44–47, 62–64, 71–72, 91, 99, 176 deixis, 57–59. See also point(ing) demand, 75, 78, 136, 139, 141–42, 191–93, 196–98, 201 democracy, 11–13, 16, 30, 32, 34–35, 101–2, 144, 211n16; démocratie à venir, 8 destinerrance, 119, 139, 141, 155 devourment, 88, 110, 128, 146, 156 digestion, 88, 106–8, 117, 125–27, 133. See also vomit digital, 45, 47 duty, 138–40, 201–2 echo, 29, 36, 54, 74–75, 109, 123–24, 132, 142, 191–92, 196, 203 éclat, 22–23, 27, 65, 79, 85, 87, 109, 223n19 244

Index

ejaculation, 75, 89, 119. See also exclamation; interjection equivalence: capitalist, 40, 42, 44–46, 48 event, 46–47, 64, 66, 69–72, 74–75, 90, 169; of language, 83, 116; trauma of, 8, 15, 18, 79 example, 7–10, 29, 48, 69–70, 95, 123–28; exemplorality, 128, 133; of itself, 167, 197; without-example, 123, 125, 127 exclamation, 119–20 factory, 51 fetishism, 63, 223n19 financialization, 10, 26–27, 61–63, 65. See also debt; neoliberalism finitude, 18, 21; of infinitude, 19, 24–27, 32, 140–41, 212–13n30 forgiveness, 166, 181–83, 193 Foucault, Michel, 3, 30–33, 43, 51–52, 61–63, 168, 174; on Pasolini, 145 Freud, Sigmund, 20, 37, 110, 156, 168, 170–4, 198 friend(ship), 74, 137, 139, 159, 177, 179, 181–82, 205 funambulism, 27, 108, 143, 175 gag, 84 generalization, 9, 32–33, 39, 41, 85, 122, 130, 161, 197, 223n19; of debt, 27, 63, 65; of metaphor, 177, 185, 187; of war, 7; of writing, 76, 77, 103–5, 112 gentleness, 176 ghost, 129, 136–37 gift, 53, 61, 166, 183 gl, 79–80, 83, 85–89, 119, 124, 129 glass, 15, 26, 51–52, 81, 87 glossolalia, 83–84, 86, 118–19 growl, 101, 120–21, 123, 128. See also animality Grundton, 181, 193, 196

habit, 187–89, 199 heartbeat, 72–75, 127 Hegel, G. W. F., 4, 22, 25, 37, 54, 57–59, 73, 78, 79–82, 86, 89–90, 116, 121; and digestion, 107, 125, 126, 188. See also Aufhebung; Klang Heidegger, Martin, 22, 48, 142, 161–65, 167–69, 174, 177–78, 180–86, 189, 193, 196, 205; and the call, 36, 140. See also being-toward-death; polémos; Stimmung; Walten Hobbes, Thomas, 35, 86 homonymy, 73, 144, 186 howl, 34, 107, 129 idiom, 9, 175, 196, 122–23; encysted, 107–8 impotentiality, 25, 32, 57, 65, 70–71, 84, 189 inanimation, 73, 105, 108 incommensurable, 17, 34, 42, 44–48, 122 incorporation, 106, 109, 117, 129; versus introjection, 106, 111–12, 124–25, 127 interjection, 88, 105, 108, 119–20, 135–36, 143 introjection, 105–6, 110–13, 124–25, 127. See also incorporation jingle, 52 Joyce, James, 135, 155 kairos, 55–56, 64 Kant, Immanuel, 22, 29, 93, 138, 140 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 35 katechon, 60–61, 63 Klang, 4, 52, 79–83 Lacan, Jacques, 54, 120, 155, 192, 195–200 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 3, 25, 36, 54, 74, 88 lies, 93, 98–99

life-death. See la vie la mort lifeline, 138 156. See also umbilical cord logos, 16, 17, 37, 143, 163, 168–69; as gathering, 17, 36, 42, 181; and phonē, 2, 14, 17, 19, 92–93, 101–2, 104–5, 108, 116, 118, 120 Lorde, Audre, 203, 205 Lyotard, Jean-François, 120, 127 melancholia, 178. See also incorporation; mourning messianism, 55–57, 77, 82, 85, 169; deconstruction as blocked, 60, 64, 66, 68. See also kairos metaphor, 105, 127–28, 162, 169, 177, 183–87, 199–200, 202–3, 223n20, 228n31; as animality, 113, 114, 127, 160; de/hypermetaphorization, 109, 111–13; as life of language, 89; retrait of, 187; of sound, 14, 40, 117, 122–23, 129, 195–96. See also catachresis microphone, 145–47, 149–50, 156–57, 192–99 migration, 4, 10–11, 14, 91, 93, 97–98. See also border mishearing, 1–2, 55, 60, 68, 101, 103, 132, 184 mmmmm, 122, 118, 120–21 monstrosity, 169, 179, 186, 228n17 mourning, 88, 106, 111, 125–26, 133, 136, 146, 156, 177–78. See also introjection muteness, 115, 120–21, 153, 224n39; mute point, 159 Negri, Antonio, 12, 31, 36; with Hardt, Michael, 51, 53 neoliberalism, 4, 7, 13–15, 22, 26–27, 33, 39, 41–48, 154, 215n58. See also capitalism Index 245

noise, 12–13, 16, 17, 23, 32, 81, 83, 103, 109, 119, 120, 140–41, 150, 181. See also phone; to poikilon now(-point), 54, 58–59, 77 obligation, 136, 138 140–41, 171, 176. See also demand; duty; responsibility onomatopoeia, 23, 86, 101, 118–20 otoimmunity, 159–60. See also autoimmunity Palestine, 12, 43, 63, 65 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 145–46, 148–49 performative, 135, 141–42, 146, 147–48, 152, 168–70; power, 23, 174, 183, 198 phonē, 19, 84, 92–94, 98, 101, 104–5, 118, 120, 133 Plato, 16, 23, 34–35, 101–2, 211n16 percussion, 18, 22, 36–37, 79, 81–82. See also tympan(um) perhaps, 70, 72, 82, 90, 139 periodization, 30 plasticity, 32, 76–78, 139, 188; versus elasticity, 24, 83 to poikilon, 16–17, 21, 23, 34–35, 144, 211n16 point(ing), 3, 4, 37, 58–59, 82, 85. See also deixis; now(-point); punctuation polémos, 33, 167, 181 post-Fordism, 51. See also neoliberalism prosthesis, 20, 105, 108, 126, 130, 132–35, 161, 164, 169, 186, 197; microphone as, 146–47, 149, 156, 193, 195, 199 psychoanalysis, 4, 106–9, 117, 158, 168, 173–74, 177, 198–99 punctuation, 3, 4, 36–37, 50–55, 57–59, 61, 80–82, 85 puissance (also puisse), 35, 74, 137, 142–44, 161, 164, 167, 169, 171–72, 176–79, 186 question, 85, 141, 192 246

Index

racism, 100 Rancière, Jacques, 12–13, 101–2, remainder (the rest), 52–53, 55, 61, 63, 125–26 resistance, 13, 33; self-resistance, 164, 201 resonance, 74, 81, 117, 121–22, 128, 141–42 responsibility, 71, 99, 130, 132, 135–36, 193; infinite, 139, 141; responseability, 4, 99, 140–41 rhythm, 17, 40–41, 49–52, 72–90; arrhythmia, 41, 74, 80, 83, 86–89; Benveniste’s theory of, 75–76; of the concept, 78; modulation of, 50, 75, 77–78; of reading, 2–3, 80. See also punctuation Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 35 rustle, 105, 114–15, 123 sacrifice, 72, 16, 19–21 scatter, 21–24, 74, 78–79 scream, 15, 23, 103, 118 secret(ion), 97, 99, 106–9, 112, 129, 133 self-reference, 34, 52, 57–59, 66–67 shatter, 15–16, 21–29. See also éclat shibboleth, 94–98 shard, 3, 16, 22, 24, 26, 29, 52, 87, 122, 164. See also éclat shout, 15, 110, 123, 129 silence, 15, 102–3, 104–5, 114–16, 153, 181, 193, 196–97; right to, 91 sob, 23, 49–50, 87, 107, 110 sonic turn, 14, 36 sovereignty, 34–36, 50–54, 63, 88, 166–68; and biopolitics, 20, 29–33, 51–52, 65–66; and discipline, 61–62; hyper, 22, 161–65, 180, 205; popu lar, 15, 100–1, 153 splutter, 107 sputter, 86 Stimmung, 140, 142

stricture, 80, 86 131, 170–72. See also constriction teleology, 56, 64, 68, 128, 151, 188 telephone, 36, 34, 108, 109, 117, 131–36, 138, 143–44, 155–57, 158–59, 170, 175; Derrida and Cixous on the phone, 136–37, 156; telephonic address, 146–47, 179, 196. See also coup: coup de téléphone testimony, 18, 42–44, 93–94 timbre (timbre), 15, 23, 42, 122, 138, 202, 205 tonality, 128–29 tongue, 83–85, 88, 109 tragen, 163, 169, 177–81, 183 tuning, 138, 142, 167 tympan(um), 3, 36–37, 123, 140, 187, 196, 199–200, 202 type, 85, 196–97; overtyping, 198, 200, 230n13 umbilical cord, 133, 134, 136, 138, 156 unconditionality, 26–29, 31, 66, 95, 122, 139–40; without sovereignty, 71, 166 undeconstructibility, 21, 24–29, 66, 117, 122–23

usure, 4, 34, 125, 160, 169, 183–85, 199, 201–2; as übertragen, 177, 180 la vie la mort, 18–20, 28, 64, 65–66, 73, 86, 118, 183, 198; beyond, 169 à vif, 7–8, 15, 20, 24 violence, 3, 8, 10, 13–16, 22, 39–43, 99, 163; catachrestic, 186–87, 189; counterviolence, 23, 65. See also Walten vociferation, 88 vomit, 87–88, 106–7, 112, 125–28. See also digestion wailing, 34, 121 Walten, 22, 31, 33, 161–69, 174, 177, 180–83, 186–90 war, 7, 10, 33. See also polémos weaponization (of sound), 15–16 wiretap. See bug wound, 8, 9, 14, 15, 22 yelp, 105, 120, 143 zoē, 93, 211n20 zoopolitics, 211n20

Index 247

Naomi Waltham-Smith is Associate Professor in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick. She is the author of Music and Belonging Between Revolution and Restoration (Oxford, 2017). As a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in 2019–20, she has been developing deconstructive field-recording methodologies to explore contemporary urban marginalization and resistance.

commonalities Timothy C. Campbell, series editor

Roberto Esposito, Terms of the Political: Community, Immunity, Biopolitics. Translated by Rhiannon Noel Welch. Introduction by Vanessa Lemm. Maurizio Ferraris, Documentality: Why It Is Necessary to Leave Traces. Translated by Richard Davies. Dimitris Vardoulakis, Sovereignty and Its Other: Toward the Dejustification of Violence. Anne Emmanuelle Berger, The Queer Turn in Feminism: Identities, Sexualities, and the Theater of Gender. Translated by Catherine Porter. James D. Lilley, Common Things: Romance and the Aesthetics of Belonging in Atlantic Modernity. Jean-Luc Nancy, Identity: Fragments, Frankness. Translated by François Raffoul. Miguel Vatter, Between Form and Event: Machiavelli’s Theory of Political Freedom. Miguel Vatter, The Republic of the Living: Biopolitics and the Critique of Civil Society. Maurizio Ferraris, Where Are You? An Ontology of the Cell Phone. Translated by Sarah De Sanctis. Irving Goh, The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion after the Subject. Kevin Attell, Giorgio Agamben: Beyond the Threshold of Deconstruction.

J. Hillis Miller, Communities in Fiction. Remo Bodei, The Life of Things, the Love of Things. Translated by Murtha Baca. Gabriela Basterra, The Subject of Freedom: Kant, Levinas. Roberto Esposito, Categories of the Impolitical. Translated by Connal Parsley. Roberto Esposito, Two: The Machine of Political Theology and the Place of Thought. Translated by Zakiya Hanafi. Akiba Lerner, Redemptive Hope: From the Age of Enlightenment to the Age of Obama. Adriana Cavarero and Angelo Scola, Thou Shalt Not Kill: A Political and Theological Dialogue. Translated by Margaret Adams Groesbeck and Adam Sitze. Massimo Cacciari, Europe and Empire: On the Political Forms of Globalization. Edited by Alessandro Carrera, Translated by Massimo Verdicchio. Emanuele Coccia, Sensible Life: A Micro-ontology of the Image. Translated by Scott Stuart, Introduction by Kevin Attell. Timothy C. Campbell, The Techne of Giving: Cinema and the Generous Forms of Life. Étienne Balibar, Citizen Subject: Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology. Translated by Steven Miller, Foreword by Emily Apter. Ashon T. Crawley, Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility. Terrion L. Williamson, Scandalize My Name: Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Disavowed Community. Translated by Philip Armstrong. Roberto Esposito, The Origin of the Political: Hannah Arendt or Simone Weil? Translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Gareth Williams. Dimitris Vardoulakis, Stasis before the State: Nine Theses on Agonistic Democracy. Nicholas Heron, Liturgical Power: Between Economic and Political Theology.

Emanuele Coccia, Goods: Advertising, Urban Space, and the Moral Law of the Image. Translated by Marissa Gemma. James Edward Ford III, Thinking Through Crisis: Depression-Era Black Literature, Theory, and Politics. Étienne Balibar, On Universals: Constructing and Deconstructing Community. Translated by Joshua David Jordan. Naomi Waltham-Smith, Shattering Biopolitics: Militant Listening and the Sound of Life.