The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity: New Perspectives on Genre Literature 1443881856, 9781443881852

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The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity

The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity New Perspectives on Genre Literature Edited by

Maylis Rospide and Sandrine Sorlin

The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity: New Perspectives on Genre Literature Edited by Maylis Rospide and Sandrine Sorlin This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Maylis Rospide, Sandrine Sorlin and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7202-4 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7202-7

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations .................................................................................... vii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Otherness: From Philosophy to Politics (and Back) Chapter One ............................................................................................... 14 Bleghbe’chugh vaj blHegh! From an Ethics of Alterity to a Politics of Style Jean-Jacques Lecercle Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 33 All Too Inhuman: The Limits of Ethical Imagination Rok Benþin Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 48 A Political Philosophy of Stylistic Defamiliarization: Ethics of the PostApocalyptic Self or What Is Really Translated in James Kelman’s Translated Accounts? Simone Rinzler The Stylistic Techniques of Representation: Potentialities and Limits Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 64 Encounters with Alterity in British Science Fiction Texts (1895-1938): Seeing Oneself ‘in a glass darkly’ Françoise Dupeyron-Lafay Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 82 Stylistic Techniques and Ethical Staging in Octavia Butler’s “Speech Sounds” Sandrine Sorlin

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Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 95 Of Chimeras and Men, or the Impossibility of Representing Otherness Maylis Rospide The Language of Fantasy Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 110 Language Variety in Terry Pratchett’s Fantasy Fiction Linda Pillière Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 126 The Abysmal Style of H.P. Lovecraft Christopher L. Robinson Crossing the Frontiers: Genre and Science (Fiction) Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 142 Describing (Post)human Species: Between Cognition and Estrangement Elaine Després Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 158 The Poetics of the Human in J. Winterson’s The Stone Gods Hélène Machinal Contributors ............................................................................................. 175 Index ........................................................................................................ 178

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 3-1. Grafting, source unknown. http://la.boutique.du.tricot.overblog.com/article-29163073.html, May 6, 2012 Fig. 9-1. An example of a Satyr, among other anthropomorphic figures. Hoppius, 1763. Source: Christian Emmanuel Hoppius, Anthropomorpha, In Amoenitates Academicae, Band 6, Stockholm, 1763. Wikimedia Commons. Fig. 9-2. An anonymous caricature of Wells’s "The Man of the Year Million", published in Punch Magazine (vol. 105, 25 November 1893, p. 250).

INTRODUCTION MAYLIS ROSPIDE UNIVERSITE PAUL VALERY, EMMA

AND SANDRINE SORLIN AIX-MARSEILLE UNIVERSITY / LERMA / IUF

Try to imagine a new colour, or a new smell. Try to wrap your mind around something you have never seen, never experienced before. Perhaps the colour you have in mind is like orange, but not quite. Maybe you came up with a smell which is iridescent. This is basically what genre literature strives to do when it stages encounters with alterity, be it human or alien. It points towards an unattainable other which remains out of reach but still demands to be laid down on paper. By summoning exotic worlds and creating fantastic landscapes, genre literature dramatizes what mainstream fiction inconspicuously does: through language it conjures whole worlds. Several scholars have tried to expose the stylistic cogs that make the science fictional machine go round. For Damien Broderick, the term science fiction itself reflects its very workings by conjoining two terms that are traditionally opposed the better to recombine them and create a new entity1. This zeugma is also called “syllepsis fiction” in Broderick’s analysis2, a term which defies logic and transcribes ideas of epistemological miscegenation, yet explains part of the internal organisation of the genre. While Broderick tries to unearth the tropes that would encapsulate the nature of science fiction as a genre, Walter E. Meyers focuses on the possibility of tearing science away from the field of natural sciences3. His take on science fiction is that of the linguist who scrutinises the plausibility, the nature and the functioning of the language of science fiction. Alien tongues feature prominently, but human languages made strange also appear throughout his pages to remind us of the strangeness of words. Without ever circumscribing science fiction to one single trope, Meyers treads the fine line between completely unintelligible languages and all-too-familiar tongues, a dichotomy which reads like a new spin on the readerly/writerly dyad by Roland Barthes. In Transformations of Language in Modern Dystopias (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1997), David W. Sisk

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shows that if science fiction has often circumscribed the necessity to build plausible future language (through linguistic clichés like the “universal translator” or by having alien races speak perfect English4), modern dystopias have no other choice but to put language at the heart of their enterprise if they want to plausibly reflect the major social and technological shift they are portraying. In the later dystopias unexplored by Walter E. Meyers (Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood or Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue), language continues to play a paramount role. Although the language of the future as depicted by Russell Hoban for instance may be said to lack linguistic plausibility (given the time distance, it should be much more corrupted than it actually is), it still powerfully manages to bring us close to what a post-apocalyptic world would resemble5. In this volume, JeanJacques Lecercle highlights the shortcomings of invented languages and, by contrast, the linguistic imagination of such modern dystopias. Recently, the study of language in science fiction has shifted from the assessment of the plausibility of invented exotic dialects to more cognitive approaches. In The Poetics of Science Fiction (Essex: Pearson Education, 2000), Peter Stockwell adopts this new critical stance which allows him to enhance the importance of the reader’s experience in creating, building, nourishing and maintaining science fictional worlds and experiences. By exploring the use of deixis (be it perceptual, spatial or temporal) and branching out towards synecdoche, litotes and metaphors, Stockwell pinpoints the demetaphorising principle at work within science fiction. Whether they conduct a micro- or a macro-analysis of the language of genre fiction, all the scholars mentioned above acknowledge language as a force to be reckoned with, be it as an object or a means of representation; however, many questions are left unanswered. Indeed, picking up the trails left by Meyers and Stockwell, the interdisciplinary nature of this volume wishes to confront different approaches of the ethics and poetics of alterity by remapping genre literature through genre analysis, stylistics, and philosophy. But once the pivotal role of language in genre fiction has been established, many issues still haunt the pages of those books and these of the present volume. Although Meyers’s, Stockwell’s, Broderick’s or Sysk’s books are openly grounded within one or two genres (usually science fiction and fantasy or dystopia) none offer a definite answer as to what genre literature is. This difficult taxonomic task is at the heart of genre studies6 which more often than not conclude on the near impossibility of defining each genre, as does Rosemary Jackson in the opening pages of Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London and New York: Routledge, 1981): “Its

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association with imagination and with desire has made it an area difficult to articulate or to define, and indeed the ‘value’ of fantasy has seemed to reside in precisely this resistance to definition, in its ‘free-floating and escapist qualities’” (Jackson 1). Science fiction is no stranger to this taxonomic aporia either, as evinced by Veronica Hollinger: The sheer diversity of these readings, however, demonstrates a lack of consensus about sf which is frustrating, fascinating (at least to me), and, no doubt, inevitable: is sf a narrative genre? a field of discourse? a mode of thinking? a body of literary texts? the compendium of mediatized entertainments which have grown up around the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises? Where exactly are its borders (does it have borders)? Is there something like an sf effect? When, if ever, should we call it science fiction, speculative fiction, sf? What do we do when we read sf? And what’s it got to do with anything outside itself?7

The difficult task of defining genre literature will not be addressed here, but the interdisciplinary nature of the following chapters will work around and through the notion: by weaving a tight interdisciplinary net, this volume aims at defining genre literature implicitly through its relationship with alterity. To paraphrase André Compte-Sponville, what is gained in pinning down and explaining away a norm is lost in terms of its scope8. It could be argued that genres are the literary equivalents of norms, and that in refusing to pin down their exact prototypical traits, the different essays in the collection manage to encompass a wider range of phenomena and in the same breath reach an unspoken consensus. Although this volume accommodates papers from different scholarly traditions, most of the chapters in this book9 owe a debt to Darko Suvin’s cornerstone concept of cognitive estrangement (sometimes the better to question it) and have found a common ground. An echo to the Russian formalists’ ostranenie, Suvin’s leitmotiv is poised between the domestication of what is strange (cognition), and the strangeness of what is known (defamiliarisation, or in Suvin’s term, estrangement), thus allowing unheard-of worlds to unravel. Nicholas Royle, in his study of the uncanny, underlines that defamiliarisation is the opposite of taming what is represented, it reaffirms the power of literature, and by extension, that of language, to make people see anew10. In asserting the potency of cognition in science fiction, Suvin both defines science fiction, and by contrast, fantasy: the latter seems to defy any graspable cognitive process and always tips on the side of strange and defamiliarised phenomena. Even though this distinction comes in handy to draw the line between the different components of genre literature, the dichotomy is not so crystal-clear according to Rosemary Jackson. Drawing

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from Todorov’s analysis of the fantastic, Jackson stresses the protean and slippery nature of fantasy11, which makes it even more difficult to distinguish it from neighbour genres. Regardless of the differences between science fiction and fantasy, both genres seem to be perfect backdrops for alterity through a gamut of subgenres and modes. What will be argued throughout these pages is that genre literature finds a common substratum in its working of alterity. The situations in which the subject is faced with different or alien beings are studied here in novels and screen adaptations of the Englishspeaking world, ranging from the nineteenth century to ultra-contemporary creations and belonging to the genre of utopia/dystopia, science fiction, fantasy, etc., as the so-called “genre literature” embodies a heuristic model that exacerbates encounters with alterity, featuring exotic, subhuman or posthuman beings that defy human knowledge (in SF and fantasy especially). Genre literature has often been regarded as an entertaining or escapist field that does not lend itself to ethical and poetical reflections, limiting its investigations to a hollow and servile repetition of the genre codes12. Nevertheless, the process of defamiliarisation, which is prominent in Suvin’s and Jackson’s work, is often associated with the stylistic, poetic and ethical force inherent in fiction, but in its attempt at metaconceptualizing the relationship between language and reality, genre literature seems to problematize and enhance these phenomena by making them more easily perceivable. Thus not resting content with merely questioning the mechanism of estrangement, genre literature explores the confines of readability and the break-point between the readerly and the writerly. Indeed, through its encounters with alterity, genre literature unveils different strata of language-related issues: how can human language represent things that have no known referent in the reader’s world of experience, and how can genre literature do justice to radical alterity and its language? The narratives about the Aztecs are among the first illustrations of a tendency to project pre-conceived expectations onto the other: “One would seek to transpose it into a familiar cognitive scheme in order to make it understandable and thereby at least partially acceptable”13. Although Broderick mentions zeugmas and syllepses as central figures in science fiction, what relationships do these tropes of fusion entertain between self and other? How effective are other figures of speech in their depiction of the other? Can tropes be said to be a product of an all-powerful Reason reducing alterity to the same? In La Raison classificatoire (Paris: Editions Aubier, 1996), for example, Patrick Tort indeed recalls that the two major classifying systems of human thoughts

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rely on metaphor and metonymy. Or, on the other hand, can tropes be said to ensure a speculative and prospective exploration, producing non-sense effects that are capable of upsetting the classifications through which we have been trained to perceive the world? Can stylistic problems like focalisation or reported speech—that are often a privileged way to access the other’s conceptual schemes—be seen as anthropocentric blows dealt to alterity? Can the other be sketched out through lexical and syntactic inventiveness without its portrait being entirely tamed or harnessed? The issue here is to measure the ability of language to map or fail to map the other’s radical difference. If representing alterity forms the core of a theoretical crux, the language of alterity also raises questions of its own. Walter E. Meyers’s panorama of the interconnection between linguistics and science fiction summarises the difficult middle-ground genre literature tries to reach in representing alien languages: “if there is little change in the language the characters are using, the reader has no trouble understanding it; if there is a great difference in the language, then the writer simply states that his characters are speaking in Old High Martian or the twenty-fifth-century development of a present tongue, and writes his dialogue in the English we know. But midway between these two extremes lies difficult ground” (Meyers 33-34). Can this middle ground really be reached by genre fiction or can it be assumed that making something accessible to the reader is already akin to taming alterity? Is there such a thing as a “rhetorical ethics” that could give us access to the other? Does reaching the breaking point of unintelligibility guarantee the birth of the other in its radical alterity? Can reducing alterity to the categories of the same or resorting to the other as a foil to reinforce the self (the other then being everything the self is not) be said to be part of the more conservative trend in SF as opposed to more subversive trends of the genre (what Broderick calls allographers along Terry Dowling’s coinage “xenographies”) or of fantasy? In its attempt at conjuring foreign planets, monsters and distant futures, genre literature morphs into a heuristic mode to explore alterity and do justice to otherness, thus introducing the notion of ethics and that of the relation between self and other. A levinasian understanding of ethics posits the subject as always already in relation with the other14, and this other subject remains irreducibly different from the self. In Totality and Infinity, the other cannot be absorbed by the self, as it remains absolutely other. This imperious respect of and call from the other’s Face is a demand to not reduce alterity to sameness. This particular definition of ethics, which has been popularised by the ethical turn, is thought through and interrogated in this volume because the unveiling of posthuman and alien creatures

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Introduction

(which might not have a Face) calls for a careful negotiation between same and other. From an analysis of conservative and anthropocentric figures of speech that are mired in the language of men and cannot do justice to otherness to that of the upsetting breach in communication brought about by experimentation, the relationship between self and other, sameness and alterity is explored. By creating a tension and a dialogue between these two opposite poles, and sometimes by going beyond this dichotomy, this volume tries to find new grounds from which genre fiction can be circumscribed. The opening part entitled “Otherness: From Philosophy to Politics (and Back)” starts with Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s interjection “Bleghbe’chugh vaj blHegh!” which, unless you are a Star Trek and Klingon language’s lover, is unintelligible. This is the radical alterity of invented languages that the author questions here, summoning different philosophers and thinkers on his way (Levinas, Hegel, Marx and Deleuze among others), as he comes to the conclusion that what can pass as radical alterity is in fact an expression of our alienated self. The unintelligibility of Klingon is resolved through translation (Surrender or die!) and nothing remains of its alterity. By contrast, the literature of nonsense or novels written in an altered form of English display a dialectic of otherness and sameness through which the reader becomes aware of the alienation that lies at the heart of language. Finding fault with the levinasian ethics presupposing the transcendence of the other who, in its radical alterity, is said to be nevertheless entirely communicable and intelligible (through epiphanic revelation), the author advocates a replacement of “rhetorical ethics” by what he calls “a politics of style”. Following a similar philosophical approach, Rok Benþin’s chapter entitled “All Too Inhuman: The Limits of Ethical Imagination” re-analyses the “political metaphors” of Frankenstein and Dracula. Questioning the theories of a posthumanist ethics of otherness (like Margrit Shildrick’s for example), the author explains why monsters should be apprehended as metamorphoses—and not just as metaphors, if they are to generate “new forms of existence”. The question of this being possible is raised as regards today’s mute fictional zombies who, transformed into individualistic consumers, are the modern, post-class struggle avatars of Frankenstein’s speaking monster that stood for a class-conscious proletariat. Benþin shows that the invention of fictional “monsters” relies on the elaboration of an all (too) human ethics that is in fact borne by humanist values. He illustrates his point by drawing examples from the TV series “Star Trek”, but also “True Blood”, showing that here the resort to abnormalities tend to blur the line between the human and inhuman displaying “comical abundance

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of overrepresentation”, verging on irony. The author concludes on a possible definition of the ethics of literature that would not be an ethics of alterity but an ethics of truth. Philosophy, Politics and Stylistics are also intertwined in the final paper of the first part, written by Simone Rinzler. “A Political Philosophy of Stylistic Defamiliarization or What is Really Translated in James Kelman’s Translated Accounts” draws on the Spinozian ethics of “adequacy”, what is adequate for a body to do when it is put to severe testing, as it is here in this post-apocalyptic novel. Kelman’s Translated Accounts falls within what Lecercle calls a politics of style: the patchwork of texts that composes it, written in “weird English”, marked by fragmentation, repetition and mumbling, reflects the linguistic resilience of ordinary “invisible” people living precarious lives. As if abiding by the Spinozian ethics, they manage to go on, producing positive “glad affects” by creating new ways of living with the other, even if it can only be through a lacking language or be bodily communicated. Expressing themselves in a style that partakes of the “Neutral” as Roland Barthes defines it, they both fail to name and succeed in capturing the harshness of the world surrounding them. Unnamed heroes depicting unnamable conditions, they are still able, in a most Beckettian manner, to say something about the unsayable. In this sense, Kelman’s style is close to Coetzee’s in Disgrace or Saro-Wiwa’s in Sozaboy. The second part entitled “The Stylistic Techniques of Representation: Potentialities and Limits” highlights the stylistic devices used by authors in their depiction of alterity and the potential shortcomings of the representation. Working on a corpus of science fiction texts ranging from the 1890s (Wells) to the 1930s (Huxley and Lewis), Françoise DupeyronLafay analyses the stylistic strategies of the representation of otherness, from the most “anthropocentric” techniques resting on the comparative mode or the conceptual approximation as “default strategy” to the most daring approaches through the use of hypallage or synecdoche. But paradoxically, the defamiliarisation at stake here does not concern extraterrestrial aliens but alien-looking humans, depicted in very uncanny ways: indeed the novels of the corpus all explore the “unstable territory” of the human perceived as alien and unheimlich by the various observing travellers that often begin to question the stability of their own human status. Rather than dwelling on the potential limits of representation, the author chooses to emphasize the heuristic power and imaginative and poetic force of the genre of science fiction that is particularly apt to make darkness visible.

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It is also humanity as we know it that is defamiliarised in Octavia Butler’s short story “Speech Sounds” here analysed by Sandrine Sorlin: in this post-apocalyptic story, a virus has deprived humans of their ability to speak and read, bringing the species back to prelinguistic animality. The author looks into the stylistic techniques used by the writer to bypass the implausibility of a story written in human language to depict wordless humanity. Indeed, drawing on Text World Theory and cognitive stylistics, she shows that Butler’s dystopia can be said to be based on metonymic cognitive processes which are characteristic of the genre (Stockwell, 2000). What this short story aptly exemplifies are the ethical implications of language loss: not only has the socio-economic superstructure collapsed on itself but ethical care for the other has been replaced by violence and indifference. If Sorlin acknowledges the conservative power of science fiction (as opposed to fantasy that seems, according to Rosemary Jackson, to go beyond metaphor all the way to complete metamorphosis15) while still emphasizing its cognitive potentialities, Maylis Rospide is more radical in her article entitled “Of Chimeras and Men, or the Impossibility of Representing Otherness”, focusing more precisely on Will Self’s science fictional texts: in her corpus, the encounter with alterity is reduced to taming it into sameness, as it tends to flatten out difference and the very defamiliarising power of science fiction. She indeed shows that the empiricist conundrum (what has not been experienced cannot be construed) impedes the power of fiction, and the chimera—that alien Other—is a mere juxtaposition of known parts, before concluding that this failure should not be construed as a flaw but as what is inherent to science fictional works. The third part entitled “The Language of Fantasy” gives an English and an American instance of the experimentation of language within the genre. In both articles, the defamiliarisation takes place within language itself: what is experienced by the reader is indeed language as other or the otherness of language. In the fantasy fiction described here by Linda Pillière in her paper entitled “Language Variety in Terry Pratchett’s Fantasy Fiction”, we could have expected encountering dwarfs, trolls, wizards, or vampires and zombies speaking a strange, invented language. There is not even an outside visitor here to the fantasy world. What the English writer’s work proposes is more like a parody of the fantasy genre deflating its traditionally elevated or archaic style. The writer is in fact exploiting the very possibilities ordinary words offer, thus inviting the reader to pay more attention to the very language s/he uses every day. The literal meaning of metaphors for instance is reactivated, rendering the

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metaphor more “active” as the source domain stands out in a new light. But Pratchett’s language does not merely refresh semantics, it also reactivates syntax, morphology and typography in a reinvigorating way. Otherness is thus not embodied here by weird and alien beings speaking an invented language, it is to be found within language itself. Blamed for being overwrought and suffering from “adjectivitis”, H.P. Lovecraft’s style seems to abide by the often archaic stylistic code of fantasy. But in his article “The Abysmal Style of H.P. Lovecraft”, Christopher Robinson shows that the American writer’s surfeit of adjectives and modifiers is the linguistic expression of affects and sensations that precede sense, with narrators who are more possessed by language than they really possess it. Rather than taking the leap over the breach of language between the semiotic and the symbolic, thus undertaking what Giorgo Agamben calls an experimentum linguae, Lovecraft’s abysmal style reveals the breach itself, bringing to the surface the “monsters under the words”, what lurks beneath language, as Paul de Man puts it about Ferdinand de Saussure’s experimentation of hypograms. Lovecraft’s haunted language presents itself in its most brutish matter, as it is deconstructed into pure affect and noise. By means of ruptures in syntax and the (ab)use of dashes or parentheses, the breach of language is exposed rather than bridged, giving a “troubling counter-example” to Agamben’s experimentum linguae and an illustration to what Deleuze and Lecercle call “a dereliction of sense”. The final part deals with the crossing of frontiers, the frontier between pure fiction and pure science but also between genres themselves. In “Describing (Post)human Species: Between Cognition and Estrangement”, Elaine Després criss-crosses scientific descriptions (drawing on Darwin’s The Origin of Species and especially Linneus’s Systema Naturae) and science fiction texts depicting post-human species (in the works of H.G. Wells, Olaf Stapledon, Brian Aldiss and Margaret Atwood in particular) in order to show how scientific the depictions of post-human creatures in science fiction could be and conversely how poetic scientific descriptions of new species sometimes are. Indeed, drawing on pragmatic and reception theories, the author highlights the stylistic and epistemological similarities between the fictional and the scientific narrative. In the naming, categorizing and describing process, science gives an existence to species just as writers do in fictional narratives. Just as the first scientist who described Homo sapiens was also a human, thus being both observer and object, the fictional narrator is almost always a member of the human species: his descriptions of posthuman species often prove to be mere “metaphors for humans”. The objectivity of science is thus questioned by

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Després as she shows that it is not rare for scientists to ‘include themselves’ in the narrative of their experiments. This is beyond the confines of genre literature that the postmodern writer Jeanette Winterson wishes to go, adopting the strategies of science fiction in her 2007 novel entitled The Stone Gods while refusing its label. In “The Poetics of the Human in J. Winterson’s The Stone Gods”, Hélène Machinal explains that what Winterson dislikes in science fiction is the tendency of the genre, according to her, to produce a “closed” world. Her own novel is based on a circular open process (the future turning into a prehistoric past that is close to our own future), because for the writer closure is on a par with silence. In reaching beyond the genre boundaries, she also reaches beyond the disappearance of the human. Indeed Winterson’s post-human novel offers a reflection on the nature of the human as humanity has been modified though technology, but it does not proclaim an ‘effacement’ of humanity to use Foucault’s phrase, as human loss seems to be counterbalanced by the evolution of robots towards consciousness. When reading the novel, the uncanny feeling created by the proximity of defamiliarisation and estrangement through both radical alterity and relative identity leads to a thrust beyond dichotomies. Besides, the writer presents words and story-telling as the ultimate force of resistance against entropy and total fragmentation: “words are the part of silence that can be spoken”.

Notes 1

“A zeugma is the rhetorical yoking, apparently unnatural or at least against the grain, of two quite different terms into one condensed and startling figuration. In this book I mean to consider—to tease into parts, then to recombine those severed parts, not once but several times, not in one way but by various paths—a popular but still despised zeugma: sf or ‘science fiction’” (Broderick 2000, 10). 2 “A related rhetorical gadget is syllepsis, in which a single word is applied simultaneously to two quite distinct topics; perhaps sf or SF is a form of syllepsis fiction” (Broderick 2000, 41). 3 Walter E. Meyers, Aliens and Linguists: Language Study and Science Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980. 4 In this volume Maylis Rospide points to the “Star Trek problem” as evoked by the English writer Will Self which states that English has always been the lingua franca among alien creatures, even if this sometimes deflates the reader’s necessary suspension of disbelief. 5 For an analysis of the language of twentieth-century dystopias, see also Sorlin, “Twentieth-Century Linguistic Dystopias: A Continuum between Commitment and Autonomy”, Jean-Michel Ganteau & Christine Reynier (eds.), Autonomy and

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Commitment in Twentieth Century British Literature (Montpellier: PULM, coll ‘Present Perfect 5’, 2010): 203-211. 6 The fact that genre defies definition is at the core of Alastair Fowler’s study of genres: “However, these attempts to apply speech act theory do not take us far. This is partly because of the limitations of the theory itself […]. But in part—and this is what we need to notice—the reason is that the fictional genres resist definition” (Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes, Oxford: OUP, 1982, 7). Karl Canvat draws the same conclusions in “La problématique des genres littéraires : Bilan des recherches et nouvelles orientations”, . 7 Veronica Hollinger, “Contemporary Trends in Science Fiction Criticism, 19801999”, Science Fiction Studies 26.2 (1999) . 8 André Comte-Sponville, Dictionnaire de la philosophie (Paris : Albin Michel, 2000). 9 Françoise Dupeyron-Lafay, Sandrine Sorlin, Maylis Rospide, Elaine Després and Hélène Machinal all rely, at one point or another on Suvin’s take on science fiction, sometimes the better to question it. 10 “Russian formalism (at least evidences in the work of its best known practitioner Victor Shlovksy) was impelled not by a desire to domesticate, order and control that strange stuff called literature, but rather by a desire to register and affirm the power of literature (especially poetry) to make strange, to defamiliarise, to make unfamiliar all sorts of familiar perceptions and beliefs” (Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003, 5). 11 Jackson 1-2. 12 Adam Roberts echoes this traditional take on science fiction when he describes its colonial roots: “we can argue that SF as a distinctive genre comes to cultural prominence in the Age of Empires precisely because it is a necessary part of the official ideology of empire-forming that difference needs to be flattened, or even eradicated. SF, in other words, figures as the expression of the subconscious aspect of this official ideology” (Roberts 49). Nonetheless, he laments the lack of experimentation in genre fiction or its formulaic nature and calls for a bolder embodiment of the genre: “Many fans of SF seek out the comfort of the familiar and mask that desire under the illusory rhetoric of difference, of ‘catlike mrem’ and their like” (Roberts 13). 13 Tzvetan Todorov, Les Morales de l’histoire, Paris, Grasset, 1991, p. 41, our translation. 14 “The subject can no longer be conceived of as closed up in itself, set in a structural opposition to the world onto which it peers out and of which it constructs a knowledge or representations. Such a conception of the subject is now outmoded, an abstraction or illusion. The subject must rather be understood as always in relation in the first instance, from the start” (Gibson 27). 15 “Part of its subversive power lies in this resistance to allegory and metaphor. (…) It could be suggested that the movement of the fantastic narrative is one of metonymical rather than metaphorical process: one object does not stand for

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another, but literally becomes the other, slides into it, metamorphosing from one shape to another in a permanent flux and instability” (Jackson 1981, 41-42).

OTHERNESS: FROM PHILOSOPHY TO POLITICS (AND BACK)

CHAPTER ONE BLEGHBE’CHUGH VAJ BLHEGH! FROM AN ETHICS OF ALTERITY TO A POLITICS OF STYLE JEAN-JACQUES LECERCLE UNIVERSITE PARIS OUEST NANTERRE LA DEFENSE

1. Two questions The editors of this volume ask, among others, two questions which I shall try to address: Question 1: Is there such a thing as a “rhetorical ethics” that could give us access to the other? Question 2: Does reaching the breaking point of unintelligibility guarantee the birth of the other in its radical alterity? The first question is tentative, as appears in the inverted commas around the phrase “rhetorical ethics”. For if we reduce the phrase to “rhetoric” and provisionally forget the word “ethics”, the answer to the question is immediate and positive, even if it turns out to be unsatisfactory: for is it not in the nature of rhetoric, as core of the technique of judicial or political oratory, to give us access to the other in the form of persuasion? The unsatisfactory character of the answer lies in the fact that we may be indulging in sophistry–the object of the exercise is no longer to aim towards the Good and the True, but towards the tactically convenient. It is the introduction of the word “ethics” in the phrase that turns what is always-already an answer into a question, as we may wonder whether ethics is really compatible with rhetoric: can we imagine an ethical sophist blunting his argument in order to be fair to his opponent, or simply to save his opponent’s face? The second question takes us into the domain of the invented languages of genre literature, where intelligibility, at least at first sight, there is none, the speakers of such languages being irretrievably alien. But its formulation

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presupposes that intelligibility comes first, and moves towards its breaking point, as it does when the psychiatric patient lapses into delirium, when he or she leaves the linguistic furrow. And the question suggests that it is this break up of communication or of sense that gives us access to the other in its (rather than “his”) radical alterity. The problem of course is: what kind of access is this, if unintelligibility is total? How can I go beyond an immediate awareness of an alterity so radical that there is no possible point of contact with this radical other? And there is a third question implicit here: can we articulate questions 1 and 2, and if so how? This is probably the question that is of the greatest interest to us, as it is the question of the function of nonsense in invented languages and more generally in fiction. Is literature, with it focalisation on écriture, which includes a recourse to rhetoric, a proper site for an ethics of alterity, and can such an ethics emerge from the contact between our common language (common to author and readers of the text) and an unintelligible language inserted in the text? We might re-formulate this third question in the two following provisional theses, which it will be the aim of this paper to assess and modify: (i) the invented languages of fiction give us an access to radical alterity and (ii) access to radical alterity is a question of ethics.

2. Enter the Klingon Here are three sentences in an invented language: (i) bleghbe’chugh vaj blHegh (ii) pIHoHqu’vIpbe’ (iii) SutPhtaHvIS chaH DIHIvpù

I think you will grant me that such sentences are, to most of us, utterly unintelligible. And it is easy to spell out the reasons why. First, they are un-utterable for the average speaker of a natural language, the script being totally foreign to us, for instance in its lavish use of capital letters in unusual places (but I find myself in roughly the same situation when confronted with a text in Gaelic). Secondly, it is impossible to recognize a single word or morpheme, and in the case of (ii) even to recognize that this is indeed a sentence (but again, I have had a similar experience while trying to read the menu in a Hungarian restaurant). Thirdly, it is impossible to break up those sentences into recognizable words with their suffixes and prefixes, and tentatively to ascribe parts of speech to them (but again, I find myself in the same situation when attempting to read a text in a Native American language). I am indeed at a loss.

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Perhaps translation will help: (i) Surrender or die! (ii) We are not afraid to kill you! (iii) While they were negotiating, we attacked them.

The three sentences are written in Klingon, the language of the Klingon Empire in the cult television series of the sixties, Star Trek (remember Mr Spock and his pointed ears?). And I have quoted them from Mark Okrand’s The Klingon Dictionary (Okrand 1992). He is the linguist who created this alien language for the series, and his task was obviously to make the language as alien as possible. In those days of a still icy Cold War, the Klingon Empire was the military imperialist empire of a race of humanoids bent on domination and conquest, against which the democratic Federation, meaning us, was intermittently at war. Hence the strange script, the strangeness of which is meant to suggest an alterity that is not only racial, but political. And it is indeed clear that, in this case, “radical alterity’ must be understood in its ideological sense of rejection of the alien, an incitement to radical xenophobia. For it is only too obvious that this language is a language of war, domination and naked power, as appears in the examples that illustrate the grammar of Klingon, from which my three sentences are taken. Here are other examples (I spare you the Klingon): “officer who hit her” illustrates the relative clause in Klingon (Okrand 1992, 63); “If you do the wrong thing, I will kill you” (if clause) (Okrand 1992, 52). And here is a list of words taken at random from the English-Klingon lexicon that is the core of the book (they are all words beginning with “gh”, a notoriously unpronounceable sound in Klingon): “diplomacy, serpent, diplomat, dominate, be rough, midnight snack, consent, nose necklace, be messy, scare, exile, court-martial, vacation, ethics” (Okrand 1992, 86). This vocabulary, if you allow me the expression, has a one-track mind. And the language is, as is natural, the expression of a culture, except that this is a culture of conquest and domination, witness the inclusion in the grammar of a section on “clipped Klingon”, a reduced form of the language used for barking orders. Or again, witness the lack of plain civility in this culture, as we learn in the introduction to the grammar that Klingon has no words for greetings: barked orders are obviously how they address one another. So that the presence of the word “ethics” at the end of my list must be taken as ironic: there is no ethics compatible with this form of rhetoric, the only function of which is the domination (discursive or otherwise) of the interlocutor who is always-already an enemy (there is no word for “tenderness” in the lexicon, and the Klingon word for love is

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“bang”, which will suggest the wrong idea in the English-speaking reader). No wonder they attack those who negotiate with them. This, therefore, is a language of the exclusion of the Other as alien, what I would like to call, if you pardon me the coinage, a desperanto, a language devoid of hope or cooperation: a language for imperialists. And yet that alterity is not as radical as it seems, in that this is undoubtedly a language, an instrument of communication with other races. What we have is not merely a number of utterances in Klingon in the television series, but a whole dictionary of the language, complete with grammar and elementary phrase-book for eager intergalactic tourists (for instance, “Where is the bathroom?”, “Will it hurt?”, “Go to jail!”, and other useful phrases) (Okrand 1992, 170-1). And the grammar of Klingon has the same structure as an average grammar of English or French: sounds, parts of speech, morphology, syntax. Better still, a closer look at Klingon syntax will show that it ought to be entirely familiar to us. Thus, we learn that the “basic structure” of the Klingon sentence is Object-VerbSubject: “puq legh yoS” means “the officer sees the child”, while “yoS legh pugh” means “the child sees the officer”. We don’t need to be subtle linguists to realize that this is an inverted form of English and nothing else. So our first conclusion must be that Klingon, far from being the expression of radical alterity is a thinly disguised form of English. So we are not surprised to learn, in the introduction to the grammar of the language, that for purposes of communication, the Klingons themselves prefer English. The language of democracy, our language, is the language of intergalactic globalisation: “Although Klingons are proud of their language and frequently engage in long discussions about its expressiveness and beauty, they have found it impractical for communication outside the Klingon Empire. For intra- and intergalactic communication, the Klingon government, along with most other governments, has accepted English as the lingua franca” (Okrand 1992, 10). The question therefore is: is this a feature of this particular invented language, or are all invented languages, in so far as they are languages, constitutively unable to give us access to alterity? For the immediate objection to my analysis of Klingon is that I have chosen a caricature: a language of exclusion, going back to the period of the Cold War, with no utopian aims. So let us take another look at the evidence.

3. Enter the Vril-ya There is one classic Utopia in which a whole chapter is devoted to the language of the alien race. Bulwer Lytton’s The Coming Race (Bulwer

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Lytton 1995) was published in 1871 and obviously influenced by Jules Verne’s Voyage au centre de la terre, published in 1864. But whereas Verne’s tale is what is known as a “ripping yarn”, full of adventures and dangers overcome, the hero’s visit to the land of vril, a mysterious substance or force which not only provides light and energy, but heals and kills at will (it has survived in the English language in the brand name Bovril), is strangely devoid of action. After the first few pages (they describe the hero’s entry in the land of the vril-ya) the novel turns out to be a systematic and quasi-scientific description of their civilisation: of their mores, beliefs, foreign policy, and of the economic structure of their society. And chapter 12 is entirely devoted to a description of their language. It starts with a quotation from Max Müller, the Oxford linguist, on the typology of languages. The language of the vril-ya, being inflectional, belongs to the most perfect type of language. The main roots are described, as in most 19th century grammars (Max Müller it was that introduced the concept of “root” into the science of language), together with the rules of word creation and word derivation, and the meaning of inflexions. There is even a table of cases, the word “man” being systematically declined, as in a Latin grammar. What we have, therefore, is a perfect language, but hardly an access to radical alterity, as there are two recognizable sources to its perfection: it is a kind of Esperanto, a created language rid of the defects of complication and exception that plague natural languages; and its structure is the best, being based on “the Aryan or Indo-Germanic” type of languages. In other words this perfect language is a reflection of the linguistic ideology of the period. And this is coherent with the rest of the tale, an a-critical utopia which is a thinly disguised image of the actual perfections of an imperialist but parliamentary monarchy, practising religious tolerance: you have recognized Victorian Britain. So we are back at exactly the same point: both the language of the evil Klingon Empire and of the perfect race of the vril-ya (who will nevertheless one day invade our superficial earth and destroy our civilisation, hence the title of the novel) provide us with pictures of ourselves, not of alterity, be it radical or mild. The suspicion grows in us that images of alterity are in fact images of our own alienation, and that as long as we are within the ambit of language there is no escaping the self. Let’s try to reach out to radical alterity, if not in literature, at least in philosophy.

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4. Enter Levinas The philosopher of radical alterity is undoubtedly Emmanuel Levinas: his Totalité et infini is an explicit attempt to think radical alterity around the twin concepts of Autrui and the Face (le Visage) (Levinas, 1990). And indeed, the reference to a rhetorical ethics and the possibility of opening up to radical alterity place us in the centre of the problematic of Totalité et infini. Let us, therefore, for a moment suppose that our “other” is the Levinasian other, not merely the Other of the Same (l’Autre du Même) but the Other Self of the Self (Autrui par rapport à Moi)–that Other who is the source of transcendence in the epiphany of the Face, the source of ethics, an ethics based on the radical alterity of the revelation of the infinite in Autrui’s face. Levinas’s philosophical style, with its characteristic of assertive ressassement, of unceasing repetition, is highly coherent: what we have is an articulated system of concepts, or rather of contrasts between concepts, which can be captured in the form of a systematic correlation, the beginning of which is given in the very title of the book. The following table reconstructs this correlation: 1 Infinite Totality

2 Other Same

7 Transcendence Immanence 11 Epiphany of meaning Construction of meaning

3 Autrui Self 8 Face Things

4 Ethics Politics

5 Eschatology History

9 Separation Belonging

12 Face to face interpellation Rhetoric and Antilanguage

6 Metaphysics Ontology 10 Expression Exchange

13 Speech (Parole) Product (Oeuvre)

In my reconstruction, I have privileged what concerns language, because it is of prime importance in Levinas’s problematic, the access to Autrui by way of his Face being steeped in language (but language for him is speech, the direct address of parole rather than the system of articulated langue). And the access to the radical Other is given in an epiphany of meaning (donation de sens) which contrasts with the slow and painful

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construction of meaning in articulated language: expression (of the Face) is the order of the day rather than the exchange of communication, and the relation between the participants (Autrui and Self) is not one of equality, even if it occurs face to face, but of interpellation, of hailing (I answer Autrui’s call and I issue my own call to Him–question and answer rather than cooperative exchange of information). The articulated language of cooperative exchange is plagued by the possibility of using rhetoric, an inauthentic means of persuasion, and of falling into the anti-language of non-communication and epiphanic failure, the best example of which for Levinas is the language of the witches in Macbeth. Where does this leave the possibility of access to radical alterity through the invented languages of genre literature? And where does this leave the possibility of a rhetorical ethics? The answer, I am afraid, is “Nowhere” in both cases. In this problematic, the phrase “rhetorical ethics” is contradictory, as “rhetoric” and “ethics” belong to different and opposed lines in the correlation: there is no possible ethical stance in rhetoric, which is dealt with in a section entitled “Rhétorique et injustice” (Levinas 1990, 66-9). Rhetoric is the domain of lying and sophistry, and its result is akin to the situation created by the systematic lying of Descartes’ malin génie: “Situation que créent ces êtres ricanant, communiquant à travers un labyrinthe de sous-entendus que Shakespeare et Goethe font apparaître dans les scènes de sorcières où se parle l’antilangage et où répondre serait se couvrir de ridicule” (Levinas 1990, 92). Of course, anti-language here involves much more than the witches’ incantations (“Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble”): it concerns the oblique language of the oracle that is meant to deceive Macbeth, but I am afraid our invented languages must be taken as forms of anti-language, as not deserving an answer in so far are they are not the occasion for a donation de sens. Levinas’ main thesis is that radical alterity presupposes transcendence: Autrui is another name for God, even if He appears in the shape of the naked helpless Face calling for ethical responsibility. He appears in an epiphany of meaning, not in unintelligibility, albeit radical. For Levinas, the archetypal form of language is parole, not Saussure’s concept but rather a form of contact based on oral speech, in face to face interaction. Language as we capture it under Saussure’s langue, the code or system, is on the side of oeuvre, a human product, not the expression of the transcendent Face. All the more so if what we have is a written form of language, as we must have in literature: even if the words bear the trace of a real presence, they are at best traces, with loss of epiphanic revelation. Invented languages, in so far as they are literary products, project the

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wrong type of alterity through their (apparent) incommunicability onto what was an entirely communicable, although radical, alterity, the alterity of the transcendent Face. In fact, there is no such thing as unintelligibility in Levinas: Autrui’s expression, although pre-linguistic, is utterly intelligible (this is the epiphanic revelation of meaning): natural languages bear traces of this epiphany (this is their glory), but they are also capable of betraying it by reducing it to oeuvre, an immanent human product. Invented languages only increase such betrayal: they provide no access to alterity, they are merely antilanguages. There are two problems here. One is local: in spite of the words we have used (ethics, radical alterity), our problematic cannot be a Levinasian one, in which case we might wish to alter our terms. But the second is more general: do we have to accept Levinas’s position as a philosophie première, given that it is a hardly disguised form of religious thinking? If we do not, we might wish to keep our terms and go beyond Levinas.

5. Exit Levinas, pursued by a Marxist bear There is no disguising the importance of Levinas’s position: it is an attempt to think together radical alterity and language, which is exactly what the two questions we started from incite us to do. So we might be inclined to do with Levinas what Marx famously did with Hegel: put him right way up. In this case, this would take the form of inverting the lines of the correlation, turning the negative terms into positive ones. Thus, we would move from “infinity rather than totality, etc.” to “totality rather than the infinite, politics rather than ethics, history rather than eschatology, immanence rather than transcendence.” In other words, we would move from a Levinasian to a Hegelo-Marxist problematic (and the possibility of such move is already present in Levinas, in so far as his main philosophical opponent is Hegel, the philosopher of totality). But the move has its own difficulties. Not all columns may be readily inverted (for instance, the question of alterity would be replaced by the question of identity: the Same rather than the Other), and merely inverting the terms of a problematic does not take us out of it. So we would have to do more than invert the lines: we would have to modify the columns. For instance, a Marxist position will do without column three, Autrui vs Self. For a Marxist, Autrui is another self, with whom one engages in cooperation through communal work and its concomitant language. We need to contradict Levinas’ thesis, “Autrui ne fait pas nombre avec moi” (Levinas 1990, 28), as the other does take part in this community of work and language on an equal footing with myself. Which means that we shall

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have to invert columns 10 and 11, and prefer linguistic exchange to the epiphany of expression in parole, and the slow construction of meaning in such exchange to donation de sens. We shall ignore column 8, as the concept of the Face is of no particular importance in the cooperation of work and linguistic exchange. We shall deny that there is a valid contrast in column 13 (written language, as human oeuvre, as inscription of memory, is as important as speech in face to face interaction). And as a culmination of this process of revision, we shall replace column 9 by turning the contrast between separation (between immanent Self and transcendent Autrui) into a dialectics of alienation, in which Self is exteriorized as an Other and appears as alien to himself. This is the point where we finally leave Levinas’ problematic: not radical alterity (Autrui as Face), but alienation (otherness issuing from self and oppressing it). So the unintelligibility of our invented languages will be interpreted not as the incommunicability of radical alterity but as a result and symptom of a process of exteriorization of the self into alienation. Alienation, as we know, is a controversial Marxist concept (Is it still a concept in the mature Marx? Is it a characteristic of human essence or of the capitalist mode of production? Does it involve the alienation of the subject in the object or the loss of the object and the production of an abstract and empty subject?) (Sève, 2012, Fischbach, 2009). Its origin is to be found in Hegel and especially in Feuerbach, where it is the centre of a critique of religion. Religion for Feuerbach is the inscription of the relation of Man to himself as another being. Man contemplates his own essence as another being and worships it–radical alterity emerges not from transcendence but from the self. In Marx, religious alienation is an ideological representation of the alienation of the commodity from the worker that produces it. Here is a classic formulation of the Marxian “drama of alienation”, taken from Henri Lefebvre’s Critique de la vie quotidienne (for Lefebvre, the concept of alienation is central to such a critique): Au cours de son effort pour dominer la nature et créer son monde, l’homme fait surgir pour lui une nouvelle nature. Certains produits humains fonctionnent vis-à-vis de la réalité humaine comme une nature impénétrable, non dominée, pesant du dehors sur sa conscience et sa volonté. Bien entendu, ce ne peut être qu’une apparence ; des produits de l’activité humaine ne peuvent avoir tous les caractères des choses brutes et naturelles. Et cependant, cette apparence est une réalité : la marchandise, l’argent, le capital, l’Etat, les institutions juridiques économiques et politiques, les idéologies fonctionnent comme des réalités extérieures à l’homme. Et en un sens, ce sont des réalités, avec leurs lois. Et cependant, ce sont uniquement des produits humains.

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L’être humain se développe à travers cet « autre » de lui-même, mi-fictif, mi-réel, qui se mêle intimement au « monde » humain en formation (Lefebvre 1958, 181-2).

This half-fictional, half-real character of the products of human alienation may help us to understand the function of invented languages in genre literature, in their unintelligibility. But before that, the reversal of problematic (so called radical alterity is only the phenomenal manifestation of the alienation of the self) involves a move from ethics to politics: there is no ethics, but a politics, involved in alienation, whether it concerns the human essence, where alienation engages a politics of emancipation, or the capitalist mode of production, where alienation demands a politics of class struggle against exploitation. This is where invented languages have a part to play, as ideological representations, of a reactionary kind (as is obviously the case with Klingon) or perhaps of an emancipatory kind (I am prepared to argue this in the case of the apparent dystopia of Riddley Walker, or of the mock German of Adenoid Hynkel’s speech in Chaplin’s The Great Dictator). An invented language like Klingon is a direct representation of what Feuerbach describes as religious alienation: the invented language escapes from his creator, like Frankenstein’s monster, and imposes itself on him as a system distinct from him, which constrains his freedom of expression. And it would not be a real objection to say that Klingon was invented by one man, Mark Okrand, and is imposed on all other men, as potential or actual speakers of the language. There is every indication that Klingon has escaped from his creator and from the television series for which it was created: there is such a thing as a Klingon Language Institute, you can take classes in Klingon, and apparently Hamlet has been translated into Klingon–it would seem that this utterly artificial language is attempting to become a natural language. However, the consequence of this excursus through alienation is, as far as invented languages are concerned, a paradox. On the one hand, invented languages claim to represent radical alterity through their utter unintelligibility (you could even imagine an invented language that would be a private language, for which no corpus of translations and no grammar would be offered). But, on the other hand, in actual fact, they all turn out to be utterly intelligible, in that they come complete with grammar, lexicon and phrase book, and will readily confess to the inquiring linguist that they are remarkably like our own language, being based on the mother tongue of their inventor–a case of radical sameness posing as radical alterity. Even Wardwesân, the invented language in Frédéric Werst’s novel, Ward IerIIe siècle (Werst 2011), which attempts to provide a more

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inventive and less Indo-European form of grammar, comes with a corpus of translated texts and historical and literary introductory notes, which blur the radical alterity of an unintelligible series of texts: although they make up almost one half of the text of the novel, the unintelligible texts are present as markers or symptoms of alterity rather than actual entries into radical alterity (in other words, they connote rather than denote it). On the face of it, invented languages, which purport to give us access to radical alterity and as such contradict the problematic of alienation (where radical alterity there is none, only the alienation of the Self), appear to be typical products of alienation, childish fantasies of absolute power, the power to create a language, and as such they take us through the three moments of alienation: the moment of exteriorization (Entausserung)–I am the creator of a language, I exteriorize my Self in that creation; the moment of alienation proper (Entfremdung)–this creation of mine escapes me in so far as it is unintelligible; and the moment of reification (Verdinglichung)–this creation of mine is now no longer only my creation but an external system that lies outside my reach. But perhaps we were wrong to suppose that invented languages might give us access to radical alterity. Perhaps there is no such thing as radical alterity, only the indirect alterity of alienation. And in that respect, invented languages may be of prime importance, in so far as they do not provide only a direct but also an indirect representation of alienation, simply because they are languages. In their very strangeness and at least apparent unintelligibility, they focus on the fact that language, which is cooriginary with human consciousness, is always a form of alienation, a system created by mankind that has become independent and imposes itself on its speakers, not only because they have to learn it, but because it determines the extent of what can be said, and therefore thought, and involves the speaker in the dialectic that governs the relations between the subject and her language, I speak language (I say what I mean and mean what I say), but it is language that speaks (I am the mouthpiece of the language that conditions my thought). This dialectic is the dialectic of subjectivation, of the interpellation of the individual into a subject, that is into a speaker, by her language, with possible counter-interpellation of her language by the subject in stylistic creativity, or, in the case of invented languages, linguistic creation–a form of alienation that is entirely positive, since it is by undergoing it that we all become subjects. The alterity of invented languages may not be radical alterity, but the otherness from which the self emerges: this alienation is also a form of disalienation, since it allows the human subject to realize her generic essence, to go beyond

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her individual being and reach universal humankind through the potential universality of language (here you recognize Hegel’s concept of language). This dialectic of positive alienation through language, which is the dialectic of subjectivation, is inscribed within language in the form of another dialectic, that of the construction of sense out of nonsense: sense is not given in epiphanic revelation, as in Levinas, but is collectively constructed out of original nonsense in linguistic exchange with others. The human collective makes sense of the chaos of the world by expressing it into constructed sense: the alienated system of language is collectively appropriated and put to use in order to make sense of the world. Invented languages, as apparent nonsense, bear witness to the necessity of this dialectic: their unintelligibility is not only a representation of alienation, but also of the need to overcome it, or turn it into a positive factor, by making sense of the chaos of nonsense–for it is a constitutive characteristic of linguistic and literary nonsense that, by withdrawing sense, it calls for its recreation, for its translation into articulate meaning. Perhaps this is where real linguistic alterity lies, and it goes far beyond the special case of invented languages, as it concerns virtually every utterance.

6. Enter Wagner and Garibaldi We do not have to go as far as invented languages to find the dialectics of linguistic subjectivation (I speak language/ language speaks me) and of the construction of sense out of nonsense at work. Because the main characteristic of nonsense is not its apparent lack of sense but the multiplicity of meanings its lack of sense calls for, the simplest interjection will do. Here are two examples of this. L’amante senza fissa dimora, a novel by Fruttero and Lucentini (Fruttero & Lucentini 1986), tells of the brief but passionate encounter, in Venice, of a Roman principessa and a rather seedy tourist guide, a Mr Silvera, who turns out to be the Wandering Jew. Whenever a question is asked about the past of Mr Silvera, about his employment, his prospects and his destination, he has one single answer, the monosyllable “Ah”, uttered with a faintly ironic smile, which immediately kills all attempts at eliciting information from him. The monosyllable is unintelligible, or rather uninterpretable, not because it lacks meaning, but because it implicitly contains an infinity of meanings, between which the interlocutor cannot decide. This is for Mr Silvera the only way of concealing his real identity from his newly acquired lover, that is of preserving his alterity (and can we imagine a more radical alterity than that of a man who, still living at the end of the 20th century, has met Christ in person?).

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And here is my second example, to be found in an essay by the Italian novelist, Giuseppe Pontiggia. In Prima persona, a collection of essays, he comments on an article by Roberto Alaimo that tells of the failed meeting between Garibaldi and Wagner at Arcireale in 1881. The train in which Garibaldi is travelling stops at the station of Arcireale, in front of the Hotel delle Terme, where Wagner is staying. The crowd, of course, cheers “l’eroe dei due mondi”. Disturbed by the commotion, Wagner comes down and asks the hotel proprietor what it is all about, and who is the old man the crowd is cheering. The proprietor explains. Wagner says: “Ah!”. Meanwhile, Garibaldi’s attention has been attracted by the conversation. He asks who the venerable old man in the jacket is. Someone tells him he is “l’inventore della musica dell’avvenire”. Garibaldi says: “Ah!”. Neither of the two men makes a move and the train starts again on its journey. This is how Pontiggia describes that extraordinary scene: È un evento che nella storia dell’Occidente–come si suole dire per convenzione astronomica–non ha uguali. Due uomini epocali suggellano il loro muto incontro con l’interiezione più arcaica: “Ah!”. Viene così risparmiata ai posteri ogni frase memorabile e ci si limita a un lascito esemplarmente alieno da ogni volontà dimostrativa (“Ah!”), da ogni entusiasmo edificante (“Ah!”), da ogni scoperta della commune matrice storica (“Ah!”), da ogni irrinunciabile impegno, compito o missione (“Ah!”), da ogni abbraccio fraterno (“Ah!”). Ci viene offerta invece l’immagine familiare e dimessa di una curiosità rassegnata (“Ah!”), di una concentrazione distratta (“Ah!”), di una Storia centripeta trasformata in Storia centrifuga (“Ah!”), di un presentimento della fine (“Ah!”), di un evasione privata (“Ah!”), di un scandaglio interno (“Ah!”). Anche “Ah!” del resto, secondo alcuni grammatici, è una frase. Solo che ne contiene così tante, da diventare alla fine la più ricca (“Ah!”) e la più completa (“Ah!”) (Pontiggia, 2002, 15-16).

(It’s an event that, in the history of the West–as an astronomical convention inclines us to say–has no equal. Two epocal men seal their mute encounter with the most archaic of interjections: “Ah!” Thus is posterity spared any memorable utterance and the legacy is conspicuously devoid of all desire to demonstrate (Ah!), of all edifying enthusiasm (Ah!), of all revelation of a common historical matrix (Ah!), of all unbreakable commitment, task or mission (Ah!), of all fraternal embrace (Ah!). Instead, we are the given the modest and familiar picture of a resigned curiosity (Ah!), of an abstracted concentration (Ah!), of a centripetal

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History turned into a centrifugal History (Ah!), of a premonition of the end (Ah!), of a private evasiveness (Ah!), of a plumbing of the depths of interiority (Ah!). Besides, according to some grammarians, “Ah” is a sentence. Except that it contains so many sentences that in the end it becomes the richest (Ah!) and the most complete of all (Ah!). (my translation) You will immediately object that no nonsense or unintelligibility is involved here, as the interjection “Ah!” should make perfect sense, when uttered with the intonation that indicates its meaning. A dictionary of French onomatopoeias gives me at least two meanings: the expression of satisfaction of the drinker who has just emptied his glass (and the dictionary here quotes Tintin’s captain Haddock), and the noise produced by the patient when the doctor wants to examine her throat (“Dites: ‘Ah!’”). But the dictionary’s attempt is rather feeble, and I can imagine other contexts in which a French person would exclaim “Ah!”: surprise (“Ah!”), indifference (“Ah!”), the satisfaction that comes with understanding (“Ah!”). I have no doubt that the same applies to Italian, with one significant addition: since the Italian language has no native initial “h”, “Ah!” is also used to inscribe laughter (“Ah! Ah!”–whereas the Fench would say “Ha! Ha!”, with aspiration). And it is clear that Pontiggia, by multiplying the parenthetical “Ah!”s, wishes to suggest precisely this (the laughter of the ironist deflates the pretensions of “epocality”). But the important word is “inscribe”, not only because it raises the question of the translation of an oral expression (what Pontiggia, borrowing a concept from Jakobson calls a “sentence word”) into a written sign, but because an utterance is always already an inscription of affect, the exact meaning of which is never assured, even if the intonation is available. This raises the question of the voice as access to alterity (Dolar, 2006). And this is where, I suggest, nonsense creeps in, where nonsense through lack of meaning becomes nonsense through an abundance of meaning, as in its written form, and probably also in its oral form, the utterance is polysemous, allowing Pontiggia to indulge in his verve. What Pontiggia offers us is a reflection in act on the origin of sense in nonsense, of the dialectic of the construction of sense out of nonsense. This text is a perfect illustration of the concept of structure defined by Deleuze in a celebrated essay, “A quoi reconnaît-on le structuralisme?” (Deleuze 2002). For Deleuze, a structure always involves two series of elements (in this case two series of interpretations), stitched together by what he calls a case vide, an empty element that, itself meaningless, circulates along the series and generates meaning (in this case, the empty

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word, “Ah!”, whose absence of meaning is due to the very proliferation of its possible meanings). The exclamation shared by the two great men that fail to meet nevertheless allows the scene to take historical meaning, of a portentous or of a homely and humble type, a global meaning that emerges from the clash of interpretations. However, I may have been hasty in my conclusions. In Deleuze’s structure, the two series that have to be articulated to produce meaning are not on the same level, and cannot be the object of a simple contrast with possible synthesis: they consist of a series of signifiers and a series of signifieds. And in Pontiggia’s text we do have two series, one of signifieds (i.e. interpretations) and one of signifiers (with the important qualification that the signifier is always the same, “Ah!”), meaning being produced not so much in the clash of opposite series of interpretations, as a synthesis of opposites (History is the sum of centrifugal and centripetal interpretations), as in the clash between a surfeit of signifieds (the innumerable interpretations offered by Pontiggia) and a dearth of signifiers (the only signifier, a single phoneme, which, itself signifying nothing, gives rise to endless signification). And this is where Pontiggia’s irony takes precedence: the first structure, a proliferation of meaning made possible by the circulation of the empty element, waiting for its possible synthesis into a fixed sense (what History means) is subverted by the second structure, in which the empty element is by itself a whole series and ruins the meanings that the first series constructs and contrasts. And this is where the repetition of the single exclamation acquires its extra sense of the inscription of laughter: the meaningless series of sounds contaminates the series of meanings or interpretations and mocks it, thus ruining the meaning that the first series generates. I believe this can be generalized in a theory of sense, also to be found in Deleuze, this time in his Logique du sens (Deleuze 1969). The theory is based on the contrast between meaning and sense. Of course, this is my translation of it into English: in Deleuze’s French, the contrast occurs between sens commun and bon sens on the one hand, and sens on the other. Common sense, as shared by a community of speakers, and good sense, the right direction of meaning, characterize meaning in its three aspects, or elements: the manifestation that indicates that someone, a speaker, is responsible for the utterance (the linguistic markers of manifestation are the personal pronouns Jakobson calls shifters); the designation that assures us that the proposition has denotation, that it utters something about the world (the linguistic markers of designation are the deictics, the demonstrative pronouns that are the linguistic equivalent of a gesture of pointing); and the signification that guarantees that the

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proposition’s meaning is coherent (the linguistic markers of signification are the markers of cohesion and syntactic structure, like, for example, the adverb “therefore”). But, Deleuze claims, there is a fourth element of the proposition that logically and chronologically precedes the other three: this, he calls sense (le sens). That element, which circulates among the other three, is made up of virtualities of meaning, only some of which will be fixed by their actualization in manifestation, designation and signification. Sense is expressed by propositions and attributed to state of affairs, and so has to do with what Deleuze calls the event (its linguistic marker is the verb that expresses the event, not the noun that denotes). It is embodied in the empty square or paradoxical element that makes sense of the series, and therefore it is a site of paradoxes, the best known of which is borrowed from the medieval philosopher Nicolas d’Hautrecourt, contradictoria ad invicem idem significant (contradictory propositions have the same sense). We may draw two conclusions from this. The first is that there is no meaning without sense, or, which amounts to the same, nonsense (nonsense here appears as a multitude of virtual meanings, ignoring contradiction): meaning emerges from sense/nonsense by fixing it in common sense or good sense, and it always risks being subverted by it. The second conclusion is that literary nonsense is the best illustration of sense as theorized by Deleuze: it is not therefore a marginal literary practice, good only for children and eccentrics, it lies at the centre of the literary enterprise, as it is a virtual component of every text. What invented languages do, therefore, is focus on, or thematize, a constitutive characteristic of language, the dialectic of the construction of sense out of nonsense, the original unintelligibility of all utterances, out of which meaning is constructed. And this dialectic, in turn, is the dialectic of the positive alienation of the individual as speaker in and through her language, whereby she becomes a subject (être un sujet, c’est être un sujet d’énonciation) and acquires a place and an identity. Alterity in language, therefore, is original but not radical: it is provisional and both alienating and disalienating. And this engages a politics of expression.

7. Enter Riddley Walker Let us compare the first sentence of Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker with the few utterances in Klingon we started from: “On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kill a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there

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Chapter One hadn’t ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen”. (Hoban 1980, 1)

The difference is striking: the text is immediately intelligible, and yet there is something uncanny about it, an uncanniness that resists (whereas the unintelligibility of the Klingon text, once translated completely vanishes: there is nothing outlandish about “Surrender or die!”): this mixture of familiarity and strangeness (in spelling, in syntax, in vocabulary) is far more disturbing than the utterly foreign language that Klingon purports to be. And this feeling of Unheimlichkeit does not involve an ethical access to alterity. I suggest that the relation between myself, as reader of a language that I cannot fully recognize, and the world that is depicted through such language is a political one. Not because what is presented here is a dystopia, the chaotic world of England two thousand years after a nuclear holocaust has destroyed civilization as we know it, but because the subversion of our language focuses our attention on the pragmatic workings of language as the medium of subjectivation and social intercourse, that is on the daily practice of a form of politics such intercourse involves. We remember Aristotle’s definition of man as a political animal at the beginning of his Politics: man is a political animal in so far as he is a talking animal. The political separation of friend and foe, of civilized and barbarian is primarily, that is what the alterity of invented languages demonstrates, a linguistic separation, and the corrupted English of Riddley Walker offers the right mixture of sameness and alterity which accounts for the co-presence of the opposite forces (be they opposite classes, clans or parties) in the same polity and their irreconcilable differences. And what is at stake in this kind of text (I could also mention Ken Saro Wiwa’s Sozaboy), an invented language that is a recognizable form of English, but the alterity of which is actually greater than the apparent alterity of Klingon, is not so much an ethical cum rhetorical view of alterity, but a politics of style, the recognition of positive alienation through language, with potentialities of disalienation, what I have called the dialectics of subjectivation: interpellation of the subject by her language, and counterinterpellation of her language by the subject qua speaker. What Riddley Walker offers us is not an image of radical alterity but a practice of style as that which works through our language, a revealer of the linguistic and ideological conjuncture, an indirect representation of our linguistic common sense and of the struggle against it that we call style–a struggle for the meaning of words and for the operations of syntax, which will take into account the sedimented tradition, the moment of the current conjuncture and the potentialities for future emancipation that our

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language contains–namely the three times of language that literature is about.

8. Exeunt omnes I shall sum up my argument by quoting the two provisional theses I started from, and replacing them by five, hopefully more satisfactory, theses. First provisional thesis: the invented languages of fiction give us an access to radical alterity. Second provisional thesis: access to radical alterity is a question of ethics. And this is what I suggest we replace them with. Thesis 1. Invented languages or more generally nonsense do not give us access to radical alterity, but only to an inverted image of ourselves, the form of alterity that is necessary to the constitution of the Self. Thesis 2. This inverted image of ourselves is an instance of alienation. The function of nonsense and invented languages is a prise de conscience of alienation and therefore an incitement to disalienation (a notorious function of art). Thesis 3. The crucial importance of invented languages and nonsense is that they focus on the alienation that lies at the heart of language, an alienation that is constitutive of subjectivity. Thesis 4. What they inscribe and/or expose is the dialectics of language (I speak language/. language speaks me; language is imposed on me/ I appropriate language in style), the intra-linguistic form of which is the dialectic of the construction of sense out of nonsense. And I can now sum up the result of my argument in a final thesis: Thesis 5. As a result, what we need is not a rhetorical ethics but a politics of style.

Bibliography Bulwer Lytton, Edward. The Coming Race. Stroud: Allan Sutton, 1995. Deleuze, Gilles. Logique du sens. Paris: Minuit, 1969. —. “A quoi reconnaît-on le structuralisme?”. In L’île déserte et autres textes. Paris: Minuit, 2002. Dolar, Mladen. A Voice and Nothing Else. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006. Fischbach, Frank. Sans objet : Capitalisme, subjectivité, aliénation. Paris: Vrin, 2009.

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Fruttero & Lucentini. L’amante senza fissa dimora. Milan: Mondadori, 1986. Hoban, Russell. Riddley Walker. London: Picador, 1980. Lefebvre, Henri. Critique de la vie quotidienne. Introduction. Paris: L’Arche, 1958 (1947). Levinas, Emmanuel. Totalité et infini. Paris: Livre de Poche, 1990 (1971). Okrand, Mark. The Klingon Dictionary. New York: Pocket Books, 1992. Pontiggia, Giuseppe. Prima persona. Milano : Mondadori, 2002. Sève, Lucien. Aliénation et émancipation. Paris: La Dispute, 2012. Werst, Frédéric. Ward Ier IIe siècle. Paris: Seuil, 2011.

CHAPTER TWO ALL TOO INHUMAN: THE LIMITS OF ETHICAL IMAGINATION ROK BENýIN INSTITUTE OF PHILOSOPHY, RESEARCH CENTRE OF THE SLOVENIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES AND ARTS, LJUBLJANA

As Fredric Jameson once noted, today it is easier to imagine the end of life on earth than an alternative to capitalism.1 One could of course immediately object not only by evoking the on-going tradition of utopianism but also with reference to mainstream popular culture. For instance, a fan-made video compilation called “Examples of Communism in Star Trek”2 can be found on YouTube, showing clips from an episode in which Captain Picard tries to picture the 24th century society in which humanity has “grown out of its infancy” to defrosted US businessmen from our present. Yet, as Karl Marx argued long ago, the problem could be that such an alternative can be imagined far too easily and is therefore bound to be purely imaginary. Capitalism–to have a better understanding of Jameson’s remark–determines the horizon of meaning to such an extent that images of an alternative world do not threaten our symbolic constructions. As argued by an increasing number of philosophers and critics over the past 15 years or so, this impasse of political imagination has been correlated or even compensated by the growing interest in ethical issues. If the political and economic transcendental is firmly established, all we are left with is ethical variations whose political scope is limited to the moral integrity of politicians and managers, as well as issues concerning identity or possibly ecology. In philosophy, Alain Badiou has criticised contemporary ethics as conservative nihilism that defines the human being as a victim, especially the victim of emancipatory political projects that are necessarily bound to lead to totalitarianism. (See Badiou 30–9) In aesthetics, Jacques Rancière has argued that contemporary art and art-theory abandoned

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political divisions of opposed moralities and incompatible realities to reconstruct moral communities and consensual spaces, opposed only by the radical other of trauma or evil. (See Rancière 109–32) In literary criticism, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, among others, has called for a return to the political, after the beginning of the 21th century brought about imperialist wars and world recession that gave us a “hangover” from “a surfeit of ethics”. (Lecercle 2010b, 917) Does this mean that the ethical emphasis on otherness, while well intended, paradoxically functions as a mechanism of political normalisation? The final lesson of Jameson’s remark could be that the rise in imagining alterity is balanced by a reduction, or even a deadlock in political imagination. In genre criticism, “the ethical turn” (Rancière 109–32) may spawn interest for encountering alterity in the form of monsters or aliens and post-apocalyptic scenarios, in which society has been wiped out and people must rediscover ethical attitudes in order to coexist. Encountering other life-forms and inventing new forms of living both require the establishment of a certain ethos, consisting of humanist values like openness, acceptance and empathy. In these cases the inhuman may be nothing but a detour that leads us closer to some sort of a pre-Nietzschean ethical ideal of the human. In the first section of this paper, I address hermeneutical issues concerning the interpretation of monsters in critical theory by comparing the ethical and the political approach. The next section then presents a case study of monsters figuring as metaphors of proletariat (Frankenstein’s monster and zombies). The third section discusses the ethical questions of coexistence with monsters, often evoked by contemporary popular culture (I will focus on two TV series, Star Trek and True Blood). Based on a reading of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, the final section proposes an outline of an ethics of literature that would not be based on the notion of otherness, but on the notion of truth.

1. All monsters are equal: The crossroads of monstrous hermeneutics One of the reasons why monsters make good metaphors must be that every one of them can be identified with a specific set of distinctive characteristics, which is then applied to a potentially unlimited set of phenomena. Because they differ from one another, they can combine into useful dichotomies or differential systems. As political metaphors, they can be used either diachronically or synchronically. For instance, Franco Moretti distinguishes between pre-modern monsters, operating in the

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shadows of the margins of society (sadists) or confined to a specific place (ghosts), and modern “totalizing” monsters erring around the world, endangering the social order as a whole. Modern monsters can then be synchronically divided into two paradigmatic poles: Frankenstein’s monster as the metaphor of proletariat and Dracula as the metaphor of capital. (See Moretti 83-85) Instead of signifying fundamental historical breaks and social antagonisms, monster-dichotomies can be used to demonstrate arbitrary differences in cultural features or ethical attitudes. A recent article in the New York Times tries to demonstrate the usefulness of framing “the world through a reductive dichotomy, based on monsters”: the vampire and the zombie form two endless and parallel series that confront the likes of Steve Jobs, Michael Jordan, Sid Vicious, stocktraders, etc. (vampires) with Bill Gates, Scottie Pippen, Bono, politicians, etc. (zombies).3 If the monster, as Moretti claims, “serves to displace the antagonisms and horrors evidenced within society outside society itself” (Moretti 84), then the work of the critic consists in translating the outside back into the inside, or into the internal split. Today, this kind of “modernist” critical theory is not only replaced by notes on the proliferation of minor cultural differences in journal columns, but also by postmodern critical theory’s shift–in Deleuzian terms–from metaphor to metamorphosis: the monster is no longer an externalised antagonism, but rather a site of becoming that transcends both poles of the system. In this respect, Margrit Shildrick proposes a posthumanist ethics of otherness, based on monstrous becomings. In her view, the monster is not a metaphor of otherness, but a marker of a potential transformation: I am on the side of the monsters as signifiers of the radical destabilisation of the binary processes of identity and difference that devalue otherness. . . . Monsters signify not the oppositional other safely fenced off within its own boundaries, but the otherness of possible worlds, or possible versions of ourselves, not yet realised. (Shildrick 129)

These possibilities are opened up by the vulnerability of our bodies, since “all bodies [are] unable to comply with the norms through which they enter the space of discourse, and thus of what counts as reality” (Shildrick 2). Therefore, the monstrous is not a form of otherness as opposed to sameness but an internal otherness of the same. The vulnerable body, with its fluid boundaries and constant state of becoming, opposes the modernist logocentric subject described as “supposedly fully present to himself, selfsufficient and rational” (Shildrick 5). This kind of openness to otherness is

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not a simple counter-valorisation of difference, but is rather described in terms of an encounter, or an event. However, if I were to read Shildrick’s book as fiction, the “Cartesian”, “male” or “modernist” subject, the master of his body, ignorant of its vulnerability, would scare me most. After all, since they are already dead, modern monsters, like vampires and zombies, are characterised by their lack of vulnerability. They are corporal, but their bodies are immune or indifferent to mutilation and can only be killed (again) by monster-specific methods, like sticking a wooden stake through the heart of a vampire. Shildrick’s account of monstrosity remains limited to the negative aspect of monsters’ bodies, i.e. their deformation or disfiguration, while ignoring their positive features (power, speed, etc.) or even interpreting them (as in the case of invincibility) as attributes of the straw man of the “Cartesian subject”. Therefore, it seems that this posthumanist approach remains humanist in its emphasis on finitude and limitation, thereby confirming our initial suspicions towards “the ethical turn”. For an alternative use of the hermeneutics of becoming, we can turn to Lecercle’s experimental reading of Bram Stoker’s Dracula with Deleuze: while Dracula can easily be read ethically as “a bad novel, steeped in misogyny and the most blatant form of xenophobia” (Lecercle 2010a, 187), it can be seen in a different light when it is approached with Deleuzian concepts of becoming-animal, deterritorialisation, etc., which highlight the cognitive and existential potentials (and limitations) of vampirism. Another critique of Shildrick can be found in Monsters of the Market, David McNally’s Marxist take on the subject, in which Frankenstein is analysed in the historical context of anatomy as a means of capitalist repression, along with vampire metaphors in Marx’s Das Kapital and zombie stories in contemporary Sub-Saharan Africa. Against what he calls “the postmodern celebration of the monstrous”, McNally proposes the following argument: It is one thing, after all, to be on the side of monstrous others like people of colour or sexual ‘deviants’ in the face of political persecution and repression. But it is quite another thing where multinational corporations, racist gangs or an imperial war-machine are the monsters in question. (McNally 11)

This view entails a division of monsters, where the “good” subversive monsters are opposed to the “evil” power-monsters, culminating in McNally’s assertion that “not all monsters are equal” (McNally 11). There is something about this perhaps exaggerated and stylistically rather

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grandiose postulate that makes its reversal just too tempting to turn down: could it instead be said that “all monsters are equal”? McNally’s claim is that vampires and zombies are expressions of the omnipresent but invisible forces of capitalism; however, we should not understand them merely as reflections of the economic base, but read them “the way psychoanalysis interprets dreams–as a necessarily coded form of subversive knowledge whose decoding promises radical insights and transformative energies” (McNally 7). If we take this hermeneutical principle seriously, we have to acknowledge the fact that psychoanalysis does not distinguish between pleasant dreams and bad dreams or “progressive” and “reactionary” dreams. According to Freud, all dreams are equal, their variety notwithstanding: “the meaning of every dream is the fulfilment of a wish” (Freud, 159), or more accurately–considering the obvious objection of nightmares–“a dream is a (disguised) fulfilment of a (suppressed or repressed) wish” (Freud 183). Freud’s double concealment (disguised fulfilment; repressed wish) is otherwise adequately taken up by McNally: while the practices of capitalism are ideologically normalised and naturalised, the monsters reveal that they result from an “occult economy of terrifying transactions between bodies and money” (McNally 251). Therefore, in both cases the “subversive knowledge” gained from interpretation does not refer to different contents (of dreams and stories) or different positions (inside the psychological or the social system), but to the system itself. In Freud, the content of a dream plays the role of the entrepreneur who cannot carry out his ideas without capital: “he needs a capitalist who can afford the outlay, and the capitalist who provides the psychical outlay for the dream is invariably and indisputably, whatever may be the thoughts of the previous day, a wish from the unconscious” (Freud 561). The difference between the statement “all monsters are equal” and its reversal is therefore the difference between the formal interpretation of symptomatic products of the system and the content-analysis of the representations of the positions inside the system. The former analyses the disguise, presupposing that the key to correct knowledge lies in the disfigured, while the latter criticises disguisement and disfiguration and demands an adequate representation. If the first kind of interpretation is political, the second evokes an ethics of representation. This opposition may become clearer with a few illustrations. There is a tendency towards the division of monsters even in Shildrick, who all but relegates Frankenstein’s monster and some contemporary ones as well to the status of what could be called Cartesian toys:

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Chapter Two The disruptively organic, female-inspired and (un)natural monsters of the early modern period were to a large extent superseded–particularly during the Romantic age–by man-made hybrids which signified not a devalued place beyond rational control, but the power and authority of the male imagination, be it artistic or scientific... And in the twenty-first century, one wonders what is to stop a reconceived Cartesian subject from annexing cyberspace. The image of the isolated, ultimately disembodied computer nerd surfing the Net, or of the robotic heroes of recent science-fiction film is hardly feminist-friendly. (Shildrick 125)

Moretti’s diagnosis of a split society is thus replaced by the search for feminist-friendly representations. In McNally, on the other hand, it is the zombies that need to be worker-friendly, which was not the case in Hollywood adaptations of the myth: the traditional idea “of the zombie as a living-dead labourer was displaced in American cultural production in the late 1960s by that of the ghoulish consumer” (McNally 213). However, contemporary African zombies return to the image of the zombie labourer and thus “carry a much more powerfully critical charge” (McNally 213). The hermeneutical paradox in both cases is the following: monsters are formally subversive, but only if their content is the representation of women or workers. Therefore, ethical criticism limits the imagination by dividing its products according to a predetermined system of values. A political approach, on the other hand, traces the social contradictions–and the relations between social and psychological, textual or other types of contradictions–inscribed in the works of imagination. This interpretation, based on reading monsters as metaphors, could still be supplemented by an interpretation that would understand them as metamorphoses, i.e. not as symptoms of contradictions but as inventions of new forms of existence. However, this understanding should be founded on a different notion of ethics, a notion no longer focused on how we encounter the monstrous other (which is still the case in Shildrick, even though the monster comes from within) but on how we become monsters ourselves. Another way of developing the political approach would be to emphasise its formalist dimension. This is how Jameson tries to resolve the antinomies that characterise utopian representations. In Archaeologies of the Future, he argues that “all ostensible Utopian content [is] ideological”, so the task at hand is not to look for the true, genuine utopian content but to read them for their “critical negativity”; for example, rural utopias should be read as critiques of urban life, while urban utopias should be read as critiques of the ideological return to the rural. (Jameson 2005, 211) Furthermore, he argues in favour of “absolute formalism”: in the

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ideological situation where it is believed that there is no alternative, the very formal closure of utopia, “the radical closure of a system of difference in time, the experience of the total formal break and discontinuity–has its political role to play, and in fact becomes a new kind of content in its own right” (Jameson 2005, 179, 231).

2. Frankenstein’s monster vs. zombies: The political monster If we strictly follow McNally’s logic, Frankenstein’s creature is the true proletarian monster. In her literary creation, Mary Shelley acknowledges “the fact that proletarians are intelligent and articulate members of humankind–i.e. not zombies” (McNally 101). However, the novel is not credited only because it flatters the proletariat’s abilities but because it “reconstructs the process by which the working class was created: first dissected (separated from the land and their communities), then reassembled as a frightening collective entity, that grotesque conglomeration known as the proletarian mob” (McNally 95). I would argue that it is at this point that McNally’s reading of Frankenstein turns Freudian and at the same time political, since he interprets the novel as the disguised portrayal of the system of repression. The question that remains is how to apply this kind of reading to the zombification, so to speak, of the worker and to the subsequent transformation of zombies into consumers. If there is such a thing as the unconscious wish or desire of literature–at least of the gothic genre–it is perhaps best described by Moretti’s following statement: “The literature of terror is born precisely out of the terror of a split society, and out of the desire to heal it.” (Moretti 83) The ideological mechanisms at work in both paradigmatic examples, Frankenstein and Dracula, conceal this split by making it appear external, temporary and manageable. But when their origin is traced back to the core of society, both monsters serve as metaphors of the split. From Marx to Moretti and McNally, the figure of the vampire provides the image of the capital. What changes then, on the side of the proletariat, when Frankenstein’s monster is replaced by zombies? According to Moretti, Frankenstein’s monster can symbolise the proletariat as a self-conscious class because it is a collective and assembled organism that learned to speak and read. On the other hand, zombies are mute and dumb; even though they come in huge numbers, they can never become more than a crowd of individuals that resembles a multitude of unconnected body parts. However, Frankenstein’s monster

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remains alone and forsaken–people reject it and its maker denies it a mate. Shelley grants it awareness and language, but denies it the possibility to reproduce. Zombies, on the other hand, have no problems with reproduction but lack language and consciousness. In this sense, Frankenstein’s monster and the zombie are contraries, holding the same structural position. Therefore, in its negative definition, the zombie is what comes after the disappearance of Frankenstein’s monster, symbolising a class that has lost its consciousness and organisation, a class that has dissolved amidst the individualism of consumer society. Its positive characterisation can perhaps be derived out of the way it disguises the split society. A film like George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) portrays zombie epidemics as the disappearance of all social differences: anybody, regardless of class, race or sex, can become a zombie, unconsciously driven to the nearest supermarket.4 From beginning to end of the film, social order is suspended. Also (as is characteristic of most zombie films), the small group of people that manage to isolate themselves from zombies and fight them (and in this case take full control of the supermarket goods) is randomly formed. It seems that the equality of the zombies is–far from the socialist equality of a classless society–the neoliberal equality of equal opportunities, resulting in the ideologically sanctioned social division. The dilemma between the zombie-worker and the zombie-consumer is resolved if the zombie is regarded as a metaphor of post-class struggle submission in which everybody is supposed to be a worker or a capitalist, depending on the point of view. This is why, as testified by the open ending of the Dawn, the zombie cannot be simply excluded to restore social order. Thus, the positive definition of the zombie can perhaps be formulated by the inversion of Moretti’s claim: zombies are born out of the terror of a healed society, and out of the desire to split it.

3. “You will be assimilated”: coexistence with monsters Because Dracula, like capital, seeks unlimited expansion, “one cannot ‘coexist’ with the vampire” (Moretti 92). Frankenstein’s monster experiences this impossibility from the other side: it wants to be a part of community or create one, but its efforts are in vain. However, in times when political divisions are supposed to be overcome by ethics, the question of coexistence is reopened. Allow me to by-pass genre literature and give a couple of examples from television. I believe TV series are worthy of attention because they extrapolate the notion of genre by bringing its inherent repetitions to the extreme.

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In the 716 episodes released since its first TV-broadcast in 1966,5 Star Trek presented a wide range of alien species and futuristic technologies. In its various incarnations, the franchise also introduced different types of villains who posed a threat to the Federation, the peaceful and democratic union of planets. The Original Series (1966–1969) staged the opposition between the Federation and the Klingon species, a conflict largely modelled on the Cold War tensions between the two blocs. By the time of its sequel, The Next Generation (1987–1994), the Cold War was all but over and the Klingon could now be portrayed as the allies. The writers also redesigned their culture, turning ruthless militant imperialism into a samurai-like ethics of combat and honour. On the other hand, the Federation acquired additional utopian features. In the episode mentioned at the beginning of this paper, Captain Picard explains to businessmen that society has eliminated the “need for possessions”, making personal fulfilment the biggest challenge for an individual. The role of the primary antagonist was now taken over by a species called the Borg. While the Klingon had their own language developed for them, the Borg transmit a short message in English for whomever they encounter: “You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.” The Borg expand by way of violent assimilation of other species, which they upgrade with technological implants. Their strategy cannot be accurately described as colonialism, since there is no distinct centre of power, but rather as radical collectivism. The Borg have eliminated individuality altogether and function as a multitude of “drones” with a collective consciousness. The architecture of their starships is also characteristic: unlike the futuristic aerodynamic designs of the Federation, the Borg’s vessels are functional “socialist” cubes. The Borg can thus be understood as post-Cold War monsters: the communists are no longer “the other bloc”, a really existing evil force, speaking a strange language that can nevertheless be learned (as is the case with the Klingon), but the spectre of “totalitarianism”, a bodiless entity that only gains its ideological momentum after the collapse of its material carriers. The capitalistic and democratic world continues the fight with the undeadly incarnations of its other, for example the institutions of the welfare state, condemned by many European politicians as an emblem of socialism (in the winter of 2013, the then-prime minister of Slovenia, Janez Janša, labelled the protesters against austerity measures as “zombies”, claiming that their mentality belongs to the dead communist past). The Borg could actually be described as highly developed cyborgzombies: their clumsy, slow-moving and half-decayed bodies are guided only by simple commands from the collective consciousness. However, in

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keeping with the ethical times, their ambitions cannot be simply seen as featurelessly evil. They are not directed by the will for domination or the desire to destroy, but by their striving for biotechnological “perfection”, accomplished by combining genetic material and technological achievements of all assimilated species. In this sense, the Borg can be viewed as the incarnation of the hubris of the 20th century, the political and scientific madness that has to be surpassed by new ethical values based on human limitations. In Voyager, the next Star Trek series (1995–2001), a Borg drone with a typically impersonal name “Seven of Nine” is captured by the Voyager crew. After she is disconnected from the collective and most of her implants are removed, she slowly transforms from a green zombie-like creature into an attractive blonde. The fact that she regains humanity in the psychological and moral sense of the word after spending most of her life dehumanised in the Borg collective becomes one of the central narrative axes of the series. The conflict with the Borg can thus be characterised as the battle for the mortal human Dasein, individual existence with its array of emotions, its hopes and fears, its ability to laugh and cry, etc. With all the effort invested in imagining otherness, the moral of the story, as is often the case in mainstream science fiction, re-enthrones the all-toohuman sensibility as the highest value.6 The second example, HBO’s series True Blood (2008–), makes encounters with alterity its main theme by presenting identity issues with a political twist and comical undertones. Based on Charlaine Harris’s novel series, the plot revolves around vampires who, having made their existence officially known, are fighting for their rights as a politically wellorganised minority. This event is known as “the coming out of the coffin”–the well-constructed alternative universe of the series is supported by an inventive situation-specific language. It results from so-called “mainstreaming”, an ideology that spread through the vampire community after the invention and mass production of synthetic blood offered the option of excluding humans from vampires’ daily menu (a highly materialist consideration of the author). Before Harris, moral dilemmas were bestowed upon the vampire by Ann Rice: will he or she be able to stay in touch with what remains human in him or her, trying to act morally, or will he or she embrace the dark second nature and go “beyond good and evil”? The alternative between Louis and Lestat from Interview with the Vampire is embodied in True Blood by the two antagonistic male vampire characters, Bill and Eric, although the moral dilemma is transposed to a political level by the conflict between the democratic and the fundamentalist fractions of the vampire political scene.

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These events are being observed through their effects on a small Louisiana town called Bon Temps, where people’s reactions to vampires deliberately resemble racism and homophobia, with “God hates fangs!” being the most popular hate-speech line. In the microcosm of Bon Temps, identity issues are blown out of proportion as every book/season introduces new creatures (vampires are joined by werewolves, shape-shifters, witches, ancient gods, etc.). Because of her mysterious powers, the protagonist Sookie is constantly faced with the question “What are you?”, to which she has a ready-made reply: “I’m a waitress.” When she finally discovers the species she belongs to, she is not impressed: “I’m a fairy?! How fucking lame.”7 Despite the presence of this alien variety, the focus is on “ordinary” people, their fundamentalist Christian sects, vampire-hating groups and those who are sexually attracted to them–the “fangbangers”–, dealers in vampire blood–a new narcotic–, and so on. Unlike the Star Wars cantina where randomly shaped creatures sit at the bar, enjoying a jam session, different monstrous and human identities are explored in terms of their specific sensibilities, ways of thinking and social backgrounds and positions, which cannot always be ethically pacified. Thus, there is no room in True Blood for Star Trek’s simplistic political opposition between utopia and totalitarianism in terms of an elementary ethical schism between good and evil, human limitation and transgressive hubris. Even the stereotypical heroic battles always take place against the background of political struggles that reflect the antagonisms of society as a whole. The series uses genre conventions and repetitions to initiate the proliferation of abnormalities that estrange the familiar and familiarise the strange, therefore undermining the delimitation between the human and the inhuman and ironising any ethical mystification of the other. On the aesthetical level, the impossibility of representing otherness is rendered by comical abundance of overrepresentation, ranging from the ridiculous sound vampires’ fangs make when they pop out, to age-old vampires that once knew a weird hippy called Jesus. If an ethics of art could be derived from True Blood, it would be the idea that a waitress is just as representable or unrepresentable as any alien.

4. Proust’s monsters and the ethics of truth To conclude, I would like to re-think the arguments made in this paper by taking into account a work belonging to “non-genre” literature of modernism. One would think there are no monsters in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, until the very last sentence proves us wrong. The narrator tells us that in his work, if it is ever accomplished, he will

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“describe men, if need be, as monsters occupying a place in Time infinitely more important than the restricted one reserved for them in space”.8 What could this gigantic spider web of a novel (see Deleuze 181– 2) that makes anyone who gets caught in it resemble a monster (“les faire ressembler à des êtres monstrueux”, as Proust’s words read in French), possibly tell us about ethics? With high-society conventions, jealousy and psychological peculiarities guiding the actions of characters, it can hardly be said that considering the otherness of the other is ever raised as an issue. In general, there seems to be no great ethical dilemma the narrator would prepare himself to face. Being absent from the narrative, can ethics be found in the way the other is represented? This is hardly the case, since Proust only allows us to read the words of other characters filtered through the narrator’s libidinal investment and his interest in language curiosities. For instance, it is possible to write a different novel–as Jacqueline Rose did–presenting the same events in the words of the narrator’s lover, Albertine. As Gerard Genette comprehensively records in his text on the fundamental importance of indirect language in Proust, certain characters are presented “as stylistic specimen . . . or as collections of mischances of language” (Genette 223). Albertine herself only becomes lovable when she makes additions to her vocabulary (see Genette 225) and really loved when her words (clumsy lies) reveal what she does not say (the truth). Thus, Genette argues, the incompatibility of being and appearing, which announces the failure of the signifier, is sanctioned by the production of the contrary signifier: “the truth”. (Genette 226–7) The lie and the failure therefore constitute the site of truth in language and produce the indirect language, which is, Genette concludes, what “l’écriture” of the work as such is made of. (Genette 294) This reversal–to evoke the distinction discussed in the first section of this paper–turns our attention away from the ethics of representation and draws it toward the hermeneutics implied in Freud’s interpretation of dreams. The various kinds of truth the narrator is after–about Albertine, about high society, about art, about the sensation of reminiscence–all come down (for the narrator as well as for Proust himself) to the truth of the work. Just before the end of the novel, the narrator admits defeat and gives up on the ideal of literature, even though he has developed his writing skills and has already experienced everything he could ever write about. But knowledge, experience, will, ideal–all these things are nothing without a contingent event that can trigger the process of truth, an event that could just as easily not have happened9. Writing can only begin after a series of trivial occurrences–an uneven pavement underneath one’s feet, the sound of a

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spoon against a plate–reveals the concept of the work, the concept that makes the work possible as a true work of art. It is precisely this moment that does not cease to intrigue Roland Barthes: the narrator’s (and Proust’s) life is characterised by the will to write, which stumbles and fails, and is succeeded by hesitation, powerlessness and despair. But then something happens, “a truly dramatic turn of events”, when “ça prend” and the writing takes off, when the life of Proust ends so that the life of the work can begin. (See Barthes 2002a, 66; Barthes 2002b, 655) In order to achieve this, Proust becomes a creature with one sole purpose–to write it. What consequences can these considerations have for the ethics of literature? It is clear that Proust’s ethics is not an ethics of representation. Despite socialist sympathies and a strong passion for justice regarding the Dreyfus affair, it can hardly be said that the novel tries to give a voice to the unheard. However, Proust advocates an idea of writing that takes as much interest in the liftboy’s methodical mistaking the surname “Cambremer” for “Camembert” as it does in the complicated rules that allow certain people to talk about “le prince d’Agrigante” as “Grigri”. This can also lead to the conclusion that Proust’s ethics is not an ethics of the unrepresentable. What he is interested in are the gaps in presentation, i.e. what characters do not want to tell or do not want to hear and what can never be experienced but only re-experienced. In other words, what cannot be said is said–or half-said–all the time, and we can uncover it by following the proliferation of inadequate representations. In short, what is proposed by the novel is not so much an ethics of otherness, as an ethics of truth. The issue is not how the existence of different worlds can be accounted for and how communication can be established between them. For Proust, it is rather a question of how the indifferent multitude of worlds, the worlds of jealous lovers, hidden pleasures, competitive salons, political affairs and so on, can be united in the world of the work, the work as truth and as form (see above for the discussion on Jameson’s “absolute formalism”). The truth in question is not the truth about love, society, etc., but the truth of, the truth of literature. The immanence implied is not necessarily the immanence of language as a medium; likewise, it is not a matter of finally accomplishing the notion of literature, in some sort of a Hegelian way, as there is no one and ultimate truth of literature. There are only works, singular events, products of a desire, the desire “to write it”, whose subject can only be literature itself and whose object can be found somewhere between the lack of presentation and the surplus of representations. A desire cannot be fulfilled or accomplished, but can be triggered and made productive by contingent events. It is around this desire that the ethics of literature can revolve.

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Bibliography Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Translated by Peter Hallward. London: Verso, 2001. Barthes, Roland. “Proust et les noms.” In Œuvres complètes: Tome IV 1972–1976, 66–77. Paris: Seuil, 2002. —. “‘Ça prend’”. In Œuvres complètes: Tome V 1977–1980, 654–656. Paris: Seuil, 2002. Deleuze, Gilles. Proust and Signs. Translated by Richard Howard. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated by James Strachey. New York: Basic Books, 2010. Genette, Gerard. Figures II. Paris: Seuil, 1969. Jameson, Fredric. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983-1998. London: Verso, 1998. —. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso, 2005. Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010. —. “Return to the Political”. PMLA 125, no. 4 (2010): 916–19. McNally, David. Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism. Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2011. Moretti, Franco. Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms. London: Verso, 2005. Rancière, Jacques. Aesthetics and its Discontents. Translated by Steven Corcoran. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009. Riha, Rado. “Does Science Think?” Filozofski vestnik 33, no. 2 (2012): 77–93. Rose, Jacqueline. Albertine. London: Vintage, 2002. Shildrick, Margrit. Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self. London: SAGE Publications, 2002.

Notes 1

“It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations.” (Jameson 1998, 62) 2 http://youtu.be/pzqW0YaN2ho (The scenes are taken from season 1, episode 26.) 3 Havrilesky, Heather. “Steve Jobs: Vampire. Bill Gates: Zombie.” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/magazine/steve-jobs-vampire-bill-gateszombie.html

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This point was made by Nil Baskar in his editorial to the retrospective of zombie films in Slovenian Cinemathèque in April 2013. 5 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_trek 6 The ethical problem of the Borg seems close to the challenges contemporary science poses to various ethical committees. While the concern over humanist values, endangered by new biotechnological possibilities, necessarily remains external to science as such, the question of what it means for science to think, to explore, rather than to follow the dictate of capital, can very well be an ethical question of science itself and a question that cannot be answered irrespective of politics. In this regard, the task of conceptualising an ethics in the field of literature could be in distinguishing what remains an ethics for literature from what could be an ethics of literature. (For the question of science and ethics see Riha). 7 Season 3, episode 10. 8 Quoted from the C. K. Scott-Moncrieff’s translation, available at http://gutenberg.net.au/pages/proust.html. 9 The idea of an ethics of truth draws on Badiou’s Ethics.

CHAPTER THREE A POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF STYLISTIC DEFAMILIARIZATION: ETHICS OF THE POST-APOCALYPTIC SELF OR WHAT IS REALLY TRANSLATED IN JAMES KELMAN’S TRANSLATED ACCOUNTS? SIMONE RINZLER UNIVERSITE PARIS OUEST NANTERRE LA DEFENSE

Introduction: Life and language after disaster The preface of James Kelman’s Translated Accounts— A Novel is a warning for the reader. The situation which is going to be told is postapocalyptic. “[C]hronology is important but not to an overriding extent” and the “translated accounts” the reader will discover and struggle with are “narrations of incidents and events” which happened “in an occupied territory or land where a form of martial law appears in operation”. The whole text is a “grafting” of various translated texts “by three, four or more individuals”. An important precision is added: “While all [these texts] are ‘first hand’ they have been transcribed and/or translated into English, not always by persons native to the tongue”. What is more, these accounts have been written before the invention of computers. The texts have been edited and controlled, but to no avail. All this is revealed in an impersonal style, at least in the preface. The preface is neither signed nor dated. As in the novels studied by Sorlin (2010) such as Riddley Walker, the “grafted” texts presented here as “a novel” are written in “Weird English” according to the term coined by Ch’ien (Evelyn Nien-Ming Ch’ien 2004) recalling Ken Saro-Wiwa’s “Rotten English” in Sozaboy—A Novel in Rotten English and the “new

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englishes”— without capital letters— of postcolonial studies and, last, David Peace’s impersonal style in GB 84. Apart from all these linguistic and stylistic features, the play with written language is pervasive. In some chapters, punctuation fills whole paragraphs together with various fonts and non-Latin characters such as in quotation which is impossible to oralise: @ # &! ±4 %% ] ° Ȉ (Kelman 2001, 43).

Words are coined, stuck together, unfinished. The rules of MLA and Chicago styles are abundantly flouted. Let us look at quotation 2, which is also impossible to read aloud: