Romanticism After Auschwitz 9781503626300

Citation preview

romanticism after auschwitz

Cultural Memory in the Present Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries, Editors

Romanticism After Auschwitz

Sara Guyer

stanford university press stanford, california 2007

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2007 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. Assistance for publication of this book was provided by the Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies. Images in Chapter 7 are from Alain Resnais’ Nuit et brouillard (1955). “The Survivor,” from Collected Poems by Primo Levi, translated by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swan. English translation copyright © 1988 by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber, Inc., an affiliate of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, LLC. “Il Superstite,” from Primo Levi, Ad ora incerta. © Garzanti Editore s.p.a., 1984, 1990, 1998; © 2004, Garzanti Libri s.p.a. William Shakespeare, Sonnet 71 (“Du sollst”), translated by Paul Celan, from Paul Celan, Gesammelte Werke 5 (Übertrgungen II). © Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt-am-Main, 1967. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Guyer, Sara Emilie. Romanticism after Auschwitz / Sara Guyer. p. cm.--(Cultural memory in the present) Originally presented as the author’s Ph.D. thesis (University of California, Berkeley, 2001) under title: Surviving figures : romantic rhetoric and post-Holocaust writing. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8047-5524-5 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. English literature--19th century--History and criticism. 2. Romanticism. 3. Rhetoric. 4. Survival in literature. 5. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616. Sonnets. I. Title. PR457.G89 2007 820.9’145--dc22

2007020498

Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 11/13.5 Adobe Garamond

For Scott

Contents

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction: The Rhetoric of Survival

1

1. Romanticism, Testimony, Prosopopoeia

25

2. Naked Language, Naked Life: Wordsworth’s Rhetoric of Survival

46

3. Testimony and Trope in Frankenstein

71

4. Anthropomorphizing the Human

104

5. The Rhetoric of Wakefulness

141

6. Breath, Today: Celan’s Translation of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 71

160

7. The Remains of Figure: Nuit et Brouillard, Nacht und Nebel

187

Ending in Romanticism

216

Notes

227

Bibliography

319

Index

347

Acknowledgments

This book began as a dissertation in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. I cannot imagine a better place to have spent six years, not least because I had the chance to work with Judith Butler. This book is thoroughly indebted to her rare combination of rigor and generosity—intellectual, professional, and personal. J. Hillis Miller at UC-Irvine codirected the dissertation, and for his intelligence, wit, and continual support I am grateful. Victoria Kahn and Ann Smock served on the dissertation committee; Jacques Derrida would have served on it, were it not for administrative hurdles. All three of them contributed indelibly to the thinking manifest here. Ian Balfour and Steven Goldsmith read the entire manuscript. Their insight and erudition made this a much better book, for which my gratitude runs deep. Jacques Lezra also read the manuscript with the incisiveness and energy that are uniquely his own. I thank the English Department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, for providing a warm, intellectually exciting atmosphere in which to complete this book. I also thank the Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies, and its Director, Steve Nadler, for their investment in this project. The Department of English and the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oregon supported the writing of this book with both a New Faculty Research Grant and a Junior Faculty Award. I thank the Office of the Vice-Chancellor at UC-Irvine for awarding me a Faculty Fellowship in 2001–3, and the (former) Department of English and Comparative Literature for welcoming me during those two years. With conversations, invitations, or needed distractions, many people over many years have helped this book come into being. I particularly would like to thank Giorgio Agamben, Mike, Keri, Eliza, and Ruby Aronson, Jennifer Bajorek, Michael Bernard-Donals, Andrew Benjamin,

xii   Acknowledgments Cathy Caruth, Mai-Lin Cheng, Joshua Clover, Michael Cobb, Heather Dubrow, Billy Flesch, Anne-Lise François, Lisa Freinkel, Barbara Johnson, Tom Keenan, Terry Kelley, Dragan Kujundzic, Caroline Levine, Charles Mahoney, Robbie Miotke, John Muse, Mario Ortiz-Robles, Tilottama Rajan, Marc Redfield, Dan Rosenberg, Ben Saunders, Dan Selcer, Simon Sparks, Dan Stone, Susan Tate, Henry Turner, Rebecca Walkowitz, Andrzej Warminski, Elisabeth Weber, Susanne Wofford, and Sarah Wood. I also am thankful to the students at Wisconsin, Oregon, and Irvine, especially Aaron Rangel and Alastair Hunt, who willingly read and discussed many of the texts that I treat here. Tricia Frank provided research assistance; Jack Dudley prepared the images and bibliography and offered astute comments on the final manuscript. I appreciate their excellent and timely work. Maxine Frederickson at Berkeley, and Barbara Cohen and Barbara Caldwell at Irvine also deserve mention for the administrative support and good cheer that they offered at early stages. At Stanford, Norris Pope and Angie Michaelis have been responsive and encouraging; Andrew Frisardi and Mariana Raykov have been careful readers of the manuscript: I am glad to have been able to work with all of them. Throughout the writing of this book Mickey and Leila Straus and Susan and Bruce Waterfall offered loving support—and indulgent interruptions: I am grateful for both. Jonathan Guyer’s and Erica Guyer’s exceptional warmth, curiosity, and patience are models—I hope they are also family traits. Sadie Chapin Straus—best interruption of all—arrived just in time! Three friends—who remain intimately tied to three of the places (Oakland, Echo Park, Eugene) where this book was written—have been indispensable conversationalists, brilliant readers, and true companions: without Will Bishop, Steven Miller, and Tres Pyle writing would have been an even lonelier task. Before I visited Poland in 1990, my father gave me his copy of Primo Levi’s book The Drowned and the Saved. I read the book then, returned to it first when I studied with Gillian Rose at Warwick, and again when Giorgio Agamben gave a seminar at Berkeley in 1999. Long after I had begun to sketch the contours of this project, I noticed that my father had marked the book’s epigraph—a verse from Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” In some sense, my own book reflects an effort to read

Acknowledgments   xiii and to acknowledge the mark inscribed in the margin, where a fragment of a romantic poem still resonates in a post-Holocaust account of survival. I offer deepest thanks to my parents, Cheryl and Dan Guyer, whose concern for their children’s well-being informs every decision they make. Theirs is an extraordinary gift. Finally, I dedicate this book to Scott Straus, who, more than anyone I have ever met, knows how to live. * Earlier versions of several of these chapters have been previously published. Chapter 3 appeared in Studies in Romanticism 45: 1 (Spring 2006): 77–115; Chapter 4 appeared in a completely different form, as “Being­Destroyed: Anthropomorphizing L’Espèce Humaine,” in Theoretical Interpretations of the Holocaust, ed. Dan Stone (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), 103–26; Chapter 5 appeared as “Wordsworthian Wakefulness,” in the Yale Journal of Criticism 16: 1 (Spring 2003): 93–111; Chapter 6 appeared in Comparative Literature 57: 4 (Fall 2005): 328–51. A few sentences from the Introduction also appeared in my review essay “Remembering, Repeating . . . ,” in Contemporary Literature 46: 4 (Winter 2005): 736–45.

romanticism after auschwitz

Introduction: The Rhetoric of Survival It may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question of whether after Auschwitz you can go on living—especially whether one who escaped by accident who by rights should have been killed may go on living. His mere survival calls for coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz; this is the drastic guilt of him who was spared. By way of atonement he will be plagued by dreams such as that he is no longer living at all, that he was sent to the ovens in 1944 and his whole existence since has been imaginary, an emanation of the insane wish of a man killed twenty years earlier. theodor w. adorno1 At the far edge of this ongoing enterprise, the question of history and of ethics can be seen to reemerge, though in an entirely different manner. paul de man2

Opening with Romanticism Primo Levi’s 1984 poem “The Survivor” (“Il superstite”) opens with a repeated phrase: Il superstite

The Survivor

Since then, at an uncertain hour Dopo di allora, ad ora incerta Dopo di allora, ad ora incerta, Since then, at an uncertain hour, Quella pena ritorna, That agony returns: E se non trova chi lo ascolti And till my ghastly tale is told, Gli brucia in petto il cuore. This heart within me burns.

   Introduction Rivede i visi dei suoi compagni Once more he sees his companions’ faces Lividi nella prima luce, Livid in the first faint light, Gray with cement dust, Grigi di polvere di cemento, Indistinti per nebbia, Nebulous in the mist, Tinti di morte nei sonni inquieti: Tinged with death in their uneasy sleep. A notte menano le mascelle At night, under the heavy burden Sotto la mora greve dei sogni Of their dreams, their jaws move, Masticando una rapa che non c’è. Chewing a nonexistent turnip. “Indietro, via di qui, gente sommersa, “Stand back, leave me alone, drowned men, Andate. Non ho soppiantato nessuno, Go away. I haven’t dispossessed anyone, Non ho usurpato il pane di nessuno, Haven’t usurped anyone’s bread. Nessuno è morto in vece mia. Nessuno. No one died in my place. No one. Ritornate alla vostra nebbia. Go back into your mist. Non è mia colpa se vivo e respiro It’s not my fault if I live and breathe, E mangio e bevo e dormo e vesto panni.” Eat, drink, sleep and put on clothes.”3

When Levi’s bilingual poem identifies a point after which everything will have changed, it repeats—and translates—a prior work: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1817). This verse is familiar to readers of Levi, for it also appears as the epigraph to The Drowned and the Saved (1986). In “The Survivor,” the verse—its first line in English and all four lines translated into Italian—also offers an opening. Yet more than an epigraph, which appears as a precursor to the work of which it nevertheless becomes a part, the quotation with which the poem opens is an unmarked part of it. Levi’s poem abruptly cuts off Coleridge’s English stanza at its first line—even before the meter or the rhyme has been established, and just as it is about to state what has been happening “since then” and what an “uncertain hour brings.” This interruption is also a repetition (albeit one that does not recover the measure of the poem it repeats), for the English verse is interrupted by its translation into Italian.4 The translation translates the experience of a past time (“then”) that the Ancient Mariner can neither remember nor forget, and that orients and measures the future. Indeed, translation may be one way of describing this carrying over of the past into a new context. A translation is what neither remembers nor forgets; it is what Walter Benjamin calls Überleben, or survival.5 If Levi’s poem begins first in Coleridge’s English, and then in a “literal” translation of Coleridge’s poem into Italian that at once cuts it off

Introduction    and repeats it, it also describes an experience of interruptive repetition: “Rivede i visi dei suoi compagni . . . [Once more he sees his companions’ faces . . . ].” The poem’s formal opening (in Coleridge’s poetry, both English and Italian) gives way to a narrative that is both new (not drawn from Coleridge) and a continuation of Coleridge’s poem (insofar as its thirdperson subject is indistinguishable from Coleridge’s Mariner). In this way, the poem not only enacts a repetition in translation or repeats Coleridge’s fictional testimony; it also accounts for an experience of repetition—seeing again—that it also performs. Levi’s poem, like Coleridge’s, accounts for a spontaneous interruption, yet unlike the Mariner (whose burning heart leads him to accost an unwilling listener), the survivor in Levi’s poem is not driven by a compulsion to speak. Rather, he is the unwilling object of a (mute) address. In “The Survivor,” there is no tale told, except for the tale, absent from the “Rime,” of the addressee. “The Survivor” describes and enacts within the text the return of an unsettled past, a return that accompanies survival. It recounts the disruption of the present by an experience that has not ended, by faces that illustrate the “indistinction” of death and life, an indistinction that is both cause and effect of their agonizing return. This agony, framed as guiltless guilt (“Nessuno è morto in vece mia. Nessuno [No one died in my place. No one]”) haunts and accuses the survivor.6 It steals away the present for a past that—because “no one” died as millions were murdered and deprived of a proper death and burial, because he did not die—will not have come to an end, a past that endures and persecutes the one who has lived beyond its apparent end. In the poem, the painful, uncontrollable interruption by memory is inseparable from the return of a romantic work and is voiced through a reiteration of its lyric figures. If this implies that the return of romanticism (and perhaps lyric poetry generally) in post-Holocaust writing is tied to guilt, the connection is not accidental. The recurrence and translation of Coleridge’s lyrical ballad within Levi’s post-Holocaust poem, and the implicit suggestion in this poem that the experience of the survivor of Auschwitz is continuous with and repeats the experience of a fictional, supernatural character, seems to mock Theodor Adorno’s early claim that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”7 Levi’s poem undertakes a guilty act by writing an avowedly lyrical poem, one so intimately tied to a romantic poem that it includes it.

   Introduction The poem—as a guilty act—stands in for the causeless yet interminable guilt that the survivor suffers merely for having survived. Levi was aware of Adorno’s early disavowal of poetry—and disagreed with it. In her biography Primo Levi: The Tragedy of an Optimist, Myriam Anissimov quotes Levi: I am a man who has little belief in poetry, and yet goes in for it. There is certainly a reason. . . . I have the impression that poetry in general has become a vector of human contact. Adorno wrote that after Auschwitz there could be no more poetry, but my hope has been just the opposite. In 1945–46, it seemed to me that poetry would be better suited than prose to explain what was weighing inside me. When I say poetry, I have nothing lyrical in mind. In those days I would have reformulated Adorno’s remark like this: After Auschwitz, there can be no more poetry, except about Auschwitz.8

Levi’s response to Adorno’s injunction—which was part of a 1984 interview on the occasion of the appearance of his book of poems entitled (again after Coleridge) Ad ora incerta (At an Uncertain Hour) and in which “The Survivor” was published—is instructive, not least for its clear debt to Paul Celan’s account of poetry as “intending another.”9 Here Levi reflects upon poetry’s immediacy and his belief that poetry, rather than narrative, would be “suited” to explanation, if not to description. Thus, it was not poetry’s impossibility but its necessity that Levi seems to have felt. What had come to an end was “lyrical” (or idyllic) poetry—that is, poetry about anything other than Auschwitz.10 Levi’s poem “The Survivor” may seem to satisfy the requirement that poetry after Auschwitz must be about Auschwitz, but its opening citation— and ultimate translation—of a poem that knows nothing of Auschwitz is unsettling. Opening as if it were a continuation of Coleridge’s poem, “The Survivor” literally emerges as a poem from “before Auschwitz.” Another way of understanding that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz, is to hear this impossibility of poetry, as Maurice Blanchot hears it, to imply that from now on all poems will be from before Auschwitz.11 At the same time, it carries a poem from “before Auschwitz” to Auschwitz, at once interrupting it (cutting it off, translating it) and leaving it uncomfortably uninterrupted. Levi’s poem can be understood, on the one hand, to incorporate the performance of a guilt for which the poem accounts, correlating the guilt of survival with the guilt of writing poetry (even poetry about

Introduction    Auschwitz); and on the other hand, it can be understood to dramatize the claim that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz in an altogether different sense: poetry belongs to another time, for “from now on” poetry will be from before Auschwitz. Levi’s lyric turn reflects two critical responses to the question of literature’s possibility—or impossibility—after Auschwitz. I know of no more explicit instance of a post-Holocaust testimony repeating a romantic poem than Levi’s poem. That the poem is called “The Survivor” and aligns the familiar fictional mariner of a pseudohistorical work with the historical survivor of the camps implies that a post-­Holocaust work can emerge in and through a romantic one, and yet it also shows— as I have been explaining—the risks and questions that attend this emergence. A brief summary of Coleridge’s best-known poem illustrates why Levi might have voiced his survival of Auschwitz in terms of the Mariner’s compulsion to tell, but it also shows that in citing Coleridge’s poem, Levi threatens to undermine the specificity and authenticity of his testimony.

Returns In “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the Mariner tells the story of how he shot an albatross while at sea, an event that unforeseeably brought about the destruction of his shipmates and his own apparent, but uncertain, death. Indeed, in Coleridge’s poem one is never sure of whether the speaker—who in many ways exemplifies the figure of the poet as a man speaking to men and whose poetry is a spontaneous overflow of feeling—is alive or dead.12 Upon returning to life in the world, the need to tell the story of this destruction overwhelms him. The poem opens with the Mariner accosting a man about to attend a wedding and ends when his tale is told and its addressee—who by that point has missed the wedding ceremony that corresponds to the duration of the tale—is left “like one who hath been stunned,” one who, we are assured, will wake the next day “a sadder and a wiser man.” In some sense, then, the position of the survivor in Levi’s poem is not that of the Mariner, whose ballad it appropriates as its own, but that of the Wedding Guest accosted by a ghost. While the incorporation of any lyric poem might trouble a postHolocaust poem, especially one written by a survivor aware of and engaged in contemporary discussions of poetry after Auschwitz, the fabrication of

   Introduction history and authenticity that is so much a part of this poem is perhaps more troubling than its lyricism. While Levi’s lines seem to pick up seamlessly from the lines of the ballad that it translates, the ballad is not only explicitly lyrical—the outcome of an invention in lyric poetry—but it is also a historical fiction. Coleridge’s ballad deploys conventional signs of age, authenticity, and history in order to imitate a relic. Like other ballads popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Coleridge’s poem gives the impression of being a weathered artifact whose tale of untimeliness still speaks to the living despite being palpably out of date. Even upon its initial publication, the poem appeared an archaic work, not a forgery but a fake bearing a falsified patina. First published in Lyrical Ballads (1798), the earliest version of the poem employed archaic spellings as one of its atmosphere-creating techniques. In later editions of the poem, those upon which Levi relies, Coleridge modernized the spellings, rewrote large sections of the poem, included a Latin motto, and “glossed” the ballad, emphasizing rather than resolving the obscurity contemporary readers already had noted. These revisions of the “Rime” appear to be the work of an editor rather than an author, so that even this modernization continues to tie the poem to its initial suggestion that history (and authorship) can be simulated. Coleridge’s ballad is an example of what Susan Stewart has called a “distressed genre,” works that create the illusion of being artifacts. Yet their “artifactual nature” is a guise—the performance of the very sort of “self-referentiality” that one assumes is truly operative in Levi’s poem, even if the “I” in that poem only ever appears in quotation marks.13 Works in distressed genres, Stewart seems to imply, are not contingent: they do not refer to historical events that could be located outside the text and account for its production; nor are they properly “self­referential”—that is, texts that designate their own systems, limits, figures, and conventions. That said, Stewart gives a historical explanation for the emergence of false histories in the eighteenth century. She links the emergence of this particular form to a “deepening historical awareness of the classical world . . . supplemented by a rising archaeology that demonstrated both the reappearance and the disappearance of the past.” She goes on to explain that “the desire to produce speaking objects, objects both in and out of time, seems an inevitable outgrowth of this development.”14 In her analysis, the false relic emerges as a means of bearing the absent past,

Introduction    giving what cannot speak—what may not even have survived to speak— a voice through contemporary literature. When Stewart describes works motivated by “the desire to produce speaking objects,” she describes the trope of prosopopoeia, the act of giving face and voice to an inanimate object or an imaginary, absent, or dead person, which Paul de Man has called the “master trope of the lyric” and J. Hillis Miller has shown to be constitutive of narrative.15 If, as Stewart’s theory suggests, the fictional authenticity of the “Rime” is tied to a desire to make a lost object speak in its own voice, it also reveals that the very device that would seem to threaten Levi’s authority as a survivor is intimately a part of it: the “true witnesses,” those who, as he describes them in the poem, were never able to give testimony and who nevertheless remain to persecute the survivor, are the lost objects in whose place Levi speaks.16 But the analogy is also more complex, and thus the poem once again might be understood as the source of the guilt it describes. For rather than care for and resuscitate the lost voices—rather than remember and ventriloquize them—Levi uses his poem to reject them. Again, in the same manner that the Wedding Guest in Coleridge’s “Rime” wishes to free himself from the Mariner, Levi uses the poem to dismiss the dead who live on. But Levi also associates the survivor with the Mariner, whose self-referential verse leads seamlessly to a description of the survivor’s experience. In the poem’s sixth line, Levi turns from translating the Mariner’s implicitly firstperson speech (in line 2, “Dopo di allora, ad ora incerta . . . ”) to an explicitly third-person account (“Rivede i visi dei suoi compagni”).17 As I already pointed out, the first line to break with Coleridge’s ballad opens in a repetition: “Rivede i visi dei suoi compagni” (“Once more he sees his companions’ faces” [my emphasis]). It suggests the continuation of the repetition of the traumatic haunting cited in the first lines but also recalls the explicatory glosses Coleridge appended to later versions of the poem, glosses that appear merely to summarize the events described in the main body of the poem.18 It is not only the return of romantic agony, but also the return of the faces of the “drowned men” of the camp. The first part of the following sentence (ll. 6–10) mobilizes the ­central terms of Levi’s ethical vocabulary: “grigi [gray]” and “indistinti [indistinct].”19 The faces (visi ) return to visibility: they are livid, gray, deathhued and “indistinct,” neither living nor dead. But haunting the living

   Introduction as they refuse to remain dead, they are at once the specters of Coleridge’s romantic ballad (including the Mariner) and of Levi’s post-Holocaust poem (including the survivor). Their indistinction is not just personal, but textual. The poem renders these companions the ghastly corpses that reboard the ship in Coleridge’s ballad (“They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose / Nor spake, nor moved their eyes; / It had been strange, even in a dream, / To have seen those dead men rise” [ll. 331–35]), just as it describes the return of Levi’s “companions” murdered in Auschwitz.20 Earlier I suggested that Coleridge’s fictioning of history might be the symptom of a more insistent desire to give life and voice to a silent history, that it may indicate the emergence of a rhetoric of survival, even as it appears to threaten Levi’s authority. More specifically, I suggested that inseparable from the threat of inauthenticity is the prosopopoeia through which Coleridge gives life and voice to the Mariner-poet. Levi’s “The Survivor,” which finds its opening—its voice—in Coleridge’s prosopopoeic poem, dramatizes the relation between prosopopoeia and survival; it shows how prosopopoeia might not only be a trope through which the dead are given voice and made to speak, but it might be one offered in a desperate attempt to take voices away—a silencing that might interrupt the ventriloquism of the dead that Levi describes or, as is the case in a text to which I later will turn, a measure that might preclude the choking on too many words that Robert Antelme describes in The Human Race (L’Espèce humaine). This wish— which might seem perverse, seeming to go against the desire to bear witness to which so many survivors’ testimonies, including Levi’s and Antelme’s own testimonies, attest—suggests that prosopopoeia is no less essential to testimonial writing than it is to the lyric, but that it is prosopopoeia’s interruption rather than its fictional restoration that renders it essential. Whether or not this interruption is sustainable—whether, as we will see in Levi’s case, prosopopoeia can be a means through which one averts persecution by the too animate dead, or whether, as I think the romantic poets discovered, prosopopoeia sustains an interminable life beyond life—is this book’s concern. In other words, it is not the dead that are at issue in this discussion of prosopopoeia, but rather the living, those who live on. The men that the survivor describes are “gente sommersa” (the drowned, the Muselmänner, or “true” witnesses). The poem leaves initially uncertain whether the survivor sees the faces of people that he knew and

Introduction    whom he watched die in Auschwitz, or whether they are the faces of people about whom he has read—the living-dead in Coleridge’s “Rime.” In other words, it is not clear whether he is remembering and reliving his experience or summarizing the Ancient Mariner’s experience (and that of the Wedding Guest, audience of the Mariner’s tale). And it is not even clear whether this difference is important: Rivede i visi dei suoi compagni Once more he sees his companions’ faces Lividi nella prima luce, Livid in the first faint light, Gray with cement dust, Grigi di polvere di cemento, Indistinti per nebbia, Nebulous in the mist, Tinti di morte nei sonni inquieti: Tinged with death in their uneasy sleep.

The initial confusion is resolved when Levi describes the night in which these living-dead deportees dream only of a turnip and eat only in their dreams: A notte menano le mascelle At night, under the heavy burden Sotto la mora greve dei sogni Of their dreams, their jaws move, Masticando una rapa che non c’è. Chewing a nonexistent turnip.

The poem describes the urgent hunger of the camps, which Blanchot, reading Antelme, understands to reveal the human as nothing but need that endures: “one who has need of nothing other than need in order to maintain the human relation in its primacy.”21 This insistent, impersonal “attachment to life,” the appearance of a mouth that moves but does not speak and chews nothing at all, signifies that “man is the indestructible that can be destroyed,” and that even in this state of extraordinary privation, even in apparent death, the face remains an address.22 Yet, as soon as these faces emerge as belonging to the living rather than the dead, as soon as the mouth that moves even in sleep indicates that the dead remain alive (both a truth of Auschwitz and a truth of the survivor’s life after Auschwitz), the survivor turns from a “he” into a speaking “I”: “Indietro, via di qui, gente sommersa, “Stand back, leave me alone, drowned men, Andate. Non ho soppiantato nessuno, Go away. I haven’t dispossessed anyone, Non ho usurpato il pane di nessuno, Haven’t usurped anyone’s bread. Nessuno è morto in vece mia. Nessuno. No one died in my place. No one. Go back into your mist. Ritornate alla vostra nebbia.

   Introduction Non è mia colpa se vivo e respiro It’s not my fault if I live and breathe, E mangio e bevo e dormo e vesto panni.” Eat, drink, sleep and put on clothes.”

The survivor does not welcome the dead, even as he recognizes their faces and their mere life as an address to him. He faces them only to demand that they leave him alone, only to defend his life. In Survival in Auschwitz (“If This Is a Man?” as the title is worded outside the United States), Levi describes the Muselmänner or true witnesses as those men who have submitted entirely to the camp and who, as Levi writes, are its “backbone”: They . . . form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men who march and labor in silence. . . . One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death. . . . They crowd my memory with their faceless presences, and if I could enclose all of the evil of our time in one image, I would choose this image which is familiar to me: an emaciated man, with head dropped and shoulders curved, on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of thought is to be seen.23

The awful endurance of the corpselike faces, which here Levi also calls “faceless presences,” not only suggests that in the camp they reflected what Giorgio Agamben has called the capacity to “survive the human,” but also reveals why Levi’s world outside of the camps is continuous with the world of the camps: the faces remain to haunt him. Levi’s poem describes an unbearable repetition of the discovery in the camps that those who seemed dead were also still alive.24 Even now, “once again,” they threaten his life. Before these faces he endeavors to defend his life as his own. It is the very address to the living-dead that occurs within the poem, through which an impersonal “he” becomes an insistently personal “I,” that the poem’s reworking of lyricism can be perceived. An address to the voiceless or inanimate dead, as if they could speak, is understood in rhetorical terms as an apostrophe; the attribution of a face to the faceless that attends this address (“They crowd my memory with their faceless presences”) is an instance of prosopopoeia. While the address to the Muselmänner in Levi’s poem is apparently remote from more famous romantic effusions, like Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” it also shares some of that poem’s assumptions and effects. For it is through this address that the survivor undertakes to obtain a voice and a life in relation to the inanimate and the dead. How-

Introduction    ever, Levi’s address suggests, not that the dead are without life or voice, but that despite everything and despite their silence, their claim on him persists. In the absence of voices and faces, they continue “to say” and “to show” too much. Turning to these “drowned men,” the survivor struggles to free himself from the agony of their implicit accusations and haunting faces. He seeks a freedom that their death-in-life and his life beyond (their) death resists. The address acknowledges and repeats this predicament. Responding to them, he insists that he is not responsible for their death: “Nessuno è morto in vece mia. Nessuno [No one died in my place. No one].” “Nessuno [No one]”—repeated five times—states both that not one person died in his place and that someone, a no one (“one hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death”) died there in that place. It implies that there was no substitution and that someone, no one, died where he remains. The poem registers the extent to which the survivor’s life, his survival, means not that the “gente sommersa [drowned men]” continue to bear witness in his words, but that they who trouble the distinction between the drowned and the saved, the living and the dead, remain to accuse him. While Levi here can be understood to represent an ethical crisis (marked by hostage, expiation, and passivity) and a desperate refusal of responsibility, that refusal of responsibility remains within the structure of an address that nevertheless affirms the responsiveness it denies. When the survivor makes a claim for his freedom from the livingdead, emerging as an “I,” he only acknowledges that the faces continue to be heard, that between “he” and “I” there is a “you.”

Surviving Figures I have suggested that in Levi’s poem the transition from the accosting faces of the living-dead to the “I” of the survivor can be identified rhetorically as a prosopopoeia. Quintilian defined prosopopoeia (fictiones personarum) as a mode of imaginary speech, typically used in three instances: (1) to display the inner thoughts of our opponents as though they were talking to themselves (but they are credible only if we imagine them saying what it is not absurd for them to have thought!), (2) to introduce conversations between ourselves and others, or of others among themselves, in a credible manner; and (3) to

   Introduction provide appropriate characters for words of advice, reproach, complaint, praise, or pity. We are even allowed in this form of speech to bring down the gods from heaven or raise the dead; cities and nations even acquire a voice.25

One can see how each function of prosopopoeia is at work in the ­address to and by the dead. Yet, although Quintilian insists upon the appropriateness and credibility of prosopopoeia, he also describes its radicality: it assumes the impossible. Quintilian acknowledges that what he calls prosopopoeia has been understood by others as ethopoeia (sermoncinatio in Latin), or “the fabrication—serving to characterize natural (historical or invented persons)—of statements, conversations, and soliloquies or unexpressed mental reflections of the persons concerned.”26 The distinction is between a speech that has not taken place (but could take place) and a speech that is essentially impossible. Quintilian claims that this distinction cannot be sustained, for “we cannot of course imagine a speech except as the speech of a person [persona].”27 Only persons speak, and this means that what is made to speak is assumed to be a person (is given a mask or face). This might be a fictional person, but so is the person who speaks in a dialogue. Prosopopoeia, for Quintilian, is thus not the attribution only of a voice but also of a persona. This implies that no speech is impossible (i.e., not the speech of a person). A speech separated from a person who speaks is, for Quintilian, unimaginable. Coleridge’s “Rime” is a work in which an absent history—the history of the Ancient Mariner, the survivor with whom we know Levi identified, and with whom in his poem he associates “the survivor” (and implicitly the Muselmann)—can sound through an implicit trope, a prosopopoeia that sustains, even as it fictionalizes, a historical narrative. But Levi’s poem also deploys its own prosopopoeias: the attribution of faces and voices, however hoary, to the “faceless presences,” the helpless hearing of the address of the silent yet still persecuting voices that issue from these faces, the first-person response on the part of the survivor that addresses the dead as if they could hear him and respond, but that also asks them to leave him once and for all, to free him from the life that his address only renews and reaffirms. Paul de Man has defined prosopopoeia as the “master trope of lyric” but also as the “the trope of autobiography” and “the trope of mourning,” and J. Hillis Miller has called prosopopoeia a trope of both “narrative” and “reading,” which is the vehicle for what he understands as “the

Introduction    ethics of reading.” This book reconsiders the meaning of prosopopoeia as “the master trope of lyric,” particularly in its relation to autobiography and ethics, and focuses on the recurrence of prosopopoeia in postHolocaust literatures.28 I will argue that this recurrence does not serve a redemptive, organicist, or triumphalist rhetoric, does not sustain the life and power of a masculine lyric subject, but rather, as in Levi’s poem, bears the life of survival. Prosopopoeia, I will argue, assumes a position of passivity, division, and unending, a position that I associate with insomnia, monstrousness, and responsibility. I will argue that this is not a postHolocaust discovery, but rather that already in romanticism lyric figures generate a life beyond life, a life of passivity and impossible dying, whose beginnings and ends can be posited but not represented and whose positings perpetually unsettle rather than affirm the ends at issue. Moreover, I will argue that just as Levi returns to Coleridge and brings the “Rime” to bear Auschwitz, just as he allows this exemplary romantic work to open his poem, to be it, so too does the recurrence of prosopopoeia in postHolocaust writing—as well as in the criticism of that writing—compel a rethinking of the very works in which a contemporary understanding of prosopopoeia is developed. These include de Man’s enormously influential essays in The Rhetoric of Romanticism, above all “Autobiography as De-Facement” and “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric,” as well as the texts that I will read in the forthcoming chapters, including William Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads and his sonnets “To Sleep,” and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In close readings of these works, I consider the ways in which, already with romanticism—where it has been understood to function alternately as a redemptive trope (M. H. Abrams) or a privative one (de Man)—prosopopoeia emerges as a trope of survival, sustaining life beyond life or power. My readings of individual texts will elaborate this point more precisely, but before I am in a position to show how romantic rhetoric is a rhetoric of survival, I need first to explain, somewhat generally, how the term survival will signify in this book. Survival is linked to a failure of ends. This includes a failure of representation or accounting, above all the failure to represent death accurately or adequately, but equally, the failure to represent life and living. These failures are, in the first place, tied to a temporal predicament: that one is always too early or too late when it comes to representing one’s life

   Introduction or one’s death, or one’s pain, one’s love, one’s desire. The non-self-identity that untimeliness indicates in no way can be reconciled by the positing of an end, let alone the positing of a future possibility as a past certainty. Yet, literature masks this irremediable discontinuity or untimeliness (sometimes translated in French as malheur, which also means “affliction”) by the positing of a speaking subject who assumes that she can speak of what happens to her, appropriating experience, even telling the story of her life. Such acts of telling, of first-person speaking, make recourse to a poetic figure (prosopopoeia). But with each act of speaking, identity (death) is at once posited and evaded—posited as what one already will have survived, what is perpetually past (“always already,” to use the idiom that Derrida inherits from Hegel) and ever still to come. If Heidegger, Derrida, Lévinas, Blanchot, and de Man have made these logics—as well as their rhetorical and ethical implications—familiar to us, so much so that one could say that that the entirety of what we call deconstruction (spanning, for example, from Emmanuel Lévinas to Judith Butler) can be understood as generating a rhetoric of survival, my point here will be that within romanticism this rhetoric already is under way. Or, to put it another way, one that will resonate with claims about romanticism’s uncontainment, familiar to readers of Carol Jacobs, Cynthia Chase, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Philippe Lacoue-­Labarthe: deconstruction is, in fact, romantic. This is not the explicit argument of Romanticism After Auschwitz, although in the readings that follow, my consideration of romanticism’s rhetoric of survival will be tied to a continuous examination of the survival of romanticism in deconstruction. In 2001, the Yale Journal of Criticism published a special issue called “Interpretation and the Holocaust.” In that issue, two articles treated the uses of prosopopoeia—or personification, which they considered interchangeable—in post-Holocaust writing, albeit to very different ends. Two years later, these articles appeared as central chapters within books: Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew, by Susan Gubar, and The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification, by Amy Hungerford. In turning to these books, I wish to consider how twentyfirst-century literary critics have discussed prosopopoeia in the context of post-Holocaust writing, to explain what I understand to be the limits of these discussions, and to suggest that careful attention to the romantic

Introduction    precedent might allow for an understanding of prosopopoeia tied to neither redemption nor privation. In some sense, Gubar and Hungerford inhabit the positions held several decades earlier by M. H. Abrams and Paul de Man in their explanations of romantic rhetoric. Like Abrams and de Man, Gubar and Hungerford link their understanding of rhetorical figures to ethical positions, leading Gubar to advocate for prosopopoeia (as a redemptive or quasi-redemptive trope) and Hungerford to caution against it (as privative and impersonal). Yet, whereas Abrams and de Man took the texts of romanticism (British and German) as a point of departure, Gubar and Hungerford have identified prosopopoeia as a trope that populates U.S. literature about the Holocaust.29 The centrality of prosopopoiea in their work affirms de Man’s claim that prosopopoeia is a master trope, one that links lyric and autobiography, even if their arguments about prosopopoeia challenge his claims.30 In Poetry After Auschwitz, Gubar identifies prosopopoeia as a “rhetorical figure . . . used in some of the most perturbing poems about the Shoah.” She defines this figure as “the impersonation of an absent speaker or a personification,” and goes on to explain that prosopopoeia “allowed those poets searching to find a language for the staggering horror of what had happened to speak as, for, with, and about the casualties in verse.”31 Prosopopoeia thus allows the poet to substitute for and bear witness to, describe, engage, and remember the dead. In the earlier article, Gubar goes so far as to call prosopopoeia “an enabling device,” but in the version of the essay that appears in her book, this optimistic understanding of a figure that has been described as a Nessus tunic—a garment that destroys the life or the love it pretends to restore—is set aside.32 Yet, Gubar’s optimism has not entirely disappeared, for she affirms that prosopopoeia both allows the unspeakable to be spoken and establishes a relation (typically of identification or substitution) between the lyric subject and one who has suffered an unspeakable casualty, one that leaves only silence in its wake.33 I would even go so far as to argue that, for Gubar, prosopopoeia still functions as a restorative trope—one that resolves the problem of witnessing (even of mourning, as in the many examples of postwar verse that she cites) posed by the Holocaust—returning subjectivity to a world where all subjectivity has been exterminated.34 Against de Man’s account of the privative structure of prosopopoeia, and repeating Jean-François Lyotard’s claim that not

   Introduction only were persons destroyed in the gas chambers but so too was the possibility of those testimonies that could properly indicate the “here” and “now,” Gubar writes that the dead and dying in their poems can verbalize, [which] need not mean, as de Man proposed about prosopopoeia, that living readers must be encased in a deadly silence; but it does figure the linguistic discontinuity between Auschwitz and poetry which broadens in verse that foregrounds the distance between victim and poet. . . . For these writers, the figure of prosopopoeia holds out the promise of an unsettling empathic identification.35

Gubar’s argument is compelling, for she suggests that in allowing the dead to speak—indeed, in occasionally ventriloquizing them—the living who donate their voices do not risk becoming confused with the dead or lose their voices or their lives. Gubar insists that the prosopopoeic relation itself becomes a figure for the “linguistic discontinuity between Auschwitz and poetry.” This implies that substitution, ventriloquism, and identification keep separate the substituted terms. Prosopopoeia thus demonstrates the failure to speak with and for the dead, rather than the capacity to do so. In other words, Gubar understands prosopopoeia both to effect a substitution and to maintain a conclusive difference within the substitution. But if this is the case, the substitution cannot be nearly as effective or restorative as she understands it to be. Moreover, it relies upon a knowledge of the dead that the very model of thinking about Auschwitz from which she draws (that of Lyotard, put forth in The Differend ) precludes. In The Holocaust of Texts, Amy Hungerford speaks out against prosopopoeia understood as a means of empathic responsiveness.36 Whereas Gubar recognizes the importance of, and indeed advocates for, prosopopoeia as an essential aspect of witnessing on the part of U.S. poets who are not survivors, Hungerford argues that it is only once we stop personifying (above all, once we stop personifying texts) that the living might be free for justice. One example of the sort of personification that Hungerford cautions against is Gubar’s own—Gubar entitles her first chapter “The Holocaust Is Dying.”37 Hungerford argues that personification of this sort—the personification of texts or in this case of an “event”—is at work in some of the most influential texts of literary theory (she cites Derrida, Caruth, and Felman), as well as in the 1948 UN Genocide Convention (which included the cultural as well as physical destruction of groups

Introduction    in its definition of genocide), and in arguments about which texts should be taught in multicultural classrooms, where minority texts are treated as minority persons. Hungerford’s aim is ethical: she wishes to argue that no one can speak for the dead or inanimate, that the dead do not endure to make a claim on us, that texts do not live and do not speak. There is a difference, she is at work to persuade us, between texts (or concepts, like “language” or “the Holocaust”) and persons, a difference that comes down to embodiment. In Chapter 2, I will deal extensively with Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads, a text, like Hungerford’s own, that speaks out against personifications and paradoxically advocates a literature that would keep the reader “in the company of flesh and blood.” In a surprising and important sense, Hungerford’s argument is Wordsworthian, and like Wordsworth, who had a singular propensity for personifying texts (one thinks above all of book 5 of The Prelude ), Hungerford too gives the last word to a personification of literature itself.38 The final paragraph of her book opens with an ethical justification for her argument against personification: “I resist the personification of texts and a literal understanding of the relation between a writer and her work,” she writes, “because there is reason to believe that a just society requires imagination.”39 She concludes by insisting that we preserve the radical otherness of other persons, an otherness that personification’s ventriloquisms and resuscitations (acts of identification rather than imagination) only obfuscate: “The speaking voice of the other we hear in lyric poetry, the life of the other we observe in novels, can teach our imagination. Literature conceived of in these terms is, I think, the ally of justice.”40 Hungerford gives the last word of her argument against personification to a personification of literature and justice, one that figures the relation between these concepts as a kinship, friendship, treaty, or marriage (alliance). In other words, she figures these concepts (which are also texts) through a relation that we understand only to take place between persons, and that we also use all the time to personify impersonal relations (including the relations between states or languages). As compelling, as provocative, and as innovative as Hungerford’s argument against personification might be, it nevertheless employs the very figure against which it speaks. My reading of Hungerford evokes de Man’s reading of Wordsworth’s arguments against those epitaphs in which the dead are made to speak in

   Introduction their own voices—that is, de Man’s reading of Wordsworth’s arguments against prosopopoeia. De Man argues that Wordsworth uses the very figure he admonishes, the figure that de Man rigorously avoids calling personification. De Man shows that the two figures of language Wordsworth posits as distinct—one that would give life, the other that would give death—are in fact indistinguishable. Both are examples of figurative language in general, and prosopopoeia in particular. De Man’s reading, to which I will return several times in the forthcoming chapters, implies that there is ultimately no difference between figuring language as a “body” for a “soul” or figuring language as merely a “garment” for a “body”: structurally, both conceptions of language are metaphors that aim to make visible (to face, to figure) a language that is in no way visible, one that assumes a visibility it neither gives nor displays. But more than this, both examples assume that language can have or give a body, which it cannot do even if every discussion of language cannot but assume this body. At the very instant that Hungerford claims to link literature to justice, personification returns as what cannot be excluded, as the inextinguishable link—which is also the interruption—between literature and ethics.41

Surviving Romanticism Gubar and Hungerford—as well as Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, Derrida, Blanchot, Agamben, and perhaps most vividly Geoffrey Hartman, among so many others—turn to romanticism in the course of their critical considerations of writing after Auschwitz.42 When considered from the perspective of a critique of aestheticization, specifically a critique of National Socialism’s aestheticization of the political, this turn seems surprising, for genealogies often recognize romantic aesthetics as a source of National Socialism.43 It is by tracing a resistant, nonredemptive strain within romanticism that I will explain the recurrence of romanticism in critical and testimonial texts, of which Levi’s poem is an especially vivid example. My point is not simply to establish a counterhistory that would recognize romanticism as the origin of testimony, but rather to show how the romantic lyric and post-Holocaust testimony both are constituted by a rhetoric of survival, which troubles rather than supports efforts to establish genealogies of literature, just as it troubles rather than supports efforts to

Introduction    establish a post-Holocaust literature that will entirely have exhausted the lyrical or the literary.44 Cynthia Chase opens her introduction to the Longman Critical Reader volume Romanticism by describing romanticism as resistance: “Romanticism resists being defined as a period or set of qualities that can be comfortably ascribed to others and assigned to the historical past.”45 The two categories by which romanticism might be defined—“when” and “what”—fall short. For Chase the first difficulty, that of describing a properly romantic period, is historical (or inadequately so): romanticism is too close to the present to be distinguished from it. This proximity forecloses any attempt at periodization.46 The second difficulty arises when we attempt to determine the shape of romantic literature by identifying its defining characteristics rather than by assigning it particular dates. The questions that this strategy generates—most familiarly, whether romantic presentation is symbolic or allegorical and whether or not romanticism includes narrative—continue to arise in institutional as well as intellectual contexts. Romanticism, then, as Marc Redfield has shown, remains above all the question, and hence the incompletion, of romanticism.47 Chase and Redfield are not alone in recognizing romanticism as an incomplete mode. Their understanding—like that of Jean-Luc Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, Blanchot, Walter Benjamin, and even A. O. Lovejoy— draws upon Friedrich Schlegel’s Athenaeum fragment 116, which opens with the statement: “Romantic poetry is a progressive, universal poetry. Its aim isn’t merely to reunite all the separate species of poetry and put poetry in touch with philosophy and rhetoric. It tries to and should mix and fuse poetry and prose, inspiration and criticism, the poetry of art and the poetry of nature; and make poetry lively and sociable, and life and society poetical.”48 While Hungerford disavows personification because it does what Schlegel understands romantic poetry to do, because it “make[s] poetry lively and sociable, and life and society poetical,” it is precisely this mirroring that Josh Cohen understands as “the point of departure” for art after Auschwitz. In Interrupting Auschwitz, Cohen argues that art after Auschwitz—insofar as it “must negate its own essence or not be art”—is romantic.49 Cohen draws upon Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s reading of Schlegel’s fragment in The Literary Absolute. With romanticism, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe understand the absolute to be “incompleted” by

   Introduction l­iterature (the perpetual state of becoming that Schlegel ascribes to romantic poetry). Coincident neither with a moment that could be overcome nor with a quality that could be negated, romanticism remains what can only be unfulfilled. Cohen claims that the incompletion that constitutes romanticism (in its difference from and frustration of the Hegelian dialectic) constitutes the art that after Auschwitz would resist redemption: it is a nonabsolute absolute. At the same time, Cohen argues that “Auschwitz imposes not simply a new demand on thinking, but a transformation in the very mode of thinking.”50 The transformation of thinking—as well as of art and theology—that he is concerned to articulate is what Adorno understands as the “new” ethical imperative: one must act in such a way that Auschwitz cannot be repeated. Thus, without resolving the paradox, Cohen argues both that the incompletion of art (“The Interrupted Absolute”) is romantic and that it is the way of art after Auschwitz, when thinking, whose fusion with art is an element of the incompletion, will have been thoroughly transformed. Cohen is pointing to the very logic that governs romanticism’s rhetoric of survival.51 Levi’s poem stands not only as an instantiation of this understanding of romanticism but also as its allegory. To read “The Survivor” as an allegory of romanticism—as a testimonial allegory of the survival of romantic lyric figures, as an allegory of the romanticism of testimony—is also to recognize that the interruption and repetition of romanticism (of Coleridge’s poem, prosopopoeia, and lyric) is manifest in a translation. The allegory does not show that romanticism is the “origin” of post-Holocaust thought or writing in the sense of a genetic narrative. Rather, it figures romanticism after Auschwitz.

Romanticism After Auschwitz Like Levi’s poem, my book traces a silent passage from romanticism to post-Holocaust writing, one that affirms (paradoxically) both the radical event of the Holocaust and the remainder of romanticism.52 In the first chapter, I examine some of the most influential theories of testimony, together with Paul de Man’s reading of prosopopoeia in Wordsworth’s Essays upon Epitaphs. My claim in this chapter is not that de Man or Wordsworth is a “point of departure,” but rather that what others have understood as the “loss” or the “impossibility” of language after Auschwitz is

Introduction    what de Man calls language. While de Man’s detractors and supporters both have argued that such a claim links all testimony to an originary (or preoriginary) trauma, I focus on the misrepresentation of testimony as a loss of language, and show that once we acknowledge that it is fallacious to call the crisis of testimony a loss of language, we also can understand why it is the survivor—not only the dead—who speaks through prosopopoeia.53 In Chapters 2 and 3, I turn to canonical texts by Wordsworth and Mary Shelley in order to recast the rhetoric of romanticism as an essentially nonredemptive rhetoric. While romanticism’s redemptive efforts have been construed negatively (as violent and blind) or positively (as the source of the imagination and self-consciousness), my readings challenge this enduring opposition in order to demonstrate that romanticism’s rhetoric exposes and produces lyric subjectivity as a mode of passivity. Thus it is neither a privative nor a restorative rhetoric, but a rhetoric of survival—that is, of life and subjectivity beyond possibility or impossibility. I begin this examination with a consideration of poetry’s relation to the human. My focus is Wordsworth’s redefinition of poetry in the preface to Lyrical Ballads, specifically his definition of good poetry as that which emulates and addresses living human beings. Wordsworth identifies this possibility of poetry with the exclusion of personification, and one of the effects of this exclusion is that, as he puts it, “the reader will find himself in the company of flesh and blood.” This chapter focuses on Wordsworth’s ambivalent relation to prosopopoeia and goes on to show that Wordsworth’s poetry of man, once construed as a poetry of flesh and blood, is a poetry not of the human but rather of the not-yet-human, of a life that remains to become human life. It is a version of this life (at once human and animal, living and dead, and yet neither human nor animal, neither living nor dead) that Mary Shelley calls her creature. Thus, having established what I take to be Wordsworth’s contribution to romantic rhetoric, I turn, in Chapter 3, to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and its critical account of romantic lyric figures, apostrophe and prosopopoeia above all. Shelley’s novel explicitly and implicitly treats a crisis of witnessing and responsibility as a crisis of the human and the living. Romantic rhetoric emerges here as both the source of a monstrous survival (the creature) and the possibility of bearing witness to this monster—which Shelley calls a Gorgon—as the impossibility of seeing. Far from rendering the unbearable bearable, however, and far from turning the

   Introduction creature into a man, prosopopoeia and apostrophe allow for a nonrestorative, nonredemptive testimony. If Frankenstein is an account of a life beyond human life associated with lyric animation, Robert Antelme’s The Human Race accounts for the human as what never can be exceeded or exhausted. Already it is clear that to turn from Shelley’s gothic fiction to Antelme’s Holocaust testimony, as I do in Chapter 4, is disturbing. But this disturbance forces us to confront the relation between fiction and testimony and the recurrence of romantic rhetoric in a text that has been understood as the least sentimental, least rhetorical, and “frankest” account of the camps. Were we reading Levi’s poem, we would not have reached the line that begins “Rivede.” Turning from trope to anthropomorphism, I consider how the attribution of the human as that which remains permanently irremissible is both the condition of possibility of Antelme’s testimony and the mode of ethical relation that he discovered during his ten months in three camps (Buchenwald, Ganderscheim, and Dachau). But Antelme’s anthropomorphism is not an old humanism or even a new one. It entails “giving the name man” (rather than God, barbarism, the machine, or the inhuman) to what afflicts him, but man here means only (to use Blanchot’s phrase) “the indestructible that can be destroyed.” Anthropomorphism, in this sense, is the positing not of the human as incontestable, but rather, the human as contestation and survival. While de Man—reading Nietzsche—distinguishes between anthropomorphism and trope, Antelme’s testimony leads me to consider the limits of this distinction and to recognize that anthropomorphism’s positing of the human sets out from a positing of a trope. Some have construed post-Holocaust ethics as a mode of vigilance or wakefulness—a permanent obligation never to forget. For Emmanuel Lévinas, the ethical position stems from a subject position, or rather, a state of subjectivity without subjects that he calls insomnia. In Chapter 5, I read Lévinas together with Wordsworth to show how the position from which Lévinas’s ethics emerges also can be recognized as the state that lyric apostrophe effects. Whereas earlier I focused on canonical texts of romanticism, here I turn to Wordsworth’s relatively unknown sonnets “To Sleep.” These sonnets, as the title indicates, are addressed to sleep; they reflect the attempt to make the absent present through a poetic address. Yet, the very act through which Wordsworth conjures sleep—the apostrophe—also dis-

Introduction    misses the rest that he so desperately desires. In these sonnets lyric subjectivity, rather than a mode of self-consciousness or capacity, emerges as wakefulness. The poems, far from overcoming insomnia through the positing of a subject, instead expose the lyric subject as an insomniac and expose its figures, apostrophe above all, as a mode of vigilance and commemoration through which a limit can be witnessed but not overcome. Chapters 6 and 7, through readings of Paul Celan, also focus on the rhetoric of lyric and ethical dispositions. Celan is the poet who has occasioned the most rigorous consideration of the relation between poetry and testimony.54 However, these chapters focus not on Celan’s poetry but on his translations, specifically, his translation of a work that has nothing to do with the Holocaust (William Shakespeare’s sonnet 71) and of a work more clearly tied to the Holocaust than anything Celan wrote in his own name (Jean Cayrol’s Nuit et brouillard [Night and Fog ], the text of Alain Resnais’ documentary film). These chapters, as if now reaching the final protestations in Levi’s poem, consider the claim of the dead on us—the claim we hear them make—and our response to it. Shakespeare’s sonnet 71 (“No longer mourn for me when I am dead”) enjoins against mourning, an injunction that promises to keep the dead alive and the living free. Yet Shakespeare’s sonnet is literally unspeakable—a poem whose enjambments leave the reader either breathless or misreading. Celan’s 1964 translation of the sonnet shows how an unspeakable work can be translated without becoming speakable. Celan’s translation turns Shakespeare’s sonnet into a work of incessant interruption, specifically an interruption of and for breath, which Celan famously calls Atemwende, or breathturn. In this way, Celan’s translation fulfills Shakespeare’s sonnet by interrupting it. This interruption, which generates the possibility of a response, shows how the survival at stake in translation might be that of the reader rather than of the work. Several years earlier, in 1956, Celan translated Jean Cayrol’s commentary for Alain Renais’ 1955 film Nuit et brouillard. Both visually and textually, the film is preoccupied with indicating the limits of film, and undertakes to turn seeing into a failure to see (in a way surprisingly similar to Shakespeare’s effort to turn speaking by the dead into unspeakability). Celan’s translation of the film into German—a discomforting return of Nuit et brouillard to Nacht und Nebel—shows not that one can-

   Introduction not see or say what took place in Auschwitz but that every effort at speaking about it (in German) already says far more than one can bear. Like Shakespeare’s sonnet in translation, it leaves one choking on one’s words. Celan’s translation of Cayrol’s commentary demonstrates that a film that respects the apparent exhaustion—or inappropriateness—of representation after Auschwitz can come to be a film that shows us that what remains when nothing remains is figure: all images, all remains, become bearers of Auschwitz. In Celan’s translation, Nuit et brouillard shows us not our failure to see but rather the failure of a sublime negative knowledge that assumes we can show this failure. With the remains of figure, it shows us only that we still see much too much, that seeing “nothing” we see far more than we can stand to bear. If this book had ended with Celan’s encounters with the dead, with their enduring claim on the living, it might have remained faithful to Levi’s poem, to the apparent passage (which is also a repetition) in it from romanticism to Auschwitz. Yet, the book ends not with Celan but with Wordsworth—and with the Holocaust historian Lucy Dawidowicz’s question in 1937: “What did Wordsworth matter to me at such a time?” At this time, on the verge of the destruction of Europe’s Jews, Dawidowicz turned away from studying romantic poetry in order to move to Vilna and study Yiddish culture. This book progresses by asking whether such a turn is possible. Yet Dawidowicz’s rhetorical question is not only a statement (that is an answer to the question) but it is a question as well. This does not mean that it is just a question, one that has an answer that would allow us to dispense with it and dispense with the statement of Wordsworth’s irrelevance having obtained a clear sense of Wordsworth’s importance. Rather it shows that the question of Wordsworth—which is also the question of romanticism and its rhetoric—is not exhausted by our need for action or history. Rather, in the irresolvable tension between dismissal and defense, the question of romanticism today remains an open and unanswerable question. In other words, it is a question that we have yet to be done with. This is why an ending in romanticism is as far as this book can take us.

1 Romanticism, Testimony, Prosopopoeia And why is the question of testimonium no different from that of the testamentum, of all the testaments, in other words, of surviving in dying, of sur-viving before and beyond the opposition between living and dying? jacques derrida, “Poetics and Politics of Witnessing”

M. H. Abrams famously argues that with romantic poetics, we turn from mirror to lamp. In his influential account, poetry’s life-giving capacity came to reflect the power (indeed the life) of the human mind, and the notion of poetry that emerged with romanticism continues to inform our conceptions of creativity. By offering a historical assessment of ­ poetry’s rhetoric, Abrams locates romanticism as the epoch in which “the valid animation of natural objects, traditionally treated as one form of the rhetorical device of prosopopoeia, or personification, now came to be a major index to the sovereign faculty of imagination, and almost in itself a sufficient criterion of the highest poetry.”1 While Abrams argues that the capacity to animate objects (by which he designates the nonhuman and nonliving, rather than the dead or abstract ideas) signals a form of sovereignty—understood as creative, life-giving power—Paul de Man shows, in response, that the moment of apparent transition (from convention to the powers of mind) registers instead the extent to which sovereignty and the imagination are rhetorical effects. It is not the changing expression of sovereignty or creativity that de Man associates with romanticism, but rather

   Chapter 1 the exposure of the extent to which the capacity to make live and make poetry is underwritten by rhetoric, and by prosopopoeia in particular.2 These competing accounts of prosopopoeia reflect the widespread concern of romanticism—and the criticism of romanticism—to be the possibility of life and the living, specifically the possibility of a life beyond life and a speech that would be impossible because not necessarily human. Romanticism frames this possibility in a dialectical mode, such that the capacity to animate (to infuse objects with life, as Abrams describes it) becomes evidence not of a rhetorical exercise but of the performance of imagination. The positing of a life beyond life—or impossible life—through poetry, thus reflects an affirmation of the human and the sovereignty of the imagination. In future chapters, I will challenge this assumption by showing how canonical—and noncanonical—romantic texts reveal a different account of rhetorical animation, one that gives evidence of ineptitude and excess, rather than sovereignty. In this chapter, I focus on the more recent past, and the emergence of what has been called an altogether new mode of literature—testimony—as it shares in similar aims and anxieties. With testimony, the question of literature’s relation to life returns with a newfound urgency (the urgency of historical recollection in the absence of an archive) and newfound anxiety (what is the place of lyric in this recollection?).3 In this chapter, I will focus on how contemporary theories of testimony turn to poetry in order to deal with the relation of literature to life. By treating these theories of testimony (by Shoshana Felman, Elie Wiesel, Giorgio Agamben, and Jacques Derrida) in explicit dialogue with Paul de Man’s “Autobiography as De-Facement,” I will show how testimony is ordered by figurative language, which neither redeems nor deprives, but rather assumes a life beyond life. It is this language that I propose we call romantic.

A Crisis of Poetry In the book that she and Dori Laub devote to Testimony, Shoshana Felman cites the position (which may or may not be her own position) that “testimony is the literary—or discursive—mode par excellence of our times.”4 Felman identifies as her source Elie Wiesel’s oft-repeated account of the history of poetry. Wiesel writes of testimony in a hypothetical mode:

Romanticism, Testimony, Prosopopoeia    “If the Greeks invented tragedy, the Romans the epistle and the Renaissance the sonnet, our generation invented a new literature, that of testimony.”5 In Wiesel’s account, which is an analogy, the possibility that his generation will have invented a new form corresponds to his understanding of the Greeks and Romans, as well as the Renaissance, that is to say, of those moments marked not only by literary innovation but by political and philosophical invention: the invention of the state, of democracy, of empire, of the human and humanism. Implicit here is an understanding of the relation between literary history and political history: we arrive at this invention (of testimony, of Auschwitz), only if we recognize its debts to Europe’s history, that is, only if we recognize that what is absolutely new is both destined from and analogous to that which preceded it. Yet, Felman revises the literary dimension of Wiesel’s statement and translates it to reflect a more general state of “discourse.” The revision at once implies that she accepts Wiesel’s account of testimony’s place in history and raises the question of poetry’s relation to testimony. Is testimony—as Wiesel suggests—a form of poetry, even poetry’s late-modern fulfillment? Or is it the mode in which poetry is exhausted and displaced? Is testimony the poetry of Wiesel’s generation or does Wiesel live at a time in which poetry has become impossible? Felman focuses not on Wiesel’s quasi-historical narrative but rather on the meaning of testimony’s new prevalence. “What,” she asks, “is the significance of this growing predominance of testimony as a privileged contemporary mode of transmission and communication? Why has testimony in effect become at once so central and so omnipresent in our recent cultural accounts of ourselves?”6 In asking these questions, Felman translates Wiesel’s statement out of its poetic—or aesthetic—frame into one that is more general, cultural, and discursive. She identifies testimony here not as a poetic mode but as a “mode of transmission and communication.” And, rather than examine testimony’s contemporary prevalence within a poetic framework (as Wiesel does), she turns instead to the law, explaining testimony’s centrality in a juridical context: In its most traditional, routine use in the legal context—in the courtroom situation—testimony is provided, and is called for, when the facts upon which justice must pronounce its verdict are not clear, when historical accuracy is in doubt and when both the truth and its supporting elements of evidence are called into question. The legal model of the trial dramatizes, in this way, a contained and

   Chapter 1 culturally channeled, institutionalized, crisis of truth. The trial both derives from and proceeds by, a crisis of evidence, which the verdict must resolve.7

Upon having translated testimony from poetry to communication, ­Felman turns to “the legal context,” in which testimony responds to and signifies “a crisis of truth.”8 The courtroom is where a crisis of truth is resolved by the marshaling forth of testimony. Felman sets up an opposition between testimony, supported by the oath or the promise (the performative), and fact. It is in the absence of facts, Felman explains, that testimony is introduced. However, as the most relevant cases—the Nuremburg and Eichmann trials, for example—make clear, once a “crisis of truth” is understood only as “a crisis of evidence,” the crisis is not permanent, but resolvable. In other words, when the crisis that testimony signifies is conceived strictly on a courtroom model, it is also contained and overcome. Later in the essay, Felman revisits poetry, focusing on Stéphane Mallarmé’s Oxford and Cambridge lectures and on the unprecedented poetry emerging in late-nineteenth-century France. Felman notices that Mallarmé figures his lectures on poetry as a breathless “testimony of an accident known, and pursuing him.”9 Accident here implies both a crash or fall that ends in a wound (even death), and the mode of a new poetry that would be free rather than prescribed, a revolutionary poetry understood as analogous to, and even the culmination of, the French Revolution. Yet the event to which Mallarmé bears witness remains to be finished, determined, or understood. Testimony of this sort—given in advance of full consciousness or knowledge, that is, testimony to a pure event, is what Felman calls “precocious testimony.” She goes on to explain that it is at this moment that such testimony constitutes poetry. Precocious testimony in effect becomes . . . the very principle of poetic insight and the very core of the event of poetry, which makes precisely language—through its breathless gasps—speak ahead of knowledge and awareness and break through the limits of its own conscious understanding. By its very innovative definition, poetry will henceforth speak beyond its means, to testify—precociously—to the illunderstood effects and to the impact of an accident whose origin cannot precisely be located but whose repercussions, in their very uncontrollable and unanticipated nature, still continue to evolve even in the very process of the testimony.10

Thus, Mallarmé—who cannot be said to belong to Wiesel’s generation, at least not in the manner that Wiesel seems to mean it—names for Felman

Romanticism, Testimony, Prosopopoeia    the instant when poetry in modernity becomes testimony. At this instant, poetry—and implicitly, poetics—is charged with witnessing an unfinished, violent event, which, for Mallarmé, is the event of modern poetry itself.11 Although Felman is at work to explain testimony’s relation to poetry, she does so through a discussion of poems that radicalize poetry within poetry (those by Mallarmé, and later Celan), rather than an account of conventional testimonies, like those by Wiesel or Primo Levi. She does not—or does not yet—allow Wiesel’s testimony to be the place where testimony displaces poetry.12 Modern poetry may be testimony (which is not at all akin to saying that it is “confessional”), but this displacement or exhaustion of poetry occurs within poetry. Wiesel’s and Felman’s accounts of poetic history differ, even if both recognize poetry as the source of testimony. Weisel understands testimony to displace poetry: testimony fulfills, rather than interrupts, the history of poetry. Felman focuses on the crisis of poetry, while Wiesel begins with the Renaissance sonnet, which in his formula becomes analogous to postHolocaust testimony. In Felman’s account, what Wiesel calls “our generation” becomes indistinguishable from modernity, and specifically the crisis of poetry that Mallarmé witnesses and effects.13 My point here is not to recover testimony as a term that only refers to the Holocaust (i.e., Wiesel’s generation), to what Agamben calls “the devastating experience in which the impossible is forced into the real.”14 Rather, I wish to consider how, in subtly opposed ways, both Wiesel and Felman—but also Agamben and Derrida— show testimony to be essentially tied to poetry, and in particular to the lyric and its figures. Understood as a mode of ineptitude or weakness, poetry cannot resolve a crisis of truth, but instead is the condition of possibility of bearing witness to such a crisis without having any means to overcome it.15 In this sense an account of testimony’s poetic status and its dependence upon lyric figures, far from redeeming testimony as art, far from recovering testimony’s possibility, instead discloses the exhaustion and ineptitude of art, an ineptitude that resists any effort at its exclusion or negation. While Felman initially turns away from a poetic definition of testimony, translating it as a “means of transmission,” that is, as an aspect of culture and a juridical device, only to reintroduce testimony as the crisis of verse, it is not at all clear that Wiesel understands testimony’s relation to poetry in terms of poetry’s crisis, whether conceived in Mallarmé’s terms or in the terms of those who, Adorno above all, have struggled to make

   Chapter 1 sense of the meaning or possibility of poetry after Auschwitz.16 Testimony may mark a crisis, the crisis that Primo Levi calls the absence of “true witnesses,” yet, in Wiesel’s curious account, Holocaust testimony—even if it is a new form—seems to support and remain a stage within poetry’s history rather than the devastation of it. When Felman bypasses the literary historical aspect of Wiesel’s account of testimony (and the fact that his is a claim about poetry in particular), to focus instead on testimony’s relation to law, she also avoids the risk that Wiesel recognizes—perhaps inadvertently—and that she repeats in passing. Testimony, as Wiesel shows, is one of poetry’s sustaining incarnations, rather than its crisis. Testimony is what remains of poetry. In Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben takes issue with Felman and Laub’s study on the basis of its aestheticization of a crisis of voice. Agamben focuses on the book’s last chapter (devoted to Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah), claiming that even as Felman and Laub define testimony’s occasion as “an event without witnesses” and show how such an event produces a “threshold of indistinction between inside and outside,” because both the one who undergoes the experience (insofar as she is deprived of voice and life) and the one who survives (insofar as her life, the condition of speaking, is also an exclusion) are both incapable of witnessing, they also turn away from the “threshold” they identify. Specifically, Agamben argues that instead of analyzing the structure of exclusion, Felman and Laub focus on the aesthetic possibility that issues from the crisis of truth, and so “aestheticize testimony.”17 He suggests, in other words, that they redeem testimony for poetry. The turn to song in the late passage that Agamben considers, and the turn away from poetry in the early passage that I have considered, can be seen to belong to the same movement. In both cases, Felman avoids testimony’s aporetic structure, even as she seems to describe it. “Law” and “song” indicate two ways of not interrogating the relation of testimony to poetry, specifically poetry that does not recover the crisis of voice, but rather gives an impossible voice, a voice that bears witness to the impossible as impossible.

A Possibility of Testimony (Agamben) Agamben—whose account of testimony itself implies the proximity of testimony to poetry—defines testimony in its opposition to the

Romanticism, Testimony, Prosopopoeia    “archive.” He explains that whereas the archive (a figure for language and memory that he draws from Foucault) designates the system of relations between the unsaid and the said, we give the name testimony to the system of relations between the inside and the outside of langue, between the sayable and the unsayable in every language—that is between a potentiality of speech and its existence, between a possibility and an impossibility of speech. . . . In testimony, by contrast the empty place of the subject becomes the decisive question.18

In this definition, the difference between the archive and testimony corresponds to the difference between actual and potential speech. The archive is constituted by “what” is said, not as a unity, but rather as the relation between the said and the unsaid that each utterance bears (“that there is language,” to use Christopher Fynsk’s phrase) even without uttering it. Testimony, here, is the outcome of an act of naming or invention (“we give the name testimony . . . ,” Agamben writes), whereas the archive signifies independence of a speaking we (“the archive, which designates . . .”).19 This is a relation ordered by possibility, between what can be said (together with, but not distinguished from, its being said) and what cannot be said: what is possible in language (langue). The first and most significant difference between Foucault’s archive and Agamben’s testimony concerns the status of the subject. The enunciation as archive (according to The Archaeology of Knowledge) is not an archive of the subject but of the relation between the said and the unsaid (the system itself ). Agamben sets out by adhering to this model of systematic relation in his “naming” of testimony, but rather than follow an opposition between presence and absence, he treats the opposition between the possible and the impossible and identifies contingency (which he defines as a capacity not to be) as an essential element of testimony. “Testimony,” he writes, “can exist only through a relation to an impossibility of speech— that is, only as contingency, as a capacity not to be.”20 This is not the capacity to say one thing or another, but the capacity to “have”—or not to have— language. This notion of subjectivity tied to language remains indebted to Benveniste’s account of “subjectivity in language,” but unlike the Benvenistean subject—and unlike the statement that occurs in its exclusion (Foucault)—Agamben’s subject is the subject witness to desubjectification. Testimony marks the recovery of the subject in the impossibility of speech.

   Chapter 1 In this sense, it is an inversion of the Foucaultian account of the statement that exists without author or subject. Thus, the speaking subject is the impossibility of speech, and her recovery does not transform the impossibility through which she is constituted or to which speech bears witness. Agamben writes: But the relation between language and its existence, between langue and the archive, demands subjectivity as that which, in its very possibility of speech, bears witness to an impossibility of speech. This is why subjectivity appears as witness; this is why it can speak for those who cannot speak. Testimony is a potentiality [i.e., the possibility of impossibility, being-towards-death of the subject, contingency] that becomes actual [impossible] through an impotentiality of speech [no longer capable or potent, exhaustion or absence]; it is, moreover, an impossibility that gives itself existence through a possibility of speaking. These two movements cannot be identified either with a subject or with a consciousness; yet they cannot be divided into two incommunicable substances. Their inseparable intimacy is testimony.21

For Agamben, the actuality of testimony is tied directly to the “impotentiality” of speech, and testimony is an impossibility tied directly to a possibility of speaking—these are the movements (divided and inseparable) to which the terms complete witness and survivor (divided and inseparable) refer.22 If testimony describes a paradox (the witness sees everything but does not live or speak, the survivor lives and speaks, but has not seen everything and thus bears witness to an impossibility of speaking), and if it thus “refutes” any possible denial of Auschwitz, this is because in the Muselmann [which Agamben understands to name the absolute impossibility of bearing witness], the impossibility of bearing witness is no longer a mere privation. Instead, it has become real; it exists as such. If the survivor bears witness not to the gas chambers or to Auschwitz [both of which have been posited as what it is not possible to witness] but to the Muselmann, if he speaks only on the basis of the impossibility of speaking, then his testimony cannot be denied. Auschwitz—that to which it is not possible to bear witness—is absolutely and irrefutably proven.23

The existence of speech’s impossibility (what Agamben will now call “subjectivity”) in the speech of a survivor who speaks only of what he cannot speak, who encounters the limit of speech in his own testimony, marks

Romanticism, Testimony, Prosopopoeia    the moment in which Auschwitz becomes irrefutable (in other words, it is ­irrefutable because no one is capable of speaking it, because it remains the absolutely unspeakable in the instant that it is spoken). While Agamben figures the paradox of testimony in terms of the absence of witnesses, an absence that, contrary to expectation, proves rather than threatens the existence of Auschwitz, Derrida considers the paradox of testimony as the inextinguishability of fiction’s possibility.

The Literature of Testimony (Derrida, Blanchot) In Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, a book devoted to what does and does not remain (demeure), Derrida acknowledges the paradox that if the testimonial is by law irreducible to the fictional, there is no testimony that does not structurally imply in itself the possibility of fiction, simulacra, dissimulation, lie, perjury—that is to say, the possibility of literature of the innocent or perverse literature that innocently plays at perverting all of these distinctions. If this possibility that it seems to prohibit were effectively excluded, if testimony thereby became proof, information, certainty, or archive, it would lose its function as testimony. In order to remain testimony, it must therefore allow itself to be haunted. It must allow itself to be parasitized by precisely what it excludes from its inner depths, the possibility, at least, of literature.24

Testimony’s impossibility (that it is literature) is also its condition of possibility (that it could be literature). Yet this is not simply a unidirectional movement. Rather, Derrida sets out from the acknowledgment, at once obvious and thoroughly disruptive, that testimony not only risks becoming literature but that literature risks becoming testimony. What, he pursues, is the status of a testimony that occurs within a literary narrative? Maurice Blanchot’s last récit, The Instant of My Death, is a narrative in which an “I” accounts for the death and the life of a “young man” that he can only have been. This “I” and hence this “young man” is—as a letter from Blanchot to Derrida testifies—the narrative’s author: Maurice Blanchot. All three—I, he, Maurice Blanchot—are, as Derrida writes, “the same without being the same.”25 The narrative ends with a division of voice, two sentences placed in quotation marks: “ ‘I am alive. No, you are dead.’”26 Blanchot’s two sentences might be understood as an example of the two positions of impossible speech that Agamben (after Levi) calls “the survivor” and “the witness.”

   Chapter 1 As if, at the moment that the one who remains alive, the survivor, states her enduring life, she encounters her death—not as a psychological position (which might also be the case), but as her obligation (even compulsion) to speak of what she cannot speak, to say the impossible. Understood in this manner, her survival is a life beyond life and beyond death, which is enacted in and acknowledged by the utterances, in speaking. But here, the “I” speaks in the presence of a “you,” the “you” addresses the “I” as “you,” and both “I” and “you” speak in the voice—or through the voice—of a third who cites them (a narrator, at a minimum, but the narrator is also an “I” who speaks of the third and opens the récit with the phrase “I remember a young man”).27 Derrida asks, “Who speaks in Blanchot’s récit?” Who is speaking here? Who dares proclaim, “I am alive”? Who dares reply “No you are dead”? Up until this point, as we noted, an “I” speaks of another, of a third: “I” speaks of him. “I” is me, speaks of the young man he was and this is still me. This is called a narration. But for the first time, between the two instances of the narrator and character who are the same without being the same, there are quotation marks, there is speech that is being directly quoted. Someone is speaking to someone, a witness is speaking to the other for the first time, in a dialogue that is both an inner dialogue and, if I can put it this way, transcendent. “I” becomes “you” or addresses itself to “you,” but we do not know whether the “I” is the one who says “I” at the beginning of the text: “I remember,” or if it is the other, the young man. We do not know who “you” is, who says “you,” nor do we know what is left out of these two instances. Like each of these sentences, this conclusion is singularly, that is to say, properly genial. One of the two, One of the Two, says to the Other, “I am alive,” and would thus be the one who has survived. But it is the other, the one who has survived, who responds to him: “No, you are dead.” And this is the colloquium, this is the dialogue between the two witnesses, who are, moreover, the same, alive and dead, living-dead, and both of whom in abidance claim or allege that one is alive, the other dead, as if life went only to an I and death to a you.28

Derrida offers some cues for how to read this divided passage, which occurs within a single set of quotation marks, as if within a single voice that is then quoted (but by whom?). If testimony is by definition the position of the third (deriving etymologically from terstis), it is the voice of citation, or the narrative voice, which is also the voice of the one excluded from this drama of “I” and “you,” the one who speaks as (or for) both “I” and “you” (or “we”) that is the witness.29 Literature here is the place of testimony but,

Romanticism, Testimony, Prosopopoeia    as Derrida also notes, this passage reflects upon a loss of literature, a work that is remembered but not recovered. Indeed, if Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death bears witness to survival rather than death, if it bears witness to death as what remains, what already has taken place without taking place, if it discloses a life-death beyond life and beyond death, what does not remain—what is irrecoverably lost—is not life or death but a manuscript (“which perhaps contained war plans”) that the Nazi lieutenant stole from the young man’s home.30 It is to this manuscript, finally, that Derrida understands Blanchot’s narrative to bear witness: But a manuscript—and this would be its definition, a definition via the end—is something whose end cannot be repeated and to which one can only testify where the testimony only testifies to the absence of attestation, namely, where nothing can testify any longer, with supporting evidence, to what has been. Pure testimony as impossible testimony. Unlike the witness-narrator, the manuscript has disappeared without remainder; it does not even have speech to recall an instant of death; it can no longer say “my death.” . . . Nothing of it remains. Unless one could say: without remainder other than The Instant of My Death, than the narrative entitled The Instant of My Death, its last witness, a supplementary substitute which, by recalling its disappearance, replaces it without replacing it.31

If the manuscript does not survive (if it is lost, if it cannot speak of its own loss or death, if, in this respect, writing differs from a human life), this narrative (The Instant of My Death) bears witness to it as what it cannot recover from theft or from the tout brûlait of the southern French countryside (a burning that names and coincides with but at the same time only evokes the Holocaust). In other words, it bears witness to the impossibility of witness, and to this impossibility as the thing that endures. Literature remains to testify to the absence of the work, to that which has no voice. For Blanchot, the literature that remains is narrative, the literature of the third-person voice. Yet, The Instant of My Death culminates in what Derrida calls an overheard “colloquium” (or infinite conversation) of survivors. At this moment, an “I” addresses a “you” who cannot respond; a “you” responds to address the “I” as “you” who cannot respond.32 This play of impossible voices seems to owe its existence to a trope, the trope that Paul de Man, as I suggested earlier, identified with autobiography (as epitaph) and lyric: prosopopoeia.

   Chapter 1

Poetry and Testimony (Derrida, de Man) Although Demeure is explicitly concerned with “fiction and testimony” (these are the words of its subtitle), Derrida begins with a reflection on poetry. He opens the essay by citing and translating Goethe’s autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit (regularly translated into English as “Poetry and Truth”), in order to acknowledge that he mistranslated its title in Memoires: For Paul de Man.33 This self-reflexive gesture suggests that his own title, Fiction and Testimony, translates Goethe’s title, but also that it translates de Man’s account of prosopopoeia, which occasions Derrida’s discussion of Goethe in the first place.34 Derrida’s turn to de Man (prompted in part by the fact that he first delivers this paper in Belgium, de Man’s native country) and, in particular, his turn to “Autobiography as De-Facement” initiates his elaboration of the figure that orients his reading: demeure (remaining, abiding, an abode that does not house being). Derrida acknowledges that his consideration of fiction and testimony is explicitly indebted to de Man’s essay on autobiography and poetry. Yet this acknowledgment raises several questions that also reflect on the title of Goethe’s autobiography: does fiction merely translate (poorly or well) poetry ? Does testimony merely translate (poorly or well) autobiography, as de Man articulates it? In what way does the specular reading relation essential to de Man’s account of autobiography’s tropes resemble the strange specularity manifest in the “colloquium” of the living-dead interlocutors (the citation of this colloquium) at the end—that is not the end—of Blanchot’s récit? Does de Man give us an account of testimony and its rhetoric at the moment that he considers Wordsworth’s theory of the lyric epitaph? Does Derrida provide an account of lyric life when he describes the speech of survival in Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death ? “Autobiography as De-Facement” begins by accounting for various critical attempts to come to terms with autobiography, either through generic identifications or by means of artificial distinctions between fiction and truth in literature.35 Yet de Man insists that neither of these strategies is adequate or relevant. While it seems that he proposes to define autobiography as “a figure of reading or of understanding that occurs, to some degree, in all texts” (70), this definition remains equally untenable and emerges as a negative moment in a dialectical structure without dialectics.36 To treat autobiography as a genre (“as one genre among others”) is

Romanticism, Testimony, Prosopopoeia    a limited, and inevitably self-defeating, endeavor. In a gesture that already employs the trope he will be concerned to describe, de Man goes on to explain that once autobiography is understood as a genre (like “tragedy, or epic, or lyric poetry” [67], the very genres through which Wiesel understands testimony), autobiography “always looks slightly disreputable and self-indulgent. . . . Whatever the reason may be, autobiography makes matters worse by responding poorly to this elevation in status” (67–68). Indeed, to understand autobiography generically is to turn away from critical methods preoccupied with authorship, but only in order to identify a mode whose essential characteristic is the relation between author and text.37 A focus on the distinction between autobiography and fiction, as a difference between the verifiable and the unverifiable or as different modes of reference, may, de Man suggests, be “more fruitful” (or generative) than a generic study of autobiography; however, if autobiography depends upon reference or mimesis, can we forget that mimesis is a figure? As soon as we determine that an autobiography is an autobiography because it is referential or mimetic, we also reveal that it has the essential character of fiction, and that its mimesis assumes and posits the life to which the text refers. In other words, to define autobiography by its referential or mimetic function is also to raise the (unanswerable) question of whether the figure determines the referent or the referent determines the figure. Finally, to treat autobiography as a “figure of reading or of understanding” is to identify the autobiographical moment “as the alignment between the two subjects involved in the process of reading in which they determine each other by mutual reflexive substitution” (70)—the reflection not of a historical event, but of a linguistic structure. Thus, de Man recalls Émile Benveniste’s account of the “I” as empty signifier, the referent of the “I” as discourse itself.38 Yet, de Man also recognizes subjectivity as a tropological structure, that is to say, as an initially substitutive structure (i.e., I as referent, I as referee, whose substitution marks autobiography) that confounds the distinction between performative and referential language. This means that the autobiographical moment is textual (or that the text is autobiographical) to the extent that it is the moment at which a text reflects itself (its tropes, its substitutions). The autobiographical structure of the text leads de Man to state that “just as we seem to assert that all texts are autobiographical, we should say that, by the same token, none of them is or can be” (70). Another way of putting

   Chapter 1 this would be to say that all autobiographies, like all texts, bear witness to the figures that are the condition of their reflection, not to the subject or the author and its history as textual referent, but to a linguistic or tropological structure which is also the structure of the subject, the author, and history; all autobiography is the autobiography of figure.39 Having acknowledged the inevitably autobiographical structure of texts, de Man also acknowledges that autobiographies, insofar as they register a division they never can overcome and an incompletion (marked by the time of writing) that renders them eternally out of date, respond to their inherent impossibility by making recourse not to reference and substitution, but to speech acts. As Philippe Lejeune explains it, the author of an autobiography does not set out to prove the identity between a first-­person subject and a proper name but rather to promise that identity. De Man suggests that the shift from reference to promise is a shift from a relation between reader and author marked by “mutual reflexive substitution” (the structure of “I” and “you” as a position ordered by discourse and understood by trope) to a relation of judgment, whereby the reader becomes “the policing power in charge of verifying the authenticity of the signature and the consistency of the signer’s behavior, the extent to which he respects or fails to honor the contractual agreement he has signed” (71–72). At the moment that the signature is offered in the place of “authority,” at the moment that the text becomes a contract or legal document that guarantees the correspondence and unity of an interior “I” and an exterior “I,” the reader again becomes the arbiter—an event that, as Roland Barthes already will have claimed, has as its condition the death of the author. Thus, it is by acknowledging the authority of the dead that the reader takes her place as judge. However, is it as judge or as witness that the reader authenticates the authorial contract? If we understand the reader as a witness (cosigner) rather than a judge, we find that she is a “witness for the witness.” Celan writes, in a poem, that “Niemand” (no one) witnesses for the witness, which suggests both that this position belongs to no one and that no one has taken up this position. Agamben’s account of the witness suggests further that this logic of “witnessing for the witness” is not merely a successful substitution but rather it indicates a scene of unsubstitutability—a crisis, rather than its resolution. For the survivor—or witness for the witness—is an incomplete witness: he does not speak on behalf of the dead, but on behalf of their impossibility of speaking.40

Romanticism, Testimony, Prosopopoeia    In de Man’s reading of Lejeune, the promise of fidelity and selfknowledge displaces, but does not overcome, the problem of authority. The fact that autobiography remains within the space of literature also shows that literature is the zone where the speech act is essentially impotent.41 De Man’s argument is that the further we claim to get away from “the tropology of the subject,” the more deeply entrenched in its tropes we turn out to be. This immobility—the impossibility of getting out of the system of tropes, which is also a form of permanent parabasis—consigns author and reader to the very self-reflection that the speech act and its testament are marshaled to overcome. Having suggested that autobiography “overcomes” its essential impossibility only by redeploying the tropes that are the mark of its impossibility, de Man sets out to “illustrate” his theoretical (“abstract”) claim with an example—“an exemplary autobiographical text”: Wordsworth’s Essays upon Epitaphs. Indeed, the autobiographical exemplarity of this text seems far from obvious, especially given that Wordsworth is the author of an explicitly autobiographical poem that exists in at least four versions.42 Thus, if the parts of Wordsworth’s Essays upon Epitaphs are exemplary, it is not simply because they are autobiography, but because they figure autobiography. In order to claim the former, de Man reminds us that the essay concludes with a self-citation (the “story of a deaf man who compensates for his infirmity by substituting the reading of books for the sounds of nature” that appears in Wordsworth’s poem The Excursion [72]), and he holds that this is not only an example of Wordsworth’s writing, but is also exemplary of (stands in for, figures) all of the instances in which Wordsworth “figures his own poetic self ” with “figures of deprivation.” The citation is at once an instance and a figure of Wordsworth’s self-figuration: “the exemplary conclusion of an exemplary text” (73). If, as de Man has argued, autobiographical discourse remains “a discourse of self-restoration,” a discourse predicated upon the loss and the recovery of a self (for example, through reading), he is interested in investigating what he calls the “trustworthiness” of the claim to restoration (the implicit claim of every autobiography), or, to recall the language with which I began, the trustworthiness of the apparent recovery of life beyond death. De Man’s argument is multifaceted. As a reading of Wordsworth’s essay, his essay is concerned to show that the figure that Wordsworth recognizes as the privileged mode of epitaphic writing—prosopopoeia—is

   Chapter 1 also the figure that it repeatedly cautions against. As an account of autobiography, he registers the text’s failure to “reflect” itself, its saying of one thing and doing another (using prosopopoeia and cautioning against it). As a dismissal of the restorative features of figurative language—specifically of prosopopoeia—de Man shows that the very gesture through which figurative language appears to overcome a privation (whether muteness or deafness) only demonstrates that our being in language is what deprives us of understanding and sense. Restoration and privation—the two faces of language—remain frozen in perfect, immobilizing tension. De Man argues that Wordsworth’s strategy is a shift from an either/or logic (death or life, human or inhuman) to a both/and logic (human and inhuman, death and life). Yet, this addition, rather than overcoming opposition, rather than negating negation, instead produces a zone of neutrality; both/and here becomes indistinguishable from neither/nor (ne-utre)—neither alive nor dead, both alive and dead. Wordsworth offers the allegory of the Nessus tunic to describe the potential violence of language (“the restoration turned out to be a worse deprivation, a loss of life and of sense”); and de Man famously repeats and elaborates upon this allegory in order to claim that it is an allegory of allegory: it figures the violence of all language insofar as it is irremissibly figurative. But, just as de Man employs this figure as the figure of language (as the figure of figure, in the way that prosopopoeia is the figure of figure), it also becomes clear that the disproportion at work in the allegory of privation is not exactly what takes place in language. Rather, in language—which is to say always—there endures an absence of sense without an absence of life.

With or Without Language (de Man, Agamben) While in Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben points to the ­Muselmänner, those whom the camps destroyed, even prior to their physical deaths, as the figure of being without language, the untestifiable, “faceless ­presences” (Levi) that elsewhere he calls “bare life,” even “survival,” de Man argues that to be in language, to be dependent upon language, is to be “eternally deprived of voice and condemned to muteness” (80).43 In some sense, this linguistic privation—a privation that autobiography’s apparent restoration only discloses—describes the position of the witness, who, Agamben explains,

Romanticism, Testimony, Prosopopoeia    remains a speaking being, remains in language. However, the witness— like the Muselmann from which he is indissociable—speaks only through the impossibility of speaking; he “brings” speech to the impossibility of speech.44 For de Man, to the contrary, it is precisely not the impossibility of speech or of language that is the source of privation, nor is it the biopolitical program to “make live and let die.” To say with de Man and with Wordsworth that it is language itself that is the occasion of privation, and that this occasion comes to be felt at the instant that the autobiographicalepitaphic impulse is effected, leaves us again with questions that readers of de Man historically have voiced: how is political or ethical responsiveness possible? How is history or memory possible if language remains the fundamental zone of violence and privation? But it also leaves us with new questions: What possibility of testimony remains if the Muselmann is not the figure of the impossibility of language but figurative language itself? Does this acknowledgment suggest, not de Man’s failure to acknowledge Auschwitz (he did fail to acknowledge it, to acknowledge it in a satisfactory way, but this does not mean that we can dispense with his most radical thought of language as a result), but rather the limitation of Agamben’s figure? Does it not suggest that, for Agamben, however tied to an analysis of Levi’s testimony his account might be, “Muselmann” and “witness” remain figures? And if they are figures—as they must be (in a long history of figures like “master” and “slave,” “I” and “you”)—does not Agamben already show that it is not the impossibility of language but figurative language itself that is the condition of testimony, and that it is figurative language itself (Muselmann, which remains untranslated throughout Remnants of Auschwitz as figure par excellence) to which testimony bears witness? Is not the indivisibility that Agamben considers in fact the indivisibility of testimony and figure? Like de Man (although without ever mentioning him), Agamben discusses prosopopoeia in several paragraphs of Remnants of Auschwitz. In section 2.7, he focuses on Primo Levi’s definition of the Muselmann as “he who has seen the Gorgon.”45 It is a definition so completely metaphorical, so strangely coded, that it verges on nonsense. Yet Agamben endeavors to understand the meaning of “the Gorgon” for Levi, to discover “what, in the camp, is the Gorgon” and he undertakes his investigation by turning to Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux’s study of identity in ancient Greece, Du Masque au visage.46

   Chapter 1 In Frontisi-Ducroux’s analysis, the Gorgon—or the Medusa’s head— is not a face (visage) understood as prosopon, but it always is represented as a face, a “head-on” face. For the ancient Greeks, this face is also the image of what has no face, what cannot be seen. Agamben goes on to explain that Frontisi-Ducroux establishes a parallel between this frontality, which breaks with the iconographical convention of vase painting, and apostrophe, the rhetorical figure by which the author, rupturing narrative convention, turns to a character or directly to the public. This means that the impossibility of vision of which the Gorgon is the cipher contains something like an apostrophe, a call that cannot be avoided.47

Specifically, Agamben focuses on apostrophe as an interpellation; he reads the analogy chiastically, recognizing that if the Gorgon is a visual interruption akin to the verbal interruption of apostrophe, then it is not only what cannot be encountered, but, like an interpellation, what cannot be refused.48 This analogy leads Agamben to repeat his account of Muselmann and witness not as an impossibility of language but of seeing, and to translate his account of the living into an account of the human (the vision of the Gorgon “transforms the human being into a non-human”).49 However, if the Gorgon (antiprosopon, deface, which is also the defacement and the death of each witness) is like apostrophe, the direct address that assumes a face and a responsive life, and if, in this sense, it is not only a face, but a mask, naming the turn away that keeps one from encountering the Gorgon, rather than that which would name it, the analogy also suggests that the Muselmann is a figure for him who will have encountered figure.50 Let me interrupt myself by admitting that I am not certain of whether this is true—or even of whether we can speak unreservedly about the Muselmann as Agamben and Levi do, and as I have done until this point. However, if the Gorgon is like apostrophe, and if it is this “deface” and “turn away” that are aligned and seen, it strikes me that the Muselmann has not encountered the impossibility of language, but rather, language—figurative language—itself. Thus, it is perhaps unsurprising that here Agamben does not make a claim about language as such, but about seeing and knowing: If to see the Gorgon means to see the impossibility of seeing, then the Gorgon does not name something that exists or that happens in the camp, something

Romanticism, Testimony, Prosopopoeia    that the Muselmann, and not the survivor would have seen. Rather, the Gorgon designates the impossibility of seeing that belongs to the camp inhabitant, the one who has “touched bottom” in the camp and has become a non-human. The Muselmann has neither seen nor known anything, if not the impossibility of knowing and seeing. This is why to bear witness to the Muselmann, to attempt to contemplate the impossibility of seeing, is not an easy task. That at the “bottom” of the human being there is nothing other than an impossibility of seeing—this is the Gorgon, whose vision transforms the human being into a non-human. That precisely this inhuman impossibility of seeing is what calls and addresses the human, the apostrophe from which human beings cannot turn away—this and nothing else—is testimony. The Gorgon and he who has seen her and the Muselmann and he who bears witness to him are one gaze; they are the single impossibility of seeing.51

Agamben here describes testimony as “the single impossibility of seeing” (or the impossibility of the prosopon), an impossibility that belongs equally to the witness who bears the Muselmann as one who has seen what no one could bear to see, and to the Muselmann who apparently will have seen “it” (the Gorgon, the impossibility of seeing, apostrophe, himself ). So too does he show more explicitly how the Gorgon and apostrophe are aligned. This alignment emerges not (or not only) because of the ancient history to which Frontisi-Ducroux so carefully directs our attention, but rather because to see the Gorgon is not simply to be killed (to lose one’s life), but to see the impossibility of seeing, to know the impossibility of knowing, it is to see the prosopon as mask and not as face. It is the situation that de Man describes at the conclusion of “Autobiography as De-Facement,” when he too sees and understands—and gives us to see and understand—the impossibility of seeing (or sensing) as the condition that figurative language, prosopopoeia above all, claims and fails to overcome: “As soon as we understand the rhetorical function of prosopopoeia as positing voice or face by means of language, we also understand that what we are deprived of is not life but the shape and the sense of a world accessible only in the privative way of understanding” (81). Even at the moment of understanding prosopopoeia, we only discover that understanding is our limit. If the Muselmann sees and knows the impossibility of seeing and knowing, he is in a position like ours when we understand—when we see and know—“the rhetorical function of prosopopoeia.” This conclusion is disturbing, for it collapses a historically specific singularity into an account of subjectivity in language.

   Chapter 1 It seems either to dismiss the experience of the camps as merely an experience of language—or to dismiss de Man for not giving us adequate tools to witness anything but linguistic mutilation.52 But this is, it turns out, what Agamben says when he describes the essence of the concentration camps as seeing the impossibility of seeing, and when he ascribes this position indistinguishably to the so-called Muselmann and the witness, to the Muselmann who is his own witness. Yet Agamben also goes further than this at the very instant that he evokes figurative language in its specificity, that is, when he shows (establishing a new tropological chain) that the Muselmann is the Gorgon, is “the apostrophe from which human beings cannot turn away,” is an apostrophe that animates and freezes, faces and defaces, and is, in this respect, testimony. In other words, Agamben shows (in ways more radical and more devastating than de Man ever does) that what we find, perhaps all that we can find when we undertake the most concerted, obsessive, and faithful attempts at testimony—is figure. He shows us that testimony is a figure—that is, the chain of disfiguration. What remains is a collection of catachreses (Muselmann, Auschwitz, above all), but also prosopopoeia and apostrophe: the figures of testimony, which are also the figures of lyric poetry. If these figures remain—at once the object and condition of testimony—they are also the figures that leave us attuned, not only to a testimony whose risk is fiction, but also to a testimony whose risk and whose object is defacement. And it is upon this acknowledgment that the figure can be understood not to give death but to make live, to give and to register the life that always exceeds the ends it bears.53 Finally, Agamben’s treatment of apostrophe returns us to the quotation from Elie Wiesel with which I began. Wiesel suggested that testimony is the end of poetry within poetry, that it is poetry’s unending, a life and a possibility that remains tied to the literatures and the cultures of Europe. To understand testimony as the end and the unending of poetry is not to aestheticize testimony, nor is it to suggest that with this generation poetry has found its end. Rather, Wiesel’s formula reveals that the inexhaustible risk of testimony is its inseparability from poetry, an inseparability that I will elaborate in the coming chapters. This inseparability shows us that the figures of lyric emerge as figures of neither life nor death, of neither redemption nor privation, but of survival. Turning first to Wordsworth

Romanticism, Testimony, Prosopopoeia    and then to Mary Shelley, the following chapters will show that at the moment apostrophe and prosopopoeia are figured as creative rather than mechanical tropes—that is, as human rather than nonhuman, living rather than dead—they also come to figure life as survival and the human as the name for this survival.

2 Naked Language, Naked Life: Wordsworth’s Rhetoric of Survival Life everywhere is life, life is in ourselves and not in the external. . . . This idea has entered into my flesh and blood. Yes, it’s true! That head which created, lived by the highest life of art, which acknowledged and had come to know the highest demands of the spirit, that head has been cut from my shoulders . . . but my heart is left me, and the same flesh and blood which likewise can love and suffer and desire and remember, and this is, after all, life. On voit le soleil! fyodor dostoyevsky1

In his F. W. Bateson Memorial Lecture entitled “Personification,” the poet Donald Davie reflects upon the impossibility of separating rhetoric and poetry—and by extension, the impossibility of distinguishing between political (or persuasive) poetry and true (or antirhetorical) poetry. Focusing on personification as the metonymy of rhetoric in general, Davie argues that poetry—even antirhetorical poetry—cannot avoid personification, because it cannot do away with grammar. Here, Davie relies on Bateson’s insight that, insofar as English grammar differentiates between singular and plural nouns and requires that “ ‘a single noun, however abstract or general, must be followed by a verb in the third person singular,’ ” it personifies. Grammar is thus the limit of romantic (and late romantic, which is to say modernist or postmodernist) efforts to extinguish rhetoric from poetry.2 The impossibility of romanticism’s project, and

Naked Language, Naked Life    hence the failure of romanticism to accomplish itself, is on Davie’s reading due to a fundamental misunderstanding—not a misunderstanding of the rhetorical dimension of all language, but of human power before this limit. Indeed, in a manner that anticipates Agamben’s account of potentiality, Davie goes so far as to suggest that to be human is not to be able not to personify. The antirhetorical effort is, as Davies concludes, “based on untenable notions about the relation between our human nature and our human arts.”3 Thus, romanticism, understood as the attempt to separate poetry from rhetoric, is incomplete, not because of its conception of language as such, but because it imagines—despite its apparent intentions— an inhuman art. When, in 1800, and again in 1802, Wordsworth proposed to create an audience for a truly human poetry—for his and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, but also for good poetry past, present, and future—it was clear to him that at stake in this new poetry was the relation of “our human nature and our human arts.” Critics long have framed Wordsworth’s account of poetry either as a humanizing or an inadvertently dehumanizing experiment. Wordsworth’s effort to invent a poetry written in “the real language of man,” and to eschew personification in favor of a less ostentatious or mechanical art, aims, as he explains, to “put the reader in the company of flesh and blood.” Yet, it is far from clear that “flesh and blood” can be easily assimilated to the human (or the living). Wordsworth’s defense of antirhetorical, nonpersonifying poetry of man—a poetics of flesh and blood—also inaugurates a more radical project than the one it overtly elaborates. Wordsworth imagines a poetry that, as I will suggest, leaves in the place of the human a not-yet-human life. The formative exclusion of personification functions as an act of personification that yields not man but rather what Wordsworth calls “flesh and blood.” In Chapter 1, I considered how Giorgio Agamben recovers apostrophe and prosopopoeia for testimony, and I suggested that at the very moment that Agamben argues for the capacity of testimony to bear a radical loss (the loss of witnesses) and figures testimony as “the apostrophe from which we cannot turn away,” he also repeats Paul de Man’s account of the privative nature of figurative language. I suggested there that Agamben theorizes not the absence or impossibility of language (to use his own idiom) but rather language itself.4 In this chapter I develop that reading by focusing on Wordsworth’s preface, a critical text obsessed with—and

   Chapter 2 by—figurative language. I will be concerned to elaborate upon, but also to recast, de Man’s accounts of prosopopoeia and anthropomorphism. When, in the preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth promises to exclude rhetoric, and personification above all, from poetry—which is to say, when he invents British romanticism—he neither succeeds in humanizing poetry by stripping it of rhetoric (an impossible task), nor offers a negative demonstration of the resilience of mechanical rhetoric in a newly human poetry. Rather, in Wordsworth’s theory of human poetry, romantic rhetoric emerges as a rhetoric of survival.5

De Man’s Wordsworth De Man’s most sustained reading of romantic prosopopoeia focuses not on Wordsworth’s preface, but on his Essays upon Epitaphs, in which Wordsworth apparently transforms what M. H. Abrams calls “the most fundamental neo-classic frame of reference,” wherein “language is the ‘dress’ of thought, and figures are the ‘ornaments’ of language.”6 In place of an Augustan model of poetic practice—one that reflects a far-­reaching, cross-disciplinary figuration of the human body as a garment—Wordsworth advocates the reconciliation or “incorporation” of language and thought, arguing that language must not merely clothe thought (as his neoclassical predecessor Pope stated), but embody it.7 Wordsworth writes: “If words be not (recurring to a metaphor before used) an incarnation of the thought but only a clothing for it, then surely will they prove an ill gift; such a one as those poisoned vestments, read of in the stories of superstitious times, which had the power to consume and to alienate from his right mind the victim who put them on.”8 Yet, the account of language that Wordsworth privileges, like the one that he rejects, remains, on his own reading, and also on de Man’s reading, an example of the language of figure. Both language figured as dress and language figured as body are figures of language; both betray the impossibility of merely saying what one means and meaning what one says. One way of understanding the situation in which Wordsworth’s theory of language emerges as indistinguishable from the theory against which he so adamantly writes would be to acknowledge that he himself suffers in (or through) a language that does not sustain him as he claims it

Naked Language, Naked Life    should, a language that is not transparent, “like the power of gravitation or the air we breathe.”9 In the effort to make language visible through language (figure), the distinction between the two accounts of language collapses. Both accounts rely upon figures of visibility, which is to say, both employ figural means of accessing language. Wordsworth can advocate the use of some figures and dismiss others, he can laud the animating power of figural language and condemn its parallel violence, but he cannot undertake to think language outside of a figure that is at once animating and violent. Thus, language—as the language of figure and the figure of language—turns out to be what Wordsworth cautions it could become: “a counter-spirit, unremittingly and noiselessly at work to derange, to subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate, and to dissolve.”10 Language may be blinding and “noiseless,” but as soon as it is figured (figured even as what we do not see and only forget, like a physical power that keeps us earthbound or like the nutrients we inhale, that is, as our life support system), and as soon as we undertake to grasp language through the language of figure, language comes into view as our life. But rather than a stable force, it emerges as a deviant, disruptive power.11 It is on the basis of these passages from the third “Essay upon Epitaphs” that de Man provides his most elaborate account of privative and paralyzed figures in Wordsworth—above all of prosopopoeia as a figure of autobiography that “deprives and disfigures to the precise extent that it restores” (my emphasis).12 Wordsworth’s understanding of language as incarnation (or symbol) evokes his calls—earlier in the Essays and throughout the preface to Lyrical Ballads—for a naked, human language. In the preface, Wordsworth hails the possibility, indeed the aesthetic necessity, of language “stripped” of artifice, a poetry that would not, as Joseph Warton thought it should, “give Life and motion to immaterial beings; and form, and color, and action, even to abstract ideas,” but rather would reflect the existence of human life.13 Poetry would find its life in being indistinguishable from everyday speech; it would be only a minimally modified sample of actual, passionate communication. The metaphor of “stripping,” however, assumes that language could be naked language—that it could appear as bare flesh appears. In fact, it is precisely as bare flesh and living substance—as “flesh and blood”—that Wordsworth imagines the life that issues from and is reflected in his poetry: it is this life that is its life. Thus, as an alternative to the mechanical pathics and poetics of his predecessors, Wordsworth offers

   Chapter 2 a poetics of flesh and blood. But, herein lies the paradox: if this is a poetry of life and living substance, it is not a human poetry; if this is a human poetry, it is a poetry of figure (synecdoche, prosopopoeia) that presents the human only in its absence, only as the effacement of the living-in-general. More than this, the poetry animates and anthropomorphizes inhuman life. By turning now to Wordsworth’s preface, I hope to consider the life at stake in his poetry, and to make a two-fold claim: (1) only insofar as it is perceived as the effect of a figure, only insofar as it effaces its life, is this life human life; (2) the poetry that excludes artificial figures in the name of the human becomes a poetry of prosopopoeia. Wordsworth’s poetry is human to the extent that it is figural (to the extent that it acts as the figure it claims it must exclude). Yet, understood as a poetry of symbol and substance, rather than figure, or as an organic rather than rhetorical poetry, it is the poetry of nonhuman living. By tracing this aporia, I propose to reflect upon what in this text remains of the opposition between anthropomorphism and prosopopoeia, that is, upon the difference between a poetry of substance and a poetry of figure, the remains of the human and the living that this poetry bears.

A Poetics of Flesh and Blood I In the preface, Wordsworth defends the style, subject, and aim of the poems included in the Lyrical Ballads. He presents the project as an “experiment”—an attempt “to ascertain, how far, by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation, that sort of pleasure and that quantity of pleasure may be imparted, which a Poet may rationally endeavour to impart.”14 By framing the project as a “rational” endeavor offered to elicit and to measure readerly pleasure, a pleasure that he later will explain is the condition of poetic persuasiveness, Wordsworth defends in the name of science his turn to “the real language of men” as the medium of poetry. Wordsworth’s defense is divided into three parts: an elucidation of his choice of subject (“humble and rustic life”), an explanation of his objectives (to write poetry with a purpose, specifically, to evoke feeling and thus to enlarge the reader’s capacity for strong feeling), and a description of his style (the poetry is distinguished from everyday language or prose only by

Naked Language, Naked Life    meter, rather than by a peculiar diction or artificial figures). He associates this stylistic invention with a properly human poetry, a poetry that would have (and give) the measure of man. The most explicit mark of this style is the exclusion of personification. Wordsworth defends this exclusion as the first of several related yet less specific stylistic decisions, including the avoidance of poetic diction, the use of an adequate rather than an elevated language, and the refusal of “a large portion of phrases and figures of speech which from father to son have long been regarded as the common inheritance of Poets” (133). His argument against personification reflects each of these decisions, and stands in for the larger argument of this poetry’s aim and effect. He explains: The Reader will find that personifications of abstract ideas rarely occur in these volumes; and are utterly rejected, as an ordinary device to elevate the style and raise it above prose. My purpose was to imitate, and, as far as is possible, to adopt the very language of men; and assuredly such personifications do not make any natural or regular part of that language. They are, indeed, a figure of speech occasionally prompted by passion, and I have made use of them as such; but have endeavoured utterly to reject them as a mechanical device of style, or as a family language which Writers in metre seem to lay claim to by prescription. I have wished to keep the Reader in the company of flesh and blood, persuaded that by doing so I shall interest him. (131)

Here, Wordsworth both describes the reading that the preface only can anticipate and implicitly promises the kind of reading that it will install (“The Reader will find,” implicitly, “[I promise that] the Reader will find . . .”; “[I promise that you who are] the Reader will find . . .”). Words­ worth describes the experience of reading as already programmed, an experience without experience, and in doing so, he both addresses the reader as the recipient of a promise and describes him as a third-person subject or a character (which is to say, as someone he does not address). In other words, his account of the reader effaces the address to the reader. This shift in register covers over the extent to which his poetry (like this text) relies, not upon imitation, representation, and truth, but upon figures of facing and address. Wordsworth describes the reader’s experience of reading in objective, impersonal terms. In explaining what will happen to the reader, Words­ worth also puts an end to his contingency and experience. Like a promise,

   Chapter 2 the address that silently underpins this description is oriented toward the future, but it also relegates the future to necessity rather than contingency. It transforms the unforeseeable into the narratable. It allows the future to be concisely narrated in a story of historical certainty that any reader of Wordsworth’s poems—any reader insofar as she is characterized as a reader, which is to say, insofar as she is already a personification—knows to be false (for she will find personifications). For these very reasons, the promise also turns out to be infelicitous as a performative. It is this proleptic temporality that runs throughout the preface—and that links the poetics of flesh and blood to a poetics of survival. The future of poetry is already past. Moreover, the triangulation through which an “I” speaks of a third person, rather than to a second person, through which the “I” covertly addresses the second person in a promise that underlies the description, and the initial interruption of the promise that is both addressed to the reader and accounts for the impossibility of reading, frames Wordsworth’s account of his poetry. The gesture through which the “I” addresses a “you” (in each case, individual, in each case a linguistic effect) as a “he,” as a fixed category of subjectivity, as an allegory (“the Reader”), also gives a first example of Wordsworth’s claim: this text does not produce readers through its figures of address; the life it gives emerges not through animating acts of reading, but, like “the Reader” of which he speaks, what lives in his poems pre-exists the works addressed to (or by) them. These poems merely “imitate” the lives and voices that precede it. In a gesture that freezes an act of reading, relegating it to an exhausted past rather than an indeterminate future, Wordsworth states that “the Reader”—and in 1802, “my Reader”— is someone other than “you.” How does this obscure address—and the attendant interruption of reading—affect the reading that Wordsworth is at work to ensure? What kind reading would leave the reader “in the company of flesh and blood”? Is this third-person addressee a dead abstraction or living substance or something else altogether? By focusing on Wordsworth’s understanding of personification, we might begin to approach these questions. In explaining what the reader will find in his poems, Wordsworth suggests three uses for personifications: they can be used as “a mechanical device of style,” “a family language,” or—and this is the only use that he condones—“a figure of speech occasionally prompted by passion” (131).

Naked Language, Naked Life    In the first example, personifications are dismissed because their aim is to elevate poetry, and they achieve this aim by dividing poetic from everyday language (device is linked etymologically to divide), and, above all, because they are understood to be mechanical, rather than natural or human, functions. At the same time, “personifications” are a means of establishing family relations and lines of inheritance ordered not by blood (organic, natural means) but by convention (the laws of prescription). Personifications are the work and the appearance in and through the work of insensate machines: automatons that passionlessly animate abstract ideas, rather than listen to or speak in, which is to say, “imitate,” the “very language of men.” In the second case, personifications are a “family language”: a language that appears to create relations of “flesh and blood” between poets but accomplishes these ties through juridical rather than natural inheritance. Finally, while Wordsworth rejects personifications in order to invent a poetry of man, a personal poetry defined as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (rather than a mechanical reproduction or family inheritance), he also allows rare yet necessary personifications insofar as they are “a figure of speech occasionally prompted by passion” (131). In other words, in certain contexts, personifications indicate not dead mechanisms but “the company of flesh and blood.” In a reading of Wordsworth’s “strange fits,” Barbara Johnson links Wordsworth’s exclusion of mechanical personifications and contingent acceptance of certain, passionate personifications to his definition of poetry as the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling.” As Johnson elaborates it: Wordsworth understands poets to access by habit the overflow that is essential to “all good poetry,” and Wordsworth even goes so far as to claim that passion can be obtained “blindly and mechanically.” In defining poetic composition in this manner, Wordsworth posits as essential to good poetry the criteria on the basis of which he dismisses personification from it. Johnson recognizes the return of the machine in the poetry of passion as “the acting out of an insight into the nature of poetry and the poetic process . . . the problem [of any modern theory of poetic language] of articulating authenticity with conventionality, originality and continuity, freshness with what is recognizably ‘fit’ to be called poetic.”15 Drawing on Johnson’s reading, we can recognize the appearance of an ambiguous synecdoche of the human—“flesh and blood”—at the very moment that such poetic figures of speech are censored as the acting out of an insight

   Chapter 2 into the nature of poetry and human life. What—or who—is signified by this figure? There are at least five possible answers to this question. 1. Offered as an opposition to a mechanical figure or mere abstraction, flesh and blood seems to indicate living substance. Indeed, flesh and blood is the substance of living being (animal life) and finite existence. 2. Flesh and blood names the bodily mechanism, a circulation ­machine. 3. As a synecdoche of human life, flesh and blood takes a part (the body— animal or, as Descartes would say, machine) to stand in for a whole (human life).16 This means that the living being Wordsworth claims to produce is human only once it is read as a figure, understood to refer to a life that remains absent from it—a life that is apart from its part. If “flesh and blood” is a figure for human weakness and passion (including suffering and patience), or for humanity (including wickedness and inhumanity), it remains a figure that ushers in human life through a substitution of living substance in general (animal or machine) for human life. Rather than reconcile substance and spirit as human being (rather than incarnate man in language), this figure posits the human only when substance is not substance but figure. 4. Flesh and blood, far from being a Wordsworthian invention, is among the oldest of figures. It is passed on from Greek and Latin to English, appearing as early as 100 c.e., in Matthew 16:13–17: When Jesus came into the coasts of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, saying, Whom do men say that I the Son of man am? And they said, Some say that thou art John the Baptist: some, Elias; and others, Jeremias, or one of the prophets. He saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am? And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Bar Jonah: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.

And there is another instance in 1 Corinthians:49–50: “And as we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly. Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption.” In the popular understanding of the New Testament, flesh and blood is a figure for the human in opposition to the divine, a figure for human life as unredeemed, and a corrupt, base life that must

Naked Language, Naked Life    be overcome. But in addition, it can be understood to signify the “rotting” physicality of human life. 5. Finally, flesh and blood is a figure for kinship; it implies the shared blood of family members (rather than the legalistic claims of poetic inheritance). In this sense, flesh and blood names the presence of the other as a “relation” (rather than friend): a fragile, contingent, living being who resembles oneself and for whom one is responsible.17 In short, flesh and blood is both an anthropomorphism (“an identification at the level of substance”) and a trope (metaphor or metonymy, synecdoche).18 Thus, if flesh and blood is understood “literally” as organic substance, as the living or life-in-general, in opposition to dead metaphors and mechanized personifications, it is nonhuman (animal, mechanical) life. If flesh and blood is understood as human rather than nonhuman, as the mark of “real men” rather than artificial personifications, it signals the human only through an ancient figure. Rather than “naturalize” the human or reconcile the human and the nonhuman, the figure of flesh and blood indicates a human life that only can appear through the nonhuman life that figures it, that is, that appears only in its absence. Wordsworth offers a poetry of both living substance in general and living substance as the figure of the human, a figure that, rather than substantializing the human, renders the human as a figural effect. Indeed, this figuration may already be what is at stake in the strange cover-up through which this passage at once addresses and fails to address the reader: wherein a first-person subject speaks of a third person who is, but also is not, its addressee. The gesture with which Wordsworth seems to avoid the pretensions of apostrophe (the turn to address the reader directly as a “you”) is also the gesture through which he renders the reader a personification. While promising to keep his reader in the company of “flesh and blood” means that Wordsworth will animate her, evoke her feelings, fill her with passion, move, and interest her—that is to say, address her as human—he also avoids the direct address that would achieve this animation, instead referring to her experience of reading as an event yet to occur, even if it is already determined and fully described. The experience of reading—both anticipated by and described in this preface, an experience that is accessed through the preface that assumes and forecloses a reading of the poems it precedes—leaves in question the status

   Chapter 2 of a “reader” programmed to remain indistinguishably among kin (“flesh and blood”) and among the living (“flesh and blood”), a reader who is at once kept alive (open to the future) and left for dead (one for whom all of this already has taken place). Wordsworth’s promise to keep the reader “in the company of flesh and blood” is also a promise to sustain relations among kin. It thus reflects the kinship of the reader (a personification) and the poet (“a man speaking to men”), as well as the kinship of the reader with these poems: their living substance becomes his body, face, and life. Yet, insofar as the reader is a personification, Wordsworth’s promise portends his poetry’s production of personifications. In other words, Wordsworth promises to keep the reader among personifications (her kin, her “flesh and blood”) and among the living (“flesh and blood”). But if the living are kin (or akin) to personifications, this means that they are mere figures (“flesh and blood” becomes a personification through kinship). Wordsworth suggests that this kinship will animate and address the reader, turning her into living flesh rather than dead figure. At stake in Wordsworth’s exclusion of personifications is the life of the reader. It would seem, then, that Wordsworth’s poetry merely draws its “life” from the personifications he claims to exclude. One way of explaining this situation would be to say that this aporetic structure displaces the mention of personification with its use. Yet “flesh and blood,” this new (and still very old) figure, is too ambivalent, too unmanageable to leave us quietly content in the knowledge that William Wordsworth remains helplessly susceptible to the personifications he claims to censor. When Wordsworth treats the reader as a personification, he renders “flesh and blood” to be both the nonspeaking, nonhuman life we make speak (i.e., animate and personify) and the personified substance that merely resembles us. Rather than reconcile these oppositions, Wordsworth’s poetry of human passion sustains the division of life and figure. This means that every consideration of Wordsworth’s poetry on our part is already the response of (a) personification—our speaking life as the animation of a personification and our production of the speaking life of his text. To find ourselves in “the company of flesh and blood” (as the text promises and describes—turning the past into the absolute future and the reader into a specter) is to find ourselves successfully addressed as personifications, human inhabitants of a living world, which also means to find

Naked Language, Naked Life    ourselves the source of a living world that emerges dead like us. If, at the same time, this figure keeps us among the living—if it turns us, personified readers, into beings who are “in the company of flesh and blood”—it establishes the possibility of a specular scene in which our life is at stake. This life is not only a human life, but it is a living in general (“flesh and blood”) that is separate and yet indissociable from the human life it can only figure. In the place of incarnation, we are left with a poetry of flesh and blood—a poetry in which figure lives on.19 By turning now to an oddly futuristic narrative that Wordsworth appends to the 1802 revision of the preface, we can perceive the full force of his defense of poetry against personifications.

A Poetics of Flesh and Blood II Wordsworth seems to acknowledge that at least part of the urgency of his defense of poetry is that he is at work to secure a lasting function for poetry. He seems to worry that if poetry is merely a technology—a mechanical device for donating human life—it is bound to become a relic. Thus, in defending a poetry that does not animate mechanically, that does not merely create automatons (or personifications), but that supports and sustains human life, Wordsworth also defends poetry against its potential for exhaustion. Wordsworth introduces his narrative of poetry’s potential with a long effusion on the work of the poet and the meaning of poetry. Having devoted the bulk of the preface to an explanation of the nondifference between poetry and prose, and having answered the questions, “What is meant by the word Poet? What is a Poet? To whom does he address himself?” (138), with a definition of the poet as “a man speaking to men” (138), Wordsworth goes on to ask what the poet does, specifically what he does— and what he will do—in distinction from “men of science.” In this wildly optimistic (and at the same time, radically leveling) passage, Wordsworth figures the poet not only as one who “keep[s] the Reader in the company of flesh and blood,” but as one whose song “binds together” all human beings now or ever to have lived on the earth: The Poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion. Poetry is the breath

   Chapter 2 and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science. Emphatically may it be said of the Poet, as Shakespeare hath said of man, “that he looks before and after.” He is the rock defence for human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere with him relationship and love. In spite of difference of soil and climate, language and manners, of laws and customs: in spite of things silently gone out of mind, and things violently destroyed; the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time. . . . Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge—it is as immortal as the heart of man. (141)

Unwilling to believe that the poet’s extraordinary powers of animation and social unification are limited only to the present (albeit a present in which the poet recovers all that is past, all that is lost), Wordsworth fictions a future in which the poet will remain “rock defence for human nature; an upholder and preserver.” At the very moment that Wordsworth promises the enduring life of poetry and imagines the capacity for poetic transformation to extend beyond “difference[s] of soil and climate, language and manners, of laws and customs,” to the point at which it even will include automatons in its efforts, “flesh and blood” again emerges as part of the experiment. Until this point, “flesh and blood” named poetry’s proper outcome—an effect that we saw was human to the extent that it was a figure, nonhuman to the extent that it named a living substance. Yet here, “flesh and blood” explicitly names a nonhuman life that can be anthropomorphized, a life that can (and must) be “transfigured” by poetry. “Flesh and blood” emerges as the name of a being that a poet must make human. Moreover, it names the being whose existence conditions rather than threatens the survival of poetry (understood as both a subjective and objective genitive: poetry as what will survive and the survival that poetry effects). Wordsworth’s allegory of the future enacts and anticipates poetry’s survival; it opens with a hypothetical account of the risk of poetry’s extinction and concludes with an affirmation of its apparent resilience: If the labours of Men of science should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the Poet will sleep then no more than at present, but he will be ready to follow the steps of the Man of science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the science itself. The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or the Mineralogist, will

Naked Language, Naked Life    be as proper objects of the Poet’s art as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us, and the relations under which they are contemplated by the followers of these respective sciences shall be manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings. If the time should ever come when what is now called science, thus familiarised to men, shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus produced as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man. (141)

M. H. Abrams reads this passage to “herald the poetry of machinisme and the industrial revolution.”20 The “material revolution, direct or indirect,” that Wordsworth here anticipates would allow for expanded access to the world. This expansion is not only the effect of a world of machines that do the work of men and through which men work and become parts of machines, but it is also a world in which the possibilities now attributed to poetry will be taken over by science. Wordsworth projects a world in which scientific technology could replace poetry because it—rather than poetry—would have human life and form as its proper object, because it—like poetry—would deal in (and as) “flesh and blood.” Rather than propose a nostalgic or evasive poetics or promise that the poetry of the future will save us from modernity, Wordsworth instead conceives of poetry as an active participant in—even the sustenance of—modern science. Yet, his elaboration of the risks and opportunities of this modernity is far from uncomplicated. Wordsworth first accounts for the threat to poetry by acknowledging that poetry could become obsolete if the range of objects accessible to sense changed and expanded. He anticipates a future in which we will be able to see and feel those objects that until this point only poetry has given us to feel. Having accounted for this potential expansion of world, he goes on to acknowledge the possibility that science might also expand human sense. He anticipates a new man, able to see more and feel more than today’s man, not only because research has led to the discovery of new objects and thus expanded the capacity of the subject, allowing him to see and feel what before now he could neither see nor feel, but because the subject’s very capacity for sense has been expanded or intensified. Finally, Wordsworth recognizes the possibility that science, rather than poetry, might put us “in the company of flesh and blood,” which is to say that science will take man as its object. Science (still a science tied to ­Paracelsus and the Illuminati)

   Chapter 2 not only would build machines and not only would expand human sense, but it would make men. Until the point of this imagined future (which is also to say, beginning from the moment of this text and the poems that this text at once reflects upon and promises), poetry has been (and only now at this very moment comes to be) dedicated to preserving and protecting the life and voice of man. At the moment that Wordsworth invents romantic—or modern—poetry, he also invents a poetry that will survive its ends and be oriented toward the ends of man.21 Poetry’s relation to modern science will follow at least two itineraries. In the first place, Wordsworth seems to suggest that science will be modeled after the poetry that he envisages. This projection of a science ­modeled after poetry also guarantees the future of the poetry. Yet, this promise also bears a risk, which might be risk of any imitation (including the imitation that this poetry undertakes when it imitates real men): the risk that what is imitated will be made obsolete by the imitation—in this case, the risk of poetry’s obsolescence. Although this projected science is modeled after Wordsworth’s projected (and already reflected) poetry, Wordsworth acknowledges that the poet nevertheless stands ready to follow the scientist (who follows him). The crossing of these anticipations and followings thus leads Wordsworth to state neither the priority of poetry nor that of science, but rather becomes the rhetorical condition of a future in which the poet stands at the scientist’s side, “carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the science itself,” a world in which the poet seems to animate the scientist’s machines (141). Yet, Wordsworth tells at least two stories here. In the first place, he tells a story about language and the language of man, about the accessibility and inaccessibility of scientific language, the accessibility and inaccessibility of scientific objects in direct relation to the language in which they are communicated. The role of the poet is thus to help scientists to communicate their findings. In the second place, he tells a story about science’s objects, its inventions and discoveries. Both are stories of “flesh and blood.” In the first reading, “flesh and blood” is a name for the living language of men, the language in which science will become accessible and through which science will become human science; in the second reading, “flesh and blood” names the scientific object, the material and the objective of a science—the human form. If poetry will anthropomorphize science (as this account of poetry already does when it

Naked Language, Naked Life    accounts for a science that could be “ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood”), this means that it will make science communicate the way a man communicates with other men, make it act and appear human, and that it will help science in the project of making human beings, making objects that act and appear human. In his commentary on Wordsworth’s preface, W. J. B. Owen virtually ignores this passage, and he entirely ignores Wordsworth’s projection of science and poetry joined together (as if in an erotic embrace) to produce a new being. He does, however, reflect momentarily on the science of his day to state that it “appears even further than in Wordsworth’s day from ‘putting on a form of flesh and blood,’ and is more and more concerned to clothe itself in mathematical symbols.” Owen sums up the situation by lamenting the fact that “Wordsworth’s hopes now seem further from realisation than they may have appeared to him.”22 With this statement, Owen essentially repeats Hegel’s account of the superiority of signs over symbols and hieroglyphs, while turning a theory of poetry that would seem to argue on behalf of a language of symbol (“flesh and blood”), rather than a language of allegory (“personification”), into a treatise in support of signification.23 Like Wordsworth, Owen too seems untroubled by the future that he seems to advocate—a future in which substance (“flesh and blood”) is a garment rather than a symbol, in which symbolic language is apparently noncommunicative and implicitly nonhuman. But if the possibility that science will speak of new objects and discoveries (indeed of us), in such a way that might also interest us, poses a threat to poetry’s livelihood, Words­ worth assures us that poets too can take up scientific objects.24 But just as Wordsworth ensures for the survival of poetry in modernity, so too does he admit that the task of the poet no longer will be merely to present—sustain and defend—man through poetry, no longer merely to keep readers “in the company of flesh and blood,” but to “transfigure” newly created beings into living men, to welcome science’s androids as men. Wordsworth is remarkably unfazed by this future. Indeed the possibility that a future science will begin to make men proves far less threatening to him than the possibility that poetry would continue to rely upon mechanical devices of language like personification. Wordsworth in fact is ready and willing to help in the project of making humans, a project that seems to suggest the most threatening of mechanical inventions: an automaton who (thanks to the poets) would be indistinguishable from a

   Chapter 2 man. And this is where the very phrase that Wordsworth earlier offers as the alternative to personification, and as his poetry’s source and issue in living substance, returns—not as poetry’s effect, but as science’s effect, not as a human life, but as a nonliving, not-yet-human form that poetry must transfigure. The poet of the future will have as his charge the animation and transfiguration of a “form of flesh and blood.” For Wordsworth, it seems that the anthropomorphism of this “form of flesh and blood” will be the survival—if not the salvation—of poetry. This allegory tells the story of poetry’s self-sacrifice, of the future that this sacrifice guarantees, and the rhetoric of survival that it invents.

The Rhetoric of Survival My reading of Wordsworth’s preface up to this point has shown that “flesh and blood” emerges there as both the proper (read: human, living) issue of poetic mimesis and the inhuman issue of science, a form of life that only poetry can make human. In the first case, “flesh and blood” is the apparent alternative to personification; in the second it is what remains in need of the poetic transfiguration that I have called “anthropomorphism.” That said, “flesh and blood” also is a trope—a metonymy of life and human life—that remains inhuman. It marks the difference between Wordsworth’s poetry and the mechanical or inadequately human poetics that precedes it, and it marks the animal (or machine) life that a future science will come to make. In other words, to read Wordsworth’s poetics of “flesh and blood” is to consider the relation between anthropomorphism and trope in the lyric. In his essay “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric” Paul de Man distinguishes between anthropomorphism and trope by explaining that an anthropomorphism is an “identification on the level of substance.”25 De Man’s definition of anthropomorphism is notable for its distance from a dictionary definition or etymology. The Oxford English Dictionary, for example, defines anthropomorphism as an “attribution of human form or character”—whether to a deity, or in a later definition, to “anything impersonal or irrational” (including animals).26 De Man goes beyond this definition to suggest that what is attributed or ascribed through anthropomorphism is not an appearance, but a substance (essence) or subsistence

Naked Language, Naked Life    (existence). And in this respect he also implies that man is merely a synonym of substance, and that any “identification at the level of substance,” which is to say, every symbolism, is already a humanism. This mode of defining rhetorical terms nontraditionally is characteristic of de Man’s approach. While his explanation of prosopopoeia seems to emphasize etymology (prosopon-poein, or “face-making”), it also avoids any mention of “personification,” the Latinate translation of prosopopoeia and the term with which nearly every dictionary or rhetoric handbook defines the term.27 In defining prosopon as face and mask, and in focusing on the play and the violence that attends this double meaning, de Man excludes the definition of prosopon as person. As Cynthia Chase reminds us, de Man’s definition of prosopopoeia is a reading. While this definition/reading seems neologistic, it also is accomplished through a selective reworking, rather than total abandonment, of the etymological archive. Similarly, while Nietzsche’s essay “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” is the occasion of de Man’s essay on the (non)difference between anthropomorphism and trope, the source of his definition remains somewhat obscure. Missing from it—as from the definition of prosopopoeia—is a reference to what is most obvious or expected, to what we typically understand to be the essential meaning of the term. In the case of prosopopoeia, de Man writes of faces and masks but not of persons; in the case of anthropomorphism, he writes of substances and names but not of men. What therefore does de Man signify by anthropomorphism? As an “identification,” anthropomorphism is a means of conceiving or effecting unity or sameness. As an identification that takes place “on the level of substance,” it effaces the figural or linguistic condition of its unifying act. De Man goes on to explain that this identification “thus implies the constitution of specific entities prior to their confusion,” stating, but indeed not stating, that from the perspective of anthropomorphism (ideology), “the human” remains prior to any attribution of human form or figure.28 Anthropomorphism assumes that “man” or “the human” would not be an effect of figure or even a metalepsis; indeed, the human would not be contingent at all but rather would signify a prior unity, a unity marked by the existence of a proper name.29 If, as de Man claims, anthropomorphism ends in a proper name rather than a proposition, if it describes the attribution of a name, this is because its term has only a single sense, it effects an essential identity: the human.

   Chapter 2 In de Man’s account, prosopopoeia differs from anthropomorphism in at least two ways. The first corresponds to the difference between a substance and an appearance. Prosopopoeia in de Man’s reading of it does not give what is already given (an essence), but rather, what it gives (the face) is given only through its figure. The fact that figure in French names both a figure of speech and a face signals the importance of prosopopoeia as the figure of lyric.30 Thus, and this is the second aspect, prosopopoeia acknowledges a mutual substitution, a specular process or movement, rather than an identification of entities that might pre-exist this process.31 In recognizing prosopopoeia as the operative trope of literature and its criticism, de Man turns a history of literature and a practice of reading away from its traditional preoccupation with the human (which it supports and forms). This gesture already signals that a critique of humanism is underway.32 Etymologically and rhetorically, this face (prosopon) is a figure (rather than a substance, an appearance rather than an essence), and it is in this sense also that de Man registers the difference between anthropomorphism and trope (or figure). In some respect, then, Wordsworth’s “flesh and blood” would be readable as a bold and unequivocal anthropomorphism: the substantialization of poetry, in which poetry is posited (but also reflected) as the living being of human mind. Yet, as I already have been at work to suggest, Words­worth’s account of poetry’s “identification at the level of substance” (rather than at the level of abstraction, as is the case with personification as he understands it) occurs at the expense of the human, rather than as its support and affirmation. Or, put another way, it occurs in the dramatization of the human as either mere substance (living-in-general, nonhuman living) or as trope (metonymy, synecdoche—the very figures that Fontanier identifies with personification). In some respect, de Man can be understood to describe this alternative when he avoids calling anthropomorphism the ascription of the human, and instead associates anthropomorphism with the assumption of substance—with being, subsistence in general, noncontingency, nonpredication, which is to say with the preNietzschean, pre-Freudian (and to a certain extent, pre-Kantian) subject.33 In avoiding the “human,” de Man’s rhetoric does not signify merely a decision between one interpretation of the human over another. Rather, like Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein before it, it instantiates a radical change in idiom as thinking, or in his case, as reading. In the preface to Lyrical Ballads, “flesh and blood” is the figure of

Naked Language, Naked Life    the human and the not-yet-human. It is the figure of the human as what precedes figuration and what good poetry makes manifest, which is to say that it is the condition and the outcome of Wordsworth’s poetry. Yet, “flesh and blood” also is the name of a life that can become human only through poetry. It is the alternative to the animation of the nonhuman or abstract (personification) and at the same time it is the nonhuman life that can speak only through poetry’s animation. The question that faces us is how Wordsworth’s figure (or antifigure) of “flesh and blood” bears upon the rhetoric of romanticism—as it reflects a poetic alternative to personification, on the one hand, and a coming anthropomorphism as the future of poetry, on the other. How, in other words, does Wordsworth’s preface help us to think further about the life— and afterlife—of poetry? My questions are not merely empirical. (Can we say that poetry continues to matter? Poetry today is at once thriving and obscure.) Nor are these questions driven by nostalgia (as if to suggest that poetry, rather than cinema or critical theory, is the form that will sustain us). Rather, I wish to ask what place poetry—already with Wordsworth—has in accounting, not only for everyday life or sublime interruption, but also for human life as survival. Should Wordsworth’s poetry—should the figures of lyric—turn out to bear life, not in its power and activity, but in its passivity and its passion, in its division and its survival, this discovery might lead us to think differently about the survival of poetry and its figures. We might be able to approach romanticism (and readings of romanticism) as neither evasion nor cover-up, but as a discourse that sustains human life in language, that sustains life as a life beyond life, a nonspeaking, nonhuman life that poetry welcomes as human, a life that poetry allows to speak while maintaining the division and the nonidentity of living and speaking. Lyric anthropomorphism—understood as an “identification at the level of substance”— and prosopopoeia—understood as a facing in and through language, a facing that admits face is figure—remain distinct not because anthropomorphism is a humanism whereas prosopopoeia is the term through which the critique of humanism can be undertaken. Rather, anthropomorphism in Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads is the means through which poetry’s act emerges both as a “transfiguration” of a nonhuman form into a being that can be welcomed as human and as a retrospective, yet nevertheless anticipatory announcement that poetry can either posit nonhuman

   Chapter 2 life (inscription, “flesh and blood”) or figure humans in their constitutive absence, but it cannot posit human life without figure. In Wordsworth’s preface, lyric anthropomorphism, rather than redeeming life through language or relying upon a fallacious assumption of human givenness, has another imperative and another effect: it is the means through which nonhuman life survives as human and through which poetry bears nonhuman life. Finally, it is the means through which poetry will survive. If anthropomorphism is poetry’s survival, and if poetry must make human the substance that already has been posited as its living, human issue, as the life that poetry sustains, it seems as if the gesture through which Wordsworth ensures the future existence of poetry is the very gesture through which he registers poetry’s issue (the natural, living substance that sustains it and that it sustains) as neither human nor living. Thus, if the poetry that Wordsworth invents is distinguished from its predecessors because it claims to avoid the personification of abstract ideas and promises instead to keep “the Reader in the company of flesh and blood,” this substance, which I have suggested signifies a life-in-general that registers the absence of human life, now emerges as a form of what is neither living nor human. Taken together, the contemporary poetry of the Lyrical Ballads (which is the poetry Wordsworth figures as the poetry still to come, the poetry only introduced here) turns out to be more radical, more interruptive than the poetry that Wordsworth will imagine to accompany science in a future whose promise he can only remember. The poetry of Lyrical Ballads is radical because it presents “flesh and blood.” If this gesture would seem to be the most naturalizing, most symbolizing, most redemptive of transformations—in which an apostrophic animation or dramatization of voice is taken as evidence of living being, not a fictional being of which it is the cause (like Lucy, or the Boy of Winander, who we understand at least in some respect to be stand-ins for Wordsworth himself ), but as living substance, which is to say that the inscription itself or “poetry” is “flesh and blood”—we also discover that this apparent naturalization of poetry as life itself, as the being of human life, the life in and through which we live, emerges as nonhuman and nonliving. The poetry of the Lyrical Ballads makes no effort at overcoming or transfiguring, but rather gives us ourselves and our poetry as “flesh and blood.” If poetry’s future task might seem more radical, more disruptive, its gesture, however generous, is predicated upon the (anxious) acknowledg-

Naked Language, Naked Life    ment of the inadequacy of “flesh and blood,” as if—faced with modernity—poetry could do better than it has. How should we read poetry’s last gasp? Is it a gesture through which the human remains thoroughly intact, in which the human and the “as”-human are maintained in their difference, a liberal humanist gesture of opening that sustains a division within the human, and that sustains the human as the ground of recognition and life? Or does this gesture register a radical act of democracy that divides the human, leaving human life open to nonhuman life and at the same time a shelter of it, a gesture that, as we already have seen, reflects back upon the invention of a human poetry to disclose it as a poetry of the nonliving and the nonhuman? Is Wordsworth the most radical thinker of democratic poetry—a poetry far in excess of the fiction of poetry as a world wide web? Or is he rather a theoretician of the survival of the human despite its opening to androids and automatons, despite the effect of this gesture, which is the dismissal of human poetry as nonhuman? I would argue that it is ultimately not only the strange and wonderful allegory of the union between science and poetry that indicates Wordsworth’s radical poetics of survival, but also that the poetry of the future here recalled, the poetry of the Lyrical Ballads, becomes the occasion of this opening. Flesh and blood—this natural substance—is human only when it is a figure, and when it is understood as a figure, it is only a mechanical device of rhetoric. Herein lies the paradox of the first appearance of “flesh and blood” in the preface. Yet, if the second instance names flesh and blood as a figure, a garment, something that could be put on—like Vesalius’s anatomic images—this does not exclude flesh and blood from becoming human, that is, what can be animated and addressed (“welcomed” in an apostrophic gesture). Indeed, Wordsworth seems to imply that only the poet (rather than the scientist) knows that this being is not a human being, only the poet can create a world in which nonhumans are addressed as humans, in which, for example, we recognize “flesh and blood” as the source of a voice that we hear and to which we respond. To read Words­ worth’s figure, to anthropomorphize flesh and blood, is the act and the risk of reading. Even as we read “flesh and blood” as nonhuman life, even in the gesture through which we read its figure, we find ourselves addressed by a text that puts us in the company of “flesh and blood” that animates us as readers, turning a personification into a substantial, living being, even if this life is nonhuman, the life of figure.

   Chapter 2 It might seem as if this life—Wordsworth’s naked life, the life of naked language, “flesh and blood”—is what Agamben in Homo Sacer has called “bare” or “naked” life, a life separated from its way of life, without face. Agamben, after Foucault, understands “bare life” as the outcome of biopolitics, a modern (but also quite ancient) politics through which sovereignty is constituted, not by a capacity to kill (or perhaps to forgive, to release), but rather by making live, by sustaining life apart from political life. For Agamben, this specter of power and violence is a being whose life can be reduced merely to living, and the hope of a future politics would be the emergence of a new being whose life would be inseparable from its form. Thus he writes: Intellectuality and thought are not a form of life among others in which life and social production articulate themselves, but they are rather the unitary power that constitutes the multiple forms of life as form-of-life. In the face of state sovereignty, which can affirm itself only by separating in every context naked life from its form, they are the power that incessantly reunites life to its form or prevents it from being dissociated from its form. . . . Thought is form-of-life, life that cannot be segregated from its form; and anywhere the intimacy of this inseparable life appears, in the materiality of corporeal processes and of habitual ways of life no less than in theory, there and only there is thought. And it is this thought, this form-of-life, that, abandoning naked life to “Man” and to the “Citizen,” who clothe it temporarily and represent it with their “rights,” must become the guiding concept and the unitary center of the coming politics.34

In some sense, Agamben’s formulation of “bare life” and his anticipation of a coming politics seems familiar to us as readers of Wordsworth, although for Wordsworth it is “poetry” rather than “intellectuality” or “thought” (Agamben never says “philosophy”) that has the “unitary power” that Agamben anticipates. Indeed, Wordsworth explains in the preface that the task of the poet is not like that of the chemist or anatomist, the doctor or the lawmaker; rather, poetry (today and in the future), like thought, might be understood to “reunite life to its form.” Furthermore, for Wordsworth, as for Agamben, this reuniting is not merely a matter of “theory” but rather of living—of “corporeal processes” and “habitual ways of life.” Yet despite these apparent similarities in diagnosis and aim, if not exactly in idiom, it also would seem that the ends of Wordsworth’s and Agamben’s projections are entirely at odds: it would seem as if Wordsworth anticipates the coming and endurance of a truly human poetry, whereas Agamben seems

Naked Language, Naked Life    concerned to offer a coming politics that no longer would be oriented toward man. Agamben understands bare life to be symptomatic of a politics oriented by “rights” and “citizens.” These terms, like “man,” are mere “garments” that cover over the “bare life” they nevertheless sustain. Thus, the possibility of politics otherwise, a politics that no longer would be organized according to the separability of life and the production and nourishment of unlivable lives within life, would require the abandonment of the division between form and content; it would require a new symbolism that would replace the outdated and implicitly violent terms through which our lives today are ordered. Discourses of “human rights,” in Agamben’s analysis, fail in this respect because they only keep bare life clothed, rather than providing new and other modes of living. But however apparently new this thought might be in the field of politics and critical theory, Agamben’s call remains romantic. Agamben’s account of politics redeploys the terms that Wordsworth offers in opposition to personifications. As de Man shows in “Autobiography as De-Facement,” terms like man—remain garments that do not reconcile or restore life but sustain it as “naked life.” Yet, more than this, in reading Wordsworth, we also saw that the coming poetics (which is also a politics of hospitality marked by the arrival of and welcoming of a new being) fails to reconcile the form of life (language) with its living. Wordsworth imagines that a new being will emerge when science is ready “to put on the form of flesh and blood,” prepared to clothe itself in a new garment, not merely as a man, but in the garment of apparent—but only apparent—life, a garment that we might call “form-of-life.” Reading Wordsworth, we understood the effects of this projection to bear upon the poetry of the immediate (and not only the distant) future, the poetry of romanticism that Wordsworth at this moment was inventing, that his essay introduces and reflects. For at the moment when poetry promises a new politics and a new unity, the moment when it displaces personification and even—for a brief but essential instant—promises and posits not man but “flesh and blood,” it offers not life in its inseparability but a substance inseparable only from figure, an emergence constituted by its division. This apparent substance is at once the literal stuff of living in general and the figure of the human; it is poetry as inscription (letter or picture) and poetry as sign and figure. These competing and mutually

   Chapter 2 exclusive possibilities can be thoroughly conjoined, emerging as inseparable from one another (as “flesh and blood,” as kin), but this inseparability in no way overcomes the division that constitutes them. “Flesh and blood” merely bears the inseparability and the division of bare life and human life (figure), the living and the human, and, as such, establishes flesh and blood as the figure of a life beyond life, a life that might nevertheless be welcomed by poetry—by the radically democratic gesture of a poetry to come, which includes the poetry of the Lyrical Ballads—“as human.” In other words, Wordsworth’s coming poetics, like Agamben’s coming politics, rather than vanquish the divisions of life, shows us instead that even the life of symbol remains destined to produce neither a living substance nor a human life, but merely a life beyond life. The coming politics, like the coming poetry, far from freeing us from the figure of survival (far from freeing us from romanticism), leaves us sustained and nourished by it.

3 Testimony and Trope in Frankenstein That at the “bottom” of the human being there is nothing other than an impossibility of seeing—this is the Gorgon, whose vision transforms the human being into a non-human. That precisely this inhuman impossibility of seeing is what calls and addresses the human, the apostrophe from which human beings cannot turn away—this and nothing else is testimony. The Gorgon and he who has seen her and the Muselmann and he who bears witness to him are one gaze; they are a single impossibility of seeing. giorgio agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz

It is no surprise that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818, 1831) has received attention as a work of fictional autobiography.1 Shelley was married to a poet in whom we continue to have prurient as well as intellectual interest, and in whose prose the novel opens. She was the daughter of two enormously influential theorists and fiction writers, well known for their ideas about and practices of parenting. Moreover, Frankenstein is composed of three first-person autobiographical accounts and is framed by a preface and an introduction that recall the notorious ghost story contest that was the story’s initial occasion. For these reasons, and others still, Shelley’s novel has been read both as a legible autobiography of a woman author (daughter and wife) and as an allegory of autobiography, in which Shelley’s monster is understood as “a figure for autobiography as such.” But to read the monster as “a figure for autobiography” is already to suggest that Shelley’s monster is the figure of autobiography: prosopopoeia, the “fiction

   Chapter 3 of an apostrophe.”2 Indeed, prosopopoeia and apostrophe condition and name the central events in Frankenstein: the discovery of the origin of life, the pursuit of the ends of man (and earth), and the creation of a monster witness to the ends it suspends. As a story of the crisis of the human, and as an account of inhuman survival, Shelley’s novel raises key questions, not— or not only—about autobiography and its figures, about the assumption of a self in and as writing, but rather about testimony and its figures. Along these lines, the novel initiates a rethinking of romantic rhetoric, one attuned to the tensions and intersections not only of autobiography and fiction but also of testimony and poetry. The novel shows how lyric figures effect human life as a life beyond life, and it shows that the rhetoric of romanticism is a rhetoric of survival.3

“. . . the apostrophe from which human beings ­cannot turn away . . . ” When he was seventeen years old, Victor Frankenstein’s parents arranged for his departure from their “domestic circle” in Switzerland, to go to Ingolstadt, Germany, so that he might “enter the world, and take [his] station among other human beings.”4 His mother’s death causes a delay of many months, but once at the university, Victor spends two years studying chemistry under the direction of M. Waldman and M. Krempe, and finally “becom[es] as well acquainted with the theory and practice of natural philosophy as depended on the lessons of any of the professors at Ingolstadt” (33). Surpassing his professors, and on the verge of causing them (and all of us) to “lose face” (as Waldman later will exclaim “D——n the fellow! . . . I assure you he has outstript us all . . . if he is not soon pulled down, we shall all be out of countenance” [49; my emphasis]), Victor decides it is time that he return to the family fold. However, an unquenched interest in the origin of life keeps him from returning there, instead staying at work on the project that will leave us “out of countenance.” Years later, reflecting on his university days, Victor explains to Robert Walton that he had “determine[d] thenceforth to apply [him]self more particularly” to the inquiry into the origins of life by studying physiology—in this case, by visiting charnel houses and digging up graves. As if testing Wordsworth’s dictum that “origin and tendency are notions insep-

Testimony and Trope in Frankenstein    arably ­ co‑relative,” Victor sets out from the assumed relation of origin and end.5 He wants to know where life—not just human life, but life in general—originates. Determined to overcome the “cowardice or carelessness” (33) that has kept other researchers from unfolding the “mysteries” of life, he undertakes to examine fresh corpses.6 Victor thus promises to surpass human limits and “tastes” in order to arrive at an understanding of the origin of human life. This commitment to pass beyond the human is also the mark of the human in Shelley’s novel. The human witnesses the human only in surpassing it; however, to surpass the human is monstrous—unbearable and obscene. Indeed, Victor explains that it is his great enthusiasm for the project that makes such grim work possible: “Unless I had been animated by an almost supernatural enthusiasm, my application to this study would have been irksome, and almost intolerable” (33). Enthusiasm—or inspiration, enthusiasmos—allows Victor to bear the unbearable. Animating and selfdividing, it lets him live with death and among the dead without being paralyzed by horror.7 Yet Victor also admits that he is able to enter into the world of the dead, not only because an “almost supernatural enthusiasm” blinds him to the awfulness of his labor, but because his father’s tutelage already will have immunized him against “supernatural horrors.” As he explains: To examine the causes of life, we must first have recourse to death. I became acquainted with the science of anatomy: but this was not sufficient; I must also observe the natural decay and corruption of the human body. In my education my father had taken the greatest precautions that my mind should be impressed with no supernatural horrors. I do not ever remember to have trembled at a tale of superstition, or to have feared the apparition of a spirit. Darkness had no effect upon my fancy; and a church-yard was to me merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life, which, from being the seat of beauty and strength, had become food for the worm. (33–34)

Victor is able to endure the images of “natural decay,” not only because of his almost supernatural disposition, but also because his Enlightenment education allows him to see corpses not as “supernatural horrors” but as part of the food chain. To see the dead body as “food for the worm”—rather than as a den of ghosts or spirits—is, however, to be able to see what ghosts and spirits disclose, and what this project already has transformed

   Chapter 3 him into: the excess of life, a life that exceeds the end of life. While Victor has an admittedly demystified sense of the grave and the corpse, it is this demystification of the supernatural that conditions the “almost supernatural” work of scientific research. If superstition (the admission and attendant fear of the supernatural) would have kept Victor from his discovery, his own supernatural powers make the discovery possible. They make it possible for him to witness the passage from death to life as the revelation of life’s origin. Trolling through graveyards, Victor therefore can analyze “every object the most insupportable to the delicacy of human feelings” (34). Victor’s supernatural enlightenment thus allows him to support the insupportable and see what humans cannot bear to see.8 Yet, Victor’s discovery of the origins of life is indissociable from the suspension of the limit he discovers. His own survival of the ends of man is at once the condition and the effect of the discovery. He explains: Now I was led to examine the cause and progress of this decay, and forced to spend days and nights in vaults and charnel houses. My attention was fixed upon every object the most insupportable to the delicacy of the human feelings. I saw how the fine form of man was degraded and wasted; I beheld the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life; I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of eye and brain. I paused, examining and analysing all the minutiae of causation, as exemplified in the change from life to death, and death to life, until from the midst of this darkness a sudden light broke in upon me—a light so brilliant and wondrous, yet so simple, that while I became dizzy with the immensity of the prospect which it illustrated, I was surprised that among so many men of genius, who had directed their inquiries towards the same science, that I alone should be reserved to discover so astonishing a secret. (34)

Once among the dead, Victor looks—even if to look is not to feel as a man, is to do what a man cannot do—and gives three accounts of what he sees: “I saw how the fine form of man was degraded and wasted; I beheld the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life; I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of eye and brain” (my emphasis). At first he seems to describe realistically something that can be seen, the process of degradation; he then goes on to describe a passage from death to life. This account— which is an account of “the corruption of death”—relies upon and interprets the “how” of man’s degradation. Victor grasps (beholds) by way of the double genitive the invisible passage from the dead to death to life, from death as corruption to the corruption of death, and this coincides with his

Testimony and Trope in Frankenstein    perception of a living face (of earth) as the issue of a dead body. The third account—in which he admits to seeing what his father taught him to see (the worm)—interprets the second account and marks a shift from progressive discovery to interpretive repetition. Victor sees the life that succeeds death in the worm that takes the corpse as the condition of its life. In other words, the passage from death to life (“the corruption of death”) that Victor sees does not (yet) coincide with the resuscitation of a single being, but rather involves the incorporation of the dead into “life” as the incessant life of the earth. A worm that inhabits—indeed, inherits—eye and brain gives an image to “the corruption of death.” It provides an image of the degraded corpse (the very image that allows Victor to make his discovery), and signals the return of the corpse (as food for the worm) to a fictional cycle of life. Victor interprets an inheritance as the passage from death to life— a passage that precludes any further passage, not because death is an end, but because upon this passage, life and death become indistiguishable and indissociable in the figure of the worm-infested face. When Victor discovers the origin of life, sees “how the worm inherited the wonders of eye and brain” (my emphasis), sees the image of “the corruption of death” and the passage of death into life, he enters into—as he witnesses—a world of neither death nor life, but of a life that endures in the absence of death. He discovers life—not as the seemingly palliative Wordsworthian intimation— but as the truth of intimation, as the endurance of living on. Moreover, if this discovery of the origin of life is, specifically, the discovery of human life, it coincides with an analogous passage of the human into the nonhuman. In his genius vision, a degraded animal becomes the “inheritor” of mind and vision, and even the most exalted organs of enlightenment become food for the worm. However, when Victor, thanks to his own superhuman position, witnesses the limits of man, he also discovers that the worm is man’s progeny, and that this image of this inheritance is also that of mortal ruin (the infested skull). Victor construes this inheritance as a figure of the death of man and the origin of life; its image allows him to perceive “the change from life to death, and death to life” in such a way that the passage marks both a tropological substitution and a real discovery. This double face of man’s suspension gives premature birth to the monster (life beyond life, human beyond human), whose birth coincides with Victor’s “discovery” of the ends of man. When Victor discovers the origins and ends of man—when he bears

   Chapter 3 what is “insupportable” to men and witnesses in the bodies of the dead the passage from death to life—he sees a face. By seeing the earth as a face (perceiving its “blooming cheek”), Victor seems to see the redemption of death in natural life. Yet the prosopopoeia (this facing) that allows death’s passage into life, also renders the earth an image of mortality: the face inhabited by worms. The facing of the earth is both an image of degradation and— inseparably—an image of enduring life. The earth—as face—remains in “bloom” even as corpses corrode; it is “mortalized” (faced) and its mortification is the sign of life’s recovery. However, what here figures corruption (worms devouring the face) is not corruption when the face is the face of earth, but is merely a sign of life. And this means that the life of the earth becomes the image of death’s corruption. The prosopopoeia that allows Victor to discover the origin of life in an interrogation of the carnage of death also allows him to witness “the corruption of death”—to see death, death without end. Turning death into life, turning the dead corpse into a sign of life, Victor at once discovers the origin of life and the truth of romantic rhetoric. The limit that Victor witnesses through prosopopoeia already coincides with emergence of a life beyond life—his own and the monster’s. When Victor witnesses the ends of life, he gives birth to the monstrous excess of what never can be witnessed. While prosopopoeia is the condition and effect—the origin and tendency—of the monster who marks their co-relation and betrays the attendant crisis of human ends, apostrophe is the condition and effect of the monster’s account.9 Apostrophe, furthermore, will make the monster “appear” and present him in and as a “figure of man.”10 But the “restoration of mortality” that the presentation of the monster would seem to imply—a restoration reinforced by the fact that the monster always responds when the dead or inanimate are addressed—suggests rather that apostrophe yields monstrosity, the “monstrosity” of (in)human speech.11 On his eventual return home to Switzerland, occasioned by the (monster’s) murder of his brother William, Victor melancholically approaches the mountain ranges that frame his “native town,” weeps “like a child,” and calls out: “Dear mountains! my own beautiful lake! how do you welcome your wanderer? Your summits are clear; the sky and lake are blue and placid. Is this to prognosticate peace, or to mock at my unhappiness?” (55). The call—a version of the lyric gesture of addressing the earth with

Testimony and Trope in Frankenstein    the assumption that it can respond—establishes a relation of nativity and origination: Victor belongs to the mountains as they belong to him. He identifies the calm landscape as a response—an enigmatic response that he is unable to interpret. The calm may be a true “sign” of what is to ensue or may be a false sign that would mock and deceive him. Once he takes nature as signifying and renders nature welcoming, it becomes impossible to tell what is a mask or deception and what is a prognosis; it is impossible to read the symptoms once they are understood as symptoms.12 This impossibility, the acknowledgment that the landscape may deceive, undercuts any promise, any “true” sign or “sign of truth.”13 While this apostrophe is retrospective—Victor cites it in telling Walton his story—it is met with an apostrophe in the present of narration, an apostrophe that is “used” rather than “mentioned.”14 Victor interrupts the narrative to address Walton directly: “I fear, my friend, that I shall render myself tedious by dwelling on these preliminary circumstances; but they were days of comparative happiness, and I think of them with pleasure. My country, my beloved country! who but a native can tell the delight I took in again beholding thy streams, thy mountains, and, more than all, thy lovely lake” (55).15 In a dizzying series of turns, a second apostrophe to his “beloved country” quickly subsumes the first apostrophe in which Victor addresses Walton as a friend, establishing the relation that Walton desires and that Victor already admits is unbearable. By invoking the nation, Victor’s question establishes that Walton, a nonnative of Switzerland, is unable to understand him, but the answer to the question “who but a native can tell . . . ?” is—as Victor already “knows,” and as the ensuing (and at this present moment, already past) events demonstrate—the monster. If the question of national sentiment seems rhetorical, stating nationalism as an “undeniable” fact, it turns out also to be (and thus to be undermined by) a real question, the answer to which Victor will come to “speak” and “see.”16 The question of prognosis or mockery is not only a matter of “reading” the signs in the landscape as it first appears but also of the landscape’s “response” to Victor’s apostrophic questions. The rhetorical figure that dominates Victor’s return to Switzerland—and his narrative of that return—is “apostrophe”: Victor addresses mountains, lake, country, friend, and his dead brother (a child for whom he once cared as if for a son), assuming that they might hear and respond to his call. Victor, the “native,” arrives

   Chapter 3 home, but so late that he is left outside of his gated hometown. Stuck, he decides to cross “his” lake in order to visit William’s grave, and is met by a fierce, blinding storm. Thunder “was echoed from Salêve, the Juras, and the Alps of Savoy; vivid flashes of lightning dazzled my eyes, illuminating the lake, making it appear like a vast sheet of fire; then for an instant every thing seemed a pitchy darkness, until the eye recovered itself from the preceding flash” (56). Blinded by the electrical storm, Victor calls to his dead brother: “William, dear angel! this is thy funeral, this thy dirge!” (56). And as soon as he invokes the dead, Victor “perceive[s] in the gloom a figure which stole from behind a clump of trees” (56). In apparent response to his apostrophe, a “figure” emerges from the shadowy landscape.17 The “figure” emerges from hiding only to remain hidden “in the gloom” that simultaneously describes the sky’s darkness (at the moment of this stormy funeral) and Victor’s emotional state (as if at a funeral). However, in the glimmer of a lightning flash that presents the monster as his “hideous progeny” and as his object, Victor suddenly finds his own weight unbearable and is “forced to lean against a tree for support.” In a chiasmic reversal, Victor literally “loses” some of his life at the moment he donates life and voice to “his” addressee: “A flash of lightning illuminated the object, and discovered its shape plainly to me; its gigantic stature, and the deformity of its aspect, more hideous than belongs to humanity, instantly informed me that it was the wretch, the filthy daemon to whom I had given life” (56). This sudden weakness dramatizes the privation that attends apostrophe’s seeming “restorations.” Here, the monster is “aligned” with apostrophe. He responds to and is called by each of Victor’s apostrophes. These responses at once demonstrate and mock apostrophic power, for the monster requires apostrophe in order to (dis)appear and to speak. Victor’s apostrophes do not recover calm by staging an exchange between the human and the earth, the speaking and the mute. Rather, they interrupt the “recovery” that they aim to commemorate or affirm. Victor’s revelatory glimpse of the monster in the flood and flash of light at once gives the “figure” to be seen in its hideousness, its informing deformity, its vivid inhumanity, and shocks the eye—as the monster himself shocks the eye. Thus, one can see what one can not bear to see. This blind(ing) image implicates the monster in William’s murder and the impending execution of the Frankensteins’ servant-friend Justine Moritz. It also betrays the landscape’s initial calm as a sign of mockery.18 To not be able to see

Testimony and Trope in Frankenstein    what one is not able to see—to not see what (would) prevent(s) one from seeing—is not to overcome the monster’s hideousness, not to transform a deformity into information. Rather, this privation in advance, which will recur as mist, gesture, and voice, indicates that the taking away of the eye (the turn away, the apostrophe) is the condition of “monstrous appearance” and “monstrous speech,” the speech of the unbearable. While Victor “summons” his progeny, the monster returns only two months later, some time after Justine’s execution. The execution, like the initial animation of the monster, remains a “secret” event within the novel. It occurs in the gap between the first volume, in which it is anticipated, and the second volume, in which it is recalled. The execution of a woman guilty in name alone, in lieu of that of the truly guilty murderer, leads Victor into a state of extreme despair, guilt, and remorse. His life becomes a death-in-life, a “dead calmness of inaction,” and leads him to a “deep, dark death-like solitude” (66).19 However, while Victor describes himself as dead and indicates that he has guiltily entered an unspeakable “hell of intense tortures, such as no language can describe,” the cause of his death is his enduring life: the local authorities execute Justine, not him—the murderer perhaps “not in deed, but in effect” (72). In order to “restore” Victor’s life and allow Elizabeth and Ernest to experience wonder and sublimity, Alphonse Frankenstein proposes that his surviving children join him on a tour of Chamounix. Once there, Victor remains “subdued” and “depressed”; in order to hide his grief he takes leave of his family, ascending Montanvert “alone” in the cold and rain: The ascent is precipitous. . . . In a thousand spots the traces of the winter avalanche may be perceived, where trees lie broken and strewed on the ground; some entirely destroyed, others bent, leaning upon the jutting rocks of the mountain, or transversely upon other trees. The path, as you ascend higher is intersected by ravines of snow, down which stones continually roll from above; one of them is particularly dangerous, as the slightest sound, such as even speaking in a loud voice, produces a concussion of air sufficient to draw destruction upon the head of the speaker. (75)

Montanvert is dangerous—it is “precipitous” and “precipitates.” Falling stones (“precipitation”) attend the sharp ascent (of its “precipice”). The “blasted” or already destroyed stones and trees line the path, which in rainy August still bears “the traces of the winter avalanche.” There is no

   Chapter 3 guarantee that the winter is over or that the seasons move successively or cyclically rather than collapse into simultaneity. As Victor ascends the mountain, he must negotiate the stones that like and with “a loud voice” could “draw destruction upon the head of the speaker.” On Montanvert, voice is powerful. It has the power to summon an avalanche, to move the earth, to destroy.20 Thus, when Victor calls out from the mountaintop, where a “field of ice” replaces the broken trees, and the majesty of Mont Blanc, viewed from the summit of Montanvert, restores a feeling of security and “something like joy” (76), his apostrophe proves a powerful invocation. It “produces a concussion of air sufficient to draw destruction upon the head of the speaker.”21 The sublime mountainscape gives Victor a feeling of potential freedom and mastery; however, in order to live that freedom he will have to free himself from the dead who haunt him, which may be possible only in death. Victor calls upon the dead and presents them with an alternative—give me happiness or death. He exclaims: “Wandering spirits, if indeed ye wander, and do not rest in your narrow beds, allow me this faint happiness, or take me, as your companion, away from the joys of life” (76). The apostrophe sets out with admitted uncertainty about the place and the nature of its object. Victor calls out to “wandering spirits,” but as soon as he calls them, he also admits that he does not know whether or not they wander; and if they do not wander, if they are not in a position to hear or respond, then the chance at recovered happiness or quick death is nullified.22 The wandering dead either could give Victor what he already has received—happiness—or they could deprive him of it, leaving him among the dead—that is, they could take him as a companion. Thus, if he is happy, which he acknowledges he is, the dead already would have responded, proving themselves restless and responsive spirits. But if he turns unhappy—sullen, deflated, depressed, among the dead—if this proves a mocking rather than a prognostic moment of calm, the spirits also will have responded to his call. The apostrophe is inevitably fulfilled.23 Victor ascends the glacier as an act of mourning, and his apostrophe summons the dead in order that he might be freed from them.24 Yet the dead that Victor summons—if they respond, and they always do— are the wandering dead: they cannot free him for happiness in the world, for they cannot free themselves from the world. Thus, the address itself, insofar as it assumes that the dead can decide his fate, assuming therefore

Testimony and Trope in Frankenstein    that they can act and speak, by definition precludes the freedom it desires. While Victor offers the spirits a choice—they can either let him be or take him away—the address ensures that whatever ensues he nevertheless will remain with them. Victor’s apostrophe recalls the familiar “romantic” apostrophes issued atop the Alps. However, if the apostrophe demonstrates Victor’s capacity to summon the dead “successfully” (a form of mastery that he over and again will perform in the novel), it also is indissociable from the risky nonmastery of figures (in which, for example, “wandering spirit” also signifies the monster) that attends figurative animation.25 “As I said this,” Victor recalls: I suddenly beheld the figure of a man, at some distance, advancing towards me with superhuman speed. He bounded over the crevices in the ice, among which I had walked with caution; his stature also, as he approached, seemed to exceed that of a man. I was troubled: a mist came over my eyes, and I felt a faintness seize me; but I was quickly restored by the cold gale of the mountains. I perceived, as the shape came nearer, (sight tremendous and abhorred!) that it was the wretch whom I had created. I trembled with rage and horror, resolving to wait his approach, and then close with him in mortal combat. He approached; his countenance bespoke bitter anguish, combined with disdain and malignity, while its unearthly ugliness rendered it almost too horrible for human eyes. But I scarcely observed this; anger and hatred had at first deprived me of utterance, and I recovered only to overwhelm him with words expressive of furious detestation and contempt. (76; my emphasis)

The encounter (ironically) describes a successful apostrophe, one that again presents “the figure of a man.” Coincident with the apostrophe— “as” he issues it—Victor beholds the “figure” speeding toward him as if propelled by the address. The figure as “figure of man” is “superhuman,” both in its speed and its frame. Victor calls upon wandering spirits, and the monster comes. His arrival, motivated by Victor’s voice, again requires that Victor lose some of his life (“and I felt a sudden faintness seize me”), and surrender his voice (“anger and hatred had at first deprived me of utterance”). Furthermore, the “appearance” of this “figure” coincides with a lapse in vision—“a mist came over my eyes.” This misty veil, which recalls the blinding light that attended the creature’s last “appearance,” is a kind of masking in which the withdrawal of vision gives way to a figure. The apostrophe yields the monster’s now speaking face: “he approached;

   Chapter 3 his countenance bespoke bitter anguish combined with disdain and malignity.” It speaks what is “almost too horrible” to see. The belated encounter with the creature repeats the initial scene of the monster’s animation, although it more explicitly cites (and allegorizes) the conventions of the romantic lyric. Victor recovers from his syncope intent upon facing off, putting an end to his torment by putting an end to the monster in a struggle to death. However, the apostrophe troubles the division between life and death, and thus precludes the “mortal combat” that Victor hopes to effect. The apostrophe through which Victor demonstrates his mastery—a mastery that resembles the mastery of modern scientists who “mimic the earthquake” (30–31)—withholds the end. Alive, Victor still is taken as the “companion” of the dead. Instead of a face-off, he is confronted with the monster’s speaking but “unsupportable” face. Manifest in his misty eyes, Victor’s passion (a version of the enthusiasm that sustained him at the grave) allows him to face and address the monster. Just as a prosopopoeia effected (and suspended) the origin of life in this novel, an apostrophe makes it possible for the monster to speak, yet achieves this only by veiling (masking) his face, reiterating the impossibility of speaking to which the monster gives (no) image. However, the monster is also an initially speaking being (unlike a man). On the “dreary night of November,” the night the creature is animated, Victor is inversely deanimated (“breathless horror and disgust filled my heart” [39; my emphasis]), in a chiasmic “catastrophe” and tries to sleep. His sleep is incessant wakefulness, burdened with nightmarish dreams in which his sister-cousinlover, Elizabeth, takes on the face of his dead mother; and he awakens to find—is awakened by—the creature at his bedside. As Victor explains to Walton: By the dim and yellow light of the moon, as it forced its way through the windowshutters, I beheld the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had created. He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me. His jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks. He might have spoken, but I did not hear. (39–40)26

The monster’s first words may or may not be words; they are produced neither in the mouth nor the throat but by his animal-like “open jaws.”27 Between then and now, the monster will have had language lessons, yet it

Testimony and Trope in Frankenstein    is nevertheless Victor’s apostrophe that allows the monster to speak: the apostrophe allows him to be heard (by masking his “face,” by masking Victor’s face).28 Victor, confronted with the spirit he invoked and to whom he has given “life,” speaks to the monster, initially to accuse him: “Devil! . . . do you dare approach me? and do you not fear the fierce vengeance of my arm wreaked on your miserable head? Begone, vile insect! or rather stay, that I may trample you to dust! and, oh that I could, with the extinction of your miserable existence, restore those victims whom you have so diabolically murdered!” (77). With each gesture, Victor addresses and refuses the monster. He threatens the monster, although to have given the monster “life” is also to have lost his own capacity for self-preservation, to have lost his own life, a privation reinforced by the monster’s “superhuman” powers. Addressing the monster as an insect, Victor renders him a less-than-animal that he can kill. But threatening to “trample” him “to dust,” Victor also evokes the terms of the monster’s incessant life, like the worm (an insect) in the dust of the earth. Threatening, “Begone . . . or rather stay,” establishes Victor’s power over the monster, for it stages an alternative, like the one voiced in the apostrophe to the dead, that in one way or another will be fulfilled. Victor recognizes that the retributive murder of the monster is not only technologically impossible (even if it is what he hopes one day to accomplish), but also ultimately unsatisfying. The life of the monster cannot recover the deaths of his brother and friend, and yet to the extent that it cannot substitute, it is also a perfect substitution. Like the “wandering spirits” Victor addresses, the monster is the amalgam of many dead, formed into a single living figure. Victor’s predicament is that the animating figure through which he seeks happiness or death always summons a monster to whom he is beholden. When Victor threatens to “annihilate” the monster with the (empty) hope that he could “restore those victims,” the monster asks, “How dare you sport thus with life?” and continues by enjoining, “Do your duty towards me, and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind” (77). “Sport[ing] with life” names both Victor’s promise of annihilation and his hope of animation. But to “sport with life,” to give and to take it, to play with and to mock it is what Victor does with his own life and with the lives of the “Wandering Spirits” he calls. To “sport” with life is to animate

   Chapter 3 and to figure; the alternative is “duty,” and an implicit contract. Delineating this alternative between “figuration” and “the ethical,” the monster is guilty of staging a false opposition. Victor will redeploy this same opposition when he decides against building a female creature, asking, “Had I a right, for my own benefit, to inflict this curse upon everlasting generations? . . . I shuddered to think that future ages might curse me as their pest, whose selfishness had not hesitated to buy its own peace at the price perhaps of the existence of the whole human race” (138). How one treats one’s monsters bears upon the “rest of mankind” (that is, mankind in its entirety and its remainder). Victor’s decision in favor of “the whole human race” and against the monster’s (and his own) happiness responds to the monster’s “question”: “How dare you sport thus with life?” Victor “sacrifices” one “good” for another, “selfishness” (or inhuman monstrousness, for he otherwise might be perceived a pest) for “glory.” The monster seems to suggest that one could not sport with life, that one could speak (and above all that he could speak) without mocking life, without giving and taking life, and he seems to suggest further that this “serious” speech would prove the ethical one. However, to speak without monstrousness, without figuration and without sporting with life, is not to speak. The monster’s own narrative—framed by Victor’s and Walton’s words—is evidence of this predicament. The monster does not merely tell his life story; he aims to persuade.29 He wishes to move Victor with his speech, and manages this by masking the face whose burden he attempts to convey. He speaks, obtains a voice that can be heard, only upon taking away Victor’s face, by reentering the “game” that he accuses Victor of playing. Frankenstein the novel, moreover, repeats this gesture. Its narrative frame serves as a mask that at once allows the creature to be “heard” and “seen” without depriving him of his constitutive deprivation of a face. The monster, in other words, speaks the impossible (his inhuman life) without his speech simply becoming possible, leaving the human intact. The monster’s entire speech—the account of his life—aims to change Victor’s mind, prompting him to animate another.30 The condition of persuasion is to establish a situation such that the monster can be heard. Over and again, the monster attempts to address Victor: “Be calm! I entreat you to hear me” (77); “How can I move thee? Will not entreaties cause thee to turn a favourable eye upon thy creature . . . ?” (78); “But hear me. The

Testimony and Trope in Frankenstein    guilty are allowed by human laws, bloody as they may be, to speak in their own defence” (78); “Listen to me . . . listen to me” (78). Victor repeatedly responds with the cry, “Begone!” As with the previous apostrophes, the monster renders Victor’s exclamation effective, not by leaving but by disappearing, putting his hands over Victor’s eyes as the condition of allowing himself to be heard. When Victor recalls this gesture, he also recalls the simultaneous fulfillment of both his and the monster’s desires. “ ‘Thus I relieve thee, my creator,’ he said and placed his hated hands before my eyes, which I flung from me with violence, ‘thus I take from thee a sight which you abhor. Still thou canst listen to me, and grant me thy compassion’ ” (79). The condition of persuasion is finally not the speaker’s capacity to move with his words, but the speaker’s capacity to move by “the giving and taking away of faces.”31 Until this moment, it is the capacity to move his hand, to remove himself by himself, while not moving, and to be moved himself, moved away (and violently), that Victor has proved incapable of accomplishing. If this extralinguistic act is the condition of being heard, it is also the image of apostrophe (the turn away in speech) and prosopopoeia. Making the monster “begone” in this instance, Victor also “makes” him stay there before his eyes. The removal that presents the monster becomes the condition of his narrative, his account of the anguish and the pleasure of a life that begins after the end. But if the creature makes it so that Victor can hear him, he also precludes the “mortal combat” that Victor desires but cannot stage. In fact, the creature—by virtue of his size, his power, his life—in every case eludes the encounter that Victor attempts to effect. “Mortal combat”: this is not a moment when the two figures come together in a death struggle, but rather a relentless deferral whereby the distance between the two is never—and never can be—overcome. The crisis of “mortal combat,” of mortality, is this displacement. It is the failure to unite in a battle in which Victor might put the creature to death. Thus, when Victor abandons his efforts to make the creature a female mate, when he is struck by the fear of the unforeseeable confirmed in the horror of the creature’s face as it “expressed the utmost extent of malice and treachery” (139), the creature promises him: “I shall be with you on your wedding night” (140). The statement is a realized promise to the extent that whether or not the monster is “actually” or “physically” present on that night (and he will

   Chapter 3 be physically present enough to murder Elizabeth), he will already have appropriated that night by promising to appropriate it as his own. Victor mistakenly assumes that the promise means the fulfillment of his desire for “mortal combat” rather than the deferral of it. Thus Victor responds: “ ‘Villain! Before you sign my death-warrant, be sure that you are yourself safe.’ I would have seized him; but he eluded me, and quitted the house with precipitation” (141).32 Recalling the “precipitous” stones and the mountain precipice in which words could cause an avalanche, the monster—the figure of man—leaves, with “precipitation,” as he came.33 Victor’s warning—“be sure that you are yourself safe”—is understood as an order rather than a threat. If the statement assumes that the creature may not be safe, his response—his departure, which suggests a literal reading—both acknowledges Victor’s warning and demonstrates its naïveté. Once again, Victor fails to seize upon his enemy. The novel’s entire third volume accounts for the attempt and failure to stage a “mortal combat” across and beyond Europe’s bleak horizon. This horizon is rife with apostrophic ironies. Victor, having abandoned all hope that the law could serve his cause, decides to “quit Geneva forever” (171). In a final gesture of farewell, Victor returns to his family grave to pronounce his destiny and again to solicit the help of these wandering spirits: I knealt on the grass, and kissed the earth, and with quivering lips exclaimed, “By the sacred earth on which I kneel, by the shades that wander near me, by the deep and eternal grief that I feel, I swear; and by thee, O Night, and by the spirits that preside over thee, I swear to pursue that daemon, who caused this misery, until he or I shall perish in mortal conflict. For this purpose I will preserve my life: to execute this dear revenge, will I again behold the sun, and tread the green herbage of earth, which otherwise should vanish from my eyes for ever. And I call on you, spirits of the dead; and on you, wandering ministers of vengeance, to aid and conduct me in my work. Let the cursed and hellish monster drink deep of agony; let him feel the despair that now torments me.” (171–72)

When Victor calls upon “spirits of the dead” and “wandering ministers of vengeance” to sustain him, as when he last called upon these spirits in the Alps, the monster responds. In the first case, the response is almost immediate: “I was answered through the stillness of night by a loud and fiendish laugh. It rung on my ears long and heavily; the mountains re-echoed it,

Testimony and Trope in Frankenstein    and I felt as if all hell surrounded me with mockery and laughter” (172).34 The echoing laughter mocks the invocations, not only because it signifies that catastrophic and unanticipated approach of the spirits of the dead, not only because it demonstrates that Victor cannot exclude monstrosity as long as he uses lyric figures, but also because it listens to Victor’s summons. The laughter which fills the entire mountain range is then followed by an intimate whisper: “a well known and abhorred voice, apparently close to my ear, addressed me in an audible whisper—‘I am satisfied: miserable wretch! you have determined to live, and I am satisfied’ ” (172). The voice confirms that the monster has heard Victor’s call, and, having heard it, he will respond: he will literally “aid and conduct” Victor across the Mediterranean and then the Black Sea until reaching this frozen vast from which he now speaks. To aid and conduct is not only to provide “a slight clue” (172); it also means keeping Victor alive. Sometimes this takes the form of “a repast . . . in the desert,” which, Victor claims, “restored and sustained me,” and which he attributes with ironic accuracy to “the spirits that I had invoked to aid me” (173). At other times, it takes the form of an inscription: “Prepare! your toils only begin . . .”; an inscription coupled with a meal: “You will find near this place, if you follow not too tardily, a dead hare; eat, and be refreshed. Come on, my enemy; we have yet to wrestle for our lives . . .” (174); or even the silent encouragement of a recollected inscription: “After a slight repose, during which the spirits of the dead hovered round, and instigated me to toil and revenge, I prepared my journey” (176). Victor can neither read the threats nor the sustenance as the monster’s response to his invocation, the mocking fulfillment of his apostrophic solicitations. But Victor already will have described the linguistic predicament he suffers. Before setting out in pursuit of the monster, Victor addresses his story—the story of the monster—to a local magistrate with the hope of legal intervention. The magistrate responds by admitting to Victor that the monster “appears to have powers which would put all my exertions to defiance” (169). Victor accuses the magistrate of not believing him, and, unable to trust the magistrate’s defense, he responds in the flush and rage of a “phrenzy,” an “apparent” madness or delirium. The monster appears too powerful, the magistrate appears not to believe the story, and Victor appears mad. But this encounter also demonstrates that the monster remains invisible before the law, and Victor’s narrative therefore indicates

   Chapter 3 a possibility of testimony (and ethics) that would not take the law as its model. While Victor first tells his story in the desperate hope that the law could resolve his contest, the law fails to arrest the monster’s enduring life and fails to treat a life and story that cannot be verified. What emerges, instead, is Victor’s recognition (before the law) that human wisdom is ignorance, that the division between knowing and saying that constitutes the human would have to come to an end. Thus, in an exasperated statement that stages its own truth, Victor turns to the magistrate and exclaims: “Man . . . how ignorant art thou in thy pride of wisdom! Cease; you know not what it is you say” (170). The division of knowing and saying—in a statement where “saying” takes the place of “doing”—is addressed to a man and defines man in general. And to man, as the division of knowing and saying, Victor says, “Cease.” To put an end to man would be to put an end to this division. However, this end would not finally articulate knowing and saying, nor would it reduce all figures to literal certainty. Rather, the division of knowing and saying names the paradox of testimony, of bearing witness to the ends of man. By turning now to the novel’s engagement with romantic poetry, the details of this paradox will emerge.

Poetry, Testimony, and Trope While Frankenstein provides a narrative account of prosopopoeia and apostrophe—figures that it relies upon for its presentation, which are also the constitutive tropes of the romantic lyric—the brief preface to the 1818 edition renders explicit the novel’s relation to poetry. In the preface, Percy Bysshe Shelley, writing in Mary Shelley’s name, states that the novel has as its primary aim a “comprehensive and commanding” account of the human. The novel accomplishes this aim—at once to display and preserve the human at the limits of the imagination—by taking its “rule” from poetry.35 The preface opens by dismissing the apparent foundations of the novel—Erasmus Darwin’s arguments for regeneration, on the one hand, and stories of specters, on the other—in order to establish its seriousness.36 It thus clears the way for Shelley to posit poetry as the novel’s ground and the preservation of the human as its aim. Victor’s impossible animation of the inanimate “afford[s] a point of view to the imagination for the delineating of human passions more comprehensive and com-

Testimony and Trope in Frankenstein    manding than any which the ordinary relations of existing events can yield” (3). The novel thus positions the imagination through the monster who embodies it and gives it a vantage. This positioning enables an image of “human passion” more “comprehensive and commanding,” more complete and hence more authoritative, than regularly possible, because it issues from the position of a life beyond life.37 At stake in the novel, therefore, is not only the endurance of the domestic scene despite its interruption, but also the monstrous point of view, the monstrous embodiment of the imagination. An extreme or unbelievable event—the monster’s life— allows the human to be witnessed. Percy Shelley (in Mary Shelley’s name) aligns this presentation of the human—witnessed from an impossible perspective occasioned by a supernatural event—with the preservation of the human. By outlining, or “delineating,” the human from this position, the novel is understood to render a narrative of the unspeakable (life after the end of life) as a human narrative. Rather than signal the recuperation of human mastery, this narrative demonstrates the capacity of the human to survive the human. The monster’s face “discloses” the truth of the human as the capacity to endure the suspension of the human. The preface explains that the novel sets out to accomplish this survival—or “preservation” of the human at its limit: “I have thus endeavoured to preserve the truth of the elementary principles of human nature, while I have not scrupled to innovate upon their combinations” (3). Executed in the animation of the inanimate, the formation of a life that dreams of putting an end to any but “violent death,” the delineation of the human in the novel proves a truly novel (“innovative”) means of preservation. However, the preface claims that the novel appropriates this logic of preservation—whereby human nature remains intact even within a supernatural situation—from poetry. Shelley explains: The Iliad, the tragic poetry of Greece,—Shakespeare, in the Tempest and Midsummer Night’s Dream,—and most especially Milton, in Paradise Lost, conform to this rule; and the most humble novelist, who seeks to confer or receive amusement from his labours, may, without presumption, apply to prose fiction a licence, or rather a rule, from the adoption of which so many exquisite combinations of human feeling have resulted in the highest specimens of poetry. (3)

The law of poetry thus describes both the life of the monster (the supernatural or unnatural embodiment that preserves the human in its excesses)

   Chapter 3 and the practice of the novel. The definition of poetry through which the novel is conceived recalls Wordsworth and Coleridge’s definitions of the Lyrical Ballads. Shelley recapitulates and combines the claims for experimental poetry that Wordsworth offers in the 1802 preface to Lyrical Ballads, and the discussion of the project that Coleridge provides in the second volume of Biographia Literaria.38 Wordsworth’s preface includes “rules” for poetry: he states that a difference, at the level of language, between poetry and prose cannot be sustained, and that “good” poetry avoids personification. To posit Frankenstein as the “adoption” and application of Wordsworth’s rule of poetry is not simply to subsume narrative to poetry. Rather, the preface frames the novel as a (critical) redeployment of poetry’s rule, and, in particular, its exclusion and recurrence of personification, which the question of the human in the novel addresses.39 While the preface ironically invokes Wordsworth’s “rule,” it also evokes Coleridge’s “licence.” The Lyrical Ballads were understood to include poems of two sorts—“natural” and “supernatural”—and Coleridge’s definition of the aims of the latter introduces a “licence” to “suppose” that the novel enjoys. Coleridge explains: The thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency.40

The “supernatural,” what Coleridge later calls the “romantic,” poems of the Lyrical Ballads are those poems that set out with “supernatural” “incidents and agents” whose value (“interest”) consists in sustaining or establishing rather than undermining the “dramatic truth” of human emotion. Already the truth of the supernatural requires a double fiction. Its truth is “dramatic” (i.e., it is true for its consistency and its correspondence rather than for its actuality), but it also requires the truth of “supposing” the impossible and positing it as a ground for the imagination. What counts as supernatural—as providing a point of view unavailable in “nature”— is “real,” but only insofar as it “really” reflects delusion. “Real” emotions of delusion and the emotional truth that an impossible event gives to be

Testimony and Trope in Frankenstein    seen are both means toward the preservation of the human at its (impassioned) limits. For Wordsworth, the preservation that Shelley’s preface describes would involve “chus[ing] incidents and situations from common life”— the death of a child, the account of an old man or idiot boy, and so on— and conveying these incidents in the “language of man.”41 However, Coleridge understands the supernatural to include “every human being who . . . has believed himself under supernatural agency.”42 Based upon belief, the statement irrecoverably troubles the distinction between supernatural and natural experience, not least because the being described by “supernatural” poetry resembles the poet who, in Wordsworth’s account, as in Coleridge’s, is defined as a man (speaking to men).43 To apply poetry’s rule to prose fiction is to write Frankenstein; it is to suggest that when poetry produces or preserves man from the “comprehensive” position of the supernatural, when it keeps one in the company of men, it produces monsters. When Victor accounts for his discoveries, he frames his narrative with a warning: “A human being in perfection [like Coleridge’s poet] ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind, and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquility” (37). While suggesting that passion—the passion that left him in a working trance—was the condition of his “filthy” labors, the passage again recalls Wordsworth’s condition and definition of a poet as “a man . . . endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul than are supposed to be common among mankind.”44 Overcome by “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”—which can be understood as an account of exemplary “supernaturalism”—the poet may also desire “to let himself slip into an entire delusion.”45 Thus Victor implicates the condition of poetry, which is also the rule of the novel, as the condition of animating the inanimate, the condition of monstrous life. In Biographia Literaria, Coleridge introduces his “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798) to exemplify this poetry. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is the first and perhaps most controversial of the Lyrical Ballads.46 As Wordsworth set out to remove “the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude” from everyday life in order to make us see and hear and feel, in the “Ancient Mariner,” Coleridge undertook to obtain the same end: the presentation, preservation, and recuperation of the human.47 Not only does

   Chapter 3 the present (rather than recollected) scene of Shelley’s novel (Walton and his crew on a ship en route to the North Pole) resemble—and invert—the compulsively recollected scene of Coleridge’s poem, but Shelley’s novel is voiced by men who explicitly figure themselves in relation to Coleridge’s Mariner. On the dreary November night that he animates and abandons his monster, Victor “escapes” to the streets of Ingolstadt. He passes the night anxiously wandering and finally sleeping in the local churchyard (i.e., resting, rather than working among, the dead). In the morning, afraid to return home, Victor races through the town in a paranoid fit: I issued into the streets, pacing them with quick steps, as if I sought to avoid the wretch whom I feared every turning of the street would present to my view. . . . [I] felt impelled to hurry on, although wetted by the rain, which poured from a black and comfortless sky. . . . I traversed the streets, without any clear conception of where I was, or what I was doing. My heart palpitated in the sickness of fear; and I hurried on with irregular steps, not daring to look about me.” (40; my emphasis)

While enthusiasm made it possible for him to endure the unbearable work of discovery and animation, Victor can negotiate the living monster only by not looking. Upon “seeing” the monster, Victor exclaims, “Oh! no mortal could support the horror of that countenance” (40). He states both that the countenance could not be the face of a mortal (no mortal could bear that face) and that it could not be seen by a mortal (like the Gorgon’s face, to see it is to turn to stone). This being the case, Victor’s fitful tour of ­Ingolstadt—structured “as if I sought to avoid the wretch” (my emphasis)—is a moment of “turning away” (ultimately figured in the novel as “abandonment”), a dramatization of avoidance. The “as if ” signals the paradox of seeing that the monster articulates. To see the monster is no longer to be mortal—it is to die, to become inhuman. To not see the monster would be to turn away, to maintain oneself as human (and, in Victor’s ethical order, to save the human race). To see the monster and live entails ceaselessly turning—a dizzying avoidance that leads Victor to admit that he is “without any clear conception of where I was or what I was doing.” Victor describes this tactical blindness in the voice of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner: Like one who, on a lonely road,    Doth walk in fear and dread,

Testimony and Trope in Frankenstein    And, having once turn’d round, walks on,   And turns no more his head; Because he knows a frightful fiend    Doth close behind him tread. (ll. 451–56)48

In this stanza, which belongs to the sixth part of the Lyrical Ballads (1798) version of the poem, the Mariner uses a simile—“Like one who, on a lonely road”—to describe his ability to see upon awakening from a trance and the inability (even refusal) to see that attends this awakening. In the lines that precede these, the Mariner recovers from his trance in increments. In the first place, he “sees” that he can do nothing but look at the “stony eyes” of the dead “that in the moon did glitter.” He explains: “I could not draw my een from theirs / Ne turn them up to pray” (ll. 445–46). From the blindness of the initial trance (“His great bright eye most silently / Up to the moon is cast” [ll. 421–22]), the Mariner “recovers” to behold (and be held by) the arrested and arresting vision of the dead, before “the spell was snapt / and I could move my een” (ll. 447–48) The awakening has as its first stage not being able to turn away.49 However, once the Mariner can see, can move his eys, he also cannot. He can see ahead (for he is “like one, that . . . turns no more his head” [l. 454]), but to see ahead (to look “far-forth” [l. 449]), thanks to the broken trance, is not to be able to see ahead or behind. ­Furthermore, the turning motion in these lines is a simple inversion, one that troubles the location of “behind.” The direction of the turn proves ambiguous in a spatial and temporal sense: there are literal corpses, a literal “fiend”(the body of many corpses), and there is a past curse that remains “behind” one without having come to an end. The Mariner, “once turn’d round,” suggesting a turn of his body, a 180-degree turn, does not “return,” but walks on, continues forward (or backward) while turned—facing— backward. Like Walter Benjamin’s version of Klee’s angel, the Mariner’s head is frozen. Turning his head once, he turns it no more. He faces backward because he resembles one who “knows a frightful fiend / Doth close behind him tread” (ll. 455–56). In this analogy, the Mariner does not turn away from the fiend “behind” him, but turns eternally to face his dead shipmates (the effects of the curse, the murder of the albatross: a long signifying chain ensues). But this just as certainly might mean that they still remain behind him, behind him even as he has turned toward them, for the turn in the poem that acknowledges a past and responds to what is behind also renders ambiguous—and ultimately unlocatable—the place of

   Chapter 3 the trauma. If they are behind him as he faces backward, this would mean that they are what he always will “know” as he “walks on,” although this also means that they are what he will never encounter. For Victor, who repeats the Mariner’s simile, this non-encounter is confirmed by the fact that the monster is the one he cannot see.50 When Victor cites the Mariner’s simile, it functions as a literal description: Victor is not like the “one who, on a lonely road, / Doth walk in fear and dread,” he is him, when, alone on the streets of Ingoldstadt, he runs from the demon he loathes and fears. Nevertheless the “like” that renders the simile, like the “as if ” two paragraphs earlier, unsettles Victor’s statements. If Victor accounts for a turning away that would mark the end of turning, an end of troping that would avoid monsters and monstrousness, in the novel, this gesture is accompanied by a moment of figuration (the “as if,” the “like”) that returns the turn even at the moment one turns away. To turn away from the monster is not to recover mortality or to be free from the risks of turning, of troping. Indeed, Robert Walton’s eventual encounter with the monster, read in relation to his own self­fashioning as an “ancient mariner,” illustrates this inevitability of figures and turns. Turning to Walton—the bearer of Victor’s and the monster’s first-person narratives—I also turn, in conclusion, to an explicit thinking of testimony. In his second letter to his sister, Robert Walton writes from “Archangel” to assuage his addressee’s fears even as he remarks his own: I cannot describe to you my sensations on the near prospect of my undertaking. It is impossible to communicate to you a conception of the trembling sensation, half pleasurable and half fearful, with which I am preparing to depart. I am going to unexplored regions, to “the land of mist and snow,” but I shall kill no albatross, therefore do not be alarmed for my safety. (10)

Walton’s letter issues from the mute flush of anticipation. What he has to say is unspeakable, and in order to overcome the failure to describe, he offers a promise in place of “communication”: “I shall kill no albatross.” Yet, what “counts” as killing the albatross—like the effects of the albatross’s murder in Coleridge’s “Rime”—is unforeseeable.51 The promise is meaningful only if taken as a figural promise not to make a fatal (or inadequately fatal) mistake, but it is a promise that only can be fulfilled literally. However, a literal reading renders the promise irrelevant and leaves his

Testimony and Trope in Frankenstein    assurances entirely unconvincing. In the 1831 revision of the novel, Shelley expands this passage, and Walton continues his letter to Margaret in even less assuring tones: Therefore do not be alarmed for my safety, or if I should come back to you as worn and woful as the “Ancient Mariner?” You will smile at my allusion; but I will disclose a secret. I have often attributed my attachment to, my passionate enthusiasm for, the dangerous mysteries of ocean, to that production of the most imaginative of modern poets. (21)

Walton discloses an attachment to modern poetry’s “rule” and “licence” that recalls the novel’s own self-articulation as a poem. The “secret” inspiration for his journey, the secret cause of his “passionate enthusiasm,” is a poem, this poem. The admission turns Walton’s first statement of reassurance, however untenable, into an actual question. While Walton tells Margaret that she should not be alarmed if he returns as the “Ancient Mariner,” to “come back . . . as the ‘Ancient Mariner’ ” would be to return as the living-dead, “worn and woful.” Walton’s description translates the Mariner’s own self-description in the poem: Forthwith this frame of mine was wrench’d   With woeful agony, Which forc’d me to begin my tale   And then it left me free. Since then at an uncertain hour   Now oftimes and now fewer That anguish comes and makes me tell   My ghastly adventure. (ll. 611–18)

The Mariner’s “wrench’d” frame—that “worn” body that Walton assures he will not (yet warns he might) have upon return—is the turned and twisted body. It is the turned body of the one on a lonely street who “walks on” without turning back, even if this means that he is always turned away, here turned by “woeful agony.” Walton ironically claims that he will not be “turned.” However, at the novel’s end, the monster’s “appearance” at the side of Victor’s coffin unforeseeably “interrupts” this promise and demonstrates the futility of promising not to kill an albatross, the futility of any attempt at a prescriptive ethics. While Frankenstein is familiarly under­stood as a frame narrative, with this interruption, its closing frame

   Chapter 3 becomes a “wrench’d” frame: it proves less consolidating, less enclosing, than is often assumed.52 It suffers a turn. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak acknowledges that toward the novel’s close the “distinctions of human individuality themselves . . . seem to fall away.”53 The characters, like the Ancient Mariner who, Wordsworth complained, was devoid of “distinct character,” lose their frames. This indistinction is manifest in the blur between the novel’s three first-­person “narrators” and the attendant indistinction between human and nonhuman, life and a life beyond life. While the recurring figure of the Ancient Mariner, coupled with rhetorical gestures of identification, will have contributed at the novel’s close to this ultimate porosity, the possibility of substitution between characters becomes an explicitly ethical question. Victor, having completed his narrative, approaches the aporia in which his story can never catch up with his life, in which the mortal combat will remain unlived. Just before his death, Victor (re)considers transferring to Walton the “task” of destroying the monster, the perceived threat of impending apocalypse. In a final gesture, perhaps “misled by passion” (186), Victor at once obliges and excuses Walton from the task: “When actuated by selfish and vicious motives, I asked you to undertake my unfinished work; and I renew this request now, when I am only induced by reason and virtue” (185). On the verge of death, Victor posits “reason and virtue” (cognition and ethics, comprehension and command), rather than self-preservation and the satisfactions of retribution, as “motives” for enjoining Walton to complete his “unfinished work.”54 As soon as he summons Walton to this duty, Victor paraleptically withdraws it as an unjustifiable demand: “ ‘Yet I cannot ask you to renounce your country and friends, to fulfil this task; and now, that you are returning to England, you will have little chance of meeting with him. . . . I dare not ask you to do what I think right, for I may still be misled by passion” (185–86). Victor cannot ask Walton to abandon “his country and friends”—that is, to “abandon” what he has already left and does not yet have—in order to pursue the monster. Victor dare not ask Walton to undertake the “right,” because he may be deluded. The distinction between “right” and “passion” recalls the preface’s claim that the novel fulfills an ethical function (the preservation of the human, it performs the “right”) by presenting—and issuing from a position of—human passion. Passion (to be “spontaneously overtaken” in the Wordsworthian account of poetry, to speak from a position of enthusias-

Testimony and Trope in Frankenstein    tic excess) becomes the condition of preserving the human; that is, passion becomes the appropriate origin of the ethical. But Victor’s demand, at once issued and withheld, is founded not only upon a mischaracterization of Walton but also upon a recurring misconception of the monster. In order to “see” the monster, in order to take Victor’s place, Walton will not have to do anything but listen, he will not have to change direction or plan, sacrifice country or friend. Rather, as Victor established early in the novel, “a frightful fiend / Doth close behind him tread”: the monster—whom Victor cannot see—has all along been there awaiting his “victim’s” death. While recounting for his sister the final events of Victor’s death (and so soon afterward that still his “tears flow” [186]), Walton is struck by the midnight sound of an almost human voice: “I am interrupted. What do these sounds portend? It is midnight; the breeze blows fairly, and the watch on deck scarcely stir. Again; there is a sound as of a human voice, but hoarser; it comes from the cabin where the remains of Frankenstein still lie. I must arise and examine. Good night, my sister” (186). When Walton writes “I am interrupted,” the interruption witnesses and effects a break in the narrative. This break—by “a sound of a human voice, but hoarser” that he will “identify” only once it is repeated, by a voice that resembles a human voice, that is not-quite-human and that troubles the distinction between the human and the nonhuman (for the human voice, like this voice, is the voice that can bear meaning and signify in language)—interrupts Walton’s story (his mourning of Frankenstein, his letter, his untold return to England, his mutinous adventure). This interruption of the story is the moment of impossible testimony: the moment in which the faceless monster interrupts the novel’s frame. Until this point Victor’s voice has mediated between Walton and the monster, but now the sound of the monster’s almost human voice and his “appearance” interrupt the letter and the narrative. If Victor’s response to the monster was to kill him, something he could not accomplish, Walton’s response is to speak to him so that the monster can be heard. This gesture, rather than allowing Walton or the monster to return to life (to human life and society), instead abandons them both to an inhuman survival, in which the monster promises to die but only ends up “lost in darkness and distance,” and in which Walton can continue to speak, but only in order to bear the monster’s words and watch him be “borne away” (191).

   Chapter 3 Walton discovers the monster hanging over Victor’s corpse—in rage and in grief: “Over him hung a form which I cannot find words to describe; gigantic in stature, yet uncouth and distorted in its proportions. As he hung over the coffin, his face was concealed by long locks of ragged hair. . . . When he heard the sound of my approach, he ceased to utter exclamations of grief and horror, and sprung towards the window” (186–87). The sound of the monster “interrupted” Walton’s mourning and now exceeds his capacity for description. Walton’s response in turn interrupts the monster’s lament. But as the monster runs to “jump ship,” Walton instead calls on him to stay. In a gesture that the monster finds utterly confusing (accustomed to Victor’s—and everyone’s—insistence that he who resists description “begone”), Walton solicits rather than banishes him. Dazed, the monster “paused, looking on me with wonder; and, again turning towards the lifeless form of his creator, he seemed to forget my presence” (187). Walton first is shielded from the monster’s face, for it is “concealed by long locks of hair.” But when the face “appears,” it is an enjoinder to Walton to remember his “duties”: “Never did I behold a vision so horrible as his face, of such loathsome, yet appalling hideousness. I shut my eyes involuntarily, and endeavoured to recollect what were my duties with regard to this destroyer. I called on him to stay” (187). Here Walton beholds the unbearable figure without beholding it (“Never did I behold . . . ”); he shuts his eyes “involuntarily,” and, remembering his “duties,” calls out to the “destroyer.” Walton’s address inverts Victor’s apostrophic solicitations. Yet, as it is a response to an imperative, Walton’s call is initially enigmatic, at once prerequisite to the fulfillment of Victor’s order and the sign of his refusal of it and his enactment of another obligation. But Walton’s utterance—even if it serves Victor’s demand—is also a response to the unbearable, hideous monster. The response assumes the monster’s face and is a response to the voice of the nonhuman, a response that does not humanize him but allows for the words of this human less-than-animal to sound: “Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings, who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of bringing forth. I was nourished with high thoughts of honour and devotion. But now vice has degraded me beneath the meanest animal” (189). The monster responds; he stays and speaks. In fact, the monster frees Walton from his murderous obligations by promising to take them on and sacrifice himself. He describes the agony

Testimony and Trope in Frankenstein    and the anguish of his life, and offers Walton a parting reassurance that he will disappear: “He is dead who called me into being; and when I shall be no more, the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish. I shall no longer see sun or stars or feel the winds play on my cheeks” (190). If the monster was “called into being” rather than born, if he is the effect of a lyric figure, he is also the figure as testimony: “this inhuman impossibility of seeing is what calls and addresses the human, the apostrophe from which human beings cannot turn away—this and nothing else is testimony.”55 The monster explains his own impending disappearance as the loss of face and feeling; he has never had a face. To lose his face, to lose what he never will have had, will be to be heard, not as a subject but as the interruption of an almost human voice.

Coda: Interruption This book opened with Primo Levi’s poem “The Survivor,” which begins with a citation of Coleridge’s “Rime,” the very stanza that also serves as the epigraph to The Drowned and the Saved: Since then, at an uncertain hour, That agony returns: And til my ghastly tale is told, This heart within me burns.56

Coleridge’s stanza describes an unforeseeable return of agony that turns the Mariner away from the present (this “uncertain hour”) and demands to be voiced. And this turn includes a further turn, the turn of the Wedding Guest, held by the Mariner’s gaze, away from his own life and festivity.57 The Wedding Guest cannot not hear the Mariner who cannot not tell his tale.58 Levi even goes so far as to describe himself as the “ancient mariner,” and in this light Agamben understands him as “the perfect witness.” Agamben quotes from an interview in which Levi says: “You remember the scene: the Ancient Mariner accosts the wedding guests, who are thinking of the wedding and not paying attention to him, and he forces them to listen to his tale. Well, when I first returned from the concentration camp I did just that. I felt an unrestrainable need to tell my story to anyone and everyone!”59 However, Levi explains that he is not a “true witness,” for the

   Chapter 3 true witnesses are the Muselmänner or the drowned, the men of the camps who gave up from the outset, the living-dead deportees who, rather than resisting Nazi violence, submitted to it entirely, not by reorienting every expectation in order to survive, but by abandoning all expectation. The Muselmann, Agamben writes, “is not only or not so much the threshold between life and death; rather, he marks the threshold between the human and the inhuman.”60 These “true witnesses” are deprived even of words: “those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute.”61 Agamben sets out to establish what this phrase might mean and to answer the question: “What has the Muselmann seen, and what, in the camp, is the Gorgon?”62 Agamben explains that to see the Gorgon is to see the impossibility of seeing. The Gorgon would not name something that existed—something that once existed and no longer exists, or even something that existed only in the camps. Rather, it names the “lacuna” of witnessing itself. Yet Levi calls the Muselmann one who has seen the Gorgon, one who will have seen the horrible nonface from which one must turn away or be turned to stone. The Muselmann did not turn away, but lives on, “a walking corpse” without a story. To bear witness to the Muselmann means to see the impossibility of seeing. And this means that one who sees the Muselmann (the only true witness) also sees the Gorgon, for he encounters the impossibility of witness. Earlier, I pointed to Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux’s Du Masque au visage, a study of ancient Greece from which Agamben draws. FrontisiDucroux, as I explained, distinguishes the Gorgon from the prosopon (the mask that becomes indistinguishable from the living face). In her account, the Gorgon is the anti- or the non-prosopon; yet, in ancient Greece, the hideous, unbearable face of the Gorgon is not “hidden” but repeatedly and fully appears.63 There is nothing that it excludes, there is no part of it that remains unseen by the spectator in the world, who sees the face in its full frontality, unlike the spectator represented on a vase, who faces away from us even when not turning away from the Gorgon. Frontisi-Ducroux links this appearance of the Gorgon—and its effects—to “apostrophe.” The Gorgon’s unbearable face is and effects a “literal” apostrophe, a turning away (designated in accounts of the icons by the Greek verb “apostrophein”), and is presented as a face turned from the profile (the silhouette of all human faces on Greek vases) to the fully frontal figure. Apostrophe, she explains,

Testimony and Trope in Frankenstein    also is the turning motion that describes Perseus’s inverted profile on Greek vases, the turning away that is the condition of Perseus’s life. To avoid the Gorgon, to turn away from the impossibility of seeing in order to live, is also to discover oneself, as Levi does, addressed—that is, defaced—by the Gorgon. This address leaves one unable to turn one’s face. In turning to Frontisi-Ducroux, Agamben registers an unavoidably figural moment in testimony—the moment of apostrophe and of prosopopoeia. Even this early example suggests that these turns do not shore up the human, but over and again “transform the human being into a non-human.”64 By returning to Mary Shelley’s account of the Gorgon we might link this transformation not only to ancient modes of visual representation but also to romantic modes of lyric presentation. In Frankenstein, when Walton pauses for the monster’s lament, he momentarily “doubts” that the monster’s voice could be a true voice. Victor has told him that the monster is eloquent, and Walton worries that the monster’s expression of grief, however touching, may be “merely” rhetorical and hence duplicitous: I was at first touched by the expressions of his misery; yet when I called to mind what Frankenstein had said of his powers of eloquence and persuasion, and when I again cast my eyes on the lifeless form of my friend, indignation was rekindled within me. “Wretch!” I said, “it is well that you come here to whine over the desolation that you have made. You throw a torch into a pile of buildings, and when they are all consumed you sit among the ruins, and lament the fall. Hypocritical fiend! if he whom you mourn still lived, still would he be the object, again would he become the prey of your accursed vengeance. It is not pity that you feel; you lament only because the victim of your malignity is withdrawn from your power.” “Oh it is not thus—not thus,” interrupted the being. (188–89)

While the monster’s speech initially turns Walton away from writing a letter, Walton turns away from the monster (“I again cast my eyes on the lifeless form of my friend . . .”) in order to determine whether or not the monster’s grief is merely a mask. Walton is left to decide between two competing claims. Indeed, the grammar of the sentence in which Walton registers his doubt is ambiguous. The “his” of “his powers of eloquence and persuasion” refers at once to the monster and to Victor. While the logic— in which Victor would tell Walton of his own eloquence—seems awkward it is also true that Walton is well “aware” of Victor’s own power of speech, for as he earlier writes: “His eloquence is forcible and touching; nor can I

   Chapter 3 hear him, when he relates a pathetic incident, or endeavours to move the passions of pity or love, without tears” (179); and, “Even the sailors feel the power of his eloquence: when he speaks, they no longer despair; he rouses their energies and while they hear his voice, they believe these vast mountains of ice are mole-hills, which will vanish before the resolutions of man” (181). In this sense, Victor provides an eloquent performance, yet its persuasion competes with its persuasiveness. Confronted with the imperative to kill, Walton also encounters the risk of rhetoric: wherever one turns, language may blind and deceive; it might be monstrous. After the monster speaks, Walton will bear his words until the end. The monster’s insistence, “Oh it is not thus—not thus,” responds to Walton’s accusation that he created the very “fall” that he laments, and that he mourns the loss of Victor only as the loss of his own “power.” The monster implies that Victor will not have understood, will not have known, and will not have told the monster’s story. But the doubly negative response to the accusation of deception (“not thus—not thus”) does not recover the monster’s truth as speakable—or as bearable outside of speech (and its risks). The “not not deception” of the monster’s speech interrupts Walton’s speech, rendering him a “mask,” a “voice” that bears the monster’s few words and allows the impossibility of seeing and speaking to be borne in its impossibility. This interruption transforms the novel from a protective human frame that encloses, even buries, the monster into an unraveling of voices: human, almost human, and, finally, mute. If this novel has modern poetry as its condition and its rule, and if the lyric figures of prosopopoeia and apostrophe are evidence of this inheritance, not least because they are the figures that present and preserve the human, it is in this sense also that the novel has testimony as its end. In a final articulation of mortal combat, the monster points to Victor and says to Walton: “He is dead who called me into being; and when I shall be no more, the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish.” Apostrophe and prosopopoeia— in turns that can be dizzying—unfulfill the monster’s suicidal wish, not by remembering the immemorial but by bearing it, not by death but by what always has been and always will remain a dis-appearance. Agamben, who has defined the “remnant of Auschwitz” as the relation of witness that endures between the dead and the survivors, the drowned and the saved, gives the “last word” of his book to the ­Muselmänner—the

Testimony and Trope in Frankenstein    true witnesses who cannot bear witness. To give them the last word is to recognize that the relation he has described can occur within a single name. The book does not simply end, but dissolves in fragments from nine testimonies of survivors who were Muselmänner. The testimonies, collected in a 1987 study of the Muselmann, are voiced in the first person and italicized. Agamben is concerned to establish that the paradox here—in which the Muselmann bears witness in the first person—does not turn the impossibility of speaking into a possibility, but acknowledges the impossibility of speaking as a Muselmann even in these testimonies. In parentheses, names of the former Muselmänner follow each fragment. However, rather than serving to produce distinct characters or subjects, the chain of “I’s” gives the effect of a single, disrupted form, a hoarse and barely audible voice in which the many dead are speaking. While Shelley’s novel and Agamben’s essay both end in an apparent interruption of the impossible—the monster appears, the ­ Muselmänner bear witness—the bearer of mute or monstrous speech has the last word. Remnants of Auschwitz concludes in a fragmentary phrase of unrecollection—residua desideratum, which means the remains are longed for or the remains remain. It is this second meaning that suggests not only the absence of remains but also something like their presence—not in a positive sense but in the sense that they divide the present by remaining unrecovered and unredeemed, and yet remain nevertheless. This phrase, like the names of survivors, appears in parentheses, and if it therefore seems to commemorate an absent testimony (Agamben mentions that ten people admitted to being Muselmänner, although only nine testimonies are reproduced here), it also expresses the permanent absence of testimony, testimony as what remains and what never can recover the remains. In Frankenstein, this absence coincides not with the final commemoration of death’s limit but with death’s absence. The novel ends with the survival of the monster, with his promise of death and with his absent remains: “He sprung from the cabin-window, as he said this, upon the ice-raft which lay close to the vessel. He was soon borne away by the waves, and lost in the darkness and distance” (191).

4 Anthropomorphizing the Human Anthropomorphism seems to be the illusionary resuscitation of the natural breath of language, frozen into stone by the semantic power of the trope. It is a figural affirmation that claims to overcome the deadly negative power invested in the figure. paul de man, “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric” So “anthropomorphism” would be the ultimate echo of truth when everything stops being true. maurice blanchot, “The Indestructible”

Saying Everything In the foreword to L’Espèce humaine (The Human Race), his account of Buchenwald, Gandersheim, and Dachau, Robert Antelme explains that he was able to bear witness to his experience only once he learned how to stop speaking. This admission is strange: one must learn how not to speak in order to bear witness. Antelme recalls that upon his first returning to Paris, he found that when he spoke he only could say everything, yet when he said everything, those to whom he spoke found him incomprehensible, and more than this, he found himself choking on his words. As soon as he began to account for what he had seen and experienced in the camps, he would begin to choke. In order to bear witness—in order to survive the camps from which he was now apparently free—Antelme had to learn to speak to others. That is, he had to learn how not to speak.

Anthropomorphizing the Human    Even so, readers, admirers, and friends of Antelme have described The Human Race as a singularly frank account of the camps, and by this they mean that it is a work that “says everything.” Edgar Morin, for example, understands The Human Race to be different from a “good many deportees’ accounts [which] are heavily rhetorical, written in a stereotyped language.”1 Unlike these other works, which include David Rousset’s Les Jours de notre mort, The Human Race is, Morin says, “the only book—that stands firmly at the level of humanity, at the level of naked experience lived and expressed in the simplest, most adequate words there are. As a result,” he continues, “this book which, in a sense, is a work of antiliterature . . . was a book of pure literature; in this sense, after it there was nothing more one could write.”2 Here Morin sets up, if only to break down, an opposition between antiliterature and literature. He suggests that, after the camps, only a work that resists literature—a work of total frankness and simplicity—can become a work of justified literature. The Human Race is such a work, and, as such, would be the fulfillment of literature: “after it there was nothing more one could write.” If literature has been understood as freedom—the freedom to say everything—Antelme’s testimony radically transforms this definition. Saying everything, for Antelme, far from freedom, is a deporting necessity. When this becomes the case, the relation between literature (as saying everything) and testimony, but also between saying everything and being human, becomes a question. Morin is not alone in his assessment. Michel Surya, François Dominique, and Maurice Blanchot also describe Antelme’s testimony as a work whose frankness is absolute. For Surya, Antelme’s testimony reveals that literature before this point never has said everything, even when, as in the case of Sade, it has demanded that everything be said.3 As Surya explains: “The insufficiency of literature, its inability to say everything, is exactly what The Human Race seemed to put an end to (though in fact only provisionally; it merely suspended it).”4 But whereas Morin figures the absolution of literature as a mode of fulfillment—a negation of negation through which literature is redeemed by testimony, Surya recognizes this negation to be precarious and impermanent. He suggests that the camps and deportation are not the occasion of a new literature, or of a literature that has gone through its purification, but this does not lead him to argue against literature (as Adorno, on a certain reading, could be understood to do). Rather, in a parenthesis that withholds the positive claim he offers, Surya

   Chapter 4 explains that Antelme’s testimony interrupts and respects, achieves and suspends literature’s impossibility. The mark of this ambivalence, he suggests, is manifest in Antelme’s rejection of authorship, authority, and, implicitly, literature. Unlike Cayrol, Levi, or Wiesel, Antelme wrote just one book; he did not become an author and did not add to or take anything away from The Human Race by writing anything else.5 François Dominique, like Surya, also understands Antelme’s book to devastate a concept of literature understood as “saying everything.”6 Dominique recognizes The Human Race to exhaust—or register the exhaustion of—literature by the real once the real has become “unimaginable.”7 Blanchot is the source of Dominique’s insight, and while Dominique does not cite Blanchot’s brief essay “War and Literature,” it is there that Blanchot most clearly identifies Antelme’s effect on literature.8 In this essay, Blanchot calls The Human Race the book that is “the simplest, the purest, and the closest to this absolute that it makes us remember.”9 Blanchot goes on to suggest that works of post-Holocaust testimony do not transform literature so much as they transform reading and relation. As he writes, these works, which “have kept their dark radiance,” are “not read and consumed in the same way as other books, important though they may be, but present as nocturnal signals, as silent warnings.”10 In an insistently neutral language (“dark radiance,” “nocturnal signal,” “silent warning”), Blanchot suggests that these works differ from other books because of the experience that they generate. They are not digestable and—keeping with his metaphor—neither acceptable nor rejectable, they get stuck in our throats. While Blanchot here describes the reader as one who is left choking on the words that she reads, Antelme explains that he could give an account of his experience (the account that Blanchot calls unconsumable) only once he could stop choking on his words, only once he could learn again how to speak, how to say something and not everything. Antelme explains that he could communicate his experience to others only by not saying everything. He explains that, initially, it was impossible to bridge the gap we discovered opening up between the words at our disposal and that experience which, in the case of most of us, was still going forward within our bodies. . . . We were indeed dealing then with one of those realities which cause one to say that they defy imagining. It became clear henceforth that only through a sifting [par le choix], that is only through that self-same imagining could there be any attempting to tell something about it.11

Anthropomorphizing the Human    Only by “sifting,” that is, by not saying everything, does Antelme communicate “the absolute.” This “antiliterature,” this indigestible account, stripped of technique and convention, addresses us because Antelme recurs to selection, substitution, and figure. By not saying everything, by learning how not to speak, Antelme writes as a man speaking to other men. To use his own startling phrase, he once again becomes a man of the earth.

“I was no longer a man of the earth” On June 21, 1945, in the first weeks following his return from the camps, Antelme wrote a letter to his friend (and rescuer) Dionys Mascolo that he calls “his first act of ‘concrete’ living [mon premier acte de vivant ‘solidifié’].”12 Antelme understands this letter as the act (of writing) through which he becomes a survivor rather than a deportee and can begin to count himself among the living. The letter is written by one who can only anticipate the life that it will effect and yet retrospectively reflects upon the life that issues from it. In other words, the letter reflects upon the survival (the life beyond life) of which it is the cause.13 In the letter, Antelme confesses to Mascolo that he no longer knows what to say—and what not to say: Je m’aperçois que je cours un assez grave danger: D. je crois que je ne sais plus ce que l’on dit et ce que l’on ne dit pas. Dans l’enfer on dit tout, ce doit d’ailleurs être à cela que nous, nous le reconnaissons; pour ma part, c’est surtout comme cela que j’en ai eu la révélation. Dans notre monde au contraire on a l’habitude de choisir et je crois que je ne sais plus choisir. Eh bien, dans ce qui chez d’autres représentait pour moi l’enfer, tout dire, c’est là que j’ai vécu mon paradis; car il faut que tu saches bien D., que pendant les premiers jours où j’étais dans mon lit et où je vous ai parlé à toi et à Marguerite surtout, je n’étais pas un homme de la terre. J’insiste sur ce fait qui me hante rétrospectivement. I see that I am in the midst of a great danger: D., I believe that I no longer know what to say and what not to say. In hell one says everything; that must actually be how we recognize it. For me, that is the main way it was revealed. In our world, on the contrary, we are used to choosing, and I believe that I no longer know how to choose. Now, saying everything, which in others represented hell for me, is for me where I lived my paradise; D., it is necessary for you to really know that since the first days when I was in my bed and when I spoke to you—to you and

   Chapter 4 to Marguerite above all—I was not a man of the earth. I insist on this fact, which retrospectively haunts me.14

The danger of the camps in which one’s life was the target of a system of destruction had been replaced with the danger that one might live without living like a man of the earth. Antelme experiences this second danger to be as grave as the first. While he has survived, he recognizes that to live as a speaking being is not a guarantee of living as a human being, or, put another way, that one might survive but this does not mean that he has not fallen off the earth. Antelme speaks here not of a nation or group to which he might belong but of the most universal sort of belonging: to be of the earth, to breathe air and drink water. Here, Antelme does not suggest that being human is at stake (it is not), but only his earthliness. It is in this extraordinary deportation—from the earth itself—that Antelme recognizes the survival of the human beyond its capacity to survive, beyond its end, and in its radical alienation.15 At the end of the war, Antelme’s state was so dire that the allies who liberated Dachau had left him to die. By chance, François Mitterrand, a fellow member of the resistance who served as the French representative to the liberation of Dachau, found Antelme among the quarantined deportees and arranged for Mascolo and Georges Beauchamp to remove Antelme secretly from the camp. Mascolo recalls that during their risky return to Paris, Antelme “talked the whole time; he didn’t stop talking, recounting. . . . Day and night, he didn’t stop talking”; and Beauchamp heard in that talk “the first stirrings of The Human Race. He talked and talked.” Beauchamp continues, “A kind of fever that lasted until exhaustion. . . . He thought he was going to die.”16 But when Antelme writes to Mascolo, he fears not the physical danger of his first return but the danger that accompanies his still delirious speech, which he understands to threaten both his capacity to live among men and his capacity to remember the camps. He can only say everything, but saying everything leaves nothing to be heard or understood.17 The very quality that has been taken as the index of man (speech itself ) has come to signify a nonhuman life (it has become nothing other than a cry).18 Marguerite Duras, who cared for Antelme in these first days, describes his physical state in detail. Antelme was impossibly weak, incapable of standing alone, and able to eat only a teaspoon of gruel at a time, but for

Anthropomorphizing the Human    Duras it was his shit that distinguished him from others. His shit, Duras writes, “was inhuman”: For seventeen days the turd looked the same. It was inhuman. It separated him from us more than the fever, the thinness, the nailless fingers, the marks of SS blows. We gave him gruel that was golden yellow, gruel for infants, and it came out of him dark green like slime from a swamp. After the sanitary pail was closed you could hear the bubbles bursting as they rose to the surface inside. Viscous and slimy, it was almost like a great gob of spit. When it emerged the room filled with a smell, not of putrefaction or corpses—did his body still have the wherewithal to make a corpse?—but rather of humus, of dead leaves, of dense undergrowth. It was a somber smell, dark reflection of the dark night from which he was emerging and which we would never know.19

Antelme’s inhuman shit is not the stuff of a dead man, not the excrement of a man at all, but the stuff of the earth (bearing “a smell . . . of humus, of dead leaves, of dense overgrowth”), as if bearing witness to the fact that the relation between man and earth has been overturned, as if the earth in which the dead decompose was buried in him.20 Duras saw Antelme’s shit as betraying his position—its horror and danger. What she recognizes in his shit he recognizes in his speech: Antelme no longer is a man of the earth. The danger of this position is two-fold: In the first place, it indicates the risk that speaking might no longer be the mark of a man, even that speech might indicate that one no longer is a man. But there is a further risk. Antelme recognizes that he bears witness to the camps when he speaks in a language that cannot be understood, saying everything. He communicates the camps best when he speaks in a manner that does not communicate. Antelme acknowledges that for others, “saying everything” might seem like hell, and that for him this immense freedom and indecorous frankness is a private paradise. In either case it is not the lot of man. Antelme confessed his fears to Mascolo about two years before writing The Human Race. In the foreword to The Human Race—the only part of the book in which he reflects upon his life outside of the camps— Antelme again relates his experience, this time from a distance that allows for reflection. He concludes the preface by explaining that although in the camps he felt “contested then as a man, as a member of the human race,” he also discovered there the “indivisible oneness” of the human race.21 It is

   Chapter 4 this experience that leads Antelme to explain the difference between what he went through and the experience of heroes—whether literary or historical. He writes: Of the heroes we know about, from history or from literature, whether it was love they cried forth, or solitude, or vengeance, or the anguish of being or non-being, whether it was humiliation they rose up against, or injustice—of those heroes we do not believe that they were ever brought to the point of expressing as their last and only claim an ultimate sense of belonging to the human race.22

It is from this “beyond” the grave (the opposition of life and death) and beyond the earth (the opposition of the alien and the inhabitant) that Antelme insists that the humiliations, violences, and debasements that marked the “realities” of the camps have led him to “claim an ultimate sense of belonging to the human race [l’espèce]” and “a clear vision of its indivisible oneness [une vue claire de son unité indivisible].”23 Yet, Antelme’s conception of the human implies less a positive characterization of capacity than a limit-experience, even a disaster. In an essay called “The Indestructible,” which initially appeared in the Nouvelle Revue Française and later was included in the section of The Infinite Conversation called “Limit-Experience,” Blanchot offers a formula to explain what Antelme means by the human: “man is indestructible and . . . he can nonetheless be destroyed.”24 This definition implies that the human can be destroyed, can endure as destroyed, deprived of everything that might make him human, including the capacity to choose or to speak, and that being destroyed is not the end of destruction or the destruction of the human. Blanchot’s text is a fragmentary conversation between an incalculable number of anonymous voices.25 These voices—impersonal, and yet intimate—are testament to the disaster they describe. Not only do they speak of man, they also speak as men, that is, as ghostly, hardly differentiated interlocutors. The infinite conversation that transpires between them is not a dialogue (speech divided between two). Nor are these voices merely mouthpieces—personifications of ideas already found in books. Often (although less explicitly in this conversation than in others), the positions they voice can be attributed to Hegel, Heidegger, Lévinas, Nietzsche, Bataille, or Blanchot, but rarely, and never entirely or uncritically, do they reflect the positions of just one of writer. Rather, these voices are the non-

Anthropomorphizing the Human    self-identical, multiple, and divided movement of writing at the borderline of literature and philosophy (performance and cognition). When it appears in The Infinite Conversation, “The Indestructible” is divided in two parts, and the section devoted to Antelme is called, like Antelme’s book, “L’Espèce humaine” (translated into English as “Humankind”). To speak at once of destruction’s infinite possibility and its impossibility is not to overcome its negation or to return the identities that would turn this conversation into a dialogue or turn philosophy or testimony away from literature (possible or impossible). Rather, it is to speak beyond or before the opposition of possible and impossible, destructible and indestructible. In Antelme’s testimony and Blanchot’s conversation, the definition of the human as enduring (in) its own suspension, as the capacity to remain human despite every privation, introduces a further exigency: the human is not defined by the capacity to speak or to die, but by the capacity (which is a form of weakness) to survive, to be destroyed and to live beyond destruction. Antelme describes this “capacity” as a state of perpetual contestation: “To say that one felt oneself contested then as a man, as a member of the human race . . . it was that that we felt most constantly and most immediately, and that—exactly that—was what the others wanted. The calling into question of our quality as men provokes an almost biological claim [revendication] of belonging to the human race.”26 Here Antelme makes two points: first, he explains that in the camp one felt “contested” as a man. This means that being human was at issue. In this sense the “human” is a claim or proposition (I am human), brought about in response to the feeling that the human is in question. Second, Antelme understands the destruction of certainty, the calling into question of one’s belonging to the human race, not merely as an accidental effect of the camps, but as National Socialism’s explicit aim. This aim also proved to be its limit.

Man Without Limit The first voice to speak in Blanchot’s conversation describes The Human Race as an ethical, rather than historical, event: Each time the question: Who is “Autrui ”? emerges in our words I think of the book by Robert Antelme, for it not only testifies to the society of the camps, it also leads us to an essential reflection. I don’t mean to imply that his book spells out

   Chapter 4 a full response to the question. But even without taking into account the time or the circumstances it portrays (while nonetheless taking them into account), what impels this work toward us is what remains of the question’s interrogative force. Through reading such a book we begin to understand that man is indestructible and that he can nonetheless be destroyed. This happens in affliction [malheur]. In affliction [malheur] we approach the limit where, deprived of the power to say “I,” deprived also of the world, we would be nothing other than this Other that we are not.27

This voice introduces The Human Race as a philosophical work whose power lies not in its detailed account of life in the camps but in the “essential reflection” that this account bears (and solicits). The “essential reflection” responds to, without exhausting, the question of the other man, defined as interminable alienation and unlimited destruction.28 The voice figures ­Antelme’s account of the endurance of the human in a state of radical privation as evidence of the indestructibility of the human. Indestructibility (survival) in this respect is not merely a power, but an overwhelming lack. Man is (and is capable of ) what Thomas Carl Wall has called “radical passivity”; it is as passivity that he is “indestructible” and that the oppositions between capacity and noncapacity, destruction and indestructibility are divided.29 But just as soon as one voice offers this definition of man, a second voice points out that however true it might sound, its truth would be impossible to determine: “Man is the indestructible that can be destroyed,” the voice repeats, and continues, “This has the ring of truth, and yet we are unable to know it through a knowledge that would already be true. Is this not merely an alluring formulation?”30 The skeptic recognizes that the very problem of this definition of human priority and endurance is that the limit­lessness it identifies remains unknowable. There is no knowledge that precedes it; the frame through which it becomes understandable is the frame that it alone produces. Because we are incapable of experiencing a limit that is perpetually deferred, we can never be certain that “man is the indestructible.” And because every account of destruction implies that the one who speaks remains, every account of destruction is also an account of the indestructible. How, therefore, can we know that an infinite capacity for destruction is true? The status of this insight—“man is the indestructible that can nevertheless be infinitely destroyed”—remains in question. Is this neutral, enigmatic insight a truth or is it merely an appearance? What is the source of its insight? And what is its effect?

Anthropomorphizing the Human    One of the voices explains that rather than ground knowledge or release us for freedom, this discovery (which is the discovery of the camps) instead is “overwhelming.” He explains: “that man can be destroyed is certainly not reassuring; but that because of and despite this, and in this very movement, man should remain indestructible—this fact is what is truly overwhelming: for we no longer have the least chance of seeing ourselves relieved of ourselves or of our responsibility.”31 This voice finally turns to Antelme’s text to find a positive statement of this “inexorable” affirmation of the human, which it understands as evidence of extraordinary power: “‘But there is no ambiguity; we remain men and will end only as men. . . . It is because we are men as they are that the SS will finally be powerless before us. . . . [The executioner] can kill a man, but he cannot change him into something else’. . . . Human power is capable of anything . . . Man can do anything; and first of all, he can deprive me of myself.”32 The passage in which Antelme affirms the irreducibility of the human begins not with “man” but with trees and animals: The valley outside is dark. From it there comes no sound. The dogs are sleeping a healthy, sated sleep. The trees breathe calmly. The nocturnal insects feed in the fields. The leaves perspire, and the air fills with moistures. Dew covers the fields, and in a little while they will gleam in the sun; they are right there, next to us, and we should be able to touch them, be able to caress that vast soft pelage. . . . ­Never shall we have been so aware of nature’s wholesome goodness; never so ready to behold as omnipotent the tree that will surely still be alive tomorrow. We have forgotten about everything that is dying and rotting in this powerful night. . . . To us who look so like animals any animal has taken on qualities of magnificence; to us who are so similar to any rotting plant, that plant’s destiny seems as luxurious as a destiny that concludes with dying in bed. We have come to resemble whatever fights simply to eat, and dies from not eating; come to where we exist on the level of some other species, which will never be ours and towards which we are tending. But this other species which at least lives according to its own authentic law—animals cannot become more animal-like— appears to us as magnificent as our “true” species, whose law may also be to lead us here to where we are. Yet there is no ambiguity: we’re still men, and we shall not end otherwise than as men.33

Antelme witnesses the German landscape from a house somewhere between Gandersheim and Dachau. In this landscape—dark and silent, and in this respect profoundly different from the camps—trees, insects, and dogs all

   Chapter 4 appear secure in a freedom that at once seems an anthropomorphic attribution and is exactly the freedom from which the deportees (who appear like dogs, and whose stomachs are filled with indigestible dog biscuits, the only food they’ve found to eat) are deprived. The scene seems to reflect certain ambiguity, the clear and catastrophic confusion of the human and the nonhuman. Antelme’s insistence that there is no ambiguity here is surprising: to exist in resemblance and division—to appear a rotting plant or voracious animal—is a (is the) truly human possibility. If to be human is understood as a capacity, it is the capacity to suffer—even to die—without becoming other than a man. The human is at once a limit on what is possible and means that one can suffer every possible violence without exceeding this limit. One only suffers as a man.34 And this also means that one only acts—even when one has pretensions of divinity—as a man. For Antelme, the impossibility of becoming other than human marks, in at least two ways, the limit of the Nazi project. The SS—however they exerted their power, and however others after the fact came to understand their murderous violence—nevertheless remained human. And the deportees they victimized as rodents and insects never could become anything other than men. That a man can resemble anything else, that a man can appear animal or thing—or god—does not change what a man is (infinite capacity, the capacity to be anything, the capacity to be nothing, survival of every limit), but rather designates the enduring limit of the human. It is this infinite capacity for resemblance and survival—whereby any apparent transformation always remains evidence of the irremissibility of the human—that Antelme understands as the law of the species. Antelme locates the ultimate failure of the SS and collapse of the Nazi project in the failure to recognize the endurance of the human. Paradoxically, even perversely, Antelme thus insists that the SS do not threaten the “species” but unambiguously affirm it: It is an SS dream to believe that we have an historical mission to change species, and as this mutation is occurring too slowly, they kill. No, this extraordinary sickness is nothing other than a culminating moment in man’s history and this means two things. First, that the solidity and stability of the species is being put to the test. Next, that the variety of relationships between men, their color, their customs, the classes they are formed into mask a truth that here, as the boundary of nature, at the point where we approach our limits, appears with absolute

Anthropomorphizing the Human    clarity: namely, that there are not several human races, there is only one human race. It’s because we’re men like them that the SS will finally prove powerless before us. It’s because they shall have sought to call the unity of this human race into question that they’ll finally be crushed.35

Referring to Nazi revolutionary ideology and to the eugenics program it spawned as a “dream” and then as a “sickness,” Antelme claims that what remains at stake is “the species”—not the Jews as a people, not all those become Jews through Nazi ideology, not the good, not God, but the human species understood as an ultimate singularity because it bears an infinite capacity for difference. The SS puts the species to the test by testing what a human can endure (eugenics), as well as, and this seems to be Antelme’s point, testing what the human can endure (the camps). Conceived as subjects of pathology and fantasy, the SS are bound to reach a limit. And they reach this limit in encountering the limitlessness of the human species, which endures despite every division generated to mask it. The Nazi project discloses the human: this is why it must fail. In Antelme’s logic, the SS never will succeed in transforming humans into nonhumans, because every substitution, every debasement extends rather than encounters the limit of the human. Even when men are forced to live in ways that are “unimaginable” and “inhuman,” these exigencies remain human exigencies. The Nazis never will be able to accomplish their end, because there remains no limit to what man can endure as man, and because torture only confirms this. Antelme finally states that if the human is an unsurpassable limit, a man can be killed but he cannot be changed into something else: “And so, here, the animal is luxurious, and the tree is divinity, and we cannot become either animals or trees. We cannot, and the SS cannot make us succeed in it. And it is just when the mask has taken on the most hideous shape [figure], it is just when it is about to become our own face [figure]—that it falls.”36 Antelme distinguishes between sovereign natural entities (animals and trees) and humans who only can live in anticipation and radical division. The majesty of the tree and the animal is this self-identity from which humans are deprived; the sovereignty of the nonhuman is their essential nonresemblance. The human, however, is a division between appearance and essence (when essence is the capacity to appear as anything, the capacity for unlimited destruction), a division that Antelme registers as that between a mask and a face: one can appear an animal, but, because one appears

   Chapter 4 an animal, one remains a man.37 Antelme goes further to suggest that the moment in which a man appears most monstrous (most defaced or disfigured), the moment that he is about to become an animal or monster, is also the moment that appearance (figure or mask) gives way to essence. The essence of the human is this capacity of non-self-identity and division. The human is merely a capacity for resemblance, for appearing as, which Blanchot will translate as the infinite capacity to be destroyed.38 The actuality of the human is disclosed in the moment that a mask verges on becoming a face. The mask falls once it comes to be our face (“and it is just when it has taken on the most hideous shape, it is just when it is about to become our own face—that is when the mask falls [c’est au moment où le masque a emprunté la figure la plus hideuse, au moment où il va devenir notre figure, qu’il tombe]”).39 If this seems to establish the difference between a superficial appearance (mask) and an essential human face, it is a difference that remains unsustainable, for the human is only an infinite capacity for masking, for taking on faces (masks, figures, disfiguration). It is the infinite capacity for defacement, for resemblance and disfiguration—which is to say, the infinitude of figure—that Antelme registers as essentially human. The absence of face, the enduring nonidentity between the mask and the face, does not mean that man has a face but that the face of man only ever is a mask—an infinite number of masks. More importantly, it is this masking—this figuration and disfiguration—that reveals the essence of the human as figure.40 But just as Antelme accounts for the position of men whose “hideous” state signals not their bestiality but their humanity, so too does he provide a frame for understanding the SS neither as “animals” nor as “inhuman actors,” neither as “gods” nor as “devils” whom they may resemble, but as men. And if, at that moment, we think what, here, is certainly that which requires the most considerable effort to think, that “The SS are only men like ourselves”; if, at the moment when the distance between beings is at its greatest, at the moment when the subjugation of some and the power of others have attained such limits as to seem frozen into some supernatural distinction; if, facing nature, or facing death, we can perceive no substantial difference between the SS and ourselves, we are obliged to say that there is only one human race. Everything in the world that masks this unity, everything that places beings in situations of exploitation and subjugation and thereby implies the existence of various species of mankind, is

Anthropomorphizing the Human    false and mad; and that we have proof of this here, the most irrefutable proof, since the worst victims cannot do otherwise than establish that, in its worst exercise, the executioner’s power cannot be other than one of the powers of man: the power of murder. He can kill a man, but he can’t change him into something else.41

Because they resemble, the SS emerge as non-self-identical men. The division means that being-as (as animals, as gods) is also the mark of not-being what one resembles (animals, gods), that is, of the division that describes all figure. The prisoner who envies dogs and trees, the SS guard who envies the gods, the SS perceived as an inhuman actor, the man of the camp perceived as vermin: in Antelme’s logic—or ethics—every one of these attributions and perceptions is evidence of the irremissibility of human being. Yet, just as Antelme describes a radical form of non-self-identity, so too does he insist upon the unity of the human race in its non-self-identity, that is, in its affliction (malheur). In other words, the unity of the species is its capacity to resemble, its identity as nonidentity. However, the apparently frozen and unbridgeable divisions within the human—the division between the SS and the deportee, which Antelme understands only as an exaggeration of other divisions of class, race, and gender manifested in every­day life—reach their limit at the moment that one can say that they, the SS, are “men like ourselves.” This logic rests on two inversions. The first inversion is that to be human is to be capable of resembling but incapable of overcoming the nonidentity that resemblance involves; it is to be other than oneself and not to become something else. This is what Blanchot, in “The Relation of the Third Kind (Man Without Horizon),” will call “an I without a self.”42 Yet, if non-self-identity recovers (without recovering) the deportee, if it articulates every instance of privation as a human exigency, it also recovers (without recovering) the SS. This is the second inversion. For Antelme, this recovery of the human in its apparent destruction culminates in being able to say that “they are men like ourselves.” In Blanchot’s “L’Espèce humaine,” the voice that I have been calling the first, describes this final capacity to say “they are men like us” as a naming. He understands Antelme to show that when one is afflicted—when all that remains of self, world, and horizon is a hideous mask—when he has become someone “who no longer has either a face or speech,” when “he becomes the unknown and foreign,” what nevertheless remains is an enduring “knowledge” of “the unity of the human species” and the act of naming that ensues: “his last recourse is to know that he has been struck not

   Chapter 4 by the elements, but by men, and to give the name man to everything that assails him.”43 The man deprived of horizon, addressed and faced as other than man, can know and say that he remains in a human relation, that this affliction belongs to him only insofar as he remains a man, and that it is executed neither by gods nor by nature, but by other men. This knowledge seems to register an undeniable humanism—the sort of humanism that Nietzsche critiques in “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” But is this a humanism, considering that human essence is an infinite capacity for disfiguration? If non-self-identity is the mark neither of sovereignty nor of freedom, but rather of an extraordinary passivity—a passivity so extreme that even destruction, however ruinous, is not its end—can we still understand this naming as a humanism? Or rather, might we begin to understand that here emerges an understanding of the human (the indestructible that can be destroyed) that arrests both familiar humanisms and familiar antihumanisms? The acknowledgment of the inexhaustibility of the human leaves humanism and every attempt at abandoning the human at a standstill. “To give the name man to everything that assails him” would be to denaturalize or demechanize power and violence by way of a linguistic act. This naming renders the relation between the prisoner and the SS one between men in the unity of their perpetual disfiguration.44 Reworking the phrase that he used earlier in response to the definition of man as “the indestructible that can be destroyed,” the second voice in Blanchot’s conversation gives another name to this experience. He calls it “anthropomorphism”: “‘Anthropomorphism,’ ” he says, “then would be the ultimate echo of truth when everything ceases to be true. We should, therefore, complete Pascal’s thought and say that man, crushed by the universe, must know that in the last instance it is not the universe, but man alone who kills him.”45 Just as “man is the indestructible that can be destroyed” was said to have the sound of a truth, even if one never could know it (“Cela sonne comme une vérité” [my emphasis]), so too does anthropomorphism (giving the name of man) resonate as “truth’s ultimate echo.” Is this a mockery of Antelme’s apparently naïve—and deeply discomforting—insistence upon biological claims? Is it a dismissal of the one knowledge that Antelme understands to remain when all else has been destroyed: the victim’s knowledge that he, like his assailant, remains human? Or rather, does this voice acknowledge that neither truth nor knowledge is at stake here but that what is at issue is an act—like the act

Anthropomorphizing the Human    of writing through which Antelme returns to earth or the claim through which the biological endurance is understood—an act of survival. The voice that understands Antelme’s attribution of the name of man to victim and executioner as an anthropomorphism also understands anthropomorphism to be the remainder of truth when “everything ceases to be true.” The voice here describes a disaster of truth (destroyed­indestructible) that parallels the disaster of the human. Anthropomorphism names this disaster, but this also means that it names the time (“when everything ceases to be true”) of testimony: the time in which no witnesses remain. While this would seem to describe a contemporary catastrophe, the voice attributes this understanding of the human to Pascal—to the pensée that it only “completes.” The pensée in question conjoins a definition of man with the affirmation of an impossible knowledge: that one could in the last instance know one’s killer as one’s killer. The knowledge that Pascal reflects—and that marks human specificity—would be the knowledge of a dead man who lives on beyond his death, a knowledge that never can be known. The pensée reads: L’homme n’est qu’un roseau, le plus faible de la nature; mais c’est un roseau pensant. Il ne faut pas que l’univers entier s’arme pour l’écraser: une vapeur, une goutte d’eau, suffit pour le tuer. Mais, quand l’univers l’écraserait, l’homme serait encore plus noble que ce qui le tue, parce qu’il sait qu’il meurt, et l’avantage que l’univers a sur lui; l’univers n’en sait rien. Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. There is no need for the whole universe to take up arms to crush him: a vapour, a drop of water is enough to kill him. But even if the universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler than his slayer, because he knows that he is dying and the advantage the universe has over him. The universe knows none of this.46

Pascal offers a botanical—rather than animal—metaphor to define the human: man is a thinking plant, rather than a thinking or speaking animal. The metaphor affirms man’s extraordinary frailty. Yet, this frailty is coupled with a capacity for knowledge far in excess of that of the whole universe and its destructive power. The knowledge of weakness is extraordinary, unsurpassable strength. If The Human Race translates this thought, it is because it registers the power of the weakest—the deported, afflicted, most deprived of men—and because it links this weak power to figure and

   Chapter 4 non-self-identity. The power of the weakest man over the strongest (the power of the slave over the master) is the knowledge that victim and executioner both are men, capable of infinite destruction. But while Pascal’s is a thought of the difference between victim (a man) and executioner (the universe), Antelme registers what he calls their “essential unity.” Pascal’s pensée sets out by defining man as other than man, by saying that man is a reed (roseau). Le Robert states that from the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries, roseau “developed metaphorical values implying fragility, vulnerability . . . or flexibility” suggesting that Pascal is using a conventional metaphor.47 Pascal’s metaphor elides the resemblance that Antelme understands as essentially human and states that man is something other than man, an organic, nonhuman species of grass. Although water comprises the reed’s universe, it also threatens its death. But unlike the reed, man—a thinking reed—can know this. This is where man’s difference lies. The capacity to think, the capacity to know he thinks, frees man from nature and from the “universe” that kills him. The universe— whatever its power before the frailty of a man—never knows. If Pascal’s pensée uses metaphoric comparison to establish the difference between the human and the nonhuman, Antelme’s thought articulates the unity of the human through its permanent self-difference. Understood as the completion of Pascal’s pensée, Antelme’s naming of the human establishes that the death struggle is not between man and the infinite universe but rather between man and man, where man is the capacity to be infinitely destroyed. When one knows that he is dying, one knows that he remains a man and that he will die as nothing other than a man. To know this is to enter into the infinity of survival, the incompletion of the negation. Furthermore, in Blanchot’s conversation, it is not strictly a matter of “knowing,” the knowledge that from Descartes to Kant and Wordsworth recovers man from the abyss, but rather of naming. This naming—which the voice calls “anthropomorphism”—coincides with and suspends the end of truth; it is called “an echo of truth when everything ceases to be true.”

Anthropomorphism When the voice in Blanchot’s text dismisses Antelme’s affirmation of the human as an exorbitant anthropomorphism, it does so in a passage that translates Nietzsche’s account of “anthropomorphic truth” in “On

Anthropomorphizing the Human    Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense.” In that essay, Nietzsche defines “a thoroughly anthropomorphic truth” as the discovery (as if for the first time) of a forgotten positing, the mistaking of metaphors for concepts. He explains (ironically praising man’s genius over that of the bee): When someone hides something behind a bush and looks for it again in the same place and finds it there as well, there is not much to praise in such seeking and finding. Yet this is how matters stand regarding seeking and finding “truth” within the realm of reason. If I make up the definition of a mammal, and then, after inspecting a camel, declare “look, a mammal,” I have indeed brought a truth to light in this way, but it is a truth of limited value. That is to say, it is a thoroughly anthropomorphic truth which contains not a single point which would be “true in itself ” or really and universally valid apart from man. At bottom, what the investigator of such truths is seeking is only the metamorphosis of the world into man. He strives to understand the world as something analogous to man. . . . Similar to the way in which astrologers considered the stars to be in man’s service and connected with his happiness and sorrow, such an investigator considers the entire universe in connection with man: the entire universe as the infinitely fractured echo of one original sound—man.48

For man, truth is a game of hide-and-seek (or figuration) that links the taxonomies of zoological science to the constellations of astrological pseudoscience. The search for truth not only relies upon but aims for what Nietzsche calls a “metamorphosis of the world into man,” such that the universe is not what crushes man (as in Pascal), but what comes to signify only him. In some sense, Antelme’s notion that every privation, every arrival at an inhuman position, only gives further evidence of the endurance of the human repeats Nietzsche’s understanding of anthropomorphic truth. Indeed, this is what the voice in Blanchot’s conversation suggests when, echoing Nietzsche’s statement that anthropomorphism renders the universe “the infinitely fractured echo of one original sound—man,” he supposes The Human Race to imply that “anthropomorphism would be the ultimate echo of truth, when everything ceases to be true.” But in an instance of only partial translation (perhaps a recollection by memory), Blanchot places anthropomorphism (the assumption of man at the center of a universe that only reflects and echoes him) in the place that the universe occupies in Nietzsche’s phrase. Turning to Pascal, Blanchot recovers the “universe”—only to understand it in a gesture that he borrows from Nietzsche—as the echo of man (“We should, therefore, complete Pascal’s

   Chapter 4 thought and say that man, crushed by the universe, must know that in the last instance it is not the universe but man alone who kills him”).49 In “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric,” an essay that sets out to consider “the gesture that links epistemology with rhetoric in general, and not only with the mimetic tropes of representation,” Paul de Man also turns to Nietzsche’s essay, focusing in particular on Nietzsche’s apparent definition of truth as trope.50 De Man cites Nietzsche’s definition of truth as “Ein bewegliches Heer von Metaphern, Metonymien, Anthropomorphismen [a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms],” only to cut it off (as he somewhat coyly admits) “before it has been allowed to run one third of its course.”51 For de Man, the alignment of epistemology and rhetoric, or aesthetic with rational judgment, truth and trope, is “the main tenet and the major crux of all critical philosophies and ‘Romantic’ literatures.”52 Thus at stake here is not only Nietzsche’s text or truth itself, but the claim—stated or dramatized—that romanticism is “the recovery of controlled discourse on the far side of even the sharpest denials of intuitive sense-­certainties.”53 If here “controlled discourse” signals rationality, romantic and critical texts are understood to establish that “controlled discourse can be obtained by way of the loss of self and sense undergone in the transports and suspensions of the aesthetic.”54 The imputed claim of romanticism is that ecstatic, aesthetic, or rhetorical suspensions will lead to rationality or truth. Tropes would not send one out of the system of truth, but return one to it. Nietzsche’s definition of truth, de Man continues, states this restoration in full, ironic consciousness of its implications. However, de Man is not interested in the negative knowledge of truth’s uncertainty as much as in the interruption that attends its statement: What interests us primarily in the poetic and philosophical versions of this transaction, in this give-and-take between reason and imagination, is not, at this point, the critical schemes that deny certainty considered in themselves, but their disruption by patterns that cannot be reassimilated to these schemes, but that are nevertheless, if not produced, then at least brought into focus, by the distortions the disruption inflicts upon them.55

De Man is interested in “patterns,” structures that have nothing to do with meaning—with knowledge or truth—but disrupt the “schemes” (i.e., patterns in which epistemology and rhetoric are continuous) here rendered.

Anthropomorphizing the Human    In this condensed sentence, de Man articulates a relation between the disruptive pattern and the epistemology-rhetoric scheme that does not circumscribe the interruption, or control it, but rather indicates the denial of the denial of certainty when the denial of certainty is offered as something certain.56 The pattern that interrupts the epistemology-rhetoric scheme— anthropomorphism—does not belong to it as an excess that would recover truth and lead us back to “controlled discourse,” including “controlled discourse” about the absence of controlled discourse (i.e., rhetorical indeterminacies). The question that this evokes is how “anthropomorphism” and “man” as they are deployed and named in The Human Race interrupt de Man’s account of anthropomorphism as the recuperative, humanist understanding of truth. How does anthropomorphism interrupt the interruption of anthropomorphism that de Man locates in Nietzsche’s essay? Nietzsche’s claim is interrupted by the enumeration of truth as “a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms” (my emphasis). De Man insists that we attend to this list for it marks a moment when Nietzsche, the philologist, uses technical terms. As de Man points out, metaphor and metonymy are properly rhetorical terms; however, anthropomorphism “is no longer a philological and neutral term, neither does it complement the two former ones.”57 Anthropomorphism is neither a third term added to the set that begins with metaphor and metonymy nor a synthesis of them, but this does not mean that it is “neutral” (not neutre, neither one, nor the other). Rather, it belongs to another order and assumes a prior term—the human—which it “takes as given.”58 In order to isolate the specificity of anthropomorphism and distinguish it from metaphor and metonymy, de Man defines trope (metaphor and metonymy) as “the possibility of stating a proposition.” Thus rendering Nietzsche’s definition of truth to mean that truth is possibility of stating a proposition; and an “army” of tropes is thus the possibility of stating “several . . . infinitely varied sets of propositions.” The seemingly scandalous truth of Nietzsche’s essay is not, in de Man’s account, very scandalous, or very significant: it is ultimately only the statement of a grammatical fact. At the moment epistemology and rhetoric are (it seems) perfectly conjoined, they manage only to fulfill “an unchallenged grammatical possibility.”59 But Nietzsche is up to something else: he not only states the continuity of truth and trope (e.g., metaphor and metonymy), but disrupts the recuperative statement of that disruptive continuity.

   Chapter 4 In de Man’s reading, “anthropomorphism” (rather than metaphor and metonymy) is the truly disruptive term. It is a recuperative figure that interrupts the recuperation of certainty about uncertainty (truth is a trope) that Nietzsche’s statement otherwise implies. As de Man defines it: [Anthropomorphism] is not just a trope but an identification on the level of substance. It takes one entity for another and thus implies the constitution of specific entities prior to their confusion, the taking of something for something else that can then be assumed to be given. Anthropomorphism freezes the infinite chain of tropological transformations and propositions into one single assertion or essence which, as such, excludes all others.60

Anthropomorphism introduces “substance” into Nietzsche’s scheme. Here, however, de Man does not argue that anthropomorphism relies upon “man” and takes “man” as given—even if anthropomorphism literally means to give the form (morphe) of man (anthropos). Rather, as Rodolphe Gasché explains, the introduction of “substance” elaborates the binary opposition between anthropomorphism and trope: if trope is understood as structure, anthropomorphism will be framed in terms of substance.61 Gasché goes on to explain that anthropomorphism not only arrests the infinite substitutability that tropes imply, but by “tak[ing] substitutability to be evidence for the prior givenness of one single substance,” also shows that “one thing can be taken for another in order to be able to assume the prior givenness of an ultimate referent.”62 Nietzsche disrupts the apparently disruptive account of tropes with the arresting of an anthropomorphism in which all substitutions relay back to a prior substance, itself an effaced substitution (or a forgotten metaphor). But what if, as in Antelme’s case, that “prior substance,” that ineffaceable ground, is only the infinite capacity for substitution and non-self-identity? For Nietzsche and de Man, anthropomorphic substitutions, or “identifications on the level of substance,” refer us to a ground they assume as prior to the substitution: “the infinitely fractured echo of one original sound—man.” Substance, entity, single assertion, and essence oppose and name the limit of infinite substitution. As soon as a substitution is understood to be a sign of rationality rather than an uncontrollable movement, it also is understood to refer to (assume and establish) a human figure. Thus, an arrested assertion would signify an anthropomorphism in the sense that Nietzsche articulated it. Man is the condition of truth, by

Anthropomorphizing the Human    virtue of positing the terms of truth. In this account, the arrest proper to anthropomorphism also signifies the disruption of Nietzsche’s disruption (his truth claim). The disruption of the recovery of knowledge in negative knowledge is the disruption by (and of ) the human: this disruption renders the proposition truth is a trope an anthropomorphism. First “substance” and then the “proper name” inhabit the place where we would expect to find man. De Man claims that anthropomorphism “is no longer a proposition but a proper name, as when the metamorphosis in Ovid’s stories culminates and halts in the singleness of a proper name, Narcissus or Daphne or whatever.”63 Enumerating possible proper names— on the way to establishing that Nietzsche’s enumeration of truth proves no enumeration at all but is “in fact a foreclosure which acquires, by the same token, considerable critical power”—de Man encounters and repeats a version of the forceful disruption he finds in Nietzsche’s essay.64 Anthropomorphism “is” a proper name rather than a proposition; it ends not in sheer substitutability but in the singularity of pure reference, a reference that is obviously given (insofar as one’s proper name is also one’s given name). If the example of Narcissus seems to register the narcissism (permanent self-reflection) and echoing with which Nietzsche defines anthropomorphism, de Man’s ultimate example of anthropomorphic singularity is “whatever.”65 Barbara Johnson, in an essay that considers the limits of de Man’s account of anthropomorphism (and its relation to personification), gives one explanation for de Man’s curious interest in the proper name. Johnson reads de Man’s essay together with the case of Rowland v. California Men’s Colony, Unit II Men’s Advisory Council, in which the Supreme Court was asked to determine whether a group of inmates could be figured as “an artificial person” and thus sue in forma pauperis to recover the right to cigarettes. She suggests that if in de Man’s essay, “man” were to be the “given”—the “substance” or the “singularity” obtained in the assumption of anthropomorphism—anthropomorphism would lead to a concept (of man) or a metaphor rather than a proper name. Thus anthropomorphism would remain within the circuit of propositions (i.e., tropes) and would not render the frozen singularity de Man claims it effects. Johnson answers the question, “Why call this a proper name?” by explaining, “Man would be subject to definition, and thus to transformation or trope. But proper names are not subjects of definition: they are what they are. If ‘man’ is

   Chapter 4 taken as given, then it can only be because it is out of the loop of qualification. It is presupposed, not defined.”66 “Man,” in Johnson’s reading, is a proper name rather than a concept, and, she remarks parenthetically, this point is dramatized and “particularly vexed” in a text signed “de Man.”67 For Johnson, even “man” could be a proper name—if man signifies (with an echo of the divine name) that “it is what it is.” Once “man” (here also a signature) is a proper name, it seems any particular proper name would no longer be surprising. Yet Johnson finds the proper names that de Man offers up to be “surprising.”68 She reminds us that the names Daphne and Narcissus “haunt” de Man’s readings of Baudelaire’s “Correspondances” and “Obsession,” poems he reads in the second half of the essay. Echoes and ambiguously human trees become two of the central terms in de Man’s reading. And, as we have begun to see, these terms also haunt Nietzsche’s essay, Pascal’s pensée, and Blanchot’s conversation. In fact, Johnson goes so far as to suggest that “Nietzsche’s triumvirate of metaphor, metonymy, and anthropomorphism . . . functions like the plot of an Ovidian metamorphosis”69 and thus allows us to see that de Man’s “triumvirate” (“Narcissus or Daphne or whatever”) echoes Nietzsche’s “metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms.” The final term that interrupts de Man’s enumeration of anthropomorphism is neither an addition nor a synthesis, and if it is a neutral term (“whatever”), its neutrality is resoundingly nonneutral. It is not a proper name but the possibility of any proper name. De Man’s list of proper names (“Narcissus or Daphne or whatever”) inverts, all the while repeating, the crisis of Nietzsche’s list of “tropes.” For truth to be whatever name is not exactly for truth to be a trope—“the possibility of stating several propositions about a single subject.” Rather, defining anthropomorphism by way of the proper name, de Man introduces an infinite variation or lack of quality (“whatever”) as a “ground” that neither freezes nor signifies substance. Another version of this gesture—whereby anthropomorphism is defined by infinite substitutability as evidence of man as infinite substitutability—emerges in Antelme’s The Human Race. “Narcissus or Daphne or whatever”: the first two names signal mythic figures and allegorical explanations. They are proper names and the names of objects (the flower, the laurel) that remain after the metamorphoses of persons into things. In this respect, proper names become nouns, even as the origin of a language of names is figured as human. Yet, this list

Anthropomorphizing the Human    of Ovidian metamorphoses—of metamorphosis that “halts in the singleness of a proper name”—produces its own crisis. The final name in de Man’s series, introduced to signify any name whatsoever (whatever name) is not a proper name or singularity, but takes the place of one. Expanding upon Johnson’s recognition of the centrality of the Ovidian allegory to the structure of these texts, we might ask whether de Man’s Ovidian examples (“Narcissus or Daphne or whatever”) trouble the very notion of anthropomorphism he is at work to understand (and at work to understand as the crisis of Nietzsche’s essay on truth). What happens when “whatever” takes the place of a name? “Whatever” (quodlibet in Ovid’s Latin), like Odysseus’s “no one,” is an antiname. Taken as a name it puts all systems of identification into a crisis. “Whatever” is a term of dismissal or unimportance: it does not matter, whatever name you choose, you still end up with an anthropomorphism. Thus, “whatever” not only states a possibility, but the closure of possibility, and this is the case not only as it appears in the final (infinitizing) term in a list, but as it sounds a response of frustration and indifference to the other.70 For Antelme, man is “whatever.” When Giorgio Agamben sets out to imagine a “coming community,” echoing Hannah Arendt, he is concerned to articulate quodlibet or whatever not as indifference but, attending to its Latin definition, as “singularity.”71 Reading Agamben’s essay with de Man’s, we can see that when de Man articulates the indifference of any singularity and the nondifference between one proper name and another, stating that all proper names share in the structure of foreclosed indeterminacy, he also registers singularity as a difference. Rather than mean “being, it does not matter which” whatever (quodlibet) would state “being such that it always matters.”72 Is this being-that-matters, being such that it always is an echo of man, at stake in anthropomorphism? Given its placement in a series of Latin names, “whatever” can be heard as an example (the exemplary example) of the frozen singularity that de Man wishes to identify, and to acknowledge as a crisis. The term that seems devoid of singularity, that takes the place of the proper name and stands for any name whatsoever, comes to register the absolute singularity of a being—a singularity that indicates the singularity of man. Yet, “whatever” also disrupts de Man’s account of anthropomorphism, for it indicates an ethical dimension of anthropomorphism. It signals a possibility of thinking anthropomorphism not only as an identification of essence or substance but the endurance of impropriety.73 This impropriety—which

   Chapter 4 Agamben later will call “the absolutely non-thing experience of a pure exteriority,” the most difficult thing to think—will return us to The Human Race, to the affliction, non-self-identity, and radical alterity that Antelme recounts, and to the anthropomorphism that is at once the means and the issue of his recounting.74 De Man identifies anthropomorphism as the suspension of Nietzsche’s apparent claim to mastery. This mastery forecloses rather than sustains the radical uncertainty or non-thing-ness of truth that the statement “truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms” articulates and, in articulating it, undoes. In other words, anthropomorphism is the suspension of a suspension, and this double negative is the moment at which Nietzsche does not merely recover the negative knowledge of truth’s trope, does not merely call upon us to remember that truth is a trope, but rather shows that this remembrance is beyond our power. Anthropomorphism is precisely what keeps us from the recollection of which it is evidence. By including “whatever” as an example of anthropomorphic foreclosure, de Man also correlates anthropomorphism—the assumption of an ultimate ground or essence: man—to the articulation of the human as devoid of essence, as the possibility of “pure exteriority,” or, to return to the term with which I began, the possibility of “being destroyed.” In Blanchot’s conversation, anthropomorphism emerges as the last act (possibility or power) of a man who has “become the unknown and the foreign,” one who has fallen “as though outside of himself.”75 The attribution of a name (“man”) to one’s assailant—an attribution that designates man as “the measure of all things”—is neither the forgetting of metaphor (as Nietzsche suggests) nor the solidification of a limit (as de Man suggests), but rather the displacement of every limit through the name man. Anthropomorphism designates the other (including the SS guard) as man when man is not a being of essences but a being capable of infinite resemblance, of destruction without end, as “whatever.”76 “Whatever” interrupts de Man’s reading of anthropomorphism in Nietzsche. It interrupts his account of “the gesture that links epistemology with rhetoric in general,” as it is manifest in critical philosophy and romantic poetry and discloses the “ground” that anthropomorphism assumes to be only “pure exteriority” or irremissible otherness. In Agamben’s idiom, it would be the assumption of an “irreparable” otherness of the self; in Blanchot’s idiom, it would be the assumption of an affliction in which no one appears or remains, in

Anthropomorphizing the Human    which all that remains is an echo of man. Yet as soon as the voice in Blanchot’s text states that “anthropomorphism would be the ultimate echo of truth when everything ceases to be true,” as soon as it echoes (translates and inverts) Nietzsche’s definition of truth, it too bears the remnants of an Ovidian allegory: Echo herself—the voice without language.77 If anthropomorphism is a restorative figure, this is only because it restores man’s weak power (the capacity to be destroyed, to live on) and introduces a possibility of speaking within weakness that does not recover a self or power. The voice in Blanchot’s conversation that calls Antelme’s act an anthropomorphism worries that the gesture through which the afflicted “give[s] the name man to everything that assails him” would be impossible.78 If affliction (malheur, time-out-of-joint) is truly affliction, if man disappears in it, who remains—who could remain—to speak?79 Wouldn’t the act of naming through which victim and executioner are identified as men be impossible from within the affliction to which Antelme bears witness? Wouldn’t this naming necessarily correspond to the recovery of man beyond affliction, the overcoming of affliction in a testimony that we now can understand as anthropomorphic? The voice in Blanchot’s conversation explains what he perceives to be this aporia: It is precisely in affliction that man has always already disappeared: the nature of affliction is such that there is no longer anyone either to cause it or to suffer it; at the limit, there are never any afflicted—no one who is afflicted ever really appears. The one afflicted no longer has any identity other than the situation with which he merges and that never allows him to be himself; for as a situation of affliction, it tends incessantly to de-situate itself, to dissolve in the void of a nowhere without foundation.80

If, in affliction, the one who suffers already will have disappeared (already will have been destroyed), no one is afflicted. If affliction strips one of self—if it is destruction—no one experiences affliction. No one can speak of or from it: affliction effects a crisis of witnessing.81 The question implicit in the skepticism that this voice registers is whether anthropomorphism recovers man in lieu of bearing witness to the disappearance of man, whether the gesture through which he understands (even parodically) Antelme’s ­response to suffering and the obligation to bear witness to affliction displays an impossibility of bearing witness, offering to overcome affliction only through a restoration of knowledge.

   Chapter 4 Yet, “anthropomorphism”—to give the name man—is not simply an act of sovereign virility. The restoration of man that “anthropomorphism” seems to effect only ensures that man is the possibility of being-whatever, that is, of being-destroyed. If everything relates back to the single name (“man”), its propriety is radical impropriety, the capacity to be anything. Man is the infinite chain of signification (or inhuman language). To say this is not to say only that man is a trope (as Novalis does), but rather to say that anthropomorphism indicates man’s being-whatever: being-de-­situated, beingnowhere, being-dissolved, being-without foundation, being-destroyed.

The Name of Man In Smothered Words (Paroles suffoquées) Sarah Kofman considers the necessity and the impossibility of speaking of her father’s death in ­Auschwitz: Because he was a Jew, my father died in Auschwitz: How can it not be said? And how can it be said? How can one speak of that before all possibility of speech ­ceases? Of this event, my absolute, which communicates with the absolute of history; and which is of interest only for this reason. To speak—it is necessary— sans pouvoir: without allowing language, too powerful, sovereign, to master the most aporetic situation, absolute powerlessness and distress itself, to enclose it in the clarity and happiness of daylight? And how can one not speak of it, when the wish of all those who returned—and he did not return—has been to tell, to tell endlessly, as if only an “infinite conversation” could match the infinite privation [dénuement]?82

Kofman repeats an argument about the camps as the absolute of history (or what Blanchot will call “disaster”). While she acknowledges that this history has a personal manifestation, she also explains that it is for this historical reason, rather than for a personal reason, that her father’s death is at once unspeakable and that she must speak.83 She must speak it, and yet there is nothing to say but this fact—“Because he was a Jew, my father died in Auschwitz”—a fact that is not the foundation of a discourse but rather its unsettling in a rush of questions. These questions are a form of the “speech without power” that she understands the situation to demand. By unsettling speech, by unsettling it as if without alternative, Kofman under­ takes a testimony in which the language of mastery (grammar, knowledge,

Anthropomorphizing the Human    iterability) dissolves, in which discourse is permanently interrupted rather than generated.84 Kofman bears her father’s absent testimony—and the fact of his death—by citing the only details she can access: dates, numbers, and names of places: My father: Berek Kofman, born on October 10, 1900, in Sobin (Poland), taken to Drancy on July 16, 1942. Was in convoy no. 12, dated July 29, 1942, a convoy comprising 1,000 deportees, 270 men and 730 women (aged 36 to 54): 270 men registered 54,153 to 54,422; 514 women selected for work, registered 13,320 to 13,833; 216 other women gassed immediately.

And she goes on to describe the memorial document in which she finds evidence of his anonymous death: It is recorded, there, in the Serge Klarsfeld Memorial: with its endless columns of names, its lack of pathos, its sobriety, the “neutrality” of its information, this sublime memorial takes your breath away. Its “neutral” voice summons [interpelle] you obliquely; in its extreme restraint, it is the very voice of affliction [malheur], of this event in which all possibility vanished, and which inflicted on the whole of humanity “the decisive blow which left nothing intact. This voice leaves you without a voice, makes you doubt your common sense and all sense, makes you suffocate in silence.”85

Kofman turns from Serge Klarsfeld’s numbers—concrete, exact, lacking in pathos—to a description of how the Klarsfeld memorial affected her as a “you.” The most sober, least sentimental or anthropomorphizing of documents (a list of the dead along with the numbers that they were given in the camps, numbers sewn on their clothing, tattooed on their forearms) has the effect of taking away the breath and voice of the living, of leaving them without words, without sense, and virtually without life. Yet this devastating, “sublime” memorial also speaks to the living, offering an oblique summons in “the very voice of affliction.” This address from a memorial is shorn of all lyricism and the familiar anthropmorphisms that would allow the dead to speak to us from the grave—or, in the case of the camps, from the absence of the grave. It is part of a list that takes the place of a grave, while still signifying that there is no grave for the anonymous dead killed in gas chambers and burned in crematoria. Here, Kofman hears the absence of any rhetorical ostentation, the avoidance of every figure, the list of the dead, as a voice—or a cry.86

   Chapter 4 Kofman’s response to the “voice” of the memorial, which is so vividly, the absence of voice, appears on the pages of her book that are given over to a reproduction of the page from Klarsfeld’s memorial on which “Berek Kofman” appears. The page from the memorial is so much larger than Kofman’s small book that it is printed horizontally across two of her pages and compels one (compels you) to turn.87 You must turn her book and turn away from it, in it, to encounter the list of the names of the dead that interrupts reading, that leaves her speechless and breathless, that fissures the book in an abyss of names and numbers from which all meaning is absent. We witness the memorial as it takes away—suffocates—Kofman’s speech, leaving her in silence and paralyzing our acts of making sense and of reading. But, we also see that the recovery of a proper name (what I have been calling anthropomorphism) and the summons that it effects is not the recovery of power and possibility in the face of infinite substitution, but rather the abyssal interruption of all language and speaking. Kofman’s readings of Blanchot and Antelme follow this catastrophic turn, but they do not signify the restoration of voice. Instead, they issue in a voice that endures its interruption. Kofman’s questions of how to speak are never resolved (“How? How?” she will ask over and again). Her only recourse is to a speaking that would occur in its impossibility, the speaking that Antelme describes as the speech of The Human Race and that Ann Smock associates with a “Disastrous Responsibility”: “To have to speak without being able to speak or be understood, to have to choke [Devoir parler sans pouvoir parler ni être entendu, devoir suffoquer].”88 Choking interrupts—like the pages that interrupt Kofman’s text. It interrupts the crisis borne when every speaking of the “truth” is a failure to speak the truth, when the only way to speak, and not just to speak but to be understood, requires not speaking, or “choosing.” Choking interrupts the contiguity between epistemology and rhetoric. Choking—choking-speaking—is what Antelme has to interrupt in order to write The Human Race, to return to the earth, and what The Human Race still bears, in its interrupted, fragmentary form.89 But it also bears in the suspension of choking, by a fictional address. At one point, Antelme imagines that he could address an SS guard with whom, as Kofman puts it, “no true speech” was possible.90 In this passage, Antelme recalls Jacques, a young French medical student and, like him, a political prisoner. He begins by describing Jacques’ radical transfor-

Anthropomorphizing the Human    mation in the camp: Jacques has become unrecognizable; he looks as one never could have imagined a man—this man—to look. Antelme imagines a scene in which he might present Jacques—the unimaginable endurance of the human—to an SS guard. While the passage exemplifies Antelme’s understanding of the survival of the human within and despite every privation, Antelme’s turn to address an SS officer, to show Jacques to him, is what links impossible speech, anthropomorphism, and survival: The face [figure] of the medical student, Jacques, is no longer the face we knew when we got here; it is crossed and cut by two wide creases; the nose is pointed like the noses on the dead. Back at his home, nobody knows what strangeness his face could contain. Back at his home they are still looking at a photograph that no longer represents anybody. . . . We are being transformed. . . . Jacques, who was arrested in 1940 and whose body is rotting with boils, and who has never said, who will never say, “I’ve had enough,” and who knows that if he doesn’t figure out a way to eat a little more he’ll die before we’re through and who already walks around like a ghost of bones and who scares the other guys, because in him they see the picture of what they will soon be themselves, and who has always refused, and always will refuse to make the least deal with a kapo in order to eat, and whom the kapos and the medics are going to hate more and more, because he gets thinner and thinner and his blood is going to hell—Jacques is what in religion they call a saint. Nobody back home ever dreamed he could be a saint. They’re not waiting for a saint to return, they’re waiting for Jacques—the son, the fiancé. They are innocent. If he gets back, they will respect him, respect him for-what-he’s-suffered, for what all of us have suffered. They’ll try to recuperate him, to make a husband out of him. . . . The SS who confuse us cannot bring us to confuse ourselves [Le SS qui nous confondent ne peuvent pas nous amener à nous confondre]. They cannot prevent us from choosing. On the contrary: here the need to choose is constant and immeasurably greater. The more transformed we become, the farther we retreat from back home, the more the SS believe us reduced to the indistinctness and to the irresponsibility of which we present the incontestable appearance, the more distinctions our community does in fact contain, and the stricter those distinctions are. The inhabitant of the camps is not the abolition of these differences. On the contrary, he is their effective realization. Were we to go and find an SS and show Jacques to him, to him we could say: “have a look, you have turned him into this rotten, yellowish creature. You have succeeded in making him what you think he is by nature: waste, offal. Well, we can tell you this, which by all rights would lay you out cold if “error” could kill: you have enabled him to make of himself the strongest, the most complete of men, the surest of his powers, of the resources of his conscience, of the scope of his

   Chapter 4 actions. Not because the unhappiest [le malheureux] are the strongest, nor because time is on our side. But because one day Jacques will cease running the risks you make him run because you’ll cease exercising the power that you exercise now; because we can already provide an answer to the question whether at some point it can be said that you have won. With Jacques, you never won. You wanted him to steal. He didn’t steal. You wanted him to kiss the kapos’ asses in order to eat. He wouldn’t do it. You wanted him to laugh in order to look good when a Meister was beating some guy up. He didn’t laugh. Most of all you wanted him to doubt whether any cause was worth his rotting away like this. He didn’t doubt. You got off looking at this wasted wreck that stands before you; but you’re the one who’s been had, fucked to the core. We show you nothing but boils, sores, gray heads, leprosy; and that’s what you believe in, the leprosy. You sink deeper and deeper. “Jawohl! we were right, jawohl, alles Scheisse!” Your conscience is at rest. “We were right. Just look at them.” No one is so deluded as you, and you’re deluded by us, who are leading you to the very end of your error. Calm yourself, we won’t undeceive you; we’ll bring you to the end of your enormity. We will let ourselves be taken the whole way to death, and you’ll see only the vermin who are dying.91

Jacques’ face has changed in the camp: it is slashed and divided, gashed and scarred. These cuts keep the prisoners “from telling the handsome from the ugly”; they divide the divisions that organize the world outside the camps. Jacques’ face—“a face of the dead”—undoes not only aesthetic but ontological categories; it divides the division between the living and the dead.92 Antelme singles Jacques out because Jacques—who has survived four years in the camps, who appears a phantom, and who can be seen to illustrate the statement “man is the indestructible who can be infinitely destroyed”—is resistance itself. Antelme explains that at the moment when there seems no longer to be any difference between one man and the next, when it seems, and when the SS act, as if each man is entirely substitutable with the next (because none are men), the men resist being confounded. Confondre here is both a transitive and intransitive verb; the first part of the sentence states: The SS do not distinguish between us. They confuse us. They view us as an entangled mass rather than individual men. It also states that they—the SS—leave us confounded. They baffle us. The sentence’s ambiguous grammar—it “confuses” the subject and object of confondre—culminates in the refusal of confusion (understood both as bafflement and indistinction) and a linguistic enactment of the “unity” of the human race. This is a refusal to confuse appearances: the appearance of nondifference between the men in

Anthropomorphizing the Human    the camp and the suspension of responsibility that this appearance seems to signal. However, the sentence cannot state this without undergoing and registering the confusion that it promises to resist. Antelme claims that “the more transformed we become, the farther we retreat from back home, the more the SS believe us reduced to the indistinctness and to the irresponsibility whereof we do certainly present the appearance—the more distinctions our community does in fact contain, and the stricter those distinctions are.”93 The appearance of indistinction instead is evidence of enduring difference and singularity. Antelme dramatizes the endurance of these differences and of the nonidentity between appearance and essence in a fictional address to an SS officer before whom he imagines presenting Jacques. “Regardez,” “Look,” Antelme “says” to the fictionalized SS officer, addressing him in a gesture that assumes he can be addressed as man, that he too could be the addressee of an order. The address exposes the limit of the SS. In the first place, this is because it demonstrates their failure to “confound” the men of the camp and the failure to capitulate that Jacques’ face and his attendant life figures. The apostrophic act by which Antelme holds Jacques before the SS officer turns Jacques, “rotten, yellowish,” into “the strongest, most complete of men.” The very gesture through which the SS will have turned Jacques into “waste, offal” will have turned him into a man. Antelme’s address to the SS officer also is self-reflexive: it renders him one who can speak even from the point of affliction, who can address an SS guard, even if only through a fiction. Yet, as Antelme speaks to the SS, he also effects a turn within the address. He speaks not only in his own voice but also in the voice of the SS. The anthropomorphizing apostrophe assumes the voice of the SS, and this ventriloquism assumes that even an SS officer can speak and not just kill, that Antelme can speak in his voice. The ventriloquized “guard” is interrupted by the response that his position precludes. Responding here, repeating the situation in acting out what never could have taken place, Antelme exposes the SS officer’s violent inability to “see.” The SS officer sees the deportees “as vermin who are dying” (to take the mask as a face) rather than seeing men covered in boils and eating fallen scraps (the survival of the human).94 Addressing the guard, Antelme sets out to correct his vision, to make him see what he does not see. But rather than restoring vision, rather than staging a scene of recognition, the fictional dialogue acknowledges anew the failure of

   Chapter 4 vision and the impossibility of an encounter. This staged reappropriation is offered in the mode of irony—the ironically generous “protection” of the SS guard in which the victim promises to keep his executioner “undeceived”: “Calm yourself, we won’t undeceive you; we’ll bring you to the end of your enormity. We’ll let ourselves be taken the whole way to death.” Each of these statements reasserts a power (the action of a self, “bringing down” the SS, leaving them undeceived, letting themselves, the men of the camps, be taken) that is no power.95 The fictional address to the SS not only assumes that he is a man, that the deportee is a man, but in doing so designates the human as a capacity to endure as destroyed or deprived, to speak when speaking seems impossible. The other episode that Kofman understands to illustrate the impossibility of “true speech” in the camps involves the disarticulation of Antelme’s own name. Having been in Buchenwald for about three months (the date is October 1, 1944), Antelme is named for transport to Gandersheim, a labor camp. Kofman traces the contradictions associated with roll call in the camp. Characteristically, she undertakes this examination through a series of questions that look at violence without making sense of it or recovering from its effects. Kofman’s questions precede the passage that she will set out to treat: How could they [the kapos] speak to them, in their singularity and their difference, other than to butcher [déchirer] their language and mangle [écorcher] their names in those moments in which they derisively feigned still to maintain some identity [leur avoir conservé une quelconque identité] to those whom they treated as “nothings”? When their way of looking at them and being with them during roll call in the camp signified that there was no difference between this or that face [figure] of the detainee? When, for someone to remain distinguishable, a red or white circle had to be painted on the back of his striped jacket? When they had reduced them to a state of panic in which they no longer recognized this face [visage] from that other, could no longer differentiate one “drooping head” and “gaping mouth” from another, no longer recognized themselves, and were becoming more and more like “skulls, like forms eternally becoming more and more alike [des crânes de mort, de formes pareilles qui ne finiront plus de se ressembler]”?96

Kofman’s questions lead to a paradox: everything in the camp aims to do away with internal differences, to solidify only the difference between the SS and the detained, between the self and the other—to make it so that there will be no other, to exclude and exterminate the other. Starvation,

Anthropomorphizing the Human    work, physical violence, torture, striped uniforms, shaved heads, the assignation and tattooing of numbers, murderous conditions—all serve to separate the men of the camp from the kapos and the SS and to efface the differences that persist between the men of the camps, to turn them from singular beings into indifferentiable, ceaselessly resembling forms. We have seen that Antelme recognizes this destruction as the proof of the human, the endurance of the human in destruction. Yet, in a perversion of logic, the Nazis simultaneously insisted that the deportees could not be differentiated from one another and that they must be identified by name during regular roll calls. These names no longer simply state—as Johnson understands the proper name in de Man to state—“it is what it is.” Names in the camps become something else, as if they indicate only the capacity to suffer endlessly as a man. The name in the camps spoken by the SS is farcical. This is not only because it is ripped apart in being mispronounced, but also because it continues to work and to designate singularity only by registering an infinite capacity for privation. Standing on the camp’s outer edge, beneath a star-filled sky, Antelme thinks of the head of his block, another political prisoner, presumably German, who has been in Buchenwald for eleven years. Despite this man’s hatred of the SS, Antelme recognizes him to have been subsumed by the system of the camp, and this discovery also leads Antelme to discover his own conversion to this world. “I never wondered what his name was,” Antelme admits, “I never thought he could have a name?’ ” 97 The ­Blockältester seems nameless; swallowed by the machinery of the camps, he appears beyond the name. This privation would seem to be the aim of the camp, the aim that attends numbering and counting prisoners, rendering them: “numbers, nothing but numbers; and for him neither can we have names. We’re outsiders [nous ne sommes pas dans le coup].”98 When Antelme admits that the block leader also was nameless, that he too was a man of Buchenwald, he articulates the camp in its perverse success. He realizes that he has come to perceive the block leader in the same terms that he imagines the block leader (and the SS who oversee his work) to perceive the prisoners: incapable of having names, they are numbers, “outsiders.” But for the prisoners there is always roll call. Their names are regularly broadcast, and they are obliged—from within a system of destruction—to affirm their names. Roll call returns a name to those who have been given numbers, but the return of the name does not coincide with the

   Chapter 4 reappropriation of first-person speech, of subjectivity or selfhood. Instead, the name dramatizes the crisis of subjection (of privation and affliction) that occurs in the camps. The endurance of the name in the camps witnesses that man has become a site of singularity without a self (affliction).99 Antelme describes the strange experience of roll call in the camps: The passageway under the tower has been lighted up. The SS arrive. Two of them wear garrison caps; the others, sentries, wear forage caps and carry rifles. They count. A Lagerschutz calls out the names, butchering them [appelle les noms en les estropiant]. In among them, amidst Polish and Russian names, is my name. Laughter when my name is called [Rigolade de mon nom], and I reply “Present.” It sounded outlandish [comme une barbarisme] in my ear; but I’d recognized it. And so for one brief instant I had been directly designated here, I and no other had been addressed, I had been specially solicited—I, myself, irreplaceable! And there I was.100

In responding to the deformed name (estropiant literally means “paralyzing, crippling”), to the familiar combinations of vowels and consonants, rendered laughable, foreign, if still recognizable in the Lagerschutz’s mouth, responding to the “barbaric” sound of the misaccentuations and mispronunciations upon his ear, Robert Antelme says, “Je.” Over and over again he says, “Je.” In speaking his presence, in taking it on, in taking this on as his present, Antelme revels in the singularity of his name (and his “Je”) and the unsubstitutability of his “présent”: No one could say “présent” in his place. Were he not there to say it, everything would have been brought to a halt, no one would have left, no one would have moved until he said “yes,” “present,” this—that—is me. And yet this is the very place of affliction. Antelme hears his own name—mutilated—and responds to it, even when the name is no one’s name (a mangled name from within the camps). Even when there is “no one” there to respond, he is “designated” by the name, “addressed” and singularly “solicited.” Yet the one who responds “I” is only a “someone.” Someone was found [Quelqu’un s’est trouvé] to say “yes” to this sound, which was at least as much my name as I was myself, in this place. And you had to say yes in order to return into the night, into the stone that bore the nameless face [à la pierre de la figure sans nom]. Had I said nothing, they would have hunted for me, and the others would not have left until I had been found. They would have had a recount, they would have seen that there was one who hadn’t said “yes,” one

Anthropomorphizing the Human    who didn’t want that him to be him. Then, having found me, the SS would have worked me over so as to make it clear to me that here being me really meant being me, and so as I’d have the logic of it good and straight in my head: that, around here, I was damned well I, and that this nothing that bore the name that had been read out was damned well me.101

Antelme responds to his name as a third-person someone, “found,” according to the passive construction, by an undesignated, not first-person, someone else. Someone had to be found (s’est trouvé ) in order to respond, and yet Antelme goes on to say that the one called is “me” alone, wholly irreplaceable. There is no one to respond, someone had to show up or turn up to say “yes,” to affirm the name and that the one named is me and me alone, an identity established with a near mania that disseminates rather than merely consolidates the identity of the “I.” Someone, no one, is called and responds when Robert Antelme recognizes his mangled name still operative in the language and the voice of the camp and of the SS. It is, as Antelme writes, “as much my name as I was myself, in this place.”102 And here the name—the name to which “quelqu’un” says yes—does not permit the freedom of an “I,” but rather, saying “yes” to the name in the starlit night only returns one to the night, only allows one to remain one who has no name: “Et il fallait dire oui pour retourner à la nuit, à la pierre de la figure sans nom.”103

Anthropomorphizing the Human When, during roll call in the camp, Antelme responds to his name, his response conditions his transport from one camp to the next, and— even if it leads to an almost manic repetition of the “I”—also leads to (and is a condition of ) remaining within affliction. The affirmation of his name only returns him “to the night, to the stone that bore the nameless face.” Here it seems that the opposition between figure and anthropomorphism (facing and naming) finally comes undone. Yet, it comes undone not because anthropomorphism emerges as a cover-up of figure, a forgetting of the linguistic origins of man and his truths. Rather, it comes undone because the very ground of the critique of anthropomorphism trembles once the man that it assumes is marked neither by knowledge nor by power but by infinite passivity and acts of naming. The name (the

   Chapter 4 proper name and the name of man) returns one to affliction. The affirmation of the name conditions a transport that we cannot help but hear in its resonance with and its difference from the metaphors that de Man distinguishes from anthropomorphism. This transport has Gandersheim, and eventually Dachau, as its destinations. Antelme’s testimony not only relies upon lyric anthropomorphism in order to offer an account of the camps (the account that has been singled out as the most straightforward), but it also identifies lyric anthropomorphism (“giving the name man”) as an ethical act. It is clear that when Antelme says “yes” to his mangled name, he does not recover a self of power, nor does he arrest a sovereign identity. Rather, Antelme’s affirmation returns him to the night of nondistinction, the “starlit night” in which he stands. The name returns him to the universe of the camp as a stone with a face but no name, for he only has a name in the place d’appel. Dead (a frozen stone) and alive to speak (one who has a face), he is anonymous, invisible. The name gives him over to (rather than recovers him from) infinite destruction and the night, like the day, in which all deportees appear the same. The very endurance of the difference of his proper name is not what saves him from confusion but what keeps him deported, transports him within the system. With this understanding of the proper name, it seems that we no longer are considering anthropomorphism’s fictional arrest of infinite substitution (trope), but neither are we simply speaking of the infinite chain of trope. Rather, the anthropomorphism of the human emerges as the naming of the human as an infinite capacity for being destroyed. This “infinity” differs from the infinity of the trope, instead naming the capacity of a man to sink beyond the name through the name, to become “a stone that bore the nameless face,” at once a frozen entity and a face. If this infinity is understood as man, it both repeats the old anthropomorphism (to find man indicated everywhere) and completely exhausts it. In other words, the anthropomorphism of the human that we find in Antelme’s The Human Race is a remnant of romanticism. It does not redeem the human as a power or deprive the human of life and limb. Rather, it acknowledges an infinite capacity for destruction, witnessing this destruction without overcoming it. The lyric figure that allows one to speak in one’s own proper name and returns one to the night emerges as a figure of survival.

5 The Rhetoric of Wakefulness In insomnia one can and one cannot say that there is an “I” which cannot manage to fall asleep. . . . I do not stay awake: “it” stays awake. emmanuel lévinas, Ethics and Infinity

In an essay on “Language and Culture After the Holocaust,” Geoffrey Hartman invokes wakefulness when he considers the meaning of “after Auschwitz” and the injunction “Never Forget” that issues from the camps.1 In French, veiller signifies both wakefulness and vigilance. To remain awake, not ever to lose consciousness, would be the mode in which one abandons oneself to becoming a perpetual witness. Recalling Blanchot, Hartman thus aligns wakefulness with an unbearable attention to disaster. Wakefulness names one way of figuring a limitless ethical obligation after the Holocaust. He explains: “Mankind, a devoted part of it, a kind of priesthood, would have to forsake sleep and engage in a ‘ceaseless vigil.’ ”2 In this sense, wakefulness would signify a deliberate, priestly decision to “forsake sleep” and remain incessantly in the world, never to be nonconscious, never to forget. Wakefulness would belong to the time after the end and render an interval without end, and it also would describe the being of a new man: the insomniac. Wakefulness means that one endlessly lives on in the night, and living on without being able to see a thing, one must remain endlessly alert.

   Chapter 5 In the phrase from Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster to which Hartman refers, destruction means even the end of ends: “what took up again from this end (Israel, all of us) is marked by this end, from which we cannot come to the end of waking again.”3 If this seems like an account of redemption—our life and the life of Israel (as a state rather than a people)—it is rather a life beyond life, a life of survival that is characterized by vigilance or wakefulness, passivity rather than consciousness. Hartman, after Blanchot, understands literature after Auschwitz to set out from this interrupted end, that is, he understands literature—and life—as a mode of wakefulness, which perpetually refers to and “watches over” the end that proved no end for it. Offering yet another account of the possibility of poetry after Auschwitz, Hartman implies that poetry (ethical poetry) is wakefulness, that is, the bearer of a boundless, incomplete responsibility that would do away not only with nonconsciousness (sleep) but with consciousness as well. This ceaseless vigil marks the end of the subject in a turn from consciousness to wakefulness. Wordsworth’s 1807 sonnets “To Sleep” already account for the lyric aspect of this expanded sense of wakefulness when they demonstrate the relation between poetry and sleeplessness. Although the sonnets treat the literal wakefulness that plagues their subject, they also show how a lyric figure—the apostrophe—becomes the source of wakefulness. The sonnets show, first of all, that the figure through which consciousness is assumed, instead produces wakefulness, and further that wakefulness is a state that is neither literal nor figural, neither actual nor literary; rather, it undercuts any division between the literal and the figural, experience and poetry.

Do I Talk in My Sleep? As readers of Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journals know well, William Wordsworth was a bad sleeper. Wakefulness is everywhere in Wordsworth’s work: the ambiguous claim of “A slumber did my spirit seal” and the Ode’s passage from lamentation (“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting”) to “intimations of immortality” name only two of the bestknown examples.4 The insomnia that Dorothy recounts, an experience of exasperation and patience, and the awakened insight (even if negative) that the poems archive suggest that wakefulness may be both condition and effect of Wordsworth’s poetry.

The Rhetoric of Wakefulness    In The Prelude, Wordsworthian wakefulness emerges as a mode of watchfulness—the endurance of consciousness, even to the point of delusion—rather than the visionary interruption of a dreamer’s trance.5 Yet it is the 1802 series of sonnets “To Sleep”—first published in the 1807 Poems in Two Volumes, where they number among the first of the “Miscellaneous Sonnets”—that allows the relation between insomnia and poetry, so prevalent in Wordsworth’s lyric, to be elaborated.6 While insomnia is the theme of the sonnets “To Sleep” (and the apparent cause of their exasperated tone), a figural reading of these poems registers the relation between insomnia and poetry—the wakeful subject and the lyric subject, vigilance and figurative language—that the poems articulate. The sonnets suggest how poetry’s failure to interrupt consciousness, and thus poetry’s attendant failure to serve consciousness, becomes a mode of vigilance. They demonstrate that lyric figures effect an abyss of uninterruptable wakefulness at the very moment that they are marshaled to solicit sleep. In aligning poetry and wakefulness, Wordsworth’s sonnets “To Sleep” also indicate the testimonial aspect of lyric. In these sonnets, two modes of lyric ineptitude are conjoined: poetry’s inability to overcome insomnia and the seeming impossibility of witnessing insomnia, a state in which subjects and objects remain absent.7 The sonnets indicate how an event (or a state) that precludes consciousness can be witnessed; how, in failing to bring sleep, thus failing to restore consciousness or return vital subjects and visible objects, lyric figures allow for insomnia to be witnessed without being overcome. These sonnets effect witness without negation—in this case, without negating the insomnia or attendant absence of consciousness that they convey. In their failure to negate negativity, that is, in their failure to restore a subject of consciousness, and in their ineptitude before “the pains of insomnia,” Wordsworth’s sonnets “To Sleep” render a mode of lyric vigilance that makes evident the ethical aspect of romantic lyricism. To Sleep O gentle Sleep! do they belong to thee, These twinklings of oblivion? Thou dost love To sit in meekness, like the brooding Dove, A Captive never wishing to be free. This tiresome night, O Sleep! thou art to me A Fly, that up and down himself doth shove Upon a fretful rivulet, now above,

   Chapter 5 Now on the water vex’d with mockery. I have no pain that calls for patience, no; Hence I am cross and peevish as a child: Am pleas’d by fits to have thee for my foe, Yet ever willing to be reconciled: O gentle Creature! do not use me so, But once and deeply let me be beguiled.8

“O gentle Sleep! do they belong to thee”—the first sonnet “To Sleep”— opens with a question that already effects the poem’s aim: “O gentle Sleep! do they belong to thee, / These twinklings of oblivion?” The question posed to sleep assumes sleep to be a listener and potential respondent by virtue of addressing it. But in the question, the speaker admits that he is not exactly sure of what is and is not sleep. Indeed the first problem for the poem is that the “I” does not know—indeed, cannot know— whether or not he successfully solicits sleep. The poem solicits this not knowing, “the twink­lings of oblivion” that are indecipherably sleep and the mere appearance of sleep. The poem asks whether the “twinklings of oblivion” deceptively resemble sleep (with a deception that itself would be a form of nonconsciousness) or are actual instances of sleep. The question can be heard to provide its own answer in the stuttering across the first and second lines of “thee” and “these.” The “twinklings of oblivion” are “thee’s”—the possessive of “thee” and synonym of “thine.” While ungrammatical, the repetition sounds the doubling already at work in the admission that sleep can arrive (which one recalls rather than experiences) and that sleep can deceive the insomniac by not arriving. To receive an answer to the question not only would involve the presentation or successful summoning of sleep, but also the awareness that would attend the consciousness that one is not asleep. Sleep would arrive and respond, but only as consciousness. The question to sleep therefore seems to clarify a cognitive ambiguity. In it, the “I” posits sleep as an addressee and establishes a relation between sleep and self as a relation between subjects. If this gesture effectively presents sleep as an interlocutor, it also puts the speaker in the position—oblivion—about which and to whom he inquires. The question serves as its own referent. As an open question, it exemplifies and confirms the oblivion in question. Sleep is manifest in the poem, and the question that asks sleep whether or not it is manifest (i.e.,

The Rhetoric of Wakefulness    the question that renders this first claim ambiguous) turns out to be its ­confirmation. The accusation that follows attributes to sleep the very qualities that keep the insomniac awake:       Thou dost love To sit in meekness, like the brooding Dove, A Captive never wishing to be free.

These lines establish sleep as parent (a brooding Dove, which “Thou dost love” already sounds) and as hostage. At once about substitutability and causality, this statement occurs within a causal claim (I am awake because you are hostage, and hence I am a hostage because you are a hostage) that substitutes sleep and the insomniac. Sleep is submissive (“meek”) because it does not respond (or submit) to the insomniac’s call, and more than this, because it does not allow the insomniac to submit to sleep but condemns him to remain awake. Passion and passivity, the qualities that constitute sleep, keep the insomniac awake and hostage to the world. But this reading assumes that the insomniac issues the accusation, while the figurative logic of the sonnet allows that sleep itself could be speaking here. Apostrophe introduces this possibility. Imputing the qualities of wakefulness to sleep signals an attempt to substitute sleep and the one who lies awake. Apostrophe can simultaneously assume or posit subjects, and this apostrophe assumes and posits as a subject (and through a subject) a state in which there are none: a state in which there are no subjects. Turning an inanimate, absent, or mute object into a speaking subject by addressing it has been understood as apostrophe’s major accomplishment.9 Allowing for speech without subjectivity is the apparent accomplishment of “O gentle Sleep!” The sonnet presents the sleep that conventional tricks, those catalogued in the second sonnet “To Sleep” (“A Flock of sheep”), fail to conjure. Unlike an apostrophe to the dead that seeks in one way or another to make the unconscious conscious again, giving life and voice to the lifeless and the voiceless, the apostrophe to sleep wants unconsciousness, or it wants to produce its own consciousness by rendering itself unconscious. In order to present unconsciousness, the lyric subject addresses sleep and assumes that sleep can respond. The address to sleep—which attempts to summon sleep as sleep—also raises anew the question of the meaning of apostrophe.

   Chapter 5

Straight Turns Theoretical discussions of poetic apostrophe differ in their accounts of what apostrophe is or does—whether, for example, apostrophe is, accompanies, or should in no way be associated with prosopo­poeia. In “Autobio­graphy as De-Facement,” De Man emphasizes the relation between apostrophe and prosopopoeia when he claims that “the fiction of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased or voiceless entity [and sleep is absent and voiceless, as well as a figure of death] . . . posits the possibility of the latter’s reply and confers upon it the power of speech.”10 By addressing unconsciousness as a “you” (or a “thee”), the unconscious object of address acquires the ability to speak. This speech is what Barbara Johnson, in “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” calls ventriloquism, or “throwing one’s voice.” In Johnson’s definition, “apostrophe . . . involves the direct address of an absent, dead, or inanimate being by a first-­person speaker.”11 While according to de Man, apostrophe is an address to an absent, dead, or mute entity, Johnson understands apostrophe as the address of these entities. Johnson’s genitive implies that address is at once to and by the inanimate or voiceless entity—and this is what apostrophe accomplishes. Thus in Johnson’s definition “the possibility of the latter’s reply” is already assumed by the genitive of. This leaves in question who the first-person speaker is, and troubles the “direction” of address through which apostrophe is defined. Johnson continues: Apostrophe is thus both direct and indirect: based etymologically on the notion of turning aside, of digressing from straight speech, it manipulates the I/thou structure of direct address in an indirect, fictionalized way. The absent, dead, or inanimate entity addressed is thereby made present, animate, and anthropomorphic. Apostrophe is a form of ventriloquism through which the speaker throws voice, life, and human form into the addressee, turning its silence into mute responsiveness.12

Johnson first defines apostrophe as “direct address” through the example of Percy Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” (“O wild West Wind,” etc.). Like the opening line of Shelley’s ode, “O gentle Sleep!” also invokes an allegorical addressee. But Johnson suggests that as a turn away, a trope of trope, ­direct address is indirect, a deviation from convention. Here direct and indirect are not merely opposites: they coincide with, rather than ex-

The Rhetoric of Wakefulness    clude, one another. Apostrophe is a direct address—an address “to”; however, its direction is a mode of indirection within speech. It is a trope of direct speech as a turn away from direct (or “straight”) speech. In this ­logic, direction is both indirection and an effect of indirection. Or, to use the other formula that emerges in Johnson’s definition: straightforwardness is (an effect of ) fiction. The straightening out of relations that apostrophe apparently effects is rendered by a turn, a trope.13 In Johnson’s account of apostrophe, unconsciousness can speak because a consciousness has thrown her voice. But voice is not all that is thrown. If throwing one’s voice makes it seem and sound as if one’s own voice issues from elsewhere, from another, a dummy, Johnson extends this familiar figure to include “throwing life and human form.” The ventriloquist cannot speak both from here and elsewhere—in both her own voice and the voice of another. She only can stage a dialogue between them. Once one throws not only “voice,” but life and human form—as if these could be thrown, as if these are thrown when one throws one’s voice—the interruption is radicalized: the throwing of life and human form attends the throwing of voice. To throw one’s voice is to throw one’s life and one’s form. If voice implies life and form, as the logic here suggests, the absence of my voice when the other speaks and lives also is the absence of my life, my human form. Apostrophe allows one to speak as another—as the nonhuman and the nonliving. Not only can I make it seem as if someone else speaks when I speak, but Johnson suggests that with apostrophe, I make it seem as if someone else lives. When unconsciousness speaks, consciousness remains, but it remains silent, nonhuman, and nonliving. It is in the apostrophe’s apparent success, however, that an assumption of the lyric subject’s mastery—his ability “to make the objects of the universe potentially responsive forces”—reaches its limit.14 Apostrophe exhausts the subject’s voice (and following Johnson, also its life and human form). Apostrophe and insomnia both can be understood as suspensions of an end. De Man goes even further than Johnson and claims that apostrophe (and here he reads the epitaphic surmise addressed to the living: “Sta viator,” “Pause, Traveler!”) “is not only the prefiguration of one’s own mortality but our actual entry into the frozen world of the dead.”15 The pause whereby “we” become subject to an apostrophe dramatizes in advance— and thus helps us to anticipate—our own deaths. But more than this, in rendering an apparent death-in-life, and a life-in-death (for the words are

   Chapter 5 spoken by the dead), the apostrophe suspends the mortality it seems to give. The voice of the dead interrupts our own voices and arrests us just as our own voices interrupt the muteness of the dead. The chiasmus that orders the epitaph may turn us into stones, but frozen—speaking with, for, and as the dead—we enter into the ceaselessness of living on. Living on or survival then is the meaning of “our actual entry into the frozen world of the dead.” Wordsworth’s apostrophe to sleep, and especially its final line, aims for this entry, which is also the suspension of the nonconsciousness it intends. Apostrophe signals the impossibility of getting out of the world. Wordsworth’s two other sonnets “To Sleep” resonate here, for they also take apostrophe as their theme. Yet these “explanatory” sonnets are uncontainable in still another sense: Wordsworth had obvious trouble completing and arranging them.16 In the 1807 Poems, in Two Volumes, “A flock of sheep that leisurely pass by” appears as the second of the three sonnets “To Sleep.” However, in 1836, Wordsworth rearranged the series and put “Fond words have oft been spoken to thee, Sleep!” in the second position. This change bears upon the series’ end, for the “A Flock of sheep that leisurely pass by” concludes with a seductive exclamation of praise, once again to sleep as a mother (“Come, blessed barrier betwixt day and day, / Dear mother of fresh thoughts and joyous health!”), while “Fond words have oft been spoken to thee, Sleep!” ironically culminates in bitter admonishment (“Mere Slave of them who never for thee pray’d / Still last to come where thou art wanted most!”).17 Furthermore, Wordsworth not only rearranged the order of the series, a gesture that signals the flexibility of the end; he also manipulated the order of the sonnets’ lines, as is especially evident in the fifth line of “A flock of sheep that leisurely pass by.” “A flock of sheep that leisurely pass by” opens with a list of conventional devices for summoning sleep—counting sheep, replaying soothing sounds, imagining emptiness. To Sleep A flock of sheep that leisurely pass by, One after one; the sound of rain, and bees Murmuring; the fall of rivers, winds and seas, Smooth fields, white sheets of water, and pure sky; I’ve thought of all by turns; and still I lie Sleepless; and soon the small birds’ melodies Must hear, first utter’d from my orchard trees;

The Rhetoric of Wakefulness    And the first Cuckoo’s melancholy cry. Even thus last night, and two nights more, I lay, And could not win thee, Sleep! by any stealth: So do not let me wear to night away: Without Thee what is all the morning’s wealth? Come, blessed barrier betwixt day and day, Dear mother of fresh thoughts and joyous health!

This sonnet “To Sleep”—like the one that succeeds/precedes it—enumerates several failed gestures of solicitation as part of a solicitation “to sleep.” Upon having listed in the first half of the octave all of his futile attempts at bringing on sleep, the lyric subject still remains awake. While the list in some sense enacts these devices by enumerating them—for reading it, one actually counts sheep (“one after one”) and makes the sound of “murmuring”—it also enacts the failure of these devices. Thus the octave concludes by stating that all these turns of thought and phrase only leave the insomniac (and the reader) still awake, still turning. Apparently, the line in which Wordsworth speaks the endurance of insomnia remained especially difficult to render.18 Between the sonnet’s initial publication in 1807 and its final publication during Wordsworth’s lifetime in 1845, this ten-word line underwent five notable changes (not including Wordsworth’s correction from Dorothy Wordsworth’s “I have” to “I’ve” in Dove Cottage MS 44). In the 1827 five-volume Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Wordsworth inverted the line’s order to read: “By turns have all been thought of; yet I lie.” This change endured through the 1832 four-volume edition of Poetical Works, but in the six-volume 1836 edition the line is altered again to read: “I thought of all by turns, and yet I lie.” In the 1838 edition of The Sonnets of William Wordsworth, the line reads: “but I have thought of all by turns, and yet I lie.” And in his own copies of the Sonnets and the 1836 Poetical Works, Wordsworth penciled in the corrected “I have thought of all by turns, and yet do lie,” a change that was adopted in the 1845 Poems of William Wordsworth. These revisions dramatize and even reflect the difficulty of “getting right” the first-person speech of insomnia. How can a first-person subject speak of and in his radical passivity, the passivity he desperately wants to overcome but cannot? How can he speak the failure of overcoming weakness without producing a fictional suspension of the very situation he is concerned to witness? Can speech suspend this situation or can it only make it

   Chapter 5 appear to be suspended? Passive voice (“by turns have all been thought of ”), in which the thinking subject and the supine subject are disengaged, proves inadequate. In this abandoned locution the speaker makes language responsible for and adequate to the passivity he suffers. Changing “still” in the 1807 volume to “yet” in all of the future volumes, Wordsworth unambiguously states duration without change. “Still” means that something—a person or a thing or a state—endures because it is either motionless or timeless. Thus, with the line “I’ve thought of all by turns; and still I lie” (my emphasis), Wordsworth states that the turns prove ineffective. They do not move him or move sleep. However, the line also states that he not only remains in place, but he remains “still” in the sense of being calm or arrested or unmoving. It is the failure to achieve “stillness”—still lying, he is not lying still— that Wordsworth sets out to overcome in a turn of phrase. Apostrophizing sleep, he attempts to overcome his own “tossing and turning” in bed. Therefore the ambiguous, and even inaccurate, “still” gives way to “yet.” Wordsworth thinks and writes by turns. On the one hand these lines elucidate the various means of apostrophe and the tossing and turning the apostrophes are meant to overcome; on the other hand they indicate the failure to turn to sleep, and away from consciousness. The difficulty of voicing one’s own deprivation of “stealth” (l. 10), like the difficulty of voicing the failure of a “turning” language to put an end to turning or to effect the longed-for but perpetually unachieved “reconciliation” that the first sonnet summons, is manifest in the line’s instability, its uncontainability.19 The sonnets are uncontainable to the extent that words of address in them are simultaneously (and indistinguishably) described and used. The sonnets perform the practices they seem only to catalogue, and catalogue these practices within still other performatives. Indeed, the third sonnet “To Sleep” (“Fond words have oft been spoken to thee, Sleep!”) explicitly reflects upon the address that it also enacts: To Sleep Fond words have oft been spoken to thee, Sleep! And thou hast had thy store of tenderest names; The very sweetest words that fancy frames When thankfulness of heart is strong and deep! Dear bosom Child we call thee, that dost steep In rich reward all suffering; Balm that tames All anguish; Saint that evil thoughts and aims

The Rhetoric of Wakefulness    Takest away, and into souls dost creep, Like to a breeze from heaven. Shall I alone; I surely not a man ungently made, Call thee worst Tyrant by which Flesh is crost? Perverse, self-will’d to own and to disown, Mere Slave of them who never for thee pray’d, Still last to come where thou art wanted most!20

When the sonnet lists the means of addressing sleep (“Dear bosom Child . . .  / Balm that tames . . .  / Saint that evil thoughts and aims / takest away” [ll. 5–8]), it cites these apostrophes to sleep within an apostrophe to sleep.21 Moreover, it demonstrates that descriptive (mimetic or citational) and performative language cannot be disentangled: the description of address becomes an address when address fails to obtain the end it seeks by obtaining it. The sonnets thus can be understood both to theorize and to use apostrophe. In both modes they expose the muteness that attends animation. The attempt to use a trope and reflect upon its limit produces a crisis at the level of the line and uncertainty at the level of the series. If this is a moment of poetic self-awareness (an account of lyric figures through a lyric figure), how should this self-awareness be understood? Does it indicate the poet’s mastery of a linguistic predicament? Or does this mastery— which should also signal nonconsciousness—involve other (uncontainable) outcomes and effects? In order to answer this question, I will need to examine further the state that apostrophe effects in the first sonnet. If in “O gentle Sleep! do they belong to thee” the apostrophe to sleep (and indistinguishably to the wakeful one) as a brooding dove consolidates the subject and object of address, another explicit apostrophe to sleep and an analogy reestablish, at least momentarily, the relations at work in the poem. The poet continues: This tiresome night, O Sleep! thou art to me A Fly, that up and down himself doth shove Upon a fretful rivulet . . .

The analogy stages a relation between thou (sleep) and me (the speaker) as a relation between two mobile but inhuman—and nearly formless—objects: a fly and water. In effect, the analogy states that the relation between I and thou, speaker and sleep, is not one of consciousness: the speaker, a fretful rivulet, is indifferent to and unaffected by sleep, figured as the fly

   Chapter 5 that “uses” the water. If this indicates literal “use”—recalling the female fly’s movement at reproduction—here a male fly appears (“up and down himself doth shove”), and only appears, as a fly dropping her eggs.22 Thus, when the speaker complains in the sonnet’s penultimate line that he is being “used”—“O gentle Creature! do not use me so”—the protestation recalls the earlier analogy in which he is used as the ground upon which a flysleep teasingly appears to reproduce itself. This is another of the sonnet’s attempts at self-de-animation, another of its linguistic narcotics. Both fly and rivulet belong to the category of things that might conjure sleep, archived in “A flock of sheep that leisurely pass by.” The analogy can be seen to produce a chiasmic relation between the insomniac and sleep, which is mediated by conventional sedatives that are also its terms.23 Apostrophe established a relation between subjects that this analogy serves—or should serve—to transform into a relation without subjects or consciousness. But before reaching this end, the analogy itself is interrupted. The enjambment between lines 6 and 7 marks this interruption, rendering a second analogy within the first. While the sonnet is on the way to saying, “Sleep is to Me as a Fly is to a (Fretful) Rivulet,” enjambment leads it first to say, “Sleep is to Me as a Fly is to Me.” The line reads:     O Sleep! thou art to me A Fly, that up and down himself doth shove Upon a fretful rivulet . . . (my emphasis)

The embedded analogy reintroduces consciousness. Sleep is an annoyance: it comes and goes and keeps me from sleeping. If sleep is to me as a fly is to water, then sleep is something of which I am not conscious, and, to follow through with the framing analogy, something that would have no apparent effect on an already “fretful rivulet.” Yet when sleep is to me as a fly is to me, sleep is something I can chase and maybe, though not always, kill. Something that I might—though rarely—master. Once sleep is to me as a fly is to me, I am no longer a suffering insomniac. Yet, as the pause reintroduces a system of consciousness and unconsciousness, it also introduces a personification that troubles again the consciousness it returns. The other side of the analogy, the relation between the fly and water, is also reoriented. We need only look at the final line of the sonnet’s octave to see that the relation between fly and water involves something like a

The Rhetoric of Wakefulness    consciousness. The water now reflects the insomniac’s sentiments; the fly is responsible for vexing it.       thou art to me A Fly that up and down himself doth shove Upon a fretful rivulet, now above, Now on the water vex’d with mockery.

Mockery—of the analogy and as the failure of this analogy—causes vexation: it inscribes a preexistent, neutral state within a logic of cause and effect that is contingent upon consciousness. One could say that this figurative circuit restores the consciousness that sleep would serve, despite the fact that sleep remains absent. Yet this suggestion still assumes that the sonnet produces a situation of consciousness without end, a situation, to use the desperate language of the sestet, in which to be “reconciled” and to be “beguiled” become interchangeable. This consciousness without end is no longer consciousness, but wakefulness. Until this point, I have sought to demonstrate how an apostrophe, even an apostrophe to sleep, produces wakefulness. In my reading of “O gentle Sleep! do they belong to thee” I traced the work of apostrophe: first as it allows the insomniac to inhabit the position of sleep, then as it imputes to sleep the insomniac’s attributes, but also as it leads us to wonder if sleep itself might speak in this poem. I then went on to demonstrate how an analogy, mobilized to transform the apostrophe’s subjects into objects, chiastically reinscribes the consciousness it was meant to calm. The first two cases register a doubling in which the speaker and addressee, insomniac and sleep, exchange positions, but this exchange demonstrates that consciousness can depart from consciousness without being unconscious, which is to say, that it cannot really depart, and cannot thus remain conscious. Furthermore, it describes an unconsciousness that occurs only so long as it is coincident with an utterance. In the third case, personification marks the return of consciousness—albeit inhuman consciousness— just as consciousness is en route to its evacuation. This return exhibits the impossibility of negating an apostrophe and discloses the inhuman vigilance that such a negation instead produces. While in each of these cases the apostrophe is addressed to sleep, the sheer fact of an address, the address’s incessant capacity to animate and its immunity to negation, introduces wakefulness as nonmastery, irremissibility, and survival.

   Chapter 5

Wakeful Figures In the final chapter of Wordsworth: The Sense of History, Alan Liu briefly considers Wordsworth’s sonnets “To Sleep.” Liu focuses on Wordsworth’s insomnia as a sign of what he calls “existential repetition,” a blankness, even a kind of death, that is the absence of the imagination—or the end of poetry.24 Thus Liu, implicitly following Dorothy’s diagnosis, understands Wordsworth’s insomnia as an effect of writer’s block, specifically of Words­worth’s inability to write The Pedlar, a biography of the imagination; and conversely, he understands writer’s block as the effect of insomnia. Yet, this abyssal relation is itself structured like insomnia. Not being able to write—or not being able to voice an exigency (in this case the desire to sleep, and thus to live) that, once voiced, returns one to the position of not being able to voice it—marks the burden of wakefulness.25 The sonnets “To Sleep” do not offer any outlet from the abyss, but they do describe and dramatize how apostrophe produces a state of incessant wakefulness. Apostrophe fails to overcome wakefulness, but rather repeats and reproduces the state it aims to suspend. “To Sleep” shows that the response to wakefulness only reintroduces wakefulness itself. Wakefulness describes a state—not being unconscious—in which what becomes manifest, to use Emmanuel Lévinas’s language, is “the impossibility of rending [déchirer] the invading, inevitable, and anonymous rustling of existence.”26 Lévinas dedicates a central section of his 1947 volume De l’existence à l’existant to the crisis of insomnia. In general, Existence and Existents is a preparatory essay that formulates the terms of the intensive reworking of ethics that Lévinas undertakes in his later works. Accommodating the ambiguity of veiller, which means both watch and wakefulness, Lévinas describes insomnia through the repetition of this term: On veille quand il n’y a plus rien à veiller. Le fait nu de la présence opprime: on est tenu à l’être, tenu à être. On se détache de tout objet, de tout contenu, mais il y a présence. Cette présence qui surgit derrière le néant n’est ni un être, ni le fonctionnement de la conscience s’exerçant à vide, mais le fait universel de l’il y a, qui embrasse et les choses et la conscience. [One watches on (on veille) when there is nothing to watch (à veiller) and despite the absence of any reason for remaining watchful (de veiller). The bare fact of presence is oppressive; one is held by being, held to be. One is detached from any

The Rhetoric of Wakefulness    object, any content, yet there is presence. This presence which arises behind nothingness is neither a being, nor consciousness functioning in a void, but the universal fact of the there is, which encompasses things and consciousness.]27

For Lévinas, to remain awake in the night is to be deprived, by darkness, of an object. In the night, a version of Hegel’s night, everything disappears; but when everything disappears or comes to an end, there is still a remainder. The remainder in the absence of any object or form, and hence of any content, is not a subject, for the subject cannot endure in this state of blindness and reduction. What remains is not a being, for singularity does not remain. Rather, what remains is the self without self, or subject without subjectivity—witness to bare, inexhaustable presence. Lying awake in a literal sense, one comes up against the impossibility of there not being Being, the relentless insistence of presence. Personal insomnia unleashes the forgotten insomnia of Being, whose “work” never lets up. In other words, existence and existents are both insomniacs. For Lévinas as for Wordsworth, insomnia coincides with, but remains distinct from, the impossibility of not being, of tearing oneself out of existence or of tearing existence apart. Indeed, Lévinas recalls that he arrived at his understanding of insomnia through his own childhood experience of remaining awake at night while the world around him, which he could not abandon and in which he could not participate, continued to sound with the murmur of adult voices. Lévinas’s confusing childhood wakefulness prompted him to question this mode of existence: How can the world continue when I am precluded from participating in it? How can it continue without me and how can I continue without it? Unable to summon sleep, the “I” is weak—like the child, orphan of the day, Lévinas recalls. This is not the weakness of death, but rather that of remaining incessantly in the world. It is not an obligation—I will remain awake, I will remain vigilant—that, as Hartman seems to suggest, one could choose, but rather an obligation that one suffers. To suffer this obligation, this weakness, is to encounter the end of existence or consciousness, not as a possibility but as an impossibility. It is to linger interminably in the excruciating interval of living on. In Lévinas’s account of insomnia and the il y a, as in Wordsworth’s sonnets “To Sleep,” wakefulness introduces a crisis of witnessing. How can one speak of—or speak from—this point of reduction, anonymity, or

   Chapter 5 exposure? Does figuration—the positing of “I” and “thee” in apostrophe, for example—free us from this night of privation or does it return us to the night of vigilance? Apostrophe and prosopopoeia register, rather than resolve, a break in the rhythm of consciousness-unconsciousness: they interrupt, only to sustain interminable wakefulness.

Apostrophe and the Return of Existence In the trilogy of essays that includes “Apostrophe” (1977), “Reading Lyric” (1985), and “Deconstruction and the Lyric” (1997), Jonathan Culler asks us to consider what poems (and the lyric figures that constitute them) do. He asks what, if anything, they can make happen. To argue that in Wordsworth’s sonnets apostrophe is a mode of vigilance might be to admit, with W. H. Auden, whom Culler quotes, that poetry makes nothing happen. But when nothing happens, as we have seen, existence endures—the existence that murmurs when one lies awake at night. Making nothing happen, the lyric figure lets the absent, submerged, or mute entity arrive and speak. Wakefulness, this state beyond consciousness, proves endless. Auden’s poem “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” seems to register its endurance: Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would never want to tamper; it flows south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth. (ll. 35–41; my emphasis)28

Culler quotes only the stanza’s end—“it survives, A way of happening, a mouth”—and argues that these lines thematize the performativity of lyric poetry. Poetry’s way of happening is a happening. But the enigma of Auden’s lines remains. Moving from survival, the survival of poetry, to a mouth, these lines neither resolve nor narrate the relation between survival, mouth, and mode: Does it—poetry—survive as a mouth? Does it survive in our mouths? Does it survive because of our mouths or because it gives us mouths? And if it is a mouth, a mouth that survives, what survives

The Rhetoric of Wakefulness    is us, us insofar as in voicing it we are made to speak and to live on in a figure, a figure of address.29 Reading apostrophe in Wordsworth’s sonnets allows us to encounter a version of this survival. Returning to Lévinas’s description of insomnia in Existence and Existents, we can see how a romantic figure bears upon ethical analysis.30 For Lévinas, insomnia—the incessantness of being—is encountered in the insomnia of a being. The two are not synonymous; however, the “consciousness of a thinking subject”—the noninsomniac who sleeps at night and is awake in the day—puts an end to the insomnia of both existence and being. The emergence of a subject of consciousness effects and signals a division between the subject (who sleeps at night) and what Lévinas calls the il y a that remains awake. In Lévinas’s account, the wakefulness of the il y a or “there is” differs from the wakefulness of a dream, which is the constitutive wakefulness within sleep that makes sleep possible. Rather the “there is” is wakefulness in wakefulness itself, which endows only more wakefulness. As he explains: “The there is . . . does not encase itself in sleep like a dream. Its very occurrence consists in an impossibility, an opposition to possibilities of sleep, relaxation, drowsiness, absence [L’il y a . . . ne s’emboîte pas comme un rêve dans un sommeil. Son événement même consiste dans une impossibilité—dans une opposition aux possibilités—de sommeil, de détente, d’assoupissement, d’absence].”31 This means that the il y a is invisible or unavailable to the subject who sleeps and who does not encounter the irremissibility of Being. But it means also that the il y a itself does not sleep: it is prey neither to drowsiness nor to interruption. Yet how can this insomnia of Being—encountered by a being who suffers from insomnia—appear? The difficulty here is that on the one hand the il y a has to be personified in order for it to be described in its ceaseless, wakeful energy, but on the other hand that it is precisely consciousness or subjectivity—the attributes with which personification endows its object—that interrupt or hide the il y a. The inherently “impersonal” event of the il y a—the event of anonymity and the absence of the subject—is stated in terms that personify Being and make it resemble a subject. Yet the personification, in which the il y a is figured as an insomniac, does not interrupt wakefulness, but, as in Wordsworth’s sonnets, helplessly effects wakefulness in place of consciousness.

   Chapter 5 Upon claiming that insomnia is the impossibility of abandoning consciousness, Lévinas raises the question of how wakefulness can be described if it is anonymous. He outlines the problem that description poses and calls for a new method of phenomenology, a new mode of witness: “Here description would make use of terms while striving to go beyond their consistency; it stages personages, while the there is is the dissipation of personages. A method is called for such that thought is invited to go beyond intuition [La description utilise ici des termes dont elle cherche précisément à dépasser la consistance, elle met en scène des personnages, alors que l’il y a est leur dissipation. Indice d’une méthode où la pensée est invitée au delà de l’intuition].”32 A description of the anonymous states in which objects and subjects remain absent requires a figure—the staging of a personage, or to recall Frances Ferguson’s phrase, the personification of a person.33 Wakefulness—which Lévinas associates with “certain awakenings of delirium [certains réveils du délire]” and “certain paradoxes of madness [certains paradoxes de la folie]”—happens to no one. Happening to no one, a state without a subject, it also “is impossible to recount [il est impossible de raconter].” 34 For Lévinas, any description, any account of “my wakefulness,” would suspend wakefulness by reintroducing a subject of experience turned away from the impersonal and the incessant. Wordsworth’s sonnets, in their description of the insomniac’s suffering, seem to rely upon an interruption of this sort. However, the sonnets also show that the interruption of anonymity—the staging of subject and object, I and thee, by way of apostrophe—does not rescue the insomniac and posit a subject (who can sleep). Rather, the staging of a subject only returns the insomniac, once again and incessantly, to the night of sleeplessness and poetry. Wordsworth’s sonnets and Lévinas’s essay show that a personage or figure allows for the description of a state without subjects. The figure, which is the condition of possibility of witnessing a limit, also is impotent: it neither tears one out of the state of wakefulness nor overcomes the abyss of witnessing the absence of subjects. Yet, upon having acknowledged the impossibility of suspending or accounting for insomnia, Lévinas also claims that there can be an end to the vigilance that he (in a figure of authorial impersonality) describes.35 To put insomnia “to a stop,” Lévinas explains, “a subject would have to be posited.” Indeed, this is what Words­ worth sets out to accomplish in “O gentle Sleep! do they belong to thee”

The Rhetoric of Wakefulness    when he struggles to put a stop to insomnia by positing a lyric subject. However, as a reading of the sonnet makes clear, its positings—its assumptions and its apostrophes—only manage to stage a “personage,” witness to an uninterrupted wakefulness. To read Wordsworth with Lévinas is thus to encounter the wakefulness, the ceaselessness, the survival that attends apostrophe—to discover the impossibility of arresting that wakefulness by way of a figure.

6 Breath, Today: Celan’s Translation of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 71 But can a mortal still sing? And how to speak of his song? Has the quarrel between the poet and the thinker gone far enough to make a basis for their agreement? This will not occur without a risk. A risk that risks life itself, going beyond it barely by a breath. A breath that, if it is held, saves through song, prophet of pure forces that call out and refuse shelter. Does not everything already in existence paralyze the breath? Imperceptibly occupying the air, preventing its free use, strangling with multiple coils anything still anxious to cross this captive atmosphere? luce irigaray, “Belief Itself ” sie setzt Wundgelesenes über. paul celan, “Dein vom Wachen . . . ”1

Überleben, Übersetzen Walter Benjamin suggests that there is a link between translation, Übersetzen, and survival, Überleben. In German, Übersetzen and Überleben, are visibly linked by the prefix that they share, a prefix that indicates a movement (spatial or temporal) over, across, beyond, or above. Beyond this linguistic link Benjamin also finds a conceptual one, for translations, Benjamin explains, issue not from the life of works but from their afterlife (or survival—in German these words are indistinguishable), from the

Breath, Today    fact that they surpass their time. It is not the life of the work that generates translation, but the fact that a work already lives beyond its life. This life beyond life is, in other words, not the effect of a translation but its source. As Benjamin puts it: A translation issues from the original—not so much from its life as from its afterlife. For a translation comes later than the original, and since the important works of world literature never find their chosen translators at the time of their origin, their translation marks their stage of continued life. The idea of life and afterlife in works of art should be regarded with an entirely unmetaphorical objectivity. Even in times of narrowly prejudiced thought, there was an inkling that life was not limited to organic corporality. But it cannot be a matter of extending its dominion under the feeble scepter of the soul, as Fechner tried to do, or, conversely, of basing its definition on the even less conclusive factors of animality, such as sensation, which characterizes life only occasionally. The concept of life is given its due only if everything that has a history of its own, and is not merely the setting for history, is credited with life. In the final analysis, the range of life must be determined by the standpoint of history rather than that of nature, least of all by such tenuous factors as sensation and soul. The philosopher’s task consists in comprehending all of natural life through the more encompassing life of history. And indeed, isn’t the afterlife of works of art far easier to recognize than that of living creatures?2

Benjamin makes a number of claims here—claims both commonsensical and far-fetched. He suggests, for example, that only once we recognize the histories of everything—even those things that appear merely as a background to history (life, the earth, the city, the book) might we then begin to give the concept of life “its due.” By perceiving life in merely spiritual or biological terms or by viewing life as a condition of history (rather than, as Benjamin seems also to imply, history’s issue), we fail to grasp the meaning of the very term (Überleben) that allows us to understand translation. Indeed, Benjamin’s claim that a translation is intimately tied to the afterlife of a work is comprehensible only once we acknowledge that he means an afterlife that is neither biological (the effect of transplants) nor spiritual (evidence of an eternal soul), but rather, historical. Benjamin’s observations lead him to make a curious statement, in the form of a question that also implies an analogy: “isn’t the afterlife of works of art far easier to recognize than that of living creatures?” In some respects, Benjamin’s point is banal. It is undoubtedly much easier to recognize the historical afterlife of that which has never had a biological life than it is to

   Chapter 6 discuss the afterlife of living creatures, who regularly are understood to live on spiritually or, more recently, biologically, as in the case of those who are “brain dead.”3 Once life is detached from animality and spirit, once it is not the living that we are taking about (at least directly) but instead that which has never lived, it becomes somewhat easier to recognize the historical sense of afterlife. Yet, can we say (and indeed, does Benjamin’s analogy already imply) that literature in general, and translation in particular, engages not only the life and afterlife of works but the life and afterlife of living creatures, including the spiritual and biological sense of this life? Is translation related to survival, not only in a historical sense, but also in a sense that evokes the biological and spiritual (which is to say, the inauthentic) aspects of the concept of life? Is this a possibility that could, never­ theless, be the mark of a historical, rather than transcendental, aspect of works? As much as Benjamin is interested in dissociating historical from organic or spiritual life, it may be the case that these distinctions are not as secure as he would like them to be. This is not only because there is a long history of confusing the life of works with the life of their authors, but also because of the rhetorical assumptions that attend literature in general, and lyric in particular. That literature animates, whether characters (in the case of the novel) or addressees (in the case of lyric), is an ideological fiction that has informed literary practice and criticism for an extremely long time. Nowhere is this more evident than in the claim that underlies lyric apostrophe: poetry has the power to transform a nonresponsive, nonliving creature into one who can respond. It would seem unlikely, to say the least, that Paul Celan, who understands poetry as an address to an ineluctable yet inaccessible other, would indulge in this ancient fiction of poetic animation. However, Celan’s translation of Shakespeare’s sonnet 71 (“No longer mourn for me . . .”) shows how poetry is at once radically transformed and also remains.

Shakespeare at Four Hundred On the occasion of the four hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, Celan was invited to translate twenty of Shakespeare’s sonnets into German. Celan first emerged as an iconic post-Holocaust poet following upon the enormous popularity of “Todesfugue,” but by 1964, the year

Breath, Today    of the Shakespeare celebrations, he already had abandoned the accessible musicality of his earlier poem in favor of an interrupted, neologistic poetry marked by difficulty, interruption, and pain. The invitation to translate Shakespeare’s sonnets thus apparently returned Celan to the style of poetry from which he had turned away, a poetry that seemed to him no longer to be a legitimate means of expression in the present. Moreover, the invitation charged Celan with translating not only beautiful love poetry but the love poetry of a literary icon, a poet who—even in Germany, where thanks to A. W. Schlegel’s translations, Shakespeare had become as much a part of the canon of German letters as Goethe—exemplifies literature itself. Celan almost always had been interested in Shakespeare. John Felstiner reports that even as a schoolboy, Celan “tried making German versions” of Shakespeare, and in 1941, as Romania fell to the Nazis and the Jews of Czernowitz were forced to live in a ghetto, Celan “worked on translating some Shakespeare sonnets.”4 Later, “during his months at forced labor,” Celan apparently “carried a notebook containing his version of sonnet 57,” which eventually was included among the twenty sonnets gathered for Shakespeare’s birthday celebrations.5 Thus, not only is it possible to say that Celan discovered his first poetic spirits through translating Shakespeare, but also that Shakespeare (in translation) remained with him through what he called his experience of language’s “terrifying silence.” Shakespeare’s sonnets accompanied Celan throughout his life. Celan’s translation of Shakespeare’s sonnet 71 reflects the extent to which translation can translate not only an individual poem, but also can translate poetry and its tropes. In Shakespeare’s poem, a lover anticipates his eventual death and orders his beloved to forget him once he is gone; yet the very gesture through which the speaker compels the addressee to let him go also ensures that she remember him by forgetting him, and ensures furthermore that he will live on. While the poem is explicitly about survival—the living who survive the dead and the survival of the poem’s opening imperative (“No longer mourn for me . . .”)—which is to say, while the poem explicitly concerns survival of and through poetry, it also forecloses the possibility of translation, at least insofar as translation is a mode of remembering. This does not mean that the poem has not been translated—in German alone, Karl Kraus and Stefan George, together with Celan, are among its most well-known twentieth-century translators. Rather, it means that to translate this poem is to betray its message,

   Chapter 6 to really forget the dead by remembering them, that is, by carrying over rather than carrying out their command. Celan’s translation of the sonnet’s paradoxical injunction (“Forget me”) not only demonstrates that translation involves the afterlife of a work and the acknowledgment that the work already lives on, but in translating this sonnet, Celan also translates its unreadability or, put another way, translates its poetry, its tropes and figures. In translating the unreadability of the original, and in bearing its tropes and interruptions, Celan’s poem thus introduces another mode of unreadability, one that is appropriate to his time. Celan undertakes this translation by remembering and repeating—rather than simply abandoning—the sonnet’s shocking order: “Forget the dead.” And it is by translating this uncomfortable injunction that Celan translates not only Shakespeare’s sonnet but also the relation of lyric to survival.

English, 1609 Shakespeare’s sonnet 71 makes particularly vivid why poetry would be called “verse.” The poem works by way of a series of turns and reversals effected in the movement of each line.6 No longer mourn for me when I am dead Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell Give warning to the world that I am fled From this vile world with vildest worms to dwell. Nay, if you read this line, remember not The hand that writ it, for I love you so, That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot, If thinking on me then should make you woe. O, if, I say, you look upon this verse, When I, perhaps, compounded am with clay, Do not so much as my poor name rehearse, But let your love ev’n with my life decay,    Lest the wise world should look into your moan,   And mock you with me after I am gone.7

The sonnet’s first line, “No longer mourn for me when I am dead,” paradoxically states that death would be the end of mourning, that the addressee should stop mourning once her lover has died. The imperative seems to

Breath, Today    enjoin against mourning the dead, but also implies that mourning takes place now, while the subject still lives and speaks. The poem’s opening address thus seems to put a limit on mourning, yet, in doing so, implies— even insists—that mourning only should occur while its object remains alive. Reading on, and recalling the Quarto spelling of “Than” as “Then,” it becomes clear that the poem calls for a limit on mourning in another sense. It is not that mourning should end with the death of the lyric subject (“No longer mourn for me when I am dead”), but that mourning should last only as long as it takes for the death knell to sound (“No longer mourn for me when I am dead, / Then you shall hear the surly sullen bell”). While the first line states that mourning should end at the instant that the life of the mourned one ends, and while this end coincides with the end of the line and the word that ends it—dead—it becomes clear that this exorbitant demand is generated when one mistakes the end of the line for the end of the sentence.8 The second line continues and cancels the demand of the first line; it reveals that to read the poem as an enjoinder against mourning after death—that is, against timely mourning—is to misread it. The living should mourn, but their mourning should be measured. “No longer” now indicates a brief interval (“No longer . . .  / Than”), rather than an imperative to stop (“No longer mourn”). Yet the time of mourning is so rigorously prescribed that it is as if the phrase “No longer mourn for me when I am dead / Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell,” even read all the way through, turns out to be merely another way of saying: do not mourn for me, or mourn only in such a way as it is impossible to do so. The difference between the interrupted reading—in which the sense of the line is mistakenly assumed to conclude at its end—and the completed reading turns out to be hardly a difference at all.9 The sonnet’s first-person subject demands that mourning—even if it lasts only for one minute or one day—coincide with, rather than succeed, the death knell that will “give warning to the world that I am fled.” “Give warning” describes the bell’s message; however, it also evokes the imperative tense of the first line. Thus, “Give warning” sounds an implicit imperative (“[You] Give warning” just as “[You] No longer mourn”). The rhyme substantiates this reading, for it returns to the first line and recapitulates it (I am dead / I am fled). The bell that marks this death also marks the duration of the addressee’s mourning and thus sounds a second obligation: “Give warning to the world that I am fled.” The death anticipated

   Chapter 6 in the first line, in the third line is transformed into an absence: “I am dead” becomes “I am fled.” The difference between these two statements is a difference of one consonant sound and of figure (whereby absence is a euphemistic way of stating death). Yet, while “I am dead” and “I am fled” are almost the same syntactically, they are also, finally, irreconcilable. While both statements, insofar as they are used, rather than mentioned or cited, have the status of fiction or lie (for their utterance is also their cancellation), they are not strictly equivalent: the one, death, implies the impossibility of return; the other, departure, implies that return remains a possibility.10 This is one example among many in which Shakespeare’s poem puts the meaning of ends into question. Over and again, the poem leaves unclear whether the end is actually an end or merely an instance of ending. Although each line seems to force the reader to undergo the experience of misreading or confusion, the correct readings seem, deceptively, to reveal the accuracy of the misreading. Like the other breaks in the first quatrain, the break between lines 3 and 4 forces the reader to revise the understanding upon which she might have arrived prior to the end of the quatrain. It recalls, as it corrects, the first line read as an inverted injunction to arrest mourning once death has occurred. This nonopposition is not merely an effect of enjambment, it also is tied to the poem’s thematic claim: the difference between life and death is permanently undermined. If the world from which the dead flee is “vile” (understood as base or awful), and if death seems an escape from vileness, according to the fourth line, the dead flee the world to dwell “with vilest worms.” The preposition “with” (“I am fled / From this vile world with vilest worms to dwell” [my emphasis]) ambiguates the line: although awkward, the lines suggest that one flees from “this vile world” with its “vilest worms,” just as it more obviously states that the dead flee the vile world for a worse place, one that is inhabited “with vilest worms.” The question thus emerges: is there any difference between life on this earth and death, when death, far from affording a spiritual afterlife, leads to more worldly life? If there is a change between the world and its beyond, this is a barely perceptible intensification, whether figured as dwelling with “vilest worms” or merely dwelling. A repetition at the level of the sound and of the letter (vile World / vilest worms) further reduces the difference, suggesting that one flees without fleeing at all.

Breath, Today    Here, dwelling bears a trace of its Old English meaning—confusion or leading astray, which is what the poem does.11 In the first quatrain, error is the effect of poetry, specifically of enjambment. Thus, it is as if every reading leaves the addressee “dwelling,” that is, in the position reached— however errantly—in the final line of the first quatrain. Dwelling emerges as the suspension of a horizon and collapse of a vertical. To flee “from this vile world with vilest worms to dwell” is to shift from a horizontal movement to a vertical one. The poem can be understood to work by repeatedly forcing a horizontal movement across the line into a vertical, abyssal, movement down to the next line, yet this falling motion actually leads one upward and backward to cancel and revise the previous line. This movement, at once progressive and redemptive and static, dissolves in the last line, which expresses verticality, an apparently final falling, in figuring death as a life that endures not beyond but beneath the world. As the various modern editions of sonnet 71 make clear, there is no consensus on how to mark the end of this line. The Quarto uses a colon— as does the version included in Celan’s Gesammelte Werke.12 However, Helen Vendler proposes a semicolon, and Steven Booth, William Kerrigan, Stanley Wells, and Gary Taylor employ a full stop.13 This debate reflects a question: what kind of stop might properly mark the end to this perpetually self-canceling command? What kind of stop could acknowledge the suspension and incorporation of the end that the poem’s first quatrain enacts even as it presents the markers of an end? What kind of mark could resemble the bell that punctuates the end of a life, the mourning that might acknowledge and recover one’s loss? If, until this point, I have traced the ambiguities at work in the first quatrain’s every line, I have done so in order to demonstrate that to stop in this first quatrain is impossible and necessary; it is a mistake and an obligation; it is “dwelling” (in the sense of errancy), but also reflects the dumbness of the living, including the living lyric subject who is so determined to influence the future in which he no longer lives, when it comes to death. Reciting the quatrain aloud dramatizes this predicament. No longer mourn for me when I am dead Than you shall hear the surly, sullen bell Give warning to the world that I am fled From this vile world with vil[d]est worms to dwell.

   Chapter 6 Each enjambed line leaves one equivocating over whether or not to continue. The poem asks one both to mourn and not to mourn, it insists that the subject is dead and still enduring, that one should speak, but that even if one does not speak, what would be said already has been said. William Empson calls this equivocation the “double grammar” of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and it is what makes the poem so breathtaking.14 It is a poem that takes your breath, that demands it. Without all of your breath—and so much breath is an impossible gift—the sonnet equivocates on the question of what it would be to mourn or to die; with your breath, it leaves you breathless, as if dead in life. The first quatrain cannot be read (aloud) without either producing a misreading or leaving the reader breathless. The breathlessness and/or misreading that it commands are variations on the “dwelling,” which is to say the life-in-death or errancy with which the quatrain ends. No longer mourn for me when I am dead Than you shall hear the surly, sullen bell Give warning to the world that I am fled From this vile world with vil[d]est worms to dwell.

However, if one sets out to overcome errancy by refusing to pause, attending to the sonnet as faithfully as possible, one is left gasping for breath— hoarse and heaving: interrupted not in the poem but in life. A faithful reading of this quatrain is also violent and privative; it leaves the living dwelling with the dead, just as the dead dwell with the living. How could Paul Celan bear a poem that forces its addressee to confront the choice between misreading and breathlessness? How could he bear a poem that treats the opposition between understanding and death as an aesthetic rather than a historical trauma? How could poetry force one to choose between the exhaustion of one’s intellect and the exhaustion of one’s breath? Poetry can be difficult, demanding, relentless, and unforgiving, and perhaps this is nowhere more evident than in Celan’s own late work, but can it go so far as to require that one give up one’s breath in order to avoid it? And, worse, to chose life over death, in this alternative, may be no choice at all. But as much as the poem figures a dilemma of reading and performance, it also presents a dilemma for translation. How can a translation at once “obey” this poem, listen to it and translate it? If, in Shakespeare’s poem, life (the life of the speaker and the addressee)

Breath, Today    is always already afterlife; if reading the first quatrain produces errancy or breathlessness as its only alternatives; and if, in the poem, the lyric subject warns against mourning, memory, or commemoration, the task of the translator (die Aufgabe der Übersetzer) is bound to failure—as Paul de Man recognizes, when he notes the untranslatability of the word Aufgabe (at once job, responsibility, abandonment, and resignation).15 In the case of Shakespeare’s sonnet, this failure involves the inevitable betrayal of the expression of the poem, an expression that demands that one forget the one who compels him to forget. This betrayal—coupled with the felt difficulty of a postwar translation of a poem that urges forgetting, cautions against mourning, allows the dead to speak, and leaves breathlessness and misreading as its outcome—haunts Celan’s translation of sonnet 71.

German, 1964 In 1963 Celan published the collection of poems called Die Niemandsrose, which included “Tübingen, Jänner,” a stuttering commemoration of an encounter “with” Hölderlin at the Hölderlinturm, and “Die Schleuse” (The Lock Gate), a poem that includes the lost words Kaddisch and Schwester and that closes with the returned word Yizkor (Hebrew for the imperative “remember,” and the name of the Jewish mourning prayer in which this imperative does not appear). In this same year Celan was working on his Shakespeare translations. The translations were occasioned by a date (the four hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth), yet this date, rather than mark the life of the work, marked instead the life of a man—a man who four centuries earlier had yet to become Shakespeare. In 1964, eighteen of the sonnets appeared in the journal Neue Rundschau, and all twenty aired on German Radio 3. The radio program, in progress for one year, was entitled “Die Rose Schönheit nicht sterben” (The Beautiful Rose does not die) and was broadcast on April 23–24, 1964, from the Großen Saal der Hamburger Kusthalle. Richard Johnson read the sonnets in English and Celan read his translations.16 The dissemination of Celan’s translations across German radio waves and postwar Germany seems itself to translate the “warning to the world” that the “surly sullen bell” in Shakespeare’s sonnet 71 conveys. Yet, this bell signals not that someone has died but rather that Shakespeare

   Chapter 6 lives on beyond his life, beyond the limits of the biological or spiritual life that the occasion implicitly commemorates, even as it honors what Benjamin calls “fame.” Sonnet 71 obviously has a strange place in this repertoire, for the poem is directed at ensuring the life of the living, of making sure that the beloved who lives on severs her ties to the dead. Yet, as I have suggested, the poem also registers the impossibility of this task (Aufgabe): the dead have not died, and the living—in this case, both the addressee and the reader—remain within an ethical dilemma that seems to issue from a profoundly unethical demand (on the part of the lover and the poet). The poem forces the living to choose between their own lives and the proper commemoration of the dead, and it shows that to go on living (to breathe) is inseparable from betraying the instructions of the dead: instructions that nevertheless inform them to go on living. Celan’s translation is attuned to the sonnet’s irony as well as its violence; it is a postwar response to it, not merely to personal violence (between lovers) but to historical violence. Celan’s attention to violence is clear from the outset. He does not open the poem with Nicht, the obvious translation of Shakespeare’s “no” (and the first word of both Stefan George’s and Karl Kraus’s translations),17 but with Du (you): Du sollst, bin ich hinweg, so lang nur klagen, als du die Glocke hörst, die düstere, vom Turm; so lange, als sie braucht, der Welt zu sagen: Der bei dir wohnte, ging und wohnt beim Wurm. Dies schreibe ich, doch du, hast du’s gelesen, vergiß, wers schrieb. Denn sieh, ich liebe dich: ich wollt, ich wäre nie in deinem Sinn gewesen, wenn, da du mein gedenkst, dich Gram beschlich’. Du laß, ruht einst dein Blick auf diesen Worten, derweil ich Staub bin, Staub bin und nicht mehr, die Liebe werden, was auch ich geworden, und meinen Namen, sag ihn nicht mehr her: Die Welt, klugäugig, sucht schon deine Tränen, mich, da ich fort bin, mit dir zu verhöhnen.18

Opening with the informal, second-person singular, Celan translates a poem already in the register of address into a poem that is explicitly and

Breath, Today    initially directed at an intimate “you.” Krzysztof Ziarek calls “mindful address,” which this translation can be seen to employ, “the single most characteristic feature of Paul Celan’s poetry.” He argues, moreover, that Celan’s concern with the other, with the possibility of speaking to him/her, of addressing the other in what constitutes his/her alterity for language . . . with acknowledging the unrepresentable alterity of the other, of his/her suffering, pain, and death, finds both its source and its haunting force of expression in the catastrophe of the Holocaust and Celan’s personal experiences of persecution, suffering, and the loss of family.19

Ziarek’s claim suggests that to recognize in Celan’s work—including his translations of others’ work—a concern with the “you” is to recognize a biographical and historical scar.20 Celan’s poems make an obvious and oftentimes painful demand, because the poem is, as he says, “a message in a bottle,” not because it prescribes the addressee’s response. Celan’s translation expresses care for the living, which is also the aim of Shakespeare’s sonnet, but he does so by interrupting every demand that sounds like an order, by puncturing—and punctuating—those demands that would confine the poem’s addressee. It is this puncture that marks Celan’s translation as a dated one. This interruption indicates the way that Celan enacts—and thematizes—the double task of translation: he both bears a work of the past in which the Holocaust is entirely unanticipated and leads this work that knows nothing of the world in which it endures to bear witness to that which it does not know. This dated interruption comes early in the translation. It begins with the first word, “Du.” And yet, counter to all expectations of post-Holocaust poetry, and especially to Celan’s own heavily burdened poetry, this poem asks its addressee not to remember but rather to forget. Celan’s translation of the first quatrain of sonnet 71 stages two equivalences, two occasions in which analogy yields a measure. Du sollst, bin ich hinweg, so lang nur klagen, als du die Glocke hörst, die düstere, vom Turm; so lange, als sie braucht, der Welt zu sagen: Der bei dir wohnte, ging und wohnt beim Wurm.

The poem opens by enjoining a “you” to mourn for an “I” only for so long as she hears the church bell express the loss, to mourn only for as long as

   Chapter 6 it would take the bell to say, “Der bei dir wohnte, ging und wohnt beim Wurm [The one who lived with you is gone and lives with worms].” Celan personifies the bell—attributing to it speech and voice—and, inversely, reifies the mourner, whose wailing (“klagen”) sounds virtually indistinguishable from the clanging of the bell (der Klang or klingen). Yet, as an example of what Werner Hamacher calls Celan’s “figures of inversion,” the personification of the bell (and reification of the mourner) does not simply mark a reversal or substitution but reflects the absence of a death knell.21 The death knell’s sound is heard in every human word, and yet also remains absent, replaced by a brutal euphemism: the one who lived with you is gone to live with worms.22 Celan’s translation employs three tropes—paronomasia, prosopopoeia, and euphemism—through which the impossibility of mourning is dramatized. In the lines I have been reading, the sound of the death knell (Klang ) is replaced by a human voice that addresses both the individual lover and the larger public to announce death and—in the logic of the sonnet—give time for mourning (klagen). While in Shakespeare’s lines the bell is personified to the extent that it “gives warning,” in Celan’s translation that warning is not merely reported but enacted.23 The clang (Klang) of the bell does not sound; it speaks (to say, “Der bei dir wohnte, ging und wohnt beim Wurm”) through a fiction of apostrophe. Thus the bell comes to sound through a figure of animation. A fictional voice, which stands in for the absent Klang, gives time to mourning (klagen) and also turns the mourner’s lament into something like a bell (“so lang nur klagen”). Peter Szondi argues that paronomasia—this figure of punning repetition and the near-identity of words—recurs throughout Celan’s poetry. He focuses in particular on Celan’s translation of Shakespeare’s sonnet 105 (“Let not my love . . .”), where paronomasia is a figure that consolidates or unifies through establishing resemblances. Szondi argues that by using paronomasia, Celan “enacts” the theme of constancy that is the central theme of Shakespeare’s sonnet. In “The Second of Inversion: Movements of a Figure through Celan’s Poetry,” however, Hamacher argues against Szondi, showing that paranomasia does not establish constancy, but rather produces a pervasive—ethically driven—indeterminacy of meaning. In other words, if for Szondi paronomasia performatively makes things “constant” through the repetition of words, and if the rhetoric of this translation is an enactment of its theme, for Hamacher repetition—which always bears with it a

Breath, Today    difference—undoes identity and disarticulates the word as a self-­identical unit.24 As he explains: “I read in paranomasia, as it is used by Celan, a mode of the diversification of linguistic units (syllables, words, syntagms) through which they open themselves to a multiplicity of other—and indeed, a limine, indeterminable—unities, hence under the appearance of correspondence, making room for a limitless play of alteration.”25 In Celan’s translation of sonnet 71, paronomasia recurs as a figure of translation. In this instance, it reinforces the very differences it seems to deny, but it also demonstrates that a disarticulating relation of sameness is one way of describing the relation between a work and a translation. The speaking, rather than clanging, bell that gives time for lament (klagen) troubles the distinction between the living and the nonliving upon which mourning (klagen) typically relies. The first lines of Shakespeare’s sonnet also trouble this distinction, for they leave initially uncertain whether mourning begins or ends with death. Here, the paronomasia is aligned with prosopopoeia, which is the trope that makes mourning possible (it allows the silent bell to sound) and impossible (the bell never rings, it only speaks).26 Paronomasia renders virtually indistinguishable the mourning of a loss and the marking of it. If this is what Shakespeare’s sonnet demands of its addressee, Celan’s translation shows that such a correlation can be abyssal. In the translation, the bell is a voice and the lament is a bell. If mourning should last only for so long as it takes a bell to say, “Der bei dir wohnte, ging und wohnt beim Wurm,” then mourning would last forever. Furthermore, if I have suggested that Celan’s translation turns Shakespeare’s sonnet into a postwar poem, one in which the dead cannot but be the dead of the camps, and in which the question of mourning’s possibility or impossibility is tied not to the lover’s exorbitant demand but to the death of individual, mournable death, this becomes particularly clear in an instance where Celan embellishes Shakespeare’s poem. Celan specifies that the bell comes from a tower or steeple: “als du die Glocke hörst, die düstere, vom Turm.” As soon as he locates the bell as coming “vom Turm,” he implies that such a bell, which marks not only the death of the lyric subject but also the response of the addressee, will not sound for the dead that most concern him. This bell will never sound for those who died without funerals, including his mother and father. If it comes from a tower (Turm)—like the watchtower that appears in Alain Resnais’ Nuit et brouillard—it could not possibly ring to announce that someone has died;

   Chapter 6 if it comes from a steeple (Turm), and hence from the church, it never will mark the death of a Jew. And so, if the time of mourning is measured by the sound of this bell, how is mourning possible? Celan translates Shakespeare’s injunction against mourning—an injunction that, although it is offered to protect the living from suffering, produces a violent dilemma of impossible mourning—into a version of possibility that is historically marked rather than aesthetically manipulated. This is not to say that Celan’s translation avoids aestheticization. While Celan rarely employs euphemism, here he maintains Shakespeare’s euphemism for death (“to dwell with worms”). Once this euphemism enters into Celan’s polyglot lexicon, however, it transforms into another paronomasia.27 In Remnants of Song, a book that presents Baudelaire and Celan as distantly linked witnesses to the shock of modernity, Ulrich Baer points out that Celan frequently puns on the word Wurm, and explains that this might be due to the fact that in French (the language of Celan’s everyday life), the word for worm is vers, which also means verse or poetry.28 In order to read this “interlingual pun,” Baer focuses, however, on poems in which neither Wurm or vers appear. The worms in Shakespeare’s sonnet— and in Celan’s translation of it—suggest that this cross-lingual paronomasia, like translation, is tied to the afterlife. Indeed, if we read “Wurm”—via French—as vers, Celan’s sonnet states that afterlife might not only be an enduring life in the earth but also a life in verse.29 And this is what Shakespeare’s poem at once achieves and denies when it demands—through a poem—that the living forget the dead, and when it simultaneously ensures that the dead live on. In other words, although the poem claims to release the living from their ties to the dead through forgetting, it also undermines its imperative and shows that whatever the living do they will betray the dead. When the lyric subject claims that he will have “gone to live with worms,” he also says that he will continue to live on in poetry if not in the world. Moreover, in the background noise of this phrase, we hear the opposition between living in the “world” and living with “worms” (or life and afterlife) as an opposition between “living with you [Der bei dir wohnte]” and “living with verse [ging und wohnt beim Wurm].” Read in this way, Celan’s translation evokes the fragmentary phrase, “poetically man dwells,” which Heidegger appropriates from Hölderlin’s “In lieblicher Blaue . . .” (In lovely blueness . . . ). Provocatively, death—which is also afterlife—emerges here as “poetic dwelling.”30

Breath, Today    While Celan translates Shakespeare’s verb “to dwell” as wohnen, his translation does not allow for a reading of the poem that remains possible within Shakespeare’s sonnet: the dead leave the world thus to dwell. By adding a first “wohnte,” Celan establishes that “dwelling” happens with the addressee, that is, in the world and with worms or in the earth. The difference registered is no longer the minor difference between the “vile world” and “vilest worms.” The first-person, speaking subject becomes a “he” (der), while the second-person addressee (dir ), both the beloved and the world, remains unchanged. Wohnen describes how one lives in the world and how one “lives” once one leaves it. The repetition of “wohnt[e]” recalls but also forgets the “vileness” that Shakespeare attributes alike to life and death; the awfulness of the world and of what lies beyond the world.31 While the bell states bluntly that the one who “dwelled with you is gone and dwells with worms,” and while it turns the first-person subject into a third person, this other dwelling that occurs beyond the world is never named as a “death.”32 In fact, while the statement “I am dead” takes on a central significance in Shakespeare’s sonnet and establishes the first rhyme, even if it is “translated” by that rhyme into “I am fled,” in Celan’s poem no form of the word Tod appears. In the quatrain that follows, the “I” returns as a writer, and the addressee, as a reader who is ordered to forget. The quatrain opens with the deictic dies (this): Dies schreibe ich, doch du, hast du’s gelesen, vergiß, wers schrieb. Denn sieh, ich liebe dich: ich wollt, ich wäre nie in deinem Sinn gewesen, wenn, da du mein gedenkst, dich Gram beschlich.33

Dies refers at once (and ambiguously) to the pure autoreferent (the phrase “I write this”), to the line or the poem as a whole, to the implicitly vocalized—or apostrophic—line that precedes it, and to the inscription of the word dies (I write “this”).34 In another “interlingual pun,” this time borrowed from English, it also states what remains unwritten in Celan’s German: the verb sterben (to die). While, strictly speaking, Celan’s “dies schreibe ich” translates Shakespeare’s Nay, if you read this line, remember not The hand that writ it,

   Chapter 6 the phrase “dies schreibe ich” (I write this) appears nowhere in Shakespeare’s sonnet. More than merely offering a creative translation of Shakespeare’s line, the claim “I write this” exposes the ambiguous referent of the “writer’s hand” in a translation.35 The line forces us to ask what is “this” that “I” write? Who is the “I” (this “he” turned “I”) who writes in translation and writes in a line that, in the original, does not have an “I,” in a line that does not appear there? In his essay on Celan’s “figures of constancy,” Szondi argues that in the translation of sonnet 105, “Celan leaves untranslated those passages in which Shakespeare describes his own poem, his own style, and the goal of his writing, or else he translates them so ‘freely’ that they no longer seem to deal with these topics.”36 Although one could argue that this also describes what occurs when Celan substitutes “I write this” for “the hand that writes,” Celan’s supplementary phrase, rather than distinguishing between what remains Shakespeare’s writing and his own, only reflects how troubled such a distinction may be. If “this” refers to the line that Shakespeare never wrote, it evokes the question of translation: who writes here? And in this sonnet that question is met with a second and related question: whom should the addressee (remember to) forget? If the translator is the one who writes, he is also a reader and addressee: does this mean that the translation of this poem not only ferries it into another language but responds to the very text it translates? Does this suggest that the translation at once repeats and fulfills the poem’s impossible imperative? The order “vergiß, wers schrieb” demands that the reader forget not only a fact that exists outside of the poem but a claim offered in the poem itself: “I write this.” Celan’s translation thus expresses the wish of all good translation—that we forget that it is a translation, meaning both that we forget that it is not the work of the original author and that we forget that it is not itself an original work. Thus, the command to forget here is also a command to remember that this text is written by someone other than the one who signs it, either to experience these words as Shakespeare’s words or to experience these words as Celan’s, but not to experience them as a translation. However, to the extent that this demand simultaneously and indistinguishably asks us to read the poem as Celan’s poem and as Shakespeare’s poem, to the extent that it asks us to “forget who writes it,” it also leaves uncertain who should be forgotten. Which writer—which kind of writing—does the poem ask us to forget? And without an answer to this question, how could the one who

Breath, Today    writes possibly be forgotten? Moreover, if the statement “I write this” is also the translator’s supplement, it seems both to exemplify the active forgetting for which the poem calls and to prevent it. Translation not only reflects an identity crisis, it enacts a crisis of writing. Writing here means both an act of mechanical inscription and an act of creativity or invention, and if translation would appear to be a mechanical task, a blind repetition rather than poetic invention, this poem seems to suggest the very inventiveness of translation, the desire on the part of the translator to lead the reader to forget that this is a secondary work in the two senses that I already have suggested. Yet, as soon as the mark of invention and originality is the phrase “I write this,” as soon as the self-­referential (or autobiographical) phrase also refers to the words, even the letters, on the page (d-i-e-s) the difference between the writing of inscription and the writing of invention collapses. For “dies schreibe ich” is the inscription as invention.37 In Shakespeare’s sonnet, as in Celan’s, the obligation to forget is tied to the possibility of love. Only when the writer is forgotten will his love become visible. A self-sacrificial logic is evident here, tied to the survival of the addressee as well as to the survival of a love for her through which the poet-speaker will live on. The lyric subject explains that if the survivor forgets the one who loved her, she will discover that the love (and with it, the lover) lives on. The expression of love (“Denn sieh, ich liebe dich”) thus is followed by its manifestation. The poem in this respect is an act of love: it brings something new into the world, rather than merely reflecting what already exists. What one sees, what one reads, is the following: ich wollt, ich wäre nie in deinem Sinn gewesen, wenn, da du mein gedenkst, dich Gram beschlich’.

If, as I have suggested, the quatrain initially dramatizes the pronominal crisis that attends translation and calls into question the possibility of the very forgetting that it solicits, it goes on to reflect the lover’s desire not only to erase himself from the future but also from the past. In other words, the “writer” undertakes to make himself unfelt and unknown, to present himself as dead now but also dead always. When the lyric subject states his wish that their love never would have existed if the survivor were stalked by fear whenever she thinks of it—or of him, Celan introduces another paronomasia, one that suggests how paronomasia is not only a trope of constancy or inconstancy, but a trope of translation.

   Chapter 6 Here the pun is on the verb gedenken, which appears in the final line of the second quatrain: “ich wollt, ich wäre nie in deinem Sinn gewesen, / wenn, da du mein gedenkst, dich Gram beschlich’ ” (my emphasis). In the opening sentence of Celan’s “Bremen Address” (1958), Celan introduces the word gedenken as one among a number of cognates in the semantic chain that leads from denken (thinking) to danken (thanking): “Denken und Danken sind in unserer Sprache Worte ein und desselben Ursprungs. Wer ihrem Sinn folgt, begibt sich in den Bedeutungsbereich von: ‘gedenken,’ ‘eingedenk sein,’ ‘Andenken,’ ‘Andacht’ [The words ­denken and danken, to think and to thank, have one and the same origin in our language. If we follow its meaning (Sinn) we end up in the semantic fields of ‘commemoration,’ ‘being mindful,’ ‘remembrance,’ ‘prayer’].”38 When Celan translates Shakespeare’s “thinking on me” as “mein gedenkst”— which means both to think of and to commemorate—he frames this activity not merely as passive recollection but as an active memorialization, akin to the memorialization that occurs in translation. Celan’s sensitivity to the disseminating root of gedenken—an awareness that he voices in the speech and practices throughout his poetic work—also alerts us to the significance and mobility of gedenken in the phrase “wenn, da du mein gedenkst.” The phrase “mein gedenkst,” which means to think of or commemorate me, also incorporates, that is, both resonates with and covers over, the adjective eingedenk, which means “mindful.” In this respect the phrase economically states that to think of me or to commemorate me is not to be mindful of my demand, that is, to think of me is to betray my demand that you forget me. And yet, to forget me is also to remember me. To think of me is to be mindful of me (mein gedenkst is eindgedenk)—even if it is not. Celan also uses eingedenk in “The Meridian,” the address he delivered on the occasion of receiving the prestigious Büchner prize. There it characterizes the central feature of contemporary poetry, poetry that would not commemorate—or bury—a catastrophe but rather “would be mindful of ” (“engedenk zu blieben”) catastrophic dates. The kind of date that Celan refers to here reflects the etymological roots of catastrophe (as inversion): he is especially interested in the date with which Büchner’s narrative Lenz opens, the day upon which “the sky becomes an abyss.” Büchner writes: “On 20th January, Lenz crossed the mountains. . . . He carried on, indifferent, the way meant nothing to him, now up, now down. He felt no tiredness, just occasional regret that he couldn’t walk on his head.”39 Janu-

Breath, Today    ary 20 dates freedom as inversion or catastrophe, and as the occurrence and nonoccurrence of the catastrophic. With reference to Lenz, Celan speculates: “Vielleicht ist das Neue an den Gedichten, die heute geschrieben werden, gerade dies: daß Hier am deutlichsten versucht wird, solcher Daten eingedenk zu bleiben? [Perhaps the newness of poems written today is that they try most plainly to be mindful of this kind of date?]”40 For Hamacher, Celan’s use of paronomasia is tied to a scene of inversion, like this one. The breakdown or breakup of words in Celan’s poetry can be understood to reflect an encounter with the abyss. Hamacher writes: This abyss [the sky from the perspective of one who stands on his head]—not the bottomlessness of heaven, not what a deteriorating philosophy would like to perceive in the inverted sky and call transcendence but, instead, the untenability of the transcendental forms of our representation itself—opens up with ever less concealment in Celan’s linguistic mode of procedure and his poetological reflection during the late fifties and sixties. . . . Just as the functions of the sign break down in the face of an “object” such as the abyss, death, or nothingness, conventional units of meaning—words and sentences, strophes, which are also turns—likewise dissolve, having been infected, as it were, with this death, and they thus leave room for an altered form of speaking and for the interruption of speaking itself.41

Hamacher is suggesting here that paronomasia is a figure that reflects the inoperativity of the sign before the abyss. The paronomasia of “mein gedenkst” shows that commemoration and mindfulness are at once inextricable and irreconcilable, and it is for this reason, perhaps, that the survivor—who is condemned to betray the dead—would be stalked by grief. However, there remains a third pun here, a third risk, one that again returns to the question of translation. Turning to Celan’s poem “Weggebeitz” (Etched Away), composed in autumn of 1963 and published first in the 1965 broadsheet Atemkristall (Breathcrystal) and again in the 1967 volume Atemwende (Breathturn), will allow this other sense of “mein gedenkst” to sound. “Weggebeitz” employs the very dissolution of language that Hamacher describes. Nowhere is this more obvious than at the end of the poem, which reads: “das hundert- / züngige Mein- / gedicht, das Genicht” (ll. 4–6).42 Here the line breaks divide the words, producing an internal interruption, which, unlike traditional enjambment, forces one to encounter a break (and its violence) rather than read over it. Michael Hamburger translates this line “the hundred- / tongued pseudo- / poem,

   Chapter 6 the noem.”43 Not one of these lines is composed entirely of “complete” words; and even those words that seem complete, despite the interruptive line breaks (words like “mein” or “Gedicht”) are rendered fragmentary and, to use Hamacher’s phrase, “infected by death.” This is the case, for example, with “Mein-/gedicht”: the lower-case g ensures that it not be read only as “my poem,” for German nouns are capitalized, but rather as the divided word mein-/gedicht, which turns my poem into a “Genicht” but also a poem that is “meineidig” or “perjured.” Playing on the inverted alliteration of meineidig and Gedicht, and the resonance of dig and dicht, the poem ends with an unfulfilled, yet undeniable act of testimony: ein Atemkristall, dein unumstößliches Zeugnis. a crystal of breath, your irreversible witness.44

Baer understands “Weggebeitz” to suggest that the coagulation of true and false witnesses in the broken word “Mein-/gedicht” (read as “my poem” and “perjured poem”) is Celan’s way of questioning the possibility of identifying a poetry that has “integrity.” As Baer explains it: What must first disappear . . . is the pseudo-poem, which draws on the possessive pronoun “mein” for “mine” and the adjective “mein” meaning “perjurious” or “false” (in analogy to German “Meineid” for “perjury”). The first stanza indicates that all, even “my” poems, that is, poems troped as autobiographical may commit “perjury,” which means to give false, misleading, or incomplete testimony. In a time when secondhand or prefab opinions dominate nearly all discourses, even poems are not immune from falsity and corruption.45

When in his translation of sonnet 71 Celan adds, “I write this,” and then proceeds to demand that the reader forget the “I” who writes if to think of him (“mein gedenkst”) will cause pain, he also states that what is mine is “meinedig,” an act of false witness. Thus, the pain that reading and thinking and remembering evoke may not be due solely to commemoration, but also to a perjured commemoration—“du mein gedenkst”—or in other words, to translation. Here commemorating the dead involves a form of perjury, the perjury of this translation in which the “I” (of 1609) is written

Breath, Today    by another (the “ich” of 1964). It is through this act of false testimony that Celan’s poem emerges as an act of testimony. In this respect the sonnet in translation is a contemporary poem, which is to say, a poem mindful of catastrophic dates.46 Celan’s translation at once repeats and forgets, bears and obeys Shakespeare’s sonnet and its injunctions. Perhaps this is most explicit in two places where Celan does not translate Shakespeare. In both of these places, Celan leaves out of his translation words that appear in Shakespeare’s sonnet. Yet, what these occasions have in common is that they employ figures that abound in Celan’s own poetry. The first example occurs when the sonnet orders “remember not / The hand that writ it,” and in not translating Shakespeare hand (but, as I have shown, replacing it with the phrase “dies schreibe ich”) Celan fulfills the demand of the poem. Yet, this forgetting of the writer’s hand also seems an effacement of his own signature, for the hand recurs throughout his work as a figure for poetry and expression.47 Another example occurs when Celan translates Shakespeare’s lines O if, I say, you look upon this verse, When I, perhaps, compounded am with clay, Do not so much as my poor name rehearse, But let your love ev’n with my life decay (my emphasis)

as Du laß, ruht einst dein Blick auf diesen Worten, derweil ich Staub bin, Staub bin und nicht mehr, die Liebe werden, was auch ich geworden, und meinen Namen, sag ihn nicht mehr her.

Missing from these lines is the uncertainty—the tentativeness—of Shakespeare’s “perhaps.” Again, “veilleicht” (perhaps) is a word that recurs throughout Celan’s poetry and prose, and is an essential aspect of Celan’s definition of poetry in “The Meridian,” where Celan repeats the word eight times. Here the very absence of Shakespeare’s word is the absence of Celan’s word. It is thus by not translating Shakespeare that he translates Shakespeare, which is to say, that he effaces his own signature, and in doing so traces another version of the sonnet’s paradoxical demand. Celan’s translation ends with the eyes and the faces of the poem’s two addressees and its two readers: the lover and the world. It ends with

   Chapter 6 the teary, sentimental eyes of the lover and the clear, ironic eyes of the world. Yet this final, face-to-face encounter is a scene of blindness and misreading, rather than of insight. The blurry eyes that would seem to reveal the endurance of the dead, to expose a still unbroken attachment, instead reveal that the survivor has betrayed the dead and that the dead have been forgotten. But this forgetting is also what the dead demanded, which shows, once again, that the misreading is the most accurate one, and that the dead indeed are remembered but only because they are forgotten. In this allegory of reading, the afterlife that Benjamin perceives as translation’s source is also the translator’s catastrophe.

Breath, Today Always still to come, always already past, always present in a beginning so abrupt that it cuts off your breath, and still unfurling as the return and eternal new beginning . . . maurice blanchot, “Encountering the Imaginary”

In “The Meridian,” Celan offers a rare—speculative and enigmatic—definition of poetry, a definition that culminates in the word he leaves untranslated in sonnet 71: vielleicht, “perhaps.” Dichtung: das kann eine Atemwende bedeuten. Wer weiß, vielleicht legt die Dichtung den Weg—auch den Weg der Kunst—um einer solchen Atemwende willen zurück? Vielleicht gelingt es ihr, da das Fremde, also der Abgrund und das Medusenhaupt, der Abgrund und die Automaten, ja in einer Richtung zu ­liegen scheint,—vielleicht gelingt es ihr hier, zwischen Fremd und Fremd zu unterscheiden, vielleicht schrumpft gerade hier das Medusenhaupt, vielleicht versagen gerade hier die Automaten—für diesen einmaligen kurzen Augenblick? Vielleicht wird hier, mit dem Ich—mit dem hier un solcherart freigesetzten befremdeten Ich,—vielleicht wird hier noch ein Anderes frei? Vielleicht ist das Gedicht von da her es selbst . . . und kann nun, auf diese kunst-lose, kunst-freie Weise, seine anderen Wege, also auch die Wege der Kunst gehen—wieder und wieder gehen? Vielleicht. Poetry is perhaps this: an Atemwende, a turning of our breath. Who knows, perhaps poetry goes its way—the way of art—for the sake of just such a turn? And since the strange, the abyss and Medusa’s head, the abyss and automaton, all seem to lie in the same direction—it is perhaps this turn, this Atemwende, which can

Breath, Today    sort out the strange from the strange? It is perhaps here, in this one brief moment, that the Medusa’s head shrivels and the automatons run down? Perhaps, along with the I, the estranged I set free here and in this manner, some Other is set free? Perhaps after this, the poem can be itself . . . can in this now art-less, art-free manner go other ways, including the ways of art, time and again? Perhaps.48

Celan’s tentative hope for poetry is that it lead to freedom, of both the “I,” who is turned on her head, and “some Other,” an unforeseeable addressee. As I suggested earlier, Celan commemorates the occasion of his speech by referring to Büchner’s Lenz, who imagined, suddenly, that he would like to stand on his head, that is, to turn himself upside down. While Lenz never does this, the very idea of such a turn, and the recognition of this desire, frees him. As Celan describes it, this turn “takes his—and our—breath and words away [verschlägt ihm—und auch uns—den Atem und das Wort].” 49 If poetry is, perhaps, this, which is to say if it is a turn to the abyss, it also is what Celan calls “a terrifying silence [furchtbares Verstummen]”—a phrase that he uses in the “Bremen Address” to name what language endures and can endure: “it (language) had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence [furchtbares Verstummen].”50 Taken together, these phrases suggest that poetry would neither evade nor avoid, neither bury nor fill the catastrophic silence, but rather, that poetry would bear it. Poetry would “mean” (bedeuten)—in the sense of vouloir dire or intend (gedenken)—this silence. For poetry to mean a breathturn, for it to be directed toward this turn, suggests that it attends to and acknowledges the “terrifying silence” that language endures, but that it does not give this silence meaning, does not valorize or represent it, by undergoing it. Rather, poetry becomes the experience of silence. How does poetry do this? How does it become the experience of a breathturn? Does this mean that poetry is a turn to silence or rather a turn away from it? Is it an act of inspiration or of expiration? Does poetry turn the insides out or take the outside in? How, for Celan, does translation also come to signal and effect this uncanny turn?51 In the opening sentence of “The Meridian,” Celan defines art as “a puppet-like, iambic, five-footed thing without—and this last has its validation in Pygmalion and his statue—without offspring.”52 Art in this sense turns the human voice into the iambic line, that is, a mechanical, futureless thing, a fiction of animation that freezes the living rather than nourish them.53 It is not, Celan suggests, that poetry can avoid art (or rhetoric)

   Chapter 6 altogether, but rather that poetry must exhaust art through art. Celan draws his examples of this path from Büchner’s plays, including Danton’s Death, Leonce and Lena, and Woyzek, and his narrative, Lenz. To go the way of art would be to stay with art as it imitates and freezes human life: art as mimesis, impersonation, or puppetry, art as it freezes (at least wants to freeze) a spontaneous tableau vivant into a nature mort by holding up a Gorgon’s head.54 While contemporary poetry follows art, rendering and employing art’s sometimes violent means of grasping at life, it follows this route in order to turn away from it, that is to distinguish the mute, mechanical work of art (prosopopoeia) from a “mode” of production (poesis) that interrupts and redirects, recapitulates and breaks free. This turn occurs not by the abandonment of art and its tropes, but rather through acts of composition that implode the work, acts that turn “verse” into Worten (words) and then break apart the words themselves. Celan’s translation of sonnet 71 does precisely this. By going the way of art—by following the route of Shakespeare’s “puppet-like, iambic, five-footed thing”—Celan also turns it, and turns away from it through it, by turning our and its, your and my breath. In the most material sense of the word, Celan directs Shakespeare’s sonnet toward and through an Atemwende. This breathturn is intimately tied to the foregrounding of the you (“Du”), which becomes the poem’s first word. Atemwende gives Celan’s translation its date.55 As I already have explained, the first quatrain of Shakespeare’s sonnet begins with a long—too long—expiration. It begins by taking our breath away, by making us—we who vocalize it—breathless. It dramatizes both the gift of voice that allows a lyric subject to speak beyond his death and the loss of breath that accompanies a “proper” reading of the poem. It is impossible to read the poem aloud without pausing to recover one’s breath and thus misreading it altogether (e.g., “do not mourn at all” becomes “mourn only briefly”; “mourn as the death knell sounds” becomes “you should announce to the world that I have died,” etc.). I also have suggested several of the ways in which Celan’s first quatrain follows Shakespeare’s sonnet while turning from it. For example, he writes “Du” in the place of “no” and he turns Shakespeare’s relentless self-canceling lines into selfdividing, paranomasic words. While, following Hamacher, I have shown that Celan’s paronomasia divides not only the line but also the word, and thus disrupts both the horizon of the verse and the verticality of the move-

Breath, Today    ment it conveys, there exists, in Celan’s first quatrain, still another mode of poetic interruption, one that introduces not a proliferation of meanings but rather a proliferation of breaths or Atemwenden. Du sollst, bin ich hinweg, so lang nur klagen, als du die Glocke hörst, die düstere, vom Turm; so lange, als sie braucht, der Welt zu sagen: Der bei dir wohnte, ging und wohnt beim Wurm.

Celan’s translation of Shakespeare’s sonnet inscribes the interruptions that Shakespeare’s sonnet struggles to overcome, every line of Shakespeare’s translation ends with a punctuation mark, and every line is internally divided by a comma, if not more than one.56 These interruptions are not instances of deception—as one might understand Shakespeare’s enjambed lines to be—yet they withhold meaning: they divide the fact of obligation (“Du sollst”) from any particular obligation (“so lang nur . . .”); sound (“die Glocke horst”) from source (“vom Turm”); I from you; a sound from its qualities; a span of time from what takes a span of time; one dwelling—one strangeness—from another dwelling, another strangeness.57 These interruptions indicate what Maurice Blanchot has claimed “speaks to us” in Celan’s poems: “This white space, these arrests, these silences, are not pauses or intervals allowing for the breath of reading, but belong to the same rigor, allowing for just some unleashing, a non-verbal rigor that would not be expected to carry meaning. It is as if the void were less a lack than a saturation, a void saturated with void.”58 But more than this, the address also “animates” us—not in the way that art animates (which is to say, freezes) us with its tropes and figures, but through the interruption of art. These interruptions—the literal pauses for breath, the literal silences—with which Celan marks Shakespeare’s sonnet, may give the reader a chance to catch her breath, to inspire or expire. The pause is unprescribed and unmeasured, rather than an “iambic, five-footed” thing. The caesuras inscribed within each line and the marks that divide one line from the next do not guarantee against violence or suffering, nor do these marks ensure their own success. Rather, by both incorporating and suffering a “terrible silence,” Celan’s translation of Shakespeare’s sonnet 71 leaves open the possibility that it may be read or not read, that reading may give life or take life, give breath or take breath. Celan thus introduces into the lyric another mode of animation, one that is mindful of dates.59

   Chapter 6 In this respect, Celan’s translation of Shakespeare’s sonnet 71 bears and follows an apostrophic lyric to its end, but it also registers within and through translation the interruption of iambic art with another “strangeness,” the dead mark and the living breath. This is neither a redemptive fiction of full presence nor another dramatization of the privative trope. Rather, Celan’s interruption of the sonnet recalls the poetic principle of inspiration—to be inhabited by the other—but also enacts it as breath. This transfiguration of inspiration—which can be found in Lévinas and in Blanchot, as well as in Celan—does not simply repeat an older mode of poetic enthusiasm; nor is it a strictly literal or antifigural moment that would allow us to recognize in post-Holocaust writing the eschewal of figurative language or the privileging of silence. Rather, the caesura as a stop for breath incorporates inspiration, allows inspiration to interrupt the poetic address that bears and precludes it. The interruption of this apostrophe, in order that the one who vocalizes it—which is to say, the one who reads it—may take a breath, translates the turn of apostrophe. The turn in the trope, the turn of breath in the apostrophic donation of breath, is, in Celan’s translation, an animating figure that interrupts one form of life with another form of life. The prescriptive address of an “I” encounters the interruption of and for a “Du.”

7 The Remains of Figure: Nuit et Brouillard, Nacht und Nebel Whichever word you speak­— you owe to destruction. paul celan1

In earlier chapters, I have considered texts in which a donation of voice or face through apostrophe and prosopopoeia offers to overcome an aporia of presentation and yet opens up another possibility of witnessing—a possibility, that, I should be clear, also remains tied to an impossible task.2 Prosopopoeia and apostrophe do not, as we have seen, successfully recover voices and faces where no voices remain, and yet, in readings of romantic and post-Holocaust works, they have not emerged as tropes of negativity without remainder. Rather, they are what I have called “surviving figures,” for they have opened a territory of witnessing that occurs not in its possibility but in its impossibility, or, as J. Hillis Miller has said, just because something (in his example, reading) is impossible, does not mean it cannot be “done.”3 In a relation of perpetual undoing (deferral, survival), these figures posit the life beyond life to which they refer. Insomnia, the anthropomorphism of the human, and the turn of a breath—all have indicated key instances in which figure is not a restorative device, but a mode of witness that avoids the restoration of subjectivity as its means or aim.

   Chapter 7 By turning from poetic and prose testimonies to film—Alain Resnais’ 1955 documentary Nuit et brouillard and its translation into German by Paul Celan—I approach this aporia of presentation from another direction. The texts I have considered thus far marshal figures in the service of the visible. This effort to see already is constituted by an aesthetic impossibility (and here, I use aesthetic in its etymological sense, as sense, but also in its philosophical sense, as implying judgment), and thus effortlessly gives us to “see” only our failure to see, our blindness, our failure to hear, our deafness.4 Resnais’ film differs from these other works insofar as it registers an attempt to turn film into a medium of blindness that it aims not to overcome, and hence it reflects an attempt to make film “adequate” to the charge of documenting Auschwitz. The film renders film a means of not seeing, and shows Auschwitz literally as our failure to see or know, anticipate or recall it.5 Resnais’ film thus can be read to reflect on the problem of figure after Auschwitz. It functions like an inversion of figuration, as I have described it. Resnais uses the most vibrant film available (Kodakcolor) and two forms of sound (Hanns Eisler’s score and a voice-over commentary) to make film the place of nonpresentation. The film struggles to register the impossibility of seeing anything at Auschwitz, to register Auschwitz as this impossibility. Not even these most modern technologies of visual production, not even the most avant-garde efforts of film, Resnais seems to claim, can overcome the aporia of presentation (memory and knowledge) that Auschwitz names. And yet, the effort to use film “against” itself, to use film to approach film’s limit and to demonstrate the failure to see, to show that nothing is left for us to see and that we, as a result, can know nothing of Auschwitz, can know Auschwitz only as that of which we will know nothing, is not merely a dialectical strategy offered to get beyond a limit through its negation. Indeed it is against this “hope” that the film cautions.6 The film shows us that its effort to present nonknowledge—to present the impossibility of seeing the lives lived and died at Auschwitz through visual technologies and to show film’s limit through film—remains incomplete. Nuit et brouillard shows us how a film that respects the apparent exhaustion or inappropriateness of figure after Auschwitz can come to be a film that shows us that figure is what remains when nothing remains. Nuit

The Remains of Figure    et brouillard thus shows us not our failure to see but rather the failure of sublime negative knowledge. In doing so, it raises the question of a certain definition of Auschwitz as this aporia of presentation and the possibility of an ethics ordered by the charge of vigilance, by what Adorno understands as a new categorical imperative.7 Thus, despite the fact that the film takes Auschwitz as its ground, Auschwitz seems to emerge here—as it does in Adorno’s account of poetry and in thinking about ethics, culture, and art after Adorno—as a synecdoche, that is, it is a part (one camp, one manifestation of the destruction) that stands in for a whole (the destruction in its entirety). This strategy is doubly complicated by the fact that the part that here is taken to signify the whole also is imperceptible. What we cannot see (Auschwitz) stands in for all of the violence that it both gives us to see (as a figure) and veils (because it takes its place). Derrida has cautioned against treating Auschwitz as a figure: “What is the referent here? Are we making a metonymical usage of this proper name? If we are, what governs this usage? Why this name rather than that of another camp, of other mass exterminations, etc. (and who has answered these questions seriously)? If not, why this forgetful and just as grievous restriction?”8 Auschwitz must function as a figure in order to justify its ubiquitous use, and yet, if it is a metonymy or a synecdoche, this means that the crimes that occurred at Auschwitz indicate something other than the crimes that took place there. Resnais’ film offers the beginning of a response to these questions, by suggesting that the name Auschwitz—as well as the names of other camps, of which the commentator enumerates seven (including Auschwitz and Struthof, the only camp that was on annexed French land)—are “names like any others.”9 Yet, these are not just proper names, nor are they just figures (in both senses of justice). As an interruption of this opposition (what Cohen calls “interrupting Auschwitz”) between the proper name and the figure, Auschwitz refers at once to the particular site of destruction that is Nuit et brouillard ’s location and to the problem of representation at its limit. It comes to signify so much more than Auschwitz (all of the camps, the destruction of Europe’s Jews), because it cannot even properly signify this one camp—Auschwitz. In this chapter, I trace the film’s treatment of aesthetics. At the moment that Resnais shows us “nothing” or shows us our inability to see or know anything of Auschwitz, at the moment he presents the limit of

   Chapter 7 film, he also shows us figure in its remains. Yet, if the argument that follows reflects again a theoretical tradition preoccupied with demonstrating that works are always allegories of their own modes of production, allegories of figure and failure, it recalls this strand of criticism in order to direct it elsewhere and otherwise. To say that testimony in Nuit et brouillard is tied to the recognition of figure’s remainder is to register a possibility of artworks linked neither to restorative power nor to the interminable shuttle of referential failure, neither to the capacity of the work to resurrect impossible witnesses nor to the capacity of the work to see nothing in the ruins of a concentration camp. Instead, this argument elaborates upon an aesthetic possibility that readings of Wordsworth and Shelley have allowed me to associate with romanticism. Figure, rather than redeeming loss or recovering life through the work, rather than merely registering the blindness and the muteness of the work (and its audience), remains relentless. In Nuit et brouillard this relentlessness (or restlessness) indicates the impossibility of not seeing the horrors of Auschwitz. We see not because we can (Resnais will insist that he—that we—can see nothing), but because we cannot help but see what remains—that there are remains—even when nothing remains.

Film Histories The origins of Nuit et brouillard are plural. The film issued from a set of projects including a collection of testimonies and an exhibition of photographs organized by the Comité d’histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale. The book of testimonies, Tragedie de la deportation, 1940–1945: Temoinages de survivants des camps de concentration allemands (Tragedy of the Deportation, 1940–1945: Testimonies of the Survivors of German Concentration Camps, Chosen and Presented by Olga Wormser and Henri Michel) (1954), is a five-hundred-page collection of mostly published documents that contained many of the earliest postwar accounts of the camps, including excerpts from Antelme’s L’Espèce humaine (The Human Race), Rousset’s L’Univers concentrationnaire (A World Apart), and Cayrol’s Lazare parmi nous (Lazarus Among Us).10 The volume includes several pages of photographs as well, but the exhibition, held at the Institut Pédagogique National, collected far more images. At the time, Michel and Wormser

The Remains of Figure    had invited the film producer Anatole Dauman to view the exhibition, and together with Michel he decided to make a documentary that would “record the history of the deportation.”11 They invited Alain Resnais— at the time known primarily for his short documentary films on artists and for a recent work that had been the French selection for Cannes—to direct the film. However, Resnais initially refused the commission because he believed that such a film only could be made by someone who had “firsthand experience” of the deportation; such a project was, as he put it, “totally beyond my capacities.”12 From the beginning the film was tied to a limit. Making it was something Resnais believed he could not do. Resnais ultimately agreed to undertake the project on the condition that Jean Cayrol, who had been deported to Mathausen as part of the Nacht und Nebel decree, would agree to work on it with him. Cayrol already was the author of novels, several books of poems (including Poèmes de la nuit et du brouillard [1946]), and Lazare parmi nous, a work comprised both of testimony and literary criticism from which Michel and Wormser excerpt. In that work, Cayrol not only gives a detailed account of the deportee’s dream life in and after the camp (this account makes up only its first section), but also includes an essay on literature: “Pour un romanesque lazaréen,” in which he articulates a “concentrationary” style. Cayrol’s essay is one of the first works to recognize the camps as the occasion of a new artistic mode.13 In addition, Resnais invited Hanns Eisler, a communist and Jew who had fled Germany in 1933 and worked with ­Brecht (and later Adorno), to compose the score.14 Along with Sascha Vierney and Chris Marker (who had introduced Resnais and Cayrol), they quickly made the film, preoccupied not only with the history of the deportations but also with the possibility of testimony. Indeed, the film’s mode is largely one of self-interrogation. It is preoccupied with questions that have an aesthetic as well as ethical dimension: How can a film present what cannot be seen? How does this failure to see or to know what happened indicate an ethical and political failure in the 1930s and 1940s and the endurance of its crisis—as a crisis of memory and responsibility—today? How does this crisis—and the impossible, interminable vigilance that it solicits—produce a situation of hostage, not simply to the past but to the forms of violence that endure in the insecurity and unmaintainable difference between past and present?

   Chapter 7 Visually, the thirty-two-minute film alternates between contemporary sequences shot in hyperreal Kodakcolor and a montage of archival materials presented in black-and-white. These archival materials include both still and moving images, including those filmed by Nazi propagandists, above all Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, a clip from which is included in the very first black-and-white sequence.15 When, in 1956, Paul Celan (already the author of two books of poetry) was commissioned to translate the film into German, his task included not only translating a work composed in one language into another language but the translation of a work into the language from which it initially was translated.16 He had to return Nuit et brouillard to Nacht and Nebel, making German again the language in which “Nacht and Nebel” would sound, this time not as a decree of 1942 or as a line from Richard Wagner’s Ring, the source of Himmler’s phrase, but as a documentary film, as testimony.17 Celan’s translation follows from West Germany’s refusal to admit the film into the Cannes Film Festival (1955), and its subsequent removal from the competition (despite the fact that it had been the French film board’s unanimous first choice). The translation was commissioned in response to the chair of the Budenstag’s Committee on Press, Radio, and Film’s call for a “German soundtrack” and a commitment to show the film “as extensively as possible throughout the Federal Republic, and most particularly in the context of youth organizations and film clubs.”18 Despite the calls of the Committee on Press, Radio, and Film, ­Celan’s translation of Nuit et brouillard appeared at an intermediary moment in the German film scene, the time after the Trümmerfilme (Rubble Films) of the late 1940s, which, Anton Kaes explains, “tried to come to grips with the recent past against the still contemporary background of ruined ­cities” and prior to the emergence of a New German Cinema of the 1960s, influenced by the French New Wave (Resnais, but also Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut), and inaugurated with the 1962 “Oberhausen Manifesto,” signed by Alexander Kluge and twenty-five others.19 In the 1950s, the German film scene was instead preoccupied with avoiding the immediate past. In Kaes’s description Heimat, or “blood and soil,” films took their place, offering “cliché-ridden, Agfa-colored images of German forests, landscapes, and customs, of happiness and security.”20 That Nuit et brouillard uses saturated landscapes only to show that they are the very

The Remains of Figure    place where the ruins of Auschwitz stand, that it treats guilt as a question (“Who is responsible?), and that it precedes the turn in German cinema toward independence, are three of the many reasons why the film would have an unsettling effect in the German context. But it also has an unsettling place in Celan’s corpus: it is by far his most explicit treatment of the Holocaust, and his only film work. In “returning” Renais’ French film to German, Celan’s translation also turns—and returns—Cayrol’s commentary to poetry, and turns or returns poetry into the place where such a commentary could occur. Poetry becomes the occasion of the anxiety and “temporal disorder” that the film displays in its disruption of then and now, in its presentation of survival in a place and time where all that remains is the voice of a soundtrack and the blind eye of a camera.21 This return to poetry allows us to witness the remains of figure in a film that shows the failure to see.

Poetry and the Wound of Art Nuit et brouillard opens with a wide shot of a placid, rural landscape; the camera slowly moves backward and earthward to reveal the sweep of a barbed wire fence and to reveal its own position behind this fence. Once the landscape is fully inscribed by the wire, the camera holds still and the voice of the commentary sounds: “Même un paysage tranquille [Even a peaceful landscape],” or in Celan’s translation, “Auch ruhiges Land.”22 In other words, the film opens by remarking the failure to see that it also enacts. The painterly landscape in its vivid color belongs to a place called Auschwitz. The initial failure to have seen that this landscape could have become the site of a concentration camp, and the failure now to see that it was a concentration camp, is interrupted by the appearance of barbed wire. At this moment, the voice belatedly accounts for what we initially saw; it says what we do not see, for by the time the “tranquility” of this landscape is articulated, it already is passed. The barbed wire already has been etched over it. The voice emerges in misrecognizing what we now see and describes a barbed wire inscribed field as the place of tranquility and calm, reflection and self-reflection. Yet, as soon as the film dramatizes the noncorrespondence between saying and seeing, the strange comfort that the knowledge of this division would permit (the familiar

   Chapter 7 comfort of knowing that things are not as they appear) is itself interrupted. The film again presents the landscape in which appear a distant barn, the faint smudge of a grazing animal, a row of haystacks, Monet-like in their moving stillness. This time, the commentary properly corresponds to the image: “même une prairie avec des vols de corbeaux, des moissons et des feux d’herbe [even a meadow in harvest with crows circling overhead and grassfires].” Yet, the correspondence is only an effect of failing to look closely: in the far right corner of the frame, the faint web of barbed wire, behind which the camera stands, remains still visible. The film presents, not the unavoidable obviousness of noncorrespondence, but the vigilance demanded in order that we might at least recognize the noncorrespondence, that we might see the traces that remain hidden in plain view. A third shot again confounds saying and seeing. This time a road cuts diagonally across the frame, while the voice speaks: “même une route où passent des voitures, des paysans, des couples [even a road where cars, and peasants, and couples pass].” The road on screen, however, remains completely desolate: there is no one, no sign of human life. Even as the camera pans to show more of it, no car, no peasant, no couple appears. Only the camp’s watchtower and its double row of barbed wire fencing come into view. As the camera crosses the road and crosses the wire fences to discover itself in the camp, the voice continues: “même un village pour vacances, avec une foire et un clocher, peuvent conduire tout simplement à un camp de concentration [even a resort village with a steeple and country fair can lead to a concentration camp].”23 The camp is at once identified ironically as a resort village, in which the watchtower is a perverted steeple and is what stands next to such a village, without interrupting its calm. The voice describes this village as the camera already has reentered the camp; the simultaneity of reference confounds the division between one city and another, Auschwitz and the calm village that stands next to Auschwitz. Yet, if we know that Auschwitz is not a resort, if we recognize this simultaneity as irony, we are left not with the ironic knowledge of (and freedom from) perversion through the perversion of language and representation, but instead this perversion—and euphemism as one mode of this perversion—returns us to the noncorrespondence with which the film opened.24 In doing so, it registers not the shock of Auschwitz but the collapse of the difference between Auschwitz and what “leads” to Auschwitz.25

The Remains of Figure    Cayrol’s text opens in an unbroken paragraph: “Même un paysage tranquille, même une prairie avec des vols de corbeaux, des moissons et des feux d’herbe, même une route où passent des voitures, des paysans, des couples, même un village pour vacances, avec une foire et un clocher, peuvent conduire tout simplement à un camp de concentration [Even a peaceful landscape, even a meadow in harvest with crows circling overhead and grassfires, even a road where cars, and peasants, and couples pass, even a resort village with a steeple and country fair can lead to a concentration camp].”26 In this initial moment, in which a film documentary of Auschwitz opens with beauty, Cayrol awakens us to the fact that “even” the beautiful, “even” the calm, “even” the naïve, “even” the quotidian, “even” sites of love are not prophylactics against destruction, but can become, can touch upon, territories of extraordinary destruction. The repetition of “même” in this opening passage also indicates a certain “identity” (même designates the self-same, as in moi-même or soi-même) that the repetitions come to enact. Indeed, this passage involves the “return of the same,” even as it bears the shock of an interruption. While Cayrol states that it is this self-same spot, this spot that seems incapable of division, that is divided, the film—in the noncorrespondence of text and image—shows that this landscape is the site of division. Even in its evocation and enactment of self-sameness the text produces the landscape as the locus of misrecognition rather than, as would be the offering of the romantic landscape, selfrecognition.27 We are left with the landscape as the site of recollection’s and anticipation’s failure. When Celan bears this opening sequence into German, he interrupts Cayrol’s unbroken paragraph. Celan recognizes each of the repetitions as breaking up the line, and in his translation, each repetition coincides with a collapse of the forward motion of syntax. Rather than moving beyond the shock that the opening sequence registers, Celan’s text leads each addition back to the first word: “auch”; it leads the forward movement of the film into poetry’s abeyance: Auch ruhiges Land, auch ein Feld mit ein paar Raben drüber, mit Getreidehaufen und Erntefeuern, auch eine Straße für Fuhrwerke, Bauern un Liebespaare, auch ein kleiner Ferienort mit Jahrmarkt und Kirchturm kann zu einem Konzentrationslager hinführen.28

   Chapter 7 Celan’s interruption of Cayrol’s paragraph with this movement backward that is also a remaining in place (with the cumulation and stasis of “auch”) seems to resist Cayrol’s claim that a familiar landscape could “tout simplement” (all at once, and simply) lead to a concentration camp. The arrested motion of Celan’s text thus departs from Cayrol’s explicit claim that the landscape would lead the way to the camps, as well as its implication that Auschwitz is the destiny of history and that those art forms associated most directly with romanticism are complicit. In stalling Cayrol’s causal claim (x leads to y), Celan seems to resist an account of history and art that would indict—and in the same instant, release—the romanticism of landscapes, blindness of self-reflection, the escapism and nostalgia of rural life. Not only does Celan’s text refuse the historical itinerary that Cayrol’s text implies, but it effects (and registers) this interruption with the word auch. “Auch” translates “même,” and with its guttural, distinctly German sound, turns “même” into the occasion of a break in the logic of destiny and proximity. In disarticulating the passage, Celan also leaves untranslated the phrase that Cayrol uses (whether as a literal or ironic indictment) to describe the progression from beautiful landscape to horrifying camp, the phrase that describes the passage that Cayrol’s paragraph, but not ­Celan’s lines, also enacts: “tout simplement.” In an essay on Celan’s translation of Nuit et brouillard, David N. Coury has focused on this opening passage, and especially its first three words. Coury notes that Cayrol’s text “invites the viewer to consider that any place could be the site of a former concentration camp, even this quiet countryside,” and goes on to explain how he understands Celan to rework Cayrol’s claim.29 He writes: Celan, however, transforms this first line ever so slightly but quite peculiarly: “Auch ruhiges Land, / auch ein Feld mit ein paar Raben drüber, mit Getreidehaufen und Erntefeuren.” In the first line, the obvious omission of the indefinite article ein and the syntactic change from Landschaft to Land (countryside to country), as well as the added break in the line are conspicuous changes. “Auch ruhiges Land” in and of itself makes little sense within the context of the passage—“Auch eine ruhige Landschaft” (Even a quiet landscape) would be the expected translation. What is missing, however, is the implied subtext that runs throughout the entire text and that then gives this line meaning: “Auch ruhiges Deutschland”— even in a quiet German landscape, the land of poets and philosophers, could such atrocities occur and could occur again. Celan plays with and exploits the affinity

The Remains of Figure    between pays and paysage, Land and Landschaft, “country” and “countryside,” and thereby invites the reader to “think in” the German element of the text that ­Cayrol has somewhat diplomatically left out. Moreover, the change from paysage to pays (land, country, or nation) underscores the difference between the notions of an apolitical landscape and a nationally (nationalistically?) defined country. Further, the inserted break after this line has a powerful implication not found in the original—even in quiet Germany; what follows imparts less a sense of universality than an indictment of all those who refuse to believe that such things did or could not ever happen in such a country as Germany.30

I quote from Coury’s text at length because, while I find his initial insight persuasive, his analysis remains ideologically rather than critically motivated, to the point of reading Celan’s text to do the very opposite of what it does. Coury begins by noting that Celan’s translation not only interrupts Cayrol’s paragraph in the ways that I thus far have discussed, but that, from the outset, Celan also effects a break in the syntax. Nacht und Nebel opens with a contortion of grammar and sense, and Coury reads this contortion to indicate another sense, another unspoken meaning. In other words, Coury’s analysis recovers Celan’s text from nonsense by filling in— or as Coury ambiguously writes, “ ‘think[ing] in’ the German element.” This act of “thinking in” implies both the work of inserting “the German element” and that of thinking in or within the German element, or in Deutsch, the German language. It is within “the German element” that we have the disruption of sense. By returning Celan’s text to a grammar and sense it does not bear, Coury risks thinking in German, which is to say thinking in absolutes rather than in the bending and abuse of sense that is required by the act of bearing witness. Indeed, if Cayrol asks us to recognize a contradiction, asks us to begin from the point at which the facts and relations do not make sense, but does so in a paragraph that is measured and controlled, Celan sets out in the realm of this contortion and in the discomfort that it effects. And here, as elsewhere in Celan’s work, language, the German language, remains the place where that discomfort continues to be suffered. If one element of this contortion is Celan’s translation of “paysage” as “Land” (rather than the more appropriate Landschaft), this is not merely the shift from “countryside” to “country” (as Coury suggests), but from a term that originates in an aesthetic idiom to one that belongs to a national or territorial idiom. Part of the confusion of Coury’s analysis comes from

   Chapter 7 the translations of these texts into English. He initially translates Landschaft as “countryside” and Land as “country,” and later incorporates paysage and pays into this translation machine. Then, only a sentence later, he translates paysage as “landscape” and pays as “land,” and accuses Cayrol of “diplomacy.” Yet, in French, it is campagne, rather than paysage, that typically would translate into “countryside.” Thus, at the very moment that Coury acknowledges that paysage means “landscape” (rather than countryside), he also shows that Cayrol’s text is not simply “diplomatic,” but rather that it is preoccupied with aesthetic questions—questions of the possibility and impossibility of presentation and of the relation between presentation and remembrance.31 In not translating paysage as Landschaft, Celan does not simply, as Coury suggests, situate himself in anxious relation to those “poets and philosophers” that take the German landscape as their home, but he abandons an aesthetic idiom, an abandonment that is reflected in the interruption and the unbearable agrammaticality of Celan’s first lines.32 These lines leave us outside of art’s idiom, concerned not with the possibility of a work of art after Auschwitz but with the language of remains. The passage from Cayrol’s seamless prose to Celan’s disarticulated poetry, from repetition’s noninterruption to its division, from the return of the same (“même”) to arrested movement (“auch”), from beauty to wounded sense, offers neither lightness nor simplicity but rather the labor and the effort, the struggle and the contortion of translation.33 Moreover, because German grammar differs from French grammar, Celan’s first lines end, not with the arrival at a concentration camp, not with the correspondence of the sentence to the image, but with the verb hinführen, which Celan uses to translate conduire (“to lead to”). Yet, Celan’s phrase (“. . . kann zu einem Konzentrationslager hinführen”) also allows us to hear another German verb, zuführen. Like hinführen, zuführen means “to lead to” or “to lead toward,” but it also means “to supply.” Read together with his translation of paysage as Land, this passage states that the relation between country and camp is not only one of directionality or destiny (hinführen), but also one of supply (zuführen).34 If the country before us on screen, the country in which there is no one to be found—the country that Coury designates as Germany but that we now can read in the failure of such designations and the wound of language that bears this failure— supplied the camp, this means that it kept the camp working (supplied it

The Remains of Figure    with demands for labor, with bystanders who refused to see it, with Nazis who ran it). But more than this, it means that it supplied the camp with deportees, living persons that the camp turned into prisoners, slave laborers, and corpses. For Celan, Nacht und Nebel opens with the barren country, not the suspect work of art (and film in particular). By abandoning beauty and tranquility, by opening with the wound of language and the contortion of sense, with the interruption (and the horror) of “auch” rather than the simplicity and identity of “même,” by opening with the acknowledgment of blindness rather than the effort to present blindness, Celan’s translation has neither overcome the crisis of presentation nor tried to overcome it. Rather, Nacht und Nebel opens and remains in its wound.

To See the Failure to See While Nuit et brouillard opens from within Auschwitz—where all that remains is the invisible filmmaker, his camera and crew (“Le sang a caillé, les bouches se sont tués, les blocks ne sont plus visités que par une camera . . . Plus aucune pas que le nôtre [The blood has dried, the tongues have fallen silent, the only visitor to the blocks now is the camera]”), the film also enacts the arrival at Auschwitz.35 The second of the color (contemporary) sequences in the film follows almost seamlessly on a black-andwhite montage that presents the rise of the Nazi party, the building of the camps, and the deportation of Jews from all over Europe. This sequence culminates in a moving image of the trains, first as they pass through the countryside in daylight, and then as they arrive at the camp in “la nuit et le brouillard.” Yet this sequence, which concludes with the film’s first mention of the phrase nuit et brouillard (nacht und nebel ), is not an archival clip but rather is taken from Wanda Jakubowska’s Ostatni etap (The Last Stage). Ostatni etap is a fictional portrayal of the female experience in Auschwitz, which Jakubowska shot on location at Auschwitz in 1947. As Stuart Liebman and Leonard Quart have noted, when Jakubowska returned to Auschwitz to make the film, “the camp grounds had already returned to their prewar status as meadows, albeit ones demarcated by the ominous Holocaust icons of guard towers and barbed wire fences.”36 They go on to explain that in order to create an appropriate stage, she “ ‘restored’ the

   Chapter 7 notorious Appellplatz, on which much of the action is set, to the muddy, rutted space it had been when thousands of inmates had endured the Germans’ endless daily inspections and roll calls. The hospital bunks stacked four or five high, into which the hundreds of sick inmates had been claustrophobically jammed, were also used again in a number of moving scenes.”37 That Resnais uses footage from Jakubowska’s feature (which had won the 1949 New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Foreign Film, and so was relatively well known) in the first of his “archival” sequences, and that he uses this footage to present the arrival of the trains “dans la nuit et le brouillard,” indicates a complicated relation between fiction and testimony in Nuit et brouillard. Does this clip function as actual testimonial material (rather than the reenacted fictional material—however reflective of Jakubowska’s own experience—that we know it to be)? Or does it dramatize the absence of actual archival material and thus register the fact that it is only through fiction that “la nuit et le brouillard” can be accessed? In this initial archival sequence, we find a fiction that looks like history, one that nevertheless might provide us with the best access to history available, by presenting us with the inaccessibility of the history we seek. The color sequence that follows upon the clip from Jakubowska’s film begins on the tracks that lead to Auschwitz and moves at almost the same pace as the train pictured in black-and-white. The camera’s movement not only recalls the trains and their absence (it moves in the opposite direction as they move), but also establishes its difference from the stable camera before which the trains pass.38 The commentary that accompanies this scene proceeds by asking after the film’s task: What sign does the film aspire to decipher? What trace does the camera tracking along the abandoned and overgrown tracks that lead to Auschwitz hope to identify? The camera retraces the trains’ movement only to register their absence. It traces the tracks, now overgrown with grass and yellow wildflowers, and traces its own efforts to present what took place at Auschwitz, when all it can give to see today, even in color, are these blades of grass and wildflowers: “jour et soleil” (day and sunlight, “Tagelicht und Sonne”), rather than “nuit et brouillard.” 39 The commentator suggests that perhaps the film strives to inhabit the position of a deportee and to see what a deportee arriving at the camp might have seen: “Ou bien du piétinement des premiers débarqués poussés à coups de crosses jusqu’à l’entrée du camp, parmi

The Remains of Figure    les aboiements des chiens, les éclairs des projecteurs, avec au loin la flamme du crematoires [Perhaps those driven to the camps at gunpoint amid the barking dogs and glaring searchlights with the flames of the crematorium in the distance].” 40 The moving camera continues along the empty tracks until Birkenau first comes into view, at which point, incapable of retrieving what it seeks, incapable of presenting the experience of the entry to the camps, the film then seems to abandon its contemporary efforts, returning instead to the archive. Yet, the apparently black-and-white shot that presents the arrival at the camp and concludes with the arrival at Auschwitz’s inscribed gate (“Arbeit macht frei”) is not shot in black-and-white, nor does it belong to the archive. Rather, it is shot by Resnais on color film at night. Like the clip from Jakubowska’s fictional documentary, which already will have corrupted the purely historical realm of the archive, this shot dramatizes the entry to the camp. The apparently clear distinction between past and present, between archival and contemporary images recognizable by their appearance in black-and-white rather than color, breaks down. In the first place, this interruption suggests that the present could look like the notso-distant past, and furthermore that style might not help us to distinguish between fiction and testimony, between archival image and its contemporary reenactment. It suggests that, even today, even in color, we might remain in the night and fog, and that the zone between them is gray, as Primo Levi has described. In “Sadism and Film: Freud and Resnais,” Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit consider moments in the film like the two I have been discussing: There are moments in the film when we can’t be sure of whether we are being ­given a sequence from the archives or whether Resnais has filmically reconstructed (instead of re-composing already filmed) moments from the past. We are thinking of such scenes as the arrival, in a dense night fog, of a trainload of prisoners at a concentration camp, as well as the secret departures of trucks from the camp in the middle of the night, scenes filmed in a sepia-like “compromise” between color and black-and-white, and whose photographic texture is closer to that of the present-day scene than to that of the documents. The documentary temptation is of course to find out when and how such scenes were filmed, but such information would be irrelevant to our experience of them, the experience of a temporal indeterminacy. We are no longer certain of where the past stops and the viewing present begins. The very distinction presumably meant to serve

   Chapter 7 documentary clarity can, then, be used in order to put into question the distinctness of the past.41

While Bersani and Dutoit’s description of the effects of these moments is persuasive, it nevertheless seems important that we submit to “the documentary temptation” and consider “when and how such scenes were filmed,” not so that we can rest satisfied in the certainty of knowing what is past and present, what is truly an archival image and what is Resnais’ fiction, but rather to consider how Resnais’ film treats (and tracks) this zone of indistinction. Indeed, both of the scenes that Bersani and ­Dutoit describe—“the arrival, in a dense night fog, of a trainload of prisoners at a concentration camp, as well as the secret departures of trucks from the camp in the middle of the night”—belong neither to the archive nor to Resnais’ direction, but rather they both come from Jakubowska’s film, from an explicit reconstruction of Auschwitz at Auschwitz, a reconstruction that Resnais’ film does not exactly undertake but cannot help but risk, especially in the “arrival” scene that he shoots at night. In that scene, there is no commentary. The music gestures toward, but does not reach, its end, as the camera stops before the gate, arriving, in place of the trains it cannot recover, at Auschwitz. After a moment, the voice resumes: “Premier regard sur le camp [Ein erster Blick auf das Lager; First sight of the camp].”42 At this point the film passes from the shot that appears at once in color and black-and-white to a closely cropped identity card photo from the archives. The screen is given over entirely to this image, cut off just above the eyebrows, just below the nose, leaving no mouth or head, only two wide-open and seemingly terrified eyes (perhaps thanks to the cropping), and a nose. Thus, in lieu of an image of the camp, as if in parody of the countershot and in mockery of our own wide eyes, our own—and the camera’s—search for something to see, we see only these eyes. In place of seeing the camp, we see seeing as the failure to see. And seeing this, we don’t see what is on the other side of that gate, or perhaps, we see all that there is to see. However, this is an archival rather than a contemporary image, and we already have come to expect the archive to provide evidence. Here, the montage turns the archive (in this case the Auschwitz Museum) into the repository through which we see the failure to see. Moreover, if this is an image taken from an identity card or passport, a picture not from the camp but from before the camps, the apparently

The Remains of Figure    startled face is frozen not before the gate to Auschwitz (as the montage suggests) but rather before a camera.43 Taken together, the four successive shots—the clip from Jakubowska’s film, the color shot where the camera (in lieu of the cattle cars) tracks along the overgrown train tracks, the color / black-and-white shot of the nighttime arrival at Auschwitz, and the still image from the archive—present the crisis of filmic testimony. The commentary continues at this point: “c’est une autre planete [ein anderer Planet; it is another planet].” 44 From the interruption of these alien eyes—at once the eyes of someone who has seen the camp and the eyes of one posed before a camera—the film proceeds to “present” this concentrationary “planet” through still images of all of the elements of the camp: images of men lined up for “disinfection,” of shaved heads, of tattooed arms, of clothes marked by the symbols of the camp (yellow stars, green triangles, NN . . . all in black-and-white), and provides an explanation of the camp’s hierarchy (from common criminal to the “untouchable” SS to the commander, above all). Yet, while the film presents the essential facts in both image and text, so that through it the camp comes to be identified and known, while the film seems to have provided the categories necessary for understanding the camp, leaving us in a better position to comprehend what took place there, who executed it, who suffered it, this segment concludes not with the assertion of a ground but with the question of knowledge. Cayrol explains the position of the commandant, who stood “tout en haut”: “il preside aux rites; il affecte d’ignorer le camp [he oversees the camp routine; he pretends to know nothing of the camp],” and then uses the commandant’s feint as the basis upon which to raise the more general question of knowledge: “Qui ne l’ignore pas, d’ailleurs? [Who does know anything? or, Who does not not know?].”45 Cayrol’s text collapses the commandant’s pretense of nonknowledge with the crisis of knowledge posed by Auschwitz; it aligns one nonknowledge with another (a collapse that is heightened in French, where ignorer—deriving from the Latin ignorare, does not signify, as it does in English, an active disregard or avoidance, but rather all forms of not knowing, including those that are constitutional: knowledge of the disaster or one’s own death, for example). In translating this passage, Celan disassembles Cayrol’s paragraph and the information that it bears (the abuses, the camp hierarchy) into an ­interrupted, ­visibly

   Chapter 7 “poetic” text, thus stalling—being stalled by—the machine of understanding. Indeed, just as earlier Celan refused the seamlessness of the film’s opening account of the event of Auschwitz, so does he here refuse to make Auschwitz into knowledge. He translates Cayrol’s question to read: “Wer übrigens weiß schon etwas davon? [Who remains that even knows anything of it?].”46 Here, the question of knowledge corresponds to the question of survival and reflects the logic of the impossibility of the “true witness” that Agamben locates in Levi. For Celan, it is not the general failure of knowledge that gives some solace to the commander’s pretense, a pretense that makes him appear not to know in the way that we cannot know. Rather, what distinguishes all of us, what raises the question of knowledge, is that we remain (übrigens). Our failure to know is tied directly to the crisis of knowledge effected by Auschwitz; it is not the denial of Auschwitz but the acknowledgment of its destruction. This archival sequence and the commentary’s factual account of the camp culminate in the question of the possibility of knowing. With the return to color, to the domain of present vigilance and responsibility, the film endeavors to know something of the camps, even if it undertakes this effort only under the sign of its acknowledgment that “the camps’ reality” is that they remain unknowable: “Méprisée par ceux qui la fabriquent, insaisissable pour ceux qui la subissent, c’est bien en vain qu’à notre tour, nous essayons d’en découvrir les restes [The reality of these camps despised by those who built them, and unfathomable to those who endured them—what hope do we have of truly capturing this reality?].”47 Celan’s translation avoids the sentimentality that Cayrol’s text—with its admission of vain efforts—evokes. In lieu of sentiment, Celan offers interruption: broken lines and sentences that culminate in an unfinished, indeed unfinishable account. His translation of this claim into the three-part failure of testimony as the camps’ reality is not conclusive, but fragmentary. Celan writes: “Die Wirklichkeit der Lager: die sie geschaffen haben, ignorieren sie, und die sie erleiden, können sie nicht fassen. Und wir, die wir nun zu sehen versuchen, was übrig blieb . . . [The reality of the camp: those who created them, ignore them, and those who suffered cannot grasp them. And we, we alone strive to see what remains remain . . . ].”48 Celan’s text, rather than merely stating its own failure, employing failure as the ground of self-knowledge; rather than transforming this scene into one of sublime knowledge and attendant freedom, over-

The Remains of Figure    coming finitude through the work—instead founders. Celan’s account of the camps’ reality trails off in the imperfect verb—“what remains remains . . .” This may mean that it remains to be known, remains to be understood, remains to be seen, and so forth, but in the absence of knowledge, understanding, and vision, it remains as its remains, unrecovered, unredeemed— and thus it cannot recover us in the knowledge of our failure and finitude. It does not leave us comfortably grasping ourselves as finite, vainly striving beings. Rather, by resisting the gesture that would turn this failure into knowledge, and refusing to absolutize the limit, Celan recasts Cayrol’s explanation of the failure of description according to its incompletion—the very incompletion to which the film otherwise would seem to bear witness.49 At the same time, Resnais’ camera slowly reenters the camp, passing through an open gate, first registering a brick block and then pausing before a wooden block. The sky is impossibly blue, the clouds pillowy, and the dead leaves on a tree in front of the block waver with uncomfortable grace. This tracking shot of the block’s exterior is followed by a shot of its interior, at which point the commentary begins to state what we see: “ces châlis où l’on dormait à trois, ces terriers où l’on se cachait, où l’on mangeait à la sauvette, où le sommeil même était une menace [the wooden barracks where people slept three to a bed, the burrows where they hid and ate in furtive fear and where sleep itself presented a threat].” This is also what we do not see: the camera slowly tracks along a row of empty wood “beds,” strange and empty shelves in which persons once “slept” three to a pallet. The film shows that it cannot recover the “life” of the camps, that its images cannot become the basis of knowledge, that it can show us only these remains, which require acts of imagination—or translation—for us to perceive them as the instruments of destruction. In slowly taking us through the interior of the block, the film also demonstrates that it can document not what took place but only the failure to see or to know what took place. Cayrol continues by explaining that this failure of representation is due to magnitude and measure: “aucune description, aucune image ne peuvent leur rendre leur vraie dimension [no description, no image can reveal their true dimension],” and as Celan translates this passage, “kein Bild, keine ­Beschreibung gibt ihnen ihre wahre Dimension wieder.”50 The “true dimension” of the camps would be the measure of the fear they produced, rather than an accurate account of the number of persons deported or killed,

   Chapter 7 descriptions of how they suffered, or an understanding of the methods with which the Nazis caused them to suffer. The film provides this information in presenting us with archival documents. But we also are told that these images do not present the camp in its “true dimension,” for that would require not an image but the production of a feeling, the feeling and the experience of “uninterrupted fear”; it would involve the imposition of violence, not the representation of what took place but the imposition of its effects. The film would have to become the camp in order to convey its “true dimension.”51 Thus, the failure to present what took place is partially an aesthetic problem but also an ethical one. The film claims that the enormity of what took place in the block will remain unrepresentable (unimaginable, indescribable) because it was formless and interminable—without interruption. From this position, the film goes on to present the camp in its unrepresentability: emptiness and absence. These images, rather than represent what took place, become the representation of unrepresentability. Indeed, from within the block, the camera gives us nothing to see: empty pallets that once were the site of a fear we cannot access or can access only through acts of imagination. The film nevertheless evokes this feeling of fear, through its use of montage and the attendant collapse of the distinction between past horror and present remembrance. From its apparently sylvan opening, the film suggests that we may not know whether we are in the time of horror or the time of the recollection of horror. It leaves perpetual vigilance—which, nevertheless, is likely destined to fail—as our only resource.52 The commentary continues in an almost paraleptical mode, approaching the task of presentation by stating what the film would need to show were it to represent what took place. Yet whereas paralepsis would mark an instance in which a text says what it claims not to say, if the film communicates under the sign of noncommunication, here it is not simply a matter of a text that does the very opposite of what it says (of irony) or that says what it says in a negative mode. While the commentary “provides” everything that would be needed to present the camps, the film registers the failure to translate this description into an image. Thus, the commentator’s description (“Il faudrait la paillasse qui servait de garde-manger et de coffre-fort, la couverture pour laquelle on se battait, les denonications . . . [We would need the straw mattress, at once pantry and strongbox, the fiercely contested blanket, the denunci-

The Remains of Figure    ations . . .]”), coincides with an image of the empty shell of the block.53 The camera can show neither suffering nor violence but only its failure to show this. Resnais does not turn Auschwitz into a set of Auschwitz (as Jakubowska does); rather, he turns what remains of Auschwitz into the image of the failure to see it. Cayrol responds to his quasi-paraleptical enumeration of what the film cannot show with an account of what it can and does show: “De ce dortoir de briques, de ces sommeils menacés, nous ne pouvons que vous montrer l’écorce, la couleur [Of this brick dormitory, of this menaced sleep, we can show you only the shell, the color].”54 With this statement, the commentary refers both to the empty dormitory presented on screen (what we do see) and to the menaced sleep just described (what we cannot see). It refers to the image before us and to what it has just stated has no image (“le sommeil même était une menace, aucune description, aucune image ne peuvent leur render leur vraie dimension”). In conflating the image onscreen (the image that is also the figure of our failure to see) with what we are led to understand has no image (night in the camps or absolute fear), and in claiming that what we see is “the shell, the color” of the brick dormitory (which we can establish that it is) and “the shell, the color” of fear—fear moreover that is beyond dimension and image—the film apparently gives dimension and image to what allows none. In claiming that there could be a shell or a color (even if there is nothing but shell, nothing but color) to dimensionless fear, it also gives it dimension—form and measure. At the same time as the statement of the impossibility of representing uninterrupted fear is transformed into an admission of only a limited capacity to represent, a capacity only to represent the failure of adequate representation here, the commentator speaks as a “we” to an explicitly articulated you: “nous ne pouvons que vous montrer l’écorce, la couleur [we can but show you the outer shell, the surface]” (my emphasis).55 “We” and “you” emerge here in the blindspot. The “we” is fully aware that the film only can show its failure to show, only can give dimension to what remains dimensionless. The awareness of the failure of presentation coincides with the address to the “you,” distinguished from the “we,” a “you” who is called upon to confront her own position in relation to this failure to see. If the recognition of finitude becomes the condition of responsibility and vigilance, and if the image of absence (which gives dimension to what

   Chapter 7 has no dimension and yet shows nothing other than the failure to see it) is what demands vigilance, Celan’s translation of this confession enacts the crisis rather than reflecting upon it. Celan offers no pronouns, no grammatical subject, no object of address, no verb, no action, no statement of capacity or incapacity. He offers no distance, no position from which to reflect upon representation and its limits—indeed, he offers no position at all. He writes: “Von Gefahren umlauerter, backsteinfarbener Schlaf . . .”56 Celan’s fragmentary phrase disarticulates Cayrol’s sentence and its appositional structure. If I have suggested that this appositional structure also conflates the measured and the measureless, the image presented to us and what we are told has no image, and if it does this while suggesting that communication networks remain intact, Celan offers no such stability. Every word in his phrase disarticulates. Here, there is no relation, no priority, no logic, no grammar, no ground from which to distinguish then and now. The sentence trails off prior to the appearance of subject, object, and verb, so that if the sentence might have stated that all that can be shown is “backsteinfarbener Schlaf,” it recovers no persons, acts, or possibilities after having uttered “backsteinfarbener Schlaf.” In German, backstein, which means brick, literally means “baked stone,” and farbener, “colored,” includes the name I. G. Farben, the chemical company that operated at Auschwitz (Monowitz) and supplied Zyklon B to the gas chambers.57 Sleep is death’s euphemism, a euphemism that recalls other euphemisms unspoken in this film, like “the Final Solution.” This “brickcolored sleep” is the sleep of gas chambers and ovens, not the menaced sleep of the living, the menace that belongs only to sleep, which can be sound or interrupted, but the euphemistic sleep of Auschwitz’s dead. Neither “we” nor “you” have a place here, neither “we” nor “you” return to reflect upon representation’s limit, for every word, every German word and its parts—von, Gefahren, umlauerter, backstein, farben, er, Schlaf—becomes a word from Auschwitz that undoes the possibility of there being a sentence, a period, a sense.58 For Celan, Auschwitz is not an aesthetic predicament that eventuates in the consciousness of finitude and the comfort, however disturbing, of negative knowledge. Rather, Auschwitz is the suffocating hypersignificance in which every word has become a word of destruction. We have too many words for it.59 Taken as a translation of Cayrol’s commentary, this moment, which seems to bear the Celanian poetic signature in its early formation (1956),

The Remains of Figure    might also be an instance of what Paul de Man has called “the prosaic.”60 At this point in his commentary, Cayrol shifts from a mimetic account offered under the sign of impossibility to a tropological, apostrophic address offered in the mode of possibility. In other words, the commentary moves from impossible mimesis to the performative address that it frames as possible (indeed, as all that is possible). If this shift from hypothetical mimesis (a mimesis that occurs in commentary but cannot occur in the frame) to performative (which consolidates the commentary and the film in an act of address that also posits “we” and “you” as the condition and the outcome of this film) appears seamless, it is this seamless passage across an irrecoverable break that indicates the failure of the commentary to approach violence and disarticulation. It is Cayrol’s seamless prose that Celan—again, and most explicitly—does not translate. If Celan’s is the more “prosaic” of texts, and if this “prosaic-ness” corresponds to the text’s appearance as poetry (marked by broken lines and the language that we associate with Celan’s own poetry), this is because it cannot negotiate or articulate the distance between failed mimesis and performative positing. Instead, his text is a disarticulation of the sentence and the word. The disarticulation of—in and through—the German language, from which the French text remains freed.61 But what of the image? Just as Resnais seems to show us the image as absence of the image, the presentation of absence also seems to suggest an unbearable excess. Once the commentary has ended, Resnais’ camera remains silently in the block. It continues to track across the empty bunks built of wood and brick. On the horizon of the barrack there is a doorway that leads to another room filled with faint, rusty light. The camera moves toward this doorway, toward the boarded-up window on its far side. The forward tracking seems to suggest that we are moving toward the core of the camp, where me might see it, see something. Yet what could we see? If the gas chamber and crematorium are the core of the camp, seeing them would be our annihilation. The camera leaves us (the “you” named here in French), as Bersani and Dutoit suggest, “cinematic deportees.”62 The camera—and the deported viewer along with it—never arrives at the end of the hallway. Rather, slowly, but also abruptly, the camera turns away to reveal only a blank brick wall and an air vent through which voices, now mute, might once have been heard. The film shows us nothing and in silence.

   Chapter 7 Yet, now, nothing and silence are not the signs of film’s self-­consciousness of finitude, of “our” failure to show “you,” but rather, they indicate something closer to Celan’s ellipsis, to the danger it reflects, portends, and suffers. Indeed, Celan’s ellipsis allows us to recognize the oversaturation of every image, even these blank images. These are—literally—images of Auschwitz. It is not that they show us nothing, but rather that they already show us too much, far more than “we” or “you” can bear.63

The Remains of Figure Celan’s translation does not merely turn Resnais’ film into an account of aesthetic failure, in which Auschwitz emerges as the recognizable limit of aesthetic possibility, but rather makes felt the extent to which this film is incapable of the self-consciousness of finitude that it also states. The film claims that it can show nothing of the horror it seeks, and thus, framing but also responding to the black-and-white montage sequences of explicit annihilation and unrelenting horror, the color sequences pass from images of a written-over yet intact romantic landscape, with which the film opens, to images of an empty, incomprehensible terrain of the destroyed crematorium, with which it ends.64 Initially, the film implies that its effort to grasp something of what took place paradoxically produces beautiful images, images that seem to neither reflect nor anticipate a concentration camp in which 1.3 million persons were killed.65 Moreover, the initial inescapability of beauty, despite the barbed wire that cuts across the frame—the suggestion that what remains to be seen remains a placid landscape—is, in the film’s logic, an aspect of the annihilation and its horror: the horror is unremembered by the earth.66 The film also passes from its opening scene of the landscape’s beautiful indifference to a closing sequence, filmed from the heart of the camp, in which the camera tracks across a mass grave and burrows through the remains of the destroyed crematorium. Thus, the film suggests, the invisibility borne by the beautiful landscape is not all that remains (a beauty that, the commentary implies, has destruction as its source rather than its negation), but the confounding, idle artifacts of the camp also remain. We have moved, in the course of the film, from one image of nonpresentation to another.

The Remains of Figure    One way to characterize this passage is through an aesthetic idiom: the film seems to register an itinerary that passes from beautiful to sublime presentation, from intact universality to acknowledged finitude. This coincides with the implication that a sacrificial logic conditions our access to Auschwitz. Through these images, it gives us to understand that we fail to understand; it teaches us to see that we do not see. Yet, between these two landscapes of blindness (of beauty and blankness, form and formlessness), the film also shows us the images that it cannot evoke. We encounter not only the figure of blindness but also that of inescapable vision. We see not no one, not the absence of corpses, but we see a world in which corpses remain exposed and visible, in which the presentation of nothing (sublime negative knowledge) is saturated with the presentation of too much, with the interruption of the ultimately reassuring play between the figure of absence and the absence of figure. The haunted landscape with which the film ends—the landscape of an invisible mass grave and a destroyed crematorium—is not an image of the failure to see and thus the failure to anticipate, remember, and know what took place because there is nothing to see here, no evidence of the living or the dead remains. It shows us, instead, that every bit of this nothing is already too much—that every piece of debris, every tangled remnant, dark corner, and stray brick, belongs (as it literally does here) to Auschwitz. The final black-and-white sequence in the film—which precedes the scrutinizing of the camp’s ruin with which the film actually ends—is composed of both motion shots and still shots that coincide with the allies’ arrival. Whereas “our” entry into the camps led us to discover only a blank wall, an empty block, a distant, inaccessible doorway, “they” found fields of tortured corpses and barracks filled with well-fed perpetrators.67 The film shows black-and-white images of this excess of persons: a landscape of dead bodies; dozens of stern SS officers, both men and women, pouring out of their headquarters; other members of the SS made to drag corpses to mass graves or to arrange rows of skulls; masses of confused and bedraggled survivors looking on; and corpses, too many to count, and many broken and crushed, piled by bulldozers in mass graves. It also shows individual faces: the contorted face of a dead woman being dragged to her grave by an SS officer, the faces of a group of survivors, faces of a kapo and an officer as they deny responsibility (or guilt, “Schuld,” in Celan’s translation)

   Chapter 7 in a courtroom.68 The sequence culminates in a close-up of the face of a survivor (described in the decoupage as “silencieux et pensif ”), to whom the film seems to give voice by asking the question—not so much of him but on his behalf—“Alors qui est responsable? [Who then is responsible?].” The face emerges here as the occasion of responsibility—both the denial of juridical responsibility and the solicitation of responsibility outside of the law, responsibility to and issuing from the one whom Lévinas would call “the other man.” But the recognizable face of individual responsibility does not give the final image in this sequence; rather, the sequence concludes with three separate images of a mass grave filled with cadavers— anonymous, entangled, and entirely mutilated.69 The color sequence that follows on these images begins with an examination of the ground that covers the mass grave in which such bodies are buried. In some sense it repeats through the filmic frame the gesture of burial that it represents. The corpses are now buried: an abstract, bluegreen field, scattered with debris, covers them and covers the screen that seconds before was strewn with black-and-white corpses. As the camera continues to track across the brightly colored field, we discover that this is not the close-up it initially seemed but a distant overhead shot, one that displaces and confuses us rather than freeing us. We see this ground as something other than our ground, for we view it from a point located above the trees, whose dead leaves’ shadows lightly stain the ground. Yet, just as the camera seems to show us “nothing,” just as it seems to show us—as Cayrol showed us—that we see nothing and that there is nothing left to see, the pockmarks on this displaced ground, the strewn bits of wood or stone that remain when nothing remains, the shadows of branches, the shapes that catch our eye: all come to resemble the corpses we have seen, that is, they come to resemble precisely what they show us we cannot see.70 In a subsequent shot, the camera again shows us the former barracks surrounded by grass, only to discover, in the midst of this apparently tranquil scene, a rusty apparatus whose use we cannot reconstruct yet whose form suggests a human body. Another shot takes us to the crematorium— now collapsed, it has taken on the shape of a strange temple from which thick wires and red bricks protrude. The rusty apparatus, the tangle of wires that jut out of the collapsed crematorium, rather than showing us our failure to see any trace of vio-

The Remains of Figure    lence in the remains of Auschwitz, evoke the corpses that we have just seen. In the deliberate exclusion of any persons from contemporary images of the camp (despite the fact that there was at least a film crew working and living there), and in the exclusion of virtually all reenactment or dramatization, the film’s presentation of nothing and of absence emerges, not as the image of the failure to see or to grasp, but as the failure to escape seeing and grasping, that is, the failure to escape from the world of figure even— perhaps especially—in the testimonial instant. To use the idiom of an earlier chapter, it leaves us, every one of us, an insomniac. While Resnais’ film concludes, even collapses, in the empty field of an unmarked grave, in the useless apparatus, in the ruined temple of the crematorium, all of this emptiness and ruin emerges overwrought by images. The landscape—“Diese Landschaft: die Landschaft von neun ­Millionen Toten,” which we see now as the crematorium’s fallen wall—is not only haunted by nine million ghosts (as Cayrol implies) or fertilized by ash and bone (as Celan implies), but it also bears the remains of figure.71 The remains of figure, moreover, are what Celan’s translation, in its disarticulation of Cayrol’s commentary, has allowed us to describe. By avoiding the “comforting” knowledge of failed presentation, refusing to recover knowledge as negative knowledge, which is to say, by returning this film to German and to Germany (where all is there to be “known,” where these ghosts inhabit the language), confronting the reality of the camps as the interruption of our reality—our grammar and our sense—Celan’s translation allows us to “see” what by the end of Resnais’ film we cannot help but see: when there is nothing, when nothing remains, figure remains.

Ending in Romanticism What did Wordsworth matter to me at such a time? lucy dawidowicz

Reflecting upon the events that led her to abandon the study of poetry and turn her attention instead to Jewish culture in Vilna just as it was about to be destroyed, Lucy Dawidowicz associates her decision with a rhetorical question: “What did Wordsworth matter to me at such a time?”1 At the time (1937), Dawidowicz was a graduate student in English at Columbia, but she already had determined that her “destiny might lie in history rather than poetry.” As she explains, “it first occurred to me that . . . my portion was not to be the English Romantic poets, but the European Jews.”2 Acting on her revelation, Dawidowicz dropped out of her master’s program—only to reenroll the next semester with a new focus: the Yiddish press, rather than the romantic poets. While Dawidowicz had discovered her destiny to be with history, rather than poetry, she nevertheless continued with her coursework and found herself sitting in a classroom, “hardly hearing the professor drone on about Romantic literature in England as opposed to Germany.”3 Having returned to romanticism after turning away from it, Dawidowicz came to ask herself the question that I have taken as my epigraph. As she recalls in her memoir: “It was early spring and from the window I could see the pale

Ending in Romanticism    sunshine and yellow-green of the new leaves on the trees. Why was I sitting here? What did Wordsworth matter to me at such a time?”4 When Dawidowicz asks, “What did Wordsworth matter to me at such a time?” she seems to question the viability of poetry in a time of crisis, even to anticipate the response with which, after Adorno, we have become familiar. Her question also implies a statement: today—at this time—Wordsworth does not matter to me.5 Yet, the immediate occasion for Dawidowicz’s question is not the opposition between English romanticism and Europe’s Jews, that is, between poetry and history, beauty and destruction, the untimely and the urgent (she already had decided to abandon the romantics), but between an experience that leaves one numb, mute, and deaf (“hardly hearing the professor drone on”) and a world—the natural world—that still leaves one alert and seeing, inquisitive and alive (“I could see the pale sunshine and yellow-green of the new leaves. Why was I sitting here?”).6 “Such a time,” far from straightforwardly indicating the time of impending violence against the Jews of Europe, also refers to spring in New York City. The opposition then is not between beauty and destruction, but between the dead letter and the living world. Dawido­ wicz’s question overlays two apparently irreconcilable oppositions: on the one hand the opposition between poetry and history (beauty and destruction), and on the other hand the opposition between literature and experience (aesthetic and natural beauty). Despite its grammar, Dawidowicz’s question, “What did Words­ worth matter to me at such a time?” is less a question than a statement that assumes poetic untimeliness is synonymous with “making nothing happen” (to recall Auden’s famous phrase). In this sense, even as it fails to distinguish between the sylvan scene from which it emerges and the still potential destruction that it anticipates, Dawidowicz’s question assumes that uncertainty or undecidability can be dispensed with, in favor not of action but of life. The question, rather than seriously asking about Wordsworth or the figure of Wordsworth and hence the problem of figure (operative even here), implicitly frames an opposition between the study of poetry and the study of living culture. It does this by invoking the present (“such a time”) as a self-identical instant, even if it also renders ambiguous the meaning of “such a time.” Does it refer to natural or historical temporality, to seasonal restoration or historical destruction? In both cases, however different they

   Ending in Romanticism appear to be, it suggests that living is at stake—and that to remain with poetry is to turn away from life and the living. Over the course of this book, I have argued, to the contrary, that the question of living (and the living) is inseparable from the question of poetry, and that both are determined by non-self-identity. We cannot even think about the ethical subject—witness to and survivor of her limits— without also recognizing the lyrical formation of this subject (what ­Lévinas understands as a subjectivity without subject). In doing so, I also have resisted a tendency, no less operative today than it was when Lucy Dawidowicz first turned away from poetry, to identify culture as the de facto site of responsibility. In order to effect this argument, I have had to consider the meaning of poetry and the issue of its figures. At times, this argument has sounded like a defense of poetry—or at least a defense of prosopopoeia and apostrophe. But over and again, I have also suggested that there is nothing particularly defensible about lyric figures, only that they are the irreducible condition of speaking and of seeing, that is of doing what we cannot do. Their value is neither positive nor negative—and it is this neutrality that contributes to their endurance, and even their irremissibility. If this book is not a defense of poetry, it is an acknowledgment of the survival of poetry, even in the places where it seems least justified and least likely. I have shown that when lyric figures give voice to the voiceless, make the inanimate live, and render the nonhuman human, they expose voice, life, and human being not as givens but rather as figural effects. Thus, this “power,” far from a capacity in a conventional sense, instead is closer to what Blanchot calls disaster. Indeed, the rhetoric of survival is structured like the disaster: “it changes everything, all the while leaving everything intact.”7 The implications of this claim are at least twofold. In the first place, it allows us to recognize the neutrality or inoperativity of lyric: whatever it accomplishes, lyric changes nothing. It neither redeems nor restores nor deprives.8 In the second place, it nevertheless compels us to think about the adequacy and effectivity of lyric figures, and to consider the relation between the attribution of life, face, or voice through language and the imperceptible or ungraspable experiences we are obliged to witness. These attributions do not make the subject newly capable of experience. They do not radically change her senses—in the way that Wordsworth, in 1802,

Ending in Romanticism    imagined science one day might do (thus exhausting poetry’s necessity). Rather, they allow for acts of witnessing without rendering those acts possible. They allow, in other words, for the impossible to take place without changing the fact of its impossibility. No wonder, then, that a scholar committed to action might ask: “What did Wordsworth matter to me at such a time?” With her question, Dawidowicz also states that Wordsworth was nothing. What could Wordsworth be, when, as she says, “premonitions of war poisoned the air as if the suffocating aroma had already been unloosed,” or when “it was early spring.”9 The two instants—visible and invisible, fundamentally new and endlessly repeated—though conjoined by her question are discontinuous, and this discontinuity is disconcerting. Dawidowicz’s turn from poetry to a more urgent task of tracing the history of Yiddish culture in Vilna and, ultimately, anti-Semitism in Poland implies that “Wordsworth” only could be a means of avoiding the claims of the present, specifically, of avoiding one’s own responsibility to know the present and to speak in favor of justice.10 Understood in this way, Wordsworth, a proper name, becomes a figure—a synecdoche for romanticism and poetry in general. Yet, Wordsworth names not a therapeutic refuge or restorative discourse, one that hides violence and protects us from history (for his name is offered in opposition to the lush springtime scene). It names even less: “Wordsworth” names that which does not matter, and this naming takes place through a moment of linguistic undecidability, the very sort of undecidability that poetry exposes and endures. Susan Gubar and Ron Rosenbaum both have reflected on Dawidowicz’s question and have sought to recover poetry’s importance for her formation. Both suggest that had Dawidowicz not learned to read Words­ worth, she might have been unprepared for a career analyzing Hitler’s rhetoric. Rosenbaum explains that whether or not Dawidowicz’s theory of the early origins of the Holocaust is tenable, he nevertheless remains “fascinated [b]y the way she applied the literary-critical techniques from her English-major period—the search for subtextual ambiguities she pursued in studying Wordsworth—to the prose of Adolf Hitler. Agree or disagree,” he writes, “it’s a dazzling performance.”11 In the first chapter of Poetry After Auschwitz, Gubar agrees. Following Rosenbaum, she argues that reading Wordsworth trained Dawidowicz to recognize Hitler’s use of euphemism

   Ending in Romanticism and deception, and that had Dawidowicz been less attentive to romantic rhetoric (“subtextual ambiguities”), she also would have been less able to decipher Nazi rhetoric.12 Yet, to read Dawidowicz’s question as an actual question, as Gubar and Rosenbaum both do, is to allow Wordsworth (and the untimely poetry for which he stands) to be redeemed as the condition of cultural analysis. This defense of poetry comes at the expense of the very undecidability between rhetoric and grammar that poetry (like Dawidowicz’s rhetorical question) exposes. Consequently, as a defense of poetry, this seems somewhat weak. It suggests that poetry’s function is primarily pedagogical, that it has no intrinsic value, and that what is being defended is rather indefensible (it is nothing, that which does not matter, a means and not an end). Gubar hints at this when she considers Dawidowicz’s turn to history (and turn away from “the frivolity of verse”) in the context of Auden’s elegy “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” and thus, in the context of a larger discussion of what—if anything—poetry makes happen. Yet, to defend Wordsworth’s value—and implicitly the value of romanticism today—as a training ground dispenses with the question’s rhetoric (its claim that “Wordsworth doesn’t matter”). In addition, and perhaps this is only to say the same thing, it neutralizes the disconcerting possibility that poetry is inconsequential and that turning away from it will not overcome the inconsequence that it exposes. There remains another way of approaching Dawidowicz’s question, one that does not merely dispense with it: choosing to read its rhetoric or grammar. This approach neither sets out from the assumption that the question can be answered nor denies the fact that it asks anything at all. Indeed, neither Dawidowicz’s turn to culture and the living nor her readers’ defense of poetry in the service of cultural understanding acknowledges that the question—“What did Wordsworth matter to me at such a time?”—remains open and infinite (because undecidable and unanswerable). When Dawidowicz dispenses with this incompatibility, that is, when she sees that poetry no longer is defensible and decides that she must abandon Wordsworth, she also shows that poetry—whether or not it is defensible—cannot be dispensed with: for if it does not matter, if it is a something that is a nothing, there is no way that it (that Wordsworth) could simply be abandoned or affirmed in the name of historical experience (or natural beauty). Indeed, it was only after she had decided no longer to pursue the

Ending in Romanticism    study of the English romantics that Dawidowicz again found herself studying them; it was only then, as she fulfilled her last credits, that she came to ask: “What did Wordsworth matter to me at such a time?”13 Wordsworth himself reflects upon the complex opposition between poetry and experience in a sonnet that conjoins ethical and lyric address, and that shows ethical and lyric responsiveness to be as inextricable as grammar and rhetoric. One aim of this book has been to show that the romantic subject represents this nexus of lyric and ethical address. To turn to Wordsworth now is to suggest that Wordsworth does matter— that Wordsworth, as figure of romanticism and as the name for particular texts, could and should matter—at this time, not before Auschwitz (the time when Dawidowicz abandoned him), but after Auschwitz. And yet, if Wordsworth matters it is as an interruption of the opposition between ethics and poetry, or what matters and what does not. The action that Wordsworth’s poem “Mark the concentred Hazels” solicits is an act of acknowledgment. In this respect the poem, which is offered in an imperative mode, also construes the imperative as an obligation to bear witness: to acknowledge what is there before you (nothing), and to see “through” it that you do not—cannot—see.14 The poem that offers this charge, far from positing negative knowledge as its freedom, is also compelled by the charge it issues. Standing in the position of its addressee, the poem bears witness to poetry, that is, to its own inability to bear witness and hence to the permanence of its charge. It offers an account of poetic failure linked to ethical responsiveness and testimony; it shows how poetry obliges and enacts testimony. Mark the concentred Hazels that enclose Yon old grey Stone, protected from the ray Of noontide suns:—and even the beams that play And glance, while wantonly the rough wind blows, Are seldom free to touch the moss that grows Upon that roof—amid embowering gloom The very image framing of a Tomb, In which some ancient Chieftain finds repose Among the lonely mountains.—Live, ye Trees! And Thou, grey Stone, the pensive likeness keep Of a dark chamber where the Mighty sleep: For more than Fancy to the influence bends

   Ending in Romanticism When solitary Nature condescends To mimic Time’s forlorn humanities.15

It no doubt seems odd to turn, in conclusion, to an act of testimony that bears witness not to a catastrophic limit—which we saw at work in Night and Fog and The Human Race, as well as in Frankenstein and the sonnets “To Sleep”—but to the slightest accident: the moment at which the natural world resembles the world of human artifice, when trees appear in a particular light and leave our position in question. In commanding us to “mark” this most minimal event, when the natural world resembles the artificial world and a stone comes for a moment to look like a tomb, the poem cautions against both a naïve anthropomorphism, which makes it seem as if we can see death, and the equally naïve belief that we can avoid naïveté and do away with anthropomorphism. In fact, the poem, which commissions us to see an accident— and even goes so far as to charge us with “marking” it (turning us into the marker or sign of death, but also of death’s invisibility, and exposing the full implications of this accident, which is also an accident of reading)— addresses not only us but also the nonhuman, inanimate objects (the stone and trees) that both deceive and enlighten us. The ethical address with which the poem opens has the effect of humanizing us by compelling us to face death, not as finitude but only as the failure to see death. The ethical address that opens the octave is followed by a lyric address in the sestet, an apostrophe or turn away from the living, ethical subject (reader and addressee), now rendered a survivor or one who lives on. The lyrical address—issued to the nonliving and nonhuman objects, the stone and tree—repeats the ethical address (the charge to act and witness) to an apparently human subject, and in doing so disrupts any confidence we might have in our capacity for responsiveness and in the meaning of our responsiveness. For this repetition of the imperative is also an exemplary instance of apostrophe and prosopopoeia, and establishes a parallelism— even a likeness—between the ethical and lyric charge. The sestet is an address to the tree that leads us to mistake the stone for a tomb, and to the stone that subsequently appears to mark the dead.16 The poem orders the trees to live and the stone to keep its “pensive likeness,” where likeness is both resemblance and a face. The ends that the poem solicits are also the ends that its figures effect. The imperative (to

Ending in Romanticism    live, to continue to resemble) is oriented to the future, but the figures through which it is issued (apostrophe and prosopopoeia) posit the outcome they solicit when they assume that the tree and stone (the addressees) can respond, which is to say, that they have life and face. This absolute figure would seem to leave no remainder. And yet the poem culminates in a justification of its imperative—and even a defense of its rhetoric. In doing so, it suggests that the anthropomorphism for which the poem accounts is a referent (an earthly anthropomorphism, nonhuman in its origin) rather than an act (including an act of reading), and that if this is the case, we need to think otherwise about lyric and ethics, the living and the nonliving, the human and the nonhuman. The sonnet ends by offering a reason for responsiveness, yet this explanation remains insistently open: For more than Fancy to the influence bends When solitary Nature condescends To mimic Time’s forlorn humanities.

Whatever justifies the responsiveness, it is caused by more and eventuates in more than a mere fiction (what de Man would call “the fiction of an apostrophe”). Wordsworth’s sonnet leaves uncertain what “more than Fancy” might be, whether it belongs to the past (as a condition) or the future (as an outcome). In other words, the responsiveness that the poem solicits—which refers both to the apparently human addressee (called upon to “mark”) and to the apparently nonhuman addressee (called upon to “live”)—is justified by a past or future change that may be a change in truth or life or in the imagination (three among many ways of figuring that which is “more than Fancy”), but whose exact meaning remains indeterminate. The source of this change is a way of seeing the world that nevertheless is based on what Wordsworth and Coleridge call “fancy,” that is, a rearrangement of givens, in this case, a rearrangement of the relation between the human and the nonhuman, the living and the nonliving.17 This catastrophe is not physically violent or murderous, in the way that the impending catastrophe that Dawidowicz came to recount in The War Against the Jews is violent, but it does reflect a radical displacement of the human subject. The mode of witnessing and responsibility that Dawidowicz advocates (in lieu of reading Wordsworth) relies upon the existence of a subject of knowledge, action, and self-conscious questioning, all evident in her question: “What did Wordsworth matter to me at

   Ending in Romanticism such a time?” This subject has long been recognized as romanticism’s subject (the lyric subject), but as Wordsworth’s sonnet “Mark the concentred Hazels” (like Shelley’s Frankenstein) shows, the romantic subject is a subject without power, for whom living is always a living beyond. The subject comes to see that he does not see death. More than this, as a responsive ethical-lyrical subject, he stands in for (marks) the death he does not see. Could the critical gaze that chooses history over poetry, the present over the untimely, rescue us from violence or forgetting? My point is neither that Dawidowicz should have stuck with Wordsworth nor that poetry will save us from ourselves. Rather, I am suggesting that the untimeliness of romanticism won’t be easily dismissed, and it certainly won’t be exhausted by a rhetorical question. Romanticism returns in the texts that oblige us to remember, but also in the texts that affirm that we cannot remember. It returns in the texts through which survivors address us, and it returns neither as a freedom from poetry’s risk (or pleasure), nor in a sure sobriety, but rather, in the enduring irony that poetry is inseparable from the charge to and performance of vigilance. In other words, romanticism’s return (which also implies its repression) is a return of what never has left or ended: it is the unsettling of a poetry that ties us to a future—but also a past—that we remain to know.

reference matter

Notes

introduction: the rhetoric of survival 1. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1973), 362–63. 2.  Paul de Man, introduction to “The Rhetoric of Romanticism,” ed. Paul de Man, special issue of Studies in Romanticism 18, no. 4 (Winter 1979): 495–99. My reading of de Man’s introduction—and the theory of legacy it figures—appears in “At the far edge of this ongoing enterprise,” in The Legacies of Paul de Man, ed. Marc Redfield (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007). 3. I reproduce the English translation by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann, included in Primo Levi’s Collected Poems. See Primo Levi, “The Survivor,” in Collected Poems, trans. Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), 64. In the translation, the first five lines—Coleridge’s—are printed in a smaller font and set off from the remainder of the poem by a space. The effect is to suggest that Coleridge’s stanza is a kind of epigraph to the poem—both a part and not a part of it. The Italian publication, in the second volume of Levi’s Opere, does not distinguish between Coleridge’s and Levi’s words. Both editions include a note referring to Coleridge’s “Rime.” The poem is also included as the opening text in the English collection Moments of Reprieve: A Memoir of Auschwitz, trans. Ruth Feldman (New York: Penguin, 1986). Another translation of the poem appears in Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, although curiously (given all that Agamben has said about poetic enjambment), it is translated to appear as a single paragraph, which reads: Since then, at an uncertain hour, that punishment comes back. And if it doesn’t find someone who will listen to it, it burns his heart in his chest. Once again he sees the faces of the other inmates, blueish in the light of dawn, grey with cement dust, shrouded in mist, painted with death in their restless sleep. At night their jaws grind away, in the absence of dreams, chewing on a stone that isn’t there. “Get away from here, drowned people, go away. I didn’t usurp anyone’s place. I didn’t steal anyone’s bread. No one died in my stead. No one. Go back to your mist. It isn’t my fault if I live and breathe, eat and sleep and wear clothes.” (quoted in Agamben, 90)

Agamben (and his translator Daniel Heller-Roazen) also present the poem in

   Notes to Pages 2–3 Italian, but efface the poem’s first (English) line. See Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone, 1999). 4. Or if it does translate the poem’s measure, it is in the repetition of ora (hour) or or, heard in its certain uncertainty (or arrhythmia) throughout Levi’s Italian lines: Dopo di allora, ad ora incerta, / Quella pena ritorna, / E se non trova chi lo ascolti / Gli brucia in petto il cuore.” In “Worked or,” Andrzej Warminski has read the repetition of the or sound in Keats’s “Grecian Urn” as the stutter of language— a stutter that might be taken to reflect a traumatic time of “uncertain hours.” Andrzej Warminski, “Worked or,” in Material Inscriptions (forthcoming). 5. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1 (1913–26), ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 253–63. Zohn translates Überleben not as “survival,” but as “afterlife.” 6. Agamben discusses the poem in the chapter of his book devoted to “Shame; or, On the Subject.” Rather than focus on the reference to Coleridge with which the poem opens, he discusses instead the reference to Dante with which it ends: The citation from Dante in the last verse bears witness to the fact that what is at issue in this text is not simply the disavowal of responsibility. The citation comes from the thirty-third canto of the Inferno (v. 141), which describes Dante’s encounter with Ugolino in the traitors’ pit. It contains a double, implicit reference to the problem of the guilt of the deportees. On the one hand, Dante’s “dark well” is the place of traitors, in particular those who have betrayed their own relatives and friends. On the other hand, in bitter allusion to his own situation as a survivor, the cited verse also refers to someone whom Dante believes to be alive, but also who is only apparently living, since his soul already has been swallowed by death. (Agamben, Remnants, 91)

This double reference is quite close to the reference to the Ancient Mariner—one who inadvertently betrayed family and friends (above all his nephew), and who, by all indications, is “only apparently living.” 7. See Theodor W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 34. The sentence comes at the very end of the chapter: “Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation” (34). Adorno returns to his claim (written in 1949, first published in 1951) in Negative Dialectics, where he writes: Perennial suffering [Adorno has just referred to a “world whose law is universal individual profit,” which he analogizes to “the electrified barbed wire around the camps”] has as much

Notes to Page 4    right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living—especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living. (362–63)

8. Myriam Anissimov, Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist, trans. Steve Cox (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 1999), 368–69. In Poetry After Auschwitz, Susan Gubar notes that many contemporary U.S. poets make similar claims. She mentions Jerome Rothenberg (“after auschwitz / there is only poetry no hope / no ­other language left to heal”), Adrienne Rich, and Charles Bernstein (Gubar, 28, 11). Gubar also elaborates upon Irving Feldman’s response (in a poem) to Joseph Brodsky (and Mark Strand), who ironically dismiss Adorno’s claim: “In any case, (or, as our comedians say, ‘But seriously, folks’), has Adorno’s question/been disposed of, interred beneath the poems/written since Auschwitz?—rather than raised again / and again like a ghost by each of them?” (12). See Susan Gubar, Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003). It is worth noting the very different notions of poetry that each of these examples offers. Rothenberg suggests that poetry takes the place of hope yet still has a therapeutic function (even if his line is ambiguous and also seems to suggest that poetry too is wounded and in need of healing). 9.  Paul Celan, “The Meridian,” in Collected Prose, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop (Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY: Sheep Meadow, 1986), 49. Originally published in Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), 3: 198. 10. In Regions of Sorrow: Anxiety and Messianism in Hannah Arendt and W. H. Auden (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), Susannah Young-Ah ­Gottlieb recalls W. H. Auden’s account of the “wickedness” of writing a play about Auschwitz. Auden wrote: “To write a play (that is, to construct a secondary world) about Auschwitz, for example, is wicked; author and audience may try to pretend that they are morally horrified, but in fact they are passing an entertaining evening together in the aesthetic enjoyment of horrors” (18). Gottlieb goes on to clarify that “Auden’s remarks shouldn’t be confused with Adorno’s famous dictum. . . . What Auden calls ‘wicked’—and implicitly distinguishes from evil—traverses the distinction between culture and barbarism . . . poetry becomes not barbaric but, rather, wicked whenever it fails to acknowledge its limits” (18–19). Also, in an essay on “The Survivor,” devoted to Hannah Arendt, Jean-François Lyotard explains that for his purposes “the word survivor implies that an entity that is dead or ought to be is still alive”; in this sense it is not only the man in Levi’s poem who is a survivor, but also poetry. See Jean-François Lyotard, Toward the Postmodern, ed. Robert Harvey and Mark S. Robert (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1993), 144. 11. In “Après coup” (After the Fact) Blanchot writes: “In my opinion—and in a way different from the one that led Adorno to decide with absolute correctness—I

   Notes to Pages 5–6 will say there can be no fiction-story about Auschwitz [À mon sens, et d’une autre manière qu l’a, du reste, avec la plus grande raison, décidé Adorno, je dirai qu’il ne peut pas y avoir de récit-fiction d’Auschwitz].” Two paragraphs later, he goes on to explain that this means: “No matter when it is written every story from now on will be from before Auschwitz [Récit d’avant Auschwitz. A quelque date qu’il puisse être écrit, tout récit désormais sera d’avant Auschwitz].” Maurice Blanchot, Vicious Circles: Two Fictions and “After the Fact,” trans. Paul Auster (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1985), 68–69; Maurice Blanchot, “Après coup”: Précédé par le r­essassement eternal (Paris: Minuit, 1983), 98–99. 12. These definitions of poetry are Wordsworth’s. He offers them explicitly in the preface to Lyrical Ballads (the volume in which Coleridge’s poem first appears, albeit in a version different from the one that Levi cites), as well as in the advertisement, which appears in the 1798 edition of the book, and hence prior to the preface which appears only in 1800 and is revised in 1802. I discuss these texts in greater detail in Chapter 2. 13. Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 67. Alan Bewell considers the relation of the “Rime” to history, specifically to the history of colonialism and its “survivors,” including “the anonymous and spectral” experience of the common sailor that is the source of the Ancient Mariner’s voice. Bewell also focuses on the repetition of the tale, which marks the link between the experience recounted in the poem and the experience of the modern reader, and goes so far as to claim that “Coleridge seems to be suggesting that if there is any redemption at all, it lies in telling the tale.” See Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 101, 108. The colonial context is not the one in which Levi would have read and appropriated the poem, but it does give further evidence of the status of the Mariner as survivor. 14. Stewart, Crimes of Writing, 67. See the fine essays “Notes on Distressed Genres” and “Scandals of the Ballad” in Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation. In “Crimes of Writing,” the volume’s introductory chapter, Stewart aligns these eighteenth-century models with what, in postmodernity, she suggests can be understood as a parallel or inherited concern. Yet, even this suggestion bespeaks the artifacts’ resistance to claims about a successive temporality. Stewart is interested in the eighteenth century’s encounter with “the impossibility of mastering temporality.” In her analysis, the “new antique” attempts to overcome this impossibility and the cultural scene of postmodernity continues to negotiate it. She writes: “It is not particularly difficult, in the style of Walter Benjamin’s studies of the baroque, to allegorize this problematic of temporality into current postmodern conditions of the production of art and literature. . . . The postmodern ‘problems’ of rapidity and fragmentation might be seen as either an inheritance of or parallel to eighteenth-century cultural developments”

Notes to Page 7    (5; my emphasis). Here, Stewart concludes with two perspectives on the relation between the eighteenth century and now—either an inheritance of or parallel to. She never resolves this either/or, but takes it as evidence of “the persistence of enduring problems in the history of the philosophy of representation” (5). My own argument is concerned to articulate, not only the possibility of an inheritance or parallel between romantic and post-Holocaust texts, but the impossibility of this simply being the case, given the apparently conflicting demands of romantic and post-Holocaust presentation. 15.  De Man’s claims can be found in “Hypogram and Inscription,” in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 27–53, and “Autobiography as De-Facement,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 67–81; Miller’s claims appear in Versions of Pygmalion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). In the same year, Miller also published a collection of essays under the title Tropes, Parables, Performatives: Essays on Twentieth-Century Literature (New York: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1990). This too infrequently read collection begins with the question of the relation of rhetoric and ethics that is so much a part of Miller’s work in Versions and in the Wellek Lectures devoted to The Ethics of Reading, and it concludes with “Prosopopoeia in Hardy and Stevens,” an essay that reminds us of the significance of de Man’s claim that prosopopoeia is, as Miller puts it, “the fundamental trope of lyric poetry” (245). Miller goes on to explain the stakes of de Man’s claim: “Prosopopoeia is more essential to poetry . . . even than metaphor. Without prosopopoeia no poetry”(245). Miller concludes the essay by claiming that prosopopoeia is a kind of ineptitude that all poets—even the best—share. He writes: “Even the most powerful and purest of poets cannot not have prosopopoeia” (258). 16. On the distinction between the “true witness” and the “survivor,” see Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Vintage, 1989), 82–84. 17.  Levi does not exactly translate the two instances of the first person in Coleridge’s stanza: “my ghastly tale”; “this heart within me burns.” Rather, his translation reads: Since then, at an uncertain hour, That pain returns And if no one is found to hear it The heart burns in the breast.

The first-person possessive is clearly implicit, especially in line 5. But unlike lines 17 or 19 (“in vece mia” or “mia colpa”) it is unstated. 18. The actual gloss reads: “And ever and anon throughout his future life an agony constraineth him to travel from land to land.” 19. The second chapter of The Drowned and the Saved—a book that takes as its epigraph the same Coleridgian stanza with which the poem opens—is entitled

   Notes to Pages 8–12 “The Gray Zone.” Giorgio Agamben discusses Levi’s “zones of indistinction” as an alternative to an ethics modeled on the law. See the first chapter of Remnants of Auschwitz. The examples of this gray zone, as they appear in both books, are the Sonderkommando, or Special Squads, those prisoners, many of them Jews, temporarily allowed to live so long as they maintained the gas chambers, men before whom Levi asks us to suspend our judgment, even when we know, as he reminds us, that these men on break from their horrendous work even had taken part in a soccer match with the SS (Levi, Drowned, 60). Agamben, in one of his most extravagant, and contentious, moments, claims that rather than perceive the match as “a brief pause of humanity in the middle of an infinite horror,” we should instead recognize it as “the true horror of the camp,” and goes on to write that this match “repeats itself in every match in our stadiums, in every television broadcast, in the normalcy of everyday life” (Remnants, 26). 20. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1834), in The Complete Poems, ed. William Keach (New York: Penguin, 1997), 167–86. In many ways the poem dramatizes Emmanuel Lévinas’s account of ethics as first philosophy, in which the “I” responds, hostage to the other’s call. Lévinas’s work—early and late—exemplifies the post-Holocaust reliance upon romantic rhetoric that I am concerned to outline. A future project would, however, have to demonstrate that “inspiration,” as Lévinas employs it in Otherwise Than Being; or, Beyond Essence (trans. A. Lingis [Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998]), is a postHolocaust manifestation of a romantic trope. 21. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 133. 22. Ibid., 132, 130. Lévinas formulates this in the phrase “the face speaks” (Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis [Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969]). Even in the moment when there is no actual speech—when the “subject” (who is not a subject) of address is asleep, in a dream, when his mouth is doing something other than speaking or eating, he—a specter for Levi, but also a spectral being in the camp—speaks. One could understand Levi’s poem as an account of what Lévinas calls the “epiphany” or “visitation” of autrui in the face, the persecution or “hostage” that ensues. And yet, it is Levi’s ambivalent refusal (his “no” that is inseparable from the “yes” of its address), together with his insistence that there has been no substitution and that his life is his alone, which is the impossible wish of figural address. 23.  Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Summit, 1986), 90. 24.  Robert Antelme, who I discuss in Chapter 4, casts this formula in terms of the human rather than the living: those who seemed no longer human remained human. 25.  Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, bks. 9–10, ed. Donald A. Russell (Cam-

Notes to Pages 12–15    bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 51. 26. Heinrich Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: A Foundation for Literary Study. trans. M. T. Bliss et al., ed. David E. Orton and R. Dean Anderson (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 366. 27.  Quintilian, Orator’s Education, 51. As Donald Russell points out, “Persona represents prosopon (‘face, mask, person’) as in prosopopoeia” (50, n. 48). By this he means that it is the Latin translation of the Greek term. 28. See de Man, “Hypogram and Inscription” and “Autobiography as DeFacement”; Miller, Versions of Pygmalion. 29. Neither critic is particularly interested in nonfictional prose or testimony. Gubar focuses on poetry and Hungerford on fiction and criticism—including the fictional testimony of Binjamin Wilkomerski. One major difference between the current study and theirs is my inclusion of nonfictional or documentary texts, including Antelme’s The Human Race and the texts of Nuit et brouillard, in an examination of the rhetoric of post-Holocaust writing. 30.  De Man’s claim that prosopopoeia is the trope of both poetry and autobiography indicates the impossibility of Adorno’s claim that poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, for what constitutes the lyric is also what constitutes autobiography and—as I will discuss in the following chapter—testimony. 31.  Gubar, Poetry After Auschwitz, 178. Gubar’s essay was originally published as “Prosopopoeia and Holocaust Poetry in English: Sylvia Plath and Her Contemporaries,” in “Interpretation and the Holocaust,” ed. Laura Frost et al., special issue of Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 191–215. In that essay, the claim is slightly different. She calls prosopopoeia a “rhetorical device” that “surfaces in some of the most powerful poems about the Shoah” (191). I will make reference to the revised version of the essay that appears as Chapter 6 of Poetry After Auschwitz, entitled “The Dead Speak,” and I will point out differences between the two versions as seems necessary. To my mind, the most significant difference is Gubar’s addition of a first paragraph that treats Charlotte Delbo’s claim, “I died in Auschwitz but no one knows it.” One of the more surprising—and, interesting—aspects of Gubar’s argument, an aspect that I do not discuss here, concerns the reading of Plath’s relation to the Holocaust. Gubar avoids, and even dismisses, the argument that Plath illegitimately appropriates a rhetoric of suffering that is the proper stuff of survivors alone. “Instead,” Gubar argues “besides clarifying the ways in which Jewish men and women under fascism suffered a wounding feminization, they enable students to evaluate what it means for a writer to feel impelled to mine material that she knows will necessarily remain discordant with her own situation” (201). Gubar is right to free Plath from debates concerning the legitimacy or illegitimacy of her metaphors. However, I am not entirely convinced that an inversion of the priority (to see feminization as an essential aspect of the camps) is compelling. For a related argument about fascism’s continuousness

   Notes to Pages 15–18 beyond the camps, see Ingeborg Bachmann’s resonant novel Malina (trans. Philip Boehm [Teaneck, NJ: Holmes and Meier, 1999]). 32.  Gubar, Poetry After Auschwitz, 191. It is de Man, in “Autobiography as DeFacement” (80)—elaborating upon, which is to say reading, Wordsworth—who makes this claim. In the essay “Poetry and Liberty,” included in the issue of Yale French Studies called “Literature and the Ethical Question,” Yves Bonnefoy also uses the figure of the Nessus tunic in a manner that evokes Wordsworth. Speaking of critics who focus on the language of poems rather than on poetry and the poetic, Bonnefoy writes: “They risk not understanding poetry, becoming blind to it, forgetting it; or, rather, reclaiming its great works in order to take them apart according to other laws. Let us lead them to admit that what takes place in poetry . . . and those very methods that now veil the poetic will come to unveil it, revealing that what they consider the positivity of the poem, and its happiness, is only the tunic of Nessus which the poet seeks to cast off ” (268–69). 33. In his reading of Levi’s Drowned and the Saved, Giorgio Agamben articulates the relation between the survivor and the Muselmann as a primary, non(or even post-) dialectical relation, one that, I would argue, takes the place of the ­master-slave dialectic as the organizing figure of late modernity. In Gubar’s account, however, it is not the survivor per se but the poet who donates her voice to the “drowned.” Agamben’s analysis of Levi’s books, and in particular his reference to Keats and Pessoa, crucially suggests that testimony relies not on narrative, but on lyric tropes of voice and personhood. Yet, as he writes, “Neither the poem nor the song can intervene to save impossible testimony; on the contrary, it is testimony, if anything, that founds the possibility of the poem” (Remnants, 36). 34. For a mode of witnessing Auschwitz apparently stripped of subjectivity see my discussion of Nuit et brouillard in Chapter 7. 35.  Gubar, Poetry After Auschwitz, 189. 36. Amy Hungerford, The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 37.  Gubar, Poetry After Auschwitz, 1. 38. Hungerford briefly discusses Wordsworth in her introduction, and I find it strange that she never mentions the preface to Lyrical Ballads as a key precedent for her own position, one that insists on “flesh and blood.” 39. Hungerford, Holocaust of Texts, 157. 40. Ibid. 41.  J. Hillis Miller likely would agree with Hungerford’s formulation of the relation between literature and ethics, for he, more than anyone, has shown how an ethics of reading is tied to prosopopoeia—in other words, how prosopopoeia might be the link between literature and justice. 42. Although not all of them use the phrase “after Auschwitz.” See, for example, Derrida’s reference to Goethe and de Man in the opening of Demeure: Fiction

Notes to Pages 18–19    and Testimony (trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000]), as well as the Blanchot-Shelley constellation that he figures in “Living On: Borderlines” (trans. James Hulbert, in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom et al. [New York: Continuum, 1979], 75–176); Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster (trans. Ann Smock [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986]) is formally tied to Schlegel’s fragments, upon which he reflects therein; in his discussion of “Shame; or, On the Subject,” in Remnants of Auschwitz, ­Agamben treats Keats on negative capability; see also his more general examination of prosopopoeia, which I consider in Chapters 1 and 3. While Hartman can be understood to have two oeuvres, the one devoted to thinking literature and culture after Auschwitz, the other to a reading of Wordsworth (and romanticism more generally), and while this double-headed project seems to have influenced a generation of critics, the moments in which the two itineraries intersect are to my mind the most interesting, if also the most bizarre. For example, in the “The Question of Our Speech,” one of the essays collected under the title The Fateful Question of Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) and delivered as the Wellek Lectures, Hartman treats Wordsworth as a poet of “translatio ­studii”—one who carries forth an exhausted pastoral culture into an era in which it is absent. Rather than reading this as retrograde nostalgia, Hartman finds in Words­worth’s sympathetic poetry a receptacle for the rural life that modernity rejects; it is in this respect that, in Hartman’s reading, the very poetry perceived as nostalgic actually sustains modern life by keeping rural sentiment secure (in its absence). The Wordsworthian imagination in this reading immunizes (by translating or sublating) England in ways that are absent from continental Europe, where there is created “an unprogressive, overidealized, image of what is lost” (73). As a dialectical analysis of history, Hartman argues that it is Wordsworth’s instantiation of an antimodern, rural imagination that becomes the condition of modernity free (or more free) from the idealizations that lead to violence. 43. The genealogy typically runs from Hölderlin, Schiller, or Wagner to Heidegger, Göbbels, and Hitler. For one version of the genealogy, understood to be based on a misreading—albeit a misreading recognized as a repetition of Schiller’s own misreading—see the final paragraphs of Paul de Man, “Kant and Schiller,” in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 154–55. See also Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art, and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, trans. Chris Turner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). 44. My understanding of invention is indebted to Derrida’s “Psyche: Inventions of the Other,” where he states that any invention is an invention of the impossible. See Jacques Derrida, “Psyche: Inventions of the Other,” in Reading de Man Reading, ed. Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 25–65. 45. Cynthia Chase, introduction to Romanticism, ed. Cynthia Chase, Longman

   Notes to Page 19 Critical Readers (London: Longman, 1993), 1. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and JeanLuc Nancy’s The Literary Absolute is dedicated to the task of better understanding a poorly understood early romanticism by, in the first case, making its texts available in French. Yet, as they explain: In these few pages of introduction and in all that follows, we will find more than one occasion to suggest the degree to which the denomination “romanticism” is inadequate to this object. As it is usually understood—or not understood—this name is quite inaccurate, both in what it evokes as an aesthetic category (which often amounts to an evocation of evocation, so to speak, to an evocation of flowing sentimentality or foggy nostalgia for the faraway), and in what it pretends to offer as a historical category (in a double opposition to classicism and to realism or to naturalism). . . . Finally, this name is false in a very general manner, in that it attempts to set something apart—a period, a school, a style, or a conception—that would belong first and foremost to a certain past. (Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988], 1)

46. Chase’s explanation of the claim that “romanticism is the origin of our modernity” is actually quite complex, for she shows that such a claim not only precludes the possibility of a critical distance that would allow for a genetic account of this history, but also that such a claim might merely be the effect of an autobiographical or specular fiction, the outcome of our projection onto the romantics’ “concepts and attitudes that are central to our interpretation but superficial or tangential in their texts.” So-called periods that share some of these identificatory difficulties include “the Renaissance” (a contested term) and “modernism.” See Marc Redfield’s fine discussion of romanticism as a “trope for aesthetics” and the turn or resistance to romanticism within romanticism, in which he reminds us: “We are being romantic when we seek out the historical identity or Zeitgeist of romanticism, or the Renaissance, or for that matter ‘modernity’ itself as a cultural development.” Marc Redfield, The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 33. 47. On literature as what originates in and remains a question, see Maurice Blanchot, “Literature and the Right to Death,” in The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 300–344. In some respects, this might generate an understanding of romanticism as trauma, or as what Cathy Caruth calls “unclaimed experience,” and might indicate one way of understanding the romanticism–post-Holocaust constellation. See Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). I do not, however, pursue this line of thinking here. For a study of British romanticism focused on the preoccupation with textual afterlife—specifically, with posterity—that raises the questions of survival in a related manner, although with rather different stakes, see Andrew Bennett, Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999),

Notes to Pages 19–20    as well as his book Keats, Narrative, and Audience: The Posthumous Life of Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Bennett writes: Although the desire to “live on” or “survive” in one’s writing goes back at least to Horace’s aere perennis, and is a particularly notable feature of the Renaissance—in, for example, Shakespeare’s sonnets—the Romantic period makes of posterity the major trope of reading. This “invention” involves a refiguration of posterity as the necessary ground of artistic production and has important consequences, not least for strategies of reading and authorial presence. Both writing and reading become problematic because both involve a kind of “posthumous life”. . . . Put simply, once posterity becomes necessary to writing, the attempt by reading to return to the originary act of inscription is interrupted by the absolute barrier of death itself. (Keats, Narrative, and Audience, 9–10)

48. Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 31. 49.  Josh Cohen, Interrupting Auschwitz (London: Continuum, 2003), 21. 50. Ibid., xvi. 51. Forest Pyle offers a particularly persuasive consideration of romanticism’s incompletion or self-division, one that figures a nonredemptive romanticism as “radical aestheticism,” an aestheticism marked by “force” and its “interruption” (a term Pyle does not use, but of which I think he would approve). See Forest Pyle, “Kindling and Ash: Radical Aestheticism in Keats and Shelley,” Studies in Romanticism 42, no. 3 (Winter 2003): 427–59. That Pyle employs a rhetoric of burning and ash, and that he refers to Celan at the very moment that he defines “radical aestheticism,” suggests rhetorically the critical sympathies that our inquiries share. Pyle writes: What I am calling radical aestheticism should not be confused with the aestheticisms that we customarily ascribe to the poets of the second generation [of Romanticism]. . . . A poem can be said to constitute a radical aestheticism the moment it delivers itself and the aesthetic to its vacating radical, which is paradoxically the moment that aesthetic immersion is experienced as the undoing of any aesthetic claim to an autonomous and self-reflexive formal totality. What I am describing as the radical aestheticism of these poets is best understood through the Latin root of the word radical: namely, something that is taken, as through a process of burning, to its radix, its root or extreme elements. In this sense, a radical aestheticism is the experience of a poetics that exerts such a pressure on the claims and assumptions of the aesthetic that we encounter through these works something like autoimmolation, something which is reduced to its kindling and leaves as residue nothing but ashes. A radical aestheticism does not result in the “reassuring” knowledge Bourdieu promises with his sociology of the aesthetic; it leaves us, rather, with what Celan would call the singbarer Rest, the “singable residue.” (“Kindling and Ash,” 430–31)

The major difference between my inquiry and Pyle’s concerns the choice of tropes and texts: whereas he focuses on the second-generation romantics (Keats and Shelley) and several other poets (Dickinson, Rossetti, Hopkins), in whom he finds

   Notes to Pages 20–26 the continuation of “radical aestheticism,” I am interested in a rhetoric of survival that—while legible in Shelley (as Derrida and de Man both have shown)—is active in Wordsworth’s poetry and poetics, and in what I take (implicitly) to be Mary Shelley’s reading of Wordsworthian romanticism in Frankenstein. 52. Again, see Pyle for a definition of radicality tied to destruction, kindling, and ash, which is to say, as a strange synonym (one that Celan also registered) of the Holocaust. 53. Caruth and Felman exemplify the position that supports de Man, LaCapra exemplifies the critique. 54. See, for example, the many excellent essays collected in the volume Word Traces: Readings of Paul Celan (ed. Aris Fiorestos [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994]), as well as essays by and interviews with Jacques Derrida collected in Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). chapter 1: romanticism, testimony, prosopopoeia 1. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 55. 2. Abrams also will write: What is distinctive about the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge is not the attribution of a life and soul to nature, but the repeated formulation of this outer life as a contribution of, or else as in constant reciprocation with, the life and soul of man the observer. This same topic was also central in the literary theory of these writers, where it turns up repeatedly in their discussions of the subject matter of poetry, their analyses of the imaginative process, and their debates on poetic diction and the legitimacy of personification and allied figures of speech. (ibid., 64)

Another way of phrasing de Man’s response to Abrams would be to say that the romantics discover that writing (autobiography), rather than mind, is the condition of experience and perception: “the outside world has in fact always been a book, a succession of voiceless tropes” (The Rhetoric of Romanticism [New York: Columbia University Press, 1984], 80). 3. Maria-Letizia Cravetto has also shown that testimony has a long history in mystical writing. Her study Fidélité à l’après draws upon the work of Michel de Certeau in order to consider the relations “between mystical experience and testamentary writing.” See Maria-Letizia Cravetto, Fidélité à l’après: Á propos du suicide de Primo Levi et de l’intériorité du mal (Paris: Kimé, 2000), 11. De Certeau already has established a version of this constellation: he concludes The Mystic Fable by linking the thirteenth-century mystic Hadewijch of Anvers and the post­Holocaust poet Nelly Sachs, in whom “experience only kept the form and not the content of traditional mystics.” See Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, vol. 1,

Notes to Pages 26–29    The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 299. It is possible to read Lévinas’s account of bearing witness to the infinite as a moment in this constellation. See, for example, the section of Otherwise Than Being; or, Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), devoted to “Witness and Prophecy.” 4. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, M.D., Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), 5. 5.  Quoted in ibid., 6. Alvin H. Rosenfeld uses this sentence as the epigraph to the second chapter (on “Holocaust and History”) of his A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), a study that exemplifies the restorative understanding of literary animation that I am at work to contest. Wiesel makes this claim in his lecture “The Holocaust as Literary Inspiration,” collected in Dimensions of the Holocaust: Lectures at Northwestern University, by Elie Wiesel et al. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1977), 9. This account comes in the context of a discussion of “the great novelists of our time—Malraux, Mauriac, Faulkner, Silone, Mann and Camus,” and yet, curiously absent from Wiesel’s account of the history of literary forms is the novel (the form that became his own, albeit transformed as testimony). 6. Felman and Laub, Testimony, 6. 7. Ibid. 8. This is what, in Chapter 3 of the volume, “An Event Without a Witness: Truth, Testimony, and Survival,” Dori Laub will elaborate as the crisis that attends “an event without a witness.” 9. Ibid., 18. 10. Ibid., 21–22. 11. In “Dead End,” Michel Surya also considers Mallarmé already to reflect the impossibility of literature that Adorno identifies. Surya writes: Practically nothing has been understood about what Adorno once remarked about Auschwitz, poetry, and so on, though it is cited everywhere and is understood morally as a prescription, whereas he said it in the most distant, most technical way. He said it in this sense: Literature is impossible. This means practically nothing to those who still claim to write. (It was already impossible, in effect, with Flaubert, with Mallarmé, and the like. In what is it more so now? How have the deportation, the extermination, made it more impossible?). (Michel Surya, “Dead End,” in On Robert Antelme’s The Human Race: Essays and Commentaries, ed. Daniel Dobbels [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003], 93)

12. While Wiesel has written poetry, his position is not that of an author or poet but of a witness. Or, put another way, he is an author (has authority) only insofar as he is a witness. For another discussion of becoming a witness, rather than an author, through writing, see Surya’s discussion of Antelme: “Antelme certainly thought of a literature that would make authority impossible, or present

   Notes to Pages 29–30 an authority that would have no author. And certainly he accused himself of not being able not to be an author” (ibid., 92). 13. More specifically, Felman aligns witness with a certain pursuit of the limit: “the witness’s readiness, precisely, to pursue the accident, to actively pursue its path and its direction through obscurity, through darkness, and though fragmentation, without quite grasping the full scope and meaning of its implications, without entirely foreseeing where the journey leads and what is the precise nature of its final destination” (Testimony, 24). 14.  Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone, 1999), 148. And further: “Auschwitz is the existence of the impossible, the most radical negation of contingency; it is, therefore, absolute necessity. The Muselmann produced by Auschwitz is the catastrophe of the subject that then follows, the subject’s effacement as the place of contingency and its maintenance as the existence of the impossible” (148). It is with this account of Auschwitz that I think Agamben most obviously differs from Blanchot, for whom the impossible never is “realizable,” never is possible. It is in this respect that the disaster, for Blanchot, cannot be witnessed (in a manner that differs from the impossibility of witnessing Auschwitz): “the disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact.” Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 1. That said, to bear witness to this impossibility—the writing of the disaster—continues to take place, albeit as the disaster of writing. 15.  Recently, Oprah Winfrey chose Elie Wiesel’s Night for her Book Club. The choice followed on the heels of the revelation that her previous choice, James Frey’s Million Little Pieces, was fraudulent—fiction posing as memoir. The choice has prompted Wiesel and others to insist upon the fact that nothing in this book is fictional, that the book is not a novel and that everything is true. 16. This shuttle between the courtroom and the poem is repeated in all discussions of “apostrophe,” and in some discussions of “prosopopoeia.” Lausberg, for example, defines apostrophe as “ ‘turning away’ from the normal audience (the judges; cf. § 61.1) and the addressing of another, second audience, surprisingly chosen by the speaker.” See Heinrich Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: A Foundation for Literary Study, trans. M. T. Bliss et al., ed. David E. Orton and R. Dean Anderson (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 338 (my emphasis). Lausberg refers to Quintilian here, who refers to Cicero’s use of apostrophe in defense of Scaurus’s bribery charge. See Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, bks. 3–5, ed. Donald A. Russell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 213. For a particularly clear example of the relation between prosopopoeia and the courtroom, see the same passage in Quintilian, as well as Fontanier’s definition of prosopopoeia: “Prosopopoeia . . . consists in staging the absent, the dead, supernatural beings, or even inanimate objects to make them act, speak, respond so that they can

Notes to Pages 30–32    be understood or at least taken as confidants, witnesses, guarantors, accusators, avengers, judges, etc. [La Prosopopée . . . consiste à mettre en quelque sorte en scène, les absens, les morts, les êtres surnaturels, ou même les être inanimés; à les faire agir, parler, répondre, ainsi qu’on l’entend; ou tout au moins à les prendre pour confidens, pour témoins, pour garans, pour accusateurs, pour vengeurs, pour juges, etc.].” Pierre Fontanier, Les Figures du discours (Paris: Flammarion, 1977), 404. All translations are by the author unless otherwise stated. 17. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 36. Here, Agamben treats the final chapter of Testimony, which is devoted to Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah. He finds particularly contentious Felman’s suggestion that “each testimony speaks to us beyond its words, beyond its melody, like the unique performance of a singing” (Felman and Laub, Testimony, 277–78; Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 36), and Agamben goes on to write: “To explain the paradox of testimony through the deus ex machina of song is to aestheticize testimony” (36). Thus Agamben reads Felman to cover over the incomprehensibility of testimony by understanding it to communicate in the way that music communicates. Several questions arise here: How does Felman’s claim about testimony and song relate to my own claim about testimony and poetry? How does Agamben’s scathing dismissal of Felman bear upon the argument that I am at work to make? And, finally, how does Agamben’s criticism here relate to his own turn to poetry (to Keats and to Pessoa in particular) in the third chapter of Remnants of Auschwitz? For Felman, testimony is like poetry because it is not language but a nonlanguage (the nonlanguage that she calls “song”); for Agamben, nonlanguage is what testimony bears. Poetry and song neither precede testimony nor save it. My argument is precisely that poetry does not save testimony, and rather that testimony’s recourse to poetry demonstrates poetry’s nonredemptive quality, a quality that we can retrospectively recognize as romantic despite the fact that romanticism regularly is understood to indicate redemptiveness. 18. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 145. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 146. For an earlier discussion of this essential thought of contingency in Agamben, see The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), in particular the chapter on Glenn Gould. Agamben’s claim can generally be understood as a response to Keats on negative capability. Claudine Kahan has written about Keats and Agamben; see in particular, “La Honte du témoin,” in ed. Catherine Coquio, Parler des camps, penser les genocides (Paris: Michel, 1999), 493–513. 21. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 146. 22. Agamben’s account of testimony as a relation between two impossibilities of saying recalls Emmanuel Lévinas’s account of ethical relation ordered by the division and the indivisibility of the saying and the said (le dire et le dit). See

   Notes to Pages 32–33 Lévinas, Otherwise Than Being. For Lévinas, “saying” is the exposure—and the passivity—that is borne by, yet precedes, every communication; it is what says (without saying), “here I am,” and what leaves responsiveness and responsibility (passivity, exposure, and substitution of the priority of the subject for the priority of the other) in the position of the subject. In other words, while Lévinas makes clear that he understands subjectivity as “being hostage” (127), he also shows that the subject is always a deportee. In the final section of Otherwise Than Being, Lévinas also links subjectivity to inspiration: “It is the possibility of being the author of what had been breathed in unbeknownst to me, of having received, one knows not from where, that of which I am an author. In the responsibility for the other we are at the heart of the ambiguity of inspiration” (148– 49). In a manner that resonates with Agamben’s account of the destabilization of inside and outside, and in the language of authorship and subjectivity, Lévinas associates subjectivity with an initial inhabiting of which one is the author (i.e., responsible) without knowledge, in which one is hostage and survivor. Agamben discusses some of his differences from Lévinas, and in particular from Lévinas’s conflation of ethics and guilt. The Lévinasian notion of “substitutability” will be important to what Derrida (reading Blanchot) calls the “instance” of testimony. Derrida writes: A witness and a testimony must always be exemplary. They must first be singular, whence the necessity of the instant: I am the only one to have seen this unique thing, the only one to have heard or to have been put in the presence of this or that at a determinate, indivisible instant; and you must believe me . . . anyone who in my place, at that instant, would have seen or heard or touched the same thing and could repeat exemplarily, universally, the truth of my testimony. (Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000], 40–41)

While Derrida says that “the example is not substitutable,” he also says (repeating the Lévinasian logic): “but at the same time the same aporia always remains: this irreplaceability must be exemplary, that is replaceable” (ibid., 41). 23. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 164. 24.  Derrida, Demeure, 29–30. Derrida first presented this essay at a symposium devoted to “passions de la littérature”; the first part focuses on the “seals” of seven “passionate” trajectories of literature: (1) passion as a history of literature, running from the story of Christ to romanticism; (2) passion as love and the avowal of love; (3) passion as finitude and passivity; (4) passion as guilt; (5) passion as pain suffering, patience, experience without activity; (6) passion as martyrdom— and thanks to the etymological link, testimony; (7) passion as “the endurance of an indeterminate or undecidable limit where something . . . must bear or tolerate everything” (28). In the first example, Derrida already suggests that to the extent that any discussion of passion concerns literature it also concerns romanticism. In

Notes to Pages 33–35    turning to Wordsworth’s claim that poetry is passion, I also will return to these manifestations of the passions of literature. 25.  Derrida, Demeure, 96. 26. These sentences recall the final note, beyond eternity, of Blanchot’s earlier narrative L’Arrêt du mort (Death Sentence). Derrida also notes the resonance with L’Arrêt du mort when he writes (citing himself ): “There is a postscript. A sort of parergonal hors-d’oeuvre. After the word ‘death,’ after the death sentence of ‘you are dead,’ one turns the page. As if there were a blank—thus an infinite time immediately prior to the epilogue” (Demeure, 97). 27. This pronominal drama recalls Beckett’s “Company,” in which the phrase “devising it all for company” (for the other, to make the other, in the place of the other, to abate loneliness and to offer hospitality) evokes several of the aspects of testimony that Derrida describes, above all his interest in the “we”—a “we” that divides but need not exceed the one. 28.  Derrida, Demeure, 96–97. 29. On the third party, see Derrida, “the question of number arises: the question of the one, the two, the three, and the immense question of the third, of the witness as third party (testis, terstis)” (ibid., 32); see also Agamben, “In Latin there are two words for ‘witness.’ The first word, testis, from which the word ‘testimony’ derives, etymologically signifies the person who, in a trial or lawsuit between two rival parties, is in the position of a third party (*terstis)” (Remnants of Auschwitz, 17). Finally, Lévinas speaks of the third as the guarantee of justice: It will turn out to be possible to understand the manifestation of being on the basis of justice, to which is led a saying which is not only addressed to the other, but is addressed to the other in the presence of a third party. Justice is this very presence of the third party and this manifestation, for which every secret, every intimacy is a dissimulation. Justice is at the origin of the claims of ontology to be absolute, of the definition of man as an understanding of Being. (Otherwise Than Being, 191, n. 2)

Lévinas’s claim is strange, for it relies upon both a version of the future anterior (“It will turn out to be possible”) and a revision of Heideggerian ontology that, on my reading, is at once preserved and broken by the originary status of justice, the presence not only of the other before me but always of a third as the arbiter between us. Finally, see Blanchot on the neutral, narrative voice for the correlation of testimony and literature. 30.  Blanchot, Writing of the Disaster, 7. 31.  Derrida, Demeure, 100–101. 32. That it is overheard—cited and recited—marks the lyric instance. On the lyric as speech overheard, see Northrop Frye, John Stewart Mill, M. H. Abrams, and Sarah Zimmerman. That it is a “colloquium” reflects both the occasion of Derrida’s presentation (a colloquium devoted to Passions of Literature and to which

   Notes to Pages 36–37 he refers throughout his text) and Blanchot’s The Infinite Conversation. Loqui means “to speak”; col-loqui, “to speak together.” 33.  Derrida introduces the passage from Memoires: For Paul de Man in this way: “I wrote the following, which you will perhaps forgive me more easily for citing if I promise not to do it again and if I also do so to admit without modesty the shortcomings of a translation.” Derrida, Demeure, 15–16. 34. Furthermore, in a manner that parallels Wiesel’s placement of “testimony” in Europe’s literary history (a literary history that begins even in advance of literature, insofar as it begins with Greece rather than Christian Rome), Derrida examines testimony within the framework of European culture and history—its literatures (as traced in Curtius’s 1948 European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages) and its invention of literature (a Latin word). On literature beginning in advance of literature, Derrida writes: “In Greece there is still no project, no social institution, no right, no concept, nor even a word corresponding to what we call stricto sensu, literature” (Demeure, 23). Yet as soon as Derrida acknowledges that his topic will be Europe, he acknowledges that the literature of testimony (the literature of this generation) does not remain within Europe’s borders; testimony is not a nationalist or imperialist literature but rather a “passion of literature.” Literature troubles Europe’s borders to include “Rushdie and all of the writers who not only suffer from an international, suprastate threat of murder but suffer death itself, every day on any street corner, who suffer prison and exile, sometimes inner exile” (22). 35.  Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 67–81. Further references to “Autobiography as De-Facement” will be cited parenthetically in the text. 36. This account of reading seems at least partially indebted to Roland Barthes’ essay “The Death of the Author,” although Barthes privileges not “reading” but the reader, still a someone: Here we discern the total being of writing: a text consists of multiple writings, proceeding from several cultures and entering into dialogue, into parody, into contestation; but there is a site where this multiplicity is collected, and this site is not the author, as has hitherto been claimed, but the reader: the reader is the very space in which are inscribed without any of them being lost, all the citations out of which a writing is made; the unity of a text is not in its origin but in its destination, but this destination can no longer be personal: the reader is a man without history, without biography, without psychology; he is only that someone who holds collected into one and the same field all of the traces from which writing is constituted. (Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard [New York: Hill and Wang, 1986], 54)

37. On genre, generation, and genetic criticism, see de Man’s introduction to the issue of Studies in Romanticism entitled “The Rhetoric of Romanticism,” vol. 18, no. 4 (Winter 1979): 495–99.

Notes to Pages 37–39    38. In “Subjectivity in Language,” Benveniste writes: I can only be identified by the instance of discourse that contains it and by that alone. It has no value except in the instance in which it is produced. But in the same way it is also as an instance of form that I must be taken; the form of I has no linguistic existence except in the act of speaking in which it is uttered. There is thus a combined double instance in this process: the instance of I as referent and the instance of discourse containing I as referee. The definition can now be stated precisely as: I is “the individual who utters the present instance of discourse containing the linguistic instance I.” (Émile Benveniste, “Subjectivity in Language,” in Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek [Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971], 218)

39.  De Man: “The specular moment is not primarily a situation or an event that can be located in a history, but . . . it is the manifestation, on the level of the referent, of a linguistic structure. The specular moment that is part of the all understanding reveals the tropological structure that underlies all cognitions, including knowledge of self ” (70–71). The rhetoric of manifestation and unconcealing suggests the extent to which de Man’s project includes a revision of Heideggerian ontology, in which the trope or tropological system emerges in the place of Being. 40.  Dominick LaCapra reads this relation somewhat differently than I do. See his comprehensive essay “Approaching Limit Events: Siting Agamben,” in History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 144–94. LaCapra offers a critique of Remnants of Auschwitz that focuses on Agamben’s use and abuse of the Muselmann (and of Primo Levi) as transhistorical figures: “Levi serves Agamben as a prosthetic device (not to say a dummy-figure) in a covert process of identifying with, and speaking for, the ultimate victim and instance of abjection, the Muselmann” (161). 41. See J. L. Austin, and readings of Austin including: Barbara Johnson, “Poetry and Performative Language: Mallarmé and Austin,” in The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 52–66; Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” in Limited Inc, trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988); J. Hillis Miller, Speech Acts in Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); and Shoshana Felman, The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). Also see Foucault on authorship and the proper name, in “What Is an Author?” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, by Michel Foucault, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 113–38. 42.  The Prelude is evidence of a crisis that Lejeune’s theory (or any of the theories he discusses) might not be able to arrest. Indeed, that Lejeune excludes poetry from the realm of autobiography, in precisely the same manner that Austin

   Notes to Pages 40–44 excludes poetry from the realm of speech acts, suggests that Wordsworth’s poem may provide no problem at all for a theory whose frame already excludes it. 43. For Levi, see Survival in Auschwitz, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Summit, 1986), 90; for Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 156. See again LaCapra, “Approaching Limit Events,” for a critique of Agamben’s treatment of the Muselmann as a transhistorical figure. LaCapra writes: “The problem here is not the argument that Auschwitz, or the Muselmann in particular, poses distinctive problems for ethics or that it is dubious to impute essential dignity to the Muselmann, especially for self-serving reasons. What is problematic pertains to the synecdochic use of the Muselmann as a theoretical cypher to disprove human dignity and to discredit all preexisting (perhaps all presently conceivable) forms of ethics” (180). 44. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 164. 45. Ibid., 53. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., 53–54. 48. Frontisi-Ducroux gives several examples of apostrophe, including the juridical one; however it is this interruption as direct address that forms the basis of the analogy. See Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux, Du masque au visage: Aspects de l’identité en Grèce ancienne (Paris: Flammarion, 1995). 49. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 54; my emphasis. 50. While Frontisi-Ducroux’s book is devoted to the difference between mask and face—to the face (prosopon) and the antiface or deface (antiprosopon, Gorgon), to the silhouette or profile that marks the three-dimensionality of the face and the flat image of the mask and the Gorgon—de Man points out that etymologically prosopon is both mask and face, and in the case of prosopopoeia, a mask/ face attributed by apostrophe: “Voice assumes mouth, eye, and finally face, a chain that is manifest in the etymology of the trope’s name, prosopon poien, to confer a mask or a face (prosopon). . . . Our topic deals with the giving and taking away of faces, with face and deface, figure, figuration and disfiguration” (76). 51. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 54. 52. And de Man regularly is dismissed, or rebuked, for failing to recognize the possibility of an account of mutilation or suffering that would be other than an account of our privative being in language. For versions of this response—tied directly to the usefulness of de Man for thinking about the Holocaust—see Eric L. Santner’s introduction to Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); Gubar’s discussion of prosopopoeia in Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003); and Amy Hungerford, The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). For a reading of de Man that recovers this failure for history and sets out to recover de Man’s history from its judges, see Shoshana Felman, “After

Notes to Pages 44–48    the Apocalypse: Paul de Man and the Fall to Silence,” in Testimony. Santner in particular ties his dissatisfaction with de Man’s account of linguistic privation to a critique of the nonhistorical, nonaffective account of survival that he finds in it: Much post-structuralist critical practice views the figure of the mourner-survivor as a kind of arch-trope not just for what it means to be a citizen of postwar or postmodern society but, more radically, for what it means to be a member of a linguistic community. To be a speaking subject is to have already assumed one’s fundamental vocation as survivor of the painful losses—the structural catastrophes—that accompany one’s entrance into the symbolic order. (Stranded Objects, 9)

Santner understands this account of loss and privation to give way to “a heroism of an abstract mode of bereavement . . . a heroism of the elegiac loop (29), in lieu of an account of a mourning that would be more human. He nevertheless makes clear that his work does not obviate—and in fact remains indebted to—certain of de Man’s mature writings (30). 53. It is in this respect that the difference between Derrida and Agamben might be most palpably felt. For Agamben, survival is “bare life,” privation and suffering. For Derrida survival is a life beyond life that surely is tied to suffering (passion) but that cannot be overcome simply with a change of political attitudes or aims. chapter 2: naked language, naked life 1.  Quoted in Terence Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 168. Des Pres cites this passage— drawn from a letter Dostoevsky wrote to his brother—as an example of an account of “awakening” that shows “one does not have to survive the concentration camps in order to arrive at awareness of life’s immanent value” (168). 2.  Donald Davie, “Personification,” Essays in Criticism 31, no. 2 (April 1981): 93. In her excellent Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), Adela Pinch makes a claim similar to Bateson’s as quoted by Davie. She refers to Lord Kames, who, in the 1788 volume Elements of Criticism, points out that because English language nouns are not gendered it “gives thus a fine opportunity for the prosopopoeia,” and she goes on to state that “to introduce a gendered pronoun is to personify” (50). 3.  Davie, “Personification,” 104. 4. It is in this respect that Agamben’s account of testimony resembles Shoshana Felman’s defense of de Manian rhetoric as a theory of testimony and forgiveness. This resemblance occurs despite Agamben’s explicit criticisms of Felman and despite the fact that he never (to my knowledge) mentions Paul de Man. 5. On the relation between personification and prosopopoeia, see in particular Cynthia Chase’s “Giving a Face to a Name: De Man’s Figures,” in Decomposing Figures: Rhetorical Readings in the Romantic Tradition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

   Note to Page 48 University Press, 1986), 82–112. Chase is interested in the rhetoric of de Man’s rhetorical readings, indeed, the turns and effects that his figures achieve. While Chase makes clear—as does de Man himself, as well as Barbara Johnson—why prosopopoeia differs from anthropomorphism, the difference between personification and prosopopoeia is somewhat more difficult to establish. Having quoted a passage from “Wordsworth and the Victorians,” in which de Man claims that when Wordsworth calls the earth a “speaking face,” it is not merely an anthropomorphism (for it does not assume the existence of being or substance that preexists figure) but a prosopopoeia. Chase explains: “These comments specify that the figure in Wordsworth’s lines is a prosopopoeia, not an anthropomorphism, and not exactly a personification, and they suggest the crucial significance of that distinction elaborated in the later essay ‘Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric’ ” (83). Chase goes on at length to explain the anthropomorphism/prosopopoeia distinction, but the distinction between personification and prosopopoeia is treated only briefly as the effect of a critical translation: specifically, de Man’s privileging of “face” and “mask,” rather than “person,” in his translation of prosopon. Chase explains that the effect of this choice of translation is “to imply that a face is the condition—not the equivalent—of a person” (83). This translation would put personification on the side of anthropomorphism, for it would assume the person is a given (as what could be given or taken), just as anthropomorphism would assume that the human is a given, that it is what could be given or taken. As I understand de Man, by privileging prosopopoeia, he seems not only to avoid the assumption of natural persons or humans as givens, but perhaps more significantly, to avoid persons and humans altogether. In a gesture that I understand to betray a Heideggerian influence, de Man avoids discussion of persons or men (at least at the very moments one would most expect them, for example, in the definitions of prosopopoeia and anthropomorphism). This exclusion of “men” and “persons” seems to suggest that as soon as we are in the realm of persons and humans we already risk sustaining the sedimented fictions he is at work to recast. To the contrary, Johnson writes of “personification” exclusively. For example, in the introduction to A World of Difference she explains (in a personification) the role that rhetoric will play in the essays that follow: “For local historical reasons, metaphor and ­metonymy get star billing, with a supporting cast of catachresis, apostrophe, chiasmus, anacoluthon, hediadys, repetition, ellipsis, and personification.” Barbara Johnson, A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 6; my emphasis. As I understand it, Johnson’s preoccupation with personification rather than prosopopoeia, with persons rather than faces or masks, is tied directly to her interest in legal discourse, and potentially to questions of gender. Person is, among other things, a legal fiction; prosopon is not. In the “proem” with which he opens Versions of Pygmalion, perhaps the only book to be devoted entirely to a study of prosopopoeia, J. Hillis Miller writes: “If prosopopoeia is a cover-up of death or

Notes to Pages 48–49    of absence, a compensation, its power is needed even in my relation to my living companions. My neighbor is always somehow absent even in moments of the most intimate presence. Personification both covers over these blank places in the midst of life and, sooner or later, brings them into the open.” Versions of Pygmalion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 4. Miller makes an argument here that strongly informs my own: prosopopoeia’s “cover-up” is in no way limited to the dead or inanimate alone, but is a condition (to use Chase’s word) of all relation, perhaps above all my relations with the living. Curiously, at the moment that Miller turns from the dead to the living, from acts of mourning to acts of friendship, he also changes registers, ever so slightly, speaking, as he does only infrequently, of “personification” rather than prosopopoeia. Following Chase, we could say that de Man, like Wordsworth, excludes “personification” from his discourse. If for Wordsworth this exclusion serves (or would apparently serve) the survival of men, for de Man this is part of a pervasive critique of humanism and its discourse. In the pages that follow, I hope to address both of these exclusions. In anticipation of this reading, let me only justify the choice of texts: it seems clear to me that although de Man expunges “personification” from his discourse, his reading of “prosopopoeia” as the dominant Wordsworthian trope and of anthropomorphism as the risk of lyric is a clear response (via Abrams) to Wordsworth’s treatment of personification. 6. M. H. Abrams, Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), 290. 7. For a fascinating discussion of the history of the body as clothing (with images), see Mario Perniola, “Between Clothing and Nudity,” in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, ed. Michel Feher (Cambridge, MA: Zone, 1989), 2: 236–65. Wordsworth’s response to this logic is wide-ranging, and by no means limited to the reconciliation of language and thought; it also can be found at work in his treatment of life and death, reason and passion, and, as Theresa Kelley has shown, even his account of the beautiful and the sublime. See her Wordsworth’s Revisionary Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 8. William Wordsworth, Essays upon Epitaphs, in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), 2: 361. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. A Heideggerian insight informs this account of the difference between a language that is ready-to-hand (a seamlessly communicative language through which subjects and object pass and even act), and a language that appears (because it is idle or inorperative and becomes inoperative at the instant it is made to appear). 12. Other essays in which de Man takes up Wordsworth’s figures—either in the service of a slightly different argument or in a less sustained manner—include

   Notes to Pages 49–54 the early “Time and History in Wordsworth,” collected in Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism: The Gauss Seminar and Other Papers, ed. E. S. Burt, Kevin Newmark, and Andrzej Warminski (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 74–94, and the briefer “Wordsworth and the Victorians,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 83–92. For a lucid reading of “Wordsworth and the Victorians” that elaborates upon several of de Man’s own figures (drowning, for example) and that reads the essay in the context of several other essays in The Rhetoric of Romanticism, see Neil Hertz, “Lurid Figures,” in Reading de Man Reading, ed. Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 82–104. 13.  Quoted in Abrams, Mirror and the Lamp, 289. 14. William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), 1: 119. Further references to the preface to the Lyrical Ballads will be cited parenthetically in the text. The Owen and Smyser edition includes both the first 1800 version and the 1850 version, which is based upon Wordsworth’s revised preface for the 1802 edition of Lyrical Ballads, and which appeared in his Poetical Works (1850). Unless otherwise noted, all references will be to the 1850 edition. 15.  Johnson, World of Difference, 95. 16. In the “Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences,” Descartes, who is preoccupied with distinguishing with certainty between automatons and humans, humans and animals, explains that while it would be impossible to tell the difference between an animal automaton and an actual animal because both are machines, the difference between a human automaton and an actual human would be easily recognizable (despite the fact that he has already described both as machines, one made by humans, one by God). See René Descartes, “Discourse on the Method,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 2 vols., trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 1: 109–51. He writes (referring to the “Treatise on Man”): I made special efforts to show that if any such machines had the organs and outward shape of a monkey or of some other animal that lacks reason, we should have no means of knowing that they did not possess entirely the same nature as these animals; whereas if any such machines bore a resemblance to our bodies and imitated our actions as closely as possible for all practical purposes, we should still have two very certain means of recognizing that they were not real men. The first is that they could never use words, or put together other signs, as we do in order to declare our thoughts to others. For we can certainly conceive of a machine so constructed that it utters words, and even utters words which correspond to bodily actions causing a change in its organs (e.g., if you touch it in one spot it asks what you want of it, if you touch it in another it cries out that you are hurting it, and so on). But it is not conceiv-

Notes to Pages 55–60    able that such a machine should produce different arrangements of words so as to give an appropriately meaningful answer to whatever is said in its presence, as the dullest of men can do. Secondly, even though such machines might do some things as well as we do them, or perhaps even better, they would inevitably fail in others, which would reveal that they were acting not out of understanding but only from the disposition of their organs. (139–40)

17. In the preface, Wordsworth mentions the “sister arts” in order to describe the kinship of poetry and prose as a relation even closer than that of flesh and blood. He writes—reflecting upon Thomas Gray’s “Elegy on the Death of Mr. Richard West”: “We are fond of tracing the resemblance between Poetry and Painting, and, accordingly, we call them Sisters: but where shall we find bonds of connection sufficiently strict to typify the affinity betwixt metrical and prose composition? They both speak by and to the same organs; the bodies in which both of them are clothed may be said to be of the same substance, their affections are kindred and almost identical, not necessarily differing even in degree” (Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” 1: 135). 18. The definition of anthropomorphism as “an identification at the level of substance” is de Man’s—I will return to this definition and to a discussion of the relation between anthropomorphism, personification, and prosopopoeia, in the chapter’s final section as well as in my reading of Robert Antelme’s The Human Race in Chapter 4. According to Fontanier, the figures “metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche” happen to be the three figures associated with personification. 19. And this suggests that the end of bare life that Agamben imagines as the aim of a new political possibility would also risk being an end to language. While I in no way mean to suggest that all suffering, all privation is merely an effect or account of language (“death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament” [“Autobiography as De-Facement,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 81]: a proposition that we do, however, need to take seriously), I do wish to suggest that as soon as we (1) use figures as proper names (rather than difficult catachreses), figures like Muselmann and Auschwitz, and we (2) associate bare life or testimony with the absence of language, language risks becoming a strange savior. I will return to a consideration of Agamben in the final pages of this chapter. 20. Abrams, Mirror and the Lamp, 309. In “Strange Fits: Poe and Wordsworth on the Nature of Poetic Language,” Johnson also links her reading to the Industrial Revolution: “Let it suffice here to suggest that, in the discussion that follows, the complex fate of the word ‘mechanical’ may not be unconnected to a set of attitudes toward the industrial revolution” (World of Difference, 92). 21. Adela Pinch points to the other mention of blood in the preface (and the human life that it signals): Wordsworth wishes, he says, to keep his readers “in the company of flesh and blood”; but pages later, in order to buttress an assertion that prose and poetry are made of essentially

   Notes to Pages 61–63 the same substance, he personifies poetry itself in order to capture its affective and expressive nature: “Poetry sheds not tears ‘such as Angels weep,’ but natural and human tears; she can boast of no celestial ichor that distinguishes her vital juices from those of prose; the same human blood circulates through the veins of them both.” This is personification with a vengeance: the only flesh and blood here is that of a tearful expressive poetry. Feelings may belong no more certainly to real persons in romantic poetry than in eighteenth­century philosophy. (Strange Fits of Passion, 49)

In the preface, the passage that Pinch discusses follows immediately on Wordsworth’s attempt to find a figure—better than “flesh and blood” or the “sister arts”—for describing the relation between poetry and prose. This suggests that the poetry that he advocates and invents also requires new figures, neither human nor nonhuman, figures of flesh and blood, beyond flesh and blood. See note 17, above. 22. W. J. B. Owen, Wordsworth’s Preface to “Lyrical Ballads” (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1957), 185. 23. For a sustained reading of this double gesture, see Paul de Man’s “Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics,” in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 91–104. For a discussion of this predicament as it relates specifically to the Chinese language and Chinese aesthetics, see Haun Saussy, The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993). 24. Indeed, Wordsworth’s predecessors Erasmus Darwin and Charlotte Smith were both botanists who treated scientific objects in their poetry. 25.  Paul de Man, “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 241. 26. Akira Mizuma Lippit discusses the modern inclusion of animals in this definition in Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000): “It is during the nineteenth century, with the rise of modernism in literature and art, that animals came to occupy the thoughts of a culture in transition. As they disappeared, animals became increasingly the subjects of a nostalgic curiosity. When horse-drawn carriages gave way to steam engines, plaster horses were mounted on tramcar fronts in an effort to simulate continuity with the older animal-driven vehicles” (186–87). In other words, Lippit seems to imply that a shift from the gods to the animals as the referent of anthropomorphism corresponds to a more general nineteenth-century trend through which animals at once appear and disappear. 27. For definitions that align prosopopoeia and personification, see, for example, in the eighteenth-century, lecture 13 (“Of the Prosopopoeia, or Personification”) in Rev. Robert Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews Translated from the Latin of the Right Rev. Robert Lowth . . . by G. Gregory . . . (London: Johnson, 1787), 2 vols., 1: 280–301. Based on information from the RLG Pro-

Notes to Pages 63–64    grams’ Web site page English Short Title Catalogue: Eighteenth Century Collections, www.rlg.org/en/page.php?Page_ID=179 (accessed April 10, 2007). For classical Greek references, see also Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux, Du masque au visage: Aspects de l’identité en Grèce ancienne (Paris: Flammarion, 1995), 14–17, 19–20. See also George A. Kennedy, A New History of Classical Rhetoric (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). Kennedy mentions Aphthonius of Antioch, a Greek rhetorician practicing in the second half of the fourth century, whose treatise was translated into Latin in the late fifteenth century. Kennedy explains that Aphthonius’s rhetoric is divided into fourteen exercises, the eleventh of which is “Ēthopoeia, or personification.” Prosopopoeia, which Aphthonius understands as “personification of an imaginary or mythological character” (rather than “a speech attributed to the ghost of a known person,” which he calls eidolopoeia), is only one of three divisions of ethopoeia, all of which, Kennedy reports, are to be judged by “clarity, conciseness, floridity, lack of polish, and absence of figures” (205–6). One notable exception to the alignment of personification and prosopopoeia is Fontanier’s Les Figures du discours (Paris: Flammarion, 1977). Fontanier begins by distinguishing “prosopopée” (which he categorizes as a “figure of thought by imagination”) from several other figures that can be understood to accompany it: “Prosopopoeia, which must not be confounded with Personification, Apostrophe, or Dialogism, which almost always accompany it, consists in staging the absent, the dead, supernatural beings, or even inanimate objects to make them act, speak, respond so that they can be understood or at least taken as confidants, witnesses, guarantors, accusators, avengers, judges, etc.; and from this it follows either as a ruse or seriously that one is not the master of his imagination [La Prosopopée, qu’il ne faut confondre ni avec la Personnification, ni avec l’Apostrophe, ni avec le Dialogisme, qui l’accompagnent presque toujours, consiste à mettre en quelque sorte en scène, les absenses, les morts, les êtres surnaturels, ou même les être inanimés; à les faire agir, parler, répondre, ainsi qu’on l’entend; ou tout au moins à les prendre pour confidens, pour témoins, pour garans, pour accusateurs, pour vengeurs, pour juges, etc.; et cela, ou par feinte, ou sérieusement, suivant qu’on est ou qu’on n’est pas le maître de son imagination]” (404). Yet, this is not to say that de Man merely follows Fontanier, for one of the ways that he defines prosopopoeia is as a “fiction of apostrophe.” 28.  De Man, “Anthropomorphism and Trope,” 241. 29.  Barbara Johnson delights in acknowledging that de Man’s own proper name is “man”—or “of ” or “from” man. See her “Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law,” in Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, ed. Barbara Cohen et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 205–25. 30. Actually, as I mentioned earlier, de Man calls prosopopoeia the “master trope of lyric.” It is not clear to me that de Man ever offers a systematic distinction between tropes and figures, but instead uses them interchangeably.

   Notes to Pages 64–72 31. In this respect, de Man is Lacanian. See Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I,” in Écrits (New York: Norton, 1982), 1–7: “We have only to understand the mirror stage as an identification, in the full sense that analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image—whose predestination to this phase-effect is sufficiently indicated by the use, in analytic theory, of the ancient term ‘imago’ ” (2). 32. However, I also think that a reading of de Man’s implicit critique of humanism remains to be fully effected. Such a reading could begin by following “ ‘Eating Well,’ ” in which Derrida considers the humanism that endures in Lévinas’s ethics and Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. What would happen if we began to read according to the mouth rather than the face? See Jacques Derrida, “ ‘Eating Well’, or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in Who Comes After the Subject? ed. Eduardo Cadava et al. (New York: Routledge, 1991), 96–119. See also my “Buccality,” in Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis, ed. Gabriele Schwab (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 77–104. 33. See, for example, Howard Caygill’s discussion of “subject,” in A Kant Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). 34.  Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 11–12. chapter 3: testimony and trope in Frankenstein 1. All references to Frankenstein will be to the Oxford World Classics edition of the 1818 text, edited by Marilyn Butler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Also, it is worth noting that although my focus in this chapter is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a reading of her novel The Last Man (1826), written between the two editions of Frankenstein, also could lend insight into the romantic rhetoric of survival, particularly as it relates to testimony, not least because The Last Man is offered as a found document in a foreign language. In other words, it must be translated in order to be read. There are many excellent readings of The Last Man, in particular, Barbara Johnson’s “The Last Man,” which focuses on the novel together with Maurice Blanchot’s récit by the same name and thus also might be read as a translation of Derrida’s reading of Shelley (Percy), and Blanchot, in “Living On: Borderlines.” See Barbara Johnson, “The Last Man” in The Other Mary Shelley, ed. Audrey A. Fisch, Anne K. Mellor, and Esther H. Schor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 258–66; and Jacques Derrida, “Living On: Borderlines,” trans. James Hulbert, in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom et al. (New York: Continuum, 1979), 75–176. 2. See Barbara Johnson, “My Monster / My Self,” in A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987): “What is at stake in Frankenstein’s workshop of filthy creation is precisely the possibility of shaping a life in one’s own

Notes to Pages 72–73    image: Frankenstein’s monster can thus be seen as a figure for autobiography as such” (146). In “Autobiography as De-Facement” (in The Rhetoric of Romanticism [New York: Columbia University Press, 1984], 67–81), de Man writes: “Prosopopeia is the trope of autobiography, by which one’s name . . . is made intelligible and memorable as a face” (76). The monster, of course, remains as what has neither name nor face. 3. There have been several critical accounts of the novel’s relation to romanticism. For discussions of Frankenstein as a critique of romantic mythology (subjectivity, imagination) from a specifically feminist point of view, see: Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 114–42; and Margaret Homans, “Bearing Demons: Frankenstein’s Circumvention of the Maternal,” in Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 100–119. For an analysis of the novel in relation to romantic ideology and science, see Michael Manson and Robert Scott Stewart, “Heroes and Hideousness: Frankenstein and Failed Unity,” SubStance 71–72 (1993): 228–42. For a highly compelling cultural materialist understanding of the novel as “parody,” one that focuses largely on Frankenstein as a critique of romantic ideology at work in literary theory, see Mark Hansen, “‘Not Thus, After All, Would Life Be Given’: Technesis, Technology, and the Parody of Romantic Poetics in Frankenstein,” Studies in Romanticism 36 (Winter 1997): 575–609. Hansen writes: “Frankenstein self-reflexively interrogates the so-called romantic ideology: unlike the great lyrics of Wordsworth or Percy Shelley, Frankenstein stages the failure of language to generate a complete representational reduplication of reality (and thus to transcend it); and unlike contemporary (read: de Maninan) efforts to attribute this failure to an intrinsic property of language itself, Frankenstein links it directly to the technological changes ensuing within the advent of machine autonomy” (578–79). While I agree that Frankenstein is a self-reflexive work, one that suffers rather than transcends the limit of the human that it presents, I am more inclined to emphasize the linguistic-figurative nature of this failure, albeit in order to consider the implications of this failure for the novel’s conception of the human (and the ethical). Even as he dismisses de Man for privileging language as the primary site of failure, Hansen cannot help but describe Shelley’s “machinic” critique as a “failure of language.” In the novel, the machinic metaphor always describes the workings of language. 4. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 28. Further references to Frankenstein will be cited parenthetically in the text. 5. See the first of Wordsworth’s Essays upon Epitaphs for this statement in William Wordsworth, The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), 2: 51. Victor Frankenstein’s inquiry into the origin of life—setting out from his childhood curiosity

   Notes to Pages 73–74 about an electrical storm—can be read in direct relation to Wordsworth’s discussion of the authenticity of the child’s “intimations of immortality.” Indeed, Frankenstein can be read as an elaboration of Wordsworth’s notion of the “intimations of immortality,” one that understands the question of finitude to lead not to a sense of infinity but, rather, to the production of an interminable, unbearable remainder: the monster. 6. This is also Percy Shelley’s question. See both the “Triumph of Life” and “Essay on Life”: “For what are we? Whence do we come, and whither do we go? Is birth the commencement, is death the conclusion of our being? What is birth and death?” In Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: Norton, 2002), 506. Or later: “What is the cause of life?—that is, how was it preceded [produced], or what agencies distinct from life, have acted or act upon life? All recorded generations of mankind have wearily busied themselves in inventing answers to this question. And the result has been . . . Religion. Yet, that the basis of [cause of ] all things cannot be, as the popular philosophy alledges, mind is sufficiently evident” (508). 7. Furthermore, animation makes it possible for Victor to narrate his story. This is primarily a matter of his syncopations of life and death. For another version of living with the dead, see Percy Shelley’s “Alastor,” where the poet sleeps in charnel houses. The relation between these works is at least partly witnessed when Mary Shelley reproduces his “Mutability,” a poem published with “Alastor,” in Frankenstein. It also points to the revision and perversion of Wordsworth’s intimations (and an attendant revision and repetition of romantic rhetoric) at work here. In other words, Frankenstein demonstrates the monstrousness of the poetic spirit. For a detailed account of their relation, see Homans, “Bearing Demons.” 8. Compare with Mary Shelley’s “On Ghosts” (1824), where she writes that she has only ever once seen a ghost—in a dream! She continues this ironization of the ghostly with a long description of returning to the home of her dead friend (and husband) to find herself—and it—haunted by him: I walked through the rooms filled with sensations of the most poignant grief. He had been there; his living frame had been caged by those walls, his breath had mingled with that atmosphere, his step had been on those stones, I thought:—the earth is a tomb, the gaudy sky a vault, we but walking corpses. The wind rising in the east rushed through the open casements, making them shake;—methought, I heard, I felt—I know not what—but I trembled. To have seen him but for a moment, I would have knelt until the stones had been worn by the impress, so I told myself, and so I knew a moment after, but then I trembled, awe-struck and fearful. Wherefore? There is something beyond us of which we are ignorant. The sun drawing up the vaporous air makes a void, and the wind rushes in to fill it,— thus beyond our soul’s ken there is an empty space; and our hopes and fears, in gentle gales or terrific whirlwinds, occupy the vacuum; and if it does no more, it bestows on the feeling heart a belief that influences do exist to watch and guard us, though they be impalpable to

Notes to Pages 76–77    the coarser faculties. (The Mary Shelley Reader, ed. Betty T. Bennett and Charles E. Robinson [New York: Oxford University Press, 1990], 336)

9. In Dialogue and Literature: Apostrophe, Auditors, and the Collapse of Romantic Discourse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), Michael Macovski calls the monster “a central apostrophic narrator” and argues that apostrophe in Frankenstein introduces a proliferation of different voices that “are indications not of dispersal but of the rhetorical construction of selfhood from multiple voices” (108). Macovski argues convincingly that apostrophe effects being—the being of the monster. However, his examples of apostrophe—which serve the larger argument of the book—all concern attempts at storytelling or address between the characters in the novel, the narrators in particular, but also other failed listeners, including the De Laceys. My own analysis is concerned to examine the redeployments of conventional romantic apostrophes (to mountain and lake) as well as the address to another character. I am not concerned to demonstrate that there is a maintainable distinction between the nonhuman and the human object of an apostrophe. The novel over and again unsettles these distinctions, and apostrophe, by giving and taking away voice, serves that unsettling. Rather, I am interested in apostrophe’s implications for the novel’s conception of the human, speech, and testimony. I address this explicitly in the final section. 10. Throughout the novel the monster is perceived—especially on first sight— as a “figure of man.” Upon first meeting the creature atop Montanvert, for example, Victor “suddenly beheld the figure of a man” (76). 11.  De Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement,” 81. 12. This leads to a proliferation of prognoses: “Night also closed around; and when I could hardly see the dark mountains, I felt still more gloomily. The picture appeared a vast and dim scene of evil, and I foresaw obscurely that I was destined to become the most wretched of human beings. Alas! I prophesied truly” (55; my emphasis). It is only when Victor cannot see the landscape, when it is dark, that he can foresee what will befall him. These moments of prophecy occur, and are confirmed, only retrospectively, a point that the direct address to Walton in the previous paragraph affirms. 13.  Recall Wordsworth’s response to Mont Blanc in The Prelude, the first sentence of which also recalls the wedding guest’s obligatory response to the Ancient Mariner (“he could not chuse but hear”):        . . . with such a book Before our eyes we could not chuse but read A frequent lesson of sound tenderness, The universal reason of mankind, The truth of young and old.

In The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979), 6.473–77. Here there is hardly a chance for

   Notes to Page 77 the deception or mockery that Victor describes, however the mountain “deceives” Wordsworth; he crosses “by accident” and does not notice the descent: Hard of belief, we questioned him again, And all the answers which the man returned To our inquiries, in their sense and substance Translated by the feelings which we had, Ended in this—that we had crossed the Alps. (6.520–24)

14. However, this interruption of the present establishes that Victor does not belong to the “present” or to the past: he remains turned backward to the losses he summons and speaks. 15.  J. Douglas Kneale has argued that an apostrophe is never a direct address. However, the example of apostrophe in Frankenstein illustrates how difficult it may be to establish what is and what is not a direct address. In the final section of this chapter, I will discuss Victor’s and Walton’s “turns” in more explicit detail. In the meantime, the fact that Victor is turned away from Walton, even as he is turned toward him in order to tell his story, justifies my discussion of this turn as an example of apostrophe. Apostrophe here is a turn to the one who is seemingly before him and whom he has been addressing. For Kneale’s argument, see the chapter called “Apostrophe Reconsidered: Wordsworth’s ‘There Was a Boy,’ ” in his book Romantic Aversions: Aftermaths of Classicism in Wordsworth and Coleridge (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999), 11–27. 16. Thomas Dutoit aligns monster and mountain, in his excellent “Re-Specting the Face as the Moral (of ) Fiction in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” (MLN 109, no. 5 [December 1994]: 847–71). He argues that Jura is “an important suggestion of the ethical dimension of such unrepresentability”—that is, the unrepresentability of the monster’s face which Victor encounters and is shielded from on the Alps. Dutoit continues: “Indeed, the name ‘Jura’ is a homonym with the Latin jura, the plural of jus, which means law. . . . Wouldn’t Jura (the mountain) be merely a kind of double or replica for jura (laws)?” (862). This punning—only one of the many idiomatic constellations that he finds/makes throughout the ­novel—allows Dutoit to link the mountain (Jura) to the judge (mountain and judge are both described as having/dealing with the “dark side”) and the monster (both mountain and monster are called “insurmountable,” and, to continue with my own punning, mon(s)tre/ Mont (Blanc) also participate in this homonymy). For Dutoit, this play discloses the monster as “embody[ing] a radical sense of the ethical” (863), one that he will consider through a Kantian reading of the novel’s reading of the Critique of Practical Reason and through a careful analysis of Lévinas’s nonphenomenological ethics of the face. In Dutoit’s analysis, “what is at stake in the novel is a radical sense of ethics related to the non-phenomenal face (of the monster). This ethic is radically other than traditional ethical values of happiness and virtue in the ‘domestic circle’ ” (868). That the storm passes through—even comes from—Jura (mountain/law)

Notes to Pages 78–80    raises the question of how origin and tendency are understood in Shelley’s novel. In other words, is this a matter of the excess of and departure from the law, or the instantiation of it? Dutoit would likely claim both, to the extent that this is both an instantiation of law and a radical—ethical—revision of it. It would be important to include the Frankenstein family servant “Justine” in this chain: Justine is accused of murdering William Frankenstein and executed for the crime to which she publicly pleads guilty and privately admits to not having committed. The association between Justine and the monster is not just a matter of jura—laws—but rather of calculability in a more general sense. The novel deals in a similar manner with the animation of the monster and the execution of Justine: these are the two events that the novel cannot represent. While I find Dutoit’s argument convincing, it is still susceptible to Agamben’s recent critique of the post-Kantian fusion of ethics and law. If one were to take seriously Agamben’s suggestion that ethics be thought outside of legal idioms (guilt, responsibility, etc.) and rather approached through the “gray zone” or the “zone of irresponsibility,” the site of the ethical would not belong to responsibility to and for the face that disappears (i.e., the monster) but rather to an excess of responsibility (Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen [New York: Zone, 1999], 21). While this notion of “unassumability” already seems to attend Lévinas’s ethics, Agamben’s provocation—which is also a rejoinder to philosophical moralism—bears on the novel to the extent that the novel occurs in this crisis zone. Dutoit briefly discusses apostrophe in the novel, focusing in particular on the repeated exclamation “Good God!” as an apostrophe in which God and the monster are identified (858). 17. Whether or not Victor “sees” the figure remains a question. The figure appears in the light that Victor already has described as “blinding.” The “inform[ing]” “deformity of its aspect” is like the light that also protects Victor from the creature it “resembles.” 18. The execution of Justine is also an execution of the just and of “justice,” not simply because of the monster’s guilt but because the law comes to murder the innocent. Justine’s execution is one of three capital trials in the novel. The only execution that occurs, its occurrence is literally the “murder” of justice. This is only the first step of a reading of the novel’s critique of the death penalty. Mary Shelley, a reader of Cesare Beccaria, demonstrates over and again the impossible mastery of the ends of man, a mastery that in each case produces a monstrous excess. Her critique of this mastery is inseparable from her critique of the death penalty. 19. Under pressure from the prison guards, Justine does provide a “false” confession, the only confession in the novel that the law can accommodate. 20. Compare with Waldman’s lecture on modern scientists, “the terms of which,” Victor states, “I shall never forget”: The ancient teachers of this science . . . promised impossibilities and performed nothing. The modern masters promise very little; they know that metals cannot be transmuted and

   Notes to Page 80 that the elixir of life is a chimera. But these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt and their eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature, and shew how she works in her hiding places. They ascend to the heavens; they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, even mock the invisible world with its own shadows. (30–31)

In this passage, Waldman claims that modern science is defined by negative knowledge—the capacity to know what it cannot know, to know that one cannot know—through which science incorporates, rather than suffers, its own limit. This mastery is performed in acts of “command, mimicry, and mockery”—the terms that also might be understood to constitute the novel’s own performance of a critique of romantic “nature” (here, personified). 21. Shelley-Victor assuages any doubt concerning the critical account of convention here deployed, upon citing the third and fourth stanzas of Percy Shelley’s “Mutability” (1816) immediately prior to reaching the mountaintop. Hansen argues that by placing this fragment here—as a gloss on Victor’s desire for an animal life of pure needs, rather than a speaking human life, a gloss on Victor’s desire for something other than the mutability that words effect—Shelley ventures a critique of “mutability” as an ideal. I would suggest that, prefaced by the statement “but now we are moved by every wind that blows, and a chance word or scene that word may convey to us” (75), the cited poem performs a critical account of the “power” of words (“thoughts” and “dreams”) to move things—and us, a power that the possibility of avalanche exemplifies. 22. The wanderer about whom Victor speaks is also himself, as illustrated in the initial apostrophe in which he asks the Swiss mountains and lake how they will welcome their “wanderer.” Although he names himself there, he also summons the monster, his shadow-wanderer. Again, the passage from Percy Shelley’s “Mutability” reinforces the suggestion that “we” are wandering spirits because we have language. 23. For another example of the inevitable fulfillment of apostrophe, see my discussion of Wordsworth’s sonnet “Mark the concentred Hazels” in the final chapter. 24. Homans has argued that the novel is a mourning work that sets out to— and carefully avoids—breaking its attachments with the dead mother. Lawrence A. Rickels and Avital Ronell have focused their analyses on the novel’s cryptology and its melancholia: “Shelley’s work of mourning,” Rickels writes, recognizes that melancholia is a work too, and that mourning and melancholia are opposed and comparison shopped only in the streamlined modeling of a merely integrative mourning. It is not only denial of his most fervent wish to reanimate the mother that is Victor’s guiding spirit: the near-miss relations, now of mourning, now of unmourning, must be

Notes to Pages 81–83    displaced from view. . . . Realization of this goal [i.e., of animating the mother versus an unrecognizable, never before existent being] would bring Victor too close to recognizing that there was loss in the first place. (The Vampire Lectures [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999], 282–83)

In The Telephone Book and again in Finitude’s Score, Ronell suggests that “the monster knows that it was created to sing the lament of mourning, to teach the necessity of hanging up, which the professors with their self-willed striving could not effect.” In The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 195. See also, Finitude’s Score: Essays for the End of the Millennium (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 242. This lament sounds at the very end of the novel, when, before disappearing, the monster mourns Victor’s death. In the scene I am considering, it is not irrelevant that Victor already will have described his initial response to the creature come to life: “A mummy again endued with animation could not be so hideous as that wretch” (40). The creature is thus more hideous than the wrapped and embalmed—but maternal—return to life. For discussion of the pun on mummy, see also Mary Jacobus, “Is There a Woman in This Text?,” New Literary History 14 (Autumn 1982): 117–41. 25. In addition to Hansen’s discussion of “parody” in Frankenstein, Philip Stevick has written an essay called “Frankenstein and Comedy.” Stevick rightly links comedy to automation. The automaton is the comic figure, as he points out recalling Bergson, but Stevick does not align this automaton-comedy with the critical account of romantic presentation that I understand to be inextricable from its comic aspects. See Phillip Stevick, “Frankenstein and Comedy,” in The Endurance of “Frankenstein”: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel, ed. George Levine and U. C. Knoepflemacher (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), 221–39. 26. Compare Victor’s traumatic awakening with Freud’s “Dream of the Burning Child.” Here it is a child’s animation, rather than its death, that he dreams, and the flames of which awaken him. See Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), for a fine reading of this episode. 27. In her analysis of the Gorgon, which I discussed in Chapter 1 and return to in the final section of this chapter, Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux explains that the Gorgon got its name from something like the sound gr . . . gr . . . (Du masque au visage: Aspects de l’identité en Grèce ancienne [Paris: Flammarion, 1995]), 11. It is not clear to me that this would be the same as the monster’s mumblings. This allegory reminds us, however, that the monster has no name. 28. See also the following passage: I improved rapidly in the knowledge of language, so that in two months I began to comprehend most of the words uttered by my protectors. . . . My days were spent in close attention, that I might more speedily master the language; and I may boast that I improved more

   Notes to Pages 84–86 rapidly than the Arabian, who understood very little, and conversed in broken accents, whilst I comprehended and could imitate almost every word that was spoken. (94–95)

The monster describes the two-part project of language study—comprehension and communication or imitation. 29. It is true that all fictional characters can be understood as prosopopoeias. However, the monster dramatizes this fact. For further discussion of prosopopoeia in prose and its ethical stakes, see J. Hillis Miller, Versions of Pygmalion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 30. On persuasion and staged identity, see again “My Monster / My Self,” in which Johnson argues that all three narratives in the novel are generated by an act that assumes or stages the end that the narrative is meant to effect. 31. Cf. de Man: Voice assumes mouth, eye, and finally face, a chain that is manifest in the etymology of the trope’s name prosopon poien, to confer a mask or a face (prosopon). Prosopopoeia is the trope of autobiography, by which one’s name . . . is made as intelligible and memorable as a face. Our topic deals with the giving and taking away of faces, with face and deface, figure, figuration and disfiguration. (“Autobiography as De-Facement,” 76)

Frankenstein’s version of prosopopoeia “assumes” mouth, eye, and face in the sense that de Man suggests: it gives and takes away the face. Victor “loses” his eye in order to gain an ear, as if a pun on “cut off your nose to spite your face.” Victor loses his eye in order to “assume” that the monster has a face, in order to give him a face, which would make him bearable. But this “assumption” of a face as the condition of hearing the monster, this defacement of Victor as facing (rendering visible and invisible) of the creature, recalls the initial gesture whereby Victor discovers the secret origin of life in the “blooming cheek” of earth. De Man’s chain of substitutions—mouth, eye, face—implies a progression. “Face” would be the final assumption, what is taken and given as a culmination rather than as a sheer substitution. Yet the monster that emerges in the facing of the earth is one for whom eye and mouth do not finally imply face. Only when the other is deprived of the eye (and here one thinks not only of Victor but of the blind De Lacey) does the monster have a “figure”—that is, a “face.” The figure, as “figure of man,” is the appearance of what cannot be seen as what cannot be seen. 32. Throughout the novel the encounter between Victor and the monster involves the hand (or arm): from the earliest threat: “Do you not fear the fierce vengeance of my arm wreaked on your head” (77; my emphasis), to the creature’s hand placed over Victor’s eyes, to the writing that is here assumed and that recurs when the creature inscribes notes in the landscape daring Victor to continue. Thus the hand that hides the face (in writing or violence or literal covering) is also what reveals the monster to Walton at the novel’s end: “As he hung over the coffin, his face was concealed by long locks of ragged hair; but one vast hand was extended,

Notes to Pages 86–90    in colour and apparent texture like that of a mummy” (187). This “appearance” repeats Victor’s “conversation in the mountains,” where the hand is the condition of testimony as disclosure. 33.  “Precipitation” puns, as before, on the storms (both electrical storms and merely gloomy ones) that signify the monster’s proximity. 34.  Recall also that Victor explains: “rage choaked my utterance.” Unable to speak his promise, and implicitly “choaked” by the monster’s laughter, Victor now sounds the monster’s hoarse, inhuman voice: the voice of one who cannot speak. 35. That the poet rather than the novelist authors the preface is not adequate reason to dismiss its claims for the novel’s relation to poetry. Nevertheless, Steven Goldsmith gives a suggestive analysis of the relation between poetry and prose, gender and genre, in Shelley’s preface, which he understands in terms more violent and hierarchical than I describe here: “Within their own relationship, this rivalry between discourses was underscored by sexual difference and an asymmetry of power. One need only remember the preface to the 1818 Frankenstein, in which Percy usurped his wife’s voice, writing it as if he were she, to recognize that this genre competition could be painfully humbling for her.” See Steven Goldsmith, Unbuilding Jerusalem: Apocalypse and Romantic Representation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 298. 36. Curiously enough, the ground that Shelley works to lay bare might already be conceived of as poetry. Darwin, a poet, proposes in Zoonomia the possibility of regeneration, and the ghosts and specters from which the novel wants to distance itself belong to Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron’s ghost story contest. Moreover, the prevalence of poetry and its relation to the everyday is precisely what is at stake in the romantic theory of poetry through which the novel will be framed. Ronell makes an analogous claim when she writes that “technology can choose a genuinely human temporality only if it chooses to read a certain grace of poetry, a listening to finitude more truthful than technology’s disassembling of space-time” (Finitude’s Score, 243). While Ronell’s suggestion concerns the monster’s reading list, it also recalls Wordsworth’s analysis of the man made in the marriage of (techno)science and poetry. 37. As I suggest above, for de Man this is the prosopopoeic aspect of every autobiography insofar as it incorporates its end. As a fictional autobiographical text, the preface itself would belong to the category of “commanding and comprehensive” accounts of the human that it names. Also, compare this embodiment of the imagination with Homans’s account of the literal. The comparison challenges the emphasis in her text on authorial intentionality. For a generous, yet critical, account of Homan’s reading of Frankenstein as it belongs to a context of feminist readings, see Cynthia Chase’s introduction to Romanticism (Longman Critical Readers [London: Longman, 1993]). 38.  Percy Shelley read the Biographia Literaria as soon as it appeared (1817). See

   Notes to Pages 90–91 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria; or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, 2 vols., ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 2: 7, n. 1. 39. Shelley’s preface responds to Wordsworth’s by acknowledging that if poetry no longer distinguishes itself from prose, a novel can take poetry as its model. Nevertheless, the repetition of the poetic gesture seems curious. It does not elevate the novel to the level of poetry, for the understanding of poetry through which the novel conceives itself argues against a conception of poetry as an elevated discourse: “the same human blood” runs through poetry and prose alike. But despite this “leveling,” Wordsworth is sure to maintain the difference between “good” poetry and the “amusements” of “frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse” (William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon, 1974], 1: 129). These “lesser forms,” Wordsworth complains, leave Shakespeare and Milton “driven to neglect.” Shelley’s preface distinguishes the novel because, rather than neglecting Shakespeare and Milton, it takes their works as its model. 40. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 2: 6. 41. Compare the aim and purpose of Wordsworth’s poetic “experiment,” in the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” 1: 123, 125: The principle object, then, proposed in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and, further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature: chiefly, as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement.

42. This phrase recapitulates the preface’s means of seriousness and means toward establishing poetry as its foundation. It defines the poet of the Lyrical Ballads as one who believes the unbelievable (unlike the author of this fiction). It will thus align the poet with a semblance that is synonymous with an “actual” experience of the supernatural (unlike this fiction); and it will attribute this to “the human,” insofar as the man who has this experience is the poet, and the poet, above all, is “a man talking to men.” Thus the initial gestures of shoring up seriousness so as to frame the novel in terms of poetry, in fact, distinguish the novel from the very poetry it tries to resemble. 43. Cf. Wordsworth: I ask what is meant by the word Poet? What is a Poet? To whom does he address himself? And what language is to be expected from him?—He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to

Notes to Pages 91–94    be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him. . . . To these qualities he has added a disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present; an ability of conjuring up in himself passions, which are indeed far from being the same as those produced by real events, yet . . . do more nearly resemble the passions produced by real events, than anything which, from the motions of ther own minds merely, other men are accustomed to feel in themselves. (“Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” 1: 138)

Coleridge: “What is poetry? is so nearly the same question with, what is a poet? that the answer to the one is involved in the solution of the other. . . . The poet described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity” (2: 15–16). Wordsworth’s account of the poet, which I reproduce only in part, quickly renders the “natural” or the “common” (“a man speaking to men”) as the supernatural, even the delusive. For Coleridge, drawing from Schelling and Schiller, poet and poetry belong to an ideal system of hierarchies and relations that involve “the whole soul of man.” 44. Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” 1: 138. 45. Ibid. 46. The most pertinent example of the disagreements it aroused is Wordsworth’s letter to Joseph Cottle (June 24, 1799), which R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones mention in their notes to Coleridge’s “Rime.” The letter reads: “From what I can gather it seems that the Ancyent Mariner has upon the whole been an injury to the volume, I mean that the old words and strangeness of it have deterred readers from going on” (quoted in Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 2nd ed., ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones [London: Routledge, 1991], 273). In the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth appends a note to the poem and takes credit for publishing it. He states, however, that the poem’s major “defect” is “that the principal person has no distinct character, either in his profession of Mariner, or as a human being who having been long under the controul of supernatural impressions might be supposed himself partake of something supernatural” (ibid., 276). 47. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 2: 7. 48. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Complete Poems, ed. William Keach (New York: Penguin, 1997), 161. 49. More specifically, this concerns an upward turn: when entranced, the Mariner can only look up; when partly freed from the trance, he cannot look up. The analogy to one on the street translates this vertical account to one that is horizontal, contiguous, and narrative. In other words, the presentational analogy introduces temporality. 50. In Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), Susan J. Wolfson argues that simile has a central place in Coleridge’s practice (and theory) of poetry, and is the “extended

   Notes to Pages 94–96 trope of the Rime” (74). Simile, Wolfson explains, is “formal” rather than organic or unifying, and “threaten[s] to supplant [Coleridge’s] organic formalism” (66). Wolfson pays particular attention to the simile from the “Rime” that recurs in Frankenstein. Like all similes in Coleridge’s work, this stanza belongs to “a rhetoric of uncertainty” (74); however, insofar as it takes up its own stanza, in Wolfson’s reading, it and the state of mind it describes “seem as detachable and free-floating as the wandering Mariner himself ” (79). The stanza/simile is just like the Mariner (it seem[s] as); simile is the simile of the Mariner. Moreover, if this simile seems detachable, it is also, as Wolfson suggests, detached from the poem when it appears in Shelley’s novel. However, its appearance there, as I will suggest, has a differently unsettling effect. It introduces a likeness (simile) to name what is. This is not a literalization of the figure that affirms romantic unity, but rather it is evidence of the deeply unsettling remainder of a figure like simile that endures as a simile despite the fact that it describes something that seems to be literally true. That Wolfson understands Shelley’s redeployment of the stanza to demonstrate that “the formal charge of simile is to turn round a circle of subjectivity impervious to clarification” (79) also reinforces the relation between this passage and trope. Simile at once describes an impenetrable circle of subjectivity (it turns around that circle), and it turns that subjectivity around. In Frankenstein, the likeness of a “figure of man”— of the monster that introduces a collapse of the difference between the human and the inhuman—occasions these dizzying turns, but in this passage, the sheer fact of simile will confirm and repeat these unsettling effects. 51. On this, see for example Coleridge’s response to Anna Letitia Barbaud’s criticism that the poem did not have a moral: But I told her that in my judgment the chief fault of the poem was that it had too much moral, and that too openly obtruded on the reader. It ought to have had no more moral than the story of the merchant sitting down to eat dates by the side of a well and throwing the shells aside, and the Genii starting up and saying he must kill the merchant, because a date shell had put out the eye of the Genii’s son. (Table Talk, May 30, 1830, and March 31, 1832, quoted in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Complete Poems, ed. William Keach [New York: Penguin, 1997], 499)

This makes clear that the poem attempts to resist prescriptiveness (despite its final appeals to the Wedding Guest). The allegory through which Coleridge makes this point concerns a loss of vision, a form of irresponsibility. It suggests that one can be “accountable” for the other’s loss of vision by doing what seems like nothing. The point is not that one should not kill an albatross, just as the point here is not that one should not throw date shells away or even that one should watch where one throws things. Rather, one cannot see or foresee what one is doing. (Ir)responsibility has unforeseeable effects. 52. For discussion of the “frame narrative,” see Peter Brooks’s Lacanian analysis in “What Is a Monster? (According to Frankenstein),” in Frankenstein: Mary

Notes to Pages 96–101    Shelley, ed. Fred Botting (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995), 81–106. See also Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s description of this structure: “Frankenstein is built in the established epistolary tradition of multiple frames. At the heart of the multiple frames, the narrative of the monster (as reported by Frankenstein to Robert Walton, who then recounts it in a letter to his sister) is of his almost learning, clandestinely to be human.” In Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 276. 53. Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts,” 277. 54. This describes Kant’s antinomy of happiness-virtue, which Dutoit understands the monster to “embody” (“Re-Specting the Face,” 864). 55. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 54. 56.  Levi, however, cites the 1834 version of the poem. These are lines 582–85 of the 1834 poem. The 1798 version reads: “Since then at an uncertain hour, / Now oftimes and now fewer, / That anguish comes and makes me tell / My ghastly adventure” (ll. 615–18). 57. In the 1834 edition, from which Levi cites, Coleridge glosses this moment of arrest: “The wedding-guest is spell-bound by the eye of the old sea-faring man, and constrained to hear his tale” (Coleridge, Complete Poems, 168). 58. In The Coming Community, Agamben discusses the logic of not not being able: Only a power that is capable of both power and impotence, then, is the supreme power. If every power is equally the power to be and the power not to be, the passage to action can only come about by transporting (Aristotle says ‘saving’) in the act its own power not-tobe. This means that, even though every pianist has the potential to play and the potential not to play, Glenn Gould is, however, the only one who can not not play, and directing his potentiality not only to the act but to his own impotence, he plays, so to speak, with the potential to not-play. (The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992], 36)

59.  Quoted in Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 16. 60. Ibid., 55. 61.  Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Vintage, 1989), 83–84; Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 33. 62. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 53. 63. Frontisi-Ducroux offers both locutions—the one to describe the Gorgon’s negativity (it is the absence of a face), and the other to describe its activity (it “attacks” your face, it keeps you from having a face). Before the Gorgon, one either hides one’s face (and Perseus’s shield exemplifies this hiding) or one’s face is turned to stone. On this, see also Jean-Pierre Vernant, La Mort dans les yeux: Figures d’autre en Grèce ancien, Artemis, Gorgô (Paris: Hachette, 1996). 64. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 54.

   Notes to Pages 105–6 chapter 4: anthropomorphizing the human 1.  Jean-Pierre Saez, “In the Company of Robert Antelme: Interviews with Georges Beauchamp, Marguerite Duras, Dionys Mascolo, François Mitterrand, Edgar Morin, Maurice Nadeau, and Claude Roy,” in On Antelme’s “The Human Race”: Essays and Commentary, trans. Jeffrey Haight (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 219. 2. Ibid. 3. Thomas Keenan discusses Sade’s “freedom to say everything,” and the ethico-political stakes of this right to freedom, in the chapter entitled “Freedom, the Law of Another Fable: Sade’s Insurrection,” in his Fables of Responsibility, by Thomas Keenan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 70–96. He writes, recalling Sade’s Juliette: Indeed, an imperative or a right [to say everything] is required, acquired, because the possibility of saying (everything) is just what cannot be taken for granted. If it were simply possible, rights would be unnecessary. Whether or not it can be, everything demands to be said, and it demands its rights and its freedoms. . . . A subject cannot choose to exercise this right, to say everything, and nothing separates the right from a responsibility, an ineluctable or irrevocable call. (ibid., 93–94)

4. Surya, “Dead End,” in On Robert Antelme’s “The Human Race,” 92; trans. modified. 5. Surya’s account of authorship and literature here is clearly indebted to Foucault’s “What Is an Author?” and to the discussion of the literature of terror in “Language to Infinity.” In Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald D. Bouchard, trans. Donald D. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 113–38, 53–67. See my discussion of testimony’s relation to authorship in Chapter 1. 6. In the section of The Infinite Conversation called “The Limit-Experience,” the very section in which the essay on Antelme appears, Blanchot also treats “infinite negation” and its appearance as “the movement of writing” in Sade. Blanchot writes: “Writing is the madness proper to Sade. . . . From this buried solitude that horrified him (and doubly so: in itself, and through the sanction it represented), and from this horror turned into attraction, there originated and grew the irrepressible necessity of writing; a terrifying force of speech that would never be calmed. Everything must be said. The first liberty is the liberty to say everything.” The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 220. Dominique discusses this essay, but not in the context of the letter to Mascolo. 7.  Robert Antelme, The Human Race, trans. Jeffrey Haight and Annie Mahler (Marlboro, VT: Marlboro, 1992), 3. 8.  Blanchot’s essay, collected in the volume Friendship, responds to a question

Notes to Pages 106–8    posed by a Polish magazine: “In your opinion what is the influence that the war has had on literature after 1945?” This context perhaps accounts for one of the strange phrases that appears in the essay. Having just explained that the war “was not only a war, a historical event like any other. . . . It was an absolute,” Blanchot identifies three events that constitute the war: the holocaust of the Jews, the genocide against Poland, and the formation of a concentration camp universe” (109). It is the middle term, “the genocide against Poland,” that seems to have an occasional source. Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 109. 9. Ibid., 110. 10. Ibid. 11. Antelme, The Human Race, 3–4. 12.  Quoted in Dionys Mascolo, Autour d’un effort de mémoire: Sur une lettre de Robert Antelme (Paris: Nadeau, 1987), 13. 13. Antelme writes: “Mon cher Dionys, Je vais essayer de t’écrire quelques lignes, c’est-à-dire d’accomplir mon premier acte de vivant ‘solidifié’—car j’ai déjà accompli de nombreux actes de vivant, j’ai notamment pleuré, et les larmes sont aussi loin que possible de la mort [Dear Dionys, I will try to write several lines, that is, to carry out my first act of ‘concrete’ living, for I already have carried out several living acts, notably, I have cried, and tears are the furthest possible thing from death]” (ibid., 13). This is not the first act of living—for crying was that— but the first act of “concrete” or “solidified” living, which is to suggest, active or determined living. 14. Ibid., 12. 15. In Nuit et brouillard, Jean Cayrol uses the phrase “une autre planet” (another planet) to describe Auschwitz. 16. Saez, “Interviews,” 217. Mitterrand recalls in broken sentences: We were walking about this huge camp, witnesses to such scenes . . . In a kind of field, a kind of open lot inside the camp, stepping over bodies, those of many dead, of many dying who’d been tossed there. Trying not to step on. . . . We heard a voice, someone who said, “François.” Pierre Bugeaud bent down; then I bent down. I didn’t know from what source the call had come. We finally spotted the one who’d called, but we didn’t recognize him. It was Robert Antelme. (ibid., 216)

In the interviews with Saez collected under the heading “In the Company of Robert Antelme,” Mitterrand, Mascolo, and Beauchamp recall the process through which they found Antelme—through which Antelme found them—in Dachau and brought him home to Paris. Duras gives further details of Antelme’s return in The War: A Memoir, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Pantheon, 1986). 17. One example of this comes in Saez’s interviews. He asks Beauchamp: “Do you remember the account he gave to you? Did this account focus on the meaning of the experience he had just lived through, or on the experience itself?”

   Notes to Pages 108–10 Beauchamp replies: “He did want to talk, needed to talk. He was tired, utterly exhausted, but he needed to talk. He said to us, ‘Whenever I hear someone speak of Christian charity, my reply will be Dachau’ ” (217). While Beauchamp goes on to recall that Antelme was focused on explanation, he does not respond to Saez’s questions by recalling what must have been a many-hours-long account. Likewise, Mascolo describes only that Antelme spoke incessantly. To me this suggests that the account was not comprehensible for its information, which could not merely be repeated, but that what was most memorable, most significant about Antelme’s initial speech, was that there was so much of it. 18. See Blanchot in The Writing of the Disaster: The holocaust, the absolute event of history—which is a date in history—that utter-burn where all history took fire, where the movement of Meaning was swallowed up, where the gift, which knows nothing of forgiving or of consent, shattered without giving place to anything that can be affirmed, that can be denied—gift of the very passivity, gift of what cannot be given. How can it be preserved, even by thought? How can thought be made the keeper of the holocaust where all was lost, including guardian thought? In the mortal intensity, the fleeing silence of the countless cry. (The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986], 47)

19.  Duras, The War, 58. 20. Compare this description with Celan’s poem “There was earth inside them” and with his strange parable in “Backlight,” to which I return in the final chapter: “Bury the flower and put a man on his grave,” in Collected Prose, trans. Rosemarie Waldrop (Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY: Sheep Meadow, 1986), 12. Celan seems acutely aware of an inversion (catastrophe) that Antelme here lives physically. 21. Antelme, The Human Race, 5, 6. Throughout these passages there is a tension between an understanding of human beings as speaking beings and of human beings as biologically determined beings. While speaking does not guarantee that one is a man of the earth (indeed, delirious speech suggests the opposite—suggests that one has come unhinged from the earth), at the points when Antelme explains the endurance of the human in the camps, he always does so by describing it as a “claim” or “contest” (“expressing as their last claim an ultimate sense of belonging to the human race”) or, in the passage that I discuss above, “an almost biological claim of belonging to the human race” (6; my emphasis). De Man considers “claiming” as a linguistic act in his reading of Wordsworth’s “Bless’d Babe” passage in “Wordsworth and the Victorians,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 83–92. 22. Antelme, The Human Race, 5. 23. Ibid., 5, 6. Mascolo describes Antelme’s “life beyond life”—or life beyond the grave: Avoir voulu survivre vous charge d’une responsabilité infinie. Comme d’avoir donné la vie, dirait-on. Et en effet. Mais ici, par un retournement total de valuer, à force égale, la com-

Notes to Pages 110–11    passion sans limites se change en impitoyable exigence. . . . J’ai demandé à venir au monde. J’ai donc absolument perdu tout recours. Et que faire alors d’une vie que j’ai voulue? Et comment n’en pas faire quelque chose, quand moi-même je me suis retiré jusqu’à la consolation d’y être condamné? . . . De telles questions ne se posent sans doute qu’à ceux qui ont des raisons de penser qu’ils sont “réellement d’outre-tombe.” Toute literature à part “je suis réellement d’outre-tombe” n’a évidemment aucun sens si ne sont écartées les images selon lesquelles le mouvement de mourir ne serait tantôt qu’un figement sur place, suivi d’érosion lente (la mort stricte), tantôt quelque passage sans retour vers d’autres spheres (le “trépas” rhetorique)—les deux vues pouvant d’ailleurs se combiner tout à loisir. (Autour d’un effort de mémoire, 52–53) Having wanted to survive charges you with an infinite responsibility. Like having given your life, one could say. And in effect. But here, by a total reversal of the value of equal terms, limitless compassion changes into pitiless exigency. . . . I asked to come into the world. I have thus lost every recourse. And what makes up the life that I wanted? And how can I not do anything when on my own I withdrew into the consolation of being condemned there? . . . These questions are posed no doubt only by those who have reason to think that they are “really beyond the grave.” All literature aside, “I am really beyond the grave” has no evident sense if it does not dismiss the images according to which the movement of dying would be only a freezing in place followed by slow erosion (plain death), or would be a passage without return toward other spheres (the rhetorical “demise”)—the two views can regardless combine at will. . . . “From beyond the grave” then would be the point from which it is possible to think that a mortal limit was really attained and crossed, the only crossing which would permit return. What he had thus known (not by death as such, not lacking sentences which effectively mean nothing and can say nothing), this is what of death can be reported.

On Antelme as one who has returned from the grave, see also Surya, “Dead End.” Recently, Irving Wohlfarth, Martin Crowley, and Colin Davis have argued that Antelme’s text is a work of humanism. Why one would assume that Antelme’s work is humanist is, from its title, obvious. However, any claim for Antelme’s humanism would have to address the human as the “indestructible that can be destroyed” or as “whatever,” which would interrupt every familiar or redemptive humanism. See Irving Wohlfarth, “L’Espèce humaine à l’épreuve des camps: Réflexions sur Robert Antelme,” in Parler des camps, penser les genocides, ed. Catherine Coquio (Paris: Michel, 1999), 569–608; Martin Crowley, Robert Antelme: Humanity, Community, Testimony (Oxford: Legenda, 1993); Colin Davis, “Duras, Antelme, and the Ethics of Writing.” Comparative Literature Studies 34, no. 2 (1997): 170–83. 24.  Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 130. 25. The version of Blanchot’s essay included in the Dobbels’s collection removes the marks that indicate the text’s plural voices. 26. Antelme, The Human Race, 5–6.

   Notes to Pages 112–16 27.  Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 130; trans. modified. There are many slight differences between the NRF version of the text and the version later included in The Infinite Conversation. I will not identify all of these; however, I will point out those differences that strike me as particularly relevant. 28. The “who” of this question seems to resonate with the “quality” (qui, qua) of Antelme’s statement that in the camps what was contested was the deportee’s “quality” as a man. 29. See Thomas Carl Wall, Radical Passivity: Lévinas, Blanchot, and Agamben (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999). The reference to Wall can serve to recall the explicitly Lévinasian terms in which this conversation is voiced. 30.  Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 130. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., 130–31. The passage is taken from Antelme, The Human Race, 219– 20. The italics are Blanchot’s. 33. Antelme, The Human Race, 218–19. 34. See the final sentence of the foreword: “Elle [the feeling of biological belonging] sert ensuite à méditer sur les limites de cette espèce, sur sa distance à la ‘nature’ et sa relation avec elle, sur une certaine solitude de l’espèce donc [After that it serves to makes us think about the limitations of that race, about its distance from ‘nature’ and its relation to ‘nature’; that is, about a certain solitude that characterizes our race; and finally above all—it brings us to a clear vision of its indivisible oneness].” In Antelme, L’Espèce humaine, 11; The Human Race, 6. 35. Antelme, The Human Race, 219; trans. modified. 36. Antelme, The Human Race, 219–20; trans. modified. 37. This might be compared to Jacques Derrida’s account of la bête—in Deleuze as well as Ronell. As Derrida suggests, only a human can be bête (stupid, bestial, brutish). An animal cannot be bête precisely because it is an animal. 38. This resemblance recalls Blanchot’s account of the corpse in “The Two Versions of the Imaginary”: “When this moment has come, the corpse appears in the strangeness of its solitude as that which has disdainfully withdrawn from us. Then the feeling of a relation between humans is destroyed, and our mourning, the care we take of the dead and all the prerogatives of our former passions, since they can no longer know their direction, fall back upon us, return toward us. It is striking that at this very moment, when the cadaverous presence is the presence of the unknown before us, the mourned deceased begins to resemble himself. ” In The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 257. This resonance allows me to suggest that the image of “cadaverous resemblance” may belong to the living—the being-destroyed—and not only to the dead. 39. Antelme, The Human Race, 219; L’Espèce humaine, 229; my emphasis. 40.  Bruno Chaouat explains the importance of the face in The Human Race by

Notes to Pages 117–19    relating it to both Agamben’s account of the “Gorgon’s head” and Lévinas’s notion of the ethical relation as face-to-face. Chaouat argues that “in ‘disturbing the logic of the face,’ in disfiguring the human face or in de-humanizing it, the experience of extreme suffering as witnessed by Robert Antelme has altogether shattered the certainties of a humanism grounded upon human likeness and the stability of the human face.” “ ’La Mort ne Recèle Pas Tant de Mystère’: Robert Antelme’s Defaced Humanism,” L’Esprit Createur 40, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 94. In withholding this stability, and thus in refusing the aim of fascist identitarian politics (and policy), Antelme understands the human to be determined not by the resemblance between myself and another but by the ceaseless capacity of humans to resemble. The question raised in Chaouat’s essay concerns the mask, as prosopon, which he evokes by way of Agamben and Frontisi-Ducroux rather than de Man. It remains unclear to me, however, whether the nonphenomenal face in Lévinas can be called a prosopon, even if it is a speaking face—a face that addresses me and demands my response. Jill Robbins warns: “caution is required before comparing Lévinas’s descriptions to figural and tropological operations such as prosopopoeia, synecdoche, or metonymy,” especially given Lévinas’s stated disavowals of figure. In Robbins, Altered Reading: Lévinas and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), xxiv. Chaouat resolves this problem by treating prosopon as a term beyond figure. 41. Antelme, The Human Race, 219–20; trans. modified. 42.  Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 71. 43. Ibid., 131. 44. The relation between men as a relation in which there is nothing in common—in which this “nothing,” rather than identity, marks the human and responsibility—in The Infinite Conversation is called “the relation of the third kind.” It is a relation that would involve neither unity nor identity as its mode, but rather the acknowledged non-self-identity or radical interruption (what in the essay here in question is called the human) as its condition. This relation—an ethical relation—evokes the vis-à-vis as Lévinas articulates it, a relation between humans that is unmediated: there is nothing between them. All of this said, Blanchot implies (with Foucault as his example) that it may not be quite so easy to give up humanism. He writes: “Ideology is our element: that which causes us to breathe and, at the limit, asphyxiates us” (Infinite Conversation, 262). 45. Ibid., 131; translation modified. The English translation is missing a dash, which would set this off as issuing from a voice other than the one who “reads” Antelme. In the NRF version, Blanchot insists that anthropomorphism should be “understood in the deepest sense [entendu en un sens plus profound],” quieting perhaps the dismissive tone that sounds in The Infinite Conversation. 46.  Blaise Pascal, Pensées: Texte de l’édition Brunschvicg (Paris: Garnier, 1958), 162; trans. as Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (New York: Penguin, 1966), 95.

   Notes to Pages 120–23 47.  Roseau is also a biblical means of measurement (kaneh in Hebrew), equal to six cubits (approximately the length of one’s forearm) and thus the measure of man. See Le Robert dictionnaire historique de la langue française, 3 vols. (Paris: Robert), 2000, s.v. roseau. 48. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1979), 85–86. 49.  Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 131. 50.  De Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 239. 51. Ibid. It is worth noting that this passage reads, “A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms,” in Daniel Breazeale’s translation of Nietzsche’s essay. See Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” 84. 52. Ibid. I will take for granted the substitutability between these three sets of analogous terms; however, it is also the case that as a question of judgment— framed in Kant, but also in Nietzsche—the structure of presentation that de Man reads introduces specifically ethical questions. 53.  De Man, Rhetoric of Romanticism, 240. 54. Ibid., 239. 55. Ibid., 240. 56. In other words, de Man responds here in a gesture that is continuous with the response of many readers of this essay: if truth is a trope, what is the status of the truth of Nietzsche’s claim “truth is a trope”? The discussion of Nietzsche in the first part of de Man’s essay can be understood as a rigorous response to that question, rather than a dismissal of Nietzsche’s claim on the basis of its seemingly abyssal nature. De Man demonstrates that the abyssal claim includes its own interruption. 57.  De Man, Rhetoric of Romanticism, 240. 58. That anthropomorphism is considered nonneutral whereas metaphor and metonymy are neutral terms may help us to understand why, for Barbara Johnson, anthropomorphism evokes questions of gender. One might also see how the question of gender is at work in Antelme’s book—and in most accounts of the camps that remain accounts of either men’s or women’s experiences (see, for example, Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After, trans. Rosette C. Lamont [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997]). But sexual difference is particularly felt in the final sentence of Antelme’s foreword, which I quote again in order to emphasize that l’espèce is a feminine noun, as are all of the nouns in this sentence: “Elle sert ensuite à méditer sur les limites de cette espèce, sur sa distance à la ‘nature’ et sa relation avec elle, sur une certaine solitude de l’espèce donc [It serves to make us think about the limitations of that race, about its distance from ‘nature’ and its relation to ‘nature’; that is, about a certain solitude that characterizes our race]” (11).

Notes to Pages 123–27    59.  De Man, Rhetoric of Romanticism, 241. 60. Ibid. 61.  Rodolphe Gasché, The Wild Card of Reading: On Paul de Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 193. 62. Ibid., 193. 63.  De Man, Rhetoric of Romanticism, 241. The relation between anthropomorphism and metamorphosis is not a preoccupation that de Man imports, but rather it is explicitly mentioned in Nietzsche’s text: “At bottom, what the investigator of truths is seeking is only the metamorphosis of the world into man” (“On Truth and the Lie,” 85–86). 64.  De Man, Rhetoric of Romanticism, 241. 65. The metamorphosis that “whatever” signifies may owe more to Kafka than to Ovid. 66.  Barbara Johnson, “Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law,” in Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, ed. Barbara Cohen et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 207. 67. As I discussed in Chapter 2, de Man’s unusual definition of anthropomorphism in terms of the proper name resonates with the definition of prosopopoeia (over personification), in “Autobiography as De-Facement,” as signifying face or mask, rather than “person.” See again Chase’s Decomposing Figures: “De Man’s translation or definition of prosopopoeia is already a reading. . . . Translating prosopon as ‘face’ or ‘mask,’ and not as ‘person,’ is to imply that a face is the condition—not the equivalent—of the existence of a person.” Cynthia Chase, Decomposing Figures: Rhetorical Readings in the Romantic Tradition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 83. Does this also apply to anthropomorphism (i.e., is the name the condition of a human)? The fact of de Man’s proper name might be understood to suspend the very difference at stake here. I am not sure whether this is a generalizable claim or whether it remains within the singular logic of his proper name. For a magnificent dramatization of this singularity, see Jacques Derrida, Signéponge/Signsponge, trans. Richard Rand (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), a study dedicated to Paul de Man. 68. On the divine name “divided enough in the tongue,” see Jacques Derrida “Des tours de Babel,” in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 104–34, esp. 108. 69.  Johnson, “Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law,” 207. 70. In other words, “whatever” does not only imply indifference (“What do you want for dinner tonight?” “Whatever.”), but it also can function as a statement of rude dismissal. As a statement of indifference, “whatever” can sound a sharp judgment or a announcement of major difference. This is largely manifest in tone and intonation, and in the teenage female voice (either drawn out: “Whatev-errr” or condensed: “Whudev’r”). In this sense, indifference—not caring what

   Notes to Pages 127–29 the other does—would not indicate generosity or openness but that the other has fallen out of a world in which she could matter. “Whatever” thus functions as the popular dramatization of a rhetorical and ethical question, one that warrants a critical reading along the lines of which de Man, in “Semiology and Rhetoric,” reads Archie Bunker’s “what’s the difference?” 71. Agamben’s debt to Arendt in The Coming Community is especially evident in his considerations of love and the lovable. “Whatever” designates the lovable. In this sense it resonates with what, in The Human Condition, Arendt calls the “who”: For love, although it is one of the rarest occurrences in human lives, indeed possesses an unequaled power of self-revelation and an unequaled clarity of vision for the disclosure of who, precisely because it is unconcerned to the point of total unworldliness with what the loved person may be, with his qualities and shortcomings no less than with his achievements, failings and transgressions. Love, by reason of its passion, destroys the in-between which relates us to and separates us from others. (The Human Condition [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958], 242)

The passion of love is a passion of proximity and self-otherness that recalls both Narcissus’s drowning and Antelme’s “malheur.” 72. Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 1. 73. Ibid., 29. Agamben’s term is improperty: “But a manner of rising forth is also the place of whatever singularity, its principium individuationis. For the being that is its own manner this is not, in effect, so much a property that determines and identifies it as an essence, but rather an improperty; what makes it exemplary, however, is that this improperty is assumed and appropriated as its unique being” (ibid., 29). 74. Ibid., 67. 75.  Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 131. 76. For Agamben, this logic of essences would prevail in Nazi ideology. See The Coming Community, 63–68. Again, the double genitive makes heard both the transitive and intransitive versions of this phrase. 77. I am grateful to Kevin Newmark for hearing the echo of Echo in Blanchot’s phrase and for pointing it out to me. Blanchot writes on Echo in The Writing of the Disaster : Since it is said that Echo loves Narcissus by staying out of sight, we might suppose that Narcissus is summoned to encounter a voice without body, a voice condemned always to repeat the last word and nothing else—a sort of nondialogue: not the language whence the Other would have approached him, but only the mimetic, rhyming alliteration of a semblance of language. Narcissus is said to be solitary, but it is not because he is excessively present to himself; it is rather because he lacks, by decree (you shall not see yourself ), that reflected presence—identity, the self-same—the basis upon which a living relation with life, which

Notes to Pages 129–31    is other can be ventured. He is supposed to be silent: he has no language save the repetitive sound of a voice which always says to him the self-same thing, and this is a self-sameness which he cannot attribute to himself. . . . And such is the fate of lovers who touch each other with words, whose contact with each other is made of words, and who can thus repeat themselves without end, marveling at the utterly banal, because their speech is not a language but an idiom that they share with no other, and because each gazes at himself in the other’s gaze in a redoubling which goes from mirage to admiration. (127–28)

78.  Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 131. 79. This account of affliction resonates with Derrida’s consideration of “time out of joint” in Specters of Marx, and suggests the proximity between survival and spectrality that runs throughout Derrida’s work. See Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York: Routledge, 1994). 80.  Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 131–32. 81. That anthropomorphism can be an act like an execution, like a suicide, seems to be one of the recurring points in any sustained analysis of the deployments of these figures. For one particularly salient example, see Blanchot’s “Literature and the Right to Death,” in The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 300–344, but for another, see Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. 82. Sarah Kofman, Smothered Words, trans. Madeleine Dobie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 9–10; trans. modified. Originally published as Sarah Kofman, Paroles suffoquées (Paris: Galilée, 1987), 15–16. 83. See the fragment from Blanchot’s Le Pas au-delà that Kofman takes as one of her epigraphs: “That the fact of the concentration camps, the extermination of the Jews and the death camps where death continued its work, are for history an absolute which interrupted history, this one must say without, however, being able to say anything else. Discourse cannot be developed from this point.” Le Pas audelà (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 114. It may be that the recurrence of romantic figures acknowledges that no discourse—no “literature,” no “field of study”—can be developed from the point of the Holocaust. On the difficulty of dating this point, see Geoffrey H. Hartman, “Language and Culture after the Holocaust” in The Fateful Question of Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 99–140. 84. For Blanchot, in After the Fact (the essay Kofman cites just before naming her father), and for Lévinas, whose thought Blanchot’s essay evokes and in whom it finds its culmination, this interruption would precede the division between truth and trope, aesthetics and epistemology: “avant même le partage entre énonciation et énoncé, il y a le Dire inqualifiable, la gloire d’une ‘voix narrative’ qui donne à entendre clairement, sans jamais pouvoir être obscurcie par l’opacité ou l’énigme ou l’horreur terrible de ce qui se communique.” In Après coup: Précédé

   Notes to Pages 131–32 par le ressassement éternel (Paris: Minuit, 1983), 97–98. Translated in English by Paul Auster, Vicious Circles: Two Fictions and After the Fact (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1985), 68. 85.  Kofman, Smothered Words, 10; Kofman, Paroles suffoquées, 16–17. 86. In After the Fact and in his essays on Kafka, particularly those collected in The Infinite Conversation, Blanchot understands the “neutral” or narrative voice to be ceaseless. It is a voice that sounds prior to any division between epistemology and rhetoric, signified and signifier. In this respect, it is a literary version of the speaking that Antelme explains plagued him upon his initial return from the camps. Kofman’s book recalls both the literary narrative (the neutral voice) that Blanchot describes and the incoherent testimony (the suffocating voice) that Antelme describes and that gives Kofman’s book its title. The first is the summons of the dead; the second is her response to this “summons.” But this is also the voice that Antelme explains he must interrupt in order that he can bear witness in a language that can be heard, turning it into a voice of literature (a new literary absolute), in order that he might speak as a man. 87. Unlike her massive two-volume reading of Nietzsche (Explosion), both of Kofman’s works directly tied to the Holocaust—Paroles suffoquées and Rue Ordener, rue Labat (Paris: Galilée, 1994)—are miniscule: slim volumes printed on unusually small pages (far smaller than the other books in the series in which they appear). These are books of choking—only very few words finally get through. 88. Ann Smock, “Disastrous Responsibility,” L’Esprit createur 24, no. 3 (1984): 5–20. Quoted in Kofman, Smothered Words, 39; Paroles suffoquées, 46. 89. This is most evident in the “Good Friday” passage, which Kofman cites. This passage is one of the most overwhelming in Antelme’s book because it speaks pain, because pain speaks in it. One imagines that this passage recalls Antelme’s delirious speech upon his initial return, for it registers piled up facts, each of which is unbearably brutal. Furthermore, the entire passage is framed by Jesus’ “beautiful story.” The part of the passage that Kofman quotes reads: K. died, and we didn’t recognize him. Guys died saying, “The bastards, the shits . . .” The little gypsies at Buchenwald, suffocated like rats. M.-L. A.—dead, the hair cut off her head, a skeleton. All the ashes upon the soil of Auschwitz. . . . “Father, why hast thou . . . ?” Screams of suffocating children. Silence of ashes spread across a plain. K . . . est mort, lui, et on ne l’a pas reconnu. Des copains sont morts en disant: “Les vaches, les fumiers . . .” Les petits tziganes de Buchenwald asphyxiés comme des rats. M.-L. A.—morte, squelette, rasée. Toutes les cendres sur la terre d’Auschwitz. . . .

Notes to Pages 132–36    “Mon père, pourquoi m’avez-vous . . . ” Hurlements des enfants que l’on étouffe. Silence des cendres épandues sur une plaine. (antelme, The Human Race, 188; L’Espèce humaine, 195)

90.  Kofman, Smothered Words, 42. See also The Infinite Conversation: But what in this situation remains essential, its truth, is the following: the camp confined no more than a bondless entanglement of Others [un enchevêtrement sans lien d’hommes Autres], a magma of the other [autrui] face to face with the force of a Self that kills, and that represents nothing but the untiring power to kill. Between these deported persons who are Other and this Self of Force no language is possible; but neither is there any possibility of expression between these Others. What is then said is essential, but in truth [en vérité] heard by no one. (Infinite Conversation, 134–35; L’Entretien infini, 198–99)

In addition to the impossible speech between the Self of power and the Other of affliction, Blanchot also articulates the situation Antelme describes in the preface—the fact of not being heard by anyone. Both Blanchot and Kofman link (with unmistakable irony) this impossible speech to the confrontation with God before whom, like Abraham, one would turn away, the one whose face cannot be seen. See Kofman, Smothered Words, 49. 91. Antelme, The Human Race, 87–89; trans. modified; L’Espèce humaine, 92–94. 92. Antelme, The Human Race, 87. This logic of a divided division recalls that of the semiotic square, but is indebted to Agamben’s thought of the division of division as it emerges in his recent work on St. Paul and Benjamin. 93. Antelme, The Human Race, 88. 94. The question that emerges here is whether this is akin to stating that the SS maintained an uninterrupted, masterful claim to truth as trope: a position that, as we have already seen, Nietzsche could not hold. 95. The claim, “Calm yourself, we won’t undeceive you; we’ll bring you to the end of your enormity. We’ll let ourselves be taken the whole way to death [On ne vous détrompera pas, soyez tranquilles, on vous emmenera au bout de votre énormité. On se laissera emmener jusqu’à la mort]” (Antelme, The Human Race, 89; L’Espèce humaine, 94), moves from a statement of our (on) taking the SS down to our letting ourselves be taken down, taken to death. Both of these remain anthropomorphisms of the human: the former insofar as the reduction of enormity (turning gods into men) is what anthropomorphism manages and the latter because the final power—to let oneself be taken to death—recalls, as it completes the anthropomorphism that precedes it, Pascal’s pensée. The repetition of the verb emmener—first as “active” and then as “passive” and reflexive—establishes the link between these two “gestures.” 96.  Kofman, Smothered Words, 44–45; trans. modified; Kofman, Paroles suffoquées, 51–52.

   Notes to Pages 137–42 97. Antelme, The Human Race, 20; Antelme, L’Espèce humaine, 25. 98. Ibid. 99. Here, I refer implicitly to Louis Althusser’s association of the entrance into subjectivity with a calling by the law. That the law—in its most unified, fascistic sense—here calls upon the prisoner serves to render him a subject to authority. However, the moment of authority sets out by being undermined because of language. This moment acknowledges the entry into the Law of the Camps. For one account of the passage of ideology critique from Althusser to de Man (by way of Benjamin), see Michael Sprinker, Imaginary Relations: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Theory of Historical Materialism (London: Verso, 1987). 100. Antelme, The Human Race; 21; Antelme, L’Espèce humaine, 26–27. 101. Antelme, The Human Race, 21, trans. modified; L’Espèce humaine, 27. Compare this immediacy with the last sentence of Blanchot’s L’Arrêt de mort—an address to measureless unhappiness: Dans l’absence, dans le malheur, dans la fatalité des choses mortes, dans la nécessité des choses vivantes, dans la fatigue du travail, dans ces visages nés de ma curiosité, dans mes paroles fausses, dans mes serments menteurs, dans le silence et dans la nuit, je lui ai donné toute ma force et elle m’a donné toute la sienne, de sorte que cette force trop grande, incapable d’être ruinée par rien, nous voue peut-être à un malheur sans mesures, mais, si cela est, ce malheur je le prends sur moi et je m’en réjouis sans mesure et, à elle, je dis éternellement “Viens,” et éternellement, elle est là. (L’Arrêt de mort, récit [Paris: Gallimard, 1948], 127) In absence, in unhappiness, in the inevitability of dead things, in the necessity of living things, in the fatigue of work, in the faces born of my curiosity, in my false words, in my deceitful vows, in silence and in the night, I gave it all my strength and it gave me all its strength, so that this strength is too great, it is incapable of being ruined by anything and condemns us, perhaps, to immeasurable unhappiness, but if that is so, I take this unhappiness on myself and I am immeasurably glad of it and to that thought I say eternally, “Come,” and it is there.

See Jacques Derrida’s discussion of Blanchot’s “Viens,” in “Living On: Borderlines.” 102. Antelme, The Human Race, 21. 103. Antelme, L’Espèce humaine, 27. chapter 5: the rhetoric of wakefulness 1.  Geoffrey Hartman, “Language and Culture after the Holocaust,” in The Fateful Question of Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 99– 140. 2. Ibid., 100. 3. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 84.

Notes to Pages 142–43    4.  Dorothy Wordsworth reports William’s insomnia throughout her Grasmere Journals, ed. Pamela Woof (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). See, for example, the entry from January 28, 1802: “William out of spirits & tired. After we went to bed I heard him continually he called at 1/4 past 3 to know the hour” (59). The next day she writes: “William was very unwell, worn out with his bad nights rest— he went to bed, I read to him to endeavour to make him sleep” (59). At times Dorothy’s journal reads like an account of William’s insomnia. Sleeplessness also sounds in the short 1839 lyric that Wordsworth translates from Thomas Warton’s Latin: Come gentle Sleep, Death’s image tho’ thou art Come share my couch nor speedily depart How sweet thus living without life to lie Thus without death how sweet it is to die.

William Wordsworth, “Come gentle Sleep, Death’s image tho’ thou art” (from the Latin of Thomas Warton, in Last Poems, 1821–1850, ed. Jared Curtis [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999], 330). 5. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979). In book 5 of The Prelude, wakefulness famously is associated with “The Dream of the Arab,” yet it is perhaps more accurately represented in book 10, when Wordsworth accounts for the anxious night in October 1792 during which he lay awake in a Paris house recalling the “September massacres” (“With unextinguished taper I kept watch, / Reading at intervals” [Prelude, 10.61–62]). On that night Wordsworth’s insomnia—brought on by the realization of the day’s incessance (“Year follows year, the tide returns again, / Day follows day, all things have second birth; / The earthquake is not satisfied at once” [10.73–75])—both leads him to hear a disembodied, textual voice “that cried / To the whole city, ‘Sleep no more!’ ” (10.76–77), and serves as a proleptic response to the fictional voice of which it is no doubt the cause. Mary Jacobus discusses Wordsworth’s “demonic vocalism” in “ ‘Dithyrambic Fervour’: The Lyric Voice of The Prelude,” in Romanticism, Writing, and Sexual Difference: Essays on “The Prelude” (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 169–70. For a poetic narrative in which insomnia and trance are causally related, and figured as two versions of untimeliness, specifically related to “the triumph of life,” see Percy Bysshe Shelley, “The Triumph of Life,” in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: Norton, 2002):    But I, whom thoughts which must remain untold   Had kept as wakeful as the stars that gem The cone of night, now they were laid asleep,   Stretched my faint limbs beneath the hoary stem   Which an old chestnut flung athwart the steep Of a green Apennine: before me fled   The night; behind me rose the day; the Deep

   Notes to Pages 143–45   Was at my feet, and Heaven above my head When a strange trance over my fancy grew   Which was not slumber, for the shade it spread   Was so transparent that the scene came through As clear as when a veil of light is drawn   O’er evening hills they glimmer. (ll. 21–33)

The example from Shelley in which wakefulness, trance, and the “triumph of life” are aligned differs from the Wordsworthian example. In Wordsworth, wakefulness is not aligned with dreaming, and insomnia is in no way a form of mediation that ultimately could serve the restoration of consciousness. The irony of Shelley’s poem is of course the failure of this mediation, which is signaled minimally by the poet’s death. 6. The sonnets appear in William Wordsworth, Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 140–42. 7. This is Emmanuel Lévinas’s understanding of insomnia—to which I return in the final sections of this essay. Another definitional question that already will have surfaced concerns the relation between “insomnia” and “wakefulness.” “Wakefulness” (or veiller, which in French is also used to designate watchfulness or vigilance) can be understood as insomnia’s effect; however, “wakefulness” also can serve as insomnia’s cause. I will use both terms interchangeably to signal an inextricable constellation of wakefulness-insomnia. 8. Wordsworth, Poems, in Two Volumes, 140. 9. For an account of this fiction of subjectivity that lyrical address in the figure of apostrophe accomplishes, see above all Jonathan Culler’s “Apostrophe,” in The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 135–54. Culler sketches versions of this argument in later essays, including “Reading Lyric,” in “The Lesson of Paul de Man,” ed. Shoshana Felman et al., special issue of Yale French Studies 69 (1985): 98–106, and “Deconstruction and the Lyric,” in Deconstruction is/in America, ed. Anselm Haverkamp (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 41–50. Mary Jacobus understands apostrophe in Wordsworth’s Prelude as “the signal instance of the rupture of the temporal scheme of memory by the time of writing” (“ ‘Dithyrambic Fervour,’ ” 166). See also Barbara Johnson’s “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” in A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 184–99. Johnson poses the question of lyric subjectivity, not only in romantic or late-romantic works, but also in a constellation of poems in which aborted fetuses address their would-be mothers—or, more accurately, in which women are addressed by the not-yet-persons to which they did not give birth. Johnson’s excellent discussion of the reemergence of a romantic lyric figure in late-modern, women’s writing remains a model for my own inquiry into the status of these figures in post-Holocaust writing.

Notes to Pages 146–50    10.  Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 75–76. 11.  Johnson, “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” 185. 12. Ibid. 13. It is in this sense that J. Douglas Kneale’s criticism of Culler’s and Johnson’s confusion of address and apostrophe strike me as somewhat unfounded. See J. Douglas Kneale, Romantic Aversions: Aftermaths of Classicism in Wordsworth and Coleridge (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999). Kneale argues, for example, that a poem addressed “to” something—for example, “to the West Wind” or “to Sleep”—never is an example of apostrophe but rather of “ecphonesis,” because apostrophe signifies a “movement in voice” rather than voicing or address itself (12). In other words, Kneale, after Peacham, seems to suggest that apostrophe is always a matter of those who already have voices (i.e., persons), whereas prosopopoeia should be invoked as the proper designation of an address to sleep or to the wind, or to any addressee. If voice is initially absent, then even in these instances, seemingly direct address is already a trope; it is a turn. 14. Culler, Pursuit of Signs, 139. 15.  De Man, Rhetoric of Romanticism, 78. 16.  “Uncontainable” is Carol Jacobs’s word. She uses it in her Uncontainable Romanticism: Shelley, Brontë, Kleist (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989) to raise the question of “romanticism” itself—a question that my own reading of Wordsworth engages. Jacobs writes: Ever since its inception (if such a concept makes sense) Romanticism has denied itself a historically limitable field. If I have called this volume Uncontainable Romanticism, then, it is not because Shelley, Brontë, and Kleist fall neatly into that historical abyss we tend to label romantic. What Romanticism has come to mean in recent years, in any case, is a yielding of its own temporal limits to register critical claims of a much more overwhelming kind. “Romanticism” as it appears here is uncontainable as well because what takes place in these pieces is an uncontrollable moving beyond all those parameters seemingly fixed within the texts, because of the insistence in each text that it stage its own critical performance. (ix)

I am suggesting that Wordsworth’s sonnets “To Sleep” are uncontainable in both of the senses that Jacobs outlines here. 17.  Both of these attributions—“mother” and “Slave”—recall the image of the dove in the first sonnet to sleep. 18. Here I am following Jared Curtis’s suggestion, in his edition of the Poems, in Two Volumes in the Cornell Wordsworth. Curtis writes: “Revisions in those manuscripts that postdate the first book publication of the poem are assumed to be the author’s in his own hand or at his direction” (Wordsworth, Poems, in Two Volumes, 57). 19. It is worth pointing out that, again, according to the evidence in the Cornell Wordsworth, no other line in any of the sonnets “To Sleep” proved this difficult to

   Notes to Pages 151–52 settle. See the notes to the reading texts of the sonnets (Poems, in Two Volumes, 140– 42), and the transcriptions of “A flock of sheep that leisurely pass by” and “Fond words have oft been spoken to thee, Sleep!” (Wordsworth, Poems, in Two Volumes, 644–45, 640–41). 20. Wordsworth, Poems, in Two Volumes, 141–42. 21. It also evokes Charlotte Smith’s apostrophe to sleep in her sonnet “To Sleep” (1784): “Come, balmy Sleep! tired nature’s soft resort!” See Charlotte Smith, “To Sleep,” in The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. Stuart Curran (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 19–20. Sleep is a “balm” in the first line of Keats’s 1819 “Sonnet to Sleep,” albeit in an almost ironic appropriation: “O soft embalmer of the still midnight.” See John Keats, “Sonnet to Sleep,” in Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982), 275. “Still” in Keats’s sonnet maintains the ambiguity that Wordsworth will attempt to arrest, although in that sonnet “still” modifies “midnight” rather than the insomniac “subject.” At this point it may also be helpful to recall the questions with which Keats opens “Sleep and Poetry” (1817), the poem to which my own chapter is indirectly addressed. Keats writes: What is more gentle than a wind in summer? What is more soothing than the pretty hummer That stays one moment in an open flower, And buzzes cheerily from bower to bower? (ll. 1–4)

Here Keats’s apparently rhetorical questions turn out to be “actual” questions: “What, but thee, Sleep? Soft closer of our eyes!” (l. 11). 22. Wordsworth had read Izaak Walton’s Compleat Angler and, a sometimes fisherman, likely would have known that this movement typically attends reproduction. See the sonnet “Written upon a Blank Leaf in ‘The Compleat Angler.’ ” The sonnet first appeared in 1819, although the date of composition is unknown. William Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1904), 202. 23. In the apostrophe to sleep in 2 Henry IV, King Henry asks: Why rather, sleep, liest thou in smoky cribs, Upon uneasy pallets stretching thee, And hushed with buzzing night-flies to thy slumber, Than in the perfumed chambers of the great, Under the canopies of costly state, And lulled with sound of sweetest melody? (william shakespeare, 2 Henry IV, in The Complete Works, ed. stanley wells and gary taylor [oxford: clarendon, 1988], 523)

Henry is confounded by the fact that his peasant subjects sleep, although their monarch lies awake (they are likely exhausted, as Charlotte Smith’s sonnet “To

Notes to Pages 154–56    Sleep” suggests). Here, sleep lies uncomfortably and is itself lulled to sleep by “buzzing night-flies” like the one Wordsworth employs to figure sleep and whose buzzing keeps him awake. 24. Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989). In fact, Liu considers repetition in “A flock of sheep that leisurely pass by” (the counting and the effort to arrive at sleep through numbing repetitions or what he calls “bleak seriality”) as a “gentler version” of the repetition at the end of Wordsworth’s “A slumber did my spirit seal,” which describes a dead (or all too living) Lucy “roll’d round . . .  / with rocks and stones and trees” (Words­ worth, 471). However, if the blankness at the end of “A slumber” indicates awakened insight (even if momentary and naïve), the blankness in “A flock of sheep” aims to break out of the wakefulness it cannot help but perpetually recover. 25.  Liu’s brief discussion of Wordsworth’s “sleeplessness” shows how a mode of figural reading can be dizzying. Liu turns from an account of the circular relation of writer’s block and insomnia that I discuss above to a brief analysis of repetition in the first quatrain of “A flock of sheep that leisurely pass by” and to insomnia as a symptom of “existential repetition” (Liu, Wordsworth, 470). Repetition in “A flock of sheep that leisurely pass by” is another example of the serial repetitions that Liu locates in “A slumber did my spirit seal” (“No motion has she now, no force / She neither moves nor sees / Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course / With rocks and stones and trees” [Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, 164]). The discussion of repetition then leads Liu to consider the passage in Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal in which she explains that she read some lines of poetry over and over again in order to lull William to sleep. Without pausing to examine the relation between this anecdote and “A slumber,” Liu returns to the problem of “blockage,” claiming that not only writer’s block but also the blockage of Coleridge’s bowels is the source of Wordsworth’s insomnia. Indeed, he goes on to suggest that Coleridge’s constipation is the condition of Wordsworth’s sleeplessness and the sonnets that archive it. Liu describes Coleridge’s ailments at length—claiming that his system is blocked, that he is blocked, and that the friendship is blocked, before turning to a discussion of Annette Vallon, the Lonsdale debt, and finally to a description of Wordsworth in 1802 as being “in the grip on Sisyphean repetition” (473) of which the sonnets “To Sleep” are one archive among others. For a rather different, literary-historical and intertextual account of the sonnets, see J. V. Cunningham, Tradition and Poetic Structure (Denver: Swallow, 1960). 26. Emmanuel Lévinas, Existence and Existents, trans. A. Lingis (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1978), 65. Originally published as De l’existence à l’existant (1947; reprint, Paris: Vrin, 1986), 109. 27.  Lévinas, De l’existence à l’existant, 109; Existence and Existents, 65. 28. W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” in Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage, 1991), 247–48.

   Notes to Pages 157–58 29. In her excellent Regions of Sorrow: Anxiety and Messianism in Hannah Arendt and W. H. Auden (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), Susannah Young-Ah Gottlieb explains Auden’s understanding of what poetry can— indeed must—do. It must praise, or, as in the last line of the Yeats elegy, “Teach the free man how to praise.” Auden’s notion of praise lies between utopia and melancholia; it is what, in a Benjaminian phrase, Gottlieb understands as a “weakly redemptive” mode, like “going on” and “getting on” (Regions of Sorrow, 184). As Gottlieb concludes: “Poetry as praise cannot repair any faults and does not celebrate faultlessness in any form. By praising faulted beings, poetry lays the ground for forgiveness—and this ground is fissured, fluid, and thankfully faulted” (197). While praise here is a nearly neutral term, one that approximates what elsewhere I call “acknowledgment,” and while poetry—even poetry as praise—is nonredemptive, it remains more positive, even if only by a hair, than the account of poetic passivity or survival that I am here at work to describe. Poetry as wakefulness and survival neither “repairs” nor “celebrates,” but neither does it provide a ground, however scorched, for freedom. It merely endures and is that through which we merely endure. 30. Insomnia recurs throughout Lévinas’s oeuvre, although here I am concerned only with its most explicit, most formal articulation. For other versions of this argument, see Lévinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987); the discussion of the il y a in Ethics and Infinity, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), Lévinas’s clearest account of his position; and the 1975 essay “God and Philosophy,” in Basic Philosophical Writings ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 129–48. 31.  Lévinas, Existence and Existents, 66; and De l’existence à l’existant, 110–11. In The Space of Literature, Maurice Blanchot details the relation between sleep and dream in a discussion that by turn evokes Freud and Borges: The dream is the reawakening of the interminable. It is an allusion at least, and something like a dangerous call—through the persistence of what cannot finish—to the neutrality that presses up behind the beginning. . . . He who dreams sleeps, but already he who dreams is he who sleeps no longer. He is not another, some other person, but the premonition of the other, of that which cannot say “I” any more, which recognizes itself neither in itself nor in others. (Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982], 267)

32.  Lévinas, Existence and Existents, 66; De l’existence à l’existant, 112. 33. See Ferguson’s discussion of “We Are Seven” in Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (London: Routledge, 1992), in which personification concerns forms of existence: “The interest of ‘We are Seven’ lies in the girl’s being able by counting to personify persons—which in this case represent neither abstract ideas nor flesh and blood. Her personifications

Notes to Pages 158–62    take their plausibility and their strangeness from the mere fact that they attempt to cancel out the difference between past existence and present existence” (164; my emphasis). For an earlier account of this “personification of persons,” see also the first chapter of her Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977): The insistence of the cottage girl in “We are Seven” that she and her dead siblings are not separated from one another by death involves a kind of personification, but it is personification pushed to such an extreme that it becomes a virtual anti-type to personification. This girl personifies persons, and the radically disquieting element in her remarks is the growing consciousness in the poem that persons should need to be personified, should need to be reclaimed from death by the imagination. (26–27)

In the terms of my discussion, it is not simply a matter of recovering persons from death or canceling out the past and present through enumeration. Rather, personification makes recounting possible by at once interrupting and failing to interrupt wakefulness. 34.  Lévinas, Existence and Existents, 67; De l’existence à l’existant, 112. 35. This anonymity recalls Keats’s description of the poet’s impersonality. Both Blanchot and Agamben refer to Keats’s October 27, 1818, letter to Richard Woodhouse in a context that resonates with my own discussion of witnessing. See Blanchot, Space of Literature, 180, n. 5; and Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone, 1999), 112–13. chapter 6: breath, today 1. This line from Celan’s poem “Deim vom Wachen” (Your Dream) can be translated as “it carries / woundreadings over.” Pierre Joris translates it somewhat less neologistically as “it carries / sore readings over.” See Paul Celan, Breathturn, trans. Pierre Joris (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 1995), 80–81. The poem also appears in Paul Celan, Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), 2: 24. 2. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1 (1913–26), ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 254–55. 3. For an argument that treats the ethical stakes of the distinction between the life of living creatures and the life of texts, especially as it relates to personification, see Amy Hungerford, The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). For a discussion of “bare life,” including the life of those who are “brain dead,” see Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), among others. Derrida also examines this ­passage in

   Notes to Pages 163–64 “Des tours de Babel,” where he considers Benjamin’s insistence, on the one hand, that what is at stake in the essay is the task of the translator (rather than translation) and, on the other hand, that what survives is not an author but the work: Benjamin situates the problem, in the sense of that which is precisely before oneself as a task, as the problem of the translator and not that of translation (nor, be it said in passing, and the question is not negligible, that of the translatoress). Benjamin does not say the task or the problem of translation. He names the subject of translation, as an indebted subject, obligated by a duty, already in the position of the heir, entered as survivor in a genealogy, as survivor or agent of sur-vival. The sur-vival of works, not authors. Perhaps the sur-vival of authors’ names and of signatures, but not of authors. Such sur-vival gives more of life, more than a surviving. The work does not simply live longer, it lives more and better, beyond the means of its author. (Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar [London: Routledge, 2002], 114)

4.  John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 9, 13. 5. Ibid., 206. Felstiner’s phrase—“making versions”—is ambiguous, for it suggests both translation and imitation. More than this, it also evokes the language of turning that forms a part of Celan’s definition of poetry as Atemwende or “breathturn,” which I discuss in the final section of this chapter. 6. This inversion coincides with what Timothy Bahti calls the ends of the lyric. See The Ends of the Lyric: Direction and Consequence in Western Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). The end turns out to be a suspension of the end. That Bahti’s study begins with Shakespeare and concludes with Celan suggests that the double text I consider in this chapter can be understood to designate the two “ends” of the study of the “ends” of the poem, that is, the two suspensions that figure the finite—and inevitable afterlife—of the lyric. 7. I reproduce Stephen Booth’s modern version of the poem in Shakespeare’s Sonnets (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 63. The Quarto edition reads: Noe Longer mourne for me when I am dead, Then you shall heare the surly sullen bell Giue warning to the world that I am fled From this vile world with vildest wormes to dwell: Nay if you read this line, remember not, The hand that writ it, for I loue you so, That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot, If thinking on me then should make you woe. O if (I say) you looke vpon this verse, When I (perhaps) compounded am with clay, Do not so much as my poor name reherse; But let your loue euen with my life decay.

Notes to Page 165      Least the wise world should looke into your mone  And mocke you with me after I am gon.

Helen Vendler’s version differs only slightly from Booth’s modernization: she uses parentheses in lieu of commas in lines 9 and 10 and supplies a semicolon rather than a full stop (both in lieu of a colon in the Quarto) at the end of line 4. In Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 326. Kerrigan’s version is nearly identical to Booth’s except for his modernization of “vildest” (as “vilest”) in line 4, and restoration of “even” (from Booth’s “ev’n”) in line 12. In The Sonnets and “A Lover’s Complaint,” ed. John Kerrigan (London: Penguin, 1986), 112. The version of the sonnet printed alongside Celan’s translation is, like Celan’s translation, divided by double spaces into three quatrains and a couplet. It appears as follows: No longer mourn for me when I am dead Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell Give warning to the world that I am fled From this vile world with vilest worms to dwell. Nay, if you read this line, remember not The hand that writ it, for I love you so That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot If thinking one me then should make you woe. Oh if, I say, you look upon this verse When I perhaps compounded am with clay, Do not so much as my poor name rehearse, But let your love even with my life decay; Lest the wise world should look into your moan, And mock you with me after I am gone. (paul celan, Gesammelte Werke, 5: 338)

Peter Szondi claims, on Klaus Reichert’s word, that the version of the poems included in the Insel-Bücherei edition Einundzwanzig Sonnette “was not suggested by Celan, nor did he provide the publisher with it; he did however examine and approve it.” See Szondi, Celan Studies, trans. Susan Bernofsky, with Harvey Mendelsohn (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 118, n. 19. 8. In Celan’s poetry, the coincidence of the end with the end of a poem occurs most dramatically in the poem “Du liegst im großen Gelausche” (You lie . . . ); 1971), where “Nichts / Stockt [Nothing / stops],” which is written across two lines, is the end of the poem. Szondi discusses this structure in his unfinished essay “Eden,” as does Thomas Fries in his somewhat elusive analysis of Szondi. See Peter Szondi, “Eden,” in Celan Studies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 83–95; Thomas Fries, “Critical Relation: Peter Szondi’s Studies on Celan,” trans.

   Notes to Pages 165–66 James G. Hughes, Boundary 2: A Journal of Postmodern Literature and Culture 11, no. 3 (Spring 1983): 139–67. In the discussion that followed Fries’s paper, Jacques Derrida aligned this logic of the “stop” (i.e., the end of the poem), as stated by “Nichts / Stockt,” to the invaginated logic that, in “Living On: Borderlines,” he locates in Blanchot and Shelley. Jacques Derrida, “Living On: Borderlines,” trans. James Hulbert, in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom et. al. (New York: Continuum, 1979), 75–176. 9. The brevity of mourning here required ensures its impossibility. In aiming to forestall melancholia, the prescription seems to render melancholia inevitable. This is something like what Judith Butler, in The Psychic Life of Power: Essays in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univeristy Press, 1997), describes as the “foreclosure” of love or loss allegorized by the unavailability of a public space for homosexuals to mourn, especially to mourn AIDS-related deaths, and the guilt or self-beratement that attends this foreclosure. Butler lays out the predicament in this way: The problematic is made all the more acute when we consider the ravages of AIDS, and the task of finding a public occasion and language in which to grieve this seemingly endless number of deaths. More generally, this problem makes itself felt in the uncertainty with which homosexual love and loss is regarded: is it regarded as a “true” love, a “true” loss, a love and loss worthy and capable of being grieved, and thus worthy and capable of having been lived? Or is it a love and a loss haunted by the specter of a certain unreality, a certain unthinkability, the double disavowal of the “I never loved her, and I never lost her,” uttered by a woman, the “I never loved him, I never lost him,” uttered by a man? (138)

Shakespeare’s sonnet might be understood as an early-modern version of this allegory: addressed to the enigmatic Mr. W.C., the sonnet follows the conventions of the heterosexual love lyric and implicitly figures the addressee as feminine in order to get over mourning, in order to render mourning something that will have occurred and been finished with even if it never will have taken place. Shakespeare’s sonnet turns a prohibition against mourning into an interval for mourning, but does so paradoxically and preemptively by destabilizing, rather than establishing, the difference between the living and the dead. 10.  Perhaps the best example of confusion between the absent and the dead comes in William Wordsworth’s lyrical ballad, “We Are Seven,” where the young girl explains:      Seven are we, And two of us at Conway dwell, And two are gone to sea. Two of us in the church-yard lie, My sister and my brother, And in the church-yard cottage, I Dwell near them with my mother.

Notes to Page 167–69    See William Wordsworth, “Lyrical Ballads,” and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 73–75. 11. At the risk of moving too quickly, I want to point out Celan’s response to this connection. Rather than describe the poet as dead in the first line, Celan instead uses the German word hinweg (gone away), which maintains a sense of errancy and might even be read “literally” as on a ruined (or broken) way. 12.  Vendler, Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 326; Celan, Gesammelte Werke, 5: 339. Further references to Celan’s translation of sonnet 71 will be cited parenthetically in the text. 13.  Vendler, Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 326; Booth, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 63; Kerrigan, The Sonnets and “A Lover’s Complaint,” 112. For Wells and Taylor, see William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 759. In the preface to his edition of the sonnets, Booth uses the example of sonnet 116 to discuss the decisions that govern his punctuation. In short, he is unconvinced by the authenticity of the punctuation (and orthography) in the Quarto and hence emphasizes clarity—even when that involves an attempt to preserve some of the sonnets’ own nonclarity. 14. See William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York: New Directions, 1947), 48–56. 15. See de Man’s account of the impossibility of translating Aufgabe in Benjamin’s title “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers”—and the Aufgabe (qua failure) of Benjamin’s French and English translators in “Conclusions”: The translator, per definition, fails. The translator can never do what the original text did. Any translation is always second in relation to the original, and the translator as such is lost from the very beginning. . . . Aufgabe, task, can also mean the one who has to give up. If you enter the Tour de France [as if it were the Tour de Babel—author’s aside] and you give up, that is the Aufgabe. . . . The translator has to give up in relation to the task of refinding what was there in the original. (Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986], 80)

16. In 1960, Celan published translations of the two other sonnets (90 and 137) in the journal Neue Rundschau. The remaining eighteen sonnets appeared in the same journal, vol. 75 (1964). In 1967, Celan added sonnet 107 and published Einundzwanzig Sonnette (Twenty-one Sonnets). According to the chronology produced in Axel Gellhaus et al., eds., “Fremde Nähe”: Celan als Übersetzer; Katalog (Marbach am Neckar: Schillergesellschaft, 1997), sonnet 71 is dated February 5, 1961 (sonnets 1–5 and 70–71 are from this period). This information—as well as excerpts from the correspondence between Celan and the program directors— appears in “Fremde Nähe,” 417–47. Felstiner discusses Celan’s relation to Shakespeare at several points in Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. An earlier version of this discussion appears in his “Translating Celan Translating Shakespeare,” Parnassus: Poetry in Review 16, no. 1 (1990): 174–94. Much of the biographical information

   Notes to Pages 170–72 offered there also draws upon Israel Chalfen, Paul Celan: A Biography of His Youth, trans. Maxmilian Bleyleben (New York: Persea, 1991) (the English translation to which Felstiner provides an introduction). The final couplet of Celan’s translation of Shakespeare’s sonnet 106 serves as the epigraph to the biography; however, while Shakespeare’s English is presented in its standard form, Celan’s German, printed beneath it, appears on four lines, thus aligning the caesuras with the line breaks. 17. Stefan George, sonnet 71, in Shakespeare Sonette (Berlin: Bondi, 1909), 77; Karl Kraus, sonnet 71, in Shakespeares Sonette (Wein: Fackel, 1933), unnumbered. 18. Celan, Gesammelte Werke, 5: 339. 19.  Krzysztof Ziarek, Inflected Language: Toward a Hermeneutics of Nearness; Heidegger, Lévinas, Stevens, Celan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 133. 20. Celan’s two most developed explanations of his poetics give theoretical proof to Ziarek’s claim. In his 1958 address upon receiving the Bremen Prize, Celan said that poems are “headed toward.” “Toward what,” remains a question, but Celan offers as possible answers: “something open, inhabitable, an approachable you, perhaps, an approachable reality. Such realities are, I think, at stake in a poem.” In Paul Celan, Collected Prose, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop (Riverdale-onHudson, NY: Sheep Meadow, 1986), 35. In “The Meridian” (1960), Celan writes that a “you” is the “intention” of the poem (Collected Prose, 49). In both cases, Celan is at work to describe the contours of contemporary (read: postwar) poetry in Europe. 21. Werner Hamacher, Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan, trans. Peter Fenves (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 337–87. 22. Another version of this infestation of all words by a cry or sentence that remains absent is evident in Celan’s translation of Jean Cayrol’s text for Alain Renais’ documentary Nuit et brouillard, which I discuss in the next chapter. 23.  Vendler emphasizes the personification in Shakespeare’s line: “The personified surly sullen bell, ungenerous to its parishioner even in the hour of his death, epitomizes the reach of social disapproval” (Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 328). On Celan’s translations of Shakespeare’s sonnets as “enactments,” see Peter Szondi’s “Poetry of Constancy—Poetik der Beständigkeit: Paul Celan’s Translation of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 105,” in Celan Studies, 1–26. Bringing Benjamin’s notion of translation as translation of intention to bear upon Celan’s translation of sonnet 105, and acknowledging the thematic questions of writing that the sonnet evokes for the translator, Szondi argues that Celan’s sonnet differs from Shakespeare’s sonnet because “constancy” is not merely its theme but its mode: “In Celan’s version [of sonnet 105], the poet does not speak of his ‘argument,’ his ‘invention,’ or his ‘scope,’ but instead, the verse is arranged in accordance with the exigencies of

Notes to Pages 173–74    this theme and of this objective aim. Nor does the poet affirm that his verse leaves out difference. Rather, he speaks in a language in which differences are simply left out” (25–26). I am indebted to Szondi’s reading of sonnet 105, especially for the “cues” that it gives to my own reading. However, as should be obvious, by focusing on a sonnet where “poetry of survival” rather than “poetry of constancy” is at issue, the direction of my inquiry obviously differs from his. For a fine reading of Szondi’s essay and rereading of sonnet 105, see Thomas Pepper, “Er, or Borrowing from Peter to Pay Paul,” in Word Traces: Readings of Paul Celan, ed. Aris Fioretos (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 353–68. Pepper attends to the “third person” and absent addressee as the thematic scar remaining in Celan’s translation of Shakespeare’s sonnet 105. My attempt to read Celan’s poetics of survival can be read as a reflection on the final paragraph of Pepper’s essay, and especially its penultimate sentence, which reads: Thus here, in the kingdom of ich, ihr, and er, in which there is no du (as there is no you in Shakespeare’s poem either—the poet at this point being fully engaged in his activity of writing, which activity is not being addressed, as in many of the earlier sonnets, to a singularly beloved you), a kingdom from which all “persons” have been deported, the poet’s activity is always already accomplished in the preterite of “den ich da lieb.” (363)

24. Szondi, Celan Studies, 20–21. 25. Hamacher, Premises, 355, n. 15. Although Hamacher seems to be speaking about the same trope as Szondi, he spells it “paranomasia” rather than “paronomasia.” 26.  Later in the sonnet, paronomasia will more explicitly reflect the task of translation, which wavers between mindfulness (eingedenk ), commemoration (gedenken ), and false commemoration (meineid gedenken ). Celan’s translation bears witness to the crises that remembering and forgetting involve. By dramatizing these crises—above all with the figure of paronomasia as a dramatization of the unsettling afterlife that translation renders—Celan also introduces another interruption. 27. Euphemism, according to Richard A. Lanham, is a “circumlocution to palliate something unpleasant.” A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 72. It is a form of aestheticization. His example is pass away for die. The most familiar example in this context would be “Final Solution” for genocidal murder. Celan’s entire poetic project—in its difficulty—might be understood as a response to euphemism. Thus, in the “Bremen Address” Celan states that language “had to go through . . . terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It went through. . . . In this language I tried, during those years and the years after, to write poems: in order to speak, to orient myself, to find out where I was, where I was going, to chart my reality” (34). The “reality drive”—which is manifest in

   Notes to Page 174 positing, naming, finding, and forging words—constitutes Celan’s response (and resistance) to euphemism. For another (albeit somewhat reticent) definition of euphemism—one articulated in a reading of Wordsworth’s “A slumber did my spirit seal,” see Geoffrey H. Hartman, “The Interpreter’s Freud”: I want to suggest that Wordsworth’s curious yet powerful complacency is related to euphemism: not of the artificial kind, the substitution of a good word for a bad one, or the strewing of flowers over a corpse, but an earthy euphemism, as it were, a balm deriving from common speech, from its unconscious obliquity and inbuilt commitment to avoid silence. To call it euphemism may be inadequate, but the quality I point to resists overconsciousness and demystification. . . . What makes Wordsworth’s poetry so difficult to psychoanalyze is its underlying and resistant euphemism, coterminous with ordinary language, and distinguished from the courtly and affected diction of the time. (A Critic’s Journey: Literary Reflections, 1958–1998 [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999], 216)

In this account, euphemism is tied to Wordsworth’s poetics of man, that is, to the exclusion (and recurrence) of prosopopoeia. Kevis Goodman offers a compelling account of euphemism that resonates clearly with Celan’s poetry. She considers euphemism as more than mere ideology, and writes (having quoted George Orwell’s more limited understanding of the trope): “I would also hold the door open for a more vexed or compulsive kind of fair-speaking that is neither snow-job nor silence, but rather more like static or stutter: a disturbance of speech that acknowledges a history beyond the pleasure principle, but not beyond representation.” Kevis Goodman, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 139. 28. Ulrich Baer, Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 181. French is biographically relevant: Celan lives and writes in Paris, is married to a French woman, teaches at the École Normale, and translates French poets, including Char, Michaux, and Rimbaud, into German. 29. I refer in particular to Baer’s reading of “Welchen der Steine . . .” (Whichever stone . . . ). 30.  References to Hölderlin and Heidegger echo throughout Celan’s sonnet. All of the “major” additions in his translation reflect either Heidegger’s or Hölderlin’s poetics. Furthermore, three of these additions congeal in the matrix: building, dwelling, thinking. Celan introduces these words into the poem: he adds a building (Turm, suggesting the Hölderlinturm of “Tübingen, Janner”), dwelling (the first wohnte), and as we will see in line 8, the status of this poem as translation circulates around thinking and its relation remembering (gedenkst, which he does not “add,” but rather interrupts). The account (and demonstration) of memory and love at work in these lines evokes, in particular, Hölderlin’s “Andenken” (Remembrance) (e.g., the poem’s last lines: “Es nehmet aber / Und giebt Gedachtniß die

Notes to Page 175    See, / Und die Lieb’ auch heftet fleißig die Augen, / Was bleibet aber, stiften die Dichter [But it is the sea / That takes and gives remembrance, / And love no less keeps eyes attentively fixed, / But what is lasting the poets provide]”). Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger (London: Penguin, 1994), 252–53. These specters of Heidegger and Hölderlin suggest two main points: (1) contrary to John Felstiner’s analysis of the “Jewish turn” in Celan, this 1964 poem is concerned with the poetics of being; (2) the poetics of being with which the sonnet is concerned relates to what Hölderlin in his Sophocles translations calls the “counterrhythmic turn,” a turn that in this translation emerges as the instance of “survival.” A full account of Celan’s relation to Heidegger and Hölderlin in the context of translation is beyond the scope of this chapter, and I direct the reader to some of the best analyses of their Auseinandersetzung for some initial clues. See, for example, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s Poetry as Experience, trans. Andrea Tarnowski (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), in particular the chapter entitled “Two Poems by Paul Celan,” a reading-translation of Celan’s “Hölderlin” (“Tübingen, Janner”) and “Heidegger” (“Todtnauberg”); Christopher Fynsk, “The Realities at Stake in a Poem,” in Word Traces, ed. Fiorestos, 159–84, which argues that “we find in Celan’s statement [of poetics] a forceful appropriation of Heidegger’s description of the structure of the work of art . . . [that] depart[s] from Heidegger by pushing Heidegger’s thought to the singularity of existence (or of the work of art) in the direction of a very radical understanding of the relation to the other” (169); Dennis Schmidt, “Black Milk and Blue: Celan and Heidegger on Pain and Language,” in Word Traces, ed. Fiorestos, 110–29—an essay that thinks together Celan’s attempts to “name” silence in a poem and Heidegger’s attempts to name the word; and Hadrien France-Lanord, Paul Celan et Martin Heidegger: Le Sens d’un dialogue (Paris: Fayard, 2004). 31. Here it is worth noting that Stefan George faithfully translates “vile/­ vilest” as “feiler/feilester,” and uses haus (as a verb) rather than wohnen to translate Shakespeare’s “dwell” (“Aus feiler Welt zu feilster Würmer haus”). Kraus, on the other hand, uses wohnen, but divides Shakespeare’s English line across two German ones (“der grauser Welt die Botschaft überbringe / daß ich nunmehr bei grausen Würmern wohn”). That Celan drops the adjective remains curious here. At least two (compatible) readings of this change are available. On the one hand, this might be a consequence of the vocalization of the line in Celan’s translation and the relation between the utterance (not exactly a speaking “I”) and the addressee (der Welt ). The ethical demands of address preclude the aggression that maintaining the “vileness” would entail. But one could argue that the decision to say “­wohnen” twice structurally and aurally repeats, which is to say translates, the repetition of “vile” in Shakespeare’s sonnet. And it could be said, furthermore, that the German word for vile is wohnen—that, at least metonymically, it

   Notes to Pages 175–76 is dwelling in the Heideggerian register. The availability of this reading is given etymologically (and thus by way of Heidegger’s own methodology). Vile signifies the common or the base and only later takes on the secondary sense of “horribleness.” Surprisingly, it is not linked etymologically to the word villain, which would seem to share its origin. Villain descends from the Latin word villa (while vile has its origin in the Latin vilis), which means “country house” and shares with the Greek word oikos an origin in the Indo-European *weik-, *wik-, *woik-. The villain, thus is literally a “dweller in a villa,” so that by the medieval period, there is an encounter—a metaphorization, perhaps—that links “vile” with “villa” and thus that allows one to hear and to find “dwelling” in “vileness” and, likewise, “vileness” in “dwelling.” The historico-etymological proximity between dwelling and vileness might provide another way of understanding the place of “vileness” in Celan’s translation. 32. This turn confirms Pepper’s reading of the translation of sonnet 105. Pepper considers the relation between “I” and “he” (in the absence of a stated “you”), and, in an inversion of Celan’s reading of Lenz in “The Meridian,” he writes that “ich, I, in its abstract, (non)positional generality, is no more personal than the socalled third person.” Thus, Celan’s “er als ein ich [he as an I]” becomes “ich als ein er [I as a he]” (Collected Prose, 46; Gesammelte Werke, 3: 194). Pepper argues that this impersonality is not a thematic issue but a linguistic—even a musical one. He thus argues that sonnet 105, is “a poem in er” (“Er, or Borrowing from Peter to Pay Paul,” 362, 363), where er means he and also functions like a musical note. Pepper implicitly asks us to read the translation of Shakespeare together with ­Celan’s best-known poem, “Todesfugue.” In an essay on the voice of narrative, Blanchot considers the passage from je to il as the interruption of and by the other: “The narrative ‘he’ [or ‘it,’ il ], whether absent or present, whether it affirms itself or hides itself, and whether or not it alters the conventions of writing—linearity, continuity, readablity—thus marks the intrusion of the other—understood as neutral—in its irreducible strangeness and in its wily perversity. The other speaks.” Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 385. 33. All three quatrains and the final couplet alternate between “Du” and “Die[s]” as their opening word. The syncopation between “you” and “this/the” always means that the lines set out with alterity—even if this is the alterity of selfreferential writing. 34. On the rhetoric of the deictic present—sense-certainty and the “this”—in Hegel, see de Man, “Hypogram and Inscription,” in The Resistance to Theory, 27– 53; and Andrzej Warminski, “Reading for Example: ‘Sense-certainty,’ in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,” in Readings in Interpretation: Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 163–79. 35. On translation as it emerges in Celan’s translation of sonnet 87, see George

Notes to Pages 176–80 Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975): All of Celan’s own poetry is translated into German. In the process the receptor-language becomes unhoused, broken, idiosyncratic almost to the point of non-communication. It becomes a “meta-German” cleansed of historical-political dirt and thus, alone, usable by a profoundly Jewish voice after the Holocaust. To consider Celan’s Shakespeare translations separately from the rest of his work is, therefore, almost impossible. I want to look at one example only [sonnet 87] in which, characteristically, Celan makes of his recomposition of Shakespeare’s meaning an active image of the process of translation itself. (389)

By describing Celan’s poetic practice as one of “cleansing” language, Steiner inscribes this work as a repetition of the violence to which he responds. I would agree with Steiner’s suggestion that translation is at stake in all of Celan’s poetry, but I think that this can in no way be aligned with a “cleansing.” 36. Szondi, Celan Studies, 25. 37. There is still another resonance here: the demand, “vergiß, wers schrieb” also evokes: “vergiß, verschreib.” The demand to forget who writes would thus be met with another imperative: prescribe, write in advance, but also miswrite, make a mistake. “You”—the you who reads—is not only then called upon to forget who writes (a forgetting that is suspended as soon as it establishes that “I write”), but she also is called upon to make a mistake, to make a slip of the pen. To forget who writes is what this poem does when it aligns forgetting (who writes) and miswriting, when it aligns forgetting who writes with the coincidence of a prescription (Verschreiben) and a miswriting (Verschreiben), at the same time that the writer demands that the addressee forget who writes (wers schrieb). This forgetting would render an anonymous or unauthored work, which introduces another iteration of the revisionary demand wers schrieb as Vers schrieb, or verse wrote (or was written). To forget who writes would be to forget that this work is prescribed (written in advance, dictated to the translator) and that it is misinscribed (that it is written incorrectly). In other words, it would be to forget that this is a translation, and to figure it as writing that writes itself. 38. Celan, “Ansprache anlässich der Entgegennahme des Litteraturpreises der Freien Hansestadt Bremen,” in Gesammelte Werke, 3: 185; Celan, Collected Prose, 33 (trans. modified). 39.  Georg Büchner, Lenz, in Complete Plays, “Lenz,” and Other Writings, trans. John Reddick (New York: Penguin, 1993), 141. 40. Celan, “Der Meridian,” in Gesammelte Werke, 3: 196; my emphasis; “The Meridian,” in Collected Prose, 47. 41. Hamacher, Premises, 354–55. 42. Celan, “Weggebeitz,” in Gesammelte Werke, 2: 31. 43.  “Etched Away,” in Poems of Paul Celan, trans. Michael Hamburger (New York: Persea, 1972), 231. Pierre Joris translates the poem as “Eroded by”: “my

   Notes to Pages 180–83 ­ undred- / tongued perjury- / poem, the noem.” In Paul Celan, Breathturn, trans. h Pierre Joris (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 1995), 94–95. And John Felstiner— ensuring that the possessive remain heard without replacing the initial “die”— translates: “the hundred- / tongued My- / poem, the Lie-noem.” In Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, trans. John Felstiner (New York: Norton, 2001), 218. 44. Celan, Gesammelte Werke, 2: 31; Poems of Paul Celan, trans. Hamburger, 231. 45.  Baer, Remnants of Song, 187. 46. In 1997–99, Jacques Derrida devoted his seminar on Questions of Responsibility to “Pardon and Perjury.” The first seminars opened with a reading of Celan’s poem “Todtnauberg,” and my own thoughts on perjury—as well as on pardon— are indebted to him, as is my reading of Celan more generally. Derrida’s reading of “Todtnauberg” appears in Pardonner: L’Impardonnable et l’imprescriptible (Paris: L’Herne, 2005), 50–56. Derrida’s essays on Celan, “Shibboleth” above all, are collected in Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). On “Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye,” see Joel Fineman’s book by that title (Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Subjectivity in the Sonnets [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988]); see also the essay from which they originated, “Shakespeare’s ‘Perjur’d Eye,’ ” included in his posthumous The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literary Tradition: Essays Toward the Release of Shakespeare’s Will (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991). The title phrase comes from (the “Dark Lady”) sonnet 152: “For I have sworn thee fair: more perjured eye, / To swear against the truth of so foul a lie.” Celan did not translate this sonnet. But for Celan, translation and perjury have an intimate relation: Claire Goll falsely accused Celan of plagiarizing her husband Yvan Goll’s poetry. One could read the so-called Goll affair in the context of this logic of translation-perjury, but that reading will have to be undertaken elsewhere. 47. See Hamacher’s discussion of Celan’s “hands” and the role of grasping in a reading of the poem “Radix, Matrix”: “Speaking is grasping with the hands. In his letter to Hans Bender, Celan had written of poetry as hand-clasping and had thereby taken up once again the dead metaphor of grasping a concept, of making oneself capable of being grasped and, held in this grasp, of being understood” (Premises, 371). 48. Celan, “The Meridian,” in Collected Prose, 47, trans. modified; Gesammelte Werke, 3: 195–96. 49. Celan, “The Meridian,” in Collected Prose, 47; Gesammelte Werke 3: 195. 50. Celan, “Bremen Address,” in Collected Prose, 34; Gesammelte Werke, 3: 186. One cannot help but see and hear in this “Verstummen” the “vers” of poetry. 51. Or, as Lévinas writes, in the chapter of Otherwise Than Being that bears an epigraph from Celan: “I exist through the other and for the other, but without this being alienation: I am inspired. This inspiration is the psyche. The psyche

Notes to Pages 183–85    can signify this alterity in the same without alienation in the form of incarnation, as being-in-one’s-skin, having-the-other-in-one’s-skin.” Otherwise Than Being; or, Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 114–15. 52. Celan, “The Meridian,” in Collected Prose, 37; Celan, Gesammelte Werke, 3: 187. 53. On Pygmalion and prosopopoeia, see J. Hillis Miller, Versions of Pygmalion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), the first chapter in particular. 54. This is one of the most remarkable figures in Büchner’s—and Celan’s— work. Art would thus be a movement or a relation whereby it would be both the Medusa’s head and the frozen-murdered person before it. Considered in relation to Primo Levi’s (and Giorgio Agamben’s) deployments of the figure of the Gorgon’s head, one could say that witnessing requires a repetition of the arrest of art. 55. Here I refer specifically to Fynsk’s reading of Atemwende in “The Meridian.” Recalling Derrida’s discussion of Celan’s dates, Fynsk writes: “The time of the poem, of course, is that of an Atemwende; and as we have seen, the poem marks a date, even commemorates a date (it is ‘mindful,’ Celan says), as it proceeds from this pause of the breath and the word. It speaks from out of this date, ‘its date,’ and as such it speaks of its own concern” (“The Realities at Stake in a Poem,” in Word Traces, ed. Fiorestos, 169–70). While I agree with Fynsk that the Atemwende is the poem’s “present,” I am not certain that one can, as he does, equate entirely the commemorative (gedenken) and the mindful (eingedenk). It seems to me that the translation of these terms in the sonnet shows that they always risk being the same, but that mindfulness and commemoration (like poetry and art) might follow the same path, also undergoing a silent turn that divides them. 56. That Celan’s sonnet and Shakespeare’s sonnet both were broadcast on German Radio confirms the relevance of a discussion of reading aloud. However, I would argue that even silent reading is affected by Shakespeare’s enjambment and Celan’s interruption. 57. William Fitzgerald has suggested to me that the third quatrain of Celan’s sonnet, which begins “Du laß,” repeats the structure of cancellation that occurs in Shakespeare’s first quatrain. This repetition occurs in the deferred reading of the imperative (Leave!), an imperative that also enjoins one to stay, to read these words. It also occurs in the repetition in lines 10 and 12 of “nicht mehr”: “Staub bin und nicht mehr, /  . . . sag ihn nicht mehr her.” Not only does line 10 state both that I am no more than dust and that because I am dust I am no more, “nicht mehr” (“translating” Shakespeare’s “no longer”) is repeated. The repetition, however, assumes that what is no more still needs to become no more. The imperative states, at once, do not say my name here and do not repeat (hersagen) my name. The one who is no more still has to be rendered no more. 58. Maurice Blanchot, “The Last One to Speak,” trans. Joseph Simas, Acts 8–9

   Notes to Pages 185–87 (1988): 228; Le Dernier à parler (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1984), 11. Blanchot claims that these interruptions are not “pauses or intervals that allow the reader’s breath,” and I think that my reading concurs with his suggestion that the interruption does not just return us to possible reading but rather interrupts it, translating one form of unreadability into another. 59. In “Summa Lyrica,” his own interrupted essay on “speculative poetics,” Allen Grossman claims that poetry has two breaths: Scholium on line and breath. There are two breaths or breathings which poetic analysis takes into account: the Greater or Feeding Breath is the breath taken in, during which there can be no speech. This breath comes to an end with the limit of expansion, when the body is as full as can be of the nurturant air. This silent feeding on the world to the limit of expansion precedes or prepares for the line opening (or, in appropriate degree, the lesser medial caesura). The Lesser Breath is the breathing out, during which speech occurs as the reticulation of the dead breath. This Lesser, or Dead, or Speech Breath explores the opposite limit, the limit of contraction—at which limit is the line ending. The strong sense of the contradiction of speech and feeding lends weight to the preference of silence to speech, and adds a further bitterness to the paradox of storytelling. (“Summa Lyrica: A Primer of the Commonplaces in Speculative Poetics and the Ether Dome: An Entertainment,” special issue of Western Humanities Review 44, no. 1 [Spring 1990]: 59)

Grossman sets out by acknowledging the physiological division of breath and speech, but physiology here culminates in testimony. When one breathes in— in anticipation of speaking, when one “feed[s] on the world” in anticipation of speaking the poem—this breath occurs at the edges of a line. The line break gives time for the life breath. For Grossman, the “bitterness of storytelling” is that to tell a story—to speak one’s story—forces one to enter into the world of the dead. If there is a difference between poetry ordered by lines and storytelling ordered by sentences, it acknowledges that when one speaks, one bears and follows the dead breath not the life breath. Yet Celan’s translation interrupts this paradox; it interrupts the logic of the line and of the sentence. chapter 7: the remains of figure 1.  Paul Celan, “Whichever Stone You Lift,” in Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, trans. John Felstiner (New York: Norton, 2001), 70–71. The German reads: Welches der Worte du sprichst— du dankst dem Verderben.

2. I offer this clarification in distinction from arguments like Gubar’s, in which prosopopoeia always makes something impossible possible. My analysis is not so optimistic as hers.

Notes to Pages 187–88    3. He writes: “That something in the realm of interpretation is a demonstrable impossibility does not, however, prevent it from being ‘done,’ as the abundance of histories, literary histories, and readings demonstrates. On the other hand, I should agree that the impossibility of reading should not be taken too lightly. It has consequences, for life and death, since it is incorporated in the bodies of individual human beings, and in the body politic of our cultural life and death together.” See J. Hillis Miller, “The Critic as Host,” in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom et al. (New York: Continuum, 1979), 218. Judith Butler offers another version of this logic, articulated in terms of rights and what she calls “a strange neighbouring” of the universal and the particular: When one has no right to speak under the auspices of the universal, and speaks none the less, laying claim to universal rights, and doing so in a way that preserves the particularity of one’s struggle, one speaks in a way that may be readily dismissed as nonsensical or impossible. When we hear about “lesbian and gay human rights,” or even “women’s human rights,” we are confronted with a strange neighbouring of the universal and the particular which neither synthesizes the two, nor keeps them apart. (Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left [London: Verso, 2000], 39)

While my own emphasis here is not on the coupling otherwise of the universal and particular per se, what I wish to elaborate is this structure of an impossibility that endures even in its apparent occurrence. For the romantic precursor of this logic, see William Blake’s Descriptive Catalogue: “Historians pretend, who being weakly organized themselves, cannot see either their miracle or prodigy; all is to them a dull round of probabilities and possibilities; but the history of all times and places, is nothing else but improbabilities and impossibilities; what we should say, was impossible if we did not see it always before our eyes.” William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose, ed. David Erdman (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), 343. Ian Balfour examines this passage in The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy: “The mythical revolutionary moment, then, does not hover somewhere above or beyond history but stands as a paradigm for the historical act. . . . That these acts are impossible does not prevent them from happening.” The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 140. 4. For a discussion of aisthesis as sense, see the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, in particular, The Muses, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 1–39; and The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 1997. Nancy writes: “It is necessary to take as our renewed point of departure the sense of sense as aisthesis, insofar as it implies neither transcendence nor immanence. The heterogeneous entelechy of the sensing/sensed, in the spatializing unity of its contact, implies relationship in the form of being-affected-by, and consequently in the form of being-affectable-by, being-­liable-to (of which intellection and intelligible sense are, after all,

   Notes to Pages 188–89 only modulations or modalizations, even affections of affect itself )” (Sense of the World, 128). 5. Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah is the other film that most clearly offers testimony in lieu of representation—whether the reenactment of the past (as one finds in Schindler’s List or the dozens of other films that undertake to re-create the experience of the camps) or the recovery of archival images. Both films—Nuit et brouillard and Shoah—present the Polish landscape, but, unlike Nuit et brouillard, Shoah involves survivors who speak in their own voices. For a recent film on the Armenian genocide that reflects the questions at issue in making a film about genocide and also is a film about genocide, see Atom ­Egoyan’s excellent Ararat (Toronto: Serendipity Point Films, 2002). 6. It is this warning that gives the film its final words. 7. In short, the film seems to solicit an ethics that corresponds to Adorno’s revision of the categorical imperative after Auschwitz: live in such a way that Auschwitz could never recur. However, as we will see, it offers no hope that such a life is possible. For a fine discussion of the notion of the new categorical imperative in Adorno, see Josh Cohen, Interrupting Auschwitz (London: Continuum, 2003). 8. The statement appears in an interview; Derrida is responding to a question, posed by Jean-Luc Nancy, about Heidegger’s “silence.” Derrida states: I hope that you are not expecting me simply to say “I condemn Auschwitz” or “I condemn every silence on Auschwitz.” As regards this last phrase or its equivalents, I find a bit indecent, indeed, obscene, the mechanical nature of improvised trials instigated against all those whom one thinks one can accuse of not having named or thought “Auschwitz.” A compulsion toward sententious discourse, strategic exploitation, the eloquence of denunciation: all this would be less grievous if one began by stating, rigorously, what we call “Auschwitz” and what we think about it, if we think something. What is the referent here? Are we making a metonymical usage of this proper name? If we are, what governs this usage? Why this name rather than that of another camp, of other mass exterminations, etc. (and who has answered these questions seriously)? If not, why this forgetful and just as grievous restriction? If we admit—and this concession seems to me to be readable everywhere—that the thing remains unthinkable, that we still have no discourse equal to it, if we recognize that we have nothing to say about the real victims of Auschwitz, the same ones we nonetheless authorize ourselves to treat by metonymy or to name via negativa, then let’s stop diagnosing the alleged silences, forcing avowals of the “resistances” or “unthought” in everyone indiscriminately. Of course, silence on Auschwitz will never be justifiable; nor is speaking about it in such an instrumental fashion and in order to say nothing . . . (Jacques Derrida, “‘Eating Well’, or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in Who Comes After the Subject? ed. Eduardo Cadava et al. [New York: Routledge, 1991], 118)

9.  “Le Struthof, Oranienbourg, Auschwitz, Neuengamme, Belsen, Ravensbruck, Dachau, furent des noms comme les autres sur les cartes et les guides [Struthof, Oraneinberg, Auschwitz, Neuengamme, Belsen, Ravensbruck, Dachau.

Notes to Pages 190–91    These were names like any others on maps and in books].” Paul Celan, Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt-am-Main: Surkamp, 1983), 4: 76–77; “Building the Camps,” Night and Fog, DVD, directed by Alain Resnais (Paris: Como Films and Argos Films, 1955; n.p.: Janus Films, 2003). 10. The first reference to Cayrol is mislabeled in the index and the footnotes; it appears on page 136 (rather than 126, as printed). The reprinted passage is from the first section of Lazarus parmi nous, entitled “Les Rêves lazaréens,” and devoted to dreams in and after the camp. The volume includes excerpts from the chapter on “Les Rêves concentrationnaires,” and concludes with Cayrol’s admission that here he speaks only of what he knows: “Je ne parle ici que d’une catégorie du prisonniers que je connais bien; ceux qui étaient Nacht und Nebel, c’est-à-dire ceux qui ne recevaient aucun colis, aucune nouvelle et étaient retranchés totalement du monde vivant [Here I spoke only of a category of prisoners that I know well, those who were Nacht und Nebel, that is, those who could not receive packages or news and who were totally removed from the living world].” In Tragedie de la deportation, 1940–1945: Temoinages de survivants des camps de concentration allemands, ed. Olga Wormser and Henri Michel (Paris: Hachette, 1954), 137; Jean Cayrol, Lazare parmi nous (Neuchâtel: La Baconnière, 1950), 44–45. The testimony most extensively quoted in the book belongs to Antelme. 11.  Richard Raskin, “Nuit et Brouillard,” by Alain Resnais: On the Making, Reception, and Functions of a Major Documentary Film (Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 1987), 27. 12. In an interview, Resnais explains: “Ma première réaction a été évidemment de dire que je ne pouvais pas faire ça par-ce que je n’avais jamais été moi-même déporté, qu’il me semblait que seul une metteur en scène qui a été déporté pouvait se charger de ça. C’était donc tout à fait au-délà de mes capacités [My first reaction was obviously to say that I could not make it because I had not been deported myself and because it seemed to me that only a director who had been deported could be charged with this task. It was thus totally beyond my capacities].” Quoted in Raskin, “Nuit et Brouillard,” by Alain Resnais, 47. 13. Although Cayrol suggests that it is not an entirely new mode, for he sees the “romanesque lazaréen” already to have developed in the eighteenth century with Abbé Prevost. Ulrich Baer has suggested that Cayrol’s essay—which first appeared as a journal article—may have given rise to Blanchot’s account of a Lazarean literature in “Literature and the Right to Death,” in The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 300–344. This insight might allow for a more sustained analysis of Blanchot’s 1962 essay and its preoccupation with the Reign of Terror in its relation to the camps. 14. Apparently, Dauman thought that there would be no chance that Eisler would agree to work on the film. However, Eisler said yes almost immediately and spent several weeks in Paris working on the score. Albrecht Dumling explains

   Notes to Page 192 that, given the time constraints, Eisler used several preexisting works, above all a piece that he had composed for Hamlet. Albrecht Dumling, “Eisler’s Music for Resnais’ Night and Fog (1955): A Musical Counterpoint to the Cinematic Portrayal of Terror,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 18, no. 4 (October 1998): 575–84. 15. Andrew Hebard discusses Resnais’ relation to Nazi aesthetics and the “contamination” of art that the aestheticization of politics effected: The Nazi gaze contaminates Resnais’s present-day footage in quite deliberate ways. At the same moment that the commentary mentions these observation posts and the gaze of the guards, the camera pans across the camp from one of these very same observation posts. . . . It is notable that the bunkshot is the one where the more archival qualities of black and white infect the color footage. Similar to the archive which consists largely of Nazi photographs and films, the gaze of Resnais’s camera becomes the gaze of the Nazi. (Andrew Hebard, “Disruptive Histories: Toward a Radical Politcs of Remembrance in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog,” New German Critique 71 [Spring–Summer 1997]: 98)

16.  Mohn und Gedächtnis (Poppy and Memory), which included “Todesfugue,” had appeared in 1952; Von Schwelle zu Schwelle (From Threshold to Threshold) appeared in 1955. 17. For discussion of the phrase Nacht und Nebel, see Raskin, “Nuit et Brouillard,” by Alain Resnais, 15–24. 18. Ibid., 45. This call is represented in Margarethe von Trotta’s 1981 film Das Bleirne Zeit, translated as Marianne and Juliane (VHS, directed by Maria von Trotta, [Munich: Bioskop Film, 1981; New York: New Yorker Video, 1998]). The film is an account of two sisters’ relation to one another and to politics in the thirty years following the war. One sister (Juliane) is a liberal—a 1970s feminist, who works for a “new” women’s magazine, lives with an architect, refuses marriage and motherhood, speaks out in favor of unequivocal abortion rights, and so on; the other sister (Marianne) is a radical—a militant activist who went to Beirut in the 1970s and now has returned to Germany to bomb a bank. Although it is never exactly clear what Marianne has done, she is a fugitive, and her eventual prison experience closely resembles that of Gudrun Ensslin (one of the founders of the Baader-Meinhof Gang / Red Army Faction). Like Ensslin—and also like Ulrike Meinhof—she will be found dead by hanging in her prison cell. Much of the film is devoted to Juliane’s attempt to understand her sister’s militancy in the context of post-Holocaust Germany, an attempt that becomes more and more obsessive and futile (ruining her relationship and her life, and with no clear aim). The film portrays this destructive but nevertheless sympathetic interrogation as the position of the guilty-innocent generation of Germans born at the war’s end. In one of the flashback scenes, prompted by a visit to Marianne in prison, Juliane recalls a day when they were teenagers in the same class at school. The teacher assigned a Rilke poem (“one of the most beautiful in the language”). Marianne

Notes to Pages 192–93    (in a frilly dress) dutifully recites the poem in class, but Juliane (in jeans), when asked to analyze it, explains that it is sentimental, soppy, and irrelevant—only to be kicked out of class. Later that afternoon, both girls attend a screening of Nuit et brouillard at a youth center, with their father (who is portrayed as a heartless, stern Christian) behind the projector. This is Celan’s translation of the film, and von Trotta includes most of the last black-and-white sequence. The year is likely 1956 or 1957. The girls cannot bear to watch the images on screen and run out to the bathroom to vomit together. This shared trauma (seeing and vomiting both) becomes the occasion for Juliane to reflect upon their different responses to Nuit et brouillard’s address. Nuit et brouillard (Nacht und Nebel)—coupled with the viewing some years later of a documentary on mutilated third world children (a clip from which von Trotta includes, and which suggests the endurance of the horror that Resnais portrays)—appears to be the source of Marianne’s turn from dutiful daughter to violent radical. If von Trotta’s is a film about the power of film, it also recognizes the risk of its address. Anton Kaes also mentions this episode in From “Hitler” to “Heimat”: The Return of History as Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 24. 19.  Kaes, From “Hitler” to “Heimat,” 12. 20. Ibid., 15. 21. For a sustained analysis of anxiety in Resnais’ film, see Hebard, “Disruptive Histories.” Hebard argues that Nuit et brouillard offers a nontherapeutic mode of remembrance that does not coincide either with distancing or with mastering a loss. Hebard does not merely abandon a psychoanalytic idiom in order to undertake this reconception of remembrance, but recovers one of the essential terms of Freudian psychoanalysis—ambivalence—in order to describe what he calls “an anxious politics that does not work against the ambivalence of traumatic aporia, but works with in it.” In this account, anxiety is understood as “working ‘through’ ambivalence in a more literal sense, for it inhabits the very agonies of ambivalence and posits no exteriority as the location from which to launch a ‘politics’ ” (92). While Hebard focuses primarily on the visual elements of the film in order to explain the film’s anxious ground, I would add that the anxiety of remembrance that he so compellingly identifies as the film’s “accomplishment” is directly linked to the film’s inability to eschew figure at the very instant it dramatizes its failure to figure. Elissa Marder uses the phrase “temporal disorder” to describe the temporality of modern experience, along the lines of what Benjamin, reading Baudelaire, called “shock,” or what others, beginning with Freud, have called “trauma.” See Elissa Marder, Dead Time: Temporal Disorders in the Wake of Modernity (Baudelaire and Flaubert) (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001). 22.  “Building the Camps,” Night and Fog, DVD; Paul Celan, Gesammelte ­Werke, 4: 77. Unless otherwise noted, references to Cayrol, Nuit et brouillard (­Paris: Fayard, 1997), and Celan, Nacht und Nebel, will be from Celan’s ­Gesammelte

   Notes to Page 194 ­Werke, which includes both French and German texts. Even-numbered pages refer to Cayrol, odd numbers to Celan’s translation. References to the English translation of the French text are from the subtitles to the film. From the outset, it is also worth noting that, according to Raskin, Cayrol’s text may have been more of a collaborative effort than his name under the credit line “commentaire” suggests. Having watched Resnais’ film just once, he explained that he could not write his commentary while working closely with the film, as would be typical, for he found watching it unbearable. Thus, he wrote the text from memory, and Chris Marker, who was an assistant on the film, helped correlate the text and image. Thus, it remains unclear the extent to which certain of the preoccupations that emerge in the correspondence—or noncorrespondence— of text and image can be attributed only to Cayrol, or whether they should be attributed to the collaborative efforts of Cayrol, Marker, and presumably Resnais. Unlike Cayrol, Eisler projected the film while he composed and conducted the music, an act that apparently confused the musicians, for they tended to play intensely when intense scenes were projected, although these are the moments at which Eisler’s score remains most light, most gentle. 23. Celan, Gesammelte Werke, 4: 76. 24. As I mention in note 27 of Chapter 6, Hartman implicitly opposes euphemism to irony in his discussion of “A slumber did my spirit seal,” in “The Interpreter’s Freud.” While he does not specifically cite de Man’s reading of Wordsworth’s poem in the “Irony” section of “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” his analysis clearly reflects a disagreement with and recasting of de Man: “Yet though the poem can be said to approach muteness—if we interpret the blank between the stanzas as another elision, a lesion in fact—Wordsworth keeps speech going without a trace of guilty knowledge. . . . I want to suggest that Wordsworth’s curious yet powerful complacency is related to euphemism.” A Critic’s Journey: Literary Reflections, 1958–1998 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 216. Hartman goes on to explain his understanding of euphemism as an essential element of language: I have sometimes talked of euphemia rather than euphemism, both because we are dealing with a feature basic to language, and not simply to one poet’s use of language, and also because the aphasia it circumscribes remains perceptible. Wordsworth’s euphemia, in short, is nourished by sources in language or the psyche we have not adequately understood. They bring us back to an awareness of how much sustaining power language has, even if our individual will to speak and write is assaulted daily by the most trivial as well as by traumatic events. (220–21)

This notion of language as sustenance ultimately leads Hartman to reaffirm his understanding of language’s restorative powers, but rather than describe the de Manian chiasmus/paralysis of prosopopoeic donation, Hartman instead describes language as a means of proximity with the dead: “Writing has an impersonal, even impersonating, quality which brings the poet close to the dead ‘whose names are

Notes to Pages 194–98    in our lips,’ to quote Keats. Personare meant, originally to ‘speak through’ another, usually by way of an ancestral mask, which made the speaker a medium or an actor in a drama in which the dead renewed their contact with the living” (221). Nevertheless, to describe the dead as “renewing contact with the living,” and to do so through a “mask,” no doubt indicates a recuperative version language (structured chiasmically), which, however general in its sweep, remains closer to Gubar than to de Man, and thus leads us to forget how very absent and mute the dead remain—despite our efforts to renew contact with them. Kevis Goodman develops Hartman’s account of euphemism in Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 25. Agamben has made a similar point in Homo Sacer. Agamben understands the camp as the zone in which law and fact are confounded, the zone in which the state of exception becomes rule, the zone of dislocating localization that he calls “the hidden matrix of the politics in which we are still living.” The contemporary war on terror—which began after Agamben’s book appeared—has made this situation abundantly clear to us. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 175. 26. Celan, Gesammelte Werke, 4: 76. 27. For an explicit discussion of the landscape tradition and Celan’s reworking of it, see Ulrich Baer, Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). 28. Celan, Gesammelte Werke, 4: 77. 29.  David N. Coury, “ ‘Auch ruhiges Land . . . ’: Remembrance and Testimony in Paul Celan’s Nuit et Brouillard Translation,” Prooftexts 22, nos. 1–2 (­Winter– Spring 2002): 63. As I already have explained, this is not all that Cayrol’s text suggests; its temporal logic is far more complex, for what is at stake in his text— and in Resnais’ film generally—is not only the disturbing incongruence between current calm and former violence, not only the crisis of remembrance that this incongruence effects, but also the crisis of a preventative politics or an anticipatory ethics. 30. Ibid. 31.  Le Robert dictionary defines paysage as “a term from painting that designates in general the representation of a rural site, even the picture itself. . . . By ­metonymy, in the 16th Century the word meant the whole of the country, the country (1556). Before the end of the century, it commonly meant the area of the country that the eye could grasp in its entirety (1573), and it was this visual value that has been taken away from it” (s.v. “paysage”). The OED’s first definition of landscape is: “a picture representing natural inland scenery, distinguished from a

   Notes to Pages 198–200 sea picture, a portrait, etc.” (s.v. “landscape”). Only in the seventeenth century does landscape come to mean a view that can be taken at one glance, in the case of Nuit et brouillard, what the camera can see, for it cannot see “a country,” let alone “country.” Part of Coury’s confusion might be due to the English subtitles, which translate the second use of paysage (at the end of the film) as “countryside.” In French the passage reads: “Neuf millions de morts hantent ce paysage.” The English subtitles read: “Nine million dead haunt this countryside” (my emphasis). The image on screen at this point is not of the landscape with which the film opens, but rather of the collapsed crematorium, wrapped with rusty wires and overgrown with green shrubs. This is the point at which Celan twice uses the word Landschaft—a doubling that calls attention to the catachrestic use of the word: “Diese Landschaft: die Landschaft von neun Millionen Toten” (Celan, Gesammelte Werke, 4: 76–77). 32. Coury, “Remembrance and Testimony,” 63. 33.  Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit recognize a similar seamlessness in Resnais’ tracking shots, especially the shots filmed in the Block: All of Resnais’ compositional, or aestheticizing, strategies are designed to inhibit any account-giving, or any story-making, on the part of the spectator. Even the smooth mobility of Resnais’ expert tracking techniques works in this direction. While, for example, in a lateral tracking movement, the camera appears to float down the aisle between the crowded rows of empty bunks in one of the camp’s dormitories, the narrator tells us about the sleepless nights in these dormitories, the sudden intrusions by SS officers. There is almost something soothing about the movement, and yet its very uninteruptedness deprives us of the leisure of visually reconstructing the narrative we are listening to. We are, in other words, being deprived of the time we would need to provide the spoken text with its visual complement, to complete or immobilize its sense. And the movement never stops. (“Sadism and Film: Freud and Resnais,” Qui Parle 6, no. 1 [Fall–Winter 1992]: 21)

If, as we saw in Celan’s translation of Shakespeare’s sonnet, he interrupts the movement for a pause of breath, here his interruption of Cayrol’s text—which cannot interrupt, but only can accompany Resnais’ image—does not serve the reconstruction of a narrative or the recovery of a story but rather bears the wound of the German language. 34. See Coury, “Remembrance and Testimony.” 35. Celan, Gesammelte Werke, 4: 76. 36. Stuart Liebman and Leonard Quart, “Lost and Found: Wanda Jakubowska’s The Last Stop,” Cineaste 22, no. 4 (1997): 43. 37. Ibid. 38. Hebard considers the difference between the archival material and the contemporary camera work in terms of movement: The color footage is taken with a camera that not only pivots and tilts, but also tracks

Notes to Pages 200–207    relentlessly through the spaces of the abandoned camp. Much of the archival material, on the other hand, appears in the form of black-and-white, still photographs. The archival film footage is, with very few exceptions, shot by a stationary camera, a camera that occasionally pivots and tilts, but never moves. This oscillation between fixed and moving points of view initially structures a formal difference between past and present. (“Disruptive Histories,” 95)

Hebard will go on to show how this opposition breaks down. 39. Celan, Gesammelte Werke, 4: 78–79. 40. Ibid., 4: 80. 41.  Bersani and Dutoit, “Sadism and Film,” 18–19. 42. Celan, Gesammelte Werke 4: 80–81. Cayrol’s text reads: “Premier regard sur le camp: c’est une autre planète. Sous son pretexte hygiénique, la nudité, du premier coup, livre au camp l’homme déjà humilié.” Celan breaks up the lines of Cayrol’s text according to the punctuation marks, so that the German translation reads: “Ein erster Blick auf das Lager: / ein anderer Planet. / Unter de Vorwand der Hygiene liefert die Nacktheit einen bereits Entwürdigten ein.” 43. The shooting script (included in Raskin) identifies this image as a photo from an identity card—and the trace of an official stamp remains visible on it. This also seems to evoke the relation of true witness as Agamben has accounted for it; if the film “survives,” it presents the one who has seen the Gorgon’s head, yet paradoxically, the camera seems to have the effect of the Gorgon. 44. Celan, Gesammelte Werke, 4: 80–81. Jakubowska (quoted in Liebman and Quart) apparently used this same phrase to describe Auschwitz: “Jakubowska and her coscriptwriter Gerda Schneider decided to set almost all the action in the middle of ‘tine other planet,’ which was the women’s concentration camp at AuschwitzBirkenau” (“Lost and Found,” 43; my emphasis). 45. Celan, Gesammelte Werke, 4: 80. 46. Ibid., 4: 81. Celan recasts this sentence in terms of Wissen (savoir), although only to use the German ignorieren to translate méprisée in the following paragraph. 47. Celan, Gesammelte Werke, 4: 80. 48. Ibid., 4: 81. 49. This passage seems to harken back, although in order to solicit a different kind of response, to Hölderlin’s: “Was bleibet aber, stiften die Dichter [But what is lasting the poets provide].” For an excellent discussion of incompletion and Auschwitz, see Cohen, Interrupting Auschwitz. 50. Celan, Gesammelte Werke, 4: 80–83; my emphases. 51. Consider this in relation to Bersani and Dutoit’s account of sadism. 52. For another version of this failure, see Hebard’s discussion of the collapse of relevant and grounding distinctions—and the “anxiety” that they produce—in “Disruptive Histories.” 53. Celan, Gesammelte Werke, 5: 82.

   Notes to Pages 207–8 54. Ibid. 55. This is the first use of vous, although nous is used just before this, in the passage discussed above when the commentator describes the efforts of the film and its makers to find what remains of Auschwitz: “C’est bien en vain qu’à notre tour, nous essayons d’en découvrir les restes? [ . . . what hope do we have of truly capturing this reality?].” There is one other instance of direct address in the film, in the final color sequence, which begins: “Au moment où je vous parle . . . [As I speak to you now . . . ].” Whereas the passage I now discuss concerns a plural first-person address (“we”), the final passage involves the singular first person (“I”). 56. Celan, Gesammelte Werke, 5: 83. One possible English translation of this phrase is: “Of dangerous lurking, brick-colored sleep . . .” 57. I. G. Farben is mentioned somewhat later in the film: “Die Industrie­Planung zeigt Interesse für dieses unerschöpfliches Arbeitsfkräfte-Resevoir. Manche Werke haben ihre eigenen, der SS unzugänglichen Lager. Bei Steyr, Krupp, Heinkel, I. G. Farben, Siemens, Hermann Göring und anderen werden auf diese Weis die Lücken geschlossen [1945. Les camps s’étendent, sont pleins. Ce sont des villes de cent mille habitants. Complet partout. La grosse industrie s’intéresse à cette main d’oeuvre indéfiniment renouvelable. Des usines ont leurs camps personnels interdits aux S.S. Steyr, Krupp, Heinkel, I.G. Farben, Siemens, Hermann Goering s’approvisionnent à ces marchés (Celan, Gesammelte Werke, 5: 94–95); 1945. The camps are spreading, and they’re full. Cities of a hundred thousand inhabitants, full to bursting. Heavy industry takes an interest in this endlessly renewable labor force. Factories have camps of their own, off-limits to the SS. Steyer, Krupp, Heinckel, I. G. Farben, Siemens, Hermann Göring recruit their labor here]” (Night and Fog, “Extermination”). 58. Upon hearing “farbener” as “I. G. Farben,” we are left with the stray er, or what Thomas Pepper would call an “er-finding.” Thomas Pepper, “Er, or Borrowing from Peter to Pay Paul,” in Word Traces: Readings of Paul Celan, ed. Aris Fiorestos (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 358. Szondi discusses a moment in Celan’s translation of Shakespeare’s sonnet 105 in which er as a prefix turned personal pronoun becomes one of the occasions to recognize Celan’s reflection upon grammar. The passage reads “Ich find, erfind” (and Szondi reads erfind not only as the repetition of the finden in “invention,” but the conjugation ich find, in which er is heard as a personal pronoun er find that resonates with Celan’s “Ich grabe du gräbst, und es gräbt auch der Wurm [I dig, you dig, and the worm digs too],” in “Es War Erde in Ihnen” [“There was Earth Inside Them”], the poem with which Die Niemandrose opens). Er schlaf does not simply sound as a grammatical phrase (“he sleeps,” which would be er schläft). Erschlaffen means “weakening” or “growing limp,” which describes the text’s own limpening or limping at this instance of breaking off, which is somewhat closer to Pepper’s suggestion that Szondi’s separation of er,

Notes to Pages 208–9    “one of the most common diaphones to be found in German, perhaps the most common,” leads not to the discovery of constancy but rather to “the automatisms which pervade the entire linguistic structure” (358). To be left with er at the instant when Celan abandons the translation of nous and vous suggests that the disarticulating destruction that precludes a reflection upon address—but is merely an address—also shows that German is the language not of wir and ihr of but er—unaccounted for, absent, linguistically lurking here. See Celan, Gesammelte Werke, 1: 211; The Poems of Paul Celan, trans. Michael Hamburger (New York: Persea, 1972), 152–53. 59. Or, in other words, we encounter in this instant the materiality of the letter, the prosaic, untranslatable element that Paul de Man has recognized in Kleist and in Kant. That this corresponds to the translation—or rather the absent translation—of the apostrophic instance in Cayrol, that it corresponds to the avoidance of the statement of the failure of presentation, and to what I understand as the performance of failure in its stead, the translation of trope as performative, is another way of understanding the disarticulation of language. This is linked also to the fact that at least two of Celan’s words are neologisms: umlauerter and backsteinfarbener. The 1955 poem “Welchen der Steine du hebst” (Whichever stone you lift), from which this chapter draws its epigraph, follows the same logic, although does so in an address to an intimate other (“du”): “Welches der Worte du sprichst— / du dankst / dem Verderben [Whichever word your speak— / you owe to / destruction].” See Celan, Gesammelte Werke, 1: 129; Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, trans. John Felstiner (New York: Norton, 2001), 70–71. The debt to destruction, in which destruction becomes the resource of every word, figures the ethical morass of survival. 60. On the prosaic, see, for example, Paul de Man, “Hegel on the Sublime”: Hegel describes the inexorable progression from the rhetoric of the sublime to the rhetoric of figuration as a shrinkage from the categories of critical language that are able to encompass entire works, such as genre, to terms that designate only discontinuous segments of discourse, such as metaphor or any other trope. His only language becomes increasingly contemptuous of these subparts of the aesthetic monument. He calls them inferior genres (untergeordnete Gattungen), only (nur) images or signs “deprived of spiritual energy, depth of insight, or of substance, devoid of poetry or philosophy.” They are, in other words, thoroughly prosaic. They are so, however, not because of some initial shortcoming in the poet who uses these art forms rather than the major representation genres—epic, tragedy—but as the consequence of an inherent linguistic structure that is bound to manifest itself. (­Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996], 118)

And from “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant”: “The bottom line, in Kant as well as in Hegel, is the prosaic materiality of the letter and no degree of obfuscation or ideology can transform this materiality into the phenomenal cognition of aesthetic judgment” (Aesthetic Ideology, 90); and from “Anthropomorphism and

   Note to Page 209 Trope in the Lyric”: “True ‘mourning’ is less deluded. The most it can do is to allow for non-comprehension and enumerate non-anthropomorphic, non-celebratory, non-lyrical, non-poetic, that is to say, prosaic, or, better, historical modes of language power” (in The Rhetoric of Romanticism [New York: Columbia University Press, 1984], 262). 61. As I mention in the previous chapter, Szondi describes a similar enactment at work in Celan’s translation of Shakespeare’s sonnet 105. Szondi notices that there, as here, Celan “leaves untranslated those passages in which Shakespeare describes his own poem, his own style, and the goal of his writing, or else he translates them so ‘freely’ that they no longer seem to deal with these topics.” Peter Szondi, Celan Studies, trans. Susan Bernofsky, with Harvey Mendelsohn (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 25. Szondi goes on to explain: In Celan’s version, the poet does not speak of his “argument,” his “invention,” or his “scope,” but instead the verse is arranged in accordance with the exigencies of this theme and of this objective aim. Nor does the poet affirm that his verse leaves out difference. Rather, he speaks in a language in which differences are simply left out. Celan, writing in the wake of the later Mallarmé and an attentive observer of modern linguistics, philosophy of language, and aesthetics, drew the logical consequence from the Symbolist conception of poetry, in which a poem is its own subject matter and both invokes and describes itself as a symbol. According to Jakobson, there exists a certain kind of constancy that is projected from the paradigmatic axis (of which it is constitutive) into the syntagmatic axis and that distinguishes the poetic sequence from the prosaic in this latter axis. If we accept Jakobson’s views, then we may say that in translating a poem whose subject matter is that very constancy, Celan, perhaps without knowing of Jakobson’s theorem, replaced the traditional Symbolist poem—which deals only with itself and which has itself as its subject matter—with a poem that does not deal with itself, but which is itself! He thus produced a poem that no longer speaks about itself, but whose language is sheltered in that very place that it assigns to its subject matter, which is none other than itself: It is sheltered “in constancy.” (25–26)

Szondi’s influential analysis allows us to perceive explicitly the relation within the two texts of Nuit et brouillard, to recognize Cayrol’s own self-reflexive, Symbolist inheritance (his production of a work about itself, about its possibility and impossibility, about its existence and demand from within that tension), and Celan’s abandonment of translation at the instance when the work posits and reflects upon its limit. Enacted here is not constancy but rather the extent to which the tension between the possibility and impossibility of presentation is active in the German language. Here, we also might contemplate the role of music in the film, and link Eisler’s score, and in particular its continuation once the screen has gone black (in the absence of the written word fin but with “fin” as the French commentary’s last word, albeit as “un cri sans fin”). The score concludes with four beats of the drum like the sound of an ellipsis. 62. This logic—of being deported through or by the work—recurs in several

Notes to Pages 209–12    accounts of writing after Auschwitz. See for example Blanchot on language and writing: “And it is thus toward another sort of language entirely—the language of writing, the language of the other always other whose imperative does not develop at all—it is in the direction of this other language that, outside of everything, outside consciousness and unconsciousness, in the element that vacillates between waking and reawakening, we know ourselves (not knowing this) to be always already deported.” Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 79. 63.  Bersani and Dutoit describe this scene as bearing a false promise: The camera appears to float down the aisle between the crowded rows of empty bunks in one of the camp’s dormitories, the narrator tells us about the sleepless nights in these dormitories, the sudden intrusions by S.S. officers. . . . There is the false promise at the end of the dormitory of a point of rest: we see part of the wall as a pinkish figure, doubling the screen’s frame, toward which the camera appears to be leading us. But before we get there, the tracking gives way to a pan to the right which scans the air vents before leaving the dormitory. Resnais’ technique makes us into cinematic deportees. (“Sadism and Film,” 21)

What Bersani and Dutoit consider a possible point of rest—a point on the far horizon from which we might be able to gather together the images and arrive at an understanding of what we have heard if not seen—in other words, a point on the horizon where we might see something—is also the place where they understand the film to figure itself. If the film suggests that were we to reach that horizon we might uncover a hidden truth, the indecipherable figure on the horizon remains undeciphered and at a perpetual distance. Bersani and Dutoit suggest that this “pinkish figure” is the “double” of the frame. Moreover, behind the figure, there is a window through which we cannot see. Taken together, the window and the double figure stage a mise en abîme of the film as the inaccessible core of the block. While the camera moves toward this distant figure, it never arrives there. Rather, the film registers the distant—abyssal—doorway without arriving at it or receiving the satisfaction (of final self-reflection, of something or nothing) that it appears to promise. Resnais’ film shuttles between the possibility of discovery as the discovery of figure (film’s figure, its own self-reflection, the mise en abîme), and the turn away from this abyssal reflection (figure) to the presentation of a blank wall. If it refuses the self-recovery of reflection and presents instead the blank of its absence, it is this movement, in the absence of persons, rather than Cayrol’s commentary, that Celan seems to translate when he writes, “Von Gefahren umlauerter, backsteinfarbener Schlaf . . . “ 64. In her reading of William Wordsworth’s Excursion, Kevis Goodman notes that the poem “provokes and stages a disturbance in the ear,” and goes on to write: I hope it is clear that this is not the same thing as the staging of a failure of signification, a deconstruction of meaning, since something is “registered,” namely muteness—which far more actively than “silent” (the plausible synonym we might have expected to modify

   Notes to Pages 212–15 “register”) suggests a forceful hindrance, external or physical, or else something too difficult to be uttered. (Georgic Modernity, 142)

This account of Wordsworth’s poem resonates with my reading of Celan’s translation of Nuit et brouillard. 65.  Raul Hilberg, “Auschwitz,” in The Holocaust Encyclopedia, ed. Walter Lacquer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 32–44. 66. That said, many have noted that the earth in Auschwitz is ashen, and that it is precisely the ash that makes it so fertile. The film itself suggests this implicitly, by noting in the final archival sequence (“ ‘Who Is Responsible?’ ” 26'05"– 26'26"of the Night and Fog DVD) that one of the hoped-for “uses” of the bones that remained in the ovens was fertilizer (“Avec les os . . . des engrais. Tout au moins on essaie”; “Aus den Knochen / wird Dünger gewonnen. Man stellt Versuche an” [Celan, Gesammelte Werke, 5: 94–95]; “From the bones . . . fertilizer—at least they tried” [Night and Fog, “Extermination”]). In German, the words for fertilizer and dung are the same (Dünger), thus the effort is not merely “recuperative” (to use Cayrol’s own word), but shows that recuperation involves the transformation of human corpses into animal excrement. Thus in an even stronger sense does the film register the sacrificial structure of the aesthetics of the beautiful with which it begins. On this “indifference” of the earth, we might also recall everything that Blanchot says of disaster: “Disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact” (Blanchot, Writing of the Disaster, 1). 67.  Recall Antelme’s description of the American allies’ response: “‘It is frightful. Yes, these Germans really are worse than barbarians. Frightful, yes frightful!’ Yes, truly frightful.” Robert Antelme, The Human Race, trans. Jeffrey Haight and Annie Mahler (Marlboro, VT: Marlboro, 1992), 288. 68. Celan, Gesammelte Werke, 5: 97. These are the only faces in the film that visibly are speaking, although we do see their lips move and we do not hear them. We only hear the commentary (which ventriloquizes them: “Je ne suis pas responsable”) and the score. 69. At the center of the last of these images is a spread out, faceless corpse that appears in the position of the crucifixion, but also suggests Picasso’s Guernica, which had been the subject of one of Resnais’ earlier short films. According to the decoupage, these are not images from Auschwitz but rather images from Dachau—demonstrating, even in their extraordinary excess, the absence of images of Auschwitz, the fact that we have nothing to see here, that we must translate, and that, as Cohen puts it, Auschwitz is a catachrestic term. 70. The question that emerges here concerns the meaning of “showing” (presentation, Darstellung)—the difference between showing and saying, between film and narrative as means of showing. 71. Celan, Gesammelte Werke, 5: 97.

Notes to Pages 216–20    ending in romanticism 1.  Lucy Dawidowicz, From That Place and Time: A Memoir, 1938–1947 (New York: Norton, 1989), 24. 2. Ibid., 23 3. Ibid., 24. 4. Ibid. Dawidowicz gives a slightly different version of this question in an interview with Diane Cole, where she cites herself using the present tense (which is also the title of the magazine in which the interview appears), “What is Wordsworth to me at this time?” See Diane Cole, “Lucy Dawidowicz: A Profile,” Present Tense 11, no. 1 (Autumn 1983): 22. 5. On the statement as question, see Heinrich Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: A Foundation for Literary Study, trans. M. T. Bliss et al., ed. David E. Orton and R. Dean Anderson (Leiden: Brill, 1998): “The expression of an intended statement in the form of a question to which no answer is expected, since in view of the situation from the point of view of the speaking party, the answer is supposed to be self-evident. The impatient and emotive couching of the statement in the form of a question is intended to humiliate the opposing party” (340). 6.  Dawidowicz, From That Place, 24. 7. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 1. 8.  De Man makes this point especially clear at the end of “Autobiography as De-Facement” (in The Rhetoric of Romanticism [New York: Columbia University Press, 1984], 67–81), when he writes: “Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament, and the restoration of mortality by autobiography (the prosopopeia of the voice and the name) deprives and disfigures to the precise extent that it restores” (81). By describing the perfect correlation of restoration and privation, de Man describes a neutral effect of figures. 9.  Dawidowicz, From That Place, 24. 10. See Peggy Kamuf ’s reading of the question “how can we take fiction seriously?” in “ ‘Fiction’ and the Experience of the Other,” for an analysis that parallels my own (and that ends with a pseudocitation of Blanchot). Peggy Kamuf, The Book of Addresses (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 135–53. 11.  Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil (New York: Random House, 1998), 380. 12. Susan Gubar, Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003). On this mode of defense, Gubar cites Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hartman to suggest that poetry generates attentiveness. My argument in Chapter 5 suggested that this attentiveness, rather than a capacity to see or to know, is a mode of insomnia. Gubar explains that “poetry after Auschwitz displays the ironic friction between the lyric’s

   Notes to Pages 221–22 traditional investment in voicing subjectivity and a history that assaulted not only innumerable sovereign subjects but indeed the very idea of sovereign selfhood” (12). The difference between our arguments is that I understand lyric subjectivity as other than sovereign, as a subjectivity without subjectivity. 13. That Dawidowicz gives natural beauty as the source of her decision against poetry, and finds Vilna “reposed in a bucolic romantic landscape,” which she describes in the words of Adam Mickiewicz, a Polish romantic poet, suggests that whether or not poetry matters, the world that she takes up continues to have an enduringly complex relation to the poetry from which she has turned away. Again, see Goodman’s account of Wordsworthian acknowledgement in which “something is ‘registered,’ namely muteness.” Kevis Goodman, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 142. 14. This poem has occasioned very few critical readings. For the most sustained analysis of it, see the penultimate chapter of Marshall Brown, Preromanticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 301–61. Brown reads the sonnet as a pedagogical—rather than an ethical—poem and understands it to allegorize and achieve the passage from what he calls the “preromantic crisis of expression” (353) to “romantic humanism” (359). In charting this “progress,” Brown insists upon offering a truly historical or prosaic—rather than an aesthetic—account of romanticism and preromanticism, thus enjoining his readers not to understand his book as “telling a story—not, at least, if a story means a package neatly tied up” (360). Brown’s hesitation about stories—here the story of romanticism and its precursors—also resonates with Blanchot’s account of stories in “After the Fact.” 15. William Wordsworth, Shorter Poems, 1807–1820, ed. Carl H. Ketchum (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 42. 16. Although it bears pointing out that the sestet does not open with the apostrophe. Rather, it opens with the continuation of the octave, which carries over through the middle of the sestet. Wordsworth explains in an 1833 letter to Alexander Dyce that he finds this strategy of “overflow” to generate “a pervading sense of intense unity” and to render the sonnet “not a piece of architecture, a whole made out of three parts,” but “an orbicular body—a sphere—perhaps a dew drop.” See The Letters of William Wordsworth, ed. Alan Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 258–60. Brown also discusses this letter in Preromanticism (351–52). 17. In his preface to the edition of poems in which the sonnet appears, Words­ worth explains his use of the terms fancy and imagination. See William Words­ worth, preface to Poems (1815), in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), 3: 26–39. If Coleridge, “desynonymizes” these terms, Wordsworth sets out with a long passage from William Taylor’s 1813 British Synonyms Discriminated, which states, for example, “Imagination is the power of depicting and fancy of evoking

Note to Page 222    and combining. The imagination is formed by patient observation; the fancy by a voluntary activity in shifting the scenery of the mind” (ibid., 376). Wordsworth goes on to suggest that these distinctions—and ultimately that Coleridge’s—are inadequate because too general, and explains that he understands fancy to differ from imagination in two key respects. In the first place, fancy “does not require that the materials that she makes use of should be susceptible to change in their constitution from her touch.” Indeed, fancy works to rearrange—and ultimately to support—given terms, rather than to dissolve them, and, relatedly, fancy follows the law of accident rather than necessity; it produces effects that are “surprising, playful, ludicrous, amusing, tender, or pathetic”; it is a charm “­given to quicken and beguile the temporal part of our nature, [whereas] Imagination [is given] to incite and to support the eternal” (ibid., 383–84). Wordsworth completes his comparison, with an allegory of condescension: “In what manner ­Fancy ambitiously aims at a rivalship with Imagination, and Imagination stoops to work with the materials of Fancy, might be illustrated from the compositions of all eloquent writers, whether in prose or verse, and chiefly from those of our own Country” (384).

Bibliography

Abrams, M. H. “Construing and Deconstructing.” In Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism, ed. Morris Eaves and Michael Fischer, 127–82. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986 ———. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953. ———. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York: Norton, 1971. ———, ed. English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. ———. Can One Live After Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. ———. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E. B. Ashton. London: Routledge, 1973. ———. Notes to Literature. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen. 2 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991–92. ———. Prisms. Trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983. Agamben, Giorgio. Ce qui reste d’Auschwitz: L’archive et le témoin; Homo Sacer III. Trans. Pierre Alferi. Paris: Rivages, 1999. ———. The Coming Community. Trans. Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. ———. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. ———. Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience. Trans. Liz Heron. London: Verso, 1993. ———. Language and Death: The Place of Negativity. Trans. Karen E. Pinkus, with Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. ———. Means Without End: Notes on Politics. Trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

   Bibliography ———. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Trans. Daniel HellerRoazen. New York: Zone, 1999. Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review, 1971. Anissimov, Myriam. Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist. Trans. Steve Cox. Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 1999. Antelme, Robert. L’Espèce humaine. Paris: Gallimard, 1978. ———. The Human Race. Trans. Jeffrey Haight and Annie Mahler. Marlboro, VT: Marlboro, 1992. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. ———. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, 1973. Auden, W. H. Collected Poems. Ed. Edward Mendelson. New York: Vintage, 1991. Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. “Avec Dionys Mascolo.” Special issue of Lignes 33 (1998). Bachmann, Ingeborg. Malina: A Novel. Trans. Philip Boehm. Teaneck, NJ: ­Holmes and Meier, 1999. Baer, Ulrich. Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Baer, Ulrich, and Amil Eshel, ed. “Paul Celan.” Special issue of New German ­Critique 91 (Winter 2004). Bahti, Timothy. The Ends of the Lyric: Direction and Consequence in Western Poetry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. ———. “Figures of Interpretation, the Interpretation of Figures: A Reading of Wordsworth’s Dream of the Arab.” In “The Rhetoric of Romanticism,” ed. Paul de Man, special issue of Studies in Romanticism 18, no. 4 (Winter 1979): 601–28. ———. “Lessons of Remembering and Forgetting.” In Reading de Man Reading, ed. Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich, 244–58. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. ———. “The Unimaginable Touch of Tropes.” diacritics 25, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 39–58. Balfour, Ian. “Reversal, Quotation: Benjamin’s History.” MLN 106 (1991): 622–47. ———. The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” In The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard, 49–55. New York: Hill and Wang, 1986. Bate, Jonathan, ed. “Green Romanticism.” Special issue of Studies in Romanticism 35, no. 3 (Fall 1996).

Bibliography    Baudelaire, Charles. Les Fleurs du mal. Trans. Richard Howard. Boston: Godine, 1982. Baumann, Gerhart. Erinnerungen an Paul Celan. Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1986. Bayley, John. The Romantic Survival: A Study in Poetic Evolution. London: Constable, 1957. Beer, John. Romantic Influences: Contemporary—Victorian—Modern. London: Macmillan, 1993. ———. Wordsworth and the Human Heart. London: Macmillan, 1978. Benjamin, Andrew. Present Hope: Philosophy, Architecture, Judaism. London: Routledge, 1997. ———. Translation and the Nature of Philosophy: A New Theory of Words. London: Routledge, 1989. Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Verso, 1983. ———. Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 1 of 3. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1991. ———. Illuminationen. Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1961. ———. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Fontana, 1968. ———. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osborne. London: ­Verso, 1977. ———. Selected Writings. Vol. 1 (1913–26). Ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Bennett, Andrew. Keats, Narrative, and Audience: The Posthumous Life of Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. ———. Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Benveniste, Émile. Problèmes de linguistique générale. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. ———. Problems in General Linguistics. Trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek. Coral ­Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971. Berger, Anne-Emmanuelle. “The Latest Word from Echo.” New Literary History 27, no. 4 (1996): 621–40. Bersani, Leo. The Culture of Redemption. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Bersani, Leo, and Ulysse Dutoit. Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. ———. “Sadism and Film: Freud and Resnais.” Qui Parle 6, no. 1 (Fall–Winter 1992): 1–34. Bewell, Alan. Romanticism and Colonial Disease. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.

   Bibliography Bident, Christophe. Maurice Blanchot: Partenaire Invisible. Paris: Vallon, 1998. Blake, William The Complete Poetry and Prose. Ed. David V. Erdman. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982. Blanchot, Maurice. L’Amitié. Paris: Gallimard, 1971. ———. Après coup: Précédé par le ressassement éternel. Paris: Minuit, 1983. ———. L’Arrêt de mort, récit. Paris: Gallimard, 1948. ———. L’Attente, l’oubli. Paris: Gallimard, 1962. ———. Au moment voulu. Paris: Gallimard, 1993. ———. La Communauté inavouable. Paris: Minuit, 1983. ———. De Kafka à Kafka. Paris: Gallimard, 1981. ———. Death Sentence. Trans. Lydia Davis. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1978. ———. Le Dernier à parler. Paris: Fata Morgana, 1984. ———. “Discours sur la patience (en marge des livres d’Emmanuel Lévinas).” Le Nouveau Commerce 30–31 (1975): 19–46. ———. “Do Not Forget.” Trans. Michael Holland. In The Blanchot Reader, ed. Michael Holland, 245–49. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. ———. “L’Écriture consacrée au silence.” Instants 1 (1979): 239–41. ———. L’Écriture du désastre. Paris: Gallimard, 1980. ———. L’Entretien infini. Paris: Gallimard, 1969. ———. L’Espace littéraire. Paris: Gallimard, 1955. ———. Faux Pas. Paris: Gallimard, 1943. ———. Faux Pas. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. ———. La Folie du jour. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1981. ———. Friendship. Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. ———. The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays. Trans. Lydia Davis. Barry­ town, NY: Station Hill, 1981. ———. “L’Indestructible.” Nouvelle Revue Française 112, no. 1 (April 1962): 671–80. ———. The Infinite Conversation. Trans. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. ———. L’Instant de ma mort. Paris: Fata Morgana, 1994. ———. The Instant of My Death. Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. ———. “The Last One to Speak.” Trans. Joseph Simas. Acts 8–9 (1988): 228–39. ———. Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him. Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman. New York: Zone, 1989. ———. “ ’N’oubliez pas.’ ” L’Arche (May 1988): 68–71.

Bibliography    ———. “N’oubliez pas!” La Quinzaine Litteraire 459, nos. 16–31 (March 1980): 11–12. ———. “Notre compagne clandestine.” In Textes pour Emmanuel Lévinas, ed. F. Laurelle, 79–87. Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1980. ———. La Part du feu. Paris: Gallimard, 1949. ———. Le Pas au-delà. Paris: Gallimard, 1972. ———. Pour l’amitié. Paris: Fourbis, 1996. ———. The Sirens’ Song: Selected Essays. Ed. Gabriel Josipovici. Trans. Sacha Rabinovitch. Brighton, England: Harvester, 1982. ———. The Space of Literature. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. ———. The Step Not Beyond. Trans. Lycette Nelson. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. ———. The Unavowable Community. Trans. Pierre Joris. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1988. ———.Vicious Circles: Two Fictions and After the Fact. Trans. Paul Auster. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1985. ———. Une Voix venue d’ailleurs: Sur les poèmes de Louis-René des Forêts. Plombières-les-Dijon: Ulysse, 1992. ———. The Work of Fire. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995. ———. The Writing of the Disaster. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. Bloom, Harold. The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971. Bloom, Harold, et al. Deconstruction and Criticism. New York: Continuum, 1979. Bonnefoy, Yves. “Poetry and Liberty.” In “Literature and the Ethical Question,” special issue of Yale French Studies 79 (1991): 255–69. Booth, Stephen, ed. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977. Botting, Fred, ed. Frankenstein: Mary Shelley. New York: St. Martin’s, 1995. Brisman, Leslie. Romantic Origins. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978. Bromwich, David. Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Brooks, Peter. “What Is a Monster? (According to Frankenstein).” In Frankenstein: Mary Shelley, ed. Fred Botting, 81–106. New York: St. Martin’s, 1995. Brown, Marshall. Preromanticism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991. Bruns, Gerald L. Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

   Bibliography Büchner, Georg. Complete Plays, “Lenz,” and Other Writings. Trans. John Reddick. New York: Penguin, 1993. Budick, Sanford, and Wolfgang Iser, eds. Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Butler, Judith. Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death. New York: ­Columbia University Press, 2000. ———. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993. ———. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004. ———. The Psychic Life of Power: Essays in Subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. ———. Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. Butler, Judith, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj ŽiŽek. Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. London: Verso, 2000. Butler, Marilyn. Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background, 1760–1830. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981. Cadava, Eduardo. “The Haunted Ethics of Paul Celan.” Alphabet City 4–5 (1995): 68–75. Cadava, Eduardo, et al., eds. Who Comes After the Subject? New York: Routledge, 1991. Caruth, Cathy. Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. ———. “An Interview with Geoffrey Hartman.” In “Essays in Honor of Geoffrey Hartman,” ed. Helen Reguiero Elam, special issue of Studies in Romanticism 35, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 631–52. ———. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. ———, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Caruth, Cathy, and Deborah Esch, eds. Critical Encounters: Reference and Responsibility in Deconstructive Writing. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995. Caygill, Howard. A Kant Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. Cayrol, Jean. Lazare parmi nous. Neuchâtel: La Baconnière, 1950. ———. Nuit et brouillard. Paris: Fayard, 1997. ———. Poèmes de la nuit et du brouillard. Paris: Seghers, 1946.

Bibliography    Celan, Paul. Breathturn. Trans. Pierre Joris. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 1995. ———. Choix de poèmes. Trans. Jean-Pierre Lefebrvre. Paris: Gallimard, 1998. ———. Collected Prose. Trans. Rosmarie Waldrop. Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY: Sheep Meadow, 1986. ———. Gesammelte Werke. Vols. 1–5. Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1983. ———. Poems of Paul Celan. Trans. Michael Hamburger. New York: Persea, 1972. ———. Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan. Trans. John Felstiner. New York: Norton, 2001. Chalfen, Israel. Paul Celan: A Biography of His Youth. Trans. Maxmilian Bleyleben. Intro. by John Felstiner. New York: Persea, 1991. Chambers, Ross. Facing It: AIDS Diaries and the Death of the Author. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. Chaouat, Bruno. “ ‘La Mort ne Recèle Pas Tant de Mystère’: Robert Antelme’s ­Defaced Humanism.” L’Esprit Createur 40, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 88–99. Chase, Cynthia. Decomposing Figures: Rhetorical Readings in the Romantic Tradition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. ———. “Reading Epitaphs.” In Deconstruction is/in America, ed. Anselm Haverkamp, 52–59. New York: New York University Press, 1995. ———, ed. Romanticism. Longman Critical Readers. London: Longman, 1993. Clark, David L., and Donald C. Goellnicht, eds. New Romanticisms: Theory and Critical Practice. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. Clark, Timothy. The Theory of Inspiration: Composition as a Crisis of Subjectivity in Romantic and Post-Romantic Writing. Manchester, England: Manchester ­University Press, 1997. Cohen, Barbara, et al. Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Cohen, Josh. Interrupting Auschwitz. London: Continuum, 2003. Cole, Diane. “Lucy Dawidowicz: A Profile.” Present Tense 11, no. 1 (Autumn 1983): 22–25. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria; or, Biographical Sketches of My L­iterary Life and Opinions. 2 vols. Ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate. Prince­ ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983. ———. The Complete Poems. Ed. William Keach. New York: Penguin, 1997. Colin, Amy D., ed. Argumentum e Silentio. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1986. Coquio, Catherine, ed. Parler des camps, penser les genocides. Paris: Michel, 1999. Cottom, Daniel. “Frankenstein and the Monster of Representation.” Sub-Stance 28 (1980): 60–71. Coury, David N. “ ‘Auch Ruhiges Land . . .’: Remembrance and Testimony in Paul

   Bibliography Celan’s Nuit et Brouillard Translation.” Prooftexts 22, nos. 1–2 (Winter–Spring 2002): 55–76. Cravetto, Maria Letizia. Fidélité à l’après: Á propos du suicide de Primo Levi et de l’intériorité du mal. Paris: Kimé, 2000. Critchley, Simon. Very Little . . . Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature. London: Routledge, 1997. Crowley, Martin. “ ‘Il n’y a qu’une espèce humaine’: Between Duras and Antelme.” In The Holocaust and the Text: Speaking the Unspeakable, ed. Andrew Leak and George Paizis, 174–92. New York: St. Martin’s, 2000. ———. Duras, Writing, and the Ethical: Making the Broken Whole. Oxford: ­Clarendon, 2000. ———. Robert Antelme: Humanity, Community, Testimony. Oxford: Legenda, 2003. Culler, Jonathan. “Apostrophe.” diacritics 7, no. 4 (1977): 59–69. ———. “Changes in the Study of the Lyric.” In Lyric Poetry: Beyond the New Criticism, ed. Patricia A. Parker and Chaviva Hosek, 38–54. Ithaca, NY: ­Cornell University Press, 1985. ———. “Deconstruction and the Lyric.” In Deconstruction is/in America, ed. ­Anselm Haverkamp, 41–51. New York: New York University Press, 1995. ———. The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981. ———. “Reading Lyric.” In “The Lesson of Paul de Man,” ed. Shoshana Felman et al., special issue of Yale French Studies 69 (1985): 98–106. Cunningham, J. V. Tradition and Poetic Structure. Denver: Swallow, 1960. “David Rousset.” Special issue of Lignes, n.s., 2 (May 2000). Davie, Donald. “Personification.” Essays in Criticism 31, no. 2 (April 1981): 91–104. Davis, Colin. “Duras, Antelme, and the Ethics of Writing.” Comparative Literature Studies 34, no. 2 (1997): 170–83. Dawidowicz, Lucy. From That Place and Time: A Memoir, 1938–1947. New York: Norton, 1989. ———. The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945. New York: Holt, Rinehart and ­Winston, 1975. de Certeau, Michel. The Mystic Fable. Vol. 1, The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Trans. Michael B. Smith. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. de Man, Paul. Aesthetic Ideology. Ed. Andrzej Warminski. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. ———. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979. ———. Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Culture. 2nd rev. ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.

Bibliography    ———. Critical Writings, 1953–1978. Ed. Lindsay Waters. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. ———. “Lyrical Voice in Contemporary Theory: Riffaterre and Jauss.” In Lyric Poetry: Beyond the New Criticism, ed. Patricia A. Parker and Chaviva Hosek, 55–72. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. ———. The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. ———. The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. ———. Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism: The Gauss Seminar and Other Papers. Ed. E. S. Burt, Kevin Newmark, and Andrzej Warminski. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. ———, ed. “The Rhetoric of Romanticism.” Special issue of Studies in Romanticism 18, no. 4 (Winter 1979). Delbo, Charlotte. Auschwitz and After. Trans. Rosette C. Lamont. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge. New York: Routledge, 1992. ———. Acts of Religion. Ed. Gil Anidjar. New York: Routledge, 2002. ———. Aporias. Trans. Thomas Dutoit. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993. ———. Demeure: Fiction and Testimony. Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. ———. Demeure: Maurice Blanchot. Paris: Galilée, 1998. ———. L’Écriture et la difference. Paris: Seuil, 1967. ———. The Gift of Death. Trans. David Wills. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. ———. Jacques Derrida. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. ———. Limited Inc. Trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988. ———. “Living On: Borderlines.” Trans. James Hulbert. In Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom et al., 75–176. New York: Continuum, 1979. ———. Memoires: For Paul de Man. Trans. Cecile Lindsay et al. New York: ­Columbia University Press, 1989. ———. Mémoires: Pour Paul de Man. Paris: Galilée, 1988. ———. Parages. Paris: Galilée, 1986. ———. Pardonner: L’Impardonnable et l’imprescriptible. Paris: L’Herne, 2005. ———. Passions de la littérature: Avec Jacques Derrida. Ed. Michel Lisse. Paris: Galilée, 1996.

   Bibliography ———. Points . . . : Interviews, 1974–1994. Trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. Ed. Elisabeth Weber. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995. ———. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Trans. Alan Bass. ­Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. ———. Psyché: Inventions de l’autre. Paris: Galilée, 1987. ———. “Psyche: Inventions of the Other.” In Reading de Man Reading, ed. Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich, 25–65. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. ———. Schibboleth: Pour Paul Celan. Paris: Galilée, 1986. ———. Signéponge/Signsponge. Trans. Richard Rand. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. ———. Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan. Trans. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. ———. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. New York: Routledge, 1994. Descartes, René. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. 2 vols. Trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Des Pres, Terence. The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976. Dobbels, Daniel, ed. On Robert Antelme’s “The Human Race”: Essays and Commentary. Trans. Jeffrey Haight. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003. ———. Textes inédits sur “L’Espèce humaine.” Paris: Gallimard, 1996. Dobie, Madeleine. “Sarah Kofman’s Paroles Suffoquées: Autobiography, History, and Writing ‘After Auschwitz.’ ” French Forum 22, no. 3 (September 1997): 319– 41. Dumling, Albrecht. “Eisler’s Music for Resnais’ Night and Fog (1955): A Musical Counterpoint to the Cinematic Portrayal of Terror.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 18, no. 4 (October 1998): 575–84. Duras, Marguerite. La Douleur. Paris: POL, 1985. ———. The War: A Memoir. Trans. Barbara Bray. New York: Pantheon, 1986. Dutoit, Thomas. “Re-Specting the Face as the Moral (of ) Fiction in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” MLN 109, no. 5 (December 1994): 847–71. Eaves, Morris, and Michael Fischer, eds. Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986. Eberle-Sinatra, Michael, ed. Mary Shelley’s Fictions: From Frankenstein to Falkner. New York: St. Martin’s, 2000. Egoyan, Atom, dir. Ararat. Toronto: Serendipity Point Films, 2002.

Bibliography    Elam, Helen Regueiro, ed. “Essays in Honor of Geoffrey Hartman.” Special issue of Studies in Romanticism 35, no. 4 (Winter 1996). Eldridge, Richard. The Persistence of Romanticism: Essays in Philosophy and Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Empson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity. New York: New Directions, 1947. Erskin, Michael. “ ‘To Truths Translated’: Celan’s Affair with Shakespeare.” New German Critique 91 (Winter 2004): 79–100. Felman, Shoshana. The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub, M.D. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge, 1992. Felman, Shoshana, et al., eds. “The Lesson of Paul de Man.” Special issue of Yale French Studies 69 (1985). Felstiner, John. Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. ———. “Translating as Transference: Paul Celan’s Versions of Shakespeare, Dickinson, Mandelshtam, Apollinaire.” In Translating Literatures: New Vistas and Approaches in Literary Studies, ed. Kurt Mueller-Vollmer and Michael Irmscher. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. ———. “Translating Celan Translating Shakespeare.” Parnassus: Poetry in Review 16, no. 1 (1990): 174–94. Ferguson, Frances. Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of I­ndividuation. London: Routledge, 1992. ———. Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977. Fineman, Joel. Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Subjectivity in the Sonnets. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988. ———. “Shakespeare’s Sonnets’ Perjured Eye.” In Lyric Poetry: Beyond the New Criticism, ed. Patricia A. Parker and Chaviva Hosek, 116–31. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. ———. The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literary Tradition: Essays Toward the ­Release of Shakespeare’s Will. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991. Fiorestos, Aris, ed. Word Traces: Readings of Paul Celan. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Fisch, Audrey A., Anne K. Mellor, and Esther H. Schor, eds. The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond “Frankenstein.” New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Fletcher, Angus. Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1964. Fontanier, Pierre. Les Figures du discours. Paris: Flammarion, 1977.

   Bibliography Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 1978. ———. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977. ———. Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from the Outside. Trans. Brian Massumi. New York: Zone, 1987. Freeman, Barbara. “Frankenstein with Kant: A Theory of Monstrosity or the Monstrosity of Theory.” In Frankenstein: Mary Shelley, ed. Fred Botting, 191–205. New York: St. Martin’s, 1995. Friedlander, Saul, ed. Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution.” Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” Trans. James Strachey. In On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, vol. 2 of The Penguin Freud Library, 245–68. London: Penguin, 1964. Frey, Hans-Jost. “The Relation Between Translation and Original as Text [the Example of Celan’s Version of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 137].” Trans. Georgia Albert. In Word Traces: Readings of Paul Celan, ed. Aris Fiorestos, 345–52. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Fries, Thomas. “Critical Relation: Peter Szondi’s Studies on Celan.” Trans. James G. Hughes. Boundary 2: A Journal of Postmodern Literature and Culture 11, no. 3 (Spring 1983): 139–67. Frontisi-Ducroux, Françoise. Du masque au visage: Aspects de l’identité en Grèce ancienne. Paris: Flammarion, 1995. Frost, Laura, et al., eds. “Interpretation and the Holocaust.” Special issue of Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (Spring 2001). Fry, Paul H. A Defense of Poetry: Reflections on the Occasion of Writing. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995. ———. “Green to the Very Door? The Natural Wordsworth.” In “Essays in Honor of Geoffrey Hartman,” ed. Helen Reguiero Elam, special issue of Studies in Romanticism 35, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 535–51. ———. The Poet’s Calling in the English Ode. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957. Fynsk, Christopher. Language and Relation . . . That There Is Language. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. ———. “The Realities at Stake in a Poem.” In Word Traces: Readings of Paul Celan, ed. Aris Fiorestos, 159–84. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

Bibliography    Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Gadamer on Celan: “Who Am I and Who Are You?” and Other Essays. Trans. Richard Heinemann and Bruce Krajewski. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. Gasché, Rodolphe. The Wild Card of Reading: On Paul de Man. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Gellhaus, Axel, et al., eds. “Fremde Nähe”: Celan als Übersetzer; Katalog. Marbach am Neckar: Schillergesellschaft, 1997. George, Stefan. Shakespeare Sonette. Berlin: Bondi, 1909. Gigante, Denise. “Facing the Ugly: The Case of Frankenstein.” English Literary History 67, no. 2 (2000): 565–87. Goldsmith, Steven. Unbuilding Jerusalem: Apocalypse and Romantic Representation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993. Goodman, Kevis. Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the ­Mediation of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ———. “Making Time for History: Wordsworth, the New Historicism, and the Apocalyptic Fallacy.” In “Essays in Honor of Geoffrey Hartman,” ed. Helen Reguiero Elam, special issue of Studies in Romanticism 35, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 563–77. Gottlieb, Susannah Young-Ah. Regions of Sorrow: Anxiety and Messianism in Hannah Arendt and W. H. Auden. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Gross, Kenneth. The Dream of the Moving Statue. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992. Grossman, Allen. The Long Schoolroom: Lessons in the Bitter Logic of the Poetic Principle. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. ———. “Summa Lyrica: A Primer of the Commonplaces in Speculative Poetics and the Ether Dome; An Entertainment.” Book-length essay and a poem, both by Allen Grossman. Special issue of Western Humanities Review 44, no. 1 (Spring 1990). Gubar, Susan. Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. ———. “Prosopopoeia and Holocaust Poetry in English: Sylvia Plath and Her Contemporaries.” In “Interpretation and the Holocaust,” ed. Laura Frost et al., special issue of Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 191–215 Guyer, Sara. “At the far edge of this ongoing enterprise.” In The Legacies of Paul de Man, ed. Marc Redfield, 77–92. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. ———. “Being-Destroyed: Anthropomorphizing L’Espèce Humaine.” In Theoretical Interpretations of the Holocaust, ed. Dan Stone, 103–26. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001.

   Bibliography ———. “Buccality.” In Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis, ed. Gabriele Schwab. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Hake, Sabine. German National Cinema. London: Routledge, 2002. Hamacher, Werner. Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to ­Celan. Trans. Peter Fenves. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Hamacher, Werner, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Keenan, eds. Responses: On Paul de Man’s Wartime Journalism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. Hamilton, Paul. “The Romanticism of Contemporary Ideology.” In Intersections: Nineteenth-Century Philosophy and Contemporary Theory, ed. Tilottama ­Rajan and David L. Clark, 302–21. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. Hansen, Mark. “ ‘Not Thus, After All, Would Life Be Given’: Technesis, Technology, and the Parody of Romantic Poetics in Frankenstein.” Studies in Romanticism 36 (Winter 1997): 575–609. Hartman, Geoffrey, H. A Critic’s Journey: Literary Reflections, 1958–1998. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. ———. The Fateful Question of Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. ———. The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust. Bloomington: ­Indiana University Press, 1996. ———. “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies.” New Literary History 26, no. 3 (1995): 537–63. ———. The Unremarkable Wordsworth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 ———. “Witnessing Video Testimony: An Interview with Geoffrey Hartman.” In “Interpretation and the Holocaust,” ed. Laura Frost et al., special issue of Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 217–32. ———. Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964. ———, ed. Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Haverkamp, Anselm, ed. Deconstruction is/in America: A New Sense of the Political. New York: New York University Press, 1995. Hebard, Andrew. “Disruptive Histories: Toward a Radical Politics of Remembrance in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog.” New German Critique 71 (Spring– Summer 1997): 87–113. Hegel, G. W. F. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts. Trans. T. M. Knox. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. ———. Phänomenologie des Geistes. Hamburg: Meiner, 1988.

Bibliography    ———. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings. Rev. exp. ed. Ed. David Farrell Krell. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993. ———. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1962. ———. Existence and Being. Ed. Werner Brock. Washington DC: Gateway, 1949. ———. Holzwege. Frankfurt-am-Main: Klostermann, 1950. ———. On the Way to Language. Trans. Peter D. Hertz. San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1971. ———. Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Perennial Library, 1971. ———. Vorträge und Aufsätze. Pfullingen: Neske, 1954. ———. What Is Called Thinking? Trans. J. Glenn Gray. New York: Perennial ­Library, 1968. Hertz, Neil. “Lurid Figures.” In Reading de Man Reading, ed. Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich, 82–104. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Hill, Leslie. Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary. London: Routledge, 1997. Hölderlin, Friedrich. Essays and Letters on Theory. Trans. Thomas Pfau. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988. ———. Hymns and Fragments. Trans. Richard Sieburth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. ———. Sämtliche Werke. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1951. ———. Selected Poems and Fragments. Trans. Michael Hamburger. Ed. Jeremy Adler. New York: Penguin, 1998. Holland, Michael, ed. The Blanchot Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995 Homans, Margaret. Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Hungerford, Amy. The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. ———. “Memorizing Memory.” In “Interpretation and the Holocaust,” ed. Laura Frost et al., special issue of Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 67–92. ———. “Surviving Rego Park: Holocaust Theory from Art Spiegelman to Berel Lang.” In The Americanization of the Holocaust, ed. Hilene Flanzbaum, 102–24. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Irigaray, Luce. L’Oubli de l’air chez Martin Heidegger. Paris: Minuit, 1983. ———. Sexes and Genealogies. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

   Bibliography Jacobi, Jolande, ed. Paracelsus: Selected Writings. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951. Jacobs, Carol. Uncontainable Romanticism: Shelley, Brontë, Kleist. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Jacobus, Mary. “Is There a Woman in This Text?” New Literary History 14 (­Autumn 1982): 117–41. ———. Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. ———. Romanticism, Writing, and Sexual Difference: Essays on “The Prelude.” ­Oxford: Clarendon, 1989. Janowitz, Anne. England’s Ruins: Poetic Purpose and National Landscape. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Johnson, Barbara. “Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law.” In Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, ed. Barbara Cohen et al., 205–25. ­Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. ———. The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. ———. The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race, and Gender. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. ———. “The Last Man.” In The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond “Frankenstein,” ed. Audrey A. Fisch, Anne K. Mellor, and Esther H. Schor, 258–66. New York: ­Oxford University Press, 1993. ———. Mother Tongues: Sexuality, Trials, Motherhood, Translation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. ———. The Wake of Deconstruction. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. ———. A World of Difference. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Johnson, Lee M. “Wordsworth and the Sonnet.” Special issue of Anglistica 19 (1973). Johnston, Kenneth R., et al. Romantic Revolutions: Criticism and Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Kaes, Anton. From “Hitler” to “Heimat”: The Return of History as Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. Kahan, Claudine. “La Honte du témoin.” In Parler des camps, penser les genocides, ed. Catherine Coquio, 493–513. Paris: Michel, 1999. ———. “Witnessing Figures.” Boundary 2 18, no. 2 (1991): 47–64. Kamuf, Peggy. The Book of Addresses. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. ———, ed. A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds. New York: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1991.

Bibliography    Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Trans. J. H. Bernard. New York: Hafner, 1951. Keats, John. Complete Poems. Ed. Jack Stillinger. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982. ———. Letters of John Keats. Ed. Robert Gittings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970. Keenan, Thomas. Fables of Responsibility. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. Kelley, Theresa. Wordsworth’s Revisionary Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Kennedy, George A. A New History of Classical Rhetoric. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Knapp, Steven. Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985. Kneale, J. Douglas. Romantic Aversions: Aftermaths of Classicism in Wordsworth and Coleridge. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999. Kofman, Sarah. Paroles suffoquées. Paris: Galilée, 1987. ———. Rue Ordener, rue Labat. Paris: Galilée, 1994. ———. Smothered Words. Trans. Madeleine Dobie. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998. Kraus, Karl. Shakespeares Sonette. Wein: Fackel, 1933. Krell, David Farrell. Contagion: Sexuality, Disease, and Death in German Romanticism and Idealism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Kritzman, Lawrence D., ed. Auschwitz and After: Race, Culture, and “the Jewish Question” in France. New York: Routledge, 1995. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. New York: Norton, 1982. LaCapra, Dominick. History and Memory After Auschwitz. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998. ———. History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. ———. “The Personal, the Political, and the Textual: Paul de Man as Object of Transference.” History and Memory 4, no. 1 (Summer 1992): 5–38. ———. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. Heidegger, Art, and Politics: The Fiction of the Political. Trans. Chris Turner. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. ———. La Poésie comme expérience. Paris: Bourgois, 1986. ———. Poetry as Experience. Trans. Andrea Tarnowski. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997.

   Bibliography ———. Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, and Jean-Luc Nancy. L’Absolu littéraire: Théorie de la littérature du romantisme allemand. Paris: Seuil, 1978. ———. The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism. Trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988. ———, eds. Les Fins de l’homme: Á partir du travail de Jacques Derrida. Paris: Gaililée, 1980. Lacquer, Walter, ed. The Holocaust Encyclopedia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001. Lanham, Richard A. A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. 2nd ed. Berkeley and Los ­Angeles: University of California Press, 1991. Lanzmann, Claude. Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust. New York: Pantheon, 1985. Laporte, Roger. “Readings of Paul Celan.” Trans. Norma Cole. Acts 8–9 (1988): 222–27. Lausberg, Heinrich. Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: A Foundation for Literary Study. Trans. M. T. Bliss et al. Ed. David E. Orton and R. Dean Anderson. Leiden: Brill, 1998. Leak, Andrew, and George Paizis, eds. The Holocaust and the Text: Speaking the Unspeakable. New York: St. Martin’s, 2000. Levi, Primo. Ad ora incerta. Milan: Garzanti, 1998. ———. Collected Poems. Trans. Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann. London: Faber and Faber, 1984. ———. The Drowned and the Saved. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal. New York: ­Vintage, 1989. ———. Moments of Reprieve: A Memoir of Auschwitz. Trans. Ruth Feldman. New York: Penguin, 1986. ———. Survival in Auschwitz. Trans. Stuart Woolf. New York: Summit, 1986. Lévinas, Emmanuel. Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1994. ———. Basic Philosophical Writings. Ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. ———. De dieu qui vient à l’idée. Paris: Vrin, 1982. ———. De l’existence à l’existant. 1947. Reprint, Paris: Vrin, 1986. ———. Ethics and Infinity. Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne ­University Press, 1985. ———. Existence and Existents. Trans. A. Lingis. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1978.

Bibliography    ———. Noms Propres. Paris: Fata Morgana, 1976. ———. Of God Who Comes to Mind. Trans. Bettina Bergo. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. ———. Otherwise Than Being; or, Beyond Essence. Trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998. ———. Proper Names. Trans. Michael B. Smith. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. ———. Sur Maurice Blanchot. Paris: Fata Morgana, 1975. ———. Time and the Other. Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987. ———. Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1961. ———. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969. Levine, George, and U. C. Knoepflemacher. The Endurance of “Frankenstein”: ­Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979. Liebman, Stuart, and Leonard Quart. “Lost and Found: Wanda Jakubowska’s The Last Stop.” Cineaste 22, no. 4 (1997): 43–45. Lippit, Akira Mizuma. Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Liu, Alan, Wordsworth: The Sense of History. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989. Livingston, Ira. Arrow of Chaos: Romanticism and Postmodernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Lovejoy, Arthur O. “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms.” In English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism, 2nd ed., ed. M. H. Abrams, 3–24. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Lowth, Rev. Robert. Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews Translated from the Latin of the Right Rev. Robert Lowth . . . by G. Gregory . . . 2 vols. London: Johnson, 1787. Based on information from the RLG Programs’ Web site page English Short Title Catalogue: Eighteenth Century Collections. www.rlg.org/en/ page.php?Page_ID=179 (accessed April 10, 2007). Lyotard, Jean-François. Le différend. Paris: de Minuit, 1983. ———. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. ———. “Discussions; or, Phrasing ‘After Auschwitz.’ ” In Auschwitz and After: Race, Culture, and “the Jewish Question” in France, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, 149–79. New York: Routledge, 1995. ———. L’Inhumain: Causeries sur le temps. Paris: Galilée, 1988.

   Bibliography ———. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and ­Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991. ———. “The Survivor.” In Toward the Postmodern, ed. Robert Harvey and Mark S. Roberts, 144–63. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1993. Macovski, Michael. Dialogue and Literature: Apostrophe, Auditors, and the Collapse of Romantic Discourse. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Manson, Michael, and Robert Scott Stewart. “Heroes and Hideousness: Frankenstein and Failed Unity.” SubStance 71–72 (1993): 228–42. Marder, Elissa. Dead Time: Temporal Disorders in the Wake of Modernity (Baudelaire and Flaubert). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. ———. “The Mother Tongue in Phèdre and Frankenstein.” Yale French Studies 76 (1989): 59–77. Marianne and Juliane. VHS. Directed by Maria von Trotta. Munich: Bioskop Film, 1981; New York: New Yorker Video, 1998. Mascolo, Dionys. Autour d’un effort de mémoire: Sur une lettre de Robert Antelme. Paris: Nadeau, 1987. “Maurice Blanchot.” Special issue of Lignes 11 (September 1990). Mellor, Anne K. “Possessing Nature: The Female in Frankenstein.” In Romanticism and Feminism, ed. Anne K. Mellor, 220–32. Blomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Mileur, Jean-Pierre. “The Return of the Romantic.” In Intersections: NineteenthCentury Philosophy and Contemporary Theory, ed. Tilottama Rajan and David L. Clark, 325–48. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. Miller, J. Hillis. The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. ———. The Linguistic Moment: From Wordsworth to Stevens. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. ———. “On Edge: The Crossways of Contemporary Criticism.” In Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism, ed. Morris Eaves and Michael Fischer, 96–126. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986. ———. “ ‘Reading’ a Part of a Paragraph in Allegories of Reading.” In Reading de Man Reading, ed. Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich, 155–71. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. ———. Speech Acts in Literature. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. ———. “The Stone and the Shell: The Problem of Poetic Form in Wordsworth’s Dream of the Arab.” In Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, ed. Robert Young, 244–65. London: Routledge, 1981. ———. Tropes, Parables, Performatives: Essays on Twentieth-Century Literature. New York: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1990.

Bibliography    ———. Versions of Pygmalion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Naas, Michael. “Blanchot . . . Writing . . . Ellipsis.” Qui Parle 10, no. 1 (Fall– ­Winter 1996): 89–111. Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Birth to Presence. Trans. Brian Holmes et al. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995. ———. The Inoperative Community. Ed. Peter Connor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. ———. The Muses. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. ———. The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. ———. “Un Souffle.” Rue Descartes 15 (1997): 13–16. Newmark, Kevin. “L’Absolu littéraire: Friedrich Schlegel and the Myth of Irony.” MLN 107 (1992): 905–30. ———. Beyond Symbolism: Textual History and the Future of Reading. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. ———. “Resisting, Responding.” In Responses: On Paul de Man’s Wartime Journalism, ed. Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Keenan, 343–49. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Francis Golffing. New York: Doubleday, 1956. ———. Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s. Ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1979. Night and Fog. DVD. Directed by Alain Resnais. Paris: Como Films and Argos Films, 1955; n.p.: Janus Films, 2003. Niranjana, Tejaswini. Siting Translation: History, Postructuralism, and the Colonial Context. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 1992. Nouvet, Claire. “An Impossible Response: The Disaster of Narcissus.” In “Literature and the Ethical Question,” ed. Claire Nouvet, special issue of Yale French Studies 79 (1991): 103–34. ———, ed. “Literature and the Ethical Question.” Special issue of Yale French Studies 79 (1991). O’Neill, Kevin C. “An Introduction to Robert Antelme.” In Marguerite Duras Lives On, ed. Janine Ricouart, 203–15. New York: University Press of America, 1998. Ovid. Metamorphoses. Trans. Frank Justus Miller. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Owen, W. J. B. Wordsworth’s Preface to “Lyrical Ballads.” Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1957.

   Bibliography Parker, Patricia A. Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode. Princeton, NJ: Princeton, University Press, 1979. Parker, Patricia A., and Chaviva Hosek, eds. Lyric Poetry: Beyond the New Criticism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. Pascal, Blaise. Pensées: Texte de l’édition Brunschvicg. Paris: Garnier, 1958. ———. Pensées. Trans. A. J. Krailsheimer. New York: Penguin, 1966. Pepper, Thomas. “Er, or Borrowing from Peter to Pay Paul.” In Word Traces: Readings of Paul Celan, ed. Aris Fiorestos, 353–68. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. ———. Singularities: Extremes of Theory in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Perniola, Mario. “Between Clothing and Nudity.” In Fragments for a History of the Human Body, ed. Michel Feher, 2: 236–65. Cambridge, MA: Zone, 1989. Pfau, Thomas, and Robert F. Gleckner, eds. Lessons of Romanticism: A Critical Companion. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. Pinch, Adela. Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. Poovey, Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Pyle, Forest. The Ideology of Imagination: Subject and Society in the Discourse of ­Romanticism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995. ———. “Kindling and Ash: Radical Aestheticism in Keats and Shelley.” Studies in Romanticism 42, no. 3 (Winter 2003): 427–59. Quinney, Laura. The Poetics of Disappointment from Wordsworth to Ashbery. Richmond: University of Virginia Press, 1999. Quintilian. The Orator’s Education. Bks. 9–10. Ed. Donald A. Russell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Rajan, Tilottama. Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980. ———. “Romanticism and the Death of Lyric Consciousness.” In Lyric Poetry: Beyond the New Criticism, ed. Patricia A. Parker and Chaviva Hosek, 194–207. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. ———. The Supplement of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990. Rajan, Tilottama, and David L. Clark, eds. Intersections: Nineteenth-Century Philosophy and Contemporary Theory. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. Randel, Fred V. “Frankenstein, Feminism, and the Intertextuality of Mountains.” Studies in Romanticism 24 (Spring 1985): 515–32.

Bibliography    Raskin, Richard. “Nuit et Brouillard,” by Alain Resnais: On the Making, Reception, and Functions of a Major Documentary Film. Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 1987. Rauch, Alan. “The Monstrous Body of Knowledge in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” Studies in Romanticism 34 (Summer 1995): 227–53. Redfield, Marc. The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Reiman, Donald H., and Neil Fraistat, eds. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. New York: Norton, 2002. Reynolds, Sir Joshua. Discourses on Art. Ed. Robert R. Wark. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. Rickels, Laurence A. The Vampire Lectures. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Riffaterre, Michael. “Prosopopeia.” Yale French Studies 69 (1985): 107–23. Robbins, Jill. Altered Reading: Lévinas and Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Ronell, Avital. Finitude’s Score: Essays for the End of the Millennium. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. ———. Stupidity. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. ———. The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. Rosenbaum, Ron. Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil. New York: Random House, 1998. Rosenfeld, Alvin H. A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. Saez, Jean-Pierre. “In the Company of Robert Antelme: Interviews with ­Georges Beauchamp, Marguerite Duras, Dionys Mascolo, François Mitterrand, Edgar Morin, Maurice Nadeau, and Claude Roy.” In On Antelme’s “The Human Race”: Essays and Commentary, trans. Jeffrey Haight. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003. Santner, Eric L. Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990. Saussy, Haun. The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993. Schlegel, Friedrich. Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms. Trans. Ernst Behler and Roman Struc. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1968. ———. Philosophical Fragments. Trans. Peter Firchow. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Schmidt, Dennis. “Black Milk and Blue: Celan and Heidegger on Pain and

   Bibliography ­ anguage.” In Word Traces: Readings of Paul Celan, ed. Aris Fiorestos, 110–29. L Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Seyan, Azade. Representation and Its Discontents: The Critical Legacy of German ­Romanticism. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992. Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works. Ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. Oxford: Clarendon, 1988. ———. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Ed. Stephen Booth. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977. ———. The Sonnets and “A Lover’s Complaint.” Ed. John Kerrigan. London: ­Penguin, 1986. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. 1818. Reprint, ed. Marilyn Butler. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. ———. Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus. 1831. Reprint, ed. M. K. Joseph. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969. ———. Frankenstein: Contexts, Nineteenth-Century Responses, Criticism. Ed. J. Paul Hunter. New York: Norton, 1996. ———. The Last Man. Ed. Morton Paley. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. ———. The Mary Shelley Reader. Ed. Betty T. Bennett and Charles E. Robinson. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat. New York: Norton, 2002. ———. Shelley’s Prose. Ed. David Lee Clark. New York: New Amsterdam, 1988. Smith, Charlotte. The Poems of Charlotte Smith. Ed. Stuart Curran. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Smock, Ann. “Disastrous Responsibility.” L’Esprit createur 29, no. 3 (Fall 1984): 5–20. ———. Double Dealing. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985. ———. “Learn to Read, She Said.” October 41 (Summer 1987): 53–60. ———. What Is There to Say? Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.” In “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 262–80. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Sprinker, Michael. Imaginary Relations: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Theory of Historical Materialism. London: Verso, 1987. Stamm, Rudolf. “ ‘A Cup of Alteration’: Shakespeare’s Sonett 66—Deutsch von Stefan George, Karl Kraus, und Heinz Helbling. Sonnet 116—Deutsch von Heinz Helbling, Ilse Krämer und Paul Celan—Französisch von Pierre Jean Jeuve.” In Meaning and Beyond: Ernst Leisi zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Udo Fries and Martin Heusser, 21–41. Tübingen: Narr, 1989.

Bibliography    Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. ———. “The Long Life of Metaphor: An Approach to the ‘Shoah.’ ” In Writing and the Holocaust, ed. Beryl Lang, 154–71. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988. Stevick, Philip. “Frankenstein and Comedy.” In The Endurance of “Frankenstein”: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel, ed. George Levine and U. C. Knoepflemacher, 221–39. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979. Stewart, Susan. Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994. Stoekl, Allan. “Execution and the Human.” Intertexts 3, no. 1 (1999): 3–31. Stone, Dan. “Perec’s Antelme.” French Cultural Studies 10, no. 2 (June 1999): 161–72. ———, ed. Theoretical Interpretations of the Holocaust. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001. Surya, Michel. “Dead End.” In On Robert Antelme’s “The Human Race”: Essays and Commentaries, ed. Daniel Dobbels. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003. Szondi, Peter. Celan Studies. Trans. Susan Bernofsky, with Harvey Mendelsohn. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. ———. On Textual Understanding and Other Essays. Trans. Harvey Mendelsohn. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Trezise, Thomas. “Unspeakable.” In “Interpretation and the Holocaust,” ed. Laura Frost et al., special issue of Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 39–66. Udoff, Alan. “On Poetic Dwelling: Situating Celan and the Holocaust.” In Argumentum e Silentio, ed. Amy D. Colin, 320–51. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1986. Veeder, William. Mary Shelley and Frankenstein: The Fate of Androgyny. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Vendler, Helen. The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Vernant, Jean-Pierre. La Mort dans les yeux: Figures d’autre en Grèce ancien, Artemis, Gorgô. Paris: Hachette, 1996. Wall, Thomas Carl. Radical Passivity: Lévinas, Blanchot, and Agamben. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Warminski, Andrzej. “Facing Language: Wordsworth’s First Poetic Spirits.” diacritics 17 (Winter 1987): 18–31. ———. “Man and Self-consciousness: Kojève, Romantic Ironist.” Parallax 4, no. 4 (1998): 57–64. ———. Material Inscriptions (forthcoming).

   Bibliography ———. “Missed Crossing: Wordsworth’s Apocalypses.” MLN 99, no. 5 (December 1984): 983–1006. ———. Readings in Interpretation: Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Warton, Thomas. The Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Warton, B.D. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1802. Waters, Lindsay, and Wlad Godzich, eds. Reading de Man Reading. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. White, Deborah Elise. Romantic Returns: Superstition, Imagination, History. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Wiesel, Elie. “The Holocaust as Literary Inspiration.” In Dimensions of the Holocaust: Lectures at Northwestern University, by Elie Wiesel et al., 5–19. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1977. Wohlfarth, Irving. “L’Espèce humaine à l’épreuve des camps: Réflexions sur Robert Antelme.” In Parler des camps, penser les genocides, ed. Catherine Coquio, 569–608. Paris: Michel, 1999. Wolfson, Susan J. Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. Wordsworth, Dorothy. The Grasmere Journals. Ed. Pamela Woof. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Wordsworth, William. Last Poems, 1821–1850. Ed. Jared Curtis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999. ———.The Letters of William Wordsworth. Ed. Alan Hill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. ———. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 1787– 1805. Ed. Ernest de Selincourt. Rev. by Chester L. Shaver. Oxford: Clarendon, 1967. ———. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, 1806– 1811. Ed. Ernest de Selincourt. Rev. by Mary Moornan. Oxford: Clarendon, 1969. ———. “Lyrical Ballads,” and Other Poems, 1797–1800. Ed. James Butler and Karen Green. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992. ———. Poems, in Two Volumes. Washington, DC: Woodstock, 1997. ———. Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800–1807. Ed. Jared Curtis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983. ———. Poetical Works. Ed. Thomas Hutchinson. Rev. ed. Ernest de Selincourt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936. ———. The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850. Ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill. New York: Norton, 1979.

Bibliography    ———. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth. Ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1974. ———. Selected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman. New York, New American Library, 1970. ———. Shorter Poems, 1807–1820. Ed. Carl H. Ketcham. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989. Wordsworth, William, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads. 2nd ed. Ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones. London: Routledge, 1991. Wormser, Olga, and Henri Michel, eds. Tragedie de la deportation, 1940–1945: ­Temoinages de survivants des camps de concentration allemands. Paris: Hachette, 1954. Wu, Duncan, ed. Romanticism: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. ———. Wordsworth’s Reading, 1770–1799. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Young, Robert, ed. Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader. London: Routledge, 1981. Ziarek, Krzysztof. Inflected Language: Toward a Hermeneutics of Nearness; Heidegger, Lévinas, Stevens, Celan. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Zimmerman, Sarah M. Romanticism, Lyricism, and History. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999.

Index

Abrams, M. H.: Gubar and Hungerford compared with, 15; on lyric as speech overheard, 243n32; on neoclassical view of language, 48; on romanticism and prosopopoeia, 13, 25, 238n2; on Wordsworth on poetry and science, 59 Ad ora incerta (Levi), 4 Adorno, Theodor W.: on new categorical imperative, 189, 302n7; on poetry after Auschwitz, 1, 3, 4, 20, 29–30, 105, 217, 228n7, 229n8, 233n30 aestheticization, 18, 30, 174, 241n17, 293n27, 304n15, 308n33 After the Fact (Blanchot), 277n84, 278n86 Agamben, Giorgio: on aestheticizing testimony, 30, 241n17; on apostrophe, 42, 44, 47; on “bare life,” 40, 68–69, 247n53, 251n19; on camp as zone in which law and fact are confounded, 307n25; on capacity to “survive the human,” 10; The Coming Community, 127–28, 267n58, 276n71; on ethics and law, 259n16; Felman compared with, 247n4; on the Gorgon, 41, 42, 43, 44, 71, 100, 101, 273n40, 299n54; on improperty, 127–28, 276n73; on Levi as perfect witness, 99; on Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved, 234n32; on Levi’s “The Survivor” and Dante, 228n6; on Levi’s zones of indistinction, 232n19, 234n32; on logic of not being able,

267n58; on the Muselmann, 32, 40, 100, 102–3, 246n43; on possibility of testimony, 30–33; on prosopopoeia, 41–44, 47; Remnants of Auschwitz, 30, 40, 41, 102–3; on romanticism and post-Holocaust literature, 18, 235n42; on survival as “bare life,” 40, 247n53, 251n19; on “survivor” and “witness” as positions of impossible speech, 32, 33; on testimony and language, 31– 32, 40–45; on testimony and poetry, 29; on testimony as the apostrophe from which we cannot turn away, 44, 47; on the third party, 243n29; translation of Levi’s “The Survivor,” 227n1; on witnessing Auschwitz, 240n14; Wordsworth compared with, 68–69 “Alastor” (Shelley), 256n7 Althusser, Louis, 280n99 Anissimov, Myriam, 4 Antelme, Robert, 104–40; bearing witness only by learning to stop speaking, 104, 106–7; and Blanchot’s reading of Levi’s “The Survivor,” 9; experience in the camps of, 22; first concrete act of living after release of, 107, 269n13; “I was no longer a man of the earth,” 107–11; mutilation of name of, 136, 138–39; rescue from Dachau, 108; on survival beyond capacity to survive, 108. See also Human Race, The (L’Espèce humaine) (Antelme)

   Index anthropomorphism: as an act like execution, 277n81; of Antelme’s The Human Race, 22, 118–19, 120, 121, 123, 124, 129, 139–40, 274n58, 279n95; Blanchot on, 104, 118, 120, 121–22, 128–29; as defined by de Man, 62–63, 251n18; de Man distinguishes trope and, 22, 62–63, 122–30; de Man on proper name and, 125–26, 253n29, 275n67; dictionary definition of, 62; as figural affirmation for de Man, 104; “flesh and blood” figure as, 55, 62; of the human, 139–40; Johnson on gender and, 274n58; lyric, 65, 66, 140; and metamorphosis, 125, 126, 275n63; Nietzsche on anthropomorphic truth, 120–21, 122, 123–25, 128, 129, 274n56; as proper name, 125; prosopopoeia distinguished from, 64, 65, 248n; as restorative, 129, 130; Wordsworthian poetry anthropomorphizes science, 60–61; Wordsworth’s “Mark the concentred Hazels” on, 222, 223; in Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads, 65–66 “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric” (de Man), 13, 62, 104, 122, 248n, 311n60 Aphthonius of Antioch, 253n27 apostrophe: Agamben on, 42, 44, 47; in Antelme’s The Human Race, 135– 36; and Benjamin on translation and survival, 161; de Man on, 147– 48, 223; ecphonesis distinguished from, 283n13; Gorgon and, 42, 44, 100–101; Johnson on, 146–47; legal versus poetic approaches to, 240n16; and Lévinas’s ethics, 22; and prosopopoeia, 146; “romantic” apostrophes atop the Alps, 81; Shelley’s Frankenstein and, 21, 22, 72, 76–84, 98, 99, 102, 257n9, 258n15; as trope of survival, 187; wakefulness produced by, 154;

Wordsworth attempts to avoid pretensions of, 55; in Wordsworth’s “Mark the concentred Hazels,” 222; in Wordsworth’s “To Sleep” sonnets, 145, 148–53, 157, 283n13 “Apostrophe” (Culler), 156 “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion” (Johnson), 146, 282n9 Ararat (film), 302n5 archive, Agamben contrasts testimony with, 31–32 Arendt, Hannah, 127, 276n71 Arrêt du mort, L’ (Blanchot), 243n26, 280n101 Auden, W. H., 156, 220, 229n10, 286n29 “Aufgabe des Übersetzers, Die” (Benjamin), 161, 291n15 Auschwitz, see Holocaust, the authenticity, 38, 53 authority, 38, 39 autobiography: de Man on, 15, 36–40, 263n37; Shelley’s Frankenstein as figure for, 71; Shelley’s Frankenstein read as, 71–72 “Autobiography as De-Facement” (de Man), 36–40; Agamben on Gorgon compared with, 43; on apostrophe and prosopopoeia, 146; on death as displaced name for linguistic predicament, 251n19, 315n8; and Gubar on prosopopoeia, 234n32; on prosopopoeia as trope of autobiography, 262n31; prosopopoeia defined in terms of face not person in, 275n67; rethinking, 13; on terms like “man” remaining garments, 69 automatons, 54, 61–62, 250n16, 261n25 “Backlight” (Celan), 270n20 Baer, Ulrich, 174, 180, 303n13 Bahti, Timothy, 288n6 Barbaud, Anna Letitia, 266n51 Barthes, Roland, 38, 244n36 Bataille, Georges, 110 Bateson, F. W., 46

Index    Baudelaire, Charles, 126, 305n21 Beauchamp, Georges, 108, 269n16, 269n17 Beckett, Samuel, 243n27 Benjamin, Walter: “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers,” 161, 291n15; on fame, 170; and Klee’s angel, 93; on romanticism and Schlegel’s Athenaeum fragment 116, 19; on shock, 305n21; Stewart on problematic of temporality and, 230n14; on translation and survival, 2, 160–62, 287n3; on translation as translation of intention, 292n23 Bennett, Andrew, 236n47 Benveniste, Émile, 31, 37, 245n38 Bernstein, Charles, 229n8 Bersani, Leo, 201–2, 209, 308n33, 313n63 Bewell, Alan, 230n13 Biographia Literaria (Coleridge), 90, 91, 263n38 Blake, William, 301n3 Blanchot, Maurice: After the Fact, 277n84, 278n86; on Antelme’s The Human Race, 105, 106, 110–20; on anthropomorphism, 104, 118, 120, 121–22, 128–29; L’Arrêt du mort, 243n26, 280n101; on the corpse, 272n38; and deconstruction as generating rhetoric of survival, 14; on Echo and Narcissus, 276n77; “Encountering the Imaginary,” 182; on Holocaust as the absolute event of history, 270n18; on the human as the indestructible that can be destroyed, 22; on the human as the need that endures, 9; “The Indestructible,” 104, 110–11, 272n27, 104, 110–11, 272n27; The Infinite Conversation, 110–20, 126, 128–29, 268n6, 273n44, 278n86; The Instant of My Death, 33–35; on interruptions in Celan’s poems, 185, 299n58; on language of writing, 313n62; on Lazarean literature, 303n13; “Literature and the Right to

Death,” 236n47, 277n81; on narrative voice as ceaseless, 278n86; on no true speech as possible in the camps, 279n90; Le Pas au-delà, 277n83; on passage from je to il, 296n32; on poetry after Auschwitz, 4, 229n11; on relation of the third kind, 117, 273n44; “The Relation of the Third Kind (Man Without Horizon),” 117; on romanticism and post-Holocaust literature, 18, 235n42; on romanticism and Schlegel’s Athenaeum fragment 116, 19; on Sade and infinite negation, 268n6; on Shelley’s The Last Man, 254n1; on sleep and dream, 286n31; Space of Literature, 286n31; transfiguration of inspiration in, 186; “The Two Versions of the Imaginary,” 272n38; on the unconsumable, 106; on wakefulness and attention to disaster, 141–42; “War and Literature,” 106, 268n8; on writing of disaster, 130, 218, 240n14; The Writing of the Disaster, 142, 235n42, 270n18, 276n77, 313n62 Bleirne Zeit, Das (film), 304n18 Bonnefoy, Yves, 234n32 Booth, Steven, 167, 288n7 “Bremen Address” (Celan), 178, 183, 293n27 Brown, Marshall, 316n14 Büchner, Georg, 178–79, 183, 184, 296n32, 299n54 Butler, Judith, 290n9, 301n3 Caruth, Cathy, 16, 236n47 Cayrol, Jean: Antelme contrasted with, 106; collaboration on commentary for Nuit et brouillard, 306n22; “concentrationary” style of, 191, 303n13; Lazare parmi nous, 190, 191, 303n10; Poèmes de la nuit et du brouillard, 191; Resnais invites to write commentary for Nuit et brouillard, 191; in Wormser and

   Index Michel’s Tragedie de la deportation, 1940–1945, 190, 303n10; writings of, 191. See also Nuit et brouillard (film) Celan, Paul: art as defined by, 183–84, 299n54; on Atemwende (breathturn), 23, 182–83, 184–85, 288n5, 299n55; “Backlight,” 270n20; “Bremen Address,” 178, 183, 293n27; cleansing of German by, 296n35; coincidence of the end and the end of the poem in work of, 289n8; commissioned to translate Cayrol’s commentary for Nuit et brouillard, 192; “Dein vom Wachen,” 160, 287n1; early interest in Shakespeare, 163; in Felman’s discussion of testimony, 29; “figures of constancy” of, 176; “figures of inversion” of, 172; and French language, 294n28; invited to translate Shakespeare’s sonnets, 162–63, 169; “The Meridian,” 178– 79, 181, 182–84, 296n32, 299n55; “mindful address” of work of, 171, 292n20; Die Niemandsrose, 169; on no one witnessing for the witness, 38; poetry as defined by, 182–84; on poetry as intending another, 4, 161, 171, 183; publication of Shakespeare sonnet translations of, 291n16; puns on word Wurm in work of, 174; and Pyle on radical aestheticism, 237n51; “Die Schleuse,” 169; Shakespeare sonnet translations broadcast on radio, 169, 299n56; “There was earth inside them,” 270n20; “Todesfugue,” 162, 296n32; “Todtnauberg,” 298n46; transfiguration of inspiration in, 186; on translation and perjury, 298n46; translation of Cayrol’s Nuit et brouillard, 23–24, 187–215; translation of Shakespeare’s sonnet 71, 23, 160– 86; translation of Shakespeare’s sonnet 105, 176, 312n61; “Tübingen, Jänner,” 169, 294n30; vielleicht (“perhaps”) in poetry of, 181; “Weggebeitz” (“Etched

Away”), 179–80, 297n43; “Welchen der Steine du hebst” (“Whichever Stone You Lift”), 187, 300n1, 311n59 Chalfen, Israel, 292n16 Chaouat, Bruno, 272n40 Chase, Cynthia, 14, 19, 63, 236n46, 247n5 Cohen, Josh, 19–20, 189 Cole, Diana, 315n4 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: Biographia Literaria, 90, 91, 263n38; constipation of, 285n25; on fancy and imagination, 223, 316n17; on the poet and poetry, 265n43; Shelley’s Frankenstein and definition of poetry of, 90, 91; simile in poetics of, 265n50; on supernatural poems in Lyrical Ballads, 90–91. See also Lyrical Ballads (Coleridge and Wordsworth); “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (Coleridge) Coming Community, The (Agamben), 127–28, 267n58, 276n71 Company (Beckett), 243n27 Compleat Angler (Walton), 284n22 I Corinthians: 49–50, 54 Coury, David N., 196–98, 308n31 Cravetto, Maria-Letizia, 238n3 Crowley, Martin, 271n23 Culler, Jonathan, 156–57, 282n9 Curtis, Jared, 283n18 Darwin, Erasmus, 88, 252n24, 263n36 Dauman, Anatole, 191, 303n14 Davie, Donald, 46–47 Davis, Colin, 271n23 Dawidowicz, Lucy, 216–24; changes from romantic literature to Yiddish culture, 216, 219; on nature as source of her decision against poetry, 316n13; returns to romanticism, 216, 220–21; viability of poetry questioned by, 217; The War Against the Jews, 223; “What did Wordsworth mean to me at such a time?,” 24, 216–21, 223–24 “Death of the Author, The” (Barthes), 38, 244n36

Index    de Certeau, Michel, 238n3 deconstruction, 14 “Deconstruction and the Lyric” (Culler), 156 “Dein vom Wachen” (Celan), 160, 287n1 Delbo, Charlotte, 233n31 de Man, Paul: on anthropomorphism and proper name, 125–26, 253n29, 275n67; anthropomorphism and prosopopoeia distinguished by, 64; anthropomorphism and trope distinguished by, 22, 62–63, 122– 30; “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric,” 13, 62, 104, 122, 248n, 311n60; anthropomorphism as defined by, 62–63, 251n18; on anthropomorphism as figural affirmation, 104; on apostrophe, 147– 48, 223; on autobiography, 36–40, 263n37; on Baudelaire, 126; on being in language as being dependent upon language, 40; on claiming, 270n21; and deconstruction as generating rhetoric of survival, 14; failure to acknowledge the Holocaust, 41, 246n52; Gubar and Hungerford compared with, 15; “Hegel on the Sublime,” 311n60; and Lacan, 254n31; on language as occasion of privation, 40, 41, 47; Ovidian examples of, 125, 126, 127, 129; persons excluded by, 63, 248n; “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” 311n60; on the prosaic, 209, 311n59, 311n60; on prosopopoeia, 7, 12–13, 15, 35, 63, 64, 231n15, 233n30, 234n32, 246n50, 253n30, 262n31; on question of history and of ethics as reemerging, 1; rhetorical terms defined nontraditionally by, 63; The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 13; on romanticism and prosopopoeia, 25–26; on specular moment, 245n39; “Time and History in Wordsworth,” 249n12; on translator,’s task, 169, 291n15; trope as

defined by, 123; “Wordsworth and the Victorians,” 248n, 249n12, 270n21; on Wordsworth’s Essay on Epitaphs, 17–18, 20–21, 39–40, 48. See also “Autobiography as De-Facement” (de Man) Demeure: Fiction and Testimony (Derrida), 33–36, 242n24, 244n34 Derrida, Jacques: on “always already,” 14; on Benjamin on translation, 287n3; on la bête, 272n37; and Blanchot’s L’Arrêt du mort, 243n26; and Celan’s “Todtnauberg,” 298n46; on colloquium of survivors, 35, 36, 243n32; and deconstruction as generating rhetoric of survival, 14; Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, 33– 36, 242n24, 244n34; on humanism in Lévinas and Heidegger, 254n32; on instance of testimony, 242n22; on inventions of the other, 235n44; on logic of the “stop” in Celan, 289n8; Memoires: For Paul de Man, 36, 244n33; “Poetics and Politics of Witnessing,” 25; on romanticism and post-Holocaust literature, 18, 234n42; on survival, 247n53; on testimony and poetry, 25, 29; on the third party, 34, 243n29; on time out of joint, 277n79; on treating Auschwitz as a figure, 189, 302n8 Descartes, René, 54, 120, 250n16 Des Pres, Terence, 247n1 Dichtung und Wahrheit (Goethe), 36 Differend, The (Lyotard), 16 distressed genres, 6 Dominique, François, 105, 106 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 46, 247n1 “Dream of the Burning Child” (Freud), 261n26 Drowned and the Saved, The (Levi), 2, 99, 231n19, 234n32 Dumling, Albrecht, 303n14 Duras, Marguerite, 108–9 Dutoit, Thomas, 258n16

   Index Dutoit, Ulysse, 201–2, 209, 308n33, 313n63 ecphonesis, 283n13 Egoyan, Atom, 302n5 Eisler, Hanns, 191, 303n14, 306n22 Empson, William, 168 “Encountering the Imaginary” (Blanchot), 182 Essays on Epitaphs (Wordsworth): as concluding with self-citation, 39; de Man’s reading of, 17–18, 20–21, 39– 40, 48; on language as incarnation of thought, 48–50; on origin and tendency as inseparably co-relative, 72–73 Ethics and Infinity (Lévinas), 141 ethopoeia, 12 eugenics, 115 euphemism, 172, 174, 194, 208, 293n27, 306n24 Excursion, The (Wordsworth), 39, 313n64 Existence and Existents (Lévinas), 154, 157 face: de Man defines prosopopoeia in terms of, 275n67; of the Gorgon, 42, 100; the human as infinite capacity for taking on, 116; Lévinas on ethical relation as face-to-face, 273n40, 273n44; prosopopoeia posits by means of language, 43 Feldman, Ruth, 227n1 Felman, Shoshana: Agamben compared with, 247n4; Hungerford and, 16; on testimony, 26–30, 241n17; Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, 26, 246n52; on witness, 240n13 Felstiner, John, 163, 288n5, 291n16, 295n30 Ferguson, Frances, 158, 286n33 figure: and Dawidowicz’s “What did Wordsworth mean to me at such a time?,” 217, 219; as essence of the human, 116; as generating a life

beyond, 13; as irreducible condition of speaking and seeing, 218; as mode of witness, 187–88; Nuit et brouillard as inversion of figuration, 188; remains relentless, 190; Shelley’s Frankenstein monster perceived as “figure of a man,” 76, 81, 257n10; testimony and, 26, 44; Wordsworth as, 219, 221; Wordsworth obsessed with figurative language, 47– 48. See also face; personification; prosopopoeia Fineman, Joel, 298n46 “flesh and blood” figure: as anthropomorphism and trope, 55, 62; significations of, 54–55; Wordsworth calls for “flesh and blood” poetry, 47, 49–50, 51, 52, 53–62, 64–70, 251n21 Fontanier, Pierre, 64, 240n16, 251n18, 253n27 Foucault, Michel, 31–32, 68 Frankenstein (Shelley), 71–103; and apostrophe, 21, 22, 72, 76–84, 98, 99, 102, 257n9, 258n15; arms and hands in encounters between Victor and monster in, 262n32; as autobiography, 71–72; Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and, 90–94; commitment to pass beyond the human in, 73; death penalty critiqued in, 259n18; discovery of origin of life in, 72–76, 255n3; ending of, 103; ethical function of, 96; failure of language in, 255n3; as figure for autobiography, 71; as frame narrative, 95–96, 266n52; gap between first and second volume of, 79; human passions delineated in, 88–89, 91, 96–97; interruption in, 95–96, 97, 98, 103; the Jura suggests ethical dimension of, 258n16; Levi’s “The Survivor” and, 99–102; monster perceived as “figure of a man,” 76, 81, 257n10; monster’s own narrative in, 84–85; mourning in, 80, 260n24;

Index    and poetry, 88, 89–91, 256n7, 264n39; preface to 1818 edition, 88–90, 263n35, 263n36, 264n39; preservation of the human as aim of, 88–89, 96– 97, 102; prognoses in, 76, 257n12; and prosopopoeia, 21–22, 71–72, 76, 82, 85, 88, 102, 262n31; romanticism’s relationship to, 255n3; as selfreflexive, 255n3; Shelley’s “Mutability” cited in, 256n7, 260n21, 260n22; as story of crisis of the human, 21, 72; and testimony, 72, 88, 97, 102, 103 Freud, Sigmund, 261n26 Frey, James, 240n15 Fries, Thomas, 289n8 Frontisi-Ducroux, Françoise, 41–42, 43, 100–101, 246n48, 246n50, 261n27, 267n63 Fynsk, Christopher, 31, 294n30, 299n55 Gasché, Rodolphe, 124 George, Stefan, 163, 170, 295n31 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 36 Goldsmith, Steven, 263n35 Goll, Claire, 298n46 Goodman, Kevis, 294n27, 313n64 Gorgon: Agamben on, 41, 42, 43, 44, 71, 100, 101, 273n40, 299n54; FrontisiDucroux on, 42, 43, 100–101, 246n50, 261n27, 267n63; Levi on Muselmann as he who has seen the, 41, 100; monster in Shelley’s Frankenstein compared with, 92, 101 Gottlieb, Susannah Young-Ah, 229n10, 286n29 Grossman, Allen, 300n59 Gubar, Susan: Agamben compared with, 234n32; Poetry after Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew, 14–15, 219, 229n8, 233n31, 315n12; on poetry and attentiveness, 315n12; poetry as focus of, 233n29; on poetry’s importance for Dawidowicz, 219–20; on prosopopoeia, 15–16, 233n31, 300n2

Hamacher, Werner, 172–73, 179, 180, 184 Hamburger, Michael, 179–80 Hansen, Mark, 255n3 Hartman, Geoffrey H., 18, 141–42, 155, 235n42, 294n27, 306n24, 315n12 Hebard, Andrew, 304n15, 305n21, 308n38 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 61, 110, 311n60 “Hegel on the Sublime” (de Man), 311n60 Heidegger, Martin: and Blanchot’s “The Indestructible,” 110; and deconstruction as generating rhetoric of survival, 14; de Man’s analysis of anthropomorphism compared with analysis of Dasein of, 64; Derrida on humanism in ontology of, 254n32; on dwelling, 295n31; on language that is ready-to-hand versus one that appears, 249n11; references to in Celan’s translation of Shakespeare’s sonnet 71, 174, 294n30; silence about Auschwitz of, 302n8 2 Henry IV (Shakespeare), 284n23 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 169, 174, 294n30, 309n49 Holocaust, the: Adorno on poetry after Auschwitz, 1, 3, 4, 20, 29–30, 105, 217, 228n7, 229n8, 233n30; in Antelme’s The Human Race, 104– 40; Derrida on treating Auschwitz as a figure, 189, 302n8; failures to acknowledge, 41, 246n52, 302n8; impossibility of language after, 20– 21; in Levi’s “The Survivor,” 1–11; no true speech as possible in the camps, 132, 136, 279n90; in Resnais’s film Nuit et brouillard, 187–215. See also Muselmänner; post-Holocaust literature Holocaust of Texts, The: Genocide, Literature, and Personification (Hungerford), 14–15, 16–17, 246n52 Homans, Margaret, 260n24, 263n37 human, the: Blanchot on, 9, 22; as capacity to survive beyond

   Index destruction, 111, 114, 118; commitment to pass beyond in Shelley’s Frankenstein, 73; figure as essence of, 116; infinite capacity for defacement of, 116; as without limit, 111–20; man as a trope, 130; nonself-identity of, 117–18, 120; origins and ends of in Shelley’s Frankenstein, 75–76; Pascal’s definition of, 119–20; preservation of as aim of Shelley’s Frankenstein, 88–89, 96–97, 102; recuperation of in Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” 90; Shelley’s Frankenstein as story of crisis of, 21, 72; speech as index of, 108, 111, 270n21; Wordsworth on poet as man speaking to men, 5, 230n12, 264n43. See also anthropomorphism humanism, 63, 64, 118, 254n32, 271n23 Human Race, The (L’Espèce humaine) (Antelme), 104–40; on allies’ response to the camps, 314n67; anthropomorphism of, 22, 118–19, 120, 121, 123, 124, 129, 139–40, 274n58, 279n95; as antiliterature, 105, 107; on choking on too many words, 8, 104; choking-speaking interrupted in order to write, 132; essential reflection results from, 111–12; on the face, 116, 272n40; first stirrings of, 108; “Good Friday” passage of, 278n89; as humanist, 118, 271n23; on human race as one, 109–10, 120, 272n34; imagined addressing of SS officer in, 132–36, 279n95; on man without limit, 111–20; on names in the camps, 136–39; as saying everything, 105– 7; tension between speaking and biology in, 270n21; as testimony, 22; in Wormser and Michel’s Tragedie de la deportation, 1940–1945, 190 Hungerford, Amy: ethical aim of, 17; fiction and criticism as focus of, 233n29; The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and

Personification, 14–15, 16–17, 246n52; on prosopopoeia, 15, 16–17; and Schlegel’s Athenaeum fragment 116, 19; as Wordsworthian, 17 I. G. Farben, 209, 310n57, 310n58 “Indestructible, The” (Blanchot), 104, 110–11, 272n27 Infinite Conversation, The (Blanchot), 110–20, 126, 128–29, 268n6, 273n44, 278n86 “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” (Auden), 156, 220 insomnia, see wakefulness Instant of My Death, The (Blanchot), 33–35 “Interpretation and the Holocaust” issue of Yale Journal of Criticism, 14 Irigaray, Luce, 160 Jacobs, Carol, 14, 283n16 Jacobus, Mary, 281n5, 282n9 Jakubowska, Wanda, 199–200, 202, 207, 309n44 Johnson, Barbara: on anthropomorphism and gender, 274n58; on anthropomorphism and personification, 248n; on apostrophe, 146–47; “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” 146, 282n9; on de Man and proper name, 125–26, 137, 253n29; on Shelley’s Frankenstein, 262n30; on Shelley’s The Last Man, 254n1; on ventriloquism, 146, 147; on Wordsworth and Industrial Revolution, 251n20; on Wordsworth’s exclusion of personification, 53 Johnson, Richard, 169 Jours de notre mort, Les (Rousset), 105 Kaes, Anton, 192 Kames, Lord, 247n2 Kamuf, Peggy, 315n10 Kant, Immanuel, 120, 274n52, 311n60 Keats, John, 284n21, 287n35

Index    Keenan, Thomas, 268n3 Kennedy, George A., 253n27 Kerrigan, William, 167 Kluge, Alexander, 192 Kneale, J. Douglas, 258n15, 283n13 knowledge: Auschwitz and crisis of, 203–4; as recovering man from the abyss, 120 Kofman, Sarah: and Blanchot’s “discourse cannot be developed from this point,” 277n83; on her father killed because he was a Jew, 130–32; on names in the camps, 136; on no true speech as possible in the camps, 132, 136, 279n90; Rue Ordener, rue Labat, 278n87; Smothered Words (Paroles suffoquées), 130, 278n87 Kraus, Karl, 163, 170, 295n31 LaCapra, Dominick, 245n40, 246n43 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 14, 18, 19–20, 235n45, 294n30 language: Agamben on testimony and, 31–32, 40–45; de Man on being in as being dependent upon, 40; de Man on privative nature of, 40, 41, 47; de Man on the prosaic, 209, 311n59, 311n60; in de Man’s reading of Wordsworth, 18; failure of in Shelley’s Frankenstein, 255n3; Hartman on euphemism as essential part of, 306n24; impossibility after the Holocaust, 20–21; as incarnation of thought for Wordsworth, 48– 50; lessons for monster in Shelley’s Frankenstein, 82–83, 261n28; restoration and privation as two faces of, 40; scientific, 60; testimony with or without, 40–45; that is readyto-hand versus one that appears, 49, 249n11; Wordsworth on naked, 49, 68–69; of writing for Blanchot, 313n62. See also speaking “Language and Culture after the Holocaust” (Hartman), 141

Lanham, Richard A., 293n27 Lanzmann, Claude, 30, 302n5 Last Man, The (Shelley), 254n1 Laub, Dori, 26, 30 Lausberg, Heinrich, 240n16, 315n5 Lazare parmi nous (Cayrol), 190, 191, 303n10 Lejeune, Philippe, 38, 39, 245n42 Lenz (Büchner), 178–79, 183, 184, 296n32 Levi, Primo: Ad ora incerta, 4; on Adorno and writing poetry after Auschwitz, 4; Antelme contrasted with, 106; describes himself as “ancient mariner,” 12, 99; The Drowned and the Saved, 2, 99, 231n19, 234n32; on Muselmänner, 10, 12, 41, 100; Survival in Auschwitz, 10; on true witnesses, 8–9, 30, 99–100, 204. See also “Survivor, The” (“Il superstite”) (Levi) Lévinas, Emmanuel: and Blanchot’s After the Fact, 277n84; and Blanchot’s “The Indestructible,” 110; Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and ethics of, 232n20; and deconstruction as generating rhetoric of survival, 14; Derrida on humanism in ethics of, 254n32; and Dutoit’s reading of ethics of Shelley’s Frankenstein, 258n16; on ethical relation as faceto-face, 273n40, 273n44; Ethics and Infinity, 141; Existence and Existents, 154, 157; on insomnia, 141, 154– 56, 157–59, 282n7, 286n30; lyric apostrophe and ethics of, 22; on the other, 214, 298n51; on the saying and the said, 241n22; on subjectivity and inspiration, 242n22; on subjectivity without subject, 218; and testimony’s relation to mysticism, 238n3; on “the face speaks,” 232n22; on the third party, 243n29; transfiguration of inspiration in, 186 Liebman, Stuart, 199–200 Lippit, Akira Mizuma, 252n26

   Index literature: Antelme’s The Human Race transforms, 105–7; Blanchot on language of writing, 313n62; Derrida on passions of, 242n24; as freedom to say anything for Sade, 105, 268n3; as mode of wakefulness for Hartman, 142; relationship to testimony, 105; of testimony, 33–35. See also autobiography; poetry; postHolocaust literature; translation “Literature and the Right to Death” (Blanchot), 236n47, 277n81 Liu, Alan, 154, 285n24, 285n25 Lovejoy, A. O., 19 Lyotard, Jean-François, 15–16, 229n10 lyric: anthropomorphism, 65, 66, 140; Bahti on ends of, 288n6; as changing nothing, 218; Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” as explicitly lyrical, 6; as generating a life beyond life, 13; and Levi on poetry after Auschwitz, 4; Levi’s “The Survivor” as avowedly lyrical, 3; performativity of, 156–57; prosopopoeia as “master trope of,” 7, 12–13, 15, 35, 64, 231n15, 253n27; as speech overheard, 243n32; Wordsworth’s “To Sleep” sonnets posit lyrical subject to put and end to insomnia, 158–59 Lyrical Ballads (Coleridge and Wordsworth): Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” appears in, 6, 91, 230n12, 265n46; as experimental project, 50, 90; natural and supernatural poems in, 90–91, 264n42; poetry of as radical, 66, 67, 70; Shelley’s Frankenstein and, 90; Wordsworth proposes to create audience for, 47. See also preface to Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth) Macovski, Michael, 257n9 malheur, 14, 117, 129, 276n71 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 28–29, 239n11 Marianne and Juliane (film), 304n18

Marker, Chris, 191, 306n22 “Mark the concentred Hazels” (Wordsworth), 221–24, 316n14, 316n16 Mascolo, Dionys, 107, 269n16, 269n17, 270n23 Matthew 16:13–17, 54 Memoires: For Paul de Man (Derrida), 36, 244n33 “Meridian, The” (Celan), 178–79, 181, 182–84, 296n32, 299n55 metamorphosis, 125, 126, 275n63 Michel, Henri, 190–91 Mickiewicz, Adam, 316n13 Miller, J. Hillis: on doing the impossible, 187, 301n3; on ethics of reading, 234n41; on prosopopoeia, 7, 12–13, 231n15, 234n41, 248n; Tropes, Parables, Performatives: Essays on TwentiethCentury Literature, 231n15; Versions of Pygmalion, 248n Million Little Pieces (Frey), 240n15 Milton, John, 89, 264n39 mimesis, 37, 62, 209 Mitterrand, François, 108, 269n16 Morin, Edgar, 105 Muselmänner: Agamben on, 32, 40, 100, 102–3, 246n43; as he who has seen the Gorgon, 41, 100; Levi on, 10, 12, 41, 100 “Mutability” (Shelley), 256n7, 260n21, 260n22 Mystic Fable, The (de Certeau), 238n3 Nacht und Nebel (film), see Nuit et brouillard (film) name: Blanchot on naming, 120; de Man on anthropomorphism and proper, 125–26, 253n29, 275n67; mutilation of Antelme’s, 136, 138–39 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 14, 18, 19–20, 235n45, 301n4, 302n8 New German Cinema, 192 New Testament, 54–55 Niemandsrose, Die (Celan), 169

Index    Nietzsche, Friedrich: on anthropomorphic truth, 120–21, 122, 123–25, 128, 129, 274n56; and Blanchot’s “The Indestructible,” 110; on metamorphosis, 275n63; “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” 63, 118, 120–21, 122, 123, 126, 275n63 Night (Wiesel), 240n15 Novalis, 130 Nuit et brouillard (film), 187–215; allies’ arrival in, 211, 214; archival material in, 192, 199, 206, 308n38; archive and reconstruction confused in, 201–2; on arrival at the camp, 200–201; on Auschwitz as “une autre planete,” 203, 269n15; on camp commandant’s pretense of nonknowledge, 203–5; Celan commissioned to translate Cayrol’s commentary for, 192; Celan not translating parts of Cayrol’s commentary for, 209, 312n61; Celan’s translation interrupts Cayrol’s commentary for, 195, 196, 197, 198, 204, 215, 308n33; Celan’s translation returns Cayrol’s commentary to poetry, 193; “cinematic deportees” created by, 209; clip from Jakubowska’s Ostatni etap in, 199–200, 202; color film used in, 188, 192; after the commentary has ended, 209–10, 313n63; euphemism in, 194, 208; fertility of Auschwitz suggested by, 314n66; final sequences of, 212–13, 214–15, 314n69; first mention of phrase nuit et brouillard in, 199; Hebard’s analysis of anxiety in, 305n21; image of identity card in, 202–3, 309n43; and impossibility of representing uninterrupted fear, 205–7; incongruence between current calm and former violence in, 214–15, 307n29; as inversion of figuration, 188; Lanzmann’s Shoah compared with, 302n5; making of, 190–93; on

noncorrespondence of saying and seeing, 193–94; opening paragraph of Cayrol’s commentary for, 195–97; opening shot of, 193, 199, 206, 210; paralepsis in Cayrol’s commentary for, 206–7; as passing from one image of nonrepresentation to another, 210–11; “paysage” translated as “Land” rather than “Landschaft,” 197–98, 307n31; prosaic-ness of Celan’s translation of Cayrol’s commentary for, 208–9; as reflecting on problem of figure after Auschwitz, 188, 215; as rendering film a means of not seeing, 23–24, 188, 199–210; saturated landscapes in, 192–93; testimony of, 190, 192, 203; tracking shots of, 308n33; in von Trotta’s Marianne and Juliane, 305n18 “Oberhausen Manifesto,” 192 “Ode to the West Wind” (Shelley), 10– 11, 146, 283n13 “On Ghosts” (Shelley), 256n8 “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” (Nietzsche), 63, 118, 120–21, 122, 123, 126, 275n63 Ostatni etap (film), 199–200, 202, 207, 309n44 Ovid, 125, 126, 127, 129 Owen, W. J. B., 61, 250n14 paralepsis, 206–7 paronomasia, 172–73, 177–79, 184–85, 293n26 Pas au-delà, Le (Blanchot), 277n83 Pascal, Blaise, 118, 119–20, 121–22, 126 passion: Derrida on passions of literature, 242n24; Shelley’s Frankenstein in delineation of, 88–89, 91, 96–97; Wordsworth on personification and, 52, 53, 56; Wordsworth’s “To Sleep” sonnets on sleep and, 145 passivity: radical, 112; Wordsworth’s “To Sleep” sonnets on sleep and, 145

   Index Pedlar, The (Wordsworth), 154 Pepper, Thomas, 293n23, 296n32, 310n58 personification: in Celan’s translation of Shakespeare’s sonnet 71, 172, 292n23; Davie on poetry and, 46–47; de Man avoids mention of, 63; of a person, 158–59; and prosopopoeia, 63, 247n5, 252n27; Wordsworth eschews, 17, 47, 48, 51–57, 62, 64, 65, 69; and Wordsworth’s “flesh and blood” figure, 67; Wordsworth’s propensity for personifying texts, 17. See also prosopopoeia “Personification” (Davie), 46–47 “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant” (de Man), 311n60 Pinch, Adela, 247n2, 251n21 Plath, Sylvia, 233n31 Poèmes de la nuit et du brouillard (Cayrol), 191 Poems in Two Volumes (Wordsworth), 143, 148, 283n18 “Poetics and Politics of Witnessing” (Derrida), 25 poetry: Adorno on poetry after Auschwitz, 1, 3, 4, 20, 29–30, 105, 217, 228n7, 229n8, 233n30; anthropomorphism and survival of, 66; Celan’s definition of, 182– 84; Davie on rhetoric and, 46–47; Dawidowicz questions viability of, 217; in Dawidowicz’s formation, 219–20; democratic, 66; as intending another for Celan, 4, 161, 171, 183; Levi on explanatory role for, 4; as mode of wakefulness for Hartman, 142; as nonredemptive, 241n17; as at once thriving and obscure, 65; as reuniting life to its form, 68, 69–70; romanticism attempts to separate rhetoric from, 47, 48; Shelley’s Frankenstein and, 88, 89–91, 256n7, 264n39; survival of, 66, 218; testimony and, 26–30, 36–40, 241n17; and wakefulness in Wordsworth’s

“To Sleep” sonnets, 143–45; what poems make happen, 156–57, 220; Wordsworth as synecdoche for, 219; Wordsworth calls for truly human, 47; Wordsworth on “flesh and blood,” 47, 49–50, 51, 52, 53–62, 64–70, 218–19, 251n21; Wordsworth on poet as man speaking to men, 5, 230n12, 264n43; Wordsworth on sister arts of, 251n17; Wordsworth on the poet’s work, 57–62. See also lyric Poetry after Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew (Gubar), 14– 15, 219, 229n8, 233n31, 315n12 “Poetry and Liberty” (Bonnefoy), 234n32 Pope, Alexander, 48 post-Holocaust literature: Adorno on poetry after Auschwitz, 1, 3, 4, 20, 29–30, 105, 228n7, 229n8, 233n30; prosopopoeia in, 13, 187; romanticism and criticism of, 18–19; as transforming reading and relation, 106. See also Antelme, Robert; Cayrol, Jean; Celan, Paul; Levi, Primo preface to Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth), 50–70; anthropomorphism in, 65– 66; on “flesh and blood” poetry, 47, 49–50, 51, 52, 53–62, 64–70, 251n21; as obsessed with figurative language, 47–48; personification excluded by, 17, 21, 48, 51–57, 62, 64, 65, 69; poetry as defined in, 21; on the poet’s work, 57–62; on reader’s experience, 51–52, 55–56; revision for 1802 edition of, 57, 250n14; on sister arts of poetry, 251n17; three parts of, 50 Prelude, The (Wordsworth), 17, 143, 245n42, 257n13, 281n5, 282n9 prosopopoeia: Abrams on romanticism and, 25, 238n2; Agamben on, 41–44, 47; all fictional characters as, 262n29; anthropomorphism distinguished from, 64, 65, 248n; apostrophe and, 146; as assuming the impossible, 12;

Index    in Celan’s translation of Shakespeare’s sonnet 71, 172, 173; in Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” 7, 8, 12; de Man on, 7, 12–13, 15, 35, 63, 64, 231n15, 233n30, 234n32, 246n50, 253n27, 262n31; de Man on romanticism and, 25–26; and de Man’s reading of Wordsworth’s Essay on Epitaphs, 17–18, 20–21; ethopoeia and, 12, 253n27; Gubar on, 15–16, 233n31, 300n2; Hungerford on, 15, 16–17; in “Interpretation and the Holocaust” issue of Yale Journal of Criticism, 14; legal versus poetic approaches to, 240n16; Levi’s “The Survivor” and, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12; literature of testimony as dependent on, 8, 35; Miller on, 7, 12–13, 231n15, 234n41, 248n; as Nessus tunic, 15, 40, 234n32; and personification, 63, 247n5, 252n27; as positing voice or face by means of language, 43; in post-Holocaust literature, 13; Quintilian on, 11–12; Shelley’s Frankenstein and, 21–22, 71–72, 76, 82, 85, 88, 102, 262n31; as trope of survival, 13, 187; Wordsworth’s Essay on Epitaphs and, 39–40; in Wordsworth’s “Mark the concentred Hazels,” 222; Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads as opposed to, 17, 21. See also personification Pyle, Forest, 237n51 Quart, Leonard, 199–200 Quintilian, 11–12, 240n16 quodlibet (whatever), 127, 275n70 Raskin, Richard, 306n22 “Reading Lyric” (Culler), 156 Redfield, Marc, 19, 236n46 “Relation of the Third Kind, The (Man Without Horizon)” (Blanchot), 117 Remnants of Auschwitz (Agamben), 30, 40, 41, 102–3

Resnais, Alain: invited to direct Nuit et brouillard, 191, 303n12; Nazi aesthetics and, 304n15. See also Nuit et brouillard (film) rhetoric: Davie on poetry and, 46–47; de Man on epistemology and, 122, 123, 132; romanticism attempts to separate poetry from, 47, 48; romanticism’s rhetoric of survival, 14, 20, 21, 72, 76, 218; of wakefulness, 141–59; Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads on excluding from poetry, 48; Wordsworth’s rhetoric of survival, 62–70. See also apostrophe; trope Rhetoric of Romanticism, The (de Man), 13 Rich, Adrienne, 229n8 Rickels, Lawrence A., 260n24 Riefenstahl, Leni, 192 “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (Coleridge), 5–11; archaic appearance of, 6; as controversial, 91, 265n46; as explicitly lyrical, 6; fabrication of history and authenticity of, 5–8; Levi’s Ad ora incerta and, 4; Levi’s “The Survivor” repeats and translates, 1–3, 7–11, 13, 227n3; in Lyrical Ballads, 6, 91, 230n12, 265n46; moral of, 266n51; prosopopoeia in, 7, 8, 12; and Shelley’s Frankenstein, 90– 94; survivor in, 12; Wordsworth’s The Prelude recalls, 257n13 Robbins, Jill, 273n40 romanticism: Abrams on prosopopoeia and, 25, 238n2; apostrophes atop the Alps, 81; as attempt to separate poetry from rhetoric, 47, 48; and criticism of post-Holocaust literature, 18–19; deconstruction as romantic, 14; de Man on prosopopoeia and, 25–26; as incomplete, 19–20, 46–47, 237n51; Levi’s “The Survivor” as allegory of, 20; lyric figures generating a life beyond in, 13; and modernity, 19, 236n46; National Socialism and,

   Index 18, 235n43; as nonredemptive, 21; as recovery of controlled discourse, 122; as resistance, 19; return of, 224; rhetoric of survival in, 14, 20, 21, 72, 76, 218; Shelley’s Frankenstein initiated rethinking of rhetoric of, 72; Shelley’s Frankenstein’s relationship to, 255n3; on survival through texts, 26, 236n47; and testimony, 25– 45; uncontainment of, 14, 283n16; untimeliness of, 224; Wordsworth and invention of British, 48, 60, 69; Wordsworth as synecdoche for, 219, 221; Wordsworth’s “flesh and blood” figure and, 65. See also Coleridge, Samuel Taylor; Shelley, Percy Bysshe; Wordsworth, William Romanticism (Chase), 19 Ronell, Avital, 260n24, 263n36 Rosenbaum, Ron, 219–20 Rosenfeld, Alvin H., 239n5 Rothenberg, Jerome, 229n8 Rousset, David, 105 Rowland v. California Men’s Colony, Unit II Men’s Advisory Council, 125 Rue Ordener, rue Labat (Kofman), 278n87 Russell, Donald, 233n27 Sade, Marquis de, 105, 268n3, 268n6 Santner, Eric L., 246n52 Schiller, Friedrich von, 235n43 Schlegel, August Wilhelm von, 163 Schlegel, Friedrich von, 19–20 “Schleuse, Die” (Celan), 169 Schmidt, Dennis, 294n30 science: Shelley’s Frankenstein on, 259n20; Wordsworth contrasts poetry with, 57–62, 218–19 Serge Klarsfeld Memorial, 131–32 Shakespeare, William: Celan invited to translate sonnets of, 162–63, 169; Celan’s early interest in, 163; Celan’s sonnet translations broadcast on radio, 169, 299n56; “double

grammar” of sonnets of, 168; 2 Henry IV, 284n23; publication of Celan’s sonnet translations of, 291n16; Schlegel’s translations of, 163; Shelley’s preface to Frankenstein and, 89, 264n39. See also Shakespeare’s sonnet 71 “Shakespeare’s ‘Perjur’d Eye’” (Fineman), 298n46 Shakespeare’s sonnet 71, 160–86; as about survival, 163, 177; as act of love, 177; aestheticization in Celan’s translation of, 174; Atemwende (breathturn) in Celan’s translation of, 184–85; Celan’s embellishment of, 173–74; Celan’s translation of as testimony, 181; Celan’s translation responding to the text it translates, 176; dated interruption in Celan’s translation of, 171, 173, 184–86; death and absence confused in, 166; “double grammar” of, 168; “dwelling” in, 167, 175, 295n31; end of Celan’s translation of, 181–82; English text of, 164; English text printed alongside Celan’s translation, 289n7; euphemism in Celan’s translation of, 172, 174, 293n27; first quatrain of, 164–68, 171–72, 184–85; German text of, 170; injunction against mourning of, 23, 165–66, 174, 176–77, 180, 290n9, 297n37; interruptions in, 185; irony of, 170; as literally unspeakable, 23, 168–69; meaning of ends called into question by, 166; as “message in a bottle” to Celan, 171; opening address of, 164–65; paradoxical injunction to forget in, 164, 170; paronomasia in Celan’s translation of, 172–73, 177–79, 184–85, 293n26; personification in Celan’s translation of, 172, 292n23; prosopopoeia in Celan’s translation of, 172, 173; punctuation for end of line four, 167; Quarto edition text of, 288n7; radio

Index    broadcast of Celan’s translation of, 169, 299n56; references to Heidegger and Hölderlin in Celan’s translation of, 169, 174, 294n30; second line contradicts the first, 165; second quatrain of, 175–81; third quatrain of, 181, 299n57; Tod not appearing in Celan’s translation of, 175; translating as betraying message of, 163–64; translation leaving out words that appear in Shakespeare, 181; tropes in Celan’s translation of, 172; violence of, 170 Shelley, Mary, 71; Frankenstein read as autobiography of, 71; The Last Man, 254n1; “On Ghosts,” 256n8. See also Frankenstein (Shelley) Shelley, Percy Bysshe: “Alastor,” 256n7; Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria read by, 263n38; “Mutability,” 256n7, 260n21, 260n22; “Ode to the West Wind,” 10–11, 146, 283n13; on origin and end, 256n6; preface to 1818 edition of Frankenstein, 88– 90, 263n35, 263n36, 264n39; “The Triumph of Life,” 281n5 Shoah (film), 30, 302n5 “Slumber did my spirit seal” (Wordsworth), 294n27 Smith, Charlotte, 252n24, 284n21 Smock, Ann, 132 Smothered Words (Paroles suffoquées) (Kofman), 130, 278n87 Smyser, Jane Worthington, 250n14 sonnet 71 (Shakespeare), see Shakespeare’s sonnet 71 “Sonnet to Sleep” (Keats), 284n21 Space of Literature (Blanchot), 286n31 speaking: Antelme bearing witness only by learning to stop, 104, 106– 7; Antelme’s The Human Race as saying everything, 105–7; as index of the human, 108, 111, 270n21; lyric figures as irreducible condition of, 218; monster in Shelley’s Frankenstein

as eloquent, 101–2; no true speech as possible in the camps, 132, 136, 279n90; Nuit et brouillard on noncorrespondence of saying and seeing, 193–94; Shakespeare’s sonnet 71 as literally unspeakable, 23, 168– 69; speech acts, 39; speech without power, 130–31; survivor speaking of what he cannot speak, 32–34. See also apostrophe; language; testimony speech acts, 39 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 96, 267n52 SS: Antelme on humanity of, 114–15, 116–17; Antelme on limits of, 135–36; in Resnais’s Nuit et brouillard, 203, 211 Steiner, George, 296n35 Stevick, Philip, 261n25 Stewart, Susan, 6–7, 230n14 “Subjectivity in Language” (Benveniste), 245n38 survival: Agamben on, 40, 247n53; Antelme becomes a survivor, 107; apostrophe as trope of, 187; in Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” 156; Benjamin on translation and, 2, 160–62, 287n3; beyond capacity to survive, 108; in Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” 12; deconstruction as generating rhetoric of, 14; Derrida on, 247n53; the human as capacity to survive beyond destruction, 111, 114; in Levi’s “The Survivor,” 1–13; as linked to failure of ends, 13–14; of monster in Shelley’s Frankenstein, 97; of poetry, 66, 218; prosopopoeia as trope of, 13, 187; romanticism’s rhetoric of, 14, 20, 21, 72, 76, 218; Shakespeare’s sonnet 71 as about, 163, 177; survivor as incomplete witness, 38; survivor speaking of what he cannot speak, 32–34; through texts, 26, 236n47; Wordsworth’s rhetoric of, 62–70 Survival in Auschwitz (Levi), 10

   Index “Survivor, The” (“Il superstite”) (Levi): as allegory of romanticism, 20; as from “before Auschwitz,” 4; Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” quoted in, 1–3, 7–11, 13, 227n3; Dante reference in, 228n6; on the dead remaining alive, 9–10, 11; as describing and enacting return of an unsettled past, 3; as guilty poem, 3–5; as performing and accounting for experience of repetition, 3; and prosopopoeia, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12; refusal of responsibility in, 11; Shelley’s Frankenstein and, 99–102; Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” compared with, 10–11 Surya, Michel, 105–6, 239n11 Swann, Brian, 227n1 Szondi, Peter, 172, 176, 289n7, 289n8, 292n23, 310n58, 312n61 Taylor, Gary, 167 testimony, 25–45; absent, 131; Agamben on aestheticizing, 30, 241n17; Agamben on possibility of, 30–33; Agamben on tropes and, 234n32; Antelme’s The Human Race as, 22; aporetic structure of, 30; as the apostrophe from which we cannot turn away for Agamben, 44, 47; archive contrasted with, 31–32; Celan’s translation of Shakespeare’s sonnet 71 as, 181; Derrida on, 25, 29; Felman on, 26–30, 241n17; as figure, 44; with or without language, 40–45; in law, 27–28; literature of, 33–35; as misrepresented as loss of language, 21; in mystical writing, 238n3; of Nuit et brouillard, 190, 192, 203; as ordered by figurative language, 26; poetry and, 26–30, 36–40, 241n17; precocious, 28; prosopopoeia as essential to literature of, 8, 35; relationship to literature, 105; Shelley’s Frankenstein and, 72, 88, 97, 102, 103; the third

party, 34, 243n29; Wiesel on, 26–30, 37, 44, 239n5; of Wordsworth’s “Mark the concentred Hazels,” 221–22; Wordsworth’s “To Sleep” sonnets and, 143; Wormser and Michel’s Tragedie de la deportation, 1940–1945, 190–91, 303n10. See also witness Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (Felman and Laub), 26, 246n52 “There was earth inside them” (Celan), 270n20 “Time and History in Wordsworth” (de Man), 249n12 “Todesfugue” (Celan), 162, 296n32 “Todtnauberg” (Celan), 298n46 “To Sleep” (Smith), 284n21 “To Sleep” sonnets (Wordsworth), 142–56; apostrophe in, 145, 148–53, 157, 283n13; as attempting to make the absent present through poetic address, 22–23; “A flock of sheep that leisurely pass by,” 148–49; “Fond words have oft been spoke to thee, Sleep!,” 150–51; insomnia as theme of, 143; “Oh gentle sleep!,” 143–44; posits lyrical subject to put an end to insomnia, 158–59; publication of, 143, 148, 149; on relation of poetry and wakefulness, 143–45; as testimony, 143; Wordsworth’s rearrangement of, 148 Tragedie de la deportation, 1940–1945: Temoinages de survivants des camps de concentration allemands (Wormser and Michel), 190–91, 303n10 translation: Benjamin on survival and, 2, 160–62, 287n3; Celan’s translation of Cayrol’s Nuit et brouillard, 23– 24, 187–215; Celan’s translation of Shakespeare’s sonnet 71, 23, 160– 86; de Man on translator’s task, 169, 291n15; as enacting crisis of writing, 177; paronomasia as trope of, 177; as translation of intention for Benjamin, 292n23

Index    “Triumph of Life, The” (Shelley), 281n5 Triumph of the Will (film), 192 trope: anthropomorphism distinguished from, 22, 62–63, 122–30; de Man’s definition of, 123; “flesh and blood” figure as, 55, 62; man as a, 130; truth as, 122, 274n56 Tropes, Parables, Performatives: Essays on Twentieth-Century Literature (Miller), 231n15 Trotta, Margarethe von, 304n18 “Tübingen, Jänner” (Celan), 169, 294n30 “Two Versions of the Imaginary, The” (Blanchot), 272n38 Uncontainable Romanticism (Jacobs), 283n16 untimeliness: of romanticism, 224; and Shelley’s “The Triumph of Life,” 281n5; and survival, 14; of Wordsworth’s poetry, 220 Vendler, Helen, 167, 289n7, 292n23 Versions of Pygmalion (Miller), 248n Vierney, Sascha, 191 wakefulness: apostrophe produces, 154; and attention to disaster, 141–42; crisis of witnessing introduced by, 155–56; Lévinas on insomnia, 141, 154–56, 157–59, 282n7, 286n30; rhetoric of, 141–59; in Shelley’s “The Triumph of Life,” 281n5; Wordsworth’s insomnia, 142, 154, 281n4; in Wordsworth’s “To Sleep” sonnets, 142–56; in Wordsworth’s work, 142 Wall, Thomas Carl, 112 Walton, Izaak, 284n22 War Against the Jews, The (Dawidowicz), 223 “War and Literature” (Blanchot), 106, 268n8 Warminski, Andrzej, 228n4

Warton, Joseph, 49 Warton, Thomas, 281n4 “We Are Seven” (Wordsworth), 286n33, 290n10 “Weggebeitz” (“Etched Away”) (Celan), 179–80, 297n43 “Welchen der Steine du hebst” (“Whichever Stone You Lift”) (Celan), 187, 300n1, 311n59 Wells, Stanley, 167 whatever (quodlibet), 127, 275n70 Wiesel, Elie: Antelme contrasted with, 106; Night, 240n15; on testimony, 26– 30, 37, 44, 239n5; as witness, 239n12 Winfrey, Oprah, 240n15 witness: Agamben on “survivor” and “witness” as positions of impossible speech, 32, 33; Antelme bearing witness only by learning to stop speaking, 104, 106–7; apostrophe and prosopopoeia open up another possibility of, 187; Dawidowicz on, 223; Felman on, 240n13; figure as mode of, 187–88; Lévinas calls for new mode of, 158; Levi on true witnesses, 8–9, 30, 99–100, 204; survivor as incomplete, 38; wakefulness introduces crisis of witnessing, 155–56. See also testimony Wohlfarth, Irving, 271n23 Wolfson, Susan J., 265n50 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 142, 149, 281n4 Wordsworth, William, 46–70; Agamben compared with, 68–69; on Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” 265n46; Dawidowicz’s “What did Wordsworth mean to me at such a time?,” 24, 216–21, 223–24; The Excursion, 39, 313n64; on fancy and imagination, 223, 316n17; as figure, 219, 221; on “flesh and blood” poetry, 47, 49–50, 51, 52, 53–62, 64–70, 218–19, 251n21; insomnia of, 142, 154, 281n4; on intimations of mortality, 255n3; in invention of

   Index British romanticism, 48, 60, 69; on knowing rescuing man from the abyss, 120; on language as incarnation of thought, 48–50; on language as occasion of privation, 40, 41; “Mark the concentred Hazels,” 221–24, 316n14, 316n16; on naked language, 49, 68–69; on origin and tendency as inseparably co-relative, 72–73; The Pedlar, 154; personification eschewed by, 17, 47, 48, 51–57, 62, 64, 65, 69; Poems in Two Volumes, 143, 148, 283n18; on poet as man speaking to men, 5, 230n12, 264n43; on poetry and experience, 221; poetry of man of, 21; on the poet’s work, 57–62; The Prelude, 17, 143, 245n42, 257n13, 281n5, 282n9; propensity for personifying texts, 17; rhetoric of survival of, 62–70; Shelley’s Frankenstein and definition of poetry of, 90, 91, 264n39; “Slumber did my spirit seal,” 294n27; truly human poetry called for by, 47; wakefulness

in work of, 142; “We Are Seven,” 286n33, 290n10; writer’s block seen as cause of insomnia of, 154, 285n25; “Written upon a Blank Leaf in ’The Compleat Angler’,” 284n22. See also Essays on Epitaphs (Wordsworth); Lyrical Ballads (Coleridge and Wordsworth); preface to Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth); “To Sleep” sonnets (Wordsworth) Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Liu), 154 “Wordsworth and the Victorians” (de Man), 248n, 249n12, 270n21 Wormser, Olga, 190–91 Writing of the Disaster, The (Blanchot), 142, 235n42, 270n18, 276n77, 313n62 “Written upon a Blank Leaf in ’The Compleat Angler’” (Wordsworth), 284n22 Yale Journal of Criticism, 14 Ziarek, Krzysztof, 171, 292n20

Cultural Memory in the Present

Hubert Damisch, A Childhood Memory by Piero della Francesca Dana Hollander, Exemplarity and Chosenness: Rosenzweig and Derrida on the Nation of Philosophy Asja Szafraniec, Beckett, Derrida, and the Event of Literature Alison Ross, The Aesthetic Paths of Philosophy: Presentation in Kant, Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nancy Gerhard Richter, Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers' Reflections from Damaged Life Bella Brodzki, Can These Bones Live? Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory Rodolphe Gasché, The Honor of Thinking: Critique, Theory, Philosophy Brigitte Peucker, The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film Natalie Melas, All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison Jonathan Culler, The Literary in Theory Michael G. Levine, The Belated Witness: Literature, Testimony, and the Question of Holocaust Survival Jennifer A. Jordan, Structures of Memory: Understanding German Change in Berlin and Beyond Christoph Menke, Reflections of Equality Marlène Zarader, The Unthought Debt: Heidegger and the Hebraic Heritage Jan Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies David Scott and Charles Hirschkind, Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors Gyanendra Pandey, Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories James Siegel, Naming the Witch J. M. Bernstein, Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting Theodore W. Jennings, Jr., Reading Derrida / Thinking Paul: On Justice Richard Rorty and Eduardo Mendieta, Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty

Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine Renaud Barbaras, Desire and Distance: Introduction to a Phenomenology of Perception Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art Ban Wang, Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory, and History in Modern China James Phillips, Heidegger's Volk: Between National Socialism and Poetry Frank Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience István Rév, Retroactive Justice: Prehistory of Post-Communism Paola Marrati, Genesis and Trace: Derrida Reading Husserl and Heidegger Krzysztof Ziarek, The Force of Art Marie-José Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary Cecilia Sjöholm, The Antigone Complex: Ethics and the Invention of Feminine Desire Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow . . . : A Dialogue Elisabeth Weber, Questioning Judaism: Interviews by Elisabeth Weber Jacques Derrida and Catherine Malabou, Counterpath: Traveling with Jacques Derrida Martin Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing Nanette Salomon, Shifting Priorities: Gender and Genre in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul Jean-Luc Marion, The Crossing of the Visible Eric Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany Anne Freadman, The Machinery of Talk: Charles Peirce and the Sign Hypothesis Stanley Cavell, Emerson's Transcendental Etudes Stuart McLean, The Event and Its Terrors: Ireland, Famine, Modernity Beate Rössler, ed., Privacies: Philosophical Evaluations Bernard Faure, Double Exposure: Cutting Across Buddhist and Western Discourses Alessia Ricciardi, The Ends of Mourning: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Film Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb, eds., Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena Jean-Luc Nancy, A Finite Thinking, edited by Simon Sparks Theodor W. Adorno, Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, edited by Rolf Tiedemann Patricia Pisters, The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity Dorothea von Mücke, The Rise of the Fantastic Tale

Marc Redfield, The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape Dan Zahavi, Husserl's Phenomenology Rodolphe Gasché, The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant's Aesthetics Michael Naas, Taking on the Tradition: Jacques Derrida and the Legacies of Deconstruction Herlinde Pauer-Studer, ed., Constructions of Practical Reason: Interviews on Moral and Political Philosophy Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given That: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment Ian Balfour, The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy Martin Stokhof, World and Life as One: Ethics and Ontology in Wittgenstein's Early Thought Gianni Vattimo, Nietzsche: An Introduction Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971-1998, ed. Elizabeth Rottenberg Brett Levinson, The Ends of Literature: The Latin American "Boom" in the Neoliberal Marketplace Timothy J. Reiss, Against Autonomy: Cultural Instruments, Mutualities, and the Fictive Imagination Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, eds., Religion and Media Niklas Luhmann, Theories of Distinction: Re-Describing the Descriptions of Modernity, ed. and introd. William Rasch Johannes Fabian, Anthropology with an Attitude: Critical Essays Michel Henry, I Am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity Gil Anidjar, "Our Place in Al-Andalus": Kabbalah, Philosophy, Literature in ArabJewish Letters Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Veils F. R. Ankersmit, Historical Representation F. R. Ankersmit, Political Representation Elissa Marder, Dead Time: Temporal Disorders in the Wake of Modernity (Baudelaire and Flaubert) Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts Niklas Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting Jean-Luc Nancy, The Speculative Remark: (One of Hegel's bon mots) Jean-François Lyotard, Soundproof Room: Malraux's Anti-Aesthetics Jan Patočka, Plato and Europe

Hubert Damisch, Skyline: The Narcissistic City Isabel Hoving, In Praise of New Travelers: Reading Caribbean Migrant Women Writers Richard Rand, ed., Futures: Of Jacques Derrida William Rasch, Niklas Luhmann's Modernity: The Paradoxes of Differentiation Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality Jean-François Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine Kaja Silverman, World Spectators Samuel Weber, Institution and Interpretation: Expanded Edition Jeffrey S. Librett, The Rhetoric of Cultural Dialogue: Jews and Germans in the Epoch of Emancipation Ulrich Baer, Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan Samuel C. Wheeler III, Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy David S. Ferris, Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity Rodolphe Gasché, Of Minimal Things: Studies on the Notion of Relation Sarah Winter, Freud and the Institution of Psychoanalytic Knowledge Samuel Weber, The Legend of Freud: Expanded Edition Aris Fioretos, ed., The Solid Letter: Readings of Friedrich Hölderlin J. Hillis Miller / Manuel Asensi, Black Holes / J. Hillis Miller; or, Boustrophedonic Reading Miryam Sas, Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism Peter Schwenger, Fantasm and Fiction: On Textual Envisioning Didier Maleuvre, Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia Niklas Luhmann, Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy Mieke Bal, ed., The Practice of Cultural Analysis: Exposing Interdisciplinary Interpretation Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, eds., Religion