The Ethics of Community: Nancy, Derrida, Morrison, and Menendez 9781472542816, 9781441128850

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Acknowledgements

Writing about community and extension, indebtedness and the other, while being slapped in the face with the impossibility of “going it alone” has been a strange and often overwhelming experience. I have found myself in need of help like never before. The effortless generosity that countless people have shown me not only allowed me to complete this project but further, changed my life in unfathomable ways. The inspired Department of Comparative Literature at SUNY BuffaIo consistently fed my intellectual curiosity and supported my work. I will never forget the awesome precision and beauty of Rodolphe Gasche’s lectures. Your genuine love of the question is unmistakable and has profoundly influenced my scholarly development. I thank Henry Sussman for encouraging and supporting me from graduate school right up to the acquisition of the book contract. Your consistent generosity and presence in my academic life has been mind blowing. You are a true mentor and role model. I received a great deal of intellectual, institutional, and emotional support from my colleagues in the English Department at FIU. I am deeply grateful to Bruce Harvey, who has been a sagacious reader of my work. Your insightful comments and keen readerly eye have made me a better thinker and writer. I thank Carmela Mcintire for bringing me to FIU and showing me great kindness through my first difficult years at FIU. Steven Blevins, Jason Pearl, Yvette Piggush, and Andy Strycharski, your emotional and intellectual friendship and camaraderie have been crucial to my sanity and general well-being. Asher Milbauer has been a consistent source of support and encouragement. At times your absolute confidence in my abilities and worth gave me enough strength to continue writing. However, I am particularly indebted to James Sutton, Department Chair extraordinaire! Not only have you wholly backed my work but you have repeatedly gone to bat for me when times got rough. For your tenderness and compassion, I thank you. I am indebted to Continuum editors Haaris Navqvi and Srikanth Srinivasan for your patience and guidance. Feeling your care and

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respect through the many stages of the publication process never failed to lift my spirits. I cannot adequately convey my gratitude to the indomitable and spirited Heather Russell, friend, comrade, colleague, and partner in crime. Your rare combination of irreverence and grace, power and poise, and infinitely generous spirit has been both inspiration and sustenance through these tumultuous years. I will never forget the many times that you said to me “Of course you can!” with a wonderful wave of the hand! Ellen Thompson, colleague, friend, sister New-England transplant, confidante, and endless source of support and friendship. Your words of encouragement and care during the mutually trying years of tenure, divorce, death, and kid stress border on the epic. I will never be able to thank you enough for all the love that you have given me. I have been deeply moved and energized by a magical friendship with Danny Luis whose intensity and integrity have often held me up throughout this process. I thank you for exposing me to faith in lifelong friendship and all that it entails. I will never forget your total openness to me. To fellow self-deprecator Sylvan Lee whose ability to make me laugh until I cry is unparalleled, thank you. The countless meals and childcare you so generously provided largely contributed to the completion of this project. Your friendship has meant the world to me and I simply cannot imagine life without you. I thank Tom Phillips for sharing a world with me for nearly thirty years. The love and acceptance that you have extended to me has made me a stronger and happier person. I feel truly lucky to have you in my life again. Who else would send me the wise words “If you don’t sin Jesus died for nothing?” I am immensely grateful to Berthold Schoene for first legitimizing this project and giving me a much needed confidence boost. The sense of intellectual kinship that I have felt with you has been pivotal to the completion of The Ethics of Community. I feel especially grateful for the friendship, guidance, and support of Gustavo Perez Firmat. Your intellectual acuity, sensitivity, and irreverence have touched me more than you know. You are indeed unforgettable. I am forever indebted to the undergraduate and graduate students in English and Philosophy at Florida International University whose intellectual spirit and energy have kept me motivated and fresh through these many semesters. Matt Bucemi, Sarah Rodriguez. Soraya Bascoy, Rodrigo Torres, Claudia Carcach, Michael Martin, Nicole Billitz, Mariane Stanev, Diamys Garcia, Chris Miranda, and Walter Jouvin are

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Acknowledgements

just a few of the many students who have enhanced my development as a teacher and scholar. I thank Monica Vera and Parker Phillips for your friendship, strength, and much needed research and proofreading assistance! Without your labor and solidarity, I would not have been able to complete The Ethics of Community. Know that you each exude a particular kind of gentle warrior energy that I admire very much. I am tremendously indebted to Café Demetrios for allowing me to make an office of your beautiful café these last several years. Your hospitality and support never failed to give me a lift when most needed. The free coffee refills presented to me by Demetrio, Leo, Kati, Maritza, Dora, and Franscisco were an essential component of the writing process. I owe a special thanks to my FIU colleague Isaiah Thomas who has revived my faith in possibilities for sociopolitical change. Your revolutionary spirit, intellectual curiosity, and financial generosity have given me soul-sustaining glimmers of hope through the last stretch of this project. To Mikele Arriema, Virginia Arriema, and Willie Bu I owe countless hours of childcare. I will never forget the many deadlines met as a result of your unflinching willingness to take on my family as your own. Wrapped up in your generosity I believe that I have experienced some sense of non-communing community. I am unspeakably grateful to my sisters Halina Luszczynska, Aida “Gigi” Luszczynska, and Nathalia Uribe for standing with me through these difficult years of illnesses, hospitals, and loss. I simply would not have made it through this time without you. Our unquestioned commitment to one another bind us unshakably and the peace granted therein has been my rock. I cannot come close to sufficiently acknowledging all that my daughters Amaya and Kadijah have given to me. Without their inspiration this book surely would not have been written. Amaya, your tender yet fierce “mirada” never fails to remind me of the intense complexity of existence and love. You are beyond precious and so much more than I can tell you. Kadijah, from the first time you held my face to yours I felt the strength of your generosity and care. You are a beautiful and inspiring force to be reckoned with. My love for you both literally takes my breath away. I began this project with my mother and father alive. Both died before its completion. I am forever indebted to them for all of the (mostly unpopular) wisdom that they shared with me: a love of thinking otherwise, radical irreverence and dissent, vodka shots in the name of Dionysus, and long Sunday breakfasts listening to everything from Bob Dylan to Jacques Brel to Susana Baca. In all of these arenas their

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keen respect and appreciation for meaningless meaning remained constant. My overlapping intellectual, personal, and cultural hybridity was nourished rather than thwarted by them and my life has unfolded accordingly. At its best moments this book is a tribute to the exceptional people that they were.

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For my daughters, Amaya and Kadijah, with boundless love. For my parents, Robert Luszczynski and Laura Riesco, who showed me how.

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Introduction

This book is about creating a necessary conversation. The Ethics of Community brings together two conventionally independent schools of critical inquiry— Continental Philosophy and Cultural/Literary Studies—and makes them speak directly to and with each other. Though admittedly, there is perhaps a greater degree of conversation in cultural/literary studies with continental philosophy than there is in its reverse, my aim here is to demonstrate how the inherently ethical component of community and deconstruction so elaborately analyzed by contemporary French philosophers Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida can be provocatively traced and underscored in the context of cultural considerations central to African American and US Latino Literature.1 As exemplars within these fields, Toni Morrison in Beloved and Ana Menendez in In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd serve as case studies through which I model what such a conversation might, in fact, look like. More specifically, Morrison’s foregrounding of the distinct cultural sensibilities of its black and white characters and Menendez’ preoccupation with language and exile, themselves activate a deconstructive ethics and thus provide fertile contexts to explore the role of culture in Nancian community and imperative ethicity and Derridean bearing witness. Thus in this study, distinct cultural understandings and contexts provide a particularly interesting way of thinking through the specificities of particular strains of Nancy’s and Derrida’s thought. Given that The Ethics of Community highlights deconstruction, ethics, and culture, it would appear germane to a cultural studies analysis. Cultural studies, as a field, indeed largely conceives of itself as heavily indebted to or even defined by the ethical thrust of deconstruction, which it puts to work in its stringent analysis of culture. In other words, almost by definition an ethically driven deconstruction of culture and cultural phenomenon is the very project of cultural studies. The strident and ubiquitous demand for “openness to alterity” and “radical responsibility to the other” frequently articulated in much cultural studies scholarship (and literary criticism) on some level links it to central themes in deconstruction and ethics. Furthermore, given that cultural studies assumes the inevitable textuality of culture, its approach is necessarily deconstructive.2

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2 The Ethics of Community However, for various reasons the examination that follows exceeds the confines of a cultural studies analysis. Although like a cultural studies project, The Ethics of Community is interested in the ethical component of deconstruction and the manner in which it is saliently activated in particular cultural contexts, my discussion of themes pertinent to culture, linguistic specificity, bilingualism, temporality, and exile, is not in terms of power and politics per se (as it might be in a Foucauldian model), but rather is in the context of the ethical component of community, imperative ethicity, and bearing witness, all specific moments pertinent to the constitutive events of deconstruction. In other words, rather than a customary link between cultural studies and deconstruction in which culture is approached deconstructively in its relationship to networks of power, I am linking ethical moments (bearing witness, imperative ethicity, community) of both areas. I locate the relation between cultural considerations and deconstruction in a potentiality for and activation of an ethical event. Furthermore, given that obliterating the high/low culture opposition is central to its overall project, cultural studies analysis generally casts an extremely sharp (and deconstructive) critical eye on actual (albeit discursively constituted) cultural phenomenon such as “Media Spectacle and the 2008 Presidential Election” or “NASCAR and the “Southernization” of America” rather than on literature or philosophy.3 Such traditional objects of study and consideration are in some sense precisely that from which cultural studies seeks a departure. Thus despite the overlap of concerns with culture, deconstruction, and ethics, the literary component of The Ethics of Community marks a distinct break with cultural studies as it is most commonly practiced. Analyzing cultural elements within literature from a deconstructive perspective appears to fall more squarely within the more diffuse category of “literary criticism” (although certainly there can be and sometimes is an overlap between cultural studies and literature). Literary criticism is obviously more open insofar as it can examine any literary text from any number of theoretical vantage points. The defi ning ethico-political and deconstructive thrust of the cultural studies project is not a necessary component of literary criticism and we could even assert that such an approach is relatively atypical within the field. While a critical examination of any literature could certainly contain a broadly conceived deconstructive thrust alongside an ethico-political engagement, it is not a defining element of a critical enterprise as it is within cultural studies. In this manner, while my objects of study (philosophy and literature as they are most broadly conceived) place The Ethics of Community within the general field of literary criticism, its deconstructive approach to (and foregrounding of) culture, place its analysis and central epistemological concerns within cultural studies.

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Turning more pointedly to the body of critical work that examines US American and particularly African American and US Latino Literature does not significantly narrow down the possible approaches. Deconstructive sensibilities and ethical or political dimensions may or may not be present (although the past decade or so has witnessed a proliferation of work indebted to Derridean thought).4 The literary criticism devoted specifically to US Latino Literature frequently gestures toward general Derridean motifs (sliding signification, absence of origins, and openness to alterity); however, the deconstructive elements here are so loosely evoked that the analysis is barely informed by the philosophical work. The constitutively ethical component of deconstruction is rarely interrogated with any kind of depth or nuance in the context of this particular branch of literary criticism. Given the profound degree to which my literary analysis is grounded within the intricacy of Nancian and Derridean thought, The Ethics of Community thereby marks a significant departure from the literary criticism generally devoted to this body of work. Such an emphasis on particular Nancian and Deriddean themes would then in some manner place this investigation as well, within a continental philosophical realm. Within the continental philosophical community (from whence the work of Nancy and Derrida emerges), there are a growing number of scholars who consider deconstruction and ethics together; however, precious few examine either culture or US American literature (not to mention African American or US Latino Literature) in a direct and sustained manner. Simon Critchley’s work most notably seeks to articulate the relationship between deconstruction and ethics, and certainly scholars such as John Caputo and David Wood proceed along a similar critical path.5 However, this interest in deconstruction and ethics has not sought to change the traditional objects of study of philosophical thought. Firmly ensconced within a mostly philosophical terrain (with an occasional splattering of literature), scholarly work on deconstruction and ethics almost never examines cultural phenomenon as such (as cultural studies does), or cultural concerns and issues evoked within “ethnic” US American literature (as literary criticism might). Although Critchley and J. Hillis Miller have plainly noted their interest in and openness to these lines of inquiry they are indeed notable exceptions.6 Historically continental philosophy has been (and generally continues to be) a tradition of inquiry that examines a particular theoretical issue or query ever deeper and more closely (consider Heidegger’s “what is Being?” and the many famous Derridean “What does it mean?” questions: “What does it mean to learn?” “What does it mean to bear witness?” “What does it mean to love?”) and situates the analysis within the historical and philosophical tradition out of which it emerges. Undeniably

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4 The Ethics of Community the issues of community and culture are engaged but are traced from the Greeks, to Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bataille, Blanchot, Nancy, and Agamben (to name only a few) in all of their most minute intricacy, and not considered in relation to, for example, gang communities of East L.A. as a cultural studies project might do. Concrete cultural phenomenon (discursively constituted or otherwise) are generally outside of philosophy’s central project. Further, although philosophy has had its interest in literature (and certainly Heidegger took great strides in problematizing the boundary between these areas) such convergences do not have a history of looking significantly at US American literature and most particularly at African American or US Latino Literature. Examining cultural issues (exile, bilingualism, linguistic specificity, etc) from a deconstructive lens (and its attendant ethical components) within a general horizon of what is disciplinarily understood as philosophy and literature, The Ethics of Community blurs the boundaries between cultural studies, literary criticism, philosophy, and African American and US Latino Literature. Given its juxtaposition of philosophical explications and explorations alongside literary engagements on culture, all concerned with deconstruction and ethics, this project amalgamates all of the above areas as a thoroughgoing activation of interdisciplinarity.7 The analysis that follows illustrates that in- depth and nuanced appreciations of Nancy and Derrida regarding deconstruction and ethics can and indeed perhaps even ought to be considered alongside African American and US Latino Literature and the approaches to cultural and linguistic specificity to be found therein. Part cultural studies (in its focus on deconstruction as ethics and its very interest in a discourse on culture), part “theory” (in its untangling of the intricacies of philosophical explorations), and part literary criticism (in its belief that literature has significant offerings parallel to those of deconstruction as ethics), this project is an attempt to transgress boundaries, itself almost a battle cry of cultural studies discourse. Indeed blurring the lines between discourses is an integral part of not only cultural studies but a certain strain locatable within continental philosophy at least since Heidegger. The Ethics of Community is an attempt to activate the transgression.

On Intervention Literary criticism has a long tradition of considering the interventionist possibilities of literature. From Leavis’s claim that literarature facilitates a withstanding of industrial capitalism’s alienating effects, to the formalists’ notion that it defamiliarizes or estranges the world, to Gadamer’s “understanding” achieved through literary engagement, literature has long been conceived in terms of its potential to transform and intervene

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in our lives. Furthermore, Bakhtinian dialogics and Foucauldian analysis of power have been readily appropriated (within cultural studies, literary criticism, and “theory”) as containing liberatory and oppositional thrusts or potential. In contrast, deconstruction in the realms of literary criticism, “theory,” and continental philosophy, is often accused of being incapable of ethico-political intervention, a position to which I shall return. However, an experience of the event of deconstruction, itself an intervention as interruption, locatable in an engagement with literature and philosophy and the ethico-political possibilities that might emerge therein, has not been significantly considered. Contemporary literary criticism devoted to African American and US Latino Literature proceeds from various theoretical grounds. Athough psychoanalytic, postcolonial, and queer interpretive endeavors are on the rise, black and US Latino literary criticism still frequently grounds itself in understandings of mestizaje, borderlands, and notions of “otherness” (all in some manner related to Derridean deconstruction) very much contextualized by considerations of structures of power, oppression, and exclusion. As such, there is almost inevitably an implicit or explicit desire for political intervention vis-à-vis the offered analysis.8 However, in spite of the tremendous overlap between the occupancy of multiple linguistic and cultural spaces and deconstructive ethics, the latter is generally not engaged in significant depth. African American and US Latino literary criticism does not consider an experience of deconstruction as a possible vehicle for contributing to what might loosely be called “an ethics of being.” Although the literary criticism clearly welcomes deconstruction’s epistemological impetus when it comes to subverting hierarchical and hegemonizing imperatives, it forecloses deconstruction’s equally potent power to proffer an ethical relation. Thus, although radical in illustrating how constitutively multiple being or identity is (and refracted through the contexts of, say, gender, sexuality, race, or class), it generally ignores how such an experience of constitutive nonidentity is necessarily thoroughly interwoven with deconstruction and thereby always-already ethically embroiled. In short, African American and US Latino literary criticism is willing to go “a piece of the way” with deconstruction, but resists treading and trekking through the dense terrain attending a deconstructive journey. Deconstruction, however, is in fact an active, experiential agent itself and as a consequence is inherently simultaneously transgressive and transcendent.9 While US “ethnic” American literary criticism is broadly focused on multiplicity, borderlands, and the power structures that contextualize them (and is thus often marked by an ethico-political critique as intervention), cultural studies and continental philosophy have their own unique relation concerning the roles of deconstruction, ethics,

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6 The Ethics of Community and intervention. The issue of intervention that so characterizes the cultural studies project and with which the thought of Nancy and Derrida has a complex engagement, may be accurately identified as the “sticking point” between them and is worth examining in some depth. While cultural studies understands itself as radical, oppositional, liberatory, democratizing, and interventionist by definition, the thought of Nancy, Derrida, and the continental philosophical community in general is not so programmatically oriented and indeed much of their work pointedly resists application. Insofar as Nancian and Derridean (non-propositional) propositions concern ontological events that are always-already occurring (repeatedly and singularly), “application” or “institution” is simply an unfitting approach (as the title The Inoperative Community plainly reveals). Derridean deconstruction and bearing witness as well as Nancian community and imperative ethicity (all intimately related) are necessarily already at play in any textual context. Neither being nor world can avoid implication by and within them and are rather thereby situated. Given that the ontological events that Derrida and Nancy unravel are radically prior, they escape our conceptual grasp thus refusing any attempt to “work” them. Deconstruction, imperative ethicity, bearing witness, and community are events that we can attempt to trace, but by defi nition they cannot be applied or even appropriated. However, despite this noninstructive insistence on the part of Nancy and Derrida, deconstruction is perceived as justice and therefore there is an undeniable and urgent quality of their work as it pertains to ethics and politics. So while both philosophy and cultural studies share an understanding of deconstruction as justice, there is a considerable distinction in terms of the steps that should coexist alongside or follow this initial understanding. In other words, having/being deconstructed, now what? The relationship between cultural studies and what we might loosely call “contemporary French philosophy” is thus bound to be complicated if not at some moments contentious. Although relying on deconstructive elements for the propulsion of its project, cultural studies breaks with deconstruction in a philosophical context in its prioritizing of decisive and meaningful political action or directly thematized desire to “make a difference in the world.”10 Stuart Hall notes deconstruction’s alleged inability to sustain a politics maintaining that deconstructing culture, politics, and power is insufficient. In this vein, Hall plainly states that “if we are concerned to maintain a politics it cannot be defined exclusively in terms of an infinitely sliding signifier”11 (Hall 1996, 258). However, according to Paul Bowman, deconstruction’s own logic forbids the possibility of the kind of politics or intervention that characterizes the cultural studies project.

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Cultural Studies desires definite, precise, certain, fully present and knowable, unmediated interventional power and agency in the present of the institutional terrain of culture and society. This “desire” is “impossible” and “metaphysical” because the institutional terrain of culture and society is never fully present, but constitutively mediated, in deferral, relay, and referral (differance), prone to the “slippage of signification” and dissemination. (Bowman 2004, 4)12 If cultural studies is to understand itself as deconstruction and perceive culture as textual, decisive programmatic action becomes, strictly speaking, impossible. It is not that cultural studies proceeds unaware of the paradox of its position concerning deconstruction and intervention but rather that unlike deconstruction in philosophy, cultural studies chooses to disregard the contradiction and “operate on two fronts at one and the same time” (Hall 1992, 282).13 Such is the impasse between deconstruction as it is situated within cultural studies and deconstruction within continental philosophy. While these two crudely circumscribed areas share various intersecting moments, particularly as concerns a foregrounding of an ethical thrust of deconstruction and the discursive nature of culture, the issue of intervention is certainly a primary and important location of difference. In spite of Stuart Hall’s simultaneous indebtedness to and desire to “go beyond” deconstruction, there is a sense in a particular strain of emerging cultural criticism that a call to transcend deconstruction is deeply problematic. Indeed Bowman and Stefan Herbrechter locate a politics of intervention squarely within the realm of a particular kind of “critique.” For Bowman, cultural studies must be an “interruptive deconstructive cultural studies” interrogating both its own relation to culture and power as well as new objects of study such as “technoscience, managerialism, bureaucracy, efficiency, effectivity, performance, performativity, productivity, and production” (Bowman 2004, 15).14 Herbrechter’s profound alliance with a deconstructive project manifests in a desire to understand cultural studies as deconstruction, which would allow it (deconstruction) to “do cultural studies the biggest favor possible,” namely to “sharpen the resistance to itself” (Herbrechter 2004, 8).15 For Hillis Miller cultural studies must have a more engaged relationship to philosophy at large. Submitting that cultural studies has historically assumed loaded concepts such as “community” and “the body” for granted, he notes that Nancy’s difficult and vast interrogations of both of these concepts could benefit cultural studies discourse tremendously (Hillis Miller 2008, 4).16 Implicitly, Hillis Miller focuses on a more nuanced critique rather than a program or initiative for the development of a politics of intervention. Similarly, in Bowman’s

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8 The Ethics of Community Interrogating Cultural Studies, Simon Critchley (who understands a deep overlap between “the kind of philosophy I do” and cultural studies) responds to Bowman’s query on the divergent roles of intervention in cultural studies and philosophy, by revealing that critique is an ethico-politically driven intervention, rendering it “as activist as the most active cultural studies” (Bowman 2003, 62–63). In other words, interpreting a culture in terms of its objects (such as the Coen brothers’ films or popular music in his case) is itself linked to a “notion of liberation” (61).17 Certainly there are countless examples such as these that indicate a belief in the oppositional and democratizing power of critique.18 While a certain sect of cultural studies practitioners may scoff at critique as intervention it is no less manifest in the field today.

Interruptive Intervention Alongside Bowman and Herbrechter I reject both a facile notion of clear and plain articulation and presentation as well as a solely analytic or “playful” performance of the deconstruction of culture, and propose a foregrounding of interruption as a vehicle to potentially altered engagements with the material world. However, unlike Bowman, the location for the interruption that I propose is within the philosophical and literary realms. The Ethics of Community contributes to an interventionist discourse in foregrounding an ethical event of being that can potentially lead to liberatory experiences, approaches, and understandings. One could certainly interject that an intricate engagement with Nancian or Derridean philosophemes is not useful as an interventionist tool, and if intervention is conceived as directly programmatic or instructive then such a claim is plainly justified. However, The Ethics of Community proposes an understanding of intervention as a “transformative” experience of interruptive ethics that can itself illicit distinct and arguably liberatory or democratizing approaches to be activated.19 While such an intervention in the world cannot be directly instructive, it nonetheless has the potential to be deeply active. For example, in Morrison’s Beloved, nonrepresentational linguistic events disrupt and alter several characters’ totalizing perceptions of themselves and their world leading to new possibilities of community or being-with others. Similarly, in Menendez’ In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, a recognition of the impossibility of locatable origin or home prompts an ontological disruption that itself reveals a non-recuperable world for a protagonist and her engagements with it are correspondingly altered. A reader who follows or traces such an encounter with the nonbeing of being can be confronted with (and interrupted by) the unraveling of borders between character, reader, and text leaving a space or gap where essential being was thought to exist. The result can be a profound experience of groundlessness and ontological noncoincidence that shakes us to the core.

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Rather than summarize Nancy and Derrida or even, less generously, reference their complex thought without explanation, The Ethics of Community slowly and carefully outlines community, imperative ethicity, and bearing witness, and invites the reader into a moment in which an experience of their ideas becomes possible.20 In other words, in the context of deconstruction and ethics, close textual engagements permit the content of the thought to come to life. To do justice to the intricacies of the event of community, the necessary and constitutive slippage of signification and being, the complexity of their nonsequential movements, and the degree to which their rendering escapes us and simultaneously makes us (and the paradox therein), we must be patient, meticulous, and even precise and clear regarding that which refuses precision and clarity. The watered down summary that provides a “sense” of this thought does not permit the intense activation or happening of the unheimlich (eerie or “loca” for Menendez) experience that it is (or we are). In both philosophy and literature we must grapple within the language and/as ideas of the texts, in order to experience or be “in” (despite the seeming contradiction of this articulation) the space of differance in language and meaning. An attempt to get ever closer to the slippage, to occupy the space of differance is worthwhile and valuable in that it exposes us (in an active and experiential sense) to the constitutive events of being about which we are preoccupied. In other words, the object of study can be accessed both conceptually and ontologically as an overlapping of thinking and being (which is the subject of the study) if we think closely and meticulously rather than broadly and generally. At the very least, this is one avenue of access to the exposure. Ultimately, The Ethics of Community seeks not only to explain Nancian and Derridean community, imperative ethicity, and bearing witness but additionally to instigate an interruption that their work both thematizes and performs. For readers already familiar with the “notoriously difficult” thinking of Nancy and Derrida such an exercise is unnecessary; however, for those more disciplinarily entrenched within English and literary criticism of US American literature, a detailed and meticulous explication can supply an entry into the interruptions and intervention that they offer. Derrida’s and Nancy’s thought resists summary and therefore must be unraveled and explained from the deepest intricacies of “the inside” in order to open the possibility of an experiential interruption, which is largely what is at stake in this project. Close readings can potentially reveal those spaces and gaps of language that perform the imperative ethicity or deconstructive ethics in question. The stakes are of the highest order: if we can experience the constitutive interruption of which they speak, which is ethical at its heart, we might be capable of engaging being, language, and the world in a manner that is consistent with it.

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10 The Ethics of Community Given that The Ethics of Community seeks to introduce particular Nancian and Derridean elements to culturally focused literary critics unfamiliar with the specificities of their work, detailed explication is crucial. As such, the two chapters devoted solely to Derrida and Nancy are strictly philosophical, indeed very traditionally attempting to explicate some of their central ideas. (For students and scholars more disciplinarily entrenched within English a nuanced comprehension of either Derrida or Nancy cannot be presupposed.) Without an in-depth understanding, it is easy to misread and incorrectly appropriate their thought, and in such instances the radical concepts invoked are often not genuinely engaged and indeed their traditional and “status quo” counterparts merely reified. Perhaps most notably, a quick summary of Nancian community can lead to erroneous conclusions concerning its applicability. The “unworkability” of Nancian community is germane to his analysis and must be rigorously thought through to be avoided. I offer a detailed and clear presentation of Nancy’s thought as a way of introducing his work to those who are not familiar with it so that these misunderstandings and reductive and facile applications might be avoided. Additionally, teasing out the specifics of Nancian and Derridean thinking can open up numerous critical trajectories that a general overview does not permit. Although I choose to bring to the fore a few possible dialogues between their work and the themes of language specificity, exile, and identity, there are undoubtedly countless others. It is my hope that clearly explicating select elements of Nancy and Derrida provides an introduction that will prompt literary critics to engage it in all of its complexity and conceivably recontextualize it in exciting and innovative ways. Indeed these possibilities of noncustomary juxtapositions interest me most. Thus The Ethics of Community seeks to offer clear presentations of select Nancian and Derridean ideas and juxtapose them with noncustomary texts in an effort to illustrate that these textual crossings can yield important and fruitful insights. Outlining elements of Nancy’s and Derrida’s work in an introductory manner is an attempt to transgress an exclusionary language and understanding and extend the work outward. If Bowman is correct in noting that “specialist languages clearly ‘separate’ and can therein only intervene within the realm of their own enclave,” then such an introductory presentation of Nancy and Derrida is an attempt to break out of or transgress the boundaries of a strictly philosophical discourse (Bowman 2004, 12). Although I use specific elements of their thinking on community, imperative ethicity, and bearing witness, in the context of literary analysis, other details could similarly be of interest to and/ or useful for other scholars. Last, while Derrida’s vast oeuvre has influenced cultural studies and some literary criticism, the same cannot be said concerning the work

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of Jean-Luc Nancy. In this context, The Ethics of Community itself intervenes by placing Nancy on center stage and in so doing introducing his work to a new audience.21 Alongside J. Hillis Miller, I submit that Nancian thought concerning community and imperative ethicity has tremendously “useful” implications for cultural studies and culturally focused literary critics alike (Hillis Miller 2008, 6). In these contexts, in the disciplines in which direct mediations upon immigration, exile, cultural identity, processes of “othering” are often examined, the work of Jean-Luc Nancy has not been foregrounded. His extensive meditations upon community can be very provocatively engaged alongside considerations of culture both within cultural studies and literary criticism. Reading Nancy and Derrida alongside texts that thematize cultural difference, exile, and bilingualism is grounded in a belief that whole new lines of culturally engaged critical inquiry can be thereby introduced. Extending their thought in new and unique contexts is not at all contradictory to Nancian or Derridean understandings as they have both plainly indicated. Derrida’s interest in the singularity of languages and Nancy’s in the relationship between culture and philosophy reveal that these considerations are consistent with their projects.22 Indeed linguistic differences and cultural and geographical crossings are topics in some way particularly apropos to their interests. It appears obvious that the ruptures consistent with cultural intersections and geographical displacements would be prime locations for discussions of constitutive interruptions and their attendant ethical character that so preoccupy both thinkers. If we are interested in considering the ways in which their thinking might be pertinent in material situations (as discursively constituted), looking to scenes of cultural multiplicity seems a particularly appropriate place to begin.

Imperative Ethicity, Bearing Witness, Community The Ethics of Community illustrates that continental philosophical thought (or literary theory) and African American and US Latino Literature can all be shown to theorize the relationships among a destabilized subject, language, and ethics. As critics like bell hooks and Lisa Sanchez-Gonzales aptly note, theory, African American literature, and US Latino Literature are all frequently preoccupied with interrogating the notion of a unified and stable subject, self, or identity.23 Although a few critics do well to point this out, they do not take the analysis further and examine the ways in which the primary texts indicate that language is inevitably implicated in this destabilization. For contemporary continental thought and much African American and US Latino Literature, being exists immersed within language and language itself functions (or achieves signification) on the basis of a gap or space (since

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12 The Ethics of Community as Derrida has illustrated vis-à-vis Saussure, it is the negative, or that which something is not which allows it to mean). Given its existence within and as this space, being assumes the qualities of language and is imbued with a space or an element of absence as well as a slippery and non-definitive quality. As such, in proper deconstructive fashion, being cannot be a full presence or unified whole. Once a consideration of language is brought into play, ethics can emerge as an important theme. According to all of the works treated in The Ethics of Community, philosophical and literary alike, it is within this space of being that does not re-present or signify (the space that deconstruction traces and underscores) that there lies an ethical imperative. Since it is outside of representation or signification, it is considered nondiscursive or atheoretical. However, it “is” (and is not) nonetheless and the being that resides in this space is toward, responsible, and accountable to the other in some manner. Language which is poetic or which does not seek to re-present is most capable of accessing this non-theoretical, ethical space of being. I take a culturally oriented literary analysis of a nonunified subject composed of this gap or space, not one but two steps further in engaging the interconnected issues of language and ethics and addressing these difficult yet pressing inquiries in new and unique contexts. One of the central themes is the interruption of being facilitated by the occupation of multiple narrative/cultural spaces (or locations of difference) and nonrepresentational or poetic language—ultimately ethical and antimetaphysical spaces. The gap of language and being that denies full presence takes on particular importance in the context of linguistic and/or cultural contexts that are not as founded in Western metaphysics and representational language, which is most pointedly the case in Morrison’s oeuvre.24 There are obviously many possible examples of such events but we examine two particular contexts in which such a situation is manifested. The texts of Toni Morrison and Ana Menendez, both implicitly and explicitly, contain moments in which being occupies a distinct and arguably extra-discursive or linguistically nonrepresentational space. How do we discuss “cultural sensibility” without falling into a kind of cultural essentialism? Is there an imperative to discuss culture and language? How might a non-absolute ethical imperative manifest in the historical material world? What are the implications of its existence? What does it mean pragmatically for being-in-common or community? What is the relationship between ethics and community, witnessing, ecstasis, language, and being? These are just a few of the many questions that the following exploration addresses. I elucidate these complex events in a threefold manner. First, I engage in a reading of Nancy’s imperative ethicity alongside Derrida’s

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conceptualizations of bearing witness as they are outlined in “The Free Voice of Man” (Retreating the Political) and “Poetics and Politics of Witnessing” (Sovereignties) respectively, in order to show the profound overlap between these two thinkers as they jointly maintain the inextricable relationship between language and ethics. Second, I illustrate how community conceived in a radically new way as an event of being’s destabilization in Nancy’s The Inoperative Community is a natural extension forward from this thinking and provides an important segue into a discourse of material communities. Last, I explore possible relationships between the philosophical thinking already established and literary manifestations of ethics, being, and community through readings of Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Ana Menendez’ In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd. In the interest of clarity, I have divided the aforementioned topics into two equally integral parts, the one philosophical and the other literary. Chapters 1 and 2 are thus explications and commentaries on Nancian community and Derridean bearing witness while Chapters 3 and 4 comprise close readings of Morrison’s Beloved and Menendez’s In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd. This structure is intended to cultivate philosophically oriented literary engagements that are nuanced, sensitive, and precise rather than vague, reductive, and general. The philosophical terminology invoked in Chapters 3 and 4 are rigorously discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, providing the reader with multilayered and rich understandings of the ideas involved. As such, when approaching the literary texts of Chapters 3 and 4, we are more attuned to the potential crossings and creations that occur in a philosophical and literary encounter. An in-depth discussion of ethics must interrogate the nature of ethics itself. Chapter 1 traces Nancy’s discussion of the inevitable presence of an imperative (a “we must”) that drives all philosophical discourses. From where do these imperatives emerge? Through careful analysis of Nancy’s conceptualization of the ethical imperative in his seminal essay “The Free Voice of Man,” I explain how philosophical imperatives emerge from their own discourses. If philosophical discourses create the imperatives that ostensibly drive their thought (which is to say, if the imperative emerges from within rather than outside of the discourse as it is traditionally thought to do) then the imperative is not justifiable, independent of its own discourse. The extravagant proposition is that the imperative that drives philosophical discourse is situated in that very philosophical discourse. Thus, Nancy suggests the eruption of an extra-philosophical or extra-discursive imperative, one that directly thematizes its ungroundable and unjustifiable nature. Turning away from conventional ethics and its implicit grounding in the absolute, Nancy names the non-absolute imperative “imperative ethicity.” Finally, then,

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14 The Ethics of Community Chapter 1 examines the ways in which Jean-Luc Nancy’s “The Free Voice of Man” responds to both Derrida’s early piece “The Ends of Man” and his later essays, which directly thematize issues of ethics, being, and language (themes opened up but not directly thematized in earlier Derridean works). As such, Chapter 1 places in dialogue Derrida and Nancy, beginning with Nancy’s “The Free Voice of Man” and ending with an examination of how Nancy can be provocatively read alongside Derrida’s later work on ethics in Sovereignties in Question. In Chapter 2 I steer the discussion in a slightly different yet clearly related direction by introducing Jean Luc-Nancy’s The Inoperative Community into the already established discussion. Thinking community in Nancian terms, as ecstatic being that exists to, toward, and accountable toward the other, is a natural extension of elements of Derridean thought on being, language, and accountability. Furthermore, in Chapter 2 I analyze the historical occurrence of the concentration camp in the context of Nancian community, allowing us to approach more concrete concerns such as culture and exile. Chapter 2 provides a clear and decisive link between the philosophical discussion that comprises Chapters 1 and 2 of the book and the literary interpretations of Chapters 3 and 4. Chapter 3 illustrates how Toni Morrison’s Beloved describes “real-life” situations that may indicate elements of “the opposite of the concentration camp” and exemplify potentially ethical ways of being. The Ethics of Community proposes that close readings of Beloved extend the conversation begun with Nancy and Derrida on ethics, community, being, and language by underscoring textual events in which (Nancian) community flourishes, responsibility is at play, and thus being/ethics finds more breathing room. In Beloved, these situations consistently entail an element of nonrepresentational language, lending themselves to a consideration of ethics as it has been outlined above. Most particularly, orality and song occupy a privileged space in Beloved and close readings of these communal moments reveal what a Nancian community might actually look like, or at the very least, how we might imagine it. In Chapter 4, I explore ways in which particular exile situations foster considerations of the relationship between temporality, narrative, and experiential disruption. Through close readings of various passages of the first and final stories of In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, I examine the ways in which a longing for a romanticized and idealized “home” (one that specifically signifies as absolute origin and ground) can fundamentally inform perception and experience. In this recognition temporality and narrative are foregrounded to such a radical extent that the protagonists experiences “real” ontological disruptions. We witness complex moments of narrative and ontological slippage both thematized and unthematized within the text. Despite the profound discomfort and dis-ease of the protagonists, they ultimately pass through

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profound experiences of bearing witness that convey the inevitability of narrative rendering in time which itself demands the recognition of the impossibility of the much sought after “beginning” and “identity.” Although Menendez’s 2001 In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd has received significant critical acclaim, it has been largely ignored in the academic world of literary criticism.25 As of 2010 it has been in circulation for nearly ten years and only a handful of academic articles address it.26 This dearth of critical attention may be due in part to what Rafael Dalleo and Elena Machado Saez have identified as the difficult political line that many contemporary Cuban American writers have been forced to negotiate.27 The current generation of Cuban American writers is often neither über-Left nor Right; rather the writers walk a somewhat ambiguous line between the two vociferous factions.28 Possibly literary critics (with generally Left-leaning politics) find it easiest to simply avoid addressing the political ambiguity. Additionally, a certain faction of critics within the bourgeoning field of US Latino Literature do not believe that Cuban American literature fits within a broader US Latino designation due to the unique relationship that said group has to class and consumption. If US Latino Literature is defined as literature with a progressive political agenda, then as Eliano Rivero plainly states in “Hispanic Literature in the United States: Self-Image and Conflict,” Cuban American literature can never be included in this group. As such, many scholars of US Latino Literature may choose not to treat texts falling within the Cuban American category. Dalleo and Machado nicely articulate a need to get beyond such reductive identifications. The lack of scholarly attention is particularly lamentable given the tremendous philosophical richness of the text and the cornucopia of interpretations to which it is amenable. Thoughtfully considering the complexities of exile as it relates to language, culture, desire, and time, In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd is a beautiful albeit melancholy work. While it is obvious that most of the stories in the collection focus upon exile or immigration, what is perhaps less apparent is that they all address experiences of loss and mourning and more specifically a desire to recover that which is imagined to be lost: ontological presence and the certainty it provides. It is not just Cuba, a loved one, or another time that is missed, but rather the full presence thought to have been encapsulated therein. As such, in the context of exile, missing, mourning, and desiring, Cuba is most precisely a missing, mourning, and desire for full presence and the corresponding transparency and intelligibility it implies. The figuration of loss as loss of presence lends itself to deconstructive interpretations. In this way, Menendez’s text is an important contribution to the growing body of work within US Latino Literature, exile studies, and deconstructive ethics.

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16 The Ethics of Community In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd depicts a desire for fully present meaning in various ways including a longing for national and cultural origin, extra-temporality, and a fully knowable and transmittable self and other. Regardless of its figuration, transparency, intelligibility, and certainty are all coveted for the total and immediate presence that they necessarily imply. While much of the critical work on US Latino Literature addresses (or at the very least intimates the existence of) a desire for metaphysical presence, it stops short of analyzing it in significant depth, generally ignoring the component of presence as it pertains to notions of truth.29 Paradoxically though, the situations of exile and immigration (almost definitive aspects of US Latino Literature) are those which so poignantly bring to the fore the impossibility and correspondingly intensified desire for presence, continuity, certainty, and the completely knowable world that they would reflect. Were it not for the violent interruption of geography, temporality, language, and culture, the desire for continuity, to mend that which is perceived as broken, would likely not assume the intense and passionate form that it does in much exile literature, that of the US Latino variety included. The continual negotiation of distinct geographies, cultures, and languages, underscores or even calls forth being’s discontinuity or rupture. As we witness in our examination of Menendez’s text, such negotiations can occur on a number of levels but we submit that via an almost forced contemplation of discontinuity and loss, exiles and immigrants can be compelled to examine a lack of full intelligibility inherent to language and being in a manner that the occupants of an imagined cohesive and consistent culture, language, and geography are not. More simply stated, immigrants and exiles are positioned in such a way that considerations of being in time, place, language, and culture are more pressing and thus simply more likely to occur. While numerous critics have explored the relationship between exile, writing, language, and being in some manner or another, none has rigorously done so with regard to deconstructive ethics. Although Doris Sommer’s provocative and entertaining Bilingual Aesthetics engages a conversation concerning bilingualism and deconstruction, it does not do so in significant depth. In more general terms, Sommer figures bilingualism in a manner not unlike our understanding of exile and immigration, situations obviously frequently interrelated. Sommer points to but does not examine a manner in which the traversing of languages and borders is itself a moment or event related to deconstruction and an ethics of difference. Creative, open, and democratic, the experience of bilingualism forces a confrontation with “otherness,” one that Wilhelm von Humboldt noted is crucial since “. . . in the study of foreign tongues students best learn the humility that comes from

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never forgetting . . . to negotiate the otherness of the world” (Sommer 2004, xiv). Sommer suggests that humility is a good antidote for the colonizing and conquering impulses that accompany essentializing thinking. According to Sommer, not only is teaching bilinguals about deconstruction redundant but also importantly, bilingualism and/or deconstruction lend themselves to more democratic and creative ways of being in the world (the two being related in their recognition of and openness to difference). She argues that monosystems and cultures stifle both democracy and creativity and cause a lack of interrogation of and wonder about the world. “If instead we learned to tolerate the normally melancholic overload of language and identity, we would train ourselves toward a humane acknowledgement of a world haunted by damaging efforts to cleanse and to conquer” (xv). Sommer’s claim implies potential benefits of acknowledging the impossibility of pure signification and identity, impossibilities evoked in bilingualism. Rather than pointing toward a need for cohesiveness and unity (as much US Latino Literary criticism still does), we should rather recognize that clamoring for coherence is integrally related to projects such as “ethnic cleansing” and colonization in general. If we could accept or even embrace “the normally melancholic overload of language and identity” we could both acknowledge the dangers of the opposite (what Nancy would call a will to essence) and foster a more democratic way of being in the world which is itself integrally related to creativity. For Sommer, languages are fluid, active, and impossible to identify as such. “Words are not proper and do not stay put. They wander into adjacent language fields, get lost in translation, pick up tics from foreign interference, and so can’t quite mean what they say” (xix). But is it really just linguistic wanderings, translation issues, and foreign interference that prompt the meandering and inconclusivity of language? Certainly translations and border crossings contribute to the ways in which words do or do not work, however, they tell only a piece of the story. Even the most elemental lessons of deconstruction illustrate that signification itself is necessarily already problematized given the infinite deferral and difference of meaning (differance). In other words, not only do literal borders and translations infuse signification with possibility and movement but additionally, signification itself relies on a simultaneous presentation and withdrawal (the trace or difference that we have already discussed) that forbids full meaning and stagnancy. Although presented entirely tangentially, Sommer makes a significant observation regarding temporal and ontological ramifications of multilingualism, exile, and immigration. The melancholia that results from existing in more than one time and being of more than

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18 The Ethics of Community one “temperament” is not specific to bilinguals (and here I would add exiles or immigrants) but is rather simply a state of being proper to “all of us,” which is to say, to being itself. “The double-take makes a little melancholia normal for those of us— all of us—who live inside or alongside more than one temporality and more than one temperament” (Sommer 2004, 9; italics mine). The reading of Menendez’s text that follows explores this exilic aspect of being in much the same way. Like Doris Sommer, Gustavo Perez-Firmat is interested in the effects of multilingualism. Although starting with similar questions concerning the traversing of multiple linguistic and geographical spaces, the trajectory of Perez-Firmat’s argument adds nuance to that of Sommer. In “Land or Language,” the final essay of his seminal The Cuban Condition, Perez-Firmat closely examines Carpentier’s Los Pasos Perdidos and concludes that while language is constitutive of being (and “dominates” the subject), it is nonetheless, in another sense, “immovable.” Unlike Sommer’s claim that language “won’t stay put” Perez-Firmat asserts that it can only stay put insofar as the experience of the speaker solely exists as such in a particular circumscribed territory. A language is immovable; it is anchored in a bounded space and cannot be displaced or transplanted. Outside of Spanish-America, Spanish-American experience needs to be spoken in other words. The novel thus establishes an equation between language and place. Language is place and place is language. One cannot lose one’s place and keep its language; one cannot keep a language without staying in place. (Perex-Firmat 1989, 142) It is not language or signification in general that Perez-Firmat addresses but a particular language and corresponding experience. While signification in general constitutes us and thus is implicitly location-less (hence the Barthesian nods in his piece), a singular language can only be in its designated territory. Being here exists according to a particular language and all of the attendant cultural, geographic, historic, and etymological echoes that exist within a discrete territory. As such, you cannot leave the place and keep the language. Alongside Perez-Firmat my approach suggests that language exists for each of us (uniquely) in a particular space, and simultaneously is always in some degree of flux in both the general and singular senses. The ways in which signification at its most elemental is based upon difference has by now been well-rehearsed in a post-structural context, however, it is also the case that specific languages and the unique worlds that they speak (the aforementioned echoes) endlessly move and morph both within and without their ostensibly discrete territories, with the distinction between the two most often impossible to

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identify. Rather than a “same” language within a particular location and the corresponding necessity of an “other” outside of it, we propose the irrepressible irruption of difference constitutive of language and being in any context. Further, and more importantly for my project, an ecstatic element of language and being is particularly salient in border crossing situations such as those of multilingualism, exile, and immigration. Nancian imperative ethicity and Derridean bearing witness and all of their differential echoes come into play intensely given the palimpsest of languages and cultures that these events imply. It is in this context that we confront the possibility and indeed necessity of something “other” that emerges in scenes of cultural crossings. Similar to the work of Perez-Firmat, Michael Ugarte’s “Luis Cernuda and the Politics of Exile” ambitiously proposes a “poetics of exile” in which the exilic experience (regardless of specific culture or context) intensifies the “tenuousness of the relationship between language and reality” and is necessarily characterized by desire and a corresponding absence. The exilic voice thereby eerily speaks both the experience of exile and the nature of language which themselves overlap (in that they are similarly constituted by absence). Ugarte’s work is extremely effective in forcing a confrontation with the interrelatedness of exile, desire, language, and presence. Our task is to precisely unravel the relationships between these overlapping events and ideas. Through readings of Cernuda’s poetry, Ugarte demonstrates how exile necessarily implies loss and thus absence, the experience of which prompts desire. In this respect exilic desire works like any other, which is to say based on absence, movement, and ultimately writing (what we come to understand as Nancian imperative ethicity): Immediate surroundings have meaning only in terms of a lost geography, a place that is absent. To be displaced is to be obsessed with memory. It is to perceive the world always in terms of relations: nostalgia, the fictional recreation of better times in relation to a negative reading of the present. Exile is a constant process of evaluation of the new home in relation to the one left behind and vice versa. Adaptation to the new locus is the unfolding of a creative process . . . Exile intensifies the tenuousness of the relationship between language and reality, for the life of exile is, in many ways, the life of fiction. Nothing is apprehended without the grid of memory and comparison; naming and re-naming are constant activities. All the signifieds within the land of exile keep slipping away as they are subjected to a process of mediation between the new land and the old. Exile calls for the assimilation of a new way

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20 The Ethics of Community of being, a new language which is itself nebulous and seems always to turn on itself. Again what remains is the ambivalence of the wandering word without the security of a home to nourish it with a single meaning. In this scheme, exile may be considered as yet another manifestation of Nietzsche’s “prison house of language.” (Ugarte 327)

Ugarte intimates that the trace-like existence of the exile (living within a world of constantly sliding significations) overlaps with that of language (here we can add that if being is necessarily in language then being too is necessarily of the trace, writing, and ultimately, exile). The trajectory of Ugarte’s analysis moves from literal exile to absence to desire to language. He repeatedly asserts that the exilic voice is one which works very much like language and literature at their most elemental. In other words, what constitutes language and literature is what constitutes exile: the ongoing interplay and eruption of absence, desire, and language. The following chapters illustrate that being and community, writing, imperative ethicity, and bearing witness refuse our attempts to separate them. When trying to get a handle on the precise mechanisms involved in imperative ethicity and the manner in which being is writing, why not look to situations that bear out the logic of the trace, so to speak? What better way to probe the intricacies of being in and as writing than to consider a situation that “accentuates the tenuousness of the relationship between language and reality?” Ugarte notes Derrida’s assertion that to write is to be an exile. In other words, writing (as signification) and exile are saturated by the absence and desire that both constitute and propel them. Given the manner in which being is itself constituted by language and writing (and we discuss this dynamic in detail in Chapters 1 and 2), we might just as well proclaim that to be is to be an exile. Indeed Ugarte’s reading of Cernuda’s “Como el Viento” from Un rio, un amor stresses the parallels between the structure and language of the poem and the defining factors of exile. Not only are both built upon an absence (significance achieved via figuration as well as a suggested yet unnamed thematic in the poem, and the absence of “home” in exile) but both are characterized by restlessness and movement indicated by the centrality of wind in the poem and the obvious displacement that is exile. Ugarte suggests that there is an “illusory unity” to Cernuda’s poetry that is a “linguistic marker of exilic desire” (332). Ugarte is plainly interested in an aspect of exilic desire that is distinct from desire proper. In other words, there is something unique to the exilic voice that speaks in Cernuda’s poetry and that can then be linked

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to the nature of language itself. Literal exile speaks like language at its most basic (the “sliding signification” already referenced). In contrast, our project pursues a thinking of literal exile as a point of entry into the workings of the metaphorical exile that constitutes being and language (and all of the intricacies therein). Arguably, exile literature can help us in our attempt to hold onto and grapple with these fundamental ontological issues that escape our grasp. Through the figure of exile we are poised to more closely examine being itself and gain insights that would otherwise be inaccessible. So while Ugarte treats literal exile and its fundamental relationship to the workings of literature and language, we pursue a thinking about exile as being and the relationship to language. We try to think how in exile, being, and language it is the imperative of finitude that creates the spacing that makes desire and writing, and forbids identity, their opposite. Lene Johannessen’s “The Lonely Figure: Memory of Exile in Ana Menendez’s ‘In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd’’’ does a fine job of extending a conversation concerning exile into considerations of figuration. Johannessen rightly stresses the significance of re-mapping in exilic efforts at orientation. Inevitably, she argues, the displaced will call upon figuring processes in order to comprehend their new world in a meaningful manner. However, the degree to which all being relies upon a signifying process is not lost on Johannessen: We should recognize that writing about and in exile is writing of and about being in extremis because the literature of migration and exile necessarily intensifies the sensitivity to the temporal and spatial complexities and contradictions embodied in all attempts at representation. Writing of exile magnifies and dramatizes the distance between what was and what is in narrative exercises that tend to turn on the retrieval of home, in order to recreate and restore familiarity, if only its memory. (55) There is a crucial tension between the importance of representation in exilic experience on the one hand and on being in general on the other. Johannessen asserts very clearly that to talk about exile is to talk about being “in extremis” thus linking the two realms. However, she then proceeds to discuss events of exile, memory, and figuration as though they are specific to an exilic situation. In this sense, her presentation proceeds along two different levels simultaneously. Johannessen discusses figuration, namely “analogy and metaphor,” as “the master tropes of migration” and “the way in which understanding as familiarization occurs” rather than as the sole manner in which being can be (which is what the assertion concerning exile as being in extremis suggests) (Johannessen 55). In order to apprehend and order

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22 The Ethics of Community a new and foreign world, a subject necessarily engages a process of figuration, understanding the new world in terms of the old. “As tales of relocation from old to new and from known to unknown, migration’s stories invariably entail a certain degree of metaphorization in the most general meaning of the word, namely as figuration. Faced with strange surroundings, the ability to map and figurate is essential to the process of orientation and inhabitation” (Johannessen 55). This is not a critique of making the other into the same à la a Levinasian approach, but rather a recognition that the only way to comprehend and correspondingly navigate a world is to understand it in the terms available to us. Johannessen cites Michael Seidel’s observation that “imaginative powers begin at the boundaries of accumulated experience,” which is another way of getting at this issue of mapping and figuration; imagination occurs in terms of the experiences of the subject (Seidel 2). Although analogy and metaphor (figuration in general) are central to the orienting process of the migrant or exile, are they not fundamental to being itself (as Johannessen herself suggested)? Isn’t the unavoidability of figuration and the manner in which it is contextualized by “the boundaries of accumulated experience” another way of accessing the centrality of writing and language and corresponding necessity of bearing witness? Certainly border crossings demand re-mappings and orientations that draw upon or emerge from a figuring process, but this is the situation of being itself, as the works of Nancy and Derrida indicate. Writing and language, which happen on the “boundaries of accumulated experience,” are the terms with and within which we map and figure, whether we be literally exiled or not. As Chapters 1 and 2 of this book illustrate, a rigorous examination of signification, being, community, and ethics reveals their overlapping and the degree to which they are constituted by differance, spacing, and the other to whom there is extension. To talk about figuration as a necessary component of exile whilst ignoring the specifics of figuration itself is to miss several large pieces of the picture. First of all, the fact that figuration is not only central to but constitutive of being is insufficiently recognized. While Johannessen does well to observe that exile is an extreme situation of being, it would certainly be productive to keep this insight in view and follow the thought to its conclusion. Second, we must unravel the complex events of figuration or writing in order to get a more precise grasp of the specifics of exile, as both material fact and ontological metaphor. We must consider exile not only as “being in extremis” but additionally as a materialized or literal situation of these constitutive and pre-discursive events of being. We come to see exile as a material “event” of finitude, community, and the ethical imperative, a basic yet contextually dependent human issue that becomes historically manifest in various ways.

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Inviting a wide range of critical approaches, from early 1990s historicist (and often essentializing) readings to more contemporary feminist, psychoanalytic, and postcolonial interpretations, Toni Morrison’s 1987 Pulitzer Prize winning Beloved has received tremendous critical (and popular) attention. The most acclaimed novel within the Nobel prizewinner’s oeuvre, Beloved is a central focus of 311 monographs and roughly 667 articles.30 However, in spite of the centrality of language, community, and ethics to Beloved, there has been little invocation of Derridean ethics and no mention of Nancian community within the critical work.31 Rather than presenting a laundry list of Beloved’s scholarly treatment (scarcely related to this book), I simply and briefly place The Ethics of Community in relation to the studies with which it does share pivotal interests. In distinct ways, both Satya Mohanty’s 1993 “The Epistemic Status of Cultural Identity: On Beloved and the Postcolonial Condition” and Molly Abel Travis’s recent “Beyond Empathy: Narrative Distancing and Ethics in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace” address themes pertinent to The Ethics as Community. Mohanty does a fine job of outlining the complex and troubled relationship between theory and praxis in his heavily cited 1993 Cultural Critique piece on Beloved. Mohanty’s analysis reflects the contentious relation between “the postmodernists” on the one hand and “essentializing” thinkers on the other. In a by now familiar indictment against post-structural positions, Mohanty takes issue with what he perceives as “the postmodernist” rejection of the category of “experience” (since it is an unreliable source of knowledge). Given this alleged rejection, postmodernism can neither provide an objective truth nor account for the historical material world. Mohanty’s is a call to reclaim “moral universals,” a task that he suggests can be accomplished by the co-substantiation of “the (cultural or historical) particular and the (moral) universal” (Mohanty 1993). Mohanty reads Beloved as containing “moral universals” based upon an objective ethics and knowledge that are visible through the transformation of its characters, most notably Sethe and Paul D. (pt. 25). While this study shares Mohanty’s interest in exploring the complex relationship between the theoretical and material and a potential ethical imperative, it differs significantly in its approach. A deconstructive ethics is most precisely a turning away from or refusal of a groundable and objective truth. The “sacred” (a complicated notion to which we return throughout the book) component of being and ethics emerges from undecideabiity rather than empirical certainties. Mohanty in some way anticipates this response and claims it insufficiently pragmatic but we in turn argue that the unworkability of community and ethics is exactly the place from which it derives its power and, importantly, can

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24 The Ethics of Community make a substantial difference in our material lives. Vis-à-vis the same text (Beloved), we illustrate that an eruption of finitude and imperative ethicity can and does invoke and provoke theoretical and material transformations. Rather than either reified as “objective” or neglected as unreliable, experience is the site of the ethical event of community and thus a profoundly relevant topic. The location for the continual interface between the material and the theoretical, experience needs to be redefined in a manner distinct from Mohanty’s final conclusion of an attainable empirical one. We trace this rethinking in our treatment of Beloved vis-à-vis the thought of both the postcolonialist Paul Gilroy and continental philosopher David Wood. Molly Abel Travis’s recent “Beyond Empathy: Narrative Distancing and Ethics in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace” comes far closer to the theoretical underpinnings and articulations of this project. Travis shares our deconstructive understanding of ethics and reads Beloved accordingly. Her conclusions concerning the radical alterity of narrative and the ethical possibilities echo our own; similarly, her stress upon the fragmentary and unsublateable character of Beloved the text and character is compelling and instructive. Rather than attempt to build a cohesive and easily applicable ethics, Abel illustrates how Beloved consistently denies such definitive appropriation and pragmatic rendering. The combination of narrative distancing and empathy combines to create compelling characters and situations whose ethical situatedness cannot be readily apprehended. Travis submits that ethical thrusts are locatable in an element of undecideability rather than in any objective moral insistence. Our task is to augment, and even “fill in,” Travis’s analysis insofar as she shares our theoretical “ground” concerning the nature of ethics as an openness to alterity and yet fails to bring any kind of nuance or explanation to the picture. To assert that “It is only through openness to alterity that there can be an ethical relation” is all fine and well but what exactly does this mean (Travis 2010, 232)? The complex history of considerations of alterity and ethics is not even mentioned much less explained. From Heidegger to Levinas, to Derrida, and Nancy (to name only a few), there is certainly a long history of engagement to this issue. It is precisely here that continental philosophy and literature must have an enhanced and far more vital relationship. In spite of a similar ethical consideration, an integral part of our analysis of community and Beloved posits a point antithetical to Travis’s own. While we emphasize movement between beings, Travis underscores an ethical thrust of a “side by sideness of stories”: “The full ethical force of Beloved’s design derives from this side-by-side relationship between stories that do not coalesce or resolve themselves into a harmony” (237). While we certainly agree that “harmony” or “resolution”

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Introduction

25

is not a part of an ethical movement in deconstructive ethics, it is precisely this side-by-sideness that we will call into question. As a result of the impossibility of relation between a side-by-side structure, it cannot account for the fundamental and ecstatic movement that, according to deconstructive ethics, constitutes being in and as community. To be interrupted by finitude or exposed by community is to be jolted out of a habitual and correspondingly (in some manner) comfortable or familiar space. Additionally, interruption is a stopping point, a break, a mark of dis-continuity, and often can be irritating, frustrating, or simply discombobulating as a result. In this spirit of healthy discomfort, the interruptions that hopefully follow are not necessarily altogether pleasant. When we experience ourselves as fragmented, as incapable of catching up to the word/idea that leads us (and makes us) it is eerie, unheimlich (Heidegger and his “followers”), “inaugurating” (Beloved), and “loca” (In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd). However, in spite of the dis-ease that it elicits, passing through such an experience (that we can never have in the sense of self-possession), necessarily leaves us not-the-same in all of the senses of this phrase (both not one with ourselves and distinct from before). Among other things, interruption precludes identity, authenticity, self-possession, communing community, origin, and home. In turn, it simultaneously gives and is spacing, exposure, sharing, non-communing community, language, the other, responsibility, and justice. These are the central motifs of all of the chapters that follow, philosophical and literary alike. It is my hope that closely examining them exposes us to the exposure with which they are all in some way concerned, which is to say, I hope for being’s interruption.

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1 Nancy and Derrida: On Ethics and the Same (Infinitely Different) Constitutive Events of Being

We begin by exploring the relationship between ethics, writing, finitude, and spacing as they are presented in Nancy’s essay “The Free Voice of Man” (Retreating the Political), which is in some manner a response to Derrida’s “The Ends of Man” (Margins) The relationship between these events of being cannot be easily untangled. By nature, each moment is radically implicated by the others such that there exists neither foundation nor chronological ordering. Rather, we are in a realm in which being can best be understood as a series of singular ruptures or interruptions that precisely and radically turn away from any sense of grounding or order. As such, Nancy’s thoughts are necessarily difficult to fully grasp. Indeed, in what follows our discussion of being will be contextualized by the notion that there is a discursively inaccessible imperative to all philosophical discourses that ultimately implicates being in and as writing, finitude, and spacing. As such, not being able to fully conceptually grasp these ideas is precisely the point (as they are not accessible to logical or philosophical examination). Thus our project is to expose the manner in which being is fundamentally intertwined with the exhaustion of the philosophical endeavor. The second portion of this chapter explores the ways that Nancy’s approaches can be augmented and amplified by Derridean discussions of ethics. Through a consideration of Derrida’s essays “Poetics and Politics of Witnessing” and “Rams” (Sovereignties in Question) and the notions of bearing witness, testimony, poetic language, and “carrying” discussed there, we interpret possible points of intersection and distinction between the two thinkers. The most central similarities involve the notion of a radically prior being-with that is constitutive of being as well as a consideration of the limit of discursive thought. Additionally, while Nancy’s thought is more intricate concerning the specificities of these issues, Derrida’s is more willing to discuss the nature of the experiences of being-with and the impasse inherent to the philosophical.

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On Ethics and the Same Constitutive Events of Being 27 Our approach is twofold insofar as we scrutinize the ethical imperative both conceptually and as an experience of being. (In spite of the oppositional framework presented here, interrogating the concept/ experience dichotomy is an important final step in this exposition.) Conceptually, we must do our best to unravel and articulate the intricate complexities of the imperative as it is related to constitutive events of being, despite the understanding that we will not be able to fully “reach” our object of thought (as it is inaccessible to philosophical inquiry). Examined as an experience through which being passes (again and again and each time singularly), the events of the imperative, finitude, writing, and spacing that constitute being will be considered as in some way concretely relevant. The final portion of the chapter exposes potential problems with, as well as possibilities of, discussing these issues in the context of the material or historical world. According to Jean-Luc Nancy in “The Free Voice of Man,” within any philosophical endeavor there lies an imperative that drives the thought or exploration at hand. Whether implicitly or explicitly presented, a “we must” lurks or announces itself within the discourse, immediately, always-already placing us within an ethical realm. The question “From where does the imperative come?” assumes a particular power contextualized by the radical lack of a final signified within a post-structural framework. This question concerning the origin of the imperative opens up numerous pathways of consideration. First, Nancy asserts that the philosophical discourse itself invents and presupposes the imperative that fuels it. In other words, the origin of the imperative of any philosophical discourse is that philosophical discourse (it must create its own justification): “Because philosophical discourse also, if not primarily, always consists precisely in determining its obligation by itself, in producing the knowledge of its end, and thus the theory of its duty” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1997, 36). Second, if the “we must” of any and all philosophical discourse originates in the discourse itself, it is not theoretically or discursively justifiable: “this ‘il faut,’ this ‘It is necessary,’ is unjustifiable, it anticipates everything that it would be necessary ‘to know’ ” (34). If the discourse creates its own justification or imperative then the imperative cannot logically precede and be outside of the discourse, as an imperative is generally, traditionally considered to be. Thus by implication we must rethink our conception of the imperative and philosophical discourse. Third, Nancy observes that the imperative, any initial “il faut,” is radically unavoidable as it “shows” or “inserts” itself in any and all philosophical discourses. Given this irrepressible “showing,” we cannot avoid the question of the imperative while simultaneously we cannot (philosophically) justify it. These three observations concerning the imperative of philosophical discourse are sufficiently complex as to merit significant consideration.

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28 The Ethics of Community In what follows, we attempt to unravel and elucidate some of the complexities to be found therein. Before considering the ways that a philosophical discourse invents its own imperative, it is useful to make several clarifying distinctions between an imperative as it is traditionally conceived and the imperative as Nancy would like to think of it (although ultimately we will see that the latter inevitably exists even within a discourse that denies it or that works from a traditional point of departure concerning an imperative and its relationship to an ensuing discourse). One of the central difficulties in firmly grasping this piece is that Nancy invokes (without directly thematizing) three different kinds of imperative that ultimately can be traced back to one. The first is the imperative within a traditional philosophical discourse that specifically maintains the existence of an extra-linguistic, absolute foundation from which meaning, knowledge, and morality emerge. The second type of imperative exists within a philosophical discourse that fails to or scarcely interrogates its own implicit imperative and proceeds as though it is a given. Here, the imperative can be traced back to some sort of immanent foundation or final signified like that referenced above. The only distinction between the first and second imperative then is the discourse within which it is placed; the first discourse readily acknowledges the absolute foundation from which the imperative is thought to emerge and the second does not. The imperative itself, however, is considered to come from a place that is extra-linguistic and thus in some sense is understood as unimpeachable. (Examples might be as follows: Human Progress, Nature, Science, etc. Certainly we can readily see such notions functioning in many facets of human life today.) The third type of imperative exists within a discourse such as that of Nancy or Derrida where there is an acknowledgement that the imperative within discourse cannot be discursively or philosophically proven and rather exists in another realm entirely. Here, the imperative is conceived as “showing” itself rather than proving itself: “. . . philosophical discourse shows itself having to deconstruct itself” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1997, 37). While all three of these kinds of discourse have different relationships to the imperative within their own projects, according to Nancy and Derrida, all three necessarily contain within them the same imperative which is the one that inserts itself in a showing in every philosophical discourse. As we will see, such an imperative is precisely and radically other than the absolute foundation upon which traditional philosophical discourse grounds itself. Similarly, Nancy’s exposition in “The Free Voice of Man” distinguishes between the philosophical, or what he also alludes to as a realm of “proof,” and the nondiscursive or nontheoretical (which is the home of the imperative as we need to think of it).

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On Ethics and the Same Constitutive Events of Being 29 In what sense, or how and why, precisely, do all philosophical discourses “determine their obligation” by themselves? This is so simply because in a post-structural framework there is no final signified, no imminent or absolute source or fount of meaning outside of a linguistic realm from which an imperative might emerge. Thus, if the imperative cannot be attributed to or located within an extra-textual space (in other words, if there is no meaning-making source outside of the text or language) it must necessarily emerge from within the text. In the event of a radical lack of grounding of any kind of a priori foundation from which an imperative, obligation, or duty might come, we are left acknowledging that there can be no imperative as it is traditionally conceived and that any imperative that does exist must necessarily: (1) emerge from the text or language itself; (2) be radically unlike a traditionally conceived imperative; (3) be philosophically unprovable (which is to say, exist in a realm or emerge from a place that is other than philosophical discourse or the realm of the provable) or inaccessible to philosophical discourse. Why is the imperative as Nancy wants to conceive it entirely inaccessible to the realm of proof, which is to say, to philosophical thought? Nancy answers this question briefly, elliptically, but precisely: “this ‘il faut,’ this ‘It is necessary,’ is unjustifiable, it anticipates everything that it would be necessary ‘to know’ ” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1997, 34). In other words, “it would be necessary to know” in advance (anticipates) what it would be necessary to know (the imperative) in order for the “it is necessary” (the imperative) to function, or to get its driving force. It is perhaps useful to think of this first in traditional terms in order to understand the manner in which the logic of the imperative is itself inherently faulty, which is to say (since we are in a philosophical realm), illogical. Traditionally conceived, philosophical discourses can be said to be composed of the following sequentially ordered elements: (1) an imperative that sets the discourse in motion or lays its groundwork; (2) a corresponding approach; (3) a corresponding discourse; (4) a corresponding knowledge. In order for such a system to function, both the imperative and writing must be conceived as entirely distinct from each other and from being. To sustain the logic of philosophical discourse so conceived, the imperative must exist independently of writing and being and instead must emerge from an unquestionable, imminently meaningful ground that determines its nature. Consistent with the “meaning” of the imperative, the approach, discourse, and resulting knowledge all emerge after the imperative and in the order of the above list. However, Nancy points out that this is a logical impossibility because the imperative cannot come from an unimpeachable ground that would necessarily exist outside of a discourse and rather is always-already implicated in a discourse itself. It cannot “know” and

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30

The Ethics of Community

“direct” without already being bound up in a whole system of knowledge and writing and all that that entails. It cannot exist as before and outside because by logic an imperative would anticipate and would already know and in some sense exist within the knowledge that it is supposed to engender. As such, we cannot prove the existence of an imperative but rather the imperative shows or inserts itself within philosophical discourse. This other imperative demands the deconstruction of philosophical discourse and it does so in the event of a showing. This is an entirely different way of thinking about philosophical discourse and the imperative that inevitably lies therein. Given the unjustifiable nature of the imperative as it is traditionally conceived within philosophical discourse, and this new understanding of an imperative to deconstruct discourse that manifests as a “showing” rather than in the realm of the provable (or the philosophical), we are left with an inexorable paradox: the philosophical endeavor is understood to contain within it the imperative that demands for its own deconstruction thus implying in some sense that philosophy itself demands its own end (or, we are at the end of philosophy as we have traditionally conceived it).1 There is a command to prove the unprovable nature of philosophical discourse, which is another way of saying that there is a demand within a philosophical discourse to deconstruct itself (illustrating where the philosophical, logical endeavor meets its impasse). However, this demand itself is discursively unjustifiable (we must prove the impossibility of proving); the imperative to deconstruct itself cannot itself be philosophically justified because the imperative does not exist within the realm of proof. How are we to respond in the wake of such a paradox? Nancy suggests, following Derrida in his critique of Levinas, that rather than exalting this phenomenon to a transphilosophical mystery, we need to examine and discuss it as precisely and rigorously as possible (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1997, 41). Additionally, in “Poetics and Politics of Witnessing,” Derrida describes a possible response to this unheimlich experience of being within that which is inaccessible to logical or provable thought. Such an experience is marked by the inability to “have” the “knowledge” of that which cannot be proven. Here, the imperative is not accessible to discursive thought and it is precisely that inaccessibility that is experienced or felt in some way. For Derrida, the response is one involving a compulsion to repeat: What we are calling here the force, the energy, the virtue, and above all in its language, is what makes us have to cite it, again and again with an irresistible compulsion . . . What we have here is a compulsion to cite and recite, to repeat what we understand without completely understanding it, feeling at work in

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On Ethics and the Same Constitutive Events of Being 31 the economy of the ellipsis a power more powerful than that of meaning and perhaps even than that of truth, of the mask which would manifest itself as mask. The reciting compulsion, the “by heart” desire, stems from this limit to intelligibility or transparency of meaning. (Derrida 2005, 87)2 In addition to being radically inaccessible to philosophical thought, the nondiscursive imperative is always activated thus prompting us to interrogate it. But how do we interrogate or even access this “we must”? Must we interrogate the “we must”? In the philosophically provable realm we cannot because we cannot provide the imperative for interrogating the imperative. Indeed, we can no longer provide the imperative for any discourse but the experience is most aporetic here when the discourse precisely concerns an interrogation of the nature of discourse and, more precisely, the imperative that drives it. However, according to Nancy, this nonphilosophical imperative does not need to be justified philosophically. Such a claim is in some sense intuitive as the nondiscursive imperative exists as precisely other than the philosophical and thus in its nature would resist such an appropriation. As Nancy thematizes directly, duty in this nondiscursive sense is that which “. . . it is not necessary to legitimize in discourse . . . a duty which, while still remaining a duty, would decidedly turn aside from the philosophical duty that philosophy has always deduced or wanted to deduce from theoretical reasons . . .” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1997, 37). In other words, not only is there not an imperative to philosophically justify the nonphilosophical imperative, but the nonphilosophical imperative is precisely a turning away from philosophy as it is traditionally conceived in terms of theoretical reasoning within the realm of the provable.3 Exactly what happens in the event of the nondiscursively accessible imperative that imposes itself? What constitutes such an occurrence and how does it relate to being? In order to effectively respond to these questions, we must examine the inextricable link between the imperative (or duty or obligation) and finitude, which Nancy locates in and discusses from the point of departure of Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. It is this inextricable link that the next few pages attempt to explain: A being that is fundamentally interested in a duty knows itself in a not-yet-having fulfilled, so that what indeed it should do becomes questionable for it. This not-yet of a fulfilling, which is itself still undetermined, gives us a clue that a being whose innermost interest is with a duty is fundamentally finite. (Heidegger 1990, 147) It is useful to call attention to the complex notion of finitude itself within this framework. Vast in its implications, finitude is that which

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32 The Ethics of Community simultaneously radically denies the possibility of completion (in the sense of a teleological orientation) and appropriation (rendering impossible the imposition of an absolute meaning). For a being who is fundamentally finite, the completion of a goal and a satisfaction in firm ground are impossibilities. Following Heidegger, Nancy asserts that a being who is concerned with duty is a being who “is fundamentally finite.” As that which is necessarily in a position of incompletion (“a not-yet-having-fulfilled”) the being concerned with duty can neither “finish the job” nor even, properly speaking, identify it. Arguably, as a “still undetermined . . . not-yet of a fulfilling” duty already places us in a nondiscursive realm, which, strictly speaking, can be neither identified nor defined.4 If a being concerned with duty is a being who knows itself as fundamentally finite, then we might assert that finitude emerges or perhaps even “shows itself” in the event of duty, obligation, or ethics. Indeed Nancy indicates that we must understand “finitude as ethical, as the opening of ethics.” We can clearly see finitude as ethical (or in the realm of duty) insofar as it renders being’s completion both in the sense of a goal or end (telos) and in the sense of its own radical fragmentation (death), impossible. (In other words, it is because of finitude that being cannot complete itself.) As the depropriation of the end, finitude is ethical. But similarly, the ethical or that which exists in the realm of a duty or obligation is finite as the quote from Heidegger’s Kantbuch revealed: “. . . a being whose innermost interest is with a duty is fundamentally finite” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1997, 40). Indeed at this point it is nearly impossible to discern any distinction between the ethical and finitude; both are constituted by a depropriation of the end and exist as events rather than foundations. It may be most useful to think of fi nitude as ethical insofar as finitude necessarily entails a component of duty or there is some sense in which it demands to be thought, which is another way of saying it commands us to think of it in the way of an obligation. But simultaneously, finitude is the opening of ethics (which is distinct from being ethical) insofar as finitude is the necessary context or space in which ethics can “open” or occur; ethics must be as finitude, a formulation itself indicating that just as finitude is ethical, the ethical is finite. As such, finitude and the ethical indicate distinct elements of a singular event of being. As previously noted, if finitude depropriates the end and duty is itself fi nite (or pertaining to or entangled with finitude) then duty is also that which denies the possibility of an end. “Finitude is the depropriation of the end . . . Hence duty might thus be said to indicate the opening—and the question— of the proper ethos of the non-proper” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1997, 40). As such, duty indicates the opening of the ethos of that which is a finite being or is non-proper.

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On Ethics and the Same Constitutive Events of Being 33 Engaged in the experience of duty, exposed to, in, and as finitude, being cannot understand itself as a proper-being and in contrast, is spaced.5 In this context, the opening indicated by duty (of a being who is not a proper being) is an “unheimlich ethos.” The ethos here is unheimlich insofar as the goal toward which this ethos is oriented is ultimately characterized by a denial of the end of the (or any) goal, or, in some sense, the opening up onto the impossibility of arrival. Or as James Gilbert-Walsh so precisely frames it in his insightful essay “Broken Imperatives: The Ethical Dimension of Nancy’s Thought”: “This ethos is unheimlich inasmuch as its relation to its proper end is the very ‘depropriation of the end’ ” (Gilbert-Walsh 2000, 47). As a result, a being experiencing itself in duty experiences itself as a finite being and as such is implicated in this unheimlich ethos involving a non-possession of its own end. But what of the role of writing in this unheimlich ethos characterized by an opening into finitude? In some sense, this is the central question that Nancy poses to Derrida in “The Free Voice of Man.” Hence he writes: “The thought of writing has not written the ethics of this duty (of the question as to its propriety and its impropriety). It has let us know nothing beyond the response that we have just read. But could it be said, for all that, to have maintained responsibility intact? This is what we must know . . .” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1997, 41). Is there a way of thinking through Derridean writing or differance that will allow us a recourse to duty? Although this thought had not been significantly thematized by Derrida at the time of “The Free Voice of Man,” Nancy opens the possibility that a Derridean notion of writing had nonetheless “maintained responsibility intact,” which is to say, allowed or perhaps even encouraged a space for its activation.6 Given the association that has already been established between finitude and duty, we may say that insofar as “difference, which is nothing, is therefore finitude, which in its turn is nothing,” writing is immediately implicated with the question of duty or obligation and as such the ethical realm (46). This is the case because “duty belongs essentially to finitude” (or duty occurs in and as finitude even while finitude occurs in and as a duty), and finitude is itself writing (46). If duty is an essential part of finitude and finitude is writing, then writing (as finitude) is always-already implicated with duty. In other words, as the space or location of noncoincidence, of the radical denial of any kind of identity, writing (as difference) places being within a realm of infinite deferral and non-presence, or finitude. Here, the duty in which writing is implicated is both brought forth by difference or writing, and is that which differs or defers itself. The interconnection and overlapping of duty, finitude, and writing is thus established. In a formulation that entirely denies a logic of sequence or conditions of possibility, Nancy proposes

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34 The Ethics of Community a thinking in which writing is always-already implicated with a sense of duty, and indeed writing, duty, and finitude cannot be disentangled but rather indicate distinct aspects of the same (infinitely different) event of being. Thus, we can assert that Nancy’s proposal, and answer to the question concerning the articulation of an ethos within a Derridean conception of writing, is that insofar as writing or infinite difference is finitude, and finitude is itself of duty, writing does indeed alwaysalready invoke an obligation or duty. In the spirit of the non-realizable duty already indicated, duty “differs or defers itself,” which in some sense is simply a more intricate sense of the Heideggerian notion of the not-yet fulfilling of a duty which is itself uncertain. As we would expect, in the context of writing or difference, duty is noncoincidental, appropriatable or sublatable. More radically and precisely framed, duty cannot exist in any other way than in the way of writing, which is to say, in the way of difference and deferral. As such, we must look at duty not just in the context of writing, but as fundamentally related to writing insofar as both are infused with or have their determining thrust in a Heideggerian sense of finitude. In fact, we could reasonably propose that the differing and deferring of duty is indeed the same as the differing or deferring of writing. But not only are writing and duty so fundamentally entangled, Nancy suggests that “difference brings forth duty by itself” (LacoueLabarthe and Nancy 1997, 46). Here, difference seems to be the privileged anti-structure. It is from difference that duty emerges. Any consideration of writing must therefore necessarily involve (whether made explicit or not) a sense of duty. However, writing and duty are both finitude. As the infinite deferral of presence, writing is finite and as that which only knows itself in a not-yet having fulfilled, duty is also finitude. In this case, writing and duty highlight a distinct but overlapable aspect of finitude. Thus, in an enigmatic formulation, difference or writing evokes duty, while duty is necessarily imbued with difference or writing. Any attempt to locate the first moment or event from which all others proceed is doomed to fail. Being is always-already implicated in finitude, writing, and duty. These three moments all involve a simultaneous lack of a proper end and selfcoincidence, and as such, imply deferral. Establishing any kind of causality or foundation is impossible and indeed there is some sense in which this thought eludes capture. As is often the case with Nancy’s work, this discussion of duty, writing, and fi nitude largely involves highlighting different aspects of a single (yet irrevocably multiple) event ontological of being. But what is the nature of this difference that evokes duty or obligation? “. . . difference obliges, that difference (if it has anything) has

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On Ethics and the Same Constitutive Events of Being 35 the structure and nature of an obligation, prescription, and injunction, even if these terms can no longer be understood in accordance with its ethico-metaphysical concept. Difference obliges differently” (LacoueLabarthe and Nancy 1997, 46). It is evident here that more than simply “evoking” duty, difference is itself structured by duty or obligation: “difference (if it has anything) has the structure and nature of an obligation” (46). Thus the very structure or composition of writing is itself duty or obligation; writing is composed of obligation or as Nancy indicates, the nature of writing is “obligation, prescription, and injunction” (46). In some sense then writing and obligation are barely discernable here. In classical terms, the defining factor of writing is obligation, prescription, and injunction. Thus, difference or writing is by nature obligation, but what is obligation, by nature? Of what is it composed and how does it function? The addition of the terms “prescription and injunction” provide some insight regarding the determining factors of this (nondiscursive) obligation that occurs in and as writing. Additionally, we already know that this obligation that emerges from, in, and as writing is in some way unique given that it “obliges differently” and cannot “be understood in accordance with its ethico-metaphysical concept” (46). If we are to understand this obligation inherent to writing as one synonymous with prescription and injunction, there is some sort of a command at work; the obligation herein obliges. Indeed it is at this point in “The Free Voice of Man” that Nancy shifts from the terms “obligation” to “imperative.” But we must not forget that the obligation or imperative under scrutiny takes place or happens in and as writing (or difference), and, further, is inseparable from finitude. In the last analysis, the imperative within writing that is finitude “does nothing except” to command and defer sense or, at least, “inscribes its differance” (48). In other words, the imperative commands that sense be infinitely deferred and never identical with itself. This is intuitively accessible since we understand that the imperative takes place in and as writing, which itself indicates that there can be no identity or presence of meaning or being. However, the provocative insight that we attain with this observation is that it is precisely the imperative within or of writing that renders coincidence impossible. Most assuredly, writing is differance, but here we extend that thought to conceptualize the event of the imperative as that which evokes the spacing of differance that renders identity impossible. There is again the sense here that we are simply getting an even more precise and detailed look at these constitutive events of being.7 Arguably, spacing is privileged in Nancy’s analysis of obligation, writing, and finitude and grants us further insights. Indeed we might even say that obligation, writing, and finitude all enact a spacing while

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36 The Ethics of Community simultaneously they are “structured” themselves by spacing. For example, not only does obligation evoke the spacing in and as writing, but further it is the imperative that “renders indiscernible the “indices” of the addresser and the addressee” (48). There is some sense in which the inscription of difference in and of the imperative enacts a spacing in such a way that the “I” and the “you” “are as rigorously associated as they are disassociated” (49). Here, “it is not even a question of reintroducing an Other into the originary sphere; it is a matter of an alterity or an otherness of the ego in its egoity and even before any alter ego . . . on the register of sense, as on that of the subject, the imperative is only or only makes spacing. The imperative spaces” (49). There is something in the imperative that happens in and as writing that spaces being such that there is a being and an other of being in being. Here we find an analysis and description of the noncoincidental ego. In writing, in the event of the imperative, both constituted by and constituting finitude, being is spaced in and from itself. The crucial element that we must bear in mind is the fact that it is specifically the imperative, entangled with finitude, existing in and as writing, that spaces being in such a way. Being is constitutively spaced by the imperative that exists in and as writing, and in and as finitude. Thus, being is alwaysalready constitutively implicated by, with, and in the imperative that spaces. Nancy’s term for this imperative that spaces that is constitutive of being is imperative ethicity. Thus, the inextricable link between finitude, the imperative, writing, and hence the spacing of and as being is identified. These four events cannot be separated and, indeed, in the final analysis, can all be said to indicate distinct aspects of a rupturous single event of being, which is itself a spacing between, in, and that is being. For Nancy, the imperative is an implicit and constitutive ontological element of being and it acts in and as being as a spacing. The imperative happens in and from writing and writing is constituted by finitude and spaces being. The spacing enacted in writing and as an imperative constitutes being as spaced, as a being and an other than being, a radical alterity within and as being.8 Thus we may conclude that in every discourse, indeed in every inscription or writing, there is an imperative, an obligation toward which we have already been called. A groundless ground, imperative ethicity, if it is anything, is a demand to be as an interruption, as an event that cuts through and denies any and all attempts at totalization, sublation, and identity.9 What is the relationship between Nancy’s thought on the imperative, finitude, and writing and Derrida’s notions of bearing witness, testimony, and “carrying” as they are outlined in “Poetics and Politics of Witnessing” and “Rams” from Sovereignties in Question? Most saliently, a Derridean notion of bearing witness and testimony is inextricably

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On Ethics and the Same Constitutive Events of Being 37 linked to poetic language: “All responsible witnessing engages a poetic experience of language” (Derrida 2005, 66). Derrida (playfully) seeks to “prove” this “hypothesis” within “Poetics and Politics of Witnessing” where he makes the case that any and all bearing witness necessarily involves the paradoxical and aporetic experience of the presentation of a secret as a secret. I propose that such a conceptualization is consistent with Nancy’s analysis of writing and, further, that the central points of this analysis can be said to play themselves out most saliently in the context of poetic language. As that which calls attention to its nonreferential nature, and thus in some way thematizes the space between the signifier and the signified, poetic language can be considered that which is more akin to a non-totalizing linguistic event. As such, poetic language is a space where differance can more freely find its playing room. Inhabiting the space and spacing of writing (particularly poetic language), being can experience its finitude in a manner distinct from that of a language which seeks strict representation.10 Derrida’s proposition regarding witnessing is that it must engage a poetic experience of language insofar as it is incapable of expressing or directly indicating that to which it is bearing witness. The radical irrecuperability (and hence inevitably secret nature) of any experience of being to which one might bear witness results from the lack of full presence of being and the world. If I were fully present to myself, and capable of achieving or reaching fully present meanings of the world in which it would be immediately intelligible and re-presentable, then I would have a “guaranteed testimony” that could become “a demonstratable theoretical truth” (Derrida 2005, 68). According to Derrida, this is precisely the antithesis of testimony as testimony, which is comprehensible precisely as that which cannot be proven or is a secret that must manifest itself as a secret. The secret always remains the very experience of bearing witness, the privilege of the witness for whom no one can be substituted, because he is, in essence, the only one to know what he has seen, lived, felt; he must thus be believed, taken at his word, at the very moment when he is making public a secret that nonetheless remains secret. A secret as secret. (88) Indeed the truth of the secret, the singular experience of the being who bears witness, cannot be fully appropriated even by the witness and thus can surely not be “re-presented” as a provable truth in testimony. And it is precisely the imperative that spaces in and as writing and that manifests as fi nitude that radically denies the possibility of complete appropriation and transmittal. As such, we are left with a bearing witness and a testimony that is invariably

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38 The Ethics of Community poetic insofar as it denies the representation of a fully present meaning to a fully present being. As Derrida says, the poem engages in a “signing and de-signing of itself in a single gesture— sealing and unsealing itself—. . . sealing while (by, through) unsealing itself, as a poetic text” (67). This kind of anti-structure should by now be familiar to us. Poetic language signifies or means by and in a simultaneous movement of signifying and “un-signifying,” which is to say that it achieves meaning via the process or event of denying the full meaning of that which it signifies. Both Nancy’s and Derrida’s analysis here, one of originary ethicity and the other of bearing witness and testimony, respectively, evoke the same trace like structure of being. In each case or event, being has the structure of the trace as an imperative, which is to say that it must efface itself.11 The imperative invoked here is one of necessity. Being cannot not efface itself or be being other than in the structure of the trace, indicating that it is both being and other than being (a fi nite being), and thus composed of imperative ethicity. Similarly, or in the same gesture or event, the act of bearing witness underscores the finitude of being insofar as it is precisely being’s nonidentity (or finitude) that necessitates or demands that testimony can only be the presentation of a secret as secret, which is to say can only take place (responsibly) as poetic language (which itself understands the impossibility of full presence which is to say the imperative of finitude). The poem bears witness. We don’t know about what and for what, about whom and for whom, in bearing witness for bearing witness, it bears witness. But it bears witness. As a result, what it says of the witness it also says of itself as witness or as bearing witness. As poetic bearing witness. Can we not, then, here transfer to bearing witness, to this poetic bearing witness, as to that which in all bearing witness must always appear as “poetic?” (Derrida 2005, 87) In other words, when one bears witness (and in some sense one is always bearing witness to or before the other), one is inevitably engaged in a constant signing and de-signing of meaning (or implicated in the logic of the trace), which is to say, within writing, and when responsibly enacted, poetic language. The next conceptual juxtaposition we engage involves a Nancian notion of finitude and sharing and a Derridean conception of “carrying” as it is outlined in “Rams” from Sovereignties in Question. Nancy posits sharing in “The Inoperative Community” as being as spaced by being via its encounter with the other of an other being. Here, my other

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On Ethics and the Same Constitutive Events of Being 39 of being touches or encounters your other of being and being is thus shared or divided and is constitutively spaced and implicated with a radically irrecuperable alterity. Nancian sharing is extremely difficult to think insofar as he places the being of being as happening as an event simultaneous to sharing (which necessarily implicates an other being) or what we will see Derrida here calls “carrying.” In contrast, Derridean “carrying” involves more of a chronological ordering insofar as “before I am I carry” (Derrida 2005, 162). However, despite this distinction between sharing and “carrying” the two notions bear much in common as we witness in the following passage: To carry no longer has the meaning of to comprise, to include, to comprehend in the self, but rather to carry oneself for to bear oneself toward the infinite improbability of the other, toward the encounter with its absolute transcendence in the very inside of me, that is to say, in me outside of me. And I only am, I can only be, I must only be starting from this strange, dislocated bearing of the infinitely other in me . . . Before I am I carry. Before being me, I carry the other. I carry you and must do so, I owe it to you. I remain before, owing, in debt and owing to you before you. I must keep myself in your reach but I must also be your grasp. (Derrida 2005, 162) As already indicated, the defining elements of this Derridean notion of “carrying” themselves involve a Nancian notion of finitude as the imperative that spaces. Carrying radically denies the possibility of sublating or assimilating the other from the point of departure or frame of a cohesive or unified ego or self. In such a case, the alterity of the other is entirely denied as the other simply becomes incorporated into the self. In contrast, Derridean constitutive carrying involves being as toward the undeniable and radical otherness of the other. Carrying situates being as bearing oneself toward the impossibility of comprehending the other and rather touching or encountering alterity as “absolute transcendence” or as entirely beyond being. Being as moving toward is a being that is spaced by the imperative and is itself determined by finitude (the being of duty according to Nancy and indeed the very definition of being as it is conceptualized in The Inoperative Community). As such, being is not one or not an identity and thus comprises being and being’s own other of being. Like in Nancy’s sharing, Derridean carrying involves my other of being encountering your other of being and both of these beings are necessarily finite, which is to say spaced by the imperative. Most provocatively, this event is not secondary to an already established foundation of being, but rather exists as the very condition of possibility of being. Being is constituted by carrying or

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sharing. “And I only am, I can only be, I must only be starting from this strange, dislocated bearing of the infinitely other in me” (Derrida 2005, 162). In other words, being only is insofar as it begins from an originless place of dis-location that radically denies any and all senses of foundation or ground. Further, this constitutive movement of my other of being bearing toward your other of being always-already implicates the other in my being at its most fundamental. As such, “before I am I carry the other.” In some sense, literally, I cannot be without you. Before I can have a being or be as a being, I am already bound up with or more precisely toward you. Thus it is evident that in order to be at all, I must be as accessible to you or as Derrida frames it, “I must keep myself within your reach;” we must, in some way, be together. Moreover, I am and must be “your grasp” or that reach without arrival of being toward being. The imperative of finitude that spaces could not be more evident here. Derrida’s repetition of the “must” indicates the obligation or duty that is inextricable from finitude, which according to Nancy itself spaces. The being-toward of the above passage involves an imperative (I must) that prohibits being as an identity and further designates being’s fundamental spacing that involves a movement toward without arrival.

Now What? Conceptualizing Nancy and Derrida’s philosophical discourses on the constitutive events of being and their relevance for thoughts on ethics or relations to an other might leave us with some sense that there is something yet to be done. Such abstract and difficult (and at times poetic) theoretical elaborations upon being and responsibility no doubt further our understanding of meanings of being. But how do these discourses affect our actual lives in the world of concrete existence? Nancy himself poses this question directly at the close of Retreating the Political (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1997). In the final chapter of the text, aptly entitled “What Is to Be Done?” Nancy seeks in some way to address the issues of agency, action, and concrete existence. After Nancy and Derrida’s intricate and rigorous insights on the nature of the ethical, how are we to act? It is extremely clear that the understandings of ethics with which Nancy and Derrida provide us, radically deny any kind of simplistic application. As Nancy repeatedly warns in “The Inoperative Community,” to make a work or project of this thought is tantamount to a totalizing gesture that reduces it to that which is precisely nonethical. So, what are we to do? How and where might we locate agency and action within this thought?12 Not surprisingly, upon closer interrogation we find that these particular questions concerning agency, action, and the phenomenal world presuppose the existence of certain approaches that are

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On Ethics and the Same Constitutive Events of Being 41 perhaps antithetical to the ethical as we have outlined it in this chapter. Arguably, “What now?” and “What is to be done?” imply, at the very least, two dichotomies that we must examine. First, do they not reinscribe a traditional dichotomy between theory and practice, philosophy and action, or thinking and doing? Nancy gestures toward this problematic in “What Is to Be Done?” when he questions the very nature of our knowledge of thought and action: “Perhaps we no longer even know what it is to think nor, consequently, what it is to think “doing,” nor what “doing” is absolutely” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1997, 157). In other words, rigorously thought, what does it mean “to do” or “to act”?13 Certainly, opposing thinking and acting as nonproblematically as the question “what is to be done?” presupposes is, at the very least, reductive. Even traditionally conceived, thinking involves a component of “doing” just as “doing” involves a component of thinking. As Nancy rightly notes, the question: “What is to be done?” presumes that we begin with a theory and proceed forward with a corresponding practice that would enable us to reach the goal indicated by the theory. As such, the question itself is problematic insofar as it is both teleologically oriented and rests upon an untenable and somewhat foundational opposition. Teleological thinking is precisely unethical (as well as logically inconsistent with the nature of being) in a Nancian and Derridean approach as it involves a closure of possibility and even an end-point to the event of being (the attainment of the goal). Furthermore, such “closure of possibility” implicitly draws upon the belief in an immanently meaningful or foundational logic. Any such foundation from and toward which we conceptually proceed involves the antithesis of the ethical as Nancy and Derrida have described it. Both thinkers highlight the non-ground of the constitutive imperative of being that spaces and implicates being in its finitude. Thus the question “What is to be done” participates or is complicit with several modes of thought that are inconsistent with the ethical as we have come to understand it. The question “What now?” is perhaps even more problematic insofar as it amplifies the presumption of a simplistic and divided notion of theory and practice or thinking and doing. Here, we proclaim implicitly that we have completed our philosophical endeavor and thus are “now” ready for action. Furthermore, both questions imply that the “doing” that follows the theory will take place in the phenomenal or more commonly framed “real” world. Thus another dichotomy is obviously playing itself out: the philosophical and the concrete. Within questions such as “What is to be done?” and “Now what?” so frequently posed to and by philosophers lies the presupposition that the theory that precedes the practice is “abstract” and the action “concrete.” Although intuitively sound (and thus perhaps demanding interrogation), such

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42 The Ethics of Community presuppositions deny the complex and too scarcely thought interplay between how (and the terms within which) we think and how we act, which upon even slightly closer inspection are in some way intertwined. Undeniably, much of the time, the language within which we perceive and all of its corresponding structures determines our “real” world and the actions that follow. As such, actions are always-already infused with or implicated by language or that which is generally conceived of as “abstract.” Such a problematization of the traditionally conceived relationship between philosophy and action does not seek to negate the existence and analysis of something like an “actual” material or historical world and the manner that we engage or act within it. We must propose entirely the opposite. In the context of a Nancian originary ethicity and a Derridean bearing witness and carrying, a reconsideration of the relationship between theory and practice demands a careful and patient examination of our actions in the “real” world; it is only through such a reconsideration that we might be able to make evident the manner in which our actions participate with and within the linguistic and theoretical context of being. Certainly there are times in which firmly inscribed conceptualizations of being and the world, unexamined foundations and grounds from which we think and move, largely determine our actions. In light of notions of originary ethicity, we must examine our actions in the material world to expose those moments in which we rely upon or participate within a foundational or metaphysical thinking that has been revealed to be precisely anti-ethical. Further, if we do engage in this examination of our being in the material world, we might witness moments in which “action” is implicated with and within “thinking” or language as imperative, finitude, writing, and spacing. Such a possibility presumes that not all of our actions or events of being in the phenomenal world are founded in metaphysical presuppositions. Surely there are moments of rupture where the noncoincidence of being happens plainly as a singular event. At those moments, we might be able to recognize them in all of their “glory.”14

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Nancy’s Community

Jean-Luc Nancy’s difficult and exhaustive exposition of community as presented in The Inoperative Community provides us with tremendous opportunities to consider community in radically innovative ways. As Nancy rightly notes, there is an imperative to expose the erroneous and limiting conceptualization of being and community insofar as it can and does lead to what might be called impoverished “relations” within the material world, most dramatically exposed in his analysis of the logic of the concentration camp.1 Although within The Inoperative Community Nancy does not make direct links between his philosophical observations and the material realm, it, nonetheless, becomes clear that there is indeed such a connection. In addition to elucidating the ideas within The Inoperative Community, it is our task to inquire into and extrapolate upon the precise nature of the relationship to be found between the philosophical and the historical.2 Any attempt to systematically present the ideas that comprise “The Inoperative Community” is necessarily difficult. Although what follows is indeed such an attempt, it is marked by an understanding that these ideas resist systematization and in some instances, conceptualization itself. Because the events, moments, or ruptures that constitute being (and community) happen from a place of groundlessness, there is no base or substance from which one can proceed in a chronological fashion. Everything that constitutes being occurs as in a flash. Specific and distinct characteristics and contexts of such a flash do exist; however, the terms that describe it tend to overlap and the (nonprocessional) processes indicated are fundamentally dependent on the others for their meaning. So while I attempt to explain the concept of the singular being, or the being for whom community is ultimately a question, I must necessarily delve into the problematics of, for example, finitude and ecstasy. It, therefore, becomes impossible to define each term distinctly and separately, discuss their chronological relationship, and thereby unravel their connection. All of the ideas happen simultaneously and in a sense each describes a different piece of the same moment. The structure of “The Inoperative Community” is contiguous with the ideas Nancy conveys, which pertain to understanding outside of a context of foundation and chronological ordering. In other words, the

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44 The Ethics of Community essay unfolds without a point of origin and a corresponding development or progression, as do the concepts he explores. Rather Nancy moves fluidly from one terminological exposition to another and unravels the complexity of community accordingly. For the sake of clarity and accessibility, the presentation that follows departs from his structure insofar as there is an institution of a kind of progression. The manner in which the concepts that he presents defy such an ordering becomes elucidated as we gain an ever-increasing understanding of their meaning. The beginning of the chapter provides a context from which to understand the fundamental issues and stakes involved in a thinking of community. When possible, I have separated the key terms of “The Inoperative Community” but only insofar as they permit such separation. Certainly, particularly toward the end of the essay, the terms come to utterly resist clear distinction. At these points, I define them provisionally and subsequently allow them to reveal themselves in Nancian fashion. My hope is that throughout the chapter the central issues of community, its imperative, and the stakes involved will be exposed.3

The Individual and the Absolute Nancy suggests that by definition the individual is the indivisible atom, a necessarily totally detached figure of immanence that is the ultimate for-itself. It is a figure of absolute certainty representing an absolute origin (The Inoperative Community 1991, 3). The individual being, so conceived, not only reflects an impoverished perspective but is ultimately a logical impossibility insofar as the individual is incapable of being in any way toward an other. We know that being must be toward an other, or as Nancy plainly states, “one cannot make a world of simple atoms. There has to be an inclination or an inclining from one toward the other, of one by the other, or from one to the other” (3). As an absolute for-itself or in-itself, how would this being, this individual, be capable of “being-with” in any way?4 What would characterize the being-with, the connection, or the attachment of the individual? How can an immanence be unto an immanence? Lacking any capacity to be or lean toward the other, the individual can rather only be unto itself. Strictly speaking, relation in this context is impossible; it would be a “connection” devoid of relation, a side-by-sideness with no attachment. Highlighting such an observation is crucial for it is here, in the context of the individual, that “we” have been and remain (11–12).5 Furthermore, it is a central issue insofar as it would seem that if pressed, “we” all know, have some kind of an understanding (however unformulated it may be), that being exists in relation in a complex, important, even fundamental way; there is a sense that the detached being-side-by-side of the individual is simply inadequate to the connections of (or that are)

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being. Nonetheless, the general context of our time, the context of the individual, places us within this contradiction of understanding being as both individual and connected. Even the most traditional, humanistic sense of community no doubt intends to convey a more profound connection than that which we have seen is possible for the individual. The community of humanism has as its condition of possibility (the individual) that which makes all connections or relations impossible. The question of being as it relates to the question of being-with must be engaged indicating that we must move beyond the individual as our point of departure. Nancy continues his critique of the concept of the individual by discussing how an essence or immanence is imagined to be achieved (from where does the essence emerge?). As with the essay as a whole, this issue is generally contextualized by a meditation on the betrayal of communism. In communism, the essence or immanence of the individual allegedly completes itself in and as community through one’s labor. In other words, the labor performed is itself conceived as the production of both the essence of the individual and the essence of community. Through “his” labor “man” produces his own essence as the production of the essence of the community. Accordingly, one would here achieve, fulfill, and most precisely produce one’s essence in the form of one’s labor. Similarly, humanism is the understanding of the individual as containing the essence of humanness. The individual is not integrally connected to the community as it is with communism; however, the conceptualization of the individual as essential functions the same way in both modes of thought. Humanism simply envisions the human as the primary immanence and does not extrapolate this notion onto a community. Being conceived as an individual or subject, as it is in both communism and humanism, has very specific ramifications for a conception of community. If the individual is perceived as the achievement of immanence, then the community of individuals is, without question, the community of immanence, characterized by a lack of a leaningtoward the other. Furthermore, if community is formulated as the production of human essence, then the will to essence necessarily informs all ties of the individual. “Essence is set to work in” and through all manner of relations (3). Accordingly, we must understand and remember that the ties or relations between individuals within this context are characterized by a lack of being-with and rather institute and expose the will to essence. Everything is understood in terms of the accomplishment of this essence, which becomes the work of all relations. Nancy indicates that we have called this “totalitarianism” but we might call it “immanentism,” which is the impoverished perspective

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that is the general horizon of our time (3). The individual is thus the point of departure for our world, dooming us to think only within the terms of immanentism. What specifically is lost in a thinking of being as a will to essence, that is, a thinking of being in which being is individual? Throughout the preface and the body of the essay Nancy stresses the imperative of thinking community in its true sense. However, we must first inquire into the nature of being and death for a being characterized by immanence or essence. How can an essence or immanence, an absolute foritself, be, or be-with, or die? The individual is incapable of being-with, given that an essence cannot lean outside of itself to be with an other. This is so by definition, as the immanence is and can only be an absolute for-itself. The individual cannot die insofar as it is characterized by an immanence that necessarily implies the infinite. Death is impossible for an immanence or individual and, accordingly, ceases to have meaning. Last, one could argue that an immanence is not capable of being in the first place. As that which cannot move or act, the being of an individual is contrary to being (or at the very least, called into question). We might propose that the individual is both already dead (incapable of being) and infinite (incapable of dying as it is immanent). As such, both being and death become radically problematic. Consequently, there is no meaning of being for the individual, which again is characterized by a lack of movement, action, and connection.6 All of the characteristics that constitute being are impossibilities for the individual. We cannot properly close a discussion on the conceptualization of being as individual without at least addressing the question of the origin of such thought. Nancy engages this issue briefly in observing that “some” have seen in the concept of the individual Europe’s triumphant dominance insofar as the European idea of the individual illustrated to “the world” the way to emancipation from tyranny, as well as the standard against which all communal endeavors or projects should be gauged (3). Given Nancy’s painstaking and thorough critique of the individual, this text reflects his vehement disagreement with such an understanding. However, the allusion to the thinking of the individual as a European concept brings us to question the status of “the world” (the “other” world, the non-European world) to which such an idea was illustrated. Is the entire world subject to such thinking? Nancy proposes that the individual is the ontological ground upon which we walk and “we” are accordingly “lost” (11–12). To what “we” does he refer? It does seem that Nancy is implying that the “we” for whom this thinking is a point of departure is the “we” of the world.7 However, he indicates clearly that this manner of thought is specifically European in origin and was then “shown” to the rest of the world (3). We are

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compelled to inquire concerning the reception of this illustration. Did (and does) all of “the world” perceive it? Is it possible that being was (is) conceptualized differently in those places in which the illustration of the individual was (is) perhaps not perceived and received (at least as fully)? These questions become important later in this chapter and we return to them when we examine Nancy’s brief reference to the contexts within which community is “slight and inaccessible” (35). If community is not the community of the individual then what is it? We might imagine that he would begin this investigation with a description of the being of which community would be made (or more accurately, as we see later, the being that is constituted by community). But rather than proceed in such a linear fashion, Nancy discusses community from a different angle. He slides it into the discussion in the context of an analysis regarding the manner in which a metaphysics of the subject is incapable of considering the question of community. In a rather painstaking exposition, Nancy challenges any metaphysics of the absolute and illustrates that it is community in its true sense that cuts through and denies any metaphysics of the absolute. We trace this discussion in the following pages as the implications regarding the role of community in the dismantling of metaphysics are provocative and relevant to a rigorous understanding of Nancy’s thought. We have already seen that community cannot be conceived from the point of departure of the individual, as the individual is a figure of the absolute and therefore utterly without relation. Nancy begins his discussion of community and metaphysics by reminding us that any of the forms that a metaphysics of the subject might assume prohibit a thinking of community. All of the following are examples of such a metaphysics: the Idea, History, the Individual, the State, Science, the Work of Art, and so on (4). Again, these have been constructed upon the ultimate foundation, which is the metaphysics of the subject or the absolute. Nancy challenges this foundation and we find that community itself prohibits metaphysical thinking. It bears repeating that an absolute for-itself is “perfectly detached, distinct, and closed: being without relation” and that according to Nancy such a being cannot logically exist (4). Or more precisely, the very logic of the absolute points to the impossibility of the absolute. Nancy begins this deconstruction with the following observation: “A simple and redoubtable logic will always imply that within its very separation, the absolutely separate encloses more than what is simply separated” (4). This idea can be best unraveled by using a specific example of the absolute. For our purposes, it is most logical to use the Individual as our example of “the absolutely separate” (4). It is absolutely separate because it is an immanence or rather the immanence par excellence, and nothing else has this same quality. The Individual, the absolutely

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separate necessarily “encloses more than what is simply separated” due to the fact that it is the ultimate immanence (4). Because it is an ultimate immanence and thus an almost magical entity, what is separated within it is more than just the thing itself (if it were just the individual that were absolutely separate it would be merely an individual and not an Individual). Within the absolutely separate must be enclosed more than what is separated as it must receive its ultimately immanent quality from somewhere other than itself. Here we find the logical quagmire. That which is absolutely separate must have a separate entity that is itself enclosed in order to make the separation absolute. Or as Nancy puts it, “the closure must not only close around a territory (while still remaining exposed, at its outer edge, to another territory, with which it thereby still communicates), but also, in order to complete the absoluteness of the separation, around the enclosure itself” (4). The enclosure must enclose both a territory and the enclosure itself. The separateness, in order to be absolute, must have an enclosure not just around the Individual but also around that which encloses the Individual. It must be doubly enclosed. “To be absolutely alone, it is not enough that I be so; I must also be alone being alone- and this of course is contradictory” (4). The very definition of the absolute indicates the impossibility of the absolute. The contradiction that arises within the logic of the absolute is that there is a relationship within alone between two entities and if that is the case then there can be no “alone.” Thus by definition, the kind of self-enclosure and “aloneness” implied by the absolute indicates a relationality that violates the logic of the absolute itself. In summary, the essence of the absolute is to be absolutely nonrelational, that is, absolutely alone. In order to be absolutely alone there must be an alone being alone which implies more than one, which implies not alone at all. Regarding this relation that necessarily constitutes that which wants to be absolute, Nancy says: “This relation tears and forces open, from within and from without at the same time, and from an outside that is nothing other than the rejection of an impossible interiority, the ‘without relation’ from which the absolute would constitute itself . . .” (4). The relation itself denies the possibility of the absolute by tearing and forcing open that which would like to be absolutely closed; relationality is implicit in the logic of the absolute and is always denying such closure. It exists inside the absolute (thus rendering it non-absolute) insofar as the logic of the absolute itself suggests relation which thus prohibits the absolute. The outside of the absolute can be understood simply as the denial of the absolute interiority of the absolute “without-relation” from which the absolute understands itself as constituted. Thus, both inside and outside the absolute there is relation that “tears and forces open” by itself, indicating that the total interiority that the absolute would like to claim is an “absolute” impossibility.

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It becomes clear in the next section that the tearing open enacted by relation is a description of community. In other words, community is the tearing and the forcing open of the absolute of metaphysics. “Excluded by the logic of the absolute-subject of metaphysics (Self, Will, Life, Spirit, and so on), community comes perforce to cut into this subject by virtue of this same logic” (4). Thus community cuts into the metaphysical subject, again, by virtue of the very logic of the absolute. There is a sense in which community itself brings out of the absolute that part of the absolute that causes it to contradict itself (like a light that shines on the logical flaw of any metaphysics of the absolute). It is not simply that community sets the absolute in relation but rather that it undoes that which is supposed to be absolute: “The logic of the absolute sets it in relation: but this, obviously, cannot make for a relation between two or several absolutes, no more that it can make an absolute of the relation. The logic of the absolute undoes the absoluteness of the absolute” (4). The relation, or community, is the undoing of the absolute, if it is at all. As an undoing, a taking apart, a cutting into, an opening up, an action rather than a thing, community is not exactly an “is.” By definition, community undoes immanence as it is that within the very logic of immanence that cuts into and undoes its logic. Since community is within immanence, there can be no immanence. As that which explodes the myth of the absolute, community has not yet been considered. The questions and concerns that have guided our thinking on community have assumed the individual as the frame of reference. Only now, says Nancy, do we find ourselves asking the questions of community for the first time.

Death and Community Community is constituted by the immanence that is perceived as lost from it. Furthermore, were immanence to be achieved (for example, through an understanding of death as an achievement of immanence), community would certainly not be the result. Rather, Nancy argues, the only possible implication of such an achievement is death. If we consider what it is in death that engenders immanence (all meaningmaking and hence recuperative gestures), the impossibility of communication or community becomes evident. The realm of the individual immanence (and death) implies nothing more than “the continuous identity of atoms” (12). The only possibilities for being herein are a meaningless side-by-sideness of individual atoms. As we will see, in this formulation, death loses its senseless meaning. Another way of conceiving of an occurrence of immanence as an occurrence of death is by considering the absolute lack of movement that is necessarily proper to an immanence. Any will to essentialize being indicates something of death insofar as, strictly speaking, an

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essence is not capable of being. As that which is a an absolute or total for-itself, how could an immanence move, be-with, engage, interact, change, or “be” in any way that indicates the quality of being? It simply cannot. By definition, such an entity would rather be characterized by death. Thus, it can be said on this level as well that any will to immanence is a will to death. For Nancy, the logic of a will to immanence is the logic of imbuing death with meaning or making a work out of it. In contrast, for the finite or mortal being (the being that is not an individual) death is that from which meaning cannot be derived. If immanence is the goal, then death functions as a work by moving being closer to an achievement of purity, unity, and ultimately immanence. In contrast, Nancy often stresses that “true” community is that which cannot make sense of death, as death is irrecoverable and unsublateable. But it certainly bears mentioning that Nancy also indicates that what is at stake here is death “losing the senseless meaning that it ought to have and obstinately does have” (14). Thus, a “senseless meaning” is formulated as proper to death whereas a meaning with the goal of immanence is not. Nancy uses the example of Nazism to illustrate a material situation in which being is conceived from the point of departure of the individual with immanence as the ultimate goal. In this context of a will to immanence death is instituted as a work; community here is only “slight” and “inaccessible” (35). In contrast, for the fi nite or mortal being there is the unworkability of death and community. For the former, death has lost its senseless meaning and for the latter, death is senselessly meaningful. If we do not think of the question of community (which is the question of the being for whom death is irrecuperable, or senselessly meaningful), death loses the senseless meaning that it ought to have (14). In other words, if we fail to think of death as that of which we can make no sense, we will lose our death, that death which is most properly our own or the death that Nancy calls the “singular death.” Thus it is evident that although Nancy repeatedly indicates death’s irrecoverable and unsublateable character he does not proclaim it meaningless; in fact he asserts that it has “senseless meaning,” which is a “meaning beyond meaning” (14). This senseless meaning is crucial as it is that around which community emerges or upon which it is dependent. In other words, the senseless meaning of death has meaning insofar as it is an understanding of its own senselessness, its irrecoverability and resistance to institution that form the backdrop for the existence of being and community. Being and community occur simultaneously as there is no mediation between the two; thus, being is community. Being is outside of being or being cannot recuperate, sublate, or make sense of its ownmost possibility, that is, its singular death.

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Nancy first indicates the real ramifications of these issues in this context of a will to immanence and its relation to death. While in other essays he will cite other examples, the primary example used in this essay is that of Nazi Germany.8 Any political, economic or social program that assumes as its goal the will to a community of essence or immanence has as its work the work of death. Thus in Nazi Germany the desire for a pure Aryan being was nothing other than a desire for death. What this meant for the victims, or those who were deemed neither Aryan nor pure, is obvious. However, Nancy proposes that the work of death extended to the victimizer, those for whom the community was to be achieved as this immanence. “That is why political or collective enterprises dominated by a will to absolute immanence have as their truth the truth of death. Immanence, communal fusion, contains no other logic than that of the suicide of the community that is governed by it” (12). Thus, we find that it was not only “the other” who was exterminated but additionally those within the “Aryan” community who were not deemed sufficiently pure. Furthermore, Nancy asserts that on a certain metaphorical level, Germany as a whole was self-exterminated. Interestingly, he maintains that it would be reasonable to make such an assessment given “certain aspects of the spiritual reality of this nation” (12). Here we find the death of both victim and the “community” that intends or wills immanence. Any institution or regime like Nazism, governed by a desire to achieve purity and banish the impure other, is working according to a desire for immanence that is primarily ruled by a logic of death. In the end, despite the fact that death must be conceived in both literal and metaphorical terms, this empirical example powerfully demonstrates that a work toward immanence is the same as a work of death.9 Literal death conceived as immanence carries with it a poverty of understanding insofar as death loses its senseless meaning. Furthermore, immanence itself seems to be of the nature of death and thus calls to mind that which is more of death than of being. Logically, any political enterprise desiring or working toward or for immanence itself reflects the work of death. A desire for immanence is equivalent to a desire for death. However, the example of Nazism brings to light another level upon which the will to death is occurring, and this is the actual world of concrete beings. Literal death can be the result of a will to essence as witnessed in the death of the other deemed insufficiently pure. Thus on both abstract and empirical levels the will to immanence is equal to a will to death. A large part of the imperative or driving force within this Nancian project is to illustrate the connection between that which is abstract, or philosophical, and that which is empirical, or real. An unexamined will to immanence has led to disastrous and horrific consequences within the real or actual world.

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52 The Ethics of Community In another gesture toward the material, Nancy extends this discussion to the “citizens and militants . . . workers and servants” who have bought into the dream of achieving immanence in and through an ultimate community that, although yet to come, will come and thereby provide the immanence so desired (13). But by now, he argues, there is a realization that the “yet to come” is not coming, which results in dissatisfaction and resignation. Nancy warns us against this realization (or “consciousness”) and likens it to the consciousness of the “lost” (immanent) community; in the same manner as community so envisioned could never have been lost as it never existed, the immanence dreamed of being achieved through a community to come, was never to come or never to take place. The nostalgia and dreaming are essentially two sides of the same coin. The former is a mournful looking back at an immanent community and the latter is a hopeful looking forward to that which is yet to come. Both of them are fictitious. It would be impossible for immanence to come for the community that would come offering immanence would be nothing more than death. In other words, a perception of an immanent community yet to come indicates death existing as a means to something else and death precisely denies such application or function being totally resistant to any kind of recuperation. Furthermore, as the community that would bring immanence, this community would again be the community of death, which is simply impossible because such a death (or death so conceived) cannot or could not “come about or form a future” (13). What can come about and “form a future” says Nancy, is the singular, irrecuperable death. Communion or immanence is not what comes of death; properly speaking nothing can come of death. Nancy maintains that although millions of deaths are justifiable, they are not sublateable. Regardless of the context or how justifiable the death may be, it still absolutely resists recuperation; we simply cannot make a work out of death. According to Nancy, the modern age has only understood justifiable death as “salvation or the dialectical sublation of history” (13). In both death as salvation and death as the recuperation of history, some sort of immanence is imagined to be attained. Given that this is the only way that death is being perceived, it has lost its sense of infinite negativity or its singular irrecuperability. Thus death is being deprived of that which is most proper to it and thereby most proper to us, or to being itself. In this contemporary context we are therefore deprived of our own death, the death that Nancy calls our singular death, which is being’s ownmost possibility.10 Singular death is the death that each particular being (alone) has to die. Unlike death as the achievement of immanence, which cannot come about, the singular death can come about and form a future. This is a crucial element of Nancy’s project as it is around this death that community can

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be conceived. While it is clear that Nancy is challenging the conception of community as a will to immanence, as that which makes a work of death, we must clarify and elaborate upon Nancy’s true community. In Nancy’s vision of community, community reveals itself through death and death reveals itself through community. Interestingly, community or being-with, “results” from the fact of the mortality or finitude of being. Simply stated, community or being-with comes about in the context of the mortal being. Thus only the mortal, finite, and we will soon see, singular being, can be in community. For the individual, the subject, the being incapable of inclination, community is impossible. The community, or the event of being-with, is that through which my finitude or mortality is presented or exposed to me and as such, death is revealed through community. Death is quite straightforward here: the death of being simply indicates my mortality, the fact that it is impossible that I might be either immanent or infinite. This, in turn, has vast implications insofar as if I am not immanent or infinite I must conceive of my death in such a way that prohibits me from understanding myself as an individual or a subject. Rather I must perceive of my being as ecstatically thrown into the possibility of my singular death.11 The death that is not the death of the individual but the death of the singular being, reveals to being its lack of immanence, which itself indicates being as outside of itself, or ecstatic. (It is useful here to think of immanence as the ultimate for-itself and the opposite of immanence as being as out-from-itself.) Death reveals to being that it is not immanent, is ecstatic, and in its ecstasis (or in its being outside of being) is toward an other being. In this “toward an other,” being is, constitutively, a being-with. Insofar as this is the case, death reveals community, or being-with, to being. On another level, community as the event of being-with is nothing other than the exposure of finitude that can occur only through an other. Here, I am revealed to myself to be mortal and thus incapable of immanence insofar as I have an other of my own being. In my lack of immanence, in my mortality or finitude, the fact that I have an other of being is exposed to me. In this sense as well, finitude indicates, or more precisely reveals, through the other, a lack of immanence. However, although community reveals to being its lack of immanence and thus its singularity, this formulation is misleading insofar as it seems to designate a sequence of events or chronological ordering when, in fact, community is that which has always already happened. We do not begin with being, proceed to an event of being-with in which death is revealed to being, and then arrive at the singular being. Rather the event constitutes being itself and therefore there is never a time in which the event has not already occurred and is not taking place.

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54 The Ethics of Community Importantly, such a community, which is necessarily the community of finite beings who are capable of death and thus lack the possibility of immanence, is not a community in which any kind of substantial or transcendent bond between subjects would occur. Community neither works to achieve anything that can be considered a product nor comprises anything “higher” or more transcendent than the beings within it or, more precisely, the beings for whom being is finite. (We see here as we do throughout the text that our language itself resists this thought.) Nancy’s assertion that the community of finite beings is calibrated on the death of its members indicates that the community is itself of the order of mortal beings rather than of the order of transcendence. Thus community is dependent upon and is in the way of the finite character of being. Being as finite necessarily indicates being in community. There is no temporal priority with regard to being and community but rather they exist simultaneously. If being is finite, then being is automatically in community or is in the way of community. The relation that the finite being has to death, which is characterized by non-immanence, places the finite being immediately “into” or as community. We cannot understand this event in terms of an order, process, or development, which makes it exceedingly difficult to conceptualize. There is no ground from which anything emerges, upon which we might attempt to impose an order. There is absolutely no mediation between being and community. Here we recognize that community or being as finite constitutes being itself. Properly speaking, being cannot be if is not finite and thus not in community. The distinction between community and the finite being is nonexistent. The two terms name the same event, which is being as finite and mortal. (Finitude as mortality and finitude as ecstasy name two sides of the same coin of nonimmanence.)

Ecstasy and Singularity Thus far, we have determined that the individual cannot be our point of departure and that it is community itself (or relation) that cuts through any metaphysics of the subject. Furthermore, the connection between being, community, and death has been illustrated. But what of being that is not characterized by immanence; in other words, what about true being or the being characterized by community? Nancy first approaches an analysis of this being through Bataille.12 This discussion clarifies that ecstasis, as the opposite of the absolute, characterizes the being in question. “Ecstasy” is the name for the rupture that cuts through the possibility of absolute being. (However, as we saw above, “community” is the name for that rupture. These terms are largely interchangeable and simply indicate different ways of accessing the same

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idea.) If absolute being is impossible (due to the rupture or ecstasis), then being itself is defined as relational (or as community). According to Nancy, if we are to understand ecstasy in a rigorous sense, we find that it is not about effusion or illumination, but rather about the outside of being of being, that is, of being set in relation to itself (6). Ecstasy is the absolute impossibility of the absolute, the name for the impossibility of absolute immanence, insofar as it implies being as outside of itself or being as relational, which is, therefore, neither absolute nor immanent. Any thinking founded upon the individual is itself based upon a notion of immanence and, thereby, necessarily denies the possibility of ecstasy. Being cannot be thought without ecstasis (being considered as relational rather than as the absoluteness of the totality of beings). In the following quote we can certainly see the beginnings of a conceptualization of being that is an alternative to immanence and the individual. “Ecstasy answers—if it is properly speaking ‘an answer’— to the impossibility of the absoluteness of the absolute, or to the ‘absolute’ impossibility of complete immanence” (6). In other words, rather than the absoluteness of the absolute or complete immanence, there is something called “ecstasy.” Notions of the individual (being as absolute) and of a pure collective whole (community as absolute) are again revealed to be impossible given ecstasis. All modes of thought that assume as their frame of reference either the individual or the community as immanence (humanism and communism respectively) are linked by their denial of ecstasy, of being as outside of itself, of the fundamentally relational (and interruptive) aspect of being. The question of community is integrally linked with the movement or event of ecstasy. The events of ecstasy and community indicate that neither being nor community can be considered within the realm of the absolute. Ultimately, we cannot think of either being or community without thinking of ecstasis. Much of what is unraveled in this chapter pertains to a fundamental manner in which being is conceived as outside of itself or as ecstatic. There are, of course, many particularities within the formulations that Nancy develops; however, the thinking of ecstasy is a useful umbrella concept for beginning an understanding of the constitutive events that Nancy is trying to describe.13 The fact that ecstasis is constitutive of being rather than a result of it indicates that in ecstasy being is outside of itself, or relational, in such a way that there is nothing that comes before it. The very principle of being is relation. Being is not first an individual or an immanent whole that then comes to be fragmented and set in relation, but rather being as being, in order to be being, is set in relation. In order to conceive of community, we must understand ecstasy in the sense of being as always-already outside of itself, as set in relation to itself to such a radical degree that it never existed in any other way. Ecstasy so conceived

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56 The Ethics of Community is fundamental to being, preceding everything, that is, every concept or understanding of being as an immanence in the form of an individual or subject. If ecstasy denies the possibility of immanence in being, then community is likewise prohibited from such a production. Both being and community are here affected, and as the chapter progresses, we continue to witness their inextricable connection. Nancy proposes the being for whom being is ecstatic, or the singular being, as an alternative to the individual. He first broaches the question of singularity briefly in an aside early in the essay. Singularity, or being as non-absolute or non-immanent, does not occur in the context of atoms (as does the individual) but rather in the way of the clinamen, which is a leaning toward that which is unidentifiable insofar as it is not a thing but rather a relation. It names an event or a movement and accordingly cannot be identified as such. Given these descriptions of ecstasy and singularity, we can see the manner in which the singular, non-absolute being, is the being to whom ecstasy happens. “Singularity is linked to ecstasy: one could not properly say that the singular being is the subject of ecstasy, for ecstasy has no ‘subject’—but one must say that ecstasy (community) happens to the singular being” (7). The terms ecstasy, singularity, and community are so closely related that one could argue that they are indistinguishable. To say that ecstasy happens to the singular being basically indicates that the singular being is the ecstatic being. The singular being “happens” or is as being outside of being (insofar as it “is”). Therefore, singularity and ecstasy name the same event of being. Furthermore, strengthening the earlier observation that community and singularity (and thus ecstasis) are themselves indistinguishable, in the above quote, Nancy places the term “community” in parentheses immediately following ecstasy to indicate that the two terms are largely synonymous. Community can also be understood as ecstasy or as the spacing of being outside of itself and thus points to the constitutive and relational aspect of being. Singularity and community are distinct only insofar as they allude to specific intricacies of the event of being. Singularity, for example, gestures toward the uniqueness of the singularity whereas in community the notions of sharing and compearing (or co-appearing) are fundamental. However, ecstasy can be considered a general name for both terms. Ecstasy defines the outside of being of being and singularity is the being to whom ecstasy has always-already happened. Strictly speaking, ecstasy is the defining event of the singular being and accordingly ecstasy is singularity. Last, community is the spacing of being itself or the manner in which it is always-already set in relation, which occurs constitutively in the event of ecstasy. The relationship between these three key terms as they have been set forth thus far is a strange one. They are distinct in some way but, simultaneously, are largely synonymous.

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The above is only a brief introduction to singularity, and Nancy returns to and elaborates upon it significantly later in the essay. As we progress, we learn more regarding the specificities of singularity. For now, we must bear in mind that there can be no interiority to the singularity as it names the being constituted by relationality. All of the singular being, or all the singular being, is as set in relation. At this point, we must address a new component of Nancy’s analysis, which is that this relation that is constitutive of being occurs between being itself (being as outside of being) as well as between being and other beings (between singularities). In fact, we see that singularity is radically dependent upon other singularities for its being.

Singularity, Finitude, and Communication In order to examine the fundamental relationality of singularity, we must consider the importance and connection of finitude to singularity. We have already witnessed the incredibly close connection between ecstasy and singularity, and we find a similar dynamic occurring between singularity and finitude. Nancy notes that the singular being is the finite being (27). In an earlier section, we discussed a manner in which finitude concerns the absolute impossibility of the absoluteness (immanence) of being. We saw how this occurred in a twofold manner. First, finitude (which, importantly, we only experience through the other and the presentation of our mortality) indicates mortality, and second, it indicates ecstasis. (And we saw how mortality and ecstasis are themselves related.) However, finitude, its intricacies, and particular relationship to singularity, merits further exploration. One of the central difficulties in conceptualizing singularity is that it does not emerge from a ground and, very possibly, does not come from or proceed from anything (27). Singularity as such is not quite born. In contrast to an emergence from a particular ground, or having a distinct birth, the singularity is the point of reference against which birth or the concept of birth is “neither a production nor a self-positioning” (27). In the context of singularity, birth cannot be made into a work, a production, or a place from which the self can be understood. Rather it is something like a continual happening of being in which fi nitude is continually born. Nancy names such a birth “the infi nite birth of fi nitude.” Birth and fi nitude are so conceived insofar as fi nitude (the presentation to my being by the other of the impossibility of immanence and thus the presentation of my mortality and my experience of ecstasy) occurs over and over, or is continually born for the singular being. In other words and more simply, fi nitude is continually born in the ecstasis that happens to the singular being.

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58 The Ethics of Community Nancy has already illustrated that one of the primary factors of community in a non-immanent sense is that there is no common, essential substance in which beings would partake or share and which would exist in a totality superior to them. In other words, there must be no communion of beings (there must be a substance or a definitive “thing” for communion, and this is precisely what Nancy wants to deny). But what is there in place of such a communion? What happens among singularities? What are the interactions of the inoperative community? Here Nancy proposes communication. Finitude, or that which appears to the singular being, cannot commune for it is not a ground, thing, or substance. But it can and does appear, present and expose itself, and “thus it exists as communication” (28). Communication is an appearing and exposition. Finitude exists in communication, that is, in exposing and appearing (importantly, Nancy calls this phenomenon “more originary than any other.” Here again these events are described as constituting being rather than occurring after there is a being that is already constituted). Such an exposition and appearance necessarily occurs to a being. Finitude is not exposed unless there is another being to whom the exposure can occur. There must be more than one being; there must be an “among” beings in order for communication (appearing and exposing) to take place. Nancy calls this co-appearing or compearing and states that finitude can only compear. By definition, finitude appears or communication occurs among singularities in the form of a “together” (28). This formulation has vast implications that Nancy draws out at the end of the essay. The fundamental nature of “being among” is apparent. Ultimately, this radical connection to or necessity of the other constitutes being itself. For Nancy, singularity, by definition, cannot exist alone as being is dependent for its being on other being(s), granting a priority to being-with. Being-with almost seems to precede being. Generally, this constitutive event does resist such chronological placement; however, given that being-with is a kind of condition of possibility for being, it is tempting to think of being-with as assuming some kind of precedence. However, oddly, it would be more accurate to observe that the two events (being and being-with) occur simultaneously.

Sovereignty, Sharing, and Community Not surprisingly, inextricably linked to ecstasy, finitude, and singularity are the concepts of sovereignty and sharing. We begin with sovereignty, an idea that Nancy develops from Bataille. The following quote alludes to the manner in which sovereignty is connected to ecstasy and finitude (and communication): “. . . sovereignty is the sovereign exposure to an excess (to a transcendence) that does not present itself and does not let itself be appropriated (or simulated) that does not even

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give itself—but rather to which being is abandoned” (18). Thus being is exposed to an excess of transcendence. (This is perhaps reminiscent of the exposure of finitude that occurs in ecstasis.) The very exposition of the excess to which being is exposed is itself sovereignty (recall earlier discussion on how the appearing and exposing of finitude is communication). In this exposure that is sovereignty, being is abandoned to an excess or transcendence. Therefore, sovereignty exposes being to an excess in such a way that being is abandoned to it. Further, the excess to which being is exposed and abandoned (which is sovereignty) is not a substance. It is not a thing that could present itself or let itself be appropriated. In fact, Nancy indicates that this excess, properly speaking, is not, in a manner similar to the way that Heideggerian Being is not. In the end, like Bataille before him, Nancy concludes that the exposure and abandonment to the excess that is sovereignty is nothing. The exposure and abandoning to an excess of sovereignty is important insofar as it designates a certain spacing of being that is crucial to an understanding of singularity and thus community. In the nothing to which being is exposed and abandoned, that is, in sovereignty, being is as being outside of itself. In sovereignty being is “in an exteriority that is impossible to recapture, or perhaps we should say that it is of this exteriority, that is, of an outside that it cannot relate to itself, but with which it entertains an essential and incommensurable relation. This relation prescribes the place of the singular being” (18). (Such spacing of being outside of itself is reminiscent of the ecstasy that occurs with the exposure of finitude.) In sovereignty, which is nothing, in which being is exposed and abandoned to an excess, being comes to be in an outside of itself that is groundless, formless, and without substance. In other words, being is itself of this very exteriority. The way of being in sovereignty is being that is of this exteriority. The outside radically refuses or denies both capture and assimilation. However, being does have an “essential and incommensurable relation” to its exteriority (18), which is that being in relation is the way that being is; being itself is so spaced. In other words, it is essential to being that being has a being and an outside of being, which “constitutes” its very singularity. Or “the place of the singular being” is prescribed by this relation (18). In sovereignty, being is placed or spaced outside of itself (through its exposure and abandonment to an excess) and thus put in relation with itself. Sovereignty and ecstasy are linked insofar as both name an event of being as exteriority. We must bear in mind that in both of these events being is as a relation to itself resulting in a spacing of being that is fundamental to the way in which Nancy is conceiving of community. In a sense, a discussion of sharing brings us one step closer to a more solid understanding of Nancy’s conception of community. He provides

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60 The Ethics of Community a brief definition of the term in which it is evident, once again, that the ideas he introduces are extremely tightly interwoven: Sharing comes down to this: what community reveals to me, in presenting to me my birth and my death, is my existence outside myself. Which does not mean my existence reinvested in or by community, as if community were another subject that would sublate me, in a dialectical or communal mode. Community does not sublate the finitude it exposes. Community itself, in sum, is nothing other than this exposition. (26) Sharing indicates both sharing as we generally think of it (a giving out or allocating among participants) as well as a dividing. When we attempt to think of the revealing or exposing of finitude (communication) by community (or by an other singularity) that leads to an ecstasis, or an understanding of being outside of being, we must understand this process as sharing. Sharing is community presenting to me my birth and death, my finitude, and thus my being as outside of itself. The term is fitting insofar as it describes a situation in which being is divided (shared) into being and outside of being. Furthermore, the dividing necessarily occurs among singularities, and, in this sense, it is an experience (albeit a constitutive and preconscious one) that we share or an experience that occurs as a sharing. Nancy hastens to observe that when my existence outside of myself is revealed to me it is not then appropriated, reinvested, or sublated by community that is a subject capable of this activity. Community is not a subject and thereby resists “operation.” The finitude that community exposes cannot be sublated by a community or by anything else. Furthermore, community itself is nothing other than the exposition of finitude. Therefore, we have at last arrived at a definition of Nancian community. “Community itself, in sum, is nothing other than this exposition” (26). Community is the exposition of finitude.

A Closer Look Having acquired a sense of the different components that contribute to the events of community, we can examine them in more depth. A further look at communication, or the exposure of finitude with an emphasis on the co-appearing of the exposure, leads us to a discussion of the specifics of the spacing of the singular being. Nancy begins this discussion by observing that communication exists fundamentally in a certain dislocation: Communication exists before all else in this sharing and in this compearance of finitude: that is, in the dislocation and in the

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interpellation that reveal themselves to be constitutive of beingin-common- precisely inasmuch as being-in-common is not a common being. The finite being exists first of all according to a division of sites, according to an extension-partes extra partessuch that each singularity is extended. (29) Communication, or the exposure of finitude to and of my being, exists in the dividing of being (sharing) and in the fact that this exposure and dividing can only take place together (compearance). Another way of understanding the exposure, dividing, and compearing is as a dislocation and an interruption that is constitutive of being-in-common but only insofar as being-in-common is not a common being. It is no surprise that the finite being is not reducible to a common being as we have been discussing from the beginning how none of what Nancy is attempting to describe is sublateable or reducible to an immanence or substance. However, the fact that this event is a “dislocation” and that the finite being or the singular being exists as a “division of sites . . . such that each singularity is extended” points to an aspect of spacing that we must develop (29). Singularity exists as being as outside of itself, relational in its very nature. In a similar manner, this relation is an extension toward that which is in contrast to a self-enclosure. But what precisely happens in this spacing of being to itself and how is that spacing related to other singularities? In other words, where and how does the outside of being that is an other (outside of being) fit in to this picture? Nancy writes the following on singular being: It is what it is, singular being, singularity of being, only through its extension, through the areality that above all extroverts it in its very being . . . and that makes it exist only by exposing it to an outside. This outside is in turn nothing other than the exposition of another areality, of another singularity—the same other. This exposure, or this exposing-sharing, gives rise, from the outset, to a mutual interpellation of singularities prior to any address in language . . . Finitude compears, that is to say, it is exposed: such is the essence of community. (29) Singular being emerges only through the outside of being that radically extroverts it and causes it to exist as an exposure to an outside. We have repeatedly discussed the outside of being of being, but we have not yet probed the outside of the outside of being itself in any kind of depth. This outside is revealed to be “the exposition of another areality, of another singularity –the same other” (29). Presently, it is evident that

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62 The Ethics of Community each singularity is composed of being and a being outside of itself, which is necessarily extended toward an other singularity. In other words, if the outside of being is the other of “self,” then we may assert that my other of self is extended toward an outside in which I come upon another other of self. These others are the same insofar as they are both the other of a “self” or they both indicate the outside of being of being. Nancy names this event exposing-sharing. My other of self (or finitude) is exposed to another other of self. In this exposure, both you and I are simultaneously spaced, divided, or shared (we return to this idea in a moment with a close reading of “you shares me”). This exposing-sharing constitutes a mutual interruption or interpellation of singularities that precedes any linguistic connection or relationship. The relationship between singularities described as an exposing-sharing is preconscious and constitutive of being rather than an experience that we have of being. We must keep this point in mind as we engage the issue of the places in which community is “slight and inaccessible” that is addressed at the end of the essay. The following quote indicates that exposition and compearance are fundamentally conceptually connected and crucial to the existence of community: “Finitude compears, that is to say it is exposed: such is the essence of community” (29). Recall that compearance is another name for co-appearing, which implies that the process of exposition that is a compearing necessarily occurs among singularities. The finite being or the singularity can only compear as singularity is radically dependent on the other. The exposition of finitude or of the singular being cannot occur without an other singularity, or an other exposition. Thus the exposition of finitude necessarily implies that it compears. Compearance comes very close to naming the same thing as exposition. Finitude or the singular being is exposed and this exposure must necessarily occur among singularities, which is another way of saying that it must compear. Compearance itself highlights the fact that when finitude or singularity is exposed it is exposed “together” (28). These seemingly synonymous terms underscore a different aspect of the same process. Paradoxically, Nancy is able to provide a clearer picture of community by describing its constitutive moments with many different terms, which themselves focus on its varying aspects. Any thought of communication, or finitude as exposing itself, must not have as its frame of reference a “social bond” (29). The notion of the social bond implies both the subjectivity of being (or being as subject–object) and an illusory intersubjectivity of the subject–object (29). Here, being is envisioned as immanent and thus there can be no interconnection or leaning toward between such beings. Accordingly, the “social bond” names a situation that, strictly speaking, cannot exist. What exists in its place is an impoverished perspective regarding the other and community.

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Furthermore, communication or compearance occurs at a much more fundamental level than the “social bond,” that is, it is a prelinguistic or preconscious event that constitutes being. Nancy highlights the importance of understanding that it does not transpire at the level of or in the place of a ground, of a “from-which.” It does not “set itself up” from a foundation or among beings that are already established subjects. (No doubt we have seen how it denies or even resists the concept of being as a subjectivity.) The implications are immense insofar as relation itself constitutes being rendering the singular being totally dependent upon the other. Nancy thus asserts that humans are fundamentally social in a much more vital and radical sense than is generally thought. Although compearance comes from no ground or place, Nancy indicates in what it consists, which provides a bit more insight into the event: “It consists in the appearance of the between as such: you and I (between us)—a formula in which the and does not imply juxtaposition, but exposition. What is exposed in compearance is the following, and we must learn to read it in all its possible combinations: ‘you (are/and/is) (entirely other than) I.’ Or again, more simply, ‘you shares me’” (29). The beginning of this quote alludes to the togetherness or the “among” that is necessary for compearance. When there is a “between” you and I or even more fundamentally when there is a you and I at all, compearance is happening in the “between” and in the “and.” What occurs in the “between” and the “and” in which compearance is, is not a side-by-sideness of you and I (a juxtaposition), but rather an exposition. Opposing juxtaposition and exposition is particularly effective here. In juxtaposition we are almost forced to see the lack of connection indicated, whereas exposition specifically gives the sense of an opening to an outside, thus implying a kind of relation. The latter portion of this quote raises the issue of the nature of what is exposed in the exposition. “What is exposed in compearance is the following . . . you shares me” (29). We already know that the other of being (or the extension of being that is not enclosed in a form) is exposed. Furthermore, we are aware that the outside to which the other of being is exposed is simply another areality or another spacing of another other than being. The above quote illuminates the picture further by pointing to the “you shares me” aspect of compearance. The importance of the “you” as other to compearance or the exposure of finitude has already been established; however, this citation also highlights that when the exposure occurs among singularities, you (as other) exposes my finitude. Insofar as this is the case, I am shared or divided by you. It is useful to think of sharing in terms of the spacing that it enacts upon being. In other words, when I am exposed to the finitude of being, my being is spaced or set in relation. (However, we must bear in mind that I am always-already exposed; I do not first exist as a

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64 The Ethics of Community subject and then become exposed and thus shared.) I am only shared, divided, or spaced when I come upon you. I am dependent on you for my ecstasy, for my finitude, and my finitude is most properly my own, so I therefore need you in order “to have” (although properly speaking it is not a “having”) that which is most properly mine (my other of being, my finitude, my death). You as entirely other than I bring me to my entirely other than I. Insofar as I have an entirely other than I, I myself am divided, spaced, or shared, but I can only be as such given that my other of being is exposed to your other of being. Compearance or co-appearing necessarily indicates that there is not just one exposition occurring. Finitude is exposed from me to you and from you to me, if you will. My other of being as toward your other of being automatically implies that we are co-exposed. “You shares me” or causes me to be outside of myself in that the finitude that I am exposing necessarily occurs to you; I cannot be exposed without you. The “to you” is as fundamental to this equation as the exposure. I need you to expose my finitude and when finitude is exposed, I have an other of being, or am exposed, divided, or shared. In this sense, in the “to you” of the exposition, you shares me. The simultaneity of the exposition of finitude (which immediately implies a sharing or an ecstasy) and the “to you” of the exposition are crucial. There is no temporal priority given either to one or the other; they occur completely simultaneously. The moment in which my finitude is exposed to you and the moment that I am ecstatic or shared is the same.

Community as Slight or Abundant? Insofar as community (or the compearing of finitude or communication) is simply how being is or that which constitutes being, it seems that it would be impossible to lose it. According to all that Nancy reveals regarding his conception of community, it is prelinguistic, preconscious, and a constitutive aspect of being, utterly resisting any kind of appropriation. Until this point in the text, “The Inoperative Community” is consistent with this understanding. However, toward the end of the essay there seems to be a barely perceptible shift. This shift to which I refer certainly does not indicate that we could make a work out of community, but it does gesture toward the possibility that contexts exist that are more or less conducive to the being of community. This is a strange notion, given that we have come to understand community as a constitutive aspect of being; we can neither enact it nor, properly speaking, even grasp it. It is with us before everything, having an absolute priority and immediacy and, therefore, could not be something that a material context could make more or less visible

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or more or less “abundant.” Nonetheless, Nancy indicates that this is precisely the case. The following pages will attempt to think of community as a constitutive aspect of being and community as dependent on its context for the way in which it is (for example, “slight” and “inaccessible”). Nancy leads up to the suggestion that community might be more or less accessible or more or less abundant depending on its historical material, with an observation that we cannot lose community: Community is given to us with being and as being, well in advance of all our projects, desires, and undertakings. At bottom, it is impossible for us to lose community. A society may be as little communitarian as possible; it could not happen that in the social desert there would not be, however slight, even inaccessible, some community. We cannot not compear. Only the fascist masses tend to annihilate community in the delirium of an incarnated communion. Symmetrically, the concentration camp—and the extermination camp, the camp of exterminating concentration—is in essence the will to destroy community. (35) Even in the “social desert,” community would be present in “some” sense, “however slight, even inaccessible” it may be (35). How could this constitutive aspect of being be slight and inaccessible? How do we reconcile this with the assertion that “we cannot not compear” that we have been digesting for the entire essay? If we cannot not compear and community is indeed a constitutive aspect of being that is prelinguistic, then how could it be slight and inaccessible? Being is community and thus would seem to be resistant to such discussion of degrees. The less than subtle insinuation is that there is less community in the concentration camp and that there are, therefore, times and places in which community is more difficult to locate or slight and inaccessible. Thus, there must be some way in which this prelinguistic, constitutive aspect of being is integrally related to the empirical or actual conditions of existence. Apparently, a will to immanence, such as that reflected in the camp, prompts community, or compearance, to somehow happen to a lesser degree. Here, perhaps immanence draws community in, that is, limits the exposure of finitude, rendering it slight and inaccessible. Ostensibly, this too would occur on the same prelinguistic level thus maintaining community’s inoperative and resistant quality. It is perhaps useful to think of community as still existing in this context (“we cannot not compeer”), however, existing in such a way that it is held at bay or not permitted the space in which to flourish. The problem here arises from the suggestion that the material context could alter the

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66 The Ethics of Community quality (it is here described as “slight and inaccessible”) of that which is preconscious. It would seem that although community is a constitutive aspect of being, it, nonetheless, can be more or less evident, which is an odd formulation. There are tremendous implications to thinking of community as slight and inaccessible. For example, the opposite would necessarily also be true. Certain contexts could, thus, render community abundant and accessible. Although as a prelinguistic process it remains that which cannot be instituted, it seems to be a possibility that contexts could be imagined or created that would allow community, in the Nancian sense, to flourish. These contexts would necessarily be of an order (or non-order) that is the opposite of the concentration camp, that is, of the will to immanence and, rather, be in a way that is more conducive to absolute alterity. Community remains that out of which one cannot make a work (and here lies an aspect of its resistant character); however, Nancy has opened the door to the possibility that there are contexts within which community may be more or less accessible. We still cannot grasp, hold onto, make a work of, or institute community in any way, but we can reconsider immanence and imagine contexts in which this reconsideration would be prevalent. Accordingly, possibly, community could flourish. Although Nancy does not expand upon this idea in any way, here he does introduce it briefly in the preface in which he asks: “. . . how can the community without essence (the community that is neither “people” nor “nation,” neither “destiny” nor “generic community”) be presented as such? That is, what might a politics be that does not stem from the will to realize an essence? . . . I shall not venture into the possible forms of such a politics. This would be beyond my competence” (x–xi). There is, therefore, more than one allusion to the relationship of this thought of community to a more historical material level. Nancy’s suggestion that there are specific sites or places where community exists in varying degrees prompts numerous questions. What might those places where community could be abundant actually look like? We know that they are not characterized by a will to immanence and, furthermore, they must be marked by a structure that is open to absolute alterity, that is, to the absolute impossibility of immanence. But what form might such a structure assume? What exactly is the opposite of the concentration camp? In attempting to answer these questions, we are compelled to return to Nancy’s discussion of the most fundamental stumbling block to any thinking of true community: the concept of the individual. Nancy’s entire analysis of community begins with the assertion that it was a European invention, which some believed had shown the world a means of escape from tyranny “and the norm by which to measure all

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our collective or communitarian undertakings” (3). If we couple this notion with an understanding that there are places or sites in which community is more or less accessible, does it not seem appropriate to ask if some of these places might be those which have been least effected by a pervasive, overwhelming, and guiding notion of the individual? If our frame of reference for understanding being and community is the individual, then a will to immanence is contextualizing our thought. However, if the frame of reference in terms of being is otherwise— or is at least less absolutely guided by this thought—then would it not be easier to imagine the existence of a context more conducive to an abundant community? (Is the “we” of which he speaks in reference to our beings as lost most particularly a Western “we”? Similarly, is “the world” that bears witness to the conflagration of community most precisely a Western world?) While it is neither my intention nor within my capabilities to delve into an anthropological examination of cultures less influenced or guided by a European notion of the individual, given that Nancy cites it as the primary barrier to a thinking of community and that he opens the door to the possibility of places of more or less community, it is reasonable to observe that cultures less influenced by this European thought would provide some interesting insights into places or events in which community might flourish more easily.

The Resistance of Community The discussion concerning contexts of community and specifically the concentration camp continues: “But even in the camp itself, undoubtedly, community never entirely ceases to resist this will. Community is, in a sense, resistance itself: namely, resistance to immanence. Consequently, community is transcendence: but transcendence which no longer has any ‘sacred’ meaning, signifying precisely a resistance to immanence” (35). Even in this most extreme situation where there is a deliberate attempt to annihilate community, it, nonetheless, never stops resisting a will to immanence (for as we know immanence or identity is precisely the opposite of community). Community does not resist because it is threatened but rather it resists by its very nature. If immanence were not the goal, community would nevertheless continue to resist it since community does not try to resist or institute itself as a resistance. Its very being is a resistance to immanence. By definition, community resists appropriation of any kind and thus any appropriation with the goal of achieving immanence. Furthermore, community is itself transcendence but transcendence conceived without the connotation of the sacred. (For Nancy, the term “sacred” is still imbued with a notion of communion that is itself based on a desire for immanence.) The transcendence that community

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68 The Ethics of Community indicates is based on its resistant character. For Nancy, there is something transcendent in the manner in which community resists “all the forms and all the violences of subjectivity” (35). No doubt the “violences of subjectivity” refers to atrocities that result from a will to immanence such as that of the concentration camp. Community’s inherent resistance to such a will is transcendence itself. Linked to its resistant character (revealed to be transcendence) is the notion that community exists as an imperative which assumes the form of a task and a struggle. Throughout the entire text, Nancy expresses the urgency to think this thought. Community is “given to us— or we are given and abandoned to the community: a gift to be renewed and communicated, it is not a work to be done or produced. But it is a task, which is different—an infinite task at the heart of finitude” (35). If community is a “gift to be renewed or communicated,” there follows the implication that it may not be renewed or communicated. It will nonetheless remain (“we cannot not compear”). However, in these instances we might imagine it as “slight and inaccessible.” In contrast to a work or production, community is a task and a struggle that exists infinitely at the heart of finitude. In its nature community resists and struggles against a will to immanence and there is an imperative linked therein. The struggle and resistance against immanence exists given that being’s being demands to be exposed. Accordingly, community cuts across or breaks through the logic of the concentration camp and all other examples of a will to immanence. The implications of Nancy’s exposition of community are farreaching. Our conceptions, henceforth, must not be marred by the inherently reductive and limiting framework of the individual. From this new and (paradoxically) groundless point of departure, we can attempt to imagine events of community, moments of resisting immanence, within the literary and material worlds. Nancy’s rigorous analysis prompts us to assume this task. Quite possibly, community herein conceived suggests that one avenue of exploration (among many) may be contexts less saturated with the overarching concept of the individual. Accordingly, African American and US Latino Literature provides a fertile location for such exploration. Approaching these texts from a radically new conception of community where being is a complex event rather than ground can provide provocative, new, and interruptive insights.

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3 Morrison’s Beloved, Nancian Community, and Derridean Witnessing

Thus far we have closely examined the necessity of overcoming a humanistic perspective of being. Vis-à-vis both Nancy and Derrida, we have analyzed the ways in which a metaphysical humanism is a profound conceptual obstacle to any theory or praxis of ethics. Nancy’s “The Inoperative Community” reveals that the notion of being as an Individual radically separate from other beings not only makes beingwith impossible but is itself a logical impossibility. Tracing the history of the Individual and observing the resulting societal structures, permits a full view of the corresponding relational poverty. How can an entirely self-enclosed being move toward the other in any way? Ultimately we found that according to Nancy being is an event simultaneous to being-with. I am, and can only be, with the other giving an ontological priority to Heideggerian Mitsein (being-with). “The Free Voice of Man” adds texture to the discussion by exploring the role of language in being. All discourse, indeed all thought, is always-already implicated with imperative ethicity, an extra-discursive obligation that ultimately involves being in and as the trace. Imperative ethicity is thus the way of being. Derrida’s “Poetics and Politics of Witnessing” considers the inevitability of bearing witness and its poetic nature. Since being in the world involves a profound entangling of being, language, and world, experiencing and thus witnessing is never transparent and representative (of a pre-given and objective world) but rather always singular and necessarily involving the poetic (rather than that which re-presents). As such, Derrida claims that all responsible witnessing must involve a poetic experience of language. When I bear witness to you, a vow or an oath is always implied: you have to believe me. The “to you” of any communication or relation must simultaneously be a promise. All relation is based upon this extra-discursive event that happens within language as a pledge. Further, Derrida echoes Nancy’s prioritizing of esctatic exposure in “Rams” wherein he claims that “before I am I carry the other.” Rather than a simultaneous or coexistent being and being-with, Derrida maintains that I am and can only be after having been in a way of responsibility to the other.

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70 The Ethics of Community The relationship between deconstructive ethics and the world of concrete experience and agency has continually manifested in our inquiry as we have grappled with how to understand the “real-life” implications of our analysis. What are we to actually do with our understanding? In Chapter 1 we addressed these questions and found that their frame generally presupposed a metaphysical opposition between theory and praxis. However, consistent with Nancy’s rupturing of community and extra-discursive imperative, and Derrida’s poetic experience of witnessing and the corresponding extra-discursive oath, we located the possibility for “glory” in the actual world. Despite the constant threat of totalizing and reducing our intellectual insights by “putting them to work,” it is our task and responsibility to imagine ways of being in the world that are consistent with our intellectual endeavors. An examination of Toni Morrison’s Beloved provides us with just such an opportunity. Concerned as it is with ethical responsibility and obligation, witnessing, language, and the extra-discursive realm, Beloved engages the central issues of our explorations. The context for its philosophical underpinnings and articulations is located squarely within a specific and extreme historical situation. Locating the discussion within the confines of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and its immediate aftermath recontextualizes our concerns. The thinking and events of being that we have discussed assume a particular urgency when framed by a dire quest for survival in the realm of an unjust, oppressive, and violent sociopolitical and economic structure such as slavery. Here we witness how deconstructive ethics and its attendant views of language and being assume an actual and irrepressible power. In the close readings of Beloved that follow, we consider what deconstructive ethics looks like in action, imagining contexts in which the space of being opens and community in the Nancian sense can flourish. At stake are singular moments of being within nonrepresentational language that allow and even promote a space of a flourishing being-with, community, or carrying of the other on both a conceptual and material level (insofar as they permit separation); these textual moments transcend conceptualization for both character and reader. Given that the contexts for Beloved are black communities in the slave and post-slave United States, it is not only the structure of slavery that informs our discussion but additionally, and even more crucially, black cultural sensibilities. Culture has thus far been wholly absent from our discussion.1 Its consideration demands the adoption of an entirely new lens, one that our previous examination of Nancian community clearly supports. Recall that Nancy painstakingly explores the far-reaching power and ramifications of thinking in terms of the Individual, which he identifies as a product of Europe and even interpreted by some as an

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indicator of Europe’s triumphant dominance, illustrating to the world a path to freedom from tyranny and standard for communal endeavors. Extending that thought, we can consider with Beloved the degree to which cultures that are less infused by an overarching perspective of the Individual and its corresponding structures and sensibilities might conceive and exist in and according to alternative understandings. Perceiving cultures as hybrid entities, continually and always in flux and fluid, is a central component of our interrogation. In the same manner that being continually moves and resists identity, culture consistently transforms. Rather than being fixed and absolute, cultures necessarily move and change. Given the general consensus of the humanities concerning the debunking of the reductive essentializing of metaphysical (and by extension Enlightenment and Romantic) doctrines (concerning truth and progress particularly), we may see that considering texts “within” the bounds of “the West” but nonetheless contextualized very plainly by hybridity, mestizaje, or creolization might be fertile grounds for investigating that which is less determined by essential notions of the Individual that are so contrary to possibilities of being-with, ethics, and the trace (or deconstructive ethics). These texts provide a context for understanding and philosophizing that is distinct from but certainly related to the canonical “West” (which is of course not only “the canonical west” as infused as it is with the allegedly “Other”) and has its own singular way of understanding language, culture, being, time, artistic expression, and so on. One prime example of such a consideration of culture is Paul Gilroy’s groundbreaking and influential The Black Atlantic, which provides a compelling examination of black expressive culture and its power and potential regarding innovative and liberatory experiences (such as the nonhierarchical and lateral relations in call and response). Gilroy carefully examines the manner in which cultures refuse independence and isolation. By nature and definition, culture involves interface, relation, and movement. Thus rather than an absolute category, culture indicates ways of being that are fluidly unique, in constant process and relation to “’other” cultures, as well as shifting geographical, historical, political, social, and economic contexts. While Nancy understands the Individual as simultaneously the primary frame for thinking of being or existence in the West and the central obstacle to any thinking of being-with or community, Gilroy similarly tackles the legacy of Enlightenment thinking and its belief in Truth, Progress, and the corresponding scientific racism as a difficulty in transcending essentializing thought and its attendant racism. For our purposes it is perhaps most useful to understand the central tenants of Enlightenment and Romantic thought as an extension of the kind of metaphysical thinking of the Individual that Nancy so rigorously attacks. While in many

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72 The Ethics of Community respects extremely different, Nancy’s and Gilroy’s analyses share a preoccupation with the degree to which this discourse has infused our Western understandings and prohibited a thinking of being-with or “the ineffable” respectively.2 Nancy’s tone is urgent concerning the necessity of understanding being as radically social; he explains this urgency to some degree in terms of the horrific consequences of metaphysical thinking and a particular historical event with which such thought is consistent: the Nazi concentration camp. Blending elements of Nancy and Gilroy’s critiques of the Individual and the Enlightenment respectively permits us to propose a compelling analysis of an ethical, deconstructive, and experiencing subjectivity. Nancy’s position is powerfully augmented by Gilroy’s emphasis on the subject of lived experience (in culture) while Gilroy’s benefits from the more nuanced understanding of the relationship between language and ethics. Alongside Gilroy, we maintain that examining black cultural production in all of its powers and possibilities necessitates a reframing from traditional objects of study; performance, music, as well as the phatic elements of language have been disregarded for too long. Extending (and at places departing from) Gilroy’s discourse, we consider how moments of black cultural production provide contexts for a flourishing of ethical or deconstructive being, and, possibly, corresponding material structures. In our analysis, these events are consistently marked by a nonrepresentational experience of being which can and sometimes does lead to actual ethical practices. Here we probe the relationship between theory and praxis or concept and experience. Finally, interrogating the complexly interrelated roles of language and culture alongside ethics and being and the concept/experience dichotomy allows us to consider the possibilities of agency for a deconstructed subject. A productive way to approach or combine components of Nancy’s and Gilroy’s analyses and amplify them with a consideration of agency is to introduce David Wood’s compelling Ethics and Politics after Deconstruction and “The Experience of the Ethical” (Dooley and Kearney 1999). Wood is interested in reintroducing “experience” into a continental philosophical discourse of deconstructive subjectivity. He notes that while Derrida had always acknowledged the rupture within the notion of presence and experience (thus necessarily undermining the possibility of either), only his later works evoked “experience” without placing it “under erasure.”3 The later works thus clearly denote some shift in perspective as they plainly and freely reference “an experience of the aporia” as well as “experiences” of the limits of language and discursive thought, which we witnessed and examined in Chapter 1. In a move similar to that suggested at the close of the previous chapters, which gestures toward a thinking of concept and

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action (and that further echoes Gilroy’s treatment of culture), Wood suggests the following: If we apply the principle of what we proposed earlier—that we must will the conditions of what we value-then we must ask under what conditions such negotiable identity could best flourish. It may be said that our contemporary rich diversity of stories, language, cultural symbols, etc. is no substitute for tradition, that one cannot just buy and sell roots, tribal bonds, etcetera. But one serious response here would be that a culture of dynamic identity modification is a culture, a tradition itself. (Ethics and Politics after Deconstruction 2005, 23) Wood thus accommodates a thinking of a deconstructive subjectivity or “negotiable identity” alongside “experience,” culture, and agency such that not only can we consider the subject as nonessential but the agency of said subject becomes a legitimate possibility. The primary task remaining is to identify as precisely as possible the relationship between a deconstructive, ethical subject (or subject of the trace), and language, experience, agency, and culture. In what follows, we consider being as both essence and trace (and the distinct contexts that constitute them), the relationship between theory and praxis, and the relationship between experience and agency. Approaching Beloved in this manner (and perhaps listening to its offerings) grants us valuable new perspectives. If we can imagine contexts and more specifically structures within which there is little space for a flourishing of community, that is, if community is subject to degrees of existence, then we ought to be able to talk about places within which community (ethics) might more or less saliently exist. If it exists more saliently, if there is an opposite of the concentration camp, then is not the corresponding lived experience a decidedly different one? If all of our structures of existence are based upon a will to essence as Nancy proposes (and we stand to lose the meaningless-meaning of being), then the structures as well as the concepts according to and with which the structures are made and determined cannot be separated from our “lived experience” in the material world. The “concepts” and “lived experiences” are irrevocably intermingled. As we engage Beloved, we must bear in mind that the black community that we are examining is no more an idealized community than any other. Its not infrequent collapses into “meanness,” envy, and rancorousness refuse a romanticizing and reductive view of its complexity.4 Our primary focus concerning a black community is its emphasis on nonrepresentational language, the power of song, and hospitality that indicate a valuing of non-absolute and non-groundable sensibilities,

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74 The Ethics of Community which can certainly be interpreted as evincing something of an ethical character as we have come to understand it. These sensibilities are contrasted to the logic and corresponding being of the proponents of slavery. Existing within language is one thing but the distinction between existing within nonrepresentational language (and the corresponding groundlessness) versus representational language (and its compatibility with the desire to name, define, and possess) is entirely another, and this distinction is made clearly within the text. Loosely based upon the historical incident in which a runaway slave woman in South Carolina named Margaret Garner killed her baby girl as slave catchers approached, Beloved addresses many of our central preoccupations. While the bulk of the narrative unfolds in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1873, the text is replete with temporal shifts that abruptly place the reader throughout the slave South pre-emancipation proclamation. In the narrative present, our protagonist Sethe struggles to “beat back the past” whilst living in a house haunted by the ghost of her murdered baby with her one remaining child, her daughter Denver (Beloved 1987, 73). The suffering that she endured at the hands of the plantation overseer (paradoxically named “Schoolteacher”) and his nephews, the loss of her husband and children, and her horrific murder of her baby that the overarching crime of slavery instigated contribute to a life of unlivable memories that she struggles to keep at bay. Consistent with Nancy’s and Derrida’s assessment of the Shoah, the institution of slavery is presented very precisely as a will to essence. Strengthened and cemented by structures of commodification, objectification, and exchange, a condition of possibility of slavery is the logic of the Enlightenment’s scientific racism and its attendant rendering of humans as fundamentally partly animal. Sethe perceives this logic clearly and prefers death to the “dirtying” that results from it. Importantly, it is the character named “Schoolteacher” (the institutionally chosen proprietor and transmitter of knowledge) who explicitly provides Sethe with an understanding and experience of this concept. At Sweet Home, the plantation in which she resided with her husband and children prior to her escape, she overhears him providing a lesson to one of his nephews: “No, no. That’s not the way. I told you to put her human characteristics on the left; her animal ones on the right. And don’t forget to line them up” (193). Sethe is jolted by the overheard lesson and turns to Miss Garner (the mistress of the plantation) for a definition of a critical term: “characteristics.” “What do ‘characteristics’ mean?” (195). After several orders directed at Sethe, Miss Garner eventually succumbs to Sethe’s insistence and responds, “A characteristic is a feature. A thing that’s natural to a thing” (195). At this point, Sethe understands that Schoolteacher conceives of the slaves as intrinsically animal.

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Transcending this label is impossible given its essentialistic foundation: black people are, in part, inherently animal. Armed with this totalizing master discourse, Schoolteacher subsequently observes and takes notes on the pupils’ (his nephews) sexual assault of Sethe, an enactment of the interrogation into her human and animal “characteristics”: “. . . two boys with mossy teeth, one sucking on my breast the other holding me down, their book-reading teacher watching and writing it up” (70). As partly animal, Sethe’s body is literally “milked” by one of the nephews; however, as partly human, she also provides a disabled body (“the other holding me down”) upon which a sexual act can be performed. In an effort to further his “studies” into the “nature” of the slaves’ beings and observe his theories in action, he takes notes surrounding the events of the assault. Schoolteacher’s experiment demonstrates Beloved’s refusal of a theory/practice opposition, forcing the reader to witness scientific racism in and as action. Schoolteacher’s inability to see the slaves outside of a commodifying perspective is further revealed when he makes the trip to Ohio to “reclaim” the runaway Sethe and her children. Unbeknownst to Schoolteacher and his posse, Sethe witnesses their approach and races to the shed to kill her children and herself. Upon encountering Sethe in the shed, Schoolteacher laments the loss of the labor he claimed as his own: Right off it was clear, to Schoolteacher especially, that there was nothing there to claim. The three (now four because she’d had the one coming when she cut) pickaninnies they had hoped were alive and well enough to take back to Kentucky, take back and raise properly to do the work desperately needed, were not. Two were lying open-eyed in sawdust; a third pumped blood down the dress of the main one—the woman schoolteacher bragged about, the one he said made fine ink, damn good soup, pressed his collars the way he liked, besides having at least ten breeding years left. But now she’d gone wild, due to the mishandling of the nephew who’d overbeat her and made her cut and run. Schoolteacher had chastised that nephew, telling him to thinkjust think-what would his own horse do if you beat it beyond the point of education. (149) Schoolteacher’s approach to Sethe reveals nothing other than the impossibility of a genuine approach to the other. He conceives of her as an animal (a horse) and a source of labor, in other words, solely in terms of use value, a commodity that must be owned both for his benefit and her own: “. . . people who needed every care and guidance in the world to keep them from the cannibal life they preferred” (151).

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76 The Ethics of Community Other than as labor outlined in very specific terms, Schoolteacher is incapable of perceiving Sethe at all. The failure of the vast majority of the white characters to conceive the humanity of the slaves is obvious; however, more veiled is that this perceptive lack extends into their ability to see being at all. The world of the white characters in Beloved is thoroughly infused with humanistic notions and their being is correspondingly impoverished. With the exception of Amy Denver, who is herself marginalized by a white patriarchal power structure, the text offers no examples of white people engaging to or toward the other as we will witness is a possibility in the black community. Rather, the white characters, from Schoolteacher, the nephews, Mr. and Mrs. Garner and the Bodwins, only understand in terms of commodification and exchange.5 Such an impoverished view leads to the essentialization, reduction, and violence unto the other and themselves as Stamp Paid reveals in the following passage: White people believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift, unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way, he thought, they were right. The more colored people spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought from that other (livable) place. It was the jungle white folks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. In, and through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it. Touched them every one. Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own. (199) The assessment of the “spreading” of the perceived lethal and “unnavigable waters” of “every black skin” to the “white folks” themselves is consistent with Nancy’s proposal that those who engage in essentializing violence are both perpetrator and victim of their own crime. The event of the totalization of being (“the other”) is not only the attempted annihilation of being and being-with (or a will to death), but the annihilation of the agent. In other words, essentializing the other is implicitly an essentialization of self (or the will to death of the other is a will to death of “self”). If we recall that for Nancy and Derrida being is radically social in an a priori fashion and is itself a being-with and its

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attendant obligation, then it follows that “making a work or project” of the other is tantamount to refusing the being-with that is being itself. Similar to the impossibility of community in Enlightenment formulations is the impossibility of bearing witness. The view of being as a totalizable essence renders a strict separation between being, world, and language. If being is an objectively knowable for-itself that is implicitly only unto-itself, then it is knowable through and with a language that is radically separate from being and the world. An objective being and world are knowable with a language that directly reflects and re-presents it. Such is the condition of possibility of Romantic and Enlightenment doctrines and so goes the world of slavery and Schoolteacher (and the concentration camp). Bearing witness as we have come to perceive it thus stands in direct contrast to these classical formulations, necessitating a poetic language which itself eschews representationality and its correspondingly reductive “defi nitions.” Derrida notes the totalizing quality of representational language and Beloved echoes this thought, further underscoring the relationship between representational language and power: “Definitions belong to the definer and not the defined” (190). In addition to demonstrating the unspeakable horrors of slavery and the essentializing logic upon which it is based, Beloved reveals moments or events in which community as a non-communing relation becomes manifest. These situations provide clues as to what a flourishing rather than “slight and inaccessible” community might actually look like. The first of these moments that we investigate concerns Sethe, her daughter Denver, and their extreme isolation from the community. Effectively cast out of the black community in Lorain, Ohio (through a painful and ongoing process of mutual rejection), Sethe eventually comes to assert, “the world is in this room” (182–3). The provocative component of the mutual disdain between the community and Sethe is that it results not from her “rough actions in the shed” or her murder of her baby, but the pride and assertion of independence that followed (152, 232, 249, 256). As Stamp Paid, a central character, later pronounces: “Pride, well, that bothers em a bit. They can get messy when they think somebody’s too proud” (232). Sethe’s independent and proud demeanor, consistently evincing that she could “go it alone,” is entirely untenable for the community. Given that Sethe’s total and radical isolation from the community is a central element of the narrative (she literally has not a single friend or even acquaintance with whom she interacts and Denver suffers mightily as a result), it is crucial to examine it rigorously. Dichotomies such as those between individual and community, radical self-reliance and interdependence, inside and outside, from which Sethe works, are oddly those in which the community participates, transcends within the community that eschews

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78 The Ethics of Community Sethe, and ultimately transcends entirely. In what follows, we trace several textual moments that illustrate the manner in which the realms of concept and experience become “one.” Near the close of the text Denver is finally forced to leave the porch of her house, a momentous event given that she has not left the confines and perceived safety of the home realm in several years. The ghost of the baby has not only manifested in corporeal form but Sethe has become entirely overcome with devotion and an impossible desire to convince Beloved of the necessity of the murder. At this point in the text, Sethe has removed herself from all outside contact, including her employment (and source of income and food) and her life is entirely lived according to Beloved and her demands. Beloved has become increasingly large and angry while Sethe has diminished physically to such a dangerous degree that Denver fears for her mother’s life. Denver perceives clearly the gravity of the situation and realizes that she must “ask somebody for help” in order to save her mother (243). However, her alienation is so complete that Denver perceives leaving the porch as a departure from all ground and orientation: “. . . since neither Beloved nor Sethe seemed to care what the next day might bring (Sethe happy when Beloved was; Beloved lapping devotion like cream), Denver knew it was on her. She would have to leave the yard; step off the edge of the world, leave the two behind and ask somebody for help” (243). Denver and Sethe’s frame of communal exile is clearly visible. For Denver, leaving the house meant leaving “the world” and facing possible annihilation as one might perceive actually stepping off the edge of the world.6 After a brief conversation with her grandmother’s ghost, Denver finds the necessary courage and leaves the porch to find that “the way came back” (245). She manages to locate the last house she had ever visited, that of Miss Lady Jones, the black schoolteacher of the community and the one from whom Denver had learned her letters. The encounter between Miss Lady Jones and Denver that follows contains within it an event that transforms Denver’s life. Rather than words of wisdom or a message of hope and encouragement, it is the simple utterance of the “word baby, said softly and with such kindness that inaugurated her life in the world as a woman” (248). It is the “to you” of the utterance rather than any message that Miss Lady Jones was trying to relay that is so transformative for Denver. The power of the word “baby said softly and with such kindness” is obviously not a matter of strict signification but of another element of a linguistic experience. Language is not functioning representationally in this instance and the intensity of Denver’s experience is drawn rather from a profound sense of being “with” an other whose utterance has not articulated or represented a message, but expressed kindness, care, and an experience of beingwith an other that Denver has so severely lacked.

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It is no coincidence that Denver’s inauguration into womanhood did not end with Miss Lady Jones’s kindness. Rather: The trail she [Denver] followed to get to that sweet, thorny, place was made up of paper scraps containing the handwritten names of others. Lady Jones gave her some rice, four eggs, and some tea. Denver told her that she couldn’t be away from home for long because of her mother’s condition. Could she do chores in the morning? Lady Jones told her that no one, not herself, not anyone she knew, could pay anybody anything for work they did themselves. “But if you all need to eat until your mother is well, all you have to do is say so.” She mentioned her church’s committee invented so nobody had to go hungry. That agitated her guest who said, “No, no,” as though asking for help from strangers was worse than hunger. Lady Jones said goodbye to her and asked her to come back anytime. Two days later Denver stood on the porch and noticed something lying on the tree stump at the edge of the yard. She went to look and found a sack of white beans. Another time a plate of cold rabbit meat. One morning a basket of eggs sat there. As she lifted it, a slip of paper fluttered down. She picked it up and looked at it. “M. Lucille Williams” was written in big crooked letters. On the back was a blob of flour-water paste. So Denver paid a second visit to the world outside the porch, although all she said when she returned the basket was “Thank You.” Every now and then, all through the spring, names appeared near or in gifts of food. Obviously for the return of the pan or plate or basket; but also to let the girl know, if she cared to, who the donor was, because some of the parcels were wrapped in paper, and though there was nothing to return, the name was nevertheless there . . . (248–9) Denver’s agitation at the perceived charity that she and her mother would receive confirms the values of self-reliance and pride that Sethe has passed on to Denver. Sethe and Denver’s lonely existence is predicated upon a view of being as radically individual or unto itself. Here it is clear that the conceptual understanding of being (radically selfreliant) has grave and concrete ramifications in the material world. The above passage contains numerous provocative pronouncements concerning Denver’s experience of community in both a traditional and a Nancian sense. The implications of the trail that Denver followed to reach “that sweet and thorny” place of adulthood are vast. Containing within it the absent presence of an other, predicated upon the notion that a body has traversed an area and left a path, a trail is a

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80 The Ethics of Community literal manifestation of the structure of the trace. Denver follows this path of others who have in some way gone before her but do not manifest as presences. The fact that Denver follows this trail of absent presence in order to reach womanhood is telling. Changing in such a way that she is able to reach a different and necessary experience of being necessitates her dependence on rather than independence from others, both in the Nancian sense and literally. The trail is a metaphor for her movement to adulthood but, simultaneously, her movement from her home to the homes of others literalizes the metaphor. Further, Denver follows a metaphorical path of absent presence (the trail) upon which she is dependent to reach maturity, but is literally dependent upon the food left for her by members of the community. The metaphor of the trace or trail functions as an abstraction as well as a literal phenomenon simultaneously rendering the two realms inseparable. Adding another layer of complexity to Denver’s experience is the fact that the trail is made up of “the handwritten names of others,” which are also literal manifestations of a trace. The trail that she follows is thus a trail of a trail or a trace of a trace. The text proposes that evolutionary or transformative events of being can occur in the context of phatic and nonrepresentational occurrences of language and being in the context of the trace. Crucially, these momentous events occur both metaphorically (or poetically) and literally. The path or trail is an actual traversing of land as well as a trace of beings (the handwritten names of others). These experiences are ethical in both a conceptual and literal sense on a level beyond a close consideration of the nature of the trail and its transformative impact. The material content of this experience is a literal putting bread in the mouth of the other evincing actual, tangible, and conceivably life-changing generosity. Denver’s neighbors, whom she literally does not know, are sacrificing some of their own food (and Miss Lady Jones has made it clear that no one has much extra) to help Denver and her mother (for whom they clearly do not have positive feelings). On every level community is flourishing. The space of being is first opened when Denver experiences the “to-ness” of Miss Lady Jones’s utterance. Denver experiences the nonrepresentational event as a manifestation of “kindness,” which we might assert (particularly given the events that follow) as a hearing of the oath or pledge (the to-you) inherent to (non-communing) communication. The moment marks the beginning of a profound change in Denver’s life. The path that she then follows can be considered a trace of a trace, the absent presence of being, or the spacing that is ethics. Rather than a merely conceptual non-groundable ground, this space experienced as an event is literally manifest as a central ethical image: the feeding of the other.

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According to Nancy and Derrida, deconstruction is ethical insofar as differance is the opening up of the space of to-ness, allowing me to be to you. Being is the trace and when it is experienced as such, it is necessarily nondiscursive. An experience of the trace’s trace leads Denver to one such moment. According to Derrida, all representation, whether spoken or written, occurs via the structure of the trace; according to Nancy, all imperatives, including the most fundamental of all, imperative ethicity, find their ultimate breathing room in the space of being/ language. Denver’s powerful experience with Miss Lady Jones underscores an opening of the space of being that contains a play of several traces at once (and itself further calls forth the interplay of the theory/ practice binary). It is the handwritten names of others, the actual linguistic trace (that which exceeds conceptualization) that is contextualized (and actually also indicate or refer to in a representational manner) by a literal or empirical moment of that which the Derridean trace is supposed to theoretically allow: to-ness or hospitality as an event of being that transcends the concept/experience dichotomy. The text speaks a literal manifestation of an a priori responsibility to the other presented as putting bread in the mouth of the other. The literal traces, both the area traversed to other homes and the handwritten names of others, call forth differance (or the trace), noncoincidence, and non-presence, as well as and simultaneously, an material to-ness that conceptual difference ostensibly makes possible. According to Nancy and Derrida, difference or the trace creates the spacing that is imperative ethicity. These appear to be highly abstract formulations; however, here, they literally manifest in an actual ethical relation that is coincidental with literal “trails” or traces. Throughout this book there has been a continual attempt to indicate the complexity of an abstract/concrete relation and particularly its relation to the concomitant notions of ethical theory and praxis. We are first philosophically grounding the proposition that these dichotomies are in fact constructions and the terms of the binaries cannot, strictly speaking, be entirely disentangled. Our task is to locate those moments where conceptual and material oppositions are transcended and the results are extra-discursive and ethical experiences that necessarily involve an interruption of being as an identity. This experience evades capture in the world of concepts as well as in the world of what we commonly think of as “experience.” Denver’s journey to womanhood vis-à-vis Miss Lady Jones’s spoken words and the handwritten notes of others defies the concept/experience dichotomy, and manifests as a trail through (or passage within) imperative ethicity and the extra-discursive or an “experience of the trace.” For Denver, the event is marked by a literal manifestation of traces as well as literal manifestations of ethical movements defined as a flourishing and unfettered

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82 The Ethics of Community “to-ness” that has a profound impact. The first moment occurs with the nonrepresentational utterance of Miss Lady Jones and the subsequent events occur as the neighbors literally leave traces as they put bread in the mouth of the other. This example illustrates that what is at stake in this instance is all that the extra-discursive moment entails. But is this necessarily an extra-discursive moment? We can certainly affirm that it is transformative for Denver insofar as she experiences an “inauguration” that leads to womanhood. We are prompted to call it extra-discursive as the changes that occur do not emerge from representation, meaning, or concept but rather from something other that happens in the event of language. The significatory power of “oh baby” is not found in the content but rather in the manner in which it is extended (“said softly and with such kindness”). That the continuation of this trace or trail is a result of a (continued) extension of others is not insignificant (“The trail she followed to get to that sweet, thorny, place was made up of paper scraps containing the handwritten names of others”). Given that Denver’s experience is contextualized by a multifaceted trace, denies conceptual access, and foregrounds Nancy’s radical sociality, we can interpret it as an extra-discursive moment of being-with or community. Being is the trace and yet there are locatable contexts that encourage the “speaking” of the trace that lead to its flourishing. The rather simple idea is that differance is always-already there as it is the way of being, however, it can flourish or wither depending on material context. In the case of Beloved, there are repeated situations in which this component of being can be somehow tapped and then flourish (as well as the opposite in both the white and black communities). The result is repeatedly one of transformation. Through the character of Stamp Paid this “actual” generosity is in some way thematized as the following quote indicates: After a disagreeable breakfast he went to see Ella and John to find out what they knew. Perhaps there he could find out if, after all these years of clarity, he had misnamed himself and there was yet another debt he owed. Born Joshua, he renamed himself when he handed over his wife to his master’s son. Handed her over in the sense that he did not kill anybody, thereby himself, because his wife demanded he stay alive. Otherwise, she reasoned, where and to whom could she return when the boy was through? With that gift, he decided that he didn’t owe anybody anything. Whatever his obligations were, that act paid them off. He thought it would make him rambunctious, renegade—a drunkard even, the debtlessness, and in a way it did. But there was nothing to do with it. Work well; work poorly. Work a little; work not at all.

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Make sense; make none. Sleep, wake up; like somebody, dislike others. It didn’t seem much of a way to live and it brought him no satisfaction. So he extended this debtlessness to other people by helping them pay out and off whatever they owed in misery. Beaten runaways? He ferried them and rendered them paid for; gave them their own bill of sale, so to speak. “You paid it now life owes you.” And the receipt, as it were, was a welcome door that he never had to knock on, like John and Ella’s in front of which he stood and said, “Who in there?” only once and she was pulling on the hinge. (184–5) Stamp foregrounds larger textual themes that are otherwise only implied, expressing a hybrid sensibility in which his own conclusions are distinct from and yet literally rendered in terms of the master’s discourse of exchange and receipt. The master narrative informs Stamp Paid’s thought, while, simultaneously, his own sensibilities determine the contents of his engagement. Certainly content and structure cannot be strictly separated as the “in terms of which” are crucial to a precise understanding of content. Nonetheless, Stamp Paid’s reflections appear to confirm the possibility of a thinking in terms of the master that paradoxically defies “his” entire discourse. His stress upon extension (he literally “extended his debtlessness to other people”) and hospitality (“a welcome door he never had to knock on”) indicate that his sensibility is virtually antithetical to a slave system of oppression, objectification, and commodification. Stamp Paid’s interaction with the dominant structures of the master, in which he both thinks in their terms and subverts them, is a poignant example of cultural hybridity. Of a distinct (insofar as this is possible) cultural context (the African and African American and its attendant economic, geographic, historical specificities), Stamp Paid’s responses to his situations demonstrate a blended approach, informed by both the master narrative and a simultaneous opposition to it. Understanding the fluid nature of such cultural sensibilities is thus crucial to our analysis. A closer examination of the above passage further reveals the extent to which Stamp Paid directly highlights an ethical imperative that often manifests in the concrete world of the black community in Beloved. Such an imperative does not appear as a result of interrogation, choice, or an externally prescribed doctrine but simply as a “way to live.”7 For all but the expelled Sethe and Denver, hospitality in some form is simply the way of being. Stamp Paid’s articulation in this passage is momentous as it is the one instance in the text that a conceptual understanding that grounds an overarching ethical imperative is presented. While the other members of the community who frequently behave according to a fundamental ethical imperative (such as those

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84 The Ethics of Community witnessed in the generosity of Miss Lady Jones and the community who provides offerings of food to Denver) do not reveal an abstracted reason for their behavior, Stamp Paid does. Contextualized by the coexistence of principles of debt, payment, the gift, and hospitality, Stamp’s musings clearly demand rigorous interpretation. Oddly, the notion of the “gift” might first appear to be an indication of a commodification of women, however, even slightly closer inspection reveals that the gift that he extends is not his wife Vashti to the owner’s son but rather the paralysis that she demands of him as a response: “Born Joshua, he renamed himself when he handed over his wife to his master’s son. Handed her over in the sense that he did not kill anybody, thereby himself, because his wife demanded he stay alive . . . With that gift, he decided that he didn’t owe anybody anything” (185, italics mine). Strictly speaking, his “gift” is thus to do nothing and correspondingly, stay alive; he gives the gift of his life, a fact that becomes more significant as we proceed. Giving his life leads him to conclude that he is debtless or “that he didn’t owe anybody anything. Whatever his obligations were, that act paid them off” (185). Ostensibly, previous to his act of not acting he had obligations, however unformulated they may have been, but his actionless action paid them off and as a result he considered himself “debtless.” In response to the absence of an ethical imperative or sense of obligation, he “thought it would make him rambunctious, renegade—a drunkard even, the debtlessness and in a way it did. But there was nothing to do with it. Work well; work poorly. Work a little; work not at all. Make sense; make none. Sleep, wake up; like somebody, dislike others. It didn’t seem much of a way to live and it brought him no satisfaction” (185). With no accountability, responsibility, or obligation to an other, Stamp found himself entirely free to behave according to his own will and desire. He perceived that the debtless situation may cause him to “act out” wildly, subvert lawful behavior, and possibly “even” become a drunk. One could argue that his conclusion that “in some sense it did” emerges from his subsequent “unlawful” behavior of ferrying runaways across the Mississippi into “free” Ohio. More interesting still is his ultimate conclusion regarding his lack of obligation to others: “It seemed no way to live and it brought him no satisfaction” (185). After maintaining his life in response to Vashti’s demand (his “gift”), he found himself without responsibility to others which in turn prompted the conclusion that living “debtlessly” was “no way to live and brought him no satisfaction.” Stamp Paid is quite specific regarding the utter meaninglessness of living with no accountability and the lack of satisfaction it brings. From working, to sleeping, to sense, the absence of stakes is clear. Even senselessness becomes a possibility in this world devoid of responsibility and yet such a senselessness

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(unlike the one we witness at the close of the text) is literally unsatisfactory. Stamp’s response is to look elsewhere for a “way to live” and a corresponding “satisfaction.” The giving of his life and the subsequent perceived lack of obligation ultimately revealed to him another kind of obligation, which can be read as “a way to live” that is ultimately satisfying (contrary to the “no way to live” of rambunctiousness, renegade behavior, and alcohol). Rather than living a life unto himself in which he could work, sleep, and make sense according to only his own will or desire, he “. . . extended this debtlessness to other people by helping them pay out and off whatever they owed in misery. Beaten runaways? He ferried them and rendered them paid for; gave them their own ‘bill of sale’ so to speak. ‘You paid it now life owes you’” (185). Provocative in its implications, this passage reveals that a response to debtlessness that does bring satisfaction is an extension of debtlessness to other people by helping them “pay out and off whatever they owed in misery . . .” (185). In a nearly extra-discursive structure, a fulfilling response to the absence of obligation is to extend this absence and “help” others. In effect, Stamp is extending to others the sense of the absence of an obligation to extend to others. Importantly, it is precisely when Stamp is devoid of an obligation to others that he perceives plainly an obligation to others and it is this that he then extends. In other words, that which he is extending and the extension itself are one and the same; further, extension and “helping others” is revealed to be continuous with rather than contrary to life insofar as it is the “way to live.” Stamp Paid’s subversive “bill of sale” is the extension of the sentiment that they have paid off to life what they owe in misery. Oddly, the transaction of extension and satisfactory life has further echoes of commodification insofar as it is framed by Stamp’s reception of a receipt. However, consistent with his transgressive understanding, the exchange relationship of commodification is entirely subverted by that which he receives in return for his extension, which is hospitality in a most elemental form: “And the receipt, as it were, was a welcome door that he never had to knock on . . .” (185). The strict barrier of the (metaphorical and literal) threshold of an other (the door of the home) evaporates as Stamp assumes an always-already welcome relation with the others to whom his life is extended. Literalizing a fundamental ethical image yet again, Stamp’s manner of engagement with the black community is marked by a deterioration of borders between inside and outside such that in some way he is always-already with, extended to and welcomed by, the other. (The degree to which this is the precise opposite of Sethe’s formulations is not to be lost on the reader.) Importantly, rather than a merely conceptual understanding, Stamp’s realizations and their progression emerge directly from and

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86 The Ethics of Community within his experiences in the material world and his attendant theory and practice cannot be disentangled. It is the situation with Vashti and his concession of inaction that initiates his sense of debtlessness. He gives to her the maintenance of his life, which ultimately leads to a confirmation of an ethical imperative beyond imperative that he finds satisfying and consistent with life itself. “A way to live” is simultaneously a conceptual and active formulation. Living for Stamp is itself extending extension, a movement highly similar to Nancy’s exposing exposure. Stamp Paid’s name change further complicates his narrative. “Perhaps there he could find out if, after all these years of clarity, he had misnamed himself and there was yet another debt he owed. Born Joshua, he had renamed himself when he handed over his wife to his master’s son” (185). This brief passage is replete with cultural intersections that trace a complex movement from a traditional Christian name (originally, at some point, a name that emerges from the master) to a culturally African American one, and can be interpreted as echoing the biblical Joshua’s name change from Hoshea to Joshua.8 Contrary to a simplistic expectation of consistency between the signification of each name and the sensibility and structure that informs them, the names Joshua and Stamp Paid function precisely as interruptions to their contextualizing structures. Successor to Moses, spy, and leader of the Isrealites into the promised land, the Biblical Joshua appears to have significant similarities to Beloved’s Joshua renamed Stamp Paid. A self-identified spy and he who ferries runaways across the Ohio River and into “freedom,” Stamp can reasonably be likened to his namesake. Additionally, the Biblical Joshua himself also underwent a change of names from Hoshea meaning “salvation” to Joshua, “the Lord saves.” How are we to interpret Stamp’s rejection of his given name and subsequent interrogation of its accuracy? Recall that Stamp Paid did not rename himself, rejecting his given name, until he endured the experience of maintaining his life for Vashti. At that point he was only vaguely aware of “whatever his obligations were” and did not have a clear understanding of any sort of imperative within which he might live. However, following his experience with Vashti he made a conscious decision that whatever obligations he did have, his act of paralysis paid them off. He no longer owed anyone anything and thus renamed himself Stamp Paid. One could read this as Stamp Paid eschewing obligations and thus, appropriately, rejecting the name Joshua with all of its implications of service as well as the notion that “the Lord saves.” He had had his “share of misery” and was not in any way embracing a sense of feeling saved by the Lord. As such, the change to Stamp Paid directly

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articulates the rejection of the implications of the Biblical Joshua (he was not saved and he had no obligation toward the other) and an acknowledgement that life owed him since his “stamp” in misery from life had been paid. Had Stamp Paid’s assessment of his life stopped there we would have a fairly neat analysis, consistent with the implications of the Biblical Joshua. However, his conclusion that a life solely in accordance to his recognition of imperative-lessness was “no way to live” instigated a response of extension. In the absence of a nebulous and unformulated imperative that one could argue is contextualized by the slave name Joshua and its attendant statusquo implications, Stamp Paid’s response (the one contextualized by exchange and receipt) is to engage in another kind of obligation, one of extension toward the other (which itself defies exchange and receipt). The implications of each name are inverted in terms of the actions to which they correspond. If we push this reading slightly further, we might conclude that Stamp Paid rejects the externally imposed obligation of a Biblical prescriptive imperative and only therein is able to reach a more a priori version of ethical obligation or obligation as we have come to understand it. Arguably, Stamp Paid rejects the name Joshua, the saving Lord that it implies, and therein is able to reach his more radical position of extension. Staging a dialogue between Stamp Paid’s narrative and the philosophical expositions of Nancy and Derrida reveals numerous points of intersection. Our reading of Nancy’s central position in “The Inoperative Community” indicates that a traditional humanism or immanentism must be overcome in order for the speaking of being to be heard. Furthermore, the closing of “The Free Voice of Man” underscores that thinking and doing cannot be so easily opposed. The entanglement between Stamp Paid’s conceptual understandings and his actions in the material world reveal a full sense of Nancy’s points to a radical degree. Stamp does what he gives, that is, he provides extension to the other as he extends to them. The object of generosity and the generosity are one and the same. Echoing Nancy, Stamp Paid can be interpreted as eschewing the prescriptive dogma of a final signified (“the Lord”) and approaching a more radical understanding of Biblical thought.9 Stamp enacts a Nancian community and thus illustrates what a deconstructive ethics might actually look like in action. Being ecstatic (or as Nancian community), always-already engaged in a movement toward the other, he “extends” himself to others as a “way to live,” a way that is consistent with “living” or being (alive). Stamp Paid’s narrative and activities throughout the text reveal to us how an inoperative community may manifest in the actual world.

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88 The Ethics of Community The a priori character of Derridean carrying is similarly evident in a close reading of Stamp Paid’s assertion that living in the absence of a prescribed obligation leads to an obligation of a radically prior nature. The complete absence of any imperative (or debtlessness) gives way to a “no way to live” that in turn leads to an obligation beyond obligation. As “path,” the way to live that Stamp identifies is in extending toward the other, culminating in the evaporation of the metaphorical threshold between self and other (the implicit welcome indicating the needlessness of knocking). Strictly speaking, the path or way “to live” (to be alive) for Stamp Paid is thus to extend. Living becomes extending, which translates into actions in the material world. That which is extended is precisely the condition of possibility for radical obligation insofar as Stamp “gives” debtlessness which in turn can lead to the extension in which he engages. If “to live” is extending then there is a formulation in which being is extension to the other. Here, at the very least, as “I live” I carry the other. An involved reworking of being as an identity is evident in Beloved near the close of the text as thirty townswomen gather outside of Sethe’s house to confront the ghost of the murdered baby. The description of the event underscores both a movement forward that is nonrecuperable as well as the meaningless-meaning of the movement (similar to the unfolding of Nancy’s analysis, these are interrelated and only slightly distinct aspects of the same event or movement). The context for the event in question is the desire of the townswomen to rescue Sethe from being haunted by the materialized ghost (256). The women have no distinct plan in mind as they make their way to Sethe’s home for a confrontation with the other worldly entity. Without a formulated strategy, there is no intention of creating a precise result other than the vague and undefined rescue. Upon arriving, they begin to sing, creating a powerful sound that literally causes Sethe to tremble: For Sethe it was as though the Clearing had come to her with all its heat and simmering leaves, where the voices of women searched for the right combination, the key, the code, the sound that broke the back of words. Building voice upon voice until they found it, and when they did it was a wave of sound wide enough to sound deep water and knock the pods off chestnut trees. It broke over Sethe and she trembled like the baptized in its wash. (261) The sound created by the singing does not emerge from a single voice but rather from “building voice upon voice until they found it.” The voices are configured as dependent upon one another for the creation of this immensely powerful sound indicating a literal manifestation of a notion of being’s radical interdependence. Furthermore, the singing itself is significant insofar as it is a singing toward. The women are

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not singing for themselves or as a performance rather they are singing to or toward Sethe and Beloved. The extension outward of the sound does not return to them in any way. They receive neither response nor even verification of the sound’s reception.10 Even more critical than the singing toward is the meaninglessmeaning evinced therein. The sound that the women create that “broke the back of words” breaks signifying meaning insofar as the “back” of a word can be read as that upon which referential meaning is dependent. The sound does not indicate an articulation of a message or idea. Although the sound breaks signifying meaning, it is, nonetheless (or consequently more), meaningful, as it can “knock the pods off chestnut trees” and causes Sethe to “tremble like the baptized in its wash.” Thus, what comes forward from the women, moving toward Sethe and Beloved, is a sound borne of many intermingling, interdependent voices that is meaninglessly meaningful and completely resists recuperation. Given its lack of signifying meaning, the sound cannot be received in the sense of recuperation or totalization. If the sound betrays a meaning that is simultaneously nonreferential and meaningful, then it cannot be apprehended by an already established self or subject. Rather, like the non-recuperable senseless meaning itself, the being that is affected by it must correspondingly be nontotalized and totalizing, and, thus, be a nonsubject or nonunified being. Arguably, the meaningless sound is the speaking of being or community. Nancy’s analysis suggests that community or being ecstatic is prior to all of our conscious projects or understandings, which is why we are more radically social than we generally imagine. In Beloved the singing women seem to have a conception of this always-already interdependence. In a reworking of line 1 of the Book of John, the text states that the women “stopped praying and took a step back to the beginning. In the beginning was the sound, and they all knew what that sound sounded like” (259). If we understand beginning not as origin but as that which is prior to conscious understanding or undertakings, then we might suggest that the sound that “broke the back of words” (a meaningless-meaning dependent for its being on being together and movement toward) came before all else. The beginning does not concern the origin of time but rather the beginning of being in the sense of a radical priority of the event of community, being-with, or an a priori ethical obligation. The cleansing that the sound provides for Sethe is not insignificant insofar as throughout the text she repeatedly indicates the severity of the “dirtying” she experienced in the context of slavery, which is itself presented as a mechanism logically premised upon the power of defi nition (of making a literal and figurative work out of being, the precise opposite of Miss Lady Jones’s speaking of being

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and Stamp’s understanding of extension) (251). The radical cleansing that is likened to a baptism can be interpreted as community interrupting the logic of the defi ner, here posited as the slave owner Schoolteacher who constructs (black) being as essentially “animal” (193). Indeed, Sethe identifies Schoolteacher’s project of defi ning the slaves as having both animal and human “characteristics” as that which she absolutely cannot allow her children to endure, and this is the reason she provides to Beloved in an attempt to explain her murderous impulses (251). The context that provides the flourish of community is, thus, the thirty townswomen who have come to rescue Sethe from being bedeviled by the ghost of the baby she murdered (255). The flourish refers to the unbridled and accessible nature of the being ecstatic of the singing women; arguably, the singing itself indicates an event of Nancian community. Here, there is nothing to hold it back, to restrict the intensity of its movement toward. Rather than seeking to construct being as a work or project, they speak the meaningless-meaning of being insofar as they signify no-thing but rather create together a power that is a kind of transcendence, which is the speaking of being itself. Possibly, here we can locate the opposite of the concentration camp and more clearly see the link between concrete experiences of existence and the abstract or conceptual realm. But we cannot close the analysis without noting the paradoxical nature of the identification of ecstasis. We began with an attempt to locate a context that permits a vision of ethical obligation in action. However, the identification of the context necessitates the identification of the event itself (community or being ecstatic), which is problematic insofar as it is by “definition” unidentifiable. As radically prior, preconscious, and prelinguistic, an a priori ethical obligation is simply the way of being. Identifying this always-already way is problematic since in identifying and naming we invariably run the risk of totalizing, making community into a work or project, or attempting to operate the inoperable. However, Nancy opens the door to such a pursuit by evoking the relationship between context and the character of community. If it can be slight and inaccessible, then it can flourish as well. Despite the difficulty and almost paradoxical nature of the task, attempting to locate moments when community flourishes, when being as ecstatic ruptures or interrupts essentializing projects, is vital. It allows a glimpse into the possibilities and the power of being, which subverts an often dominating and always totalizing will to essentialize and thus, the very real and disastrous consequences to be found therein. Although community resists institution, we can, nonetheless attempt to recognize its moments and encourage the contexts within which it emerges.

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In some sense, Beloved itself is a bearing witness to the intricacies, cruelty, and horror of the trans-Atlantic slave trade (insufficiently recognized in a US American cultural context and thus of a particular urgency). Within this larger project are numerous thematizations of the nature of the process. Foregrounding the power of non-communing communication (the singing women), the nonrepresentational linguistic event (Miss Lady Jones’s “Oh baby”), and hospitality and an ethical imperative (Stamp Paid’s debtlessness and welcome door), various themes of deconstructive ethics coalesce.11 The significance of bearing witness in and of Beloved lies in its imprecision, groundlessness, and ultimate impossibility. Although we cannot know that for which there is a witness (the “object” of the witnessing, Beloved and Beloved) in a precise and absolute sense, we know that it/she is not nothing. By extension, fully naming and “having” an experience cannot occur.12 However, the repeated incantations at the close of the text that “this is not a story to pass on” indicate that we must pass something along by telling the story of that which refuses enclosure and ground. Reminiscent of a Heideggerean invocation of Being, the final pages of Beloved suggest that “we” all must engage in a remembering and telling. “Down by the stream in back of 124 her footprints come and go, come and go. They are so familiar. Should a child, an adult place his feet in them, they will fit. Take them out and they disappear again as though nobody ever walked there” (274). The footprints once again evoke a trace-like structure of and to Being (or an absent presence) so fundamental to the understanding that we have thus far achieved. Further, should we “forget her like a bad dream” all that is left is “wind in the eaves, or spring ice thawing too quickly. Just weather. Certainly no clamor for a kiss” (274). With only weather remaining, the fundamental elements of being are lost (the meaningless meaning of being). Beloved is simultaneously a narrative of the trans-Atlantic slave trade that we must remember and tell (and bear witness) and a narrative of narrative, that is, a narrative of being. Beloved the character is a type of incarnation of this aspect of being (narrative incarnate –is this not being?) insofar as despite her attempt to have Paul D. “call me my name,” that is, name her finally and fully, as an immediately transparent being her efforts inevitably fail.13 Just as Paul D. and the other characters cannot name her (we have only her inscription on a tombstone again invoking the trace), she is, strictly speaking, inaccessible. However, the imperative to tell her story is nonetheless irrevocable and urgent as it involves participating in being in a dual sense— doing the only thing that we can do (telling the story) and thus opening being and invoking a direct and almost immediate embodiment of a responsibility or obligation to the other.14 The reader bears witness to her story alongside the text insofar

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92 The Ethics of Community as we understand that witnessing is (and is in) the telling or the a priori obligation of archi-ethics. However, lest we feel too comfortable, fulfilling the archi-obligation of being is in some sense an oxymoron. The archi-obligation referenced necessarily refuses or denies fulfillment (not unlike Derridean mourning) with Beloved’s “name” an appropriate signifier of these events given that it is impossible to be-loved once and for all.15 Rather than giving rise to completion, the telling necessarily erodes closure. An ongoing movement of the approximation of any rendering, Derridean bearing witness necessarily involves expropriation and poetic language such that the telling refuses to lead to a definitive told. In the case of Beloved (both text and character), the incompletion of the event urgently implores us. Like being loved, we cannot tell her story once and for all. Bringing to the fore the “clamor for a kiss” (reminiscent of Nietzschean laughter, Derridean dancing, and Bataillean eroticism) necessitates the discomfort (and concomitant possibility of “cleansing”) experienced in interruption. Eschewing a tidy and comforting recuperation, Beloved implores us to experience the interruption it performs.

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4

Ethics as the Eruption of Finitude

What is “inhabiting a language” where one knows both that there is no home and that one cannot appropriate a language? —Jacques Derrida, “Language Is Never Owned” (Sovereignties) Ah, the ghost of the transient moves through the open, innocent heart, like a summer cloud —Rilke, The Sonnets to Orpheus Contextualized as we are by a Western metaphysical culture and its attendant exaltation of truth and its transparency, the denial of logocentric virtues is uncomfortable.1 An abrupt immersion in a culture that is not one’s own (resulting from the necessary displacement that defines immigration or exile) cultivates a continual interruption between being and the world. Surrounded by rupture both philosophically (since this is the nature of being) and historically (as an exile or immigrant), the characters within Menendez’s In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd are often materially reminded of the impossibility of possession, ground, and transparency and frequently become consumed with repairing the alleged break. The overwhelming sense of rupture in turn reinforces the experience of that which is believed to be lost and thus even more fervently sought: unity, totality, or metaphysical presence. The characters pursue complete intelligibility in distinct ways but it is invariably frustrated by language and time, two of the more prominent themes of the text. Unlike the characters of Beloved who often embrace alternative and non-teleological linguistic spaces, the protagonists of In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd have a definite goal of achieving or possessing fully present meaning in time and language. As such, when they are unable to attain the meaning that they pursue, they are mournful rather than liberated. Although many US Latina texts share a preoccupation with the various ruptures that characterize an exile or immigrant experience, In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd most pointedly thematizes the roles of

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94 The Ethics of Community language and temporality in exile.2 When the place, culture, language, and temporality of what is considered home is interrupted, there often follows some level of interrogation of the roles of language or narration as well as time, memory, and the possibilities of recuperation in our lives. In Menendez’ text this interrogation and awareness often leads to explorations of these issues beyond the realm of exile or immigration and into our lives or being in the world in more fundamental terms. As we discussed in Chapters 1–3, the kind of understanding of being, time, and language evoked in In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd is grounded upon a subversion of an Enlightenment or Western logocentric foundation. Rather than radically separate, being, time, and language overlap to such a profound degree that they are indistinguishable as such. Where metaphysical perspectives rest upon an absolute meaning that springs forth from an unimpeachable ground, In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd repeatedly evokes the unavoidable overlap of being, time, and language. What follows is a bearing witness to exile and immigration that simultaneously addresses bearing witness itself. In other words, we seek to bear witness to both exile and bearing witness or to perform the content of the exploration (which we have understood is in some way inevitable). Chapter 4 then echoes back to the Introduction in that it too is concerned with a way of reading that is mindful of an extra-discursive experience that is imperative ethicity. The argument/ event that is simultaneously outlined/performed is that an experience of exile or immigration and the particulars (almost necessarily) to be found therein (geographical, temporal, linguistic, and cultural rupture) can and often do lead to direct engagements with Nancian community, ethics, and finitude. As such, Chapter 4 does not so much stress a “fluidly unique” aspect or aspects of Cuban American culture as it does the cultural intersections and interruptions that occur in situations of exile and/or immigration. In this chapter, we examine various moments and scenes in which bearing witness, imperative ethicity, and community are brought to the fore. In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd is framed by the title story of an elderly Miami Cuban exile named Maximo, and “Her Mother’s House,” the story of Lisette, an adult daughter of exiles. Despite the fact that they are separated by a generation, both Maximo and Lisette long for a possession of origin, here figured as Cuba and Cuban-ness. In what follows we see that both characters confront finitude and imperative ethicity, and in some way experience altered engagements with the material world. Curiously, while Lisette and Maximo repeatedly confront temporal and linguistic instabilities borne of the impossibility of fully present meaning, the narrator still appears to understand the world in terms of metaphysical values of knowledge attainable as

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and through presence, clarity, and light. A certain tension between immanentism, the individual, and a transparent and fully intelligible world, on the one hand, and finitude, community, writing, and an ethical imperative, on the other, reveals the complex relationships that Maximo, Lisette, and the narrator have with various metaphysical and non-metaphysical sensibilities. This chapter examines these two stories that pointedly treat exile and its possible ramifications. We begin with the title story as it concerns Maximo’s direct experiences of exile and preoccupation with time, nostalgia, presence, appropriation, and bearing witness. There are multiple examples of a will to identity, truth, and presence throughout In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, but Maximo’s relationship to them is among the most complex in the text. Both desiring and resisting a complete and unambiguous appropriation of meaning in time, Maximo is consistently troubled, melancholic, and disoriented. He appears to understand the potential dangers of nostalgia and the fixed and reductive (alleged) truth it seeks to re-present, but nonetheless, laments and suffers the impossibility of “holding on” to meaning and being in time. Ultimately, we see that Maximo’s disquietude in the face of nostalgia escalates to a point that he simply can take no more and explodes against it. In an event that is fittingly characterized as “improper,” Maximo finally experiences a disappropriation of time, being, and culture and his actual life and conceptual musings change accordingly. While this ecstatic event of community (and the necessary eruption of finitude it implies) is not framed as in any way joyous or celebratory, we see that it is nonetheless productively uncomfortable and what we have come to understand as ethical. Following our examination of Maximo, we take a close look at the final story of the collection, “Her Mother’s House,” and its protagonist Lisette, the child of Cuban exiles. Lisette negotiates her mother’s nostalgia for her childhood home as well as her own feelings of groundlessness in a world where her history and home are perceived as elsewhere. Central issues of the story concern a coexistence of cultural, discursive, and ontological interruption. We see how Lisette’s journeys reveals that community and bearing witness are particularly pertinent to not only exiles but their children as well. For Lisette, finding her origin rather than remembering it (as was the case with Maximo) is the primary issue. Rather than feeling ruptured from a cultural, national, and personal home, she feels a “blank page” where the beginning of her story should have been (Menendez 2001, 210). Her quest through most of “Her Mother’s House” is thus to find and possess that home. As an adult, Lisette visits Cuba and the mythical home of her mother’s stories in an attempt to “fill in” her gap-filled past. However, her experiences in Cuba and encounter with the

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96 The Ethics of Community house prompt recognition of the impossibility of fulfilling her desire. Ultimately, in Cuba and upon her return to Miami, Lisette experiences and understands herself as inevitably finite, a singular being who can and must bear witness rather than capture or possess her past and her life.

“In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd” Maximo’s is a story of a Cuban exile in Miami. One of the first to leave Cuba “on the eve of the first of January 1961,” he abandoned his comfortable and prestigious career as a university professor in Havana to become first a cab driver and eventually the owner of a small restaurant, where he and his wife Rosa served “black beans and rice to the nostalgic” (Menendez 2001, 7). He was thirty-six when he left and in the narrative present he is an elderly man whose wife had died five years earlier and two daughters are grown and gone. Maximo spends his days playing dominoes with three friends (one Cuban and two Dominican) at Domino Park, a historic landmark and tourist attraction in Miami. The story chronicles Maximo’s melancholic musings of time, loss, and the impossibility of recovery. Although an enthusiastic joke teller at the park, he is often privately disoriented, overcome by vertigo and at times hallucinating (7, 9). While he perceives the dangers of and is unsettled by the nostalgia that has pervaded the exile community in Miami, he simultaneously desires the temporal and significatory recovery and appropriation that nostalgia promises. Maximo then can be said to resist both nostalgia (and its appropriative movement) and finitude, community, and their ecstasic disappropriation. From the opening to the closing pages of “In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd,” various manifestations of nostalgia are depicted as dangerous and unethical in their foreclosure of ontological movement and extension. Its appropriative sensibilities (revealed in a desire to reach and possess its object of thought) attempt to deny the irrepressible showing of the imperative or rupturous nature of fi nitude. Even more insidiously, rather than cultivating connection or community as it purports to do, the text reveals that nostalgia actually objectifies and murders.3 By the close of the story something important happens and Maximo explodes against a commodified nostalgia, transforming how he inhabits his world. In what follows we trace the essentializing impulses of nostalgia, Maximo’s complex rejection of and desire for the full presence that it promises, and last, the pivotal moment of Maximo’s life that changes everything. Ultimately at stake is the conceptual and material difference that Maximo’s shifted relationship to community, imperative ethicity, finitude, and bearing witness makes. Additionally, we

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examine how the eruption of finitude and community simultaneously and necessarily involves a subversion or interruption of their opposite, the will to immanence. We see that Maximo’s rupturous event is one in which community’s resistance to immanence is potently clear.

Malignant Nostalgia and the Oppression of Purity As the narrator recalls Maximo and Rosa’s early years in Miami as first sandwich vendors and then small restauranters, we learn of the dynamics of a particular Miami exile community on the famous (if not infamous) Calle Ocho.4 The narration reveals a great deal not only about the preoccupations of the community but, even more profoundly, the terms in which they articulate and understand their nostalgia, which evinces crucial epistemologies concerning time and being: They worked together for years like that, and when the Cubans began disappearing from the bus line, Maximo and Rosa moved their lunch packets indoors and opened their little restaurant right on Eighth Street. There, a generation of former professors served black beans and rice to the nostalgic. When Raul showed up in Miami one summer looking for work, Maximo (not Rosa?) added one more waiter’s spot for his old acquaintance from L. Street. Each night, after the customers had gone, Maximo and Rosa and Raul and Havana’s old lawyers and bankers and dreamers would sit around the biggest table and eat and talk and sometimes, late in the night after several glasses of wine, someone would start the stories that began with “In Cuba I remember.” They were stories of old lovers, beautiful and round-hipped. Of skies that stretched on clear and blue to the Cuban hills. Of green landscapes that clung to the red clay of Guines, roots dug in like fingernails in a good-bye. In Cuba, the stories always began, life was good and pure. But something always happened to them in the end, something withering, malignant. Maximo never understood it. The stories that opened in the sun, always narrowed into a dark place. And after those nights, his head throbbing, Maximo would turn and turn in his sleep and awake unable to remember his dreams. (7, italics mine) The necessarily “good and pure” character of this other time and place is not at all incidental. As classic articulations of a metaphysics of presence, the desire for and nostalgia concerning goodness and purity (or goodness as purity and purity as goodness) is yet an other manifestation of the will to essence or immanence that Nancy discusses throughout his work on community. It is no accident that

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98 The Ethics of Community this is the precise manner that metaphysical truth and presence and their attendant historical manifestations (subjectivity, masculinity, whiteness, purity, and heteronormativity) have been mythologized. Recall that the self-enclosed individual indicates an absolute for itself, a pure entity utterly devoid of difference and movement. Purity, like its cousin terms “authenticity” and even “race,” indeed indicates ideality, a fully present and transparent being in a correspondingly readable and reliably “real” world.5 By definition, at its most fundamental, purity is the ultimate antithesis of difference and must forbid it to achieve itself as such. That for which nostalgia yearns is generally this imagined and mythologized state of complete understanding. Indeed the notion of nostalgia has long been noted as a potentially dangerous and threatening impulse, the precise opposite of an ethics of difference. As Nancy so painstakingly outlines, it is not simply the point of departure of the individual that has bred destruction and terror throughout our world, but the logic that sustains and propels it: that of truth as purity and presence. In other words, the past of another place (“I remember in Cuba”) is certainly missed, but more particularly the participants understand and thematize that what is lost is not just Cuba and the past but the goodness and purity they allegedly embodied. Indeed a conceptualization of the past as “good and pure” is a fine working definition of nostalgia itself and this level of understanding is not lost upon these exiles. Crucially, the stories that began with “In Cuba I remember” “always” began “life was good and pure.” In their articulations, nostalgia cannot be in any other way than as a desire for the lost object necessarily perceived as good and pure. The individual was thought to be the path to this realization of existence. Whether it be a yearning for that which is imagined to be lost or a looking forward to the community to come (by way of communism), both structures have denied community and finitude and thus the difference and imperative ethicity that constitutes being. Rather than foster community as it often purports to do, nostalgia cultivates precisely the opposite: death. This is the point that Nancy and Derrida as well as Beloved and In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd all seem to be driving home. The concept and corresponding material manifestations of purity (which cannot be disentangled) are murderous and must be so perceived. The murderous movement of the nostalgic stories is notable to Maximo who “never understood” how something “always happened to them in the end, something withering, malignant” (7). The distinction between the stories withering and something withering befalling them must be underscored. The more traditionally structured “the story withered” implies that the teller lost her narrative skill

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or energy, whereas something withering happening to a story indicates that the story is independent from the teller. The fact that something withering and malignant happened to the stories with no mention made of the teller indicates that the stories and their tellers lead independent lives (and deaths). The stories are subject to withering and wither as they are subject to malignancy and are ultimately malignant. Both dying (withering) and certain to die (malignant) these nostalgic stories fail to deliver that with which they initially tantalize their audience (and/or teller): some degree of access, proximity, or even possession or recovery of the goodness and purity of the Cuba they collectively narrate, construct, and remember.

Maximo’s Resistance Domino Park, the setting for much of the story and the place at which Maximo and his friends spend most of their time, is an actual tourist attraction in “Little Havana” on Eighth Street in Miami. A particularly important space for our consideration, the Park as tourist attraction embodies nostalgia “at work” and the alleged recovery and appropriation of a “lost time” it promises. Maximo’s disdain for the dynamics between the Domino-playing men and the tourists who watch them is consistent throughout the story. While he is confused by the malignancy of the nostalgic discourse at the restaurant (“he never understood”), we see that the commodified nostalgia of the tours of Domino Park is unmistakably offensive to him.6 As the following lines illustrate, Maximo resists going to the Park from the beginning, explaining that he will not be “the sad spectacle in someone’s vacation slide show” (9). However, his friend Raul is undetered and coaxes Maximo along: But Raul was already dressed up in a pale blue guayabera, saying how it was a beautiful day and smell the air. “Let them take pictures,” Raul said. “What the hell. Make us immortal.” “Immortal,” Maximo said like a sneer. And then to himself, The gods’ punishment. (9) Maximo understands the static “spectacle” of Cuban-ness as punishment vis-à-vis immortality. The reduction of Cuban men to objects for viewing entertainment is a material manifestation of a will to essence or immanence, which is not only perceived negatively by Maximo but, perhaps more importantly, is perceived negatively in terms of the lack of finitude and, ironically, community it indicates.7 Reduced to a spectacle in a slide or live “show,” these Latinos (and arguably Cuban culture at large) become exoticized object/other to the gaze of the viewing

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100 The Ethics of Community subject (the “pink” US Americans).8 Domino Park as spectacle metaphysically reifies a subject/object opposition rather than dissolving it as Nancy’s community would necessarily do. The story of Maximo and Domino Park underscores that objectification occurs as a result of a particular logic and manifests in specific material situations; it is unjust and appropriating precisely due to its foreclosure of being. A kind of ontological murder, the spectacle attempts to fix and hold being itself, that which necessarily and by definition refuses to be held down. Ecstasis, compearance, and community all indicate that being, at its most fundamental, is not fundamental. Maximo’s harsh rejection (it is the gods punishment) of the immortality (fixity) that the spectacle implies can be read as a direct indictment of its attempts to deny community and finitude. Recall that finitude is the spacing of being that is both rupturous and constitutive, containing two central meanings: we are all going to die (or are radically finite) and we can never be one, unified, essential, or absolute. The “show” of the Domino players is here framed as that which grants immortality, and although Raul cannot see the problem, Maximo is keenly aware of the “punishing” nature of the designation. A conceptual cousin of the concentration camp, the Park as tourspectacle functions according to the implicit framework of the individual that Nancy so meticulously critiques. The flip side of exterminating concentration, the romanticized spectacle of nostalgia appropriates and reduces Cuban (which indicates something) to Cuban-ness (which is saturated with meaning and thus vacant), an absolute designation permitting neither ontological nor temporal difference.9 The nostalgic speech of the tour guide is precisely not a telling or bearing witness (which is underscored throughout the text, from the telling of jokes to the desire within “Hurricane Stories,” to Lisette’s stories) but a proclamation and alleged re-presentation of Cuban-ness, retaining an even more lethal character than the nostalgia disseminated at the restaurant. Maximo rightly recognizes the difference. “‘You see, Raul,’ Maximo said. “You see how we’re a spectacle?” He felt like an animal and wanted to growl and cast about behind the metal fence . . . ‘A goddamn spectacle. A collection of old bones,’ Maximo said” (24). Maximo’s sense that he is being likened to an animal almost necessarily calls to mind the structure of a zoo where animals are viewed for mass consumption. Objects for the enjoyment of the paying public, the zoo animals and Domino-playing-older-Cuban-men are frozen in time and discourse. The will to immanence is visible in the attempt to deny constitutive elements of being: its movement, extension, finitude, imperative ethicity, and ability to bear witness. Nancy’s analysis of the ontological inevitability of finitude and ecstasis on the one hand and the impossibility of immanence on the other highlights the

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movement-between of the former and the stasis of the latter. Both zoo animals and these Cuban (and non-Cuban!) men clearly move and thus cannot help but deny the objectifying logic that attempts to fix them in time, place, and language. Indeed the fact that Maximo feels like “an animal and wanted to growl and cast about behind the metal fence” is significant in that it indicates that Maximo in some way understands the problem with fixity and wants to respond to it by moving fiercely. A historical material manifestation of nostalgia and its implicitly essentializing logic, the spectacle forecloses being and its possibilities in a murderous and appropriative movement. Furthering the malignancy metaphor of the nostalgic stories at the restaurant, the “collection of old bones” reduces the complexity and ecstatic movement of being to a static and mass grave, necessarily invoking violent and multiple deaths. The correlation between the camp of exterminating concentration and the sad spectacle of old bones is not difficult to make. Just as the camp takes a logic of purity to a deadly extreme, the Park spectacle does the same (same) in reverse. Rather than exterminating impurity, the tour bus and guide murders vis-à-vis romanticizing nostalgia, a fact obviously not lost upon Maximo given the terms in which he frames his protest. According to the theoretical explorations of Chapters 1 and 2, community, ecstasis, finitude, and writing are intricately entwined, inevitably thrusting forth an ethical imperative. In spite of the spectacle to which the Park is reduced by the touristic gaze, also discernable are moments of ecstatic eruption or disappropriation. In some way the simultaneity of nostalgia’s desire to capture and fix, and being’s resistance to this reduction, confirms Nancy’s claim that community is irrepressible (being cannot not compear). Nancy thus provides a theoretical exposition while Maximo in Domino Park shows us what such a material manifestation of community and ethics might actually look like. More specifically, not only does Maximo erupt against the tour guide in a public and vociferous fashion but he is clearly transformed. The scene and its aftermath thus call to mind the central themes of our analysis: community, ethics, finitude, and bearing witness: An open trolley pulled up and parked on the curb. A young man with blond hair, perhaps in his thirties, stood up in the front, holding a microphone. He wore a guayabera. Maximo looked away. “This here is Domino Park,” came the amplified voice in English, then Spanish. “No one under fifty-five allowed, folks. But we can sure watch them play.” Maximo hears shutters click, then convinced himself he couldn’t have heard, not from where he was.

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102 The Ethics of Community “Most of these men are Cuban and they’re keeping alive the tradition of their homeland,” the amplified voice continued, echoing against the back wall of the park. “You see, in Cuba, it was very common to retire to a game of dominos after a good meal. It was a way to bond and build community. Folks, you here are seeing a slice of the past. A simpler time of good friendships and unhurried days.” Maybe it was the sun. The men later noted that he seemed odd. The tics. Rubbing his bones. First Maximo muttered to himself. He shuffled automatically. When the feedback on the microphone pierced through Domino Park, he could no longer sit where he was, accept things as they were. It was a moment that had long been missing from his life. He stood and made a fist at the trolley. “Mierda!” he shouted. “Mierda! That’s the biggest bullshit I’ve ever heard.” He made a lunge at the fence. Carlos jumped up and restrained him. Raul led him back to his seat. The man of the amplified voice cleared his throat. The people on the trolley looked at him and back at Maximo; perhaps they thought this was part of the show. “Well.” The man chuckled. “There you have it folks.” Lucinda ran over, but the other men waved her off. She began to protest about rules and propriety. The park had a reputation to uphold. (25–6) Battling the nostalgic and objectifying rhetoric, Maximo explodes against the tour guide’s speech. In “a moment that had long been missing from his life,” he literally curses the touristic logic and embodiments that attempt to “capture” him on so many levels. The logic and movement of nostalgia, on both sides of the fence (that allegedly divides subject from object, viewer from viewed, and US American from Cuban) are appropriative, totalizing, and murderous. From the stories invoking the “good and pure” life in Cuba told by the exiles to the “you here are seeing a slice of the past” of the US American tour bus, Cuba is accessed as an unmoving object to be re-presented alongside the “Cuban” as its ontological corollary. When nostalgia is the guiding conceptual apparatus, there are pictures, the oxymoronic “still lifes,” slideshows, and rhetoric that Maximo perceived as withering, malignant, and mierda (shit). In contrast, the being of community and bearing witness that Nancy and Derrida discuss cannot stop moving. It is perhaps no accident that Maximo’s response to the

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rendering static of objectification is to “no longer sit still.” Further his “moment” is one that “had long been missing from his life,” indicating its necessity or imperative quality. There is much about Maximo’s “out-burst” that evokes ecstasis. He literally erupts or ex-plodes off of the bench, shouting, waving his fist in the air, and finally lunging for the crowd. It is not difficult to characterize this event as one of extension, intense movement, and again, the antithesis of the stillness, fixity, and death that characterizes the nostalgia he has encountered. Nostalgia is likened to death and murder and is dangerous and damaging in terms of its appropriative movements and objectifying project (and this project is inherent to nostalgia rather than an incidental byproduct). It is not simply that the narration reveals how Maximo understands nostalgia as destructive, but rather, and more significantly, the text perceives nostalgia as potentially dangerous in particular terms. It is not merely negative but far more intensely, nostalgia is literally framed as a malignancy to finitude. The withering stories of the restaurant and the photos procured by the tour punish by invoking immortality or denying the finitude that is community/singularity. Maximo’s moment literally challenges the appropriative movement of the spectacle in both form (eruption/rupture/expropriation) and content (your nostalgia/spectacle is shit). Fittingly, the Park overseer Lucinda objects to Maximo’s outburst citing the “rules and propriety” that he transgresses. The detailed exposition of the importance of appropriation and disappropriation in Chapter 1 have clearly indicated the metaphysical understandings at stake in articulations of the proper. The overlap between the philosophical underpinnings and their historical material corollaries is not at all difficult to see. The logic is appropriating and essentializing and as Nancy indicates, the corresponding structure of the tour bus and the interactions it initiates are as well. More precisely, the logic of Cuban nostalgia for sale is deathly: Cuba and Cubans are reduced to a static immanence necessarily incapable of any manner of movement. But how does his eruption and resistance to immanence transform Maximo? How does it “make a difference” in his life and the lives of those around him? After the narration of Maximo’s outburst at the Park, only two scenes remain. The first is just several lines long and it tells of Maximo’s inability to sit at his pine table or even cook dinner during the evening following his scene at the park. All he can do is sleep. The scene that follows, and the final one of the story, takes place the next day at the Park and reveals the profound effects of Maximo’s disruptive moment of the day before. In this final section of the story, Maximo is able to finish the joke (which he now calls a story) that he had previously attempted to tell his friends at the Park.

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104 The Ethics of Community “Let me finish the story of Juanito the little dog.” No one said anything. “Is that okay? I’m okay. I just remembered it. Can I finish it?” The men nodded, but still did not speak. “He is just off the boat from Cuba. He is walking down Brickell Avenue. And he is trying to steady himself, see, because he still has his sea legs and all the buildings are so tall they are making him dizzy. He doesn’t know what to expect. He’s maybe a little afraid. And he’s thinking about a pretty little dog he knew once and he’s wondering where she is now and he wishes he were back home . . . He’s not a depressive kind of dog, though. Don’t get me wrong. He’s very feisty. And when he sees an elegant white poodle striding toward him, he forgets all his worries and exclaims, ‘O Madre de Dios, si cocinas como caminas . . .’ ” The men let out a small laugh. Maximo continued. “ ‘Si cocinas como caminas . . . ,’ Juanito says, but the white poodle interrupts and says, ‘I beg your pardon? This is America—kindly speak English.’ So Juanito pauses for a moment to consider and says in his broken English, ‘Mamita, you are one hot doggie, yes? I would like to take you to movies and fancy dinners.’ . . . So Juanito says, ‘I would like to marry you, my love, and have gorgeous puppies with you and live in a castle.’ Well, all this time the white poodle has her snout in the air. She looks at Juanito and says, ‘Do you have any idea who you’re talking to? I am a refined breed of considerable class and you are nothing but a short, insignificant mutt.’ Juanito is stunned for a moment, but he rallies for the final shot. He’s a proud dog, you see, and he’s afraid of his pain. ‘Pardon me, your highness,’ Juanito the mangy dog says. ‘Here in America, I may be a short insignificant mutt, but in Cuba I was a German Shepherd.’ ” (27–8) The joke contains a structure and follows a movement that significantly parallels that of the tour bus at Domino Park. Insofar as both the nostalgia and photographs of the tour attempt to “capture” the past (the better days of nostalgia) and re-present it as a kind of artifact, and the “white dog” claims superiority based on her breeding and class and correspondingly maligns Juanito for his hybridity (he is an insignificant mutt) both situations attempt to appropriate Cuba and Cubanness in an absolute fashion. “Cuban” is either fixed in time and space as a “slice of the past” or necessarily impure as “an insignificant mutt.” Essentializing logic clearly has concrete ramifications pertaining to

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our ways of structuring our relations to one another both systematically (commodified culture/tourism) and interpersonally (evinced in the dialogue between the “white poodle” and Juanito). The very idea of a business venture based upon the commodification of nostalgia would not be possible were a metaphysical logic of appropriation not there to found and propel it. Similarly, Juanito implicitly values the “white poodle” given that he approaches and pursues her romantically; further, their ensuing interaction (reifying her desirability as “a refined breed of considerable class” and his lack of “significance” given his hybridity) indicates that a guiding narrative of the value of purity or “good breeding” grounds and fuels their interactions. Furthermore, the content of the joke highlights the contextual/historical role of signification or meaning. In the context of the United States, Juanito the dog is perceived as an “insignificant mutt” (the hybrid literally failing to signify or engender significance) but in Cuba, Juanito reassures the “white poodle” (and seemingly himself), he is a German Shepherd, a breed that not only signifies but does so in terms of masculinity, strength, dignity, and bravery. Given that the story directly thematizes a metaphysical discourse of purity and its material incarnations of both racism and classism, Juanito’s tale also brings to the fore the overlap between the philosophical and the historical. Here, a pure/impure theoretical opposition itself implicitly grounded upon a metaphysics of presence provides the base and propulsion for the privileging of nostalgia in the case of the tour bus and purity in Juanito’s narrative. Structures of consumption as well as direct interpersonal understandings are framed according to these logics. Additionally, as a “white” purebred of “considerable class,” the poodle in Juanito’s story feels sufficiently superior to deny him a most basic component of sovereignty: the ability to bear witness or speak. The poodle directly inquires of Juanito if he knows to whom he is speaking, implying that if he did, he would not dare attempt to communicate. Invoking ontological privileges (she is pure), the poodle materially manifests as white and high class (and interestingly, female). Juanito, the impure (mutt), low class, insignificant, other, literally should not have a voice according to the poodle of “considerable class.” Invoking the same logic as that of nostalgia, the logic of purity totalizes being, rendering it static in both time and space. This is precisely the impoverished world of the individual, a world in which Maximo is denied a basic and fundamental space to bear witness. If we understand Maximo’s ability to tell the joke/story of Juanito the dog as contextualized by his outburst against the tour bus from the previous day, then we may assert that a confrontation with an ethical imperative cultivates more of the same. While the first incident with the tourists reveals Maximo’s inability to “sit still” with the appropriative

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106 The Ethics of Community and totalizing force of nostalgia, its commodification, and thus its material manifestation, the second “outburst” occurs directly following Maximo’s telling of the joke/story of Juanito and involves an eruption of sadness. Indeed we can plainly see that Maximo in some way “gets” the relationship between purity (or essentializing logics) and temporality, whether consciously or otherwise. The story of the violent objectification and denigration to which Juanito is subject by the “white poodle” makes Maximo first cry, and immediately following, contemplate temporality and the impossibility of appropriation therein: Maximo turned so the men would not see his tears. The afternoon traffic crawled eastward. One horn blasted, then another. He remembered holding his daughters days after their birth, thinking how fragile and vulnerable lay his bond to the future. For weeks, he carried them on pillows, like jeweled China. Then the blank spaces in his life lay before him. Now he stood with the gulf at his back, their ribbony youth aflutter in the past. And what had he salvaged from the years? Already, he was forgetting Rosa’s face, the precise shade of her eyes. (29) The tears can be read as a provocative movement bearing certain similarities to the ecstatic eruption of anger at the Park. As an extension outward, the tears are an unanticipated expression that also transgresses or subverts propriety, particularly, culturally, for a Cuban man. Indeed a most common US American expression of tears is that one “bursts into tears.” Maximo’s unexpected crying and this sense of bursting forth both indicate an eruption of sorts that can be likened to finitude (insofar as it cuts through the expected and the known). In some sense, the hiding of these tears underscores their impropriety and can thus be said to reinforce their subversive character. Although Maximo ponders the nature of temporality throughout the story he does not directly confront the issue of time and finitude as ravaging until this moment in the text.10 It is crucial that Juanito’s designation as a “mutt” is followed by profound considerations of temporality. Hybridity and temporality are not generally conceived as interrelated but Maximo’s narration reveals precisely this correlation. Nostalgia and its appropriative movement attempts to stop time while Maximo’s engagement with time as that against which you fight losing (what had he salvaged?) invokes the disappropriation (or temporal aspect of finitude) inherent to being in time. Arguably, Maximo is able to consider temporality directly only in the context of his eruption against nostalgia and his ability to finish telling the joke/story of Juanito. The final page reveals a head-on interrogation of being in time in terms of his assessment of his own life and what he feels he has lost.

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Maximo is transformed given his ability to finish the joke/story at all. Recall that his previous attempt to tell it was unsuccessful and rather it is only after he has the “moment that had long been missing from his life” that he is able to complete the tale. He had told other jokes throughout the story but the single joke that does not work, that he refers to as a “story,” that surprises him and makes him confront temporality and cry before his friends, and then, we will see, engage in a final command, is arguably another moment in which imperative ethicity erupts before him, undeniable and irrepressible. The particular terms in which Maximo perceives his being in time are telling. He recalls considering temporality as a young versus an older man, and from both vantage points there is some degree of absence rather than a possessed presence: Then the blank spaces of his life lay before him. Now he stood with the gulf at his back, their ribbony youth aflutter in the past. And what had he salvaged through the years? Already he was forgetting Rosa’s face, the precise shade of her eyes. (29, italics mine) His youthful relation to time indicated blank spaces ahead while old age brought “a gulf at his back.” Notably, both situations pointedly fail to capture time as a spectacle and photograph attempt to do. The plural “blank spaces” indicates a number of unknowns to come while the singular “gulf” implies a lone yet massive absence. Spatially structuring temporality, they both call forth emptiness, non-presence, or absence (in both time and space). The metaphor of “salvaging” through time is also extremely telling and gives us an even more intricate sense of Maximo’s experiences. “And what had he salvaged through the years?” Maximo’s simple but potent query resonates. “Salvage” connotes a recuperative keeping, holding on, rescuing, and preservation from an unforeseeable misfortune, wreckage, or disaster. For Maximo, time is the disaster from which we attempt to rescue something of our lives. In spite of time and the unforeseen circumstances of his life, what had he managed to keep or recuperate? So well trained are we to conceive of value in terms of appropriation that it may be difficult to even notice that Maximo’s question implicitly values appropriation or keeping. The metaphysical frame of holding on (itself a manifestation of the priority of presence) will not be a ground that gives way easily. Further indication that appropriation is here framed in and in spite of time, and even more precisely that time itself is conceived in terms of presence, is the fact that he gages what he has salvaged according to what he can and cannot remember. Presumably, if he could have remembered the precise shade of Rosa’s eyes, he would have had that

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108 The Ethics of Community as his own, or that at least would have been salvaged. Salvaging as appropriation is to come as close to presence as possible, that is, to remember. For Maximo, as a fading memory, Rosa is becoming lost to him. In other words, given that he was not salvaging this memory of “the precise shade of Rosa’s eyes” through the years, he was losing them and by implication, her. To have is then to remember, and to lose is to forget. (Interestingly, while presence appears to be what Maximo desires here, it is simultaneously that to which he objects in both the restaurant and tour bus manifestations of nostalgia.) In addition to “the precise shade of Rosa’s eyes,” that which Maximo and the other Miami Cuban exiles attempt to “rescue from loss at sea” (another definition of “salvage”) is another time and place, the past of Cuba that is radically irrecuperable and yet tantalizes as an object of ideality (hence nostalgia). The only avenue for recovery or possession contra time is memory, that which is necessarily imbued with deferral (and thus an element of absence) since it must be situated in language and time. Thus memory precisely and paradoxically precludes the possibility of appropriation that Maximo and the other exiles so desperately seek. The final lines of the story repeat and reinforce the distinction between the fixity of the spectacle on the one hand and the imperative, bearing witness, and resistance on the other. Following Maximo’s tears and melancholic musings of time and loss, just a few moments pass (in which his two Dominican friends Carlos and Antonio are noticeably uncomfortable) before he can hear the tourists behind him and the fence that divides them: When the wind eased Maximo tilted his head to listen. He heard something stir behind him, someone leaning heavily on the fence. He could almost feel the breath. His heart quickened. “Tell them go away,” Maximo said. “Tell them, no pictures.” (29) The simultaneous evocation of a literal clinamen (“leaning heavily on the fence”) and the “almost” felt breath of the tourist versus the pictures that s/he presumably wants to take (literally or otherwise) is telling. This final scene is arguably a showing (that must insert itself) of the irrepressible nature of community, regardless of the context. The leaning and breath of the tourist indicate a movement of and between one being and an other in which the “between” is stressed more than s/he who leans and breathes. In other words, the heavy leaning of the tourist on the fence that Maximo hears and the breath of the leaner that he can “almost feel” underscores the importance of the movement over and above its agent.

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Equally significant is the fact that Maximo’s response to the leaning and breathing departs from the three previous choices he had made in the face of the tourists. Up to these final lines he had sat still, erupted, or cried. After hearing and almost hearing the leaning and breathing, he makes a very different choice in issuing an imperative to bear witness to finitude: “Tell them go away,” Maximo said. “Tell them, no pictures.” In a powerful and strange literalization of being as community and the implied deferral and lack of presence, Maximo tells them (his friends) to tell them (the tourists) not to take pictures (which deny difference and finitude in a will to essence evinced in the spectacle). Maximo’s imperative (“tell them”) is a direct challenge to presence and purity and the logic and structures of the absolute. In effect, Maximo bears witness in and as an ethical event insofar as he “tells them” (his friends, in both a command and a bearing witness to his experience) to bear witness on his behalf. In this way Maximo resists the logic of immanence and the materialization of that logic that the tourists picture-taking and objectification initiates. Maximo does not just say no, he commands no and further he commands that his friends command resistance as well. Not only does he demand no to the objectifying pictures but he tells his friends to tell the tourists to “go away.” The final command that he gives to his friends involves both bearing witness and the inescapability of difference as a way of “away.” Maximo has done his going and the “way” (both as literal path and manner) that he traveled was most definitely an “away” “way,” both historically as an exile and ontologically as a finite being. It is important to think of Maximo’s fi nal telling as an imperative that is particularly situated or contextualized rather than existing as a piece of a chronological order. It is not that he is capable of issuing an imperative to bear witness directly as a result of understanding himself as a fi nite being (who therefore knows himself in duty). Rather we posit that the contexts of cultural difference, immigration, and exile are material contexts in which community in the Nancian sense is more likely to flourish. Certainly it is always happening but here it is a song that is played a bit louder. Unlike the concentration camp (or camp of exterminating concentration), the will to essence of the tour bus nostalgia leaves more space for dissent, a space Maximo readily occupies. Maximo’s vexed relationship to nostalgia is evident throughout the story but does not emerge as directly subversive until the closing pages, when he is fi nally unable to “sit still” any longer in the face of objectification. His ecstatic “moment” at the Park is an event of community that cuts through and tears open the will to essence that the tour guide attempts to institute. Not only is it indicative of resistance as the ecstatic component of singularity/community indicates

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110 The Ethics of Community but further it can be said to have initiated sovereignty, the exposition of fi nitude to Maximo vis-à-vis the rhetoric of the tour guide. Paradoxically Maximo is “shared” by the disembodied voice of the other that seeks to objectify him or reduce him to a static spectacle. Here, the tour bus nostalgia is a material embodiment of a will to immanence and Maximo’s eruption of fi nitude and community must manifest as dissent.

Lisette’s Longing “Her Mother’s House,” the last story in the collection, tells the story of Lisette, an only child of Cuban exiles living in Miami. Set in both Miami and Cuba, the narrative is replete with both temporal and spatial shifts, often making it difficult to construct a cohesive and orderly sequence of events. However, a basic chronological restructuring reveals that from the earliest years of her childhood, Lisette’s life is framed by her mother’s intense longing for her own childhood home lost in the Cuban revolution. As a recently divorced young woman (paradoxically frustrated by her ex-husband’s belief that the past is “something you can play again like an old song”), Lisette is driven by a desire to visit the house of her mother’s stories. When a reporting assignment presents her with an opportunity to travel to Cuba, she jumps at the chance. Undeterred by her mother’s protests, Lisette thus makes the journey to her mother’s house, seeking fulfillment and orientation for her life, which she experiences as uncomfortably uncertain due to its lack of a “beginning that every story needs.” The trip to Cuba is thus meant to fill in a perceived absence of cultural, national, and personal origin. However, upon encountering the house for which her mother was “half mad with longing” and which was “always in the air, behind every reproach,” Lisette discovers that her mother (Mabella) had deceived everyone and that the house described as majestic was in fact comparable to a shack, particularly when contrasted with the relative opulence of the house in which they all lived in Coral Gables, a generally affluent section of Miami (206). The destabilization of her separation from her husband Erminio forms the backdrop for Lisette’s desire to travel to Cuba, that is, to find solid ground upon which to stand and confidently understand her identity (which she perceived, at the beginning of the story, as identifiable). In her own words, “. . . every story needed a beginning” and “her past had come to seem like a blank page, waiting for the truth to darken it” (210). Thus we can ascertain that prior to her trip to Cuba, Lisette had been thinking metaphysically and actively sought her origin and the sense of groundedness it would ostensibly provide. The obstacle she perceived was her lack of the beginning of her story, the truth to darken the page that was her life. If she could only visit the house and

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thereby finally encounter the origin of which she had been deprived (and which was indeed a foundational absence in her life) she could finally begin her life. The text is replete with figurations that valorize and glorify clarity, intelligibility, and truth, and indeed Lisette’s desire for such possession is visible throughout the narrative.11 Mostly, Lisette yearns for a world in which bearing witness and the centrality of narrative it implies is unnecessary. Having had enough of storytelling given her mother’s endless accounts of her childhood home (“That house. Always in the air behind every reproach”), Lisette seeks a directly accessible and entirely retrievable world (206). Although she herself scarcely comprehends this desire she is crystal clear concerning the heart of the matter: “She wasn’t going to explain to her mother things she could barely explain to herself. How every story needed a beginning” (210, italics mine).

Storytelling Upon encountering the actual house, everything changes and Lisette confronts the fact that her mother had lied.12 Given that the endless stories of her mother’s house had been such a central aspect of her life, the realization of her mother’s deception is immensely disruptive. Upon encountering the lie of the house, she not only understands but additionally experiences that her origin, both in terms of her mother’s house and her very being, is a story. In other words, she experiences the impossibility of catching up to herself in language, that is, she experiences difference, finitude, and imperative ethicity. Interestingly, in an eerie performative move, the “original” master or grand house that was to provide the origin for Lisette was the vehicle for the master or grand narrative of the concept of origin itself. Lisette thus finds precisely the opposite of the origin, ground, and corresponding certainty she had been seeking and can now only pine for the narratives within which she previously operated (her desire shifting from the possession of first-hand knowledge of the house and Cuba to the desire for the initial desire; or from desire of object to desire of desire of object): “If only Lisette could get up now and return to the hotel in Havana . . . back to the Cuba she could talk about later, the simple stories of the rafters, the plain facts of their sadness” (221). Recognizing that their sadness (and who is included in this “their”?) is no longer “factual” and the rafters stories have lost their “simple” quality, Lisette cannot return to her once guiding paradigm. Indeed her experience in Cuba and encounter with the house makes her less grounded, culturally, nationally, and ontologically, than ever. As we shall explore in the following pages, Lisette rather finds that she is far more disoriented and groundless than she had been when she embarked upon her journey to Cuba seeking the beginning that “every story needs” (210).

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112 The Ethics of Community Since she wishes to but presumably cannot return “to the simple stories of the rafters, the plain facts of their sadness,” she recognizes the role of bearing witness in the journey of recovery. How will she tell this story? “The house, the idea of her mother’s house there in the shadow, is a present thought in this retelling, the way she described it to herself much later” (218). Although the subject of the sentence begins as the house itself, it is quickly qualified as an idea, thought, retelling, and description, with access to it hampered by these as well as by “shadow” and time (“retelling” and “later”). Thus, several significatory and temporal disjunctions are here highlighted, revealing the importance of imperative ethicity and bearing witness to Lisette’s life. Writing, finitude, and spacing are crucial elements of the noncoincidence insisted upon in this line. Entirely denying unity, ground, and origin, this seemingly innocuous line dashes any and all hopes of retrieval and recovery. In what follows, we see that Lisette had failed to anticipate the complete overlap of being, language, and time that she would experience in Cuba, and the ensuing difficulties of fully possessing and subsequently recounting said experience. The linguistic and temporal chasm that is the context of any narration is highlighted in the interruption between the house and the idea of the house and the flickering presence and absence that is the nature of any “retelling” or signification. Bearing witness is inevitably composed of this interruption as is imperative ethicity. For Lisette, the thought or idea of her mother’s house is ostensibly “present” as a thought in the moment of “retelling” but “retelling” is always-already occurring and thus a notoriously slippery affair. (Here, recall Derrida’s claim that there is some sense in which we are always bearing witness, and Nancy’s that imperative ethicity is constitutive of being.) First, as she is retelling, it is already “not a present thought” as language eschews the present. Second, with each “reading” or “retelling” it produces its trace-like indication or signification. To which “this retelling” does she refer? Is she discussing the process in which the narrator/Lisette is engaged in the writing (with each retelling) or the process by which it is “present” to each reader/producer of the text? In either situation, but particularly in the case of the latter, there is a rupture between the notions of “the present thought” and “this retelling” revealing that both refuse the presence that they ostensibly offer. “The present thought” could be that of Lisette or the thought of the immeasurable readers who read the text. (As such, it is not “the present thought” in the singular as it pretends to be but rather is necessarily the present thoughts.) “This retelling” is even more problematic as it could refer to more than one possible “this,” which then denies the meaning of “this.” It is impossible to locate the “this” of the retelling. Further,

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rendered in the gerund, the “retelling” itself refuses the closure that the “this” suggests (and simultaneously denies). The last clause of the sentence reinforces this antinomy with which the text at large is concerned and which so frustrates Lisette: “. . . is a present thought in this retelling, the way she described it to herself much later” (218). To hold open the paradoxes of “a present thought in this retelling” alongside “the way she described it to herself much later” is strictly speaking impossible. Assuming that “the present thought in this retelling” is the “present” thinking of the narrator/Lisette as she is telling it to the reader (which refuses temporal designation), how do we contend with the disconnect of “the way she described it to herself much later?” In other words, what she has written and what we are reading, which was (in some manner) present to her at the time of the writing or “retelling” and is “now” present to “us” as we read (again and again and again), is only the way that she herself understood it retrospectively, thus not “present” at all. The narrator accentuates the fact that we are not receiving the present of “this present thought” but a re-presentation (with the temporal lag it necessarily implies). The not so subtle insinuation is that “the present thought” is not a present thought. And although it is “present” to the reader as they are reading, and was present to author/narrator/Lisette at the time of the writing as a thought (with its own temporal and linguistic ruptures), it is necessarily (doubly) removed temporally and linguistically from “the present.” In other words, the text tells the reader that we will not arrive at a present thought, indeed that there is no such thing as a present thought. The absence of even the possibility of presence in telling, in bearing witness, is the emergence of finitude and imperative ethicity. The narrator reveals and traces Lisette’s experiences of these events and prompts the reader to conceivably experience it through and as this tracing. As replete as it is with significatory and temporal disjunctures, the line in question refuses more than it offers, highlighting the problematic nature of presence and meaning not only for exiles and immigrants but for being in general. Arguably, it is the ardent desire for intelligibility, presence, and home of exiles and their children that provides the impetus for such meditations. This yearning powerfully inscribes the impossibility of presence vis-à-vis the denial of national and cultural recuperation and possession. Despite herself, Lisette cannot help but recognize the complex, slippery, and rupturous nature of bearing witness and imperative ethicity. (All she can do is engage the “retelling” of the “idea” of her mother’s house rather than possess, retrieve, and present the house “as it really is.” However, much as she longs to “return to the simple stories of the rafters, the plain truths of their sadness,” she

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114 The Ethics of Community realizes the impossibility of her desire for this and any other manner of possession.

Interruption The revelation of the dis-continuity between her mother’s stories and the actual house directly result in experiences of dis-continuous being. In what follows we examine the various disorientations that Lisette thus endures: Lisette saw the way Lisidro bent his head toward this house, this little dream. His lips moved, wordless. Alicia took her hand. And then Lisette was sitting at a wood table inside a small kitchen. A kerosene stove, a bucket of oil, a yellowed basin filled with water, a refrigerator covered in silver tape, black at the edges. Lisidro kept moving his lips at Lisette. She blinked. Was that her laughter? Inside it was dark; the contrast with the outdoors made her eyes hurt. She tried to look at Alicia, her polished coconut face. (219) The “little dream” of a house overtakes Lisette as her encounter with those around her is imbued with a surreal character. Lisidro appears to speak as “his lips moved” however he is “wordless.” The dissimilarity between the actual house and that of her mother’s stories of it results in several instructive ruptures. First, there is that between subject and expression in vocal signification: his lips moved but Lisette experienced him as without words. Additionally, there is the disjuncture between Lisette and an other being: he appears to be speaking to her but she cannot hear him. Following the experience of wordlessness, there is a temporal discontinuity: “Alicia took her hand. And then Lisette was sitting at a wood table inside a small kitchen.” Lisette proceeds from being outside of the house looking at it as an object to being seated at a table inside of it. The dream like progression from one place and moment to another without any linkage between them is conspicuous. The temporal and spatial shifts indicate a profoundly disconcerting and fragmented experience wherein time and place do not move fluidly but exist in abrupt repositionings with no continuity between them. The next line reveals that the disconnect between self and other continues for some time: “Lisidro kept moving his lips at Lisette. She blinked.” Rather than any kind of experience of communication or connection, Lisette only sees a person moving their lips at her. Failing to understand him and not even experiencing him as speaking Lisette rather only perceives him physiologically, observing “his lips moving.” The narrative appears to indicate that she does not understand the implications of moving lips as connected to producing speech.

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The closing lines of the paragraph reveal the most intense disjuncture: “Was that her laughter? Inside it was dark; the contrast with the outdoors made her eyes hurt. She tried to look at Alicia, her polished coconut face” (219). The certainty of the identification of one’s own being, of a continuity between self and expression (never mind the continuity between “idea” and rendering), is lost. When she hears laughter, she cannot be sure if it is she or another who laughs. The question does not concern the precariousness of signification but rather of literal expression (laughter), which she cannot trace back to its origin. The experience reveals a startling incoherence of being and simultaneously an uncertainty regarding the division between self and other. Notably, laughter is the vehicle that disrupts the self/other opposition. As a nonrepresentational and ecstatic event (or an erupting disruption to representation) that cannot be pinned down to an origin, laughter can be aligned with finitude and imperative ethicity. An extension of no-thing and functioning outside of an order of signification, laughter has the potential to expose us to the way in which we are not one and are rather constituted by finitude.13 In other words, it is potentially an event of imperative ethicity. Laughter then denies self-enclosure, the individual (as Nancy outlines the concept), and identity. Appropriately then it is laughter that momentarily erases a border between self and other, radically denying the identity that Lisette had sought. Lisette also experiences a precariousness of cultural and national identity, evident in her anxiety about her Cuban-ness (she had been “vaguely hurt that no one recognized her as Cuban” and “exaggerated the contours of the words so” there would be “no doubt that she was one of them”) and a new ambiguity regarding what “Cuba” means (she longed to return to “the Cuba she could talk about later, the simple stories of the rafters, the plain facts of their sadness,” 213, 221). In addition to the failure of her mother’s house to serve as a point of truth and origin, Lisette experiences Cuba itself as disconnected from her mother’s stories. Inconsistent with her mother’s narration and the “plain facts of their sadness,” the Cuba Lisette experience is complicated and not easily totalized. She directly confronts a different story of Cuba when Matun relates his understanding of the government from which Lisette’s family fled: “You know. The government has been very helpful to us. Yes, very generous with us. They gave us this land when your grandparents left. Every Sunday, me and the wife drive the scooter to Havana and sell guavas and mangoes. We are not poor; we are doing very well,” he said. “Thanks to our government and the grace of God.” (224)

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116 The Ethics of Community Matun’s presentation stands in sharp relief to the Cuba narrated to Lisette by her mother. Lisette reveals early in the story that she believed that she first understood her mother when she literally crawled into Lisette’s room, weeping at the softness of the toilet paper and the poverty of the children in Cuba who had to use whatever they could in its place (206). In contrast, Lisette finds herself faced with Matun indicating that the government has been “good” to them. This does not coincide with “the plain facts of their sadness” and obviously places some nuance into Lisette’s previously held convictions. Lisette’s intensified ontological instability emerges from the clash between, on the one hand, the story of her mother’s house as a foundational absent presence, and on the other, the revelation of her mother’s house as a lie that explodes her beliefs in foundation, presence, and truth. Oddly she had been on more solid terrain before her trip. Although she had only heard stories of the house rather than experiencing it “fi rsthand,” she at least had a founding idea (along with the idea of foundation) upon which to ground her self-understanding. When fi nally reaching the origin she sought, she fi nds “someone else’s imaginings, a different story” thus jolting her into an even more precarious space than she had previously occupied. As the fi nal story of the collection, it is not unreasonable to read “Her Mother’s House” as addressing the many themes of the text as a whole. The temporal, spatial, and linguistic slippages that so frustrate the various characters of the text reach a climax not through the arrival at an ultimate resolution, a long-awaited return to the imagined original Cuba, but rather in irresolution and the impossibility of self- coincidence or identity. Being in time, space, and language simply will not permit it. Facing her mother’s actual house, Lisette experiences the commanding and deferring of sense that Nancy defines as imperative ethicity. Further, Lisette’s attempts to access the house that has so contextualized her life and that she sought as a definitive ground and origin, exposed her to the imperative within/of writing that renders impossible the coincidence she had so fervently sought. The imperative evokes the spacing of difference that belies identity. Thus for Lisette, the finitude that she experiences (that which continually resists her desire for presence or self-coincidence) is an imperative emerging within writing and irrepressibly showing itself when she attempts to bear witness to her experiences of her mother’s house. The finitude that is an imperative for Lisette, which happens in and as writing, is also a spacing that renders identity (precisely that which she has been after in all of its senses— oneness, presence, and cultural/national designation) impossible. These events of being are not derivative but constitutive and the historical experience of exile forces Lisette to confront them.

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Lisette’s confrontation with finitude is unsettling as her life had been organized around a single, unifying, and unified notion of ideality and the fully present and transparent world it speaks. In other words, Lisette was guided by a profound desire for that which she had been taught was desirable: Meaning, Cuban-ness, Home, and so on. However, her journey of recovery to Cuba forces her to confront the impossibility of ideality. She rather finds herself in and as writing, finitude, and imperative ethicity. Who knows what form the experience of interruption would have assumed had she not been overwhelmed with a quest for authenticity, ethnicity’s version of truth. By the end of the story she is able to embrace the locura that is her life, not vis-à-vis logotherapy but locotherapy, an idea to which we shall return.

The Discursively Constituted Real: Reading a World Lisette’s experience of being interrupted is both material (the spatial and sensory disruptions) and metaphorical (she experiences “a different story”) much like the path that Denver traverses to reach womanhood and Nancy and Derrida’s invocation of Nazism. For Lisette, as for the readers tracing her movements, this is an experience in which the division between narrative and real is impossible to discern. Lisette does not solely understand that her mother lied but rather experiences the inevitability of the narrative that she is. Lisette’s situation illustrates that explorations of national and cultural identity can and do prompt larger inquiries and experiences of imperative ethicity and bearing witness and their attendant implications of writing and finitude. The contradiction between her mother’s stories and the house before Lisette is somewhat tenuous as the house is not figured solely as a lie but additionally as “someone else’s story” from “someone else’s imaginings.” In this manner it is identified as a matter of narrative even while it is contextualized by recountable and absolute facts that the realm of “lies” inhabits. Further, given that Lisette “walked into the room, half hearing Matun, not seeing the small rug, the flowered curtain strung across one corner,” perception itself is problematized thus prompting the reader to confront the irrecuperability of the real (which again, would frame the lie) (223). However, the persistent notion that her mother simply “lied” suggests that there is a truth against which the lie is assessed, which in some way reinforces rather than destabilizes a truth. Evidence of the foregrounding of Reality and its Truth is manifest directly following Lisette’s disoriented moments with Matun and Alicia. After her hearing and traditional spatio-temporal sense return and she is capable of speaking with Matun, she considers her situation in a manner that emphasizes the degree to which a firm paradigm involving truth guides her understanding:

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118 The Ethics of Community He stood and walked back to a small room. Alicia and Lisidro stayed behind at the table. Lisette closed her eyes to shut out the truth that sat with its arms crossed in front of her. And what of it! She wanted to shout. So she lied for years. So she lied! If only Lisette could get up now and return to the hotel in Havana, the men dancing on the Malecon, back to the Cuba she could talk about later, the simple stories of the rafters, the plain facts of their sadness. (220–1) Reinforcing the traditional binary of truth and falsity, Lisette seeks a truth upon which she feels stabilized. The truth that sits before her is not in any way yielding and is rather presented in precisely the opposite sense: “Lisette closed her eyes to shut out the truth that sat with its arms crossed in front of her.” She literally does not want to see this plainly presented “truth” (further it is perhaps worth noting that “the truth” is presented as a being that is closed in upon itself). A figure of obstinance, this crossed arm truth leaves little room for questioning and indeed her determination is simply that her mother lied thereby rendering her past false rather than firm. The object of her desire is an absolute ground from which she can move without question and with certainty. The issue that she is contending with here is not the inescapability of narrative but the falsity of her origin. However, in another sense that highlights the complex relation between the discursive and real, the narration turns around presence and absence like a mobius strip. Prior to her visit to Cuba her foundation existed, it was simply absent in her life; the encounter with the house, her attempt to make present this foundational absence, results in the explosion of the absent (narrative) foundation that she sought to experience. Cuba reveals to her the absence of her foundational absence and rather places her within “someone else’s imaginings, a different story.” The tension is palpable. Her mother lied, denying her the truth of her origin, but the truth of the origin is figured as a story or imagining rather than empirically verifiable fact. We can read the tension between the ground of intelligibility (her mother “lied”) and groundlessness of its problematization (she encountered “the house of someone else’s imaginings, a different story” and failed to even see parts of the room) as a simultaneous acknowledgement of the inescapability of the actual, concrete world and the distinction between the inevitability of narrative and pure fabrication, especially when performed for self-serving purposes. In other words, while there is a brute material world in which we all exist, there is a concomitant interpretive mechanism that in another sense constitutes that world. These two manners of considering the world and our place within it are distinct permitting us to differentiate between and

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acknowledge the potential coexistence of willful deception (occurring in the context of “the real world”) and the nuances of perception and understanding (occurring in the narratively constituted world). Laclau and Mouffe name this tension between reality and narration the discursively constituted real, which stresses the dual importance and simultaneity of the presentation (real) and withdrawal (discursive) inherent to signification (a useful perspective in our considerations of the pertinence of finitude, imperative ethicity, and bearing witness to our understandings of “Her Mother’s House”).14 Thinking in terms of the discursively constituted real has the decided advantage of recognizing the importance of and overlap between the material and narrated worlds. Within Laclau and Mouffe’s formulation both are stressed and neither can be thought without the other. Further, if we think of the real as discursively constituted alongside exile, finitude, imperative ethicity, and bearing witness, we get a slightly different slant. (We may need to be reminded that differance also means different from a base that does signify.) Undeniably, a component of that to which we bear witness, that from which we are inevitably separated, is a real world. Laclau and Mouffe’s discursively constituted real and Lisette’s experience of and bearing witness to her mother’s house similarly underscore reality (“she lied”) and productive narration (the house is “a different story”), both of which necessarily imply finitude and bearing witness. The indeterminacy of narrative and the presentation and withdrawal of signification upon which it rests is most pronounced in the comparisons of perspectives (and degrees of “life-satisfaction”) of Matun, Alicia, and Lisidro on the one hand, and Mabella on the other. Mabella’s profound expressions of sadness and empathy for the impoverished citizens of Cuba and the dire conditions and presumed tragic nature of their lives (Cuban children rely on inventive and less than desirable sources for toilet paper) appear to be contradicted given the facts of Matun’s and Alicia’s lives. Certainly they live very modestly by Mabella’s Coral Gables standards (in the small shack upon which her fabrications are based), but they appear neither hungry nor unhappy.15 The fact that they “are doing very well” belies Mabella’s descriptions of tragedy and blight. In contrast, Mabella lives in an extremely comfortable and arguably luxurious Coral Gables home and yet appears nearly perpetually dissatisfied, consumed as she is with the loss of her life in Cuba and empathy for her cursed Cuban brethren. Lisette is thus left digesting the coexistence of a lack of access to material wealth (discussed in dramatic terms by her mother) and satisfaction or happiness (impossibilities given her mother’s descriptions of Cuban life): Matun reveals that life is “good” in the shack while her mother is veritably plagued by an obsession with the loss of an imaginary luxurious home

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120 The Ethics of Community (while simultaneously living in an actual one).16 One might say that not only is the house one of “someone else’s imaginings, a different story” but the Cuba that she encounters with Matun, Alicia, and Lisidro is similarly a different Cuba. What does this disparity reveal? Certainly it is interesting and significant that the real is discursively constituted but it carries an immediate urgency insofar as the stories that we tell affect the ways in which we live our lives, how we understand, approach, and experience our being in and as a part of the world. In other words, imperative ethicity (and bearing witness) is a difference that makes a difference.17 As we already observed, while the concrete world is foregrounded in the lie, the narratives or imaginings that emerge within and from it are stressed simultaneously. The fact that Lisette reveals that she “wishes she could go back to the Cuba that she could talk about later, the simple stories of the rafters, the plain facts of their sadness” indicates something in addition to an emphasis upon a material horizon of being (221). At stake in this quote is a Cuba that Lisette recognizes she will be unable to “talk about later” and one to which she wishes that she could return. Notions of access (talk about) and retrieval (later) are implicitly evoked yet again. The brief quote reveals that “simple stories” and “plain facts” can be retrieved and articulated while the Cuba that she encounters on her visit belies such access. Presumably this Cuba that she experiences is not simple or factual. That to which Lisette would like to return is a fully present world accessible by a fully present subject. Arguably, the easily spoken and retrieved “simple stories” and “plain facts” work neatly and clearly within a logocentric perspective concerning the relationship between being, the world, and language. In this view, as we have seen, a fully present being accesses an already meaningful world which is then nonproblematically accessed and retrieved. Lisette has experienced an ontological rupture that forbids a self-understanding as fully present. Additionally, the multiple disruptions between her mother’s narratives and those of Matun cause a further interruption of a present, unshakable, and fully exterior reality. Lisette appears cognizant of the central role of narrative within her understandings when she indicates that the house she perceives is “the house of someone else’s imaginings, a different story” (219). The easy correlation between a fully present subject experiencing an already (and thus unalterably) meaningful world, and its attendant clarity (which Lisette repeatedly reveals she desires), become impossible. A single and foundational real that she can access and continually recount is recognized as another fiction upon which she has based her life and understanding. The inability to “talk about” this Cuba “later” reveals the profound extent to which Lisette appears to perceive a particular divide, rupture, or interruption between

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experience and signification. Although the impossibility of absolute groundability is recognized, the desire for it remains: “She wishes she could return to the Cuba she could talk about later . . .” Arguably at play here is a conceptual battle between metaphysical conceptions of fully present meanings and more contemporary foregroundings of the productivity of narrative and necessity of bearing witness. At this point in the story, Lisette has been exposed to finitude yet is still pining a loss of transparency. Are we certain that Lisette “could” not “talk about it later?” Should she attempt to articulate “later” her destabilizing experience of Cuba and her house, what might it look like? How could she “talk about” that which appeared to continually evade conceptual capture? How can she discuss her experience and understanding without relying on metaphysical principles of what is real? What happens to experience, understanding, and a corresponding articulation or communication when the ground is revealed to be a construction rather than an absolute?18 We are left with bearing witness. Indeed, the narrative rendering that we are reading is precisely such an attempt. She can only thematize the fact that she cannot “talk about” the Cuba that she is encountering (and indeed she has already revealed that we are reading a past “present thought” of her recollection); or the narrative that we are reading is an attempt to “talk about it later,” which actually thematizes its own impossibility. In this sense the text bears witness in a Derridean sense rather than offering an account of the truth, “simple stories,” and “plain facts.” The textual recognition that being cannot disengage from the historical world, narrative, or temporality signifies that what is possible is bearing witness or a rendering of a singular experience (which itself contains no resemblance to an absolute truth and precisely turns away from factuality). The narrative shifts in temporality reveal that the account of the house is one that is recreated “much later” from memory. As such, the “now” of the imagination (“a present thought”) necessarily comes later than the experience. While experiencing, she recognizes the impossibility of a subsequent retrieval and yet the narrative that we are reading emerges precisely from such a “later” (it is a subsequent retrieval). These two assertions must be held open simultaneously. Lisette both cannot talk about this Cuba (as she could the other of dogmatic assertions in which being, the world, language, and time existed fundamentally separately), and the narrative account that we read is one in which Lisette “talks about” this Cuba. An experience of a temporal and significatory noncoincidence that forbids full presence and its corresponding clarity (that Lisette so desires) is here plainly felt.19 Lisette’s multiple experiences of dis-location force a confrontation with finitude, imperative ethicity, and bearing witness and the precise ways in which they overlap. Exile can be read as a kind of literalization

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122 The Ethics of Community of these constitutive events of being. An interruption that cuts through and denies any and all attempts at sublation and identity, exile exposes being to its constitutive finitude and thus imperative ethicity. Given finitude and imperative ethicity, being can only bear witness or tell a story of itself, an apt description of Lisette’s experience in Cuba. In this sense, the situation of exile strikingly articulates the unavoidable and complicated interplay between the discursive and the real. In some way “Her Mother’s House” is thus a metatext in its bearing witness to bearing witness. The narrative thematizes its own impossibility and accordingly bears witness to the problematic nature of bearing witness. Although a “we must” is not directly present in this story, the inescapability of bearing witness nonetheless speaks. The impossibility of straight intelligibility and Enlightenment notions of truth and factuality implicitly evoke a bearing witness of being that is an ethical imperative. The spacing that emerges in the linguistic or narrative act provides an extension of being that can be read as a kind of metaethics. Rather than a fact of isolation, bearing witness is an event of extension and even expropriation from one to an other. What remains in the place of a false and foundational understanding of a real world is our movement to the other that bears witness to our experiences. This is the point at which our characters seem to stop, providing a first step in a deconstructive understanding but being unable to move out and beyond it in a thematized manner. At stake here is an illustration of the manner in which texts that do not explicitly thematize ethics are still bound within an ethical imperative. Recall Nancy’s proposal that at the heart of non-communing communication is an ethical imperative or imperative ethicity. The degree to which metaethics is at play in any and all linguistic acts becomes manifest as Nancy’s inoperative community and compearance are herein invoked. Recognizing the (absent) presence of a non-thematized ethical imperative assists us in perceiving where and how it occurs as an event regardless of its explicit articulation. Not only is it provocative to examine the various manifestations of a metaethical imperative but further it is an obligation at the heart of narrative and being (and finitude) that demands recognition. The command of finitude that we witness this unheimlich experience draws its power not only from itself but correspondingly from the demand that we reject its opposite, a foundation and metaphysical “immanentism” and its very real and untenable ramifications evinced here in a dogmatic perception of “Cuba.”

Authorship and Bearing Witness Toward the end of the story, as Lisette is cleaning out the house in Coral Gables in preparation for its sale, she finds a letter sent to her

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sometime in an apparently distant past as she cannot recollect receiving it. Typewritten (“as if the sender wanted to remove the last trace of himself”), it is addressed to “L” and closes with an “A.” It is a letter encouraging “L” to write the book she had apparently at one time considered writing about “the Cuban experience”: “L.: So happy you’ve finally decided to write that novel. I think the Cuban experience is a great idea for a book. You have to promise me one thing: You have to make fun of them. There’s no other way to write this. Send me what you have. Love you. Miss you. Can’t wait to see you. A.” The letter was typed, as if the sender wanted to remove the last trace of himself. She couldn’t remember receiving it. Who was A. Had she ever thought of writing a novel? . . .. Had she written the note herself? She sat at her old bed and tried to reach back into the years. She met herself going the other way. Promising she would never write, never publish, never be a special section in the bookstore. Better to write about berms and set-asides, last night’s vote in a small room of microphones and lights. (226–7) Another metatextual moment, the above passage invokes multiple interpretations. Possibly the omniscient narrator has written to the protagonist, Lisette. Or perhaps it is Ana Menendez (indicating both the “A” of author and Ana) who writes the letter referencing “a book on the Cuban experience” thus suggesting that it is Lisette who has ultimately written the text that we are reading. In a traditional perspective, the Author magically and extra-linguistically transports an absolute, objectifiable, and intelligible meaning to the reader. In the letter from A. to L., however, something quite distinct occurs. The author of the text (literally Ana Menendez) encourages a character to write the very narrative that we are reading (thereby challenging a notion that the Author is in complete control of their text, literalizing the suggestion that characters (and readers) repeatedly coauthor the text). Further, the request that L. “send” what she has, suggests that Ana/author does not know what the character in her text might reveal. The traditional trajectory or sequentiality of creation is interrupted. The text reveals understandings and meanings to the author rather than the author standing in full and objectifying control of their text. In other words, the author’s text is not only the author’s text but additionally another text with which they are

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124 The Ethics of Community engaged as a reader. “Love you, miss you, can’t wait to see you” also implies a relationship that exceeds simple creation. Given the palimpsest of being, language, and world, accessing the author and text as independent entities is impossible. In her inability to ascertain the author of the note as well as our inability to find the original text referenced therein (does it refer to the one Lisette writes that is this story, the whole text of In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, the one that we the reader create?), Lisette as author and reader and we the reader (as author and reader) find ourselves in the throes of finitude and imperative ethicity and within the realm of bearing witness. While this experience is certainly unsettling it is nonetheless valuable and important. Here we experience our being as differance, as writing, and we are correspondingly interrupted; we cannot possibly be the same (in both senses of the word). The content of the note further accentuates the ways in which issues of exile and culture are pertinent to those of authorship and textuality. At one point Lisette had considered writing a book about “the Cuban experience,” which we understand from reading this very story in which the letter appears is impossible to access and rather opens into the necessity of bearing witness. One way to write about “the Cuban experience” might be to write about the impossibility of writing about “the Cuban experience,” which is arguably the very text that we are reading (the Cuba of her experience cannot be talked about later). Interestingly the letter also indicates that “You have to make fun of them. There is no other way to write this,” a clear imperative. The degree to which Lisette (and the text at large) makes fun of its characters is debatable but the interruption of straight re-presentation implicit within “making fun” is undeniable as is the observation concerning the impossibility of reflecting a straightforward (not making fun) “Cuban experience.” The discovery of the letter from “A.” is directly followed by the ad that Lisette writes for the paper in which she describes her childhood home that they are trying to sell (revealing that Lisette is letting go of two homes): “Beautiful Coral Gables home, five bedrooms, three baths, vaulted ceilings in the dining room. Balcony with wrought-iron railings overlooking large pool. Entrance flanked by royal palms. She paused and added, “The house of your dreams” (227). Importantly, the final detail (“entrance flanked by royal palms”) is used by her mother to describe the house in Cuba. In a manner similar to the simultaneous conflation and spacing between Ana Menendez, Lisette, and reader or author and text/reader, the “house” referenced in the title “Her Mother’s House” is ambiguous. The house of her mother’s childhood in Cuba is the one with which Mabella is consumed and describes in tremendous detail as opulent and luxurious. Lisette reveals that “she began to remember all of it too” indicating that it assumed a central

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role in the lives of both mother and daughter (207). However, given that Lisette’s visit reveals the degree to which her mother had fabricated the elaborate details of the house, we are left wondering if the house of her mother’s preoccupation is the one in Cuba or the one in which she actually lives in Coral Gables. It appears possible that the later Coral Gables house became superimposed upon the memory of the house in Cuba further underscoring the role of narrative in our lives and the impossibility of disentangling reality and textuality. Indeed throughout the entire narrative we are presented with small details of the Coral Gables house that overlap with the presentation of the house in Cuba. During a dramatic moment in which Lisette’s mother remembers how the soldiers took her house, she tells Lisette that she “walked straight, not turning once to look at the stained-glass windows . . . not even the white columns that climbed to the second floor. And the iron railing on the balcony where the rattan furniture was laid out for company, the clink of glasses. Lisette began to remember all of it too” (206–07). Additionally, Lisette’s father reveals to Lisette that: The first years of their marriage, all her mother did was talk about her lost plantation. Her father told Lisette how she used to lie in bed giving him imaginary tours of the house. The graceful stairway laced with gardenias in the summer, the marble fireplace her father had installed on a whim after visiting the States, the long white-shuttered windows that looked out over the gardens, the mar pacificos, the royal palms. Your grandfather was the only one who could grow roses in Cuba. People came as far as Oriente to see them. (214) Although not thematized as spectacular and presented in small, nearly tangential references, the house in Coral Gables contains a “second floor balcony” to which her father had attached lights that extended “to the roof of the gazebo.” The house Lisette describes is one that bears striking similarities to the one in Cuba for which her mother is “half mad with longing” (206). Just as Lisette is simultaneously a character/text brought forth by Ana Menendez (who can also be read as a character/text) as well as a character/text that speaks independently (and to the author), and in this sense Lisette and Ana Menendez are profoundly connected and yet separate, the houses of her mother, the one in Cuba (of the past) and the one in Coral Gables (of the present), are also oddly intertwined and overlapping. Arguably, Lisette’s mother remembers/creates the house in Cuba according to her present material conditions prompting an intermingling between the two houses that traverses both time and space. Noting a parallel between Mabella’s relationships to the two central houses of

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126 The Ethics of Community her life with the relationship between Lisette and the author of the note is instructive as it calls forth the degree to which textuality is a central element of being, which in turn underscores metaethical possibilities. Lisette ultimately realizes the degree to which the original house she sought is fabricated by her mother and necessarily textual. While apparently not cognizant of the process, Mabella is figured as similarly enveloped in textuality. Her preoccupation with her childhood house and the stories she tells of it become interwoven with the house of her present. The origin figured as house, author, or even as text (suggested in the note) are all impossible to locate as independent entities and rather revealed to be immersed within and a part of the deferral and rupture that is writing. The experience of origin’s impossibility is an experience of finitude that awakens us to the necessity of bearing witness. The inescapability of the constructedness inherent to recollection and iteration (and the attendant exposure to finitude and denial of origin) becomes increasingly visible to Lisette and the narrator who ultimately thematize the impossibility of “talking about it later” and recapturing experience in time and language. Arguably, the exile experience facilitates such recognition as exiles and their offspring are removed in time and space from an imagined and longed for origin. Being’s complete immersion in language and time is certainly not a new consideration. In the case of Lisette and her mother’s house, however, we have occasion to examine the ways in which Nancy’s imperative ethicity and Derridean bearing witness play themselves out in a particular situation of immigration or exile. Recall that according to Nancy there is an radically prior imperative at the heart of discourse or language (within which being inevitably exists). Denying ideality and foundation, imperative ethicity is the spacing within fi nitude that drives any and all narrative. Our existence within it thus places being fi rmly within an imperative. We can only exist as spacing and obligation to the other. Even though neither Lisette nor her mother express any overt obligatory sense, the imperative can nonetheless be located within the opening of a linguistic space that is underscored as an interruption of the continuity to which Lisette and her mother aspire in distinct ways. The Enlightenment notions of truth, presence, and a locatable origin, although fervently sought, are revealed to be impossibilities and in their place lies a recognition of the ruptured (and arguably rapturous) relationship of being to itself, language, and time. It is within the space created by this interruption that being’s movement becomes possible and an imperative highlighted. These observations allow us to perceive new understandings and connections. First, we are permitted a view of the manner in which exile experience lends itself to deconstructive sensibilities. Second, we can locate moments wherein an ethical

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imperative is most saliently present despite its lack of direct articulation. Third, we are able to discuss how and why we might attempt to make these moments more powerful given a belief that they will lead to actual ethical relations.

On the Way to Her Mother’s House It is not only the house as a figure of origin that remains irrecuperable in time and narration but the road that leads to it as well. Indeed the road to her mother’s house is even more inconclusive than the house itself. At least with the house the reader has some orientation regarding truth/falsity (Mabella lied), however, in the case of the road there is only ambiguity. As the means of access to the imagined and ardently desired origin (the house), the road is a significant figure (particularly when we acknowledge that the manner of access contributes to the constitution of the object of perception). Here we can draw a parallel between the way (road) to her mother’s house (origin) and the way (language) to retrieval and articulation of that house that was once considered a longed-for manifestation of presence and truth. The descriptions of the road with which the story begins and ends are nearly identical, however, they bear little resemblance to that within the body of the narrative that reveals (via absence) a different experience of the “road to her mother’s house.” Both the first and final narrations are rendered in the past tense. The first description appears as a recollection brought forth by a third-person omniscient narrator: The road to her mother’s house crossed a wooden bridge into a field of sugarcane that bent green and wide to the horizon before it narrowed into a path flanked on both sides by proud royal palms. It was late afternoon in summer and the men were coming in from the fields, hauling their machetes behind them. They stepped aside with their backs to the palms to let her pass and then stood waiting for the dust to settle, their hats flapping softly in the breeze. Lisette watched the men in the mirror until they retook the road and then her eyes were on the green fields ahead of her . . . (205) In contrast, when Lisette herself is articulating her memory to her family near the close of the story, it is presented as a bizarre unquoted blend of first- and third-person narration. Upon her return from her trip, surrounded by family at a party at her house, Lisette is asked to describe her mother’s house in Cuba: Her parents had thrown a party here after she’d returned from Cuba, all of them healthy and young, the orange trees in blossom,

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128 The Ethics of Community her cousin’s daughters splashing in the pool. She looked up at the house, the palms framed against the sky. What was it like? What was the house like? The children’s laughter like punctuation marks. Only her mother was silent. She sat across from her, her hands in her lap. Lisette followed her gaze. The day was bright, shimmering above the water. Lisette spoke slowly. It was too bad, she began, that the soldier had taken her camera. There was so much to see. The road to the house that crossed a wooden bridge into a field of sugarcane. The narrow path flanked on both sides by royal palms. It was a later afternoon in summer and the men were coming in from the fields, their hats flopping softly in the breeze. (228) In contrast to the above quote, the majority of the body of the text is an account of Lisette’s visit to her mother’s house in Cuba in which “the road to her mother’s house” is not presented as structurally cohesive (as it is disrupted by Lisette’s internal dialogue as well as the simple fact of her being literally lost) making it difficult to piece together a solid description. However, that which the narration does present is inconsistent with the framing narratives (although it does not entirely deny them either). Given that the descriptions repeated in the opening and close of the text are absent in the body rather than contradicted, it appears possible that they might be accurate. “Lisette turned onto the first opening in the field, a bumpy road of loose sand and stone. The men stepped aside to let her pass. The landscape was green and flat but for the hills. She came to the end of the road where it disappeared into a field of sugarcane” (214–15). There is no wooden bridge mentioned on the way to her mother’s house, the men do not resume the road while she continues to drive, and the royal palms dissipate quite early giving way to a dusty and flat landscape. Although these narrations appear inconsistent, it is difficult to definitively assert the impossibility of their coexistence. The text continually frustrates our attempts to achieve narrative cohesiveness and firmly decide what version to believe or what logical account to construct. The identical narration repeated at the start and close of the story could be interpreted as imagined recollections in the opening lines (“she began to remember it all too”) and then a knowingly false memory after the fact in the closing ones (which would render the narration in the body in which the repeated details are absent “true”), or is perhaps simply a repetition of an accurate description of events (that is simply absent from the body of the text). In the latter case, the narration with which the text opens (discussing the “wooden bridge that opens into a field of sugar cane”) is possibly a portion that belongs chronologically in the central body of the story, which is composed of Lisette’s

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experience of her visit to Cuba and her mother’s house. In this case, the identical account presented at the start of the text in third-person narration (but belonging in the body) and the close of the text in Lisette’s own first-/third- person narration would be an honest rendering of her experiences on the way to her mother’s house. Essentially, it would be a portion of the narrative placed “out of place” insofar as it is presented in the first paragraph of the text and absent in the body where it would temporally and thematically belong. Read in this way, there is a consistency between the opening and (nearly) closing narratives of the way to her mother’s house, and there is discontinuity solely in the disruption of the chronology of the narrative. However, at the very least, interpreting the account of the road to her mother’s house presented in the first lines and closing pages as simply “accurate” is vexed, given that in the entire narrative of the trip we are presented with no such view. We cannot be certain of the veracity of the accounts that frame the story as a whole (and indeed we might be prompted to provisionally conclude that the story itself precisely denies a sense of wholeness). In the end, a simple interpretation of narrative displacement feels unsatisfactory; there appears to be a more complex (and unheimlich) event or disruption occurring. One manner of accessing this experience of narrative discontinuity or inconsistency (that in some way refuses access) is to consider it an invitation into disruption; thinking about the text this closely is a call to be interrupted or to experience the finitude about which the story is concerned both thematically and structurally. The narration of the road to her mother’s house demands that the reader think about language (just as the road is the means of access to the house, language is the means of access to the house), which is itself figured as thinking about finitude (the roads in the story fail to correspond to each other just as Cuba and the house fail to correspond to the stories of them). The result of both discontinuities is a certain interruption or experience of finitude. It is equally possible that the opening line of the text involving the description of the “road to her mother’s house” that “crossed a wooden bridge into a field of sugarcane that bent green and wide to the horizon before it narrowed into a path flanked on both sides by proud stands of royal palms” exists solely in Lisette’s imagination (very probably that which was provided to her by her mother which “she began to remember too,” 205–06). In this event, a narrative voice of certainty (a third-person omniscient narrator) presents the reader with two contrasting presentations of the same event, one in the opening and closing and the other in the body. Provocatively, the narration that is more embellished (and thus suspect given the reality of the house in Cuba) is presented twice, once in the opening line of the text and once in the

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130 The Ethics of Community closing pages. The account that differs is presented as absence rather than a directly contradictory story, leaving the reader uncertain as to the actual events. The subtle discontinuity in content and the narrative voice in which it is presented (two in third and one in first/third), combined with the nonlinear presentation result in a performative groundlessness that further undermines the possibility of a discernment (for reader and protagonist) of “what actually happened.” This interruption between experience, retrieval, and presentation so exquisitely thematized in the story lead directly to meditations upon the possibilities of bearing witness, an issue not lost upon Lisette. Her recognition that she cannot return to “the Cuba that she could talk about later” reveals that she has come to an understanding of the impossibility of a fully intelligible world and its nonproblematic rendering. Indeed when faced with the necessity of recounting her visit to her family, and particularly her mother, she perpetuates her mother’s fabrications, perhaps revealing an understanding of the impossibilities of having her experiences accurately imparted to those around her. We may be tempted to conclude that the account of “the road to her mother’s house” offered at the close of the text is a fabrication as it is presented in the context of the continuation of her mother’s lies. The description of the road is thus guilty by association to the description of the house itself. As such, we remain dis-believing of the entirety of the first-/third-person narration that closes the text. We might thus determine that the third-person narration is reliable while the first or first/ third is not (consistent with a traditional approach in which objectivity is only possible from an impartial and removed narrator). In this case the third-person narration of the body of the text in which the details of the final version are absent is the most reliable. An understanding of the actual/fabricated narrative is therein constructed. However, this conclusion is denied by the two noncoinciding third-person accounts (one in the opening lines and one in the body). Should we believe the narration in the body of the text (which may appear reasonable given that this is the portion of text that unveils falsities), then we must assert that the opening lines, also in third-person narration, are (likely) false. Since almost the entire text is presented in third-person omniscient narration, in the event of its established falsity, is not the text as a whole called into question? The more we attempt to arrive at some sort of clear narrative voice and reliable presentation, the more the text frustrates us indicating the groundless character of being in/and narrative that the text both thematizes and performs. How else might we read the odd blend of third- and first-person narration alongside the narrative displacement and descriptive inconsistencies of “the road to her mother’s house?” The text itself presents us with a possible approach: “The house, the idea of her mother’s house

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there in the shadow, is a present thought in this retelling, the way she described it to herself much later” (218). We have already addressed the numerous disruptions of this singular meta-observation of the text that reveals the complexity of temporality and narrative in any retelling (and by implication, the corresponding unreliability). Contextualized by the preceding quote (as well as Lisette’s observation that she will not be able to “return to the Cuba she could talk about later”), the blending of first- and third-person narrations once again evinces the impossibility of certainty and foundation within narrative. This is a story about far more than the truth or falsity of her mother’s stories and rather much more profoundly performs the perpetual movement and slippage of being, time, and narration. Arrival at a ground or origin, that which Lisette so desperately sought, is revealed to be radically and provocatively unattainable. Might the bizarre juxtaposition of first- and third-person narration (occurring in a dual and overlapping manner much like the relationship between being and language itself) illustrate a manner in which all narration occurs in some way in the third person as well as the first, neither of which are strictly speaking, mine? Refusing to be traced back to a solid or foundational “I” of experience, being in time and language can only continue to tell a story of itself and the text is inevitably a performance of these events (which is itself an irrepressibly activated imperative ethicity and bearing witness). What rendering of an experience can escape the inevitability of existing as a narrative? Although it is an “I” who speaks, it is one who invariably emerges from and within a linguistic, temporal, and material context that refuses both origin and arrival and is therein composed of finitude.20 In this sense language is simultaneously mine and not mine or as Derrida articulates “I only have one language; it is not mine” (Derrida, “Language Is Never Owned,” Sovereignties, 104). Lisette thus finds herself (and correspondingly, we the reader find ourselves in the narrative) in a position of continual slippage and interruption that the narrative underscores in various ways, revealing a denial of cohesiveness in and of being, time, language, and world. It is perhaps no accident that the displaced narrative of the visit to Cuba and her mother’s house does not concern the house itself, but the way to it. It is not only the object of recuperation (the house) that belies capture but additionally the literal (and figurative) road to retrieval (language) is unattainable and the two are, in the end, the same. In other words, since an experience can only be accessed and “retold” linguistically, it is bound (and arguably liberated) by and within its medium. We have addressed the bizarre relationship between the first- and third-person narrations of the line concerning “the road to her mother’s house” as well as the inconsistency between the repeated line and

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132 The Ethics of Community the main body of the narration of the visit. However, we have yet to unravel the structural issue of the displacement of the narrative specifically in terms of its opening of the story. The thematic and chronological displacement of the first paragraph of the story indicates that cohesiveness is already challenged. The idea of a whole, clear, and intelligible narrative account is structurally dispelled from the first lines of the text. Although Lisette reveals that she wants a “truth to darken” her past, the narrative has already denounced the possibility of this arrival in the multiply ambiguous first lines, which themselves challenge the very notions that would make a defi nitive truth a possibility in the first place (the strict separation between being, language, and world forbidden by the strange relationship between the first- and third-person narrations of this same line as well as by the inconsistency of this line with the central narrative of the visit to her mother’s house). In other words, despite Lisette’s explicit desire (or rather, even in her desires given the nature of desire itself) for origin and foundation, the text has recognized its impossibility from the beginning (as bearing witness inevitably does). Desire for origin is thus in some sense an oxymoron. Language, narrative, or story is both the context out of which being fundamentally emerges and simultaneously the manner in which being can be an issue for itself (à la Heideggerian Dasein). Language is both (groundless) ground and the vehicle through and in which being can bear witness to an other. Indeed we saw in Chapter 1 how both imperative ethicity and bearing witness occur in language and being as obligation and promise to the other. When Lisette journeyed to Cuba she sought a firm and uncontestable origin but rather encountered a plethora of narrative and ontological interruptions that forbade any such cohesiveness, beginning, or clarity. A close reading of the text reveals that the lines that divide being from language and time are blurred throughout the story. Lisette can no more reach a central ground and origin of her life, experience, and narrative any more than the reader can of its rendering, which, in the end, amounts to the same thing. The experience of the reader who attempts to find the center, or place from which the various convolutions emerge, is frustrated and we find ourselves circling, repeating, and rewording in a vain attempt to arrive. Like Lisette, we must continually engage in a coming closer, an “on the way to” (road or story of) this unheimlich relationship between experience and its articulation (or Derridean bearing witness), which is to say, between experience and language and the extra-discursive event of their overlapping. The attempt to articulate the many intersecting ways in which there is a “road to her mother’s house” brings forth the non-recuperable events that are Nancian imperative ethicity and bearing witness,

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which is arguably what is at stake in this story. Given that it is the road to her mother’s house that highlights inconsistency (with the larger narrative), interruption (in its displacement), and groundlessness (in the confounding of being’s third- and first-person narration), it is not only the object of recuperation that evades our grasp, but the vehicle through which we reach for recovery, namely, language in time. The metanarrative that interrupts the otherwise straightforward representation of the events of the visit thematize these problematic elements of recuperation very plainly: “The house, the idea of her mother’s house there in the shadow, is a present thought in this retelling, the way she described it to herself much later” (218). Nancian imperative ethicity and Derridean bearing witness come directly into play when we pursuit an articulation of the relationships between the various roads to her mother’s house. As a vehicle of access, language is the road to her mother’s house and ultimately, the vehicle and the house itself become inseparable and indistinguishable (much like the event of being). Her language, articulation, and memory of the house become constitutive elements of the house itself. Another perhaps more instructive manner of accessing this complex process is that the way that Lisette can “arrive” at her mother’s house is in language and time and given the already outlined inconsistent, disruptive, and groundless character of this way or road that is language, we know that Lisette will never arrive. The road or the “way to” the object of perception and recuperation is all there is and can both encompass and transcend the dichotomy between vehicle and object. Interestingly, despite her desire for arrival at a truth or origin, Lisette simultaneously reveals that there is something preferable and more satisfying in the journey: “The air was still, the thin white clouds high in the sky, and Lisette thought again how much she preferred the journey to the destination . . . She felt it now, comfortable in her stride, accustomed to the silence, not caring anymore where the road ended” (217). As path (which we addressed in Chapter 3), a road is indicative of movement and motion toward rather than arrival. The previous passage reflects a manner in which Lisette highlights a visceral enjoyment in the motion above and beyond the destination.

Another Step Back: The Map Twice removed from Lisette’s mother’s house is the map of the road that leads there. Before Lisette’s departure to Cuba her mother begrudgingly gives her a map to guide her. Lisette finds that the map is instructive in Havana (although the street names have changed), however, as she journeys to the countryside to locate the house, she becomes lost, the map apparently ceasing to serve its purpose. Eventually, Lisette is forced to ask for directions in order to orient herself and ultimately reach her

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134 The Ethics of Community destination. Upon encountering the young man from whom she solicits information, we find that the map is read in various manners: A man approached on horseback, growing in relation to the hills with every step. She pulled to the side of the road and examined her mother’s map. On the lower right hand side, her mother had painted a large box and labeled it simply, M. Lisette looked outside at the expanse of palms and orange trees. Her mother and her cryptics. She was probably afraid that Lisette would be stopped with an incriminating document . . . The man got closer, filling up more and more of the sky, until he was upon her and Lisette sat waving her soft map like a small flag. The man took off his hat and nodded, as if unsure he would be understood. It had happened to her in Havana and Lisette had been vaguely hurt that no one recognized her as Cuban. “Buenas tardes.” Lisette said, exaggerating the contours of the words so the man would no doubt she was one of them. He smiled. “En que la puedo ayudar?” Lisette showed him the map and pointed at the road that was supposed to lead to her mother’s house. She pointed to the block in the right-hand corner, where the road branched to the right. She looked up. “Militar,” the man said and shrugged as if something struck him as silly. The notion of a military base in the middle of the campo? Her mother’s precautions? He took the map and studied it. Then he turned it upside down and nodded, smiling, to point here she was. If she continued this way past the small cane refinery and turned right on the first main road, she would pass the military instillation on her right. Then if she took the first left, she should get to where she wanted to go. (212–13) A provocative sign for readership and orientation, a map is literally that which is defined by its ability to tell us which road to take in order to arrive at a particular destination. Given our cognizance of the manners in which ontological and narrative arrival are precisely forbidden for Lisette (even as she reaches her destination), the map’s various possible significations and denial of ultimate and absolute readability comes as no surprise. The subtext of national and cultural identity so consistently present throughout In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd and “Her Mother’s House” (and much literature of exile) inserts itself directly as Lisette

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“sat waving her soft map like a small flag” (213). As an obvious symbol of a nation-state that is most frequently invoked in view of an achieved (generally unexamined) national identity and a corresponding pride (necessarily unexamined) to which Lisette appeared to aspire or already possess, a flag is a provocative simile. The map/flag is both a literal guide to her mother’s house and a metaphorical path to her perceived and desired ground for identity or imagined “Cuban-ness.” Indeed directly following the image that conceives of the map as a flag, we are presented with several lines that illustrate Lisette’s desire for recognition as Cuban and the subsequent “hurt” in its absence: “It had happened to her in Havana and Lisette had been vaguely hurt that no one recognized her as Cuban” (212–13). Further she clearly conceives of a Cuban-ness in terms of an “us” (although the narrator does not, using a “them” for Cubans) insofar as she accentuates “the contours of the words so the man would have no doubt she was one of them” (213). Lisette’s desire to absolutely ground her identity in an imagined, fully present and immanently meaningful “Cuba” (and thus making it possible for her to achieve “Cuban-ness”) is amply evident in these lines. The truth of her past that she had been seeking is revealed to be a national past complete with a fixed and unshakable Cuban identity. The likening of the map to a flag concretizes (albeit through simile) the complicity of Enlightenment organizing principles, nationalism, and its corresponding identity politics. These structures of thought are restrictive and damaging to Lisette and their constructed nature are ultimately perceived in Lisette’s ontologically disruptive experiences at her mother’s house. In addition to evoking nationality, the flag appears to Lisette as a direct representation of “her mother’s cryptics.” Unable to ascertain the meaning of the “M” in the box drawn on the map, Lisette assumes that her mother is being intentionally obtuse in an effort to “throw off” potential harassers who might determine that the map is “an incriminating document” (212). That which Lisette interprets as “cryptic” we later learn is an accurate signifier of “Militar,” a point of orientation on the road to her mother’s house. Reading and misreading is plainly foregrounded in this sequence. Lisette believes that her mother aspires to being unreadable when in fact it is Lisette who misreads both the map and her mother given that the “M” actually does signify in straight representational fashion. Or does it? The man from whom Lisette received directions appears to immediately recognize the “M” as indicative of “Militar” as he responds accordingly when Lisette “pointed to the block in the right hand corner, where the road branched to the right. She looked up. ‘Militar,’ the man said and shrugged as if something struck him as silly” (213). However, in order to understand or “make sense” of the map as a whole, he must

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136 The Ethics of Community turn it upside down at which point it becomes readable to him: “He took the map and studied it. Then he turned it upside down and nodded, smiling, to point where she was” (213). If inverted, however, the “M” that so neatly signified “Militar” morphs into a “W.” The intelligible or readable map thus fails to signify the orienting “M” that would guide Lisette to her mother’s house. Subverting totalizing signification, the noncoincidental intelligibility of the “M” and the map as a whole further thematize the problematics of representation. Ultimately we are left uncertain regarding the explanation for the inconsistency of the “M” with the larger indications of the map. Whether Mabella intentionally sought to mislead Lisette or simply recollected erroneously is impossible to discern leaving the reader in a nonconclusive space yet again.21 We are guided back to our overarching concerns of ethics and community when we conceive of the house as that toward which we have been and are in this story. In other words, as a meta-story about a (repeatedly) recollected house and how to arrive at a retelling (“the road to her mother’s house”), the house is not only that toward which the narrative continually moves but additionally the object that denies Lisette’s and the reader’s arrival. It is the house that indicates to us that experience evades recovery and possession. Lisette is left in the realm of a Derridean bearing witness where she recognizes the impossibility of a full rendering of her encounter with the house. With that recognition comes the attendant understanding of the impossibility of “plain facts” and “simple truths” and the ability to “talk about it later” to which she wishes to return. Curiously, the house is in some way an emblem of Heidegger’s metaphor for language as the “house of being” from which Lisette can apparently see no redeeming qualities. Is there any sense in which Lisette’s continuation of her mother’s lies about the house evokes Derridean bearing witness? If read carefully, we can discern a nearly confrontational tone in Lisette’s retelling of her encounter with the house, which speaks an interesting dynamic: She looked at her mother. Watched her hands turn in her lap. “Everything was the same” Lisette said after a moment. “The stairway, the balconies. Even the marble fireplace. Somehow, it all made it through the revolution.” She faced her mother. Held her chin her hands. (228) Looking pointedly at her mother as she tells the story, Lisette and her mother become curiously joined in the lie. A profound moment of connection is borne from the known disjuncture between narration and reality conspiratorially linking the two as they alone share the secret. Simultaneously, she confronts her mother with her lies by not telling

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the truth in a manner that is perhaps more profound than if she were to out the secret. “You know that I know and I know that you know that I know” is an unspoken yet powerful movement between Lisette and her mother. Additionally, it could be viewed as a challenge to her mother to tell the truth. Here, a false rendering reinforces the possible veracity and potential integrity of an experience that is inherent to bearing witness. If the power of bearing witness lies in the “you have to believe me” implicit therein, subverting its central element simply reinforces the absent presentation that has been knowingly denied. As such, the continuation of the lie functions to make more intense the bearing witness of Lisette’s experience of the house.

Locotherapy: Spanish and/or English The narrative present revealed in the final pages indicates the changes in Lisette’s life sometime following her visit to Cuba: She was an editor at the paper now, had her own office overlooking the bay. She was a little in love with a German psychologist who loved her back. In the evenings they had long conversations about the will and happiness. On Sundays they had some people from his practice for lunch and she put out her good crystal and the leather-bound Rilke . . .When, alone with him, the people gone home, she would complain of despair, her sick parents, he would hold her face and tenderly ask, “Why do you not kill yourself?” It was an old joke with them. And Lisette always laughed. Logotherapy, he called it the first time. And she’d understood loco therapy. There is meaning in this, he insisted. And he waved his arms meaning everything. “Yes,” she’d say, “it’s all loco.” (225) A pivotal tension of the story, that between groundedness, full presence, intelligibility, and “identity” (or logocentrism) and the spaces that emerge within and from being’s noncoincidental entanglement with experience, narrative, and temporality (imperative ethicity or bearing witness) are addressed in this simple situation of misunderstanding (an apropos event for articulating the distinction between the above and tracing Lisette’s conceptual shifts). Her journey to Cuba was an attempt to finally and fully ground her identity in a single and recuperable origin, which itself relied on logocentric principles. However, the various ontological interruptions coexistent with her recognition of the twin foils of narrative and temporality to coincidental being sparked a perceptual shift that ultimately thematized itself, speaking the impossibility of full presence of being or/in world. Arguably, Lisette’s conceptual and perceptual shifts and error (the misunderstanding) emerge from her experience in Cuba (with and as narration

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138 The Ethics of Community or writing or imperative ethicity), which in some manner surpassed the realm of reason and truth. An understanding that her own experiences as well as her ability to recount them escaped her grasp (she could not “have” them) revealed the limits and failure of reason, which she viscerally felt as ontological disruption. While at one time “logos” appeared to be the central principle implicitly orienting her conceptions, her trip to Cuba instigated a reorientation, which in the above passage is identified as a belief in the significance of “loco.” Rather than an orderly and deliberate reason governing the universe à la a Greco-European philosophical tradition, Lisette understands that the “meaning in all this” is not exactly a meaning at all and rather stands in direct contrast to it: it is crazy. Denied the truth and origin that she sought on her trip to Cuba and her mother’s house, and cognizant of the impossibility of transparency in narration, Lisette concludes that the only meaning is “loco” or a meaning that fails to mean (Nancian meaningless meaning). Provocatively, it is in a misunderstanding of the ultimately loaded Greek term for a powerful (and playful) Spanish one that she arrives at this directly thematized insight. Lisette literally does not hear or misunderstood the metaphysical term par excellence and instead perceives in Spanish, thereby lead with/in and by Spanish to a subversion of logos and all of its implications. A close examination of the odd juxtaposition of Spanish and English that contextualizes Lisette’s experience in Cuba reveals a provocative movement. Aside from the few words presented directly in Spanish, all of the exchanges appear to be translated. Why are dialogues that almost certainly occurred in Spanish translated to English? Do the translations result from the narrative existing as “a present thought in this retelling,” which for Lisette occurs in English? And last, how might we read the directly translated lines (the lines awkwardly presented in English since they are direct translations)?22 The words rendered in Spanish almost solely signify either some element of hospitality as in “hello” and “thank you” or that which indicates a connection to others such as “La hija de Mabi” (Mabi’s daughter) and “igualita” (identical) indicating the relation and resemblance between Lisette and her mother Mabella. Given that this presentation is a retelling, it might be reasonable to assert that the terms in which she remembers/thinks in Spanish are precisely these terms of hospitality and family connection (since Spanish is the language of her parents and heritage). She is the daughter of Mabi (in Spanish), she looks just like her mom (in Spanish), and her grandparents died in Venezuela (in Spanish). These are the terms in which these simple relations with the other are recollected and thus presented. The hospitable and connecting words rendered in Spanish simply indicate that for her Spanish is the language of these events, which are in some way

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outside of the logos that her German boyfriend believes can heal her and give her back the meaning that she has lost. However, Lisette’s mis-hearing in Spanish reveals that for her this notion is not reasonable but rather crazy. In contrast, when referencing that she is tired from her trip, would not like a tour of the house, and has a lot of work to do, there is an odd translation into English that is clearly a direct translation from Spanish. “Tengo mucho trabajo” is literally and awkwardly translated into “I have much work.” Additionally, and even more interestingly, “Estoy demasiado cansada por el viaje” is again directly and thus strangely translated to “I am enough tired from the trip.” In English, this phrase barely works as a sentence. Here, she is plainly thinking both in English and Spanish, arriving at a strange juxtaposition between the two that is neither Spanglish nor an accurate English translation, perhaps indicating an eerie space between languages and cultures. Given these observations it becomes apparent that “Her Mother’s House” is a text that is at least partly in English in/and Spanish. It is not simply translated or dubbed as the original is in Spanish in/ and English thereby problematizing the concept of locatable origin. As we have seen, the text is preoccupied by a simultaneous desire for and refusal of a static temporal and linguistic origin that is repeatedly revealed to be a slippery and unfixable narrative. The original is thus not original. The implicit and explicit juxtaposition of Spanish and English is a structural thematization of the lack of origin in language. Not only is there no origin to the story or stories (that of Lisette and “Her Mother’s House”) and not only is language by nature multiple, diffuse, and productive, but literally the juxtaposition and at times superimposition of Spanish and English underscores this complex process. The third-person omniscient narrator vacillates between translating, failing to translate, and translating badly leaving the reader with a trace of a gesture toward what would have ostensibly been “the original,” which is itself (not) presented (as it is conspicuously absent); further, the reader is rather presented with a translation that is not quite a translation as it is the original of the text. The “original” is thus neither present nor absent and both. Our analysis in this chapter has complicated notions of language and home. While we can certainly appreciate Perez-Firmat’s assertion that “If the voyage of cultural recovery has to be undertaken in English, the loss is irreparable” we must also recognize the inherent complications of “cultural recovery” evinced in the many layers of Lisette’s journey to Cuba upon which she embarked with precisely this goal (Perez-Firmat 1989, 139). Recovery, home, and language themselves signify indeterminately as we witnessed in the preceding exploration. Lisette’s quest to unearth her Cuban-ness failed not because she

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140 The Ethics of Community had been geographically removed from her parents’ place of birth and engaged the retelling in Spanish and English, but more pointedly as a result of the undeniable and powerful refusal of full presence or meaning (that which is sought in the recovery) of “Cuban-ness,” which itself indicates no-thing (which is distinct from a claim that it is nothing).23 The refusal of origin, full presence, and identity are almost necessarily brought to the fore in the context of the 1.5 generation of which Lisette is a member. With two foreign parents, growing up in Miami, her identity and culture are neither American nor Cuban. Complicating a strict notion of culture and identity as pure or authentic, Lisette’s experience is not uncommon in its multiplicity. She is (as we all are) both and neither. The language of a blended Spanish and English is her language and thus the very notion of a “home” language is already directly problematized. While Ana Menendez’ “Her Mother’s House” appears to function as though the central revelatory movements proceed from a belief and desire for a truth to a recognition of its impossibility, it additionally performs a Nancian non-meaningful meaning of the act of telling a story, bearing witness, or narration itself (imperative ethicity). In other words, the text plays out but is not self-reflexive concerning the nonsignificatory significance of the telling. In this sense, it activates while not thematizing the “sacred stripped of the sacred” that is a central component of bearing witness, Nancian community, and imperative ethicity. It is not truth that lies beneath but inevitably escapes our grasp but rather narrative or rendering (or bearing witness), and it is this final step that is thematically absent from the text. “Her Mother’s House” stresses Lisette’s craving for self-presence and certainty and simultaneously reveals the extent to which this truth that it craves is a construct (which we have been discussing throughout the chapter), but importantly it additionally performs that what is present as a non-presence (in being, time, and language and their interlacing) is the meaningless meaning in narrative imperative ethicity. The text knows this but does not know that it knows. Thus while it highlights its desire for presence, on another level it speaks the extra-discursive power of the telling. “Her Mother’s House” is a story that thematizes its protagonists’ desire for origin as something that “she could barely explain to herself” (210). However Lisette and the text seem to move in opposite directions regarding their relation to the desire for origin and recognition of its impossibility. While Lisette can barely explain to herself her desperate search for origin and truth, the text barely explains to itself that there is something other in desire, in ontological and narrative slippage, noncoincidence, and a pointed rejection of foundational thinking. It offers these alternatives but fails to recognize them as it does so explicitly with their opposite. The reverse order of Lisette and the texts’

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relationship to a desire for truth and origin lies in the fact that Lisette barely understands her desire for truth and origin and the text barely understands desire, that is, its desire for the opposite.

Conclusion Perhaps one of the the many things that Ana Menendez’ In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd illustrates is that the eruption of finitude or the ethical event of community is not necessarily joyous or even comfortable. It may not “cleanse” or feel “good” as it did at times in Beloved. Indeed by definition an eruption is in some manner unsettling so we should perhaps not expect to be happily transformed. But it transforms nonetheless. Both Maximo and Lisette are changed by the close of their stories and approach their world differently in the context of an activation of community, finitude, and bearing witness. If we consider these differences as evoking more open and less appropriative relationships to themselves, others, and the world, and in some way “getting” their inseparable nature, then that is enough. But we cannot help but wonder if the melancholia so potent throughout both stories (and the text as a whole) stems also from an unexamined belief that we are ultimately supposed to truly know ourselves and our world vis-à-vis some magical experience of certainty, clear understanding, and an experience of ontological appropriation (one that we have seen speaks a logic of death). Although such full presence and ideality can only annihilate, it often seductively appears to us as arrival and safety, as it did for Maximo and Lisette (in a figure of Cuba as lost home). Possibly, the sorrow emerges in some part from these metaphysical vestiges that prioritize presence and truth and the value it allegedly speaks. What happens though, if we shift grounds and understand truth and home differently? Or better yet, what if we embrace or lean into groundlessness and the finitude and community that constitutes us? According to Nancy, if we cannot even undertake this task, not only do we lose our ownmost death, but we do not even manage to constitute a world.24

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Conclusion

Must we ask the question of community? As we have seen, Nancy and Derrida submit that we cannot avoid the rupture that is being itself. Our analysis of imperative ethicity, finitude, writing, community, bearing witness, and carrying the other underscore the inevitability of these events. Further, the disruptive quality that they all share necessarily contains ethical implications. In a nutshell, as being we are toward the other, irrevocably obligated and accountable to in a fundamental yet unidentifiable manner. Escaping our discursive conceptualization, deconstructive ethics speaks something “other” of which we are a part and yet cannot name. Thus whether or not we are accountable is no longer the issue; rather we must consider the degree to which this accountability is visible and manifest in the material world. Cognizant though we are of the problematic elements of a dichotomous thinking of theory and praxis, concept and experience, and the abstract and concrete realms, we can nonetheless retain the propulsion of our inquiry by cautiously invoking them. In other words, we can be vigilant against a reductive and simplistic oppositional framework (that denies the complexity of and radical interdependence and indeterminacy of the above binaries) while simultaneously considering the degree to which deconstructive ethics does or does not play itself out in the material world. Curiously, we began with Nancy and Derrida whose treatment of the concentration camp and Shoah in general (the “concrete” realm) inform their discussions in crucial and significant ways. Indeed Derrida’s reading of Celan’s bearing witness to bearing witness in “Rams” invokes a consideration of an experience of the concentration camp and the im/possibility (and simultaneous inevitability) of a corresponding telling.1 Any attempt at rendering an experience (or bearing witness) confronts us with the impossibility of being coincidental to the narrative (and experience) within which we exist (which we witnessed poignantly in Chapter 4). Even within this brief discussion, the overlapping of the binaries (abstract/concrete) is already visible. In an effort to explore the pertinence of deconstructive ethics to our “actual” lives we turned to Morrison’s Beloved and Menendez’ In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd. We look to these particular texts in an effort to

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illustrate a tremendous and provocative relation between deconstructive ethics and predominant cultural issues of African American and US Latino Literature. While the typically engaged literary works of Holderlin, Rilke, Rimbaud, Mallarme, Baudelaire, Emerson, Beckett, Keats, Coleridge, or Genet certainly provide exciting interpretive opportunities and are exceptionally “writerly” texts, others that have not occupied a “power position” in the field are as well. With a few notable exceptions the dominant voices in contemporary, continentally driven theoretical discourse still mainly explore “literary” “textuality” with and within the thinking of European white male authors.2 While it may strike us as odd to invoke such loaded and clearly linguistically/ culturally inscribed terminology (as though “male” and “female,” “European,” and “white” actually and definitively signify), we must consider the important ways in which they continue to “speak” and, more crucially, exert power. In other words, regardless of the sophistication of our understandings of these terms (and perhaps because they are not generally perceived in such a manner) they are continually and significantly pertinent to our world. In order to interpret the ways in which they participate in violence, we must address them while remaining vigilant against reinscription. In this context a consideration of the general lack of attention in the continental philosophical realm allotted to African American and US Latino Literature is significant; we must at least entertain the possibility that unexamined mechanisms of power are still imperceivably at work.3 Beyond a desire to address an absence of attention that may result from a stubborn and veiled power structure, within our analysis we have illustrated that overlapping narratives are capable of piercing through totalizing ones, revealing the inevitable (and interrupted) inscription that is being. Such recontextualizations are thus particularly adept at cultivating a deconstructively ethical scene. While we are aware that these narrative overlappings are always-already occurring and we emerge as “subjects” within them, actively recontextualizing our understandings/narratives is a manner in which we can actually promote a context of interruption which necessarily forbids a reductive and violent promulgation of a single, cohesive, and often oppressive one. Resituating ourselves by deciding to juxtapose narrative forms can shock us out of the habit of sitting comfortably and complacently within a dominant and unrecognized master narrative. Additionally, we can actively foster recontextualizations that bring to the fore ontological gaps and therein we can exert certain degree of agency. Given our explorations of both Beloved and In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd we may submit that US American texts (and any texts contextualized by immigration or displacement) are often primed for

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144 The Ethics of Community this subversion of a dominant narrative as they are frequently already framed by a cognizance of ontological and narrative rupture.4 The house is a particularly appropriate metaphor from which to situate a discussion concerning the benefit of cultural recontextualizations. Morrison and Menendez both address the importance of considering the notion of a “house” in significant and distinct ways. Stamp Paid’s breakdown of the implicit barriers of a house (at once consistent with a notion of deconstructive ethics in its evocation of an always-already welcome door and simultaneously engaging in a reinscription of the walls it inevitably invokes) resituates our thinking of “housing” by underscoring an ethical metaphor of hospitality oddly couched within a narrative of exchange. Furthermore, Lisette’s profound experience of ontological rupture and ultimate liberation from a confined notion of house and home as unimpeachable origin, permits a re-encounter with dominant cultural significations of placement (particularly within a context of immigration and exile). Attempting to locate her absolute origin and identity (itself contextualized by an essentializing and metaphysical notion of “Cuban-ness”), she instead encountered profound ontological and narrative disruption in an experience of being as narrative. Such reconceptualizations continually provide us with possibilities of reinscription that can ultimately prompt meaninglessly meaningful interruptions as we have come to understand them. Although we cannot make a work or project out of community or finitude (since such activation is tantamount to identification and totalization, which negates the event of community), we can encourage those “scenes” in which being is interrupted and community can possibly flourish. Here, the agency of a being who cares to create a context for a deconstructive subjectivity becomes possible. Since discourse is necessarily difference or differance, both the material and ontological realms are fundamentally constituted by difference, that is, fundamentally cannot exist as fundamentals. One way we can think about ontology, history, and discourse is to think that there is an extra-discursive imperative that is always-already at play in all of these realms. Far from claiming purity, unity, or authenticity, this extra-discursive imperative is the spacing of finitude that forbids any and all notions of identity. If we can hear, feel, or understand the ethical imperative, then we can experience our place in and responsibility for the world differently. According to Nancy and Derrida, as well as Morrison and Menendez, the imperative erupts, cuts through, insists on showing itself. If it is so perceived then things change, we are different. As such, our engagements with ourselves, others, and the world cannot help but change as well.

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Notes

Introduction 1. I have elected to use the word “community” rather than singular-plurality in spite of the fact that the latter is Nancy’s preferred term in his second and third monographs on being-with, Being Singular Plural and The Creation of the World or Globalization. Although singular-plurality is more precise in its departure from any connotation of “communion,” “community” has the decided advantage of accessibility. Furthermore, as the first of his three texts on the constitutive and radical sociality of being, The Inoperative Community lays the theoretical groundwork for the following texts. The two terms are, however, interchangeable. 2. See pages 283–4 in Stuart Hall’s “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies.” Additionally, Laclau and Mouffe’s proposition that the “real world” is simultaneously “real” and discursively constituted has been central to the evolution of cultural studies discourse. 3. See Douglas Kellner’s “Media Spectacle and the 2008 Presidential Election” and Michael D. Gardinia and Joshua I. Newman’s “NASCAR and the ‘Southernization’ of America.” 4. Christopher Peterson’s Kindred Specters and Sam Durrant’s Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning provocatively treat Beloved alongside a Derridean (and Freudian in the case of the latter) perspective of mourning. However, neither text examines Derridean bearing witness or Nancian community. Hillis Miller’s “Boundaries in Beloved” is informed by Derridean thought. In a broader sense, Lisa Sanchez-Gonzalez’ Boricua Literature is infused with post-structural sensibilities at large. 5. Critchley, Caputo, Wood, and Lawlor indicate distinct manners of thinking ethics and deconstruction. Critchley’s work is straightforwardly ethico-politically driven; Caputo’s explorations are theologically contextualized; Wood and Lawlor explore intersections between phenomenology, contemporary French philosophy, and considerations of ethics. See Critchley’s The Ethics of Deconstruction and Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity; Caputo’s Against Ethics and edited volume Questioning God; Wood’s Ethics and Politics after Deconstruction; and Lawlor’s An essay on Animality and Human Nature in Derrida to name a few.

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6. Simon Critchley plainly indicates his alignment with a cultural studies project in an interview with Paul Bowman published in Interrogating Cultural Studies. See also J. Hillis Miller’s “Crossroads of Philosophy and Cultural Studies.” Hillis Miller contends that “cultural studies has often, more or less deliberately, forgotten all about Western philosophy” and “can always say ‘Plato or Aristotle; Descartes, Kant, or Hegel; Wittgenstein, Husserl, or Heidegger; Austin or MerleauPonty are not relevant to what I am trying to do. In any case, I am too busy mastering fi lm noir, or popular music, or fashion magazines, or whatever, to have time for philosophy’ ” (3–4). In spite of his explicit desire to see a more energized relationship between cultural studies and philosophy, Hillis Miller’s derisive attitude concerning the cultural studies orientation toward “pop” culture is appears undeniable. Both Critchley and Hillis Miller indicate a need for cultural studies to engage philosophy with more verve and commitment, yet fail to note the often explicit intersections that do exist. In fairness, both Critchley and Hillis Miller reveal with equal emphasis the degree to which philosophy could benefit from an engagement with cultural studies. 7. Strictly speaking, the “areas” themselves resist the kind of circumscription that the above sketch invokes. 8. From Anzaldua’s vociferous call to arms in her seminal text Borderlands to Santangelo-Caminero’s desire to “break a few windows” of the (racist) master’s house in Puerto Rican Negro, to Lisa Sanchez-Gonzalez’ critique of the lack of an ethical imperative within Esmeralda Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican in her own Boricua Literature, the persistence of this articulation is undeniable. 9. For an incisive analysis of the possibilities for transgression of the Symbolic Order (and the signifying order that necessarily accompanies it) in the context of Queer Theory see Lee Edelman’s No Future. Edelman’s text persuasively proposes a liberating potential of non-teleological and queer modes of existence. 10. See page 284 of Stuart Hall’s “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies.” 11. See page 278 of Stuart Hall’s “New Ethnicities.” 12. See page 4 of Paul Bowman’s very insightful “The Task of the Transgressor” wherein he provides a cogent presentation of the contemporary cultural studies terrain. In this passage he quotes from Derrida’s Dissemination (1981). 13. Ibid., 5. 14. Ibid., 15. Bowman cites Gary Hall’s formulation of the relationship between cultural studies and culture/power relations in a cultural studies that is effective: “by definition . . . a politically committed questioning of culture/power relations which at the same time theoretically interrogates its own relations to politics and to power” (Hall 2002, 10).

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15. See Stefan Herbrechter’s “Et Cetera – Cultural Studies and Deconstruction.” 16. Hillis Miller also notes that philosophy could have much to gain in reading cultural studies scholarship given its propensity to “couch its enunciations as universals valid anywhere in the world at any time. They tend to forget history and cultural differences even when they are making pronouncements about history and culture” (4). 17. When Bowman responds that “cultural studies tries to be more than critique or meditation – for cultural studies it’s all about intervention,” he plainly presupposes that critique cannot be an intervention (and further confirms that “intervention” is the defining component of a cultural studies enterprise). The dissatisfaction that Bowman’s utterance indicates (either his own or that of a cultural studies community) is with the very definition of “intervention” (critique) that Critchley suggests and he responds accordingly: “It sounds to me like your model of cultural studies would be a subset of philosophy – you’ve spoken of philosophy as a ‘meditation on culture,’ philosophy as critique. . . . But I think that perhaps the difference between cultural studies and the kind of philosophy that you engage in is that cultural studies tries to be more than critique or mediation – for cultural studies it’s all about intervention” (61). 18. Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy is a central cultural studies text that is both profoundly influenced by deconstruction and functions according to a foregrounding of analytical power. 19. The word “transformative” has troubling connotations that we must clarify before proceeding. Literally “changing shape” suggests a static form (or subject) that is then altered to become a new or distinct (and cohesive) shape or form. I would like the word to connote something altogether different, namely an active process (transforming) happening to an active being (who is in some measure always-already thus engaged). The shift in registers occurs when an active being experiences themselves as such. Having some awareness of an experience of being-as-transforming is itself a “transformative” experience. 20. The “experience” is not a totalizing one of a fully present subject. We discuss this issue in some length in Chapter 3. 21. For a noteworthy exception to this lack of engagement concerning Nancy’s thought on community and literary/cultural studies, see Berthold Schoene’s compelling The Cosmopolitan Novel. Schoene persuasively argues the necessity of conceiving of the novel as a kind of world-forming or cosmopolitan enterprise as opposed to confined within national borders. According to Schoene, Nancy’s foregrounding of the “between” rather than the opposition of self and other can be traced in the cosmopolitan novel, which “reveal(s) the anachronism of these kinds of hegemonic distinctions between self and other” (27). 22. Among others see Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other (1998), “Language Is Never Owned” (Sovereignties), and The Other Heading

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23. 24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29.

Notes (1992). The understanding that languages are “untranslatable” is a central aspect of his work and can be found throughout his oeuvre. See Nancy’s introduction to Who Comes After the Subject, Being Singular Plural (particularly “Eulogy for the Melee”) and The Creation of the World or Globalization . . . . See bell hooks’s “Postmodern Blackness” and Sanchez-Gonzalez’ Boricua Literature respectively. The degree to which Beloved is contextualized by an African cosmology is underscored in African diaspora theory. In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd was selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 2001, has been translated into eight languages, and the title story won the Pushcart Prize. As of the time of this writing there are only four scholarly articles addressing the text. They are: Jennifer Ballantine Perera’s “Only in Miami is Cuba So Far Away,” Lene Johannessen’s “The Lonely Figure: Memory of Exile in Ana Menendez’s ‘In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd,’ ” Maya Socolovsky’s “Cuba Interrupted: The Loss of Center and Story in Ana Menendez’s Collection In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd,” and Dalia Kandiyoti’s “Nostalgia and the Marketplace in Cristina Garcia and Ana Menendez.” See Machado Saez and Dalleo’s The Latino Canon and the Emergence of Post-Sixties Literature, pages 160–3. The works of Cristina Garcia, Achy Abejas, and Ana Menendez most obviously fall into this category. Although a broadly post-structural sensibility is frequently present in US Latino/a literary criticism, there are certainly moments in which more traditional or metaphysical paradigms are at work. For example, while Maya Socolovsky’s “Cuba Interrupted” ostensibly challenges foundational understandings (such as that of an orienting “center”), it ultimately does precisely the opposite. Implicitly and explicitly, Socolovsky’s entire argument assumes and asserts the possibility of recovering or engaging in “a narrative that could create stories and transform the present moment into one firmly based on a history of identity and palpable origins” (238). Ostensibly, the stories in Menendez’ collection illustrate the failure of language, narrative, storytelling, or art to accomplish what it ought to. “The story, however, demonstrates the effects of language gone wrong. Rather than producing escape or entertainment, the act of narrating jokes produces something more fearful: in the short term, tears, as laughter is made to mingle with sorrow, and in the long term, a loss of memory and origin” (239). Socolovsky’s intervention necessarily assumes the following: art is teleological; language and storytelling are rigidly distinguishable from being; sorrow is undesireable; memory and origin can be attained or possessed. Narrative fails to fulfill a desire for origin not because such an origin is itself a narrative (as I argue the text illustrates) but rather because the narratives or stories do not function

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effectively; they have “gone wrong.” The complexity of desire and its relationship to language and being is entirely unexamined and indeed not even considered. Socolovsky asserts that language “fails to sustain Cuba as an ideal and instead disintegrates it” not to show the impossibility of the ideal but to indicate that the disintegration is a product of ineffective language, storytelling, or art. 30. MLA International Bibliography, 2011. 31. For scholarship interested in ethical relations in a deconstructive context see Travis, “Beyond Empathy”; Christopher Peterson’s 2007 monograph Kindred Specters; and Sam Durrant’s Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning.

Chapter 1: Nancy and Derrida: On Ethics and the Same (Infinitely Different) Constitutive Events of Being 1. Or, as Nancy indicates in “The Free Voice of Man”: “. . . the possibility is open from the moment that one can also show – and this is what, since Heidegger, shows itself, which is to say, deconstructs itself – that, in reality, philosophy cannot philosophically prove its own necessity any longer” (37). 2. Although we are incapable of “completely understanding” that which surpasses discursive thought, Derrida directly thematizes the power and force of “this limit to intelligibility” (87). By the close of this chapter, we will be able to more precisely connect the imperative or ethical as Nancy and Derrida imagine it, to the impossibility of transparency in meaning that Derrida references (or difference). 3. An interesting sidenote here is that both the traditional foundational imperative and the nonphilosophical imperative are philosophically unjustifiable for the same reason but in different ways. Both imperatives are unjustifiable because one cannot “get behind the back” of either type as there is no original founding ground upon which an imperative can be justified and rather only a circle of imperative and discourse in which being is inevitably and always-already implicated (as we see later). Ultimately, this circle implies a certain slippage and gap between and within being and between and within meaning that makes a provable justification impossible. The second half of this chapter attempts to elucidate this process as in many ways this is what is at stake in “The Free Voice of Man.” Thus, the lack of a final signified or grounding absolute logic from which an imperative comes, is the reason both of these imperatives are unjustifiable. The first traditional kind wants to believe that such a foundation exists; the second kind of imperative is unjustifiable not because it believes in a foundation but rather because it is radically other than a foundational logic or system. It entirely denies the possibility of such a ground and is inaccessible to the logic of proof.

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4. As is evident in Nancy’s oeuvre in general, it can be said that finitude is that which will always and has always cut through the logic of the absolute or what he calls immanentism in The Inoperative Community. 5. “Sharing” is another term very close to “spacing” in this context. In The Inoperative Community Nancy explains in great depth the manner in which being is shared by, in, and as being. This sharing indicates the significance of the “between” or “among” beings that occurs in and as spacing. 6. Nancy addresses this absence of thematization on pages 34 and 42 of “The Ends of Man” in Retreating the Political. Here Nancy imagines a possible Derridean response to the question once posed to Heidegger: “When will you write an ethics?” The hypothetical Derridean response Nancy offers is as follows: “Write an ethics? But what does it mean to write the law? Is it a matter of copying out its pure and transcendent utterance, or is it rather in writing that the law might be said to trace itself? Could writing legislate? If so, how? This is precisely what we do not know. And this knowledge, as such, is also absent from Derrida’s texts. And yet, despite everything, we should have some idea about it” (34). Furthermore, on reading Derrida’s discussion of “theory” in “Violence and Metaphysics,” Nancy notes that despite Derrida’s assertion that “I have regard for recognizing that which cannot be regarded as a thing, as a façade, as a theorem. I have regard for the face itself” (“Violence and Metaphysics,” 122), he nonetheless “will not have seen this regard, or in any case, will not have made it visible or discoursed upon it” (Retreating the Political, 42). In many ways, at stake in “The Ends of Man” is an exposition of the relationship between ethics, writing, and finitude that Derrida intimated (perhaps even referenced) but did not significantly thematize (indeed Nancy claims that Derrida “lost sight of” it) (42). Certainly many of Derrida’s later texts, such as The Gift of Death, On Hospitality, Sovereignties in Question, and Counterfeit Money, do indeed thematize the issue of ethics and its relationship to finitude and writing. 7. In The Inoperative Community, this event of the imperative is discussed intricately in terms of being and community and the constitutive rupture of immanence that is being-with. 8. In other texts such as The Inoperative Community and Being Singular Plural, Nancy will focus significant attention upon the “between” beings aspect of this event. In these contexts, we would need to include the “between” beings aspect of the spacing enacted by finitude. Here, the radical sociality of being (or the radical dependence of being upon the other) is directly noted and indicated by formulations such as “You shares me” (Nancy 1991, 29). 9. In “The Inoperative Community,” imperative ethicity is called “community” and while the two terms indicate the same event, they thematize different elements of it. The Inoperative Community underscores community as “the being ecstatic of being,” which is itself most saliently being

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11.

12.

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as shared (and all of the complex implications concerning finitude, spacing, and the other) while imperative ethicity is far more concerned with the integral nature of writing or difference to this process. The distinction between the two lies in the degree to which they are each thematizing the impossibility of “straight” representation. There is some sense in which poetic language knows itself as nonrepresentational, as participating in the noncoincidence of meaning inherent to language. For a concise discussion of this issue, see Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: An Introduction. Particularly useful is his explication of Barthes’s understanding of signs as “healthy” or “unhealthy.” We should not conclude, however, that such self-effacement is the essence of being given that “the property of the trace in general . . . is a property which is not one, it does not constitute an essence” (Nancy, 50). In some way these are the questions of both James Gilbert-Walsh and Simon Critchley in “Broken Imperatives: The Ethical Dimension of Nancy’s Thought” and The Ethics of Deconstruction, respectively. While certainly quite distinct in various ways, both Gilbert-Walsh and Critchley are similarly interested in a move to “the concrete” or historical world. This entire problematic concerning thinking and doing calls to mind Heidegger’s conceptualization of thinking as “acting.” I draw the term “glory” from Derrida’s reading of Celan’s “Aschenglorie” in “Poetics and Politics of Witnessing.” In a provocative and poetic reading that oddly resonates with Nancy’s closing words in “What Is to Be Done?” Derrida notes that “This glory of ashes, this glory of ash, this glory which is that of ashes but is also of ash, in ashes – and glory, at the very least, the light or shining brightness of fire – here sheds light on a poem that I shall not even attempt to interpret with you. Light is also knowing, truth, meaning. Now this light is no more than ashes here, it becomes ash, it falls into ashes, as a fire goes out. But (and the mobile and unstable articulation of this “but” will be important for us) ashes are also of glory, they can still be renowned and renamed, sung, blessed, loved, if the glory of the renowned and renamed is not reducible either to fire or to the light of knowing. The brightness of glory is not only the light of knowing, and not necessarily the clarity of knowledge” (italics mine, Derrida, 69). If we understand “the light of knowing” and “the clarity of knowledge” as “certainties” and “glory” as akin to a certain “strength” then the following line that closes “What Is to Be Done” (which is also the close of the text Retreating the Political) is a powerful rejoinder to Derrida’s idea of glory: “it is ineluctable to invent a world, instead of being subjected to one, or dreaming of another. Invention is always without model and without warranty. But indeed that implies facing up to turmoil, anxiety, even disarray. Where certainties come apart, there too gathers the strength that no certainty can match” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1997, 158).

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Chapter 2: Nancy’s Community 1. Nancy extends his consideration of a radically prior being-with in both Being Singular Plural and The Creation of the World or Globalization. 2. One way of approaching Nancy’s three studies of community or singular-plurality is to consider The inoperative Community as supplying a foundation for the two latter works that extend out and into the material world. Indeed Being Singular Plural considers identity and culture (in identity politics and the “ethnic cleansing” of Sarajevo) while The Creation of the World directly emphasizes “concrete equality and actual justice” (53). For a thorough and precise discussion of the tension between the theoretical and material in Nancy’s oeuvre on community, see Ian James’s The Fragmentary Demand, 152–3. 3. In Being Singular Plural, Nancy clearly articulates the urgency and stakes of his project: “This book does not disguise its ambition of ‘redoing the whole of first philosophy’ by giving the Singular Plural of Being as its foundation . . . this is not my ambition but the ambition of the thing itself, of our history. . . at the very least I hope to make this necessity felt” (xv). 4. This is a reference to Heidegger’s notion of Mitsein as presented in Being and Time. One could argue that The Inoperative Community is itself an attempt to further this concept. The notion of “being-with” or Mitsein, is a kind of starting point for Nancy’s analysis of being. 5. To what “we” is Nancy referring? I briefly discuss the problematic of the “we” formulation later in the chapter. In the chapters that follow, this line of inquiry is significantly examined. 6. In Being Singular Plural, Nancy precisely asserts that we ourselves are the meaning. 7. In fact, on page 1 Nancy directly cites “the modern world” as enduring “the gravest and most painful testimony . . . of the conflagration of community.” In other words, rather than being subject to any kind of cultural specificity, the issues of which he speaks regarding community are pertinent to “the world” as a whole. According to Nancy, community has thus not yet been thought of by “the world.” 8. See Being Singular Plural by Jean-Luc Nancy. A particularly compelling discussion on the disastrous consequences of a will to immanence occurs in the essay “Eulogy for the Melee,” which is a commentary on the events in Sarajevo. 9. This example is not without its difficulties. Surely these spiritual deaths are more distinct from than similar to the actual deaths that occurred in the concentration camps. 10. This is a reference to Heidegger’s conception of Dasein and death. 11. The reference to being as ecstatically thrown, once again, is a Heideggerian notion. Nancy proceeds from fundamentally Heideggerian conceptions, such as Mitsein, Dasein, and ecstasis. His project, then, is to attempt to consider them further.

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12. Throughout the essay, Nancy repeatedly returns to a dialogue with Bataille’s conceptualizations of being, community, and ecstasy, most notably discussed in Inner Experience. 13. By way of Bataille, Nancy discusses the manner in which ecstasy occurs in the realm of an intense rupture of being at the point or place where immanence would have been. As silence, ecstasy answers the impossibility of immanence. Or again, ecstasy answers to the rupturing of being itself, denying the possibility of immanence and rendering being necessarily relational. Throughout the essay, being and community are characterized by a rupturing or cutting through with community cutting through the immanence that would have been. In this sense, community can be understood as ecstasis.

Chapter 3: Morrison’s Beloved, Nancian Community, and Derridean Witnessing 1. A more comprehensive analysis not permitted here would necessarily engage the various Derridean and Nancian texts that examine the signification of “culture.” Derrida’s The Other Heading and Nancy’s “Eulogy for the Melee” are two such texts. 2. See Gilroy 1993, 73. In addition to “the ineffable,” Gilroy is concerned with the relationship between the sacred and the profane, possibilities for survival and agency, and an embodied racialized subject. 3. See Wood “The Experience of the Ethical” 112. 4. See Beloved pages 157 and 232. 5. With the exception of Amy Denver, the white characters within the text evince a commodifying understanding of the black characters. Even the abolitionists (including Mr. Bodwin who “gives” a house to Baby Suggs) consider Sethe’s tragedy as an object to exchange for the furtherance of their cause. Mr. Garner, who appears preferable to Schoolteacher as overseer of Sweet Home, obviously directly benefits from the slave system and additionally utilizes his perspective that his slaves are “men” in order to bolster his own sense of “manhood.” Last, we examine the precise manner in which Schoolteacher articulates his commodifying approach later in the chapter. For an involved discussion of exchange relationships within the text see Rafael Perez-Torres’s “Knitting and Knotting the Narrative Thread” in Peterson, Toni Morrison: Critical and Theoretical Approaches. 6. On pages 243–4 the profundity of Denver’s isolation and fear is fully rendered: “In the brightest of the carnival dresses and wearing a stranger’s shoes, she stood on the porch of 124 ready to be swallowed up in the world beyond the edge of the porch . . . Out there where there were places in which things so bad had happened that when you went near them it would happen again . . .” 7. By all appearances members of the “black community” in Beloved generally behave according to an implicit obligation to the other. The text is replete with generous gestures that appear outside of economies of exchange and rather are more akin to gifts (expecting nothing in return

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10.

11.

Notes and characterized by extension and care). See pages 91–3, 232, 248–9, and 256–9 particularly. However, the prevalence of generosity does not negate the staggering failure of the townspeople to warn Sethe that the four horsemen were entering town. Stamp Paid reveals his belief that it was “something like meanness-that let them stand aside or not pay attention, or tell themselves somebody else was probably bearing the news” (157). For an insightful discussion of name changing in the African diaspora see Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, 203. Stamp Paid’s close relationship with Baby Suggs (“she was the mountain to his sky,” 170) and his encouragement of her nonprescriptive sermons (“she did not tell them to sin no more,” 88) is indicative of this rejection. Further, the maintenance of his Biblical engagement, despite his eschewing of the name Joshua, is clear in the text as he aspires to be “a highminded soldier of Christ” (170). In addition to the presentation of the power of song, the community withholds it should they deem someone unworthy of its supportive effects. Following Sethe’s murder of her baby and her subsequent arrest, the crowd of onlookers deem her too proud and thus undeserving of the comfort that song can provide. Provocatively, it is not her murder of her baby that is beyond forgiveness and a corresponding extension of support but rather a response of invincibility and radical independence. In this instance Sethe’s head is literally held too high to deserve comfort: “Outside a throng, now, of black faces stopped murmuring. Holding the living child, Sethe walked past them in their silence and hers. She climbed into the cart, her profile knife-clean against a cheery blue sky. A profile that shocked them with its clarity. Was her head a bit too high? Her back a little too straight? Probably. Otherwise the singing would have begun at once, the moment she appeared in the doorway of the house on Bluestone Road. Some cape of sound would have been quickly wrapped around her, like arms to hold and steady her on the way. As it was, they waited till the cart turned about, headed west to town. And then no words. Humming. No words at all” (152). The theme of “telling” is likewise textually manifest strengthening a reading that considers ethics and deconstruction. Throughout the text there are repeated “calls” to tell a story. When Nan passes on to Sethe the story of her name she emphasizes the “telling” through repetition: “Telling you. I am telling you, small girl Sethe” (62). Amy Denver is similarly concerned insofar as the worries that Sethe’s daughter will not know that it was she who brought her into the world: “You gonna tell her? Who brought her into these here world? . . . You better tell her, you hear?” (85). Further, the various first person accounts of Beloved’s arrival directly thematize the interpretive rather than reflective component of the “telling” (200–17). Last, as Christopher Peterson astutely notes, Sethe cannot directly access the recalled experience of murdering her baby daughter and only once attempts to do so with Paul D.

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She circles around it with an acute understanding that she can neither arrive at nor articulate her precise motivations. An interruption of cohesive narrative is fully evident, see Peterson 1997, 80. The fact that Beloved’s proper name is never revealed underscores the impossibility of fully reaching being/Beloved and telling her story representationally or in absolute fashion. Such is the impossibility of bearing witness and in some sense what is ultimately at stake in the text. See pages 116–17. Additionally, Beloved’s very being as a “ghost” is a literalization of an absent presence. The closing pages of Ellison’s Invisible Man poignantly speaks the inevitability of textuality and an imperative to “tell” as the following quote indicates: “So why do I write, torturing myself to put it down? . . . Why should I be the one to dream this nightmare? Why should I be dedicated and set aside – yes, if not to at least tell a few people about it? There seems to be no escape. Here I’ve set out to throw my anger into the world’s face, but now that I’ve tried to put it all down the old fascination with playing a role returns, and I’m drawn upward again. So that even before I finish I’ve failed . . .” (579). See Wood’s The Step Back, 1–2.

Chapter 4: Ethics as the Eruption of Finitude 1. For an in-depth exploration of the productive discomfort of occupying multiple cultural and linguistic spaces (and the corresponding interruptions) see Doris Sommers’s Bilingual Aesthetics. 2. See the works of Julia Alvarez, Sandra Cisneros, Achy Abejas, Ana Castillo, Helena Maria Viramontes, and Cristina Garcia, particularly. 3. Recall that Nancy understands the will to immanence as a will to death, which has been historically manifest in structures such as the Nazi concentration camp. 4. Known as populated by Miami Cubans, Calle Ocho has a long history of anti-Castro activism. Recently it has become even more nationally recognizable to hip hop and pop music audiences as the well-known Miami rapper Pit Bull references it frequently in his top selling, often overtly misogynistic, musical oeuvre. 5. For an eloquent and compelling exploration of cultural hybridity versus rhetorics of purity or authenticity, see Nancy’s “Eulogy for the Melee” in Being Singular Plural, 149. 6. However, simultaneously, the Park is a space of resistance in numerous ways. Not only is it the domain of jokes, humor, and the obviously ludic, but it is also the place where Maximo erupts against the objectifying and murderous pulsion of nostalgia and all the logic it carries. 7. The fact that all the men are assumed to be Cuban is a reduction itself. Indeed the reader knows that at least two of Maximo’s friends at the Park, Antonio and Carlos, are Dominican.

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8. For a fascinating look at the history of the often commodifying relationship between the United States and Cuba see Gustavo Perez-Firmat’s The Havana Habit. 9. See the introduction to Nancy’s Being Singular Plural for a full discussion of meaning-saturation and its corresponding meaninglessness as it relates to cultural identities and the proliferation of “destruction, hatred, and the denial of existence,” xiii. 10. On pages 9–10 we learn that the year following Rosa’s death, Maximo had begun to see her throughout his house at twenty-five and thirty. These apparent hallucinations are juxtaposed with sounds and memories that bring him back to his “other life” in Cuba prompting an interrogation of the nature of time and existence. This reading is reinforced by Maximo’s consideration of time as “a string you could gather up in your hand all at once,” 15. 11. For example, on page 208 she reveals her proclivity for clarity in terms of weather and “cleanliness”: “It was one of those clear December nights that Lisette still loved about Miami, everything clean.” On page 212 it emerges as an equation between morning and generous interpretation and “the end of the day” and a lack of understanding that eventually lead to despair: “In the mornings when everything was fresh and new, she had thought that they had something here that her parents’ generation had lost in exile. The feeling evaporated by the end of the day, replaced by a watery feeling that she would never understand herself, much less this country that seemed intent on killing itself slowly. And before she fell asleep each night despair took her again,” 212. 12. In case there is any concern that the house Lisette is confronting is somehow not the same house of which her mother spoke, Matun presents her with a photo of her mother “sitting in that very kitchen.” “Matun returned with a small wooden picture frame. He handed it to Lisette. A little girl in pigtails sitting in that very kitchen, all the furniture the same, a bucket of guava in front of her. ‘Tu mama,’ Matun said, ‘You’re grandparents loved this house.’” In Cuba I Was a German Shephard, 221. 13. In a more general sense, Johannessen makes a similar claim regarding laughter and transcendence in her reading of the title story “In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd” (2005). The jokes Maximo tells evade the “monologic world where last words and ultimate truths reign,” 65. Instead, “the inherent purpose of laughter and irony “ is “to transcend,” 65. 14. See Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 111–12. 15. While Matun’s use of the word “left” (regarding Lisette’s grandparents’ flight from Cuba) may be a euphemism for “evicted” or “forcibly removed by military threats,” there is at least a question concerning the conditions of Mabella’s family’s flight from Cuba given the revelation of her lies regarding the house. 16. This is not to dismiss the poverty prevalent in Cuba but rather to highlight the contradictions between Mabella’s narratives and Lisette’s

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18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

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particular experiences of Cuba. For a vivid description of the extreme poverty in parts of Havana, see Achy Abejas’s Ruins. In “Broken Imperative,” James Gilbert-Walsh similarly suggests that the finitude of the imperative voice “perhaps” makes “all the difference in the world,” 18. Many stories in the collection address precisely this issue. In “Hurricane Stories” the “telling” of stories (and coexistent desire to tell them) is foregrounded as the only way to come close to an other. However this recognition is melancholic at best as the desire for complete unity between beings remains although within an understanding that it can never be satiated: “I want to wake up with sand in my hair, all my memories spilling over him like a tide that returns again and again,” 48. In “The Perfect Fruit” the protagonist Matilde responds hopelessly to a realization of the impossibility of ever “really knowing” her husband and finally proclaims that “we live alone in our own core,” 73. The distinction between the written narrative of this story and speech (the “retelling”) can be provocatively engaged here alongside Derrida’s meditation on the spoken and written word in “That Dangerous Supplement” in Of Grammatology. It is particularly pertinent to Lisette as presence is an element of being and experience that she so profoundly desires. See Barthes’s (1967) classic essay “The Death of the Author” where he describes the text as “a multidimensional space in which are married and contested several writings, none of which is original; the text is a fabric of quotations, resulting from a thousand sources of culture,” 53. Approaching the “I” in these terms narrows in on the articulations and stakes of “I” within “Her Mother’s House” in the scenes of translation particularly. A playful interpretation might consider the “M” written by Lisette’s mother as indicative of a “Me” contextualized by the United States and unreadable in Cuba. In contrast the “M” becomes instructively comprehensible in Cuba only when it is turned upside down, transformed into a “W” and thus indicating an opposing perspective of “We.” The individual or “Me” framework is disrupted and can only function as a “We.” Certainly in one respect we can appreciate that this is a story of “the Cuban experience” in the United States, which would mean that for practical purposes the exchanges in Cuba could not be rendered solely in Spanish. A significant number of US American readers would be unable to comprehend an untranslated text. With its many national and cultural crossings given its distinctive history of colonization, Cuba is a wonderful example of the impossibility of a fixed understanding of nationality or culture. For a detailed and nuanced examination of culture and identity as inevitably in flux see Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic. Being Singular Plural, xiii.

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Conclusion 1. See “Rams: Uninterrupted Dialogue-Between Two Infinities, the Poem” in Sovereignties in Question. 2. Simon Critchley provides an instructive discussion of Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic in Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity. Although not within the realm of deconstructive ethics per se, Barbara Johnson approaches Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Morrison’s Sula from a poststructural perspective. 3. We also must acknowledge the fact that we simply cannot read everything and scholars must certainly be permitted their proclivities for particular texts and authors. However, such proclivities not withstanding, the lack of attention to “ethnic” American texts appear sufficiently significant to merit attention. Also worth noting are the numerous leading scholars in postcolonial studies that are rectifying these oversights within that sphere. Obviously deconstructive analysis plays a central role in postcolonial thought; however, close examinations of deconstruction and ethics are distinct from postcolonial theory and it is in the realm of the former that we see the pronounced absence of “non-European” texts. Last, US American critics do engage French feminist theory relatively frequently and thus an invocation of Derridean deconstruction is implicit; however, again, feminist theory is distinct from (albeit related to) a consideration of ethics alongside deconstruction. 4. Doris Sommer’s cogent analysis within Bilingual Aesthetics provides an excellent discussion of the aesthetics of bilingualism and the various interruptions it offers.

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160 References Derrida, Jacques. 1992. The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1995. The Gift of Death. Trans. David Willis. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1997. “That Dangerous Supplement.” Of Grammatology. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1998. Monolingualism of the Other: Or the Prosthesis of Origin. Trans. Patrick Mensah. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2000. Of Hospitality. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2005. Sovereignties in Question. Ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen. New York: Fordham University Press. Dooley, Mark and Richard Kearney, eds. 1999. Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy. New York: Routledge. Durrant, Sam. 2004. Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Eagleton, Terry. 1984. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ellison, Ralph. 1947. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage Books. Garcia, Cristina. 1992. Dreaming in Cuban. New York: Ballantine Books. Giardina, Michael D., and Joshua I. Newman. 2008. “NASCAR and the ‘Southernization’ of America: Spectatorship, Subjectivity, and the Confederation of Identity.” Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies 8(4): 479–506. Web. 22 January 2010. Gilbert-Walsh, James. 2000. “Broken imperative: The ethical dimension of Nancy’s thought.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 26(2): 29–50. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hall, Gary. 2002. Culture in Bits. New York: Continuum. Hall, Stuart. 1992. “Cultural studies and its theoretical legacies.” Cultural Studies. Ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler. New York: Routledge, pp. 277–94. Hall, Stuart. 1996. “New ethnicities.” Race, Culture and Difference. Ed. James Donald and Ali Rattanasi. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 252–9. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins. Heidegger, Martin. 1990. Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik. Trans. Richard Taft as Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. Herbrechter, Stefan. 2004. “Plus d’Un: Deconstructions and the Translation of Cultural Studies.” Culture Machine 6. Hillis Miller, J. 2007. “Boundaries in Beloved.” Symploke 15(1–2): 24–39. Hillis Miller, J. 2008. “Crossroads of philosophy and cultural studies: Body, context, performativity, community.” Romantic Circles Praxis Series: Philosophy and Culture June.

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Hurston, Zora Neale. 1937. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: HarperCollins. James, Ian. 2006. The Fragmentary Demand. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.. Johannessen, Lene. 2005. “The Lonely Figure: Memory of Exile in Ana Menendez’s ‘In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd.’ ” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 41(1): 54–68. Johnson, Barbara. 1994. The Wake of Deconstruction. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Kandiyoti, Dalia. 2006. “Consuming nostalgia: Nostalgia and the marketplace in Cristina Garcia and Ana Menendez.” Melus 13.1 Spring: 81–97. Kellner, Douglas. 2009. “Media spectacle and the 2008 presidential election.” Cultural Studies and Critical Methodologies 9(6): 707–16. Krieger, Murray. 1992. Ekphrosis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. 2001. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Toward a Radical Democratic Politics. New York: Verso Books. Lacoue-Labarthe, Phillipe and Jean-Luc Nancy. 1997. Retreating the Political. Ed. Simon Sparks. New York: Routledge. Lawlor, Leonard. 2007. This Is Not Sufficient: An Essay on Animality and Human Nature in Derrida. New York: Columbia University Press. Lee, Edelman. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Levinas, Emmanuel. 1961. Totality and Infinity. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Lawlor, Leonard. 2007. This Is Not Sufficient: An Essay on Animality and Human Nature in Derrida. New York: Columbia University Press. Machado Saez, Elena and Raphael Dalleo. 2007. The Latino Canon and the Emergence of Post-Sixties Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 160–3. MLA International Bibliography.2011. Modern Language Association. Menendez, Ana. 2001. In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd. New York: Grove Press. Mohanty, Satya. 1993. “The Epistemic Status of Cultural Identity: On Beloved and the Postcolonial Condition.” Cultural Critique 24: 41–80. Morrison, Toni. 1973. Sula. New York: Penguin Books. Morrison, Toni. 1987. Beloved. New York: Penguin Books. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1991. The Inoperative Community. Ed Peter Connor. Trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2000. Being Singular Plural. Trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2007. The Creation of the World or Globalization. Trans. Francois Raffoul and David Pettigrew. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

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162 References Perera, Jennifer Ballantine. 2003. “Only in Miami is Cuba so far away: The politics of exile in Ana Menendez In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd.” WLWE 39.2: 8–17. Perez-Firmat, Gustavo. 1989. The Cuban Condition: Translation and Identity in Modern Cuban Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press. Perez-Firmat, Gustavo. 2010. The Havana Habit. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Perez-Torres, Rafael. 2007. “Knitting and Knotting the Narrative Thread.” Toni Morrison: Critical and Theoretical Approaches. Ed. Nancy J. Peterson. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Peterson, Christopher. 2007. Kindred Specters: Death, Mourning, and American Affinity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Peterson, Nancy J. 1997. Toni Morrison: Critical and Theoretical Approaches. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Rilke, Rainer Maria. 2001. Sonnets to Orpheus. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Sanchez-Gonzalez, Lisa. 2001. Boricua Literature: A Literary History of the Puerto Rican Diaspora. New York: New York University Press. Santangelo-Caminero, Marta. 2004. “Puerto Rican Negro: Defining Race in Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets.” MELUS 29(2): 205–22. Santiago, Esmeralda. 1994. When I Was Puerto Rican. New York: Vintage Books. Schoene, Berthold. 2010. The Cosmopolitan Novel. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Socolovsky, Maya. 2005. “Cuba Interrupted: The Loss of Center and Story in Ana Menendez’s Collection In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 46(3) Spring: 235–51. Seidel, Michael. Exile and the Narrative Imagination. New Haven: Yale University, 1986. Sommer, Doris. 2004. Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Travis, Molly Abel. 2010. “Beyond empathy: Narrative distancing and ethics in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.” Journal of Narrative Theory 40(2): 231–50. Ugarte, Michael. 1989. Shifting Ground: Spanish Civil War Exile Literature. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Viramontes, Helena Maria. 1985. The Moths and other Stories. Houston, TX: Arte Publico Press. Wood, David. 2005. The Step Back: Ethics and Politics after Deconstruction. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

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Index

Abejas, Achy 148 absolute 47–9, 54–5 absolute alterity 66 absolute for-itself 44, 50 absolute in-itself 44 absolute transcendence 39 absolutely alone 48 actions, in the material world 42 African American literature 1, 3, 4, 5, 11, 68, 83, 143 Against Ethics 145 Agamben,Giorgio 4 agency 40, 70, 72–3, 144 aloneness 48 alterity 39 and ethics 24 Anzaldua, Gloria 146 archi-ethics 92 archi-obligation 92 Aryan 51 Bakhtinian dialogics 5 Barthes, Ronald 18, 151, 157 Bataille, Georges 54, 58, 59, 153 Baudelaire, Charles 143 bearing witness 1, 2, 6, 9–10, 13, 15, 19–20, 22, 26, 36–8, 42, 77, 91–2, 94, 96, 100, 102, 108–13, 117, 119–22, 124, 126, 130–3, 136–7, 140–2, 145, 155 Beckett, Samuel 143 beginning and origin 89 being 12, 26, 34, 36, 40, 71, 94 see also specific entries as an identity 81 as connected 44

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as finite 54 as moving toward 39, 44 as outside of itself 61 Being and Time 152 being ecstatic 87, 89 being for-itself 77 being-in-common 12, 61 being outside of being 53, 56, 60, 62 Being Singular Plural 145, 152, 155, 156 being unto-itself 44, 77, 79 being-with 8, 26, 44, 45, 46, 53, 58, 69, 70, 71, 72, 76, 77, 78, 82, 89 bell hooks 11 Beloved 1, 8, 13–14, 23–5, 69–98, 141–3, 145, 148, 153, 154, 155 “between” beings aspect 150 Bilingual Aesthetics 16, 155, 158 bilingualism 16, 17 The Black Atlantic 71, 154, 157, 158 black community 73 see also African American literature Blanchot, Maurice 4 Borderlands 146 Boricua Literature 145, 146 Bowman, Paul 6, 7, 10, 146–7 Calle Ocho 155 Caputo, John 3, 145 carrying 26, 36, 38, 39, 42, 70, 88, 142 Cernuda, Luis 19, 20 co-appearing 56, 58, 60, 62, 64 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 143

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164

Index

commodification 74, 76, 83, 84, 85, 105 communication 57, 58, 63 and finitude 58 communism 45 community 9, 10, 43, 58, 60, 70, 71, 82, 89, 96, 100–2, 150 see also individual entries as slight/abundant 64–7 compearance 56, 58, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 100, 122 compearing of finitude 64 concentration camp 14, 65, 68 concepts 81 constitutive carrying 39 see also carrying continental philosophy 1, 3–7, 24 The Cosmopolitan Novel 147 The Creation of the World or Globalization 145 Critchley, Simon 3, 8, 145–7, 151, 158 critique 8, 147 Cuban American literature 15 cultural studies 7 as deconstruction 7 culture(s) 71, 73 Dalleo, Rafael 15 death 49–54, 98, 155 “The Death of the Author” 157 deconstruction 2, 3, 5–6, 81 and ethics 3 as justice 6 and politics 6 deconstructive ethics 70, 71 deconstructive subjectivity 72, 73, 144 Derrida, Jacques 1, 4, 9–12, 14, 20–31, 36–41, 69–77, 81, 87, 93, 98, 102, 112, 117, 131, 142, 144, 146, 147, 149, 151, 153, 157 differance 7, 9, 17, 22, 33, 35, 37, 81–2, 119, 124, 144 dreaming 52, 151 Durrant, Sam 145, 149 duty 31–5, 39–40, 109

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Eagleton, Terry 151 ecstasis 12, 53–60, 90, 100, 101, 103, 153 ecstasy 54–9, 64, 152, 153 Edelman, Lee 146 ego 36, 39 Ellison, Ralph 155 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 143 Enlightenment 71, 72, 74, 77, 94, 122, 126, 135 An essay on Animality and Human Nature in Derrida 145 essence 37, 45–6, 48, 50–1, 61–2, 65–6, 73, 77, 151 ethical component of community 1, 2 ethico-political 2, 5 Ethics and Politics after Deconstruction 72, 73, 145 The Ethics of Deconstruction and Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity 145 “Eulogy for the Melee” 148, 153, 155 exiles 16, 19, 20, 21, 22, 94 and being 21 writing of/about 21 experience 73, 81 exposing-sharing 61, 62 exposition 63 and compearance 62 of finitude 60, 62–4 extra-discursive experience 82, 94 figuration 22 finitude 31, 50, 53, 57, 58, 62, 96, 100, 101, 142, 150 and duty 33 and ecstasy see ecstasy as ethical 32 of the imperative voice 157 infinite birth of 57 and sharing 38 fixity 100, 101, 103, 108 Foucauldian analysis of power 5 foundational imperative 149

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Index “The Free Voice of Man” (Retreating the Political) 13, 26 fundamentally finite 32 Garcia, Cristina 148 Gardinia, Michael D. 145 Genet, Jean 14 Gilbert-Walsh, James 33, 151, 157 Gilroy, Paul 24, 71–3, 153, 154, 157, 158 glory 151 goodness 97, 98, 99 Hall, Gary 146 Hall, Stuart 6, 7, 145, 146 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy 147, 156 Heidegger, Martin 3, 4, 31, 152 Heideggerian Being 59 Heideggerian Dasein 152 Heideggerian Mitsein 69, 150, 152 Herbrechter, Stefan 7, 147 “Her Mother’s House” 110, 141 Holderlin, Friedrich 143 humanism 45, 55, 69, 87 Hurston, Zora Neale 158 imagination 22 immanence 45–6, 46, 49, 50–5, 87, 99, 150 immigrants (immigration) 16, 94 see also exiles imperative ethicity 1, 2, 6, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 19, 20, 24, 36, 38, 69, 81, 94, 96, 98, 107, 112, 113, 115, 116, 117, 119, 120, 121, 122, 124, 126, 131, 132, 133, 137, 138, 140, 142, 150, 151 imperatives 13, 29, 37, 108 and finitude 31 kinds of 28 and writing 35 In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd 1, 8, 13–16, 25, 93–8, 124, 134, 141–3, 148 individual 44, 49, 69, 71, 79

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165

Inner Experience 153 inoperative community 88 The Inoperative Community 6, 13, 43 Interrogating Cultural Studies 8, 146 interruption of being 12 interruptive intervention 6, 8–11, 147 Invisible Man 155 issue of intervention 7 Johannessen, Lene 21–2, 148 Johnson, Barbara 158 Kandiyoti, Dalia 148 Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics 31 Keats, John 143 Kellner, Douglas 145 Kindred Specters 145 Laclau, Ernesto 119, 145, 147, 156 “Land or Language” 18 “Language Is Never Owned” (Sovereignties) 93, 147 language(s) 17–18, 69, 77, 94 gap of 12 nonrepresentational language 74 and place 18 poetic language 12, 26, 37, 38, 77, 92, 151 representational language 74, 77 Lawlor, Leonard 145 literal death 51 literal exile 21 literary criticism 1–5, 9, 10–11, 15, 17 Literary Theory: An Introduction 151 “Luis Cernuda and the Politics of Exile” 19 Mallarme, Stephane 143 mapping 22 meaningless-meaning 73, 88, 89, 90 memory 19, 21, 94, 108, 121, 125, 127, 128, 133

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166

Index

Menendez, Ana 1, 8, 12–13, 15, 123–5, 140–1, 144, 148 metaphysical truth 98 metaphysics 47 Miller, Hillis 3, 7, 11, 145, 146, 147 Mohanty, Satya 23–4 moral universals 23 Morrison, Toni 1, 8, 12, 13, 14, 23, 70, 144, 153, 158 mortal being 50, 53 Mouffe, Chantal 119, 145, 147, 156 multilingualism 18 Nancian community 6, 13, 60, 70, 87 see also community unworkability of 10 Nancian sharing 39 see also sharing Nancy, Jean-Luc 1, 3–4, 7, 9–14, 17, 22–41, 43–74, 76, 81–2, 86–90, 97–8, 100–3, 105, 112, 115–17, 122, 126, 141–2, 144, 145, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156 narrative 148 Nazism 50, 51 negotiable identity 73 Newman, Joshua I. 145 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 4 No Future 146 nondiscursive imperative 31 nonidentity and deconstruction 5 nonphilosophical imperative 31, 149 nonrepresentational language 72, 74 nostalgia 19, 52, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 105, 106, 109, 110, 155 obligation 27, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 40, 69, 70, 77, 84, 85, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 122, 126, 132, 153 Of Grammatology 157 originary ethicity 38, 42 “otherness” 16 other being 38, 39

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The Other Heading 147, 153 other of being 40 Perera, Jennifer Ballantine 148 Perez-Firmat, Gustavo 18, 19, 139, 156 Perez-Torres, Rafael 153 Peterson, Christopher 145, 149 philosophical and concrete 41, 42 philosophical discourse 27, 28 elements 29 philosophical endeavor and imperatives 27 philosophy and action 42 poem 38 poetic bearing witness 38 poetic language 12, 26, 37, 38, 77, 92, 151 “Poetics and Politics of Witnessing” (Sovereignties) 13, 30, 37, 69 Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning 145 postmodernism 23 power of definition 90 power of song 73, 154 presence 98, 107 proof 29, 30 proper being 33 Puerto Rican Negro 146 pure Aryan being 51 purity 98, 99 Questioning God 145 “Rams” 26, 36, 38, 69, 142 real world 145 recontextualizations 143, 144 recuperation 52, 89, 92, 94, 113, 131, 133 relational being 55 representational language 74, 77 resistance of community 67–8, 108 “’Retreating the Political 40 Rilke, Rainer Maria 93, 137, 143

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Index Rimbaud, Arthur 143 Rivero, Eliano 15 Romantic 71, 77 rupture 93 Saez, Elena Machado 15 Sanchez-Gonzalez, Lisa 11, 145, 146 Santangelo-Caminero, Marta 146 Santiago, Esmeralda 146 Schoene, Berthold 147 secret as secret 37 Seidel, Michael 22 senseless meaning of death 49–50, 51 sharing 58, 60, 150 and finitude 38 singular being 43, 53, 56–63, 96 singular death 50, 52 singularity 54–61 slavery 70, 74 social bond 62, 63 Socolovsky, Maya 148, 149 Sommer, Doris 16–18, 155, 158 The Sonnets to Orpheus 93 sovereignty 58–60 spacing 56, 59, 70, 150 Sula 158 tears 106 teleological thinking 41 telling 154 testimony 36, 38 as testimony 37 Their Eyes Were Watching God 158 theory 11, 150 and practice 41

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167

thinking and acting 41 as acting 151 thinking community 46 time 94, 107 to-ness 80, 81, 82 totalitarianism 45 totalization of being 76 toward an other, being 53 trace 6, 17, 20, 24, 38, 47, 69, 71, 73, 80–2, 91, 112, 123, 139, 151 Travis, Molly Abel 23–4, 149 Ugarte, Michael 19–20 unheimlich 9, 25, 30, 33, 122, 129, 132 US American literature 3–4, 9, 91, 143 US Latino literature 1, 3–5, 11, 15–16, 68, 143 “Violence and Metaphysics” 150 von Humboldt, Wilhelm 16 Western logocentric foundation 94 What is to be done? 40–1 What now? 41 When I Was Puerto Rican 146 will to essence 17, 45, 46, 51, 73–4, 97, 99, 109 see also essence will to immanence 50–1, 65–8, 97, 100, 110, 152, 155 see also immanence Wood, David 3, 24, 72–3, 145 writing 29, 33–5, 101, 142 and finitude 33

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