The Political Archive of Paul de Man: Property, Sovereignty and the Theotropic 0748665625, 9780748665624

Citation preview

234 x 156mm, but follows EUP jacket, PDF from CS5 indesign

Use th

3mm

Presents Paul de Man’s thinking to a contemporary politicised audience through original archival research Taking de Man’s recently published manuscript Textual Allegories as a point of departure, 13 experts revisit de Man’s account of Rousseau in a ‘post-theoretical’ landscape concerned with political theology, occupied with the transformation of the western model of sovereignty, and faced with the apparent collapse of the capitalist global contract. The volume is framed by an introduction by Martin McQuillan and concludes with an original and previously unpublished text by Paul de Man on Nietzsche.

156mm

Key Features • P  resents the first published responses to a recently published de Man manuscript • Relates de Man’s work to key topics in contemporary theory • Outstanding list of contributors including Etienne Balibar, Ellen Burt, Stephen Barker, Andrzej Warminski, Tom Cohen and J. Hillis Miller • First publication of a Paul de Man text on Nietzsche

Martin McQuillan is Professor of Literary Theory and Cultural Analysis at the London Graduate School and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Kingston University, London. His recent publications include Deconstruction After 9/11 (2008) and Roland Barthes, or, The Profession of Cultural Studies (2010). He is the editor of the series ‘The Frontiers of Theory’ for Edinburgh University Press. Cover image: Paul de Man © Patsy de Man. Cover design: www.richardbudddesign.co.uk

The Political Archive of Paul de Man

Property, Sovereignty and the Theotropic

Edited by Martin McQuillan

The Political Archive of Paul de Man

Edited by

Martin McQuillan

The Political Archive of Paul de Man Property, Sovereignty and the Theotropic

ISBN 978-0-7486-6561-7

www.euppublishing.com

3mm

80mm

10mm

159mm

spine 22mm

159mm

10mm

80mm

The Political Archive of Paul de Man

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd i

29/06/2012 11:11

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd ii

29/06/2012 11:11

The Political Archive of Paul de Man Property, Sovereignty, and the Theotropic Edited by Martin McQuillan

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd iii

29/06/2012 11:11

© in this edition Edinburgh University Press, 2012 © in the individual contributions is retained by the authors Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10/12pt Goudy Old Style by, Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 6561 7 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 6562 4 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 6564 8 (epub) ISBN 978 0 7486 6563 1 (Amazon ebook) The right of the contributors to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd iv

29/06/2012 11:11

Contents

List of Abbreviations Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction: Broken Promises: Rousseau, de Man and Watergate Martin McQuillan

vii viii ix 1

1.

Lovence in Rousseau’s Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse Etienne Balibar

13

2.

Reading Spectacles in Rousseau’s Letter to d’Alembert E.S. Burt

25

3.

The Utter Misery of the Human Mind: Apotropaic and Theotropic in de Man’s Rousseau Nigel Mapp

41

4.

Rhetoric and Rausch: de Man on Nietzsche on Value and Style Stephen Barker

57

5.

Theotropic Logology: J. Hillis Miller, Paul de Man and Kenneth Burke Steven Mailloux

72

6.

Normativity, Materiality and Inequality: The Politics of the Letter in Paul de Man Walter Benn Michaels

81

7.

Inscribing the Political: Paul de Man and the Wild Art of Letter Writing 91 Kevin Newmark

8.

Mistake in Paul de Man: Violent Reading and Theotropic Violence Marc Redfield

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd v

103

29/06/2012 11:11

vi 9. 10.

c o n t en ts Lightstruck: ‘Hegel on the Sublime’ Andrzej Warminski De Man vs. ‘Deconstruction’: or, Who, Today, Speaks for the Anthropocene? Tom Cohen

118

131

11.

Paul de Man at Work: What Good is an Archive? J. Hillis Miller

149

12.

DNA: de Man’s Nucleic Archive Erin Obodiac

157

13.

Sovereign Debt Crisis: Paul de Man and the Privatization of Thought Martin McQuillan

167

Appendix: Nietzsche I: Rhetoric + Metaphysics Paul de Man

179

Index

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd vi

193

29/06/2012 11:11

List of Abbreviations

w o rks by p aul de m an AI

Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) AR Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979) BI Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, Second Edition, Revised (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983) RR The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984) RCC Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism: The Gauss Seminar and Other Papers, ed. E.S. Burt, Kevin Newmark, and Andrzej Warminski (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) RT The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) TA Textual Allegories, http://ucispace.lib.uci.edu/handle/10575/1091

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd vii

29/06/2012 11:11

Acknowledgements

I

would like to thank everyone who contributed to the production of this book and the extended research project on the Paul de Man archive at the University of California, Irvine, of which it is a part. In particular I would like to acknowledge the scrupulous work of Dr Erin Obodiac who as an AHRC Post-Doctoral Researcher transcribed the handwritten manuscript of Textual Allegories: without her efforts none of this would have been possible. I would also like to thank the staff and students of UCI who supported this project: Stephen Barker, E. S. Burt, Barbara Cohen, David Theo Goldberg, Peter Krapp, Julia Lupton, Catherine Liu, Steve Mailloux, Rei Terada, Andrzej Warminski, and especially to Yolanda Choo and Arielle Read; my profound thanks also to Catherine Ji. An enormous debt is due to the staff of the UCI Special Collections and Archives: Michelle Light, Stephen MacLeod, Andrew Jones, Joanna Lamb and to Jackie Dooley, the co-producers of these several volumes based on the Paul de Man papers. Thanks are also due to friends and colleagues at the University of Leeds and Kingston University, London, notably Fred Orton and Simon Morgan Wortham. The collection is dedicated to Patsy de Man for her kindness, encouragement, and continued interest in this work. This book was made possible by research grants from the British Academy and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. ‘Nietzsche I: Rhetoric and Metaphysics’ by Paul de Man is copyright Patsy de Man; I am extremely grateful for her permission to reproduce it here. It is reproduced courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine Libraries. Paul de Man papers. MS-C004. Box 9: Folders: 1–4. The text of Textual Allegories, both the transcription and the original manuscript, can be consulted online at http://ucispace.lib.uci.edu/handle/10575/1092

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd viii

29/06/2012 11:11

Notes on Contributors

Etienne Balibar is Distinguished Professor of French and Italian at the University of California, Irvine. He is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at University Paris-Ouest (Nanterre), from September 2012 he will be Distinguished Anniversary Chair in the Humanities at Kingston University, London. His recent publications include Politics and the Other Scene (2012) and The Philosophy of Marx (2007). Stephen Barker is Professor of Drama at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Autoaesthetics: Strategies of the Self After Nietzsche (1992) and translator of Bernard Steigler’s Technics and Time, Vols. 2 and 3 (2008, 2010). E. S. Burt is Professor of French at the University of California, Irvine and is the author of Poetry’s Appeal: The Nineteenth-Century French Lyric and the Political Space (2000) and Regard for the Other: Autobiography and Autothanatography in Rousseau, De Quincey, Baudelaire, and Wilde (2009). Tom Cohen is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at SUNY, Albany. He is the author of Hitchcock’s Cryptonymies Vols. 1 and 2 (2005) and co-author of Theory and the Disappearing Future: on de Man, on Benjamin (2011). Paul de Man (1919–83) was the Sterling Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Yale University. His is the author of some of the most important works of literary theory and deconstruction including Blindness and Insight, Allegories of Reading, The Rhetoric of Romanticism, and Aesthetic Ideology. Martin McQuillan is Professor of Literary Theory and Cultural Analysis and Dean of Arts and Social Sciences at Kingston University, London. His recent publications include Deconstruction After 9/11 (2008) and Roland Barthes, or, The Profession of Cultural Studies (2010). Steven Mailloux is President’s Professor of Rhetoric at Loyola Marymount University, his recent publications include Reception Histories: Rhetoric, Pragmatism,

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd ix

29/06/2012 11:11

x

n o t e s on con tribu to rs

and American Cultural Politics (1998), and Disciplinary Identities: Rhetorical Paths of English, Speech, and Composition (2006). Nigel Mapp is Senior Lecturer in English at Westminster University, London. He is the author of Paul de Man: Rhetoric, Aesthetics, History (2011). Walter Benn Michaels is Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His recent publications include The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (2006), and The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (2004). J. Hillis Miller is Distinguished Research Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. His most recent publications include The Conflagration of Community: Fiction Before and After Auschwitz (2011) and For Derrida (2009). Kevin Newmark teaches literature and literary theory at Boston College. He is author of Beyond Symbolism: Textual History and the Future of Reading (1991) and Irony on Occasion (2012). Erin Obodiac teaches English at the University of California, Irvine, and was the Arts and Humanities Research Council sponsored researcher who transcribed Paul de Man’s Textual Allegories (2009). Marc Redfield is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Brown University. He is the author of The Rhetoric of Terror: Reflections on 9/11 and the War on Terror (2009) and The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism (2003). Andrzej Warminski is Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, the editor of Paul de Man’s Aesthetic Ideology (1996) and author of Readings in Interpretation: Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger (1987).

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd x

29/06/2012 11:11

Introduction Broken Promises: Rousseau, de Man and Watergate Martin McQuillan It was on working with Rousseau that I felt I was able to progress from purely linguistic analysis to questions which are really already of a political and ideological nature. (RT 121)

O

n sabbatical from Yale University, Paul de Man spent the academic year 1973–74 in Zurich, where he had until 1970 held the Chair of Comparative Literature. The product of this sabbatical was the manuscript entitled Textual Allegories, an extended reading of the question of figurality in Rousseau, which was to provide the material for several published articles and later the second half of the last monograph published in de Man’s lifetime, Allegories of Reading. Textual Allegories is then a draft of the thinking that will become synonymous with de Man and what is both correctly and so-problematically called ‘American deconstruction’. The shape of Textual Allegories follows exactly the chapter plan that appears in Allegories of Reading, starting from page 1 with a chapter on ‘The Metaphor of the Self’, corresponding to Chapter 8 of Allegories, ‘Self (Pygmalion)’, running though chapters on Julie, the Profession de foi, The Social Contract and Confessions. An additional un-numbered chapter entitled ‘Theory of Metaphor in Rousseau’s Second Discourse’ completes the draft of Allegories, corresponding to Chapter 7 of that book, ‘Metaphor’. While clearly the source material for de Man’s later published version there are several points of interest concerning this manuscript. Firstly, if we take seriously the claim that Allegories of Reading, like Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake or Derrida’s Of Grammatology, is one of the most important books published in the twentieth century, then it is no little thing to be able to consider a folio draft of this text. Textual Allegories differs from Allegories of Reading, page by page and line by line, and reading one against the other presents an enormous challenge of following the path of de Man’s thought in the development of his rhetorical reading strategy. In this sense, Textual Allegories can be thought of as the architectural plans for de Man’s masterpiece, the blue print for a thinking in progress and as such it can helpfully point us toward an understanding of this most concentrated of de Man’s texts. The Zurich manuscript does not stand in the place

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 1

29/06/2012 11:11

2

ma r tin m cqu illan

of Allegories of Reading, nor does it complete Allegories, rather it is in its fragmented and over-written way a trace of a text before the text, a step in the development of de Man’s writing that necessarily retains a relation to the contingent. The de Man archive is frequently marked by this sort of textual contingency that is otherwise flattened out by the effects of post hoc publication. On floor five of the Langdon Library at the University of California, Irvine, where the de Man papers are held, one can find numerous plans by de Man to arrange his output in different combinations, with different inflections and emphases, in the name of possible, imagined research trajectories. There are several drafts of the proposed contents of Allegories of Reading, when de Man finally settled upon this title and the argument it implied (TA 132–3).1 Central to each alternative Contents are the chapters of the Zurich manuscript, but the listings differ as de Man contemplates drawing on earlier published texts as well as imagined future writing, notably on Nietzsche. This situation is repeated across de Man’s oeuvre, some of these plans have provided the guide for the volumes of essays posthumously edited by E.S. Burt, Wlad Godzich, Kevin Newmark and Andrzej Warminski.2 The necessary and welcome production of these volumes then have the curious effect of pointing toward a coherent trajectory for de Man’s writing that is not significantly present within de Man’s own notebooks and papers. Here one has the feeling of instability associated with a series of divergent and multiple writing projects that momentarily coalesce only to dissolve under the pressure of their own impossible adequacy, and then to reassemble according to a displacement that suggests the principles and logic of their ordering might just as well be otherwise. However, all of these possible combinations and their subsequent collection as posthumous volumes always depend upon the permutations of single essays. What is significant about Textual Allegories as a manuscript is that it represents an attempt (perhaps the only ever such attempt) on de Man’s part to write a continuous monograph on a single topic from beginning to end. This would make Textual Allegories unique amongst de Man’s output and require us to treat it with considerable caution. For this is a piece of writing that can now only ever exist in the form of a manuscript, a draft, a fragment, as a remainder from the archive. It asks to be read according to a double movement, firstly, in a centripetal way as a monograph study of Rousseau in which de Man gathers together in an extreme metonymic concentration his developing understanding of the problems of language and textuality that he comes to name ‘allegory’. Secondly, in a centrifugal way whereby this manuscript is itself broken up into a string of published single essays on Rousseau that appear in journals before the publication of Allegories of Reading. Such a diremption, that must run through any reading of the Zurich manuscript, points toward a movement of considerable textual complexity that we will have to attend to presently. As part of a writerly archive one will never be finished with a text like the Zurich manuscript, with its numerous revisions and elisions through which every connection and no connection can be made with de Man’s published masterpiece. This manuscript transforms our appreciation of Allegories of Reading because it gives to that understanding something like an unconscious. The transcription of this manuscript by Erin Obodiac and its open access, made possible by the de Man estate and

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 2

29/06/2012 11:11

introduction

3

UCI Special Collections, compels us to enter into a consideration of the de Man archive, and I would wish that term to take on board all the resonances of the books read and unread by de Man that pass through his writing, the texts written and leftunwritten, the volumes assembled and yet-to-be assembled of Paul de Man, all the wires that run and cross through the complex spread of de Man’s writerly production into the history of twentieth-century thought. In this sense, it is the good fortune of UCI to host and to ‘guard’ what cannot be mastered, avowing as a closed archive a collection of papers that can never be comprehended as such. Rather, a manuscript like Textual Allegories opens up this archive according to its own double movement: as the most decisive index of what an archive might be, and as the opening of otherness within that archive that would give rise to the ruin of the possibility of its completeness. The transcription of the Zurich manuscript is only the start of hours, years of scholarly labour that should keep the lights burning at UCI for decades to come. To quote Derrida on the deposit of Hélène Cixous’ papers at the Bibliothèque National in Paris, ‘the corpus remains immeasurably vaster than the library supposed to hold it’.3 In the relation between Textual Allegories and Allegories of Reading one suspects, as Geoffrey Bennington says of a particularly knotty piece of Derrida, much of de Man is packed, ‘or tightly curled up around itself like those extra spatial dimensions that string-theory postulates’.4 Here, the published text is confronted with and forever estranged from its own unconscious in a relationship where everything remains to be read. The archival text, what we are calling here Textual Allegories or the Zurich manuscript, states all that it does, openly and publicly for anyone to read just as the secrets it presents can only ever take the form of absolute secrets, in Derrida’s sense, not in the form of an encryption that is potentially knowable but as an absolute deprivation of the power to decide upon the proper relation between the two texts. The archival competence of the de-Man-scholar-to-come is powerless in the face of this estranging otherness and its structure of the un-decidable. The best hope of such readers is only to confirm that structure, and work toward cooperating in rendering it even more effective as a complication of de Man’s published text. Now, the Zurich manuscript diverges from the published text of Allegories of Reading in one important respect. The most striking difference between the two texts is that, after ‘Political Allegory’ (on The Social Contract), the earlier manuscript develops two additional sections – ‘Textual Allegory’ and ‘Nietzsche I: Rhetoric + Metaphysics’ – which follow through on the implications of political allegory. De Man seems to abandon this trajectory and instead resumes his reading of Rousseau with a concluding chapter on the Confessions. For attentive readers of de Man conversant with his later work on the ideological, it is curious that textual turbulence should occur at this moment in de Man’s manuscript. Firstly, given the emphasis placed upon de Man’s justly famous essay on the purloined ribbon by those who wish to read it retrospectively as the clearest example of de Man’s suppressed biographical writing, we might note that this essay seems to be something of an after-thought to the Zurich manuscript, both the point at which de Man seems to break from his coherent reading of Rousseau to pursue alternative trajectories into Nietzsche and a moment of return in which this chapter acts as if to conclude a study of Rousseau of which it may never have been an originary part. The textual disruption around

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 3

29/06/2012 11:11

4

ma r tin m cqu illan

the reading of The Social Contract points to the alternative and contingent lines of thought within de Man’s writing that I alluded to earlier. These fragmented and crossed-through pages suggest that the path of de Man’s writing, and its critical characterization, might just as well have been otherwise. I would also suggest that as the architectural plan for Allegories of Reading, one can see in reading these pages, as one does when presented with a blueprint for a grand design, the steps that move us in a double direction, from outline to object. Firstly, as a failure of the transformation, in the sense that all translations from one text to another must necessarily fail as a presentation of a non-originary original. Secondly, and equally, the transcription of a plan allows us to see more clearly the technical tricks and feints that are rendered invisible by the presented and finished item. In the present case, it is possible to see the ways in which de Man intensifies the complexity of Allegories of Reading through the elision of the more substantial exposition given in Textual Allegories, while the text of the Zurich manuscript simultaneously complicates and unpacks the more aphoristic and concentrated parts of Allegories of Reading. I will attempt to demonstrate this in relation to particular moments in the later published text on a future occasion.5 I think one of the interesting aspects of the Zurich manuscript is the way in which its moments of textual turbulence demonstrate the central importance in de Man’s reading of Rousseau between his accounts of the Profession de foi and The Social Contract as iteratively related to the second half of the Julie as examples of the same tropological order. It is in attempting to work out this argument that one might contend that de Man’s construction over-reaches itself and the architecture of the book begins to buckle, as his argument becomes ever more attenuated. In a certain sense, we might say that de Man fails to convince himself of his own position here, and consequently retreats from Rousseau into Nietzsche and from allegory into metaphysics, by reinstating a reading of the Confessions as the illusion of closure for a reading that had already in some way collapsed. Much of that hesitancy on de Man’s part is removed from Allegories of Reading, where the relation between the chapters on the Profession and The Social Contract is both more elliptical and suggestively heightened in the seeming opacity of their respective conclusions. Nonetheless the text of the Zurich manuscript points us toward the ways in which de Man may have suggestively stuttered in crossing the bridge from Julie to The Social Contract through a profession of his faith in tropes, much in the manner of his own reading of Kant, in which The Critique of Judgment fails to bridge the gap between pure and practical reason. I would also like to point toward another item of interest concerning the Zurich manuscript and these moments of textual uncertainty that occur in the movement of a reading from the Profession to The Social Contract. This text on Rousseau, the only ‘monograph’ as such that de Man ever produced, was written (I would contend) between September 1973 and July 1974, its elaboration and revision no doubt continuing long after that, the first tranche of it, ‘The Timid God (A Reading of Rousseau’s Profession de foi du vicaire Savoyard)’, being published in the Georgia Review in 1975 – thus indicating the central importance de Man placed upon working through a reading of the Profession. This is to say that the Zurich manuscript was written during the unfolding of the events known then and now as

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 4

29/06/2012 11:11

introduction

5

the Watergate Scandal, which led to the resignation of President Nixon in 1974 and the re-imagining of North American political life. No doubt the European de Man was considerably less scandalized by the breach of an elected President’s contract with ‘the people’ than the local journalistic voices that defined and determined the popular understanding of this event. However, it is surely no coincidence that de Man chose to respond to these particular texts by Rousseau at this time and for them to present him with particular moments of disruption within his text. Certainly, the Zurich manuscript offers ample evidence for such a hypothesis when de Man writes toward the end of the chapter on the Profession de foi, in preparation for his consideration of The Social Contract, of ‘the at times striking “relevance” of Rousseau’s political writings with regard to contemporary political questions’ (TA 137). The correspondence between de Man in Zurich and Derrida in Yale in January 1973 also gives weight to such a conjecture, whereby having dispensed with formal greetings, general thanks and best wishes, the first thing de Man asks for is an update on the Watergate affair, complaining that the European press are not carrying as much detail as he would find ‘at home’ on the Eastern Seaboard.6 Such a consideration of de Man’s reading of Rousseau is not an attempt to arrest the play of meaning in Allegories of Reading by tying that text to an event or source that would explain the meaning revealed in it. Rather, it is to suggest that de Man’s text is marked by its relation to a date, to the memory and place of its writing. The opening of a textual unconscious for Allegories of Reading by the appearance of the Zurich manuscript introduces a further, compounded doubleness into de Man’s published text, which appeared in 1979 at a remove from the moment of its drafting in Zurich, the published version having done much to flatten-out the references de Man makes in Textual Allegories to the contemporary scene. Of course Allegories of Reading speaks beyond the date of either its drafting in the Zurich manuscript or its publication by Yale University Press, to other dates and to the date of the other who reads it and is read by it. However, the date of 1973 remains readable beyond its pure singularity, effaced by both the work of rewriting the manuscript and the work of writing itself within the manuscript which compels the singular date of the manuscript beyond itself to the promised date of the other – the singular date and the date of the other simultaneously and doubly command the text’s referral. Hence, from the moment we date the Zurich manuscript there must always be more than one meaning to this text and to Allegories of Reading, both of which are now opened up by the alterity that relates one to the other. One of the possible dates of the other, to which these texts write, is today. What shall the reader of today make of Allegories of Reading and of the manuscript of Textual Allegories that is now presented to us as a monograph within a monograph? In this sentence, ‘the at times striking “relevance” of Rousseau’s political writings with regard to contemporary political questions’, which appears in the Zurich manuscript but not the published edition of Allegories of Reading, we are presented with a theoretical problem of considerable complexity. On the one hand, we might recognize this syntagm as a cut within de Man’s text, a cut which contains within itself the greatest concentration of autobiographical, historical, social, political meaning, that compels an act of reading that must work toward a dismantling of all

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 5

29/06/2012 11:11

6

ma r tin m cqu illan

the borders of the book, between an inside of textual explication and an outside of social determination, between ‘published’, ‘approved’ or ‘sanctioned’ versions of a text and the fragmented traces that appear before the book and continue to speak from within the text even when they are no longer present. On the other hand, we are caught within a multiple logic of histories curled up within one another. When one reads this sentence it is the contemporary, the very moment of our reading, that is opened up by a relation to the otherness of the moment it names. For surely we are also struck today by the striking ‘relevance’ of Rousseau’s political writings, and in turn de Man’s writing on Rousseau’s political writings, to contemporary political questions. In this sense, de Man’s contemporary is related to our own, both by a direct historical path that leads from something called Watergate to our present moment, and by the ambiguity of the contemporary itself. Here we might think of ‘the contemporary’ as a moment of difficulty in reading that is marked by the alterity of the date that also cuts through the written text. The contemporary is determined by a certain singular, even provisional and contingent historical conjuncture, a present that presupposes its own sovereign significance in relation to other presences past and future. At the same time the contemporary as the determining instant of reading is opened up by the other date, the other dates, of the text that is read. The con-tempus, together with in time, is suggestive of a double preposition, pre-position, in which the text is with us in our present and we open ourselves to the time of the text. Hence, to read the ‘contemporary’ in de Man’s sentence is to open up a series of archival boxes, reading in our contemporary, de Man’s contemporary (1973–74), against the other contemporary of this text (1979), and into Rousseau’s contemporary and the contemporaries of the drafts and versions of The Social Contract (1762) that de Man cites, including the Geneva manuscript and the text ‘On Public Happiness’ (1767). As soon as we speak of the contemporary we are again in a multiplicity of dates. However, it is not the word ‘contemporary’ that de Man places in inverted commas but the term ‘relevance’. The suggestion I think is to scare off any suggestion of a reading that might be determined by any easy notion of the mimetic or the domination of the figural dimension of language by social concerns that were in some way supposed to be extra-textual: the sin of aesthetic ideology. In this sense the inverted commas are also a nod to a mode of institutional critical language that de Man does so much to put into crisis elsewhere. For a certain de Man the contemporary significance of Rousseau’s political writing would be an aberration, one present amongst many that would be no more exemplary of a sovereign present than any other possible present of Reading. However, in the matter of reading in the contemporary we might ask, what could ever not be relevant to a reading? The question of relevance is an enormous issue here in the transcription of an archival text that may or may not be relevant to a reading of de Man’s published text. What is relevant and irrelevant here? That is to say what is of use value and what might enter into an economy of reading? What might make for an economic reading of this interminably demanding manuscript? Derrida has already glossed this word for us in his text on The Merchant of Venice, ‘What is a Relevant Translation?’ He says, quite economically:

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 6

29/06/2012 11:11

introduction

7

What is most often called ‘relevant’? Well, whatever feels right, whatever seems pertinent, apropos, welcome, appropriate, opportune, justified, wellsuited or adjusted, coming right at the moment when you expect it, or corresponding as is necessary to the object to which the so-called relevant action relates: the relevant discourse, the relevant proposition, the relevant decision, the relevant translation. A relevant translation would therefore be, quite simply, a ‘good’ translation, a translation that does what one expects of it, in short, a version that performs its mission, honors its debt and does its job or its duty while inscribing in the receiving language the most relevant equivalent for an original, the language that is the most right, appropriate, pertinent, adequate, opportune, pointed, univocal, idiomatic, and so on. The most possible, and this superlative puts us on the trail of an ‘economy’ with which we shall have to reckon.7 The striking ‘relevance’ of Rousseau’s political writing to the contemporary might then be said to be a matter of discerning the way in which the text of Rousseau most adequately serves an understanding of the political scene of 1973, honouring the debts of that moment in an appropriate, perhaps the best possible, economic transfer which does the job or responds to the duty of explaining that moment through a metaphorical-metonymic translation of one through the other. One might propose that every present is curled up in the relation between the double enunciation of the reading here and now and the other date(s) of the text(s) read, including those that themselves have the semblance of readings, and are relevant to the production of a reading. Each reading must pass through and be a finite opening of the trace of each finite present as (infinitely) finite. De Man is quite correct to place ‘relevance’ in inverted commas, because ‘relevance’ in this sense is neither straightforward nor immediate. The most irrelevant detail may be relevant, and its relevance is entirely relative. It is interesting to note that ‘relevance’ as a word is related through the Latin relevare to the French relever, as that which is raised up and given prominence, the action familiar to deconstruction that both raises and erases. The aberration of the relevance of Rousseau today is then something that is truly ‘striking’, something that raises the significance of today and then strikes it through. When we pay attention to the Zurich manuscript at this point the sentence is in fact even more striking. What de Man writes in the first iteration of this sentence within the Zurich manuscript is ‘the amazing “relevance” of Rousseau’s political writing’ before striking through ‘amazing’. This is in fact de Man’s second attempt at this sentence on page 137. The comment comes in the context of a discussion of the ‘private’ and the ‘public’ as the structuring polarity of Rousseau’s political writing, and what de Man seems to write is: ‘The main political controversies about Rousseau’s political thoughts still centre around the question of this polarity; between the at times amazing “relevance” of Rousseau for contemporary political questions also between’ – at this point the entire clause is struck through in favour of a reference to Rousseau’s own historical preferences so that the sentence reads: ‘The main controversies about Rousseau’s political thought still center around this polarity; Rousseau’s historical valorizations such as, for example,

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 7

29/06/2012 11:11

8

ma r tin m cqu illan

the admiration for Lycurgus and the Lacedomians or for Rome, as well as the allusions to Plato’s Republic and the Politics, all cluster around the tensions between the individual and the public man.’ It is of course impossible to attempt to recover any sort of structuring principle of intentionality that will arrest the ambiguity of the text at this point. The only thing of which we can be certain is that wherever it is used the word ‘relevance’ is always in inverted commas and that these pages do not appear in the published text of Allegories of Reading or the text of ‘The Timid God’ that appears in The Georgia Review. De Man seems to have followed his own advice at the end of this chapter in the Zurich manuscript when he writes in the bottom margin below the final sentence ‘re-write this page’. Now, it would be an aberration of sorts to pick out this particular striking-through from the Zurich manuscript, which is itself replete with rewritings and reformulations of every kind on every page. However, I am tempted to say that this particular erasure is highly relevant to any reading of Allegories of Reading and of the archival supplement Textual Allegories. First, a word about the word ‘striking’. It is one of de Man’s favourite words, appearing five times in Textual Allegories and seven times in Allegories of Reading (although only twice in the section that maps onto the Zurich manuscript, i.e., three strikes are out from Zurich to Yale). De Man is frequently struck by what interests him in Rousseau, the strike here seems to be quite involuntary as the text of Rousseau hits the reader with an unpredictable blow or illuminates a particular scene with a lightening strike. For example, in a footnote on page 290, the lies of Albertine are said to be a ‘striking instance of the structural and epistemological implications of the anacoluthon’. The Apollonian metaphor in Nietzsche is described as ‘one of his most striking metaphors’ (AR 93). Rilke’s writing is characterized by ‘striking reversals’ (AR 45), ‘one of the most striking characteristics of literary semiology as it is practiced today, in France and elsewhere, is the use of grammatical structures’ (AR 6),‘the most striking aspect of this passage [in Swann’s Way] is the juxtaposition of figural and metafigural language’ (AR 14). In the Zurich manuscript we have not only the striking ‘relevance’ of Rousseau’s political writings but also the economy of Clarens as ‘perhaps the most striking instance of the mutual contaminations of private and public spheres’ (TA 189), while Nietzsche’s ‘more properly linguistic concerns’ are ‘almost as striking’ as Rousseau’s (TA 197). It is not that de Man uses this term more frequently than others but that when it strikes it seems to strike a decisive blow or light up the scene of the most decisive cases in de Man’s reading. In contrast ‘amazing’ or ‘amazement’ do not reappear in either Textual Allegories or Allegories of Reading. It would seem that de Man much preferred to be struck than to be amazed. The passivity of the reader here is striking, in contrast to the text that hits out or even withdraws its labour, striking out and striking through or making a strike with Archie Bunker’s bowling shoes, bouleversé. The amazed reader or the amazing aspect of a text, which would have the capacity to surprise or fill the reader with wonder, is curiously absent from de Man. It would seem that de Man’s attempt to record the turns of allegory in Rousseau ought to act as a map to see him out this textual maze. The strike in de Man, then, is not necessarily a surprise but a blow that cannot be avoided. This is a strike that our training might have prepared us for and which we must take on the chin even though it may

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 8

29/06/2012 11:11

introduction

9

knock us to the floor. The strike here is the foreseen contingency, the expected unexpected, although arriving unexpectedly it should never surprise us. After all we ought to be able to count the gap between the peal of thunder and when we will be struck by lightening. I find it singularly interesting then that de Man should make reference twice to the ‘amazing “relevance” of Rousseau’s political writing’ before crossing out. It would seem that this particular moment of textual invention is something that both fills de Man with genuine surprise and at the same time cannot be carried over into the published manuscript. Indeed it cannot be carried over into the handwritten manuscript as ‘amazing’ is deleted twice in the spaghetti maze of de Man’s strike-throughs. It is not a thought that is allowed to grow. De man comments in Textual Allegories on the striking relevance of Rousseau and Nietzsche’s political writing to his present moment: ‘The controversial impact of the question is so farreaching that it would be impossible to deal with it in less than book-size length’ (TA 138). A book by de Man on Watergate, Rousseau and Nietzsche would have taken some reading: full of stolen texts, stolen ribbons of tape, thieving legislators, scandals of one kind or another, the rhetoric of persuasion, and the will to power: G. Gordon Liddy’s Nietzsche would no doubt be very different from de Man’s. This is of course a line of flight that de Man does not take up, or at least chose not to explore in an explicit way. However, with its deconstruction of executive power (de Man’s translation, with the help of ‘some historical hindsight’ [AR 265], of Rousseau’s souverain) perhaps we might think of Allegories of Reading as precisely this book. Or at least, we might say that such a book is curled up within Allegories of Reading, the impact of these far-reaching questions taking us beyond the aberration of Watergate, which no longer needs to be named, even as it remains a step outlined in the blueprint, written in the margin of the text. Here we might say that the idea of ‘Watergate’ is a relevant metonymic concentration for the dating of the Zurich manuscript, one that is the most pertinent translation for the reader today. This is a scandal. ‘Watergate’ as a word denotes scandal, the only true scandal perhaps, the revelation of the gap between the public and the private in political discourse, and the impeachment of the sovereign as a consequence. Showing that only impeachment is proper to the sovereign. ‘Watergate’ as a word performs the figural shift of this allegory of unreadibility into the metonymic concentration of its own name, and it in turn comes to act as the figural wellspring for all scandals of the private-public even to the point of giving its name to future scandals: Whitewatergate, Zippergate, Contragate, Troopergate, and so on (although interestingly not the socalled ‘de Man affair’ itself). The difference between an ‘affair’ and a scandal worthy of the name ‘gate’ is worth considering. The suffix, gate, is the threshold that swings open between the private and the public, following its etymological root from the Dutch, gat, meaning a gap, or hole, or breach. The gate both marks off the boundary between public and private and opens out onto the gap. The breach of promise that structures any such political scandal – perhaps in this sense only the political can be scandalous, any true scandal must be political, like the ruin of the Queen in Poe’s story of purloined love letters. This is also the scandal of the archive, namely the instability it opens between the public and private individual. It is why archives are political. The scandal of Watergate is the same scandal of Rousseau’s political

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 9

29/06/2012 11:11

10

ma r tin m cqu illan

writing, the one that de Man identifies in his reading, namely, the inability of the polarity of the public and private to secure the political discourse it puts in play and yet the insistence of that discourse on the very polarity it constantly undermines. Watergate resonates in American culture because it demonstrates the fragile and figural nature of the textual constitution of a fictional promise. An affair in contrast is a matter of personal responsibility for what is done, à faire. An affair might be characterized, like the promise, as an ethical question: The Pro-Mis(e), Pro-Mettre, the putting before, the word that is already in advance of any action or gesture, an ethical performative, the ‘ethos’, the embodiment of my character meaning that my actions follow from my natural inner state. When I say ‘I promise’ I am committing myself to a course of action, which is pre-determined by my character: my word is my bond [with/is the word] and the inadequacy of that relation. There is a distinction made in French that is elided in the English idiom of a broken promise, the difference between the accidental breaking of a promise by contingent or unforeseen circumstances, ‘casser’, in which I am not responsible for the breaking, and ‘brisser’ in which I break a promise, actively through my own volition. Watergate is a scandal because the appearance of the former passive mode is revealed upon investigation to be a case of the later active mode of breaking promises. The anchoring principle of the political, the private and the public spheres, is shown to rely upon an ethical presupposition in which it is the sovereign’s inner character that is said to be put in question by his public utterances. The Watergate scandal is the impeachment of the sovereign, the death of God, or more properly the putting to death of God because God broke his contract with his people. Only a God could possibly keep a promise, de Man tells us, but equally the meaning of God is tied up with the word of God, that God should keep his word, that his covenant and contract is worth something, otherwise the people have the right to break their contract with him. This is the scandal that Duns Scotus identifies regarding the sovereignty, the divine right, of kingship: that in fact it is the people who are sovereign with regard to the contract. Thus Watergate names the scandal of the theotrope itself, the gap between God and the word of God, between tropos and logos, and the absence of God as the insurance of the stability of the structuring principle of such a polarity; equally the remains of God in the retreat that produces instability. The relevance of Textual Allegories to Allegories of Reading is tied up in this question of the broken promise: the passage from the ‘self’ of the Pygmalion chapter to The Social Contract, from the ethical allegory of Julie to the political allegory of The Social Contract, and the unreadability of both as the result of a linguistic confusion that would aberrantly determine the ethical and the political as determining categories rather than identifying them as discursive modes amongst many. This is the scandalous truth that de Man promises to reveal and which he insists upon even as the collapse of his own text demonstrates the opposite. As I suggested previously, it is in crossing this bridge that de Man’s argument becomes the most strained. It is the chapter on the promise that is broken in the Zurich manuscript, it is at the point of discussing the promise that the manuscript is at its most turbulent, in the passage from the theotropic to the contract, the transit from the sovereign to property, the moments when de Man’s architectural joints seem to come under the most pressure.

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 10

29/06/2012 11:11

introduction

11

It is here, after the discussion of the impossible contract and the broken promise, that Nietzsche intrudes upon Rousseau and the work of de Man momentarily offers the possibility of taking off in another direction, pre-emptive of the later Messenger lectures, moving from God and politics to the debunking of ideology, not the demystification of ideologies but the debunking of ideology itself as an aesthetic construct and consequently perhaps of any such act of so-called reading that might find something like an ideological inscription of Watergate in the text of Paul de Man. Finally, it would be a scandal to read de Man in this way, to read his own political archive against himself. It would be scandalous to suggest that the figural deconstruction that de Man undertakes in this book is the most relevant discourse to the more general transformations in political life that unfold during and after Watergate, something that we might provisionally term ‘the deconstruction of America’, bearing in mind that there is no deconstruction and there is no such thing as America. Scandal itself is a theotrope, it is a religious word that comes from Old French and Ecclesiastical Latin, scandalum, meaning to cause offense, notably when the reprehensible behaviour of a religious person brings discredit to their order or to religion itself. Such an ideological reading of de Man would be precisely scandalous in this way. So, let me momentarily and quite arbitrarily break my text here, breaking my own promise to demonstrate either the relevance of Textual Allegories to Allegories of Reading or the relevance of de Man’s reading of Rousseau’s political writing to the contemporary moment of 1973. Although I will now, quite scandalously, continue to insist that I have done just that and scandalously to insist upon the relevance of such an idiom of reading. Following de Man’s own description of textual allegory we might say that every reading is scandalous because it must insist upon that which it cannot demonstrate; the reading asks us to take its word for it, insured by the relevance of its worthy inner character. Equally every contract is scandalous and every archive is scandalous, every insurance policy is scandalous, every bond or note issued is scandalous because they demonstrate how much of our faith in faith itself depends upon our trust in theotropes.

no tes 1. For example, at the break between the chapter on The Social Contract and the abandoned Nietzsche chapter the manuscript of Textual Allegories maps out the plan for an extended study that might be considered an early plan for Allegories of Reading: 1(1) Stand der Forschung: The Rhetoric of Temporality 1(2) Proust and the Allegory of Reading (to be added to) 1(3) Chiasmus in Rilke Jean Jacques Rousseau 2(1) Theory of Metaphor 2(2) Metaphor of Self 2(3) Ethical allegory 2(4) Religious allegory 2(5) Political allegory 2(6) Textual allegory

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 11

29/06/2012 11:11

12

ma r tin m cqu illan Nietzsche 3(1) Deconstruction and the theory of values 3(2) Ironic allegories (a) Birth of Tragedy (b) Genealogy of Morals? (c) On Lie and Truth? (d) Zarathustra 4(1) Wordsworth’s autobiography 4(2) On the Possibility of literary history (a) “The center does not hold . . .” (On Lie and Truth) (b) Genesis and Genealogy (B of Tr + Gen o Mor) (c) Zarathustra 11 (415): 853 (on B. of Tr.)

2. See AI (1996) and RCC (1996) 3. Jacques Derrida, Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius: The Secrets of the Archive, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006). 4. Geoffrey Bennington, ‘Handshake’, Derrida Today, 1, 2008, p. 178. 5. See ‘De Man and the Neo-Cons’ in the forthcoming edition ‘Where Ghosts Live’, Derrida Today, 2012, ed. Graham Allen and David Coughlan. 6. January 7th 1974. The de Man-Derrida correspondence is the subject of a future publication project. 7. Jacques Derrida, ‘What is a Relevant Translation?’, trans. Lawrence Venuti, Critical Inquiry, 27:2, 2001, p. 177.

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 12

29/06/2012 11:11

Chapter 1

1

julie ou la nouvelle héloïse

Lovence in Rousseau’s Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse

Etienne Balibar

D

e Man’s chapter on Julie in Allegories of Reading is not only a central moment in the economy of the book, where the key hermeneutic category (the ‘allegory’) becomes illustrated and justified, it is also a brilliant interpretation of the problem of ‘passion’ as a point of superposition of epistemology and ethics that, every attentive reader would probably agree, forms the objective and the crucial interest of the philosophical novel. In my attempt at making sense of the stylistic and theoretical intricacies of La Nouvelle Héloïse, I draw particularly on two of de Man’s insights. The first one says that ‘passion is not something which, like the senses, belongs in proper to an entity or to a subject but, like music, it is the system of relationships that exists only in the terms of this system . . .’ (AR 210): hence it is a relational notion. This also means that ‘love’ (in its ever changing modalities) and the correlative other passions must be described and discussed for the clarity (however imperfect) that they can bring to a logical reflection on the nature of ‘relations’ as such. Another important aspect of de Man’s commentary is the very introduction of the category ‘allegory’ as a ‘narrative of the second degree’ (AR 205), which not only includes a deconstruction of its own realistic reading, but suspends the possibility of dissociating fiction from reasoning as if judging from a vantage point situated outside the text and exercising critical power over it. In my view, this definition of allegory goes as far as allowing us to acknowledge that a book like Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (JNH) delivers an effective conceptual result, provided we admit that this result (which is perhaps a question rather than a conclusion) is never to be separated from the writing that produces it, in other terms, from the literary experiment in which it becomes exposed. In suggesting this, I am recalling also the passage from de Man’s book, where he famously criticized the distinction that he had found in Althusser’s essay on The Social Contract, when Althusser concluded his reading of Rousseau’s political treatise by suggesting that where Rousseau could not find a conceptual solution to the aporias of his theory of an originary covenant, he would abandon theory and turn to literature to imagine the unique quality of a society that reproduces nature’s authenticity, as in La Nouvelle Héloïse or the Confessions. De Man, we remember, criticized a mechanical dichotomy of ‘theory’ and ‘literature’, or

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 13

29/06/2012 11:11

14

e t i e n n e balibar

the ‘conceptual’ and the ‘metaphoric’ discourses, and rightly so I believe. However, at the end of his own chapter on Julie, he had to admit that his reading centred on the structural analogy of two experiences of love of which Julie (the character) seeks to give an account in her (fictitious) writing (her love for Saint-Preux, the only too human lover, in the first part of the novel, and her new love of the second part, directed toward an entity that she calls ‘God’) fails to account for what most readers have believed to be able to read in this ‘second part’, i.e., a utopian description – whether normative or alternative – of a family-type social order whose relationship to the religious remains enigmatic. It is certainly not my intention to attempt here something like a (doubly) posthumous reply of Althusser to de Man on behalf of the latter’s recognition of an epistemological limit. Rather, I would try to push further de Man’s insight about the conceptual effectivity of allegoric writing, by removing the limit that he maintained, i.e., taking into account the complete system of ‘passions’ which are literarily performed in the writing of the JNH, therefore also – as much as I can in the framework of a short presentation – the complete ‘world’ of protagonists involved in the texture of the correspondences exchanged among the characters of the novel. Without going as far as Alain Grosrichard, who claims that Julie was the model for the Kantian Ding an sich, I will suggest that this system of relations (bilateral and multi-lateral), which completely subverts accepted representations of the dichotomies of passion and reason, the private and the public, also embodies one of Rousseau’s most original attempts at reaching what always remained his philosophical goal (but probably also his admitted aporia), namely a type of social relation that would negate its negation of the natural element in the human. It will be necessary to discuss first the relationship between the two most striking formal aspects of the novel which command its writing, albeit in a very concise manner. One is the ‘stylistic’ element of the couching of the novel published in 1761 in the form of a correspondence, an exchange of fictitious letters among its protagonists, which leaves it to the reader to imagine at the same time the intentions and the psychological effects that they produce, or even the complete development of the actions which they report, after a model which – shortly before Rousseau’s writing – the enormous European success of Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe (partially translated into French by Prévost in 1751) had made popular, but which he also (in particular through his allegoric title) refers to a much older humanist tradition where the status of fiction becomes less obvious. The other element is the ‘action’ itself, or the ‘plot’ that is presented by the novel in the form of a correspondence, involving its different characters with their actions, passions, decisions, social interests and sentimental or spiritual motives, leading from an initial conflictual situation (Saint-Preux’ romantic love affair with his pupil Julie against the will of her family, which she both confronts and interiorizes) to the seemingly accidental death of Julie (after she has discovered that her reasonable marriage and motherhood could not entirely fulfil her desire of love), which prompts an equivocal conclusion of the plot. I believe that these two elements cannot, in fact, remain separated from one another. Rousseau’s use of the form of the roman par lettres (which was to be emulated in a rather different manner shortly after him by Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 14

29/06/2012 11:11

lov en ce in julie ou la nouvelle héloïse

15

[1782], and partially by Goethe in his Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers [1774]) has been widely discussed, and, as de Man recalls, it was criticized as rather artificial inasmuch as the correspondence would simply describe events and situations that belong either to an inner experience of the protagonists or to a social story in which they are playing their respective roles, rather than form itself an action in the dramatic sense (prompting other actions, and reactions, as is the case when a character discovers in a letter something that he/she would or should ignore, a situation that can become complicated if a letter is disclosed to someone it should not have reached, or intensified if a letter is written with the intention of pretending a sentiment, inducing a passionate effect of jealousy, anger, gratitude, etc.). A fortiori, Rousseau’s ‘letters’ would lack the performative dimension of producing or embodying the effect they mention, or refer to, i.e., the passionate transformation of the minds and behaviors of their authors or destinataries. As a consequence the ‘letters’ written by Rousseau on behalf of his characters, whose style it is claimed remains utterly undifferentiated, would in fact address us, the social readership of the novel, but not really their receivers in the novel. This is much too short a vision, which is in fact relying on a traditional, not to say conventional, view of the agent, or the subject, that Rousseau’s writing is precisely challenging. If the ‘effect’ is perceived not as an individual one, or a sum of individual effects, but a trans-individual effect, i.e., a production and transformation of the collective relationship itself, inasmuch as it is made of ‘passions’ whose symmetries and dissymmetries, active or passive nature, constructive or destructive effects, secretive or communicative nature, etc., are continuously a problem for the protagonists themselves and contribute to bringing them together or to opposing them (alienating them from one another or simply making a complete unity of their feelings impossible, as is the case for Monsieur and Madame de Wolmar because of their religious divergence), then the ‘performative’ character of the correspondence presented by Rousseau in JNH is not diminished but, on the contrary, strongly enhanced. We can go as far as suggesting that the kind of ‘experience’ whose phenomenology forms the philosophical object of the book does not exist otherwise than as an effect, a production of the correspondence itself, which for that reason never pre-exists the fictitious writing of the letters (or perhaps the moment of their reading, which we may also extend, following de Man’s interpretation, to their being read by Rousseau himself, who writes them, which also means that for Rousseau it is produced in the action of writing: the full significance of this fact will become clear when we say something about the ‘experimental’ character of the plot, which cannot be separated from the form of its presentation, ‘stylistic’ in the etymological sense of the term). Allow me to confirm this generalized performative character of the correspondence in JNH by adding two remarks. First, the use of correspondence as a form is essentially linked to a structuring of space and time, therefore ‘distance’, or antithetic unity of separation and reunion, that plays an essential role in the story. Love, but also friendship, but also interest, are matters of subjects becoming separated forcefully or voluntarily, bridging separations through imagination or compensating for them through desire and confession, but also recreating separation in the moment of intimacy and the enjoyment of mutual presence.1 Letters written,

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 15

29/06/2012 11:11

16

e t i e n n e balibar

imposed, awaited, exchanged and read, materialize exactly this complexity of relations between distance and imagination that actually, in Rousseau’s view, creates the ‘community’, be it a community among distant individuals, or a community of individuals living together in the same place, among whom it would seem artificial to have letters exchanged, but whose link becomes redoubled and displayed through the letters they exchange with absent thirds. What binds together characters who are present in the ‘same’ place at the ‘same’ moment is (and perhaps is only) the fact that they write to others (their ‘friends’) who are momentarily absent. Here we can add a second remark. It is because the phrases through which the characters communicate in the novel are couched in the form of letters that these characters acquire not exactly an individuality in the anecdotic sense of the term (it has been long lamented that Rousseau’s characters lack individuality, physical or moral, and de Man himself agrees with that reproach), but a voice of their own. Should we consider it paradoxical that a singular voice has to be written and framed as that of a writer or scripter (and also frequently reported as ‘word’ in the writing of another scripter) in order to exist as such, or on the contrary, that this is a basic ‘grammatological’ effect, as Derrida would say (and for which he could have searched support in JNH)? I believe the second is the case. I put it in relation with the fact that every work by Rousseau (including the ‘theoretical’ ones, the Discourses or The Social Contract) is written in a dialogic manner, including the contrast, sometimes the conflict of different ‘voices’ (and the splitting of the ‘author’s’ function between different voices). But each of them is dialogic in a completely different and original manner, whose philosophical consequences are irreducible to a single model. ‘Dialogue’ and the ‘dialogic’ are indeed very complex notions themselves. This is linked with the fact (to which I will return in my conclusion) that Rousseau’s books which deal with the issue of the community (but which does not?) are not so much complementary pieces of a single doctrine than alternative experiments in discussing the same aporetic problem. But, JNH being a ‘novel’, this will have a dramatic consequence on our understanding of its meaning. We have access to this meaning only through the relation of its ‘voices’ which bear the names of the characters writing the letters. There is no sovereign or absolute (no ‘neutral’) voice that teaches us how to assess the truth or the primacy, I am tempted to say in Spinozistic terminology the adequacy, of the representations of their passions and ideas that the characters provide for us. We are left with immanent criteria or interpretations, which arise from the development of the correspondence itself, the contents and the order of succession of the letters, and the homogeneity or discrepancy of the judgments expressed by different scripters about their mutual relations. Such interpretations remain for us by definition hypothetic. The importance of this fact will become clear as soon as the characters involved in a passionate relationship, mainly Julie and Saint-Preux, the two romantic lovers, discover through writing that what they share, or what unites them physically as well as mentally, is in fact a difference, an irreducible fêlure or gap in the feeling of the common passion that, nevertheless, makes them inseparable (‘je veux jouir, et tu veux aimer’, I, 55). And the consequence will be that each and every one of the ‘theoretical’ problems posed by the nature of the community formed by the characters has to be expressed in a plurality

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 16

29/06/2012 11:11

lov en ce in julie ou la nouvelle héloïse

17

of voices. Whether this irreducibility of voices at the end denotes the impossibility of the community or embodies its reality as a reciprocity of subjects will remain to be discussed. This leads us directly to considering the other formal problem involved in the reading of JNH, namely the meaning of its ‘plot’, and first of all the way it is defined. It is common knowledge (and part of the critiques against its alleged literary weaknesses) that JNH is made of two successive ‘parts’, in which the situations illustrated are love and marriage. Or, more dialectically, it would describe the destruction of a certain form of conventional (aristocratic) family through the natural power of love, and the construction of another more authentic and stable form of family (bourgeois, in a sense to be discussed) through the sublimation of love and its association with reason. On that dichotomised basis (which is supported by Rousseau’s own indications in the prefaces and the self-critical reflections offered by the Confessions, and confirmed by a long posterity of imitations and commentaries), readers will split over the meaning of the concluding episode (Julie’s ‘conversion’ to a more mystical form of religion, her increased disagreement with her husband Monsieur de Wolmar on religious matters, and the ‘sacrificial’ dimension that can be read in her accidental death), seeing it either as a refutation of the idea of the superiority of marriage and reasonable love over passionate love, or as an indication of what Rousseau himself would consider to be the religious supplement necessary to the institution of marriage. I want to partially displace these readings and in fact challenge them by bringing together two different elements. First, it seems to me that the central dramatic element, which also carries the essential philosophical meaning, is represented by the project of transforming (in fact performing a transmutation of) one ‘passion’ into another: a metamorphosis of love into friendship, these two passions being at the same time very close (almost indiscernible in some cases) and, nevertheless, radically heterogeneous. It is to express this process as a problem (practical and theoretical) that I will borrow from Jacques Derrida’s 1994 book Politics of Friendship (which does not refer to Rousseau) the neologism he has coined or borrowed: ‘aimance’, translated into English as lovence.2 I will leave it open for the moment to decide whether lovence represents a more basic and more indeterminate affect, or affective quality, or a pulsion, that would precede the distinction of love and friendship, accounting for their vicissitudes (increasing and decreasing intensities, shifting choices of objects, reversals from attraction into repulsion, etc.), or a joint effect of love and friendship, and possibly other passions, that accounted for the production of complex social effects in which they are competing, substituting each other, circulating among subjects. Allow me to confirm the importance of this problem for an interpretation of JNH by adding two remarks. First: the distinction of love and friendship is notoriously difficult, first of all for linguistic reasons inside a single language, or owing to successive usages, or the disparity between different languages (think of what is for us the equivocity of the Greek ‘philein’, or the Latin ‘amare’, or the fact that we translate both ‘eros’ and ‘agape’, ‘amor’ and ‘charitas’, as ‘love’, etc.); but it is also crucial for all the tradition of Western political philosophy, before and after the ‘Christian’ epistemological break; perhaps it embodies – as Derrida would argue – the essential ‘political’ difference

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 17

29/06/2012 11:11

18

e t i e n n e balibar

inasmuch as it refers to the opposition of the private and the public, or the realm of the household and the city in a more or less direct manner. Therefore the simple fact that we could consider – at least in one of its possible readings – La Nouvelle Héloïse to be precisely structured by the idea of a transformation of love into friendship, and the contest over whether this transformation can succeed or not, and in which conditions, would be sufficient reason (although still formal) to read it not as marginally but as eminently political, since it would address not simply the question of the typical institutions and the qualities of different regimes and societies, but the very condition of possibility of a political society. Now we must remark that this transformation has the status of an experiment that is initially proposed by one character – Monsieur de Wolmar, the one who represents the classical combination of reason and authority, and who therefore incarnates the figure of the Master or the nomos empsychos, the incarnate law, but who becomes later endorsed by all the other characters in a process of virtuous emulation.3 It is Monsieur de Wolmar who, in a move that can be considered violent, even cruel (‘Vous jouissez durement de la vertu de votre femme’, Julie writes to him, IV, 16), proposes to his wife Julie to invite and meet again her former lover Saint-Preux as a friend (not only a friend of the family, but her own closest friend), and who sets the ‘dangerous’ test of taking them to the place of their past embrace (le bosquet) to cure the obsessions of their imagination and experience a new kind of mutual feeling. But it was Julie who had asked permission from Saint-Preux to disclose their past affair to her husband and offered friendship in exchange. And finally it is also SaintPreux who adheres to this plan (or believes himself to adhere to it) when he accepts Wolmar’s offer to educate his children. The performative character is very visible here, since by endorsing collectively the plan to substitute a collective bond of friendship for an exclusive (and impossible) relation of love, and reducing in a sense the institutional relationship of marriage (or the conjugal love) to being simply one element in the broader multipolar system of friendship, the three main protagonists (I leave aside for the moment the other characters, who are also friends, but were so from the beginning) who correspond about their common project, in fact already enact it. And the question which determines the succession of episodes in the novel becomes entirely this: what are the conditions for the conscious formation of such a ‘plan’, for its collective adoption in the modality of an ‘open secret’, and what are the vicissitudes and the results of the ‘real experiment’ that the characters carry upon themselves (in Rousseau’s fiction, of course). On this basis, it becomes possible to propose articulations of the plot that are more complicated than the usual dichotomy, I am thinking in particular of a ‘tragic’ structure in the classical sense, with five successive ‘acts’ featuring the moments of desire and demand, enjoyment and loss, absence and trial, return and community, finally death and transfiguration . . . but I will leave this aside for now. Instead, I want to consider some questions involved in the possibility of reading JNH as a ‘treatise of passion(s)’ or perhaps rather a ‘natural history’ of the passions in the Lockean sense, whose experimental writing in the form of a fictitious correspondence would not be a ‘literary clothing’ or a metaphoric device, but an intrinsic ‘allegoric’ element of theory itself. I will start with the qualities of the

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 18

29/06/2012 11:11

lov en ce in julie ou la nouvelle héloïse

19

‘passions’ and the processes of ‘transmutation’ that allow for conversions of one into another and oppositions between them. My general idea is that, for Rousseau – quite opposed from this point of view to a tradition arising from ancient Stoic philosophy which was brought to perfection in the works of Descartes and Spinoza, but much more akin to another tradition, that of French tragedy and ‘comedy’, from Racine to Marivaux, which could also include Pascal – the ‘definition’ of the passions is not only classificatory and differential, but dialogic or interactive: passions become singularised by the ways in which they react upon one another. This also involves another conception of desire, not oriented toward the ‘object’, but toward the ‘other subject’. Therefore ‘passions’ that emerge within the closed circle of a social microcosm can only become described in their development and their transformation over time, they include a ‘historical’ dimension, which makes the memory or retrospective imagination of past experiences an essential element of their present sentimental quality, and locates their ‘truth’ in a series of after-effects. This temporality will play a decisive role when ‘friendship’ is pictured not only as a substitute for love, but as an actual relationship to a past love, which is preserved as well as transformed (‘Il l’aime dans le temps passé, voilà le vrai mot de l’énigme’, IV, 14), in short iterated: an extremely ambivalent relationship that involves traumatic gestures of ‘repetition’ (such as the famous return to the secret grove or profanation du bosquet where the love kiss had taken place in order to perform a new friendly kiss, that we might call the kiss of disillusioned virtue and/or indeterminate promise) (IV, 12). A disturbing element in Rousseau’s account seems to be the practical elimination of the negative, therefore of the originary polarity of the positive and the negative passions (love and hate, hope and fear, joy and sadness, etc.), which played such an organizational role in classical treatises. It is as if Rousseau had retained only good passions (including love itself), which by themselves cannot be destructive. Or, more precisely, this is the case because the fiction features only good characters, which are incapable of wishing bad to others, what the novel calls les belles âmes, the ‘beautiful souls’, an expression that Rousseau did not invent,4 but that he imposed as an essential category for the subsequent romantic period. No Lovelace or Marquise de Merteuil here. This is also the opposite of the tragic genre, which locates a death instinct at the heart of every passion, but it does not produce less dramatic results, because it will locate the negative (in particular the ‘sad’ feelings: jealousy, melancholy resulting from the distance between the imagination of pleasure and its reality, regret caused by the absence of the loved object, etc.) on the side of the ‘excesses’ of the good itself – as its abyss. Perhaps we should choose a more comprehensive term, as the ‘excess’ seems fit to characterize sexual love, but not other forms of love that are by themselves ‘moderate’ (or seem to be so, in other terms compatible with reason, or associated with it), and especially does not characterize ‘friendship’ as the reversal of excessive love. We can think of insufficiency or even better inadequacy, whose criterion would be an intrinsic distance, forever impossible to bridge, between the experience of passion (the pleasure, happiness or enjoyment that it brings) and the expectation involved in the desire that it expresses. This is indeed true for sexual love, which Rousseau consistently describes as always unequal to its own

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 19

29/06/2012 11:11

20

e t i e n n e balibar

imagination unless it becomes filled with a specific form of imagined enjoyment. But it is also true for friendship, which in the end – particularly in the case of Julie herself – will prove to carry an element of unsatisfaction, or miss the fulfilment that it promises, producing a disturbing feeling of melancholy within happiness which calls for unreasonable new arrangements. Which means that there was no less hope in friendship than in love – perhaps more, in fact, if friendship was constructed as the hope to fulfil the expectation that love had left unfulfilled. Using the name at the same time in a broad and a narrow meaning, Rousseau distinguishes at least five modalities of ‘love’ in La Nouvelle Héloïse, which are more or less completely experienced by the various characters: passionate sexual love (bound to be illegal), conjugal love identified with happy marriage, maternal love (clearly outstripping its virtual symmetric: paternal love) (unless this last passion can be seen as identical with the ‘rational’ preference for a just order in the family, whose incarnation is Monsieur de Wolmar), devotion or the love of God, and finally friendship itself as the mutual disclosure of the hearts. The novel exhibits a phenomenology of their metamorphoses, mutual conflicts, and displacements from one character, or one couple, to another, which it would be fascinating to follow across the incidents of the plot. We have no time for that. But I want to draw attention to some aspects of this phenomenology, which I believe illustrate the depth of Rousseau’s understanding of the plasticity of desire and also account for the aporetic character of the novel, and more profoundly the concept whose allegoric structure it presents, in the strong sense of internally displaying the elements that contradict its intentions at the same time as it develops the logic of these intentions. First, it is remarkable that Rousseau describes friendship as a passionate feeling itself, no less passionate in the end than the feeling of sexual love that it is supposed to replace, or displace, in the experimental ‘project’ that the characters more and more consciously want to implement by forming a society where the souls are united by mutual trust (or, as Starobinski puts it, a society of transparency). We can suggest that this passionate nature of friendship comes from the fact that, although it desexualizes love or cuts love from its sexual goal (called ‘possession’), it certainly does not suppress or neutralize sexual difference, much the contrary. This goes along with the fact that friendship is essentially based on the transformation of the memory of the experience of love (or its desire), whereby the sexed character of the subjects is retained. In a sense we could even say that friendship, which suspends sexual pleasure or imagined fusion, intensifies sex as difference or distance. It is always coloured or singularized by the fact that it takes place between a man and a woman, but also, as we will see, a man and a man, or a woman and a woman. Friendship remains an expectancy of desire, and there is no desire among a-sexual beings. This is a unity of opposites or a ‘contradiction’ for which Wolmar finds an extraordinary formulation in a central lettre with Pascalian tones: J’ai fait une Découverte que ni vous ni femme au monde avec toute la subtilité qu’on prête à votre sexe n’eussiez jamais faite . . . que ces deux opposés soient vrais en même temps; qu’ils brûlent plus ardemment que jamais l’un pour l’autre, et qu’il ne règne plus entre eux qu’un honnête attachement; qu’ils

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 20

29/06/2012 11:11

lov en ce in julie ou la nouvelle héloïse

21

soient toujours amants et ne soient plus qu’amis . . . ce qui est pourtant selon l’exacte vérité. Telle est l’énigme que forment les contradictions . . . (IV, 14) But there is more than that. The metamorphosis which transforms sexual love into friendship essentially removes the possibility of jealousy (a sad, even murderous, consequence of love that the Second Discourse had already associated with the desire of sexual possession in a dramatic description), but it also creates new possibilities of transference, substitutions and identifications. One essential dramatic mechanism of the novel is based on the idea that a friend tends to fall in love with his or her friend’s lover, first illustrated by the case of Milord Edouard, Saint-Preux’ friend, who falls in love with Julie, and then, more importantly, by the case of Claire, Julie’s cousin, friend and confidant, who falls in love with Saint-Preux. The transferential complexity is increased when Julie, perhaps deluding herself about the nature of her actual feelings, but also implementing a rational strategy of desexualization or distanciation based on the use of the sexual difference, tries to convince her lover to marry her friend, or to substitute her friend in the place of her lover’s object of love – i.e., herself. These games lead to the idea that the transformation of love into friendship is reversible, or remains haunted by the possibility of a return of the sublimated passion, against which it will have to find ever new tactics. Hence the uncertainty that keeps growing as the novel approaches its end, and whose interpretation also notoriously affects its ‘political’ meaning. It seems that the elimination of jealousy and the transformation of sexual love into a passion that is just as intense but would become liberated from its ambivalence will never become stabilized unless a transcendent element is added to the immanent reciprocity of the affects and mutual trusts (therefore confidences) that the subjects share and put in common. But this transcendent element can be either a ‘living eye’ (oeil vivant), who is himself at the same time a member of the community and exercising a superior rational authority over it: this is Monsieur de Wolmar, whose self-conscious identification with a ‘mortal God’ has been widely commented by readers of JNH (notably Judith Shklar and Jean Starobinski). Or it can be a relationship of devotion to the absent God of revealed religions, who nevertheless has to become incarnated in the sentiments of a singular being. This is the function of Julie’s final ‘conversion’ (or rather, second conversion, since the first had taken place when she had renounced her illegitimate love to obey her family’s orders) when, against the background of her increasing uneasiness with her husband’s atheism, she both revels in her mystical devotion and sacrifices herself (or dies in a manner that can be perceived as a sacrifice), thus prompting a new foundation of the community on a ‘religious’ basis.5 This might be considered the ‘theotropic moment’ of the novel, whether in the de Manian sense or not. But it should be noted at the same time that the theological element, if developed completely, is highly heretical, not to say blasphematory, as it puts the woman (and a woman enjoying rapture, not suffering pain) in the place of Christ. And it remains very uncertain, an allegory as it were, not only because the conversion of Monsieur de Wolmar after his wife’s pious death is only vaguely alluded to as a possibility in the final letter written by the passionate Claire, but – above all in my opinion – because there remains a complete blank concerning the attitude of

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 21

29/06/2012 11:11

22

e t i e n n e balibar

Saint-Preux himself, whose ‘cosmopolitan’ friendship with Milord Edouard virtually opens another possibility of supplementing the instability of the affective community, both more ‘social’ and more ‘equalitarian’ (one of them being a poor Swiss teacher and the other a wealthy English aristocrat). The ‘couple’ formed by the two ‘comrades’ (the Greek hetairoi) Edouard and Saint-Preux, whose travels form a window toward the ‘external’ world, virtually open another series of consequences, which the readers tend to ignore in spite of the essential critique of the mundane society that their letters carry. This leads me to my final point, which I will have to present in a very schematic manner. But in a sense the best way to clarify it is precisely through the drawing of a schema. What is striking in Rousseau’s construction of the network of relations of ‘friendship’ in JNH, at the same time incorporating and displacing sexual love in order to create a passionate community where affects and rational interests are reunited, is indeed the quasi-structuralist understanding of the problem of intersubjectivity that it displays. This will be best exemplified by showing on a diagram how the two principles of ternary or triangular and binary relations become associated while remaining in a ‘deconstructive’ tension. I am borrowing this idea from Deleuze and Guattari who, in their essay on Kafka, Pour une littérature mineure, speak of ‘un champ d’immanence qui fonctionne comme un démantèlement’ inasmuch as Kafka typically would have doubles ‘proliferate’ in order to subvert the meaning of the ‘triangles’.6 Clearly the ‘structure’ organizing the situation (and the plot) in JNH is first of all a triangular system of relations, which has a quasi-Oedipal nature that many commentators have been eager to discuss.7 But I speak of a quasi-Oedipal nature rather than a directly Oedipal one: Monsieur de Wolmar is explicitly a symbolic ‘paternal figure’ in addition to being an actual father. His ‘super-egoistic’ quality with respect to the latent incestuous dimension of the triangle is also obvious, since in a crucial moment he designates his wife Julie and her former lover Saint-Preux as ‘mes enfants’ (IV, 12). However his organizing function in the triangle is virtually challenged by another principle of organization, which is the reflection of all affective relations in the unity of Julie’s ‘soul’, or if you prefer, the maternal love that she extends to the whole community. It is indeed striking that this feminine primacy is also voiced, in the form of a confession from Saint-Preux writing to his lover: ‘O Julie! Quel est ton inconcevable empire! Par quel étrange pouvoir tu fascines ma raison!’ (III, 16). This alternative principle of organization, immanent and participative rather than hierarchic and normative, is also presented as despotic, a maternal dictatorship rivalling the paternal dictatorship: ‘Julie! Femme incomparable! Vous exercez dans la simplicité de la vie privée le despotique empire de la sagesse et des bienfaits . . .’ (V, 7). But Jean Starobinski has remarkably displaced again this reading, by bringing in another logic, which is that of the couple. For Starobinski, the ‘organizing principle’, or the ‘germinative element’ of the whole plot, is not a single individual but the couple formed by Julie and her cousin Claire, because it is first among them that an absolute trust or a bond of transparency becomes established, relying on the principle of sharing secret feelings without reservation, which will become the cornerstone of friendship, forming a circle into which progressively all the characters are attracted and incorporated.

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 22

29/06/2012 11:11

lov en ce in julie ou la nouvelle héloïse

23

This is a brilliant idea, in particular because it immediately reintroduces from the margins into the core the ambivalence that characterizes passionate couples. It was daring to view the primary couple not as Julie and Saint-Preux, but as Julie and Claire who – initially – are sharing not love, but the narrative of love, and on that basis virtually become lovers themselves. The two cousins, a blonde and a brunette, like in the myths, are ‘doubles’, Doppelgänger, they are disturbingly one in two and two in one, and could become substituted in various functions (spouses, mothers). They are also hardly repressed homosexual lovers (in the end, when Julie is about to die, they sleep together and Claire expresses her passion in a very sensuous manner that has been noticed in particular by Grosrichard in his essay on ‘L’inoculation de l’amour’).8 I think that we can push the structural idea one step further by completely combining the ‘central’ triangle with its supplementary ‘doubles’: as Claire redoubles Julie, Milord Edouard clearly redoubles Saint-Preux, and even Monsieur de Wolmar has a ‘double’ who is a quasi-mute figure, an emblematic effigies so to speak, Julie’s father or le Baron d’Etanges, who always wanted to marry her to his friend to whom he is indebted for obscure reasons. Baron d’Etanges * Wolmar * * Julie * Saint-Preux * * Claire Milord Edouard What is interesting in such a presentation is not only that it offers nice combinatory possibilities to relate the different perspectives – or, as I proposed, the different ‘voices’ – who at the same time are complementary and dissymmetric, therefore to conceptualize the necessity of décalages or deferrals between the respective stages they have reached in the course of this project of achieving friendship as conversion of love. It also allows us to view the complete system, or network, of transindividual relations that commands the processes and tropes of subjectivation of the characters, and forms a model of ‘community’ in Rousseau’s attempt, as a system that combines homosexual and heterosexual relations presented on the same stage. To borrow once again from Derrida’s terminology, it simultaneously displays the modalities of aimance (‘lovence’), as it exhibits sex as différance (or differing from itself). Ultimately, it is this radical consequence of the idea of a social transformation of the passions that might prove most remarkable. And it is, I believe, this wholly non-subjective – or relational – structure of differential subjectivations that would deserve a careful comparison with what The Social Contract called le double rapport or double relationship of each to each and each to all defining the community. Not only does it challenge a ‘political’ and ‘philosophical’ conception of friendship based on the ‘double exclusion of the feminine’ (to borrow Derrida’s formulation in Politics of Friendship), which would suppress the possibility of friendship among

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 23

29/06/2012 11:11

24

e t i e n n e balibar

men and women as well as the idea of friendship among women (at least in the ‘public’ or ‘social’ sense of the category ‘friendship’). But it also provides an exciting, and puzzling, alternative to the model of community proposed by Rousseau in The Social Contract, where the discursive neutralization of the sexual difference at every moment of the construction of the sovereign people barely covered a purely homosexual conception of the constituent unity of the citizens’ wills. Quite different from the ‘unitary’ scheme of the civic community provided in The Social Contract, the collective process of subjectivation and socialization described or, rather, performed in a fictitious manner in JNH, leading to a tentative image of what we should call a ‘counter-society’ rather than a ‘society’, relies on an irreducible heterogeneity: both an intrinsic heterogeneity of the constitutive passions, and a heterogeneity of the sexual pairs of ‘doubles’ into which its quasi-hierarchic structure becomes tendencially decomposed. This was perceived by many readers of Rousseau, indeed, but they had a conventional tendency to view it as a subjective and private counterpart to the more objective and public, quasi-legal notion of the ‘contract’. For them, Julie remained a ‘family affair’ . . . We should never forget, I believe, that the three great works, each combining concept and fiction in a specific manner: The Social Contract, Emile, and La Nouvelle Héloïse, were written in exactly the same period, the stupendous years 1760–62. I prefer to see them as alternative attempts at resolving the irresolvable problem of a community, or a social bond, compatible with the voice of nature, that the Second Discourse had presented a few years before in negative, almost nihilistic terms. In those years at least, Rousseau the political thinker was not one, but three in one (not even taking into account the multiplicity of ‘voices’ among which he was distributing himself in each of these works). But this would be indeed a subject for another presentation.

No tes 1. See letters I, 54 and 55, which precede and follow Saint-Preux and Julie’s sexual intercourse (‘Quel bonheur d’avoir trouvé de l’encre et du papier!’). 2. ‘C’est là ce que je serais tenté d’appeler l’aimance: l’amour dans l’amitié . . .’, Derrida, Politiques de l’amitié (Paris: Galilée, 1994), p. 88. 3. It is to my student Debra Ligorski-Channick, currently finishing her PhD dissertation on ‘Romantic Emulation and Aesthetic Citizenship’, that I owe a complete recognition of the importance of this notion in Rousseau’s work (and its influence on subsequent literature, particularly among women writers). 4. He seems to have taken it from La Mettrie, the materialist physician and philosopher. 5. This form of devotion – arguably inspired by the teachings of Madame Guyon, who was Fénelon’s inspirator – is undoubtedly sensuous, and was censored as such by the Catholic Church. 6. Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari, Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1975), pp. 17 ff. 7. For instance Thomas Kavanagh, Writing the Truth: Authority and Desire in Rousseau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 8. Alain Grosrichard, ‘L’inoculation de l’amour’, in A. Badiou et al., De l’amour, Préface par Rose-Paule Vinciguerra (Paris: Flammarion, 1999), pp. 15–80.

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 24

29/06/2012 11:11

Chapter 2

2

letter to d’alembert

Reading Spectacles in Rousseau’s Letter to d’Alembert

E.S. Burt

P

aul de Man’s original solution to the question of the relation of Rousseau’s political to his autobiographical writings has not received the attention it deserves, in large part because his work on Rousseau’s political writings has been less read – ignored by readers of de Man unfamiliar with the political dimension of Rousseau or unable to accept that a political dimension in de Man could be anything but guilty and repressed; and ignored by most writers on Rousseau’s political theory, presumably as the analysis of a literary critic. Fewer still have attempted to relate the two sides of Rousseau’s work in the light of de Manian discussions making allegory and irony the figural modes of political and autobiographical texts respectively. Most solutions tend to reconcile the two dimensions according to by-now-classical patterns laid down by Jean Starobinski and Ernst Cassirer, the first tending to make the systematic texts into disguised confessional works that illuminate the psychology of their writer, and the second finding in the autobiographical works the empirical evidence on which the theory is built and from which it does not quite manage to detach itself.1 The newly transcribed Textual Allegories – which reveals de Man’s decision in Allegories of Reading to substitute a chapter on Rousseau’s autobiographical texts for drafted chapters on Julie and Nietzsche that were to follow the chapter on The Social Contract in the first version – brings out the importance of the neglected relation in de Man’s reading of Rousseau. My aim will be to look at what de Man’s discussion can explain about Rousseau’s politics of the spectacle in the Letter to d’Alembert, where an autobiographical dimension complicates a discourse by the newly reminted Citizen of Geneva in praise of that republic’s version of citizenship. The usual tendency is to understand Rousseau’s strategy in the Letter as opposing two sharply differentiated spectacles taking place either within the closed space of a theatre or in the open-air space of a public square, with both spectacles representing views of citizenship and subjection that are anchored by gender binaries. In the closed theatre of monarchy, representation means visibility, whereas representation follows a discursive model of ritualized performance in the open-air republican spectacles.2 Instead, I see Rousseau discarding both spectacles as insufficient to account

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 25

29/06/2012 11:11

26

e . s. bu rt

for the double relation of its people to the state, and improvising a third spectacle that corresponds to the aporias of the citizen subject3 and involves the representing in excess of the represented associated with the autobiographical. The path taken in the longer version of this chapter is as follows: first step, to discuss the intervention de Man makes in Rousseau studies with respect to the relation of political to autobiographical texts; second step, to examine what Rousseau says about the representation of sovereignty and consent in monarchic France and republican Geneva; third step, to show how autobiographical representation complicates the spectacle of citizenship. Only the first and third steps of this argument, the former in a reduced version, have been provided in the short space allotted here – a decision explained by the fact that arguments concerning visual and discursive models of representation tend to be familiar to readers of theory, as are those concerning republican and monarchical forms to readers of Rousseau. De Man’s independent path in the landscape of Rousseau studies was to posit as the source of ‘unity’ of Rousseau’s work a basic insight into the nature of texts. That insight concerned the disjunctive, finally aporetic relationship of performative and constative, which works its way not only through the political and autobiographical texts considered separately, but also into their relationship. Rousseau translated that insight into the terms of whatever discursive mode in which he was writing. In the case of the political texts, where the performative is aligned with the state as sovereign, active power and the constative with the state as defined entity, de Man explains that the problem is to deal with ‘the impossibility of distinguishing between two linguistic functions which are not necessarily compatible’ (AR 270). Elsewhere, that prudent ‘not necessarily compatible’ is stated roundly as incompatibility, with the point being that bridging the non-convergent functions requires an act of deceit because they are mutually dependent and indistinguishable in any discourse, which has to be understood as double, as both discourse and its quotation. It is the act of deluded and deluding bridging that de Man calls the referential reading-moment in the beginning passage from ‘Excuses’, where he says it is common to political and autobiographical discourse: Political and autobiographical texts have in common that they share a referential reading-moment explicitly built in within the spectrum of their significations, no matter how deluded this moment may be in its mode as well as in its thematic content: the deadly ‘horn of the bull’ referred to by Michel Leiris in a text that is indeed as political as it is autobiographical. But whereas the relationship between cognition and performance is relatively easy to grasp in the case of a temporal speech act such as (a) promise . . . it is more complex in the confessional mode of his autobiographies. (AR 278) According to this passage, the ‘referential reading-moment’ shared by political and autobiographical texts is differently inscribed in each text.4 In the case of the political text, as de Man has explained in the previous chapter on The Social Contract, the text builds in its reading-moment as a promise: the legal text looks forward serenely to the testing of its justice, its future application in a case, against the horizon

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 26

29/06/2012 11:11

r e a d in g specta cles in letter to d’alembert

27

given by the theotropic sleight-of-hand that posits a convergence of grammar and meaning in ‘god’ at the beginning of history, out of reach of any empirical verification.5 As for the reading-moment of the autobiographical text, which is in the mode of the excuse, it is built in by virtue of the fact that, beyond answering for the deeds of the past, the subject is summoned to respond for the present deed of writing confessions. When Rousseau writes of stealing an apple in the Confessions, his text is as revelatory of the narrator’s ironic, guilty relation to the common property of the language as it is of his childish misdeeds. Unlike confession, which claims to present knowledge of past deeds in transparent language, the excuse recognizes the propensity of the present performative to reduplicate the fault. In the passage quoted above, de Man further differentiates between the two discourses in degree of simplicity: the illocutionary mode of the promise, which predominates in the political texts, is easier to grasp than that of the excuse. Elsewhere, he’ll say that legal texts are entirely explicit about the non-convergence between code and meaning, the letter of the law and its spirit: ‘the fundamental incompatibility between grammar and meaning, becomes explicit when the linguistic structures are stated, as is the case here, in political terms’ (AR 269). We can know the disjunction between performative and constative in the promise – it shows up as the temporal difference between promise and execution that makes political texts narrative and allegorical. But in the case of the discourse of the self-conscious subject, it is more complex because that discourse, while it wants to eschew the performative dimension by setting all deeds in the past and acting as if self-knowledge were the horizon in which the two might converge, in fact repeats the disjunction. Even at the moment of promising closure and self-knowledge, it does so in an act that is excessive with respect to it. Although he compares and contrasts political and autobiographical texts in this short passage, de Man does not provide a more dynamic view of their relation there. In the spirit of Rousseau’s comment that he had understood that ‘everything is held by roots to the political’ (a literal translation of Rousseau’s tout tenait radicalement à la politique),6 we can ask whether the autobiographical conditions or depends on the political writings. To put it in terms of Rousseau’s metaphor of radical attachment: does an autobiographical text like the Confessions connect to the roots of the tree that is the political as its soil (or even – what amounts to the same thing – as an excrescence growing on those roots)? Is autobiography rather a tree rooted in the soil of the political?7 Scattered comments elsewhere in Allegories permit two hypotheses. In one place, de Man comments that the acts of deceit of particular citizens are necessary if the law is to be anything but an abstraction; each one steals the word ‘each’, and appropriates it in a test case for the law.8 The act is not just a theft. It is even a blasphemy, since it involves the ‘substitution of one’s own for the divine voice’ (AR 274), for that of the god that is supposed to guarantee the ultimate convergence of grammar and meaning, justice as the fit between law and case. Precisely what is missing from the programmatic political texts, on account of their allegorical mode as promise, are these blasphemous thefts, which serve the purpose of confirming that the subject is bound to the community of the promise even through its failure

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 27

29/06/2012 11:11

28

e . s. bu rt

to execute it. In a first hypothesis, then, the autobiographical texts provide the test case of the law, of the particular will as it steals the word ‘chacun’ or appropriates the ‘I’. A second hypothesis can be drawn from de Man’s discussion in ‘Excuses’ of whether the referential reading-moment as act of deceit, with its connotations of interest, strategy and calculability, can exhaust the text’s fictional dimension. In exceeding the representation of what is, autobiographical texts also envisage the possibility of non-reference. Here is de Man on fiction in autobiography: It seems to be impossible to isolate the moment in which the fiction stands free of any signification; in the very moment at which it is posited, as well as in the context that it generates, it gets at once misinterpreted into a determination which is, ipso facto, overdetermined. Yet without this moment, never allowed to exist as such, no such thing as a text is conceivable. (AR 293) In this hypothesis, autobiography would provide knowledge of an unprogrammed or improvised fictionality that exceeds signification as the sine qua non of all texts, including legal ones. Because it is about texts and the misinterpretation of the openended possibility of fiction in determinate promises, autobiography is then about what gets foreclosed by political texts with their systems that bound the horizon by the promise and reduce all heterogeneity to transgressions of it. There are evident political consequences. The readers of a genre that makes freedom conceivable, read for the impossibility and necessity of determining reference and are in training to read legal texts for their exclusions and violence. Rousseau’s Letter to d’Alembert augurs well as a place to pursue these hypotheses concerning the radical relation of autobiography to the political since it is announced as both already in its title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, citizen of Geneva, to M. d’Alembert of the French Academy, the Parisian Royal Academy of Sciences, that of Prussia, the Royal Society of London, the Swedish Royal Academy of Letters, and the Institute of Bologna: on his article GENEVA in the VIIth volume of the Encyclopedia and especially on the project of establishing a Comic Theatre in that City. (OC V, 1) The work is not just a discourse on the polis and the spectacles proper to its citizens; it is also about Rousseau’s address, as plain citizen hailing from Geneva to the Frenchman d’Alembert, with his impressive list of achievements recognized by princes across Europe. The self-conscious folding of the author’s address of a letter to a reader into the title makes the political text also autobiographical.9 With the idea of a deceitful act necessary to bridge incompatibilities we have a convenient point of entrance into the Letter, which is occupied with finding the spectacles best suited to a given state. No surprise that literature shows up where it is necessary to make the incompatible thing of consenting to law go along with the exercise of sovereignty. The problem Rousseau takes on is that of how monarchy and republican forms represent the state in its double relationship to the people,

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 28

29/06/2012 11:11

r e a d in g specta cles in letter to d’alembert

29

this last construed as both a multiplicity subjected to law and an association of free beings, participating in sovereignty. His point is not that monarchy requires deceit and republics do not. Rousseau does not forbid all theatrical display in a republic: ‘What! Are there then to be no spectacles in a Republic? On the contrary, there must be many! It is in republics that they are born . . .’ (OC V, 114). Already, we have a warning that we are not to consider the text as built around an opposition between monarchy with its obedient, deceived subjects and the republic with its active citizens basking in the light of truth. Indeed, there is an asymmetry in the manner in which Rousseau conceives of his two instances. With Paris, Rousseau is dealing with an established state that can be represented as such in the finite, closed theatre. Monarchical France, in conformity with Rousseau’s idea that the finished state is one that has begun to decay, needs such spectacles as a way to preserve its citizens from further corruption. Geneva, by contrast, is an unfinished republic – as is shown for one thing by the fact that the spectacles needed for it are yet to be provided, since Rousseau has to propose them.10 Because Geneva is a democratic republic in prospect, spectacles must be devised to help it to emerge. In short, with Paris and Geneva, we have two non-coincident aspects of the state; it exists in potentia, and also in collapse, as sovereign power and established entity (AR 270). The judgment that a state is in decay or in formation can only be made with respect to a more original situation, which in Rousseau means a situation where the fully aporetic nature of the political bond is available. To say monarchy or democracy is to say forms of government, both of which rely on an originary contract by which people have assembled to deliberate on a form by which to represent themelves in their double aspect. As The Social Contract puts it, logically speaking, before a people can choose a king, it first has to constitute itself a people capable of public deliberation: This gift [of the king] is itself a civic act; it supposes a public deliberation. Before beginning to examine the act by which a people elects a king then, it would be good to examine the act by which the people is a people. For this act, being necessarily anterior to the other, is the true foundation of society. (OC III, 359) The people have to come together to constitute themselves a people qualified to elect the form of government that is to represent it. The Social Contract states that a people must contract with itself in its double aspect, as citizens freely assembling, and as subjects having consented to rule of law (OC III, 360–2). By asking the question in this way, Rousseau places the aporia of performative and constative at the heart of the res publica: a people cannot assemble without having already accepted order and become the people its acceptance of law will make it, and yet it cannot have consented to law unless it enjoys the freedom to assemble, the shelter from force and violence that the law grants. Monarchy, democracy – these forms represent but do not create the relations set up in the constitutive pact. The double relationship of a people to the state – as citizens freely associating in the general will,

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 29

29/06/2012 11:11

30

e . s. bu rt

as particular wills subjected to law – is thus to be found somewhere in each form. So far as Rousseau is concerned then, monarchy and democracy exist on a continuum; one form can transform into and even be confused with another (OC III, 403). Both represent by dissembling the true nature and operations of an aporia. Through analyses of the closed, monarchic and open-air, republican spectacles, the second section of the argument – to appear in a longer version of this paper – shows that each system of representation tries to contain the dangers consequent upon the aporetic relation of people to the state. In the monarchic spectacle defined by visibility, with sovereignty represented on stage and subjection the lot of the spectators, the pretense is that one can distinguish action from knowledge, incarnating sovereignty in the king and subjection in the people, by the divisions operated between public and private through the spectacle. The incompatibility of the two functions is managed by making them appear separable. The peoples’ rebellion at their subjection is driven within; their repressed sovereignty is found in the confused murmurings of the heart against the law and in the caged domestic spaces where men conquer women and pace restlessly. In republican spectacles, which follow a discursive model, citizens compete in athletic exercises out in the open as actors and spectators. The equality of citizens based on their double participation as actors and spectators in public discourse is depicted. The question arises, however, whether their equality is that of free individuals or of replaceable pawns, acting blindly and under compulsion. A standard is needed to distinguish between incompatible functions represented as co-present. For Rousseau, Montesquieu’s solution to the problem – to set apart conscience, male virtue, as judge of the difference between the equality of free individuals and of a subjected people – cannot work, because male virtue too confuses power with knowledge. Womanly reserve provides the guarantee of an intact reserve of conscience cut off from the public space. However, the apartness of women also makes of them unequal citizens, deprived of access to public discourse. The republic can only make its promises of a harmonious convergence of sovereignty and consent that would not be synonymous with injustice by claiming that women’s disappearance from the scene of citizenship is a result of natural pudeur. In the two systems for the representation of citizenship described by Rousseau, the aporia of the social contract is reduced to fit either a visual or a communicative model, first in the decisive determination of the public space as stage claiming either to represent the separability of knowledge and power or their co-presence, and second in the residual ambivalences that corrupt the rebellious interior spaces in the monarchy or trouble the border between public and private in the democratic republic. The first question to be asked of the third spectacle – the spectacle of the formation of a people that Rousseau makes the true foundation of the state and the condition for its continuation with originary vigour – is whether a similar reduction occurs. The scene of rejoicing described in the last long footnote – which features an

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 30

29/06/2012 11:11

r e a d in g specta cles in letter to d’alembert

31

improvised dance by the tipsy men of Saint Gervais after a day of compulsory military service – has often been viewed as one in which ‘all are at once actors and spectators’ and thus as presenting the vision of general union toward which the democratic republic of Geneva tends (OC V, xxxviii).11 Bernard Gagnebin, the respected Rousseauist who edited the Letter for the Pléaide edition, interprets it as just such a mythico-religious spectacle of jubilatory democracy, in which all distinctions are overcome in a celebration of general union. For Gagnebin, it provides the pattern spectacle for the maximum participation of all citizens, exactly the absolute equality that Rousseau has shown the democratic republic cannot deliver. The passage provides strong evidence for Gagnebin’s interpretation. The uniting of what has been distinct is true even at the level of the time of gathering: at the end of a long day of military exercises, the men relax together before sleep; the sleeping women, servants and children rise and emerge from the house where they have been hitherto held apart, into a sort of daybreak of equality. The barriers between inside and outside turn leaky: windows and doors enable free passage in both directions. Servants dispense wine freely, as if masters offering a liberal hospitality that pours out of the houses into the streets. In the drunken soldiers and the half-clad children epic and pastoral elements are made to embrace; lions kiss lambs. Rousseau seems to look into a non-historical past that is also a future promised of a community without exclusions, where equality will be enjoyed not only among male citizens, with officers and soldiers mingling without distinction, but also by those hitherto shut into the domestic space as unequal guardians of its privacy. Gagnebin’s vocabulary shows that, in his loosely dialectical scheme, as the scene stages the overcoming of divisions, it leaves behind the opposition between spectator and actor in the name of a relation of sharing: ‘the women spectators abandon their position apart to become actresses, or better participants [participantes] . . . no more dancing, no more spectacle, everyone attains to a higher degree of shared happiness [bonheur partagé] . . . it is the reduced image of general union, father and son embraced and quivering with shared emotion [émotion partagée]’ (OC V, xxxix–xl, italics Gagnebin’s, underlinings mine). The fusion is mythic, showing the child the community to which he already belongs and giving him, as future citizen, a glimpse of the goal toward which the republic strives. Gagnebin does not specifically discuss the distributive meaning of partage, sharing out, although he gives it play in the negative pole of closing off and separation that the fusional movement works to overcome. Partage as tending toward division is in fact very prevalent in the passage. Thus, for instance, the men writing an accord with their feet – for what else is it to dance? – have had to divide off the dusty square on which they earlier marched in military formations from the page on which they now trace the evolving figures. They have, as it were, read off a non-contemporaneity of the space to itself, shared it out in a double reading that splits the time for obeying the law from the time for writing it. Similarly, the women inciting zeal each from her window will debouch separately into the square to partake in the dance, in a signal of forces drawing apart the dancers into their individual destinies and dividing who writes from what is to be left in the public space (the traces of the accord). With the appearance of the children, the dance laying down the originary traces is

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 31

29/06/2012 11:11

32

e . s. bu rt

interrupted without its figures ceasing to evolve; the generational shift thus divides a first moment where a constitutive pact is being written from a second moment where it is rather the writing of a civil code that is taking place. These instances of division do not involve a difference between co-present spectators and actors, subjects and citizens, anchored in familiar gendered dichotomies. Rather, the difference concerns a non-contemporaneity in some aspect of the spectacle, exemplified within the term of partage itself, as a tension between separate logics of fusion and division that the dance harmonizes.12 So far as the future predicted is concerned, there are indications that the forces of fusion and differentiation may prove anything but convergent, in such details as the formulation that has the women drawing the men offstage to what may as easily be death as home, or in Isaac Rousseau’s preferential patriotism suggestive of intercommunity warfare. When Rousseau says the dance was suspended then, besides a description of the past action, the statement serves as a comment on the suspension of the spectacle between partage and partage, between the celebration as leading to total fusion and as providing increasing evidence of fragmentation. This view of the dance as suspended between incompatible logics suggests that the third spectacle in the Letter is indeed organized according to the aporetic logic Rousseau describes as partially occulted in monarchic and republican spectacles. The suspension of the dance and the distance of the remembered scene from the present might seem to suggest that the scene proposes an immutable pattern for Genevan citizens, each of whom joins in the evolution of the dance’s figures. Yet everything within the text shows that reduplicatory marking is a necessary condition for the dance’s evolution (as in the move that lets the public space be read as a page). The suspension is then just another figure, a moment of hesitation choreographed within the dance, that is already marked as past upon its appearance.13 In other words, there is some dynamism to the spectacle yet to be accounted for. It is here that the test case of autobiography comes in. It indeed plays a critical part for Gagnebin, who finds in it two reasons to understand Rousseau as having determined the meaning of the spectacle in the direction of a mythic promise, tantamount to a glimpse of the promised land given the lawgiver. For Gagnebin, we need the testimony of the ‘isolated contemplator’ (OC V, xxxix) first as one who knows, a witness who saw the act of formation and pronounces its lesson. But we also need the individual’s testimony for the evidence of inner assent, the confession of feeling, which serves as a profession of faith in the living promise. In Gagnebin’s understanding, both are supplied by the confessional side of the passage, which makes performance and cognition converge in the heart’s assent to the law of the association as love. However, the autobiographical text introduces some complications that interfere with reading the spectacle as a myth of fusion. It is precisely into the notion that the two sides of testimony converge in autobiography that de Man drives a wedge when he makes autobiography ironic, synonymous with the blasphemous ‘substitution of one’s own for the divine voice’ (AR 274), thereby putting into question the hypothesis that Rousseau sets himself up as a Moses. It is not enough to consider the I’s testimony simply in terms of harmony; it has also to be considered as a scene

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 32

29/06/2012 11:11

r e a d in g specta cles in letter to d’alembert

33

redoubled and self-ironized in confession. In short, the self’s participation in the spectacle also involves partage as division. A split is evident in the fact that the story is a memory, and indeed a memory about memory-making. For the I does not remember any scene of fatherly teaching but of marking and being marked. ‘I remember having been struck by a spectacle’ (OC V, 123). The spectacle is a blow that has made an impression on the blank slate of the boy; it is textual, not visual or discursive. Indeed, it is abyssal like a text, with the I remembering a scene as inscribing a memory about inscription. This is as much as to remind that memory too is aporetic. In memory, as in reading, an image or content comes into view by forgetting about the traces that carry it; those traces can be remembered, but only at the expense of the content. Memory posits a relation to an excluded term that cannot be made visible or discursive since it is the condition for the visibility or discursivity of the scene. As the faculty of laying down and reading off traces, memory is made up of two incompatible but mutually necessary logics, and we can suppose that if Rousseau mobilizes it here, it is because it offers a concrete case of the aporia14 previously discussed that conjugates together in a single divided subject both the logic of sympathy and decisive separation. The split in memory has in fact been neatly dramatized as a division between the father-son couple over the inheritance, the first imparting a lesson as to what the scene means and the second retrospectively drawing a quite different conclusion.15 Indeed, it would be hard to say whether in telling us that ‘je crois sentir et partager encore’ (OC V, 124), Rousseau means to emphasize through the near redundancy of sentir et partager his exceedingly sympathetic feeling (I think to feel and share still) or rather to announce – as repetition always does announce – a noncontemporaneity and difference (I think to feel and divide yet again). The same phrase that confirms the continuity of an inheritance (love of the patrie left by father to son) states a difference consonant with the principle of loss and separation sexed as female in the passage. In short, we have to ask after the differences dividing father from son concerning the meaning of the pact. In Isaac’s discourse, the people of Geneva are tied together by patriotism and brotherly love. Their preference for one another starts in a mutual presence to one another and involves a certain definition of ‘people’ based on the condition of a shared territory. Isaac’s people are those who inhabit the territory of Geneva (as represented here synechdochally by the single quarter of Saint Gervais), who are linked together by customs and institutions into a community and opposed to other similarly constituted peoples: Jean-Jacques, he said to me, love your country. Look at these good Genevans; they are all friends, they are all brothers; joy and peace reign among them. You are Genevan; you will one day see other Peoples, but even should you travel as much as your father, you will never find their equal. (OC V, 124) Isaac points his son toward an ideal republic as an association of people gathered in a single place, even as he suggests the empirical destiny of expatriation for Genevans. His ‘love of his country was his strongest passion’ (OC I, 9), a love that would be

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 33

29/06/2012 11:11

34

e . s. bu rt

tested by travels necessary in a republic that, as Rousseau elsewhere explains, is too confined in territory to support its population.16 Isaac had served as a watchmaker in Constantinople by the time of the spectacle, so he speaks from experience of these centrifugal pressures. Unbeknownst to Isaac, his words will prove ironic. He will have fled into exile by the time his son was seven, after a quarrel with a patrician citizen led to a fine and prison sentence for him, as a poorer, less well-connected citizen of the artisan class (OC I, 12). In the light of those events, the claim of the future fugitive that all Genevans are peace-loving brothers seems naïve, and his prophetic ‘you’ll never find their equal’ has a meaning quite different from the one it has in context. The language that asserts the meaning of his trembling trembles with extraneous meanings indicative of divisions and discord that actual history will realize. Isaac promises one meaning and life ironically delivers another; his pious platitudes about the Genevan republic point up its distance from the ideal. In the second paragraph of the footnote, the alinea that marks the move to the commentary by Rousseau his mother’s son, there is an attention to cases of injustice and of the dissonance of the republic with its principles, signaled by the fact that Jean-Jacques dwells rather on the separating action of the women than the fusing one of the brothers, admiring how ‘these amiable and prudent women drew away their husbands, not by troubling their pleasures, but by going to share them [en allant les partager]’. As for the people, they are not defined by their co-presence in Geneva. Rather, they are the great number, a multitude of modest condition or obscure origin: ‘the true sentiments of nature rule only over the people [le peuple]’ (OC V, 124). That their feeling is ‘natural’ indicates their non-contemporaneity with respect to civil society. Jean-Jacques considers the Saint Gervais quarter an obscure place from which emerge groups unrecognized and without visibility or voice in civil society, peoples passed over in the pact.17 The referent for what Rousseau calls ‘le peuple’ is uncertain. In Rousseau’s day, Saint Gervais was populated by artisans, most of whom would have been excluded from the political bodies of Geneva: the highest ruling body, the Little Council, as Rousseau says in the Lettres écrites de la montagne and as scholars generally agree, had become oligarchical, having systematically reduced the power of the Council of the 200 and populated it through cronyism, and having made the General Council where all bourgeois and citizens deliberated into a body rubber-stamping its decisions.18 It was to Saint Gervais that the watchmaker Isaac Rousseau moved as his fortunes fell after the death of his wife Suzanne Bernard, well-born niece of a minister, settling on a street where many of the popular movements of unrest in the early eighteenth century were centred.19 We can suppose that when he talks of ‘the people’ Rousseau was thinking of these citizen artisans of Saint Gervais, who had been increasingly deprived of a voice by the patrician class. But then, his words could also very well apply to the many among the artisans with the legal status of inhabitants (non-citizen residents) or natives (inhabitants born in Geneva), who had few rights and no voice at all. According to Rosenblatt, the estimated population of Geneva at the middle of the eighteenth century was 20,000, of whom only 1500 were citizens. Saint Gervais held many of the non-citizens, who were not allowed to

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 34

29/06/2012 11:11

r e a d in g specta cles in letter to d’alembert

35

become master watchmakers and could not aspire to becoming officers in the regiment, but who would have partaken of the feast as they did have the duty to serve in the militia. Rousseau’s words about the natural feelings of ‘le peuple’ may thus refer to those behind the popular movements that will rock Geneva throughout the century as the poorer citizens and bourgeois or inhabitants and natives tried for inclusion.20 Even beyond these specific referents for the voiceless downtrodden, Rousseau may be looking ahead to the emergence of other excluded ‘peoples’, say, to the popular movements of the French Revolution, for which – through the notion of natural right and the social contract – he has been attributed responsibility.21 In celebrating the friends of Saint Gervais, Isaac sees a group of brothers standing as part for the whole fatherland. But Jean-Jacques sees a part that stands for invisible silent disparate and unrepresented parts, populaces coming into view, for a multiplicity that cannot be determined as a whole since it has no place of residence, but is found only in unstable placeholders claiming their place in the sun. Jean-Jacques’s lesson is about what Rancière might call the part des sans-parts, about those who, in the process of identifying with the whole, have not yet appeared to take their share.22 The point is an important one because it tells us that for Rousseau the test case of autobiography, with its recourse to an ironized discourse of good faith, is not there to cement an ideal of justice but to point out its cracks and the share of those constitutively without a share in it. The words of both Rousseaus turn ironically on their speakers (Rousseau’s father’s words are ironical in view of his later exile; those of the son, also ironically, point to where the true sentiments of nature will have taken the mobs of the Terror). But the way the irony operates is quite different. Rousseau’s father’s words about fusion become ironic in view of events that actualize divisions hidden to him. Rousseau the son’s differentiating words become ironic in view of events arguably generated by his texts; they can be called self-ironic in that they have already taken into account – through the emphasis on the frame and a term (people) that represents the unrepresented – the possibility of differences invisible in the present returning to disrupt any unit deemed homogeneous. The irony of the test case is that, however much it appears conforming, because it is redundant and repetitive, it introduces a potential for discrepant readings differing from the conforming meaning announced. Jean-Jacques’s language foreknows discrepant reading as its rule so that when it occurs it is as the paradoxical event of a predicted fall. Autobiography does not unproblematically confirm the convergence in discourse between act and assent; it predicts the breaks in the contract as a result of a difference within the assenting word itself. The relation of the autobiographical test case to the political theory is already not so simple, then. There are two Rousseaus teaching quite different lessons in the autobiographical text: In the words of Rousseau the father, the spectacle points to the greater inclusion of those who already live together and the future realization of the ideal of the republic. In the rereading by Rousseau the sceptical son, who recalls the differences within supposedly unified categories glossed over by the father to his cost, the spectacle points to differences excluded from the representational field. The reading of such exclusions requires new subjects who do not swear

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 35

29/06/2012 11:11

36

e . s. bu rt

their continued fealty to a past promise, but rather reread it for places where the unrepresented might voice a claim. Given what Rousseau says about the need for eyes to see and a heart to feel the attractions of the spectacle (‘il faut des yeux faits pour le voir et un coeur fait pour le sentir’ [OC V, 124]), we can guess that it is also on account of its inventive side that the autobiographical text will be critical. The issue is to produce a subject who can read the spectacle, and will therefore have transformed the notion of virtue beyond recognition, so it is no longer a matter of intentional action but of a responsibility to read and write what exceeds representation. In this sense, we’re being asked to bring pressure to bear on the individual subject, to see it not as given but as in process. In terms of de Man’s analysis of the excusing side of autobiography as in excess of its confessional side, we’re being asked to consider a fictioning that exceeds the subject as project of knowledge. A duty to invent the means to read and write the places of emergence or loss of peoples for which public discourse has no account is a duty for which a contract has yet to be written, outside any determinate idea of duty; it might be called the duty of tressaillement as a sallying outside of what is. There is at least one place that a linguistic sally surfaces in the text of the footnote to confirm this notion of a duty that is excessive and to transform the pattern. Based on the first sentence, we have been reading things as a spectacle of inscription of a memory. We have understood ‘je me souviens d’avoir été frappé d’un spectacle’, as meaning ‘I remember having been struck by a spectacle’, that is, as a constative that supposes the givenness of an I whose mind was a blank page receiving a trace subsequently read off. Frapper can have the literal meaning of to touch, strike and involve an act of literal violence as one empirical being impresses its force on another, pen on page, hand on back, etc. But in the context of writing or engraving – Jean-Jacques was apprenticed to an engraver – frapper may have another, more technical meaning. La monnaie fut frappée, for instance, means a coin was struck off, produced (as in frapper un décor, frapper une médaille, frapper un portrait, frapper des vers). Striking coin is making metal into money, symbols which circulate without a referent – as Rousseau found to his cost when he was beaten for making medals with the arms of the republic, an activity he called play and his master insisted was counterfeiting. The striking makes a tangible object thing (metal) into an intangible symbol (coin), electing one of many tangible things to stand as a representation of value.23 ‘Je me souviens d’avoir été frappé d’un spectacle’ could then be translated as ‘I remember having been struck off, coined from a spectacle.’ In making money, the coin has to be brought into conformity with an agreed-upon symbol. But therein lies a difference between coining money and coining subjects. The I’s statement is a performative, but it is not one that conforms itself to a context and confirms a previous pattern. Rather, it is a wild performative, proposing the I who witnesses the spectacle as consequent upon the spectacle’s stroke; the spectacle has to be reread not as the product of the I but as its producer. The je is not a chacun read in conformity with an already produced general will. Rather, it is a newly forged particularity proposed into existence, as if to respond to the unseen unfelt of the spectacle and its unrepresented peoples to come. The performative is unprogrammed and exceeds the political scene construed in terms of the organization of already devised beings.

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 36

29/06/2012 11:11

r e a d in g specta cles in letter to d’alembert

37

The I posited by this sally is one that has still to develop the eyes and heart necessary to witness for what is missing from the public scene. In the meantime, it must improvise with reading spectacles and what David Marshall calls a sympathetic ink to bring it out.24 My point has been to show that Rousseau’s autobiographical texts play two incompatible roles with respect to political texts. On the one side, they verify the aporetic principle that underlies the compact, providing the missing assent of the particular subject and testing the inflated claims of justice through the introduction of irony into the theotropic realm of political theory. On the other, they posit a pure fictionality, a representing without a represented that is by itself an event; they improvise unanticipated productions that can stand for the part des sans-part for which the law will have had to make provision. De Man’s recognition that in Rousseau the autobiographical texts serve both as test cases for the justice of legal texts and as productive of political fictions is not without reverberations in current political theory. So long as we read Rousseau’s political texts as promising without taking into account autobiographical irony, or consider his autobiography as merely a fictioning without consequences for the political theory, we will miss the chance to understand his contribution to current debates on citizenship or the future of subjectivity, to which de Man points through his complex understanding of the relation between the referential reading-moments of the allegorical, political and the ironical, autobiographical texts.

No tes 1. See Ernst Cassirer’s The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954) and Jean Starobinski’s La Transparence et l’obstacle (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). 2. Most works on Rousseau’s politics discuss some aspect of the spectacle. The following list provides some examples of different approaches: Jacques Derrida, ‘Le Théorème, le théâtre’, in De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), pp. 428–41; Henri Gouhier, ‘La Lettre sur les spectacles, 1758’, in Rousseau et Voltaire (Paris: Vrin, 1983), pp. 109–26; Michel Launay, Jean-Jacques Rousseau écrivain politique: 1712–1762 (Geneva: Ed. Slatkine, 1989); PauleMonique Vernes: La Ville, la fête, la démocracie. Rousseau et les illusions de la communauté (Paris: Payot, 1978); Lynda Lange, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002); Elizabeth Wingrove, Rousseau’s Republican Romance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 3. For the seminal article on the topic, see Etienne Balibar’s ‘Citizen Subject’, in E. Cadava, P. Connor and J.-L. Nancy, eds, Who Comes after the Subject? (New York: Routlege, 1991), pp. 33–57. Balibar has recently reprinted this essay in its French version, originally appearing in Cahiers confrontation, 20, (1989), as the centerpiece of a book on the topic. See Citoyen Sujet et autres essais d’anthropologie philosophique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2011). 4. De Man’s formulation makes a reading-moment the common term or property allowing the comparison of the two sorts of texts. This sets Allegories clearly in the wake of his early essay ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’ (in BI 187–228), where allegory and irony are temporal figures. 5. The newly transcribed version of de Man’s work on The Social Contract, entitled ‘Political Allegory’, is particularly insistent on the theotropism of all legal texts. In fact, its title for the early version of the essay on Emile is ‘Theotropic Allegory’.

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 37

29/06/2012 11:11

38

e . s. bu rt

6. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, vol. I–V, ed. Pléiade (Gallimard: Paris, 1959–95), vol. I, p. 404. References to these volumes will henceforth appear in the text, abbreviated as OC followed by volume and page number. All translations from these works are my own. 7. Generally, Rousseau represents the legal code as a planted pole or tree. In one scene from the Rêveries about an idealized political community, rows of trees frame a gathering (OC I, 111); in the Letter to d’Alembert, a pole similarly rallies the people (OC I, 1041). However, occasionally the political is rather the ground or soil. In the episode of the ‘noyer de la terrasse’ from the Confessions, where Rousseau makes planting a tree an act of self-positing, the law is rather a system of authorized basins and unauthorized conduits that water competing trees (OC I, 23–4). 8. De Man says, quoting The Social Contract: ‘S’approprier en secret ce mot “chacun” is to steal from the text the very meaning to which, according to the text, we are not entitled, the particular I which destroys its generality’ (AR 269). 9. On the Letter’s autobiographical aspect, see Ourida Mostefai’s Citoyen de Genève et la république des lettres: étude de la controverse autour de La Lettre à d’Alembert de Jean-Jacques Rousseau (New York: Peter Lang, 2003). 10. That the spectacles of the republic are themselves unfinished, open-ended, and their meaning as undecided as the very existence of the republic is evident in quotations like the following: ‘We have already had several such public celebrations; let us have more still and I will be the better pleased. Let your pleasures be neither effeminate nor mercenary; let them not be poisoned by constraint or interest, let them be as free and open-handed as you are. Let the sun shed its light on your innocent spectacles, you will form a spectacle yourselves, the most worthy on which it can shed its light’ (OC V, 114–15). 11. See OC V, 123–4 for the footnote, necessary for the understanding of what follows. 12. The gendered correlations between the movement of fusion and the writing men as well as the differentiating movement and the reading women are in fact very unstable: the men had to have read the square as a page; the women’s deliberate decisions to inscribe themselves in the evolving figures of the dance make them writers. 13. The spectacle evolves as a dance performance might, with a corps de ballet gathering ‘to watch’ and then ‘to mingle’ in a solo performance. In fact, of course, no watching or belated mingling really occurs; the crowd is as intent on dancing its part as the main dancers. That the performance is improvised is suggestive of a certain freedom in the actualization of possibilities otherwise left latent, but it still has to be understood in terms of the evolution of the traced figures. Everything takes places as though the mode of participation involves translation, in that each succeeding evolution actualizes a possibility of the original left undeveloped there. In short, rather than a mythic scene celebrating the original co-presence of a people, it is historical, a procession of groups arriving to share or share out, and laws being rewritten to encompass those whom an earlier inscription has left out. 14. The classic text here is Walter Benjamin’s ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in Illuminations, trans. H. Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1955), pp. 154–94. 15. It is worth noting the peculiarity of the Rousseau family inheritance: The family fortune comes from the mother and is split between the two brothers, Jean-Jacques and the disappeared François, with the father living for many years first on the revenues of both shares, and then on those of François. Upon his father’s death, the brother’s share of the mother’s fortune comes to Jean-Jacques, who is thus more a competitor with the patriarch for the maternal tradition than an inheritor in his line (See OC I, 1260). 16. At various points in his work, Rousseau discusses the need for expatriation because Genevans cannot earn a living in the city, stating in the unfinished ‘Histoire du Gouvernemen de Genève’ that therein lies one obstacle lying in the way of its realizing the ideal of republicanism, ‘it is not possible for Geneva ever to be truly free because it cannot be self sufficient and will always be at the discretion of others for its subsistence’ (OC V, 517).

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 38

29/06/2012 11:11

r e a d in g specta cles in letter to d’alembert

39

17. As a place name, Saint Gervais seems well fitted to designate a place where the voiceless and the unrepresented are found. St. Gervais is one of two saints (Protais is the other) whose lives are unknown. They were ‘discovered’ by St. Ambrose, who – after dreaming that two martyred saints lay buried in a certain church – dug up their bones, whereupon various miracles took place. Gervais was named a saint consequent upon the miracles operated through his bones, and not as a result of his life, about which nothing was known. (Cf., the article Gervais, in Louis Moréri’s 1759 Le Grand dictionnaire historique, pp. 174–5.) 18. Four kinds of political status were possible for the denizens of Geneva: citizens, bourgeois, natives, inhabitants. Citizens were the native-born sons of the bourgeois. Both citizens and bourgeois were admitted to the General Council, from which the inhabitants and natives were excluded: ‘in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the General Council’s role had been greatly reduced and by the early eighteenth century its function had become limited to the confirmation of a list of syndics annually pre-selected and presented for its approval. It exercised no legislative initiative and no longer had any real voice in taxation. Through a series of measures which in many people’s eyes warped the system approved by Calvin, the Small Council (also called the Council of 25) had emerged as the effective instrument of government in Geneva. Only a few families controlled the Small Council, through which they also controlled the larger Council of 200 and, in turn, the General Council. Positions on these governing councils, which were for life, were passed from father to son much like family property’ (Helena Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva: From the First Discourse to the Social Contract, 1749–1762 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], p. 18). One had to be a citizen to serve on the higher councils, and of a prominent family at that. 19. Rosenblatt, whose account of Genevan politics and the Rousseau family’s liberalism I am largely following, says: ‘No other block in Geneva housed as many political agitators and demonstrators as did the block to which the Rousseau family moved in 1717’ (ibid., p. 31). 20. Rosenblatt notes that not only was power monopolized by the Petit Conseil and the Conseil des Deux-Cents, but fewer and fewer families were represented on them: ‘In 1570, there were 176 different family names represented on the Council of 200. In 1734, this number had dropped to only 94, with 10 names representing one-third of the members. One of the members, Jean Trembley, was related to 108 other members; another, Jean Lullin, could count 97 relatives on the Council, 15 of whom were also on the Council of 25. In fact, council meetings in early-eighteenth-century Geneva were much like family reunions’ (ibid., pp. 18–19). In the Saint Gervais quarter, the murmuring was loud against this cosy oligarchy. The Lettres écrites de la montagne discusses the unrest. See Charles Du Bois-Melly, Les Moeurs génévoises de 1700 à 1760, d’après tous les documents officiels, pour servir d’introduction à l’histoire de la république (Geneva: H. Georg, 1882), p. 272 and passim for a discussion of the military service and its rules. 21. See James Swenson, On Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Considered as One of the First Authors of the Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000) for a discussion of Rousseau as author of the French Revolution. 22. See Jacques Rancière, La Mésentente (Paris: Galilée, 1995). In an interview in Philosophie Magazine, 10, June 2007, Rancière says that ‘the portion of the portionless . . . does not mean the portion of the excluded, but the equal capacity of any one’. He redefines the political subject to make of it an unstable representative of that unrepresentable part: ‘A political subject is neither a part of society nor a power apparatus. It is a representative of the portion of the portionless, an operator opening the political field beyond recognized partners and institutions. The “worker’s movement”, for example, was not the representation of the workers’ interests but the affirmation of capacity in those to whom the exercise of citizenship had been denied by virtue of their belonging to the world of work. In addition, a political

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 39

29/06/2012 11:11

40

e . s. bu rt

subject is not a stable entity. It exists only through its acts, its capacity to change the landscape of the given, to make seen what was not seen, heard what was not heard. It exists as the effective manifestation of the ability of no matter whom to be involved in common affairs.’ 23. Frapper is an important term in Rousseau’s Confessions. In Book III, in the scene of ‘Le dîner de Turin’ so well analyzed by Starobinski (Oeil vivant II [Paris: Gallimard, 1970], pp. 98–154), Rousseau’s translation into modern French of Tel fiert qui ne tue pas as ‘Tel frappe qui ne tue pas’ is just one example of how an intimate knowledge of the term helps him onward. While the Confessions contains no examples of frapper in constructions like ‘frapper la monnaie’, consonant among other things with Rousseau’s avowed disdain for money, there are plenty which indicate a move to a fresh domain of experience. 24. See the chapter on Rousseau in David Marshall’s The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau and Mary Shelley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 40

29/06/2012 11:11

Chapter 3

3

The Utter Misery of the Human Mind: Apotropaic and Theotropic in de Man’s Rousseau

Nigel Mapp I

T

he more that some statements get quoted, rolled out as flat theses or synoptic specimens, the more the quotation begins to work like a charm.1 Does not the following sentence tell us all we need to know about Paul de Man’s scepticism, his nihilism? Shall we not corral him right here? The Triumph of Life warns us that nothing, whether deed, word, thought, or text, ever happens in relation, positive or negative, to anything that precedes, follows, or exists elsewhere, but only as a random event whose power, like the power of death, is due to the randomness of its occurrence. (RR 122)2 Framing the sentence, whether by quoting it or writing it up to start with, may not actually fix (or erase) all its thoughts, one by one and once and for all. Simon Jarvis has heard in the extremity of this passage, and noticed hearing, something different: a wish or fear. He reads the de Man sentence, I think, precisely in order to accommodate its speculative and ex cathedra cast, rather than to defuse or reject it.3 For him, the exhaustively legalistic disclaimer may not be a pure giveaway but also the shielding of something. De Man gets an entire ‘cognitive mood’ onto the page – rather than ‘re-framing’ it, as the popular psychologists urge – and without betraying the thought or experience sustained in that mood by pre-adapting it to the restrictive canons of certainty – or even those of evidence, consistency, and modesty. Such adaptation is cognitive excision. And what then is the mood? Critical statements such as de Man’s, claims Jarvis, ‘are not really propositions offered as corresponding adequately with a state of affairs. They are a kind of disenchanted echo of performative or apotropaic speech: they describe a certain state of affairs as already existing, in order to bring it about or avert it.’4 The thought is important because it remains alive to one rhetorical mode of de

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 41

29/06/2012 11:11

42

n i g e l m app

Man’s writing, instead of dumbly recycling it. The quotation reads, as well as getting read or misread. The fear or protest that echoes into the more superstitious, hostile citation of de Man could be one way in which de Man and his many resisters converge.5 Here in Jarvis’s remarks the tallying, the checking-off, that runs through the quoted sentence is expounded as compulsive gesture.6 De Man dramatizes a fear (or ‘warning’) exactly in so far as it remarks critical hyper-vigilance, a moment at once hard-won and hyperbolic. A kind of disintegrative mnemonic reports and enacts perfected demystification, and is already its own rote formula. Of course, the sentence should be read in the context of its elaboration and of the text it purports to read or re-express, despite the paradoxical air any such requirement of relation and articulation appears to take on with such a ‘proposition’ – and despite de Man’s effort to read the impact of an absolutely outer event, Shelley’s sudden death, on the poem The Triumph of Life (to think the limits to a poem’s figuring of what will have befallen it). Yet that requirement need not obscure what is being shown or dramatized just by this means of quotably intensified grimness. The ritual communicates something, a mood that unbalances the rehearsal or description of meaning’s extinction. The feeling, or normative emphasis, or interest, or whatever the motivating and deflecting surplus in this example of assertion-through-annulment may best be called, cannot quite be discounted, whatever our wishes, as the blurring or palliation of some more modest and well-grounded literary perception; but nor is it an add-on independent of the less modest description we do get. It marks a real encounter. It says something about more discursive truth-oriented and allegedly critical epistemological processes, for it arises out of them, and models their superstitiousness. It records what is felt (insisting that this is to be felt) about the results of such processes. When we wonder whether this ‘mood’ of warding-off is itself cognitive, then, we ask if it is carried in the very suspension or demystification of meaning we often associate with, or just call, critical cognition. Does it know something, for instance, about any bare, epistemologically purified object and its debts to myth? Or about what the critical questioning of the reliability of reference may tend to conceal? Such questions try to trace out the form of something that may be best called para-critical: the performative or literary qualities of tone, mood, cadence and so on, that cannot be reliably exhibited or detected, and which seem never to authorize a reading unless they are, precisely, the tone and mood of acceptable ‘reading’. Yet such moods noticeably attach to, carry, or undermine certain forms of literary critical argumentation – even when they have been factitiously obscured by the more generally discursive, argumentative dimensions of literary critical experience and writing. The field of rhetoric of course is one that traditionally has attempted to fathom and formalize, and thus to channel, all such characteristics of argumentation, performance and persuasion. De Man’s rhetorical readings could then be taken as negotiations with, even re-animations or de-animations of, the social and historical experiences recruited (or merely ‘quoted’) by these traditions. Moods are rhetorical, that is historical, material. But is not de Man also the reader who has made incisive and memorable defences of reading, defences that seem to offer little space for such nebulous matters? Does he not endorse a close consideration of the adequacy of reading to what is read –

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 42

29/06/2012 11:11

th e u tter m isery of the human mind

43

and the restriction of criticism to the shoreline of what its texts actually say and do? Would he not be the first to ask which, if any, features of a work such propositions read? (What is being appealed to when a ‘mood’ is discussed?) But those more extreme pronouncements of de Man’s, which also sit oddly with this sort of characterization of close reading, need remembering in just this context. Such passionate epistemological scenarios therefore take on a definite interest, in that they may allow consideration of how the passionate is also cognitive. De Man’s rhetorical readings not only make the apparent demystification of emotion a vital moment, but also, perhaps ambiguously, ambitiously, enlist them as a critical thrust in some readings. His severity concerning ethical and aesthetic obliterations of texts as texts may have to do with his interest in the cognitive and linguistic character or dimensions of emotions, then, and it is only a kind of rationalistic dismemberment of understanding, where knowledge and feeling are sundered, that is targeted.7 There is after all a lot of discussion in the later de Man about passions and emotions. And however ‘apathetic’ or technical those discussions generally are and seem to wish to be, there is also nevertheless to many of them a significant aspect of pathetic dramatization, or emotional charge, that can look like the critic’s own compulsive, affective extra rather than something earned in or derived from the reading of the work under investigation.8 But that pathos is cognitively productive – or simply cognitive – and can allow something further to be read.

II The recently discovered Textual Allegories manuscript contains a chapter, ‘Theotropic Allegory’, that was later reworked into the essay ‘Allegory of Reading (Profession de foi)’ in Allegories of Reading.9 The manuscript contains several pages of material that do not appear in that volume. Here is one of them, a passage that states the conflictual linkage of the principal categories of Rousseau’s ‘thought’: The challenge of Rousseau’s thought in general is precisely that such varied categories as selfhood, truth and falsehood, good and evil, social and political order, man and god necessarily enter into systems of relationship structured – such is our contention – like linguistic models and that, therefore, to isolate any of these categories from the other (the epistemological from the ethical, for example, or the religious from the political) is just as impracticable, and for the same reasons, as to isolate a signifier from its signification, a denotation from its connotation, or a figural from a literal meaning. Anthropology, morality, politics, and religion are not, in fact, distinct categories but conceptual conventions engendered by the common epistemological aberrations that produce them. In Julie, in the Social Contract and in Emile politics and religion are inextricably intertwined – which certainly does not mean that they are happily reconciled as is all too clear from the history of families, of classes or of nations, the unavoidability of structural interactions has never been a guarantee of peace. (TA 103–4)

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 43

29/06/2012 11:11

44

n i g e l m app

The relations between these categories are linguistic, or structures that are like linguistic ones, as long as ‘linguistic’ is here understood to mean the impossibility of detaching any of them from the others while feeling the pressure to do so, to draw lines and establish the literal or proper meaning of these categories. The epistemological is not to be cleanly derived from the other categories, as its relation to them is an internal one. So there is something impossible about expounding the linguistic conditions of all these meanings, for those conditions are dependent on what is to be explained. The categories have ‘in common’ this epistemological problem. And this will account for their engendering. Epistemological aberrations are, then, both aberrations to be accounted for epistemologically, and just what epistemology introduces: erring products of suspicion. Politics and religion epitomize the problem in their ongoing failure either to part or to live happily together. But are these thematic domains equally aberrant? In a famous line, de Man epitomizes the critical function of reading: ‘It is not a priori certain that language functions according to principles that are those, or like those, of the phenomenal world’ (RT 11). Is critical suspension passionate, or at least suspicious? Is faith its opposite or its secret twin? Does passion, or even a particular passion such as fear, necessarily attach itself to the linguistic critique of secure reference?10 To say ‘Achilles is a lion’ is to say ‘Achilles is brave’ (cf. AR 151). It is a metaphor whose referential claim is anchored in the property that is conventionally taken to be naturally or essentially a quality of lions, at least when heroes are described as lions. This property is shared by Achilles, and is the proper meaning of the metaphor. The claim is borne out in the closed fictional world of Homeric epic and its associated traditions and myths for, as de Man says, it is Achilles’ job just to live up to the metaphor and thereby his very name. But outside such a consistent mythic fiction, the claim would remain speculative and revisable in so far as it implied this necessary propriety insinuated by the metaphor. De Man makes the point that it would be foolish to think that calling someone ‘Achilles’ would guarantee that they be brave. He is suggesting, then, not only that the name could attach to anyone, brave or not, but also, more specifically, that metaphorical efforts to render the world as consistent and connected as a fiction lead us into confusion about where the authority of meaning is taken to lie; and these confusions between the significations that language makes possible and the world of experience on which they impact need not be, and typically are not, as obvious as this one.11 Here, the hopeful naming wants the privileges of the artist, of a stipulative representational world in which the name guarantees a certain quality and not only functions as a description, but as a substantial enacting of the connoted quality – its necessary link, a Providential totality. De Man’s discussion of this matter occurs during his digression from the reading of Rousseau’s Second Discourse, which is the first essay on Rousseau in Allegories of Reading (1979).12 There de Man interpolates a reading of Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Language. A couple of aspects of the passionate or affective elements involved in the entwinement of reference with undecidability of reference can be sketched from this instance. The essay outlines in this manner an error that is also

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 44

29/06/2012 11:11

th e u tter m isery of the human mind

45

cognate with that which it elaborates around the name of Achilles; and this error helps us understand that ‘[t]he political destiny of man is structured like and derived from a linguistic model that exists independently of nature and independently of the subject: it coincides with the blind metaphorization called “passion” ’ (AR 156). In this essay, ‘passion’ is presented as a species of productive necessity and aberrancy. That is, it is not the by-product of a cognitive situation, but that situation itself. The passion is called fear, and it is a cognitive predicament, a state of not knowing, or a suspended surmise of possibilities and the unsuspendable imperative to decide between them. ‘Fear’, we are told, ‘is exemplary because it corresponds structurally to the rhetorical model of the metaphor’ (AR 153, note).13 De Man is reading the scenario in which Rousseau argues for the original figurality of language. A ‘primitive man’ encounters other men and is frightened, so he calls them giants (AR 147 ff.). He will later correct his assessment of their size and strength, says Rousseau, and refer to them by means of a name that he can share with them: ‘man’. This account is ‘purely linguistic’ for de Man. Fear is the suspicion or critical suspension of reference, ‘a figural state of suspended meaning’ (AR 151) or a stuck ‘hypothesis’ that hostility may exist where it cannot be seen. Fear is an open structure of undecided relations, ‘the result of a possible discrepancy between the outer and the inner properties of entities’ (AR 150, emphasis added), but it also sounds like the constitutive or ‘fundamental feeling of distrust’ itself. It is ‘based . . . on the hypothesis that [this discrepancy] might exist, a possibility that can never be proven or disproven [sic] by empirical or by analytical means. A statement of distrust is neither true nor false: it is rather in the nature of a permanent hypothesis’ (AR 150, emphasis added). Those locutions tend to make fear sound not only derivative of something purely linguistic, but also as issuing from a distrust capable of linguistic explication, in which the feeling is the suspicion. So passions are represented by de Man’s Rousseau as a suspended referential and, therefore, ‘textual’ condition. This fear leads to the metaphor ‘giant’, which has the proper meaning of ‘I feel fear’, but the metaphor literalizes the open referential suspicions of that fear (which is why the name of a mythical monster such as Polyphemos might have served Rousseau’s primitive better [cf. AR 153, n. 29]), making a possibility into certainty. The ‘figure dis-figures’: that is, it makes fear, itself a para-figural fiction, into a reality that is as inescapable as the reality of the original encounter between the two men. Metaphor overlooks the fictional, textual element in the nature of the entity it connotes. It assumes a world in which intra- and extra-textual events, literal and figural forms of language, can be distinguished, a world in which the literal and the figural are properties that can be isolated and, consequently, exchanged and substituted for each other. This is an error, although it can be said that no language would be possible without this error. (AR 151–2) Fear as referential hypothesis is lost through the naming of the man a ‘giant’, an act that eases matters apotropaically by making threat actual. Passion is a figural state

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 45

29/06/2012 11:11

46

n i g e l m app

that seems cognitively or interpretatively intolerable or unstable. Fear is both realized in this metaphorical actualization, and eased, just as the word ‘giant’ is both spontaneous error and sprung from fearful suspension. ‘In shifting from fear to the figure that follows it, we move not from the literal to the figurative, but from the openly figurative to the faux-literal’, as Rei Terada explains.14 Is the passionate hypothesis ‘permanent’? (cf. AR 150). It is the space of uncertainty that referential denomination or assertion cannot close. It is never resolved in what subsequently befalls or is made of it – the higher order concepts through which the reading of Rousseau is led. The concept of ‘man’, which corrects that of ‘giant’, only corrects the determinacy of fear by concealing what at least was a memorial of a sense of mistrust. Such metaphors pave over the fictional nature of the consistency they have introduced. Concepts of measure and number circulate as if they were properties of things. ‘The concept of man is thus doubly metaphorical: it consists of the blind moment of passionate error that leads to the word “giant,” then of the moment of deliberate error that uses number in order to tame the original wild metaphor into harmlessness’ (AR 154). The passion and its ‘suspended, potential truth’ has not resolved itself but been ‘domesticated’ according to the interests of a fabricated sameness and equality-within-inequality of civil society (AR 155). A passage from the Zurich manuscript (TA 133) discusses the ‘necessary extension’ of ‘rhetorical deconstruction into the realm of religious experience’. That extension is said to go along with ‘a paradoxical shrinkage (or reduction) of the semantic field to particular and quantitatively restricted areas’, a development exemplified in the movement to economized forms of conceptuality mentioned above. The ‘paradox’ of transcendence and concretion or specificity is in fact ‘built within the double-faced notion of referentiality’, de Man asserts. The problem of reference is thus very closely tied to religious error. The double face is, first, reference’s reduction of signification, its setting up of proper meaning or translation of meaning into specific actions. The second aspect is the ‘movement of transgression or transcendence that prevents any judgment from being anything but a sign, compels it to turn always and again into a signification that radically differs from it’ (TA 134). But what kind of compulsion is involved in this religious two-facedness, which has the germ of exposing its own dogmatism? De Man labours to clarify that the first metaphor ‘giant’ does not give the man anything; he ‘stands to gain nothing from inventing the word “giant.” The distortion introduced by the term results exclusively from a formal, rhetorical potential of the language’ (AR 154). Thus the rhetorical inflection of Rousseau’s complex relation to, and criticism of, Epicurean, Augustinian and economistic accounts of interest.15 There is nothing in the initial situation to motivate fear except the suspicions arising out of merely apparent harmlessness. The passion is of course hardly disinterested; but the man’s specific interests are posited as a motive by the metaphor itself – and in terms of which it will require correction. The imperative to placate or resolve referential suspension is just that of the passionate referential conflict. The reading of Rousseau’s Profession de foi fills out religion’s extensive role in that

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 46

29/06/2012 11:11

th e u tter m isery of the human mind

47

work.16 It starts in the privileged status granted to an inner feeling, the moral voice of conscience. De Man attempts to read this pious emphasis in connection with the epistemological and political rigour of this authorship, refusing any ‘Schillerian dichotomy’ (or, indeed, any binary that will allow harmonization) of feeling and thinking to explain away ‘discrepancies between statement and tone’ (AR 223–4, 227). The status of this feeling and its judgments (which will be excluded only to find another outlet in The Social Contract) is scrutinized: how does one textual voice restate or translate another? The presence of a fictional narrator is also a rhetorical necessity in any discourse that puts the truth or falsehood of its own statement in question. More still than epics and novels, discursive texts are necessarily dialogical – which means, among other things, that they cannot be quoted without first having been read. (AR 226) De Man develops a dialogue between what he calls the ‘quotations that support the reading of the Profession de foi as a defense of natural religion’ and the argument they ‘frame’ (AR 226, emphasis added). That is, the assertions of theistic doctrine are read and argued over in the text. In a predicament akin to that of the suspicious man discussed in Rousseau’s Essay, the vicar talks of an inner ‘confusion’, itself ‘intolerable’, that provokes and undoes the voice of conscience. Moral feeling has an uncertain authority. Given opinions are subjected to the work of inner assent, which itself is an act of comparative judgment, and itself depends on that which is meant to depend on it. The authority of moral judgment is compromised by its enabling condition being a circularly attested feeling. Assent in fact ends up assenting to itself and therefore to its ‘theistic claim for the immanent authority of conscience’ (AR 228). Theism is here an abrupt, dogmatic exit from inward confusion in the direction of a natural and transcendental ground. But judgment needs to be an independent act, and this immanence of moral feeling can no longer be such a ground. Rousseau, de Man avers, is not taken in: he goes on to examine this immanent assent and take religion under the scrutiny of reason. Judgment deconstructs the metaphorical model of sensation, but inherits its error as metaphorical system. Judgment transports, folds; it is motion (AR 228). (The model recalls Kant’s, but without a transcendental deduction.) If ‘to be’ has no proper meaning in itself, judgment is merely ‘oracular verdict’, imposition (AR 233). Now the text, as it moves away from thematizing its aporia, begins to suffer from it, ‘to the point of making the text the dramatization of its own confusions’ (AR 236). This is where those theistic, orthodox statements appear, and these are now being read as ‘constitutively associated with aberrant totalization’ (AR 237). God is brought in to this circular process as man’s metaphor, as a judging mind, grounding and sharing the structures of judgment and therefore of loving (he shares a feeling interest in our good). The exchange of properties relies on an inscrutable grace but obscures it in a kind of accountancy of good works: Like the wild metaphor ‘giant’ which, in the Essay on the Origins [sic] of Language, becomes ‘man’, the spontaneous metaphor ‘God’ can then be

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 47

29/06/2012 11:11

48

n i g e l m app

institutionalized and quantified into a contractual relationship in which God is said to owe something to man, and to pay him for the price of labours accomplished in his behalf. The pro- or regression from love to economic dependence is a constant characteristic of all moral and social systems based on the authority of noncontested metaphorical systems. (AR 239) God, available to metaphor and exchange, and also absolutely outside them in Rousseau’s analysis, is one more version of such metaphorical systems, all of which have a common pattern of error or aporia. But such theotropism, or turning to a ground for tropic movements, or toward a tropo-logy – and whether it is thematized or named in terms of Godhead or divinity or not – is thus developed as the engendering matrix of all would-be referential fixities and knowable, or avowable, passions. Theotropism is exemplarily derivative and obfuscating of figural aporia; it names the move out of figure necessitated by figure. In a complex discussion of referentiality, in several pages toward at the end of ‘Theotropic Allegory’ not appearing in Allegories of Reading, de Man states: [Referentiality] is constitutively theotropic, since the only conceivable name for a transcendental signification that would no longer be itself a sign, the only word that would have a truly proper meaning, is ‘god’. The only ‘meaning that one can give the word to be’ . . . is that of ‘god’. Yet at the same time, the referentiality resulting from this paradigmatic denomination must lead to the performance of a finite, practical or, as we say, ‘historical’ act . . . The possibility of practical action is inherently linked to the (fallacious) coinage of the word ‘god’. (TA 134)17 ‘God’ would therefore be a supreme fiction intuited as real.18 But Rousseau also knows he has no access to such a transcendental guarantee. His priestly persona craves a sign, and that is all he gets.19 The acts at issue here concern historical agents as well as the emotions of readers. As de Man traces how judgments ‘glide’ into the language of the affections, toward that more restricted, specific manifestation of godly virtue in the desiring or erotic self, the work’s emotion or pathos becomes ‘dramatically emphasized’ (AR 237–8). We resort to a kind of theatre of feelings when the judgments of feeling issue in confusion. There emerge fluctuating valuations, the haphazard moral prioritizing of insides and outsides. There seems a regressive or intensifying error, in which emotion attempts to correct or forget the aberrations it previously indexed: What has in fact been established is the gradual loss of authority of any immanent judgment or any immanent value whatsoever. At the same time, and by means of the same argument, the alternative recourse to a transcendental source of authority, such as nature, or God, has also been definitively foreclosed. The aporia of truth and falsehood has turned into the confusion of good and evil and ended up in an entirely arbitrary valorization in terms of pain and pleasure. (AR 243)

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 48

29/06/2012 11:11

th e u tter m isery of the human mind

49

The consistency of virtue and pleasure, mind and nature, of metaphorical totalization, is dogmatically, defiantly or ignorantly, reasserted. But de Man’s reading has shown that this is a relapse into confusion, an allegory or theatre of an inability to read the aporia it previously discussed so lucidly. In the case of the Savoyard vicar, we are not independent of the spectacle of this persona judging all kinds of matters awry, just as if he had not previously established that judgment is in error, or as if he is unable to read what it establishes. The ‘theotropic’ element is linked to this allegory of unreadability: The religious dimension enters the text of Rousseau’s work as the possibility of authoritative enunciation departs for good. The Second Discourse could still speak with the deconstructive authority of its devious rigor and, therefore, needed god only as a measure for the absurdity of those who believe in natural origins and causes. But the Profession de foi, like the Nouvelle Héloïse, knows that the deconstructive text too remains unreadable to its own author. The apparent lapse into naiveté and empirical silliness, as compared to the dialectical [indecipherable] of the earlier work, is a trap for the reader . . . (TA 131) The silliness is the piety, the odd equation of the divine voice with virtue, desire and passion. But for de Man, although it may remain silly, it is not a real ‘lapse’. It is the upshot of the aporia of judgment, the way the work allegorizes the impossibility of reading by introducing dogmatic, aberrant, contradictory dictates as the voice of God, and these as the strict equivalents of deconstructive narrative. Moral feelings are here theotropically appeased, confused and exacerbated. But can we think a referential gap or deficit as a space of freedom, of the finitude or historicity of law, and not blind ourselves to what we may have to act out? In de Man’s reading of Rousseau’s Social Contract, which has complex relations with the previous readings in Allegories of Reading, religion plays a key role (AR 246– 77). De Man’s essay stands under the aegis of this other question, the relationship of political and religious discourse in Rousseau. Yet it seems the purpose of his readings, or shall we say their result, to separate these dimensions and to show the elimination of the theological in favour of the political. After the pages on Rousseau’s ‘Du bonheur public’ that serve as a preliminary to the analysis of The Social Contract, de Man offers what looks like an expanded reiteration and precautionary defence or delimitation of its critical scope: We are not concerned here with the technically political significance of this text, still less with an evaluation of the political and ethical praxis that can be derived from it. Our reading merely tries to define the rhetorical patterns that organize the distribution and the movement of the key terms – while contending that questions of valorization can be relevantly considered only after the rhetorical status of the text has been clarified. (AR 258) De Man has noted that various thematic elements have the same figural structure, which is of course the basis of his re-articulation of various discontinuities in the

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 49

29/06/2012 11:11

50

n i g e l m app

tradition of reception of Rousseau’s oeuvre. He lays out that point in familiar unflinching manner at the opening of the essay: The . . . ‘meanings’ can be said to be ethical, religious, or eudaemonic, but each of these thematic categories is torn apart by the aporia that constitutes it, thus making the categories effective to the precise extent that they eliminate the value system in which their classification is grounded. (AR 247)20 The point is the thematization and the classification. Theotropic discourse, itself a constitutive potential and not a theme, will indeed be overtaken by a ‘textual’ account that also notes its necessary recurrence, the referential anchoring in theme as such. The ‘politicality’ of language could then be the unstoppable questioning of the authority of reference, whereas theotropism is the occlusion of that question in thematism, including that of idol-breaking, the revelation of some ground as placeholder for God; and that includes the occlusion of affect and passion, indeed must do so. The double face of reference, which religious figures manage to figure and disfigure, is thought further as a double relationship epitomized by textual law. The Social Contract’s discussions of religion are to contain the textuality of the Profession de foi and its deconstruction, de Man argues. The ‘referential efficacy’ of religious texts, and its subversion, is therefore understood to be overtaken by the thinking of text as text, which here means as both language of statement and language of action (AR 247). When God is invoked by Rousseau in The Social Contract in terms of the ‘Legislator’, de Man does see this as another thematizing, as for there to be ‘any operative language’ it must ‘postulate transcendental signification’ (TA 180). Religion is wheeled in when the self-authorization of the people fails. The figure of the legislator meets the occasion – divinely inspired and passionless, though a knower of passions. What then is the fate of affectivity in The Social Contract? The question hangs over the reading, which starts with an analysis of Rousseau’s ‘Du bonheur public’. The idea of readable individual private happinesses that can then be generalized is off-limits from the outset. There is no ‘easy metaphorical totalization from personal to social well-being, based on an analogical resemblance between both’ (AR 250). Yet a general happiness can ensue, surprisingly, when attention is paid to the systematic relations of the collective. De Man seeks the rhetorical model of generality that can account for this. The notion of the individual’s double relationship with the state, codified in law, while state sovereign power and law have no such double relation and treat all citizens as alienable strangers, is the resulting model. Sovereign or executive power in The Social Contract merely acts or performs. It is neither affective nor knowing. But it must constitute itself and destroy its autarchy by dependent relation on law, or legal text. Political rights and laws are indeed sundered from political action; the model is one of pure estrangement. The grammar of law that suspends referential meaning conflicts with a justice necessarily involving or demanding particular application or reference. Politics is the becoming-explicit of this estrangement. It is an aporia of the legal text itself: estrangement of the par-

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 50

29/06/2012 11:11

th e u tter m isery of the human mind

51

ticular as particular from a law that itself can exist only in this relationship (justice must relate to particulars and judge them) (AR 267). Law is not only grammatical, passionless indifference to knowing and reference; it is also destroyed by its double constitution as referential, a reference that can only ever be the secretly stolen sense of the particular as it currently and aberrantly is, a spurious universalism: There can be no text without grammar: the logic of grammar generates texts only in the absence of referential meaning, but every text generates a referent that subverts the grammatical principle to which it owed its constitution . . . We call text any entity that can be considered from such a double perspective: as a generative, open-ended, non-referential grammatical system and as a figural system closed off by a transcendental signification that subverts the grammatical code to which the text owes its existence. The ‘definition’ of the text also states the impossibility of its existence and prefigures the allegorical narratives of this impossibility. (AR 269–70) The textual predicament means constitutional law deviates from political action, and so ‘affectivity and valorization’ arise once more, although the diremption is again ‘epistemological’, de Man insists, a conflict of statement and meaning, for which affects can be no ‘reliable criterion’ (AR 272). To want what you must do according to the contract, you must know what you should want. Law is future oriented, a promise, and this model must manifest itself ‘phenomenologically, since it is defined, in part, as the passage, however unreliable, from “pure” theory to an empirical phenomenon’ (AR 273). It is now the future that is ‘hypothetical’. Unfortunately, there is no present people who can legislate: ‘the general will is quite literally voiceless. The people are a helpless and “mutilated” giant, a distant and weakened echo of the Polyphemos we first encountered in the Second Discourse’ (AR 273–4). They are in a pathetic position, full of passions they can neither authorize nor escape, except by means of a subterfuge. Rousseau’s notorious Legislator has for his purpose to reverse cause and effect and install the reconciliation of transcendental law and its particular applications of knowing and justice in order to bring about the laws that were to deliver them. God is the ‘metaphor engendered by this metalepsis’, a teleological figure that forces a convergence of figure and meaning. De Man points out the blasphemy and deceit of this ruse, along with its necessity and that of its future undoing (AR 275). Rousseau is therefore no Moses (AR 266, 275). But his text keeps on legislating nevertheless, despite showing the impossibility of this, which de Man remarks by calling it an allegory.

III De Man indeed insists that readers show that a meaning is there by showing how it is there, how the work constitutes such meaning.21 In the late (1982) piece entitled ‘The Return to Philology’, for a concise programmatic example, de Man praises Reuben Brower for his didactic and critical principle of adducing textual evidence:

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 51

29/06/2012 11:11

52

n i g e l m app

Students . . . were not to say anything that was not derived from the text they were considering. They were not to make any statements that they could not support by a specific use of language that actually occurred in the text. They were asked, in other words, to begin by reading texts closely as texts and not to move at once into the general context of human experience or history. Much more humbly or modestly, they were to start out from the bafflement that such singular turns of tone, phrase, and figure were bound to produce in readers attentive enough to notice them and honest enough not to hide their nonunderstanding behind the screen of received ideas that often passes, in literary instruction, for humanistic knowledge. (RT 23) This air of obviousness, the care taken in his exposition of critical reading, and the pragmatic ethics of critical honesty, all allow de Man to develop a case which, especially when combined with an almost en passant, non-committal appeal to the open questions of philosophical aesthetics, makes the suspension of that ‘general context of human experience’ look itself more general or permanent: Mere reading, it turns out, prior to any theory, is able to transform critical discourse in a manner that would appear deeply subversive to those who think of the teaching of literature as a substitute for the teaching of theology, ethics, psychology, or intellectual history. Close reading accomplishes this often in spite of itself because it cannot fail to respond to structures of language that it is the more or less secret aim of literary teaching to keep hidden . . . As a result, the attribution of a reliable, or even exemplary, cognitive and, by extension, ethical function to literature indeed becomes much more difficult. But this is a recurrent philosophical quandary that has never been resolved. The latest version of the question, which still determines our present-day convictions about the aims of literature, goes back to the rise of aesthetics as an independent discipline in the later half of the eighteenth century. The link between literature (as art), epistemology, and ethics is the burden of aesthetic theory at least since Kant. It is because we teach literature as an aesthetic function that we can move so easily from literature to its apparent prolongations in the spheres of self-knowledge, of religion, and of politics. (RT 24–5) De Man effectively dismisses the bulk of extant ‘literary criticism’ as anything but criticism of literature. The argument knowingly takes up a historical problem, or predicament – the growing autonomy of art and literature in modernity. The resisters of reading are blind to a key aspect of the history to which they tirelessly appeal. Worse, institutional resistance to reading in the name of ‘received ideas’ and canonical humanistic standards is directly characterized as religious, which means for de Man dogmatic: Teaching literature as a rhetoric and poetics requires a change in the rationale . . . away from standards of cultural excellence that, in the last analysis, are always based on some form of religious faith, to a principle of disbelief that is

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 52

29/06/2012 11:11

th e u tter m isery of the human mind

53

not so much scientific as it is critical, in the full philosophical sense of the term. (RT 26)22 De Man elsewhere says that he wishes to ‘take the divine out of reading’.23 Terms such as ‘religious’ and ‘divine’ may not refer, for de Man, to forms of traditional personal or organized faith in God. They name points of anchorage outside a system, uninterrogated principles of stability and coherence, transcendent signification. Reading, or interpretation, that foists pre-packed meanings onto the text – historical, political, formal, sentimental and aesthetic – are, finally, religious in that they are rooted in faith rather than knowledge, a faith in the integrity of experience and its cognitive accountability; a faith that issues, however, from a crisis of knowledge. Reading probes the claims of the aesthetic, of the senses and of phenomenal experience, as well as those of historical and political understanding construed in phenomenal terms. The attack on religion in de Man’s work, which is quite general from his early essays, is accompanied by and seems to underpin a related hostility to ‘eudaemonic’ considerations, valuations founded in feelings.24 Clearly, in many of de Man’s mature writings, despite their attention to disparities of statement and performance, there is a strong, perhaps superficial, sense that wishes, emotions, feelings and values quite generally are epiphenomenal – mere by-products, if aberrantly recurrent ones. De Man moves from the plaster façade of received, uncritical valuing toward conditions of knowing specific to the work that is to be known. This promotes a distinctive idea of knowing. Reading is to account for the derivative eccentricities of warmer, human values – which means: to trace their occurrence in rhetorical, or linguistic, terms. This seems, usually, more than a question of explicitness. The emphasis in de Man’s essays is firmly on what reading understands or fails to understand. The intensity of attention to what is felt or valued is all about articulating its at best negative involvement in understanding, the critical aporia feelings are born out of and which they seek to resolve or forget. Feelings and values tend to be symptoms that get systematically disarticulated, or voided of authority, a process whose understanding is closed to them but whose own pathos they remark or reveal. As de Man comments in 1978: For how could a text have its understanding depend on considerations that would not be epistemologically determined? . . . What makes a reading more or less true is simply the predictability, the necessity of its occurrence, regardless of the reader or of the author’s wishes . . . [I]n the case of the reading of a text, what takes place is a necessary understanding. What marks the truth of such an understanding is not some abstract universal but the fact that it has to occur regardless of other considerations. It depends, in other words, on the rigor of the reading as argument. Reading is an argument (which is not necessarily the same as a polemic) because it has to go against the grain of what one would want to happen in the name of what has to happen; this is the same as saying that understanding is an epistemological event prior to being an ethical or aesthetic value. This does not mean that there can be a true reading, but that

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 53

29/06/2012 11:11

54

n i g e l m app

no reading is conceivable in which the question of its truth or falsehood is not primarily involved. It would therefore be naïve to make a reading depend on considerations, ethical or aesthetic, that are in fact correlatives of the understanding the reading is able to achieve. Naïve, because it is not a matter of choice to omit or accentuate by paraphrase certain elements in a text at the expense of others. We do not have this choice, since the text imposes its own understanding and shapes the reader’s evasions. The more one censors, the more one reveals what is being effaced.25 The thought here is highly paradoxical. The difference between mere paraphrase and critical reading dwindles, as de Man goes on to elaborate.26 The dummy will always take over the ventriloquist. There is a kind of methodological recommendation, or ‘ethical imperative’ of reading, whose prime and Kantian characteristic is its chastening effect on desire. But this is an imperative to do what must happen anyway, which is at least the manifestation of the imperative. Indeed, the deletion of freedom sounds extraordinarily emphatic. Any argument here, then, is with the reader and her wishes; and it seems she cannot ever win, or lose. The model of reading is not one of a transparent medium in which the work is to manifest itself as itself. Any reading as such is instead the manifestation of truth as occurrence, and this is a negative and strenuous affair. Reading as this discovery is what is both necessary and what is enjoined on us for good measure, a renunciation of what pleases or motivates that is exacted whatever our wishes. It is ‘predictable’, though the sense of the passage is that reading happens when it has other plans – a negative, disruptive moment. So the text ‘imposes its own understanding’, but it is the evasive or deflective tactics that the reader is forced into that might just be the whole shape of the reading legislated by the text.

No tes 1. This chapter revises a paper delivered at the UC Irvine conference ‘Property, Sovereignty, and the Theotropic: Paul de Man’s Political Archive’ (April 2009), organized by Martin McQuillan and Erin Obodiac; my thanks to Martin McQuillan for the invitation to speak and for his generous interest in my work. I wish also to acknowledge the support of the Academy of Finland for funding my research, including that undertaken at the Irvine de Man archive. I am grateful to Cynthia Chase, Kevin Newmark and Rei Terada for several incisive remarks. 2. There is often a drive to de-fuse at work in the quoting of this sentence. An odd moment in fiction occurs in John Lanchester, Mr Phillips (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), where the sentence appears as one gathered in an album of ‘embroidered mottoes’ made by the widow of a ‘loony RE teacher’ from his notebook of memorable sayings (pp. 242–3). 3. Simon Jarvis, ‘An Undeleter for Criticism’, Diacritics, 32:1, 2002, pp. 17–18. Jarvis’s article traces the damage done to literary criticism by its refusal of thoughts and experiences that can barely be reported or explored according to the norms of academic certainty and discursive reductiveness. Jarvis’s interest is in the long, tangled histories of reasoning and

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 54

29/06/2012 11:11

th e u tter m isery of the human mind

4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

55

what it reasons itself out of – in the protest and wishfulness sunk in thinking’s broken, compressed compartments. Ibid., p. 18. De Man’s sentence is being considered along with examples from Theodor Adorno and William Hazlitt. On the resistances felt, or that should be felt, by the rhetorical reader, see especially de Man, ‘Introduction’ [to a special issue entitled ‘The Rhetoric of Romanticism’], Studies in Romanticism, 18:4, 1979, pp. 495–9; and cf. RT 12, 19–20, 21. ‘Gesture’ is a de Manian word, of course. In his writing, it looks sometimes like a term consciously deployed, perhaps with a quasi-technical or etymological sense (L. gero, gerere, carry; cf. the internal ‘syntax’ of ‘meta-phor’ and ‘trans-lation’ [see RR 251; RT 83]); sometimes like a stylistic tic. Those possibilities are themselves part of the word’s range of meaning. A ‘gesture’ can be a consciously intended, perhaps urgent, perhaps free communication, or clarification – whether insulting, involving, theatrical or otherwise. It is both meaning and its extra, but can be its undermining also. It indicates or expresses feeling. It can be non-conscious or unconscious performance or playing out, some clue. Gestures, then, are mere signs or true signs or events of meaning or meaning’s adjunct or syntax. They need reading. They can be ‘valorized’ positively or negatively. They are the conventional, general shape of a meaning or connection; also the given or assumed or casually received (or casually compelled) one. ‘Gesture’ is the idiomatic signature or even singularity of a meaningful, embodied, human being; or the illusion of such that we must go behind. We might seek the iterable quality of such an idiom or the specificity its conventionality or symptomology hide. ‘Gesture’ is, in short, a central and quite traditional rhetorical term and resource, a language. See my forthcoming ‘Gesture: Action, Mimesis, and Aesthetics in Paul de Man’ for elaborations of de Man’s employment of this word. Rei Terada’s compelling exposition of de Man’s rhetorical reading as a theory of emotion is a crucial reference in what follows. I am much indebted to it. See Terada, Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the ‘Death of the Subject’ (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2001). Neil Hertz, ‘Lurid Figures’, in Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich, eds, Reading de Man Reading (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 82–104; and Hertz, ‘More Lurid Figures’, Diacritics, 20:3, 1990, pp. 2–27. See AR 221–45. The Textual Allegories manuscript was written in Zurich in 1973–74, and represents the earliest known versions of what became finally the bulk of the essays collected in Allegories of Reading, although there are many differences between the MS and the various published versions. De Man’s reading of Rousseau’s The Social Contract, for example, informs two essays in the MS, the second of which (‘Textual Allegory’) has no equivalent in AR or elsewhere for its final pages on Rousseau’s Julie and their move toward the reading of Nietzsche. I have relied heavily and gratefully on the transcription of the MS made by Erin Obodiac. I have occasionally emended it. Thanks to Steve Macleod for his friendly and efficient help at the archive and to Martin McQuillan for digitized images of the MS. Cf. Stanley Cavell’s analysis of jealousy and sceptical doubt, Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare, updated ed. (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), esp. pp. 7ff. Although we may still amuse ourselves briefly with the comic inappropriateness of the name of any particular Achilles we know. Cf. RT 11; and de Man, ‘A Letter from Paul de Man’, Critical Inquiry, 8:3, 1982, pp. 509–13. ‘Metaphor (Second Discourse)’, in AR 135–59 (pp. 147ff.). Terada’s integral reading of de Man’s ‘coherent model of emotion as tropic structure’ begins with this instance (Feeling in Theory, p. 50). Ibid., p. 58.

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 55

29/06/2012 11:11

56

n i g e l m app

15. Pierre Force, Self-Interest Before Adam Smith: A Genealogy of Economic Science (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 16. I follow the version in AR unless indicated otherwise. 17. I have excised de Man’s page reference to Rousseau’s Profession de foi. 18. I take ‘supreme fiction’ from Simon Critchley’s fascinating, aporetic development of Rousseau’s politics and religion in ‘The Catechism of the Citizen: politics, law and religion in, after, with and against Rousseau’, Continental Philosophy Review, 42:5, 2009, pp. 5–34. Critchley is himself developing the phrase from Wallace Stevens. 19. ‘The positively-valued terms from the Profession de foi (selfhood, consciousness, etc.) all become ambivalent; none of them certainly would have to be discarded as simply aberrant, but none could remain as a stable category of undisputed transcendental authority – none could ever be transferred to a theological level without a thorough-going modification of the explicit and implicit conception of language that, up to then, had structured Rousseau’s thought’ (TA 100). 20. Cf. De Man, ‘Political Allegory’, TA 140. 21. This may not ultimately be possible, of course – which is why it is necessary; see RT 14: ‘literature is not a transparent message in which it can be taken for granted that the distinction between the message and the means of communication is clearly established’. 22. De Man also talks of ‘theoretical ruthlessness’ and appeals ironically to the ‘good conscience’ of those who refuse it in the name of such religious values. 23. See Robert Moynihan, ‘Interview with Paul de Man’, The Yale Review, 73:4, 1984, p. 586. 24. See RT 64 for a forthright commentary on some remarks of Nietzsche’s. 25. Paul de Man, ‘Foreword’ [to Carol Jacobs, The Dissimulating Harmony (1978)], reprinted in de Man, Critical Writings, 1953–1978, ed. Lindsay Waters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 221–2. 26. Rodolphe Gasché explores this aspect of de Man’s readings in his ‘In-Difference to Philosophy’, reprinted in Gasché, The Wild Card of Reading: On Paul de Man (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 48–90.

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 56

29/06/2012 11:11

Chapter 4

4

rausch

Rhetoric and Rausch: de Man on Nietzsche on Value and Style

Stephen Barker

A

mong the most important (and ubiquitous) themes running through Paul de Man’s critique of Nietzsche, particularly given its Rousseauesque framework, is the relationship among rhetoric, value and style, within the context of narrative and language per se as the cultural meaning-making ‘machines’ ‘behind’ all senses of value. For de Man this process is quite literally a machine since, as he claims in Aesthetic Ideology, ‘in the manner of Nietzsche’, for the signifier whose grounding characteristic is free play, ‘there is a machine there, a text machine, an implacable determination and a total arbitrariness . . . which inhabits words on the level of the play of the signifier, which undoes any narrative consistency of lines, and which undoes the reflexive and the dialectical model . . . as the basis of any narration’ (AI 181). Given that for de Man, as for Nietzsche, language is the meaning-making machine par excellence, having invented, established and arranged the very terms within which meaning and value can be understood in even the most basic ways (i.e., through style), says Rousseau, for de Man, language, while never merely dialectical, is simultaneously fundamentally – that is, on the very surface – meaning-full, and radically dehors, outside the human, the phenomenological matrix, the ‘rhetorical sense’ as such. Within the context of the de Manian narratives centrally under consideration here, rhetorical value and rhetorical style are what Nietzsche would call ‘tightrope’ concepts: quintessentially alien and all-too-human. In fact, as the unpublished ‘Textual Allegory’ material makes clear (Chapter VI of TA), de Man develops his Nietzsche attachment through Rousseau, finding and analyzing Rousseau within a Nietzschean context, using Nietzschean terms and perspectives. The points de Man clearly makes early on regarding the relationship between theory and narrative (i.e., that the former perpetually reveals itself as the latter) is a case in point, as is the fact that ‘whenever we seem to be closing off the rhetorical field, we in fact open up a new space of rhetorical juxtapositions and metafigural chains’ (TA 181). The world de Man maps out is saturated with reversals, swervings and illogic; indeed, the narrative cosmos as such is a world apart, a world of ‘ordered confusion’, simultaneously intensely, privately insular, and absolutely public – its most powerful characteristic is the typically Nietzschean one of being this and that.

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 57

29/06/2012 11:11

58

st e p h en barker

De Man’s case is that Rousseau’s ‘coupe amère et douce de la sensibilité’ (TA 189), like Hölderlin’s ‘dunkeles Licht’, must be seen in this light of metaphor, and that indeed ‘it is not easier’, as he says, ‘to feign confusion in order not to promise (and hence, to lie) because the light cannot be conjured away’ (TA 190) – that, in fact, Rousseau’s work has to be seen under the ‘double rapport’ rendering his theory of figures into a ‘generalized theory of textuality’ (TA 190). In La Nouvelle Héloïse this is a matter not just of value but of property and its value, that is, of what is proper to value. Rousseau indicates that property-value is based on a promise, a contracted future, and by extension a proper promise, the ‘promise-proper’. The promise made by textuality is that, as conveyed through its style, it will retain its value – its currency; that promise is a pro-jection into a to-come anticipating value through style. To promise: Pro-mettre, to do (to place – setzen – to put in place) before; to commit to some future, and to some future state or act. Just as the ‘contract’ is the temporal commitment to ‘take some proper, specific action’, the ‘promise’ is its corollary and its sub-structure: contract grounds itself on promise, always à venir. In terms of the long fragment of ‘Textual Allegory’ at which we are looking here, de Man demonstrates the fact that in terms of rhetoric, Nietzsche fulfills Rousseau’s promise, which is then revealed as being what de Man calls an ‘ironic promise’. If we are to try to take this oxymoron seriously, we must try to move beyond the strategic reversals inherent in an ‘ironic promise’ to examine – more importantly, to interrogate (that is, for de Man, to deconstruct) – not just inherent reversals, but the Rausch – the intoxication, yes, but the ‘transport’, and the ‘sensory transport’ inherent in Rausch and in Rauschen – out of which that irony, that reversal, emerges. The concluding line of the Rousseau section of de Man’s ‘Textual Allegory’ – which of course means ‘the strategies of texts’ – is that Rousseau’s promise (in La Nouvelle Héloïse and the The Social Contract) ‘can become an ironic promise’ (TA 190). By this de Man means that Rousseau is well aware of the rhetorical problems inherent in the promise (the contract). ‘But’, de Man says, ‘this moves us out of the orbit of Rousseau’s into that of Nietzsche’s text’ (TA 190). I want, then, to move into the orbit of Nietzsche’s text, to see where de Man wants to take us, as he does in ‘Rhetoric + Metaphysics’, his treatment of Nietzsche’s treatment of rhetoric, value and style. As we have seen, however, de Man finds the contemporary roots of this integral association in Rousseau’s Julie, that chiasmus of value and style about whom, regarding the Dionysian theme of wine, de Man says that Julie’s last statement [‘on m’a fait boire jusqu’a la lie la coupe amère et douce de la sensibilité’ – ‘I was made to drink to the very lees the bitter and sweet cup of sensitivity’ (III, 733)] brings together Euripides’ Bacchae and Socrates into a juxtaposition that will also produce the ‘dunkeles Licht’ of Hölderlin’s poetry, in which Dionysos appears as the god of the general will (Gemeingeist) and inspire Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. Rousseau always knew all there is to know about the Dionysian temptation of metaphor and his work reaches out well beyond the confines of this knowledge. (TA 189–90)

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 58

29/06/2012 11:11

rhe toric and rausch

59

Nothing could provide a clearer association of rhetoric and Rausch than a triangulation of Euripides’ Bacchae, Socrates and Hölderlin; further, a significant part of that ‘reaching out well beyond’ to which de Man refers has precisely to do with the effects of intoxication, which are not merely evidenced but which originate in rhetoric: for de Man, rhetoric and Rausch are both pharmaka, each in its own right. The narrative cosmos is one about which de Man can declare that ‘like Julie’s garden, whoever enters it forgets the existence of any outside world except as a totally unknown place of banishment’ (TA 188). This curiously edenic microcosm consists of a particular kind of pre-lapsarian plenitude, however, characterized by the furthest stretching of the strategy of ‘and’: appropriately, as de Man points out, the chief product of such a garden must be wine, the Dionysian elixir not only of intoxication but of excess (immoderation) in general. De Man focuses on Julie’s garden so extensively in La Nouvelle Héloïse in order to demonstrate that very excess, through which we come to understand the nature of Rausch in Rousseauesque terms, but through which de Man can set up the Nietzschean context, Julie’s viniculture transformed into narrative itself. In order to come to terms (literally) with Rausch, we must attend to its origins, as focused on by de Man, in Rousseau. In fact, de Man refers to ‘intoxication’ directly in ‘Textual Allegory’, within the framework of what he calls ‘contamination’, to be read as impurity not in a pejorative but in a liberating sense, a contamination of both the ‘public’ and the ‘private spheres’ (that is, of the entirety of experience) and of the relationship between sobriety and inebriation, once again within a Nietzschean context: wine, throughout the novel, in a chain of repeated figures that extends from the early Valais scene to the glass of undiluted wine that Julie drinks on her deathbed is an emblem of temptation and excess, always associated with the overcome illusion of the unmediated communion of darkness and light. The insane spectacle of Claire in one of the last scenes of the novel, deluded into an endless game of sublimations as a deliberate and theoretical hoax that threatens to rob her of life and reason, and is the last in a sequence of Dionysian moments. Like the poison of the ‘innoculation de l’amour’, wine is the drug, the pharmakos that destroys by healing and, in Julie’s Socratic death scene, it functions like the hemlock that brings together the disciples of Socrates. ‘On m’a fait boire jusqu’à la lie la coupe amère et douce de la sensibilité’ (III, 733). (TA 189) Rousseau ‘always knew all there is to know about the Dionysian temptation’ – the temptation of metaphor, de Man states; as always, such temptation is that of metaphorical indirection, and this doubling or indirection, when applied to notions of the self (particularly within the framework of the ‘metaphor of the self’), according to de Man, ‘engenders the frantic disorder heard in Pygmalion’s “passionate,” “transported” speech’ (TA 40). By the same token, Rausch, as indirection, doubling, ambivalence, or ambiguity, is the hinge on which de Man will make the transition from Rousseau to Nietzsche:

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 59

29/06/2012 11:11

60

st e p h en barker

Rousseau’s work has to be seen under the ‘double rapport’ that makes his theory of figures into a generalized theory of textuality. For as long as there can be two textual plots, there can be many more. The promise withheld in the Nouvelle Héloïse and stated in the Social Contract can also be stated and withheld at the same time. It can become an ironic promise. But this moves us out of the orbit of Rousseau’s into that of Nietzsche’s text. (TA 190) As a general theory of textuality, then, this ‘double rapport’ – a kind of double vision – amounts to a critique of referentiality itself. While it is true that de Man is concerned with the ways in which Rousseau’s text links referentiality and judgment, he is also centrally concerned with the nature of referentiality as both transport and transgression, fundamental elements of Rausch. Because Rousseau sees judgment as (textually) active, a ‘principle of movement’, by its very nature ‘referentiality metamorphizes (or metaphorizes) meaning into the specific actions of a praxis’ (TA 133); but by the same token, this very nature inexorably means that ‘referentiality is also, and simultaneously, the very movement of transgression or transcendence that prevents any judgment from being anything but a sign, compels it to turn always again into a signification that radically differs from it by its (fallacious) claim . . . to be a meaning’ (TA 133–4). Referentiality, framed textually as it must be, perpetually enacts a centrifugal textual praxis. But seen correctly, de Man has gone even further: in the sense in which he links Rousseau and Nietzsche, textual referentiality must be seen as constitutively metaphysical, in precisely the Nietzschean sense of that term (TA 134). Indeed, referentiality transmutes into an even more radical kind of indirection as de Man links it, as Rausch, with the sense of ‘transcendence as sign’, echoing Longinian hypsos, transport, as (the béance of and within) metaphoricity itself. De Man’s claim is that judgment, necessarily defined (but indeed created) through the terms in which ‘it’ appears, because it is therefore a function of metaphoricity, is what he calls ‘blank’; de Man’s surprising use of this word for the effect of metaphoricity on judgment spotlights the gap (between terms) in metaphoricity, the shift inherent in the metamorphosis endemic to metaphoricity. ‘Blank’ here is not passive, not absence per se but rather ergonomic, an active separation. ‘Blank’ is de Manian différance, taking dynamic form as verb rather than noun: transport/intoxication blanks. Yet ‘blank’, like ‘judgment’, is no more nor less than a sign, a cipher, a holding position, for what it appears to claim: Judgment, also called ‘attention’, ‘méditation’, ‘reflexion’, or ‘pensée’, and always described by verbs of motion such as remuer, transporter, replier, neither reveals things for what they are nor leaves them undisturbed. It shuffles them around in transportations that blank the very etymology of the term metaphor, or Aristotle’s epiphora: ‘par la comparaison, je remüe (les objets), je les transporte, pour ainsi dire, je les pose l’un sur l’autre . . .’ (571). It does this in order to establish systems of relationship that are not substantial. (TA 115)

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 60

29/06/2012 11:11

rhe toric and rausch

61

Indeed, as de Man points out, for Rousseau it is the cipher ‘transport’ that equates with the cipher ‘life’ (rather predictably juxtaposed with its false double, death) as interchangeable signs: Celui dont les viles passions ont étouffé dans son âme étroite ces sentiments délicieux; celui qui, a force de se concentrer au-dedans de lui, vient à bout de n’aimer que lui-même, n’a plus de transports . . . le malheureux ne sent plus, ne vit plus; il est déjà mort. (TA 126) The sign-function of judgment, through which it can claim meaning only through tropic prevarication, points to the fact that the essential aspect of Rausch for Rousseau as for Nietzsche, and thus for de Man, is not just ‘blank’ nor excess but the contradiction, illogic and infinite reversibility of any textuality, especially the pre-textuality of thought. Throughout the Confessions (as elsewhere), of course, Rousseau makes extensive use of various kinds of contradiction, which becomes a fundamental aspect of his narrative strategy’s complex laminations of metaphoricity. De Man then capitalizes on Rousseau’s focus on contradiction as echoing throughout Julie and makes the Nietzschean connection: one may well wonder, with equal or even better reason, whether the pattern of contradiction in this fragmented composition does not represent a more faithful outline of Rousseau’s thought-structures, simply because the narrative developments and transitions that conceal incompatible enunciations by merely putting some space between them are lacking in this case. A text like this one bears a close stylistic resemblance to what is generally referred to, somewhat inaccurately, as Nietzsche’s aphoristic manner, as we know it from The Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil, The Antichrist, The Will to Power, etc. The format of his discontinuous textual blank goes back, in Rousseau, at least as far as the notes to the Second Discourse and represents probably the most characteristic dimension of his ‘écriture’. (TA 148) Here, Rousseau’s ‘blank’-as-metaphor takes on the further energy of working against itself, manifesting its inherent contra-diction. Typically for de Man, ‘blank’ reveals another aspect of its cornucopic plenitude as a well of chiasmatic layers. Thus rhetoric, what de Man calls the emblem of ‘the disfiguring power of figuration’ (AI 49), transcends all more circumscribed spheres such as social convention or historicity, transmuting the apparently historical into an epistemological rhetorical perspective. The conclusion to which de Man must come is that all discourse, as rhetoric (very much including Nietzsche’s), is ‘demonstratively aberrant’ (AI 50), perpetually contradicting and thus undermining its own authority. De Man shows how this theme from Rousseau works its way to Nietzsche through the rhetorical perspective in which Schlegel, for whom all poetry (all concentrated rhetoric) inherently requires the suspension of ‘the laws of rational thought’, displacing itself ‘out’ into ‘a beautiful confusion of fantasy’, through which it merges with ‘the original chaos of human nature’ (AI 181). Not only is this one of Rousseau’s gifts to Romanticism; it also

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 61

29/06/2012 11:11

62

st e p h en barker

establishes the subversive nature of textuality that Nietzsche explores in ‘On Truth and Lie’ and subsequently. But de Man goes further than Rousseau or Schlegel: This chaos, the authentic language, is the language of madness, the language of error, and the language of stupidity. It is such because this authentic language is a mere semiotic entity, open to the radical arbitrariness of any sign system and as such capable of circulation, but which as such is profoundly unreliable. (AI 181) As a ‘mere semiotic entity’, language’s unreliability then blanks both meaning and meaning-making. De Man clearly leaves no doubt here that beginning with Plato’s and Aristotle’s admonitions regarding rhetoric’s dangerously intoxicating powers, reaching its culminative point in the nature of Nietzsche’s Dionysian – that is, throughout the history of rhetoric as such – rhetoric and Rausch have been much more than integrally associated: they are identical. The particularly Nietzschean turn de Man weaves into this otherwise wellexplored process has to do with his perceiving it as a value. De Man’s treatment of rhetoric and Rausch as disorienting, intoxicating powers of co-habitation presents them as Greek-German appositives and the very engine of value. Perhaps the most exciting aspect of Nietzsche’s project, as de Man sees it, is the ascribing of value to contradiction, beyond but always linked to irony. De Man plants irony into the very nature of rhetorical (read: deconstructive) procedure, rendering irony identical with value; this is possible because though value’s referential nature defines it in a particular mode, it must appear in the différant mode of rhetoric, chimerically referential in its sign-functionality. This receding quality renders the sign-metaphor not only dangerous but seductive. For de Man reference (referentiality in general) is a trap, relative to both meaning and value, because it is itself the obscure and necessarily occluded object of desire, in significant part the desire for rhetoric to overcome rhetoric, to solidify or freeze it as value beyond metaphor. *

*

*

De Man begins the Nietzsche section of ‘Textual Allegory’, ‘Rhetoric + Metaphysics’, with a problem – and not just the philosophical problem of Nietzsche the ‘problem thinker’, nor the poetical problem of Nietzsche the dithyrambic poet of radically original German, but with the problem of ‘rhetoric and Rausch’ which, de Man says problematically, ‘seem to remain incompatible’, ‘the desire for ecstatic affirmation’ being ‘strong enough to permit any simplification of the complicated business of reading’ (TA 198). Any simplification. This is an enormously complex problem and, since reading, as we know for de Man, is infinitely ‘complicated’ and can never be ‘done’, in both the senses of ‘enacted’ and ‘finished’, the strength rhetoric brings to value-making is also its greater danger and its most chimerical relation to style: in the end, reading’s promise, as introduced by Rousseau as ‘pro-mettre’ declaring the ‘proper’, can never be met. Clearly, for de Man the fact that all language is constructed on and through Rausch is responsible for this ambiguity, this missing of the

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 62

29/06/2012 11:11

rhe toric and rausch

63

target, and for the fact that such an indirection or detour has infinite implications for value, style, meaning and (any) communication. In Nietzsche, as de Man indicates, this sens(ing) of Rausch originates pre-linguistically, in die treiben, thought-patterns as proto-rhetorical promise, and is thus radically a-systematic. Nietzsche ex-presses this threshold speculation on the chaotic origins of a-systematicity, of dis-order, not systematically but in seemingly (but, problematically, not at all) random affirmations and aphorisms. These are the linguistico-semiotic vectors manifesting the forces from which they spring; the (un)fulfillment of what is then to be seen as promis, non-fulfillment of the chimerical promise (not) made before its appearance as the event of textuality. De Man does much more than to notice this Nietzschean phenomenon once again, of course, as many have done, though de Man’s approach models the specific sense in which he links Rausch to core Nietzschean concerns with value and style as consisting precisely of this chimerical quality (Jean-Luc Nancy’s and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s epigraph to their publication of Nietzsche’s Basel course on ‘Rhetoric and Language’, frequently mentioned by de Man, is ‘in science, everything of truly general importance is only ever encountered by chance – or is completely missing’. They follow this declaration with the fragment: ‘the study of language without stylistics or rhetoric’). ‘Stylistics, rhetoric-as-value, and Rausch’, then, are de Man’s Dionysian interrogation – deconstruction – of value and style. It may at first seem curious, then, that de Man begin his thoughts on Nietzsche in this material, after so many other thoughts, with ‘Rhetoric + Metaphysics’. This might initially seem curious, particularly given Nietzsche’s disdain for rhetoric as ‘mere oratory’, early on in his career and writings. How, then, to explain that he revels in all the so-called ‘tricks’ of rhetoric – its Rausch – throughout his mature writings? What has happened between, say, The Birth of Tragedy and Zarathustra, according to de Man? Is an inconsistency at work here? De Man answers that in the case of Rousseau’s genealogical association with Nietzsche, the ‘critical processes’ questioning self, diegetic reference, judgment, and law (let alone promise or contract), were already ‘dependent on the interplay between the rhetoric and the grammatical dimension’ (TA 196), and that what has happened has to do with the proper, the properties of language, in which sensation and knowledge, relative to entities, are subject to Rausch: to false identification and de-subjectification, in which – in what de Man calls a ‘semiological moment’ – necessity transmutes into contingency, a threshold transformation that can only occur if ‘the Dionysian’ can be framed as interrogation of the ding an sich, the swirling separation and dissociation of (multiple) origin and (différant) genealogy, of the metaphysical and the rhetorical; only then can we test the ‘nature’ of the propre. As Sarah Kofman asserts, in Nietzsche the metaphoric – the rhetorical, figural, ‘literary’ – becomes (devient) the ‘truthful’ form of language, and thus of metaphysics (quoted in AR 89). But Nietzsche is rigorous in his speculation on this genealogical progression, if it to be considered as such: is it possible to see something as anterior? Nietzsche and de Man ask. What does it mean to ‘come to know’? Do we ‘know’ by ‘properties’, by the ‘proper’? Is it possible (proper) to claim a ‘truthful’ form of language, or is the very idea of ‘truthful form’ an oxymoron, a threshold contradiction? Can a ‘truthful form’, the central question

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 63

29/06/2012 11:11

64

st e p h en barker

regarding value and style, according to Nietzsche, manifest or embrace – or elude – metaphysics? Is metaphysics itself a promise of this genealogy? Kofman declares that, after The Birth of Tragedy, for Nietzsche the entire concept of metaphysics, and thus of metaphorics, becomes impropre, since any seemingly solid meaning must already then be seen as speculation, as interpretation. The question sublimated in this one is whether this impropre, this un- or a-proper, is an ontology or an epistemology, and if the former what does this mean regarding the value of the proper? Since according to de Man Nietzsche inherits this interrogation genealogically from Rousseau, we must ask if such a moment, or indeed a process – an episteme – of insight into what de Man himself calls ‘the epistemology of rhetoric’, is in fact epistemological, or whether it is an ontologie sans métaphysique. Given that the history of ‘Nietzsche criticism’ has had significantly more trouble taking Nietzsche’s linguistic concerns and their manifestations into account than Rousseau’s, how are we then to account, in some economy of valuation, for what de Man calls the ‘epistemological deconstruction that distinguishes Nietzsche from Rousseau?’ (TA 208). Is this nothing more than another ‘arrogant and mendacious moment of “world history” in which clever beasts invent knowing’?1 How might we begin to address this vexing set of questions? We might at least begin by looking at the proper-ties of – what is proper to – the promise of the ‘epistemological deconstruction’ through which Nietzsche operates, evading for a moment the fact that de Man declares that this deconstruction is not only absolutely genealogical but entirely historical (that is, not metaphysical). This detour in itself would move us into a new ‘orbit’, a new parergon: that of Nietzsche’s deconstructive reading of rhetoric as value and style. For Nietzsche everything is a matter of value, initially as Wert or schätzen [worthiness], then as Währung [currency]. That is, value for Nietzsche is currency, as he clearly and declaratively indicates in ‘On Truth and Lie’. The grounding or foundation of value depends on the question (and it is, from beginning to end, a question) of de Welt as ‘factual’ or ‘prospective’; here we already come face to face with the Apollinian and the Dionysian in its initial phase in The Birth of Tragedy to its amalgamation in later works, as the ‘real’ and the ‘interpretive’ or ‘speculative’. This distinction is itself subject to threshold inversion, in that Nietzsche’s interrogative assertion is that it is the real world that is ‘speculative’, already Dionysian in its emergence, that the grounding or substantiation of all objects (in the Heideggerian sense) is the movement of logic, in the sense in which logos is a name for the periodicity of the word into a syntactical meaning-making unit. If logic in this sense is the groundwork of objects, not in the sense of Grundlage but of the werke of positing a foundation, however chimerical it may be upon inspection, this means that our belief in dingen is necessarily a function and genealogical outcome of ‘Rausch’: ‘logic’, at best an abstraction, becomes a criterion for something that can then truly be called ‘true being’. Ontology can be written out of epistemological genealogy. We must inquire as to whether Nietzsche’s texts, which frequently (particularly early on, as de Man shows) seem to concentrate more on doxa than on episteme, an ‘historical value-demagogy’ is at work. De Man points out that while in The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche is ‘still in genetic thrall to the Romantic tradition’,2 including its Rousseauesque elements, in the relation of the Apollinian, the word, to the Dionysian, music, both as languages,

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 64

29/06/2012 11:11

rhe toric and rausch

65

Nietzsche wants to make this shift his own, both in terms of claiming and ‘consuming’ that tradition and its relation to the promise, the proper, and logic itself. In a letter to Rohde, Nietzsche says that this Romantic ‘background’ [Hintergrund] to The Birth of Tragedy is ‘more or less my property, that is to say real estate [Grundbesitz], though not yet circulating, monetary, consumed property’ (quoted in AR 88). Responding to this proprietary gesture, de Man asks how then this ‘real estate’ must properly be seen; his conclusion is that at this early point in Nietzsche’s progression it is ‘the property rights over truth for . . . the power of language as statement, transferred to the power of language as voice and melody’ (AR 88). That is to say, it is both a metamorphosis (and thus inherently metaphorical) and a contract [con trahere, a drawing together of the disparate] whose terms have inevitably and perpetually shifted: it has become doubly a metaphorical rhetoric of value. Yet what happens if we remember, as de Man does, that this contract is strictly a function of referentiality, consisting of inconsistencies: what is the proper ‘referential value-status’ of such a discourse, given that in viewing the value of representative language Nietzsche is providing a rhetoric of value; that is, simultaneously an interrogation of the origin of value(s) qua value(s) and a problematizing of the process by which values are created – invented? dis-covered? – in the world? Since for Nietzsche interpretation endows representation with value, and only through representation does truth come into the world, ‘knowledge’ is itself a product of representation: in order to represent, philosophy must evaluate, interpret, must ‘find a form in which to appear’ (AR 89). Since logic, that is, rhetoric, is the basis of e-valuation, it must also be the basis for re-valuation, for any re-valuation of values. In all of his writings, the place where Nietzsche shows this most clearly is in the allegory/fable opening ‘On Truth and Lie in a Nonmoral Sense’, where the ‘drive’ (treibe) or will to what might be called truth leads to the greatest human error: the ‘invention’ of ‘knowing’ as ‘truth’;3 for Nietzsche, this ‘moment’ is both that of the greatest error and the origin of all ‘modern’ values metaphorically associated with the drive, which is more accurately an instinct, for certainty. The initatory and catalyzing fable, as Nietzsche tells it, is inevitably its own deconstruction, a ‘onceupon-a-time’ story of ‘the clever beast that therefore I am’, in very much the same way as the parabolic stories from which Thus Spoke Zarathustra is constructed. In the fable – remembering the Dionysian nature of fables: the animal in and as the human – Nietzsche’s re-valuation interrogates the metaphysics of ‘truth’s coming into the world through its “self-knowledge” ’ – or, as Nietzsche carefully puts it, not ‘knowledge’ but ‘knowing’, the stable/unstable gerundive form indicating a progression and a state, though ‘knowing’, as Nietzsche rapidly indicates, is itself a process of representation(s) taken for (or given as) originary and seamless. As de Man points out, the ‘clever beasts who invent knowing’, that ‘most arrogant and mendacious moment in world history’, are in their telling of the story of knowing necessarily mis-reading the very nature of the process by which they come to be (or, more properly, become becomings). Value, like the process of valoration for Nietzsche and for de Man is once again, and always once again, a question of property, of what is proper to valoration. In de Man’s excavation of the perpetual threshold, indeed the confusion between the figural and the referential, as we began

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 65

29/06/2012 11:11

66

st e p h en barker

to see earlier on, he asserts that the proper as ‘the very model of philosophical rigor’, including any and every sense of ‘textual allegory’, is as he must necessarily conclude ‘an allegory of errors’. The question of the proper of valuation, of the properties of value, is in fact the fundamental question that must, and can only chimerically, be deconstructed. De Man’s Nietzschean deconstruction of valuation asks the most penetrating questions: are all values textual? Is it possible to have values outside of texts? Can something like the Dionysian be a value in so far as it purports to ‘escape text as such’? Is the Dionysian something other than a figure for the rhetorical nature of language? De Man shows the Nietzsche text as a genealogical channeling of Rausch, a.k.a. the Dionysian, in the tactical distillation of his supersimplistic value-oppositions (e.g., weak/strong, disease/health, herd/‘happy few’), which perform their own exercise of Rausch in being so quasi-demagogically and pseudo-arbitrarily valorized as to be – hyperbolically – ‘value-reductions’ tolerable in ‘literature’ but not in ‘philosophy’. Just as Rousseau contradictorily juxtaposes political and fictional discourses, Nietzsche co-mingles philosophical and poetic language, as a deconstruction of the value of the very idea – ‘idea’ is always just such a distillation – of proper value and of value-proper. This strategy reveals that what is proper to value is the ‘linguistic interference’ preventing value from being referential to some established order of things prior to that interference: the clever beasts ‘invent’ knowing, the properties of which do not predicate entities (prior or otherwise) of any kind. In fact, de Man says, the very power of the identity principle, the ban on contradictions, is based on metaphorics – precisely on the Rausch endemic to language itself. De Man claims that ‘philosophy turns out to be an endless reflection on its own destruction at the hands of literature’, but this reflection is itself rhetorical, of course, a derivation of the ‘deceit’ and disruption – the Dionysian nature – of language: philosophy reflects on its own deconstruction at the hands of Dionysos. De Man calls this ‘deceit’ ‘a lie without truth, the unique quality of language’ (AR 113). But of course this deceit could be a ‘value’ only within the context of the ‘true’ (i.e., deceitful) nature of language. The identity principle positing knowing or knowledge as truth, as metaphysics’ most fundamental value (and most teleological value) says that the axioms of logic are proper to reality; this is precisely the mystification de Man shows Nietzsche deconstructing: identity, including the identity of any subjectivity, is axiomatically linked to philosophicopsychologico-rhetorical mystification. In other words, Nietzsche’s deconstruction, as philosophico-psychological de-mystification, is para-subjective: the subject is real in the ironic Nietzschean sense, claiming the force, authority or agency to initiate the logos, periodicity itself, beginning with a capital letter and starting a ‘sentence’. But such a consideration is of only secondary interest to de Man, who points out that subjectivity need not involve a self, let alone the self; thereby immediately dismissing the entire question of the subject in Nietzsche – it would be ‘redundant’, he says (TA 195), to pursue it any further. Nonetheless, inherent in the notion of values-proper, of what is proper to value, is the element of the imperative nature of value. Imperatives, as inherently rhetorical themselves, are on the one hand problematic to deconstruction and on another its very heart: ‘deconstruction is not something we can decide to do or not to do at will’;

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 66

29/06/2012 11:11

rhe toric and rausch

67

rather, it is ‘synonymous with any use of language (including, of course, silence), and the use of language is compulsive or, as Nietzsche says, imperative’ (TA 203). Deconstruction is ‘synonymous’ with any use of language, which is ‘imperative’, and it is imperative because only through language use can we hope to come to understand the deconstructive nature of language and thus of life: deconstruction is imperative because it is proper to language/life. This is what de Man calls deconstruction’s ‘plus value’: the understanding of the rhetorical nature of value plus the understanding that this understanding is itself rhetorical, in no way referential, and has proper value – the value of placing statements in ‘their proper context’ – as such. Thus de Man shows how Nietzschean deconstruction moves beyond the metaleptic imperative of at least reversing, if not ruining, any direct or immediate cause/effect element of genealogy, to what in another sense of Rausch he calls the synecdoche of thinking, the action of thinking itself: ‘thinking’, Nietzsche says, as the theoreticians of knowledge posit it, does not happen: it is a completely artificial fiction, arrived at through the extraction of one element from a process and the subtraction of all the rest, an arbitrary invention for the purpose of the understanding. (Quoted in TA 207) In Nietzschean language, this process of synecdoche is the very definition of ‘décadence’, the corruption embedded within ‘weak nihilism’ that leads to the establishment of ossified philosophical ‘systems’. This is the world, for Nietzsche, of idols and plaster saints, venerated by the herd mentality whose ressentiment knows no end and frames everything. It is the stagnation, the death-in/as-life that must perpetually be and can never fully be overcome – because the Übermensch is nothing but a promise, a de-posit positing the chimerical to-come inherent in metaphor, irony and Rausch. Nietzsche’s text is the wanderer that can posit the escape from décadence; indeed from Human All-too-Human to Zarathustra and beyond it is both wanderer and shadow, a-systematic and nomadic, Dionysian; Rausch-thought is the active manifestation of selbstüberwindungskeit as plus value. De Man’s adaptation of Nietzsche’s a-systematics dictates that ‘speculative value assertion’ should be valued at – not above or below – ‘emphatic pathos-laden value assertion’ (TA 204–5). But what is proper to all such assertions regarding language has to do with the properties of Rausch’s Dionysian dynamics. De Man’s question here, then, is: is action in language impossible or imperative? He certainly valorizes, consistently if not systematically, active, performative linguistic forms over passive or reactive ones: Tun ist alles! (Doing is all!), as Nietzsche says. But even when we remember that the forms this valorization takes, in The Genealogy of Morals, for example (high/ low or master/slave), are more of the para-demagoguery at which we have glanced and are thus to be seen in an ironic context, for de Man there is more at work in this question of action: de Man then asks whether action in language is possible at all. If the deconstruction of metaphysics is posited as what de Man calls ‘an aporia between performative and constative language’, then ‘this is the same as saying that it is structured along rhetorical lines’ (AR 131). This aporetic incision shows that ‘the possibility for language to perform is just as illusionary and fictive as the

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 67

29/06/2012 11:11

68

st e p h en barker

possibility of language to assert truths’ (AR 129). This is a radical claim – radical in that it goes to the very root of rhetoric itself, eireı¯n, to say or speak. Any difference between performative and constative speech, because it is properly rhetorical itself, is undecidable: the deconstructive aporia, like Zarathustra’s tightrope or Beckett’s ditches, is an a-terminal in-between, a lie without truth, endlessly reversible but ‘always suspended regardless of how often it is repeated’ (TA 197). It is undecidable: Rausch. Even when Nietzsche makes an assertion about a ‘pure act’, as he does in the Genealogy (a ‘pure act that is all that there is’), that pure act is still, imperatively, verbal: ‘the deconstruction of its genesis is best carried out by etymology’ (AR 128). Action-assertions regarding language are illusions forgetting they are illusions and de-faced. But assertions made in truth-mode, no less than action-mode, that suchand-such is not true does not mean that we are not being deluded, since we have just reversed the vector by which illusory truth-claims (or claims to selfhood) are made. But these are still assertions, suspended in the vertiginous Rausch of syntax, the swirl of contradiction. What is ‘on offer’, then, in this world of suspensions and illusions? I would suggest that Nietzsche lays it out for us at the end of his introduction to The Gay Science, where he tells the reader to ‘stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance’.4 Such adorers Nietzsche calls ‘artists’, and he, as one such, provides an incomparable ‘plus value’: style. How else most effectively to skirt the deadening of systematic thought than to fly above it or to skip across its surface, to be ‘superficial out of profundity’, to embrace what is already taking place in language? For de Man, as for Nietzsche, style is action’s déplacement. Style is Nietzsche’s tactic doubly to suspend his rhetoric (i.e., stopping at ‘the fold’), never to transcend the labyrinths inherent in a deconstructive strategy but to use their dynamic tensions. Like Blanchot in a Nietzschean work like The Step Not Beyond, Nietzsche casts out language-vectors among complex, chiasmatic ‘points of thought’ circulating between and across pages; thus Blanchot’s and Nietzsche’s ‘fragments’, connected only by their gaping cross-associations. Nietzsche’s style, as Walter Kaufmann nicely puts it, offers ‘scattered profound insights or single beautiful sentences’.5 But Nietzsche’s style (what de Man often calls ‘tone’) is so multifarious, and sometimes so scattered, as it is in much of Blanchot, that it is as impossible to decipher ‘his style’ as it would be to systematize his thought. When J. P. Stern famously says that Nietzsche’s style is ‘pitched half-way between metaphor and literal statement’,6 he is not only finding the perfect word for Nietzsche’s style, ‘pitched’, nor only himself bowing to the schematics of ‘half-way’ (which may be far too geometric a designation), he is also engaging in his own rhetorical redundancy in differentiating ‘metaphor’ and ‘literal statement’, which Nietzsche does and could countenance solely if in his next sentence he chose two radically different rhetorical devices for another redundant dialectical treatment. This is to say that although there are many thematic, poetic, philosophical and linguistic motifs, and even leitmotifs, in Nietzsche’s work, they are really more like constellations, persistently declaring in their subtexts that all truths are both local and cross-associational, built on atomic tension among disparate nodes. De Man addresses this in his interrogation of ‘On Truth and Lie’: ‘in the Nietzschean

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 68

29/06/2012 11:11

rhe toric and rausch

69

sentence’, de Man says, ‘the recovery of knowledge by way of its de-valorization in the deviance of the tropes is challenged’ (RR 242). The sentence to which de Man is referring is of course ‘Was ist also wahrheit?’ – ‘What then is truth?’ De Man’s analysis of what follows is one of those gem-like moments in de Man, in which each word of ‘truth–is–a–mobile–army–of–tropes’ (‘mobile army’ elsewhere translated as ‘host’, with its many reverberations) receives its interpretive due – remembering that there are only interpretations, producing or inducing a vertiginous moment of Rausch that concludes with the parodic anthropomorphism of that mobile army of tropes for which ‘the complicity of epistemology and rhetoric, of truth and trope, also turns this alliance into a battle made all the more dubious by the fact that the adversaries may not even have the opportunity ever to encounter each other’ (RR 243). These complicitous adversaries, epistemology and rhetoric, may never encounter each other because in the Nietzschean sentence tropes turn upon themselves, both always (as tropes) and never (as truths) encountering each other: Rausch/Rhetoric/ Deconstruction is in-between, as Beckett says in The Unnamable, ‘aporia pure and simple’. Consider the metaphors describing the Übermensch in Zarathustra, who is actually a what rather than a who: the Übermensch ‘overcomes’ the ‘great nausea of nihilism’ and the ‘abyssal’ e-valuative thought of the Eternal Return, ‘sails’ over morality and ‘dances’ over gravity, the ‘harvester’, ‘celebrant’, ‘transfigurer’, the ‘lightning’ bringing ecstasy – Rausch – to earth, and, in The Gay Science, transmutes into the Vogelfrei, the ‘free bird’ that is in German also the escaped convict, to be shot on sight with impunity. These skipping, aporetic flights are what Peter Janaway calls ‘rhetorical provocations’,7 agents for a stylistic revaluation of values. By engaging the reader ‘on the surface’ of the sensible with the ‘forms, tones, words’ provoking sensations and flights of fancy, Nietzsche employs his tactical style, which both is and is not gratuitous. These im-proper rhetorical divertissements lead us, de Man simultaneously asks and says, into the ‘mechanical? grammatical? paradigmatic? substitutive? synthetic? powers of rhetoric’, which can ‘never be associated with a consciousness (nor even a sub-conscious) and can never be proven right or wrong’ (TA 199–200). This Vogelfrei, the Dionysian, rhetoric, in that most Nietzschean of metaphorical visions, dances in the air through the ‘forms, tones, words’, upending all linguistic stability. De Man reminds us of a penultimate reversal: the relation of Dionysos to ‘reality’: ‘now, the image is “explained” by Dionysos (AR 117); in the ancient world, the imagistic Dionysos “explained” the image: the entire system of valorization . . . can be reversed at will’ (AR 118). But de Man says that ‘if we read Nietzsche with the rhetorical awareness provided by his own theory of rhetoric, we find that the general structure of his work resembles the endlessly repeated gesture of the artist who “doesn’t learn from experience and always falls again into the same trap” ’ (AR 118). This is the allegory of errors, the trap of evading the experience of Rausch in all language. And even if we acknowledge the denial of certainties in ‘literature’, de Man shows us the inherent aspect of language that desires some ‘recovery of controlled discourse’, in the face of ‘disrupted’ rhetorical patterns that, once their disruptions are in sight, can be reversed but, according to de Man, cannot be re-assembled nor re-assimilated. *

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 69

*

*

29/06/2012 11:11

70

st e p h en barker

This conundrum leads us back to the ‘floating signifier’ of metaphoric referentiality by which style, in Nietzsche and de Man, becomes the fulfillment of the promise of (re-)valuation. ‘Allegories of Reference’, André Warminski’s introduction to the Aesthetic Ideology, begins with the last entry in de Man’s notebook preparations for his last class in his seminar ‘Théorie rhétorique au 18ème au 20ème siècle’, in fall 1983. That last note reads La fonction référentielle est une piège, mais inévitable. (AI 3) ‘The referential function is a trap, but inevitable.’ Like the artist who must act within the (poetic) gravity of reference, carrying the weighty Dwarf of meaning through the dance, continuously trying not to fall into the same trap, the reader, the thinker, the Vogelfrei, not having learned anything, is perpetually in danger of tumbling into the same trap (de Man might just as well have said ‘chimera’, ‘fantasy’, or ‘illusion’) because de Man’s theory of rhetorical referentiality is itself that obscure object of desire sought by desire, an object frequently claimed but not capturable. In ‘The Epistemology of Metaphor’ de Man says that rhetoric cannot be isolated from its epistemological function. It is absurd to ask whether a code is true or false, but impossible to bracket this question when tropes are involved – and this is always the case. Whenever the question is repressed, tropological patterns re-enter the system in the guise of such formal categories as polarity, recurrence, normative economy, or in such grammatical tropes as negation and interrogation. They are always again totalizing systems that try to ignore the disfiguring power of figuration.8 A trap, de Man says, but inevitable. We are no longer in the realm of what he ironically calls ‘Rhetoric + Metaphysics’, but of ‘Rhetoric as Literary + Epistemological + Ontological Process’. As a critique of metaphysics this could be described as the deconstruction of the illusion that the language of historicity (episteme) can be displaced by the language of persuasion (doxa). If logic, for Nietzsche and de Man, applies only to fictional (that is, local) truths created in rhetoric schematics itself, ‘without us’, ‘The Epistemology of Metaphor’ tells us that the epistemological truthclaims to which metaphor, rhetoric, Rausch, are prone, inévitablement, are both rhetorically and historically bound and epistemologically piégé – Rousseau’s Rausch is not Nietzsche’s, and it also is – what is taken as ‘rhetoric’ is not information but the gap between the term’s pedagogical and philosophical history. In both cases, rhetoric as Rausch invites incompatible, mutually destructive ‘forms, tones, words’ to enter into complicity, to become complicit. Within an epistemologico-rhetorical context, then, de Man asks what configuration of tropes can be described, what rhetorical configuration do they generate, what is the value-status of deconstructive discourse, by what configuration of tropes can it best be described, and does this description generate new rhetorical models? These are not metaphysical questions but, on the contrary, rhetorical ones. They are the questions with which de Man

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 70

29/06/2012 11:11

rhe toric and rausch

71

concludes ‘Rhetoric + Metaphysics’; that is, they are conclusive, and thus open. This is what and how epistemology means. I have looked here at the notion of propre, of property and what is proper to de Man’s notion of rhetoric. If Nietzsche privileges (that is, understands) rhetoric as the proper – the property – of language, and if that means metaphor, then Rausch, as value-plus, means that ‘the system’, rhetoric as such, could also turn into an indiscriminate jumble of information. This is entirely within the Nietzschean and de Manian scope: instead of leading to enlightenment the random barrage of data could end in digital decadence, what Nietzsche called the ‘anarchy of atoms’. In The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche criticised the ‘literary decadence’ of his day, nineteenth-century ‘epistemological decadence’, in which ‘the word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the sentence reaches out and obscures the meaning of the page, and the page gains life at the expense of the whole’.9 The sovereign is sovereign contingent upon rhetoric. The whole, Nietzsche showed, is no longer a whole: the sovereign is not sovereign. His (Nietzsche’s, de Man’s, and the sovereign’s) words sound like a foreshadowing of internet hypertext (Rausch, entièrement!), and de Man’s words regarding the artist/fabricator, the poie¯tes, echo back to us: we are piégés by and in our thrall to language, rhetoric, irony, and their powers, but every time there is an anarchy of atoms, before the clinamen, we can respond: this is our entirely rhetorical action.

No tes 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Atlantic Heights, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979), p. 79. 2. Jacques Derrida, Eperons (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), p. 88. 3. Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lie in a Nonmoral Sense’, in Philosophy and Truth. 4. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), p. 38. 5. Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 78. 6. J. P. Stern, Nietzsche: A Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 191. 7. Christopher Janaway, Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 4. 8. Paul de Man, ‘The Epistemology of Metaphor’, Critical Inquiry, 5:1, 1978, p. 29. 9. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), Ch. 7.

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 71

29/06/2012 11:11

Chapter 5

5

Theotropic Logology: J. Hillis Miller, Paul de Man and Kenneth Burke

Steven Mailloux

I

’ll begin with a footnote attached to J. Hillis Miller’s 1979 essay, ‘Theology and Logology in Victorian Literature’. The footnote concludes: ‘Influence’ is not a matter of conscious borrowing, but something that, like a disease, in fact like ‘influenza’, insinuates itself into the air we breathe, or something that is present, whether or not we know it or wish it, in the intimate texture of our material, in the words we must use to speak or write at all. If we are another footnote to Plato, Plato was himself already a footnote to still earlier footnotes, in an endless chain of footnotes to footnotes, with nowhere a primary text as such.1

My goal in this chapter is simple: to explore some published and unpublished exchanges among Miller, Paul de Man and Kenneth Burke, all of whom practised a kind of theotropic logology, the study of words about words related to words about God. Taking my cue from Miller’s footnote, I’ll focus on the disease of referentiality, psychological in particular and ultimately theological, or more exactly, in de Man’s word, theotropic, figuratively god-centred.2 The footnote with which I began is from the published version of a 1977 paper delivered at Drew University in the second public encounter between Miller and Burke. The first was two years earlier and is described in a footnote added to Miller’s essay, ‘The Linguistic Moment in “The Wreck of the Deutschland” ’: Kenneth Burke, in remarks about this paper after its presentation at the Ransom Symposium at Kenyon College in April 1975, argued that I should add something about the multiple meaning of the word wreck in the title. The poem, he said, is about Hopkins’s wreck. This was a powerful plea to relate the linguistic complexities, or tensions, back to their subjective counterparts. Much is at stake here. That the poem is a deeply personal document there can be no doubt. Its linguistic tensions are ‘lived’, not mere ‘verbal play’ in the negative sense . . . [I]n ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ Hopkins is speaking

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 72

29/06/2012 11:11

the otrop ic l ogol ogy

73

of his own wreck in the sense of personal disaster, fragmentation, or blockage . . . The danger in Burke’s suggestion, however, is, as always, the possibility of a psychologizing reduction, the making of literature into no more than a reflection or representation of something psychic which precedes it and which could exist without it . . . Subjectivity, I am arguing, with all its intensities, is more a result than an origin. To set it first, to make an explanatory principle of it, is, as Nietzsche says, a metalepsis, putting late before early, effect before cause.3 Much later I will turn to Burke’s response to this footnote, but for now I just want to ask: Why is ‘much at stake’ for Miller in his purported disagreement with Burke? What exactly is at stake? I’ll be suggesting that for Miller and also for de Man at stake is the nature of reading itself and its relation to figuration and referentiality, rhetoric and metaphysics. To make this point, my only point, I will need to examine de Man’s early reading of Burke and their later exchange of letters. Both Miller and de Man read Burke during their graduate school days at Harvard in the early 1950s. In a student paper for Harry Levin’s course in January 1954, de Man compared Burke and Gaston Bachelard in terms of their theories of the poetic image, clearly preferring, with qualifications, the theory of Bachelard. In the section on Burke, de Man notes that the ‘extra-literary motives’ of both theorists, ‘however distinct, had something in common . . . [B]oth were concerned with introducing a formal dimension into the reasoning that applies to their respective fields of interest: science, in the case of Bachelard, pragmatic social relations in the case of Burke.’ De Man calls the 1935 Permanence and Change Burke’s ‘most sincere and clearest book’, in which ‘his main preoccupations are with the social concerns characteristic of the thirties: the feeling of impending collapse of capitalism, the inequity of overproduction contrasted with utter poverty, fascism as a desperate rear-guard action of the bourgeoisie in the class-struggle, unemployment, etc.’ De Man notes that ‘nowadays [in the 1950s] these problems seem dated, certainly not because they have been solved, but because we have lost illusions about the possibility of solving them by the mere manipulation of political and economic institutions’. De Man then adds: ‘But the sociological fallacy of the thirties, however naïve it may seem in retrospect, was backed by the best of intentions; one could blame a man for not having shared in it rather than for having done so. One’s intellectual stature might well be evaluated by the speed with which one outgrew it.’4 In de Man’s reading of Permanence and Change, Burke followed Veblen in attacking the ‘deductive causality’ of traditional ‘sociological reasoning’ and ‘substituted for it frames of thought which could be called “formal” ’. Burke used such terms as perspective by incongruity and trained incapacity to ‘introduce the discontinuity of paradox into deductive and continuous schemes’, and he ‘could not fail to notice the deep analogy between formal thought in general and aesthetic imagination’. In this way, Burke’s ‘interest in literature, as a formal activity, could be motivated by semi-revolutionary social intentions’ (18–19). De Man sees a ‘certain cogency’ even in some of Burke’s more naïve notions in Permanence and Change, such as his ‘vision of communism as “poetic” or of the poet

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 73

29/06/2012 11:11

74

st e ven m a illo u x

as the political rebel of the age’. But there is no such sympathy for Burke’s work after 1935: Since the poetic symbol and social thought have their formalist nature in common, Burke simply equates social and aesthetic behavior and gives us the endless conversion of aesthetic symbols into social facts which makes up the gist of Attitudes Toward History, The Philosophy of Literary Form, A Grammar of Motives, and four-fifths of A Rhetoric of Motives. (19) Except in that final fifth of the Rhetoric, de Man insists that all we get in Burke’s later work is a ‘socialization of the formal’ in place of Burke’s earlier ‘formalization of the social’. In Part II of the Grammar, for example, Burke’s ‘attempt . . . to represent metaphysics itself as some sort of social drama is’, according to de Man, ‘rather preposterous: the metaphysical purpose is precisely to find the general categories and essences which lie underneath apparent behavior’. Furthermore, ‘in as far as the poetic imagination lies closer to metaphysical thought than the acts of external life, it can be said to be pre-social’ (20–1). De Man saves some of his most biting criticism for Burke’s reading of Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, included in his Grammar. De Man writes that Burke’s approach ignores the aesthetic fact that in Keats’s poem ‘a social and banal experience [the felt opposition between a utilitarian and a contemplative world] had been transcended to the level of a metaphysical awareness. To retrace the way back [from the present poem to the prior experience] is both arbitrary and entirely useless’ (21). Moreover, de Man asks incredulously, what assistance is the equation of the fever which runs through the poem with Keats’s physical disease? . . . Even if Keats had told us specifically that this was the case, that his heightened sensitivity was a product of his tuberculosis and that the poems were written under the effect of this fever, what difference would it make? Again, the problem is why and how these visions of his sensitivity have taken the shape of images and how these images were put into language. De Man sums up his critique: ‘By replacing the relevant term “formalization” by the irrelevant one “socialization,” “dialectic” by “drama,” “poetic symbol” by “social situation,” Kenneth Burke has reduced the world of the poetic to a superficial sociology’ (22). Here we have the same critique of Burke’s reductionism, his too easy referentiality, that we saw in Miller, though de Man emphasizes the sociological rather than the psychological. After such disparaging criticism, one might wonder why de Man ever came to find Burke worth writing about. Nevertheless, almost thirty years later, de Man decided to add a chapter on Burke to his planned book Resistance to Theory and in January 1982 wrote directly to Burke: ‘I have long admired your work and, over the next few months, I’ll be trying to write something about it. If it works out, I’ll send you a copy.’5 Burke responded in his usual fashion to such fan letters: ‘You cannot imagine

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 74

29/06/2012 11:11

the otrop ic l ogol ogy

75

what a lift your letter gave me. I am vastly grateful that you would think of taking the trouble to size up my entanglements with the word.’6 So how did this evaluative change of heart come about in de Man? We actually get its prefiguring in the final paragraph of the 1954 student paper, where he briefly comments on that final fifth of A Rhetoric of Motives. Here, de Man writes, in treating the rhetoric of dialectical thought, [Burke] notices that it is hierarchical in essence and that, in the last analysis, order itself appears as the supreme design of poetic imagery. ‘Human effort would be grounded not in the search for “advantage” and in the mere “sublimating” of that search by “rationalizations” and “moralizations.” Rather, it would be grounded in a form, in the persuasiveness of the hierarchic order itself.’7 Burke also claims that ‘implicit in our attitude toward things is a principle of classification. And classification in this linguistic or formal sense is all-inclusive, “prior” to classification in the exclusively social sense’.8 De Man’s penultimate statement in this early 1954 assessment reads: ‘If this change of thesis marks a new beginning in Burke’s thought, it would mean that his future readers will be able to begin their study with the last chapter of the Rhetoric’ (23). Over the decades that followed, de Man’s tentative approval of Burke in this one paragraph from his early paper apparently developed into the full-blown admiration of his final years. It centred on their common commitment to the linguistic activity, the rhetorical element of language, though still understood differently by the two theorists. Some of those differences can be seen in the letter Burke sent to de Man in response to receiving a copy of Allegories of Reading. In the famous first chapter to that book, ‘Semiology and Rhetoric’, de Man remarks that ‘behind the assurance that valid interpretation is possible . . . stands a highly respectable moral imperative that strives to reconcile the internal, formal, private structures of literary language with their external, referential, and public effects’ (AR 3). Of course, de Man argues that this assumed connection between internal and external, between literary language and referential effect, is called into question through a close reading of a text’s rhetoric. Indeed, ‘rhetoric radically suspends logic and opens up vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration’ (AR 10). He supports his claim by pointing to recent ‘theoretical and philosophical speculation’, with Kenneth Burke as his exhibit A. Burke, de Man writes, mentions deflection (which he compares structurally to Freudian displacement), defined as ‘any slight bias or even unintended error’, as the rhetorical basis of language, and deflection is then conceived as a dialectical subversion of the consistent link between sign and meaning that operates within grammatical patterns; hence Burke’s well-known insistence on the distinction between grammar and rhetoric. (AR 8) In his March 1982 letter thanking de Man for sending a copy of Allegories of Reading, Burke comments that he read this opening chapter ‘not without difficulty’

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 75

29/06/2012 11:11

76

st e ven m a illo u x

because he was ‘used to slicing up the territory differently’, citing his own ‘Four Master Tropes’ essay, in which he ‘substitutes for metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony the terms perspective, reduction, representation, and dialectic respectively’.9 But Burke goes on to say that de Man’s analysis of a Proust passage (the hand-underhand, torride-torrent) was made to order for my [logological] purposes, though I don’t know for sure whether you would go along with my notion (in terms of my recent self-occamizing job whereby I wd. reduce us to ‘bodies that learn language’) that the passage you are discussing also ties in the ‘guilt’ of [Proust’s] chosen profession with his psychogenic asthma.10 And here we are back again to the point of de Man’s early 1954 objection and Miller’s later 1976 footnote criticism of a too easy or quick move from the poem to the poet in Burkean logological interpretation. Remember Miller wrote ‘Much is at stake’ in this disagreement. We might clarify the stakes by noting de Man’s remarks in the second part of Allegories of Reading. He argues that it is only by reading the figural dimension of Rousseau’s language and by attending to his theory of rhetoric that we can avoid ‘a prognosis of inconsistency’ for the body of Rousseau’s texts, ‘leading to the separation between the theoretical, literary and the practical, political aspects of Rousseau’s thought’ (AR 137). A rigorous rhetorical interpretation questions the literal reading that equates ‘extra-textual reference’ with ‘literal correspondence’ and that ignores the mediation of language, positing a too clear distinction between Rousseau’s literal political language and his figural literary language (AR 136). With such a distinction in place, the explicitly ‘fictional’ parts of Rousseau’s political text can be read as symptomatic of a psychological disease: ‘The literary faculty which, in the Second Discourse, invents the fiction of a natural state of man becomes an ideology growing out of the repression of the political faculty’ (AR 137). Thus, in such a literal reading, the ‘theoretical interest of a text like the Second Discourse is primarily psychological’ (AR 138); it can be read ‘for an understanding of [Rousseau’s] psychological self-mystifications’ (AR 139). It is this referential, psychological interpretation of Rousseau’s political text that de Man’s rhetorical readings call into question. Burke concludes his March 1982 letter promising ‘more later’ and declaring his special interest in reading the sections on Nietzsche and Rousseau.11 Unfortunately, no further correspondence between Burke and de Man has come to light. However, from the marked-up copy of Allegories in Burke’s library, we know that he did read at least some of these later pages on Nietzsche and Rousseau.12 For example, on the inside back cover, Burke indexes p. 201 and Rousseau’s questioning of the model that assumes ‘the possibility of referential meaning as the telos of all language’. What might Burke have written about these published sections of Allegories or, if he had read them, about the earlier, more-theotropically-highlighted pages of the Textual Allegories manuscript?13 To approach a tentative answer, let’s turn to Burke’s 1979 essay on ‘Theology and Logology’, which responded to Miller’s 1976 footnote critique of Burke’s reading strategy, its dangers of psychological reductionism, where much is at stake. Burke’s

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 76

29/06/2012 11:11

the otrop ic l ogol ogy

77

response to Miller calls attention to the same Keats essay that de Man trashed in his 1954 student paper. Burke acknowledges that in his essay he ‘had noted respects in which traces of the symptoms of the disease [Keats] was to die of manifested themselves’ in the poem.14 But Burke points out that he had qualified his point by differentiating his interpretation from crude materialist readings that make poems merely passive effects of bodily causes: In such accounts, the disease would not be ‘passive,’ but wholly active; and [the symbolic] action would be wholly passive, hardly more than an epiphenomenon, a mere symptom of the disease quite as are the fever and the chill themselves. Such accounts would give us no conception of the essential matter here, the intense linguistic activity.15 Then Burke comments that he privately wrote to Miller: In that last paragraph . . . at least I say I’m not doing exactly what you say I am doing . . . However, I’ll meet you halfway. I think the relation between the physiology of disease and the symbolic action of poetry can be of the ‘vicious circle’ sort. One’s poetizing, in the very act of transcending hints got from the body’s passions, can roundabout reinforce the ravages of such sufferings. Ending the quotation from his letter to Miller, Burke comments that he ‘had in mind here such a “reflexive” process (I guess current cant would call it “feedback”) as the role of “psychogenic” asthma in Proust’s search for essence by the “remembrance of things past”.’16 To this last sentence, Burke attaches a footnote reference to which I will turn in a moment. But first let me remark that Burke does not, as he claims, quite meet Miller half way. The two critics do agree on the rhetorical fact of a poem’s ‘intense linguistic activity’ but they remain, at least in this exchange, no closer to agreement on how to characterize the nature of that activity. Miller sees it as semantically meaningful, but without direct reference to the poet’s independent and prior subjectivity in its personal preoccupation with bodily disease. Keats’s or Hopkins’s poem is not ‘about’ his disease; to insist on such aboutness, on such reference, is to risk a ‘psychologizing reduction’. Burke doesn’t quite answer the charge when he continues to focus on the poem as an effect of the poet’s preoccupation with his disease, even if he insists that the poem is an active rather than a passive effect. However, Burke does go on, in the footnote attached to his comment on Proust’s ‘psychogenic asthma’, to argue that ‘any such possible relationship between personal tensions and their use as material for intense linguistic activity (to be analyzed and admired in its own terms) might figure thus’, that is, might figure in a ‘feedback’ relationship between ‘the physiology of disease’ and ‘the symbolic action of poetry’. But, Burke continues, ‘there are special, purely logological, incentives for such a relationship between poetic activity and psychological passion’. And here Burke references his essay, ‘The First Three Chapters of Genesis’ in The Rhetoric of Religion, where he ‘discussed the process whereby the effort to characterize conditions now turns into

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 77

29/06/2012 11:11

78

st e ven m a illo u x

a “story” [allegory?] of “origins” then’.17 This citation is almost immediately followed in the same footnote by two Burkean paragraphs I will give in their entirety for their theotropic-logological significance: Incidently, with regard to Keats’s ode (which I take to envision a kind of ‘artheaven,’ a theological heaven romantically aestheticized), by my interpretation, the transforming of his disease’s bodily symptoms (fever and chill) into imaginal counterparts within the conditions of the fiction would be a poetic embodiment of the orthodox religious promise that the true believers would regain their ‘purified’ bodies in heaven. That is, the symptoms would have their ‘transcendent’ counterparts in poetic diction as indicated in my analysis. I review these various considerations because the discussion of them offers a good opportunity to at least indicate ‘humanistic’ concern (the admonition to ‘know ourselves’) that I take to be involved in the logological distinction between the human organism’s realm of nonsymbolic motion and the kind of ‘self’ it ‘naturally’ acquires through its protracted, informative traffic with the (learned) public modes of symbolic action.18 In tracking Burke’s rhetorical path of thought in this footnote, we see first that he theologizes his logological reading of Keats’s ode and then extracts from this theotropic logology a metaphysical assertion about nonsymbolic motion versus symbolic action. That is, in his article Burke moves from Proust’s novel and his psychogenic asthma to a logological connection between disease and poetry to a theologizing of that connection in Keats’s ode and, finally, to an ontological statement of logology’s underlying dramatistic model of nonsymbolic bodily motion and symbolic poetic action.19 Do such interpretive moves answer or simply confirm Miller’s and de Man’s criticisms of the referential tendencies of Burke’s reading strategy? I’m not sure. De Man and Miller’s objection to Burke’s logological referencing of the poet’s bodily disease is an example of their broader critique of any reliance on extra-textual referencing that deflects from rigorously reading the linguistic activity of a text and illegitimately attempts to stabilize rhetorical meaning by appeals outside or prior to the text. For them, Burke’s reference to a causal, explanatory signified in the poet’s body is simply another instance of the metaleptic interpretive move to ground a reading in a transcendental signified that can permanently stabilize the indeterminate relation of rhetoric to grammar. That is, Burke’s purported causal shift to the poet’s body ultimately and exactly relies upon what de Man calls the ‘theotropic’ in the Textual Allegories manuscript. Referentiality, de Man writes, is constitutively metaphysical, in the Nietzschean sense of the term as taken over by Heidegger and his best French ‘reader,’ Jacques Derrida. It is also constitutively theotropic, since the only conceivable name for a transcendental signification that would no longer be itself a sign, the only word that would have a truly proper meaning, is ‘god.’ (TA 134) In his reading of Keats, then, Burke defends against the charge of ‘reductive psychologizing’ with a double hermeneutic manoeuvre that in both stages is theotropic

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 78

29/06/2012 11:11

the otrop ic l ogol ogy

79

(in de Man’s sense): first, Burke interpretively transforms his logological referencing of Keats’s disease in his ode into a ‘poetic embodiment’ of a traditional theological doctrine (the resurrection of the body after the Last Judgment); and, second, Burke’s interpretive citing of this poetic embodiment becomes an opportunity for him to reference his metaphysical claim regarding the irreducible distinction between nonsymbolic motion and symbolic action: humans are bodies that learn language. But if Burke’s logological reading exemplifies such theotropic referentiality, his elaborations and self-occamizings demonstrate both his awareness of the fact and perhaps the wider significance of his larger logological and dramatistic project as he interprets and theorizes symbolic action more generally. Such a project not only acknowledges a theotropic referentiality; it also extends its interpretive attention to the specific symbolic actions that follow directly from the naming of God. As de Man writes, in sentences immediately following the one I just quoted: The only ‘meaning that one can give the word to be’ (Profession, p. 571) is that of ‘god’. Yet, at the same time, the referentiality resulting from this paradigmatic denomination must lead to the performance of a finite, practical or, as we say, ‘historical’ act . . . The possibility of practical action is inherently linked to the (fallacious [because referential?]) coinage of the word ‘god.’ (TA 134)20 It was Burke’s theotropic project to go much further in reading these practical activities, these historical, religious actions, including theotropic symbolic acts. And this he partly accomplished by using Heidegger and Augustine in his book The Rhetoric of Religion. But that’s another story, indeed an allegory about allegory, for another time.

No tes 1. J. Hillis Miller, ‘Theology and Logology in Victorian Literature’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 47:2, Supplement, 1979; reprinted in his Victorian Subjects (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), p. 288, n. 2. 2. I wish to thank Martin McQuillan, Erin Obodiac, Andrzej Warminski, and Hillis Miller for various kinds of help with the primary documents discussed in this paper. 3. J. Hillis Miller, ‘The Linguistic Moment in “The Wreck of the Deutschland”’, in The New Criticism and After, ed. Thomas Daniel Young (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976), pp. 59–60, n. 6 4. Paul de Man, ‘Bachelard and Burke’, January 1954, TS, pp. 17–18, Series 1, Box 1, Folder 4, Paul de Man Papers, Critical Theory Archive, Special Collections and Archives, Langson Library, University of California, Irvine. 5. Paul de Man to Kenneth Burke, 30 January 1982, Kenneth Burke Papers, Special Collections Library, Pennsylvania State University Libraries. (I am grateful to Penn State librarians Sandy Stelts and, especially, Jenna Sabre for their generous assistance.) On the planned table of contents for The Resistance to Theory, see de Man’s letter to Lindsay Waters, 11 August 1983, quoted in Waters’s Introduction to Paul de Man, Critical Writings, 1953–1978, ed. Waters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. lxix–lxx, n. 68. The chapter on Burke was never completed; see Wlad Godzich, Foreword to RT, p. xi; this posthumously published volume reprints two 1982 essays with implicitly positive mentions of

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 79

29/06/2012 11:11

80

st e ven m a illo u x

Burke, ‘The Resistance to Theory’ and ‘The Return to Philology’ (see RT, 6 and 22). 6. Kenneth Burke to Paul de Man, 16 Feb 1982, Kenneth Burke Papers. 7. De Man, ‘Bachelard and Burke’, p. 23, quoting Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (New York: Prentice Hall, 1950), p. 276. 8. Burke, Rhetoric, p. 282, quoted in de Man, ‘Bachelard and Burke’, p. 23. 9. Kenneth Burke to Paul de Man, 4 March 1982, Kenneth Burke Papers. See Burke, ‘Four Master Tropes’, Kenyon Review, 3, 1941, pp. 421–38; reprinted in his A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969 [1945]), pp. 503–17. 10. Burke to de Man, 4 March 1982. Here Burke refers to AR 64–67. 11. Burke to de Man, 4 March 1982. For another comparison of Burke and de Man in light of their correspondence, see Ethan Sproat ‘“To See Our Two Ways at Once”: The Correspondence of Kenneth Burke and Paul de Man’, in Rhetoric: Concord and Controversy, ed. Antonio de Valasco and Melody Lehn (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2012), pp. 329–39. 12. I am extremely grateful to Anthony Burke, Michael Burke, and Julie Whitaker for their kind hospitality during my visits to the Burke family home in Andover, New Jersey, which houses Burke’s private library. Thanks also to Jack Selzer for inviting me along and to William Schraufnagel for help in locating Burke’s copy of Allegories of Reading, which is inscribed: ‘For Kenneth Burke/with admiration/Paul de Man/January 1982’. 13. While theotropic appears once in the published version of Allegories of Reading (AR 261), de Man used the term at least seven times in the draft manuscript, ‘Textual Allegories’ (Series 3, Box 9, Paul de Man Papers). For example, ‘Theotropic Allegory’ (TA 98) was the title at one point for the book’s chapter 10, ‘Allegory of Reading’ (AR 221); and de Man replaced ‘theotropic systems’ in the manuscript (TA 158) with ‘god-centered systems’ in the published version (AR 260). 14. Kenneth Burke, ‘Theology and Logology’, Kenyon Review, N.S. 1, 1979, p. 162. 15. Kenneth Burke, ‘Symbolic Action in a Poem by Keats’, in his Grammar, p. 463; quoted in Burke, ‘Theology and Logology’, p. 162. 16. Burke, ‘Theology and Logology’, pp. 162–3. See Kenneth Burke to J. Hillis Miller, 18 June 1977, Kenneth Burke Papers. 17. Burke, ‘Theology and Logology’, p. 163, n. 1. See Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970 [1961]), pp. 172–272. 18. Burke, ‘Theology and Logology’, p. 164, n. 1 For more of Burke’s own take on what he was up to in writing about Keats’s poem, see, for example, ‘Methodological Repression and/or Strategies of Containment’, Critical Inquiry, 5, 1978, p. 411: ‘all that I thought I was doing was analyzing an exceptionally well-put-together art-heaven’; and ‘(Nonsymbolic) Motion/ (Symbolic) Action’, Critical Inquiry, 4, 1978, p. 831: ‘Our art-heavens such as Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” ... bridge the gap by aesthetic conceits, each in its way inviting the realm of symbolic action to take over, in terms of images that stand for things (materials) themselves symbolic’. 19. Cf. Kenneth Burke, ‘Dramatism and Logology’, Communication Quarterly, 33, 1985, p. 89: ‘Though my aim is to be secular and empirical, “dramatism” and “logology” are analogous respectively to the traditional distinction (in theology and metaphysics) between ontology and epistemology. My 1968 “Dramatism” article (in The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences) features what we humans are (the symbol-using animal). Logology is rooted in the range and quality of knowledge that we acquire when our bodies (physiological organisms in the realm of non-symbolic motion) come to profit by their peculiar aptitude for learning the arbitrary, conventional mediums of communication called “natural” languages’. 20. Quoting Rousseau’s Profession de Foi, p. 571 of J. J. Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), vol. 4; English translation by Lowell Bair, The Essential Rousseau (New York: Random House, 1974).

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 80

29/06/2012 11:11

Chapter 6

6

Normativity, Materiality and Inequality: The Politics of the Letter in Paul de Man

Walter Benn Michaels

Paul de Man, Textual Allegories

T

his volume has been organized around the fact that a new text of Paul de Man has been made available for us to read. Of course, what it means to read de Man and, especially, what reading means in de Man is itself a serious question. In fact, what ‘text’ means in my opening sentence is also somewhat questionable, for we have, as participants, been confronted with two objects – the manuscript and the transcription – which we might plausibly think of either as one text (two tokens of the same type) or, perhaps more plausibly, as two texts – since the transcription might be understood as a representation of the manuscript, and since while what we read in the transcription is (as far as possible) what we read in the manuscript (we read the same words), what we see in the transcription (typed letters rather than handwritten ones) is, of course, very different. Indeed, we might say that the difference between these texts itself involves a reflection on the question of reading since sometimes the difference between the marks we see and the words we read reminds us of both the necessity and the impossibility of moving from seeing to reading. Which is to say that sometimes – when, for example, we read the word ‘blank’ in the transcription – we are reading the difference between the marks and spaces of the manuscript and the marks and spaces of the transcription as the difference between the unreadable and the readable. And what the readable blank is doing is functioning precisely to express the fact of unreadability.

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 81

29/06/2012 11:11

82

w a l t er ben n m ich a els

All of us, of course, have encountered this difference many times in the last few months. I myself, like any reader of the transcription of Textual Allegories, felt it most strongly when confronted by its appearance in the phrase ‘the “blank” element that is part of all verbal utterance’ (TA 135), if only because, although it is clear that ‘blank’ is a term deployed by the editor to signify the illegibility of the word de Man actually used, this is a moment where one can’t help but imagine that ‘blank’ might actually have been the word de Man used, an imagination made all the more vivid by the fact that ‘blank’ is a word all of us have actually encountered in de Man’s texts, for example in the final paragraph of ‘Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant’ where he compares ‘the blank between section 27 and section 28’ of the Third Critique to the ‘blank between stanzas 1 and 2’ of ‘A slumber did my spirit seal . . .’ (AI 89). Indeed, although ‘the blank element that is part of all verbal utterance’ may not be a phrase that de Man ever actually wrote, it is nonetheless a crucial element in his writing. Thus, on the one hand, it’s obvious that the blank in ‘Phenomenality and Materiality’ isn’t quite the same as the blank in the transcription since in ‘Phenomenality and Materiality’ it refers to a white space on the page while what we are to understand by the use of the term ‘blank’ in the transcription is not that there is a blank space in the original manuscript but rather that there is a space partially filled with marks that are in a certain sense or at least provisionally unreadable. But, on the other hand, and not prematurely to foreclose our interpretation, it would also be possible to read the editor’s choice of the term ‘blank’ not only as a way of signifying literal illegibility – that is, the illegibility of the letters – but also precisely as an allusion to de Man’s effort in ‘Phenomenality and Materiality’ to find ‘an equivalence’ ‘in the order of language’ to the ‘vision’ (seeing, rather than reading?) ‘entirely severed from any purpose or use’ (AI 88) that Kant has invoked in relation to the human body and that de Man identifies with the Wordsworthian blank. What we are urged to do in the essay is first to ‘consider our limbs, toes, hands, breast’, etc., ‘severed’ from ‘the organic unity of the body’ and second to imagine both the ‘blank’ between stanzas and the replacement of ‘meaning-producing tropes . . . by the fragmentation of sentences into propositions and propositions into discrete words, or the fragmentations of words into syllables or finally letters’ as the ‘dismemberment of language’ that ‘corresponds’ to ‘the dismemberment of the body’ (AI 89). The blank that is part of all verbal utterance might thus be the unreadable white space that both enables and disables the letters, that keeps them from being too easily subsumed by the purposiveness of the word. But, of course, the ‘blank’ in the transcription signifies (or is, in any event, the effect of) a predicament that is slightly more dire, if also less gruesome, than that presented by toes severed from bodies, letters severed from words. For our difficulty here is not simply that we can’t read the word the letters make up but that we can’t read the letters themselves. We are not exactly, in other words, confronted by the materiality of the signifier – we are confronted by a materiality that is not yet (at least in our perception of it) of the signifier. Indeed, it is not yet even the materiality of the letter, since our whole problem is that we can’t recognize – which is to say, read – the letter. That is, to return to the opposition with which we began, we can see some things – marks made by a pen, white space around and among those marks – but we can’t read them.

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 82

29/06/2012 11:11

n orm ativ ity, m aterial ity and ine qual ity

83

This empirical moment – this moment of the non-identity of the letter and the mark – has, it seems to me, a theoretical significance, if only because some who have criticized de Man’s materialism (I’m thinking here of John Guillory and me, although no doubt there are others) have often themselves been criticized for failing to see that his materialism is precisely a materialism of the letter, and therefore not vulnerable to their critique. If, in other words, the criticism of de Man is that, imagining the signifier as ‘free’ or ‘empty’ or ‘opaque’ in relation to the signified, he reduces it to nothing but a mark or noise and thus to something to be seen rather than read, the defence has been that the materiality of the signifier is still after all the materiality of a signifier, and therefore that it must be and is read, even if what is read is its unreadability. ‘Materiality in de Man’, as Orrin Wang puts it, ‘is by no means a simple notion’ and cannot be ‘reduced to a physical substance’, i.e., a mark or noise.1 And Marc Redfield has pointed out that the materiality of the letter ‘is neither the physicality of ink nor the molecules or atoms of physical reality’. Rather, he goes on to say, ‘As Saussure showed, there is no such thing as a letter in sheerly phenomenal terms – as an unmediated presence-to-self of a perception. A letter can only be read (as opposed to ink on paper being seen) because of its constitutive difference from other letters.’2 Which is just to say, signifiers are marks but they are not merely marks. Hence the claim (Steven Knapp’s claim and mine) that what makes the mark a signifier can only be that it is used as a signifier and that therefore its use entirely and sufficiently determines its meaning and our further claim that the only alternative to our view is either a naïve commitment to the meaningfulness of the natural sign or a not-so naïve commitment to the meaninglessness of the natural sign is countered by the reminder that the letter is neither natural nor meaningful, that it is reducible neither to the intentionality of its user nor to the utter absence of intentionality in nature. OK. But what about this blank? The problem of transcription here (uncontroversially, I think) is the problem of determining which letters in the alphabet (I am tempted to say are represented by but let’s try not to stack the deck) correspond to the marks we have before us. The interest of the blanks is that one answer – the usual answer – is unavailable to us. We cannot say that we read any given mark as some given letter because the mark resembles that letter. Rather it’s because at least some of the marks don’t resemble any letter or because the letters they do resemble don’t amount to a word that we have a problem. In this particular case, what the letters seem to most people (and to me) to look like is ‘activistic’, which isn’t exactly a word but is a neologism made more-or-less plausible by the context. (And, if this is true, they might be understood to signify the exact opposite of what ‘blank’ would, since ‘activistic’ would, as Kevin Newmark wrote to me, be ‘somewhat consistent with what de Man is arguing just above about action, practical action, etc.’) But, obviously, my interest here is not so much in what the word actually is or even in what the letters actually are – it’s in what we’re trying to figure out when we’re trying to figure out what letters they are. And the answer to that question, of course, is itself irreducibly activistic, rather than blank – it’s what letters they’re supposed to be. The answer, in other words, has inevitable and entirely sufficient recourse to

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 83

29/06/2012 11:11

84

w a l t er ben n m ich a els

the category of intentionality – inevitable because the non-intentional (Searlian) answer to the question of what letters they are is unavailable (they are not the letters they are shaped like because they’re not shaped like any letters we can recognize) and entirely sufficient because what makes them whatever letters they are is nothing but the fact that they are the letters de Man meant them to be. And if we were, in the manner of the famous de Manian reduction of ‘The Purloined Ribbon’, to subtract intentionality, we would indeed be left with a materiality that would precisely not be the materiality of the letter. For while it is entirely true that the materiality of the letter is neither substantial nor phenomenal (that it is an effect of its difference from other letters), it is simultaneously and identically true that the relevance of the difference between these letters is a function of the intentionality of the writer. The differences, in other words, in any system of difference function only in so far as the system is actually being used. But use, as de Man insisted, is what the blank or the letter is severed from. So either the letter is the letter it’s intended to be – its materiality signifying only in relation to the other letters which are also invoked by that intentionality (indeed are a condition of its possibility) – or the letter is no letter at all, just a mark. And either the signifier is the signifier it’s meant to be or it’s not a signifier at all, and either the sign is the sign it’s meant to be or . . . Which is, of course, the argument of ‘Against Theory’ and of The Shape of the Signifier. In the context of ‘Theotropic Allegory’, however, we might approach this a little differently. We might say that our very effort to identify these marks as the sign ‘activistic’ is an example of the ‘concretization’ or ‘specification’ that, like the fence around Julie’s garden, seeks to establish and protect ‘the privileged, private property of the referential meaning’ (TA 133). And if, on the one hand, such a specification ‘means the reduction of a sign which, by itself, would remain entirely undetermined in the infinity of its possible significations’, it belongs, on the other hand, to what Rousseau describes as the order of judgment (‘juger’ rather than ‘sentir’) (TA 113, 116) and, as such, is structurally (as opposed to locally) the site of ‘error’. ‘The falsehood does not have a contingent cause that could be corrected by trial and error . . . since the act of thought’ – here the act of specifying the letters – ‘is, by its very manifestation, a falsification’ (TA 115). It’s not just, in other words, that we might specify the letters wrongly, it’s that specification is itself the wrongness. Unavoidable – what else would it mean to read them? What else would it mean, for that matter, to write them? – but still a reduction, and hence, in de Man’s terms, a falsification. Whether this reduction is best understood as, in Rousseauian terms, the giving of meaning (‘donner un sens’, TA 116) to a sensation that in itself has none, or whether it is understood as the fencing out of an infinity of possible significations in the protection of ‘a specific semantic space’ – indeed, whether there is in the end any significant difference between these formulations – is a question that I leave open for now. What the two formulations have in common is their identification of signification with specification and of specification with falsification, and what is no doubt obvious is that my own argument is in complete agreement with the first of these positions and complete disagreement with the second. For while it is certainly true

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 84

29/06/2012 11:11

n orm ativ ity, m aterial ity and ine qual ity

85

that the possibility of error is constitutive of the possibility of interpretation – hence no meaning can be immune to misunderstanding, no meaning can be truly ‘proper’3 – it is also just because no meaning can be ‘proper’ that it is equally and identically the case that some interpretations must not be in error, indeed that the very idea of interpretation requires some interpretations to be true and some to be false. A standard way of putting this would just be to say that meaning is normative and, in the terms of the argument we have been making here, that its normativity is irreducibly tied to its intentionality. Thus the identification of the mark as a letter only in so far as it’s the letter it’s supposed to be makes clear not only the inevitability of the recourse to intention but also the inevitability of the cognitive and thus of the normative – of the idea that mistakes must be possible. We cannot be wrong about (the physical character of) the marks we see but we can be wrong about the letters we read. (We can put this in the form of an apothegm; if you can’t be wrong about what letter it is, it’s not a letter. And since we can’t be wrong about what letter a mark looks like; what the mark looks like cannot determine what letter it is.) Normativity is thus as essential to language as intentionality is, and indeed the normativity is supplied by the intentionality. This is the obstacle that contemporary materialist philosophers like Ruth Millikan – in an effort that I would regard as importantly parallel to but significantly different from de Man’s – have tried to overcome in developing an account of signification. Indeed, many philosophers interested in the theory of meaning (more generally in the theory of signs), arguing that the problem of mistakes is as central to our interpretation of nature as it is to human language and thus agreeing that the question of normativity is crucial, have been working to explain how, as Millikan puts it, ‘signs’, ‘perceptions’ and ‘thoughts’ can be ‘false’.4 Millikan herself is a leading figure in perhaps the most prominent and original effort to explain error in thought, teleosemantics. It’s the teleo (or the way in which the telos is defined) in teleosemantics that constitutes its originality. Like the intentionalist account, the teleosemantic account of what makes any given response, any given effect, right or wrong relies on the notion of purpose but it redefines that purpose in evolutionary terms. Thus, for example, the thing that makes it possible for the doctor to say there’s nothing wrong with my heart is our shared sense that the heart has a ‘proper function’, which is to say that of the many things the heart does (e.g. make noise, take up space in my body, pump blood), the only that counts as its proper function is pumping blood. And the thing that makes pumping blood its proper function – that makes the circulation of blood what the heart is supposed to do and not just something that it does – is the evolutionary role played by pumping blood in the survival of creatures that have hearts, the fact that (as Origgi and Sperber put it) ‘the heart has been reproduced through organisms that, thanks in part to their own heart pumping blood, have had descendants similarly endowed with blood-pumping hearts’.5 With the heart, the question is how, when it ceases to pump blood in a way that will keep the organism alive, we can say that there’s something wrong – how can anything be wrong (or right) in nature? With respect to natural signs – e.g., the spots that mean you have measles or, to take a more complicated but famous Millikan example, the magnetosomes that point certain anaerobic bacteria in the Northern

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 85

29/06/2012 11:11

86

w a l t er ben n m ich a els

hemisphere toward water with less oxygen – the parallel question is how they can be wrong. And just as the answer with respect to the heart is (through the appeal to evolution) to give it a ‘purpose’ (what it’s supposed to do), the answer with natural signs is to give them a purpose too – to treat them as intentional signs. Natural signs – which can’t in themselves be false (the spots are a natural sign of whatever did produce them) – can also function as intentional signs. They do so, Millikan says, when the ‘information’ they are carrying is the information they have been ‘selected’ to carry.6 This is the point of the magnetosomes which ordinarily ‘correspond to’ ‘magnetic north’, ‘geomagnetic north, to the direction of deeper water and to the direction of lesser oxygen’. They are, in other words, natural signs of all these things. But only one of these things matters to the bacteria – lesser oxygen (since too much oxygen kills them). So, according to Millikan, the magnetosome’s orientation is a natural sign of all four things but ‘an intentional sign only of lesser oxygen’. ‘This is because it needs, and needs only, to coincide with lesser oxygen to serve its purpose.’7 It’s the notion of purpose that distinguishes here between the natural and the intentional sign. Which makes sense. If I speak a sentence in English, for example, that sentence is a natural sign that I know English. But it is only an intentional sign that I know English if the sentence says something like, ‘I speak English’, or if I produce it not only (or not even) for the purpose of saying whatever it is I am saying in English but for the purpose of demonstrating that I know English. So any sign produced in English signifies at least two things – the language the speaker speaks and whatever it is the speaker is saying. And it is a natural sign of one of these things and an intentional sign of the other. The magnetosome example is a little different, however, since the meaning ‘lesser oxygen’ is both natural and intentional. This is because it is a natural sign in so far as it just signifies less oxygen but an intentional sign in so far as signifying less oxygen ‘serves its purpose’, which is to help the bacteria survive. The purpose here is not the purpose of the speaker (there is no speaker); indeed, it’s not exactly the purpose of any creature. The reason that the orientation of the magnetosomes toward less oxygen counts as an intentional sign as well as a natural sign whereas magnetic north and deeper water don’t is because ‘These other natural signs are not what interests the bacterium, or rather, not what interested natural selection in selecting magnetosomes to build into the bacterium.’8 The purpose, in other words, of the magnetosomes indicating lesser oxygen is to make it possible for the bacteria to survive. The other things they indicate count only as natural rather than intentional signs because they don’t serve any such purpose. But does it make sense to think of survival as a purpose? Whose purpose is it? Millikan’s teleosemantics wants to say that the function of the magnetosomes is to indicate less oxygen and she wants to identify both purpose and function with evolutionary value. But why should we move from describing the effect the magnetosomes have on the bacteria (pointing them toward less oxygen) to characterizing that effect as their purpose? We can see the problem here by remembering the crucial thing that the distinction between natural signs and intentional signs is supposed to do for Millikan – intentional signs are different from natural signs in that they can

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 86

29/06/2012 11:11

n orm ativ ity, m aterial ity and ine qual ity

87

be false. Thus, if you put the bacterium in southern hemispheric waters, the magnetosomes will point it north but will not point it toward less oxygen. As natural signs, they are not false but as intentional signs, they are – because they are no longer pointing toward less oxygen, they are failing to perform their function of taking the bacteria into water where they can survive. Because a natural sign has no proper function, it cannot fail; because a natural sign that’s become an intentional sign does have a proper function, it can fail (it can be false). If you put these magnetosomes in the wrong hemisphere, they will fail to perform their functions just as, Millikan says, if you don’t put any coffee in an otherwise ‘perfectly functional coffeemaker’, it will fail to perform its function.9 But, of course, the failure of the coffeemaker is its failure to do what its manufacturer designed it to do. There is no parallel figure – no manufacturer – with respect to the magnetosomes; they have not failed to do what their manufacturer designed them to do. So why should we think of them as having failed at all? Why should we think of pointing the bacteria toward less oxygen as their function? Why should we think of pointing the bacteria toward less oxygen as an intentional rather than a natural sign? Why should we say that pointing the bacteria toward less oxygen is their purpose while pointing them toward deeper water is just an effect? Obviously, this distinction – between purpose and effect – is crucial to teleosemantics, and the use of purpose here is in certain ways uncontroversial, as for example, when Millikan says that ‘the purpose of the eye-blink reflex’ is to ‘prevent foreign objects from entering’ the eye.10 But what is it that entitles us to move from saying that the effect of the eye-blink reflex is to prevent foreign objects from entering the eye to characterizing that effect as its intended effect? Obviously, it’s a desirable effect, both from the standpoint of the person whose eye it is and, perhaps more fundamentally, from the standpoint of natural selection – without the reflex, the eyes would be much less useful than they are with it. But it’s hard to see how even the most desirable and useful effects are made intentional simply in virtue of being desirable and useful. The reason we are creatures with eyes is no doubt that our eye-blink reflex helps us survive but our eyes do not have reasons for blinking. If the magnetosomes didn’t point north, the bacteria could not survive, but the magnetosomes don’t point north in order to help the bacteria survive. They don’t point north in order to do anything thing at all. Which is just to say, there’s a reason that we all have hearts, but the heart does not have its reasons. So Millikan’s effort to imagine normativity in nature by treating natural signs on the model of intentional signs cannot succeed. We could put the point in de Manian terms by saying that Millikan can only make natural signs meaningful by making them teleological and that a truly material vision must deny them that teleology and thus deny them meaning. But, of course, we can then turn the point around and say, with Millikan, that a truly material vision – a vision of the sign without a purpose – is a vision of a world in which all signs are natural and hence of a world without signification, and hence that the sign in de Man must be as meaningless as the sign in Millikan must be. The stumbling block in both cases is the mistake – on Millikan’s side, the impossibility of error, on de Man’s side, its inevitability – and, without the distinction between the true interpretation and the false one, what we

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 87

29/06/2012 11:11

88

w a l t er ben n m ich a els

get (as I argue in The Shape of the Signifier) is the transformation of meaning into effect (that would be the performative), with its unavoidable (that is to say, whether it’s desired or not) promotion of the subject position and hence of the primacy of identity, the pluralist embrace of ontological difference, the pluralist critique of ideological difference, etc. And it’s worth noting that this is a conclusion reached – albeit by a slightly different route and in a very different tone – by people who entirely approve these developments, that is, by people for whom this transformation is entirely desirable. In ‘The Politics of Rhetoric’, for example, Ernesto Laclau describes a ‘cleavage’ in the ‘history of democracy’ with Robespierre and Pol Pot on one side, ‘constructing the people as one’ (a construction he identifies with metaphor, as if politics were best understood as a question of choosing your trope and as if tropes were in de Man chosen) and, on the other side, ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘the new pluralism associated with contemporary social movements’, which he associates with metonymy and with de Man.11 The idea here is that de Manian deconstruction has made a crucial political ‘contribution’ by providing part of the theoretical apparatus of multiculturalism. Now it goes without saying that even the most resolute critics of the politics of difference will agree that even the most theoretically hapless multiculturalist is preferable to Pol Pot, but the real force of this opposition, of course, has nothing to do with preferring diversity training to torture and mass murder. It has to do instead with what the opposition leaves out. In the United States and France (and, indeed, in Britain, Canada and Germany and around the world), what Laclau approvingly calls ‘respect of difference’ has been the handmaiden of a spectacular rise in economic inequality, underwriting the increased tolerance for inequalities as long as they involve no identitarian disparities (as long, that is, as they are proportionately distributed among races, genders, cultures, sexualities, etc.) that is the hallmark of left neoliberalism. Thus, for example, in 1979 (the year in which Allegories of Reading was published), the top quintile in American income made 44% of all the money earned (the bottom quintile made 4.2%); by 2001, the year in which Laclau published ‘The Politics of Rhetoric’, the top quintile was making 49.4%, the bottom quintile was down to 3.6%. And by 2006, the relevant numbers were 50.5% and 3.4%.12 And the great contribution of the politics of the new social movements was not to challenge these developments but to legitimate them. In the utopian imagination of neoliberalism, diversifying elites takes the place of eliminating them. Now these developments, of course, could not have been visible to de Man, who was formulating the theoretical arguments under discussion here in the late ’70s, before the great political figures of right neoliberalism, Reagan and Thatcher, even took office and before the intellectual turn to the political or the social – the triumph of race, gender, class – that would constitute left neoliberalism had taken place. Indeed, that turn is often described as (and its progenitors often thought of themselves as) repudiating de Man and what used to be called theory itself. What they were doing in fact, however, was literalizing and enthusiastically enforcing entailments of his position that he himself sought to avoid. When, for example, just to stick to our primary text for this occasion, de Man writes that ‘Sensation unadulterated by judgment is in fact inconceivable’ and posits it instead ‘as a hypo-

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 88

29/06/2012 11:11

n orm ativ ity, m aterial ity and ine qual ity

89

thetical possibility’ (TA 113), he clearly means to deny what we might describe as the Millikan-like fantasy that we could actually encounter the letter as the mark. And this denial would, in my view, extend to the suspension of cognition invoked by affect theory and certainly to the privileging of experience that supposedly undermines the distinction between meaning and effect. For here the normativity of the letter is entirely replaced by the materiality of the mark and what the letter actually does entirely replaces what it’s supposed to do. So it makes very little sense to think of de Man as an apologist for neoliberalism and it doesn’t make all that much sense either to think of him as the high theory version of the low or anti-theory psychologizing and politicizing characteristic of the last twenty years. But it does make some sense. For if, on the one hand, the encounter with the mark as such is in de Man always a counter-factual hypothetical, it is, on the other hand and in its very impossibility, essential to the structure of his argument. For it is, of course, only the impossibility of this encounter that makes ‘all readings’ ‘misreadings’ (TA 63) – that makes the very assumption of ‘readability’ ‘unfounded’. And thus the encounter with the mark that can never take place functions everywhere – precisely because it can never take place – as an ideal. And while it is certainly a mistake (the characteristic mistake of the enthusiastic literalizers) to imagine that we should or even could try to achieve this ideal, it is also, as I have been arguing, a mistake to imagine that it should or even can function as an ideal. Precisely because the letter can never be reduced to the mark, it can never – in anything other than the empirical mode; does that say ‘activistic’? – be unreadable. Which is just to say, as everyone knows, that allegories of unreadability,13 like allegories of reading, are entirely readable, and that the politics of the letter – in so far as there is a politics of the letter – has proven to be a profoundly conservative one. If, then, it would be a profound misreading of de Man’s arguments to say that he sought to establish that politics, it would also be a profound misreading of those arguments to deny that they played some role (a role not inconsistent with their own entailments) in making those politics possible.

No tes 1. Orrin Wang, ‘Against Theory Beside Romanticism: The Sensation of the Signifier’, Diacritics, 35:2, 2005, p. 13. 2. Marc Redfield, ‘Professing Theory: John Guillory’s Misreading of Paul de Man,’ in Legacies of Paul de Man, ed. Marc Redfield; available at (accessed 7 March 2012). 3. Assuming that immunity to misinterpretation is what ‘proper’ is supposed to add to ‘meaning’. 4. Ruth Garrett Millikan, Varieties of Meaning (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), p. x. 5. Gloria Origgi and Dan Sperber, ‘Evolution, Communication and the Proper Function of Language’, available at 6. Millikan, Varieties of Meaning, pp. 81–2. 7. Ibid., p. 82. 8. Ibid.

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 89

29/06/2012 11:11

90

w a l t er ben n m ich a els

9. Ibid., p. 83. 10. Ibid., p. 3. 11. Ernesto Laclau, ‘The Politics of Rhetoric’, in Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, ed. Tom Cohen et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p. 250. 12. U.S. Census Bureau. Historical Income Tables – Income Equality, available at 13. ‘Allegorical narratives narrate the story of their unreadability’ (TA 68).

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 90

29/06/2012 11:11

Chapter 7

7

Inscribing the Political: Paul de Man and the Wild Art of Letter Writing

Kevin Newmark

I

t ought to be clear by now that Paul de Man’s work is neither ahistorical nor apolitical, though it is even more evident that his writing is both historical and political in a sense that is not always easy to identify much less interpret. The problem has to do with the way de Man conceives of genuine historical and political activity as becoming accessible only on the far side of critical-linguistic analyses that are themselves made possible by protocols simultaneously literary and philosophical in nature. Hence the reference in de Man’s late writings to ideology. Ideology would be the self-defeating attempt to reach historical and political realities by by-passing or forgetting the obligation to account for the rhetorical and epistemological elements of which it too is necessarily composed. In other words, as de Man famously says in ‘The Resistance to Theory’, what we call ideology is the confusion of reference with phenomenalism. Reference, without which no history or politics worthy of the names would ever be conceivable, depends on both a hermeneutics, which pertains to a determination of the meaning ensuing from referential statements, and a poetics, which pertains to the devices by which alone meaningful reference can be achieved. ‘Phenomenalism’ names the illusory postulation of a historical and political reality so immediate as to be somehow free of the linguistic complications that attend upon any and all referentiality. The actual move to history and politics, then, implies nothing more nor less than that: a passage that always occurs by articulating thought with action, though only by also shouldering the burden imposed by its own unavoidable mediation through the properly linguistic orders of reality. One of the several different ways that de Man himself characterized such a passage to history and politics in the year or so before he died was as the transition from a language of tropes to a language of performatives. ‘The topic that has emerged’, de Man sums up his entire project in a lecture he gave in March of 1983, ‘has been the question of reversibility . . . linked to the question of historicity . . .’: The model for that . . . is the model of the passage from trope, which is a cognitive model, to the performative . . . Not the performative in itself . . . but the transition, the passage from [one] conception of language . . . to another . . . And

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 91

29/06/2012 11:11

92

k e v in n ew m a rk

this passage . . . occurs always, and can only occur, by ways of an epistemological critique of trope . . . History is therefore . . . the emergence of a language of power out of a language of cognition . . . It is not a dialectic, it is not a progression . . .1 History, according to de Man, is the passage that moves beyond cognition to performance, from thought to actual and therefore truly political power. But this passage that takes one irreversibly from acts of knowledge to something that actually occurs and does something to change the face of the world as such, is not to be thought of in any way as a progression. How, then, is it to be thought? A helpful example is provided by the short prologue that opens ‘Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric’.2 Working from a truncated version of Nietzsche’s wellknown but less well understood question/assertion, ‘What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms . . .’, de Man neatly condenses an analysis he will work out repeatedly in his last lectures and essays. First, he identifies metaphor and metonymy as rhetorical tropes, an identification which allows him to read Nietzsche’s qualification of truth as ‘an army of metaphors and metonymies’ to mean that it is a coordinated collection, or system, of tropological displacements between any given subject, such as truth itself, and its potentially endless expansion into different but related predicates. Truth is in this way the straightforward possibility of definition by means of an infinitely varied set of propositional substitutions among its own terms. To read Nietzsche’s sentence closely is therefore to conclude that truth is a trope, though there is at this point nothing inherently disruptive in the idea that truth, like any other trope, moreover, has to involve motions that avoid being merely tautological in nature. The passage in Nietzsche’s sentence to anthropomorphism from trope, however, alters the formal definition of truth as trope to include a new determination of a specific kind of empirical entity. In distinction to trope, the term anthropomorphism implies the prior existence of human-like beings whose potential to engage in substitutions and exchanges among themselves and others – both anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic others – can always be challenged, defended, or imposed on the basis of whatever has been taken to constitute the ‘human’ in the first place. When truth moves beyond being tropological – as it must in order to know anything more than its own purely formal consistency – it generates values (ideologies) that are then subject to struggle among their competing claims and forces – only one of which is grounded in cognition. This, then, is the moment in de Man’s miniature criticallinguistic analysis of Nietzsche’s sentence fragment that history can be said to occur, when a language of cognition makes the passage to a language of power. Hence, also at this point, the double reading that is required by the qualifier and noun ‘mobile army’. The army of cognition is a rhetorical army of tropes; but the army of force can always be an actual army of anthropomorphic troops. The cognitive ‘mobility’ of metaphorical figures is by no means equivalent to the tactical ‘movement’ of personnel units. The single noun ‘army’ thus relates to its objective correlatives – tropes and anthropomorphisms – in two entirely incompatible ways. The truth of history and politics emerges at the precise moment that, thanks to the

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 92

29/06/2012 11:11

in scr ibing the p ol itical

93

reading, the army of troops is mobilized from out of the moving collection of tropes, that is, when strategies involving the deployment of actual force go beyond the synthesizing motions of cognition, and when the stage is then set for a battle between radically asymmetrical powers. What interests us in the present case is de Man’s conclusion: ‘How the two modes of power could exist side by side certainly baffles the mind, if not the grammar of Nietzsche’s tale’ (RR 243). We begin to suspect why reading de Man regularly turns out to be such a perplexing experience. The articulation, the putting side by side of cognition and performance that is the mind in action, is said here to baffle the same mind through which alone they can appear and be understood in their very difference from each other. The passage from epistemology to politics, from tropes to performance, and that passes through language, is said to baffle the grammatical articulations of the tale whose principal objective is to convey this necessity with all possible clarity. Thus, rather than providing us with a genuine conclusion, de Man’s reading in fact points to the obligation of retracing a path to what could only be called another starting point. For the coming together in history of cognitive with performative language that eventually baffles both the mind and the grammar of all possible narratives must itself form a residue in which this very failure to understand and to narrate is in its turn marked or articulated, and obviously not just in the ideological mode of a new narrative about history. If history, and a fortiori the political, must be thought as occurrence, as de Man never tires of reminding us, then it will have to leave a material trace wherever and whenever it can be said to have actually happened. De Man tells us that this happens – it always happens and has to happen – only by way of an epistemological critique of trope; for instance when, as in the reading of Nietzsche, the notion of truth as trope is pushed to the breaking point, and when anthropomorphic figures suddenly emerge from the closed system of formal substitutions. Our question becomes: how exactly in the writing of Paul de Man is this passage beyond trope itself marked out or articulated? Where is it in the writing of Paul de Man that the emergence of a language of power from a language of cognition can be said to occur as an actual event in its own right? The answer leads back to a formulation that recurs variously as a kind of refrain in de Man’s work after Allegories of Reading. ‘The bottom line’, he will at one point insist, ‘is the prosaic materiality of the letter’.3 The shift from a tropological to a different mode of language effected through epistemological critique must itself be articulated in such a way as to leave its mark on the world, though not simply in the mode of either tropological or performative structures of language. The name de Man gives to this marked articulation that he also calls history is curiously enough the letter, or more precisely, the prosaic materiality of the letter. History in de Man is prosaic because it should always be read according to the letter – à la lettre as it were and as they say in French. This implies, among other things, that ‘history’ is itself a loaded term that can always be understood and/or performed in all kinds of mutually incompatible ways, many or even most of which are at the furthest remove from what Paul de Man calls actual history, much less its genuinely political dimension. When practical action loses touch with cognitive analysis, history becomes pure ideology and power politics. But when cognition attempts to by-pass the question of

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 93

29/06/2012 11:11

94

k e v in n ew m a rk

its own ideological potential it collapses into an idealism that is all too easily reappropriated by precisely those ideologies it refuses to acknowledge and thus fails to engage historically. Only when history is maintained within the knot of its cognitive and performative dimensions does it become history à la lettre for de Man, that is, history as it necessarily occurs in the passage from knowledge to action, and that also leaves a material trace on the world it therefore changes. This trace is in the same way and for the same reasons what de Man calls the prosaic materiality of the letter that alone articulates and thus archives the passage into history as writing. To ask about the political archive in de Man is therefore to ask how the political dimension of history can itself occur, or happen, only in such a paradoxical mode; that is, only as an event that is both singular in its coming to pass and infinitely repeatable in the written trace its passage will as a consequence have left on the world.4 We are led, then, from our earlier question – how does the passage from trope to performance occur in the writing of Paul to de Man – to a new question: in the materiality of what letter does this passage to history in its properly political and ideological dimension leave its mark on de Man’s own text? A response can be found in ‘Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant’, the essay where de Man names the letter as constituting the ‘bottom line’ (AI 70–90). According to the logic of de Man’s reading, and as he spells it out in ‘Kant and Schiller’, it is in the shift from the mathematical to the dynamic sublime, in the passage from a tropological to a performative model of language, that the occurrence of history can be located in the Third Critique. What is odd, however, is the way that de Man’s reading does not come to a stop at that point in his argument, with the simple identification of this truly historical occurrence in Kant’s text on the sublime. Rather, it is precisely there that he goes on to ask, quite abruptly in fact, whether and where this passage to the event becomes ‘apparent’ in Kant’s text at another moment, though without its being openly stated as such (AI 79). This is the moment, moreover, when de Man’s own text begins to make things happen. After inserting a break or blank into his reading, de Man undertakes to show that Kant’s text is indeed marked in an indelible manner by the passage from trope to performance, in other words, by history as it has to emerge from the articulation of the mathematical and dynamic sublime. What follows is de Man’s treatment of the General Remark that concludes the analytic of aesthetic judgment in the Third Critique. In this ever so aptly named re-mark, An-merkung, de Man finds what he is looking for: the passage from trope to performative effectuated by the epistemological critique of the sublime leaves its trace on the world when Kant goes on to consider how, within the sublime, the starry heavens that cover the earth’s surface appear as the purely architectural construct of an all-encompassing vault (ein weites Gewölbe). More precisely, de Man adds, the world of natural space can at this point no longer be seen as nature but must from now on be regarded as a function of art as techné, that is, as a building, in fact, a certain kind of house. But before rushing to take up abode there, we should examine with a bit more care the materials with which, always according to de Man, this particular house, pyramid, temple or crypt is necessarily traced out and erected. For it is here that de Man focuses on Kant’s reminder about how nature, in its

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 94

29/06/2012 11:11

in scr ibing the p ol itical

95

sublimity – that is, its radically non-teleological aspect – is to be considered as pure architectonic construct. In the first place de Man notes how, at this moment of Kant’s text, the capacity to find nature sublime is a distinctly poetic faculty. If we want to have access to the sublime by entering nature as into the architectonic of a covered house, then we will have to learn to do it the way the poets do, ‘wie die Dichter es tun’.5 But how is the poetic to be understood here – and, especially, what role does it play in the key transition from pure to practical reason that remains the burden of Kant’s entire investment in the aesthetic? Taking his cue from the way Kant links the sublime with the poetic faculty of constructing the heavens into a vast arch bounded at the horizon by the floor of the sea, de Man wonders if we should regard Kant as anticipating in this manner certain themes prevalent in romantic poetry as well as in the later Heidegger. Poetically we dwell upon the earth from the moment we inhabit natural space as though it were a house built to shelter being. The problem with this reading, according to de Man, is that the sublime in Kant’s passage is not structured like that kind of house, since it is not a dwelling, and it can therefore neither offer nor deprive us of shelter. Beyond shelter, otherwise than shelter, then, the construct that Kant’s poet builds into the sublime experience of nature has little to do with the aesthetic reception of poetry as it has developed from Kant to Heidegger and beyond. In fact, the only example that de Man can finally offer for the way ‘nature’ appears to poets as a building in Kant’s text is itself a rather strange poetic device, and it serves only to underscore the divergence of the non-teleological sublime from any symbolic and therefore aesthetic elements. In a lesser-known passage from Kant’s Logic, de Man finds a metaphorical comparison to illustrate his point about the way poets erect nature into a bounded space, as opposed to the way all other human beings – Hölderlin, Wordsworth, Heidegger, presumably – conceive of such covered buildings for the purpose of both dwelling and shelter. ‘A wild man’, de Man translates from Kant’s text, sees a house of which he does not know the use. He certainly observes the same object as does another, who knows it to be definitely built and arranged to serve as a dwelling for human beings – als eine für Menschen eingerichtete Wohnung. Yet in formal terms this knowledge of the self-same object differs in both cases. For the first it is mere intuition, for the other both intuition and concept. And then de Man supplies the conclusion: ‘The poet who sees the heavens as a vault is clearly like the savage, and unlike Wordsworth’ (AI 81). According to de Man, the poet, at least when he is acting poetically, as a poet does it, is not really a man, is not exactly human; he’s not a real Mensch as we like to say, the same as everybody else. The poet, in so far as he constructs nature in a thoroughly non-teleological manner as a house that is manifestly not a dwelling or a shelter, is therefore a wild man, ein Wilder. Or, it would be better to say: the poet is a certain kind of wild man, since the poet is most definitely not simply or naturally wild in any sense of the word. What is wild, de Man will make clear, is the poet’s prosaic capacity to find nature sublime, to consider the world in a thoroughly literal and therefore non-teleological manner,

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 95

29/06/2012 11:11

96

k e v in n ew m a rk

entirely devoid of both concept and perception, understanding and sensation, as well as all the tropological exchanges in which such pairs necessarily partake. For when Kant says that, in the sublime, the poet ‘sees’ the sky as a vault, he cannot mean that in a figural manner, since in that case the poet would already be substituting an intellectual content, a cognition, for what is happening materially before his very eyes. Still less could we call what the poet ‘sees’ in the sublime a mere perception, since in whatever form the starry skies appear to the naked eye, they in no way constitute an empirical vault, roof, arch, doorway, window or any other architectural element of an actual building. Neither as conceptual knowledge, then – for instance the heavens as a metaphorical house and shelter – nor as pure sensation – for instance the starry skies as nothing but starry skies – the only access the poet can have to the sublime passes therefore through what de Man has been calling the formal materiality of the letter, in this case, ein weites Gewölbe, the frame of a vault that freezes, burns, or better, etches the sky into an undeniable but utterly blank notation. It is in this way, in the articulated space of a signifier, that history à la lettre leaves its mark on the world. The passage from trope to performance, accomplished by way of the epistemological critique of the mathematical and dynamic sublime, issues first of all, as it must, in this ‘re-marking’ of the world as pure frame. It consists therefore in the erection of an archival vault for the inscribed signifiers that have to result from any genuinely historical event. De Man himself states this with all possible precision when, in ‘Kant and Schiller’, he indicates what also always happens in the wake of such events: ‘the transition from the trope to the performative . . . will always be reinscribed within a cognitive system, it will always be recuperated . . . in a tropological system of cognition again . . . [But] the regression from the event, from the materiality of the inscribed signifier in Kant . . . is no longer historical’ (AI 133, 134, emphasis added). Where is it, we must now ask, that the materiality of this archival vault that is erected in Kant’s text is then reinscribed within a tropological system of recuperation that is no longer historical in de Man’s sense? And what, if anything, is de Man’s own text able to in the face of this unavoidable regression and relapse? The architectonic of the letter, the techné by which alone the event is materially inscribed on the world, appears juxtaposed in Kant’s text to a second architectonic, one in which de Man retraces the construction of a new tropological narrative of recovery and recuperation. But this narrative, which recounts the all-important sacrifice that imagination will have to make to align itself with the superior powers of transcendental reason, is not a simple repetition of the earlier version of tropological structures and their transformations played out in section 26. For this time, concerning the interaction between the faculties of imagination and reason, de Man is careful to note that the tropes have expanded well beyond their merely formal operations of syntagmatic succession and paradigmatic substitution. What could remain only implicit in the first shift between the mathematical and the dynamic sublime, in the blank that signals the actual occurrence of history, will now have to become legible in the General Remark as the juxtaposition of both the materiality of the letter and the emergence of overtly political and ideological discourse. Unlike the straightforwardly tropological relationship between apprehension

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 96

29/06/2012 11:11

in scr ibing the p ol itical

97

and comprehension dealt with in sections 25–28, the relation between imagination and reason now manifests itself in the concluding Remark as an actual conflict, or battle between unequal but mutually dependent forces. Just as in the Nietzsche sentence from ‘Anthropomorphism and Trope’, de Man will identify the political dimension of Kant’s text with the moment when tropes move beyond the confines of their closed circulation to name specific entities and agents, and that independently of any philosophical justification for their constitution as such. Tropes have a tendency to generate norms or values, in other words, systems of interpretation whose authority, like that of ideologies, can no longer be restricted to purely formal structures of exchange and meaning. In the course of the Remark, the tropological transformations of metonymy and metaphor described in section 26 ‘are personified or anthropomorphized’ into the properly named faculties of ‘Reason’ and ‘Imagination’, which then square off and challenge each other for supremacy. ‘Like the five squabbling faculties hilariously staged by Diderot in the Lettre sur les sourds et muets’, de Man continues, ‘the relationship between [reason and imagination] is stated in delusively interpersonal terms’ (AI 86–7). In the third Critique, the ‘conflict of the faculties’, whether we find it hilarious or not, is therefore no longer represented as a merely academic exercise. Its implications become thoroughly political from the moment it pits the empirical freedom asserted by one anthropomorphic figure against the unequal and transcendent claim to freedom of another anthropomorphic figure. The binding claim of reason as opposed to the free-play of imagination, and which is upheld by means of recourse to a greater law and greater power, cannot be understood independently of the political and ideological ramifications that are inscribed within it. ‘The aesthetic’, de Man emphasizes in a closely related reading of Kleist, ‘is primarily a social and political model, ethically grounded in [the] notion of freedom’ (RR 264). Hence, at this point in de Man’s reading of Kant, the sudden and otherwise inexplicable references to Antigone and Iphigenia, tragic figures whose sacrifice of free will remains forever inseparable from the legal, political and interpersonal struggles to which their acts ceaselessly bear witness. Hegel, as de Man well knows, will say nothing essentially different when he discusses both Iphigenia and Antigone in his Aesthetics. Nor will Kierkegaard when he identifies Antigone as the key figure in the transition from the aesthetic to the ethical that is carried out in Either/Or. What will always have been in play in imagination’s struggle to become adequate (angemessen) to reason, despite its irreducible difference (Unangemessenheit) from it, is not only the provisional agreement, or truce, that is negotiated by the third Critique between competing ‘states’ of mind; it is as well the irreducible historical and political differences between actual states that are its necessary correlate. The crucial shift that de Man thus traces from the formal structures of tropes described in section 26 to the practical actions carried out by anthropomorphic figures in the General Remark, also demands to be accounted for in terms of Kant’s own text. The justification is provided by Kant’s insistence in section 29, immediately preceding the General Remark, that an aesthetic judgment about the sublime requires a predisposition to the feeling of practical ideas and not just concepts, i.e., a capacity for moral affect.6 Moral affectivity, in short, is what in an aesthetic judgment

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 97

29/06/2012 11:11

98

k e v in n ew m a rk

of the sublime refers imagination to the practical sphere of law and politics, just as taste is what in an aesthetic judgment of the beautiful refers it to the theoretical sphere of the understanding. We may find Kant’s actual examples of affective judgment bland or silly, de Man remarks with a smile, but we need to develop a ‘taste’ for them if we are to appreciate what is ultimately at stake in the sublime (AI 123). According to de Man’s reading, the articulation of reason with practical action, the raison d’être of the third Critique, will pass by necessity through the affectivity of the sublime, whose appearance also happens to coincide with the problem of freedom as it unfolds in the conflict between imagination and reason. Now this conflict, as we have seen, is resolved, at least in appearance, through what de Man himself calls a ‘complicated and slightly devious scenario’ of confrontation, negotiation, sacrifice, and exchange between opposing anthropomorphic powers. But this drama of personified faculties, which by its emphasis on the interplay of freedom, inequality and submission already enacts the referential political sphere that it also serves to prefigure, is itself predicated on an even more fundamental transformation that has to take place at the level of moral affect. In order for imagination to accomplish its appointed task, to ally itself with reason by giving up its empirical freedom to gain the even greater freedom promised it by the critical authority of reason, it must, according to de Man, recover from an initial shock. It should come as no surprise, mild or otherwise, that de Man would be particularly responsive to this shock, since it is of course the one that lies at the very root of the sublime.7 ‘Shock, which borders on terror’, Kant writes, ‘seizes the onlooker before the spectacle of towering mountains, gushing cataracts, and wastelands plunged into darkness’ (195/129). This description recalls Kant’s earlier and perhaps betterknown characterization of the ‘feeling’ produced by an encounter with the sublime, which occurs ‘through a momentary interruption of the vital forces’ [das Gefühl einer augenblicklichen Hemmung der Lebenskräfte] (165/99]. But we now know from de Man’s reading of the poet’s ‘material vision’ in what this shock, this suspension and thus loss of every life force effectively consists. The affect of the sublime is shock because it has to register the failure of representation and along with it a sudden encounter with the formal materiality of language. It resides in that ‘moment’ when every feeling is radically suspended, where there occurs an ‘experience’ so devoid of interest that that it cannot be reappropriated under any organic category, be it of body or mind, or some combination of them both. The ‘blank’ de Man archives between the mathematical and dynamic sublime must therefore be understood, he will insist at the end of the lecture, as the architectonic space of this shock. Without the articulated blank, moreover, there would be no such thing as either cognition or performance, much less the passage from one to the other, that is to say, history as the space of the political and ideological. Into this vault, de Man reinscribes the materiality of Kant’s signifier. He does so by reading the shock of the signifier à la lettre, as that which alone juxtaposes side by side in Kant’s text the poet’s vision of the sublime with the allegorical attempt to understand and thus recuperate from it. The drama of the faculties has no choice but to tell the self-serving story of how imagination, and then reason, will ultimately be able to overcome the historical shock of the sublime by transforming it into the illusion of tranquil admiration, the

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 98

29/06/2012 11:11

in scr ibing the p ol itical

99

necessary precursor to the respect [Achtung] always required by moral law. But such ideological relapses, de Man warns, despite their inevitability, will always be marked by the original trauma, bordering on terror, to which they owe their own existence. Only the poet who is wild or the wild man who is poetic can read the singularity of this shock that is archived in Kant’s third Critique: de Man locates it – poetically, savagely – in the inscribed signifier Ver-wunde-rung. Such would be de Man’s material vision of history as wounding, a critical art or techné that fractures the political and ideological constructions of authority it then makes possible once again in the wake of its own letter writing. The burden of the political thus becomes the everrecurring challenge of refashioning this wound of the signifier – die Wunde – into a process of philosophical questioning – das Wunder – that would one day become adequate to it, a Bewunderung of Verwunderung, then, and which is also the path followed in Kant’s analysis of the sublime.8 Such a passage will always have to proceed from the shock and quasi-terror of the letter to a recovered tranquility of the mind in its freedom to think and to act in the world with reason (AI 84–6). This, of course, leads to the most political moment of all in de Man’s text, since it also corresponds directly to the question par excellence of the political. By extending slightly de Man’s own formulation, ‘There is history from the moment that words such as “power” and “battle” and so on emerge on the scene’, one could now say: history becomes political from the moment that words such as ‘freedom’ and ‘justice’ and so on emerge on the scene (AI 133). This moment occurs in the General Remark when it addresses the law by which freedom is necessarily apportioned or measured out – gemessen an – among the conflicting claims forever put upon it by anthropomorphic figures at once imaginary and reasonable. How can we then fail, no matter the price, to assent to the passage from history’s blank shocks to the wonders of transcendental reason? De Man in no wise opposes the law of this passage, moreover; far from it, he emphasizes over and over its ineluctable hold on us. However, the passage occurs in his own writing in a critical mode that could no longer be called simply ideological, much less tropological, since it repeatedly submits itself to this law only in order to subvert the foundations of its authority. In the particular instance of reading Kant, this happens when de Man affixes his signature to the imperative of grasping the proportionality of imagination’s relation to reason – their Angemessenheit, then – the taking of a common ratio without which no law or politics would ever be thinkable (AI 89–90). The paradoxical requirement of finding a standard for measurement, or Maßstab, which governs not only the analysis of the mathematical sublime but the possibility of aesthetic reflective judgment as such, already implies an analogous obligation in the practical sphere, and Kant himself does not fail at this point to offer the exemplary case ‘in concreto’: the actual degree or magnitude of civil liberty and justice that is afforded by the state to its subjects [‘die Größe der öffentlichen Freiheit und Gerechtigkeit in einem Lande’] (section 25: 170/104). Having duly noted how the notion of the sublime ultimately hinges on imagination’s elevation from the pure shock of Verwunderung to a respectful Bewunderung before reason’s sovereignty, de Man concludes his reading by wondering how a genuine incommensurability between such powers – the original Unangemessenheit of the still phenomenally determined imagination to

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 99

29/06/2012 11:11

100 k e v in n ew m a rk the extra-sensory domain of reason – could ever be converted without remainder into their congruity, or Angemessenheit. The ‘bottom line’ – which in de Man refers every bit as much to the political as to the economic and financial discourses from which it is in the first place borrowed – would also be the line that articulates the irreducible distinction, and thus inequality, between all true differences and the merely hypothetical adequacy or equation that can only ever be imagined to prevail among them. Without such a bottom line, de Man now adds, the constant alternation, or passage, between terms like adequacy and inadequacy would proceed to the point where one can no longer tell them apart. At precisely this point, where the crucial articulation of theoretical with practical reason is supposed to be ensured by the sublime and self-sacrificing labour of imagination, the ineradicable difference between terms like equality and inequality threatens to disappear without a trace. It is at this point as well that de Man will draw his own line between Verwunderung and Bewunderung, and by doing so disarticulate once and for all their presumed compatibility within the unifying principle of the sublime. De Man, who is often thought to have forgotten about the reality principle in the name of literary fictions, is unsurpassed in his capacity to remember that the fiction of ‘comparative’ or ‘proportionate’ equality remains the most ideological of all historical and political evasions. By supplying from his own language a quasi-equivalent for the radical incompatibility of Verwunderung and Bewunderung that is covered over in Kant’s text by the figural reconciliation of the faculties, de Man’s writing stubbornly resists the seductive idea that the actual occurrence of shock and terror could ever be subsequently harmonized or made congruent with admiration and respect.9 At the point where one can no longer tell the terms Unangemessenheit and Angemessenheit apart, de Man’s reading thus underlines, the actual economic and political inequalities to which such terms also always refer would be allowed to fade from view. Hence the eruption at this point of a new line that passes between and splits them apart in de Man’s own writing. The passage that transforms imagination’s inadequacy to reason into adequacy, the promotion from empirical inequality to transcendental equivalence that remains the aim of all that Verwundering and Bewundering in Kant’s analysis of the sublime, how could de Man have possibly resisted translating it at one stroke, surprise, with the English signifier bewildering? ‘And are we not made to assent’, de Man asks in conclusion, ‘to the more than paradoxical but truly aporetic incompatibility . . . because of a constant, and finally bewildering alternation of the two terms, Angemessen(heit) and Unangemessen(heit), to the point where one can no longer tell them apart?’ (AI 89–90). The constant shuttling by which we are always made to swallow this passage between wholly unequal terms, de Man says, is not just bewildering; it is finally bewildering, bewildering at last and in its finality, bewildering definitively and without end much less ultimate purpose. In the materiality of bewildering, then, the ceaseless shudder of Verwunderung and Bewunderung is at last arrested, though manifestly not sublimated, sublated, erhoben or aufgehoben in any sense that could ever be conceived as adequate, or angemessen. Up to a point, it could even be said that bewildering is the most inappropriate or unangemessen signifier imaginable for the task assigned by reason to our obligatory passage from

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 100

29/06/2012 11:11

in scribing the p ol itical

101

Verwunderung to Bewunderung. But that is also because such a signifier, taken prosaically and therefore à la lettre, actually succeeds in re-opening the concealed wound that remains forever at the origin of Kant’s thinking of the sublime. That wound, as we have seen, is the one that is suffered, for the sake of history, moreover, by the poet who is also a wild man. For only a poet, like de Man, can ever be wild enough to restore the wound to its proper place, in the endlessly inappropriate play of the signifier. No house or dwelling can be built to domesticate or recover the wildness of that wounding letter, whose errancy inhabits the architecture of all being – a be-wild-err-ing, then, that in Paul de Man’s writing is finally and wildly historical as well as poetic and political.

No tes 1. See ‘Kant and Schiller’, in AI 132, 133, 137, emphasis added. Further references to this and other essays from the same volume will appear in the text. For a more extended consideration of this ‘passage’ from trope to performance, see chapter 11, ‘Bewildering: Paul de Man, Poetry, Politics,’ in my Irony on Occasion: From Schlegel and Kierkegaard to Derrida and de Man (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012). 2. ‘Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric’, in RR. I have attempted a more detailed reading of this essay and its ‘historical’ dimensions in ‘Beyond Movement: Paul de Man’s History’, in my Beyond Symbolism: Textual History and the Future of Reading (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). 3. ‘Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant’, in AI 90. References to Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft (vol. 10 of Werkausgabe, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978]), followed by its English translation, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, Cambridge: Hackett, 1987), will appear in the text. 4. For an elaboration of the way this aporia between the singularity of the event and the iterability of the trace it will as such have left on the world is legible in Paul de Man’s writing, see inter alia Jacques Derrida’s ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2) (“within such limits”)’, in Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, ed. Tom Cohen et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), especially pp. 329–36. 5. The key word in this formulation is the pronoun, es, it, for what exactly the poets ‘do’ in constructing the experience of the sublime remains impossible to say since it is in fact the condition of possibility of saying anything. De Man offers his own highly compact version of this undecidability in his paper, ‘Kant’s Materialism’, when he traces out the architectonic of the sublime in the following ‘juxtaposition of incompatibles’: ‘What is [the erection of the architectonic] for Kant? We receive a hint in a passage which tells us how to look at the sublime, how to read judiciously, like the poets (‘wie die Dichter es tun’): “If we call sublime the sight of a star-studded sky . . .” ’ (AI 126, emphasis added). For an elaboration of what lies compacted in de Man’s juxtaposition of ‘looking’ and ‘reading’ here, see (read) Andrzej Warminski, ‘ “As the Poets Do It”: On the Material Sublime’, in Cohen, ed., Material Events, pp. 3–31. 6. ‘Die Stimmung des Gemüts zum Gefühl des Erhabenen erfordert eine Empfänglichkeit desselben für Ideen . . . was man mit dem gesunden Verstande zugleich jedermann ansinnen und von ihm fodern kann, nämlich in der Anlage zum Gefühl für (praktische) Ideen, d.i. zu dem moralischen . . .’ (Kritik 189, 190 / Critique 124, 125). See also section VII of the Introduction. On the role of affectivity in an aesthetic judgment of the beautiful, see Jacques Derrida, ‘Le Parergon’, in ‘Parergon’, in La vérité en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978). For an

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 101

29/06/2012 11:11

102 k e v in n ew m a rk excellent account of what remains in play in the philosophical reception of Kant’s sublime ‘feeling’, which however does not mention either de Man or Derrida, see Peter Fenves, ‘Taking Stock of the Kantian Sublime’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 28:1, 1994, pp. 65–82. 7. The reference is to the famous Boy of Winander scene in Wordsworth’s The Prelude (V. 406– 9). It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that de Man’s interest in romanticism as a crux for literary theory as well as for literary criticism and history stems from his attentiveness to the peculiar structure and occurrence of this ‘shock’. For his most extended considerations of the textual occurrence of shock, interruption and fragmentation, see RR and RCC. 8. Verwundern, to amaze or astonish, has no semantic tie to verwunden, to wound. The shock of the ‘Wunde’ in Verwunderung therefore occurs and can only occur at the level of the inscribed signifier, which is also to say, like the erection of the ‘wide vault’ under which the wild poet always stands, it can happen neither as cognition nor as perception. The English word ‘wound’, moreover, does not appear in de Man’s reading of the third Critique in this essay. Rather, it becomes legible in the way he characterizes the ‘shock’ of Verwunderung variously as ‘suffering’, ‘pain’, ‘mutilation’ and ‘dismemberment’ (AI 86, 88, 89). Nonetheless, all the wounding implications of Verwunderung in the Kant essay are made literally manifest in de Man’s reading of Kleist, where the word ‘wound’ plays a key role in de Man’s treatment of the philosophical and historical category of the aesthetic as it developed in the wake of the Third Critique (RR 275–80). 9. For if the affect of shock is truly prerequisite to ‘feel’ the sublime in the first place, then what could ever prevent the sublime feeling of admiration from also repeating this inaugural shock in the necessary attempt to recover from and move beyond it? Kant himself comes close to sketching out the mutually obliterating relationship between such terms when he writes: ‘A sublime cast of mind can be called noble . . . only if it provokes not so much Verwunderung (an affect in which the representation of novelty exceeds all expectation) as Bewunderung (a Verwunderung that does not cease once the novelty has passed . . .’ (199/133; also see section 62, 311/243). In other words, Bewunderung is itself nothing but (ceaseless) Verwunderung – the uninterrupted, though now dissimulated shock that is always reinscribed in the rational fiction of the mind’s capacity to attain tranquil admiration, respect, nobility.

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 102

29/06/2012 11:11

Chapter 8

8

Mistake in Paul de Man: Violent Reading and Theotropic Violence

Marc Redfield

A

s readers versed in the polemics of twentieth-century literary theory will recognize, my title pays slant homage to a well-known essay by Stanley Corngold, ‘Error in Paul de Man’ (1982). In that essay, Corngold proposes a distinction between de Man’s use of the terms ‘mistake’ and ‘error’: ‘Mistakes (or what de Man sometimes calls “mere error” [see, e.g., BI 109]) are without true value: trivial, in principle corrigible according to a norm already known. But the skew of error implies a truth.’1 Having discerned this difference between mistake and error, Corngold proceeds to undermine it. He attempts to show that, although (in his opinion) ‘there is no place . . . for mistakes’ in a de Manian dialectic of blindness and insight,2 mistakes nonetheless persist in de Man’s work in at least two ways: as straw figures that de Man’s deconstructive essays construct in order to demolish (e.g., the totalizing power of metaphor: a power that, posited only to be destroyed over the course of de Manian argumentation, functions as ‘a sheer mistake’3); and as ‘an unironical and sheerly mistaken violence’,4 to which de Man resorts in order to achieve his readings.5 Claiming that in the end ‘it is not possible to distinguish’ between mistake and error in de Man’s writings,6 Corngold identifies the entire de Manian project as a mistake: ‘De Man’s final confusion of the terms “error” and “mistake” occurs through his pretending to truth in the name of error. The usefulness of the concept of error as distinct from that of mistake disappears utterly.’7 De Man, for his part, in a letter solicited by the editors of Critical Inquiry and published alongside Corngold’s essay, rejects this diagnosis at its root: ‘If “mistake” is random and contingent (of the order of “can” or “may”) and “error” is systemic and compulsive (of the order of “must”), then I have stated, in a variety of terminologies, the impossibility of ever coming to rest on one or the other side of this distinction.’8 But in sentences that wheel around this assertion, de Man (who never yields an inch in these kinds of exchanges, and of course is not yielding here either) pays Corngold a compliment (an ironic one, yes; but is there any other kind?): ‘I am grateful to Stanley Corngold for having pointed out a polarity (error/mistake) that I have not explicitly thematized in those terms . . . Since I use the terms “error” and “mistake” casually rather than systematically or self-consciously, I do not control their usage

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 103

29/06/2012 11:11

104 m a r c redfield as consistently as I should have.’9 He goes on to point to a sharper example of the mistake/error polarity in his own work than any marshaled in Corngold’s essay: ‘I can remember, with some embarrassment, at least one passage in Blindness and Insight in which mistake is peremptorily distinguished from error (or “blind spot”); all I can say for myself is that it took me a large number of pages to try to disentangle the snarl that resulted from this rash assertion.’10 In a footnote de Man makes clear that he’s referring to the famous moment in Chapter 7 of Blindness and Insight, ‘The Rhetoric of Blindness: Jacques Derrida’s Reading of Rousseau’, in which he had claimed that ‘Rousseau’s text has no blind spots’, attaching to that assertion an equally apodictic footnote: ‘The choice of the wrong example to illustrate metaphor (fear instead of pity) is a mistake, not a blind spot’ (BI 139). And the ‘large number of pages’ that set out to disentangle this ‘snarl’ are of course those that were first published, two years after the appearance of Blindness and Insight, as ‘Theory of Metaphor in Rousseau’s Second Discourse’ in the journal Studies in Romanticism in 1973, and that eventually became Chapter 7 of Allegories of Reading.11 So, according to de Man, Corngold is not simply mistaken. He could not be, not about a polarity so fundamental and slippery as that of mistake and error. The word error itself could be said to contain ‘mistake’ within it, for the Latin errare means both ‘to wander freely’ and ‘to wander from the right path’. In the latter case error obtains the pejorative sense of a swerve from a norm, thus signifying a possibly rectifiable ‘mistake’; in the former case (as in ‘knight-errant’) it has the more neutral, but perhaps ultimately more disturbing meaning of aimless wandering.12 Mistake suggests a finality – the finality of an accident or contingency definitively excluded from significance – that error at once incorporates and destabilizes. It is no accident (no simple ‘mistake’, in other words) that memorable denunciations of deconstruction have wielded the word mistake vigorously (John Searle: ‘It would be a mistake, I think, to regard Derrida’s discussion of Austin as a confrontation between two prominent philosophical positions’; Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels: ‘De Man’s separation of language and speech acts rests on a mistake’13). Corngold’s struggle with de Man consists finally in an effort to isolate deconstruction, as mistake, from the possibility that deconstruction might be (erroneously) in communication with (and thus contaminative of) necessity or truth. And Corngold’s argument – ambiguously erroneous and mistaken as I believe it to be – has the virtue of sharpening for us the question of how and why de Man’s famously violent reading practice involves ‘the error of mistaking’, as de Man himself puts it.14 The interplay of error and mistake may not seem immediately relevant to questions of sovereignty, but a close reading of de Man’s work suggests that the unstable difference between contingency and compulsion, or randomness and systematicity, haunts the political and theological themes that the present collection intends to address. I propose to flesh out that assertion by way of de Man’s late essay ‘Hegel on the Sublime’. The structure of what follows is pretty simple: I shall walk somewhat briskly through de Man’s essay, draw attention to one or two of its peculiarities, reflect on some interesting questions raised by de Man’s acts of interpretive violence, and finally return briefly to Hegel’s text to sketch a connection to the announced

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 104

29/06/2012 11:11

m istake in p aul de man

105

themes of this collection. This itinerary will at least have the virtue of focusing for awhile on a text of de Man’s that has been studied somewhat less than other essays from roughly the same period, such as ‘Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant’, or ‘Hypogram and Inscription’, or, for that matter, ‘Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics’, the essay on which ‘Hegel on the Sublime’ builds.15 Readers will recall that ‘Hegel on the Sublime’ was one of de Man’s Messenger lectures at Cornell, given in the spring of 1983; it thus belongs to a group of late texts focused on the problematic of the aesthetic in its relation to history, politics and language. Of these texts, ‘Hegel on the Sublime’ contains de Man’s most overt statements about politics: his dense reading of the Aesthetics is flanked, no doubt somewhat obscurely, by the claim that ‘truly productive political thought is accessible only by way of critical aesthetic theory’ (AI 107), and that ‘poets, philosophers, and their readers lose their political impact only if they become, in turn, usurpers of mastery’ (AI 118). The stakes are certainly as high as they are anywhere else in de Man’s oeuvre, and it can only be helpful to reread this essay, if we are proposing to think about de Man’s thinking about sovereignty, politics and the theotropic. So without further ado, let me begin summarizing. De Manian essays usually begin with general reflections, and this one, as I’ve just mentioned, offers as its frame a summary of his understanding of the aesthetic as bearing the burden of the link between discourse and action (AI 106), the corollary being that genuine political thought can only be achieved by way of critical aesthetic theory, and the kicker being that, at such moments, a theory of language is always tacitly or explicitly at stake. With these concerns in view, de Man proposes to read Hegel’s Aesthetics more fully than he had in this essay’s immediate precursor and companion piece, ‘Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics’ – for, despite its title, that earlier essay had spent much of its time working out a reading of Hegel’s Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften (1817), a reading that de Man now, as he begins ‘Hegel on the Sublime’, is free to summarize in a few sentences: Most clearly in the Encyclopedia, but in the Logic as well, the idea makes its appearance on the mental stage of human intelligence at the precise moment when our consciousness of the world, which faculties such as perception or imagination have interiorized by way of recollection (Errinnerung), is no longer experienced but remains accessible only to memorization (Gedächtnis). At that moment, and at no other, can it be said that the idea leaves a material trace, accessible to the senses, upon the world. We can perceive the most fleeting and imagine the wildest things without any change occurring to the surface of the world, but from the moment we memorize, we cannot do without such a trace, be it as a knot in our handkerchief, a shopping list, a table of multiplication, a psalmodized singsong or plain chant, or any other memorandum. Once such a notation has occurred, the inside-outside metaphor of experience and signification can be forgotten, which is the necessary (if not sufficient) condition for thought (Denken) to begin. The aesthetic moment in Hegel occurs as the conscious forgetting of a consciousness by means of a materially actualized system of notation or inscription. (AI 109)

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 105

29/06/2012 11:11

106 m a r c redfield This paragraph alone would merit extensive discussion, given its thematic richness (de Man’s claim here is, for instance, intriguingly reminiscent of Walter Benjamin on the shock experience), its rhetorical difficulty (why the ‘conscious’ forgetting of a consciousness? How do you forget consciously; what would that mean?), and its resolutely untraditional account of Hegel.16 But we move resolutely on (there never really is enough time for reading). De Man now sets out to show that the Hegelian theory of memorization he has extracted from the Encyclopedia has left its mark on the Aesthetics – indeed, that ‘the aesthetic is akin to memorization in Hegel’ (AI 109). (Which is also to say that Hegel the professor never quite ‘forgot’ his former speculative self, or that he had ‘memorized’ his own writings – which also means, of course, that he had lost consciousness of them.) De Man focuses on Chapter 2 of the section on symbolic art, ‘Die Symbolik der Erhabenheit’, ‘The Symbolism of the Sublime’.17 The sublime, for Hegel, is inherently linguistic; Hegel excludes the plastic arts from sublimity because no image of the divine can be adequate to its subject; and de Man comments: ‘Only the written word can be sublime, to the precise extent that the written word is neither representational, like a perception, nor imaginative, like a phantasm.’ In other words, the word ‘appears here as the inscription which, according to the Encyclopedia, is the first and only phenomenal manifestation of the idea. Monuments and statues made of stone and metal are . . . sensory appearances all right, but not, or not yet, appearances of the idea.’ The sublime thus ‘marks an open break with the linguistic model of the symbol that pervades all sections of the Aesthetics’ (AI 110). The sublime arises in the wake of the passage from pantheism to monotheism in Hegel’s ‘picture-book but by no means innocent history’, as de Man says (AI 111). The monotheistic moment is essentially verbal and coincides with the fantastic notion that die eine Substanz could be given a name – such as, for instance, die eine Substanz, or the One, or Being, or Allah, or Yahweh, or I – and that this name could then function symbolically . . . From this moment on, language is the deictic system of predication and determination in which we dwell more or less poetically on this earth. (AI 111) In the extremely dense pages that follow, de Man teases out sublime monotheism’s double and incompatible narratives. On the one hand, the sublime mobilizes a ‘dialectical and recuperative’ language of negativity: ‘Hegel’s sublime may stress the distance between the human discourse of the poets and the voice of the sacred even further than Longinus, but as long as this distance remains, as he puts it, a relationship, however negative, the fundamental analogy between poetic and divine creation is preserved’ (AI 112). De Man sees complications even in this ‘recuperative’ strand (we have not yet gotten to the truly disruptive strand): he focuses on Hegel’s quotation from Genesis, ‘And God said, let there be light: and there was light’, which Hegel quotes in order to illustrate the non-natural relationship between God and man. De Man writes: ‘Creation is purely verbal, the imperative, pointing and positing power of the word. The word speaks and the world is the transitive object

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 106

29/06/2012 11:11

m istake in p aul de man

107

of its utterance, but this implies that what is spoken and which includes us, is not the subject of its speech act. Our obedience to the word is mute’ (AI 112). Yet this muteness manifests itself as quotation: Hegel quotes the Bible quoting Moses quoting God; a representational system of mimesis and diegesis arises, devoid of positional power but by no means lacking in performative power – and in this sense by no means ‘mute’. This system generates ‘a cognitive critical inquiry’ (AI 113) in so far as, like pure reason in Kant, it inevitably exceeds its own limits in having to report – and thus to some extent repeat – the positional power of divine utterance. The word ‘light’ names, here, ‘the necessary phenomenality of any positing’: that is, the convergence of discourse and the sacred. Man is infinitely far from God, but can still echo him: so long as language can call itself mute and man can call himself miserable, we remain within the dialectized sublime, which always conveys ‘an intimation of poetic grandeur and immortality’ (AI 113). But now comes the second strand of critical narrative, which de Man attaches to another quotation of Hegel’s, this time from Psalms: ‘Light is your garment, that you wear; you stretch out the heavens like a curtain . . .’ Here the rhetorical mode is no longer mimesis-diegesis, but direct address or apostrophe, and here ‘light’ is a mere surface or covering: The garment is a surface (ein äusseres Gewand), an outside that conceals an inside. One can understand this, as Hegel does, as a statement about the insignificance of the sensory world as compared to the spirit. Unlike the logos, it does not have the power to posit anything; its power, or only discourse, is the knowledge of its own weakness. But since this same spirit also, without mediation, is the light (p. 481), the combination of the two quotations states that the spirit posits itself as that which is unable to posit, and this declaration is either meaningless or duplicitous. One can pretend to be weak when one is strong, but the power to pretend is decisive proof of one’s strength. One can know oneself, as man does, as that which is unable to know, but by moving from knowledge to position, all is changed. Position is all of a piece, and, moreover, unlike thought, it actually occurs. It becomes impossible to find a common ground for or between the two quotations, ‘Let there be light’, and ‘Light is your garment’. (AI 113–14) This split between the quotations, and between mimesis-diegesis and apostrophe, which Hegel treats as a gap between the side of God and that of man, ‘radicalize[s] the separation between sacred and human in a manner that no dialectic can surmount (aufheben)’ (AI 114). Apostrophe, the mode of praise par excellence, undoes the ground for praise reported by the mimetic-diegetic representational system. It is a trope foreign to representation – it has no dependence on report or quotation; it is ‘ludicrous and cumbersome’ on stage; it praises the veil, which is to say the device that allows for the illusion of address, rather than ‘God himself’ – yet as a mode of prosopopeia or face-giving, apostrophe nonetheless draws us into ‘the entire transformational system of tropes’. I want to return to this moment in de Man’s argument, but first let me try to

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 107

29/06/2012 11:11

108 m a r c redfield summarize, as rapidly as good faith will allow, the closing moves of his essay. De Man notes what appears to be a ‘recuperative corollary’ to the otherness of the divine at this point in Hegel: because God withdraws, human autonomy emerges as ethical selfdetermination, resulting in a legal system of reward and punishment. De Man reads this passage from the sublime to the political as only apparently recuperative: ‘recuperation’ has been disallowed by the radical loss suffered during the sublime, and what emerges instead is ‘what one could call a critical economy’: the Law, Gesetz (which in German is linked to the word for positing, setzen), against all appearances, is not in fact the grounding but the unsettling of authority. ‘The political in Hegel originates in the critical undoing of belief’, and ‘the main monarch to be thus dethroned or desacralized is language, the matrix of all value systems in its claim to possess the absolute power of position’ (AI 115). (That, by the way, is a sentence everyone who wants to write responsibly about de Man and ‘language’ ought to memorize.) De Man reads the section of the Aesthetics on ‘comparative art forms’, which comes after the section on the sublime, as a precipitate of the sublime’s critical impact. A new linguistic model emerges that replaces the dialectical structure of the symbol with a Gesetz (a ‘Gesetz der Äusserlichkeit’), a reduction of dialectic to ‘the preordained motion of its own position’. Gesetz is Gesetz is Gesetz: ‘Like a stutter or a broken record, it makes what it keeps repeating worthless and meaningless’ (AI 116). No longer can this movement be closed off by the knowledge of its own poverty. Metaphor becomes arbitrary positioning (Nebengestelltsein) disguised as finding or invention: a predicament that describes the origin of philosophy itself. In short, ‘at the end of the section in the Aesthetics on symbolic form, after the reversal of the sublime, writing is structured like memorization, or, in the terminology of Hegel’s system, like thought’ (AI 117). This is also, as I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the root of effective political critique. ‘Im Sklaven fängt die Prosa an’, de Man quotes: in the slave, prose begins. Precisely because Hegel’s prosaic aesthetic demystifies the pretensions of aesthetic genre and representation – of language as the matrix of value – ‘it is also politically legitimate and effective as the undoer of usurped authority’ (AI 118). Of the numerous and massive questions that arise in the wake of this powerful, strange reading of Hegel, I shall pursue only one here: that of the interpretive violence needed to achieve it. Let us return to de Man’s dense discussion of Hegel’s two scriptural quotations. Apostrophe, as we have seen, disrupts the representational economy of mimesis-diegesis and the dialectical turns of trope by instituting an incoherence whereby ‘the spirit posits itself as that which is unable to posit’, because of the combination of the two quotations about light: ‘Light is your garment’ (Psalms); ‘God said, “Let there be light” ’ (Genesis). But to get to de Man’s claim about the spirit positing itself as that which is unable to posit, de Man has to tell us that: ‘since this same spirit also, without mediation, is the light (p. 481), the combination of the two quotations states that the spirit posits itself as that which is unable to posit’ (AI 113–14). De Man provides no quotation to buttress his parenthetical indication ‘p. 481’, and one can examine page 481 of the Suhrkamp edition all one wants: no statement about God being light will be found there. (Nor is any such statement found on any neighboring pages.) The closest one gets is the sentence that follows the quote from Genesis:

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 108

29/06/2012 11:11

m istake in p aul de man

109

Der Herr, die eine Substanz, geht zwar zur Äusserung fort, aber die Art der Hervorbringung ist die reinste, selbst körperlose, ätherische Äusserung: das Wort, die Äusserung des Gedankens als der idealen Macht, mit deren Befehl des Daseins nun auch das Daseiende wirklich in stummem Gehorsam unmittelbar gesetzt ist. (Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, p. 481) The Lord, the one substance, does indeed proceed to externalization, but the manner of manifestation is the purest, even bodiless, ethereal externalization: it is the word, the externalization of thought as the ideal power, and with its command of being (that the existent shall be) the existent is immediately and actually posited in mute obedience. This sentence echoes behind de Man’s rhetorical deconstruction of the ‘Gesetz der Äusserlichkeit’ at the end of his essay, but this sentence doesn’t say that God is light; it says that God is word, or externalizes himself as word. One might then be led to attend to Hegel’s emphasis on the world’s dependence on God: ‘no fixed dualism is created’, Hegel says, ‘for what is brought forth is [God’s] work, which has no independence in contrast with him’; thus, if God has created the world as light – if light is the world as the transitive, mute object of the word’s power – then one might be tempted to say that the light is in fact God. But that would be a mistake. Hegel emphasizes that a lack of independence is not the same thing as God’s oneness with the world. That is the whole point of the sublime: God is not one with the world, but has withdrawn, radically. The statement ‘God is light’ misunderstands the monotheistic sublime as a version of what it is not – pantheism. God is withdrawn, infinitely, from the light, which is thus, in fact, darkness visible. There is no binary opposition because the world lacks independence; yet there is no similarity with God, either. To be sure, de Man can claim the authority of I John i, 5: ‘This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.’ Theos phôs estin; Deus lux est: that great trope was powerfully reworked by Augustine, Dante, and perhaps most memorably for us (though probably not for Hegel), by Milton in the apostrophe to light at the opening of Book III of Paradise Lost: Hail, holy Light, offspring of Heav’n first born Or of th’ Eternal Coeternal beam May I express thee unblam’d? since God is Light, And never but in unapproached Light Dwelt from Eternity, dwelt in thee, Bright effluence of bright essence increate.18 A vast Christian tradition, therefore, underwrites de Man’s assertion that ‘this same spirit also, without mediation, is the light’.19 But Hegel’s text does not say this, and for good reason: Hegel, at least at this point in this text, is committed to the (‘Hebraic’) sublimity of God as word. The word is of course the divine imperative

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 109

29/06/2012 11:11

110 m a r c redfield ‘Let there be light’; but the externalization of God as Word is not quite the same as the externalization of God as the mute, if luminous, result of the Word. We broach here the vast question of what reading is for de Man, and thereby also return to the problem of error and mistake that I sketched at the beginning. What is it to read ‘accurately’? In what does faithfulness to a text consist? And if (as we students of de Man and Derrida sometimes affirm) there can be a kind of faithfulness that involves or precipitates a certain betrayal or undermining of a text, what might we be able to say about the violence operative in that kind of faithfulness? Since good (as well as not so good) readers of de Man have often pondered the violence of his readings, we have an archive to draw on; but let me start in the most naïve way possible by asking whether de Man, as he wrote or typed the phrase containing the parenthetical reference ‘(p. 481)’ was making a contingent mistake or a programmatic error – or something uncertainly in between. The distinction between error and mistake, though it may eventually fail us, cannot simply be discarded – though never watertight, it is not simply mistaken. I would propose, for instance, that we can probably all agree that de Man made a mistake at a different point – a page earlier – in ‘Hegel on the Sublime’. On page 112 he translates a sentence from Hegel – the sentence I quoted a moment ago – and misattributes it to ‘p. 480’, whereas the quotation in fact, as we saw, comes from page 481 in the Suhrkamp edition. (Here is what de Man writes: ‘Our obedience to the word is mute: “the word . . . whose command to be also and actually posits what is without mediation and in mute obedience” (p. 480, emphasis mine)’). The quotation is accurate; only the page reference is wrong. So let us call that a mistake – a mistake with very little at stake: a kind editorial hand can rectify it, at the cost of only a butterfly-wingbeat’s worth of violence.20 Of course the ‘mistakes’ that get people exercised are not of that order. Let me recall briefly the most famous of de Man’s violations of citational decorum: the ‘ne’ that, in the final chapter of Allegories of Reading, he somewhat weirdly adds to a citation from Rousseau’s Confessions. The Rousseau sentence reads: Mais je ne remplirois pas le but de ce livre si je n’exposois en même temps mes dispositions intérieures, et que je craignisse de m’excuser en ce qui est conforme à la vérité.21 But I would not fulfill the purpose of this book if I did not at the same time expose my interior dispositions, and if I feared to excuse myself by means of what conforms to the truth. De Man, referencing the edition of Rousseau from which I cite here, quotes a portion of this sentence in French while adding a redundant expletive ‘ne’ in brackets, as backup for an oddly misleading translation: ‘‘But I would not fulfill the purpose of this book if I did not fear to excuse myself by means of what conforms to the truth’ (‘que je [ne] craignisse de m’excuser en ce qui est conforme à la vérité’)’ (AR 280).22 An expletive or pleonastic ‘ne’ with the subjunctive may be added in French without changing the positive meaning of the phrase (in other words ‘que je craignisse’ and ‘que je ne craignisse’ mean the same thing; the ne is not negational in

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 110

29/06/2012 11:11

m istake in p aul de man

111

such a construction). So first de Man manipulates the quotation, and then mistranslates it, taking the expletive ne (which Rousseau did not insert) as negational (which it is not); and the whole thing is made all the more mysterious by the fact that de Man’s reading here doesn’t in any significant way depend on this ‘mistake’ – that is, he really doesn’t need to transform ‘if I feared’ into ‘if I did not fear’ to achieve his reading of the tension between confession and excuse (which is the opposition he is building up and undermining at that point in the essay). (It would be enough to draw attention to the mere appearance of ‘fear’ in association with excuse in this sentence of Rousseau’s; whether the fear is being acknowledged or warded off, de Man has textual justification for pushing the sentence in the direction he wants it to go.) Jacques Derrida, who devotes many pages of ‘Typewriter Ribbon’ to de Man’s violent handling of quotations in the Confessions essay, discusses de Man’s translation of this sentence for a good page and a half, and then confesses himself stymied: ‘Well, let’s leave this aside.’23 Ortwin de Graef – who deserves credit for having first noticed this oddity – takes a stab at an interpretation of it, reading this moment as ‘a sudden intrusion of the authorial voice’ speaking of an imperative not to confess. (That is, not to confess to having written wartime journalism; de Graef’s essay dates from that controversy.)24 Well, as anyone might expect, I too am about to say ‘let’s leave this aside’, wishing first, though, to recall how anxious the response can be when mistake and error begin to cross in hard-to-determine fashion. A touch of frustration, even annoyance, now and then flickers in Derrida’s writing about de Man, particularly in the essay I just cited (e.g.: ‘I am all the more troubled by these passages inasmuch as de Man seems to insist firmly on a distinction that he will later have to suspend’; ‘Why does he cut the sentence, mutilating it or dismembering it in this way and in such an arbitrary fashion? . . . I have no answer to this question.’25). Less patient readers respond less guardedly. One could offer any number of examples from the archive; an interesting one for present purposes is Robert Ellrich’s outraged two-page note published in a 1991 issue of MLN titled ‘De Man’s Purloined Meaning’, and inspired by de Graef’s study of that redundant and misleading ‘ne’. Ellrich ends his condemnation of de Man with a one-sentence confession of his own: ‘My contribution will be to confess that upon first reading “The purloined ribbon” in 1979, I was sufficiently in awe of Paul de Man’s eminence to close my eyes to a mistake that now visually burns my retina.’26 I want to come back in a moment to that intriguing conjunction between ‘mistake’ and these figures of light’s mutilating power – figures of blindness, blinding light, eyes closing, burning retinas. (‘I admit I don’t see things clearly enough here’ is one of Derrida’s cagy leitmotifs in ‘Typewriter Ribbon’.27) But let me first cite another critic writing about this general topic: He relies upon a text whose reality must have been known to him, and engages in detailed analyses, referring to manuscript corrections, marginal notes, and the like, without verifying for accuracy, or at least without doing so enough. He comments upon the poems independently of one another and draws analogies only in support of his own thesis. When a passage is at odds with his interpretation – we shall see an example of this – he simply sets it aside. He ignores the

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 111

29/06/2012 11:11

112 m a r c redfield context, isolates lines or words to give them an absolute value, without any regard for their specific function in the poem from which he plucks them. (BI 249–50) And so on. I am, of course, quoting Paul de Man, writing about Heidegger in what is perhaps de Man’s greatest essay from the 1950s, ‘Heidegger’s Exegeses of Hölderlin’ (1955). And de Man is not by any means condemning Heidegger here. These comments make up a judo roll: ‘such violence has been found shocking, and rightly so’, de Man notes, ‘but it must be seen that it derives directly from Heidegger’s conception of the poetic, which he claims to have deduced from Hölderlin’s thought’ (BI 249). Though one could fill pages listing ‘Heidegger’s heresies against the most elementary rules of text analysis’, these heresies ‘are not arbitrary because of a lack of rigor but because they rely upon a poetics that permits, or even requires, arbitrariness’ (BI 250). So what poetics, in the case of Paul de Man’s late work, requires arbitrariness? Neil Hertz has taken up this question by focusing on a moment in ‘Shelley Disfigured’ that resembles the moment we’re considering in ‘Hegel on the Sublime’ both thematically and functionally. Hertz notes that de Man seems to depart from the literal sense of The Triumph of Life when he describes the ‘Shape all light’ in Shelley’s poem as drowned. ‘There is no doubt’, de Man tells us, ‘that, when we again meet the shape’ – and here, as in our Hegel passage, de Man doesn’t quote, but simply gives line numbers in brackets – ‘it is no longer gliding along the river but drowned, Ophelia-like, below the surface of the water’ (RR 111). As many readers will no doubt remember, however, Shelley’s poem actually tells us that the Shape ‘waned in the coming light’ and then ‘on the stream/Moved, as I moved’; one can just barely imagine a drowning here, but as Hertz says, ‘de Man is unaccustomedly emphatic in his insistence on this version of the shape’s disappearance or death’, and by all ordinary lights ‘de Man has imposed his interpretation on lines that contain no demonstrable images of drowning’.28 It may be that all or nearly all of de Man’s late essays – and not just his late essays, for that matter; Hertz takes as a first example a couple of peculiar moments in de Man’s chapter on Yeats in his 1960 dissertation – contain within them strange, dreamlike swerves of this sort.29 They arrive ‘with [an] air of gratuitous violence’,30 and often seem isolable as punctual moments of interpretive excess. But at other times, what one might call (following de Man) the interpretive anacoluthon is spread out over the entire narrative line. One of the things Derrida seems at times to find aggravating about de Man’s texts is their habit of transforming what Derrida understands as ‘always already’ co-implications (between, say, confession and excuse) into separate and competing narratives that go on to destroy their sustaining differences.31 De Man’s wager of reading exceeds its text, scores its text and opens it – to what? Sometimes we seem to have an answer: ‘well, of course’, we might say, ‘these acts of interpretive violence open the text to the de Manian reading’ – to the rhetorical disruption that de Man sees at work composing and deconstructing the phenomenal cognition of signification. The drowning of the Shape all light in ‘Shelley Disfigured’ and the assertion that the spirit is the light in ‘Hegel on the Sublime’ both lend

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 112

29/06/2012 11:11

m istake in p aul de man

113

themselves to that sort of assertion. As Hertz observes, ‘The moment when de Man declares that “there is no doubt” that the shape is drowned, is, as it happens, precisely the moment when he is about to stop taking Shelley’s images at face value.’32 In even more striking fashion, the argument in ‘Hegel on the Sublime’ needs that violent equation of spirit and light to obtain the collision of quotations (‘Let there be light’ and ‘Light is your garment’) out of which de Man traces the emergence of the critical economy of law in Hegel. But my brief survey of a few other examples of de Man’s rough handling of texts intends to suggest that things are not so simple. Sometimes, as in ‘Shelley Disfigured’ or ‘Hegel on the Sublime’, these moments of violence seem directed toward an end (the ‘de Manian reading’ that deconstructive critics are often accused – and not simply mistakenly – of having in mind even before they begin reading); but sometimes, as in the Confessions essay, they seem more gratuitous, a little more like ‘mistakes’. (But what strange mistakes! As though de Man could forget where his essay is going, or what Rousseau’s sentence is saying, or how the pleonastic ‘ne’ works in his own more or less native language . . . ‘Figurez-vous que je n’y pensais pas’.33) I think these odd textual moments engage our attention because in one way or another they cannot be securely located on one side or other of the divide between mistake and error, contingency and necessity. The mistakes are not simply mistakes; they feel at once functional and gratuitous; and the interpretations being forced are not simply misreadings – they do not definitively reduce to what Stanley Corngold, in the text cited at the beginning of this chapter, calls ‘an unironical and sheerly mistaken violence’. The Shape all light is moving on the stream as the narrator moves, like a reflection in the water: a drowned shape is imaginable. As for the spirit being the light in ‘Hegel on the Sublime’, both the wider Christian intertext and the unique force of the trope of light underwrite de Man’s aberrant reading. The prominence of the figure of light in so many of these scenes that I’ve been evoking is no accident, of course. A ‘mistake’ that figuratively burns your retina is a mistake disturbing the master-trope for intelligibility. Corngold, though mistaken in his assurance that mistaking can be known as such, is right to insist on ‘the peculiar tenacity of structures [de Man] calls mistakes’,34 so long as we keep in mind that tenacious mistaking of this sort is also what de Man calls error. That ‘peculiar tenacity’, in turn, can be understood in relation to the themes of this collection, for what is at stake in the figure of light, as deployed in these contexts, is sovereignty itself. De Man’s violent reading re-injects pantheism (‘God is light’) into sublime monotheism, making Hegel’s God into a self-disrupting Pantheismusstreit, a spirit that posits itself as unable to posit. This supererogatory inoculation of light generates, that is, a radical monotheism – a withdrawal of God from human comprehension in a way that no longer permits any dialectical recuperation (AI 114). The monarch as God as language as the matrix of value has been desacralized. Out of this predicament the prosaic critical economy of law emerges as the stutter of an imposition unable to justify itself, its theotropic movements exposed to political demand. De Man’s reading of light as the figure for ‘the necessary phenomenality of any positing (setzen)’ (AI 113), is a reading that sheds light by imposing it. And perhaps it would be fair to propose that, as he builds this reading, de Man pretends to discover what he knew all along, all the while leaving

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 113

29/06/2012 11:11

114 m a r c redfield traces or memorializations of a mistaking that outstrips knowledge. The notation ‘p. 481’ would then be like a knot in a handkerchief, a note that is a citation but not quite a quote – a mutilated quote: one that forgets itself as it quotes itself, and as thinking occurs.

No tes 1. Stanley Corngold, ‘Error in Paul de Man’, Critical Inquiry, 8:3, 1982, pp. 489–507, here p. 492. Corngold is using the standard abbreviation ‘BI’ to reference de Man’s Blindness and Insight; since my chapter will soon be examining some of de Man’s peculiar citational gestures, let me testify that Corngold’s reference is perfectly correct: on page 109 of Blindness and Insight (both in the original 1971 edition to which Corngold refers, and in the revised 1983 edition which I shall be using), de Man does indeed use the phrase ‘mere error’ in the sense Corngold indicates. 2. Ibid., p. 493. 3. Ibid., p. 500, Corngold’s emphasis. 4. Ibid., p. 505. 5. Corngold offers as an example of such ‘unironical and sheerly mistaken violence’ de Man’s translation of a phrase of Nietzsche’s: ‘Intelligence can only exist in a world in which mistakes occur, in which error reigns – a world of consciousness’ (Friedrich Nietzsche, Gesammelte Werke [Munich: Musarion, 1920–29], 3: 239, as translated by de Man in AR 100, and cited by Corngold, ‘Error in Paul de Man’, p. 506). The second half of that sentence, in Nietzsche’s original German, reads, ‘wo etwas verfehlt werden kann, wo der Irrtum stattfindet’; and Corngold objects to de Man’s leaving out the kann (‘mistakes can occur’), and making stattfindet (‘takes place’) into ‘reigns’: De Man’s ‘translation’ allows him to conclude that ‘Dionysos, as music or language, must now belong . . . to the teleological domain of the text, and then he is mere error and mystification . . .’ (AR p. 100, my [=Corngold’s] italics). But here the ‘insight’ produced by the mistranslation is not simply ‘owed’ to the error, as in the best manner of the operation blindness/insight (‘critics . . . owe their best insights to the assumptions these insights disprove’ [BI p. ix]). Rather it is contaminated by the error which is merely a mistake. The insight is not valid. Nietzsche does not say that intelligence is a domain of mere error. And why indeed would de Man want him to say this unless he now believes that ‘mere error’, or mistake, is all that governs intelligence? (Corngold, ‘Error in Paul de Man’, p. 506)

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

For de Man’s account of his translation of Nietzsche in response to these charges, see note 14 below. Corngold, ‘Error in Paul de Man’, p. 504. Ibid., p. 507. Paul de Man, ‘A Letter from Paul de Man’, Critical Inquiry, 8:3, 1982, pp. 509–13, here 509. Ibid., p. 509. Ibid., p. 510. Paul de Man, ‘Theory of Metaphor in Rousseau’s Second Discourse’, Studies in Romanticism, 12, 1973, pp. 475–99. The essay was reprinted as Chapter 7, ‘Metaphor (Second Discourse)’, in AR. For an incisive study, see Zachary Sng, The Rhetoric of Error from Locke to Kleist (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). John R. Searle, ‘Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida’, Glyph 1 (Baltimore: The

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 114

29/06/2012 11:11

m istake in p aul de man

14.

15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

115

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), pp. 198–208 (here p. 198); Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, ‘Against Theory’, Critical Inquiry, 8:4, 1982, pp. 723–42 (here p. 734, my emphasis). Knapp and Michaels are particularly fond of this particular word: ‘In our view, the mistake on which all critical theory rests . . . The mistake made by theorists . . .’ (p. 724, my emphasis), etc. De Man, ‘A Letter’, p. 511. In what follows I shall be reviewing instances, some of them well known, of de Man’s rough handling of texts, claiming that the violence at work at such moments is hard to pin down as simply ‘mistaken’. The argument between Corngold and de Man about de Man’s translation of Nietzsche offers a modest example of this sort of grey area. Corngold’s objections to de Man’s translation are summarized above (see note 5). In his reply, de Man admits that he had translated a little freely, but affirms that he ‘would not have to change a word in the conclusions drawn from a translation adjusted to conform more closely to the original’ (‘A Letter’, p. 511). De Man writes: ‘A corrected and overliteral translation could read: ‘The mention of intelligence can only occur in a realm where something can be missed [as one misses a target or a train], where [the] error takes place – in the realm of consciousness’ (pp. 511–12, de Man’s brackets). De Man claims that ‘after the use of “Reiche” [realm] for “world” and with the temptation of alliteration’, the phrase ‘error reigns’ is far better than Corngold’s proposed ‘where such a thing as error can take place’ – a translation that de Man in his turn characterizes as grievously mistaken, since Corngold’s translation adds a ‘kann’ that does not exist in Nietzsche (Nietzsche wrote ‘wo der Irrthum stattfindet’, not ‘wo der Irrthum stattfinden kann’). According to de Man this is important, since der Irrthum has for Nietzsche ‘a very specific and precise meaning’: ‘as in The Will to Power, “the old error of the ground [der alte Irrthum vom Grunde]”, the error which consists of mistaking the figure of a ground for an actual cognitive grounding’ (p. 512). Error in this sense takes place, with no modal softening of its event. In the present context we have the luxury of not needing to decide whether de Man or Corngold is right or wrong about Nietzsche (everything depends, of course on what one takes as the decisive context for these phrases). My point in summarizing this debate is simply to suggest that ‘mistakes’, at such moments, are considerably harder to pin down than Corngold’s aggressive phrasing (‘an unironical and sheerly mistaken violence’) suggests (Corngold, ‘Error in Paul de Man’, p. 505). ‘Hypogram and Inscription’ (1981) is collected in RT 27–53. ‘Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant’ (first published in 1984, but written about the same time as the other late essays) and ‘Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics’ (1981) are collected in AI 70–90 and 91–104 respectively. ‘Hegel on the Sublime’ (1983) is also collected in AI 105–18. An exchange between de Man and the philosopher Raymond Geuss followed upon the original publication of ‘Sign and Symbol’: see Raymond Geuss, ‘A Response to Paul de Man’, Critical Inquiry, 10:2, 1983, pp. 375–82, followed by de Man’s ‘Reply to Raymond Geuss’, pp. 383–90. De Man quotes, as shall I, from G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik I, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, in Werke (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), vol. 13. Throughout this essay, translations are mine unless otherwise noted. John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book III, ll. 1–6, in Complete Poetry and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003). See Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book 7, Chapter 10: ‘by my soul’s eye, such as it was, I saw above my mind, an unchangeable light. It was not this common light, plain to all flesh, nor a greater light, as it were, of the same kind, as though that light would shine many, many times more bright, and by its great power fill the universe. Not such was that light, but different, far different from all other lights. Nor was it above my mind, as oil is above water, or sky above earth. It was above my mind because it made me, and I was beneath it because I was made by it’ (The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. John K. Ryan [New York: Image

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 115

29/06/2012 11:11

116 m a r c redfield

20.

21. 22. 23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

Books, 1960], pp. 170–1). Hegel would also have known (though probably not by heart) Dante’s famous lines in Paradiso 13, ll. 55–57: ‘chè quella viva luce che sì mea / dal suo lucente, che non se disuna / da lui nè dall’amor ch’a lor s’intrea’ [‘for that living light which so streams from its shining source that it is not parted from it nor from the love which with them makes the three’] (Dante’s Paradiso, trans. John D. Sinclair [New York: Oxford University Press, 1977]). Andrzej Warminski, the editor of de Man’s posthumous Aesthetic Ideology, tells me that he intended to correct this reference (he has a note in the margin of his working copy to that effect), but then in the end (another mistake! – sometimes the knot in the handkerchief fails us), he forgot to do so. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les confessions, autres textes autobiographiques, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1959), p. 86. Later in the chapter de Man quotes the sentence correctly: ‘ “que je me craignisse de m’excuser” ’ (AR 288). Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2) (‘within such limits’)’, in Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, ed. Tom Cohen et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 277–360 (here p. 339). Ortwin de Graef, ‘Silence to Be Observed: A Trial for Paul de Man’s Inexcusable Confessions’, Yale Journal of Criticism, 3:2, 1990, pp. 214–15 (here p. 63). Although I confess to finding de Graef’s interpretation somewhat tenuous, let me say in passing that he’s making an intelligent point: he’s leveraging de Man’s demonstration in the Confessions essay that confession and excuse are mutually contaminating genres. Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon’, pp. 311 and 318. Robert J. Ellrich, ‘De Man’s Purloined Meaning’, MLN, 106:5, 1991, pp. 1048–51. Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon’, p. 311. Neil Hertz, ‘Lurid Figures’, in Reading de Man Reading, ed. Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 92. Zachary Sng draws our attention to an example from de Man’s reading of Locke in ‘Epistemology of Metaphor’. Here is de Man: ‘But when, on the next page, Locke speaks of language as a “conduit” that may “corrupt the fountains of knowledge which are in things themselves” and even worse, “break or stop the pipes whereby it is distributed to public use,” then this language, not of poetic “pipes and timbrels” but of a plumber’s handyman, raises, by its all too graphic concreteness, questions of propriety’ (AI 36). But as Sng points out, Locke in fact says the opposite of what de Man says Locke says. Locke writes that a person who ‘makes ill use’ of ‘the great Conduit’ of language ‘does not corrupt the Fountains of Knowledge, which are in Things themselves’ (though he does ‘break or stop the Pipes, whereby it is distributed to the publick use and advantage of Mankind’) (John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975], Book 3, Chapter 11, par. 5; p. 510, as cited and discussed in Sng, The Rhetoric of Error, p. 166). This falls into the group of de Man’s violent manipulation of quotations in ways not strictly required by the interpretation (here, as in the ‘Excuses’ essay, de Man could have worked his way around the Locke text and gotten more or less to the same place). In other words, the violence here always seems a bit gratuitous, yet also a bit determined. For a somewhat unsympathetic discussion of de Man’s readings of Wordsworth, see Don H. Bialostosky, ‘What de Man has made of Wordsworth’, in Wordsworth, Dialogics, and the Practice of Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 6ff. Hertz, ‘Lurid Figures’, p. 89. In the process, the narrative order of the text being read will sometimes suffer considerable manipulation, as when ‘the sequence of anecdotes in Kleist’s text on puppets is read in jumbled fashion [in “Aesthetic Formalization in Kleist”]’, as Hertz notes, ‘as though the discussion of the marionettes were the culminating rather than the first episode’ (ibid., p. 103 n. 11).

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 116

29/06/2012 11:11

m istake in p aul de man

117

32. Ibid., p. 93. 33. The quotation is from Henri Thomas, Le parjure (Paris: Gallimard, 1997 [1964]), p. 134, a novel famous for being to some small extent a roman à clef about de Man: ‘Just imagine, I was not thinking about it.’ The de Man character, Stéphane Chalier, says these words of rupture to his long-suffering friend, the first-person narrator, whom Chalier has asked to write the confession of his, Chalier’s, perjury. When the narrator replies, ‘my dear Stéphane, I’m not the one after all who had a little lapse of memory the day you got married’, Chalier replies, ‘That’s true. Just imagine, I was not thinking about it. Thank you. I think the visit is over. You needn’t bother to come back.’ Jacques Derrida analyzes this complex scene (partly in order to examine the question ‘Can one commit perjury “without thinking about it”?’) in ‘ “Le Parjure”, Perhaps’, in Without Alibi, ed. and trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 161–201. 34. Corngold, ‘Error in Paul de Man’, p. 504.

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 117

29/06/2012 11:11

Chapter 9

9

Lightstruck: ‘Hegel on the Sublime’

Andrzej Warminski

O

n the final examination of my undergraduate literary theory course I sometimes include a short ID for extra credit: ‘/i/ or /u/’. It’s from a moment in Roman Jakobson’s ‘Linguistics and Poetics’ when he claims that ‘Sound symbolism is an undeniably objective relation founded on a phenomenal connection between the visual and auditory experience.’ If results of research in this area have been vague or controversial, says Jakobson, ‘it is primarily due to an insufficient care for the methods of psychological and/or linguistic inquiry’. According to Jakobson, a proper attention to the phonological aspect of speech sounds – in particular, to their ultimate components, i.e., phonemes – will confirm such ‘sound symbolism’: ‘when, on testing, for example, such phonemic oppositions as grave versus acute we ask whether /i/ or /u/ is darker, some of the subjects may respond that this question makes no sense to them, but hardly one will state that /i/ is the darker of the two’. So: if hardly anyone will state that /i/ is the darker of the two, then it is as clear as day that /u/ must be darker and /i/ must be lighter. Although poetry ‘is not the only area where sound symbolism makes itself felt’, says Jakobson, ‘it is a province where the internal nexus between sound and meaning changes from latent to patent and manifests itself most palpably and intensely’. The Russian language – which has /d,en,/ for ‘day’ and /nocˇ/ for ‘night’ – seems to agree with Jakobson’s claim, but French, as Mallarmé already noted, is rather perverse since in ‘jour’ and ‘nuit’ the distribution of grave and acute vowels is inverted. Jakobson’s claim is peculiar, to say the least, and it is rather ironic given the fact that his project in this essay is based on Saussurian linguistics whose basic principle is the arbitrariness of the sign. Jakobson’s retraction, not to say betrayal, of this principle is explicit just a few lines earlier when he says that the ‘codified contiguity’ between signans and signatum is ‘often confusingly labeled “arbitrariness of the verbal sign” ’.1 The confusion is all Jakobson’s, and his synesthesia, rather than being founded on a phenomenal connection between different sensory modes, amounts to an outright hallucination. This hallucination is, of course, inevitable and predictable from the first page of his essay in so far as Jakobson assumes the aesthetic function of literature and poetry when he calls it ‘verbal art’. In his /i/ or /u/ test, he should have listened to those sub-

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 118

29/06/2012 11:11

lig h tstru ck: ‘ h ege l on the subl ime ’

119

jects who responded that this question made no sense to them, for they clearly show some aptitude for the study of literary theory (as literary theory in Paul de Man’s sense in ‘The Resistance to Theory’, i.e., one based on a ‘non-phenomenal linguistics’ like Saussure’s). On my test this past winter one hapless student identified the item as follows: ‘ “/i/ or /u/”. Schiller. If not I then it is you.’ Although the student clearly had not a clue, he nevertheless manages to outdo Jakobson at his own game by immediately transposing the phonemes /i/ and /u/ into lexical, meaning-carrying units, i.e., words – the grammatical first person subject ‘I’ and the grammatical second person subject ‘you’ which get inscribed into a self/other relation and hence potentially into a dialectic. And it is most appropriate that the student identifies the author as Schiller, for he thereby returns Jakobson’s hallucinatory aesthetification to the right address by laying it at the doorstep of the arch-aesthetic ideologist Schiller. Schiller had his own hallucinations, including believing that Kant’s ideas of reason could become available to intuition (Anschauung) in the form of beauty and that the beautiful object would thereby become a symbol and the veritable presentation (Darstellung) of the infinite.2 So: the clueless student got something right and deserves some extra credit. But what does this have to do with the sublime, in particular the Hegelian sublime as read by de Man? Everything, as it turns out, for Jakobson’s ‘symbolism’ and Schiller’s ‘symbol’ take us directly to the problematic of sign and symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics as read by de Man not only in the essay of that title (‘Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics’) but also in its follow-up ‘Hegel on the Sublime’. Indeed, ‘Hegel on the Sublime’ amounts to an ‘application’ of the first essay’s findings to Hegel’s Aesthetics since, despite the essay’s title, ‘Sign and Symbol’ does most of its reading of Hegel not in the Aesthetics but in the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, i.e., paragraph 20 of the Introduction and then the passages on the sign (as distinguished from the symbol) and a mechanical memory by rote in the section ‘Psychologie’ of the Encyclopedia’s third part, the Philosophy of Mind. Whereas ‘Sign and Symbol’ makes some assertions about the Aesthetics – on the basis of a reading of other texts – ‘Hegel on the Sublime’ tries to demonstrate the validity of these assertions by reading a particular moment in the Aesthetics: the pages on the ‘Symbolism of the Sublime’, which is the penultimate chapter of the section on symbolic art. But in ‘Hegel on the Sublime’ de Man supplements the findings and insights of ‘Sign and Symbol’ by framing the discussion of the aesthetic here in terms of its relation to the political. Indeed, de Man uses the ‘passage from the aesthetic theory of the sublime to the political world of the law’ (AI 115) that takes place in Hegel’s text to demonstrate, rather than merely asserting, how ‘truly productive political thought is accessible only by way of critical aesthetic theory’ (AI 107). This demonstration may make ‘Hegel on the Sublime’ de Man’s most explicitly political text. Perhaps it is no accident that it may also be de Man’s most difficult text. There are at least three reasons for this difficulty. It stems in large part from de Man’s attempt to present a certain conflictual doubleness or even duplicity in Hegel’s account of the sublime. It may also be due to the fact that the Hegelian sublime is to be taken as the critical undoing of the Longinian sublime, at least the Longinian sublime as appropriated by a certain ‘tradition’ in the American interpretation of Romanticism, one wholly

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 119

29/06/2012 11:11

120 a n d rzej w arm in ski invested in what de Man calls ‘the ideology of the symbol’ (AI 100). In other words, in taking up the Hegelian sublime, de Man is also taking on this tradition (which is very much a Yale-Cornell tradition). But the ultimate reason for the difficulty of de Man’s reading must surely be the apparently simple ‘fact’ that de Man cannot perform his reading of Hegel without doing violence to Hegel’s text, making Hegel say what his text plainly does not say. In the eyes of some, this ‘mistake’ – if that’s what it is – is such that it would render de Man’s reading a non-reading or a mere ‘performance’ of reading without any cognitive validity. Let me try to recount and unpack de Man’s extremely condensed reading of the Hegelian sublime, unravel the intricate strands of its implications, and then try to account for de Man’s apparent mistake. De Man’s first step in ‘Hegel on the Sublime’ is to reject ‘the principle of exclusion that is assumed to operate between aesthetic theory and epistemological speculation or, in a symmetrical pattern, between a concern with aesthetics and a concern with political issues’ (AI 105). In actual philosophy – for instance, in both Kant and Hegel – the aesthetic, rather than being a principle of exclusion, is a principle of articulation: in Kant, between the First and Second Critiques, between the schemata of theoretical reason with those of practical reason; and in Hegel, between objective spirit and absolute spirit, between the world of ethics, law and politics and philosophical thought. Or, as de Man puts it rather brutally in a 1982 seminar on ‘Aesthetic Theory from Kant to Hegel’: ‘This is why both Kant and Hegel, who had little interest in the arts, had to put it [aesthetics] in, to make possible the link between real events and philosophical discourse.’3 So: if the aesthetic – once it is taken not as a value invested with (pedagogical, religious and political) authority but as a philosophical category capable of withstanding critique – is such a principle of articulation, then what is it in Hegel and where and how does it appear in his Aesthetics? Although it may be easy enough to say what the aesthetic is in Hegel – as de Man likes to remind us, it is ‘the sensory or (better) the phenomenal manifestation of the idea [das sinnliche Scheinen der Idee]’ (AI 108) – determining where and how the idea appears in Hegel’s system is far from self-evident. Since Hegel’s Aesthetics provides only banal and empirical answers as it ‘historicizes the problem in the ideologically loaded genealogy of the modern as derived from the classical, Hellenic past’ – in short, it seems to answer ‘The Greeks’, Greek art, the highest excellence of which art is capable – a detour is needed ‘into other texts in which the discussion of the same issues is less blurred by romantic ideology’ (AI 108). The detour allows de Man to go over and summarize the findings of ‘Sign and Symbol’ directly and vigorously: Most clearly in the Encyclopedia, but in the Logic as well, the idea makes its appearance on the mental stage of human intelligence at the precise moment when our consciousness of the world, which faculties such as perception or imagination have interiorized by way of recollection (Erinnerung), is no longer experienced but remains accessible only to memorization (Gedächtnis). At that moment, and no other, can it be said that the idea leaves a material trace, accessible to the senses, upon the world. We can perceive the most fleeting and

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 120

29/06/2012 11:11

lig h tstru ck: ‘ h ege l on the subl ime ’

121

imagine the wildest things without any change occurring to the surface of the world, but from the moment we memorize, we cannot do without such a trace, be it as a knot in our handkerchief, a shopping list, a table of multiplication, a psalmodized sing-song or plain chant, or any other memorandum. Once such a notation has occurred, the inside-outside metaphor of experience and signification can be forgotten, which is the necessary (if not sufficient) condition of thought (Denken) to begin. The aesthetic moment in Hegel occurs as the conscious forgetting of a consciousness by means of a materially actualized system of notation or inscription. (AI 108–9) If nothing even remotely similar seems to be stated in the public theses or arguments of Hegel’s Aesthetics, it may be because ‘similar or equivalent assertions’ occur in passages that have been ‘overlooked, misunderstood, or censored’ (AI 109). One such moment is Hegel’s chapter on ‘The Symbolism of the Sublime’. Although it is still a merely formal consideration, the very placing of the sublime in Hegel’s Aesthetics is telling. ‘We find the sublime’, writes Hegel, ‘primarily in the Hebraic state of mind and in the sacred texts of the Jews’ (XIII 480).4 The association of the sublime with the poetry of the Old Testament may be a commonplace, but Hegel’s reasons are of interest: ‘Hebraic poetry is sublime because it is iconoclastic; it rejects art as plastic or architectural representation, be it as temple or as statue’ (AI 110). Since no image of the divine could possibly be adequate to it, says Hegel, ‘there is no place for the plastic arts in the sublime sacred art of the Jews. Only the poetry of a representation that manifests itself by means of the word will be acceptable’ (XIII 480). Since this ‘word’ is explicitly separated from anything that could be perceived or imagined, de Man does not hesitate to identify it immediately with inscription – which, according to de Man’s reading of the Encylopedia, is the first and only phenomenal manifestation of the idea. ‘Monuments and statues made of stone and metal’, writes de Man, ‘are only pre-aesthetic. They are sensory appearances all right, but not, or not yet, appearances of the idea. The idea appears only as written inscription. Only the written word can be sublime, to the precise extent that the written word is neither representational, like a perception, nor imaginative, like a phantasm’ (AI 110). De Man claims that Hegel’s chapter confirms this formal affirmation and develops some of its implications and consequences. And, if this is Hegel’s sublime, then it differs considerably from the post-Longinian sublime of his predecessors. De Man borrows from Meyer Abrams’s very useful chapter on the sublime in The Mirror and the Lamp and lists among them John Dennis, Bishop Lowth, and Herder – ‘a tradition which has survived in the American interpretation of Romanticism in Wimsatt, Abrams, Bloom, Hartman, and Weiskel’. De Man adds that this tradition was ‘finally ironized, though not necessarily exorcised, in Neil Hertz’s remarkable essay “Lecture de Longin” – which remains conveniently hidden from the tradition by appearing, of all places, in Paris, where no one can appreciate what is at stake in this closely familial romance’ (AI 110). Hegel’s sublime differs from this tradition and its interpretation of the Longinian sublime for the same reasons it also diverges from the apparent theses and arguments of the Aesthetics: that is, ‘it marks an open break with the linguistic model of the symbol

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 121

29/06/2012 11:11

122 a n d rzej w arm in ski that pervades all sections of the Aesthetics’ (AI 110). As the radical and definitive separation between the order of discourse and the order of the sacred, the moment Hegel calls sublime is decidedly un-Longinian and un-symbolic. De Man is very helpful in spelling out and generalizing what he means by ‘the concept of language as symbol to which the Aesthetics is firmly committed’ – and from which the section on the sublime marks an open break: The phenomenality of the linguistic sign can, by an infinite variety of devices or turns, be aligned with the phenomenality, as knowledge (meaning) or sensory experience, of the signified toward which it is directed. It is the phenomenalization of the sign that constitutes signification, regardless of whether it occurs by way of conventional or by way of natural means. The term phenomenality here implies not more and not less than that the process of signification, in and by itself, can be known, just as the laws of nature as well as those of convention can be made accessible to some form of knowledge. (AI 111) This is all that the phenomenalization of the sign requires – the claim that the process of signification can be known – and it amounts to a certain degré zéro of symbolicity, one could say. In marking an open break with the linguistic model of the symbol, Hegel’s sublime abandons this claim. The constraint to abandon this claim – and break with the model of the symbol – comes, in Hegel, from epistemological considerations: ‘from the classical and, in this case, Kantian critical process to discriminate between modes of cognition and to separate the knowledge of the natural world from the knowledge of how knowledge is achieved, the separation between mathematics and epistemology’ (AI 111). In Hegel’s history of art this corresponds to the passage from pantheism to monotheism – ‘the moment when the infinite difference and dispersal of what Hegel calls the “single substance” (die eine Substanz) that stands beyond the antinomy of light and the shapeless, singularizes itself in the designation of this absolute generality as the sacred or god’ (AI 111). Indeed, de Man repeats, the relationship between pantheism and monotheism is like the relationship between natural science and epistemology: ‘the concept of mind (be it as Locke’s understanding, Kant’s Vernunft, or Hegel’s Spirit) is the monotheistic principle of philosophy as the single field of unified knowledge’ (AI 111). This is a first difficult moment in de Man’s reading, but in order to understand what follows it is essential to get it right. It is difficult in part because Hegel’s chapter on the sublime nowhere makes this analogy, at least not explicitly. But if we again remember the larger context in which art takes its place in Hegel’s system, de Man’s assertion is borne out. Art in Hegel’s system is the first manifestation of absolute spirit; art expresses the same, absolute contents and meanings as religion and philosophy, its signal distinction being that it does so in sensuous form. But in order that those absolute contents and meanings may find a sensuous form adequate to them – that is, adequate as the contents of art as art, which is what happens in the following section of the Aesthetics on classical art – the absolute meaning or content has first to come into consciousness on its own account, says Hegel right at the beginning of the chapter on the sublime, ‘sepa-

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 122

29/06/2012 11:11

lig h tstru ck: ‘ h ege l on the subl ime ’

123

rated from the entire world of appearance’; and ‘the first decisive purification of the absolute [meaning] and its express separation from the sensuous present, i.e., from the empirical individuality of external things, is to be sought in the sublime’ (XIII 466). And this separation and withdrawal of the absolute from the world of sensuous appearance begins with the passage from pantheism to monotheism: The monotheistic moment (which in Hegel is not or not yet the sublime) is essentially verbal and coincides with the fantastic notion that die eine Substanz could be given a name – such as, for instance, die eine Substanz, or the One, or Being, or Allah, or Yahweh, or I – and that this name could then function symbolically, yielding knowledge and discourse. (AI 111) De Man’s including the ‘I’ at the end of his list is helpful, for it indicates that what happens here in the ‘monotheistic moment’ of the Aesthetics is the same thing as what happens in the self-positing of the ‘I’ in de Man’s reading (in ‘Sign and Symbol’) of paragraph 20 of the Encyclopedia. That is, and in short, in its initial self-positing the ‘I’ is like a sign but it states itself as a symbol. De Man’s summary in ‘Sign and Symbol’ helps us with this passage in ‘Hegel on the Sublime’: The I, in its freedom from sensory determination, is originally similar to the sign. Since, however, it states itself as what it is not, it represents as determined a relationship to the world that is in fact arbitrary, that is to say, it states itself as symbol. To the extent that the I points to itself, it is a sign, but to the extent that it speaks of anything but itself, it is a symbol. (AI 100) In other words, when the one substance is given a name, this corresponds to the moment of the sign; and the fantastic notion that this name could function symbolically, yielding knowledge and discourse, is clearly the moment when it states itself as symbol. And just as in the case of de Man’s reading of the ‘I’ in paragraph 20 this happens because the I ‘states itself as what it is not’ and thus ‘represents as determined a relationship to the world that is in fact arbitrary’, so here Hegel would want to understand the monotheistic moment ‘as a relationship between mind and nature constituted by negation’ (AI 111). But, according to de Man, something else is going on, for ‘behind this familiar and historically intelligible dialectical model stands a different reality’ (AI 111). De Man first explains why this is not a dialectic mediated by determined negation in logical terms: ‘For it is one thing to assert that absolute knowledge accomplishes its labor by way of negation, another thing entirely to assert the possibility of negating the absolute by allowing it, as in this passage, to enter in an unmediated relationship with its other’ (AI 111). That is, as soon as the absolute enters into a relationship with its other, it is negated as the absolute. Since the absolute is that which, by definition, goes beyond the relation of the one to the other, there is no other to the absolute. Hegel’s quandary may be somewhat understandable in these logical terms, but it becomes still more comprehensible once we remember that what is going on here, in terms of the positing of the ‘I’, is the sign mistaking itself for a symbol as soon as it states anything about

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 123

29/06/2012 11:11

124 a n d rzej w arm in ski itself by attaching predicates to the ‘I’. In short, once this moment is understood in linguistic terms, as it has to be, since we are talking about the word here – as de Man says, the monotheistic moment is ‘essentially verbal’ – ‘Hegel’s narrative resembles that of dialectical sublation or upheaval (Aufhebung) only on a first level of understanding’ (AI 111). In Hegel’s account of the sublime properly speaking – the sub-section titled ‘The art of the sublime’ – de Man indeed finds an ‘interference of a dialectical with another, not necessarily compatible, pattern of narration’ (AI 112). And it is by reading this interference that de Man gets to that second, or at least other, level of understanding. Needless to say, that interference is legible only in linguistic terms, indeed, as the combination of two incompatible rhetorical modes. It is worth following de Man’s steps here closely, for they lead directly to the political in Hegel. At first sight, Hegel’s account of the sublime proper would seem to be quite recognizable as a ‘dialectized sublime’, indeed the Longinian sublime of the tradition (and its survival in the Yale-Cornell interpretation of Romanticism): When we read of a hidden god who has ‘withdrawn into himself and thus asserted his autonomy against the finite world, as pure interiority and substantive power’, or hear that in the sublime, the divine substance ‘becomes truly manifest’ (p. 479) against the weakness and the ephemerality of its creatures, then we easily understand the pathos of this servitude as praise of divine power. The language of negativity is then a dialectical and recuperative moment, akin to similar turns that Neil Hertz has located in Longinus’ treatise. Hegel’s sublime may stress the distance between the human discourse of the poets and the voice of the sacred even further than Longinus, but as long as this distance remains, as he puts it, a relationship (pp. 478, 481), however negative, the fundamental analogy between poetic and divine creation is preserved. (AI 112) In fact, Hegel refers to Longinus as he repeats one of his most famous quotations, the fiat lux from Genesis: ‘ “God said: Let there be light, and there was light”; this Longinus quoted long ago as in every way a striking example of the sublime’ (XIII 481). What was already implicit in the monotheistic moment preparatory to the sublime becomes explicit here – though it seems at first to be re-dialecticized. De Man writes: For zeugen (to engender) Hegel wishes to substitute schaffen (to create) . . . Creation is purely verbal, the imperative, pointing, and positing power of the word. The word speaks and the world is the transitive object of its utterance, but this implies that what is thus spoken, and which includes us, is not the subject of its speech act. Our obedience to the word is mute: ‘The word . . . whose command to be also and actually posits what is without mediation and in mute obedience’ (p. 481, italics mine). (AI 112) But the muteness of the existent (das Daseiende) created by God’s word is rather talkative; ‘it speaks’, says de Man, ‘and even writes, a great deal in Hegel, and in an

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 124

29/06/2012 11:11

lig h tstru ck: ‘ h ege l on the subl ime ’

125

interesting variety of ways. First of all, it quotes’ (AI 112). Scripture quotes Moses quoting God and in Genesis it uses the fundamental rhetorical modes of representation: both mimesis (‘And God said “Let there be light” ’) and diegesis (‘And God called the light day . . .’). But none of these utterances is mute ‘in the sense of being merely passive or devoid of reflexive knowledge’ (AI 112). Quotations have a great deal of performative power – indeed, one could say that only quotations have such power – and carry considerable cognitive weight: ‘if, as Longinus implies, the sublime poet here is Moses himself, then the question of the veracity of Moses’ testimonial is bound to arise, that is to say, a cognitive critical inquiry is inevitably linked to the assertion of linguistic positional force’ (AI 112). This is why in the fiat lux, light is the privileged object of predication, for ‘ “light” names the necessary phenomenality of any positing (setzen)’ (AI 112). In short, in Hegel’s choice of quotation and his commentary on it, there is ‘a convergence of discourse and the sacred’ which ‘occurs by way of phenomenal cognition’ (AI 112): ‘No matter how strongly the autonomy of language is denied, as long as the language can declare and know its own weakness and call itself mute, we remain in a Longinian mode . . . A dialectized sublime is still, as in Longinus, an intimation of poetic grandeur and immortality’ (AI 112). So: despite, or rather because of, the fact that the sublime from the side of God the Creator is to be understood in linguistic terms as a mimetico-diegetic system of representation with considerable performative (though not positional) power and cognitive weight, such a sublime nevertheless still remains quite rigorously within the Longinian mode of a dialectized or dialectical sublime. As such, it is also a sublime that marks a return to the linguistic model of the symbol from which the monotheistic moment seemed to break for epistemological reasons. De Man clearly means us to understand that a convergence of discourse and the sacred which occurs by way of phenomenal cognition is an example of what he called the ‘phenomenalization of the sign’ – a con-vergence that is a veritable sym-ballein. But the symbolic convergence of discourse and the sacred gets broken apart when Hegel passes to the consideration of the sublime ‘from the side of man’ and quotes Scripture again. This time it is from a song of praise in the Psalms: ‘Light is your garment, that you wear; you stretch out the heavens like a curtain . . .’ (a translation of Martin Luther’s ‘Licht ist dein Kleid, das du anhast; du breitest den Himmel wie einen Teppich’ [Psalm 104, ll. 2–3]). The juxtaposition of this quotation with the fiat lux from Genesis is, says de Man, quite amazing. As a garment, light is now an outside that conceals an inside: One can understand this, as Hegel does, as a statement about the insignificance of the sensory world as compared to the spirit. Unlike the logos, it does not have the power to posit anything; its power, or only discourse, is the knowledge of its weakness. But since this same spirit also, without mediation, is the light (p. 481),5 the combination of the two quotations states that the spirit posits itself as that which is unable to posit, and this declaration is either meaningless or duplicitous. One can pretend to be weak when one is strong, but the power to pretend is decisive proof of one’s strength. One can know oneself, as man does,

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 125

29/06/2012 11:11

126 a n d rzej w arm in ski as that which is unable to know, but by moving from knowledge to position, all is changed. Position is all of a piece, and moreover, unlike thought, it actually occurs. It becomes impossible to find a common ground for or between the two quotations, ‘Let there be light’ and ‘Light is your garment’. (AI 113–14) De Man’s account of the incompatibility between the two quotations is clear enough: light cannot be both the spirit (or God) – as the positing word (logos) in which the power and the glory are one – and also a garment or veil that covers the spirit (or God) and is without positing power. And we would be right to hear in the statement – ‘the spirit posits itself as that which is unable to posit’ – a repetition of de Man’s reading of the positing of the ‘I’ in paragraph 20 of the Encyclopedia. The ‘I’ posits itself as sign, but as soon as it speaks of anything other than itself it is a symbol. The relationship between them is that of ‘mutual obliteration’ (AI 98). (Indeed, there is even something of an echo here of de Man’s reading of Hegel’s ‘Ich kann nicht sagen was ich nur meine’ as ‘I cannot say I’ [AI 98].) And any attempt to reconcile the two incompatible quotations by saying that the first one (‘Let there be light’) is from the perspective or side of God and that the second (‘Light is your garment’) from the side of man is nixed from the start since ‘within the monotheistic realm of die eine Substanz, no such thing as a human perspective could exist independently of the divine, nor could one speak of a ‘side’ of the gods (as one speaks of the ‘coˇté de chez Swann’), since the parousia of the sacred allows for no parts, contours, or geometry’ (AI 114). ‘The only thing the misleading metaphor of a two-sided world accomplishes’, adds de Man, ‘is to radicalize the separation between sacred and human in a manner that no dialectic can surmount (aufheben). Such is indeed the declared thesis of the chapter, but it can only be read if one dispels the pathos of negation that conceals its actual force’ (AI 114). In short, it is the juxtaposition of the two incompatible quotations that allows de Man to reconstruct the other pattern of narration that interferes with the dialectical pattern. Particularly significant for de Man’s reading – and the imminent arrival of the political out of it – is that it emerges ‘from a combination of two rhetorical modes, that of representation and that of apostrophe’ (AI 114): ‘Paradoxically, the assumption of praise, in the Psalms, undoes the ground for praise established in Genesis’, and this happens on account of the passage from representation to apostrophe, from the Longinian mimetico-diegetic system of representation with its performative power and cognitive weight to the mode of praise par excellence, the figure of the ode. The strength of Hegel’s choice of example makes clear that what the ode praises is not what it addresses (‘la prise de Namur’, Psyche or God) – for the light that allows the addressed entity to appear is always a veil – but that it always praises the veil, the device of apostrophe as it allows for the illusion of address. Since the ode, unlike the epic (which belongs to representation), knows exactly what it does, it does not praise at all, for no figure of speech is ever praiseworthy in itself. The passage reveals the inadequacy of the Longinian model of the sublime as representation. (AI 114)

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 126

29/06/2012 11:11

lig h tstru ck: ‘ h ege l on the subl ime ’

127

If the ground of praise established in Genesis is undone by the assumption of praise in the Psalms, it is on account of this passage from representation to apostrophe, from language as representation to language as trope. Why does this happen? It happens because the symbolic convergence of discourse and the sacred that is the essence of the Longinian sublime (as exemplified in ‘Let there be light’) gets undone when the light enters a transformational system of tropes – that is, when it is turned into a garment or a veil of the sacred. In entering a system of tropes, it enters a system of signification which is no longer that of the symbol, no longer one in which the relationship between sign and meaning is dialectical, i.e., mediated by determined negation. (Cf. de Man later: ‘The relationship between sign and meaning, however, in the symbol, is dialectical’ [AI 116].) As a garment or a veil, the light is no more or less praiseworthy than any other trope, and, as a trope, it is exchangeable for any other veil or garment. Needless to say, as such – that is, as trope – the sacred gets desacralized, it undergoes a thorough secularization. Perhaps this becomes still more understandable if we recall the age-old (Christian) analogy ‘garment is to body as body is to soul’ and the metaphors it produces – e.g., the body can be called ‘the garment of the soul’. It is clear that in the Judaic sublime – and the sublime as such is Judaic in Hegel – there can be no question of figuring the sacred as a body or by a body. The relationship cannot be one of body to soul, not any kind of incarnation. The sublime here is that of the sacred as the self-positing word completely separated from the world of appearances and figuration. Nevertheless, understood as a dialectized, Longinian sublime in which a symbolic convergence of discourse and the sacred is supposed to take place (at least by negation), this resolutely dis-incarnate sublime would seem to want to be – or at least Hegel would seem to want it to be – also the body of the sacred. But it clearly cannot be both like the body in relation to a soul and simultaneously like the garment in relation to the body. It cannot be both a substantial symbol of the sacred and a trope that would be an allegorical sign for the impossibility of figuring the sacred, for the utter divergence of discourse and the sacred. (Or, to put it still another way: in positing the world and itself as light – the entire realm of phenomenal cognition – the absolute, which was to be separated from the order of the phenomenal other, from the order of discourse, enters into it, but the second quotation makes clear that when it did so, it entered a system of tropes and not a system of representation – meaning that the relation of sign to meaning (in the ‘symbol’) was not one of phenomenalization, of the alignment of the phenomenality of the sign and the phenomenality of meaning, but rather tropological, more like that of the sign [as distinguished from the symbol].) Hence the incompatibility between the ‘two’ sublimes – a ‘Longinian’ sublime and a ‘Hegelian’ sublime already within the ‘Hegelian sublime’, as it were – hence the interference of two incompatible patterns of narration (dialectical and other-than-dialectical) as well as of language as representation and language as trope – and also, if the proper distinctions and transitions are made, of positing and trope, symbol and sign. ‘As the section develops’, writes de Man, the divergence between Hegel and Longinus becomes nearly as absolute as the divergence between man and God that Hegel calls sublime. Yet the discourses

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 127

29/06/2012 11:11

128 a n d rzej w arm in ski remain intertwined as by a knot that cannot be unraveled. The heterogeneity of art and of the sacred, first introduced as a moment in an epistemological dialectic, is rooted in the linguistic structure in which the dialectic is itself inscribed. (AI 115) The last sentence of de Man’s summary statement is important to remember both for the stakes of Hegel’s system and for appreciating what follows in the last sentences of Hegel’s sublime. It suggests that the absolute spirit, in having to pass through the moment of art, of the art-spirit (Kunstgeist), inscribes itself (and its putatively dialectical progression) in a linguistic structure that undoes itself and, in the process, also undoes the absolute’s claim to absoluteness. As de Man had already said in his analysis of the monotheistic moment, an absolute that enters into an unmediated relation with its other is no longer the absolute. It is also important to remember this if we want to understand what happens at the end of Hegel’s sublime and de Man’s reading of it. For Hegel’s sublime does not end with the heterogeneity of art and of the sacred – with the ‘insurmountable aloofness of God’ (XIII 484) and the ‘unworthiness’ and ‘nullity’ (Nichtigkeit) of man before God in fear and trembling. Rather in the final paragraph on the sublime Hegel would recuperate a positive value out of the very nullity of man: ‘within this nullity (innerhalb dieser Nichtighkeit) man nevertheless gains a freer and more independent position’ (XIII 485). For, on the one hand, what arises from the ‘substantial peace and constancy of God in respect of his will and its commands for man’ (XIII 485) is the law (das Gesetz); and, on the other hand, ‘in man’s exaltation (Erhebung) there lies at the same time the complete and clear distinction (better, differentiation [Unterscheidung]) between the human and the Divine, the finite and the Absolute, and thereby the judgment of good and evil, and the decision (Entscheidung) for one or the other, is deposited into the subject itself’ (XIII 485). This is how man gains a freer and more independent position and, in his righteousness and adherence to the law, finds an affirmative relation to God. Before blaming or praising Hegel for his ‘conservative individualism’, writes de Man, ‘one should try to understand what is involved in this passage from the aesthetic theory of the sublime to the political world of the law’ (AI 115). Although this passage seems to be a ‘recuperative corollary to the declared otherness of the divine’, a different economy is at work here: But the definitive loss of the absolute experienced in the sublime puts an end to such an economy of value and replaces it with what one could call a critical economy: the law (das Gesetz) is always a law of differentiation (Unterscheidung), not the grounding of an authority but the unsettling of an authority that is shown to be illegitimate. The political in Hegel originates in the critical undoing of belief, the end of the current theodicy, the banishment of the defenders of faith from the affairs of state, and the transformation of theology into the critical philosophy of right. (AI 115) The law that arises here is not one imposed by the absolute power and authority of God or that of a law-giver or legislator who speaks in God’s voice or steals the

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 128

29/06/2012 11:11

lig h tstru ck: ‘ h ege l on the subl ime ’

129

voice of God. Rather it emerges precisely out of a critical undoing of such a power and such authority, the dethroning of the illegitimate authority of usurpers. That God himself – or at least the God quoted by the ‘legislator of the Jews, no ordinary man’ in the Longinian sublime – would be such a usurper should be clear enough. But lest we start humming the Internationale at this point and congratulate de Man on having extracted revolutionary force out of critical aesthetic theory – and start to think that if we ‘deconstruct’ hard and well enough we can gain a good political conscience – we would do better to remember that the critical economy in which the power of the usurper gets undone is not the product of a dialectic but rather emerges out of a reading of the linguistic structure in which the dialectic is inscribed. De Man follows up the rousing sentences on the political in Hegel with: ‘The main monarch to be thus dethroned or de-sacralized is language, the matrix of all value systems in its claim to possess the absolute power of position. Setzen becomes das Gesetz as the critical power to undo the claim to power, not in the name of absolute or relative justice, but by its own namelessness, its own ordinariness’ (AI 115). In coming from its own namelessness and ordinariness, the critical power to undo the claim to power is essentially prosaic, and it is no accident that what immediately follows the chapter on the sublime in Hegel’s Aesthetics is a chapter on the despised ‘inferior’ or ‘subordinated’ genres (untergeordnete Gattungen), which are ‘deprived of spiritual energy, depth of insight, or of substance, devoid of poetry or philosophy’ (AI 118). Hegel means the rhetoric of figuration and its individual devices, figures and tropes. These are thoroughly prosaic – utterly unsublime and unpoetic – but they are the ‘infrastructures of language, such as grammar and tropes’ and they ‘account for the occurrence of the poetic superstructures, such as genres, as the devices needed for their oppression’ (AI 118). ‘The relentless drive of the dialectic [and its undoing, I might add] results in the essentially prosaic nature of art; to the extent that art is aesthetic, it is also prosaic – as learning by rote is prosaic compared to the depth of recollection, as Aesop is prosaic compared to Homer, or as Hegel’s sublime is prosaic compared to Longinus’ (AI 118). As an essentially prosaic discourse, Hegel’s Aesthetics is very much the discourse of the slave ‘because it is a discourse of the figure rather than of genre, of trope rather than of representation’. But, of course, this is also where it gets its strength and critical power and ‘as a result, it is also politically legitimate and effective as the undoer of usurped authority’ (AI 118). De Man’s ending sounds rather hopeful – especially coming from somebody who was characterized in the 1970s by some reviewer or other as ‘our best guide to the negative in every positive’. It’s hopeful in being put in Marxist terms – grammar and tropes are the ‘infrastructures of language’ oppressed by the ‘poetic superstructures, such as genres’. And if Hegel’s Aesthetics in being prosaic is a discourse of the slave, then it is clearly a potentially liberating discourse, one inscribed in a master/ slave dialectic. Still, our liberationist fervor cannot help but be tempered a bit if we remember that these structures are all inscribed within a linguistic structure. For despite the mind-cracking difficulty of de Man’s two essays on Hegel, the matter can be put in rather simple terms: de Man sets up the competing interests of absolute spirit – which wants to be absolutely spiritual (and not trapped in sensuous form) – and art-spirit – which wants an adequation between sensuous form and spiritual

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 129

29/06/2012 11:11

130 a n d rzej w arm in ski content – in terms of sign and symbol and then works out their mutual undoing. That he calls the labor of this undoing a ‘mutual obliteration’ should be sufficient caution for anybody who would take the liberationist rhetoric of the end literally.

No tes 1. Roman Jakobson, ‘Linguistics and Poetics’, in Language in Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 87–8. The original version of Jakobson’s well-known essay was presented at a conference on style held at Indiana University in 1958. It was then revised and published in Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960). 2. See the second paragraph of the 14th letter in Friedrich Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982) and my reading of it in ‘Returns of the Sublime: Positing and Performative in Kant, Fichte, and Schiller’, MLN, 116:5, 2001, pp. 964–78. 3. Paul de Man, “Aesthetic Theory from Kant to Hegel” (fall 1982), compiled from the notes of Roger Blood, Cathy Caruth, and Suzanne Roos. 4. De Man refers to the twenty-volume Suhrkamp edition of Hegel’s works by volume and page number: G.W.F Hegel, Werke in zwanzig Bänden (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970). 5. For a discussion of this “mistaken” page reference, see the previous chapter in this volume – Ed.

The longer version of this essay, which will appear shortly in my Material Inscriptions volumes with Edinburgh University Press, includes a response to Marc Redfield’s critique in Chapter 8 of this present book.

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 130

29/06/2012 11:11

Chapter 10

10

De Man vs. ‘Deconstruction’: Or, Who, Today, Speaks for the Anthropocene?

Tom Cohen If the word man is a conceptual figure grafted upon a blind metaphor, then the referential status of the discourse about man . . . claims to refer to an entity (man), but this entity turns out to be the substitution of a definitional for what was only a hypothetical knowledge, an epistemological metaphor substituting certitude for ignorance. (TA 3) everything is ‘outside’ everything else; there are nothing but outside differences and no integration is possible. (TA 114)

I

n Paul de Man’s talk on Benjamin’s concept of translation he at one point summarizes the latter’s conception of a history without historicism, one that is neither human nor temporally indexed: As such, history is not human, because it pertains strictly to the order of language; it is not natural, for the same reason; it is not phenomenal, in the sense that no cognition, no knowledge about man, can be derived from a history which as such is purely a linguistic complication; and it is not really temporal either, because the structure that animates it is not a temporal structure . . . The dimension of futurity, for example, which is present in it, is not temporal. (RT 92) I will use this labyrinthine proposition, a series of parries or negations, to ask what relevance de Man might have before the twenty-first-century horizons today unfolding, those say of ‘climate change’, before which such a description appears unexceptional. De Man’s final Messenger Lecture at Cornell, 4 March 1983, would be transcribed from tapes as ‘ “Conclusions” on Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” ’. The talk begins with allusion to the impossibility of any conclusion in the series of lectures. Funny things come out in these final ‘talks’. In the talk titled ‘Kant and Schiller’ there seems a near structural account of what he calls the ‘relapse’, a

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 131

29/06/2012 11:11

132 t o m co h en hermeneutic reflex of appropriation out of which something like the human is posited or maintained as a sort of defence. In both essays there emerges the insistent figure of what de Man calls ‘irreversibility’. That is, of getting to a point where, at least, one does not return, even if one has no map for the next step. De Man will, with Benjamin, identify language itself as the ‘non-human’, what the speaker nonetheless imagines as home, dwelling, oikos, interior, or precisely human territory. At the end of this labyrinth one is rewarded by a Minotaur-logic, which, half-human and half-animal, proceeds to consume the discoverer. One is deprived, says de Man with regard to Benjamin’s concept of translation, of any ‘original’ or home to return to or from which one could even evoke a narrative of homelessness or exile. The essay published as ‘Conclusions’ begins: ‘I at first thought of leaving this last session open for conclusions and discussion, but I have given up on the conclusions.’1 Might one conclude of an essay titled ‘Conclusions’ that dismisses conclusions that one hear the word more in the mode of having done with something, or giving up – de Man’s translation of Benjamin’s Aufgabe in ‘The Task of the Translator’ that ends the first sentence above. Moreover, the deferral of conclusions anticipates de Man’s revocation later of any possible messianism in Benjamin himself (that is, whether strong, weak, or otherwise). In some ways, a ‘discussion’ of what de Man was up to would also be put off for a while, set to the side by critical culture broadly. And if one wished to open it again now, as Martin McQuillan and Erin Obodiac invited us to do – that is, from a ‘new’ century, and as if in hindsight – it might begin with two incisions.

1 First, the question of what de Man was up to would open onto very different horizons today. These alternative reference points (writing in 2010) are mutually revealing. De Man by the 1990s had come to appear as the abjected figure of ‘high theory’ – one who could be paradoxically caricatured at the same time as too textualist (aesthetic, new critical, literary) and too non-anthropic (removed from praxis or politics). One might want to re-inspect this episode, today, that is to say, at a time when a certain cycle of ‘post-theory’ theory seems at a point of alluvial disorientation. It is not merely that one is no longer in the jejune ‘theory wars’ of the 1980s, strangely and inversely mimed in the right-wing culture wars of the time. Derrida is dead and a strangely auto-immune ‘deconstruction’ struggles to canonize itself in his wake. Left political thought appears in a continually remarked aporia before seeming ‘biopolitical’ models in which the polity has, in effect, disappeared.2 But today there are other factors which put in doubt the futures of the human polis. Arriving as if from without, these factors are sometimes gathered in the common phrase ‘climate change’. This includes the entire contemporary menu of calculable eco-crashes, species differentiation, heralded resource wars, mass extinction events, agricultural depletions and their innumerable offshoots and feedback loops which one could only call ‘material’ in the most irreducible sense impacting on the terrestrial definition of ‘life’. No longer in the cultural Sturm und Drang of ‘theory wars’

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 132

29/06/2012 11:11

d e m an vs. ‘de construction’

133

and the promise of political praxis that never materialized – the Left appears in acute mourning today – these horizons are marked by a suspension and a shift. That would be from a socially defined imaginary to an irreversibly emerging set of ex-anthropic – tempophagic? – phenomena. Second, we today encounter a ‘de Man’ that had been discretely cauterized postmortem. And this, not only by a critical community turned toward cultural historicisms but also, for those with an ear, by ‘deconstruction’ as it would shape itself around Derrida’s massive subsequent work. One could as readily ask, from today’s perspective, if de Man’s ex-anthropic strain was ahead of his time or better oriented to twenty-first-century problematics? Or one could also ask whether the reason de Man needed to be abjected had less to do with the ‘de Man affair’ than that it found the latter convenient to legitimize what had no place at the time (and would fail to emerge, in fact the contrary, in Derrida). In a sense, de Man would function as the homo sacer of ‘theory’. Yet de Man would also be effaced within ‘theory’ as such – as if he represented a dead-end branch or wrong turn (or acceleration). De Man would be a homo sacer of contemporary theory, which would imply that his position might open a thought of what has been excepted before any law or sense. The homo sacer for Agamben cannot be sacrificed, bears no recognition, it has face taken away, resides on the inarticulable side of the screen of life – as zoe, ‘bare life’, not bios, the life of political man. Might one inquire, from the safe afterlife of ‘theory’ today, safe in the sense of being incorporated and anodyne, why open this crypt to begin with? Does it offer anything to the new ‘aporia’ that arrives from powers that cannot be personified in the trope of sovereignty or human enemies? What strains in de Man resonate to the era of ‘climate change’? Something of this question is implicit in the invitation to comment on a recently available ur-text of de Man’s archived and transcribed by Erin Obodiac – a draft for much of what became Allegories of Reading. In it, as the invitation highlights, unpublished passages on the theotropic and sovereignty can be read for the first time.3 The questions McQuillan posed included how, or whether, such missing texts might contribute to contemporary debates on sovereignty. Do these texts, the ones missing from circulation, display a political import or a missing supplement? This exercise of restoring a sleeping text is harassed by the fact that, well, de Man had downplayed or deleted these two terms. Why? One may take the opposite tack and hypothesize that de Man’s import resides precisely in the rigours of a cognitive politics without a polis (or polity), one beyond the late humanist refuge of ‘biopolitics’ itself, but of course utterly unredemptive. Here, one would set de Man apart from today’s calls for a return to the ‘political’ (from within a ‘political’ captured by its own pursuit). As an end of the polity (and hence politics as we knew it), Agamben’s model is still only concerned with men, and can appear as the last nihilistic avatar of the twentieth-century humanist paradigm. What this bios as human community – as if back-referenced, in this, to the Greeks – cannot account for is a power that has no reference to ‘sovereignty’ as political agent, enemy nation, or personified will. After 9/11, ‘terror’ required a human face (Osama, Saddam) to stir national focus and appropriate the ‘event’ for the post-democratic era that has opened. And this

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 133

29/06/2012 11:11

134 t o m co h en would persist in a spectral ‘war on terror’, despite a repressed 2004 Department of Defense report stating that the greatest threat to ‘homeland security’ made terrorism relatively insignificant: that is, the diverse prognoses of twenty-first-century climate change that would, perhaps too obviously, alter the very premise of any home, land, interior, or political definition. Of course, what one calls ‘climate change’ is not narratable, nor suffused with pathos, nor apocalyptic; rather it is enormously banal (microbes, system balances), occurs outside perceptual enclaves (its metrics inaccessible to sight or calculated through data). And it is irreversible. What, then, is the import of irreversibility? In the era of ‘climate change’, cognitive and political statements appear radically disconnected, praxis anesthetized, the generation of ‘meaning’ a form of relapse linked to eating, interiorization, or consumption that fuels eventual disappearance. To open the crypt of an uncirculated de Man text and ask of its relevance to today risks animating a counter-gaze. It is one that would not recognize any progressive genealogy that expanded criticisms of cultural praxis toward a political resolution – since in fact nothing political or practical would have resulted. Locating itself after tipping points have passed, yet before various backloops have kicked in (full arctic meltoff, megadrought, water wars), the ‘present’ might be viewed all the more as in a time-bubble of recirculation. Perhaps, given the role of mediacratic controls and rhetorical disconnect, one might cruelly joke that one had entered a de Manian century, or one that linked the totalization of aesthetic ideologies (that is, reflexes of reference and assignation, perceptual programming, evaluative pieties) to the implications of what is now indexed as the anthropocene. If one says ‘indexed’, that would imply not only the otherwise banal decision by institutional geologists to name, with a category, an era comparable to past geological archives, or even to do so with the parallel of a sixth mass extinction event to give it heft. It is that, doing so within that process, as it plays out, implies a cleft and shock to the anthropo-narcisst continuum, the irreversible implication of being conscious of itself in that position – and accelerating. The term enters the lexicon with irreversible implications for the entire conceit of archive.

2 How much did ‘deconstruction’ create a warped lens through which de Man’s aims would be misleadingly identified, tagged, or even referenced merely to a fratricidal interspace? It would be left to Derrida to gather ‘deconstruction’ around his name, and to ingest, mourn, and occlude ‘de Man’ (this would be the exercise of ‘Typewriter Ribbon’), who in death contaminated the brand. In fact the de Man-effect harassed Derrida more with time, rather than the reverse, both as an example to be avoided and as an indigestible.4 On the one hand, de Man had not just lurched to the exanthropic, but invoked ‘deconstruction’ in the most unusual way – by attacking Derrida as reader of Rousseau, and noting that every deconstruction requires, almost instantly, a further deconstruction to rectify its errance, and so on, all but cutting off the prospect at its inception. Moreover, after the spectacle of de Man crashing, of

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 134

29/06/2012 11:11

d e m an vs. ‘de construction’

135

what occurred to his name, Derrida would need to elude the clichés and caricatures (being apolitical, unethical, and so on) by artefacting the entirety of ‘late Derrida’ and its treatments of religion, ethics and politics. In the first would be a calculation not to be trapped in the public moniker of ‘textualist’ or post-structuralist. Just as the ‘wartime journalism’ would be the excuse, rather than cause, of de Man’s abjection, the role of ‘de Man’ as a brake on and dislocation of Derrida’s strategy might have to have been invented if it were not crystallized as ‘de Man’. Contrary to doxa, de Man was doing something radically different from Derrida, and Derrida knew it. Given the contemporary attention paid to Benjamin it is signal that little has been given to de Man’s attempt to elbow and up the ante on Benjamin’s ‘materialistic historiography’ by discarding the nomenclature yet retaining the term ‘materiality of inscription’. That is, de Man would necessarily deem Benjamin misleadingly indulgent and given to metaphorics that invite (de Man’s says ‘manipulate’) theotropic and Marxist readings, while inverting sense. Rather than gesturing toward virile ‘blasting’ and ‘shock’, de Man turned toward the micrological, without pathos, where personification was withdrawn, preoriginary inscriptions set or effaced. There would be no ‘uncanny’ here, no hospitality, as de Man’s analysis posits in Benjamin a permanent exile that is none since there was and is no home – just as there is or was no metaphysics, no fully mystified Rousseau. Moreover, de Man would posit such a reading at once within and against an always operational relapse effect, a hermeneutic reflex evident across canonizations and communal sense production. The metaphor of the ‘human’ is perpetually reconstituted here as are the memes of reference. Such a programmatic relapse would be tied not to a domestication of the event (reading Plato as ‘Platonism’ say) but to the manner in which the socius reads and consumes, historicizes and dissociates from what is before it – or even accelerates a suicidal trajectory of hyperconsumption and mediacratic blinds. Derrida’s early targeting of ‘metaphysics’, for de Man, relied on a feint. There would never have been a metaphysics as such but rather a normatization of a perpetual ‘relapse’ of cognition out of which semantic reserves, referentials and coded epistemes would generate, artificially, the Nachkonstruction of the speaker, ‘man’. In ‘Kant and Schiller’, de Man marks a type of reading that is ‘irreversible’, from which one cannot go back, from which one can no longer ‘relapse’ (its model would be the Schillerian or humanistic version of a ‘materialist’ Kant), the ‘one-way street’.5 It is before the twenty-first-century horizons named above that a certain irreversibility discloses itself – only this time, that of a terrestrial mutation. This is linked to what informed Benjamin’s sense of an ‘enemy’ that was not even the Nazi threat but a self-betraying mnemonic programme on auto-pilot (called historicism). Today, other horizons accelerate beyond any nationalist, culturalist or historicist narrative that impact on and alter the premises of terrestrial ‘life’ (without concern for any artificed binary of bios and zoe). Absolutely incompatible signifying coils appear in pokerfaced disconnect; the acme of human technological comfort and foreknowledge of its own disappearance; the absorption by media streams and the invisible subclass of ‘disposable’ humans the global system holds in reserve or uses to harvest organs; the rhetoric of acknowledgement (UN speeches) and the practical dismissal of future generations or temporal continuities. This will have been one reason de Man seems

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 135

29/06/2012 11:11

136 t o m co h en relentless in deconstructing ‘deconstruction’ (in quotes), turning it against itself in advance – in which he parries its gyroscopic tendency to re-inscribe itself the first chance it gets. De Man, at the outset of Derrida’s project, critiqued any formalized ‘deconstruction’ as necessarily emerging as a ‘fallacious re-totalization’ of itself (like ‘nature’ in Rousseau). This ‘relapse’ is welded to organicist tropes and manifests itself, today, not only in the regressive underbelly of ‘after theory’ theory – the return of new media to phenomenology, of animal ‘studies’ to projected subjects, of multitude studies to crypto-Catholic rapture, of après Derrida ‘deconstruction’ to corporatism and recuperation (the ‘ethics’ of literature? God as ‘trace’?) – but something as plain as Obama’s attempt to restore Wall-Street post-2008 with money printing, for a time. What de Man calls ‘relapse’ is anything but innocent. The artefaction of semantics, of referential orders, produces a phantom interiority. It mimes a form of eating or consumption visible in the obese bodies on display in America today. It may counter-produce the home or homeland to account for its defence in retrospect, as if before an enemy ‘other’ that is its own predicament. Curious that the phantom production of a home, interiority or original ground – something that then appears to be defensible before an other – would be exactly that which accelerates a death, destruction or morbid consumption. One might link the current neuterizing of critical efforts to an error left in the wake of late twentieth-century political and theotropic preoccupations, that of imagining an ‘other’, an ‘otherness of the other’, or even a ‘wholly other’ that might be conjured, indexed, or gratifyingly achieved by a sort of clarifying extension of alterities to whatever. Such commodified alterity sustains the tropology of a ‘sovereignty’ a certain twentieth-century liberal intellectual conscience cannot relinquish without grave consequences for its premises and academic recognition. Derrida played this, felt no doubt compelled to as a currency or Levinasian shtick (even overriding his earliest writing on the latter), in a useful at the time but perilous within the subsequent parroting this rhetorical trick leaves in its wake. In any case, this was the opposite of de Man’s tact – perhaps only most explicit in his little essay on Bakhtinian ‘dialog’. As one moves down the chain of posited others that keep the trace of sovereignty, and its contracts of legibility and hope, buzzing, moves from the subaltern and racial other to the animal and, here and there, the inorganic, this blindness becomes generalized enough to be invisible, totalized, like a system of putative exchange or the bot-driven market of today’s Ponzi-driven management of times. So again, de Man’s intervention in ‘sovereignty’ questions would not take the form of entering or contributing to the discussion, however sophisticated, but would revoke it as erratic.

3 Might one distinguish here between a suicidal ‘deconstruction’ without concern for the ‘proper’ name, which in fact takes up the term itself by immediately marking its death and contamination, and one (Derrida’s) that wills survival, proliferation, installation, the calculations of cultural afterlife?

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 136

29/06/2012 11:11

d e m an vs. ‘de construction’

137

It is in addressing the prospect of ecological catastrophe ‘today’ that Slavoj Žižek turns, unexpectedly and as a sort of desperate feint, to Benjamin’s project.6 For Žižek’s Benjamin, the way to alter prescribed programmes of the future is to declare that they are indeed closed and, as a counter-stroke, to create a backloop out of which alternative ‘pasts’ are then reinscribed and out of which counter-factual futures might be kept open. He cites Jean-Pierre Dupuy: If we are effectively to re-conceptualize the notion of revolution in the Benjaminian sense of stopping the ‘train of history’ that runs toward a catastrophe, it is not enough just to analyze the standard notion of historical progress . . . This, then, is how Dupuy proposes to confront the catastrophe: we should first perceive it as our fate, as unavoidable, and then, projecting ourselves into it, adopting its standpoint, we should retroactively insert into its past (the past of the future) counterfactual possibilities (‘If we were to do that and that, the catastrophe we are in now would not have occurred!’) upon which we then act today. Therein resides Dupuy’s paradoxical formula: we have to accept that, at the level of possibilities, our future is doomed, the catastrophe will take place, it is our destiny – and, then, on the background of this acceptance, we should mobilize ourselves to perform the act that will change destiny itself by inserting a new possibility into the past.7 The way to approach these aporias is not by keeping open hope for this future – but to assume the inevitability and irreversibility of the catastrophe (as, indeed, more and more conclude today).8 It is to assume the worst as fact, and then to read back from that future, as if to undo its prospect in the face of its inevitability: What is unthinkable within this horizon of linear historical evolution is the notion of a choice/act that retroactively opens up its own possibility: the idea that the emergence of something radically New retroactively changes the past . . . Dupuy’s point is that, if we are to confront properly the threat of a cosmic or environmental catastrophe, we need to break out of this ‘historical’ notion of temporality: we have to introduce a new notion of time.9 Žižek’s caricature does not map this ‘new notion of time’ referenced to Benjamin.10 Such ‘times’ include geological and biomorphic times, tele-transferential speeds, archival programmes, reinitialized pasts – shifted, today, to the impinging logics of ghosted ‘futures’. The ticket for this would be a suspension of any presupposition of a continuous or living ‘future’. Such is its vortex that the very reflex to restitute homeland security, or biopolitical ordinance, would accelerate its shrinkage. Today one witnesses a shift from the human-on-human accounts of social power and historical justice to what is outside human sovereignty altogether. Various nations and cognitive tribes of twenty-first-century modernity – humans in their sixth millennia of writing and hypertechnics – find themselves no longer defined by opposition but before a ‘threat without enemy’, without face, charisma, personification, or real media presence, and emanating from the system or artifacted oikos itself.

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 137

29/06/2012 11:11

138 t o m co h en These metrics accomplish and disclose what no deconstruction of the archive could. The routine force of semantic ‘relapse’ is tied to terrestrial eviscerations – the mechanism that allows human artefaction of interiority as well as ‘sovereignty’. What would call itself ‘deconstruction’ today as a sort of centripetal Derrideanism seems to have hit its auto-immune moment, following Derrida’s death, without a point of intervention aside from advancing another academic enclave, whose fidelities would be more or less self-policed by Vatican-like circuitry.11 By the time Derrida spawns a British following, a second family experiment following the ruins of the first American attempt (a ruin associated with ‘de Man’s’ fortunes), there is little residual awareness of this early episode or rift that had left the American petri dish in interesting and internecine ruins. Geoff Bennington’s Jacques Derrida was catalytic here, anchoring Derrida’s global fortunes in a new machine of dissemination, self-organized along the British schoolboy network model, mainlining the global lingua and its media. But to do so Bennington needed to leap to what Derrida had shrunk most from – a recapitulation of ‘Derrida’ without citing the latter’s text, a popularization and lexicon (brilliantly executed), and a contaminating capitalization of ‘Derrida’ that would focus a new academic generation. Derrida writhes in the text he offers below Bennington, ‘Circumfession’, all but ignoring the text above, forced into a labyrinth of autobiographic blogs, writing about Augustine, his mother, his penis, whatever would get him through the exercise. Instead of Bennington’s gesture inaugurating a renewed deconstructive experimentation, where the letter of the master’s work were not cited or fetishized, or perhaps named, it would partially inaugurate the opposite, a renewed exegetical focus on and attention to the master’s text itself – less a deconstructive viral than a Derrideanism, and the academic consolidation of an invariable auto-immune stage Derrida may have wished to program in advance. Derrida would shift to direct addresses of the main arteries of institutional discourse – ‘ethics’, ‘religion’, or ‘the political’ – defining what would be called ‘late Derrida’. One may speculate whether this thread did not become a detour – a seducing calculation that had a blowback. Martin Hägglund recently argues that this entire ‘turn’ did not in essence exist (which Derrida too claimed), and that the major strains of Derridean exegesis in this regard tend to reinscribe Derrida in precisely the zones his early work permanently disbands.12 The most scandalous thing about Hägglund’s study is that it needed to be written at all. What does it say if one needs to point out that Derrida was not a theotropic writer, or that Derrida played that rhetoric on both sides, a Trojan-horse strategy of having it both ways, entering the mainline canonical discourses at the risk of spawning faux moralisms and pieties of a bonded and cultifying ‘we’ covering a broader relapse? This strategy, however, would at least carry his text to another generation or readership to come. One becomes alert nonetheless to the one general and indifferently catastrophic horizon Derrida would never address in his choice to pursue this strategy: what we provisionally call ‘climate change’.13 What if the auto-immune moment or its corollaries were wedded to a semantic reflex that ‘deconstruction’ too would rehearse or extend in its rush to endorse hospitality, ‘love’, and ethics? Where does the (human) archive, its mutating pro-

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 138

29/06/2012 11:11

d e m an vs. ‘de construction’

139

grammes of memory and perceptual reference, valuations and viral memes, find itself embedded in other ‘archival’ orders of the organic and inorganic, of biomorphic and geomorphic process? This obsessed de Man in the ur-text in question. Typically, a first deconstruction, as it is called, is answered by another – turned against itself, ongoing. This attacks in advance a certain translational legitimacy necessary to constitute a corpus, and anticipates and displaces the recuperations of today. If de Man’s suicidal ‘deconstruction’ arrived in quotes on arrival, and emerged as a critique of and differing from itself (and Derrida’s reading of Rousseau), it would have to be called something else. The tactical public linkage in America of these two names obscured this, as did Derrida’s first reflex to defend a fallen friend, and then subsume de Man, up to the point when the latter would become more indigestible, required to be vomited. Derrida recognized this with irritation. Agreeing to an assignment to write on de Man’s posthumous Aesthetic Ideology – on the figure of ‘materiality’ that occurs there – Derrida instead returns to their original contretemps, a wound he could not get rid of or have done with, and which left some sourness to the end: de Man’s critique of his reading of Rousseau, as if he could not have done with just that, might finally undue its thorn. He spends massive pages to settle a score with de Man on Rousseau, going back again, at the end tossing out the X without X formula for de Man’s ‘materiality’ (‘a materiality without matter’).14 Derrida’s ‘Typewriter Ribbon’, despite its great length, basically sidestepped the assignment – to settle scores, patch an inassimilable wound, to get the last word on the index called ‘Rousseau’, though he would never have done with it. He shows no interest in de Man’s ‘materiality of inscription’, as a figure, though he will deploy Benjamin’s ‘materialistic historiography’ as an effaced subtext in Specters of Marx, and in a way that de Man’s stripping in ‘Conclusions’ of all variations of messianism would have barred.

4 The essay on Walter Benjamin is peculiar. It has a unique import in de Man’s work, aside from being a last ‘talk’ transcribed from tapes that almost did not make it. (There are only handwritten notes.) It would seem de Man had resistance to writing on Benjamin directly – putting it off until months before death, not committing it to paper, choosing not a political or aesthetic work but that on translation. Was Benjamin, whom de Man once quipped was an ‘overrated writer’, a too proximate precursor or precisely a misleading exemplar, given the latter’s ‘manipulation’ of his embeddedness in the borrowed terms of a theotropic Marxism, or the modernist recuperations de Man pins on Gadamer’s and Hartman’s symptomatic romanticizations of modernity: ‘Benjamin’s language of pathos, language of historical pathos, language of the messianic, the pathos of exile and so on and so forth’ (RT 96). It may be that this neural-semantic ‘relapse’ would have once been an evolutionary default mode that aided the survival of the tribe, the home, the legitimation of power – only to arrive, today, within a temporal contraction before which this machinal production of community, reference and interiority accelerates its own

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 139

29/06/2012 11:11

140 t o m co h en archival disappearance. ‘Reading’ in de Man is the covert term by which an active or hyperbolic battle to outwit this mnemo-power occurs. The so-called performative of de Manian irreversibility could imply neural mutation, which the essay on Benjamin calls ‘preparatory’ to the event of ‘translation’. It would be a brake within the orders of sense production of a suicidal programme that cannot be indexed to any one ‘modernity’. Today, as remarked above, this ‘relapse’ resonates not only in contemporary theory (the diverse returns to phenomenology, embodiment, ethicisms, precritical premises) but, also, in Obama’s push to restore pre-crash ‘Wall St.’ or in the rhetoric of ‘sustainability’ itself. De Man was abjected for good reason. Like de Man, any direct address of ‘climate change’ would not re-enforce or reward prominent twentieth-century critical agendas. When Žižek arrives at his answer to the response to ecological catastrophe – a green Maoist state enforced by ruthless surveillance – the prescription both underlines and derides the critical imaginary’s dilemma. What is forecast does not correspond to any utopic narrative since it predicts triage of the global underclass first; it does not promote any playing out of ‘formal democracy’ (what seems now a left appropriation of neo-liberal triumphalism in the 1990s). But one encounters here a sentence type that generates a series of nots to block and parry every recognizable translation of a term – say, ‘history’. It would be even more benighted to imagine that what de Man calls a ‘materiality of inscription’ is some contact point with the terrestrial archive of organic and inorganic process in which it is embedded. Such would disclose nature itself as another archival operation, like that attributed to Rousseau in Textual Allegories: ‘Far from denoting a homogeneous mode of being, “nature” signifies a process of a deconstruction redoubled by its own fallacious retotalization’ (TA 145). That is to say, like Benjamin’s ‘natural history’, which is to say, neither natural nor historical. For the Benjamin of Thesis XVII, the metrics of organic life on earth crystallize the speck of time of homo sapiens: ‘In relation to the history of organic life on earth’, writes a modern biologist, ‘the paltry fifty millennia of homo sapiens constitutes something like two seconds at the close of a twenty-four-hour day. On this scale, the history of civilized mankind would fill one-fifth of the last second of the last hour’. The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides exactly with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.15 From such calculations de Man was never a ‘textualist’ such as he came to be heard, nor invested in the facticity of the ‘Book’. The non-humanism or counter truth he identifies derive from other metrics – the prehistorial, the inorganic, and the brevity of the modern archive effect called the ‘human’. Presocratic in this regard, this would begin not with Romanticism or even Homer but with a mark or inscription of any kind, which is to say ‘media’, or what he calls text. De Man conceives of the ‘blindness’ of the anthropic relapse as bound to an auto-destroying ritual of meaning

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 140

29/06/2012 11:11

d e m an vs. ‘de construction’

141

construction. De Man extends the shift of late Benjamin toward the necessity of a violence without sovereignty and to destruction as a ‘preparatory’ moment. To the extent that Derrida’s Specters of Marx chooses to revive (while pretending to elaborate) Benjamin’s ‘weak messianism’, and to do so as a rhetoric of holding open (monstrous) futures, he regresses from Benjamin, and from de Man’s observation in ‘Conclusions’ that there is in fact no messianism whatever implied by Benjamin’s double-speaking trope, weak, strong, or subtracted from itself (submitted to the X without X algorithm). Derrida, who was to have been the philosophic purist compared to the weakly literary de Man (according to an influential misprision of Gasché), is nothing if not literary in favoring the Hamletian model of the spectre, and the gothic ghost as his vehicle. The ghost is, after all, jejeune, recycling Derrida’s critique of phenomenology, compared to the rampaging vampirism and zombieism of the earth today, certainly. A certain coalescence of late Benjamin and de Man, in this regard, stand opposite the rhetorical relapses Derrida rhetorically puppeted. Always marking a limit to the archive he might then recirculate within astonishingly (excluded, say, would be the machinal, or cinema, or climate change), Derrida worked the borders, keeping the structural enigmas of ‘hospitality’ in play at least, drifting into the Eurocentric privileges of value and conceit at the very time of their destructive acceleration (ecocatastrophics) and dissolution (the shift to Asia that, still, has not been read by these traditions). Within these corridors, the ‘irreversibility’ factor that was indigestible in the late twentieth-century returns as palpably visible today. Among options tied to script and mnemonics, Benjamin-de Man crosses, as Derrida would not, into the anthropocene perspective outright. Read closely, Benjamin’s renowned Angel of History was never a fabled corrolary to the Benjaminian critic as transformative hero of allegory and ‘materialistic allegory’ (more or less invoked by Žižek above). Rather, he is transparently an impotent façade falsely contracted to the messianic needs of his benighted readership (the awakened dead of time), his ludicrously anachronist wings pinned and being swept away by a force without sovereignty – what is called, shifting to climactic idiom, a ‘storm’. Derrida’s spectragenics maintains, against this storm, the last cheery monologue of this faux angelicism. As is often the case, Derrida implants in his wishful spectragenics a counter-seed that could undo the seduction which the rhetorical contract aims to foster – in this case, what shifts the model of the ghost from Hamlet pére, with all its para-Oedipal resonances, to the ‘visor-effect’.

5 It is perhaps embarrassing to point out that de Man’s insistence on a structural disjuncture between rhetoric and referent defines the dawning era of climate change, the most untimely, irreversibly banal, least ‘apocalyptic’ and unprecedented of advents, since it dispossesses the home quite literally. Rather than inserting de Man into a discourse on ‘sovereignty’, one might use him to ask whether the ‘biopolitical model’ in Agamben’s appropriation of Foucault is not marred in advance? Agamben begins his by reinstalling ‘sovereignty’ where Foucault had made the enunciation of

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 141

29/06/2012 11:11

142 t o m co h en biopower dependent on the former’s suspension precisely. If bios and zoe were never historically binarized quite (even in ‘the Greeks’ who are supposed to authorize it), one might shift not to a zoopolitics per se – where a trope of ‘bare life’ is defined by subtraction or a deprivation of (human) bios, but to what stands beyond it as an organic and inorganic ‘life’. Just as Agamben inverts Foucault’s initial definition of biopower and its very premise – as what must be addressed without sovereignty – in order to return it to an Aristotelian conceit of politics, in effect rolling the term back into what Foucault wished to escape, so one could say his deployment of Benjamin’s ‘bare life’ returns what lies outside of binaries altogether back into a seeming opposition. Contrary to the sense promoted by Derrida, initially after de Man’s death, that he and de Man were doing the same thing, that was never so. The pop phrase that marked de Man’s difference at the time, that the ‘text’ deconstructed itself in advance of its reading, would be irritating enough, since de Man discretely bumped Derrida into the position of Heidegger’s use of Nietzsche as a straw man (so that he, Heidegger, could in fact undo ‘metaphysics’). For de Man there never was ‘metaphysics’. One might say, if de Man represented a properly suicidal deconstruction, that his writing disappeared in insisting on inverting a certain screen of personification, Derrida was all about proliferation, contamination, and survival – above all, the survival of his corpus and intervention. Distanced from the onus of a textualist or post-structuralist label, seeming to mainline ‘ethics’, ‘politics’, and ‘religion’ as the neural paths to academic tradition, to survival, a ‘late Derrida’ could appear more assimilable. Ditching the de Man-effect, the survival-factor goes way up. One may fast forward several decades – as Žižek coyly recommends – to look back onto the ‘present’. The critical heir to come, in a more accelerated stage of geomorphic mutations, may cast a cold gaze on the legacy-mongering, theoretical tribalisms and relapses that suffuse the so-called ‘present’ today. That is, she might regard with wonder that we could not shake off the serviceable phantoms of penetrating the otherness of the other human, of liberationist and post-colonial maps, of democracies to come (formal or otherwise), of holistic multitudes and biopolitical nostalgias. What is one to say of decades of determined cultural and ‘political’ criticism which coincided with a putative end of the polity, the advent of Bush, or the disclosure of ‘climate change’ – that is, of irreversible ecocatastrophics premised, as Žižek recently proffers, on how linguistic ‘meaning’ is produced? Non-apocalyptic, banal, irreversibly inhospitable, these ‘new’ horizons render Derrida’s ‘ten plagues’ of the new world order in Specters a minor skirmish.16 What may be monstrous in de Man today is not that the ex-anthropic drive seems to resonate with unfolding twentyfirst-century horizons. What is monstrous is the sheer banality of whatever may be implied by irreversibility. If the production of reference were hard-wired to a trope of the human operative today such a being seems defined increasingly as suicidally poised, oblivious to the revenge of a nonpersonified zoe. And if the bios were a spectral term from the start, or if biopower in Foucault did not mean the management of life as bios but the latter’s embedding in what lies beyond itself (organic and inorganic process), one has not just shifted as if from bios to zoe but rather bracketed the binary itself as a poeti-

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 142

29/06/2012 11:11

d e m an vs. ‘de construction’

143

cization. De Man’s retraction of face would have since been restored and humanized by Agamben or Levinas or the ‘ethical’ uses to which the face of the retrieved or recognized other (human) is put. De Man marks Benjamin’s ‘pure language’ as the opposite of any semantic reserve – the ‘non-human’ as sounds, marks. ‘Pure’ here means the opposite of some sort of transcendental sense, what rather is sheerly formal and desemanticized, banal, ‘material’, prefigural, non-human. Yet what interests is the ‘irreversibility’ this purview induces. ‘Materialistic historiography’ is not historical materialism; it suspends any dialectical materialism – become materialistisch – and diverts the production of historiality to mnemonic programs (which historicism legitimizes and conceals): ‘one is impelled to read reine Sprache as that which is the most sacred . . . when in fact in Benjamin it means a language completely devoid of any kind of meaning function, language which would be pure signifier . . . “Inhuman” becomes a curious and allinvading concept here’ (RT 99). De Man posits that this limit as a move, in its irreversibility, is still ‘preparatory’ to a translation, or transformation, to come. It is inhospitable, momentarily without hospitality or inwardness. Here, the proprietary ‘relapse’ sedates anteriority and artifices the eco (interiority, eating, hyperconsumption, anthropo-narcissism). And it posits a definition of ‘man’ as such. From the minotaurian perspective: ‘there is, in a very radical sense, no such thing as the human’ (RT 96).17 What de Man called ‘unreadability’ was not a receding irony or pathos of undecidability. It aimed at what would be unreadable to a hermeneutic system of maintenance tied to hyperconsumption and the Nachkonstruction of narrative ‘histories’. This presupposes a precession of semantics, the suspension of historial categories as institutionally applied, the disjunction between intention and act (never more on display than in public and political rhetoric today), the demythification of ‘death’ and the appeal to the inorganic. McQuillan was right to link these to the protocols of sovereignty (and its need for a human face). This is a dossier not unsuited to a world in which the great danger is not a totalitarian army or spectral terrorism but a ‘train-wreck of history’ that Žižek reads as ecocatastrophics, and which was technically inherent to and preceded the grammatization of the ‘past’ or narratives of history as such.

6 If de Man is readable today it is not because of dazzling reading techniques, or the assertions of legatees. And it is not because his rhetorical categories can be sustained – in a distinct sense, tropes were to him ‘all the same’ (as he once quipped). But how would one suppose a line of legacy for a suicidal mission of sorts that disdained the survival of the ‘proper name’? Does one await a ‘deconstruction without “deconstruction”,’ or the proper name at all, to disperse into these ‘new’ horizons, whereas one tends instead today to get a Derrideanism without ‘deconstruction’? Does the suicidal gesture of de Man’s limit, ‘irreversible’, pass into an unheard of deconstruction by (and of) the real which twenty-first-century horizons are now revealing,

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 143

29/06/2012 11:11

144 t o m co h en indifferent to human desire or survival? That includes, for instance, scenarios in which political models regress – to feudal techno-states, ‘permanent’ resource wars, prospective ‘population culling’ in this century. Such ‘futures’ now occupy an emergent climate change imaginary as calculable or virtual facts – as if a sheer anteriority of the archival itself had flipped forward. That is, as occurs to Benjamin’s bedraggled and slapstick Angel of History, wings disarticulated by a storm (a climactic trope) blowing from ‘the future’. De Man’s draft of Textual Allegories returns one to a site in which the (then) future trajectory of ‘deconstruction’ was unformed. One can now see that his instinct was to cut it off in advance, as any performative deconstruction claiming to undo a metaphysical hierarchy would, itself, need to be deconstructed in turn, and again, to the nth exponential. It is misleading to ask if such a writing is relevant today because the deleted term theotropic adds something fresh. It got in the way of what could more easily be described as anthrotropic in the absence of ‘man’ (as void metaphor). It leans the other way to numerous retro-humanisms that have regathered at this site today, or even under pop ‘deconstruction’ – whether under the lure of Levinasian ‘ethics’, or the organicist thought of phantom multitudes. What is interesting is that such re-configurations (relapse, retro-humanisms) posit, without sacrifice, a phantom ‘human’ position or interior that was never there, a ‘homeland security’ that is its own alibi, a transindividual ‘we’ that becomes a sort of meta-‘I’ (and hence, theotrope). Today, rhetorics of the ‘post-human’ replicate this entirely by applying the term to the extended powers of technologies to come, the effect of digital culture, or new anthropomorphisms shaped to promises of conquering individual mortality through nanotechnics or genetic artefactions. The latter, like the twentieth-century derived rhetoric of the political and of praxis as such (for de Man, idealisms), by-pass a ‘linguistic complication’ that links each to a broader, suicidal totalization whose form is now visible. One is left to consider whether the figure of sovereignty perpetuates its own blind today – which may be why Foucault began by barring it when enunciating biopower (and which precisely Agamben peeled back, ‘correcting’ him). De Man opens corridors to a power that cannot be conceived along the models of ‘sovereignty’ at all. Rather than exemplify the canard of a ‘prison-house of language’, to repeat, de Man implied a prison-house of generated reference at the fundamental, suicidal blind, serviced by the institutional reflexes of perceptual mnemonics. It would be odd if this archon of ‘high theory’ were a resource in fathoming a present before which ‘new models of temporality’ (Žižek) erupt or before which several thousand years of human history and writing – the recently named anthropocene era, a catastrophe for terrestrial ‘life’ – increasingly appear as a parenthesis. One can ask if, when all is said and done, the interlude of transformational thought we call ‘theory’ does not encounter its ‘conclusion’ with, in and before what is implied by the horizons of ‘climate change’. This unfolding of labyrinthine and criss-crossed horizons, not in the sense of some catastrophe to come, but rather as the disclosure of a ‘materiality’, is at once banal and irreducible to local histories, dialectics, maps of capital, anthropisms. One can ask too whether de Man did not mark the secret of this episode in some ways, set aside as its homo sacer. Hence to

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 144

29/06/2012 11:11

d e m an vs. ‘de construction’

145

conclude where I began, regarding de Man’s use of the term theotropic and evocation of sovereignty in an unpublished manuscript, one must first ask why these terms were removed or downplayed. Perhaps he had seen both terms as regressive. What is theotrope but trope as such? And why articulate a ‘sovereignty without sovereignty’ à la Derrida’s altogether too handy formula while retaining the term? Which is another way of asking whether something in de Man may have been preparatory to and probed an already post-binarized, post-anthropic timescape and violence before which the term ‘deconstruction’ was a hedging formation (like the aporia of hospitality). When Derrida takes the term back from his ‘de Man’ in ‘Typewriter Ribbon’, he takes back what was already cited in quotes and given up in advance – a frustrated manoeuvre. De Man could be said to have apprehended and performed the death of ‘deconstruction’ productively, against its ‘fallacious re-totalization’, and in so doing turned against a systemic totalization (a mediacracy of totalized tropes), whose inability to arrest or step out of itself is becoming readable, as it was not in the 1980s – in the global implosion of megadebt that cannot be indexed to any familiar narrative of capital, in the Ponzi-schemes of reference and times visible in the consumption of futures (water, oil, deferred generational debt, the impending erasure of generations), in the ecocatastrophic. The irreversibility of the latter manifest what could be called other materialities outside of any model of empathic ‘alterity’ linked to the cryptic sustainabilities of the fiat currency of subjectivity formations (to which the trope of sovereignty is linked) and a broader passivization, contamination and spell. This sort of resistance remains ineluctable and missing from the menu of mutual funds marketed as ‘after theory’ academic hunkering down. Not ‘material’ in any recognizable tradition, since it is not pivoted against any binarized other, it is less a ‘materiality without matter’, as Derrida opined, than the opposite, a matter without materiality in any recognized sense – even where, or while, it is indexed, for ‘man’, always through what generates the latter’s mnemonic and perceptual programs (phenomenality), by way of linguistic formations ineradicable from the anthropocene. Preceding face or figuralities, this approach to a mnemotechnic that nonetheless is not distinguished as for the human (the being with language), is itself inhuman (as Benjamin states), it partakes of a process in which ‘life’ as an effect is always an afterlife of formalizations – not necessarily distinct, however remote seeming, from cell formation. The ink of inscriptions that give software to naturalized and theotropic memory systems is not unrelated to, say, oil, unreadably caught at the border of the inorganic (decayed organisms), transposed to the artifactual energy of the techno-era and late anthropocene flare out one finds disclosing itself today.18 De Man reminds us of a deconstruction once defined by its ability to put itself into question most radically, not by the crafting of a pyramidal ‘deconstruction’ to bear a signature into futures it would not turn to or address (and remains reluctant to). It would be to generate yet another phantom to speak of this thread in de Man (or Benjamin) as destructively preparatory to a postanthropic thought or an unredemptive violence without sovereignty that turned against a totalization indistinct from hyperindustrial accelerations witnessed broadly today. Least of all is it ‘post-human’, in so far as the term regurgitates yet another relapse, re-positing a ‘human’ to be post to (and embodying it) which, as de Man

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 145

29/06/2012 11:11

146 t o m co h en observes in the verbal exchange following his lecture on Benjamin, in a very ‘radical sense’ never existed definitionally as such. Of course, in bending Gayatri Spivak’s decades-defining query (‘Who speaks for the subaltern?’) to the anthropocene, one technically breaks with the commodified and unstrategic promise of accessible ‘alterities’, of human-on-human restorations of justice and recognition, which today rhyme indiscreetly and formally with the neoliberal promise, or head-fake, to raise the world’s underclasses to the future status of what had been American consumers (requiring, were it feasible, four planets’ worth of resources). One shifts as if to something else not accounted for in that map, or the conceit of the social or the political as that had been imagined. And one irreversibly shifts, or translates, to where the promise of restoration and recognition, like some seductive phantom of a ‘democracy to come’, applied to an era defined by a closure of democracy broadly. But the answer to ‘Who speaks for the anthropocene?’ is of course no one, and even if we replace the ‘who’ with a more appropriate ‘what’, the very grammar must still be abandoned. One asks rather, outside of any ‘one’ as such or any sovereign trace, what speaks from the other side of the screen and outside of the Ponzi-schemes of reference (or twentieth-century ‘metaphysics’), for or from the anthropocene? – invariably, against the artefactual and collective ‘who’ the first question presupposed.

No tes 1. In transcribing the talk William Jewett will use de Man’s ‘oral pauses’ for paragraphing. See also, Paul de Man, “‘Conclusions’ on Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator’”, Messenger Lecture, Cornell University, 4 March 1983, in Yale French Studies, 97 (50 Years of Yale French Studies: A Commemorative Anthology, 2: 1980–1998), 2000, p. 10. 2. See, for instance, the special issue of Symploke on ‘Discouragement’ (14, 1–2, 2006). 3. The programme of the workshop titled ‘Property, Sovereignty, and the Theotropic: Paul de Man’s Political Archive’, April 24–25, 2009, at the University of California, Irvine, includes Erin Obodiac’s provocation: ‘Textual Allegories suggests that referentiality is constitutively theologic . . . Property, contractual law, and sovereignty must refer themselves at some station or another to a transcendental signification, and so the theotropic plays a crucial role in their denomination and operation.’ Martin McQuillan further proposes, in turn, that ‘this aspect of de Man’s work should be revisited today in a “post-theoretical” landscape concerned with political theology, occupied with the transformation of the western model of sovereignty, and faced with the apparent collapse of the capitalist global contract’. For some elaborations on the diverse politics of defining ‘deconstruction’ without Derrida, and its own impasses, see Martin McQuillan, Deconstruction after Derrida (London: Continuum, 2012), particularly the introduction. 4. See Christopher D. Morris, The Figure of the Road: Deconstructive Studies in Humanities Disciplines (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2006). 5. The logics of the relapse and of irreversibility are developed across the Messenger Lectures, the majority of which are gathered in Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). In ‘Kant and Schiller’, Schiller serves as Apollo to Kant’s even more unlikely Dionysus: ‘That process . . . is irreversible. That goes in that direction and you cannot get back from the one to the one before . . . It will always be reinscribed with a cognitive system, it will always be recuperated, it will relapse, so to

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 146

29/06/2012 11:11

d e m an vs. ‘de construction’

6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

147

speak, by a sort of reinscription of the performative in a tropological system of cognition again. That relapse, however, is not the same as a reversal’ (AI 133). See Slavov Žižek, ‘Nature and its Discontents’, SubStance, 117, 37:2, 2008, pp. 37–72. Ibid., pp. 67–8. See Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Pour un catastrophisme eclaire (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2002). The accelerating feedback loops of global warming have shifted scientific focus from myths of ‘sustainability’ to geo-engineering schemes, the missing Plan B (e.g., aerosol blanketing to deflect sun-rays), each of which generates counter aporia. This shift marks, in epiphenomenal ways, the close of the warnings about ‘tipping points’ (the eco-porn lite of Al Gore’s ‘Inconvenient Truth’), or the entry into irreversibility (Greenland glacial meltoff). Recent surveys of such include the Royal Society report, ‘Geo-engineering the Climate – Science, Governance, and Uncertainty’, available at (accessed 12 March 2012). Žižek, ‘Nature and its Discontents’, p. 68. Slavoj Žižek, in First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), activates the zerodegree logics of ‘ecological catastrophe’ in a jeremiad against the decade’s ‘critical Left’. Because of ecocatastrophics: ‘everything should be re-thought, beginning from the zeropoint’ (p. 87). The time riddle proves something of a front for Žižek who allies the thinking of ‘climate change’ with Christian apocalyptics and names the sole possible transition – instant and global – to a more or less Maoist global green state. This resonates with the murmurs heard recently from within Derridean circles that ‘Derrida Studies’ should replace the moniker ‘deconstruction’ as a focal point, retiring a deflated pop term without seeming target, while literalizing the monumentalization of the proper name’s return. One could track the auto-immune logics of what nonetheless would call itself ‘deconstruction’ après-Derrida (a phase Derrida had participated in essentially), which evinces traces of a Derrideanism without ‘deconstruction’. Derrida seems nonetheless to have both programmed and mourned this in advance, as when he laments before death the imminent disappearance of his work. That Derrida was perhaps too sophisticated in aspects of his adopted rhetorical strategy (particularly as regards his exegetes and followers) is one implication of Martin Hägglund’s Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). He tracks the remarkably systematic recuperations and relapses that imminent commentators bring to their integrations of Derrida’s innovations, and the effect of constructing a ‘late Derrida’ as if turned toward ethics, religion and politics. Specifically, Hägglund tracks the systematic relapse and, essentially, re-theotropization of Derridean exegesis. The split in Derrida’s rhetoric could be traced calendrically to the proposal to his American audience that deconstruction ‘is’ justice – and his decision to manipulate the definition’s shift from the destroying dike of a non-anthropic scale to the appeal to the ‘otherness of the other’, the reanimation of Levinas, reconciliation with Habermas, and so on. This episodic contretemps between Derrida and his ‘de Man’ is technically explored in Andrzej Warminski, ‘Machinal Effects: Derrida With and Without de Man’, MLN, 124, 2009, pp. 1072–90. At issue is Derrida’s ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Inc (2)’, in which an assignment to address the figure of ‘materiality’ in de Man’s last essays (Aesthetic Ideology had been just published) is diverted. Instead, Derrida ignores the term ‘materiality’ until the very end and returns to the scene of the crime, to settling scores with de Man on the latter’s critique of Derrida’s reading of Rousseau – as if this were never done with. He will also be concerned, through this choreography, of discretely removing de Man from a purged genealogy of ‘deconstruction’ that he can then refurbish for survival. Along the way, Derrida marks that de Man’s early use of the term ‘deconstruction’ appears in quotes, that it was in fact his (Derrida’s) term, and he virtually takes it back. What Warminski cannot bring himself to come to terms with outright is not the fratricidal nature of this history, but its

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 147

29/06/2012 11:11

148 t o m co h en

15. 16. 17.

18.

implications. The text referenced is Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, in Without Alibi, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002) and ‘Le ruban de machine à écrire (Limited Ink II)’, in Papier Machine (Paris: Galilée, 2001). This is a revised version of the text originally published in Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, ed. Tom Cohen et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, introduction by Hannah Arendt (New York: Random House, 1969), p. 263. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 77–82. For an extended exploration of de Man as a suppressed cipher within twentieth-century ‘theory’ to the twenty-first century’s horizons of an era of ‘climate change’, see Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook and J. Hillis Miller, Theory and the Disappearing Future: on de Man, on Benjamin (New York: Routledge, 2011). This thought rhymes, in abstruse ways, with threads of Martin McQuillan’s notes on a ‘PostCarbon Philosophy’, in Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, ed. Tom Cohen (Open Humanities Press, forthcoming, www.openhumanities.org). In this essay, McQuillan attempts to initiate a thinking of the era of philosophy from the perspective of the predominant chemical element not only of energy storage and extraction but of ‘life’ formations – and to link these to writing.

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 148

29/06/2012 11:11

Chapter 11

11

Paul de Man at Work: What Good is an Archive?

J. Hillis Miller

W

ell, what good is identifying the differences in the archival sequence for the understanding or reading of ‘Allegory of Reading (Profession de foi)’? The manuscript is entitled with a striking phrase, ‘Theotropic Allegory’. The word ‘theotropic’ appears just once in the manuscript, two pages after the sentence about how the inability to read should not be taken too lightly. The word ‘theotropic’ vanishes from the finished essay. Why? That disappearance is surely a crux. In pages excised from the final revised essay de Man begins by saying once more that the ‘deconstruction of rhetorical models that base the referential power of a language on a substantial relationship between sign and meaning (and thus on their implied polarity) [that would be “symbol” as defined in “The Rhetoric of Temporality], is an invariant of Rousseau’s thought. It articulates the political to the linguistic code’ (TA 132–3). De Man makes a comparison between ‘the doublefaced notion of referentiality that we keep discovering’ (TA 133) and the opposition between the busy world of society and the hortus conclusus of Julie’s garden. On the one hand, referentiality is so broad and vague that it might refer to almost anything. Referentiality is ‘transcendence’ of the linguistic in general. On the other hand, it narrows down to ‘the finite horizon of a specific semantic “space”. Like Julie’s garden, it sets up a fence, and it provides the key with which the properly initiated readers can open the gate that leads into the privileged, private property of the referential meaning’ (TA 133). The sentences that follow define this narrowing down as a process of spatial and temporal movement and turning. This leads in turn to the sentences that contain the exceptional neologism, ‘theotropic’. The four final pages then turn to the relation between religion and politics in Rousseau (‘The possibility of practical action is inherently linked to the (fallacious) coinage of the word “god” ’ [TA 134]), and to the binary opposition between public person and private person that is of such enigmatic importance in Rousseau’s political thought. Here are the theotropic sentences: As such, referentiality is constitutively metaphysical, in the Nietzschean sense of the term as taken over by Heidegger and his best French reader, Jacques

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 149

29/06/2012 11:11

150 j . h illis m iller Derrida. It is also constitutively theotropic, since the only conceivable name for transcendental signification that would no longer be itself a sign, the only word that would have a truly proper meaning, is ‘god’. The only ‘meaning that one can give the word to be’ (Profession, p. 571)1 is that of ‘god’. Yet, at the same time, the referentiality resulting from this paradigmatic denomination must lead to the performance of a finite, practical or, as we say, ‘historical’ act – such as, for example, the acts performed or the emotion experienced by the readers of the second part of the Nouvelle Héloïse under the impact of their reading. (TA 134) These sentences have such clarity and power that one understands why he named the essay ‘Theotropic Allegory’. Reading them also leads the thoughtful reader to wonder why de Man cut them and did not, so far as I know, use them elsewhere. For one thing, the powerful metaphor of the opposition between the space of vagary and the space of the locked garden violates two of de Man’s prohibitions. One is the prohibition against spatial as against temporal thinking. The other is against metaphors in general. Always fallacious judgment in Rousseau is said again and again to depend on false metaphorical comparisons and claimed similarities between things that are fundamentally unlike. Here is de Man himself doing just what he condemns so forcefully and persuasively, and claims Rousseau deconstructively condemns, in the printed part of the essay. It looks to me as if he is inadvertently proving his dictum about the reader or critic: ‘Deconstructive readings can point out the unwarranted identifications achieved by substitution, but they are powerless to prevent their recurrence even in their own discourse, and to uncross, so to speak, the aberrant exchanges that have taken place. Their gesture merely reiterates the rhetorical defiguration that caused the error in the first place’ (AR 242). De Man may have realized he had been caught in the trap he had described and so erased the evidence of that in the printed version. He always just smiled enigmatically when students asked him how he could claim to escape the fatal misreadings he ascribed as inevitably occurring to others. This may also be the case with the sentences that contain the word theotropic. We understand what is meant by saying any judgment is only a sign, such as the signs that compare narrowed-down reference to an enclosed garden, and we understand what is meant by saying such a reference is a ‘movement of transgression or transcendence’ that ‘turns always again into a signification that radically differs from it by its (fallacious) claim to be a meaning’ (TA 134). Another way to put this would be to say that a judgment, based on a baseless metaphor, is a performative enunciation that creates the appearance of pre-existence, external to language, of what it actually creates by the fiat of a speech act. ‘Metaphysics’, in the sense the word has, in different ways in each case, for Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida, is a name for the age-old system of ideological mystification that Derrida calls ‘logocentrism’, the assumption that a pre-existing ‘logos’ or ‘Being’, Sein, is at the basis and origin of all beings. De Man’s climactic claim, however, is that this movement of fallacious transgression or transcendence is ‘also constitutively theotropic’. At one level, this is a shorthand version of Marx’s claim, in The German Ideology – referred

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 150

29/06/2012 11:11

pa ul de man at work

151

to by de Man in a famous praise of literary theory and putdown of what today we call ‘cultural studies’2 – that the basis of all ideological mystifications in Western culture is the Christian belief in the Incarnation, in which divine spirit, the Word, the Logos, became matter. Commodity festishism is secretly a form of belief in the Incarnation. De Man deconstructs (or does he?) this mystification by arguing that referentiality is theotropic. Whatever a referential judgment appears to name is only a covert trope for God. The word ‘theotropic’ has a double meaning. It can mean both turned toward God, and, since a trope is a substitution, turned away from God, in an apotheotropic twist, toward some specific semantic referent that is a cryptic cover for God, a hiding of God. You can be a commodity fetishist, as we all are under capitalism, without being consciously a Christian. De Man’s expression of what he means by theotropic, however, is curious, to say the least. Kenneth Burke argued powerfully in a number of places3 that any system of language has what he called a ‘god term’, for example, the word ‘honour’ in medieval and Renaissance chivalry, or the word ‘gentleman’ in Victorian novels and in Victorian class society, or, one might argue, the word ‘judgment’ in the Profession de foi. The peculiarity of what de Man says, with however much or little irony, or however much or little just miming what he claims Rousseau says, is that he limits god terms to one single, sole, possibility, ‘the (fallacious) coinage of the word “god” ’. He does this, moreover, without explicit authority from Rousseau. Referentiality is constitiutively theotropic, says de Man, ‘since the only conceivable name for a transcendent signification that would no longer be itself a sign [such as all words are in the sign/sign relation of allegory], the only word that would have a truly proper meaning [as opposed to all other words, which are tropes for the word “god”], is “god”. The only “meaning that one can give the word to be” (Profession, p. 571) is that of “god” ’ (TA 134). If one turns to page 571 in the Pléiade edition, one finds no such thing. Rousseau rather says that what distinguishes man from other creatures is his ability to give a meaning to the word ‘is’: ‘Selon moi la faculté distinctive de l’être actif ou intelligent est de pouvoir donner un sens à ce mot est.’ Nothing whatsoever is said about God by Rousseau in this passage. Rather the reverse, since the power to give a meaning to the word ‘is’ is said to be the basis of the ability, unique to man, to superimpose one sensation on another and say they are similar or the same, thereby creating the fallacious metaphors that are the basis of judgment. One might even say that the god term here is is. I conclude that by limiting god terms to the word god, however ‘fallacious’ he says that linguistic projection is, de Man has demonstrated, perhaps inadvertently, the truth of his own climactic proposition in the printed version of the Profession de foi essay about not taking the impossibility of reading too lightly. It is impossible to decide whether what de Man says by way of the word ‘theotropic’ is theistic or not theistic. Does he really mean it or does he assert it only ironically when he says, ‘the only word that would have a truly proper meaning is “god” ’? In generating this uncertainty, de Man thereby demonstrates the truth of Derrida’s reproach to JeanLuc Nancy that it is impossible to deconstruct Christianity. It reforms itself out of

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 151

29/06/2012 11:11

152 j . h illis m iller the ruins of its déclosion or ‘dis-enclosure’, or ‘dis-explosion’. What de Man says about the way all referentiality is constitutively theotropic is undecidable, though the reader needs urgently to decide in order to know what use, if any, to make of de Man’s procedures, or how to understand what he says. I also hesitantly hypothesize that this may have been what made de Man uneasy when he went back to this passage. This hypothetical uneasiness may then have led de Man to drop the whole five pages and change the title from ‘Theotropic Allegory’ to ‘Allegory of Reading (Profession de foi)’. As Erin Obodiac reminds me, however, de Man in the late interview by Robert Moynihan sternly replies to Moynihan’s question, ‘Is your intention to take the “divine” out of reading?’ by saying, ‘Yes, I intend to take the divine out of reading. The experience of the divine is one that is totally conceivable, but which I don’t think is compatible with reading . . . Generally, the act of faith is not an act of reading, or for me is not compatible with reading.’4 The ‘act of faith’ or ‘the experience of the divine’ is on the side of ideological aberrations, while reading is the unmasking of such aberrations. De Man, in my judgment, dropped the pages about theotropic allegory because he did not want his readers to have any chance of misreading him as putting some actually existing transcendent extralinguistic god at the center of tropological systems. *

*

*

I have in my possession the notebook of spring 1983 in which de Man wrote the two sets of notes for his Benjamin essay. The first is six pages long and is headed ‘Benjamin (for Dupré)’. The second is eleven pages long and is headed ‘Benjamin (Dupré)’. It was Louis Dupré who had invited de Man to give such a lecture at Yale. It was presented at the Whitney Humanities Center in the spring of 1983, as well as at Cornell, where the recording was made that is the basis of the printed version of the essay. I was present for the Yale presentation and can remember that what de Man said not only powerfully revised traditional readings of Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator’, but also met with a good deal of resistance from members of the audience like Peter Demetz. This resistance happened again at Cornell with scholars like Meyer Abrams, Dominick La Capra, and even Neil Hertz. De Man had (and his writings still have) a remarkable ability to send people up the wall. Some weeks or months later, either late that spring or, as I think, the next fall when I used to visit de Man once a week on his deathbed (he died in December), I asked de Man if he had a copy of that lecture. He said it was never written out, but that I was welcome to have the notes. He then gave me the notebook. Eventually it will go into the archive, but I am fetishistically keeping it for the moment. All the scandalous propositions of de Man’s reading of Benjamin’s essay can be found in the longer, eleven-page notebook version. As I have said, that is presumably why de Man thought I could reconstruct the lecture from the notes. What, then, is the difference? What is missing from the notes, I claim, is essential. It is the pervasive irony of the spoken lecture. Almost no trace of that exists in the notes. Ironic formulations, however, are everywhere in the printed text. Here are some salient examples: Having cited Benjamin’s claim that ‘No poem is intended for the reader’, de Man

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 152

29/06/2012 11:11

pa ul de man at work

153

says, ‘You can see how this would have thrown them into a slight panic in Konstanz’ (RT 78). Konstanz is the home of Rezeptionsästhetik, presided over by Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser. Speaking of Benjamin’s mentions of Stefan George, de Man says: in George there was a claim made for the poet, again, as some kind of prophet, as a kind of messianic figure – George doesn’t kid around with that, he sees himself at least as Virgil and Dante combined into one, with still quite a bit added to it if necessary – and therefore he has a highly exalted notion of the role of the poet, and incidentally of himself, and of the benefits that go with it. (RT 77) The hyperbolic inflation here makes George’s claims sound absurd, as they are. You will remember that de Man at the end of his essay claims that this is just the view of the poet that Benjamin rejects. A little later de Man asserts that the passage he has cited from Geoffrey Hartman refers to ‘a historical concept which then dovetails, which injects itself into an apocalyptic, religious, spiritual concept, thus marrying history with the sacred in a way which is highly seductive, highly attractive . . . one can only really get excited if one writes in an apocalyptic mode’ (RT 78–9). The illusory possibility of a ‘marriage’ of history and the apocalyptico-religious ‘seduces’ Hartman, makes him really ‘excited’. The whole paragraph about asking ‘the most naïve, the most literal of possible questions in relation to Benjamin’s text’ (RT 79) is steeped in irony. Far from being a naïve question, it is the most serious, the most devastating question one can ask of any text, and the hardest to answer: ‘What does Benjamin say?’ (RT 79). In what follows next de Man has great ironic fun with the hapless translators who cannot tell the difference between ‘Ich gehe nach Paris’ and ‘Ich gehe nicht nach Paris’ (RT 79). One wonders why Paris. Why did that particular joke come into de Man’s mind that day in Ithaca, New York? He used to ‘gehen nach Paris’ from Belgium during the war. On the next page de Man has some more ironic fun, this time by saying that he is sure Derrida could cover up his error, made by following in a Paris seminar Gandillac’s mistaken translation (Gandillac had put ‘untranslatable’ for ‘translatable’), by saying they are the same: ‘I’m sure Derrida could explain that it was the same . . . [Then de Man draws himself and adds:] and I mean that in a positive sense, it is the same, but still, it is not the same without some additional explanation’ (RT 80). Fewer of these ironic moments appear later on in the lecture, when de Man got down to the serious business of trying to identify what Benjamin really said, though ‘forget about the poetics’ (RT 88) as a way of describing the inevitable victory of hermeneutics, of das Gemeinte, over the Art des Meinens, the study of a text’s rhetorical procedures, is a late example. Well, so what? Might one not argue that these little ironic jokes, which will remind those who ever heard de Man lecture of his characteristic tone, are just there to add to the informality and to put his audience at their ease? I do not think it is quite that simple. De Man’s irony is used primarily here to ridicule the received opinions that he

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 153

29/06/2012 11:11

154 j . h illis m iller is trying to confute. He uses irony as a powerful weapon in that warfare. In a strikingly counter-intuitive and apparently contradictory assertion in his essay on Friedrich Schlegel, ‘The Concept of Irony’ (also available only as the transcript of a taped lecture), de Man ascribes a powerful performative force to irony: ‘Irony also very clearly has a performative function. Irony consoles and it promises and it excuses. It allows us to perform all kinds of performative linguistic functions which seem to fall out of the tropologial field, but also to be very closely connected with it’ (AI 165). De Man goes on to define irony, modifying Schlegel’s formulation, as ‘the permanent parabasis of the allegory of tropes’ (AI 179). He then claims that irony can pervade a whole discourse and permanently suspend ascription of any univocal meaning to it. That would seem to disable any performative force irony might have. How can it be a felicitous performative if we do not even know what it says? The answer of course is that irony is performative just because it permanently suspends meaning in a prolonged hovering undecidability such as I have found in de Man’s essay on the Profession de foi. How that allows irony to console, promise and excuse might take some lengthy explaining, but the upshot would be that these particular performatives depend on the uncertainty of what Austin called their ‘uptake’. You can never be sure a consolation will work, or that a promise will be fulfilled, and we know from de Man’s ‘Excuses (Confessions)’ (AR 278–301) that excuses never excuse. They just repeat the crime that required the excuse in the first place. In the case of de Man’s ‘ “Conclusions”: Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” ’ the ironies I have identified in it function to ridicule and therefore disable the forms of ‘aesthetic ideology’ he wanted to exorcise in order to make way for his quite original (except for an essay by Carol Jacobs5) reading of Benjamin’s ‘Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers’. Of course, these mystifications inevitably reform themselves out of their ruins, as Schlegel and de Man knew. The aberrations irony suspends rise from their ashes. The other side of the irony is that what beguiled Hartman really is ‘seductive’, for you and me too, as is the Georgian notion that poetry is sacred, prophetic. Heidegger, notably, was seduced by the latter in his readings of Hölderlin. Which of us can claim not to be the least bit attracted and seduced by that beautiful lady, or that handsome prince, aesthetic ideology? Irony’s redoubtable performative force cannot succeed in permanently banishing aesthetic ideology. It even comes back in de Man’s own language toward the end of the Benjamin essay. Having said firmly that no such thing as reine Sprache in the sense of a sacred language exists, de Man nevertheless goes on a few sentences later to paraphrase Benjamin, apparently without irony (but how can you be sure?), as saying ‘reine Sprache, the sacred language, has nothing in common with poetic language; poetic language does not resemble it, poetic language does not depend on it, poetic language has nothing to do with it’ (RT 92). This strongly worded apotropaic formulation at least appears to entertain the notion that their might be such a thing as a reine Sprache, at least as one of the illusions of aesthetic ideology. This is analogous to the way de Man says, in the Moynihan interview cited above, that ‘experience of the divine’ is ‘totally conceivable’, but ‘is not compatible with reading’. *

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 154

*

*

29/06/2012 11:11

pa ul de man at work

155

I conclude by claiming that study of the various versions of de Man’s writings by way of the Archive does really help us to understand de Man. Well, so what? Why is that important now, when we have other things to worry about, from climate change to global financial meltdown to the meltdown of the humanities? My shorthand answer is that de Man was prophetically aware of the way assumptions about ‘the human’ and about related concepts such as pan-organicism can get us in big trouble. Paradigmatic within aesthetic ideology is the assumption that language is human and within human control, whereas language, as de Man patiently showed by way of what Benjamin is really saying, is an inhuman machine, a machine that, performatively, verspricht (sich),6 promises and contradicts itself. We have been beguiled, mystified and bamboozled for centuries and millennia by a fetishism of the organic, from the ‘mystery’ of the Incarnation down to present-day ideology of the human body in cultural studies and in feminism as an escape from the abstractions of theory, to the idolizing of organic unity in a good poem from romanticism through the new criticism, with somewhere in the background the assumption that since language is human, language too must be an organic system, to the prizing of ‘organic’ foods, to present-day ecocriticism with its idea that the whole earth or the universe as a whole may be a vast organism (‘Mother Earth’), to some hope that the Internet, as a prosthetic appendage to the human body, may also be a form of the organic, just as perhaps the global financial system may be organic, with its ‘toxic assets’ that are like poisons in a human body. All these organic metaphors, de Man (and I too) suggests, are colossal ideological mistakes, the aberrant hypostatization of a metaphor. They are fueling our fallacious assumptions, these days, that we ought just to get finance capitalism back on track and all will be well, or that global climate change might be reversed with some carbon cap laws, or that the humanities can be returned to their former glory. The human or animal body, language, a poem, the financial system, the planet, the universe, the global ecotechnical new communications systems into which we are all, or almost all, these days plugged – all these should more properly be thought of as elaborately interconnected machines that just go on operating blindly according to some built-in program. These machines are out of our control, like robots gone mad, even if we have ourselves constructed a given machine, such as the Internet, or have, by way of our ‘quants’, young mathematico-financial wizards, devised those computer programs that have spun out now worthless credit default swaps. The human genome, with its inborn ‘bugs’ (note the organic metaphor), might provide an excellent model for these autonomic programs. All these machines, moreover, come equipped with an inherent auto-immune technology that will lead them sooner or later, inch by inch or all at once, catastrophically, to self-destruct, as the human immune system, generated by the genome, may destroy the body it controls, in auto-immunity. Reading Paul de Man, dead since 1983, may conceivably help us to understand all this by some set of sideways displacements. Do I think understanding will help avoid the looming meltdowns? I doubt it. The human propensity for collective species suicide is too great, as in the disappearance of the Neanderthals (if you can call them human), of the great Mayan culture, and of the Anastazi. But at least we may have a clearer understanding as the water rises

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 155

29/06/2012 11:11

156 j . h illis m iller up to our chins. The Mayan hieroglyphs for Christ’s words on the cross, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me’, spell out, hilariously, when retranslated, at least according to a possibly fanciful passage in a mystery story I can no longer locate, ‘Sinking. Sinking. Black ink over nose’. All the ink we have spilt will only add to the flood, but it is better, I claim, more human-inhuman, to know what is happening than to be naïvely surprised by the rising waters. Paul de Man’s writings are a great help with that.

No tes 1. This number refers to the page in the Pléiade edition of Profession de foi: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres completes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin, Marcel Raymond, et al., Bibliothéque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1969). My essay in this book is an earlier and much shorter version of my essay, ‘Paul de Man at work: In these bad days what good is an archive?’ in Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook and J. Hillis Miller, Theory and the Disappearing Future: On de Man, On Benjamin (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 55–88. 2. ‘It follows that, more than any other mode of inquiry, including economics, the linguistics of literariness is a powerful and indispensable tool in the unmasking of ideological aberrations, as well as a determining factor in accounting for their occurrence. Those who reproach literary theory for being oblivious to social and historical (that is to say ideological) reality are merely stating their fear at having their own ideological mystifications exposed by the tool they are trying to discredit. They are, in short, very poor readers of Marx’s German Ideology’ (RT 11). 3. For two out of many definitions of ‘God-terms’ in Burke’s work, see Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1945), pp. 74–7; Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1950), pp. 110–14. In the former passage, Burke defines ‘God-terms’ as ‘names for the ultimates of motivation’. In the latter passage ‘honor’ is given as an example of a possible God-term within a certain socio-linguistic system. 4. Robert Moynihan, ‘Interview with Paul de Man’, The Yale Review, 73: 4, 1984, pp. 586, 587. De Man’s example of someone who ceased to be a reader, in particular a brilliant reader of irony, when he ‘[went] over to a certain mode of belief and adopted a religious life’ (p. 586), is Friedrich Schlegel. 5. De Man praises in his lecture (RT 90) Carol Jacobs’ remarkable Modern Language Notes essay of 1975, ‘The Monstrosity of Translation: Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator”,’ reprinted in Telling Time (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 128–41. Jacobs’ essay anticipates de Man’s lecture on a number of points. 6. See ‘Promises (Social Contract)’, AR 277.

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 156

29/06/2012 11:11

Chapter 12

12

DNA: de Man’s Nucleic Archive

Erin Obodiac

I

n the winter of 2008 (and here already the problem begins with this narrative mode), I began postdoctoral research with Martin McQuillan on the Paul de Man Papers housed at UCI’s Special Collections and Archives. Despite having spent years writing a lengthy dissertation on de Man and Heidegger, I had successfully managed to avoid a trip up to the fifth floor archive at Langson Library. My first task from Martin, however (and that would be Martin McQuillan not Martin Heidegger), was to take a look at what was then being called de Man’s long Rousseau manuscript, and transcribe it. There were hopes that this handwritten manuscript was an unpublished work, and indeed it had been placed in a section of the Paul de Man Papers called ‘Unpublished Materials’. Without even noticing, I had already fallen into the archival trap: i.e., the work of hermeneutic unearthing, uncovering and unburying – already in itself grounded in problematic assumptions concerning truth and reading, but also quickly leading to ideological cover-ups, grave robbing and pious re-burials. And the magic burial dust for these purposes was there not to serve the dead, nor even the living, but for us, the zombies. As it turns out, zombies – those who cannot speak and have no inner rational consciousness or will – make the best transcribers. The hypomnesic writings of copyists tell us that the radical exteriority of inscription is either all archive or is no archive at all. A de Manian approach to the archive might deploy the distinction between ideology and critical philosophy, gleaned from de Man’s reading of Kant on the sublime. Whereas an ideological approach to the archive would employ an external empirical moment or causality, the critical approach would take inscription as its condition of possibility. The example we could employ here would be the lateral archival materials concerning de Man’s work on Kant itself. For instance, in Box 14, folder 7 of the Paul de Man Papers, there’s a cahier for the 1982 School of Criticism Seminar with notes on Rhetoric/Aesthetic/Ideology, the Marionettentheater, trope as formalization, etc. Intervening, without interruption, one might say, there appears within the

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 157

29/06/2012 11:11

158 e r i n obo d ia c stream of annotations on Kant and Schiller, a testament dated 11/3/82: ‘Table of contents of unfinished book, in case of my death’. A list of titles follows, and there is some additional statement about what ‘should be possible’ if there is little time, i.e. finishing the ‘Rousseau for Viking’ and the ‘Marionettentheater for Columbia’. An ideological approach to the archive would perhaps assemble under the signature of a single phenomenalized self, de Man’s personal health condition and statements concerning his criticism of Schiller’s apotropaic figuration of death in the experience of the sublime. A critical approach might involve figuring out how what is at stake in de Man’s Kant essays – briefly, that the sublime concerns neither a metaphysical nor a transcendental principle, but the materiality of inscription, and that the sacrifice of the imagination concerns personified scenes of tropological transformation not consciousness – can help us read de Man’s scribblings about plans for future writings and his own death, a word, says de Man, that names a linguistic predicament. While wondering when we’re going to hear something about the long Rousseau manuscript, some of you might recall the other University of California conference on Paul de Man, ‘Material Events’, staged ten years ago at UC Davis. Although that conference was directed at the essays in Aesthetic Ideology, several of the papers like Derrida’s ‘Typewriter Ribbon’ took flight and returned to material from Allegories of Reading. I am struck that in our present volume, although its theme takes aim at Allegories of Reading, many of the contributors deliver on materials from Aesthetic Ideology or The Messenger Lectures. These two California conferences seem to have a proleptic or metaleptic relation to each other: we might ask, what marks their mutual chiasmic pivet-point? A short answer would be the archival trap itself: with its spectral lure of textual genesis and genealogy, its promise of enlightening disclosures and concealments, the archival trap leaves no one free from imminent exposure and live burial; everyone, everything, is drawn into this privacy/publicity machine sooner or later. Concerning the so-called unpublished, long Rousseau manuscript, archival work has made clear that it was not a newly discovered, forgotten old pad of paper with handwriting on both recto and verso. It was a manuscript that since the 1980s had already been worked on patiently, had been partially transcribed, and whose parts were in current circulation. In addition, it had already been determined by scholars familiar with de Man’s papers that the long Rousseau manuscript was Part II of Allegories of Reading, published in 1979. Nevertheless, the manuscript is placed in Box 9 of the Paul de Man Papers in a section called ‘Unpublished Materials’. This placement might have been a mistake, a compulsive error, or perhaps a strategic error. Most of the published materials for the Rousseau section of Allegories of Reading can be found in Box 6 of the de Man Papers. For instance, there is a 33-page handwritten manuscript dated 1972 called ‘Theory of Metaphor in Rousseau’s Second Discourse’, which was published as an essay in 1973 in Studies in Romanticism, and reprinted later as Chapter 7, ‘Metaphor (Second Discourse)’, in Allegories of Reading. There are no materials for Chapter 8, ‘Self (Pygmalion)’, or Chapter 9, ‘Allegory (Julie)’. However, for Chapter 10, ‘Allegory of Reading (Profession de foi)’, there’s an untitled typed draft in French on the Profession de foi and an offprint of ‘The Timid God: A Reading of Rousseau’s Profession de foi du vicaire Savoyard’, printed in The

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 158

29/06/2012 11:11

d n a: d e m an’s nucl e ic archive

159

Georgia Review in 1975. Also in Box 6, we have an offprint of ‘Political Allegory in Rousseau’ printed in Critical Inquiry, summer 1976. It corresponds to Chapter 11, ‘Promises (Social Contract)’, of Allegories of Reading. And last, but not least, representing Chapter 12, ‘Excuses (Confessions), the final chapter of Allegories of Reading, we have a handwritten manuscript called ‘Chapter VII, The Purloined Ribbon: Autobiography as Text’, published as ‘The Purloined Ribbon’ in Glyph #1: Johns Hopkins Textual Studies, 1977. The striking thing about the handwritten manuscript is that it is not labelled Chapter 12 but 7 and begins on page 191. Someone even with a mere cat’s curiosity might ask where the previous six chapters or 190 pages were. Well, they are in Box 9 in the ‘Unpublished Materials’ section of the de Man Papers. The separation of the 190 pages that preceded ‘The Purloined Ribbon’ from ‘The Purloined Ribbon’ marks the institution of a law, or rather, a nomos – a measure, orientation and distribution – in the realm of the archive. As a dividing or partitioning up, this separation originates a law in the manner put forth, for instance, in Carl Schmitt’s book The Nomos of the Earth, which asserts the concept of radical title, the radical appropriation or seizure of land and property, as the origin of law in the sense of a dividing up or partitioning up. In a Heideggerian fashion, Schmitt writes: Nomos comes from nemein – a [Greek word] that means both ‘to divide’ and ‘to pasture’. Thus, nomos is the immediate form in which the political and social order of a people becomes spatially visible – the initial measure and division of pastureland, i.e., the land appropriation as well as the concrete order contained in it and following from it. In Kant’s words, it is the ‘distributive law of mine and thine’, or, to use an English term that expresses it so well, it is the ‘radical title’.1 As a constitutive act of inscriptionally spatial ordering, the division of a 190-page manuscript from ‘The Purloined Ribbon manuscript’, which begins on page 191, renders first of all the distinction unpublished from published. This distinction, this division, this wall, determines the intra-muros and the extra-muros – the inside and outside of the territory of the state, and hence the applicability of the law. As unpublished, the 191-page manuscript has not been made public, has not been issued as belonging to the people, has not opened itself to public observation, and even, as not ‘pubes’, has not crossed over to adulthood, or perhaps more specifically, manhood. If the archive already concerns the unstable limit between the public and the private, the institution of a division between published archival materials and unpublished archival materials is no small matter. Institutions such as the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council and Yale University Press might have an interest in this division. Derrida wasn’t kidding when he analyzed the archive by way of an archontic principle, i.e. in terms of law, filiation, suppressed parricide, or in short, ‘the takeover of the archive by the brothers’,2 and Derrida adds, in the name of liberty, equality and democracy. Although the transition from the private to the public always concerns the workings of the archive, Rousseau’s ‘Du bonheur public’ reminds us that there is no way to unite the inner and the outer; there is

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 159

29/06/2012 11:11

160 e r i n obo d ia c no metaphoric totalization of the private and public well-being. Stating that there is no negotiating the public with the private, Rousseau writes of man: ‘Hand him over completely to the state or leave him entirely to his own devices’.3 Derrida has suggested that there is no state without the archive and one would expect that the public archive would concern public happiness not private. Yet, Rousseau would be the first to admit, as he does in ‘La bonheur public’, that public happiness is a fiction. The Paul de Man archive divides a 190-page manuscript from ‘The Purloined Ribbon’ manuscript, and designates the first as ‘Unpublished Materials’, and the second as published. For the moment, I will call the 190-page manuscript ‘the long Rousseau manuscript’. Like a palimpsest, the manuscript is itself an archive, an autoarchiving of its own genesis and genealogy, its own revisioning. Yet, the reading of a handwritten manuscript even for the purposes of transcription is an act of reading like any other. De Man’s own essay, ‘Genesis and Genealogy’, in Allegories of Reading, should forewarn us about the pitfalls of genetic criticism. De Man’s reading of Nietzsche, specifically The Birth of Tragedy, puts into question genetic teleological patterns of literary history since it is ‘the genetic principle which necessarily underlies all historical narrative’ (AR 82). Any reading or transcription of the Rousseau manuscript should not turn itself into a key that invents a lock (and a secret room behind it) for itself. Box 9 of the Paul de Man Papers houses the manuscript in question, a manuscript handwritten, both recto and verso, upon Euro-length papier vellin. Although the manuscript starts as page 1, the Roman numeral II in the title ‘II. The Metaphor of the Self and Its Deconstruction’ suggests that there was a section before it. Although the Roman numeral in the title deems itself a second chapter, it symptomatically re-begins with a page ‘1’, and spells out in the title a certain conflict or confrontation: the term ‘deconstruction’ is crossed out in the title ‘II. The Metaphor of the Self and Its Deconstruction’. In fact, the writing of ‘deconstruction’ (often spelled ‘de-construction’ by de Man) and its crossing-out serves as a certain authenticating watermark, or hypo-mark, of the manuscript: here/there/everywhere all over the manuscript the handwriting of deconstruction must be crossed out, not perhaps to erase or deface the encounter with Derrida, but to hesitate rigorously. In many instances, ‘deconstruction’ is entirely crossed-out, or there is an attempt to find another word. One would expect something like ‘undoing’, yet surprisingly terms such as ‘system’ or ‘structure’ pop up, suggesting that this is how system or structure operates: ‘undoing’ or deconstruction is its operation. This striking revision, which indicates that de Man is engaging not only Rousseau, but Derrida’s reading of Rousseau, had already been pre-empted by another text by de Man (written perhaps in 1970 or 1972), i.e., his lengthy chapter on Derrida for Blindness and Insight, published in 1973. The first page of de Man’s long Rousseau manuscript, which nevertheless titles itself Roman numeral ‘II. The Metaphor of Self’ (with ‘and Its Deconstruction’ crossed-out), corresponds to Chaper 8 Of Allegories of Reading, ‘Self (Pygmalion)’. The next chapter of the long Rousseau manuscript is called ‘III. Ethical Allegory’, and corresponds to Chapter 9 of Allegories of Reading, ‘Allegory (Julie)’. The chapter after that is ‘IV. Theotropic Allegory’, and corresponds to Chapter 10 of Allegories

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 160

29/06/2012 11:11

d n a: d e m an’s nucl e ic archive

161

of Reading, ‘Allegory of Reading (Profession de foi)’. However, the last pages of the manuscript chapter (pages 131–8) are not in Allegories of Reading, suggesting in an old-fashioned positivistic kind of way that there might be unpublished material here. Next, we have ‘V. Political Allegory’, which is Chapter 11 of Allegories of Reading, ‘Promises (Social Contract)’. However, the Allegories of Reading chapter continues further (i.e., there are additional pages [AR 274–7] at the end of the Social Contract chapter, which are not shown in the Rousseau manuscript). After ‘V. Political Allegory’ in our long Rousseau manuscript we have ‘VI. Textual Allegory’ for a few pages (pages 172–4). At page 174, the manuscript comes to a dead stop. That’s it for the so-called Rousseau manuscript in Box 9. You will recall, however, that the material in Box 6 includes the handwritten manuscript ‘The Purloined Ribbon: Autobiography as Text’ and corresponds to Chapter 12 of Allegories of Reading, ‘Excuses (Confessions)’. This Purloined Ribbon manuscript starts on page 191 (and is written upon the same Euro-length papier vellin as the Rousseau manuscript), so if it is continuous with it, then there are 15 pages missing from the Rousseau manuscript; i.e., pages 175–90. How did these pages come to be separated from the rest of the manuscript, especially given that these pages immediately precede the last chapter ‘The Purloined Ribbon: Autobiography as Text’? Can we joke here of ‘The Purloined Pages’? If the Paul de Man papers are gathered in a manner that divides the long Rousseau manuscript – as unpublished – from the published Rousseau material in Allegories of Reading, then within the long Rousseau manuscript itself there is a further division: pages have been excised, the manuscript has been in a certain manner circumcised. The excision of these pages marks a passage outside of the public archive – a subterranean passageway, or wormhole, if you will, burrowing from the town hall to the household. If the missing pages concern a certain circumcision of de Man’s manuscript does this also lead to a proliferation or multiplication of texts at this site, for instance, the perhaps apotropaic papers of this conference? That the manuscript is severed at the part of the text that is later to be published in Allegories of Reading as ‘Promises (Social Contract)’ suggests, as Martin McQuillan’s introduction to this volume explains, that the break also constitutes a broken promise, a broken contract, which might also constitute the archival moment itself. The skin that is the missing pages has certainly circulated in a subterranean system of substitutions, now to be re-membered or publicly re-stitched as part of the public archive. Although in 2008 I hadn’t seen the thing itself – I mean the missing pages – I had taken a look at some transcriptions of a manuscript on textual allegory forwarded from Ellen Burt and Cynthia Chase. If repression is the sign of an archive, a buried desire, and the archive articulates the unstable limit between the public and the private, we must also contend with the fact that the instability of this limit is a feature of any inscription: always there is an interplay between disclosure and concealing. The consequences that follow from this are that, as Derrida writes, ‘an archive ought to be idiomatic, and thus at once offered and unavailable for translation, open to and shielded from technical reproduction and reproduction’.4 Derrida reminds us that the archive is only the iterable letter or type (typos) of the arkhe, marking the separation from any origin, the separation of imprint from impression.

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 161

29/06/2012 11:11

162 e r i n obo d ia c Nevertheless and because of this, each archive is irreproducible, untranslatable. Is there something here that the brothers can’t seize? This is not to say that in modelling the archive upon the ‘principle’ of the materiality of inscription we unearth something more archaic. De Manian impressions are not any different, are they? We might ask, in an Archie Bunker fashion, as Hillis Miller does, what’s the good of an archive? In 2009, Cynthia Chase and Patricia de Man sent new materials to the Paul de Man Papers housed at UCI’s Special Collections and Archives. Amongst the new boxes was a pad of Euro-length papier vellin, upon which is handwritten, recto and verso, a manuscript that begins on page 175, the magic number of the first page of the missing pages in exile from our long Rousseau manuscript. Page 175 continues the chapter called ‘VI. Textual Allegory’ begun on page 172. And indeed these pages come to a close on page 190. The mystery of the missing pages that had been prompted by a clue from the ‘Purloined Ribbon’ manuscript, i.e., the fact that its pagination begins on page 191, seemed to be solved, and the Rousseau manuscript was now intact. However, something in excess of the illusion of a complete manuscript came to light: there was another handwritten manuscript that also began on page 191 called ‘Nietzsche I: Rhetoric and Metaphysics’. I had actually seen a typescript of this unpublished Nietzsche manuscript transcribed by Patricia de Man, but it was the handwritten manuscript that indicated that it started on page 191 as does ‘Chapter VII. The Purloined Ribbon: Autobiography as Text’. The archival discovery is that there is an unpublished Nietzsche manuscript that was replaced/ effaced by the published version of ‘The Purloined Ribbon’ in Allegories of Reading. Before addressing the relationship of the unpublished Nietzsche chapter to the rest of the Rousseau manuscript, we might first turn to the unpublished portion of the chapter called ‘Textual Allegory’ which begins with an elaboration of the term textual allegory: ‘The notion of textual allegory, as it derives from the Social Contract, provides the generalizing principle which makes it possible to consider the theotropic or ethical allegories as particularized versions of this generative model and thus to break down the significance of such thematic distinctions’ (TA 180). It may come as a surprise to see that de Man is here articulating a generalizing principle and that it is a generative model after his critique of genesis and genealogy, and genetic patterns in general. Nevertheless, what de Man seems to be suggesting is that ethical allegory, theotropic allegory and political allegory are all thematic, i.e., ideological versions of something called textual allegory. This thematization, however, is something that belongs to any text, including textual allegory: If, for example, we consider the introduction of a theological dimension into the political context of the Social Contract as the thematization of a structure that cannot be separated from the textuality of any text, (the inherent necessity, for any operative language to postulate transcendental signification), then the ‘inclusion’ of a deconstructed version of the Profession de foi within the context of the Social Contract is predictable, since both works can be considered as the same political allegory, the first on a figural, the second on a textual level. (TA 180)

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 162

29/06/2012 11:11

d n a: d e m an’s nucl e ic archive

163

The first thing that is striking here, but also familiar to any reader of de Man, is that a thematic element can be read as something that belongs to the rhetorical structure or rhetorical necessity of a text; for instance, the necessity of any language to postulate a transcendental signification figures itself as the theotropic. Here, the theotropic names any text’s necessity for a meaning outside of itself; in short, it names the necessary phenomenalization of the referential function. The second thing to note here would be that understanding the theotropic as part of the rhetorical structure of any text complicates discourses on political theology, such as Carl Schmitt’s, that see political concepts as analogues of theologic ones. De Man’s ‘Hegel on the Sublime’ doesn’t say exactly the same thing about the theologic. The difference that de Man would employ concerns the difference between a political allegory at the figural level and a political allegory at the textual level. De Man here is talking about first-order deconstructions, which are figural, and second-order deconstructions, which are textual. What does this mean? I’m hoping one of the speakers at this conference can answer this question. I might suggest that it has something to do with the fact that in general de Man sees no difference between political history and textual history, and in particular, understands Rousseau’s concept of the double rapport as the double aspect of language – tropes and performatives – that constitute the textuality of any text. Counter to Schmitt who asserts that the political is analogous with the theologic, de Man states that textuality serves as the basis of an analogy concerning the political: The divergence between grammar and referential meaning is what we call the figural dimension of language. This dimension accounts for the fact that two enunciations that are lexicologically and grammatically identical (the one being, so to speak, the quotation of the other and vice versa) can, regardless of context, have two entirely divergent meanings. In exactly the same way Rousseau defines the State or the law as a ‘double relationship’ that, at closer examination, turns out to be as self-destructive as it is unavoidable.5 And also: ‘The tension between figural and grammatical language is duplicated in the differentiation between the State as a defined entity (État) and the State as a principle of action (Souverain) or, in linguistic terms, between the constative and the performative function of language’.6 ‘Textual Allegory’ heads toward but does not quite say what de Man says in his lecture ‘Hegel on the Sublime’, i.e., that the sublime articulates a radical dialectically unrecoverable separation between discourse and the sacred, between man and god. In de Man’s reading of Rousseau, man and god, as tropes for each other, are only subject to a figural deconstruction. In ‘Hegel on the Sublime’, the concern is more with the positing power of language and the manner in which quotation marks, the mark of inscription, for instance the reported speech of god, renders null performative force. The informal comments at the end of this lecture are interesting: de Man suggests that law in Rousseau is not a divine order but an economy of violence, an economy that limits the damages of necessary violence. Power can absorb the transgression of the law, but it cannot absorb the power of usurpation, or to borrow a

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 163

29/06/2012 11:11

164 e r i n obo d ia c term from Schmitt’s The Nomos of the Earth, the power of radical title. Power always usurps the voice of god, always in the name of the theologic. One thing I like about de Man’s unpublished Nietzsche essay is that it retreats from ascribing too much to the positing power of language: there is, de Man reminds us, no actuality to this act, nothing, not even the performative act itself, is made present, language always disarticulating this possibility. ‘Textual Allegory’ seems to be a concluding chapter on the Rousseau material, and the final sentences indicate that it leads into the Nietzsche material, and indeed the unpublished Nietzsche manuscript does begin right after it on page 191. This would also suggest that the pages on Nietzsche that begin on page 191 were written before the pages on the other page 191 chapter, ‘The Purloined Ribbon’. The move from Rousseau to Nietzsche is abrupt, and in explanation de Man confesses his inability to close off a reading of a particular author’s work, yet also acknowledges that the very concept of monograph falsely gives in to the metaphor of an underlying singular person. De Man suggests that his idea of the ‘next step’ (in deconstructive readings) happens, but is not necessary; there is not always a next step. De Man’s next step is to move over to a different ‘author’ (Nietzsche), but claims that this choice of the author is somewhat random (we can only guess that here de Man could just as well have chosen Heidegger). On page 200 of the Nietzsche chapter, however, de Man unequivocally asserts that for Nietzsche, as for Rousseau, conceptualization is primarily a verbal process based on the rhetorical substitution of a semiotic for a substantial mode of reference, of signification (bezeichnen) for possession (fassen). Both Rousseau and Nietzsche consider conceptualization as the metaphorizing (knowledge) of a metonymic (sensation) link. This happens by way of the positing/positioning force of language (setzen). And then, in a Heidegger-ish manner, de Man states that the unwarranted substitution of knowledge for mere sensation becomes paradigmatic for a whole set of aberrations linked with the ‘thetic’ power of language (Setzen) in general, and allows for the radical possibility that all being, as the ground of entities, may be linguistically ‘gesetzt’, a [noematic] correlative of speech acts. And continuing on page 201: ‘Logic consists of positional speech acts. As such, it requires a temporal dimension, for it posits as future what one is unable to do in the present: all “setzen” is “voraussetzen” . . . but this “voraussetzen” is in error, for it presents a pre-positional, hypo-thetical statement as if it were established knowledge that exists as a presence in the present.’ De Man is warning against thinking of language only as positional act because no one self-present position is ‘achieved’: language doesn’t know anything or do anything (it is not a textual will to power, and there is no subject-substratum to the act, nor is there an ontology of the act). Nothing is ever in place (just displaced), yet this must be stated in a positional mode: the aberration of reference is stated in a referential mode. It seems that language fails to be either constative or performative. At this point, we might ask if it even fails to be inscriptional. Whatever one might make of this unpublished Nietzsche chapter, the archival manuscript suggests that it stands as a certain hypogram under ‘The Purloined Ribbon’ (I was about to say Purloined Letter), and opens up a new reading of it. In the 1976 Cornell audiotaped lecture of ‘The Purloined Ribbon: Autobiography

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 164

29/06/2012 11:11

d n a: d e m an’s nucl e ic archive

165

as Ironic Text’, de Man begins by claiming that he continues to read Rousseau interminably because no one reads Rousseau. Nietzsche, however, is also in the background of the Purloined Ribbon lecture, not only in the form of ‘Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’, but also in the sense that an unpublished Nietzsche chapter, which begins on page 191 in what I will now call the Textual Allegories manuscript was suppressed in favor of ‘The Purloined Ribbon: Autobiography as Text’, which begins as a second attempt at a page 191 in the Textual Allegories manuscript. A new reading of ‘The Purloined Ribbon’ might be called for since the archival manuscript suggests that it stands in the place of the chapter ‘Nietzsche: Rhetoric + Metaphysiscs’. The first thing to note is that a reading of Rousseau stands in the place of or substitutes for a reading of Nietzsche, and not the other way around. The metaleptic reversal of the priority of Nietzsche over Rousseau is itself made possible by de Man’s reading of The Birth of Tragedy in ‘Genesis and Genealogy’, by which he offers up a critique of all genetic patterns in general. We recall as well that the purloined ribbon represents a desire, specifically the desire for a substitution (could it be a desire for a substitution of Patricia by Paul?). In the audiotape, de Man jokes, ‘who would let a little property stand in the way of love?’ The ribbon is merely a piece of property, stolen property. In the context of the Confessions, shame relates to the exposure of a desire, not so much a desire for possession, but a desire to expose, which we might note, also belongs to the nature of archiving papers, often exposing a desire, sometime a desire to possess relics of a great writer, but more often relating to the exposure of a desire to expose, especially to future exposures or an exposureto-come. Working in the archive exposes the desire to expose, something that de Man knew about especially concerning his own experience at the Yeats Archives in Dublin. Whereas confession as revealed truth concerns an extra-verbal referential moment, confession as excuse concerns a non-verifiable speech act that articulates a discrepancy with revealed truth (perhaps it can never be shameful since it departs from the hermeneutics of exposure, the arch-technic of revealed truth). In the Paul de Man Papers, we will note in passing, there is no cataloguing or no section called ‘shameful materials’. I did notice, however, some tiny hairs scandalously exposing themselves in the folds of a few of de Man’s old notebooks. Do these hairs belong, properly or not, to the Paul de Man archive? Are they private hairs or public hairs? If, as de Man notes in his Purloined Ribbon lecture, to lie is often figured as a stealing of truth from its rightful owner, would the purloining of hairs from a public archive constitute a form of lying? What kind of confession or excuse might a purloined hair engender? And does it matter whether these hairs fell from the head of Paul de Man, or, say, some lifeless Marionette? And we will recall that in ‘On the Marionette Theater’, Kleist writes, ‘where grace is concerned, it is impossible for man to come anywhere near a puppet. Only a god can equal inanimate matter in this respect.’ To be sure, the hair itself is an archive, potentially exposing, as a repository of DNA, a genetic code, and a particular genealogy of the human genome. And for sure, a human being is no longer needed to do a certain reading of these hairs: UCI’s Bioinformatics department can provide special computer software that does genetic analysis of biological materials (machines read machines and perhaps since lying

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 165

29/06/2012 11:11

166 e r i n obo d ia c has a rhetorical structure and doesn’t require an interiority they can also lie to each other). The genetic archive, the bio-archive, can also generate a clone, a person as form and machine, a puppet, a Marionette. In the Purloined Ribbon lecture, de Man tells us that the random yet systematic, inanimate yet productive performative excuse is a machine that disarticulates the body. A letteral perhaps not random because grammatical hence systematic thread or ribbon leads from the non-name, non-signature Marion of ‘The Purloined Ribbon’ to the Marionette of ‘Kleist’s Marionette Theater’. As we all know, a Marionette (a Mary-doll) is a puppet (coming from the Greek neuropasta, meaning string-pulling) pulled by a ribbon. What happens when we pull on those hairs in the PdM archive? Like dead dried flowers pressed into a telephone book, these hairs are heliotropic, they turn toward a transcendental signification; they are synecdoches, parts of a whole, metonymies for the body of a scholar, no longer living. PdM’s DNA will not give us any insight into, for instance, his material on Rousseau or Nietzsche, but what they both or all share is their inscriptional element: a genetic code is a biotechnics of inscription like and unlike a handwritten manuscript. PdM’s writings may help us read not only dried up old heliotropes, but wiry old hairs as well.

No tes 1. Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2006), p. 70. 2. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 95. 3. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘On Public Happiness’ in The Portable Rousseau, trans. Paul de Man. UCIspace @ the Libraries, 2010 4. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, p. 89. 5. Paul de Man, Textual Allegories. UCIspace @ the Libraries, 2010 p. 170. 6. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 270.

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 166

29/06/2012 11:11

Chapter 13

13

Sovereign Debt Crisis: Paul de Man and the Privatization of Thought

Martin McQuillan Even if He exists, He’s done such a terrible job it’s a wonder people don’t file a class action suit against Him. Woody Allen

H

aving established some basic principles of rhetorical reading in his account of the Second Discourse and then established a process for ‘the deconstruction of metaphor’ in the example of ‘Self (Pygmalion)’, the 1979 published text of Allegories of Reading goes on to consider further the fictional text of the Julie. De Man finds in the second half of that book the extrapolation of the ethical relation between the lovers played out in a presentation of the relation between religion and politics in Clarens, the implications of which he will bundle out into the next two chapters in an inter-related analysis of the Profession de foi and The Social Contract. In both cases he wishes to understand whether religious texts and political texts differ from a rhetorical point of view; in the background to this analysis lies the question that de Man is working toward answering: whether literary and philosophical texts differ rhetorically. While de Man’s seamless exposition appears to swing from one text of Rousseau to another in a series of interlocking readings, the manuscript of Textual Allegories shows up certain difficulties he experiences in extending his thesis ever further into the text of Rousseau. In order to produce the appearance of a continuous argument in Allegories of Reading, de Man systematically edits out the difficulties he attempts to work through in Textual Allegories, resulting in an argument that is simultaneously both more cohesive and, in its concentration, leaves itself open to precisely the sort of rhetorical effects that de Man describes in his reading of Rousseau. There is much textual turbulence in the Zurich manuscript toward the ends of the chapters on the Profession de foi and The Social Contract. It is here that the manuscript is at its most divergent from the later published versions of de Man’s appreciation of Rousseau. It is also at the end of these two chapters in the 1979 edition of Allegories of Reading that we will find two of the most gnomic and economic parts of de Man, the famous de Manian aphorisms that seem to arrive like bolts out of the

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 167

29/06/2012 11:11

168 m a r tin m cqu illan blue, the unexpected blow that we should have seen coming but which nevertheless floors us. The two aphorisms that I am thinking of here, and which one suspects much of de Man’s thinking is curled around, are, in turn, the closing line of the chapter of the Profession de foi (which is eponymously entitled ‘Allegory of Reading’ in the 1979 text, but ‘Theotropic Allegory’ in the 1973 manuscript): ‘One sees from this that the impossibility of reading should not be taken too lightly’ (AR 245), and the closing line of the chapter on The Social Contract (‘Promises’ in 1979, ‘Political Allegory’ in 1973): ‘This is also why textual allegories on this level of rhetorical complexity generate history’ (AR 277). Now, while it is possible to struggle one’s way through the chapters of Allegories of Reading to recover the turns in de Man’s argument that lead him to make these concentrated statements, it is also revealing to visit the passages in the Zurich manuscript where these comments first appear. Their position in Textual Allegories is I think much more expository in structure and one can see that in the movement from the manuscript to the published edition de Man has heightened the complexity of these sentences by removing the expository scaffolding that surrounds them. In this respect one might think of the appearance of these sentences in Allegories of Reading as the equivalent of the presentation of a mathematical solution without the working out. The Zurich manuscript is the ‘working out’ that has been left in the notebook or on the verso of the exam script. For the slow teacher who is never as fast as the brilliant student, it will always be an advantage to see the working out. If these aphorisms are the expected unforeseeable blow in de Man, then studying Textual Allegories is like being presented with a slow-motion replay in which the leger de Man is revealed. It is as if one were offered a diagram or blueprint of a particularly brilliant trompe l’oeil. Examples such as these, that we will attend to presently, demonstrate the ways in which the trace of Textual Allegories shows through the architecture of Allegories of Reading: as a well-read aerial photograph reveals the archaeological remains of any given site, complicating the meaning and history of the relation between ground and structure. An acute example of this appears around the use of ‘theotropic’ in both texts. By the time of the 1979 publication all reference to the ‘theotropic’ as such has dropped out with the singular exception of a discussion of ‘organic and theotropic ideologies’ (AR 261) in the chapter on The Social Contract. The passage in question is revealing; allow me to quote it in order to work backwards to the ‘Theotropic Allegories’ chapter in Textual Allegories and forward again to the more concentrated and gnomic 1979 text. De Man has been discussing ‘the equation of [the] principle of totalization with natural process’ (AR 259) in the metaphorical models that his text has progressed through. In this respect, he suggests that a critical reading of The Social Contract demonstrates that it is not desireable for political units, such as the state, to aspire to the wholeness of, say, the state of nature. Here de Man, as he frequently does in this chapter, turns to the ‘manuscrit de Genève’ which contains earlier elaborations of Rousseau’s political writing that de Man claims are elided in the published text of The Social Contract. In this respect de Man’s extended reading of Rousseau depends upon precisely the sort of gesture that I am offering here with respect to the Zurich manuscript of Textual Allegories: the shuttle between Zurich and Geneva, Textual Allegories and Allegories of Reading, leaves behind

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 168

29/06/2012 11:11

sove re ign de bt crisis

169

no clear route between the two but rather an ever complex topography of paths, cross-roads, dead-ends and escapes. De Man suggests that the Geneva manuscript constitutes a polemic with Diderot in which Rousseau rejects the family and all such ‘natural’ models as the basis of a political order. Equally, says de Man, Rousseau rejects what he calls in 1979 ‘god-centred systems’ as foundational in politics: The deconstruction of metaphorical totalities which, in ‘Du bonheur public’, starts out from the relationship between private and public well-being here has a wider scope that encompasses all organic and theotropic ideologies. It is not carried out in a detailed analysis as was the case in some other texts, but asserted sweepingly, as if it could be taken for granted. If the formal definition of the contract then seems to relapse into the figure which has just been decisively condemned, then this can certainly not be true without further qualification. The definition is far from telling all there is to tell about the structure of the contract, perhaps because a degree of complexity has been reached that no longer allows for definitional language. (AR 260–1) This passage also appears with some amendments in Textual Allegories (TA 158–9) as one of several uses of the term ‘theotropic’. However, it is a decisive moment in both texts as de Man seeks to demonstrate the ways in which The Social Contract as a specifically political text, which functions beyond ‘definitional language’, differs from the fiction, philosophy and theology that he has read hitherto in Rousseau. Both texts work toward an understanding of The Social Contract as performative, which represents an altogether different order of textual difficulty than has been encountered up till now. At issue here is the contract itself as a metaphorical order that would be different in essence from, for example, the question of the self (Pygmalion) or sensation (Profession de foi). The attenuation in de Man’s argument comes in his attempt to push this argument concerning the practical exceptionalism of the contract while holding on to the development of the general argument that has provided him with the foundations that predicate this observation of the singular. We begin to see the ground shift around the contract as an issue earlier on in the reading of the Profession. In Allegories of Reading de Man highlights a contradiction in the vicar of Savoyard’s conception of God (de Man is keen to distinguish the literary voice of the vicar from Rousseau) stating that since he rejects the idea of unmediated revelation the vicar’s idea of God must be drawn by an analogical extension of human rather than natural attributes, rendering God metaphorical. Accordingly: Like the wild metaphor ‘giant’ which, in the ‘Essay on the Origins of Language’, becomes ‘man’, the spontaneous metaphor ‘God’ can then be institutionalized and quantified into a contractual relationship in which God is said to owe something to man, and to pay him for the price of labors accomplished in his behalf. The pro- or regression from love to economic dependence is a constant characteristic of all moral or social systems based on the authority of noncontested metaphorical systems. (AR 239)

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 169

29/06/2012 11:11

170 m a r tin m cqu illan Man having imagined the attributes of God, the mind of God resembling the mind of Man, God then owes Man a debt for bringing Him forth into the world and working on His behalf. The relationship between Man and God is then a contractual one represented as a form of love in which the principle of free will is understood as an opportunity for Man to demonstrate his equality to the divine freedom he shares with the God he invests in. For de Man here this contractual status is of the same order as the classic example of the ‘giant’ in ‘The Origins of Language’ and can seemingly be accounted for by the existing apparatus of what he calls throughout his reading of Rousseau ‘the deconstruction of metaphor’. What is eye-catching for the reader of today in this extract from the account of the Profession is the suggestion that the move from equality (love) into economic dependence is, according to de Man, a ‘constant characteristic’ of all systems based on the authority of ‘noncontested’ (i.e. un-deconstructed) metaphorical systems. For de Man, Rousseau should not be conflated with the figure of the vicar, because Rousseau (or in a suitably complex way the text of Rousseau) is aware of the impossibility of upholding a metaphorical system without contestations from within its own textual presentation. At the very least Rousseau’s own text remains unreadable to him because it is bound to repeat the unwarranted defigurations that it first identifies. However, such a situation has what we might be forced, provisionally, to call ‘real-world consequences’ because, as de Man suggests in his reading of the Profession, ‘when this process is described in terms of will or freedom and thus transferred to the level of reference, the differential residue is bound to become manifest as an empirical awareness that affects and indeed constitutes a world in which it now appears to be “taking place”; a mind, a consciousness, a self’ (AR 242). Given that the theotropic metaphor defines the attributes of God as a reflection of Man’s own free will, and de Man has up till now repeatedly demonstrated the allegorical construction of the self in his account of the Second Discourse, Pygmalion and Julie, this argument is leading us toward a consideration of nothing other than the question of ideology and political action. The last few pages of the reading of the Profession are amongst some of most contested between Textual Allegories and Allegories of Reading. In the Zurich text this declaration concerning the empirical affects appears much earlier (TA 127), de Man having rewritten the chapter for Allegories in order to end-load an argument that will lead him toward The Social Contract. The final pages of ‘Theotropic Allegory’ fall out completely from the 1979 publication, which ends with a pointer toward the practical nature of de Man’s rhetorical reading. He proposes that the unreadability of Profession de foi (‘a set of assertions that radically exclude each other’, namely a metaphorical disfiguration, abberation or totalization, its deconstruction and the impossibility of that deconstruction avoiding the repetition of the original error) is not the assertion of ‘mere neutral constations: they are exhortative performatives that require the passage from sheer enunciation to action’ (AR 245). When de Man speaks of a text as ‘literally’ unreadable this is no mere hyperbolic confusion of the metaphorical use of the literal; he is in fact pointing to the world and to action. The point for de Man in the final lines of the 1979 reading of the Profession is not that in the face of unreadability one should revert to theism; rather, ‘if we decide that belief, in the most extensive use of the term (which must include all possible forms

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 170

29/06/2012 11:11

sove re ign de bt crisis

171

of idolatry and ideology) can once and forever be overcome by the enlightened mind, then this twilight of the idols will be all the more foolish in not recognizing itself as the first victim of its occurrence’ (AR 245). ‘Belief’ here is a substitution for ‘religious faith’ (TA 132) from a similar earlier passage in the Zurich manuscript, which also argues that the critical overcoming of theism is only one moment in the movement of the theotropic which cannot prevent a repeat of the theological error because both critique and theism share the same allegorical structure that believes in the readability of its own enunciation. This leads de Man in the 1979 text to declare that from this one can see ‘that the impossibility of reading should not be taken too lightly’ (AR 245). This is not a matter for levity, or mere textual play, this is how all ideology operates. The Zurich manuscript continues for several pages after this assertion, which gnomically cuts short the 1979 published text. De Man goes on to reveal much of the thinking that lies behind this interest in the ideological, which turns out to be not just a late concern of the essays contained in the Aesthetic Ideology book. Having spoken of the ‘inability to read’ (TA 132) rather than ‘the impossibility of reading’, a turn of phrase that anachronistically makes the sentence sound much more Derridean than it first appeared, de Man goes on to describe this fate not as the tragedy of the human condition but as one borne out of the ‘shameful or fearful disgrace of persistently having to lie in order to make the incomprehensible more understandable’ (TA 132). This must be as true for the powers that oppress through ideology as for the semioclast who misleads us with the negative labour of their exposure of ideology. This shame and fear in human error is what Rousseau knows better than anyone, says de Man, and perhaps it is not surprising that ultimately de Man will break with his reading of the theotropic contract and conclude the published 1979 text with the Marion episode from the Confessions. Perhaps we might begin to read the story of the ribbon as another allegory of the shame of deliberate deception that upholds the theological-political contract of reference and the referential contract of the theo-political. In terms of unreadability, de Man goes on to suggest that the situation does not change between its theoretical status as ‘a unit of pure judgement and its most empirical manifestation as practical behaviour’ and that this referential set-up is ‘an invariant of Rousseau’s thought’ (TA 132). He goes on to develop a spatial metaphor of his own in order to explain what is happening linguistically in Rousseau, whereby the belief in readability is said to shrink or reduce ‘the semantic field to particular and quantitavely restricted areas’ (TA 133). At this point the manuscript does become literally unreadable as the transcription is unable to decode de Man’s handwriting: the example he gives is the unfolding of the ‘calamities of economic [blank]’ in the Second Discourse. One could speculate on the illegible word here, based on a knowledge of the Second Discourse, however the example itself here would be strictly economic, as one of many such instances of this semantic contraction in Rousseau. De Man describes it as setting up a fence around the sign to limit its possible significations, offering a ‘finite horizon of a specific semantic “space” ’ simultaneously bounding and providing a delimited key ‘with which the properly initiated reader can open the gate that leads into the privileged, private property of the referential meaning’ (TA 133). From this we might suppose

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 171

29/06/2012 11:11

172 m a r tin m cqu illan that reference as such is based upon a principle of ‘private property’ that both contracts the reader into a belief in enunciation and depends upon its own unwritten contract by which reference and propriety are one and the same. De Man pushes this further to say that since for Rousseau judgment is ‘an active principle of movement, referentiality metamorphizes (or metaphorizes) meaning into the specific actions of a praxis’ (TA 133). Action itself is then the result of this complex, uncontrollable and unreadable translation from the privatization of the sign into the definition of actions, in which all the grounds for defining and deciding upon those actions are put in doubt by the unreadability itself. The privatization of the sign here being the aberrant delimitation as ideology of polysemy through theotropic allegory, with the thought of both the semioclast and oppressor passing through this structure of private property. This insight might be what some who like to think of themselves as ‘materialists’ believe they dislike most about de Manian deconstruction but there is yet to be a serious demonstration of why he is incorrect on this point. Equally, there is yet to be a sustained encounter with de Man that carries this thought about thought itself into the political field it describes. The Zurich manuscript itself is as close as de Man ever comes in his writing to taking us toward that particular frontier. He goes on to propose that the propriety of reference ‘is constitutively metaphysical’ in the way that Heidegger and Derrida understand this term. Equally, metaphysics in turn ‘is also constitutively theotropic’ (TA 134). In his reading of The Social Contract de Man will suggest a link between a certain sens propre and property: ‘a principle of functional identification between the owning subject and the owned object is implied. This identification is not natural and legitimate, but contractual. There is nothing legitimate about property, but the rhetoric of property confers the illusion of legitimacy’ (TA 160). This is the situation we saw in the relationship between God and the Man who invents him in his own image and likeness. The rhetoric of property always finds its guarantee in a ‘Theotropic Allegory’, which in the reading of The Social Contract must always concern sovereignty, the intra/extramuros, and the nomos of the state. In this way, de Man’s readings of Rousseau here demonstrate that ‘textual allegory’ can serve as a basis of an analogy that is always more than merely analogical concerning the political: ‘The tension between figural and grammatical language is duplicated in the differentiation between the State as a defined entity (État) and the State as a principle of action (Souverain) or, in linguistic terms, between the constative and the performative function of language’ (AR 270). As Erin Obodiac has framed it for us, de Man argues that referentiality is constitutively theologic since the only word that would have a truly proper meaning, the only name for a transcendental signification that is not itself a sign, would be ‘god’. In the readings of Rousseau, however, just as the concept ‘man’ is an ideological displacement of the metaphor, or trope, ‘man’, and metaphor (a figure that disfigures) takes timid priority over denomination, so too the theologic is a displacement of what de Man calls the theotropic. Property, contractual law, and sovereignty must refer themselves at some station or another to a transcendental signification and so the theotropic plays a crucial role in their denomination and operation. It would be important at this point to distinguish between the theotropic in de Man as the deconstructive operation of allegory and the theologic which is the

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 172

29/06/2012 11:11

sove re ign de bt crisis

173

error of a political theology that grounds itself in an operation it cannot explain. In the excised pages of the reading of the Profession that conclude the second to last chapter of the Zurich manuscript, de Man pushes this problematic as far as he dare. Not only is all reference theotropic but also, and therefore, all action: ‘The only “meaning that one can give the word to be” (Profession, p. 571) is that of “god”. Yet, at the same time, the referentiality resulting from this paradigmatic denomination must lead to the performance of a finite, practical or, as we say, “historical” act’ (TA 134). If the illusion of propriety allows for the possibility of finite thought then equally the act of acting in the absence of any guarantee for decision concerning that action follows the same structure that believes without evidence in the safe ground of its own act of delimitation: ‘the possibility of practical action is inherently linked to the (fallacious) coinage of the word “god” ’ (TA 134). There is then a close and necessary relationship between transcendental meaning and practical action: ‘hence the redoubtable instrumental effectiveness of any political action (conquest, colonization but also legislation) combined with religious faith’ (TA 134). The theotropic is then the very possibility of action itself, the relapse into the theologic is the referential error that gives us both politics and metaphysics. It would not be a difficult exercise for the reader of today to fill the blanks of de Man’s manuscript with examples of the toxic ‘instrumental effectiveness’ of political actions which derive their ever more powerful effects from their combination with versions of religious faith. Such examples would in no way be limited to, or proper to, the metaphysical West or its theocratic others. In an epoch of globalization, some forty years after de Man authored the Zurich manuscript, the authority of the non-contested metaphorical system that predicates the capitalist contract ensures the regression into economic dependence implied by the idea of god is a constant characteristic of the worldwide moral or social system. For example, what is one to make of the concept of a so-called ‘sovereign debt crisis’ in which a nation state, loaned money on the basis of its inviolable creditworthiness, defaults on its payments, costing other sovereign states who loaned the money (states and their ‘private’ banks being one and the same thing in this context) and so in turn rendering them unable to repay their own borrowing, and so on until the contagion stops at the one believed most credit worthy or more sovereign than the other sovereigns. The Eurozone crisis of the summer of 2011 was based upon a negotiation between a structured or ‘orderly’ default of certain Eurozone countries in exchange for the transfer of fiscal sovereignty to the entities that bailed them out, notably the right of Germany and the IMF to dictate fiscal policy to the defaulting countries. While in practice any sovereign entity might default, in theory ‘sovereign’ was supposed to mean ‘sovereign’ in an uncontested theological sense. The crisis is said to be the result of the debts run up by the profligate nation. However, surely the difficulty has its basis in the more fundamental crisis of debt that invests in the state the idea of an indivisible, god-like sovereignty. As we saw in the case of the mind of God that reflects Man’s own attributes, the extension or metamorphorization of the state into a sovereign entity results in the quick pro/re-gression from love of the nation or the constitution (as a form of self-love) into an economic dependence in which the citizen pays for the state just as the state owes a debt to the citizens that maintain

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 173

29/06/2012 11:11

174 m a r tin m cqu illan it and collectively invest in the idea of its sovereignty. If we were to listen to the de Man of 1973 we might say that the crisis of sovereign debt is the crisis of the unreadability of the contractual relationship in which the state owes its citizens for the price of bailing it out (both in terms of taking on the debt of paying back the IMF loan but also in so doing continuing to invest in its creditworthiness). The movement from theotropic allegory to political allegory would tell us that not only is this situation untenable without a continued ideological scaffold of theological belief but that it is not necessarily something that can be easily overcome by the demonstration of its ideological constitution. Sovereign debt only becomes a crisis when those who are asked to pay the debt of the state refuse the regime of austerity imposed upon them by the state as a proxy for the extended sovereign order of its own creditors. In losing faith in the contract between the citizens and the state, the citizens become a threat to the inviolability of the state and to the sovereign order of usery and exchange which believes in nation states as the transcendental lender and debtor of last resort. However, to imitate the vocabulary of Textual Allegories, something like a revolutionary deconstruction in which unwilling taxpayers took to the streets to demonstrate the unreadability of the contract between global capital, national banks, nation states and citizens could no more act as a theological guarantee of national or collective debt than the state entity that they refuse. Nevertheless, the fact remains that in projecting themselves beyond the model of a contract between state and capital, any new entity (such as a sovereign people or revolutionary body, who as a people have opposed the sovereignty of the state) cannot escape the contractual obligations that go with such a constitution, i.e, to act as a point of referral that guarantees the obligations of debt without which reference and sovereignty itself would no longer function. Any such constitution must inevitably be theotropic and involve the production of an order of debt and economic dependence. This may not be welcome news for readers today who would like to imagine something like a state of communism beyond the capitalist promise that was not dependent upon the economic inequalities of the capitalist state. However, just as de Man was writing in 1973 in the shadow of a European functionalist Marxism, it is necessary today to reiterate the lesson of the Zurich manuscript, namely that such a vision of the constituted commune is just a displacement of the theological fantasy which the vision sets out to challenge in the first place. A revolutionary deconstruction could point out the unjustified identifications present in an unchallenged system but would be powerless to prevent the repetition of the same identifications in its own discourse. However, there would remain within in any such deconstruction the remains of a disarticulation that, as a logical margin of error, prevents the closure of the deconstruction and projects it into its own allegorical mode. This differential residue manifests itself as an empirical awareness that affects mind and world. Nothing is quite the same again after the deconstruction, it is not locked into repetition without variance even if it cannot undo the aberrant metaleptic exchange of a transcendental signification it first challenges. Now, at this point in the argument of the 1973 manuscript de Man has brought himself to a point of considerable structural difficulty. Having suggested that all reference in some way involves a relation to the reductive power of the proper, and

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 174

29/06/2012 11:11

sove re ign de bt crisis

175

that the theotropic contract is characteristic of all moral and social systems, there would seem to be little room left for The Social Contract to work in some distinctive way that will separate it from the other texts by Rousseau that de Man reads. In what remains of the excised pages of ‘Theotropic Allegory’ de Man turns away from a claim of exceptionalism for The Social Contract in favour of an exemplarity by which the text demonstrates most clearly the binary of public/private that runs through the entire corpus of Rousseau. The published text of 1979, however, continues to insist on the singularity of The Social Contract, demonstrating that the turn of the argument in Allegories of Reading is constructed or re-routed in order to produce its own rhetorical effects rather than the demonstration of a thesis that was beginning to come unstuck by the end of the second to last chapter of Textual Allegories. In Allegories of Reading de Man continues to insist that the exceptionalism of The Social Contract has been demonstrated even though he knows that he abandoned this path in 1973. There is another full-length essay to be written on the conclusion of the reading of The Social Contract in Textual Allegories and in particular the way in which de Man attempts to sustain the public/private polarity as a form of exemplary exceptionalism in Rousseau.1 The abrupt end to the published text of 1979 leaves us with the non-sequitur: ‘This is also why textual allegories on this level of rhetorical complexity generate history.’ The particular level referred to here being the further complication of the rhetorical model offered by the unique political text of The Social Contract. However, this cut excises a long consideration in Textual Allegories of the collapse of all textual allegories into the theotropic model. It is telling that the 1973 chapter ‘Theotropic Allegory’ is metonymically transformed into ‘Allegory of Reading’ for the 1979 edition, whereby the theotropic turn comes to stand for all reading as such. The 1973 reading of The Social Contract proposes an alternative to the 1979 maxim: ‘Textual allegories generate history, among other reasons because they obliterate any possible distinction between textual and political history’ (TA 179). Here there is no distinction between the level of complexity the allegory performs, all allegories are similar (i.e. theotropic) and all result in the ideological conflation between reference and action that we saw above. De Man goes on to say that what falls out from his reading of The Social Contract is ‘the generalizing principle which makes it possible to consider theotropic [he strikes this through and writes “theological” over it] or ethical allegories as particularized versions of this generative model and thus to break down the significance of such thematic distinctions’ (TA 179). In this sense the 1972 reading offers us the exact opposite conclusion of the later published essay in which the relationship between a general generative principle of allegory and the specificity of texts is one of complex dependence in which the breakdown of distinctions, ‘also implies that the terminology of generality, particularity and generative power has a degree of referential undecidability which should exclude any simplified metaphorical use of these terms, while anticipating the failure to achieve such vigilance, or such immunity to rhetorical seduction’ (TA 179–80). This looks a lot like the theotropic-metaphysical model that we saw play itself out in the practical consequences of unreadability above. For de Man in 1973 it is ‘the thematization of a structure that cannot be separated from the textuality of

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 175

29/06/2012 11:11

176 m a r tin m cqu illan any text, (the inherent necessity, for any operative language to postulate transcendental signification)’ (TA 180) and the reintroduction of the theological into the political would appear to be entirely predictable and unavoidable. In this sense de Man calls The Social Contract ‘a deconstructed version’ of the Profession, in which both texts ‘can be considered as the same political allegory’ (TA 180). For example, we can see toward the end of the published 1979 text, but also much earlier in 1973, the introduction of God in The Social Contract as way of outflanking the temporal aporia of the contract which as a promise must posit a future possibility in relation to a past entity but can never refer to any present state or people. Here the transcendental principle anchors the unreadability of the contract in divine and sovereign authority as a metaleptic reversal of cause and effect in which the promise is realized before its utterance within a teleological system whereby figure and meaning converge. We saw this in the example of sovereign debt in which the indivisibility of sovereignty is retrospectively conferred on a point of transcendental signification such as a nation state as the guarantor of debt rather than the effect of debt. In the excised pages from ‘Political Allegory’ of 1973 de Man proposes that ‘the reading of Rousseau in terms of rhetorical theory can be concluded at this point’ (TA 180), suggesting that no further insights into the general model can be obtained, offering the caveat that the generality of textual allegory should not be mistaken for a horizon limit of all rhetorical systems. Such a confusion would be another relapse into the production of the boundaries of private property in theological determination. In fact the theory of The Social Contract for the de Man of 1973 will have transpired to be one type of narrative told by textual allegory. He suggests that if we were in fact to look for an example of a text that both avoids the trap of entering into contractual promises it could not fulfill and which develops ‘a genuinely theoretical dimension’, unlike the Profession ‘which function[s] politically on the level of praxis only and [is] unable to account for [its] own efficacy’, we would have to return to ‘the deconstructive rigor’ of the Julie from whence sprung the initial impulse to read the Profession and The Social Contract as different levels of complex allegory (TA 182). Here de Man’s analysis has led him full circle back to the literary text with which he began, resulting in the need once more to distinguish between literary and political texts. However, this time de Man has no interest in reintroducing and so repeating an already collapsed analysis. Instead he makes a claim for the Julie as a text of considerable sophistication that at once earns the right to make the promise articulated in The Social Contract but is also, as literature, capable of withholding that promise. In this way in the Julie the promise is said to ‘become an ironic promise’ (TA 190) and the introduction of irony, a trope with which aspects of de Man’s later writing will become so readily associated, ‘moves us out of the orbit of Rousseau’s into that of Nietzsche’s text’ (TA 190). What then follows in the abandoned fork on Nietzsche, ‘Rhetoric + Metaphysics’, is an attempt to carry on the elaboration of a deconstruction of rhetorical systems through an author whose output, like the by now seemingly exhausted Rousseau, exists on the cusp between the literary, the philosophical and the political. Certain passages of this fragment were later reworked into the text ‘Rhetoric of Persuasion’ that sits incongruously at the end of Part I of Allegories of Reading, almost as a preface to the

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 176

29/06/2012 11:11

sove re ign de bt crisis

177

reading of Rousseau that follows in Part II, a version of the text’s own metaleptic reversal of cause and effect in which this abandoned epilogue to Rousseau comes to introduce the very text that produced it. In the 1973 fragment ‘Rhetoric + Metaphysics’ de Man seems to be introducing a new category and a new line of argument in order to uphold an analysis that has been collapsing in on itself since the ending of the chapter on the ‘Profession de foi’. Dissatisfied with this insupportable turn in his own thinking, he checks out of an extended reading of Nietzsche, that begins to look like it might only be capable of delivering him yet another version of textual allegory, in favour of a structurally satisfying return to the Confessions, ‘in order to dispel any illusion that the reading of The Social Contract may have closed off the interpretation of Rousseau’.2 This looks like a trick borne out of desperation in the face of the interminable extension of the rhetorical model and is all very different from the published and polished text of 1979 which justifies its final chapter on the shared ‘referential-reading-moment’ between political and autobiographical texts in a spectrum of significations (AR 278). While de Man makes his own promise ‘to clarify the relationship between critical procedures that start out from the discourse of the subject and procedures that start out from political statements’ (AR 278) as a reduced ambition for his thesis, the chapter ‘Excuses (Confessions)’ actually offers no such resolution. Instead a technically brilliant explication and deconstruction of the performative function of excuse leads de Man to a series of speculations on the machine-like grammar of textuality that produces rhetorical effects beyond authorial control and intention. These pages offer much to the reader but they categorically do not extend the stratification of allegorical complexity that is set up at the end of the reading of the Julie as the guiding principle of de Man’s interest in Rousseau. While the previous three chapters all reference each other, and every text of Rousseau seems to deconstruct every other text of Rousseau, the chapter on the Confessions (having been grafted on to the manuscript by its tenuous opening paragraph) is a self-contained exemplar of rhetorical reading rather than an addition to an ongoing accretion of the attempted rhetoric of rhetoric that makes the rest of Textual Allegories a genuine attempt on de Man’s behalf to write a continuous monograph study. The 1973 draft of the Confessions essay (‘Chapter VII: The Purloined Ribbon: Autobiography as Text’) is physically separated from the rest of de Man’s handwritten manuscript of Textual Allegories; however, the pages are numbered beginning at ‘191’ suggesting that it was intended to follow on from the chapter on The Social Contract in favour of the abandoned Nietzsche fragment. The edits and rewrites that de Man makes from Textual Allegories to Allegories of Readings succeed in air-brushing out all of these difficulties in his account of the bifrucation of the Julie into the Profession and The Social Contract, allowing de Man to maintain his own fiction that a comprehensive theory of tropes has been offered when in fact nothing like it has been achieved. None of this is to belittle the brilliance of Allegories of Reading as both a theoretical tour de force and a compelling resource for the deconstruction of totalitarianisms of every kind. Rather, this comparative analysis of Allegories and its other is intended to demonstrate the complexity of an unavoidable onto-political-theotropy that de Man himself first formulates and then buries in the crypt of his text as both

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 177

29/06/2012 11:11

178 m a r tin m cqu illan its productive well-spring and illuminating outcome. Just as de Man always credits Rousseau with the knowledge of his own insights, so we must credit de Man with a theoretical sophistication that he finds in others. Here we owe a debt to de Man as the unreadable sovereign of his own text in crisis.

No tes 1. See my ‘De Man and the NeoCons’ in ‘Where Ghosts Live’, special edition of Derrida Today, 5:2, 2012, edited by Graham Allen and David Coughlan. 2. Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine Libraries. Paul de Man papers. MS-C004. Box 6: Folder: 36.

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 178

29/06/2012 11:11

Appendix

Appendix Nietzsche I: Rhetoric + Metaphysics Paul de Man

S

everal Nietzsche commentators have pointed out that Nietzsche’s valorization of the critical, deconstructive processes that occupy such a prominent place in his work is ambivalent. In Ironie und Dichtung, Beda Alleman describes the seductive dangers of Nietzschean deconstruction as follows: ‘Es eröffnet sich hier (in the psychological demystification of Human all too Human) eine hervorragende Möglichkeit der Ironie, die ein angemessenes Spielfeld findet in der Spannung zwischen ‘Illusion’ und deren Auflösung, im aphoristischen Umschlag aus dem allgemein Geglaubten in eine geistreiche Enthüllung und in der Widerlegung des scheinbar allgemein Gültigen durch ein scheinbar noch allgemeiner Gültiges: der konventionell übernommenen Meinung durch die zum vornherein eigentlich feststehende verächtliche Absichtlichkeit aller menschlichen Meinungen.’ (I+D., 114) (m.i.) He goes on to comment that the a priori distrustful attitude towards human motives is too facile, too cheap an attitude to achieve philosophical dignity and he quotes Nietzsche’s own derogatory remarks against ‘Die Art Seelenaushorchung und – Ausschnüffelung’1 which he despises in Renan and in Sainte-Beuve. The attitude allows, at best, for flashes of wit – Alleman alludes to Lichtenberg and to French ‘moralists’ such as, presumably, la Rochefoucauld or Chamfort – but Nietzsche’s own authority can be enlisted in condemning it as ‘tief Unvornehm’ despite its ‘vornehmer Anschein’, as ‘blasiert’, devoid of ‘echterer Adel’, in short, as a manifestation of the ‘weak’ nihilism that is consistently being condemned throughout the work.2 It is contrasted with a more positive, joyful (heiter) value-affirmation that is said to compensate, in part, for the epistemological weakness of critical arguments which, echoing Heidegger,3 Alleman dismisses as ‘reversed Platonism.’ Nietzsche has ‘. . . die Kraft zur Umkehrung der ironischen Haltung aus einer raffinierten Abart der epigonenhaften Müdigkeit und Resignation in ein weiterführendes und fruchtbares Element einer möglichen Kunst der Zukunft, welche die verhängnisvolle Entwickelung der Religion und Philosophie in den europäischen Nihilismus hinein, das ist Nietzsche’s Hoffnung, wiederaufzufangen vermöchte.’ (ibid., p. 115) This quotation does not stem from an established authority in Nietzsche studies. Beda Alleman is primarily knows [sic] as an interpreter of Hölderlin and of Rilke

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 179

29/06/2012 11:11

180 p a u l de m an and as a discriminating applier of Heideggerian insights to literary studies. Yet it brings together, perhaps more transparently and candidly than the more specialized literature, many of the elements that have determined the understanding of Nietzsche up to the present: the characterization of Nietzsche’s deconstruction of metaphysics as both psychological and ‘ironic’; the unchecked acceptance and Übernahme of Nietzsche’s own heavily valorized vocabulary without consideration of an epistemological background that is perhaps not so simply value-laden; the sharp contrast between a negative and a positive value system and a solemn adherence to the latter at the expense of the former; the unquestioned projection of this scheme into a literal historical or political pattern, implying a negative diagnosis of Nietzsche’s post-enlightenment contemporaneity as nihilistic; the implied hope and promise that such a nihilism is to be overcome in a ‘new enlightenment’ aimed at a better historical future; the association of his victory over nihilism with a new form of art said to be Dionysian; etc.4 All the received ideas in Nietzsche interpretation are present here, as well as some of the assumptions that lead from one to the other and hint at the system of their inherence. I am not concerned with a polemical discussion of the set of opinions here somewhat arbitrarily (and unfairly) associated with the statement of a single, highly respectable critic. All these opinions could find ample corroboration in Nietzsche’s texts, which so often seem themselves much more concerned with doxa rather than episteme,5 and certainly indulge in a great deal of ‘historical’ value-demagogy. What is interesting in Beda Alleman’s statement, and warrants its use as a point of access to the (oddly-shaped and) hard to survey field of the work (as a ‘whole’ if such terminology can still be made to apply, even with emphatic quotation-marks, to the set of Nietzsche’s published and unpublished books and notes) is the assimilation of ‘irony’ with the de-constructive process and, consequently, the linkage of a rhetorical trope (irony) with the referential category of value. Alleman seems to have little awareness of the implications of such a link. It does not seem to concern him that the statements in which Nietzsche speaks derogatively about a psychological demystification (Entlarvung), which he quotes in support of his negation of Nietzsche’s negations, occurs in connection with historical literalists such as Sainte-Beuve and Renan and not with ‘moralists’ like la Rochefoucauld or Lichtenberg. Even on the most superficial level of the term, these aphorists can more readily be associated with irony than 19th century authors that Nietzsche would rather tend to associate with the ‘Colportage-Psychologie’ sensationalism of the Goncourts.6 The psychological de-constructions of Human all too Human have little to do with this brand of realism. That Alleman would fail to make the distinction is not consistent with his preconceptions. For irony is here conceived in purely diegetic psychological terms as having to do with the awareness that a subject may have of its own or another’s subject intentions. And there is nothing in Alleman’s text that suggests that this psychological horizon is not also the limit of Nietzsche’s own theory and practice of irony. The illusions that the ironic deconstructions put in question are illusions about the self exposed for reasons that are themselves self-rooted. A subject takes a (morally dubious) satisfaction at showing the bad faith of other subjects, possibly including . This strategy is facile, for, to the precise extent

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 180

29/06/2012 11:11

n ietzsch e i: rh etoric + me tap hy sics

181

that it is performed by a subject, any intentional act can always be valorized negatively as well as positively; as long as one remains within a subject-centered system, there is no intentional act that can not be shown to be ignoble. It is also vulgar (unvornehm), for the a priori valorization of the ignoble over the noble in terms of psychological truth and falsehood takes advantage of a one-sided attitude that could just as well be reversed (as the critics hasten to do when they decide that Nietzsche’s despicable contempt for contemptible human motives becomes admirable when exalted into the heroic ability to see others, and oneself, as they ‘really’ are and will again historically ‘become’). Nietzsche would then, like the early Sartre, be caught in the bad faith and the self-hatred that he has himself postulated and that, as Alleman puts it, ‘zum vornherein eigentlich festste(ht)’. Or, rather, he would have a measure of significance to the extent that he was able, for ideological and moral rather than for philosophical reasons, to get off this treadmill. It is certainly true that, in certain parts of Human all too Human, Nietzsche’s deconstruction takes the form of a psychological demystification; Alleman aptly quotes Nietzsche’s dictum about the necessity for a ‘cold bath therapy supplied by the suspicion and the contempt of man.’7 But it is equally true that in many other, later or earlier works, the critical de-constructions, though just as prominent, do not start out from psychological observations; it could, of course, be argued that, even then, they are still determined by the consciousness of a subject rather than other (and perhaps not easy to define) considerations. This is one of the things a N. interpretation has to decide. One can contend that even Human all too Human contains much more than just ‘psychological’ deconstructions8 and that these denunciations of human motives are only one particular aspect of a more general deconstructive scheme that does not necessarily have to involve the self.9 It has to be shown where this pattern occurs and how it is structured. Once this is done, the entire question of the subject in Nietzsche’s work may become so ancillary (nebensächlich) that it would be redundant to labor the point by a detailed reading of Human all too Human. What is the status of the de-construction in Nietzsche’s text? Is it legitimate to equate it with irony or with any rhetorical trope? Is de-construction itself a value or does it put ‘values’ into question by leading to a transvaluation that replaces one value system by another? Value implies reference and vice-versa: what, then, is the relationship between the figural and the referential dimension in Nietzsche’s deconstructive discourse? It seems difficult to avoid these questions. That the critical thrust of Nietzsche’s writing is directed towards the central concepts of metaphysics –summarized by Eugen Fink, for example, as Hen, Agathon and Aletheia10 – is beyond dispute, even if one contends, with Heidegger, that he remains within the ban of these concepts. It is equally obvious that this ‘critique’ is not conducted in the tone and by means of the type of arguments normally associated with critical philosophy, which is why it better be designated by a ‘new’ term such as de-construction, which Derrida used in his reading of Rousseau and which Lacoue-Labarthe uses with regard to Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche.11 Clearly the questions formulated above and stated as if the significance of the term ‘deconstruction’ were knowable common knowledge can be considered as a device to circumscribe the eccentric term

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 181

29/06/2012 11:11

182 p a u l de m an ‘deconstruction’ by means of terms such as value, trope (possibly including the much less familiar ‘irony’), reference, whose connotations are more familiar. Nietzsche himself opposes his negative to his positive assertions by such qualifications as weak and strong, diseased and healthy, herd and ‘happy few’ , terms so arbitrarily valorized that they cry out for a preliminary theory of value + if they are at all to be taken seriously. And since it is commonly admitted that value-reductions are tolerated (and even applauded) in so-called ‘literary’ texts in a manner that would not quite pass muster in so-called ‘philosophical’ texts, the question of value, itself linked to the question of deconstruction, is in its turn linked to the possible distinction between literary and philosophical texts. This is also the crudely empirical, factual level on which the specific difficulty of the Nietzsche text at first confronts the reader. Just as the factual difficulty of Rousseau consisted in the contradictory co-presence of a political with a fictional discourse, the difficulty of Nietzsche stems from the patent literariness of texts that keep making claims traditionally associated with philosophy rather than with poetry. The reading of Rousseau tried to show how the various thematic rubriques (political, psychological, ethical, theological, literary, etc.) finally had to be subsumed, at considerable epistemological and practical expense, under the more general rubrique of ‘texts’. It is not obvious that the same assimilation, at perhaps even greater expense, also has to confuse or scramble (brouiller) the assumed distinction between philosophy and literature. Nietzsche’s work raises this question – which has, of course, never ceased to be raised with reference to such writers as, for example, Plato, Lucretius, Dante?, Montaigne, Pascal?, Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger and others – and it raises it by ways of a deconstruction of the value of value. In the case of Rousseau, we did not have to go far afield to show that critical processes such as the putting-into-question of conceptuality, of the self, of diegetic reference, of judgment and of civil law were systematically dependent on the interplay between the rhetorical and the grammatical dimension within a linguistic model. We had, after all, quite explicitly ‘linguistic’ Rousseau texts at our disposal, texts such as the Essay on the Origin of Language, the section on language in the Second Discourse or the Second Preface to the Nouvelle Heloïse. Moreover, the prominence of rhetorical and linguistic theorization among Rousseau’s immediate predecessors and associates,12 not to forget his personal interest in musicology, lead one to expect a high degree of linguistic awareness on his part. Finally, we could take unfair advantage of a systematic blindness in Rousseau criticism with regard to his insight in the epistemology of rhetoric, a recurrent avoidance of the question even when it is quite prominently displayed in the text. The situation is not all that dissimilar for Nietzsche, who also wrote explicitly on rhetoric and used rhetorical terminology, especially in earlier works.13 In the latter half of the 19th century when diachronic philology is at its height, one can [illegible] speak of a Zeitgeist favorable to speculation on figural language and, as has been pointed out by those who have recently drawn attention to N’s concern with rhetoric,14 his historical antecedents tend to go back to the German romantics rather than to contemporary philologists who were to show very little esteem for his innovations. But the reluctance of Nietzsche criticism (in note including, though with qualifications and nuances

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 182

29/06/2012 11:11

n ietzsch e i: rh etoric + me tap hy sics

183

that, at this point, would lead us far astray, Heidegger) to take his more properly linguistic concerns into account is almost as striking in his case as in Rousseau’s; the quotation from Beda Alleman, in which the ground of the deconstruction is, as a matter of course, said to be psychological and not linguistic (despite the fact that it is called ironical) can serve as a paradigm for many similar utterances.15 One of the only books dealing with the subject of rhetoric in Nietzsche, a recent German work by Joachim Goth entitled Nietzsche und die Rhetorik (Tübingen, 1970) that goes back to a suggestion made by Ernst Robert Curtius, remains strictly confined to stylistic devices of persuasion and never pretends to engage wider questions of Nietzsche interpretation. Under the influence of Jacques Derrida and of a renewed interest in the epistemology of rhetoric, recent French work has begun to open up the question.16 That this still preparatory attempt is not allowed to proceed without strong resistance is eminently clear from the published discussions at a recent Nietzsche symposium. Not only does the approach by way of rhetorical and textual considerations create an unbridgeable distance between its practitioners and the kind of questions that had traditionally been asked by prominent Nietzsche scholars such as Eugen Fink and Karl Löwith, but it also comes under fire from the side of other contemporary French readers of inhibitedly literal Dionysian temper.17 Rhetoric and Rausch seem to remain incompatible, and the desire for ecstatic affirmation is strong enough to permit any simplification of the complicated business of reading. It is well known . . . publication. As Lacoue-Labarthe and JL Nancy have pointed out, N’s course on rhetoric was not original . . . p. 34–38 (top) Let us consider another, more complex example that deals not with an already elaborated ‘error’ such as the phenomenology of consciousness but with the principle of identity or of non contradiction as the metaphysical ground of logic. It allows for illustration of our contention in its most general form. In a passage dating from the autumn of 1887, Nietzsche puts the question whether the principle of (non-) contradiction is a constative or a prescriptive statement, whether it is a principle pertaining to or attributed to beings : ‘Entweder wird (mit dem Satz vom Widerspruch) etwas im Betreff des Wirklichen, Seienden behauptet, wie als ob er dasselbe anderswoher bereits kennte: Oder der Satz will sagen: dass ihm entgegengesetzte Prädikate nicht zugesprochen werden sollen? < nämlich dass ihm nicht entgegengesetzte Prädikate zugesprochen werden können.> Dann wäre Logik ein Imperativ, nicht zur Erkenntis des Wahren, sondern zur Setzung und Zurechtmachen einer Welt, die uns wahr heissen soll. (N.i.) VIII, 9 [97], p. 53 The polarities are no longer such spatial properties as inside and outside, or categories such as cause and effect but more elusive ones of ‘können’ and ‘sollen’, or ‘Erkennen’ and ‘Setzen’. To know (Erkennen) is a transitive concept that assumes the prior existence of an entity to be known (noun) and that predicates (verb) its knowability by ways of properties (adjectives). It does not itself predicate these properties but receives them, so to speak, passively from the entity itself, merely allowing it to be what it is (legein). To the extent that it is verbal, it is properly denominative or constative. It depends on a built-in non-differentiation within the system that unites the entities to its properties, the grammar that links noun to adjective by predication. The specifically verbal intervention stems from this predication, but since the predicate

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 183

29/06/2012 11:11

184 p a u l de m an is non-positional with regard to the property, it cannot be called a speech act. We could call it a speech fact or, a fact that can be spoken (i.e. known) without necessarily introducing differential deviations (écrits). Such a fact can, on the one hand, be spoken (können) without changing the order of things but it does not, on the other hand, have to be spoken (sollen) since the order of things is not dependent on its predicative powers for its existence. ‘Erkenntnis’ depends on this possibility and in fact enunciates it by way of the principle of the self-identity of entities. (Das sich – selbst – identische A) 53, l. 24 On the other hand, the language can predicate entities by way of their properties. In this text, this is called ‘setzen’, the key-verb around which the logic of the passage twists its way, snakelike. It designates genuine acts of speech, the question being whether the identity-principle is an obligatory speech act or a putative fact that can be spoken. Classical epistemology, Nietzsche asserts, has maintained the latter at least since Aristotle: ‘. . . nach Aristoteles (ist) der Satz vom Widerspruch der gewisseste aller Grundsätze . . ., der letzte und unterste . . . auf den alle Beweisführung(en) zurückgehen . . .’ (53, ll 5–8 ); it is the ground of knowledge and can only be so by being a priori given, and not ‘put up.’ The de-construction sets out to show that this is not necessarily the case. The convincing power of the identity principle is due to an analogical, metaphorical substitution of the sensation of things for the knowledge of entities. A contingent property of entities (the fact that as a ‘thing’, they can be accessible to the senses) is ‘torn away from (its) support . . .’ (Rhetoric, V, 319) and falsely identified with the entity in toto. Like Rousseau in the 2nd Discourse and the Profession du foi, Nietzsche assimilates the delusive ‘abstraction’ of the ‘coarse sensualist preconception’ (54, l. 25) with the possibility of conceptualization: the contingent, metonymic link of the sensation (Empfindung) becomes the necessary, metaphorical link of the concept: ‘Das begriffliche Widerspruchs Verbot geht geht von dem Glauben aus . . . dass ein Begriff das Wahre eines Dinges nicht nur bezeichnet, sondern fasst . . . N’s’ (54, ll. 33–34) The semiological moment (bezeichnen), which can simply be assimilated to the understanding of metonymy as the deconstruction from necessity into contingency, is clearly isolated in this line. Also like in Rousseau, it is however only one among a variety of deconstructive gestures. For this passage goes well beyond the assertion that the claim to know is just an unwarranted totalization of the claim to perceive and feel. Elsewhere, Nietzsche will devote considerable energy to questioning the epistemological authority of eudaemonic patterns, and we will have to return to this point. But here he has other, further-reaching objectives. The unwarranted substitution of knowledge for mere sensation becomes paradigmatic for a whole set of aberrations linked with the ‘thetic’ power of language (Setzen) in general, and allows for the radical possibility that all being, as the ground of entities, may be linguistically ‘gesetzt’, a [noematic] correlative of speech acts. This is what the text asserts in the mode of an unequivocal statement: Um zu bejahen (das logische Axiome dem Wirklichen adäquat (sind)) müsste man aber, wie gesagt, das Seiende bereits kennen; was schlechterdings nicht der Fall ist. (m.i.) (53, ll. 23–25) It has not, in truth, been explicitly shown that we have no a priori knowledge of the being of entities. What has been shown, (or will be, in the next paragraphs) is the possibility of unwarranted rhetorical substitutions

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 184

29/06/2012 11:11

n ietzsch e i: rh etoric + me tap hy sics

185

leading to ontological claims based on misinterpreted systems of relationship (such as, for example, identity for signification). The possibility that such a suspicion can be aroused suffices to put into question a postulate of logical adequacy which might be based on a similar aberration. Since this aberration is not intentional but based in the mechanical, (grammatical) paradigmatic? substitutive? (synthetical) powers of rhetoric, it can never be associated with a consciousness (or with a subconsciousness) and can never be proven to be right or wrong. It cannot be refuted, but we can be made aware of its rhetorical substratum and of a subsequent possibility of error that is not in our control. We cannot say that we know ‘das Seiende’ nor can it be said that we don’t know it. What can be said is that we don’t know whether or not we know it, because the knowledge we once thought we possessed has been shown to be questionable and our ontological confidence has been shaken. Nietzsche seems to go further than this and concludes: ‘Der Satz (vom Widerspruch) enthält also (m.i.) kein Kriteritum der Wahrheit, sondern ein Imperativ über das, was als wahr gelten soll.’ (53, ll. 25–28) [As is often the case in Nietzsche , the assertion precedes the demonstration; it is not always clear whether what follows the assertion is an illustration or a demonstration but in the case of this text, the actual deconstruction that follows (of knowledge as sensation and of entity as ‘thing’) is more than just illustrative and performs with demonstrative power.] This conclusion seems to be irrevocable and unambiguous. As is stated, in the form of a thesis, at the beginning of the passage, the inability to contradict, to state at the same time that A is and is not A, is not a necessity but an inadequacy, ‘ein Nicht-vermögen.’ Something one has failed to do can become feasible again only in the mode of compulsion; the performative correlate of ‘I can’t’ is ‘I must’ (or you). The language of identity and of logic asserts itself in the imperative mode and thus recognizes its own activity as that of positing entities. Logic consists of positional speech acts. As such, it requires a temporal dimension, for it posits as future what one is unable to do in the present: all ‘setzen’ is ‘voraussetzen’ (‘man sollte erwägen, was (der Satz vom Widerspruch) im Grunde schon an Behauptungen voraussetzt’) (53. ll 9–10) But this ‘voraussetzen’ is in error, for it presents a pre-positional, hypothetical statement as if it were established knowledge that exists as a presence in the present. This belief can be deconstructed by showing that the truths of a logic based on the principle of non-contradiction are ‘fingierten Wahrheiten/Wesenheiten’ (55, l. 2). But in so doing we also have reversed the temporal order: it now turns out that the future-projected, prospective assumption was in fact conditioned by previous assumptions, that the future truth was in fact part error. All ‘voraussetzen’ is ‘Nachkonstruktion.’ The deconstruction of the metaphor of knowledge into the metonymy of sensation is a surface manifestation of a more inclusive deconstruction that reveals a metaleptic reversal of the categories of anteriority and posteriority, of ‘before’ and ‘after.’ The ‘truth’ of identity, which was to become established once and forever in the future following its formulation turns out have already existed as part of its aberrant ‘position.’ (The metaphor of) Sensation is the metaphor of a metalepsis. Does this mean that we now can rest secure (though hardly safe) in the knowledge that the principle of contradiction is an error, that, consequently, all language

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 185

29/06/2012 11:11

186 p a u l de m an is a ‘setzen’, that is to say a speech act that has to be performed in an imperative mode, and that, consequently, we can henceforth free ourselves once and forever from the constraints of identity and assert as well as deny the same proposition (bejahen and verneinen) at the same time with a good epistemological conscience? Is language an act, a ‘Sollen’ or a ‘These’ and now that we know that there is no longer such a thing as knowledge, but only feigned truths, can we put an act in its stead? The text means to assert this without question: it acts by denying the one-ness and the sameness of things. ‘Es bejaht und verneint nicht ein und dasselbe sondern es verneint das Bejahen.’ But this is not the same as to assert and to deny identity at the same time. Taken by itself and as an act, this is not what the text does. It deconstructs the principle of non-contradiction by showing that this principle is an act but when it acts out this act, it fails to reach the result to which the act owed its status. This can be clarified intertextually simply by observing the play of the same verbroot in the following sentence: ‘Gesetzt, es gäbe ein solches Sich-selbst-identisches A gar nicht, wie es jeder Satz der Logik (auch der Mathematik) voraussetzt, das A wäre bereits eine Scheinbarkeit, so hätte die Logik eine bloss scheinbare Welt zur Voraussetzung.’ (53, ll. 29–33) The deconstruction of logical and mathematical truth is based on the fact that it is not rooted in knowledge but on a prior act of assumption (voraussetzen). This category of prior assumption, of language as act, is itself the result/outcome of the deconstruction. But the conclusion that would seem to follow from this, namely that the principle of contradiction is to be discarded, is again formulated in a positional mode: ‘Gesetzt, es gäbe ein solches Sich-selbst-identisches A gar nicht . . .’ This terminology is eminently correct, for we saw that the negative proposition (there is no such thing as an A that is equal to an A) has not been established as knowledge (‘proven’) but merely as possibility, as suspicion – and any hypothetical knowledge is positional. But all ‘setzen’ has been discredited as unable to control the epistemological rigor of its own rhetoric, and this discredit must extend to the denial of the principle of identity as well. The ‘burden of proof’ shifts incessantly back and forth between incompatible propositions such as A = A, A better be equal to A or else . . . , or A cannot be equal to A, etc. ‘Gesetzt’, used as a marker, upsets the epistemological rhetoric of the sentence. This complication is, of course, paradigmatic for all deconstructive discourse. Deconstruction states the fallacy of referentiality in a necessarily referential mode. There is no escape from this, for the passage also shows that deconstruction is not something that we can decide to do or not to do at will. It is synonymous with any use of any language (including, of course, silence), and the use of language is compulsive or, as Nietzsche says, imperative. Moreover, deconstruction always falls short of the assertion that it implies, and the passage from denial to assertion implicit in deconstructive discourse never reaches the symmetrical counterpart of what it denies. In this passage, for example, the assertion that language is a (speech-)act (the symmetrical counterpart of the negative assertion that it is not a knowledge based on the principle of identity) cannot be considered to be a final conclusion. But it does not follow that, if language is not an act, it has to be a knowledge. The negative thrust of the deconstruction remains unimpaired; after Nietzsche (in fact, after any ‘text’), we can no longer hope ever

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 186

29/06/2012 11:11

n ietzsch e i: rh etoric + me tap hy sics

187

‘to know’ in peace. But neither can we expect to ‘do’ anything, least of all expunge the words to do and to know, as well as their latent opposition, from our vocabulary. Lest we be inclined to misread the text as an irreversible passage from a constative language model to a performative one there are others in which the possibility of ‘doing’ (tun) is as manifestly being deconstructed as the identity principle, the basis of knowing, is put in question here in this fragment. (9 [97]) This is not obviously the case: in many texts that are more clearly destined for public consumption than the posthumous ‘fragments’ consisting of preparatory notes to a book or to books18 that never got written, the valorization consistently seems to privilege active, performative forms of language over passive or merely reactive ones; the Genealogy of Morals, for example, is a clear case in point. Active and passive (or, somewhat more ambiguously, reactive) are coordinated with values of high and low, or more crudely and provocatively even, with those of master and slave (aristocrats and plebeians), distinction and vulgarity. The sections on Ressentiment are all too well known: Ressentiment is the state of mind of ‘solcher Wesen, denen die eigentliche Reaktion, die der Tat, versagt ist . . .’ (Gen, I, 10, Schl. 782); ‘die Sklaven-Moral bedarf, um zu entstehen, immer zuerst einer Gegen – und Aussenwelt, sie bedarf, physiologische gesprochen, äusserer Reize, um überhaupt zu agieren – ihre Aktion ist von Grund aus Reaktion. Das Umgekehrte ist bei der vornehmen Wertungsweise der Fall . . .’ (m.i.) (ibid.) And a little later in the same text, in connection with a discussion of causality that anticipates many similar sections in the posthumous fragments, the hypostasis of action as the horizon of being seems unquestionable: ‘. . . es gibt kein “Sein” hinter dem Tun, Wirken, Werden; “der Täter” ist zum Tun bloss hinzugedichtet – das Tun ist alles.’ (m.i.) (Gen, I, 13, Schl. 790)19 The use of the term ‘hinzugedichtet’, as well as the context, indicate that action is here also conceived in close connection with linguistic acts of reading and interpretation, certainly not within the false polarity that opposes doing to speaking (or writing). Of course, the Genealogy of Morals calls itself explicitly a pamphlet (eine Streitschrift), and we cannot expect the same strategy with regard to value statements in a pamphlet that sets out to condemn and to convince than in the more speculative treatises that Nietzsche’s later books were, among other things, supposed to have been. One of the reasons why we need a theory of values is precisely to be able to ‘place’ statements like the ones just quoted from the Genealogy within the proper context. Enough has perhaps been said (vorweggenommen) to suggest that, on a specific question (such as the ontological authority of acts), what we have called the more speculative treatment of the question should at least be given equal consideration next to the emphatic pathos-laden value assertion. When to the electoral slogan ‘Tun ist alles’, or the cooler assertion that ‘Logik (wie die Geometrie und Mathematik) (gilt) nur von fingierten Wahrheiten, die wir [geschaffen] haben.’ (55, ll. 1–3), one would therefore want to juxtapose a passage like the following: Der ‘Geist’, etwas, das denkt . . . hier ist erst ein Akt imaginiert, der gar nicht vorkommt, ‘das Denken’ und zweitens ein Subjekt-Substrat imaginiert in dem jeder Akt dieses Denkens und sonst nicht Anderes seinen Ursprung hat: d.h. sowohl das Tun, als der Täter sind fingiert.’ (N.i.) (VIII, 11 [113], p. 296, ll. 9–17) The juxtaposition that concerns us is, of course, the symmetrical statements about ‘fingierte Wahrheiten’ and ‘fingiertes

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 187

29/06/2012 11:11

188 p a u l de m an Tun’, a significant symmetry since, in the first passage on identity, Wahrheit (as Erkenntnis) was opposed to Tun (as Setzen) as fiction is opposed to reality. It could be objected that, in the passage now under discussion, it is not action in general that is being put in question but specifically thinking and, furthermore, that the linkage between the act and the performing subject (the principle of intentionality) is being de-constructed rather than action as such. From the fragment on the principle of identity however (9, 97), it is clear that Nietzsche is not interested in a distinction between speech (or thought) acts and other acts that would not be verbal; he is interested in the distinction between speech acts and other verbal forms that would assuredly not be performative (such as knowing), but non-verbal acts, if such a thing were to be conceivable, are of no concern to him, since no act can ever be separated from the interpretation, the attempt at understanding that necessarily accompanies it. The fictional truths, which are shown to be acts, are always oriented towards an attempt ‘. . . die wirkliche Welt zu begreifen, richtiger, uns formulierbar, berechenbar zu machen . . .’ (55, ll. 5–6) and, in the later passage, ‘Denken’ is also described as ‘eine künstliche Zurechtmachung zum Zweck der Verständlichung . . .’ (296, ll 8–9). Even in the Genealogy, the pure act that is said to be all there is, is conceived as verbal: its paradigm is denomination and the deconstruction of its causal genesis is best carried out by etymology.20 As for the intentional link between act and subject, it has been the subject of a considerable number of texts among the posthumous fragments, not to mention its numerous earlier versions that go back at least as far as The Birth of Tragedy. In the later texts, it is often carried out in connection with the rhetorical deconstruction of the metalepsis of cause and effect; the passage on the phenomenalism of consciousness from which we started out21 is a case in point. The target of these texts is the metaphorical identification of cause and effect rather than the principle of activity as such. This moment in the deconstructive process still shines through this passage (11 [113] headed Zur Psychologie und Erkenntnislehre,22 as when Nietzsche denounces as ‘allergröbste und plumpste Beobachtung’, zwischen Gedanken ein unmittlebares ursächliches Band anzunehmen’. (295, ll. 26–30) But this fiction of a ‘Subjekt-Substrat’ of the act is explicitly called secondary as compared to the prior fiction of the act itself. The passage does not attack the ontological authority of the subject but the more fundamental one of act. This is also why it starts out in such apparent contradiction to the text on the phenomenalism of consciousness, a concept which had been taken apart in our first example. Here, Nietzsche begins instead by asserting: ‘Ich halte die Phänominalität auch der inneren Welt fest . . .’ But as the immediate continuation of the sentence makes clear (‘. . . alles, was uns bewusst wird, ist durch und durch erst zurechtgemacht , vereinfacht, thematisiert, ausgelegt . . . und (ist) vielleicht eine reine Einbildung.’ [295, ll. 15–22]), phenomenality is now no longer used as the authoritative term that had to be deconstructed (as in Musarion 479), but as the name of a metaphysical concept of which the aberrant status is now taken for granted. If Nietzsche’s notes were to be reordered as a logical progression (in itself a nightmarish assignment), fragment 479 / 477? in the old classification would have to come after fragment 477/479, for it takes for granted the deconstruction of the phenomenalism of consciousness, i.e. of the

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 188

29/06/2012 11:11

n ietzsch e i: rh etoric + me tap hy sics

189

subject, and moves on to a more inclusive target of ‘Denken’ as act. The deconstruction also has a different rhetorical structure: it is not based on metalepsis but on synecdoche: ‘Denken, wie es die Erkenntnistheoretiker ansetzen (still another exemplar in the gallery of setzen), kommt gar nicht vor: das ist eine ganz willkürliche Fiktion, erreicht durch Heraushebung eines Elementes aus dem Prozess und Subtraktion aller übrigen, eine künstliche Zurechtmachung zum Zweck der Verständigung . . .’ (296, ll. 4–8). Whereas the subject is the result of an unwarranted reversal of cause and effect, the illusion of action is the result of an unwarranted totalisation from part to whole. The rhetorical structure of the figures concerns us less here than the outcome of their analysis: the text on identity established the universality of the linguistic model as speech act, albeit by voiding it of epistemological authority, but the later text, in its turn, voids even this certainty, for it puts in question not merely that language acts rightly but that it acts at all. This first passage (9 [97]) showed that constative language is in fact performative, but the second passage asserts (in French: constate) that the possibility for language to perform is just as illusionary and fictive as the possibility of language to assert truths. Since the analysis has been carried out on these passages, representative of Nietzsche’s deconstructive procedure at its most advanced stage, it would follow that the deconstruction of metaphysics, in Nietzsche, can be described as the deconstruction of language as opinion and persuasion (doxa), a notion which is itself the outcome of the deconstruction of language as truth. What seemed to lead to an established priority of doxa, opinion and persuasion, over truth never quite reaches its target: it under- or, in this case, over-shoots it and reveals, by mis-hitting it, another target which one assumed to have been long since eliminated. The episteme is hardly restored intact in its former glory; it has been badly battered, but one has not entirely managed to eliminate it either. The conclusion takes us back to the course on rhetoric and to the pragmatic distinction from which it started out. One remembers Nietzsche’s casual, almost contemptuous dismissal of the popular meaning of rhetoric as having to do with the skills of persuasion (Beredsamkeit), and the concentration intent on the complex and philosophically challenging epistemology of the tropes. The distinction is not actually accounted for but taken over empirically from the history of rhetoric. Within the pedagogical model of the trivium the place of rhetoric is curiously ambivalent: on the one hand, in Plato for example and again at all critical moments in the history of philosophy (Nietzsche himself being one of them), rhetoric becomes the ground for the furthest reaching dialectical speculations conceivable to the mind; on the other hand, as it appears in text books that have undergone little change from Quintilian to present-day lyceé classes or Departments of Speech and Discourse, it is the humble and not-quite-respectable handmaiden of the fraudulent grammar used in oratory. See also Plato himself, in the course on rhetoric. Between the two functions, the distance is so wide as to be nearly unbridgeable – though, at certain periods in history (the 18th c. being a case in point) it seems to narrow down. Nietzsche’s philosophical contempt for the discipline of rhetoric as oratory is certainly entirely justified yet, as any reader of The Birth of Tragedy, The Genealogy of

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 189

29/06/2012 11:11

190 p a u l de m an Morals or of the irrepressible orator Zarathustra knows, there is hardly a trick of the oratorical trade which he is not willing to exploit to the full. In a sense, this inconsistency is accounted for by the considerable labor of epistemological deconstruction that makes up the bulk of the analytical part of the Nietzsche corpus. For, as we saw, the deconstruction seems to end up in a reassertion of the active, performative function of language, thus allowing for the reassuring conviction that it is legitimate to do just about anything with words, as long as we know that a rigorous deconstructive mind pulls the strings. But if it turns out that this same mind does not even know whether it is doing or not then there is considerable grounds for suspicion that it does not know what it is doing; Nietzsche’s insight may well be that the gap in the pedagogical and philosophical history of rhetoric coincides constitutively with the term rhetoric itself. If the deconstruction of metaphysics is structured as an aporia between performative and constative language, this is the same as saying that it is structured along rhetorical lines. And since, if one wants to safeguard the term literature, one should have no hesitation to articulate it with rhetoric, it would follow that the ‘philosophical’ deconstruction of metaphysics is a ‘literary’ process. This by no means resolves the problem of the relationship between literature and philosophy in Nietzsche, but it at least establishes a somewhat more reliable point of reference from which to ask the question. *

*

*

To establish, in general terms, the rhetoricity of deconstruction is only a preliminary stage in the discussion of our general set of questions: what is the referential and the value status of deconstructive discourse; by what configuration of tropes can it best be described and does it, in turn, generate new rhetorical models? In the reading of Nietzsche, we constantly encounter the first of these questions, whenever we have to articulate the more analytical type of language found in passages like the ones we have been using to the unbridled appeal to value in many of the published texts. At times, as is the case for The Birth of Tragedy, it becomes a question of coordinating the final, published version of a text with contemporary notes that may appear in total contradiction with the most fervently asserted convictions of the public version. How do we pass from deconstruction to value, from verneinen to bejahen, and how is this transition being modified by the contention that deconstruction is a text structured as a rhetorical model? Nietzsche at all times implies that value is not a simply referential concept, derived from an established order of things that, like nature itself or like the natural needs of man, could exist independently of linguistic interference. Some of the most penetrating analyses in the later fragments are devoted, for instance, to disproving the authority of eudaemonic experiences as the reliable basis for a natural system of values. The deconstructive energy spent on this task is understandable enough, for the easiest assumption to come to mind about the origin of value judgments is to associate them with experiences of pain and pleasure. The original model for preferring something to something else is easily assumed to be the natural distinction between agreeable and unpleasant sensations or experiences; hence the need, or the temptation, to deconstruct the pleasure/pain polarity.

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 190

29/06/2012 11:11

n ietzsch e i: rh etoric + me tap hy sics

191

No tes 1. Alleman [gives] Werke, XIV, 189 2. See, for example an among many others, WZM (VIII, 3, first passages in the book) 3. Whose own complex Nietzsche reading can certainly not be subsumed under such unqualified assertions as Alleman’s 4. [note to himself] l.h. J. Habermas, how bad he is on N. (in Erkenntnis + Interesse?) he is supposed to be Herausgeber of F.N. Erkenntnistheoretische Schriften. Suhrkamp? Is the adherence to a Grand politics à la Mode [Blitz] (with Ausschaltung of the ‘literary emphasis) also part of this scheme? By calling it politics instead of art, [Blitz] is a step ahead of Alleman. ‘art’ in Heidegger / none in Muller-Lauter / Dante ? See passage near end of WZM on neue Aufklarung (Colli-Mont) 5. Refer to quote from rhetoric 6. See VIII,3 9[110] pp. 62–13 7. Alleman, p. 114. His reference is to Werke XI, 123. Which edition? Werke 20 bd. Leipzig 1894–1926 8. See, for ex., Wanderer + seine Schatten.See in Ecce Homo, Schlechta III, p. 1121 9. According to Nietzsche, the main ‘statement’ of MazM is ‘Der moralische Mensch steht der intelligiblen Welt nicht näher als der physische – denn es gibt keine intelligible Welt . . .’ (Ecce Homo, Schlecta II p. 1123). Where? In MazM?? If the contemptible predictability of all human opinions’ (Alleman) turns out to be intelligibility, then we are certainly dealing with an epistemological rather than with psychological ‘values’, and the term ‘contemptible’ loses most of its moral onus. 10. E. Fink, reference 11. See L.Lab. ‘La Dissimulation’ in N. aujourd’hui? II, 11. The closest equivalence to the term, in American criticism, is what Harold Bloom call revisionism, or revisionary ratio in The Anxiety of Influence. 12. One thinks of Duclos, [Condillac], Diderot, du Bos, Helveticus etc. 13. In the Course of Rhetoric of 187(2?), avowedly a by no means zwingend proof of an overriding interest, since any professor of classical philology could be expected to treat the subject. What is being said in the course, however, can be shown to be of considerable exegetic importance (see p. [000 this ms.]) Figural terminology denigrating specific tropes figures prominently in Von Wahrheit und Lüge and in notes of that period. It tends to disappear almost entirely from then on, whereas the occasional use of the term semiotisch/ and Semiotik (Geneology, Schl II, [820/] (W z M ref?) is striking for a contemporary reader. (is the term used in Germany at that time?) 14. Especially Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy in Poetique, 5, 1971. p. 100 15. Fink, [Lörisch, Granier?] Note however [Danto], Arthur C. Nietzsche as Philosoper, NY 1965 G. Simon ‘Grammatik + Wahrheit’ in N. Studien I, 1972 pp.1– 16. Ph. L Lab. [ ] Sarah Koffman [ ?] J. Derrida. Mythologie [ ] (also in Ecriture + difference?) 17. N. aujourd’hui? 10/18 see especially, at this symposium, the papers of Lyotard and Deleuze, as well as the subsequent discussions Is however the book by W. Müller-Lauter closer to the French? How about Nietzsche – Studien? 11[113] [ ]: see speech act Tragisches Zeitalter 9[95] and 9(107) p. 61 18. Note on ‘Wille zur Macht’ and possible other book (Antichrist etc.) as apparent from Colli and Montinari edition? Or wait for Colli and Montinari Nachbericht?

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 191

29/06/2012 11:11

192 p a u l de m an 19. A similar psudo-argument could be set up with reference to the concept of ‘Werden’ as opposed to ‘Sein’: parallel to the corresponding categories of [‘Tun’] and ‘Erkennen’; the linguistic aspect is more clearly in evidence in the latter terms. 20. Reference? / at the end of Part I 21. Pp. of this ms 22. Musarion 477. – no errors, except for the added heading

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 192

29/06/2012 11:11

Index

Aberration, 6–9, 43–4, 48, 75, 152, 154, 156, 164, 184–5 Absolute, 16, 22–3, 31, 42, 47, 57, 64, 108, 112, 120, 122–3, 127–9 Aesthetics, 6, 11, 24, 43, 52–3, 55, 57, 70, 73–4, 78, 94–5, 97–9, 101–2, 105–6, 108, 115–16, 118–23, 128–30, 132, 134, 139, 146–7, 154–5, 157–8, 171 Agamben, Giorgio, 133, 141–4 Allegory, 2–4, 8–11, 13, 21, 25, 37, 43, 48, 51, 55, 57–9, 62, 65, 66, 69, 77, 79–80, 84, 141, 149–52, 154, 158–64, 170–2, 174–7 Althusser, Louis, 13–14 Anthropomorphism, 69, 92–3, 97–8, 144 Antigone, 97 Aphorism, 63, 167–8 Apocalypse, 134, 141–2, 147, 153 Apollo, 8, 146n5 Architectonics, 1, 4, 10, 94–6, 98, 101, 121, 168 Archive, 2, 3, 6–9, 11–12, 94, 96, 98–9, 110–11, 133–4, 137–41, 144, 146, 149, 152, 155, 157–66 Aufheben, 107, 124, 126 Autobiography, 5, 12, 25–8, 32, 35–8, 116, 138, 159, 161–2, 164–5, 177 Bachelard, Gaston, 73, 79–80 Beckett, Samuel, 68–9 Benjamin, Walter, 106, 131–2, 135, 137, 139–46, 152–6

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 193

Bennington, Geoffrey, 3, 138 Biopolitics, 132–3, 137, 141–2 Blanchot, Maurice, 68 Blasphemy, 21, 27, 32, 51 Blindness, 103–4, 111, 114, 136, 140, 160, 182 Bloom, Harold, 121, 191 Burke, Kenneth, 72–80, 151, 156ns2–3 Capitalism, 73, 138, 144–6, 155, 173–4 Chase, Cynthia, 161–2 Christianity, 17, 109, 113, 127, 147, 151 Cixous, Hélène, 3 Climate Change, 131–4, 138, 140–2, 144, 147–8, 155 Cognition, 26, 32, 36, 89, 92–3, 96, 98, 102, 112, 122, 125, 127, 131, 135–6, 146 Communism, 73, 174 Confession, 1, 3–4, 13, 17, 27, 37, 39, 61, 110–11, 113, 115–16, 154, 159, 161, 165, 171, 173 Contract, 1, 3–6, 10–11, 13, 16, 23–6, 129–30, 35–9, 43, 46–7, 49–51, 55, 58, 60, 65, 136, 139, 141, 146, 156, 159, 161–2, 167–77 Cornell University, 105, 120, 124, 131, 146, 152, 164 Corngold, Stanley, 103–4, 113–15 De Man, Patricia (daughter), 162, 165 Debt, 7, 23, 42, 145, 167–77

29/06/2012 11:11

194 i n dex Deconstruction, 7, 9, 11–13, 46, 50, 63–70, 104, 109, 131–45, 147, 149, 160, 163, 167, 169, 170, 172, 174, 176–7, 179–82, 185–6, 188–90 Democracy, 29–31, 88, 133, 140, 142, 146, 159 Derrida, Jacques, 1, 3, 5–6, 12, 16–17, 23–4, 37, 78, 101–2, 104, 110–12, 117n33, 132–6, 138–9, 141–2, 145, 147–8, 150–1, 153, 158–61, 172, 181, 183 Desire, 14–15, 18–21, 24, 49, 54, 62, 69–70, 88, 144, 161, 165, 168, 183 Dialectic, 17, 31, 57, 68, 74–6, 92, 103, 106–8, 113, 119 Dialogic, 16, 19, 47, 116 Dionysus, 58–9, 62–7, 69, 114, 146n5, 180, 183 Divinity, 10, 27, 32, 49–50, 52, 106–9, 121, 124, 126, 128, 151–2, 154, 163, 170, 176 Duty, 7, 34, 36 Economy, 6–8, 13, 46–7, 55, 64, 70, 73, 100, 108, 113, 128–9, 156, 163, 167, 169–71, 173–4 Enlightenment, 71, 180 Epistemology, 13–14, 17, 42–4, 46, 51–3, 61, 64, 69–71, 91–3, 96, 116, 120, 122, 125, 128, 131, 179–80, 182–4, 186, 189–91 Ethics, 10, 11, 13, 43, 49, 52–4, 97, 108, 120, 135–6, 138, 140, 142–4, 147, 160, 162, 167, 175, 182 Excuses, 26, 28, 116, 154, 159, 161, 177 Family, 14, 17–18, 20–1, 24, 38–9, 138, 169 Fiction, 10, 13–14, 18–19, 24, 28, 36–7, 44–8, 54–5, 66–7, 70, 76, 78, 100, 102, 160, 167, 169, 177, 182, 188 Figurality, 1, 6, 8–11, 25, 43, 45, 48–9, 51, 57, 63, 65, 76, 96, 100, 143, 145, 162–3, 172, 181–2, 191 Freedom, 28–9, 38, 49, 54, 97–9, 123, 170 Freud, Sigmund, 1, 75 Friendship, 15–24, 33, 35 George, Stefan, 153 Godzich, Wlad, 2, 55, 80, 116

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 194

Goethe, Johnann Wolfgang von, 14 Graef, Ortwin de, 111 Grammar, 27, 50, 74–5, 78, 80, 93, 129, 146, 156, 163, 177, 183, 189 Grammatology, 1, 16, 37 Guillory, John, 83 Handwriting, 9, 81, 139, 157–62, 166, 171, 177 Hartman, Geoffrey, 121, 139, 153–4 Hegel, G. W. F., 97, 104–10, 112–13, 115–16, 118–29, 163, 182 Heidegger, Martin, 64, 78–9, 95, 112, 142, 149–50, 154, 157, 159, 164, 172, 179–83, 191 Hertz, Neil, 112–13, 121, 124, 152 History, 18, 27, 34, 43, 51–2, 62, 64–5, 70, 74, 88, 91–4, 96, 98–9, 101–2, 105–6, 122, 131, 137, 140–1, 143–4, 147–8, 153, 160, 168, 175, 189–90 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 58–9, 95, 112, 154, 179, 182 Homeland Security, 134, 137, 144 Hopkins, Gerald Manley, 72–3, 77 Hospitality, 31, 135, 138, 141, 143, 145 Hyperbole, 42, 66, 140, 153, 170 Ideology, 3, 6, 11, 57, 70, 88, 91–4, 96–100, 116, 119–20, 134, 139, 146–7, 150–2, 154–8, 162, 168–72, 174–5, 181 Impossibility, 2, 8–9, 11, 15, 18–19, 28, 44, 67–8, 70, 101, 107, 126, 151, 165 Inscription, 11, 33, 36, 38, 105–6, 115, 121, 135, 139–40, 145, 146, 157–9, 161–4, 166 Intentionality, 8, 83–5, 188 Jakobson, Roman, 118–19 Joyce, James, 1 Judgment, 4, 16, 29, 46–9, 60–1, 63, 78, 84, 88, 94, 97–9, 101, 128, 150–2, 172, 182, 190 Kafka, Franz, 22 Kant, Immanuel, 4, 14, 47, 52, 82, 94–101, 105, 107, 119, 120, 122, 131, 135, 146, 157–9 Keats, John, 74, 76–8, 80 Kierkegaard, Soren, 97

29/06/2012 11:11

inde x Kleist, Heinrich von, 97, 102, 114, 116, 165–6 Kofman, Sarah, 63–4 Laclau, Ernesto, 88 Laclos, Pierre Choderlos de, 14 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 63, 181, 183, 191 Legality, 20, 24, 26–8, 34, 37, 41, 50, 97, 108 Literature, 1, 13, 24, 28, 52, 56, 66, 69, 72–3, 79, 101, 118, 130, 136, 176, 180, 182, 190 Longinus, 106, 124–5, 127, 129 Love, 9, 13–23, 32–3, 47, 116, 138, 165, 167, 169–70, 173 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 118 Marxism, 129, 135, 139, 174 Materiality, 16, 24, 77, 81–2, 84, 93–4, 96, 98, 100, 105, 115, 133, 135, 139–41, 143–5, 147, 158, 162 Mathematics, 94, 96, 98–9, 122, 155, 168, 186–7 Memory, 5, 19–20, 32–3, 36, 117, 119, 139, 145 Metalepsis, 51, 67, 73, 78, 158, 165, 174, 176–7, 185, 188–9 Metaphor, 7–8, 11, 14, 18, 27, 44–8, 51, 55, 58–71, 76, 92, 95–7, 103–5, 108, 121, 126–7, 131, 135, 144, 150–1, 155, 158, 160, 164, 167–73, 175, 184–5, 188 Metaphysics, 3–4, 58, 62–7, 70–1, 73–4, 135, 142, 146, 150, 162, 173, 176–91 Metonymy, 2, 7, 9, 76, 88, 92, 97, 164, 166, 175, 184–5 Miller, J. Hillis, 72, 79, 162 Milton, John, 109 Modernity, 52, 137, 139–40 Monarchy, 25–6, 28–30, 32, 108, 113, 129 Monotheism, 106, 113, 122–3 Moynihan, Robert, 152, 154 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 37, 63, 151, 183 Narrative, 13, 23, 49, 51, 57, 59, 61, 93, 96, 106–7, 112, 116, 124, 132, 135, 140, 143, 145, 157, 160, 176 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 2–4, 8–9, 11, 25, 57–71, 73, 78, 92–3, 97, 114n5,

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 195

195

115n14, 142, 149–50, 160, 162, 164–6, 176–7, 179–91 Nihilism, 41, 67, 69, 179–80 Nixon, Richard, 5 Nomos, 18, 159, 164, 172 Obama, Barak, 136, 140 Oligarchy, 34, 39 Pascal, Blaise, 19–20, 182 Passion, 13–24, 33, 43–6, 48–51, 59, 61, 77 Performative, 10, 15, 18, 26–7, 29, 36, 42, 67–8, 88, 91, 93–4, 96, 107, 125–6, 144, 146, 150, 154, 163–4, 166, 169–70, 172, 177, 185, 187–90 Phenomenology, 15, 20, 51, 57, 136, 140–1, 183 Philology, 51, 80, 182, 191 Philosophy, 13–17, 19, 23–4, 39, 52, 55–6, 62, 65–8, 70, 74–5, 85, 91, 97, 99, 104–5, 108, 115, 119–20, 122, 128–9, 141, 157, 167, 169, 176, 179, 181–2, 189–90 Plasticity, 20, 106, 121 Plato, 8, 32, 62, 72, 135, 179, 182, 189 Poetics, 52, 91, 112, 118, 153 Political Theory, 13, 18, 25–6, 35, 37, 51–2, 55, 73–4, 76, 88, 91, 101, 104–5, 119–20, 128–9, 132–3, 136, 144, 173, 176–7, 180, 182 Politics, 1, 3, 5–11, 13, 17–18, 21, 23–9, 34–9, 43–4, 46, 49–55, 66, 73–4, 76, 81, 88–101, 104–5, 108, 113, 119–20, 124, 126, 128–9, 132–9, 141–4, 146–7, 149, 159, 161–3, 167–77, 180, 182, 191 Post-structuralism, 135, 142 Promises, 1, 5, 9–11, 19–20, 26–8, 30–2, 34–5, 47, 51, 58, 60, 62–5, 67, 70, 78, 98, 133, 144, 146, 154–5, 158–9, 161, 168, 174, 176–7, 180 Proust, Marcel, 11, 76–8 Pygmalion, 1, 10, 59, 158, 160, 167, 169–70 Quintilian, 189 Rancière, Jacques, 35 Referentiality, 26, 28, 32, 37, 44–6, 48, 50, 60, 62, 65–7, 70

29/06/2012 11:11

196 i n dex Religion, 11, 14–15, 17, 21, 31, 43, 46–7, 49–50, 52–3, 77–9, 120, 122, 135, 138, 142, 147, 149, 153, 156, 167, 171, 173, 179 Representation, 14, 16, 25–6, 28, 30, 35–6, 39, 44, 65, 73, 76, 81, 98, 102, 107–8, 121, 125–7, 129 Republicanism, 25–6, 28–38 Richardson, Samuel, 14 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 8, 11, 179 Romanticism, 54, 61, 89, 102, 104, 114, 119, 121, 124, 140, 155, 158 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1–9, 11, 13–20, 22–41, 43–51, 55, 57–64, 66, 70, 76, 84, 104, 110–11, 113–14, 116, 134–6, 139–40, 147, 149–51, 156–72, 175–8, 181–4 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 83, 119 Schiller, Friedrich, 46, 94, 96, 119, 130, 131, 135, 146, 158 Schlegel, Friedrich, 61–2, 154–6 Schmitt, Carl, 159, 163–4 Science, 28, 30, 46–7, 55–6, 61, 63, 68–9, 71, 73, 119, 122, 129, 136, 147, 186 Semiology, 8, 63, 75, 184 Sexual difference, 20–1, 24, 88 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 42, 112–13 Signification, 28, 43, 46, 48, 51–2, 60, 84–5, 87, 112, 122, 127, 146, 150–1, 162–4, 166, 171–2, 174, 176–7, 185 Society, 13, 18, 20, 22, 24, 28–9, 34, 39, 46, 147, 149, 151 Socrates, 58–9 Sovereignty, 6, 9–10, 16, 24, 26, 28–30, 50, 54, 71, 99, 104–5, 113, 133, 136–8, 141–6, 167, 169, 171–8 Spivak, Gayatri, 146

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 196

Structuralism, 22 Sublime, 94–102, 104–10, 112–13, 115, 120, 122, 124, 126, 128, 157–8, 163 Symbol, 22, 77–80, 95, 101, 106, 108, 118–19, 121–3, 125, 127 Synecdoche, 33, 67, 76, 166, 189 Terada, Rei, 45, 55 Theology, 21, 49, 52, 55, 72, 76, 78–80, 104, 128, 146, 162–4, 169, 171–6, 182 Theotropic, 10–11, 21, 27, 37, 41, 43, 47–50, 54, 72, 76–80, 84, 103, 105, 113, 133, 135–6, 138–9, 144–7, 149–52, 160, 162–3, 168–75, 177 Totalization, 47, 50, 134, 136, 140, 144–5, 160, 168, 170, 184 Transcendence, 21, 46–8, 50–2, 55, 60–1, 68, 74, 77–9, 96–7, 99–100, 143, 146, 149–52, 158, 162–3, 166, 172–4, 176 University of California (Irvine), 2, 146, 158 Unreadability, 10, 48–9, 81–3, 89–90, 143, 145, 170–2, 174–6, 178 Violence, 28–9, 36, 103–4, 110, 112–16, 120, 141, 145, 163 Watergate scandal, 1, 5–6, 9–11 Wordsworth, William, 82, 95, 102, 116 Yale University, 1, 5, 8, 120, 124, 152, 159 Yeats, W. B., 112, 165 Zarathustra, 12n1, 63, 65, 67–9, 190 Žižek, Slavoj, 137, 140–4, 146–7 Zurich, 1–5, 7–10, 46, 55, 167–8, 170–4

29/06/2012 11:11

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 197

29/06/2012 11:11

McQUILLAN 9780748665617 PRINT.indd 198

29/06/2012 11:11