Understanding Derrida, Understanding Modernism 9781501331862, 9781501331893, 9781501331886

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Understanding Derrida, Understanding Modernism

UNDERSTANDING PHILOSOPHY, UNDERSTANDING MODERNISM The aim of each volume in Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism is to understand a philosophical thinker more fully through literary and cultural modernism and consequently to understand literary modernism better through a key philosophical figure. In this way, the series also rethinks the limits of modernism, calling attention to lacunae in modernist studies and sometimes in the philosophical work under examination. Series Editors Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski, and Laci Mattison Volumes in the Series Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism, edited by Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski, and Laci Mattison Understanding Deleuze, Understanding Modernism, edited by S. E. Gontarski, Paul Ardoin and Laci Mattison Understanding Wittgenstein, Understanding Modernism, edited by Anat Matar Understanding Foucault, Understanding Modernism, edited by David Scott Understanding James, Understanding Modernism, edited by David H. Evans Understanding Rancière, Understanding Modernism, edited by Patrick M. Bray Understanding Blanchot, Understanding Modernism, edited by Christopher Langlois Understanding Merleau-Ponty, Understanding Modernism, edited by Ariane Mildenberg Understanding Nietzsche, Understanding Modernism, edited by Douglas Burnham and Brian Pines Understanding Derrida, Understanding Modernism, edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté Understanding Adorno, Understanding Modernism (forthcoming), edited by Robin Truth Goodman Understanding Cavell, Understanding Modernism (forthcoming), edited by Paola Marrati Understanding Flusser, Understanding Modernism (forthcoming), edited by Aaron Jaffe, Rodrigo Martini, and Michael F. Miller Understanding Marx, Understanding Modernism (forthcoming), edited by Mark Steven

Understanding Derrida, Understanding Modernism Edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2019 Copyright © Jean-Michel Rabaté and Contributors, 2019 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xiii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Louise Dugdale and Eleanor Rose Cover image: Lebbeus Woods, Shard House, from San Francisco: Inhabiting the Quake, 1995. Courtesy San Francisco Museum of Modern Art © Estate of Lebbeus Woods. Photograph: Don Ross. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Rabaté, Jean-Michel, 1949- editor. Title: Understanding Derrida, understanding modernism / edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté. Description: New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. | Series: Understanding philosophy, understanding modernism | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019007361 (print) | LCCN 2019009559 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501331879 (ePub) | ISBN 9781501331886 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781501331862 (hardback: alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Derrida, Jacques. | Modernism (Literature) | Literature–Philosophy. | Criticism. Classification: LCC B2430.D484 (ebook) | LCC B2430.D484 U535 2019 (print) | DDC 194–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019007361 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-3186-2 ePDF: 978-1-5013-3188-6 eBook: 978-1-5013-3187-9 Series: Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

SERIES PREFACE

Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism Sometime in the late twentieth century, modernism, like philosophy itself, underwent something of an unmooring from (at least) linear literary history in favor of the multi-perspectival history implicit in “new historicism” or, say, varieties of “presentism.” Amid current reassessments of modernism and modernity, critics have posited various “new” or alternative modernisms— postcolonial, cosmopolitan, transatlantic, transnational, geomodernism, or even “bad” modernisms. In doing so, they have not only reassessed modernism as a category, but also, more broadly, rethought epistemology and ontology, aesthetics, metaphysics, materialism, history, and being itself, opening possibilities of rethinking not only which texts we read as modernist, but also how we read those texts. Much of this new conversation constitutes something of a critique of the periodization of modernism or modernist studies in favor of modernism as mode (or mode of production) or concept. Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism situates itself amid the plurality of discourses, offering collections focused on key philosophical thinkers influential both to the moment of modernism and to our current understanding of that moment’s geneology, archeology, and becomings. Such critiques of modernism(s) and modernity afford opportunities to rethink and reassess the overlaps, folds, interrelationships, interleavings, or cross-pollinations of modernism and philosophy. Our goal in each volume of the series is to understand literary modernism better through philosophy as we also better understand a philosopher through literary modernism. The first two volumes of the series, those on Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, have established a tripartite structure that serves to offer accessibility to both philosopher’s principle texts and current new research. Each volume opens with a section focused on “conceptualizing” the philosopher through close readings of seminal texts in the thinker’s oeuvre. A second section, on aesthetics, maps connections between modernist works and the philosophical figure, often surveying key modernist trends and shedding new light on authors and texts. The final section of each volume serves

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as an extended glossary of principal terms in the philosopher’s work, each treated at length, allowing a fuller engagement with and examination of the many, sometimes contradictory ways terms are deployed. The series is thus designed both to introduce philosophers and to rethink their relationship to modernist studies, revising our understandings of both modernism and philosophy, and offering resources that will be of use across disciplines, from philosophy, theory, and literature, to religion, the visual and performing arts, and often to the sciences as well.

CONTENTS

Series Preface  v Notes on Contributors  x Acknowledgments  xiii

Introduction: Derrida’s modernity and our modernism Jean-Michel Rabaté 1 PART ONE  Rethinking the main concepts of modernism 1 Trickster economy: Derrida’s Baudelaire, and the role of money, counterfeits, and alms in the modern city Marit Grøtta 23 2 Kant’s celestial economy: A footnote to The Gift of Death Eddis N. Miller 39 3 Derrida and Kafka: A Talmudic disputation before the law Vivian Liska 52 4 Derrida with Heidegger: Poetic language, animality, world Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei 69 5 To wound the language: Derrida reads Celan Miriam Jerade 94 PART TWO  Engaging with the poetics of canonical modernism 6 Derrida’s Joyce Sam Slote 111 7 Derrida revoicing Artaud Alhelí Alvarado-Díaz 126 8 Derrida on Bataille: From dueling to duet Claire Lozier 142

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  9 A cross in the margin: Inscription and erasure in Derrida and Pound Mark Byron 157 10 Derrida after Valéry (after Derrida) Suzanne Guerlac 178 PART THREE  Différance as performance: Pushing modernism beyond its borders 11 Three ways of looking at Derrida’s encounter with Austin Raoul Moati 195 12 Writing in the shadow of Sartre’s Genet: Derrida’s Glas and the ethics of biography Robert Doran 208 13 Derrida, Cixous, and (feminine) writing Marta Segarra 226 14 Reading between the lines: Derrida, Blanchot, Beckett Leslie Hill 240 PART FOUR  Glossary Jean-Michel Rabaté 15 Aporia 257 16 Autoimmunity 259 17 Biography/Autobiography/Autothanatography 262 18 Deconstruction 266 19 Différance 269 20 Hauntology 271 21 Hospitality 273 22 Iterability 276 23 Lies 278 24 Methods 281 25 Performative 284

CONTENTS

26 Poetry 287 27 Undecidability 290 28 Writing/Texting 293 Index 303



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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Alhelí Alvarado-Díaz is a historian teaching political theory at Columbia University and NYU. She has written Shooting the Core: Reinterpreting Political Theory through Film, Documentary and Reportage and is completing Disruptive Irrational: Desire and Repression in Antonin Artaud, Félix Guattari and Jean-François Lyotard, and Tragic Democracy: Thinking Politics with Cornelius Castoriadis. Mark Byron is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Sydney and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. His current work is in developing digital scholarly editions of complex modernist texts and their manuscripts, including the Watt module of the Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project. Another project, Modernism and the Early Middle Ages, has thus far produced the monograph Ezra Pound’s Eriugena (2014) and a dossier “Samuel Beckett and the Middle Ages” coedited with Stefano Rosignoli in the Journal of Beckett Studies (2016). Robert Doran, Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Rochester, is the author of The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant (2015) and The Ethics of Theory: Philosophy, History, Literature (2017). He has edited collections of texts such as Mimesis and Theory (2008) by René Girard, The Fiction of Narrative (2010) by Hayden White, the anthology Philosophy of History After Hayden White (2013), and special journal issues Cultural Theory after 9/11: Terror, Religion, Media (2008) and Rethinking Claude Lévi-Strauss: 1908-2009 (2013). Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei is Kurrelmeyer Professor of German at the Johns Hopkins University. Her books include The Life of Imagination: Revealing and Making the World; Exotic Spaces in German Modernism; The Ecstatic Quotidian: Phenomenological Sightings in Modern Art and Literature; Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language; and a book of poetry, After the Palace Burns, which won The Paris Review Prize.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS



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Marit Grøtta is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oslo, Norway. She has published Litterære bagateller: Introduksjon til litteraturens korttekster (2009) and Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics: The Gaze of the Flâneur and 19th-Century Media (2015), as well as articles on Schlegel, Baudelaire, Proust, Benjamin, and Agamben. Suzanne Guerlac has authored Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson (2006), Literary Polemics, Bataille, Sartre, Valéry, Breton (1997), and The Impersonal Sublime: Hugo, Baudelaire, Lautréamont and the Esthetics of the Sublime (1990). She has coedited Derrida and the Time of the Political (2009), and published numerous articles on Proust, Valéry, Bergson, Victor Hugo, Bataille, Sartre, and others. Leslie Hill, Emeritus Professor of French Studies at the University of Warwick, is the author of Beckett’s Fiction: In Different Words (1990), Marguerite Duras: Apocalyptic Desires (1993), Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (1997), Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot: Writing at the Limit (2001), The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Derrida (2007), Radical Indecision: Barthes, Blanchot, Derrida, and the Future of Criticism (2010), Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing: A Change of Epoch (2012), and Nancy, Blanchot: A Serious Controversy (2018). He has coedited After Blanchot: Literature, Philosophy, Criticism (2005) and Blanchot dans son siècle (2009), and is currently completing a book on the writings of Pierre Klossowski, titled Circulus vitiosus deus: Klossowski, Nietzsche, and the Deconstruction of Christianity. Miriam Jerade is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Her book Violencia: Una lectura desde la deconstrucción de Jacques Derrida was published by Metales Pesados in October 2018. She has published essays on Hannah Arendt and antisemitism as well as articles on Derrida, Rosenzweig, and Paul Celan. Vivian Liska is Professor of German literature and Director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, and since 2013, Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Faculty of the Humanities at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the (co-) editor of numerous books, among them the two-volume ICLA publication Modernism (2007), which was awarded the Prize of the Modernist Studies Association, and Kafka and the Universal (2016). She is the editor of the book series Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts (De Gruyter, Berlin.) Recent books include Giorgio Agamben’s Empty Messianism (2008), When Kafka Says We: Uncommon Communities in German-Jewish Literature (2008), and German-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife: A Tenuous Legacy (2017).

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Claire Lozier, Lecturer in French Studies and World Cinema at the University of Leeds (UK), is the author of De l’Abject et du Sublime: Georges Bataille, Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett (2012). She has published numerous articles on the oeuvre of those authors considered through the lens of Derrida’s work. Eddis N. Miller, Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Pace University, has authored two books, Kantian Transpositions: Derrida and the Philosophy of Religion (2014) and Kant’s Religion Within the Bounds of Mere Reason (2015). Among his published articles, one finds “Deconstruction and Religion” (2013) and “Derrida and the Problem of the Secularized Messianic” (2007). Raoul Moati, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago, is the author of Derrida/Searle, déconstruction et langage ordinaire (2009), tr. Derrida/Searle, Deconstruction and Ordinary Language (2014). Other books include Evénements Nocturnes, Essai sur Totalité et Infini (2012), Derrida et le langage ordinaire (2014), and The Night of Being: A Guide to Levinas’s Totality and Infinity (2016). He coedited Autour de Slavoj Zizek (2010). Marta Segarra, a research professor at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique–CNRS (Laboratoire d’études de genre et de sexualité–LEGS) and Professor of Gender Studies and French Studies at the Universitat de Barcelona, has published several books and collections, among which Teoría de los cuerpos agujereados (2014), Differences in Common: Gender, Vulnerability and Community (coedited with J. Sabadell-Nieto, 2014), Demenageries. Thinking (of) Animals after Derrida (coedited with A. E. Berger, 2011), The Portable Cixous (2010), L’événement comme écriture: Cixous et Derrida se lisant (ed., 2007), Ver con Hélène Cixous (ed., 2006), and Traces du désir (2008). Sam Slote, Professor of English at Trinity College Dublin, has coedited five volumes on Joyce: Probes: Genetic Studies in Joyce (1995), Genitricksling Joyce (1999), How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake (2007), Renascent Joyce (2013), and Derrida and Joyce: On Totality and Equivocation (2013). He has published an annotated edition of Ulysses in 2012 and is the author of Joyce’s Nietzschean Ethics (2013).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my friend Aleksandra Wagner, who kindly facilitated the production of the book cover. All my gratitude goes to Stanley Gontarski who has asked me, more than once, to edit such a volume—he has been a mentor all these years. I am grateful to Laurent Milesi who has re-read the entries in the Glossary and made a number of excellent suggestions. Finally, I want to say how pleasant it has been to work with an editor who is as friendly, astute and understanding as Haaris Naqvi. J.-M. R.

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Introduction: Derrida’s modernity and our modernism Jean-Michel Rabaté

The point of departure of this collection was one of those aporias that Jacques Derrida used as a launching pad for spiraling investigations at the end of which nothing was exactly as before. This aporia is condensed in two apparently contradictory theses about modernity. In one thesis, Derrida states that deconstruction cannot be “modern,” but neither will it be “postmodern” or “modernist.” In the second thesis, he states that deconstruction keeps an intimate connection with literature, not because deconstruction would be a literary way of doing philosophy, but because literature itself has to be understood as a truly “modern” notion, a notion that exemplifies the politics of deconstruction, a term to which we will return often, and that Derrida usually capitalizes.1 Often called “postmodern,” more than once deconstruction has blurred the boundaries between philosophy and literature. What we hear less often is that the concept of literature called upon by Derrida is in no way eternal or ahistorical but specifically “modern.” It is true, the philosophers discussed by Derrida tend to fall under the heading of philosophia perennis; most of them belong to the pantheon of classical thinkers from Parmenides to Heidegger, from Aristotle to Husserl, from Plato to Kant, Hegel or Nietzsche. When it comes to literature, however, Derrida understands it as keeping a necessary link with a certain modernity, which allows him to deploy a whole array of historical, ethical, and political questions. The first point was made by Derrida in a discussion with Christopher Norris, who typically wondered whether deconstruction was on the side

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of modernism or of postmodernism. Derrida refused to go one way or the other, and what’s more, he questioned the relevance of these categories: I don’t think Deconstruction is something specifically modern. There are some “modern” features of what we identify as Deconstruction in some academic contexts, but what makes Deconstruction unavoidable has been at work for a long time, even with Plato or Descartes.2 Norris was mentioning the problem posed by the fact that terms like “modernism” and “postmodernism” have different meanings in philosophy, in the arts, and in literature. This led him to present Kant as a “modern” philosopher whose program condenses the spirit of the Enlightenment as opposed to thinkers like Lyotard and Baudrillard. The latter have been associated with “postmodernism,” a theoretical program that presented itself as a critique of the Enlightenment. However, Derrida remained adamant in his refusal to let deconstruction be historicized in terms of such broad periods, genres, or schools: I wouldn’t want to call Deconstruction a critique of modernity. But neither is it “modern” or in any sense a glorification of modernity. It is very premature to venture these generalizations, these concepts of period. I would say that I just don’t know what these categories mean . . . for me, they are not rigorous concepts.3 The view of deconstruction offered in contrast was shifting, mobile, unfinished, and heterogeneous; the most important feature was that it would resist being subsumed under any concept, program, or method.4 The second point was made in response to an invitation by David Wood, who had asked Derrida to introduce deconstruction in a dialogue with other schools. Wood meant to present a general introduction that would include conflicting assessments, some of which would have a critical edge, like those of Richard Rorty and Jürgen Habermas (Habermas being represented by Christopher Norris in the volume). In his response, first published in English in 1992, Derrida stated that he did not love literature as such, as had often been said in an accusatory tone against his philosophical work. He even said that he did not prefer literature to philosophy. He vehemently rejected the accusation that he would be a “literary” thinker. Were he to retire to an island, he quipped, he would take with him only history books and memoirs, adding that he would use them to create his own literature!5 In many senses, then, Derrida can appear as a frustrated novelist or poet (as was the case of his mentor Emmanuel Levinas), which does not mean that he treats philosophy in a non-rigorous or “literary” manner. Fundamentally, what Derrida admires in literature is that it is able to keep “secrets.” The “secret” alludes to what is hidden, like passions and ardors, and they are

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both concealed and revealed at the same time. As an afterthought, Derrida expatiates more fully on what literature means for him: I have often found myself insisting on the necessity of distinguishing between literature and belles-lettres or poetry. Literature is a modern invention, inscribed in conventions and institutions which, to hold on to just this trait, secures in principle its right to say everything. Literature thus ties its destiny to a certain non-censure, to the space of democratic freedom (freedom of the press, freedom of speech, etc.) No democracy without literature: no literature without democracy.6 The text thus shifts from a descriptive to a prescriptive concept—Derrida does not want to disqualify as “literature” ancient texts that come from times, when, say, kings dominated, or closer to us, from periods of state oppression under nondemocratic regimes, but he sees in literature a willful and determined rebellion against any form of censorship or totalitarianism. To return to an older discussion, literature would inherit all the features that Derrida had associated with writing, a writing condemned by Plato in Phaedrus and elsewhere for putting aside the living voice and the authority of the speaker.7 Literature evinces the same qualities or defects, in Plato’s eyes, as writing: a refusal to submit to the authority of the king or of the father, an errancy that can never be mastered by any dominant system. Literature, like writing, implies an anarchic rebelliousness and ends up demanding democratic egalitarianism. In that sense, literature is progressive; it anticipates the historical movement toward democracy. If philosophy does not change, or changes imperceptibly, literature, a term that we tend to conceive of as much broader and almost impossible to circumscribe, let alone historicize, is marked by the time of the “modern” with its wish to obtain always more democracy. This paragraph announces the analyses developed thirty years later, albeit without any explicit reference to Derrida, by Jacques Rancière. They are most systematically presented in Mute Speech, Rancière’s study of the evolution of nineteenth-century French literary styles from Balzac to Flaubert, Mallarmé, and Proust.8 Rancière discards current accounts of modernism and modernity because his analysis returns to a genealogy of genres, rules, and hierarchies that governed representation since Plato and Aristotle. Literary productions marked by the representative system would express an order often linked with monarchy; the hierarchies in the orders of invention, dispositio, and elocutio began to be disrupted once the modern principle of equality was in sight. Then Flaubert’s “indifference” of style to its subject became the norm. The shift took place after the French and American revolutions, more precisely at the beginning of the romantic period.

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Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel, Notre-Dame de Paris, would exemplify a loss of distinction between prose and poetry. Hugo’s novel strives toward the status of a prose poem: the author’s wish is to show how stones can speak while human speech is petrified because his main character is the Paris cathedral. Hugo and others started dismantling ancient hierarchies and generic conventions in an original crossover writing. The power of the written word came to the fore in a movement toward free expression, which gave birth to a more radical modernity with Baudelaire and Flaubert, both conscious of their objective alliance against bourgeois limitations. After Flaubert, poetic genres tended to be replaced by language as such, and then language would open itself to the exploration of the unconscious with Proust and the surrealists. Even if the surrealists were divided on the issue of prose as an all too realistic genre, the global evolution toward an autonomous writing led to the rise of the novel. The novel became the dominant genre because it was so fluid and capable of circulating through diverse situations, publics, and political issues. Both Joyce and Proust demonstrated that one could include absolutely anything in a novel, from actual plays to treatises on same-sex love. The endlessly capacious novel would offer a space for an anarchic letter endlessly wandering in the world, deprived of a predetermined place or function, animated with an autonomous agency. Literature, understood in this historical reconstruction, will not refer to the avant-gardist myth of a pure writing locked up in self-referential games and tending to intransitivity, for if modern literature allows language to take over, it does not prevent it from being split between the spirit and the letter. The power granted to language hesitates between leaving complete expressivity to speech, which would be its spirit, and the domination of a letter indifferent to content, which would be the material face of the literary process. Such a tension between the spirit and the letter would deploy itself as a productive contradiction capable of generating attempts aiming at an overcoming of the aporia. What Derrida saw as a tension between the secret kept in and by literary texts and the wish to reveal it all, to say everything (as Marquis de Sade required), is reformulated by Rancière as a tension between the spirit of literature, the wish to grant expressivity its fullest extension, and the material letter, the “dead” or indifferent side of writing. Rancière’s problematic developed the thought of Derrida, building on his major discoveries about the letter and writing in the 1960s that had been obtained after arduous close readings of Plato, Rousseau, Artaud, Jabès, Bataille, and a few others, but this time it is applied to one single period and also tested through historical examples deployed in a continuous progression from 1830 to 1930. Rancière’s investigation owes something as well to the work of two philosophers who remained very close to Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, above all in their presentation of German romanticism in The Literary Absolute.9 They take as a model Schlegel who insisted on the “‘progressive’ nature of universal poetry”

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because for him, poetry was to subsume all other genres, which led to the idea of literature as a modern “absolute.” The term “absolute,” faithful to its etymological derivation, means freedom from all determinations. The infinity discovered in poetic language will thus rebound and exert a political function. If literature becomes sufficient unto itself, it replaces or absorbs not only philosophy and criticism but also religion and mythology. The Literary Absolute takes stock of the high claims of the romantics for whom literature presents itself as a “hyperbolic” constitution of language. It always strives toward infinity, even when it works via fragments, because these “parts” call up a potential “whole” that would embody the formless form capable of uniting all genres. The reference to German or French romanticism should alert us to the need to examine closely the historical boundaries of the concept of modernism. We usually take for granted that the term “modernism” implies, as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound advocated, a rejection of romanticism. Quite often, “romanticism” and “modernism” are seen as immutable and mutually exclusive categories. However, as Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers have shown in their excellent book, Modernism: Evolution of an Idea (2015), definitions of modernism have not stopped evolving since the 1940s, when the term gained prevalence in English departments in the United States. Our contention is that the thought of Derrida should be seen as expanding the concept of modernism even more; it will be a more “open” and more “philosophical” modernism, and will include a few new theoreticians. For philosophically minded readers, Adorno can be identified with high modernism, a loose movement in which Schönberg, Kafka, and Beckett appear as cultural beacons. As we have seen, Derrida is often associated with “postmodernism” because his work has been seen as playful, ironic, or experimental, if not downright literary. The ambition of this collection is to change this view. When Derrida discusses Joyce and Kafka, Valéry and Artaud, even if his affinities stay with unclassifiable writers, he is also interacting with modernism, impacting it. One of our claims is that next to Artaud and Bataille, who have gained acceptance in the canon of high modernism, we should also introduce the thought of Paul Celan, Maurice Blanchot, and Martin Heidegger so as to update our sense of what modernism can mean. These writers should belong to a revisited modernist framework, partly rethought by Derrida. What the essays gathered here show is that Derrida not only shares many references with Adorno (like Beckett, Kafka, and Benjamin, and even includes a love-hate relationship with Heidegger), but also that his thought is instrumental in actively reconfiguring modernism and thus offering a new definition. This updated and upgraded modernism would be capable of absorbing the lessons taught by Artaud, Bataille, Celan, Heidegger, Genet, Cixous, Ponge, and Blanchot, along with Paul Valéry, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, R. M. Rilke, T. S. Eliot, and Franz Kafka.

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The main effect of Derrida’s attentive close readings has been to prevent the generic simplifications that one finds even in the works of good critics. I’ll give the example of Fredric Jameson’s A Singular Modernity (2002), a book in which he devotes a section to Maurice Blanchot. Jameson is right to present Blanchot as exemplifying a certain “modernism,” but his understanding is disappointingly limited when it comes to surveying Blanchot’s thought. Jameson believes that Blanchot’s modernism is defined by a belief in the autonomy of art, a self-referential art divorced from history. This apolitical and disengaged interpretation has been debunked by recent commentators of Blanchot.10 Here, indeed, the issue is to know both what Blanchot wrote and when, and also to be wary of simplifications; but all this argument is annihilated provided one sticks to Derrida’s questioning. Jameson thinks that Blanchot is always repeating one single thesis about autonomy and art for art’s sake, a thesis easily reduced to paradoxes generated by the interaction of reading and writing.11 In the present collection, we will see how Leslie Hill pushes Derrida’s insights further and also avoids these reductive readings. In the same way as it does not make sense to pigeonhole Beckett as an “absurdist” negativist, that an attentive reader can discern the power of affirmation that inhabits his texts, it is one-sided, to say the least, to see Blanchot as a pure metaphysician obsessed by aporias, wallowing in the dead ends of a mystified notion of writing. As Hill writes in these pages, what counts for Beckett, Blanchot, and Derrida is “the unmasterable weakness of the negative, the fact that all negativity is always preceded and exceeded by an affirmation manifesting itself as the impossible.” It has to be declined with different accents, for the impossible is “that which, for Derrida, announces the future, which, for Blanchot, is inseparable from an impossibility of dying, and, for Beckett, from an impossibility of being born,” as he writes in “Reading Between the lines: Derrida, Blanchot, Beckett.” Our conversation about the links between modernism and deconstruction had been anticipated by Stephen Ross in the excellent collection that he edited in 2008, Modernism and Theory: A Critical Debate.12 Interestingly, Jameson had written an astute “Afterword” to the series of dual conversations, with exciting presentations followed by critical responses, in which he noted that no sooner have critics buried both modernism and theory than they rise from their ashes.13 He also mentioned Gilles Deleuze who, he thought, should emerge as the dominant reference for modernism studies. Without disputing that point, I believe that a place can be made for Derrida next to Deleuze. At any rate, the drift of Jameson’s Afterword was to return to Walter Benjamin’s vision of a messianic history that would have to be “blasted open” as a continuum as soon as one rethinks it from the point of view of redemption.14 This point of view, as most authors in this collection show, is shared by Derrida, who, as we have seen, keeps questioning any simplistic belief in a

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sequence of cultural periods succeeding one another. Like Benjamin, Derrida exposes each movement, moment, or heading to a violent problematic that aims at ripping it apart from its context, at destroying continuities so as to make a sense of futurity appear. With such a messianic albeit non-religious wish, Deleuze has little to do. When we take the meditations of Derrida as an incentive to push our definitions further, we have a good example of how theory brings forth new interpretations of modernism. The modernist period, which had its peak in the second and third decades of the twentieth century, serves as a site for interrogating and reframing the practices of scholars and theorists. No one has done more to promote the interaction between theory and the cultural historiography of the “modern moment” than Walter Benjamin, thus it is no coincidence that his essays have been cornerstones of definitions of modernism. Benjamin’s main effort, his unfinished compendium called the Arcades Project, keeps delineating the fault-lines between modernity and modernism. Benjamin had noted that each epoch believes itself to be at the vanguard of the modern: “Each age unavoidably seems to itself a new age. The “modern” (das “Moderne”) however, is as varied in its meaning as the different aspects of one and the same kaleidoscope.”15 Benjamin quotes Baudelaire’s famous phrase in “The Painter of Modern Life” comparing the subject of modernity to a “kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness.” Baudelaire had defined subjects of modernity as people “of the crowd” (to quote Poe’s famous tale), who are also lovers of “universal life.” They joyfully mingle with the mass of urban passersby in order to tap this “immense reservoir of electrical energy” it contains.16 As Benjamin shows, Baudelaire’s concept of modernity is linked with the philosophies of history of Hegel and Marx. Baudelaire’s modernity would have led us to modernism, provided it does not let itself be seduced by art nouveau or Jugendstil. However, Benjamin asks anxiously: “How does modernism become Jugendstil?”17 The translators correctly rendered as “modernism” die Moderne, which is not the more usual neutral (das Moderne) or the masculine (der Modernimus). The choice of a feminine term may not be random. Indeed, even within the field of modernist theory, a number of critics like Peter Bürger have argued that “modernism” has kept features coming from the “soft” aestheticizing touch of the Jugendstil. They contrast this with the “hard” revolutionary impulses in the arts to be found only with the “historical” avant-gardes. Benjamin rejects in Jugendstil the vague post-symbolism of the generation of 1890–1910, although an important lineage had linked Baudelaire to Mallarmé, Laforgue, Wilde, Jarry, younger Gide, and Yeats. Benjamin embraced the material, technological, and ideological acceleration of modernity, and armed with this view he rejected the “decadent” legacy of Jugendstil, a movement that he always associated with the poetry of Stefan George. What was wrong was not decadence per se, but

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the attempt to recreate a lost aura: “Jugendstil forces the auratic.”18 This would take us too far into Benjamin’s problematics, but I’ll simply note that Derrida always expresses his sympathy for Benjamin, which is not always the case with Adorno. It was fitting that Derrida should have received the Adorno prize in Frankfurt in 2001. The Frankfurt Address for the Adorno prize, entitled “Fichus,” sounded paradoxical because Derrida spent more than half his time discussing a letter written by Benjamin to Adorno’s wife.19 Sketching the chapters of a book that he dreams of writing on his links with Adorno, Derrida then mentions the role of literature as one of their strongest bonds: The question of literature, at the point where it is indissociable from the question of language and its institutions, would play a crucial role in this history. What I shared most easily with Adorno, even took from him . . . is his interest in literature and in what, like the other arts, it can critically decenter in the field of university philosophy.20 If Derrida’s modernity and Adorno’s modernism have a lot in common, it is above all because both Derrida and Adorno rewrite Walter Benjamin’s groundbreaking theses about the modern and the new in literature and politics. What stands out as well is that like Adorno and Benjamin, Derrida reject the idea that modernism is always “mythical.” A way of avoiding myth would be to rethink Benjamin’s concept of redemption, to offer it as a key to the link between past and present because it suggests an interminable legacy that should not be read as “postmodern” but as the most lasting legacy of modernism. Benjamin’s composition of the enormous and unfinished Arcade Project was an attempt at creating order in a literary and philosophical collection. He evoked in “Unpacking My Library” the “bliss of the collector,” a bliss that was not limited to the possession of some rare items but approximated the happiness of whoever can contemplate history as the field of ruins and fragments that it is but finds there a reason to learn to be more alive in the present. This has to do with the temporal structure of such bliss. Benjamin notes that we do not envy the future, only the past: we cannot know the future, only imagine it. Neither pleasure nor displeasure can taint the projection of hope beyond hope: The kind of happiness that could arouse envy in us exists only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us. In other words, our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. The same applies to our view of the past, which is the concern of history. The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our

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coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply.21 To “redeem” means to “buy back,” to “save,” or to “release” from bondage or sin. However, Benjamin does not believe that life will be saved when beautified by art, as Proust did. The paradoxical happiness in which the idea of salvation resides is “founded on the very despair and desolation which were ours.”22 He adds: “Our life, it can be said, is a muscle strong enough to contract the whole of historical time. Or to put it differently, the genuine concept of historical time rests entirely upon the image of redemption.”23 We collect so as to recollect, thus turning into the curators of an always unfinished and unfinishable archive. This archive can be called modernism. It is an archive that will never become a totality. Like modernism, no collection can ever be complete. Discrete objects will be placed in organized spaces so as to form a living encyclopedia; however, the encyclopedia will never be closed on itself, and like Benjamin’s Arcades Project, it will remain forever unfinished. This is the belief that Derrida and Benjamin share, and both find in it a condition for a revolutionary awakening. In the same way as there is no absolute language, there is no absolute collection, thus no end to modernism. Because the absolute is lacking, the task of the collector, which includes loving all the things and texts that will be redeemed, will be to keep open the discontinuous history of modernisms in the plural. It is to such a pluralizing task that Derrida invites us. Derrida’s attention to the unique specificity of texts and idioms leads us to see better in what the singularity of modernism consists. His innate skepticism facing labels of this type has saved him from reductive generalities. On the other hand, this does not mean that we need to eschew theory or periodization. Indeed, the canonization of high modernism by critics like Hugh Kenner and Marjorie Perloff, who themselves go back to Joyce, Pound, and Eliot, or by art critics like Clement Greenberg and philosophers like Adorno, would use criteria that overlap with the main tenets of deconstruction. The emergence of modernism in literature, architecture, film, music, and painting would not have taken place without borrowings from philosophical theories. Yeats’s version of Irish modernism would be unthinkable without his having read Nietzsche; Eliot’s anti-romantic and neoclassical bias obscure his earlier reliance on the neo-Hegelian Bradley as well as his readings of Husserl and Bertrand Russell; Beckett discovered in the late Cartesian Arnold Geulincx a philosophical sensibility akin to his; T. E. Hulme, Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis followed Bergson’s philosophy before criticizing it; Virginia Woolf, like the whole Bloomsbury group, was excited by the revolution in philosophy brought about by Bertrand Russell’s logical atomism.

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The affinity of theoreticians for modernist texts is well known, to the point that some people talk about “high theory” as one speaks of “high modernism.” Adorno takes Beckett in literature and Schönberg in music as heroes; Derrida began with Joyce as the alter ego of Husserl; Foucault worked on Flaubert and Borges, Cixous on Clarice Lispector, Deleuze on Proust, Zizek on Kafka, and de Man on Yeats. There would be more latent links, especially if one parallels Derrida’s work on “difference” with Beckett’s interrogations of the voice and writing, as Leslie Hill will point out.24 It is clear in conclusion to this rapid presentation that the ambition of this collection is not to “apply” Derrida’s thought to the main authors of modernism. We would object to such an enterprise if we had felt we needed to write or edit “essays in applied deconstruction.” These would remain entirely predictable, but with examples taken from writers called “modernist.” On the one hand, Derrida’s supple conceptualization has always questioned the possibility of applying theories to texts, or of taking texts as “examples” or “allegories” of theoretical statements; on the other hand, our wish has been to show how modernist authors allow us to understand Derrida, as much perhaps as to understand why and how Derrida has modified our interpretations of modernism. Hence the title of Part One, “Rethinking the main concepts of modernism,” in which the contributors demonstrate the several ways in which Derrida forces us to rethink the very definition of modernism by looking at basic concepts that underpin its logic and evolution. Here, we deal with the gift, with death, with the wound, with the idiomaticity of the idiom, with the divide between humanity and animality, with the necessary respect for the singularity of the text, which does not prevent one from meditating on the essence of poetry; other important keywords are the event, the law, and the links between a textual and an social economy. If one were to object that this lists looks like a list of Derrida’s own concepts, it should also be obvious that these concepts underpin our notion of the modern, and furthermore one could argue that modernism would be unthinkable without a consideration of their framing power, of their defining effects, and of their foundational positioning. Hence it was inevitable to begin with Baudelaire because, even if he did not coin the word of “modernity,” he was the first writer to use the term systematically in its contemporary sense. For Baudelaire’s groundbreaking “The Painter of Modern Life,” modernity was embodied both by Poe’s “man of the crowd” and by Constantin Guys, always on the lookout for new vignettes of fashionable Parisian life. For Baudelaire, modernity was split between an “eternal” half and a contingent or contemporary half, in which he put morality and fashion side by side. Derrida repeatedly alluded to Baudelaire and devoted a whole book to one of his prose poems. In her essay on “Trickster economy,” Marit Grøtta shows how by writing on Baudelaire, Derrida explores the possibility of the gift in relation to the exchange systems,

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the circulation of money, and the economy of literature. Addressing topics such as the event, speculation, and debt, Derrida showed that the act of giving is bound up in temporal structures, which raises questions related to the advent of modernity and capitalist economy. Discussing the prose poem “Counterfeit Money,” Derrida argues that Baudelaire was concerned with the circulation of signs and money in modern life, conscious that it depended on credit and speculation. He was aware that the modern city produced a “margin” consisting of beggars who sustained the system through their very exclusion, thus incurring debts handled through sacrifices and alms. Grøtta’s essay engages with Derrida’s understanding of the “trickster economy” at play in the French poet’s writings to make us follow the intricacies of Derrida’s thinking when he states that if there is an economy, there cannot be any gift. In a later text, Derrida stated that the only possible gift is the gift of death, which sends us to another economy, an economy that has to take not only death but also God into consideration. Curiously, a modernist meditation on time and economy presupposes taking into account the social function of religion, at least insofar as religion can be defined broadly as that which metes out a promise of heavenly reward. Thus, the question of a clash between modernism and religion can be reopened via Derrida’s dialogue with Kant about faith and religion, as Eddis N. Miller argues. In “Kant’s celestial economy: A footnote to The Gift of Death,” Miller examines the significance of Kant’s philosophy of religion for Derrida’s critique. According to Rodolphe Gasché’s influential reading in The Tain of the Mirror,25 Derrida’s main position would be Kantian, that is a philosophy of the conditions of possibility of thought—in other words, a philosophy of the transcendantal, but with an important difference: Derrida’s mode of thought would progress by launching several quasi-transcendentals. Is the question of religion a way of going back to a true transcendental? Miller shows how Derrida rethought and transposed the Kantian gesture of thinking religion within the limits of reason alone. Derrida’s seminars on Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone stage a deconstructive engagement with Kant’s philosophy of religion. Indeed, the clash between faith and knowledge marked what was called the “modernist controversy” inside the Catholic Church in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century, as we know, and was relayed by Pound and Yeats. It is not a coincidence that the passage from the gospels examined by Kant should be the same parable that Joyce quoted at the end of his story “Grace” in Dubliners. Here, Miller argues for the central role played by Kant, next to Kierkegaard, in Derrida’s thinking because he wishes to redress the balance and believes that the importance of Emmanuel Levinas for Derrida has been overestimated. At odds with Levinas’s anti-rationalist ethics of the Other, an analysis of the place of faith, reason, and religion helps assessing how Derrida’s thinking

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participates in a modernist rejection of dogmatism and intolerant political theologies. This theological context is necessary to lead us to the way of the question of the law, a concept that has kept a vital importance for Derrida, who seems to have found its most compelling articulation in Kafka. In “Derrida and Kafka: A Talmudic disputation before the law,” Vivian Liska, one of our best Kafka commentators, studies the way Kafka has accompanied Derrida throughout his work, from his meditation on “Before the Law” in the 1980s to the later seminars. Here she shows that Derrida reads Kafka’s famous parable in typically aporetic terms. However, when he points to the impossibility of founding the law, it is above all to launch a renewed questioning of the intrinsic links between literature and modernity. Kafka would be interested by the tension between the absence of law of modernity and the impossibility of knowing what the law wants. Opposing Derrida’s positive reading of the aporia to Giogio Agamben’s negative assessment (mostly facing Derrida’s inability to conclude), Liska teases out the subtle strategies of postponement deployed by both Derrida and Benjamin—the issue is the question of modernity as inherently bound up with that of literature. If one wanted to put the apologue in biographical terms, Kafka would be replaying his “Letter to his Father” in fictional guise, and would be torn between a mute Abraham and a reluctant Isaac, nevertheless ready to be sacrificed for his devotion to literature. The figure of the Kafkan victim would recur in Derrida’s 2001 seminar on the death penalty: then Kafka’s vision of an American utopia, the Great Theater of Oklahoma, appears as a premonition of the death camps and of the Shoah. The evocation of this event is enough to throw a wedge between Derrida and Heidegger. This issue had been treated by Jennifer Anna GosettiFerencei in her groundbreaking book Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language (2004), in which she demonstrated that Heidegger had distorted the work of the German romantic poet for his own ends. In “Derrida with Heidegger: Poetic language, animality, world,” Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei returns to the issue of Heidegger’s pervasive influence on Derrida. In many ways, Derrida can be called a Heideggerian thinker, but with important differences. Very often, Derrida looks critically at Heidegger’s politics and ontology. However, if he often referred to Heidegger in his seminars and books, he rarely discussed his predecessor’s theory of language and poetry as such. The question remains whether Derrida can be said to follow Heidegger’s doctrine of poetic language when he develops a thesis about poetry as what one wants to learn “by heart.” Here, the role of poetry becomes a key, as when Derrida reads Rilke after Heidegger in a different key, before transforming poetry itself into a little animal, a dead hedgehog lying on the road. The exchange with Heidegger repeats Paul Celan’s famous encounter with a philosopher whose thought he admired, but from whom he expected

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an apology for his compromised attitude during the Nazi regime. As we know, there was an encounter but the apology never came. This divided expectation is what launches Miriam Jerade’s meditation on how Derrida would read Celan. For Derrida, the name of Celan became synonymous with a thinking of the absolute singularity of the literary object. Such a singularity had to be met with ethically, which led to a greater responsibility facing the untranslatable and untamable idiom in which a part of alterity always lurks. Celan’s career goes beyond modernism although his work is partly inscribed in it, given his surrealist beginnings in Bucharest just after the war. Jerade analyzes Derrida’s readings of Celan’s poetry by taking his usage of the concept of “idiom” as a lever. If an “idiom” defines the singularity of a text, for Derrida there is also the “drive to the idiom,” as he writes in Monolingualism of the Other. Such idioms include Celan’s dated signature and his singular marks in the German language, a singularity is linked with an infinite mourning, as Derrida argued in Schibboleth and Rams. Derrida commented on Celan’s Meridian in The Beast and the Sovereign by offering his own “counterword” (Gegenwort), a word capable of launching a subversive counterviolence fighting against sovereign discourses. The friendship with Celan sends us in the direction of Derrida’s Jewishness. Is Derrida a less religious version of Emmanuel Levinas, or is he, as Martin Hägglund has argued, on the side of a radical atheism? Moreover, is Derrida a “modernist” when he discusses religion (i.e., that he keeps it within rational bounds) or is he closer to Jewish mysticism à la Buber? Derrida retuned quite often to the question of the Messiah, a messianic moment evoked as “the coming of the other, the absolute and unpredictable singularity of the arrivant as justice.”26 Messianicity implies a future that is not calculable or predictable, an “awaiting without horizon,” linked to a “hypercritical faith.” Derrida’s position seems close to that of Walter Benjamin who combined Marxism and Jewish theology, thus agreeing with Benjamin when he insisted on the structural function of messianism even though he was thinking history in Marxist terms, which dominates in Specters of Marx. Part Two, “Engaging with the poetics of canonical modernism,” deals with Derrida’s changing frames for a poetics of the modern. Derrida’s relentless questioning of critical and hermeneutic strategies should remind us that modernism was not originally a label, a simple descriptive term that co-opts and promotes a few writers in a dispassionate literary history; on the contrary, it was agonistic, dynamic, and critical. Think of Pound, Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis collaborating on Blast!, think of surrealism combativeness, and do not forget Kafka’s desire to create a literature that would wound his readers, even by shocking and awakening them. Modernism was not just the rejection of the values of an older generation associated rightly or wrongly with the Victorians, it was also the utopia of an active language capable of

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“defamiliarizing” words and objects, or of a poetry combining the substance of dreams and real life as in surrealism. This part zooms in on the original strategies Derrida devised to tackle the hermeneutics and the poetics of a few major modernist writers. “In Derrida’s Joyce” Sam Slote discusses Derrida’s impact on modernist studies and his relentless questioning of generic categories taken for granted. In Ulysses Gramophone, Derrida deconstructed the notion of a Joycean “competence” measured by the number of hours spent pondering his illegible texts. Joyce has pride of place because he was the first modernist to be inserted by Derrida as a literary icon whose power was such that he could disrupt the entire philosophical machine of phenomenology. Joyce became the rival of Husserl after they had been paired in Derrida’s Introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry. Very early, Derrida perceived a momentous tension between the transcendental foundation of subjectivity attempted by Husserl and the historicism embraced by Joyce in the wake of Vico and Hegel. Husserl’s Origin of Geometry addressed the role of tradition and transmission for mathematical or geometrical “idealities,” and wondered whether there might be literary idealities as well. Derrida pointed out a crucial hesitation in phenomenology, which undermined the possibility of its being founded on an origin identified with a living present. By slipping in the issue of literature, which led to the problem of cultural traces, Derrida ushered in a writing defined as the practice of iterability and différance. Iterable differences in literature were embodied by Joyce not only because he was the “most Hegelian of all writers” but also because Finnegans Wake staged a brotherly struggle between the orator (Shaun) and the writer (Shem the penman). Joyce would present first an alternative to phenomenology, then thanks to Molly Bloom, a resounding and feminine “Yes” to life and love. In the following chapter, “Derrida re-voicing Artaud,” Alhelí AlvaradoDíaz looks at Artaud’s poetry, his drawings, his recordings, and his plays by taking The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud as a point of departure. There, Derrida reflected on the possibilities of understanding, assessing, and penetrating the universe of Artaud, to whom he had already devoted an essay in Writing and Difference. Derrida’s struggle with Artaud insisted on the power of language as a subjective experience of appropriation, as an embodied reality beyond meaning and translation. Artaud created an unprecedented form of speech in which intonation was privileged over logic and reason. Artaud’s secret was to use “force before form,” putting the reality of life in a state of doubt. Doubt acted as a creative power and launched an irreverent rebellion that liberated language from the constraints of normality. Artaud, enfant terrible of deconstruction, evidences how deconstruction can be revolutionary. Artaud’s shrill “intonations” were ideological “detonations,” which is why Derrida had to revoice Artaud after having questioned the French poet’s adherence to logocentrism much earlier.

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From Artaud to Bataille is but a letter in the alphabet and another revision in Derrida’s confrontations with French modernism. In “Derrida on Bataille: from dueling to duet,” Claire Lozier starts from the first confrontation with Georges Bataille in Writing and Difference, which apparently led to a rejection, even a debunking, before moving on to show how Bataille’s themes return in later texts. Bataille’s notion of the “accursed share” underpins the analyses of Counterfeit Money on the impossible gift. Bataille’s ecstatic and divided subject comes to the fore when the “acephalic” subject surfaces at the end of Glas. Bataille’s foregrounding of the concepts of the impossible and non-knowledge reappears in different guises in the texts of the later Derrida. Derrida’s unconditional hospitality stresses the otherness of a guest who can kill the host in an excessive relation to the Other capable of destroying the very laws of exchange. Derrida paid homage to the groundbreaking work of Ezra Pound mostly in Of Grammatology. In “A cross in the margin: Inscription and erasure in Derrida and Pound,” Mark Byron studies the links between Pound’s modernism seeking a new knowledge through the promotion of Chinese writing with Derrida’s concept of writing and the trace. Absorbing the teachings of sinologist Ernest Fenollosa, Pound seized on Chinese ideograms to proffer a different poetic writing more attuned with the dynamism of nature. Chinese poetics gave Pound the concept of ideogrammatic writing used to launch his modernist poetics. It aspired to be complex and inclusive, to break distinctions between prose and poetry, between music and verb, between personal lyricism and historical document. It became a logbook of the torn consciousness of our modernity. Of Grammatology presents Pound as one of those who consciously tried to break with a Western tradition dominated by logocentrism. Pound appears next to Nietzsche and Mallarmé, even if his ideograms led to a Confucianist notion of the “rectification of names.” In fact, one faces the same quandary with Pound as with Heidegger, both having been attracted to a fascist ideology underpinned by a rethinking of language and ontology. Like Pound, Paul Valéry aspired to the distinction of being a philosopher as well as a poet, but he wanted to keep a critical edge and not be swayed by a totalitarian synthesis—a synthesis that he saw deriving from the European spirit. Derrida has pointed out in “Qual Quelle” that because he was a poet and a philosopher, Valéry was uniquely placed to understand that philosophy had to be written as well as poetry. Valéry shared this awareness with Nietzsche, and he made the most of it in his proliferating notebooks, that evince so many troubling correspondences with Derrida’s theses. For Derrida and Valéry, philosophy had to shake off the illusion of a transparent language, it had to reckon with form, and therefore could not be regulated by pure thinking. Valéry had attempted to probe pure thinking with his Monsieur Teste, a man reduced to pure mind, who is shown to be a monster. Derrida meditated on the tricky cases presented by French poet in

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Margins of Philosophy and The Other Heading, before offering an inspired commentary of “Sketch of a Serpent” in The Animal That Therefore I Am. It was thus not only Valéry the amateur philosopher who interested Derrida but also the poet, whose Charmes from 1922 can be called the high point of French modernism in poetry. Part Three addresses the performative power of Derrida’s problematics, pointing out it will help us rethink and reshape modernism. “Différance as performance: Pushing modernism beyond its borders” combines authors who insist on the critical and dynamic impact of Derrida’s thinking. Here again, the critical gesture is to use modernist authors so as to understand Derrida as well, while using Derrida to exceed the limitations or pious certainties about what constitutes modernism. Indeed, modernism is not just a passive repertory of texts but it aims at making a difference: it rewrites ancient categories in new idioms while unleashing a critical questioning, which tests the affirmative power of Derrida’s deconstruction. Derrida’s forcible philosophical questioning should also be questioned— to pursue such a critical debate is a way of testifying to some fidelity. This is how Raoul Moati introduces us to the central issue of performativity.27 This term is intricately linked with modernism, for modernism can be defined as the wish to keep alive a living language marked by stylistic innovation. As Samuel Beckett famously wrote about Joyce’s later writing: “Here, form is content, content is form,” adding that this writing is not about something, but is that very thing: “When the sense is sleep, the words go to sleep.”28 The wish to justify literary language through its power, its idiomatic force, or its performative agency is brought in connection with Derrida’s questioning of some of the presuppositions common to speech-act theories of Austin and Searle. When Derrida asked why literature had to be excluded from Austin’s theory of “How to do things with words,” he launched a long and ferocious war with Austin’s disciple. The controversy will teach how to think about language, whether poetic or ordinary, to students of modernism. The issue of performativity leads to the hinge between the literary and the ethical or the political that appears in Derrida’s readings of Jean Genet. In “Writing in the shadow of Sartre’s Genet, Derrida’s Glas, and the ethics of biography,” Robert Doran addresses the parallels between the two French philosophers when they interacted with a tricky writer, a thief and an outcast who nevertheless managed to provoke and challenge his audiences all his life. After Sartre, Derrida became a close friend of Jean Genet. He commented on his works in parallel with Hegel’s texts in Glas, his most experimental book. Glas was written as a response to Sartre’s superb but ultimately reductive Saint Genet, Comedian and Martyr. Derrida later returned to Genet several times, noting in “Countersignature”29 his admiration and also his dismay at discovering Genet’s last book, the posthumous Prisoner of Love. It was not so much because of Genet’s political position facing the Palestinians but because Genet insisted in this book—as in his novels—on “the ecstasy

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of betrayal.” Indeed, Genet had promised his friends the Palestinians that he would reject them as soon as they obtained an independent territory. Derrida’s friendly proximity to Genet can be compared with Sartre’s militant position that fully endorsed Genet’s positions, while Derrida, more subtly, would keep less countering than “counter-signing” his texts. As the evolution of Genet from queer poetic writing to engaged political writings proves, modernism cannot be thought of independently from history and sexuality, which sends us on the way to “feminine writing.” Derrida’s lifelong friendship and complicity with Hélène Cixous, a reputed novelist, playwright, and critic who launched the concept of “feminine writing” in the seventies, is treated by Marta Segarra in “Derrida, Cixous, and feminine writing.” Derrida and Cixous have written several books about each other, and their almost daily conversations on the phone have enriched both works. A central feature of deconstruction is its hospitality to the feminine, a fact that has been pointed out by Judith Butler. In what way does this change our views of modernism? Not only has Cixous written abundantly on Joyce, Kakfa, Proust, and Beckett, but also was she instrumental in introducing writers like of Clarice Lispector or Anna Akhmatova into a renewed modernist field whose contours and definition she has changed, including even India and Cambodia in her work, making modernism turn into a broader, less male or European domain. It was inevitable to conclude with an essay that would be devoted to two writers whose proximity to Derrida had different effects: with one, he kept on writing about him, with the other, the affinity prevented a direct engagement. The former is Maurice Blanchot, the latter Samuel Beckett. In a conversation with Derek Attridge, Derrida noted that he felt Beckett to be so close to his own philosophical preoccupations that he had avoided writing on him. This was not the case with Blanchot, to whom Derrida devoted several books. If there were only one, Blanchot would be Derrida’s true predecessor, above all because he prolonged and expanded the German romantics’ concept of an absolute literature without falling prey to formalism, as we have seen. With Blanchot, one can observe that Derrida discusses the fiction much more than the numerous essays on literature, focusing above all on texts that hesitate between fiction and documentary, as The Moment of My death. Derrida averred to Catherine Malabou that he felt that fundamentally he stood between Heidegger and Blanchot. For all his avowed fascination, has Derrida provided a consistent interpretation of Blanchot, or just allowed himself to be inspired by him? Roger Laporte once measured the impact of Derrida on Blanchot by showing how Blanchot had felt the need to rewrite his essays, changing “speech” for “writing,” after he had begun reading Derrida. Indeed, Blanchot’s work evolved over time, and his crucial concept of the “neuter” was elaborated as much as a response to Levinas’s Other as to Derrida’s écriture. If Derrida may have appeared closer to Levinas

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as time passed, nevertheless Blanchot’s “neuter” keeps a strong affinity with différance. Derrida would then return time and again to Blanchot’s paradoxical fictions that explore notions of literature, ethics, politics, and community, all providing grist to his own meditations. Hill, who has written cogently on Bataille and Beckett, and who has discussed the links between Derrida and Blanchot in his Cambridge Introduction to Derrida,30 brings the collection to a perfect close with “Derrida between Blanchot and Beckett.”

Notes 1 Find it under “Glossary” at the end of this volume. 2 Christopher Norris, “On Deconstruction and Art. Conversation with Jacques Derrida,” in Deconstruction After All, Reflections and Conversations, ed. David Jonathan Y. Bayot (Brighton, Sussex Academic Press, 2015), 44. 3 Ibid, 45. 4 See “Method” in the Glossary. 5 Jacques Derrida, “Passions: ‘An Oblique Offering,’” (trans. David Wood) in Derrida: A Critical Reader, ed. David Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 22. See also Jacques Derrida, Passions (Paris: Galilée, 1993), 64. 6 Jacques Derrida, “Passions: ‘An Oblique Offering,’” 23, and Passions, 64–65. Emphasis in the original. 7 See Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 61–172, and see “Writing” in Glossary. 8 Jacques Rancière, Mute Speech, trans. James Swenson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). Derrida’s “Plato’s Pharmacy” was published in Tel Quel in 1968, Rancière’s La Parole Muette in 1998. See Gabriel Rockhill’s excellent “Introduction” to Mute Speech, “Through the looking glass: The Subversion of the modernist doxa,” 1–28. 9 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988). 10 See, for instance, the excellent collection Understanding Blanchot, Understanding Modernism, ed. Christopher Langlois (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018). 11 Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002), 183–88. 12 Stephen Ross, ed., Modernism and Theory: A Critical Debate (New York: Routledge, 2008). 13 Fredric Jameson, “Afterword,” Modernism and Theory: A Critical Debate, 247. 14 Ibid, 247 and 250–51.

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15 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 545. Here, AP and page number. See also Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983), vol. 2, 677. 16 Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent Leitch, second edition (New York: Norton, 2010), 683. 17 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 561; Das Passagen-Werk, 697. 18 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 557; Das Passagen-Werk, 692.f 19 Jacques Derrida, “Fichus,” in Paper Machine, trans. Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 164–81. 20 Ibid, 179–80. 21 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969), 254. Emphasis in the original. 22 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 479. 23 Ibid. 24 See Derrida’s interview by Derek Attridge in Acts of Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 60–62. 25 Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univeristy Press, 1988). 26 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York: Routledge, 1994), 33. 27 See also “Performative” in the Glossary. 28 Samuel Beckett, “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico. . Joyce,” in Disjecta (London: Calder, 1983), 27. 29 Jacques Derrida, “Countersignature,” Paragraph 27, no. 2 (2004): 7–42. 30 Leslie Hill, The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Derrida (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 56–57 and 67–71.

Works cited Attridge, Derek, ed., Jacques Derrida. Acts of Literature. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Beckett, Samuel. Disjecta. London: Calder, 1983. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Benjamin, Walter. Das Passagen-Werk. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann, 2 vols. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1969. Derrida, Jacques. “Countersignature.” Paragraph 27, no. 2 (2004): 7–42.

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Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Derrida, Jacques. Paper Machine. Translated by Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. Derrida, Jacques. Passions. Paris: Galilée, 1993. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994. Gasché, Rodolphe. The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Hill, Leslie. The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Derrida. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Jameson, Fredric. A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present. London: Verso, 2002. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, and Jean-Luc Nancy. The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism. Translated by Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988. Langlois, Christopher, ed. Understanding Blanchot, Understanding Modernism. New York: Bloomsbury, 2018. Latham, Sean, and Gayle Rogers. Modernism: Evolution of an Idea. New York: Bloomsbury, 2015. Leitch, Vincent, ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, second edition. New York: Norton, 2010. Norris, Christopher. Deconstruction After All, Reflections and Conversations. Edited by David Jonathan Y. Bayot. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2015. Rancière, Jacques. Mute Speech. Translated by James Swenson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Ross, Stephen, ed. Modernism and Theory: A Critical Debate. New York: Routledge, 2008. Wood, David, ed. Derrida: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.

PART ONE

Rethinking the main concepts of modernism

1 Trickster economy: Derrida’s Baudelaire, and the role of money, counterfeits, and alms in the modern city Marit Grøtta

In 1991 Jacques Derrida published a book that is often referred to as his Baudelaire book: Given Time 1. Counterfeit Money.1 There he deals at length with a prose poem by Baudelaire, delving into nineteenth-century modernity. A splendid example of the fruitful connections between literature and philosophy, the book demonstrates Derrida’s shrewdness and sensitivity as a reader of literature. The title of Baudelaire’s piece discussed by Derrida, “Counterfeit Money,” seems full of promise for a deconstructionist reading, for money and counterfeits have to do with the circulation of signs, and Baudelaire’s approach to these phenomena at the onset of modernism cannot fail to offer valuable insight. What is perhaps most surprising about Derrida’s Baudelaire book is that he does not start out with money, as many critical Baudelaire readers do, nor does he end there. His main concern is the gift and how Baudelaire in this short piece depicts the paradoxes related to the act of giving. Through his reading of Baudelaire, Derrida shows that giving is always bound up in temporal structures that involve speculation, credit, and debt. The question

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he raises is whether it is possible to break the circle of indebtedness. What are the possibilities of a true gift? Ethical questions thus come to the fore in Derrida’s reading of Baudelaire; moreover, they prove to be intimately connected with the advent of capitalism, the birth of modernity, and the possibility of literature.2 Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) was a prime witness of modernity, depicting phenomena that are today seen as staple motifs of modernist literature: crowds swarming the streets, vehicles in motion, gas lights, cafés, city renovation, and an overflow of signs. Moreover, he portrayed a number of marginal beings at odds with modernity, but also complicit with it, such as beggars, prostitutes, gamblers, and, not least, poets. However, Baudelaire was not merely concerned with introducing modern motifs into literature; he also registered more subtle changes operating on a perceptual and societal level, affecting human relations and putting their core values at stake. This is what concerns Derrida in his response to Baudelaire. He is interested in Baudelaire as a writer of modernity and uncovers his profound insight into the role of money, counterfeits, and alms in modern life. In many respects, Given Time proves Derrida’s claim that he sees himself as an historian.3 He does so by making us appreciate Baudelaire not only as a poet who offers a series of tableaux from the city, but also as a poet who has a deep understanding of the forces at play in modernity, capable of asking: How does money work? What characterizes the relations between people in a modern city? What happens to giving and forgiveness in a capitalist society? Reading Baudelaire with Derrida is a rewarding experience because our situation today, in many respects, still resembles Baudelaire’s. The inflation of signs, the impact of economic structures, the corruption of society, and the precarious situation of marginal and disenfranchised people in big cities: these are phenomena that still crop up daily, even if they have been transformed since the nineteenth century. Our time is marked by the Internet, by fake news, by swift money transfers, by globalization, immigration, humanitarian aid, and the crisis of most democratic states. Derrida’s reading of Baudelaire disentangles the paradoxes of the modernity in which we still live today. When he describes Baudelaire’s piece as a “scene of modernity,” the reader may recognize this as an early scene in a drama still going on. My aim here is first to show to what degree Baudelaire’s poetic universe is suited for a reflection on the gift. Perceptive to the forces at play in modern life and the ways in which they affected economic as well as moral and literary matters, Baudelaire orchestrated a “trickster’s economy” in his writings, thus subverting the dominant tendencies of his day. This trickster’s economy is Derrida’s playground, his laboratory when he addresses the question of the gift. Secondly, I seek to shed light on Derrida as a reader of Baudelaire, stressing that he was not merely interested in the play of

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the signifiers, but dedicated to ethical questions and concerned with social realities underpinning Baudelaire’s modernity. The issues he addresses in Given Time are extremely important and still resonate in contemporary critical thought.

“Counterfeit Money” What kind of literary text is “Counterfeit Money”?4 Even though it is one of Baudelaire’s prose poems, Derrida always refers to it as a narrative and never mentions the hybrid genre that Baudelaire is seen as having invented. The novelty of the prose poem was that it introduced prose into the domain of poetry, which shattered the boundaries and hierarchies between existing genre. Moreover, Baudelaire’s prose poems were indebted to journalistic pieces of prose that filled the newspapers of his day, such as le fait divers and le tableau de Paris.5 Indeed, Paul Claudel was right when he described Baudelaire’s writings as a mixture of Racine’s style and the journalistic style of his time.6 Playing with journalistic genre conventions, Baudelaire created a new literary form that accommodated meditations upon curiosities and odd events in the city. Even if Baudelaire defended “pure poetry” and expressed his hatred of vulgar newspapers, he was poetically indebted to them, which is why his prose poems respect neither existing genre divisions nor distinctions between high and low. Derrida thus singled out a literary text that is utterly modern. Just as many other prose poems by Baudelaire, “Counterfeit Money” takes place in the streets of Paris. The narrator recounts a curious incident that happened as he and his friend were walking in the city, and the thoughts and emotions it prompted. If the occurrence seems rather banal or insignificant, the prose poem multiplies signals of its importance for the poet. Here is precisely what characterizes Baudelaire’s most prose poems; on the face of it, they are casual reports from the city, but they are experienced or witnessed by a sensitive subject and narrated in a cunning manner. They pass themselves off as mere anecdotes, while at the same time indicating that they can be read allegorically, whereas neither anecdotal nor allegorical readings prove to be fully satisfactory.7 The prose poem begins with the narrator and his friend leaving a tobacco shop, and the narrator observing his friend meticulously sort his change. The pair then encounter a beggar in the street and spare him some money, but upon noticing that his friend’s donation had been far greater, the narrator comments, “You are right; next to the pleasure of feeling surprise, there is none greater than to cause a surprise.” His friend then replies offhand that what he gave was in fact a counterfeit coin. This piece of information sparks off a series of speculations in the narrator’s mind, who thinks to himself that “such conduct on my friend’s part was excusable only by the desire

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to create an event in this poor devil’s life, perhaps even to learn the varied consequences, disastrous or otherwise, that a counterfeit coin in the hands of a beggar might engender.” Ultimately, the narrator is appalled when it dawns upon him, observing his friend’s demeanor, that his aim had been “to do a good deed while at the same time making a good deal; to earn forty cents and the heart of God; to win paradise economically; in short, to pick up gratis the certificate of the charitable man.” The text ends with the narrator’s harsh but silent verdict on his friend’s behavior: I could have almost forgiven him the desire for the criminal enjoyment of which a moment before I assumed him capable; I would have found something bizarre, singular in his amusing himself by compromising the poor; but I will never forgive him the ineptitude of his calculation. To be mean is never excusable, but there is some merit in knowing that one is; the most irreparable of vices is to do evil out of stupidity. Baudelaire’s story is not easy to interpret and typically puzzles the reader. As Derrida states, it deals with money, tobacco, and alms, and also, more profoundly, with giving and forgiveness, as well as narration and secrets. Money, tobacco, and alms today can look like insignificant tokens of everyday life; however, when they come to the fore in modernist literature, they become tokens of a new regime. Taking his cue from Baudelaire, Derrida explores the nature of money (the ultimate signs), the uses of tobacco (a product of luxury and expenditure), and the offering of alms (a profane kind of sacrifice). Given Time brings out the many convergences between Derrida and Baudelaire, both of whom not only shared an interest in a number of phenomena typical of modern life but also used to convey their insights in a playful, paradoxical form.

Money and credit We find a whole range of pecuniary motifs in Baudelaire’s writings, such as beggars and alms, poor people, luxury, gambling, bourgeois avarice, and calculation as an intellectual activity. His writings demonstrate that he was aware that the advent of modernity was intimately connected with the expansion of commercial forces. As David Harvey has argued, the transformation of the city in the hands of Baron Haussmann in the midnineteenth century can be seen as an adaption to capitalist economy that was meant to assure the free circulation of goods and people in the city.8 In keeping with this, Baudelaire has often been related to the rise of capitalism. Walter Benjamin saw him as a “poet in the era of high capitalism” when he examined the material conditions for his writings, pointing out how sensitive they were to the status of commodities in nineteenth-century Paris.9

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As many researchers have followed in his footsteps, this approach has been entrenched in Baudelaire studies and modernist studies. Thus there is nothing too surprising about Derrida’s interest in the topic of money in Baudelaire, but as I already noted this is not how he begins Given Time. Instead, he launches a meditation on the gift, which is what makes his reading of Baudelaire truly original. Derrida shows that both money and gifts are part of a circle of exchange. Discussing Marcel Mauss’s anthropological essay on the gift in premodern cultures, he summarizes the latter’s vision of the logics of the gift: for Mauss, any gift requires a countergift that must be adequate in size in relation to the gift that has been received; this is how economic systems are established.10 As Derrida states, “Marcel Mauss’s The Gift speaks of everything but the gift: It deals with economy, exchange, contract (do ut des), it speaks of raising the stakes, sacrifice, gift and counter-gift—in short, everything that in the thing itself impels the gift and the annulment of the gift.”11 This means that the act of giving is in fact related to temporal factors; it involves calculation and speculation, credit and debt. But—and this is what interests Derrida—temporality also leads to the destruction of the gift (the true gift), making it part of an economic circle of exchange. Temporality thus comes to the fore as a key factor in Derrida’s discussion of the gift, and on the very first pages of the book he discusses the possibility of a true gift, relating to a radical temporality. “For there to be a gift, there must be no reciprocity, return, exchange, countergift, or debt.”12 “For there to be gift, not only must the donor or donee not perceive or receive the gift as such, have no consciousness of it, no memory, no recognition; he or she must also forget it right away.”13 “For there to be gift event (we say event and not act), something must come about or happen in an instant, in an instant that no doubt does not belong to the economy of time.”14 Thus, on this view, the true gift will be connected to the event and a radical temporality that interrupts or sabotages the circle of exchange. Derrida repeatedly asserts the impossibility of such a gift, but also maintains that we have to think and desire the impossible, keep “a sort of transcendental illusion of the gift.”15 It is against this background that Derrida discusses Baudelaire and “Counterfeit Money.” Baudelaire’s prose poem too offers profound insights into the paradoxes involved in the act of giving, for it looks as if Baudelaire had taken pains to maximize the complexity of a seemingly ordinary situation: here the gift takes the form of alms, the offering is a counterfeit coin, the scene is played out between two friends, the interpretation of the event is subject to speculation, and the text ends with the narrator’s negative verdict on his friend’s act of giving. As Derrida points out, the whole story can be read as an essay on the gift, at whose center would lie the ultimate question: how to give. What does it mean to offer a counterfeit coin to a beggar? And what is the value of counterfeit money? Reflecting upon these questions, Derrida

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discusses the very logic of money. Banknotes and coins have no value in themselves, but are signs referring to a corresponding value, and they must be signed by an authority guaranteeing that the symbolic object refers to a genuine value. Authentic money is “titled” and guaranteed, whereas counterfeit money is not. If it passes itself off as authentic money, however, counterfeit money will be no different from authentic money; it is all a question of credit and belief. Hence the central role of the narrator’s speculations in the prose poem, who imagines what a counterfeit coin might engender in the hands of a beggar: “Might it not multiply into real coins? Could it not also lead him to prison?” In Derrida’s words, the narrator “speculates on what can happen to capital in a capital [NB. He means Paris, here] during the age of money, more precisely, in the age of value as monetary sign.”16 Fundamentally, Derrida brings attention to the importance of credit in monetary matters; moreover, he finds that there are structural similarities between the exchange system of gifts, the circulation of money, and the belief system of fiction. All depends on temporal factors such as speculation and calculation, credit and debt. This is how the title “Counterfeit Money” (La Fausse monnaie) becomes interesting. As a threshold text that cannot be ascribed to the narrator, it can be seen as “titling” and “authorizing” the literary piece and its value. Accordingly, “Counterfeit Money” may refer not only to the content of the story (a story about counterfeit money) but also to the story itself (the story as counterfeit money).17 We may thus read the title as a mocking reminder that we are reading a piece of fiction, and that there is no way of finding a final truth to the story. We must extend credit to the narrator and the narration because we will never be able to judge the actual events first hand. The ways in which money, credit, and fiction are intertwined may explain the widespread and keen interest in money in nineteenth-century literature. A piece of fiction that considers the status of money can at the same time reflect upon the status of fiction and the necessity of extending credit to the narration. Counterfeit money is a motif that is especially rewarding. As Derrida points out, such a motif was used not only by Baudelaire but also by Balzac and Poe, and it alludes to a specific moment in the history of money. Part of the reason of why Baudelaire’s prose poem still fascinates us today is that it offers a literary reflection on the role of money, counterfeits, and credit in the early days of capitalism.

The paradox of alms Baudelaire’s writings are populated with urban outsiders such as beggars, prostitutes, gamblers, and poets. These figures are not included in the bourgeois class of consumers for which the city is adapted and do not take

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part in the adventure of economic progress. They appear to be at odds with modernity, yet they are also deeply complicit with it. This is what Derrida explores in his discussion of the beggar. Giving alms to beggars is usually associated with altruism and unselfishness, but with Baudelaire, Derrida discovers that something else is going on. In “Counterfeit Money,” a counterfeit coin is offered to a beggar; in “Let’s Beat Up the Poor!” the beggar is assaulted. In several texts, pleading gazes do not have the expected outcome; in “The Eyes of the Poor” they are met with disgust rather than empathy. The altruistic view of beggars is consistently sabotaged in Baudelaire’s poems. In this manner, they prompt the reader to meditate on the significance of alms in a modern city. Reflecting upon this question, Derrida shows that alms do play an important role in modern urban economies. It is simply the price the citizens pay to marginal people so as to keep their own privileged position in the city’s center. Through alms the citizens buy themselves good conscience for their privileges and count themselves “acquitted.” Alms are thus not simply about giving but are rather part of a circle of exchange. This means that the act of giving alms is in fact a regular function in the modern city. Derrida points out that beggars even have their own places, such as before a cabaret or a tavern, and that begging has its own zones in the city. What seems marginal, improvised, and accidental proves to be a regulated and predictable undertaking. Even if the beggar does not work and does not produce anything, he “occupies a determined place in a social, politico-economic, and symbolic topology.” Comparing alms with sacrifices, the beggar fulfills a social function by playing the “role of symbolic mediation in a sacrificial structure.”18 Alms can be seen as profane sacrifices that play an important role in the urban economy. What Baudelaire describes is the moment when capitalist forces have started to dominate society, forcing premodern phenomena like begging and sacrifices to take on new forms. The beggar proves to be an integrated part of the modern city—he represents a “pocket” within the system, a paradoxical position that can be described as an “internal exclusion,” for “the expulsion of the beggar keeps the outside within and assures an identity by exclusion.”19 The notion of an “internal exclusion” might remind us of Giorgio Agamben’s notion of “inclusive exclusion” as developed in Homo Sacer.20 Where Derrida is concerned with the beggar as someone who is excluded from bourgeois society but who still depends on it, Agamben is more generally concerned with the outlaw and his relation to the law, but the logic remains the same: persons who are expelled or excluded from society, be they beggars or outlaws, will be inevitably included in society through a “pocket” mechanism. In fact society depends upon its outsiders in order to create an inside. In his discussion of this mechanism, Derrida groups the beggar together with madmen and criminals, and refers in this respect to Michel

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Foucault’s work.21 Derrida shows that the modern city produces outsiders who sustain the system through their very exclusion, thus incurring a debt that it negotiated through sacrifices and alms. It is in this context that the pleading look of the beggar takes on a whole new meaning. This is the look that intimidates the narrator in “Counterfeit Money,” who admits that he knows “nothing more disquieting than the mute eloquence of those supplicating eyes that contain at once, for the sensitive man who knows how to read them, so much humility and so much reproach.” Such a look is not a modest demand; in terms of ethics, it can be seen as an absolute demand. Alluding to Emanuel Levinas, Derrida asserts that “beggars can signify the absolute demand of the other, the inextinguishable appeal, the unquenchable thirst for the gift.”22 Furthermore, Derrida claims that the demand, accompanied by the pleading or accusatory gaze, is also the figure of law. Hence, the two friends in “Counterfeit Money” are summoned to pay and to acquit themselves of their debt, and the whole story can be seen as the story of a trial (GT 145). The implicit lesson of the prose poem is thus that alms are not a generous gift but something that is prescribed and obligated. As Derrida points out, the regularity of this phenomenon in the modern city “reinscribes begging and alms in a sacrificial structure.”23 Through his concern for the beggars in the modern city, Baudelaire showed an awareness of the role that they played in the urban economy. The motif of giving alms was not unique to Baudelaire, however, but was in fact a recurrent motif in the literature of the second half of the century. Stéphane Mallarmé, for instance, wrote several poems on alms and beggars. Derrida asserts that this “poetics of alms” corresponds to a specific social reality, namely “the state of the mendicant population in the cities and countrysides of a certain capitalist society at a determined stage of its industrialization.”24 In this manner, he anchors his reading in nineteenth-century Parisian society, uncovering both the paradoxical role of alms in a modern capitalist society and the cunning ways in which alms are described by Baudelaire. In fact, Baudelaire’s first title for “Counterfeit Money” was “The Paradox of Alms” (“Le Paradoxe de l’aumône”).25

The event A constant object of mockery in Baudelaire’s writings is bourgeois mindset and morality. A typical example is the prose poem “The Crowds,” in which the bourgeois is described as egotistic, self-content, and closed upon himself as a coffin.26 He is contrasted with the poet, who enjoys taking a bath in the crowd and willingly lets go of his identity. Baudelaire repeatedly mocks the way the bourgeois clings to his identity, his complicity with commercial society, and his hypocrite morality. He

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even admits to such tendencies himself when he addresses the reader by calling him a hypocrite and a brother.27 Baudelaire attacked a perverted capitalist mentality in which calculation had started to be dominant in both economic and moral matters; he criticized a corrupted society that promoted a purely economic logic. Baudelaire’s revolt against this mentality often involves violence. He describes a number of disruptive acts characterized by intuition, rapture, and ecstasy rather than calculation, premeditation, and reason. In “The Bad Glazier” the narrator throws a flowerpot at a glazier without any apparent provocation; in “Let’s Beat Up the Poor,” he attacks a beggar and gives him a thrashing (and gets beaten up as well).28 In other prose poems, a trick is played on innocent, poor people. In “The Poor Child’s Toy,” the narrator describes the perverted amusement of giving away cheap toys to children in the streets—this is not done out of charity, but in order to rejoice in their surprise and their difficulty in dealing with the offer.29 As we have seen, a similar trick is played out in “Counterfeit Money.” Narrating such incidents in cunning ways, Baudelaire sabotages bourgeois behavior and endorses an activist, contrarian, and revolutionary approach. He attempts to break the economic circle of exchange by creating an unpredicted event. Typically, these events seem amoral because the narrator takes pleasure in them, and because his pleasure is connected to the power of surprise, chance, and even violence. The whole poetics of such acts is disclosed in “Counterfeit Money,” a piece that in this sense may provide a key to the reading of similar prose poems. Speculating about his friend’s motives for offering a counterfeit coin to a beggar, the narrator recounts that “there suddenly came the idea that such conduct on my friend’s part was excusable only by the desire to create an event in this poor devil’s life, perhaps even to learn the varied consequences, disastrous or otherwise that a counterfeit coin in the hands of a beggar might engender.” The desire to create an event is described as a powerful driving force for the event itself is potentially life-changing for the beggar. Interestingly, the very insight into the supremacy of the event comes to the narrator as a sudden idea, an illuminating thought. What, then, is an event? Certainly, this is a notion that has had often been discussed in critical theory; the event has been hailed for its transformative and revolutionary potential by Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, and others.30 Generally, such a recent conception of the event can be described as the experience of a rupture, be it political or personal, and as a radical turning point changing both our parameters and practices. However, the aftermath of the event is just as important as the event itself, for it is never a certain thing or a fait accompli, but it must be maintained. The notion of the event was crucial for Derrida from the start, as was demonstrated by his early and seminal essay “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” The essay begins with the following

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proposition: “Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an ‘event.’”31 Thus for Derrida, the event is the destabilizing factor that opens up the structure; this key concept permeates his thought at different stages. Although the various conceptions of the event I mentioned all deserve to be treated in their own right, we can nevertheless speak of a tradition of the thought of the event, Baudelaire appearing as an important contributor to this tradition. A century and a half before “the event” reached prominence in deconstructionist thought and critical theory, he created a “poetics of the event” that hailed disruptive acts and chance occurrences. Reading “Counterfeit Money,” we now recall that the prose poem is itself a piece of counterfeit money, capable of generating events. In Derrida’s words, the text is “a machine for provoking events.”32 It is a linguistic event and a temporal event that has been conditioned by iterability. However, if we pay attention to the content of the story, reading it as the story about an event, it is all but clear what event happens, and for whom. Something appears to happen to the beggar, and this may seem both as an event and as a gift. In his reflection upon the story, Derrida asserts that there can be no gift without the advent of the event, and that there is no event without the surprise of a gift.33 They coincide in a radical and disruptive temporality: the gift, like the event, must remain unforeseeable and must appear as if by chance. As we have seen, however, alms are not offered at random, and they are not simply gracious gifts; giving alms is a regular function and part of a circle of exchange. Even if the counterfeit coin may prove to be life-changing for the beggar, its offering was not without calculation. Furthermore, Derrida asserts that something also happens to the narrator. To substantiate this claim, he highlights the libidinal drama that takes place between the two friends whose bond of friendship had been established through the sharing of tobacco. Something happens to this friendship when the friend confesses that he has given the beggar a counterfeit coin. For Derrida, the event is what urges the narrator to ask himself what just happened and then to meditate upon the event. This leads him to proclaim that “what happens happens to the narration.”34 One should not believe that the narration reports an event that takes place outside: in literature, the event is what provokes the narration; it is conditioned by the very possibility of a narration. The narration does not give everything away, however, and leaves much to ponder. In “Counterfeit Money,” the narration is structured in such a way that both the narrator and the reader become the friend’s debtors, and there is no way of knowing his “real” motifs or whether the coin he offered was “really” a counterfeit coin. This is where “the secret” enters literature.35 For Derrida, the secret is the noble hallmark of literature, and it is what makes literature infinitely appealing to its readers. “The readability of the text is structured by the unreadability of the secret,”

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he asserts.36 It is a secret without a secret, that is a secret without depth or thickness, which is what assures the very possibility of literature. The secret of literature is actually performed in Baudelaire’s prose poem. Derrida even ventures to say that with “Counterfeit Money” we do witness “something that resembles the birth of literature.”37 In this respect, the text resembles a true event, and not merely a literary event, for it is also a historical and a social event.

Excess Tobacco and wine are among the literary motifs dear to Baudelaire, and they are associated with dreams, poetry, and the imagination. In his poetic universe, intoxicating states of mind represent the possibility of escaping from the horror of earthly time and from the banality of a corrupted society. A whole section of poems in The Flowers of Evil is entitled “Wine,” and the prose poem “Never Be Sober” commands the reader to “always be intoxicated” so as not to “feel the horrible burden of Time.”38 The pleasures of tobacco are depicted in “Portraits of Mistresses” and “The Pipe,” whereas Baudelaire’s essay on hashish and opium salutes the “artificial paradises.”39 Tobacco and wine are thus not random motifs for Baudelaire, but an integrated part of his poetics. Attentive to the role played by tobacco in “Counterfeit Money,” Derrida subtitles the third chapter of his book “Poetics of Tobacco.” As he explains, tobacco is a stimulus for auto-satisfaction, but it is also a ritual pleasure that will be shared by friends and allies. It is pure consumption insofar as it goes up in smoke and produces only a momentary pleasure. As such, tobacco is the symbol of luxury, of expenditure, and of extravagance. In a society dominated by a commercial mindset, such as nineteenth-century Paris, it typically signals excess, waste, and abundance. Discussing the “poetics of tobacco,” Derrida draws on Georges Bataille’s reading of Baudelaire as well as his reflections on the notion of expenditure.40 Bataille argues that Baudelaire’s inclinations to excess and evil should be seen as opposing the utilitarian economics of bourgeois society. Whereas utilitarian economy favors deliberation and rationality, Baudelaire opted for unpredictable and sudden leaps of action. Taking issue with Sartre, who considered Baudelaire’s life a failure because he would have refused to take responsibility for himself, Bataille saw this “failure” as the result of a quasi-deliberate choice. Rather than yielding to mechanisms of bourgeois society, Baudelaire chose the “impossible” position of the poet. “Baudelaire wanted the impossible until the end [jusqu’au bout],” Bataille contends. He further asserts that poetry was an impossible choice insofar as it could never substitute for life, but devoted itself to excess: “It is a work of luxury, gratuitous and unpredictable.” And although poetry allowed the

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practitioner to escape from the utilitarian economics of bourgeois society, liberty cannot be conquered through deliberate choice, as this would entail a capitulation to utilitarian logic. Instead, in Bataille’s estimation, liberty must be conquered in leaps and bounds, abruptly and unexpectedly: “There is nothing surprising in liberty demanding a leap, a sudden and unforeseeable snatch, no longer accorded to those who decide in advance.” This understanding of Baudelaire supports Derrida’s reading and the role he attributes to transgression, excess, and events in the text. Yet, when Derrida addresses the topic of tobacco, he shows that it also takes part in an economy by activating a contract and an alliance between those who share it. This describes the symbolic function of smoking, Derrida contends: “Tobacco symbolizes the symbolic: It seems to consist at once in a consumption (ingestion) and a purely sumptuary expenditure of which nothing natural remains. But the fact that nothing natural remains does not mean, on the contrary, that nothing symbolic remains.”41 Tobacco’s relation to the economy is complicated by its symbolic function: it is a sign of luxury, excess, and pure consumption, but it also creates alliances and activates contractual bonds. The “poetics of tobacco” that Derrida sketches in Baudelaire’s writings celebrates excess and expenditure while also signaling that an alliance is in play, albeit an alliance that may not always be respected. Here is where the final twist of the “Counterfeit Money” lies. The narrator had trusted that he could share with his friend a commitment both to expenditure and to random events. But he discovers the calculating mindset of his friend, who does not hide his self-contentment after buying himself a good conscience cheaply by offering a counterfeit coin to a beggar. Here is why the narrator cannot forgive him. The friend has not respected the friendship: he has not raised himself above bourgeois morality and economy, and instead yielded to the calculating mindset. The prose poem teaches the reader not to try to control counterfeit money but instead accept the necessity of living with uncertainties. In keeping with this, Derrida warns against a gift that would claim “to control money and preserve itself from any simulacrum” thus clinging to the “reassuring distinction between the natural and the artificial, the authentic and the inauthentic, the originary and the derived or borrowed.”42 This warning calls up Derrida’s reflections about the intimate connections between literature and democracy. Derrida often describes literature as a modern invention that is founded upon the “right to say everything,” and thus opposes all dogmatism, tyranny, and totalitarianism.43 Even if Baudelaire was not a democrat in the usual sense of the word, he lived under the tyrannical regime of Napoleon III who had imposed censorship on the press. Baudelaire knew very well that literature depended on freedom. He was a writer who fully endorsed the process of absolute dissemination that takes place in literature.

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Derrida’s playground and laboratory If there is no doubt that Derrida is a remarkable reader of Baudelaire, he is also a reader whose approach is highly idiosyncratic. His book takes the form of a meandering walk that connects a whole range of topics related to the gift, frequently allowing foreground and background to shift place. Derrida first addresses the question of the gift, asking whether it can be formalized, and his discussion then gradually transforms into an extremely detailed close reading of “Counterfeit Money,” pursuing all the phases and turns in the text and paying attention to every detail. Furthermore, the meandering mode allows him to substantiate his reading with contextual perspectives culled from nineteenth-century culture. What he offers is thus neither a purely philosophical discussion of the gift nor a myopic close reading of Baudelaire, but rather an extremely rich reflection on Baudelaire as a writer of modernity. For Derrida, Baudelaire’s writings serve both as a playground and as a laboratory; Baudelaire’s motifs elastically translate into Derrida’s concepts, and vice versa. Thus, Baudelaire’s depiction of tobacco, friendship, counterfeit money, alms, and beggars underpins Derrida’s discussion of excess, economy, credit, debt, internal exclusion, simulacra, dissemination, and events. At the heart of it all is the deep Wahlverwandtschaft, the elective affinity, between Baudelaire and Derrida, and the question of how one should “give.”

Notes 1 Jacques Derrida, Given Time 1: Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). The book was published in French the year before as Jacques Derrida, Donner le temps (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1991). However, Derrida’s first discussion of the topic is much older. As he explains in a foreword, he gave a series of lectures under the same title in Paris in 1977–78. 2 The ethics of the gift was the topic of a conference dedicated to Derrida in 1990, where Derrida presented parts of the material for Given Time. See JeanMichel Rabaté and Michael Wetzel, L’Ethique du don - Jacques Derrida et la pensée du don, Colloque de Royaumont (Paris: Métailié-Transition, 1992). 3 Jacques Derrida and Derek Attridge, “This Strange Institution Called Literature: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 54. 4 Derrida quotes from Louise Varèse’s translation in Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen, trans. Louise Varèse (New York: New Directions, 1975). See Derrida, Given Time, 31–33. I will use the same translation of “Counterfeit Money” as Derrida, but with respect to other prose poems by Baudelaire, I will refer to Charles Baudelaire, The Prose Poems and Fanfarlo, trans. Rosemary Lloyd

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(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). The French original can be found in Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 323–24. 5 See Marit Grøtta, Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics: The Gaze of the Flâneur and 19th-Century Media (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015). It is also significant that Baudelaire’s prose poems were published in newspapers and revues, and that the renowned dedication letter was addressed to the editor of a newspaper, Arsène Houssaye. 6 Quoted in Jacques Rivière, Études (Paris: Editions de la Nouvelle Revue Française, 1921), 15. Rivière refers to something Claudel used to say, not to a written text. 7 Ibid, 38–41. 8 See David Harvey, Paris: Capital of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2003). 9 Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: The Writer of Modern Life, ed. Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006). Curiously, Derrida only refers to Benjamin in a long footnote, see Derrida, Given Time, 166. 10 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (London: Routledge, 1990). 11 Derrida, Given Time, 24. 12 Ibid, 12. 13 Ibid, 16. 14 Ibid, 17. 15 Ibid, 30. 16 Ibid, 124. 17 Ibid, 85. 18 Ibid, 134. 19 Ibid, 135. 20 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 21 Derrida, Given Time, 135. He refers in a footnote to Michel Foucault, History and Madness, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2006). 22 Derrida, Given Time, 137. 23 Ibid, 137. 24 Ibid, 135. 25 Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, 1336. 26 Baudelaire, Prose Poems, 44–45. 27 Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, trans. James McGowan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 6–7. 28 Baudelaire, Prose Poems, 38–41; 103–05. 29 Ibid, 55–56.

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30 See Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (New York: Continuum, 2006) and Slavoj Žižek, The Event: A Philosophical Journey through a Concept (London: Penguin Books, 2014). 31 Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 351. 32 Derrida, Given Time, 96. 33 Ibid, 119. 34 Ibid, 121. 35 See Jonathan Culler’s insightful reading of “Counterfeit Money” in “The Most Interesting Thing in the World,” diacritics 38, nos. 1–2 (2008): 7–16. 36 Derrida, Given Time, 152. 37 Ibid, 169. 38 Baudelaire, Prose Poems, 85. 39 Ibid, 91–96; Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil, 137. Charles Baudelaire, Artificial Paradises, trans. Stacy Diamond (New York: Citadel Press, 1996). 40 Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil, trans. Alastair Hamilton (London: M. Boyars, 1985), 48ff.; Georges Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure,” in Visions of Excess, trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 116–29; Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Vol. 1 Consumption, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1988). 41 Derrida, Given Time, 112. 42 Ibid, 70. 43 Jacques Derrida, “Passions: ‘An Oblique Offering,’” in On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit, trans. David Wood (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 1–31.

Works cited Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. Translated by Oliver Feltham. New York: Continuum, 2006. Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy. Vol. 1 Consumption. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1988. Bataille, Georges. Literature and Evil. Translated by Alastair Hamilton. London: M. Boyars, 1985a. Bataille, Georges. “The Notion of Expenditure.” In Visions of Excess, translated by Allan Stoekl, 116–29. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985b. Baudelaire, Charles. Artificial Paradises. Translated by Stacy Diamond. New York: Citadel Press, 1996.

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Baudelaire, Charles. Œuvres complètes. Edited by Claude Pichois. Vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard, 1975. Baudelaire, Charles. The Flowers of Evil. Translated by James McGowan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Baudelaire, Charles. Paris Spleen. Translated by Louise Varèse. New York: New Directions, 1975. Baudelaire, Charles. The Prose Poems and Fanfarlo. Translated by Rosemary Lloyd. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: The Writer of Modern Life. Edited by Michael Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006. Culler, Jonathan. “The Most Interesting Thing in the World.” diacritics 38, nos. 1–2 (2008): 7–16. Derrida, Jacques. Given Time 1: Counterfeit Money. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Derrida, Jacques. Donner le temps. Paris: Editions Galilée, 1991. Derrida, Jacques. “Passions: ‘An Oblique Offering.’” In On the Name, edited by Thomas Dutoit, translated by David Wood, 1–31. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993. Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” In Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass, 278–93. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Derrida, Jacques, and Derek Attridge. “This Strange Institution Called Literature: An Interview with Jacques Derrida.” In Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, edited by Derek Attridge, 33–75. New York: Routledge, 1992. Foucault, Michel. History and Madness. Translated by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa. London: Routledge, 2006. Grøtta, Marit. Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics: The Gaze of the Flâneur and 19th-Century Media. New York: Bloomsbury, 2015. Harvey, David. Paris: Capital of Modernity. New York: Routledge, 2003. Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Translated by W. D. Halls. London: Routledge, 1990. Rabaté, Jean-Michel, and Michael Wetzel. L’Ethique du don - Jacques Derrida et la pensée du don. Colloque de Royaumont. Paris: Métailié-Transition, 1992. Rivière, Jacques. Études. Paris: Editions de la Nouvelle Revue Française, 1921. Žižek, Slavoj. The Event: A Philosophical Journey through a Concept. London: Penguin Books, 2014.

2 Kant’s celestial economy: A footnote to The Gift of Death Eddis N. Miller

The following constitutes a long footnote to the fourth chapter of Jacques Derrida’s The Gift of Death, where it is a question of the relationship between sacrifice and economy, or more precisely, of a “general economy of sacrifice.” There, Derrida follows Kierkegaard’s treatment, in Fear and Trembling, of the Aqedah, the binding and (near-) sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22. Precisely at the moment when Abraham gives up Isaac for lost, offers him to God with no expectation of return—“beyond recompense or retribution, beyond economy, without any hope of remuneration [salaire]”—God returns Isaac to Abraham, “deciding by sovereign decision, by an absolute gift, to reinscribe sacrifice within an economy by means of what henceforth comes to resemble a reward.”1 Thus “terrestrial economy”—the sphere of calculation, recompense, profit—is sacrificed, becomes an aneconomy of pure loss, gift without calculation. But the terrestrial economy is sacrificed only to be reinserted in a higher order, “celestial” economy, wherein one receives back with interest what one has sacrificed. Kierkegaard’s reference, at the end of Problema III of Fear and Trembling, to the “God who sees in secret,” an allusion to Jesus’s “Sermon on the Mount” in the Gospel of Matthew, leads Derrida to a subtle reading of the complex relation between the economic and the aneconomic in the Sermon on the Mount. A few pages earlier, Derrida insists upon a certain rapprochement between Kierkegaard and Kant: “In spite of the opposition that seems to

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obtain between Fear and Trembling and the Kantian logic of autonomy, Kierkegaard still follow the Kantian tradition of a pure ethics or practical reason that is exceeded by absolute duty into the realm of sacrifice.”2 What Derrida does not discuss, however, is whether the reinscription of sacrifice within a celestial economy that he finds in Kierkegaard holds true for Kant as well. Derrida might well have paused to consider this question, at least in a footnote (where some of his most significant engagements with Kant are found).3 One might have expected Derrida to consider this question all the more since the Sermon on the Mount is the “canon within a canon” around which Kant’s interpretation of Christianity is oriented in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, a text that was a frequent object of Derrida’s attention.4 This passage from terrestrial to celestial economy is constitutive of Abrahamic religious thought, and it is therefore no surprise that Derrida’s interrogation of religion takes aim at it. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are permeated by the language of the marketplace: the language of money, loans, debts and debt slavery, debt forgiveness and redemption, interest, wages, weights and measures, treasure and treasuries. Of particular importance is the configuration of sin as a form of debt. The earliest symbols for the experience of sin in the Hebrew Scriptures are those of sin as a “stain” or “defilement,” and sin as a “weight” or “burden.” These two ways of experiencing and talking about sin give rise to two different practices for the removal of sin on the Day of Atonement: in one, an animal is ritually slaughtered, and its blood is used to wash and purify the Holy of Holies to erase the stain of sin that has accumulated there; in the other, the priest lays his hand on a different animal, upon which is transferred the burden of the sins of Israel, which this animal then carries out into the wilderness. The notion of sin as debt emerges later on through the influence of Aramaic, and by the rabbinic period almost entirely displaces sin as stain and sin as burden.5 By the time we come to the New Testament, the most natural way for Jesus to discuss the forgiveness of sin is as the forgiveness of a debt: “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”6 Beginning a few hundred years before Jesus, we begin to see in Jewish literature the idea of “redemptive almsgiving.” The emergence of this idea follows a certain logic: if sin is a kind of debt, and debts can be paid off with money, then sin can paid for with money. And the way in which one makes the payment to God is through almsgiving. Thus Daniel advises the sinful king Nebuchadnezzar as follows: “Therefore, O King, may my advice be acceptable to you: Redeem your sins by almsgiving, and your iniquities by generosity to the poor; then your serenity may be extended.”7 If it is possible to pay the debt of sin through almsgiving, is it also possible to use this almsgiving not simply to pay a debt, but to earn credit with God? In this case, money given to the poor would represent not a loss, but a sound investment, as Jesus suggests in his advice to the rich young man who came

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to him asking what he needed to do to gain eternal life: “go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven.”8 Jesus’s advice here is clear: loss in this world means gain in the next. An important biblical text in this respect is Prov. 19:17: “He that hath pity upon the poor lendeth unto the LORD; and that which he hath given will he pay him again.”9 According to the rabbis of the Talmud, this is an idea that seems so blasphemous that, if it weren’t written in Scripture, one would never dare to utter it: the idea that one can make God one’s debtor.10 And yet, it pervades the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions. The Qur’an frequently speaks of charity as a loan lent to God; in sura 57, for example, one reads: “Charitable men and women who make a good loan to God will have it doubled and have a generous reward.”11 One of the fascinating features of all three of the Abrahamic traditions is that the idea of heavenly usury should be accompanied by the condemnation of ordinary, earthly usury—lending at interest to other human beings. The prohibition on usury is found in the Torah as well as the Qur’an, and though usury is not explicitly condemned in the New Testament, the Old Testament prohibition is carried over into Christianity, and lives on until the Reformation. The church fathers produced a number of tracts against usury, which was condemned as tantamount to murder. Now, of course, no Christian can live without it. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus commands his disciples to “lend, without expecting any return.”12 One of the Cappadocian Fathers, Basil the Great (d.379), comments in his homily against usury (Homily 12) that there is something odd about Jesus’s command: if one is to expect nothing in return, then why does Jesus say “lend,” rather than “give”? Moreover, wouldn’t the command to lend and expect nothing in return run counter to Jesus’s advice to the rich young man to sell everything, give to the poor, and gain treasure in heaven? Basil’s clever solution is that what Jesus commands here is both a loan and a gift: it is a gift to the person to whom it is given; and it is a loan to God, who will repay with interest.13 And for Basil’s brother, Gregory of Nyssa, the gospel itself constitutes a written contract—with four witnesses, no less—effectively guaranteeing this heavenly reward.14 Naturally, this celestial economy risks making the poor a simple means to one’s own heavenly reward. On the one hand, charity represents the highest expression of love for one’s neighbor, and indeed the most difficult test of this love. As Jesus says, referring to the same young rich man, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. And indeed, for many in the early church, like Basil the Great, failure to heed Jesus’s command to sell one’s possessions and give them to the poor would indeed bar one from heaven, precisely because retaining anything beyond what one requires for subsistence when there are others in dire need amounts to a violation of the commandment of commandments, to love one’s neighbor as oneself.15 On the other hand, we have remarks like

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that of Saint Augustine, where this instrumentalization comes more fully into view: “What are the poor to whom we give but bearers carrying our wealth to heaven? Give, therefore, to your bearer, who hauls your gift to heaven.”16 Thus the Abrahamic traditions bequeath a tension between an aneconomy that consists in giving without expectation of return and a higher-order, heavenly economy in which everything sacrificed in this world is regained in the next, with interest. The market, suspended on earth, reasserts itself on the heavenly plane. This tension finds quintessential expression in Kant’s privileged New Testament text, Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount. Here, Jesus’s demand that one renounce any prospect of return in one’s almsgiving extends to the symbolic return that one receives in the form of the praise of others. “So, when you give alms,” Jesus says, “do not announce it with a flourish of trumpets, as the hypocrites do in synagogues and in the streets to win the praise of others. Truly I tell you: they have their reward already. But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing; your good deed must be secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.”17 Secrecy is in fact a very important motif in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic discussions of the ethics of giving, not only for preserving the dignity of the poor, but for ensuring the purity of motives, as one sees here in the Sermon on the Mount. Indeed, one might read, as Derrida does, Jesus’s command “not to let your left hand know what your right hand is doing” as making the impossible demand of secrecy even from oneself, thus granting immunity even to the kind of return that comes in the form of self-satisfaction: One must give, alms, for example, without knowing, or at least by giving with one hand without the other hand knowing, that is, without having it known, without having it known by other men, in secret, without counting on recognition, reward, or remuneration. Without even having it known to oneself. The dissociation between right and left again breaks up the pair, the parity or pairing, the symmetry between, or homogeneity of, two economies. In fact it inaugurates sacrifice.18 And yet, there is one person to whom this secret giving does not remain a secret: God, who sees in secret and closes the circle of exchange. Where does Kant stand in relation to this “celestial economy”? One would be perfectly justified in assuming that Kantian ethics and the philosophy of religion that derives from it would strictly forbid any theology wherein sacrifice of earthly self-interest is undertaken in view of a heavenly profit. Kant does not, of course, discount the possibility that there is a God who proportions happiness to our worthiness of receiving it (i.e., our virtue), and that a faith in such a God (as a postulate of practical reason) has a practical value insofar as human beings, as finite, embodied beings with

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natural inclinations, can never be entirely disinterested with regard to the question of happiness. Nevertheless, this happiness can never be made the material ground of the determination of the will, otherwise one’s actions cease to have moral worth, and one thereby loses the virtue, which would be the necessary condition of that happiness. Ethical action, therefore, requires a certain experience of divine absence, which Derrida underlines in “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” where he argues that Kant’s thesis that Christianity is the sole moral religion is at the same time a thesis concerning the death of God: In the definition of “reflecting faith” and of what binds the idea of pure morality indissolubly to Christian revelation, Kant recurs to the logic of a simple principle . . . : in order to conduct oneself in a moral manner, one must act as though God did not exist or no longer concerned himself with our salvation. This shows who is moral and who is therefore Christian, assuming that a Christian owes it to himself to be moral: no longer turn towards God at the moment of acting in good faith; act as though God had abandoned us.19 In this respect, the fact that God’s existence cannot be the object of theoretical knowledge, as the Critique of Pure Reason attempts to demonstrate, is of vital importance for ethics. Were we to have absolutely certain knowledge of God’s existence, as Kant suggests in the Critique of Practical Reason, our very ability to act morally would be compromised: Instead of the conflict that the moral disposition now has to carry on with the inclinations, in which, though after some defeats, moral strength of soul is to be gradually acquired, God and eternity with their awful majesty would stand unceasingly before our eyes (for what we can prove perfectly holds as much certainty for us as what we are assured of by our sight). Transgression of the law would, no doubt, be avoided: what is commanded would be done; but because the disposition from which actions ought to be done cannot be instilled by any command, and because the spur to activity in this case would be promptly at hand and external, reason would have no need to work itself up so as to gather strength to resist the inclinations by a lively representation of the dignity of the law: hence most actions conforming to the law would be done from fear, only a few from hope, and none at all from duty, and the moral worth of actions, on which alone in the eyes of supreme wisdom the worth of the person and even that of the world depends, would not exist at all. As long as human nature remains as it is, human conduct would thus be changed into mere mechanism in which, as in a puppet show, everything would gesticulate well but there would be no life in the gestures.20

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For this reason, I have referred to Kant’s philosophy of religion as a spectral theology, by which I mean simply that God must undergo a kind of death— the suspension of his existence in the formulation of the moral principle—so that an idea of God can be constructed that functions wholly in accord with this moral principle, rather than fighting against it. Yet, if the living God must undergo a death in the name of the moral principle, then the God that is resurrected out of practical reason is no longer the original, living God, but one who dwells between life and death, existence and nonexistence, actuality and possibility. God must not be so alive as to induce us to act pathologically out of fear of punishment or hope of reward; nor can God be so dead as to cause us to despair of all hope of happiness. Dwelling between life and death, the God of ethicotheology is a specter. If ethical action, on Kant’s understanding, can never be the means to an end (the satisfaction of inclinations and desires, or in a word, happiness), then one would assume, a priori, that Kant would reject any calculation whereby one might act in accordance to the moral law so as to store up one’s treasure in heaven. Wouldn’t any such teaching call for a moral reinterpretation in accordance with the very program of Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason? This is what makes Kant’s actual treatment of the Sermon on the Mount in the Religion all the more surprising. In Part IV of the Religion, in the section on “Christian religion as a Natural Religion,” Kant attempts to substantiate his claim that Jesus’s teachings are fundamentally ethical in nature, and that therefore it is upon these teachings that the first (and only) true church is founded. In his account of these teachings, Kant relies entirely on the Sermon on the Mount. He delineates a number of specific duties that Jesus teaches, duties that Jesus sums up, Kant claims, into a “universal rule” and a “particular rule.” The universal rule is to “do your duty from no other incentive except the unmediated appreciation of duty itself; i.e. love God (the Legislator of all duties) above all else”; (2) and the particular rule is to “love every one as yourself, i.e. promote his welfare from an unmediated good-will, one not derived from selfish incentives.”21 All of this is Kantian enough; but things soon take an interesting turn. Kant adds that, concerning the natural hope every human feels that his happiness will be proportionate to his moral conduct, Jesus promises a reward for such sacrifices in a future world—though this reward will differ in degree depending upon whether one does one’s duty for the sake of reward, or one does one’s duty for its own sake. Interestingly enough, Jesus never explicitly makes this Kantian distinction between doing one’s duty for the sake of reward and doing one’s duty for its own sake. Kant derives this teaching through a juxtaposition of the Parable of the Unjust Steward—which on his reading contains Jesus’s teaching about doing duty for the sake of reward— and the story of the sheep and goats in Matthew 25, which contains Jesus’s teaching about doing duty for its own sake.

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Let’s first look at the Parable of the Unjust Steward, which is, for Kant, about those who refine their self-interest by renouncing earthly profit to win heavenly reward. [Jesus] said to the disciples, “There was a rich man who had a steward, and he received complaints that this man was squandering the property. So he sent for him and said, ‘What is this that I hear about you? Produce your accounts, for you cannot be steward any longer.’ The steward said to himself, ‘What am I to do now that my master is going to dismiss me from my post? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am too proud to beg. I know what I must do, to make sure that, when I am dismissed, there will be people who will take me into their homes.’ He summoned his master’s debtors one by one. To the first he said, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ He replied, ‘A hundred jars of olive oil.’ He said, ‘Here is your account, sit down and make it fifty, and be quick about it.’ Then he said to another, ‘And you, how much do you owe?’ He said, ‘A hundred measures of wheat,’ and was told, ‘Here is your account, make it eighty.’ And the master applauded the dishonest steward for acting so astutely. For in dealing with their own kind the children of this world are more astute than the children of light. So I say to you, use your worldly wealth to win friends for yourselves, so that when money is a thing of the past you may be received into an eternal home.”22 (Lk. 16:3-9) Kant’s interpretation of this parable is a clever one. According to this interpretation, the steward represents a person who realizes that sooner or later he will die, and recognizes that his wealth will be of no benefit to him in the next life. So, Kant writes, this person decides to write off his account what he or his master, self-interest, could legitimately require of needy human beings here on earth, and thereby procure for himself as it were transfer bills payable in another world; in this, as regards the incentives of such beneficent actions, he indeed acts prudently rather than morally, yet in conformity with the moral law, at least according to its letter, and he can legitimately hope that for this too he will not remain unrewarded in the future.23 Kant’s reading solves some of the interpretive difficulties that this parable presents, the most obvious of which are the master’s praise of the steward who has managed to defraud him a second time, and then Jesus’s subsequent positive appraisal of the steward’s behavior. Kant solves these problems by interpreting the master as “self-interest,” which makes the steward himself the creditor of the debtors whose debts he is writing off. His “master,” self-interest, then praises him because, in the end, his actions are for the very benefit of the master that he seems to be defrauding. He

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sacrifices the self-interest of earthly gain for the self-interest of a higherorder, heavenly gain. As Kant recognizes, Jesus’s apparent commendation of the forgiveness of debt for the sake of a heavenly reward stands in tension with beneficence motivated simply by duty, something that Jesus also teaches, according to Kant. Kant’s source text here is Mt. 25:35-40, where, according to Kant, Jesus declares “as the true elects to his kingdom those who extended help to the needy without it even entering their minds that what they were doing was also worthy of recompense, or that they were perhaps binding heaven to a recompense, so to speak, precisely because they were acting without attention to it.”24 It is important to notice, however, that Kant decontextualizes this quote in an interesting and rather perplexing way. Here are the verses in context, with the verses that Kant explicitly refers to in italics: When the Son of man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne, with all the nations gathered before him. He will separate people into two groups, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats; he will place the sheep on his right hand and the goats on his left. Then the King will say to those on his right hand, “You have my Father’s blessing; come, take possession of the kingdom that has been ready for you since the world was made. For when I was hungry, you gave me food; when thirsty, you gave me drink; when I was a stranger, you took me into your home; when naked, you clothed me; when I was ill you came to my help; when in prison, you visited me.” Then the righteous will reply, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and fed you, or thirsty and gave you drink, a stranger and took you home, or naked and clothed you? When did we see you ill or in prison, and come to visit you?” And the King will answer, “Truly I tell you, anything you did for one of my brothers here, however insignificant, you did for me.” Then he will say to those on his left, “A curse is on you; go from my sight to the eternal fire that is ready for the devil and his angels. For when I was hungry, you gave me nothing to eat; when thirsty, nothing to drink; when I was a stranger, you did not welcome me; when I was naked, you did not clothe me; when I was ill and in prison, you did not come to my help.” And they in their turn will reply, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or ill or in prison, and did nothing for you?” And he will answer, “Truly I tell you: anything you failed to do for one of these, however insignificant, you failed to do for me.” And they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous will enter eternal life.25 Though Kant does not mention the sheep, his interpretation of Jesus’s words to them—a distinctive and influential one—is that they act out of

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duty rather than the desire for reward, precisely because they care for those who can in no way benefit them. They are surprised to learn that in fact they have been caring for someone who can benefit them all along—Christ hidden among the poor—but their ignorance of this assures the purity of motivation. Indeed, this passage makes the very Kantian point that ultimately the only thing that has any worth from a religious perspective is ethical action. Again, while Kant refers to Jesus’s comments about the sheep, he does not alert his reader to the fact that Jesus is discussing sheep, nor that these sheep have been separated off from the goats, nor does he point out that this division of humanity into sheep and goats seems to be a comprehensive one: one is either a sheep or a goat. If we were to do a Kantian reading of the entire passage, what would we say about the goats whom he wholly ignores? If the sheep represent those who act from duty alone, then clearly the goats would have to be those who act only when there is hope of a reward. After all, the goats failed to help their neighbors in need precisely because they did not know that serving the poor means serving Christ. Had they known that Christ was there in the person of the poor, they would have served the poor, so their responses imply, but their failure to do so without this knowledge exposes the impurity of their moral dispositions. Consequently, they are condemned to eternal punishment, the fitting outcome of their neglect of the duty to beneficence. But Kant ignores the goats, and he does so, I think, precisely because the Unjust Steward does not fit into the rigorous division of humanity at the final judgment into sheep and goats. The Unjust Steward acts for the sake of heavenly gain rather than out of respect for the moral law, and wins heaven on account of it anyway. If we try to situate the Unjust Steward in relation to the sheep and goats, it requires a tripartite division between (1) those who act out of respect for the moral law; (2) those who act in accordance with the moral law but take heavenly reward (and presumably anything else self-interest dictates) as their incentive, and therefore in fact only conform to the moral law; and (3) those who transgress the moral law. There are three groups here for Kant, but only two for Jesus: sheep and goats. Groups (1) and (3) are clearly sheep and goats, respectively. But how does one categorize the second group, in which the Unjust Steward belongs? Kant makes it clear that the Unjust Steward will receive heavenly reward, which would preclude him from being among the goats; and yet Kant goes on to contrast the Unjust Steward with Matthew’s sheep who require no such heavenly incentive. The Unjust Steward, it seems, manages to be neither a sheep nor a goat. And it is here, by allowing a place in heaven for the Unjust Steward, that Kant ultimately inscribes himself within the Abrahamic tradition of the celestial economy. The steward temporarily renounces self-interest in the name of a higher-order self-interest, and wins heaven because of it.

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Of course, it goes without saying that Kant never promises heavenly reward to anyone, and when he is discussing these issues in the Religion, he is bracketing the dogmatic claims and asking about the moral value of the scriptural and dogmatic representations. But this makes it all the more curious that Kant lets stand the idea that one can successfully make heavenly reward the ground of one’s action, and actually be rewarded for it. On the surface, nothing pushes Kant to make this concession. He could very easily have ignored the Parable of the Unjust Steward; the Religion makes no claim to be a comprehensive interpretation of scripture. Or, Kant could have interpreted the parable in a different way. After all, Kant is hardly bashful about claiming that scripture must be brought into line with ethical teaching, even if this means handling scripture rather roughly. So, why make the concession to the Unjust Steward? Why allow him to be rewarded by God for acts with merely legal worth, when the God of Kantian practical reason attends to moral worth alone? No one has tried to answer this question, and indeed, it does not seem as though anyone has noticed the problem.26 But rather than trying to render Kant’s own text consistent on this point, it is perhaps sufficient to point out that in Kant’s inconsistency, he renders himself perfectly consistent, precisely, with the logic of celestial economy that is a defining feature of Abrahamic thought. And if this consistency compromises the purity of a religion “within the boundaries of mere reason,” it is then a prime instance of Kant’s inability to maintain his boundaries and lines of demarcation more broadly, as Derrida so often tried to demonstrate.

Notes 1 Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 95–96. 2 Derrida, The Gift of Death, 92–93. 3 I am thinking, in particular, of Derrida’s notes to “Passions: ‘An Oblique Offering,’” in On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 89–127. 4 Derrida’s engagement with Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason dates back at least to the early 1970s. Derrida lectured on Kant’s Religion in the 1972–73 seminar “Religion et philosophie” (Jacques Derrida Papers. MS-C01. Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California. Box 11, Folders 14–19); portions of this seminar (though not the bulk of his analysis of Kant’s Religion) formed the basis for Glas (1974). Derrida returned to Kant’s Religion, in particular, to Kant’s four “parerga” to the Religion, in Truth and Painting, originally published in 1978. Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money contains a substantial footnote on the notion of diabolical evil in Kant’s Religion. In 1996, Derrida published

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“Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone.” I analyze Derrida’s various engagements with Kant’s Religion specifically, and Kantian ethics and philosophy of religion more broadly, in Kantian Transpositions: Derrida and the Philosophy of Religion (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014). 5 On the metaphors of sin in the Bible generally, and the notion of sin as debt in particular, see Gary A. Anderson, Sin: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), upon which this paragraph and the next one draw heavily. 6 Matthew 6:12, Authorized King James translation (henceforth KJV). 7 Daniel 4:27, as translated by Gary A. Anderson in Sin: A History, 138. 8 Matthew 19:21, KJV. 9 KJV. 10 Babylonian Talmud, Bava Basra 10a. 11 57:18. The Qur’an, trans. M.A.S. Abdel Haleem (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 12 Luke 6:35, Revised English Bible translation (henceforth REB). 13 Saint Basil, Exegetical Homilies, trans. Sister Agnes Clare Way, volume 46 of The Fathers of the Church (Washington: Catholic University Press of America, 1963), 190. 14 Gregory of Nyssa, “Against Those Who Practice Usury,” trans. Casimir McCambley, Greek Orthodox Theological Review 36 (1991): 296. 15 See “To the Rich,” in St. Basil the Great, On Social Justice, trans. C. Paul Schroeder (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2009), 42–43. 16 Quoted in Justo L. González, Faith and Wealth: A History of Early Christian Ideas on the Origin, Significance, and Use of Money (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock 1990), 218. 17 Matthew 6:2–4, REB. 18 Derrida, The Gift of Death, 107. 19 Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 11. Emphasis in the original. 20 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, in Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 5:147. All page numbers for Kant’s texts refer to the Prussian Academy of Sciences edition of Kants gesammelte Schriften. 21 Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, trans. Allen Wood and George di Giovanni (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 6:160–61. 22 Luke 16:3–9, REB. 23 Kant, Religion, 6:161. 24 Kant, Religion, 6:162.

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25 Matthew 25:31–46, REB. Italics in Kant’s text. 26 I did not notice this issue while writing Kantian Transpositions; I noticed it, however, while writing Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason: A Reader’s Guide (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015). Now, there exists no less than five additional commentaries on Kant’s Religion, none of which notice or address a problem in Kant’s interpretation of the Parable of the Unjust Steward. They are in order of appearance: Josef Bohatec, Die Religionsphilosophie Kants in der “Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft”: mit besonderer Berücksichtigung ihrer theologischdogmatischen Quellen (Hildesheim: Olms, 1996); James J. DiCenso, Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason: A Commentary (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Lawrence R. Pasternack, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kant on Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (New York: Routledge, 2014); Gordon E. Michalson, ed., Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason: A Critical Guide (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); and Stephen R. Palmquist, Comprehensive Commentary on Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Bare Reason (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015).

Works cited Anderson, Gary A. Sin: A History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. Bohatec, Josef. Die Religionsphilosophie Kants in der “Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft”: mit besonderer Berücksichtigung ihrer theologisch-dogmatischen Quellen. Hildesheim: Olms, 1996. Derrida, Jacques. “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone.” In Religion, edited by Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, 1–78. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Derrida, Jacques. The Gift of Death. Translated by David Wills. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995. Derrida, Jacques. “Passions: ‘An Oblique Offering.’” In On the Name, edited by Thomas Dutoit, 89–127. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995. DiCenso, James J. Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason: A Commentary. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. González, Justo L. Faith and Wealth: A History of Early Christian Ideas on the Origin, Significance, and Use of Money. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1990. Gregory of Nyssa. “Against Those Who Practice Usury.” Translated by Casimir McCambley. Greek Orthodox Theological Review 36 (1991): 287–302. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason, in Practical Philosophy. Translated and edited by Mary J. Gregor. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Kant, Immanuel. Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Translated by Allen Wood and George di Giovanni. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Michalson, Gordon E., ed. Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason: A Critical Guide. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

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Miller, Eddis N. Kantian Transpositions: Derrida and the Philosophy of Religion. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014. Miller, Eddis N. Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Bloomsbury, 2015. Palmquist, Stephen R. Comprehensive Commentary on Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Bare Reason. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015. Pasternack, Lawrence R. Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kant on Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. New York: Routledge, 2014. Saint Basil. Exegetical Homilies. Translated by Sister Agnes Clare Way. Volume 46 of The Fathers of the Church. Washington: Catholic University Press of America, 1963. Saint Basil. On Social Justice. Translated by C. Paul Schroeder. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2009.

3 Derrida and Kafka: A Talmudic disputation before the law Vivian Liska

“Before the law stands a doorkeeper. To this doorkeeper comes a man . . . .”1 These first words of Franz Kafka’s most famous parable, “Before the Law” (Vor dem Gesetz), evoke an archetypal narrative situation: The juxtaposition of the verb “stands” with the verb “comes” sets up a confrontation between something static and the onset of an encounter. This narrative situation occurs in the context of the law, which is generally regarded as being in conflict with narrative. Yet some commentators question whether the parable’s encounter between law and man ever actually transpires. This question implies an understanding of the relationship between the law, presented as an abstraction, and the man whose life is a narrative. What happens when this particular man appears—when narrative confronts the law? Kafka’s parable, one of the most widely read and interpreted modernist texts, describes a scene in which a man who is seeking access to the law is denied entry to it. He waits before the door until the end of his life, when he sees a shimmer of light emanating from the door. The doorkeeper informs the man that this entrance to the law was meant for him alone and that the doorkeeper will now close it. The parable consists mainly of a description of the man’s waiting and his negotiations with the

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doorkeeper as he strives to gain access to the law. The narrative does not, however, specify the nature of this law. Initially, the only certainty is that the law designates an immutable entity in contrast to the man, who has an origin, a history, and a destiny. We ascertain that the man has left his “homeland” (Heimat) and set out on a journey. He has a purpose—access to the law—and arrives at its gate, before which he will wait, search and reflect, discuss and negotiate, desire and curse, all the while growing older and eventually dying, presumably without having attained his goal. He dies unfulfilled. Whereas the law in Kafka’s parable is abstract and timeless, the man is singular and specific: he lives in a time of waiting and a state of wanting. The doorkeeper characterizes him as “insatiable” (unersättlich) as he queries about access to the law. The law—which the man from the country contends “ought to be accessible to everyone at all times” but which remains unattainable for him—is confronted with the singularity, temporality, and situatedness of lived life in all its creaturely contingency. Emphasizing the creaturely aspect is the fact that “the man from the country,” as many have noted, is literally a translation of the Hebrew term “am haaretz,” which denotes not only “a man from the land” but also someone who is ignorant of the law. Beyond suggesting that the am haaretz is outside the law because of his ignorance of it, the author implicitly opposes him to a talmid hakham, a student of the law. The reader does not discover, however, whether the am haaretz would have fulfilled his desire to enter through the door had he become a true student of the law. The doorkeeper, both mediator and barrier to the encounter, is described as the lowest-ranking representative of the law. He may be some sort of legal or rabbinic authority who marks not just the separation but also the link between the law, which is said to be immutably there, and the man who has a story—a minimal story, though a story nonetheless. In Kafka’s parable, not only does the law remain unattainable for the man from the country; it also eludes any attempt by the reader to pinpoint its meaning and effects. Interpretations of Kafka’s law-related texts abound, yet it is still uncertain whether the law in his work is to be understood in primarily legal, social, and political terms or in metaphysical, theological, and religious ones. This ambiguity has elicited numerous, sometimes contradictory, interpretations and has inspired divergent notions about the dichotomy between narrative and the law. Here I shall explore how Jacques Derrida interprets Kafka’s parable in the context of his questioning of the nature of literature and concepts of the law that intertwine the realms of the religious and the secular. I will also contrast Derrida’s reading with two other thinkers who addressed Kafka’s writings on narrative and law at the intersection of secular and religious law: Derrida’s precursor Walter Benjamin and his successor Giorgio Agamben. I will focus on the role these interpretations assign to the relationship between

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the law as an authoritative, normative ordering system and literature as an expression of singular, creaturely life.

Which law? “In Kafka’s story,” Derrida writes in his essay on Kafka’s “Before the Law,” “one does not know what kind of law is at issue—moral, judicial, political, natural etc.”2 Many pages later, as if no additional insight concerning the nature of the law had been discerned, Derrida repeats: “The story doesn’t tell us what kind of law manifests itself in its non-manifestation: natural, moral, judicial, political?”3 The repetition does, however, contain a new element: it describes the law as an aporetic instance that is and is not present—that is, present through its very absence. By the end of Derrida’s text, it becomes apparent that in his initial lists of possible “kinds of law” referred to in the parable, he omitted one kind that he nevertheless turns to later in his text: religious, or more specifically, “Judaic law.” This omission in his enumeration announcing the realms in which the law he considers resides sets it apart from the start and highlights a significant distinction. Most readings of Kafka’s stories involving the law identify it either with the juridical apparatus of the modern state or with the Jewish tradition. Adherents of the first approach consider Kafka solely in secular terms, as is common practice in recent readings offered by “Law and Literature” scholars. They depict Kafka either as a critic of the juridical systems of his time4 or as an author who prefigures the present situation and offers insights into the shortcomings of contemporary jurisprudential procedures.5 By contrast, interpreters of Kafka’s legal narratives who invoke the Jewish tradition generally equate the law with divine judgment and its inaccessibility, that is, with the Jewish concept of God as man’s all-powerful but remote “Other.” Both approaches generally disregard the possibility that Kafka deliberately left open the question of whether the law should be understood in secular or religious terms. Occasionally, the two realms are brought together, sometimes to the point of identity. In such cases, the common denominator underlying both state law and Jewish law is often the (underlying or explicit) idea of an all-powerful, almighty, and oppressive authority. In these readings, Kafka’s narratives depict a terrifying law-ruled world and literature is presented as its antidote. If it is uncertain to what the law in Kafka’s parable refers, it is equally ambiguous how Kafka regards the law. Benjamin succinctly writes that it is debatable whether Kafka’s work “is devoted to elevating the law or to burying it.” He contends that “Kafka has no answer to these questions.”6 It is, indeed, difficult to ascertain whether, in Kafka’s world, the obstacle to justice is that the law is omnipresent or that it is distorted (entstellt), compromised, and crippled to a degree that renders it indistinguishable from

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lawlessness. It is even more challenging to determine any possible alternative to the dismal state of the world depicted in Kafka’s stories. Indeed, Kafka’s parable “Before the Law” (and his other writings dealing primarily with the law) depicts a world in which the law is both inaccessible and omnipresent, boundless, pervading every level of human existence. But at the same time, the law paradoxically fails to perform its primary function, that of instating a moral and just social order in the world. Like Benjamin before him and Agamben after, in his interpretation of the law in Kafka’s writings Derrida invokes both the secular and, to a lesser extent, the religious tradition. In his reading of Kafka’s parable, Derrida refers to these two paradigms as the “discourse on moral law,”7 on one hand, and “Judaic law,”8 on the other. By contrast, Benjamin clearly distinguishes between secular and religious law, and Agamben refrains from doing so, to the point of identifying them. Derrida seems primarily concerned with what constitutes the law as such, a “law of laws” or “meta-law,” regardless of whether the law is to be understood in secular or religious terms. For Derrida as much as for Benjamin and Agamben, Kafka’s parable stages a confrontation between law and literature, in which literature has a potentially threatening effect upon the authority of the law. For all three thinkers, literature is much more than mere representation of a dreary world order. Rather, it has the power to unsettle the law wherever it presents itself as normative authority. Yet each of these thinkers conceives of this encounter between law and literature differently.

Modernist literature before the law Derrida’s essay on Kafka’s parable, eponymically titled “Before the Law,” is his first encounter with Kafka, a figure who will accompany him from the 1980s until his later seminars. The essay is not only Derrida’s most extensive discussion of the Prague author; it is also his most explicit questioning of the nature of literature in its relation to the law. Derrida’s “Before the Law” is an unsystematic, continuously deviating, self-interrupting text in which he reads Kafka’s famous parable in typically aporetic terms. Focusing on the relationship between law and literature, Derrida demonstrates the paradoxical nature of this relationship, in which law and literature are as incompatible as they are co-constitutive. Derrida situates Kafka’s parable at a threshold—the entrance to the law—and negotiates the conditions of this “non-place”; it is the perfect instance of a textual performance that undoes the boundaries of both law and literature as well as the very division meant to be effectuated by the liminal emplacement of their encounter. Derrida plays out this structural and thematic aporia at a multiplicity of levels: political, autobiographical, phenomenological, psychoanalytical, narratological, and performative.

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Derrida’s text is itself a performance that circles around, undermines, and ultimately circumvents any resolution to the aporias he uncovers in Kafka’s parable. In the process, he demonstrates one of the primary premises of modernist literature, namely, the idea that literature does not constitute a defined field. Literature, “the work, the opus,” Derrida writes, “does not belong to the field, it is the transformer of the field.”9 Divesting literature of its essence, its boundaries, and its self-identity, Derrida’s own text participates in this transformation. The essay begins with a question: how can literature, which, as concept and institution, requires boundaries, survive as literature at a time—the time of Kafka, of modernism—when there is “(no) more law and (no) more literature (plus de loi et plus de littérature)”?10 This play on the French “plus” —meaning both more and no longer—corresponds not only to modernist literature’s transcendence or transgression of all previously set codes and norms, but also to its self-doubt manifest in its oscillating reflexivity, its infinite mise en abîme, and its aim to be both more and less than reality. Derrida explicitly describes the term “literature” as an eminently modern phenomenon whose laws were established between the late seventeenth and the early nineteenth centuries. Yet he simultaneously extends his reflections beyond these historical borders to literature as such. Even as Derrida insists on the impossibility of such a generalizing attempt to pin down literature’s essence, his reflections on the meaning of “literariness” as well as the modalities of his own text display characteristics that can unequivocally be associated with modernist writing: it is elusive, fragmentary, selfreflexive, heterogeneous, and open-ended. If modernism is the period when literature most radically questions its own parameters (including its basic notions of author, work, and coherence), Derrida’s piece here—a collage of phenomenological, philological, autobiographical, and psychoanalytic reflections—can itself be regarded as a modernist text. Two divergent tendencies stand out among the myriad and often contradictory characterizations of modernism. Both are associated with contrasting responses to the crisis of representation, language, and, in a larger sense, of notions of unity, totality, and truth: on the one hand, a subversive displacement, proliferation, fragmentation, and dissemination of any foundational, monolithic center; on the other, an attitude that is closer to a negative theology: the suggestion of an empty center that features as remnant of a lost transcendence and manifests itself in a vocabulary pertaining to the unsayable, the abyss, the void at the core of things. Kafka’s parable arguably lends itself to both kinds of reading: the inaccessibility to the law which continues to radiate, however faintly, through a door that is both open and prohibited points to the latter modernist paradigm. This aspect of Kafka’s “Before the Law” contrasts, however, with the very texture of the story’s scene and scenery: the largely

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trivial exchanges between the protagonists, the playful account of the man of the country’s attention to the fleas in the doorkeeper’s fur collar, and the anticlimactic non-sequitur of the encounter, not to mention the potentially endless and humorous Talmudic disputation about the parable that follows it in The Trial. Both tendencies are present in Derrida’s reading of “Before the Law.” The division, in Derrida’s essay, however, runs to a large extent between secular and religious, or more precisely between “moral law” and “Judaic law.”

Literature and the subversion of moral law Derrida points out that it is constitutive of moral law to be threatened by narrative. The “law of laws” consists of warding off this threat: “It seems that the law as such should never give rise to any story. To be invested with its categorial authority, the law must be without history, genesis, or any possible derivation. That would be the law of the law. Pure morality has no history.”11 Law must exclude narrative to maintain its authority beyond any concrete occurrence. But what the law excludes, Derrida argues, is merely repressed, and this repression returns to haunt the law’s authority. It cannot admit narratives that reveal its origin and genealogy, but neither can it exist without narrations; it unwillingly “shelters these parasites.”12 In describing this return of the repressed, Derrida refers to Freud: incapable of ridding itself of literature, the law remains in a permanent state of defensiveness that renders it vulnerable and ultimately fraudulent or blind. Literature, in turn, needs the law to define its boundaries and ensure its survival. Derrida describes this impossible situation of mutual negative symbiosis in positive terms: “The present prohibition of the law is not a prohibition in the sense of an imperative constraint; it is a différance.”13 Where “Judaic law” is introduced, however, another scenario and a different vocabulary predominate. After Derrida quotes the “radiance that streams through the door” in Kafka’s parable, the passage that he calls its “most religious moment,”14 he writes: “There is analogy with Judaic law here.” Surprisingly, however, rather than referring to the multiple Kabbalistic or Talmudic references to the radiance of this law, Derrida quotes a passage from Hegel’s Der Geist des Christentums: Hegel narrates a story about Pompey, interpreting it in his own way. Curious to know what was behind the doors of the tabernacle that housed the holiest of holies, the triumvir approached the innermost part of the Temple, the center (Mittelpunkt) of worship. There, says Hegel, he sought “a being, an essence offered to his meditation, something meaningful (sinnvolles) to command his respect; and when he thought he was entering into the secret (Geheimnis) before the ultimate spectacle,

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he felt mystified, disappointed, deceived (getäuscht). He found what he sought in an ‘empty space’ and concluded from this that the genuine secret was itself entirely extraneous to them, the Jews; it was unseen and unfelt (ungesehen und ungefühlt).”15 Where “Judaic law” is concerned, Derrida undermines the law’s authority not through an internal, “parasitic” narrative, but instead from the “outside,” by invoking Hegel’s Spirit of Christianity; more precisely—and paradoxically—by invoking a story (whose origins can be traced to Tacitus) that declares the law’s hollowness. After Pompey conquered Jerusalem in 63 BC, he approached the holiest of holies in the Jews’ Temple and recognized that he had been deceived. Rather than discovering the Jews’ holy secret, he found only an empty space, a void, a nothing.16 Strikingly, these are the words that also, at this point, enter Derrida’s reading of Kafka’s parable, concerning not only the law but also literature, and Kafka’s story itself. Derrida subsequently refers to the law as the “nothing that forbids itself.”17 Now, however, he regards the law as neither authoritarian nor oppressive, but rather as, like différance itself, “the neuter that annuls oppositions.”18 Along with this blurring of boundaries, literature too loses its contours: Derrida now calls Kafka’s “Before the Law” a text that both “is and is not a story,” a “story without a story,” a “storyless story.”19 Law and literature, are, in the end, brought together in terms of this nothingness: After identifying the man before the law with the reader before the text, Derrida concludes: “As [the doorkeeper] closes the door, he closes the text, which, however, closes on nothing.”20 It remains unclear where Derrida situates the analogy between the passage in Kafka’s parable (where the “radiance” is shining from the law through the entrance of the door) and “Judaic law” (defined in Hegelian terms as a deceitful nothingness). This nihilation seems to be the price Derrida is willing to pay in order to divest Judaic law from the authoritarian bearings he associates with secular law. In his own text Derrida enacts the infinite openness “until death,” which he finds in Kafka’s parable. He defers the conclusion of his own text, repeatedly announcing: “I conclude,” but without actually doing so. His text ends on a quote from the unresolved quasi-Talmudic dispute between the priest and K. that follows the parable in The Trial. Derrida leaves the quote from this dispute uncommented: “The court makes no claims upon you . . . it receives you when you come and relinquishes you when you go.” The reader of Kafka’s parable—and, perhaps even more so, of Derrida’s— is released without council: Is he now released into freedom—which is also, in this context, the freedom of interpretation? Is the judgment merely postponed? Was there anything there in the first place? As Derrida states in one of his many concluding remarks, it is “as if nothing had happened. It is as if nothing had come to pass” (212). Does Derrida, in the end, leave

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us empty handed before his text, its access postponed to infinity? Were it not for the “as if,” the marker of literature, it would indeed seem as if “nothing” had the last word.21 And where nothing has the last word, infinity follows.

Giorgio Agamben: Fulfillment of the law Derrida’s infinite postponement becomes the primary target of Giorgio Agamben’s far-reaching critique. For Agamben, Kafka’s parable perfectly represents the structure of the sovereign action of an oppressive, ongoing, and omnipresent law. Moreover, the situation in which the doorkeeper prevents the man from the country from entering through the door of the law illustrates the essence of the law’s tyrannical power that has “lost its significance but continues to be in force.”22 In his reading of Kafka’s story, the open door that cannot be entered points to the world in a dismal state of exception. As no decree forbids the man’s access to the law, he is literally held in a ban that simultaneously includes and excludes him: he neither attains access to the law nor can he turn away from it. Traditional interpretations see the man from the country as a failure, for he waits in vain before the door of the law until the doorkeeper pronounces that he will close it. But Agamben views the shutting of the door positively, contending that the country man’s “entire behavior” is nothing but a “complicated and patient strategy to have the door closed in order to interrupt the law’s being in force.”23 Agamben’s surprising reading of Kafka’s parable explicitly counters Derrida’s interpretation. For Derrida, it is an endless yet nonetheless positive waiting and an ongoing negotiation with the representatives of the law. Agamben rejects this vision, which he ascribes to the Jewish tradition of a “life lived in deferral and delay.”24 In Derrida’s interpretation, the confrontation between narrative and the law leads to an intermingling that creates an undecidability concerning the status of each. The man from the country who waits before the entrance to the law embodies the inability to decide: in Derrida’s words, the man “decides to put off deciding.”25 For Agamben, the inability to reach closure, which stands at the core of Derrida’s reading, epitomizes our prevailing condition “of a petrified or paralyzed messianism.”26 Agamben reads Kafka’s man from the country as a Christ figure who, as the gospels say, fulfills the law in the pleroma, fullness, thereby ending its oppressive effects and inverting the negative state of exception into a state of freedom. Agamben explicitly attributes a strategy—a calculated goal—to the man from the country, namely, closing the door and suspending the law. Agamben’s statements of allegiance to Benjamin notwithstanding, positing such a calculated design diverges from the latter’s idea of eliciting a

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positive reversal of the world’s present state. In Benjamin’s most explicitly messianic text, the “Theologico-Political Fragment,” he depicts “messianic intensity” (messianische Intensität) and the “dynamics of the profane” (Dynamis des Profanen) in the form of two parallel arrows; the arrows point in opposite directions but propel one another forward. Benjamin does not envision any such directed deactivation of the law. The divine kingdom cannot be established by transgressive abrogation of the law; it will come instead only through earthly pursuit of human happiness and justice. Agamben, in contrast, emphasizes the destructive impulse. He approves of the heretical messiah Shabbetai Zvi, for whom “overstepping the Torah [is] its fulfillment” and “fulfilling the Torah [is] its banishment from memory” (Potentialities, 167–68). Agamben turns Kafka’s narrative into a modern gospel, thereby reducing the narrative aspect of Kafka’s parable to the mere function of illustrating a theological-political doctrine. He thereby conflates state law with Jewish law and the apostle Paul’s proclamation of the demise of the Jewish law with his own anarchist therapeutic prescription for the planet. Yet the question remains: How did the man from the country succeed in getting the doorkeeper to shut the door to the law? We cannot ascertain what—if anything—has occurred “before the law.” In the final sentence of his essay, Agamben provides a possible answer. He claims that, in Kafka’s parable, “something has really happened in seeming not to happen.”27 He thus directly and explicitly contradicts Derrida’s conclusion that Kafka’s parable is “an event that that succeeds in not happening . . . an event that happens not to happen.”28 For Derrida, the “success” constitutes the man’s remaining before the law, not actually entering it. For him, entering the law rather than, for example, commenting on it or studying it from a distance would imply that it is possible to fulfill the law. Indeed, Agamben’s notion of the messianic task of fulfilling the law by abrogating it assumes the potential—and mission—carried out by Jesus, who allegedly enacted the law’s ultimate fulfillment. This notion, omnipresent in Christian theology, is absent from the Jewish idea of justice. Furthermore, in contradistinction to the Jewish concept of messianic times as entailing a publicly visible change, Agamben seems to view Paul’s gesture of revelation as something that has already happened but is not yet visible. Finally, Agamben, more radically than Derrida, excludes from his analysis the faint glimmer of light that in Kafka’s story shines through the door of the law before the man’s death. Others have interpreted this glimmer as the rays of the Shechinah, the divine glory emanating from the Torah. In Agamben’s reading it goes unmentioned. For Derrida, this radiance represents “the most religious moment in the story” and brings him to his reflections on “Judaic law” being paradoxically empty. Agamben wants to see the door closed once and for all, along with the infinite openness of Derrida’s reading of the parable.

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Walter Benjamin: An alternate reading of Kafka, literature, and the law In the introductory words of his interpretation of Kafka’s parable, Agamben claims that he will be reading it “from the perspective of Walter Benjamin’s conception of messianic [L]aw.”29 Benjamin himself does not offer elaborate interpretation of the parable, merely alluding to “the cloudy spot” (wolkige Stelle) at its core that lends itself to infinite reflections.30 In his notes for a letter to Gershom Scholem, Benjamin even calls the law the “blind spot” (toter Punkt) in Kafka’s oeuvre.31 But Benjamin does deal extensively with questions of the law in his important essay “Franz Kafka. For the Tenth Anniversary of his Death” and in his exchange with Scholem about the Prague author. In these writings, Benjamin significantly differs from both Derrida’s and Agamben’s readings. Like them, Benjamin regards state laws as instruments of abusive sovereignty. In his essay “Critique of Violence,”32 he points to the law’s mythical nature. In his writings on Kafka, he shows how the legal system wantonly exerts its violent power everywhere, infiltrating the most personal and intimate realms of existence. Benjamin thus shares Derrida’ and Agamben’s perspective as concerns secular law, but distinguishes it from the workings of Jewish law. Unlike Derrida, Benjamin (though only slightly more cognizant of the Jewish textual tradition, through his friendship with Scholem) turns to the Talmudic tradition. In his outline for an essay that he never wrote, “Versuch eines Schemas zu Kafka,” Benjamin writes that Kafka, in his books, contrasts the “swamp world” with “the lawful one of Judaism. .  .  . Its purity and dietary laws display the defense mechanisms against this [swamp] world. . . . In other words, only the Halakhah [Jewish law] still [ex negativo] contains traces of this [prehistoric] mode of existence of mankind that is long past.”33 Considering that revealed law instituted the possibility of justice, Benjamin expresses the view that only “justice serves as the point of departure for Kafka’s critique of myth.”34 According to Benjamin, the defense against a lawless world without boundaries, separations, or distinctions would thus be Jewish law itself. Judaic law not only differs from an oppressive state law based on sheer power but also is—or rather would be—its antidote. In a letter to Scholem from August 11, 1934, Benjamin writes: “Indeed, if we follow Kafka’s presentation, the work of the Torah has been thwarted” (Das Werk der Thora nämlich ist—wenn wir uns an Kafkas Darstellung halten—vereitelt worden).35 In his drafts for this letter, Benjamin added: “And everything that Moses once accomplished would have to be recovered in our world epoch” (Und alles, was einst von Moses geleistet wurde, wäre in unserm Weltzeitalter nachzuholen).36 Benjamin differs from Agamben in this surprising defense of Jewish law. His insistence on the necessary limits to lawlessness also differs from

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Derrida’s consistent blurring of boundaries.37 Derrida’s approach to the law, however, stops short of negating all limits. This is particularly true where its relation to literature is at stake. For Derrida, literature is “always open to a kind of subversive juridicity.” Yet literature, “under certain determined conditions, can exercise the legislative power of linguistic performativity to sidestep existing laws from which, however, it derives protection and receives its conditions of emergence.”38 Even where literature “plays the law” (Derrida’s emphasis), there are, Derrida concludes, “rules of the game and the limits of subversion.”39 In this respect, Derrida’s approach resembles Benjamin’s (although Benjamin goes significantly further in limiting antinomianism). Benjamin describes the dismal world of Kafka’s novels as one of unregulated “global promiscuity,” the lowest stage of human existence. Benjamin calls this world a prehistoric swamp world (Sumpfwelt) in which everyone is guilty but also a victim of the law; it is, above all, in the words of the literary critic and theorist Rodolphe Gasché, “a law that inhibits the possibility of discriminating between right and wrong. It is constituted by the very impossibility of a clear decision—an impossibility by which this law perpetuates the order of the wrong (Unrecht), thus also excluding the very possibility of justice (Gerechtigkeit).”40 For Benjamin, Gasché continues, “the very impossibility of a clear decision” constitutes an “impossibility that perpetuates the order of wrong (Unrecht), thus also excluding the very possibility of justice.”41 Against this impossibility, Benjamin introduces Judaic law, in the form of Talmudic categories: “Kafka’s books,” he continues, “contain the missing Aggadah [the narrative component of the Talmud] to this Halakhah [its legal aspect]. . . . Intertwined with this Aggadic text is the prophetic dimension in his books.”42 The world as it appears in The Trial and in The Castle, this world without distinctions and divisions, without boundaries and order, is thus both a prehistoric Vorwelt and a world that prophetically announces the return of this oppressive lawlessness in the present. Benjamin states: “Kafka’s novels take place in a swamp world. But then, this world is also our world, because we have not overcome it, only repressed and forgotten it.”43 For Benjamin, the lawless world of prehistory depicted by Kafka is also the measure of Benjamin’s own present: writing as a German Jew in the 1930s, Benjamin describes the legal system of his own times. Benjamin sees in the interaction between Halakhah and Aggadah the model for a possible alternative to either authoritarian law or antinomianism. “Kafka’s writings,” Benjamin remarks in a letter to Scholem,44 “do not modestly lie at the feet of the doctrine as the Aggadah lies at the feet of the Halakhah. Though apparently reduced to submission, they unexpectedly raise a mighty paw against it.”45 What does Benjamin’s strange image of the “mighty paw” raised against the Halakhah imply? Does it not suggest a strike against the law? It undoubtedly evokes the manifestation of a

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creaturely presence, a gesture of threat to the law that, however, comes to a halt, but also a motion of keeping the law at a distance. The implications of this image and its relation to the interaction between law and narrative are made clearer in Benjamin’s essay “Franz Kafka: Building the Wall of China,” where he elaborates on the analogy between Kafka’s writings and the Aggadah. Benjamin explains that Kafka’s prose resembles the Aggadah in what may “appear to the reader as obsessiveness.” Speaking of Kafka, Benjamin writes, We may remind ourselves here of the form of the Aggadah, the name Jews have given to the rabbinical stories and anecdotes that serve to explicate and confirm the teachings—the Halakhah. Like the Aggadic, the narrative parts of the Talmud, [Kafka’s] books, too, are stories; they are an Aggadah that constantly pauses, luxuriating in the most detailed descriptions, in the simultaneous hope and fear that it might encounter the Halakhic order, the doctrine itself, en route.46 Benjamin calls this hesitation, the ambivalence between hope and fear of encountering the law, “deferral” or “postponement” (Verzögerung).47 With only a slight shift, this term could perfectly fit the waiting of the man at the door of the law as well as Derrida’s reading of Kafka’s parable. Benjamin’s deferral, however, is not identical with Derrida’s. Derrida turns the ambivalence of such “hope and fear” into the single term différance. As in the Talmudic narratives, Benjamin continues, Kafka’s parables “show the true workings of grace” (das eigentliche Walten der Gnade) in that (in them) “the law never finds expression as such—this and nothing else is the gracious dispensation of the fragment.”48 The Aggadah resists turning into a Halakhah, just as Kafka’s parables—or rather anti-parables—refuse to yield a doctrine or a moral. In stopping short of encountering the law, the Aggadah also circumscribes the law by keeping it from overstepping the boundaries that are set by creaturely, lived life itself. It is crucial that the “mighty paw” that Benjamin associates with Kafka’s parables does not crush the Halakhah. In Benjamin’s description, Kafka’s gesture is not to be confounded with antinomian transgression or an emptying out of the law. Rather, it corresponds more closely than it seems at first sight to the structure of dynamic interaction between Halakhah and Aggadah, between narrative and the law inherent in the Talmudic concept of justice.

What happens before the law? What, then, is happening “before the law”? Derrida considers it something “that succeeds in not happening”49—an infinite deferral. Agamben views it as something that has already happened but is not yet visible—a fulfillment

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of the law that, however, must still await a second coming before all can see it. Finally, for Benjamin, it is the coming of the man of the country to the law, just as the Aggadah comes to the Halakhah. For Benjamin (as, I believe, for Kafka), this arrival of narrative both halts the law and stops itself from either fulfilling or annihilating it. Indeed, only an am haaretz would actually want to access the law, unaware that one does not “enter” it and equally unaware that negotiating with its representatives, the rabbinic authorities, is at the core of the Talmudic tradition, the very encounter with the law itself. And here, there is indeed an analogy with certain aspects of Derrida’s deferring dynamic of différance. It remains unclear, however, what such an analogy would entail when he writes: “Like the man from the country in Kafka’s story, narrative accounts would try to approach the law and make it present, to enter into a relation with it, indeed to enter it and become intrinsic to it but none of these things can be accomplished.”50 In blurring the difference between engaging in a “relation with the law” and “entering it,” Derrida risks undoing the very crux of Kafka’s story, which hinges on this distinction. The man from the country may not accomplish his desire to enter the law, but he certainly spends his life in relation to it: a relation of waiting, of negotiation, of desire. Would not this make, precisely all the différance? The man from the country in Kafka’s parable realizes—as we do, we the parable’s readers—that the door to the law is open but that the point is not about entering, but about fulfilling it. It takes an am haaretz such as the man from the country to approach the law and even to desire entering it, to enter into a relationship with it by bringing the human, creaturely element of the Aggadah to the Halakhah, in order to point to the law’s limits, to limit its claims. This entails neither annihilation of the law nor its abrogation. Instead, the situation of Kafka’s parable marks the necessary interaction of law and narrative underlying the possibility of justice being upheld in Judaic law. The law may thus not be as empty as Hegel surmises. The power of contestation without nihilation that it bestows on the Aggadah in the face of the Halacha, of literature in the face of the law, bears a powerful affinity with the relation of modernism to the law, to narrative and to the fate of the center, the holy of holiest at its core.

Notes 1 Franz Kafka, Der Prozeβ (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2002), 294–95. 2 Jacques Derrida, “Before the Law,” in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), 191. 3 Ibid, 206. 4 See Theodore Ziolkowski, who reads Kafka’s work as a paradigmatic exploration of the crisis of the legal system in the early twentieth century,

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more particularly, the debate about the relationship between law and ethics and the confounding of morality with law. Ziolkowski shows the influence on Kafka’s fictional writings of his exposure to contemporary legal controversies such as the disputes between Pure Law and Free Law and the struggle between the conservative values and antiquated laws of the Habsburg Monarchy and the more modern legal system of the German Empire after 1871. Theodore Ziolkowski, The Mirror of Justice: Literary Reflections of Legal Crisis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 225–26. 5 Examples of readings of Kafka in the context of law and literature studies include Patrick J. Glen’s “Essay on Franz Kafka, Lawrence Joseph and the Possibilities of Jurisprudential Literature” from 2011. Glen insists that Kafka “can provide a glimpse into the real and sometimes surreal world of actual legal practice.” He also credits Kafka with showing the need to take the multiple perspectives of the participants in legal procedures into account. Patrick J. Glen, “Franz Kafka, Lawrence Joseph, and the Possibilities of Jurisprudential Literature,” Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal 21, no. 1 (2011): 54. 6 Letter of July 20, 1934, in Walter Benjamin, Benjamin über Kafka, ed. Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992), 160; Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, 1931–1934, 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), 459. 7 Derrida, “Before the Law,” 190. 8 Ibid, 208. 9 Ibid, 215. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid, 191. 12 Ibid, 190. 13 Ibid, 202. 14 Ibid, 208. 15 Ibid. 16 In a lucid interpretation of this passage in Derrida’s text, Eli Schonfeld writes: “Pompey, as related by Hegel in The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate, tells us, according to Derrida, the truth of ‘Jewish law’: . . . Instead of listening to what the sages of Israel have to say about the divine commandment and the saint of saint (kodesh ha-kodashim), Derrida reposes on Hegel’s authority, himself telling a story about Pompey. This surely serves Derrida’s reading (‘The law is silent, and of it nothing is said to us. . . . Is it a thing, a person, a discourse, a voice, a document, or simply a nothing that incessantly defers access to itself . . . ,’ though it is unclear if it clarifies anything about Jewish law.” Eli Schonfeld, “Am Haaretz: The Law of the Singular. Kafka’s Hidden Knowledge,” in Kafka and the Universal, eds. Arthur Cools and Vivian Liska (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 124. 17 Ibid, 209. 18 Ibid.

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19 Ibid. 20 Ibid, 210. 21 For Derrida, the “as if” in Kant’s categorial imperative is the place where “narrativity is almost introduced.” Schonfeld, “Am Haaretz: The Law of the Singular. Kafka’s Hidden Knowledge,” 190. 22 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 55. 23 Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 174. 24 Ibid, 166. 25 Derrida quoted by Agamben. Ibid, 195. 26 Ibid, 171. 27 Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, 174. 28 Ibid, 198. 29 Ibid, 172. 30 Benjamin, Benjamin über Kafka, 20. 31 Ibid, 154. 32 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings 1, ed. Michael William Jennings, Gary Smith, and Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 236–52. 33 Benjamin, Benjamin über Kafka, 16. 34 Benjamin, Selected Writings, 815. 35 Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe 4, 1931–34 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), 478. 36 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 7 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972–91), 2:3: 1246. 37 In his discussion on Derrida’s views on hospitality, Jean-Michel Rabaté offers an alternative understanding of Derrida’s stance. Rabaté points to Derrida’s distinction between—and simultaneous endorsement of—an absolute and a conditional hospitality, the first being absolute and without boundaries, the second pointing to necessary limits. In opposition to an unconditional law (of hospitality), conditional laws limit and regulate the access of the one who arrives, the admittance of the one seeking hospitality. Rabaté concludes: “Derrida’s power of analysis resides in always combining the two types of hospitality.” Jean-Michel Rabaté, Les guerres de Jacques Derrida (Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2016), 102. 38 Derrida “Before the Law,” 215. 39 Ibid. 40 Rodolphe Gasché, The Stelliferous Fold: Toward a Virtual Law of Literature’s Self-Formation (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 278–79.

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41 Ibid, 278. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid, 1236. 44 12 June 1938. Gasché, The Stelliferous Fold, 87. 45 Ibid. 46 Benjamin, Selected Writings, 496 (emphasis mine). 47 The English translation in Jennings, Selected Writings chooses “procrastination.” “Verzögerung,” however, has a more general meaning and is closer to deferral or postponement. 48 Ibid, 497. 49 Agamben writes: “The final sense of the legend is thus not, as Derrida writes, that of an ‘event that succeeds in not happening’ (or that happens in not happening: ‘an event that happens not to happen,’ un évènement qui arrive à ne pas arriver), but rather just the opposite: the story tells how something has really happened in seeming not to happen, and the apparent aporias of the story of the man from the country instead express the complexity of the messianic task that is allegorized in it.” Agamben, Potentialities, 174. 50 Derrida, “Before the Law,” 191.

Works cited Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Agamben, Giorgio. Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Benjamin, Walter. Benjamin über Kafka. Edited by Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992. Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Briefe, 1931–1934. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998. Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften, 7 vols. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972–91. Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings, vol. 2, part 2: 1931–1934. Edited by Michael William Jennings, Gary Smith, and Howard Eiland. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Derrida, Jacques. “Before the Law.” In Acts of Literature, edited by Derek Attridge, 183–220. London: Routledge, 1992. Gasché, Rodolphe. The Stelliferous Fold: Toward a Virtual Law of Literature’s SelfFormation. New York: Fordham University Press, 2011. Glen, Patrick J. “Franz Kafka, Lawrence Joseph, and the Possibilities of Jurisprudential Literature.” Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal 21, no. 1 (2011): 47–94. Kafka, Franz. Der Prozeβ. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2002.

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Rabaté, Jean-Michel. Les guerres de Jacques Derrida. Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2016. Schonfeld, Eli. “Am Haaretz: The Law of the Singular. Kafka’s Hidden Knowledge.” In Kafka and the Universal, edited by Arthur Cools and Vivian Liska, 107–29. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016. Ziolkowski, Theodore. The Mirror of Justice: Literary Reflections of Legal Crisis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.

4 Derrida with Heidegger: Poetic language, animality, world Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei

Derrida’s critique of Heidegger’s poetics disrupts assignments of univocal meaning and reveals a fixation on the original and essential in Heidegger’s thought. Derrida also aims to demonstrate that “the whole framework of Heideggerian discourse” is at stake in the differentiation between animal and human existence, and their respective relations to world.1 Meditations on language and on the status of animals become intertwined in Derrida’s critique of Heidegger, when he identifies the poem, somewhat cryptically, with the animal. This chapter considers the significance of Derrida’s critique of Heidegger’s poetics for a persistent preoccupation of literary modernism,2 as manifest in Rilke among other modern writers: how humanity may be engaged by animal life, and thus how literature can be informed by that which evades language. Derrida’s thinking, as he has himself observed, is indebted to Heidegger’s critique of the metaphysics of presence and of ontotheology.3 Heidegger argues that the Western philosophical tradition has failed to properly think Being, in that it has conceived Being as an essential plentitude—as presence— equating Being with a primal origin. Resisting this tradition, Heidegger understands Being—that by virtue of which beings are—as a presencing which itself withdraws in bringing forth. Philosophy has forgotten the ontological difference between Being and beings, and modernity marks a crisis in this history of forgetting. In an idiom acknowledged by Heidegger

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(though he subordinates it to that of the poet Hölderlin), Rilke understands the modern human being as having turned against the “open.” Heidegger’s critique—he calls it a “Destruktion”4—of the Western metaphysical tradition anticipates Derrida’s own deconstruction of metaphysics in its logocentrism, even while Derrida will criticize Heidegger’s ontology. Heidegger attempts to think withdrawal or absence over presence, and then beyond their opposition toward Being as an event of disclosure that takes place in language. Derrida inverts the conceptual hierarchy of presence over absence (among other binaries), in order to then dismantle the opposition, establishing the notion of différance as its very condition. The latter signifies the “non-full, non-simple, structured and differentiating origin of differences,” such that, in contrast to Heidegger’s ontological thinking, “the name ‘origin’ no longer suits it.”5 While Derrida admits the relevance of Heidegger’s ontological difference for his own différance, the latter repels notions of essence and origin to which Heidegger’s ontology remains persistently committed, and Derrida troubles the logic of origin and its corresponding destination recurring in the Seinsgeschichte.6 Différance, Derrida writes, “in a certain and very strange way, (is) ‘older’ than the ontological difference or than the truth of Being.” For it involves “the play of a trace which no longer belongs to the horizon of Being, but whose play transports and encloses the meaning of Being: the play of the trace, or the différance, which has no meaning and is not. Which does not belong.”7 Différance thus undercuts the very idea of origin, recognizing difference and deferral—by virtue of the trace, the self-effacing other conditioning the positive meaning of signs8—in play at the heart of language. While Heidegger promotes a remembrance of Being in poetic language, Derrida, in his own readings of works of philosophy and literature, draws out the diffuse, plural, marginal elements of texts to disrupt the often implicit conceptual frameworks which their manifest claims rely. Yet Derrida continually returns to what Gadamer characterized as their commonly “Heideggerian initiatives in thought.”9 It is through an internal critique of Heidegger—exploiting the heterogeneity within Heidegger’s texts—that Derrida’s own thinking often advances.10 While classical theories of language describe the latter as the externalization of a speaker’s meaning, for Heidegger the intentional structure of language is secondary, and presupposes a deeper or more original function of language as a form of disclosure—the capacity of language to reveal something as something, to bring forth a being as, or reveal it in its Being. This displacement of linguistic intention is echoed in Derrida’s critique of phonocentrism, which prioritizes speech over writing, presence over distance or absence, the immaterial voice over material inscription, secure demarcation of meaning over the proliferating play of language. Derrida, recalling Socrates’s description of writing in Plato’s Phaedrus as orphaned by the speaker, identifies a spectral element in language, a “spectral errancy,”

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in that “all words . . . will always have been phantoms.”11 This element is manifest in poetry, such that if the poem retains an apparently sovereign, unpredictable, untranslatable, almost unreadable initiative, that is also because it remains an abandoned trace, suddenly independent of the intentional and conscious meaning of the signatory.12 While Derrida displaces the living, present voice by the specter, the phonocentric voice of metaphysics haunts Heidegger’s ontology of language,13 wherever Heidegger refers to the “saying of Being”14 or describes essential thinking as “the human answer to the word of the silent voice of Being.”15 *** While Heidegger describes language as a form of revealing or disclosure— and thereby, in later essays, comes to find in poetry a sheltering rather than an exploitive orientation to the earth—he also credits poetry with a more productive function. He argues that poetry, in bringing together or gathering in relatedness that which it names, is a form of founding truth or Being.16 The idea that poetry gathers, veers toward the origin, to establish an essential truth shows up in Heidegger’s readings of Trakl and of Hölderlin, and in his ranking of Rilke among “essential” poets. Heidegger tends to insist on only the essential or “valid” poetry of the writers he interprets, and he arranges essential poets “according to rank and position in the course of the history of Being.”17 Derrida seems to follow Heidegger in interpreting poetry as a counter to dominant philosophical discourse. Yet Derrida finds much to criticize, not only in Heidegger’s repugnant association of the history of being, and essential poetry, with nationalist politics in the 1930s,18 but in what Derrida identifies as Heidegger’s interpretive hegemony over the poems he interprets, and its method.19 Derrida points out, to name just one example, that Heidegger reorients Trakl’s gestures toward the foreign and other toward an affirmation of the local and familiar. Of Trakl’s description of the soul on the earth as “something strange” (ein fremdes), Heidegger insists that the fremd, or the strange or foreign, through a strained etymology, “really means” (bedeutet eigentlich) being on the way toward a destination.20 In the course of his critique, Derrida demonstrates that Heidegger’s illumination (Erläuterung) of poetry is persistently linked to its emplacement (Erörterug) within an onto-historical destiny.21 This strategy is “situating that localizes the unique site or proper place of the Gedicht from which the poems” emerge.22 To secure this placement and its ontological relevance, the meaning of poetry is reduced to an essential truth, by way of the notion

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of gathering. Heidegger often describes poetry gathering together—for instance, in his notion of a “fourfold,” the earth, sky, mortals, and divinities, Heidegger finds poetized in Hölderlin. But this fourfold, Heidegger insists, is also a “onefold” arising “from an original unity.”23 In a similar gesture, Heidegger insists that “the essential word” relates itself to “one and the same” within an onto-historical context.24 Derrida identifies the connection in Heidegger’s view of language among gathering, origin, univocity, and unity: Everything concurs and converges toward the point. . . . The site is always the site of a gathering, the gathering, das Versammelnde. This definition of site, besides implying the recourse to an “original meaning” in a determined language, governs the whole course of the Erörterung, the privilege granted to unicity and to indivisibility in situating the Gedicht and what Heidegger calls “a great poet”—great insofar as he is related to that unicity of gathering and resists the forces of dissemination or dislocation.25 The emphasis on gathering and univocity in Heidegger’s readings belies a residual logocentrism that “could be regarded as one of the fateful mortgages of Heidegger’s thinking as a whole.”26 It is generally acknowledged that poetry is, of course, resistant to its reduction to a single meaning, and Derrida recognizes that Heidegger is often receptive to “good” polysemy in poetic language.27 Yet Heidegger, even in such moments, defers to the essential or original, insisting for example that because of its unique rigor, the plurivocal language of Trakl is, “in a higher sense, so univocal” as to be superior even to any scientific univocity.28 Derrida charges that to Heidegger any poetic “polysemy must let itself be gathered in a ‘higher’ univocity and in the oneness of a harmony,” that he valorizes the security “of poetic rigor, thus stretched by the force of the gathering.”29 Polysemy is accepted by Heidegger, in other words, wherever it can be shown to be compatible with—or constrained by—the overarching essential meaning of the poem in its ontological placement.30 Bad polysemy, on the other hand, “does not let itself be gathered in a Gedicht or in a unique site.”31 Derrida distinguishes this conditional acceptance of plurivocity from deconstructive affirmation of poetic dissemination. For deconstruction, “there is no gathering that does not have a ‘nodal resistance,’”32 nor that will reduce the “disjunctive difference” of language.33 Rejecting the essential and the original as anchoring meaning, Derrida aims to identify a more “living and dynamic meaning” in the structure of language, both in the “common, universal experience of language in general” and as manifest “as such” in poetry.34 For Derrida seems to agree with Heidegger that the poet experiences the “truth of language,” but not through its founding or institution. Rather,

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truth is experienced poetically “as an elliptic withdrawal.”35 There is an inherent instability in the poetic word that would be incompatible with any founding of truth, and the world with which poetic founding could be associated, like any world, is “always deconstructible.”36 One conduit for this instability, among others, is the fact that words, conveying meaning, are events that are ever repeated, and the repetition admits alterity. Derrida writes, Language, the word—in a way, the life of the word—is in essence spectral . . . it repeats itself, as itself, and is every time other. There is a sort of spectral virtualization in the being of the word, in the very being of grammar. And it is therefore within language already, right on the tongue, that the experience of life-death makes itself felt.37 While Heidegger repeatedly dismisses the subjective or experiential aspects of poetry in favor of their ontological significance,38 Derrida insists that the poet experiences vividly, and in the flesh (à vif), an “intimate, bodily experience of this spectral errancy.”39 This is related to the fact that there is always something untranslatable, ungraspable, unreadable in poetry, which prevents the closure of interpretation. While Heidegger aims to illuminate and ontologically situate the poem, secure its “essential” meaning, Derrida’s own approaches to poetry are attuned to, as he writes, “something I cannot hear or understand, attentive to marking the limits of my reading in my reading,” leaving what is unsaid “intact, inaudible,” such that any interpretation leaves open the possibility of others.40 Derrida’s own approach to poetic language—its affirmation of polysemy, instability of meaning, and the spectral over Heidegger’s essentiality, origin, gathering, and founding of truth—will become entwined with his recognition of animality, and his critique of Heidegger’s rejection of the animal. Before his turn to language as the primary site of analysis, Heidegger investigated the ontological situation of the human being or of Dasein, as Heidegger designates the human being in Being and Time. Dasein is that being who has a privileged relation to Being itself (“Dasein” means “to be here” or “to be there”). Through its projects and significations, Dasein is world-building (weltbildend), and it is thus that Dasein differs essentially from other entities. In contrast to Dasein, the stone is worldless (weltlos), while the animal is poor in world (weltarm), as Heidegger argues in a passage repeatedly criticized by Derrida.41 Dasein builds world by opening up the space of manifestation or disclosure of what is. By pointing to things, grasping them both literally and metaphorically, taking them in hand toward projects, Dasein creates worldly significance for them, revealing them as the beings they are—a revealing Heidegger describes in the wake of Being and Time as the structure of language itself. In What Is Called Thinking? Heidegger acknowledges that

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in its world-building projects, thinking itself is undertaken with the hands, as a handicraft (ein Hand-Werk).42 But this cognitive embodiment is nothing like that of animal embodiment. Animals cannot build world because, Heidegger argues, animals lack anything like a human hand; they cannot indicate, or sign. In a somewhat circular demand, Heidegger argues that in order to have a hand in the proper sense, it is necessary to have language—a demand that thus excludes even higher primates from world in any substantial sense. Heidegger’s ignorance concerning the capacities of higher primates—some of which were wellrecognized even in Kafka’s lifetime—is only one of the many difficulties with this view.43 If there is in Heidegger’s account a “co-implication of hand, thought, and language,”44 this very nexus seems to constitute the conditions for worldhood. To be world-enriched, it seems, one has to already be ein Zeichen, as Heidegger describes the human being, echoing Hölderlin’s phrase ein Zeichen sind wir (we are a sign).45 Only as a sign can one have a hand that signifies, that is significant, a hand that, as Derrida writes, already “thinks before being thought,” a hand that “is thought, a thought, thinking.”46 Derrida, in a characteristic reversal—and playing on the affinity between the French verb montrer (to point to, show, indicate) and noun monstre (monster)—describes the human hand, and its association with thinking, as the “monstrosity” (monstrosité) that divides human beings, as signing animals, “from every other Geschlecht.”47 Derrida interrogates Heidegger’s contention that animals are “poor” in world, which would seem to place animals beneath humans in a hierarchy of world-relatedness. Of the world-impoverished animal, Derrida asks, What does weltarm mean? What does this poverty of world mean? . . . The difference he is talking about between poverty and wealth is not one of degree. For precisely because of a difference in essence, the world of the animal—and if the animal is poor in world, and therefore in spirit, one must be able to talk about a world of the animal, and therefore of a spiritual world—is not a species or degree of the human world. . . . This poverty is not an indigence, a meagreness of world. It has, without doubt, the essence of a privation [Entbehrung], of a lack: the animal does not have enough world, to be sure. But this lack is not to be evaluated as a quantitative relation to the entities of the world. It is not that the animal has a lesser relationship, a more limited access to entities, it has an other relationship.48 Derrida exposes the difficulty of Heidegger’s subordination to the human in their relations to world while at the same time assigning to them an abyssal, essential difference. There is, he points out, no place for the animal in the ontological categories laid out in Being and Time, and this leaves uncertain, as Derrida puts it, “what modality to reserve for the animal.”49 Heidegger,

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in placing the animal’s world-relation between inanimate worldlessness and human world-building, merely “reproduces an ancient conceptual scheme and involves the classical machinery of mediation.”50 While the animal does have a relation to other beings, it does not have a relation to beings as beings, or in their Being. The lizard knows the rock on which it suns itself, but not apophantically, the rock as a rock, the sun as sun.51 The animal may be related to a given being, but it cannot meaningfully disclose them. Heidegger’s view assumes the centrality of the ontological difference as definitive of world, upon which Derrida comments: The expression “poor in world” or “without world,” just like the phenomenology supporting it, encloses an axiology regulated not only upon an ontology but upon the possibility of the onto-logical as such, upon the ontological difference, the access to the Being of the entity . . . opening to the play of the world and first of all to the world of man as weltbildend 52 But the ontological difference is made from a human perspective, from “our point of view,” from Dasein’s access to beings “as such and in their Being.”53 Derrida’s own thinking of the animal will pursue lines of alterity—not in order to erase the difference between human and animal, but to explore, deepen, and multiply it.54 He contends that “drawing an oppositional limit itself blurs the differences, the difference and the differences, not only between man and animal, but among animal societies.”55 Indeed, Derrida reminds us that even to speak of “animality” is to forget animals’ multiplicity, specificity, and differences, an erasure which supports their categorical opposition to the human.56 What is needed, Derrida thinks, is to think differently about the animal. Even the absence of language in animals, by reference to which they have been long defined, needs to be reimagined: “It would not be a matter of ‘giving speech back’ to animals but perhaps of acceding to a thinking, however fabulous and chimerical it might be, that thinks the absence of the name and of the word otherwise, as something other than a privation.”57 While Derrida might have found the beginnings of just such a “fabulous and chimerical” thinking of animals in Rilke’s poetry, Derrida somewhat summarily dismisses, in the midst of his critique of Heidegger, “a Rilkean thematics which links openness and animality.”58 The notion of the “open,” articulated in Rilke’s Duino Elegies, was criticized by Heidegger as ontologically disastrous for its “monstrous humanization” of the animal.59 The reverse of Heidegger’s own position is presented by Rilke when he describes animals as experiencing fullness of world, for which their lack of representational consciousness is the constitutive virtue.60 In the New Poems, Rilke describes flamingos, a gazelle, a swan, a panther, and a domestic cat, the last two of which are noted, but unexplored, in a footnote by Derrida in

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The Animal That Therefore I Am. Yet “The Panther” should be considered here in light of the problem of world taken up between Heidegger and Derrida, while “Black Cat” will be relevant to Derrida’s own account of the animal-human encounter. *** Describing a panther caged in the Parisian Jardins des Plantes, Rilke’s speaker in “The Panther” imagines the worldlessness of the animal otherwise than ontological incapacity or lack. Rilke’s poem begins from what is imagined as the animal’s point of view, by trading on the ambiguity of “gaze” (“Blick”) which evokes both the animal’s perspective and the observable activity of its looking. In the first two lines the speaker describes, around an observation of its gaze, the panther’s affective feeling, its visual perception, and its cognitive fatigue. Sein Blick ist vom Vorübergehn der Stäbe so müd geworden, dass er nichts mehr hält. (His gaze, from the passing of the bars Has become so tired, that it holds nothing anymore.) In an imaginative empathy, Rilke’s speaker goes on to describe the panther’s outlook, how the world (or its lack) appears (or does not appear) from behind the bars of its cage. Ihm ist, als ob es tausend Stäbe gäbe und hinter tausend Stäben keine Welt. (To him it is as if there were a thousand bars And behind a thousand bars, no world.)61 The panther has only perceptual access to what lies beyond—and that visual field is fragmented by intervening bars. The panther is pacing—thus the bars are multiplied as it passes them over and over—and to do so, it must circle in a tightly confined space, its will constrained. As described by the speaker in the final stanza of the poem, the animal clearly sees beyond the bars—in the third stanza its gaze takes in an image, one that is said to extinguish, or literally, to cease being (hört auf zu sein), in the panther’s heart.62 Such extinction reflects the deadness of world or how, to the panther, it is “as if . . . there were” a thousand bars and behind a thousand bars “no world.”63 Here the denial of world bears no evidence of ontological impoverishment, having nothing to do with any lack of signifying hands, any lack of language. The panther’s gaze is cut off, interrupted, restricted by the bars that offer none but a deadening vision, a world in negative. The panther’s freedom, conversely, would entail an unobstructed relation, a world orientation

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that will be echoed in Rilke’s later description of animals as perceiving the “open.” Despite his dismissal of Rilke’s “thematics” of openness and animality, Derrida ventures in a Rilkean direction in The Animal That Therefore I Am to examine the relationality of animals. Citing Montaigne’s condemnation of the human tendency to deny the intelligence of animals, ignorant of their “secret internal stirrings,”64 Derrida speculates about their inner lives, including the fact that animals appear to dream, and suggests that such dreaming is at least analogous to thinking. If Rilke ventures to imagine the perspective of the panther, Derrida asks whether animals may not in fact have a language of a kind, and whether they may grieve, play, laugh, forgive, invent, relate to “the future as such,” and thus imagine.65 While Derrida neglects to explore Rilke’s works for their imagining of animal life, he acknowledges the prospects for a poetic thinking about animals. Animal experience, or anything like animal interiority, cannot be considered from a philosophical standpoint; rather, such thinking originates with poetry. Derrida’s understanding of poetic language here becomes explicitly entwined with his view of the animal: “For thinking concerning the animal, if there is such a thing, derives from poetry. There you have a hypothesis: it is what philosophy has, essentially, had to deprive itself of. That is the difference between philosophical knowledge and poetic thinking.”66 While Derrida will go on to interpret animals in literature, Derrida also links the identification of poetry—such as there can be one, for the very question “laments the disappearance of the poem . . . salutes the birth of prose”67—with the animal itself. In his essay “Che Cos’è la Poesia?” (“What Is Poetry?”) Derrida approaches the animal interior, as it were, through a conventional metaphor for poetry, that of the heart, thus evoking biological, emotive, and cognitive dimensions. A poem, Derrida suggests, is that which is taken to heart, but also generates that experience of heart: “I call a poem that very thing that teaches the heart, invents the heart, that which, finally, the word heart seems to mean and which, in my language, I cannot easily discern from the word itself.”68 This signifies no romantic nostalgia for an interior to which the subject may retreat in refuge. “Heart, in the poem, ‘learn by heart’ (to be learned by heart) no longer names only pure interiority, independent spontaneity, the freedom to affect oneself actively by reproducing the beloved trace.”69 This heart is at once virtual and embodied, invoking the rhythms of the material world, “beyond outside and inside.”70 Derrida waxes on the exposing intimacy of poetry, in which one may feel to be overtaken from without. In learning a poem by heart, for example, or in the experience of listening to language as one writes poetry, one’s attention would be given over to a mnemonics directed from a source that remains out of reach, to

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which any boundary cannot pertain. Derrida likens this mechanics, perhaps surprisingly, to the traffic on the autoroute (French for highway): The memory of the “by heart” is confided like a prayer—that’s safer—to a certain exteriority of the automaton, to the laws of mnemotechnics, to that liturgy that mimes mechanics on the surface, to that automobile that surprises your passion and bears down on you as if from outside.71 When Derrida then likens the poem itself to an animal, this is not to be taken as merely allegorical. Such an animal that “is” poetry could not be the phoenix, the eagle, or any mythologized creature that could be associated with the sublime, the transcendent. Poetry that is an animal must be an earth-dweller, but also able to draw into itself, while exposed to the outside, and not wholly remote, at the edge of human traffic. Derrida names the “lowly” hedgehog (hérisson), an animal that, in a physical pose of selfprotection, ambiguously turns in upon itself while also displaying its prickly surface outward. This animal is “neither sublime, nor incorporeal, angelic.” The hedgehog lives both among and at the margins of human society, at the edge of its activity. As such, the animal rolled into a ball is “turned toward the other and toward itself, in sum, a thing—modest, discreet, close to the earth,” an animal which “hears but does not see death coming.”72 As Heidegger assigns poets a role in destitute times, Derrida too evokes poetry as exposure to disaster; yet without any of the heroism or resoluteness Heidegger attributes to the poet in the narrative of the history of Being. The hedgehog that is the poem inhabits no sublime landscape, but huddles nevertheless precariously close to danger: “No poem without accident, no poem that does not open itself like a wound, but no poem that is not also just as wounding.”73 This accidental, wounded, and wounding quality of poetry reflects the nature of language itself, its spectral errancy, at odds with Heidegger’s idea of the poetic founding of truth. Thus rejecting Heidegger’s idea of poetic founding, or “setting-forth-of-the-truth-in-the-work,” Derrida insists that the poem resists ontological veracity. The poem is not the truth of being, or the gathering of the essential, or the manifestation of fate, but “just this contamination, and this crossroads, this accident here. This turn, the turning around of this catastrophe.”74 Derrida’s playful, if confounding, likening of the poem to the hedgehog can be made sense of—insofar as it is meant to submit to intelligibility— only as a response to Heidegger’s theory of poetic language. Contrary to Heidegger’s tendency to find in poetry a univocal message, an essential truth, Derrida argues that the “event” of the poem “always interrupts or derails absolute knowledge.” The poem, Derrida writes, “never gathers itself together, rather it loses itself and gets off the track (delirium or mania), it exposes itself to chance, it would rather let itself be torn to pieces by what bears down upon it.”75 The difference between poetic language and

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prose, between the language of revealing and the language of knowledge, between poetry and philosophy, comes down to the animal, which is also the unsayable at the heart of language. Just as poetry exposes the spectrality of language, the animal illuminates for Derrida the heterogeneity at the heart of human subjectivity, the disavowal of which “institutes what is proper to man, the relation to itself of a humanity that is above all careful to guard, and jealous of, what is proper to it.”76 Heidegger’s philosophy falls squarely into this tradition. For while “the question of life disturbs almost all of his analyses and conceptual distinctions,”77 Derrida argues, Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein fails to inquire into the life of the subject, its breath, the living substrate of existence.78 At the same time, Heidegger fails to think that otherness by virtue of which the human being can in the first place recognize itself in its own being, a failure inherited from Descartes and in turn inherited by Heidegger’s descendants. If for Levinas, the face of the human other commands an ethical response, Derrida charges that “a thinking of the other, of the infinitely other who looks at me, should, on the contrary, privilege the question and the request of the animal.”79 For the animal is that very alterity that is constitutive for the human self, as the encounter with the animal allows for self-recognition: As with every bottomless gaze, as with the eyes of the other, the gaze called animal offers to my sight the abyssal limit of the human: the inhuman or the ahuman, the ends of man, that is to say the bordercrossing from which vantage man dares to announce himself to himself, thereby calling himself by the name that he believes he gives himself.80 The apodicticity of human self-knowledge, however, is disrupted by the gaze of the animal, when experienced as an other in its own right. Derrida describes the experience of his own exposure to an animal gaze, a meditation on which yields the dream of an “absolute hospitality to animals or their infinite appropriation” (le rêve d’une hospitalité absolue ou d’une appropriation infinie81), and which has implications for any deconstructive poetics. The Animal That Therefore I Am opens with Derrida’s description of the experience of being looked at by his cat as he emerges naked from the shower. I often ask myself, just to see, who I am—and who I am (following) at the moment when, caught naked, in silence, by the gaze of an animal, for example the eyes of a cat.82 The undeniable narcissism of the following treatment of the cat—Derrida eventually asks, “But cannot this cat also be, deep within her eyes, my

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primary mirror?” (Mais ce chat ne peut-il aussi être, au fond de ses yeux, mon premier miroir ?)83—reflects among other things the topic of the conference for which it was written, that of the “autobiographical animal.” Derrida announces that the language in which he will describe the gaze of the animal is language “from the heart,” echoing his treatment of the heart in “Che Cos’è la Poesia?”: “I would like to choose words that are, to begin with, naked, quite simply, words from the heart.”84 Words from the heart are there, of course, associated with the words of the poem. Yet a tension will emerge between the language of autobiographical writing—“naked” words, as it were—and literary evocation with which it is first contrasted, and later confounded. Describing the cat in what would be autobiographical language, Derrida suggests, “It can look at me. It has its point of view regarding me.” Yet this is the “point of view of the absolute other,” and seeing oneself seen by that gaze is a provocation to think through “this absolute alterity of the neighbor.”85 Derrida’s take on the gaze of the animal, on the experience of being looked at by an animal, has been understandably juxtaposed to, even read as a parody of, Sartre’s description of the look of the other.86 Yet modernist poets would be the more relevant interlocutors here, two of whom Derrida acknowledges when he sets aside in footnotes reference to two poems each by Rilke and Baudelaire. In one of his poems entitled “Le Chat,” Baudelaire’s speaker recognizes in the cat’s eyes as a mirror for the self: “When my eyes are drawn towards my cat whom I love . . . and find that I am looking into myself” (Quand mes yeux, vers ce chat que j'aime . . . Et que je regarde en moi-même).87 Had Derrida continued citing from this poem, we would find in the next stanza both Baudelaire’s (or his speaker’s) recognition of the living intelligence of the cat’s gaze, and its otherness: I see with astonishment The fire of its pale pupils Clear beacons, living opals That fix me in contemplation. (Je vois avec étonnement Le feu de ses prunelles pâles, Clairs fanaux, vivantes opales Qui me contemplent fixement.)88 Mentioning in the following footnote Rilke’s poem “Black Cat,” Derrida defers, suggesting that he “will have to try to read this poem” on another occasion, and he adds only that both of Rilke’s poems describe the “Blick,” the look or gaze of the animal.89 While “The Panther” contemplates the animal gazing from inside his cage at a world lost, “Black Cat” renders the experience of being looked at directly—as Derrida describes his own experience—from “the point of view of an absolute other.”

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Derrida insists on what could be described as the in-person (or in-animal) singularity, of his cat, and ostensibly differentiates it from any literary rendering. Derrida is, he insists talking about is a real cat, truly, believe me, a little cat. It isn’t the figure of a cat. It doesn’t silently enter the room as an allegory for all the cats on the earth, the felines that traverse myths and religions, literature and fables. There are so many of them. The cat I am talking about does not belong to Kafka’s vast zoopoetics, something that nevertheless solicits attention, endlessly and from a novel perspective. Nor is the cat that looks at me, and to which I seem—but don’t count on it—to be dedicating a negative zootheology.90 Derrida goes on here to name examples of other writers’ cats which are not adequate to the experience he is describing. Dismissing the literary-poetic cat, or cat of myth, allegory, or imagination (since it isn’t “the figure” of a cat), Derrida insists on what must be called the living presence of the animal: I see it as this irreplaceable living being that one day enters my space, enters this place where it can encounter me, see me, even see me naked. Nothing can ever take away from me the certainty that what we have here is an existence that refuses to be conceptualized.91 The manifest respect for the otherness and specificity of the individual animal—graspable, Derrida has suggested, neither in literary treatment nor conceptual language—endorses the scene of encounter. Yet this would appear, at least initially, to betray his own identification of poetry and animal, his criticism of phenomenologies of presence92 and the place they would give to unmediated perception,93 that Derrida distinguishes his “real” cat by its presence, and by its direct look—“here” in “this place,” “my space,” “one day,” as Derrida describes his cat in this particular scene, “where it can encounter me, see me”—from those mere allegories, representatives, literary ambassadors for cats in general. The encounter with the “real” cat, the perception of really being seen, is, at least initially, the term “held constant” over and against the literary representations he has rejected,94 a constant that cannot hold for long in a grammatology for which experienced phenomena are always themselves “effects of figurality.”95 This apparent deviation from the literary will soon be justified, however, not by the autobiographical, “naked” language that would somehow present the “real” singular cat in this encounter, but rather through the ethical claim such an encounter may make on our treatment of animals,96 a claim forcefully conveyed in Derrida’s subsequent discussion of animals’ suffering.97 Derrida’s deferral of consideration of Rilke becomes a more problematic omission when Derrida later mentions another “motif I would like to have

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analysed,” namely “that of the abyss, and thus of the vertigo that we could find recurrently concerning the animal, notably in Rilke and Heidegger.” For following this, Derrida immediately describes the “chiasm” that opens up when the “ ‘I’ crosses gazes—to the point of drowning there—with the animal that sees me seeing it see me.”98 Derrida might have been citing Rilke here, for Rilke describes in “Black Cat” gazing at the cat, finding one’s own gaze suspended in its eyes, just as an insect would be suspended, and drown, in amber. However Derrida, having just evoked Rilke and Heidegger together, misses an opportunity to differentiate them, to demonstrate how Rilke’s animal gaze implies their possession of world, encouraging precisely the opposite conclusion than Heidegger draws about animals’ “abyssal” difference from human beings. The collapse of the world of Rilke’s panther, too, may involve the experience of abyss, of vertigo (the panther is moving in circles around a voided will) that originates not in the ontological difference, but decidedly in its ontic, factical imprisonment and in the imbalance of power between the gazes of different species. Instead of engaging Rilke, however, Derrida turns to the “animal abyss” (l’abîme animal) in “Sketch of a serpent” (“L’Ébauche d’un serpent”) by Paul Valéry, and goes on from there to the bestiary of Richard de Fournival. Derrida’s dismissal of Rilke’s “Black Cat” has been justified by reference to the use of metaphor, whereas “there is no metaphor in the look of Derrida’s cat.”99 The non-metaphorical language of Derrida’s conveyance of his “real” encounter is to be mapped upon the ethical relation. Derrida’s language is, he has said, “naked,” whereas the Rilkean experience is, as it were, captured in a metaphorical image—preserved indeed like the insect in amber. However Rilke’s poetic figuration ought to be compatible with Derrida’s view that any originary givenness, any phenomenal in itself, is “always already a representamen.”100 Rilke’s image of the encounter, of the seeing of the cat, would be but an elaboration of a seeing that is always already, to adapt Wittgenstein’s notion, a “seeing as.”101 Any attempt to reflect upon the animal gaze, even to the point of “drowning” there, as Derrida says, “with the animal,” is always already implicated in what Derrida described, in Of Grammatology, as the play of signs “from the moment there is meaning.”102 Meanwhile, Derrida’s description of his own cat and their encounter is vulnerable to the criticism that the autobiographical approach, however much it philosophically challenges the “I” who speaks, forecloses the alterity of the animal on which Derrida repeatedly insists. The cat of The Animal That Therefore I Am, and all of Derrida’s animals, may become “symptoms of Derrida’s auto-biographical philosophy . . . never distinct and separate from Derrida.” Even the name of the cat that will live on after its death points to Derrida’s own mortality.103 Yet Derrida, having rejected, dismissed, and deferred a number of literary animals, goes on to invoke a literary origin for his own evocation of his “real” cat. As if anticipatorily undermining some of the objections just

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outlined, Derrida suggests that his whole talk could have been—or maybe secretly is—embedded in an interpretation of the animals in Lewis Carroll, and that he may be in fact quoting Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland in his description of his own cat as “really a little cat.” But we cannot know for sure: “You can’t be certain that I am not doing that, for better or for worse, silently, unconsciously, or without your knowing.”104 Derrida then reveals that this same work of fiction may be the source for the hedgehog with which he identified poetry in “Che Cos’è la Poesia?” For in Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Derrida reminds us, Alice plays a game of croquet in which the “balls were live hedgehogs.”105 It seems that the really experienced cat, and the hedgehog with which the poem is to be identified, may originate in literature after all—or at least with this performance Derrida promotes the undecidability of their genesis. A generous reading of Derrida’s position would find ontological skepticism rather than hermeneutic narcissism here, a skepticism that could be elaborated in light of Derrida’s critique of Heidegger as described earlier in this essay. For in perceiving the cat, as Heidegger might say, as such, the human Dasein in the encounter does not command any transparent access to the object of the gaze, but only as configured in and for a world. Insofar as it is by means of language that Dasein reveals beings, Dasein cannot reveal them as they would be apart from language, as they would be, as it were, before language. But since “essential” and “original” language, its univocity, Derrida has argued, cannot be secured, the as such of beings revealed by language may be always already infected with other language. Whether the cat experienced in the encounter, as a “real” cat, “seeing me,” is also literary in origin is undecidable. Thinking the animal, Derrida has insisted, can be accomplished only in poetry. Nevertheless when Derrida asks, “How can an animal look you in the face?”106 and on the authority of just such an experience differentiates his own thinking of the animal from that of his philosophical predecessors, it is not clear that the distinction between the real and the literary, the seen and the figured, is deconstructed without residue. Of philosophers from Descartes to Levinas, Derrida asserts that “their gaze has never intersected with that of an animal directed at them.”107 And again: “The experience of the seeing animal, of the animal that looks at them, has not been taken into account in the philosophical or theoretical architecture of their discourse.”108 A reading of Rilke’s “Black Cat,” however sensitively, would presumably not suffice as an experience of being looked at by the animal, in the face, as an other in its own right. In the wake of his treatment of the animal gaze, Rilke came to understand the gaze of animals as a richer access to world; that abundance differentiates them from the human captured in the notion of the “open.” In the Elegies, Rilke suggests that the capacity to represent the world also divides human beings from it—anticipating Derrida’s claim that any effort to grasp the in

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itself is touched by representation. Rilke writes of animal eyes and animal seeing: With all its eyes the animal sees the open. Only our eyes are as if reversed, and are set around it like snares, restricting the freedom of its going. (Mit allen Augen sieht die Kreatur das Offene. Nur unsre Augen sind wie umgekehrt und ganz um sie gestellt als Fallen, rings um ihren freien Ausgang.109) While Derrida, despite his powerful critique of Heidegger, dismisses the open as Heideggerian, failing to distinguish Rilke’s distinct position from that of Heidegger, Derrida’s own thinking of the animal echoes the following lines in Rilke’s elegy: “Only from the face of the animal do we know/What is outside” (Was draußen ist, wir wissens aus des Tiers/Antlitz allein).110 Rilke’s “open” is appropriated by Heidegger in his effort to think the “da” of Dasein, the time-space of world, its “originary unity” which he had not fully accomplished in Being and Time,111 and from which he came to exclude animals. Criticizing Rilke’s eighth elegy, Heidegger contends that “because he has the word, man, and he alone, is the being that looks into the open and sees the open .  .  . . The animal, on the contrary, does not see the open, never does, not with a single one of all its eyes.”112 Rilke’s affirmation of animals—the suggestion that we can learn from their gazes what is outside, and perhaps also inside, us—amounts for Heidegger to an ontological oblivion, or “an ignorance of all laws of Being” in which “the essence and the truth of being and nonbeing themselves, and nothing less, are at stake.”113 Derrida would seem to be in Rilkean territory when he insists, in direct contrast to Heidegger, on the profundity of the animal’s gaze, its direct and challenging encounter with the human, and its relation to world and language as “other than a privation.” In his last seminar, Derrida returned to the question of the animal and its world, identifying the “central paradox” in that, on the one hand, humans and animals inhabit the same environment, and yet, on the other, they undeniably inhabit different worlds, such that “the human world will never be purely and simply identical with the world of animals.” Reflecting on human individuation as represented in Heidegger’s idea of solitude, Derrida moves on to the plurality of differences, since between animals of different species, and among humans of different cultures, there is an “unbridgeable” difference in their worlds, “however close and similar these living individuals may be.”114 That any unity of world as such is “always deconstructible, nowhere and never given in nature,” leaves open as yet unthought possibilities for encounters with animal life, and for its rendering.115

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Conclusion While the Derrida-Heidegger debate on animality has been, appropriately, taken up in the direction of animal ethics,116 it also bears upon a persistent theme in literary modernism, one which, as we have seen in Rilke, ventures toward thinking the limits of human language.117 Derrida described both poetry and the animal—or the poem as animal— as “beyond the logos, a-human, barely domestic, not reappropriable into the family of the subject.”118 Derrida’s interweaving meditations on the animal and poetry emerge through his critical engagement with Heidegger’s poetics and ontology. Through this critique Derrida illuminates how both poetry and the animal trouble any originary claim of human Dasein to “the essence and the truth of being.” Derrida’s own provocative, and not unchallengeable, account of the animal gaze invites us, as do Rilke’s poems, to consider what different modality of being would be required to live alongside animals in their differences, in modalities of being unimagined in Being and Time: “Being after, being alongside, being near [près] would appear as different modes of being, indeed of being-with. With the animal.”119 The intertwining of animality and poetry in Derrida’s critique of Heidegger suggests that being with the animal and taking that into account in our understanding of ourselves would reconfigure the structure, and the exclusivity, of the human world poetically, opening up language to its relation to the unsayable.120

Notes 1 Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 160. 2 On animals in modernism, see, for example, Maud Ellmann, The Nets of Modernism: Henry James, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Sigmund Freud (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 14–34; Carrie Rohman, Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Eric L. Santer, On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Margot Norris, Beasts of the Modern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst and Lawrence (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). 3 Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 13. See also Derrida’s description of his relation to Heidegger in Richard Kearney, “Dialogue with Jacques Derrida,” Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 105–25, especially 109. 4 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1967), 19. 5 Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 11.

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6 Paola Marrati, Genesis and Trace: Derrida Reading Husserl and Heidegger (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 107. 7 Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 19. 8 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976), 18. 9 Derrida quoting Gadamer’s comparison in Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 137. 10 Derrida claims that, “I never ‘criticize’ Heidegger without recalling that this can be done from other places in his own text,” in “Heidegger’s Hand (Geschlecht II),” in Psyche: Inventions of the Other Vol II, trans. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 57. 11 Derrida, Sovereignties in Question, 105. 12 Ibid, 146. 13 Giorgio Agamben also criticizes Heidegger’s still-metaphysical concept of voice, and Heidegger’s neglect of the human voice and its relation to the animal voice in Language and Death: The Voice of Negativity, trans. Karen E. Pinkus with Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 55–60. Kevin Attell compares Agamben’s position to that of Derrida in Giorgio Agamben: Beyond the Threshold of Deconstruction (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 78–79. 14 Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe 5, Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977), 276. 15 Martin Heidegger, Was ist Metaphysik? (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1975), 50. 16 Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe 5, 65; and Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1951), 38. 17 Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe 5, 276. 18 Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 40. 19 While Heidegger’s reading of Trakl, for example, appears to be carried, conducted, initiated by lines of the poem, they are, Derrida argues, “lines which he picks out and chooses in a discreet but extremely active way.” Heidegger “seems at first to place his trust in the word” as it appears in the poem, but “from the opening pages some determining decisions have been taken.” Derrida, Of Spirit, 86, 87. 20 Ibid, 90. 21 Derrida, “Heidegger’s Hand,” 58. 22 Ibid. 23 Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe 7, Vorträge und Aufsätze (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000), 152, 151. 24 Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, 39–40.

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25 Derrida, “Heidegger’s Hand,” 60. 26 Gerhard Richter, “The Debt of Inheritance Revisited: Heidegger’s Mortgage, Derrida’s Appraisal,” The Oxford Literary Review 37, no. 1 (2015): 68. 27 See Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe 52 Hölderlins Hymne “Andenken” (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1992), 15. 28 Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe 12, Unterwegs zur Sprache (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1985), 71. 29 Derrida, “Heidegger’s Hand,” 56. 30 For a more appreciative account of Heidegger’s account of eindeutig and vieldeutig language in poetry, see Julian Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 103–05. 31 Derrida, “Heidegger’s Hand,” 56. 32 Derrida, Of Spirit, 9, 33 Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, and Eduardo Cadava (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 141. 34 Derrida, Sovereignties in Question, 105. 35 Ibid, 106. 36 Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. II, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 31. 37 Derrida, Sovereignties in Question, 103–04. 38 I discuss this in Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 27–60. 39 Derrida, Sovereignties in Question, 105. 40 Ibid, 166. 41 Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 143. As Derrida points out, he also discusses this passage in Of Spirit, “Heidegger’s Hand,” and Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993). 42 Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe 8, Was heisst Denken? (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2002), 18. What Is Called Thinking? trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 16. 43 See Gregory Radick, The Simian Tongue: The Long Debate About Animal Language (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 44 Christopher Johnson, “Derrida and Technology,” in Derrida’s Legacies: Literature and Philosophy, ed. Simon Glendinning and Robert Eaglestone (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 61. 45 Friedrich Hölderlin, “Mnemosyne,” in Sämtliche Werke. 6 Bände, Band 2 (Stuttgart: Insel Verlag, 1953), 203. 46 Derrida, “Heidegger’s Hand,” 39. 47 Ibid, 36. See Johnson, “Derrida and Technology,” 59. 48 Derrida, Of Spirit, 48–49.

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49 Ibid, 56. 50 Jacques Derrida, “On Reading Heidegger: An Outline of Remarks to the Essex Colloquium,” Research in Phenomenology 17 (1987): 173. 51 Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 156. 52 Derrida, Of Spirit, 56. 53 Ibid, 50, 51. 54 For discussion of the multiplicity of alterity, and its denial, see Kelly Oliver, “Elephant Eulogy: The Exorbitant Orb of an Elephant,” in The Animal Question in Deconstruction, ed. Lynn Turner (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 89–104, especially 91. 55 Derrida, “On Reading Heidegger,” 183. 56 Ibid, 173. 57 Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 48. 58 Derrida, Of Spirit, 54. 59 Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. André Schuwer and Richar Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 152. 60 I also discuss this in “The Imagination of Animals: Rilke, Kafka, and the Philosophy and Literature of Embodied Cognition,” in The Animal Inside: Essays at the Intersections of Philosophical Anthropology and Animal Studies, ed. Geoffrey Dierckxsens et al (Lantham, MD: Roman and Littlefield, 2016), 123–46. 61 Rainer Maria Rilke, Werke in drei Bänden, Band I (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1955), 261. 62 Ibid. 63 Cf. Lawrence Ryan, who dismisses the importance of confinement, in “Neue Gedichte—New Poems,” ed. E.A. Metzger and M.M. Metzger, in A Companion to the Works of Rainer Maria Rilke (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2001), 141. 64 Michel de Montaigne, Essays, in The Complete Works of Montaigne, Book II, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957), 331. 65 Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 62–63. 66 Ibid, 7. 67 Jacques Derrida, “Che Cos’é la Poesia?” in Points… Interviews, 1974-1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 299. 68 Ibid, 295. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid. 71 Derrida, “Che Cos’é la Poesia?,” 295. 72 Ibid, 297. 73 Ibid, 296.

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74 Derrida, “Che Cos’é la Poesia?,” 297. 75 Ibid, 299. 76 Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 14. 77 Derrida, “On Reading Heidegger,” 173. 78 Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 111. 79 Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 113. But for a comparative discussion of Levinas and Derrida on animals see Jean-Michel Rabaté, Les guerres de Jacques Derrida (Montréal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2016), 59–83. See also Jean-Michel Rabaté, Crimes of the Future: Theory and Its Global Reproduction (New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 61–74. 80 Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 12. 81 Jacques Derrida, L’animal que donc je suis (Paris: Galilée, 2006), 60. 82 Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 3–4. 83 Ibid, 51; L’animal que donc je suis, 77. 84 Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 1. 85 Ibid, 11. 86 See Gerald Bruns, “Derrida’s Cat (Who Am I?)” Research in Phenomenology 38 (2008): 404–23, and Herman Rapaport, The Later Derrida: Reading the Recent Work (London: Routledge, 2003), 100. 87 Charles Baudelaire, The Complete Verse of Baudelaire, Vol. 1, trans. and ed. Francis Scarfe (London: Anvil, 1986), 122. Translations altered. 88 Ibid. 89 Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 163–64. 90 Ibid, 6. 91 Ibid, 9. 92 See Derrida, Of Grammatology, 49; and Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers, 109. For a discussion of Derrida’s critique of phenomenology, see Christina Howells, Derrida: Deconstruction from Phenomenology to Ethics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 6–28. 93 Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, trans. David Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press), 103. 94 This phrase is evoked, in an analogous critique, by Edward S. Casey, “Origin(s) in (of) Heidegger/Derrida,” The Journal of Philosophy 81, no. 10 (October 1984): 606. 95 Richard Kearney, Phenomenology, Critical Theory, Structuralism, second edition (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994), 121. 96 Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 26. Elsewhere Derrida argues: “The relations between humans and animals must change. They must, both in the sense of an ‘ontological’ necessity and of an ‘ethical’ duty.” See Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow… A Dialogue (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 70.

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97 Derrida, quoting Jeremy Bentham, asks not whether the animal can speak or reason, but “can the animal suffer?” The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. II, 244. For discussion see Leonard Lawler, This Is Not Sufficient: An Essay on Animality and Human Nature in Derrida (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 73–74. 98 Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 66. 99 Bruns, “Derrida’s Cat,” 408. 100 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 49. 101 On the comparison of Derrida and Wittgenstein’s seeing see Newton Garver’s preface to Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, xxiii. 102 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 50. 103 James Martel, “The Animal Mirrors: The Human/Animal Divide in Derrida and Deleuze,” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 48, no. 3 (September 2015): 183. 104 Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 7. 105 Ibid. 106 Ibid. 107 Ibid, 13. 108 Ibid, 14. 109 Rilke, Werke in drei Bänden, Band I, 470. 110 Ibid. 111 James Phillips, “Restoring Place to Aesthetic Experience: Heidegger’s Critique of Rilke,” Critical Horizons 11, no. 3 (2010): 345. 112 Heidegger, Parmenides, 155. 113 Ibid, 152, 159. 114 David Farrell Krell, Derrida and Our Animal Others: Derrida’s Final Seminar, The Beast and the Sovereign (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 39. 115 Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. II, 30–31. 116 Derrida decries not only “the unprecedented proportions of this subjection of the animal” but the “interventionist violence” undertaken on behalf of animal welfare. The Animal That Therefore I Am, 25–26. For contrasting views of Derrida’s position, see Jean Grondin, “Derrida and the Question of the Animal,” Cités 2, no. 30 (2007): 31–39; and Matthew Calcaro, Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 114–16. 117 To name two other examples: it is somewhat emblematic of the entanglement of animality with this question in modernism that, in a tragic empathy with the rats he has poisoned, Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos experiences a breakdown that manifests as a crisis of language; and that Kafka experiments with animals speaking, with animalized humans deprived of speech, and with the incomprehensibility of human speech from an imagined animal perspective.

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118 Derrida, “Che Cos’é la Poesia?,” 297. 119 Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 10. 120 The author would like to thank Christina Howells and Samir Haddad for their responses to this essay.

Works cited Agamben, Giorgio. Language and Death: The Voice of Negativity. Translated by Karen E. Pinkus with Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Attell, Kevin. Giorgio Agamben: Beyond the Threshold of Deconstruction. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Baudelaire, Charles. The Complete Verse of Baudelaire, Vol. 1. Translated and edited by Francis Scarfe. London: Anvil, 1986. Bruns, Gerald. “Derrida’s Cat (Who Am I?)” Research in Phenomenology 38 (2008): 404–23. Calcaro, Matthew. Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Casey, Edward S. “Origin(s) in (of) Heidegger/Derrida.” The Journal of Philosophy 81, no. 10 (October 1984): 601–10. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Derrida, Jacques. Aporias. Translated by Thomas Dutoit. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993. Derrida, Jacques. The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. II. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Derrida, Jacques. “Che Cos’é la Poesia?” In Points… Interviews, 1974-1994, edited by Elisabeth Weber, translated by Peggy Kamuf, 288–99. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995. Derrida, Jacques. “Heidegger’s Hand (Geschlecht II).” In Psyche: Inventions of the Other, translated by Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg, Vol. II, 27–62. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Derrida, Jacques. Memoires for Paul de Man. Translated by Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, and Eduardo Cadava. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976. Derrida, Jacques. Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Derrida, Jacques. “On Reading Heidegger: An Outline of Remarks to the Essex Colloquium.” Research in Phenomenology 17 (1987): 171–88. Derrida, Jacques. Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan. Edited by Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005.

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Derrida, Jacques. Speech and Phenomena. Translated by David Allison. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Derrida, Jacques, and Elisabeth Roudinesco. For What Tomorrow… A Dialogue. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. Ellmann, Maud. The Nets of Modernism: Henry James, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Sigmund Freud. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna. Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language. New York: Fordham University Press, 2004. Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna, Rudmer Bijlsma, Michael Begun and Thomas Kiefer. .“The Imagination of Animals: Rilke, Kafka, and the Philosophy and Literature of Embodied Cognition.” In The Animal Inside: Essays at the Intersections of Philosophical Anthropology and Animal Studies, edited by Geoffrey Dierckxsens, Rudmer Bijlsma, Michael Begun and Thomas Kiefer, 123–46. Lanham, MD: Roman and Littlefield, 2016. Grondin, Jean. “Derrida and the Question of the Animal.” Cités 2, no. 30 (2007): 31–39. Heidegger, Martin. Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1951. Heidegger, Martin. Gesamtausgabe 5, Holzwege. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977. Heidegger, Martin. Gesamtausgabe 7, Vorträge und Aufsätze. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000. Heidegger, Martin. Gesamtausgabe 8, Was heisst Denken? Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2002. Heidegger, Martin. Gesamtausgabe 12, Unterwegs zur Sprache. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1985. Heidegger, Martin. Gesamtausgabe 52, Hölderlins Hymne “Andenken. ” Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1992. Heidegger, Martin. Parmenides. Translated by André Schuwer and Richar Rojcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1967. Heidegger, Martin. Was ist Metaphysik? Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1975. Heidegger, Martin. What Is Called Thinking? Translated by J. Glenn Gray. New York: Harper and Row, 1968. Hölderlin, Friedrich. “Mnemosyne.” In Sämtliche Werke. 6 Bände, Band 2, 203–05. Stuttgart: Insel Verlag, 1953. Howells, Christina. Derrida: Deconstruction from Phenomenology to Ethics. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998. Johnson, Christopher. “Derrida and Technology.” In Derrida’s Legacies: Literature and Philosophy, edited by Simon Glendinning and Robert Eaglestone, 54–65. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. Kearney, Richard. “Dialogue with Jacques Derrida.” In Richard Kearney, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers, 105–25. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. Kearney, Richard. Phenomenology, Critical Theory, Structuralism. Second edition. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994.

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Krell, David F. Derrida and Our Animal Others: Derrida’s Final Seminar, The Beast and the Sovereign. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. Lawler, Leonard. This Is Not Sufficient: An Essay on Animality and Human Nature in Derrida. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Marrati, Paola. Genesis and Trace: Derrida Reading Husserl and Heidegger. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. Martel, James. “The Animal Mirrors: The Human/Animal Divide in Derrida and Deleuze.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 48, no. 3 (September 2015): 175–89. Montaigne, Michel de. Essays. In The Complete Works of Montaigne, Book II. Translated by Donald M. Frame. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957. Norris, Margot. Beasts of the Modern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst and Lawrence. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. Oliver, Kelly. “Elephant Eulogy: The Exorbitant Orb of an Elephant.” In The Animal Question in Deconstruction, edited by Lynn Turner, 89–104. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Phillips, James. “Restoring Place to Aesthetic Experience: Heidegger’s Critique of Rilke.” Critical Horizons 11, no. 3 (2010): 341–58. Rabaté, Jean-Michel. Crimes of the Future: Theory and Its Global Reproduction. New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. Rabaté, Jean-Michel. Les guerres de Jacques Derrida. Montréal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2016. Radick, Gregory. The Simian Tongue: The Long Debate about Animal Language. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Rapaport, Herman. The Later Derrida: Reading the Recent Work. London: Routledge, 2003. Richter, Gerhard. “The Debt of Inheritance Revisited: Heidegger’s Mortgage, Derrida’s Appraisal.” The Oxford Literary Review 37, no. 1 (2015): 67–91. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Werke in drei Bänden, Band I. Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1955. Rohman, Carrie. Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Santer, Eric L. On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Young, Julian. Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

5 To wound the language: Derrida reads Celan1 Miriam Jerade

Poetry: that can mean an Atemwende, a breathturn PAUL CELAN, The Meridian

Celan’s poetry appears in the work of Jacques Derrida from 1984 onward, in the lecture he delivered at the University of Washington in Seattle; an extended version was published as Shibboleth (1986) and then Rams: Uninterrupted Dialogue—Between Two Infinities, the Poem (2003), in memory of Gadamer. In 2004, he published “Poetics and Politics of Witnessing,”2 and finally, in 2008—in the minutes of the seminar he taught in 2001 and 2002, published posthumously as The Beast and the Sovereign— Derrida devoted two sessions to “The Meridian,” the speech given by Celan on receiving the Georg Büchner Prize in 1960. While Derrida and Celan were colleagues at the École Normale Supérieure as of 1964, they didn’t meet until 1968, through Peter Szondi, just two years before Celan took his own life. Many years would pass before Derrida first wrote about Celan’s poetry. Perhaps this was because the translation of Celan’s poetry into French was also slow: André du Bouchet published parts of From Threshold to Threshold between 1955 and 1978, and Jean-Pierre Lefèbvre published a French translation of “Deathfugue” in

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1986 (a work Celan dated 1945 and which appeared in Germany in 1952). Although Derrida read Celan in German, the translations (which he always cited alongside the original German, generally referencing more than one French translation and sometimes also including Joachin Neugroschel’s English translation3) helped him study what was occurring in the language of Celan’s poems. In an interview conducted by Evelyne Grossman for the Revue Europe in 2001, Derrida confesses: “I am far from being sure I can read him in a precise or fair way, but it seems to me he touches [touché] the German language both by respecting the idiomatic spirit of that language and in the sense that he displaces it, in the sense that he leaves upon it a sort of scar, a mark, a wound.”4 Derrida recognized that Celan respected the idiomatic singularity of German, which places greater demands on the translator and confronts him with the limits of the translatable. At the same time, it means that Celan’s poetics possesses an agency in German that Derrida describes as a wound in the language. In this apparent paradox (Celan would respect the singularity of German by creating an idiom) lies the phenomenon of untranslatability, which undergoes an experience of translation, and which Derrida summarizes as follows: “There is, in his poetic German, a source language and a target language, and each poem is a kind of new idiom in which he passes on the inheritance of the German language.”5 Derrida calls this—the capacity of the singular to mark language— the idiom. In French, idiome suggests particularity, following both its Greek etymology (the particularity of style) and its Latin one (a personal language).6 This very particularity or singularity is what resists translation in the idiom. In the same interview, he states: “The idiom is what resists translation, and hence is what seems attached to the singularity of the signifying body of language.”7 Derrida mentions the idiom long before he addresses Celan’s poetry, in a 1967 text on Freud; there, he asserts that dreams contain a purely idiomatic residue that no code can interpret.8 He also discusses the idiom with respect to Rousseau, Ponge, and Artaud, but his final works especially associate with the poetry of Celan. As I see it, this can be attributed to Derrida’s perception of Celan as confronting us with a certain experience of language, one based on the ability of the singular to exercise agency over it. The idiom, as a singular means of possessing agency in language without therefore forming a private vocabulary, entails questioning the relationship between every author and the language he writes in. Celan’s relationship with German was very peculiar, as was Derrida’s with French. Derrida’s story and his relationship with the French language were marked by a colonial reality that demanded the appropriation of a language that always belonged to the metropolis, to “them.”9 As for Celan, German was not the language spoken in his native Czernowitz. In his definitive biography of

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the poet, John Felstiner cites the testimony given by a high school classmate: “We had no natural language. To speak German was something you had to achieve. You could do it but it didn’t come to itself.”10 While the German of Celan’s poetry came from his mother, it was less a mother tongue than a conquered one. Surprisingly, in Shibboleth, Derrida writes about the idiom: “Signed: Celan from a certain place in the German language, which was his property alone.”11 There is a paradox between what belongs to oneself and what is impossible to appropriate, and it reveals, according to Derrida in The Monolingualism of the Other or the Prosthesis of Origin, one of the realities of speaking a language: language reaches us by means of an Other, whose rules and orthography are imposed upon us as law. However, the demand of appropriation that weighs on all speakers of a language (i.e., the demand to submit to its law) is confronted with the idiom—which, by inserting a foreign body into language and marking it, thus disappropriates it. In The Monolingualism of the Other, Derrida describes the idiom as desire, an impulse born of uprootedness, a movement toward the anamnesis that is also a destroyer of norms. At the same time, Derrida sees the idiom as responding to the demand of “invention” in the language, so as to address the other, where its heterology promises a language to come. In the final pages of the aforementioned work, Derrida refers to Celan in discussing the “heterological opening” that allows the other to be addressed: “It can also be translated into the idiom of Celan, the poet-translator who, while writing in the language of the other, and about the Holocaust, while inscribing Babel in the very body of each poem, expressly claimed, signed, and sealed the poetic monolingualism of his work just the same.”12 To Derrida, this “heterological opening” entails the introduction of alterity into language. For an example of this notion in his poetry, we can consult the 1967 poem “Nah, im Aortenbogen”13 from Threadsuns (Fadensonnen), into which he inserts the alterity of Yiddish—untranslatable into German, as it would lose its particularity. In this poem, which speaks of mourning in exile, not only does the poet insert Yiddish and Hebrew (e.g., in the last line: Ziw, jenes Licht (“Ziv, that light”)14), but he also engages in intertextuality with a 1919 Yiddish-language poem by Moshe LeybHalpernde, which was adopted in the ghettos.15 Accordingly, the poem also constitutes a commemorative space of a lost Judeo-German world. Derrida describes this mark on language, this incorporation of a foreign body, as an event in language, an event that leaves a sort of scar. In his interview with Evelyne Grossman, he says: I believe Celan tried to leave a mark, a singular signature that would be a counter-signature to the German language and, at the same time, something that happens to the German language—that comes to pass in both senses of the term: something that approaches the language, that

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reaches it, without appropriating it, without surrendering to it, without delivering itself to it; but also something that enables poetic writing to occur, that is to say, to be an event that marks language.16 The event is singular in its arrival rather than part of a continuity or a future horizon; it irrupts. At the same time, that which irrupts singularly in the present makes a mark from the past—Derrida speaks of a scar—and opens language onto a future. That is, it makes something arrive in language itself, with respect to the idiomatic sense that establishes the singularity of every language—but also with respect to every individual’s agency in and responsibility to language. It is within this temporality that we can understand Derrida’s analysis of the relationship between mourning and the idiom in Celan. Derrida places special emphasis on the fact that Celan dates his poems. Derrida explains these dates in different ways: “Dating comes down to signing”17; “The date is a future anterior”18; “For the ashes the dates are.”19 He recalls Celan’s assertion in The Meridian as a question: “Perhaps one can say that each poem has its own ‘20th of January’?”20 To which he responds: Aber das Gedicht spricht ja! Es bleibt seiner Daten eingedenk, aber—es spricht. Gewiss, es spricht immer nur in seiner eigenen, allereigensten Sache (“But the poem does speak! It stays mindful of its dates, but—it speaks. For sure, it speaks always only on its own, its very own behalf.”)21 Celan invents a word, “allereigensten,” for the singularity expressed by every date: the poem speaks of what is more one’s own than anything else, what belongs to one more than everything. Nonetheless, if Derrida is interested in dates in Celan’s poetry, it is due to the structure linking the general with the singular, with what is most one’s own; in a sense, Derrida views the date as a sign, one that depends on its iteration in order to signify. Derrida also describes the date as metonymy: “The metonymy of the date . . . designates part of an event or a sequence of events in order to recall the whole.”22 Derrida thus reads the poem “As one” (“In Eins”), which begins with “February thirteenth” and concentrates, on the same date and in four languages, events like the electoral triumph of the Frente Popular in Spain (inscribed in the poem with a shibboleth in Spanish: “No pasarán”; the Paris protests, the peuple de Paris; and the cruise ship Aurora, whose crew joined the February Revolution (1917) before launching the October Revolution. Here, the date is both a means of leaving a signature through the idiom and also a shibboleth, a password. Derrida recalls Peter Szondi’s annotations, according to which Celan’s poems are always dated in the clean version of the manuscript but not in the publication. In some cases, as in Szondi’s reading of the poem “Eden”— dated December 22/23, 1967, which coincides with a trip to Berlin they took together—the date enables an interpretation of certain encrypted events.23 One such event is the title itself, “Eden,” referencing the eponymous hotel

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where Luxemburg and Liebknecht—the subjects of a book Celan was reading, on loan from Szondi—spent the last hours before their murder, and which they would pass during their stay in Berlin. However, says Derrida, while these signs are invaluable, they remain supplements to legibility that the poem could do without, as the poem also serves as a crypt; that is, the date operates between secrecy and commemoration. In Shibboleth, Derrida writes: “What is encrypted, dated in the date, is effaced; the date is marked in making itself off; and all the losses, all the beings whom we lament in this mourning, all the griefs are gathered in the poem of a date whose effacement does not await effacement.”24 In Rams: Uninterrupted Dialogue—Between Two Infinities, the Poem, published in 2003 to commemorate Gadamer’s25 death, Derrida discusses the melancholic date in relation to the death of his friend, evoking the French title of The Work of Mourning (2001): Chaque fois unique la fin du monde (“Each time the end of the world”), in which Derrida remembers his dead friends. Each death is like the end of the world: a sole, singular, irreplaceable instance. This sole instance demands that language speak the singularity of loss—which is why the friend’s death calls on the idiom to express, for one thing, the melancholy established in every relationship as a prior future. After all, Derrida would say, one of the two will invariably die before the other. Moreover, the idiom utters the condition of mourning that Derrida takes up from Freud, although it contradicts the idea of overcoming in the grief process: in this condition, one carries the other within, internalizing the dialogue interrupted by death and uninterrupted inside the survivor. In Rams, Derrida quotes the last line of a poem26 included in the book Atemwende (Breathturn): Die Welt ist fort, ich muss dich tragen (“The world is gone, I must carry you”). A line that, as Ginette Michaud says, Derrida would have taught us to learn by heart (par coeur) so as to enable an ethics of reading that would entail recognizing idiomaticity—and, simultaneously, to prove the impossible necessity of translation.27 Derrida will return over and over to this phrase and its idiomaticity—not only to illustrate the survivor’s responsibility (where the world is gone, and even where the poem is entrusted to us as a sole survivor), but also to delve into the concept of “world” and the verb “carry” (tragen) in this poem28. On the one hand, says Derrida, “carry” (tragen) is the language of birth, of the mother who bears her child, carries him. On the other, it is the verb of specters, of the experience of mourning that involves carrying the other within oneself, introjecting him, conveying the other and his world. Celan’s phrase addresses those who have no world, or who have been left bereft of world, as Celan would say in his Bremen speech: “To sketch out reality for myself.” Tragen, then, means the responsibility of protecting the witness’s word, of securing a place for it even when the world has disappeared. In addition to associating the idiom with mourning, Derrida also connects it with testimony. In “Poétique et politique du témoignage,” Derrida discusses

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the singularity of an idiomatic mark, of a poetic experience with testimony: tout témoignage responsable engage une expérience poétique de la langue (“All responsible witnessing engages a poetic experience of language.”)29 In turn, though, the idiom is the poetic invention in language—the only one that can bear witness to it. Derrida will dedicate a reading in “Poétique et politique du témoignage” to a poem in Aschenglorie that ends with the phrase Niemand  /  zeugt für den  /  Zeugen, which Joachim Neugroschel translates as “No one bears witness for the witness.”30 For responsible testimony to exist, the poem must grant the floor to the witness, so that he may speak from the insurmountable singularity of his account. If the witness is to speak in his name, testimony demands an inventive relationship with language. Poetics, in its very occurrence, reveals its untranslatability. The poem is untranslatable because it bears witness to events in language; in this sense, only German can bear witness to the idiomatic wound of a poem by Celan. However, viewing testimony as the political dimension of poetics cannot be generalized as the relationship between the poem and language; rather, it demands that the singularity of each poem be read in an ever-singular reading, in an inventive interpretation. The responsibility of reading, then, is untransferable, and the idiom’s responsibility doesn’t correspond to the poet alone; rather, every individual must be able to promise a language to the future and to the other. As the singular’s possibility of marking language so as to offer it to the other, the idiom, in the event of its poetic creation, leads Derrida to propose a politics of singularity,31 ensuing both from the agency exerted by the singular over language (and, therefore, the responsibility to open it and promise it to the other) and from testimony, in a double sense: that of letting the other speak and that of making language bear witness to the singularity of their encounter. If all nationalist policies somehow entail the demand for appropriating language and its norms, the idiom counters all policies of linguistic hegemony. Sovereign discourse rests, among other things, as Marc Crépon suggested with a neologism, on the “unidentity of language,”32 and on certain dates being commemorated and others forgotten. In this way, Derrida in Shibboleth promotes a politics of singularity that depends on the event of a poetics. The element of alterity in testimony is what links the poem with mourning. The poem addresses the other, bears witness to the other, or bears witness to the other’s time in itself as the origin of temporality. In the present that had been the nucleus of metaphysical destruction, said alterity is now related to the matter of mourning: the other’s time in itself is the survivor’s time, the survivor being he who protects his dead friend’s memory, who carries his voice. Derrida, in discussing the alterity of the “I” in mourning, turns our attention to the poem “The Sluice” (“Die Schleuse”), included in The No One’s-Rose (Die Niemandsrose). Celan wrote this eminently Jewish poem in 1960 during a difficult encounter with Buber in Paris (the philosopher

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of Hassidic tales didn’t understand Celan’s question about the struggle to write in German after everything that happened33); the poem is also dedicated to Nelly Sachs, “sister.”34 Derrida not only explains that this is a poem of mourning, but he also exposes the singular mark of its idiomacity in two untranslatable words associated with Jewish grief: kaddish, which means “saint” in Aramaic and is the name of a prayer for the dead; and yiskor, which means “He will remember” and denotes a commemorative rite. In Shibboleth, Derrida asserts that the poem addresses a “you” and its mourning “to tell you that what has been lost, and without remainder, is the word, a word that opens, like a shibboleth, onto what is most intimate.”35 If it is necessary to carry the poem—even when the world has gone, when a world has been exterminated—it is also necessary to keep, in itself, the poem as a place of memory36: the poem remembers the dead within the singular framework of its idiomacity, and it also seeks words, two words that cannot be translated into German and which no Jew needs to be translated. This poem also evokes grief for the words that are lost and sought—or, better put, the struggle to save words. In his “Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen” (1958), Celan’s first important speech on poetry before a German auditorium, he says of language (never specifically mentioning the German language, though it goes without saying): Reachable, near and not lost, there remained in the midst of the losses this one thing: language. It, the language, remained, not lost, yes in spite of everything. But it had to pass through its own answerless, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech. It passed through and gave back no words for that which happened; yet it passed through this happening. Passed through and could come to light again, “enriched” by all this.37 The idiom allows language to pass through, to traverse, the deadly discourse, the word that survives the world “of those Hasidic tales which Martin Buber has retold for us all in German” at a time when his native Bukovina has disappeared from the maps.38 Thus, this word, which must pass through (a sluice?), must traverse language in order to address someone, an attainable “you,” can also be considered in the sense of the counterword (Gegenwort) Celan will discuss in The Meridian, which functions as a counterviolence before the lack of response, before muteness. In the eighth session of the seminar chronicled in The Beast and the Sovereign, Derrida pauses expressly on Lucile’s cry by the gallows, “Long live the King!”—a suicidal shout in the middle of the French Revolution that Celan, in reading Danton’s Death on the occasion of receiving the Georg Büchner Prize, calls a counterword (Gegenwort):

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After all the words spoken on the rostrum (the scaffold, that is)—what a word! It is the counterword [Es ist das Gegenwort], it is the word that cuts the “string,” the word that no longer bows down before “the bystanders and old war-horses of history.” It is an act of freedom. It is a step.39 It is important to remember that the seminar encompassing Celan’s interpretation was guided by the question of sovereignty. Derrida underscores that Lucile’s “Long live the King!” is not a salute to the monarchy, but rather a salute to the majesty of poetry. The most essential matter here is how this counterword—uttered by someone who is, according to Celan, “blind to art”—is in fact an “act of freedom.” “It is a step.”40 Derrida, without seeking to conduct a hermeneutic analysis of Celan’s text, illustrates three dimensions of this counterword that snaps the thread and removes “Long live the King!” from its political code. Celan writes in The Meridian: …—Here no monarchy and no to be conserved yesterdays are being paid homage to. Homage is being paid to the majesty of the absurd as witness for the presence of the human. This, ladies and gentlemen, has no name fixed once and for all, but I believe that this is . . . poetry.41 I would like to analyze three aspects of poetry, according to Celan, that become the core of Derrida’s reading of The Meridian via this hyperbolic overbid of sovereignty or majesty: (1) the majesty of the absurd, (2) the majesty of the present, and (3) testimony. First, the counterword is associated with the inversion of the meaning that makes poetry “even more majestic” than the king’s own majesty: “This hypermajesty of poetry, beyond or outside the majesty of the absurd, as majesty of Dichtung”42 has a dynamic, a power beyond sovereignty. Derrida summarizes it in the value of presence or the present (Gegenwart)—a presence that, as we will see, is inhabited by the other; it is the witness’s presence traversed by the spectrality of the other’s words. As for the absurd, in addition to denoting “what stands beyond meaning, idea, theme, and even tropes of the rhetoric, beyond all the logic and rhetoric to which one thinks a poetics should bend itself,”43 it bears witness (according to Derrida in the tenth session) to an exit from the human. This exit would be, as The Meridian explains, the realm of art: “is a puppet-like, iambically five-footed.”44 These are the a-human and, more specifically, ominous beings Celan indicates early in his speech: marionettes, automatons, Medusa’s head, the figure of the monkey. Derrida’s seminar analyzes this condition of ominousness (unheimlich) with respect to Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics: Derrida asserts that Heidegger

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abandons Parmenides and takes up Sophocles, emphasizing man’s demonic, deimon nature and translating it as unheimlich. It is astonishing that Derrida does not mention here Heidegger’s seminar on Hölderlin’s Hymn Der Ister. Heidegger discusses Hölderlin’s translation of Antigone in that seminar and exactly suggests unheimlich for “to deimon.”45 In that seminar, Heidegger makes strong assertions about the danger of losing the spirit of the German language and its connection to ancient Greek and therefore to the origin of philosophy, adopting American English for technical purposes. According to Marc Crépon, Derrida’s reading of Celan confronts it without mentioning Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin; the question to be asked is why he does not mention it. Derrida’s notion of idiom opposes Heidegger’s affirmations on the German language that are also presented in the necessity of translation, but a translation in order to recover the spirit of the language. Going back to Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics, the essence of man is the expropriation of all identifications, and the superlative designating him as the most unheimlich crowns the Dasein with a certain sovereignty. Derrida focuses particularly on these two pairings: sovereignty and superlatively unheimlich; foreigner and strangeness. Ominousness can be attributed to the idiom as what is terribly unsettling about strangeness in what-is-one’s-own, in the intimate realm, for Büchner, according to Celan, art is etwas Unheimliches; art is found in that exit from the human, where Medusa’s head appears “to capture the natural as natural through art.”46 Likewise, automatons and marionettes (the latter found both in art and in homes) exist between life and death. Derrida’s reading includes a reflection on life—not life as substance, he explains, but life as an attribute of the living being who distinguishes the present but is traversed by the strangeness of death. The marionette is seen as a fetish, a simulacrum, a prosthesis; it draws the line between life and death, art and nature. Derrida also associates it with breath as the first and last sign of life, which is among Celan’s definitions of poetry in The Meridian: Dichtung: das kann eine Atemwende bedeuten (“Poetry: that can mean an Atemwende, a breathturn”).47 Regarding the majesty of the present, Derrida takes up, for one thing, Husserl’s living present (lebendige Gegenwart): not an essence or substance of life, but rather the attribute of the living that designates the present, the beingless living, in the majesty of the present. For another, Celan discusses the present, and even the present of the poem, as one’s own language (Sprache eines Einzelnen): “Then the poem is—even more clearly than previously—one person’s language become-shape, and, according to its essence, presentness and presence.”48 This last phrase already illustrates the relationship between idiomaticity and singularity. Celan specifies something essential to the structure of the poem’s present: in its here-and-now, it must allow the other, and the other’s time, to speak. Here Derrida complicates

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the phrase in French with an ambiguous possessive: “giving the other it’s time” (À l’autre, il doit laisser ou donner son temps).49 Derrida’s reading is encoded in this grammatical misunderstanding, as the majesty of the present is traversed by the other, by the other’s time—but also by the witnessing entailed by offering time to the other. Derrida writes that the poem is a word of “more than one”50 (233), recalling the law of the idiom as more than one in the language. Yet it is also the law of witnessing: the other’s time that, according to Derrida, becomes a countersignature of the witness’s word, encoded in the untranslatable. On the one hand, the poem is one’s own language, and according to LacoueLabarthe, this solitude constitutes the singularity of the poem.51 On the other hand, according to Derrida, ceasing to speak to the other is the condition of the event. In this sense, the solitude of presence is traversed by the other; it turns toward the other in the secret of the encounter (Geheimnis der Begegnung). Toward the end of The Meridian, Celan mentions the word “encounter” ten times: the secret of the encounter is what makes the poem, both in its creation and in its signature. Deep down, there are two encounters: the encounter with the poem and the encounter with the other, which means that the poem never presents itself. This alterity in time makes the poem a gift to the other or a gift from the other who invests his breath (Atemwende). The poem speaks to and with the other; it speaks on a date about a date. And in solitude, it bears witness to the other’s time in itself as the origin of temporality. This alterity in the present, which had been the thematic nucleus of metaphysical destruction, returns to the question of mourning: the other’s time in itself is that of the survivor, he who stores the memory and the voice of his dead friend, unable to integrate him into the work of grief. Derrida returns to both Lenz’s and Celan’s “20th of January” in resuming the poem’s testimony, its here-and-now, in the date-memory that is the poem itself—the iteration of which can also function as counterviolence in the face of oblivion. However, toward the end of the tenth session of The Beast and the Sovereign, Derrida highlights another figure—not the counterword of Lucile’s “Long live the King!,” but Büchner’s as a sharp intake of breath. Celan writes, Lenz—or rather Büchner—has here gone a step further than Lucile. His “Long live the king” is no longer a word [Sein “Es lebe der König” ist kein Wort mehr], it is a terrifying silence [Es ist ein furchtbares Verstummen]. It takes away his—and our—breath and word. [es verschlägt ihm—und auch uns—den Atem und das Wort]52 We must ask how the intake of breath (silence) can respond to the violence inflicted by discursive authority while also making room for alterity to speak

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and bear idiomatic witness to this encounter. In “Poétique et politique du témoignage,” Derrida writes: Bearing witness is not through and through and necessarily discursive. It is sometimes silent. It has to engage something of the body, which has no right to speak. We should thus not say, or believe, that bearing witness is entirely discursive, through and through a matter of language.53 Nonetheless, that which lacks the right to speak may be assimilated into the harshest violence. In a sense, sovereignty means (among other things) orchestrating that imposition. And even so, granting language to something in the body means opening oneself to listening to the greatest singularity: it means granting it the right to words of its own. In this way, I believe that Derrida drew from Celan to advance a politics of singularity in conceiving the idiom as a counterword—or, as he writes in The Beast and the Sovereign: la signature unique d’un poème unique (“the unique signature of a unique poem”).54 A counterword, however, that is also a revolution in life itself, as he says in concluding the tenth session of the seminar: “to try to think a revolution in the revolution, a revolution in the very life of time, in the life of the living present.”55 The only means of responding to violence may be a counterword capable of investing its breath and halting the discourse of sovereignty in order to let the other speak: the living other, the other’s living present.

Notes 1 An earlier and longer version of this text was published in Spanish: Jerade, “Herir la lengua: Por una de la política singularidad—Derrida, lector de Celan.” Revista Aisthesis 57 (2015): 73–92. This essay was translated by Robin Myers. 2 Previously published in 2000 in English-language translation. 3 And as Marc Crépon has discussed, only on one occasion, with respect to the poem “Aschenglorie,” does Derrida dare to venture his own translation, which he introduces with the phrase “On pourrait encore traduire.” See Marc Crépon, “Traduire, Témoigner, Survivre,” Rue Descartes 52, no. 2 (2006): 27–38. 4 Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 99–100. 5 Ibid, 100. 6 “Idiome,” Centre Nationale de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales, accessed October 23, 2013. http://www.cnrtl.fr/etymologie/idiome. 7 Derrida, Sovereignties in Question, 102.

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8 In “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” published in Writing and Difference, Derrida associates language with the psychic writing that refuses to be read in any code, asserting: “But in its operations, lexicon, and syntax a purely idiomatic residue is irreducible and is made to bear the burden of interpretation in the communication between unconsciousness’s. The dreamer invents his own grammar.” Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978), 262. 9 See Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other or the Prothesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1998). 10 John Felstiner, Paul Celan. Poet, Survivor, Jew (New Heaven: Yale University Press, 1995), 6. 11 Derrida, Sovereignties in Question, 7. 12 Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, 69. 13 NAH, IM AORTENBOGEN,/ im Hellblut:/das Hellwort.//Mutter Rahel/ weint nicht mehr/Rübergetragen/alles Geweinte.//Still, in den Kranzarterien,/ unumschnürt:/Ziw, jenes Licht. 14 According to Felstiner, Celan takes the word “Ziw” from a book by G. Scholem; the latter used Ziw to designate a luminous, supernatural splendor with respect to the Shejina. Felstiner stresses that Ziw appears in a morning prayer and in a song for the night of Shabbat, Yedid Nefesh, which Celan may have recalled. See Fesltiner, Paul Celan, 330, 434. 15 See Nitzan Lebovic, “Near the End: Celan, between Scholem and Heidegger,” German Quarterly 83, no. 4 (2010): 465–84. 16 Derrida, Sovereignties in Question, 99. Emphasis in the original. 17 Ibid, 13. 18 Ibid, 25. 19 Ibid, 37. 20 Paul Celan, The Meridian Final Version—Drafts—Materials, ed. Bernhard Böschenstein and Heno Schmull. Trans. Pierre Joris (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2011), 8. It is important to mention that the “20th of January” refers to Büchner’s Lenz, but also to the day of the Wannsee Conference, in 1942, where the “final solution” was determined. 21 Celan, The Meridian, 8. 22 Derrida, Sovereignties in Question, 20. 23 See Peter Szondi, Celan Studies (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003), 83–92. 24 Derrida, Sovereignties in Question, 37. 25 While Derrida paid homage to Gadamer, a long argument ensued between them; Gadamer’s notion of language as Sprachlichkeit, as common ground, ran contrary to the Derridian notion of the idiom. Denis Thouard recently published a book that criticizes the readings undertaken by philosophers of Celan, and recognizes that Derrida’s reading includes the project of eradicating the hermeneutic principle. However, according to Thouard,

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Derrida would ultimately use Celan’s poetry to counteract the logos. In my opinion, this reading is unjust: Derrida reads Celan’s poetry with great care, focusing on each text in its singularity, and never denies the possibility of other interpretations. See Denis Thouard, Pourquoi Ce Poète? Le Celan Des Philosophes (Paris: Le Seuil, 2016). 26 The poem begins with the phrase GROSSE, GLÜHENDE WÖLBUNG. 27 Ginette Michaud, Derrida, Celan. Juste Le Poème, Peut-être (Paris: Hermann, 2017), 9. 28 Ginette Michaud quotes a work of Ursula Sarrazin on the correlation of Celan’s verse with a verse of Hölderlin in Die Titanen “Denn keiner trägt das Leben allein” and Heine’s strophe “Ich unglückselger Atlas! Eine Welt,/ Die ganze Welt der Schmerzen, muss ich tragen,/ Ich trage Unterträgliches, und brechen/ Will mir das Herz im Liebe.” See note 77, p. 68. 29 Jacques Derrida, “‘Poétique et Politique Du Témoignage,’” in Cahier de L’Herne: Jacques Derrida, ed. Ginette Michaud and Marie-Louise Mallet (Paris: L’Herne, 2004), 521. 30 Derrida, “‘Poétique et Politique Du Témoignage,’” 224–25. Derrida quotes Jean-Pierre Lefèbvre’s translation, “Personne ne témoigne pour le témoin,” as well as André du Bouchet’s translation, “Nul ne témoigne pour le témoin.” 31 It is my understanding that Samuel Weber is working on a book about the politics of singularity. 32 Crépon, “Ce Qu’on Demande Aux Langues (autour Du Monolinguisme de L’autre),” 29. 33 According to Felstiner’s account. See Fesltiner, Paul Celan, 161. 34 For more on the genealogy of “The Sluice,” see ibid, 161–63. 35 Derrida, Sovereignties in Question, 52. 36 For more on memory in Celan’s poetry, I will take the liberty of directing the reader to my article “Memoria Y Voces. Paul Celan,” Acta Poética 27, no. 2 (2006): 151–66. 37 Felstiner, Paul Celan, 113–14. 38 Ibid, 114. 39 Celan, The Meridian, 3. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid, 3–4. 42 Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. 1, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009), 231. 43 Ibid, 230. 44 Celan, The Meridian, 2. 45 There is an English translation of this seminar by William McNeil and Julia Davies.

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46 Celan, The Meridian, 5. Paul Celan, Der Meridian und andere Prosa (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 52. 47 Ibid, 7. 48 Ibid, 9. 49 Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 234. 50 Ibid, 233. 51 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience, trans. Andrea Tarnowski (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999), 43. 52 Celan, The Meridian, 7. 53 Derrida, Sovereignties in Question, 77. The original text in French reads: “Le témoignage n'est pas de part en part et nécessairement discursif. Il est parfois silencieux. Il doit engager quelque chose du corps qui n'a pas droit à la parole. On ne doit donc pas dire, ou croire, que le témoignage est tout entier d'ordre discursif, de part en part langagier.” Le Cahier de L’Herne, 528. 54 Jacques Derrida, Séminaire La Bête et Le Souverain. Volume I (2001-2002), ed. Ginette Michaud, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Michel Lisse (Paris: Galilée, 2008), 302. Derrida, Sovereignties in Question, 227. 55 Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 273.

Works cited Celan, Paul. The Meridian Final Version—Drafts—Materials. Edited by Bernhard Böschenstein and Heno Schmull. Translated by Pierre Joris. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2011. Crépon, Marc. “Ce Qu’on Demande Aux Langues (autour Du Monolinguisme de L’autre).” Raisons Politiques 2, no. 2 (2001): 27–40. Crépon, Marc. Monolingualism of the Other or the Prothesis of Origin. Translated by Patrick Mensah. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1998. Crépon, Marc. “‘Poétique et Politique Du Témoignage.’” In Cahier de L’Herne: Jacques Derrida, edited by Ginette Michaud and Marie-Louise Mallet, 521–40. Paris: L’Herne, 2004. Crépon, Marc. Séminaire La Bête et Le Souverain. Volume I (2001-2002). Edited by Ginette Michaud, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Michel Lisse. Paris: Galilée, 2008. Crépon, Marc. Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. Crépon, Marc. “Traduire, Témoigner, Survivre.” Rue Descartes 52, no. 2 (2006): 27–38. Crépon, Marc. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. London: Routledge, 1978. Derrida, Jacques. The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. 1. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009.

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Felstiner, John. Paul Celan. Poet, Survivor, Jew. New Heaven: Yale University Press, 1995. Jerade, Miriam. “Memoria Y Voces. Paul Celan.” Acta Poética 27, no. 2 (2006): 151–66. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. Poetry as Experience. Translated by Andrea Tarnowski. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999. Lebovic, Nitzan. “Near the End: Celan, between Scholem and Heidegger.” German Quarterly 83, no. 4 (2010): 465–84. Michaud, Ginette. Derrida, Celan. Juste Le Poème, Peut-être. Paris: Hermann, 2017. Szondi, Peter. Celan Studies. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003. Thouard, Denis. Pourquoi Ce Poète? Le Celan Des Philosophes. Paris: Le Seuil, 2016.

PART TWO

Engaging with the poetics of canonical modernism

6 Derrida’s Joyce Sam Slote

By the time, in the early 1980s, when Derrida wrote his first essay devoted primarily to Joyce, it was, as he says at the outset, “very late, it is always too late with Joyce.”1 He begins with a statement of belatedness, which is perhaps the prevailing characteristic of the category of the Joycean for Derrida. And yet, Joyce had been with Derrida right from the start as he was on board for a remarkable cameo in Derrida’s first publication: his (lengthy) introduction to Husserl’s (brief) essay Origin of Geometry, where he is apparently cast as the alternative to Husserl’s approach to language. Indeed, Joyce really was something of an alternative to Husserl for Derrida, at least for a time, early in his career. He admitted to Jean-Michel Rabaté that during his year at Harvard in 1956–57, “he used Joyce to relieve the tedium and the mental cramp caused by too many pages of Husserl at one go.”2 Joyce is the refreshing flip side of the rigeurs of philosophy. Within the context of Derrida’s earliest writings, the name “Joyce” can almost be read as a metonym for the literary in its role as that which outwits (even if only in potentia) the metaphysical machinations and determinations of philosophy and other such totalizing disciplines. As Rabaté notes, for Derrida, “Joyce comes to allegorize writing as that which obstinately resists philosophy.”3 So, a certain weight gets placed on Joyce; a perhaps-unbearable weight for any one writer to assume. In Derrida’s introduction to Husserl’s essay, he posits Joyce in terms of a choice between two possible endeavors in responding to a “radical equivocity”: One would resemble that of James Joyce: to repeat and take responsibility for all equivocalization itself, utilizing a language that could equalize

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the greatest possible synchrony with the greatest potential for buried, accumulated, and interwoven intentions within each linguistic atom, each vocable, each word, each simple proposition, in all worldly cultures and their most ingenious forms (mythology, religion, sciences, arts, literature, politics, philosophy, and so forth). And, like Joyce, this endeavor would try to make the structural unity of all empirical culture appear in the generalized equivocation of a writing that, no longer translating one language into another on the basis of their common cores of sense, circulates throughout all languages at once, accumulates their energies, actualizes their most secret consonances, discloses their furthermost common horizons, cultivates their associative syntheses instead of avoiding them, and rediscovers the poetic value of passivity. In short, rather than put it out of play with quotation marks, rather than “reduce” it, this writing resolutely settles itself within the labyrinthian field of culture “bound” by its own equivocations, in order to travel through and explore the vastest possible historical distance that is now at all possible. The other endeavour is Husserl’s: to reduce or impoverish empirical language methodically to the point where its univocal and translatable elements are actually transparent, in order to reach back and grasp again at its pure source a historicity or traditionality that no de facto historical totality will yield of itself.4 The clou of the distinction between Joyce and Husserl involves translation. Joycean equivocation does not translate one language into another “on the basis of their common cores of sense.” That is, unlike Husserl, Joyce does not presume language to be transparent and, as such, allow for a flawless interlinguistic transposition of meaning. Instead, there is an excess to the mediating facet of language, of languages, that Joyce exploits. Rather than resist this excess, Derrida, likewise, indulges in it. There is clearly a performative aspect to Derrida’s consideration of Joyce: Derrida characterizes Joyce’s exuberant multidimensional comprehensiveness in a sentence that is itself exuberant, multidimensional and comprehensive, or at least seemingly so.5 It is as if Derrida is trying to himself “repeat and take responsibility for all equivocalization itself,” all equivocalization itself, including Joyce’s. A small caveat needs to be made. Derrida is not quite positing Joyce as the alternative to the Husserlian endeavor, rather, he is saying that the alternative “would resemble that of James Joyce” (ressemblerait à celle de J. Joyce). That is, Joyce stands as the closest proximate example of some hypothetical alternative. Indeed, perhaps the alternative Derrida is proposing is not Joyce as such, but rather that which repeats and takes responsibility for the Joycean project, which is to say, Derrida himself. That is, in holding up Joyce as being something like the alternative in a passage replete with Joycean flourish, Derrida is covertly signaling himself

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as the actual alternative. As Hélène Cixous remarked during a roundtable discussion on Joyce and Derrida at the 2008 Joyce Symposium in Tours, Derrida is trying to “out-Joyce” Joyce. Despite this suggestive start, that is, a start that suggests, perhaps even promises further Joycean esquisses, Joyce remained almost entirely unmentioned by Derrida in his subsequent works, with just a few exceptions.6 But, beyond these few, specific citations, the idea of a Joycean alternative retains a certain force within Derrida’s early writings even when Joyce himself goes unmentioned. For example, Derrida reprises this idea of a “choice of two endeavors”7 in the over-anthologized essay “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourses of the Human Sciences”: There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of play. The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering, a truth or an origin which escapes play and the order of the sign, and which lives the necessity of interpretation like an exile. The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms play and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name of man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology—in other words, throughout his entire history—has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of play.8 Here, that which previously had been likened to Joyce is now the more general and ephemeral play, that which escapes and resists the pernicious structuralizing genre of metaphysics. And, conversely, Husserl has aggrandized into all of metaphysics. “Joyce,” or a “Joyce function,” has become general all over, all over Derrida’s works from this phase of his career, as if the errant Joycean style were a role model for deconstruction. As Derrida writes in his appraisal of his past engagements with Joyce in “Two Words for Joyce,” “every time I write, and even in academic things, Joyce’s ghost is always coming on board.”9 And so, in 1982, as part of the commemoration of Joyce’s centennial in Paris,10 Derrida, finally, belatedly, engages with Joyce directly in “Two Words for Joyce,” the essay that announces itself at the outset as being belated. Derrida uses the talk to criticize the recently published translation of Finnegans Wake into French by Philippe Lavergne, a translation which he finds unsatisfactory because it reduces and impoverishes Finnegans Wake into something like a standard French and, in so doing, eliminates the Babelian strife that characterizes the Wake’s language.11 In other words, Lavergne’s translation has a Husserlian quality in that it tries to render the Wake into French “to the point where its univocal and translatable elements are actually transparent.”12 The talk also introduces an element of hesitation and resistance that was not overtly signaled in Derrida’s earlier (and briefer) engagements with

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Joyce. “Two Words for Joyce” is an essay of qualification, an essay of the and yet: “And yet, I’m not sure I love Joyce.”13 In resenting Joyce, Derrida has come to resent the Joyce within himself, that is, the pretense to control and mastery that always lurked on the edges of his own earlier writings. Derrida’s newfound ambivalence toward Joyce perhaps matches his ambivalence toward literature itself: an ambivalence regarding the egoism and mastery that is perhaps requisite in challenging metaphysics. To tease out this “and yet,” there is another odd moment in “Two Words for Joyce” when Derrida recapitulates his earlier argument that Joyce is (something like) the alternative to Husserl. He reprises and abbreviates that lengthy paragraph from his introduction to Husserl’s Essay, in places verbatim, yet with some perhaps nontrivial changes: The other great paradigm would be the Joyce of Finnegans Wake. He repeats and mobilizes and babelizes the asymptotic totality of the equivocal. He makes this his theme and his operation. He tries to bring to the surface, with the greatest possible synchrony, at top speed, the greatest power of the meanings buried in each syllabic fragment, subjecting each atom of writing to fission in order to overload its unconscious with the whole memory of man: mythologies, religions, philosophies, sciences, psychoanalysis, literatures. And the operation deconstructs the hierarchy which, in one sense or another, subordinates these latter categories to one or another of them. This generalized equivocality does not translate one language into another on the basis of common nuclei of meaning.14 Derrida is now less equivocal about Joyce’s status as an alternative to Husserl; here it is not simply a case that the alternative would resemble Joyce’s work, rather, now, the alternative would be the Joyce of Finnegans Wake (ce serait le Joyce de Finnegans Wake). But the relative increased certainty of positing Joyce as the alternative to Husserl is complemented by an increased uncertainty as to the Joycean commitment to equivocation. Perhaps more significantly, Derrida omits entirely what seems to be a key phrase from the earlier essay: that in circulating throughout all languages at once, Joyce now no longer “rediscovers the poetic value of passivity.”15 This elision in Derrida’s recapitulation, this undiscovery of the poetic value of passivity, remarks a telling moment in Derrida’s (re-)appraisal of Joyce. Derrida now proposes Joycean equivocation as something less of an antithesis to totality and totalization. In effect, for Derrida there was always a second Joyce, or second Joyce function, lurking within the first, the first being that which resists totality in favor of equivocation. This second Joyce is already indicated when Derrida says, in the Husserl introduction, that the alternative to the Husserlian endeavor would “take responsibility for all equivocalization.”16 The Joycean project assumes a certain potency and perhaps even mastery

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in its act of metaphysical resistance. In “Two Words for Joyce,” Derrida calls this mastery Joyce’s “hypermnesia which indebts you in advance” by compelling the reader “to inhabit a memory greater than all your finite recall can gather up, in a single instant or a single vocable, of cultures, languages, mythologies, religions, philosophies, sciences, histories of spirit or of literatures.”17 This potential contradiction between the playful Joyce and the hypermnesic Joyce is analogous to what Cixous identified as Joyce’s “art of replacement,” that is, ultimately, Joyce replaces God’s creation with his own, his own artistic puissance: Joyce is attempting to set up a vision of his own, ex-centric as far as the Creation is concerned, a world which can escape from the Absolute which rules the world God has created. Everything which usually constitutes or contributes to the traps and net in which God holds the world and the mind captive, subjected to his Presence and Omnipotence, is endangered by Joyce’s art.18 This leads to the paradox of Joyce’s egoism: Joyce, the logodædalus challenging ontotheology, replacing the one with the other. Joyce has become both omnipresent yet “like the God of the creation .  .  . invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”19 In this, Joyce is the holy trinity of structure, sign and play, equivocation and totality. Leo Bersani, likewise, sees that Joyce’s rampant, polymorphous citation and repetition of all cultural forms is ultimately, only, an egoistic project: “Ulysses indulges massively in quotation .  .  . but quoting in Joyce is the opposite of self-effacement, it is an act of appropriation, one which can be performed without Joyce’s voice ever being heard.”20 Or, as Derrida says, “In the simulacrum of this forgery, in the ruse of the invented word, the greatest possible memory is stamped and smelted.”21 If Derrida is trying to out-Joyce Joyce, then Joyce is trying to—at least according to Bersani, Cixous and Derrida—out-God God. And so, in this way, the elision of the line about the poetic value of passivity is an indication of this second Joyce function, the one that tends toward egoistic, deistic totality. This is the aspect of Joyce where the exuberance of resistance becomes the extravagance of mastery and domination, the hypermnesic Joyce that cannot be mastered, that cannot be calculated or adjudicated. These two Joyce functions, asymmetrical, intertwine: Finnegans Wake is a little, a little what?, a little son, a very little grandson of Western culture in its circular, encyclopedic, Ulyssean and more than Ulyssean totality. And then it is, simultaneously, much bigger than even this odyssey. Finnegans Wake comprehends it, and this prevents it, dragging it outside itself in an entirely singular adventure, from closing in on itself and on this event. What is called writing is the paradox of such a topology.22

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In “Two Words for Joyce,” Derrida thematizes the double bind in Joyce between egoism and equivocity in terms of how the reader—rather the professional reader, the critic—situates themselves in terms of the hypermnesic Joycean corpus, the famous “joyceware”23 needed to decode Joyce’s wares. He returns to this idea more forcefully in his second essay on Joyce, “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce,” which was originally delivered as a plenary address at the 1984 Joyce Symposium in Frankfurt am Main, that is, directly to the very specialists who he is questioning. This is where the intimidation lies: the Joycean experts are the representatives as well as the effects of the most powerful project to program over centuries the totality of research in the onto-logicoencyclopedic field—while commemorating his own signature. A Joyce scholar by right disposes of the totality of competences in the encyclopedic field of the universitas. He or she has the mastery over the computer of all memory, plays with the entire archive of culture—at least the socalled Western culture and of what within it returns to itself according to the Ulyssean circle of the encyclopedia; and this is why one can always dream at least of writing on Joyce and not in Joyce, from the phantasm of some Far-East capital, without in my case harboring much illusion on this subject.24 Joycean hypermnesia is so excessive that no reader, no community of readers, can ever presume to claim the requisite competence to read the text. “Nothing transcends this hyperbolic competence”25; Joyce always outwits his readers, Derrida included, even when, and perhaps especially when Derrida is trying to imitate and take (over) responsibility for all equivocalization itself. Derrida writes that to read and write about Joyce is “to be in his memory, to inhabit a memory henceforth greater than all your finite recall can gather up.”26 In effect, this is claiming that Joycean hypermnesia preempts criticism because Joyce has, in advance, preprogrammed and predicted it. That is, Joyce’s art of replacement is futural as well: he doesn’t just replace what has been, but he also replaces what will be precisely because the work’s reception and criticism lies enmeshed within the work itself. Paradoxical logic of this relationship between two unequal texts, two programs or two literary “softwares.” Whatever the difference between them, to the point of incommensurability, the “second” text, the one which, fatally, refers to the other, quotes it, exploits it, parasites it and deciphers it, is no doubt the minute parcel detached from the other, the offspring, the metonymic dwarf, the jester of the great anterior text which would have declared war on it in tongues.27

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And so, Derrida’s imitation of Joyce, his taking up of a Joyce function (or two) was inevitable.28 The Joycean text—in both of its functions— is promiscuously intertextual, feasting upon itself, feasting upon “all languages at once, . . . their energies, . . . their most secret consonances.” Indeed, the aspect of Joyce that might be the most relevant for Derrida is Joyce’s translational intertextuality, which Bersani construes solely as a (re-) affirmation of Joyce’s egoism. And yet, perhaps there can be more to it than that. As an example of this translational intertextuality, Joyce’s story “The Dead” ends with an indifferent blanket of snow, “Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. . . . His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”29 The line about snow being general comes, as it says, from the newspapers, as cited by Mary Jane Morkan earlier in the story, “I read this morning in the newspapers that snow is general all over Ireland.”30 And, indeed, the phrase “snow is general” was a standard formula at the time in weather reports; for example, “Reports from all parts of the country show that wintry weather and snow are general.”31 Joyce takes a quotidian phrase and, through citation and recontextualization, gives it a certain poetic charge and force. For those unfamiliar with this phrase’s provenance, it can certainly seem as if it were entirely of Joyce’s invention. Joyce’s invention, however, does not lie within creating the sentence but rather in its redeployment, as he writes in Finnegans Wake, “stolentelling.”32 Joyce even described himself as a “scissors and paste man” in a letter from 1931 to his friend George Antheil.33 A more sophisticated example can be found in the “Cyclops” episode of Ulysses when the Citizen reads from a skit in the nationalist the United Irishman about an African potentate visiting the United Kingdom: —A delegation of the chief cotton magnates of Manchester was presented yesterday to His Majesty the Alaki of Abeakuta by Gold Stick in Waiting, Lord Walkup of Walkup on Eggs, to tender to His Majesty the heartfelt thanks of British traders for the facilities afforded them in his dominions. The delegation partook of luncheon at the conclusion of which the dusky potentate, in the course of a happy speech, freely translated by the British chaplain, the reverend Ananias Praisegod Barebones, tendered his best thanks to Massa Walkup and emphasised the cordial relations existing between Abeakuta and the British empire, stating that he treasured as one of his dearest possessions an illuminated bible, the volume of the word of God and the secret of England’s greatness, graciously presented to him by the white chief woman, the great squaw Victoria, with a personal dedication from the august hand of the Royal Donor. The Alaki then drank a lovingcup of firstshot usquebaugh to the toast Black and White from the skull of his immediate predecessor in the

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dynasty Kakachakachak, surnamed Forty Warts, after which he visited the chief factory of Cottonopolis and signed his mark in the visitors’ book, subsequently executing a charming old Abeakutic wardance, in the course of which he swallowed several knives and forks, amid hilarious applause from the girl hands.34 The Alake (leader) of the western Nigerian province of Abeokuta visited England in May and June 1904, during which time he had an audience with Edward VII. Also during his visit, the Alake also spoke at a reception given by the committee of the Church Missionary Society, where he remarked that Queen Victoria had sent a Bible to his father some years before. While the United Irishman did run parodic skits, this one derives from the London Times’s reportage of this speech, which Joyce then elaborated and embellished into something a little different. In this way, Joyce is, as John Nash states, molding “the Times into its direct opposite, a humorous and anti-imperial newspaper.”35 This implies that Joyce is being polemic in this passage, which he is, but in perhaps a more oblique manner than Nash suggests. There is more to Joyce’s reworking of his source material than simply shifting the ideological valence to its seeming contrary. The Times’s report reads: The Alake spoke at some length, and at the close his secretary informed the committee of the tenor of his remarks. He said it was a red letter day in his life to meet the committee, for the history if Abeokuta was closely bound up with that of the C. M. S. His father, who was the Alake nearly 60 years ago, gave the land on which the church in the Ake township of Abeokuta was built, and he had had the honour of laying the foundationstone of the present church, built as a memorial of the missionaries Townsend and Wood. In Townsend’s time his father had sent a letter to Queen Victoria, and through Lord Chichester the Queen had sent him back two bound volumes of the Word of God, saying that that book was the secret of England’s greatness.36 The parodied version hews to the source text while adding in details that emphasize English ridiculousness, such as the following: “Gold Stick in Waiting, Lord Walkup of Walkup on Eggs” (the office is real, the Captain and Gold Stick of His Majesty’s Body Guard; Lord Walkup is, sadly, not); the “reverend Ananias Praisegod Barebones” (whose name comes from Praisegod Barebones, an English millenarian preacher and member of Cromwell’s 1653 Parliament); and the nickname for Manchester, Cottonopolis. Furthermore, the fact that the gift—to which so much value is accorded—is a Bible emphasizes the religious divide that pervades Irish nationalism since Protestantism derives from a veneration of the Bible whereas Catholicism privileges the church over the Bible. The characterization of the Alake incorporates various racist tropes, such as that whole business

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with the “wardance.” However, two of the terms used derive from different racist contexts, the use of the honorific “Massa,” which is used in racist depictions of African-American speech, but not African, and “squaw” is typically applied by Indians to white women.37 The racism is both endemic and generic. These modifications displace the dry, pro-Imperial reportage of the Times into an anti-Imperial lampoon that condescends to both colonizer and colonized alike. Joyce thus effects a multiangled, prismatic parody, both of British religious and of imperial colonization, but also of the nativist Irish nationalists, such as Griffith’s United Irishman. Even though “Cyclops” is a multiperspectival episode—shifting between the nameless one’s pub-tale narration and the various intruding burlesques—this one individual passage alone—the Citizen’s recitation from the paper—is itself multiperspectival. Furthermore, this is presented in a nested manner: the Times’s coverage is parodied through a parody of the United Irishman, which is itself read aloud by the Citizen within the action of “Cyclops”—which is an episode with a complex narrative structure. At even a basic level, the parody is a parody of a parody. Joyce’s intertextuality works as a kind of multimodal translation: different fragments transferred and recontextualized variously, multiply. As Fritz Senn has it, “Everything Joyce wrote has to do with translation, is transferential.”38 Joyce’s art of replacement is, at root, an art of translation, specifically a multiperspectival translation. Likewise, Derridean close reading is not entirely unlike this kind of prismatic, multiperspectival translation. To take a particularly complex example, in the left-hand column of Glas Derrida performs a minute and sustained close reading of Hegel that combines overt quotation with paraphrase and analysis (and this is not even to take into account the complementary right-hand column or the various interruptions styled as “tattoos”). At the point in the text I wish to discuss, Derrida is discussing Bernard Bourgeois’s reading of Hegel along with his own reading of Hegel’s reading, in “The Spirit of Christianity,” of the idea of consubstantiality in the Gospel of John and how that is a reworking (or, of you will, “re-reading”) of Jewish concepts of filiation. So, there are already various orders of nested and interlaced readings here: Nothing more Hegelian. But nothing less Hegelian: in distinguishing the old from the young, one sometimes dissembles the systematic chain of “first” texts; and above all one applies a dissociating and formal analysis, the viewpoint of the understanding in a narration that risks missing the living unity of the discourse; how does one distinguish philosophically a before from an after, if the circularity of the movement makes the beginning the end of the end? And reciprocally? The Hegelian tree is also turned over; the old Hegel is the young Hegel’s father only in order to have been his son, his great-grandson. The risk, then, is the Jewish reading.39

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This is, obviously, a very dense passage and I will not be able to tease out all that is relevant and interesting (such as the way this passage comments upon its complementary, reciprocal column on the right and the circularity of the text(s) of Glas). In these two paragraphs, Derrida is riffing off the following from Hegel’s arboreal account of consubstantiality in “The Spirit of Christianity,” the problem of how the divine translates into the human: A tree which has three branches makes up with them one tree; but every “son” of the tree, every branch (and also its other “children,” leaves and branches) is itself a tree. The fibers bringing sap to the branch from the stem are of the same nature as the roots. If a [cutting from certain types of] tree is set in the ground upside down it will put forth leaves out if the roots in the air, and the boughs will root themselves in the ground. And it is just as true to say that there is only one tree here as to say that there are three. This unity of essence between father and son in the Godhead was discovered even by the Jews in relation to God which Jesus ascribed to himself (John v. 18): “He makes himself equal with God in that he calls God his father.” To the Jewish principle of God’s domination Jesus could oppose the needs of man . . ., but even this he could do only in general terms.40 Hegel is reading the Gospel of John—elaborating upon the idea of homoousion—and proposes a metaphor not unlike St Patrick’s use of the shamrock to explain the Trinity; “Clever idea Saint Patrick the shamrock,”41 as Bloom thinks in Ulysses. But this triune plant is itself productive and can, once grafted, sprout further trinities. Hegel’s reading of John itself sprouts into Derrida’s, which paraphrases and re-grafts the “Hegelian tree.” Where Hegel puts the “son” of the tree within quotes, Derrida enquotes the father, “the first,” in such a way as to perform the generational circularity that he (both Derrida and Hegel, albeit in different vectors) is describing. With this inversion of child and parent, if God has a son, then God must have already been, somehow, human. As Buck Mulligan says of Stephen Dedalus’s (eccentric) theory of Hamlet, “He proves by algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father.”42 Likewise, this reverse logic had already been in Hegel. Derrida is, in a sense, paraphrasing the passage of Hegel quoted above, rewording and reworking the Hegelian logos alongside (para-). In writing alongside Hegelian genealogy, Derrida “makes it new” by risking the so-called Jewish reading that Hegel attempts to circumvent, thereby fulfilling the claim at the end of “Violence and Metaphysics” of Joycean synthesis, “this proposition from perhaps the most Hegelian of modern novelists: ‘Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet.’”43 This is perhaps the Joycean principle of Derrida’s style,

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the oblique reworking, refracting, and translating of a past text (or set of texts) into something new. Derrida is, in his reading of Hegel’s reading of homoousion, of the translation of the divine into the human, translating Hegel into the Jewish reading, a reading itself pre-read by Joyce. Derrida, the reader, is thus, in some way, Derrida the (Joycean) translator. Of course, translation is always belated. As Benjamin writes, “A translation issues from the original—not so much from its life as from its afterlife.”44 It is too late for Joyce because, as Senn has it, Joyce is already translational. In “Des Tours de Babel”—an essay immediately preparatory to “Two Words for Joyce”—Derrida claims that this passage in Benjamin’s text “appears Hegelian.”45 In elaborating Benjamin’s idea of the “living on,” Derrida notes that, following Benjamin’s logic, “translation is neither an image nor a copy.”46 Translation is Aufhebung by other means in that in the act of translation the original is both annulled and carried forward, annulled as it is carried forward.47 Translation is always late, always belated because of this double motion. The translation is part of the text’s afterlife precisely because it, somehow, also kills the text. Paul de Man brings this point out quite succinctly in his reading of Benjamin: “The translation belongs not to the life of the original, the original is already dead, but the translation belongs to the afterlife of the original, thus assuming and confirming the death of the original . . . translation also reveals the death of the original.”48 In multiplying the text into another language, a translation embalms the text into a single fragmentary, fractal instantiation. And yet, Benjamin’s translation only “appears” Hegelian and that is precisely the problem Derrida identifies in “Des Tours de Babel,” a problem which is also not unlike the issue of divine filiation as addressed by Hegel: the relation and interdependence of the original and its afterlife, whether kin or translation. In Joyce’s art of replacement, the translation becomes the (re)animating principle, making it new, as it were. Joycean mimesis is both imitative and creative. Likewise, in Derrida, Joyce lives on. Joyce’s translation lives on in its posthumous living on.

Notes 1 Jacques Derrida, “Two Words for Joyce,” trans. Geoffrey Bennington, in Derrida and Joyce: Texts and Contexts, eds. Andrew J. Mitchell and Sam Slote (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2013), 22. 2 Jean-Michel Rabaté, “Two Joyces for Derrida,” in Derrida and Joyce: Texts and Contexts, eds. Andrew J. Mitchell and Sam Slote (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2013), 281. 3 Jean-Michel Rabaté, “Comment c’est: un déconstruire inchoatif, allégorique,” in L’Herne Derrida, eds. Marie-Louise Mallet and Ginette Michaud (Paris: Éditions de l’Herne, 2004), 389.

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4 Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s “Origin of Geometry”: An Introduction, trans. John P. Leavey Jr. (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), 102–03. Emphasis in the original. 5 In his detailed reading of this passage, Jed Deppman notes that what was one single, long sentence in the French was cut into three sentences in the translation. See “Joyce—Event—Derrida—Event—Joyce,” in Mitchell and Slote, Derrida and Joyce: Texts and Contexts, 119. 6 Derrida lists these occasional mentions of Joyce in “Two Words for Joyce,” 27–31. See also Andrew J. Mitchell and Sam Slote, “On Totality and Equivocation,” in Derrida and Joyce: Texts and Contexts, ed. Mitchell and Slote, 5–6. 7 Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s “Origin of Geometry,” 102. 8 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 292. 9 Derrida, “Two Words for Joyce,” 27. 10 “Two Words for Joyce” was originally delivered on November 15, 1982, at a conference entitled “Pour James Joyce,” which was organized by the Centre Georges-Pompidou, the Irish Embassy in Paris and the British Council. 11 See my essay “No Symbols Where None Intended: Derrida’s War at Finnegans Wake,” in James Joyce and the Difference of Language, ed. Laurent Milesi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 195–207. 12 Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s “Origin of Geometry,” 103. 13 Derrida, “Two Words for Joyce,” 23. 14 Ibid, 27. 15 Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s “Origin of Geometry,” 102. 16 Ibid. 17 Derrida, “Two Words for Joyce,” 24. 18 Hélène Cixous, The Exile of James Joyce, trans. Sally A. J. Purcell (New York: David Lewis, 1972), 701. 19 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Chester G. Anderson (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 215. 20 Leo Bersani, “Against Ulysses,” in James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: A Casebook, ed. Derek Attridge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 218. 21 Derrida, “Two Words for Joyce,” 26. 22 Ibid, 26–27. 23 Ibid, 15. 24 Jacques Derrida, “Ulysses Gramophone,” trans. François Raffoul, in Mitchell and Slote, Derrida and Joyce: Texts and Contexts, 59–60. 25 Ibid, 61. 26 Derrida, “Two Words for Joyce,” 24. 27 Ibid, 26.

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28 In an interview with Didier Eribon, Derrida says, “I was writing about Joyce. It would be a shame therefore to write in a form that in no way lets itself be affected by Joyce’s languages, by his inventions, his irony, the turbulence he introduced into the space of thinking or of literature. If one wants to take the event named “Joyce” into account, one must write, recount, demonstrate in another fashion, one must take the risk of a formal adventure.” Points … Interviews, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), 188. 29 James Joyce, Dubliners, ed. Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz (New York: Viking Press, 1969), 223–24. 30 Ibid, 211. 31 The Cork Examiner, January 14, 1903, p. 5, col. h. 32 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber, 1975), 424.35. 33 James Joyce, Letters, Vol. 1, ed. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Viking, 1957), 297. 34 James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler et al. (London: the Bodley Head, 1993), 12.1514–33. 35 John Nash, “Newspapers and Imperialism in Ulysses,” in Modernism and Empire, eds. Nigel Rigby and Howard J. Booth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 189. 36 London Times, June 15, 1904, p. 10, col. b. 37 “Squaw,” OED.com. 38 Fritz Senn, Joyce’s Dislocutions, ed. John Paul Riquelme (Baltimore: the Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 39. 39 Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey and Richard Rand (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1986). 40 G. W. F. Hegel, Early Theological Writings, trans. T.M. Knox and Richard Kroner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975), 261. 41 Joyce, Ulysses, 5.330. 42 Ibid, 1.555–57. 43 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 153. The quotation is from Ulysses 15.2098– 99. 44 Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” trans. Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings, Vol. 1, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 254. 45 Derrida, Points … Interviews, 203. 46 Ibid, 204. 47 Derrida noted with some pride that French translations of Hegel now follow his suggestion from the 1960s that the French word “relever” perfectly captures the double sense of Aufheben that was previously thought to be untranslatable. Relever is thus, as Derrida points out, “une traduction ‘relevante’”—an event of translation that remarks translation as Aufhebung both in and into another language, in this case, French. Derrida, “Qu’est-ce qu’une traduction

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‘relevante’?,” in Mallet and Michaud, L’Herne Derrida, 573. He had first made the suggestion in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 88. 48 Paul de Man, “Conclusions: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator,’” in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 85.

Works cited Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” Translated by Harry Zohn. In Selected Writings, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, Vol. 1, 253–63. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Bersani, Leo. “Against Ulysses.” In James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: A Casebook, edited by Derek Attridge, 201–29. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Cixous, Hélène. The Exile of James Joyce. Translated by Sally A. J. Purcell. New York: David Lewis, 1972. De Man, Paul. “Conclusions: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator.’” In The Resistance to Theory, 73–105. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Derrida, Jacques. Edmund Husserl’s “Origin of Geometry”: An Introduction. Translated by John P. Leavey Jr. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1978. Derrida, Jacques. Glas. Translated by John P. Leavey and Richard Rand. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. Derrida, Jacques. Points … Interviews. Edited by Elisabeth Weber. Translated by Peggy Kamuf, Peter Connor, Marian Hobson, Michael Israel, Christopher Johnston, and Avital Ronnel. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Derrida, Jacques. “Two Words for Joyce.” Translated by Geoffrey Bennington. In Derrida and Joyce: Texts and Contexts, edited by Andrew J. Mitchell and Sam Slote, 22–40. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2013. Derrida, Jacques. “Ulysses Gramophone.” Translated by François Raffoul. In Derrida and Joyce: Texts and Contexts, edited by Andrew J. Mitchell and Sam Slote, 41–86. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2013. Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Hegel, G. W. F. Early Theological Writings. Translated by T.M. Knox and Richard Kroner. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975. Joyce, James. Dubliners. Edited by Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz. New York: Viking Press, 1969. Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. London: Faber, 1975. Joyce, James. Letters, Vol. 1. Edited by Stuart Gilbert. New York: Viking, 1957. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Edited by Chester G. Anderson. New York: Viking Press, 1968. Joyce, James. Ulysses. Edited by Hans Walter Gabler. London: The Bodley Head, 1993.

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Nash, John. “Newspapers and Imperialism in Ulysses. ” In Modernism and Empire, edited by Nigel Rigby and Howard J. Booth, 175–96. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Rabaté, Jean-Michel. “Comment c’est: un déconstruire inchoatif, allégorique.” In L’Herne Derrida, edited by Marie-Louise Mallet and Ginette Michaud, 385–91. Paris: Éditions de l’Herne, 2004. Rabaté, Jean-Michel. “Two Joyces for Derrida.” In Derrida and Joyce: Texts and Contexts, edited by Andrew J. Mitchelland Sam Slote, 281–98. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2013. Senn, Fritz. Joyce’s Dislocutions. Edited by John Paul Riquelme. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. Slote, Sam. “No Symbols Where None Intended: Derrida’s War at Finnegans Wake.” In James Joyce and the Difference of Language, edited by Laurent Milesi, 195–207. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

7 Derrida revoicing Artaud Alhelí Alvarado-Díaz

There is thus no insurance against the risk of writing. DERRIDA

Where others present their works, I claim to do no more than show my mind. Life consists of burning up questions. I cannot conceive of work that is detached from life. . . . We must get rid of the Mind . . . I would like to write a Book which would drive men mad, which would be like an open door leading them where they would never have consented to go, in short, a door that opens onto reality. (ARTAUD)1

Considering Artaud’s anti-institutional stance and his overall rejection of Western intellectual life, a relationship to Derrida may seem improbable and ironic. In Writing and Difference, Derrida celebrated Artaud’s defense of the individual’s personal experience as an exclusive realm, inaccessible to the critics, the translators, and outsider witnesses. Artaud’s positioning of the self against the critics restores the power of the individual’s voice as an original speech that forbids imitation and repetition. In Artaud’s vision of language as the living and continuing art of the self, speech is performance without allegiances to present audiences or to the established past. The self speaks for the sake of personal liberation. It is uncensored and independent from a set script: the speech of the self is life and theater. Artaud, fascinated by cultures foreign to his own French upbringing, searched for an alternative

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school of theatrical expression and for a theater in tune with “a metaphysics of gestures.”2 His celebration of Balinese theater exemplified his pursuit for a new physical language defined by spontaneity, “music, gestures, movements.”3 Artaud’s promotion of the Balinese approach to theater confronts the tension between performance and script, emotions and words. He denounces the tyranny of the text as the prison of the pulses awaiting release in the space of the stage: What is impressive about this spectacle .  .  . what is impressive and disconcerting for us Europeans is the admirable intellectuality that one feels sparkling throughout, in the dense and subtle fabric of the gestures. . . . It is a theater which eliminates the playwright in favor of what we in our Western theatrical jargon would call the director. . . . This idea of pure theater, which in the West is purely theoretical and which no one has ever tried to invest with the slightest reality, is realized in the Balinese Theater in a way that is astonishing, because it eliminates all possibility of resorting to words .  .  . and because it has invented a language of gestures which are designed to move in space and which can have no meaning outside of it.4 Artaud’s attack on the supremacy of speech embodies his attitudes toward the Occidental tradition in artistic production and the overall empire of the masterpiece. When Artaud evokes the virtue of the Balinese theater, he praises the non-scripted dimensions of art, the improvisational and non-repetitive, everything that happens outside the text and that exists in connection with the performer’s inner emotional and invisible reality. Artaud defends the artist’s inaccessible and private realms that remain remote to the interpreter and the critic and that attest to the impossibility of translation and imitation. Derrida’s own obsession with Artaud led him to a reflection on the dilemma of limits and impenetrability. As reader and interpreter of Artaud, Derrida knows that Artaud is a universe of his own, a world defined by its own language, a reality too original to confine within traditional categories. Artaud’s anger speaks to Derrida like a rabid dog, furious at the rules of Western civilization and agitated by the arrogance of French intellectuals. If Derrida’s early relationship to Artaud began as theoretical debates over stolen speech, his later writings acknowledge the sovereignty of Artaud’s language as a speech constructed through personal experience. In other words, Artaud can only understand himself: his words form part of an evolution that is unique and exclusive to his own existential journey. The art of Artaud’s speech is the labor of his own struggles and his personal reality as a man defined by art and madness. I am sure that what I am writing will not be translatable into German. Nor into Artaud’s language. Should I be writing like Artaud? I am

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incapable of it, and besides, anyone who would try to write like him, under the pretext of writing toward him, would be even surer of missing him. . . . A violent obstetrics gives passage to the words through which, however, it passes. With all the music, painting, drawing, it is operating with a forceps.5 In the cited excerpt from The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud, Derrida keeps off the territory of Artaud’s language. Derrida approaches Artaud with respect, like a visitor entering a sacred landmark, studying Artaud’s language as an artwork and, ironically, as a masterpiece. He even reminds us of the painful process that preceded Artaud’s writing, comparing it to the pains of labor and the complications of childbirth. Instead of an “offering to understanding or reception,” Derrida later revisits Artaud’s language as a difficult and lifechanging event, as a domain that resists and even rejects scrutiny and the intervention of the ever pervasive critics and judges.6 Putting his critical self to the side, Derrida reenters Artaud as a voice that allows him, the established and celebrated theorist, to rethink his own language. Rather than interpreting Artaud like a concept, Derrida reacquaints himself with Artaud as a lived experience, a life at odds with the rest of society, an existence pushed to the edges by the tyranny of normality. Artaud requires a dual confrontation with reality: at the linguistic and at the philosophical level. At the linguistic level, Artaud defends his right to own his language and to bend the rules of cultural and political correctness. The politically incorrect Artaud, who turns into the Artaud that talks of scatological matters, of death, incest and parricide, acquires his true philosophical dimension as the Other of the Occident. As the Other, Artaud decolonizes culture from the Western masterpieces, returning to the primal, the impulsive, and the irrational. *** Philosophy has always insisted upon this: thinking its other. Its other: that which limits it, and from which it derives its essence, its definition, its production. (DERRIDA, Margins of Philosophy, 1972)7 To a great extent, Artaud is the other of Derrida. In his 1967 Positions, Derrida explored the conditions of writing as the narrative of the present Self and referred to the “presence” of a voice and the faculty of humans to create a given language and a “system of given signs.””8 Derrida’s recognition of linguistic coding as human power and creative art finds its best evidence in the work and the life of Antonin Artaud. In Artaud’s writing, anguish, madness, anger, and ecstasy come together as polyphonic dimensions of the Self. The multiple personalities that inhabit Artaud constitute separate

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voices; together they create a polyphony of emotions, what Derrida considers a “certain absolute freedom of speech.”9 Writing in its authentic form is expressive pathos and provocation, an irreversible risk with no insurance. In Derrida’s words: If the anguish of writing is not and must not be a determined pathos, it is because this anguish is not an empirical modification or state of the writer, but is the responsibility of angustia: the necessarily restricted passage way of speech against which all possible meanings push each other, provoking each other too. .  .  . If writing is inaugural it is not so because it creates, but because of a certain absolute freedom of speech.10 For Derrida, writing acts as a dialectical process, a dynamic confrontation of opposing forces and emotions searching for an ultimate destiny: the liberation of the Self. Artaud’s own crusade as literary outsider culminates in a rupture with all possible institutions, schools, and movements associated with the cultural establishment of the West. For Artaud, writing becomes an essential bodily function like breathing, a raw personal experience, uncensored and indifferent to the critics. In his declaration of January 1925 he stated loud and clear that “we have nothing to do with literature. Surrealism is a means of total liberation. We are the specialists of revolt.”11 Artaud’s initial association with surrealism sought total freedom through the speech of the irrational. In the early days of surrealism, Artaud believed in the possibility of creating a voice of his own, independent from rules and restrictions. To a great extent, the surrealism endorsed by Artaud appeared as an anticipation of the late 1960s’ motto “forbidden to forbid,” an absolute renunciation of rules and social conventions. As a provocative movement, surrealism opened up a creative space for the uncanny and dark side of artists searching for liberation from bourgeois control and scrutiny of artworks. As surrealism became an established movement, Artaud abandoned the group and denounced it for betraying its initial principles as an anti-establishment current that celebrated the personal over the political. The support of surrealist artists manifested through public sympathies with communism disappointed Artaud who decided to pursue his search for cultural truth away from political ideologies. Concerning the relationship between the artist and the political world, his life was a constant rejection of compromises, privileging incoherence and rupture over civility and consensus. In solitude, Artaud creates a space for his voice, resisting normalization and the common oversimplification imposed by the critics. Like Van Gogh, he ends as the outsider of society, as an artist who can only dwell on madness and exclusion, a Self who remains true to his language. In his piece on Van Gogh, he states,

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And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become mad in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor. So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from. . . . For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable truths.12 Artaud prefers madness over the condoning silence of obedience and good manners. His praise for the “authentic lunatic” continues his crusade against the Occident and West-centered civilization. Occidental culture and order is, according to Artaud, a plague for humanity and a castration of artistic freedom. Artaud denounces not only the colonization of artistic sovereignty but also the seclusion of the misunderstood genius. For him, Van Gogh sets the example of artistic tragedy and martyrdom at the hands of a society that fails to listen to its Others. The Others of society—the lunatics, the angry, the alienated—voice a dangerous and unsettling truth that calls for the collapse of traditional civilization and for an absolute reinvention of the educational experience. Artaud denounces the judgmental culture of civilization, the tyranny of psychiatry, and the overall institutionalization of knowledge: Things are going badly because sick consciousness has a vested interest right now in not recovering from its sickness. This is why tainted society has invented psychiatry to defend itself against the investigations of certain superior intellects whose faculties of divination would be troublesome . . . it is not a certain conformity of manners that the painting of van Gogh attacks, but rather the conformity of institutions themselves. .  .  . In comparison with the lucidity of van Gogh, which is a dynamic force, psychiatry is no better than a den of apes who are themselves obsessed and persecuted and who possess nothing to mitigate the most appalling states of anguish and human suffocation but a ridiculous terminology.13 In Margins of Philosophy, Derrida alludes to the limits of the philosopher’s mind and the conscious intentions of the philosophical texts. The philosophical relates to the non-philosophical, to realities that are outside the margins of reason. In deconstructing Western philosophy, Derrida invokes the need to agitate the established epistemological order so as to think the Other of philosophy, the anti-philosophical, the disruptive voices of madness and the noise of the irrational. The logic of the margin, everything that surrounds the condition of production of the text including material and emotional factors, exemplifies Derrida’s attempt at incorporating the dialectic dimension of artistic creation, its chaos and the turbulence which form part of Artaud’s approach to writing as a physical and emotional experience at odds with the rational. Derrida’s attention to the marginal

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reinforces his search for the absolute voice of the writer in the words and the silences of the writer’s own language. Derrida’s approach integrates the invisible dimensions of creativity, including emotions and psychological states which remain secret and remote to the reader and critic. When Derrida writes about Artaud, he begins with a modest disclaimer and recognizes his limits as reader and as outsider to Artaud’s own reality. His interpretation of Artaud is an attempt at penetrating the intellectual and emotional anatomy that remains elusive to everyone but Artaud himself. Derrida’s work as interpreter, as reader, and as critic is a speculative one, a labor of approximations and potential errors. In The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud Derrida declares, We would have to—yes—write what is untranslatable. To write according to the new phrasing, but discreetly, for resistance to translation when it is deliberate, noisy, spectacular, we already know it has been repatriated. . . . So it would be necessary, while drawing by hand, to write against this language, and have it out with the so-called mother tongue as with any other, making oneself scarcely translatable.14 Derrida’s reference to the untranslatable recognizes Artaud’s universe as a unique territory and a language that is beyond translation. Artaud’s “resistance to translation” confirms the sovereignty of his creative voice, a voice that denies intellectual colonization or critical control. Inheriting Artaud’s own aversion to the psychiatric clinic as well as to the tyranny of the intellectuals, Derrida confesses the power of Artaud’s irreverent language, as a space that cannot be occupied but merely experienced as live theater. Even posthumously, Artaud’s words preserve the force of the artist’s will to be different and to own his lived experiences and his misunderstood Self. Writing, in Derrida’s reading of Artaud, is an affirmation of life and a revolution against critical pettiness and intellectual arrogance. In Writing and Difference, Derrida further argues that Artaud promises the existence of a speech that is a body, of a body that is a theater, of a theater that is a text because it is no longer enslaved to a writing more ancient than itself, an ur-text or an ur-speech. If Artaud absolutely resists- and, we believe, as was never done before, clinical or critical exegeses, he does so by virtue of that part of his adventure .  .  . Artaud attempted to destroy a history, the history of the dualist metaphysics which more or less subterraneously inspired the essays invoked above: the duality of the body and the soul which supports, secretly of course, the duality of speech and existence, of the text and the body.15 In questioning the duality of speech and existence, Artaud rewrites the history of civilization. The taboo of emotions and disorder is recovered

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through his writings, which accept the emotional as the foundation of the human condition. In a letter to Jean Paulhan, Artaud had argued that culture was not in books or statues, but in the permanent flux of human anxieties.16 Derrida’s interpretation of Artaud’s speech as a body in permanent performance resists death and reaffirms the force of continual rebirth by constantly creating and being heard by the others who exist inside, outside, and around Artaud. Whenever one reads him, Artaud is born again, inaugurating the process of thinking the Other of the reader. In the case of Writing and Difference, Derrida finds himself by reading and thinking Artaud, by examining the limits in his understanding of the cultural outcast and icon of artistic reinvention. Derrida takes the risks of writing about Artaud just like Artaud took the risk of writing against the West in the span of his lifetime. Less irreverent than Artaud, but in tune with the provocative spirit of the sixties, Derrida concludes, It is because writing is inaugural, in the fresh sense of the word, that it is dangerous and anguishing. It does not know where it is going, no knowledge can keep it from the essential precipitation toward the meaning that it constitutes and that is, primarily, its future. However, it is capricious only through cowardice. There is thus no insurance against the risk of writing. .  .  . If writing is inaugural it is not so because it creates, but because of a certain absolute freedom of speech, because of the freedom to bring forth the already-there as a sign of the freedom to augur.17 If writing is an inaugural experience, Derrida suggests that there are multiple beginnings, multiple births opening up the universe of speech and consequently the narrative of the Self. In this narrative, the truth of the Self is relative to the beginning and the progression of its journey where speech and existence are one. Derrida observes the danger and the anguish in the writer’s takeoff. Writing is a liability with no immunity against failure or misunderstanding. The risk of writing, like any creative risk, is the price of absolute freedom through revelation, exposure, and the reconciliation of words and emotions, text and body. In taking the risk, the writer’s speech becomes the heritage of the others, a life beyond its original condition, a common good. When Artaud becomes the Other of his readers, he is, to use Derrida’s words, stolen speech: Artaud knew that all speech fallen from the body, offering itself to understanding or reception, offering itself as a spectacle, immediately becomes stolen speech. Becomes a signification which I do not possess because it is a signification. Theft is always the theft of speech or text, of a trace.18

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As reader of Artaud, Derrida attempts to find the silenced voice of the legendary madman. In his talk “Artaud le Moma” Derrida steals the traces of the Artaudian cry staging a performance at the Museum of Modern Art with excerpts from Artaud’s provocative play Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu. The French-Algerian philosopher resurrects irreverence at the sacred temple of modern art in the ironic return of Artaud’s voice through the body of Derrida. Possessed by the artist, the philosopher’s body is transfigured as a new Self, the conductor of a symphony in major madness.19 *** When I write there is nothing other than what I write. Whatever else I felt I have not been able to say (ARTAUD quoted in “La Parole Soufflée”)20 In Concerning a Journey to the Land of the Tarahumaras, Artaud insists on the destruction of Occidental culture through a return to the indigenous roots of art. For him, the Tarahumaras represented a universe protected from the West and a culture where magic and the occult still had a place for public reverence. Advising Mexican audiences against the temptations of assimilating European trends, Artaud privileged indigenous rituals as a style closer to his own vision of authenticity and free from the tyranny of reason. The supra-sensorial and the irrational replace the logical, and the folkloric displaces the elitist and the refined. For him, the recovery of humankind depends on the triumph of the intuitive over the intellectual, the emotional over the rational, in other words, praxis over theory. In his lecture “Surrealism and Revolution,” Artaud denounced Europe’s rationalist approach to life, the European obsession with the schooling of society and the establishment of museums as the consummated institutionalization of art. In his view, the institutionalization of the creative process destroyed the possibilities of the creative mind, castrating intuition and reducing human experience to concepts, representations, and theory. In an earlier statement from 1925, Artaud had even referred to the school system as a fascist enterprise, in conflict with the Self and the stimulation of creativity.21 By the time he visited Mexico a decade later, Artaud was convinced of the power of intuition and the force of the irrational. Witnessing the rituals of the Tarahumaras, Artaud found a new territory for his voice confronting the Other of the Occident. Dance, music, and peyote unleashed Artaud’s voice and his hidden pulses. In the company of the Tarahumaras, Artaud’s unconscious speaks and is reborn. Mexico gave Artaud a new sense of the

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Self, connected to ancient traditions and to the life of both consciousness and unconsciousness. In Artaud’s words, There is in Europe an anti-European movement, I am very much afraid that there may be in Mexico an anti-Indian movement .  .  . I came to Mexico to look for a new idea of man. Man confronted by the inventions, the sciences, the discoveries, but as only Mexico can still present him to us, I mean with this armature on the outside, but carrying deep within him the ancient vital relations of man with nature that were established by the old Toltecs, the old Mayas—in short, all those races which down through the centuries created the grandeur of the Mexican soil.22 In his Mexican experience, Artaud follows the search for a different audience, open to his message on the power of intuition and the dangers of logic. A European outcast, Artaud visits Mexico as a prophet of resistance against the institutionalization of art and the empowerment of the Occident. Enlightened by the primitive style of the Tarahumaras, Artaud dreams and lets loose of his anxieties and the burden of being misunderstood. The Tarahumaras become the Other of Artaud just as Artaud later becomes the other of Derrida. Having devoted his life to criticize European supremacy, Artaud begins the project of deconstruction that would obsess the entire career of Derrida from the late 1960s to his death. In an interview with Henri Ronse, Derrida refers to deconstruction as the process of rethinking the conceptual genealogy of philosophy and the secrets and repressions of philosophy’s untold history. To deconstruct involves investigating the hidden sides of philosophy, its ruptures, its taboos, its silences.23 Like Artaud, Derrida searches for the occult in philosophical speech in ways that resonate with Michel Foucault’s own crusade for the study of the invisible and the unspoken in the established narratives of civilization. Derrida proposes an alternative archaeology of knowledge beginning with grammatology and culminating with the closer case studies of literary legends, rebels, and renegades of the Western canon. Following Heidegger and Saussure, Derrida digs for the foundations of speech as connected to Being and determined by the faculty of humans to invent and reinvent codes of language. Discussing the meaning of deconstruction Derrida states, To “deconstruct” philosophy, thus, would be to think—in the most faithful, interior way—the structured genealogy of philosophy’s concepts, but at the same time to determine—from a certain exterior that is unqualifiable or unnameable by philosophy—what this history has been able to dissimulate or forbid, making itself into a history by means of this somewhere motivated repression.24

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Thus for Derrida Artaud embodies the project of deconstructing philosophy. Beginning by destroying the empire of the West, attacking artistic movements transformed into trends (as in the case of surrealism) and questioning the reverence of the text itself, Artaud offers to Derrida an attitude to de-mythicize Western intellectual traditions of exegesis and to incorporate an appreciation of the irrational, the absurd and the untranslatable. Throughout his life in France and his pilgrimage in Mexico, Artaud sought to end the distinction between cultural elitism and popular art and between conceptual discourse and intuitive experience. In eliminating the boundaries of the theater, Artaud’s intonation of anger and indignation delivers a new state of inconformity fed up with the authority of bourgeois intellectuals and acquiescent cultural audiences. Artaud’s ethics of impatience shout at the repressed instinct of the European public, demanding a cure for the loss of artistic authenticity and an end to the institutionalization of cultural life. Derrida recognizes Artaud’s bold attempt in “La parole soufflée”: Having always preferred the shout to the text, Artaud now attempts to elaborate a rigorous textuality of shouts, a codified system of onomatopoeias, expressions, and gestures—a veritable theatrical pasigraphy reaching beyond empirical languages, a universal grammar of cruelty.25 Derrida finds the voice of a true revolutionary in the artistic sense of the word. The philosopher of grammatology meets an alternative universe of linguistic freedom in Artaud’s creativity of the irrational. Reciprocally, Artaud’s madness for creativity is his true force, the élan that keeps him remote from a cultural industry that demands compromise and sacrifice. Artaud’s language contains an absolute sense of discontentment with the situation of the arts in the age of cultural profit. Instead of consenting to the trends of the time and the growing intimacies between arts and politics, Artaud opts for solitude and reclusion. Artaud’s rupture with Breton and the surrealists defined his attitude of aversion toward ideological movements and organizations in general. During his time in Mexico, Artaud lamented the degeneration of surrealism from its initial unconscious mysticism to its transformation as a politicized art trend. According to Artaud, The question of whether the Surrealists drove me out or whether I walked out on their grotesque parody has long since ceased to be relevant. I withdrew because I had had enough of a masquerade that had gone on all too long. . . . Indeed, one wonders if there is still a Surrealist adventure, or

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if Surrealism did not die on the day when Breton and his adepts decided to join the Communist movement.26 Political parties, that Artaud saw as yet another institutionalization of life, the establishment of new dogmas and the replacement of old hierarchies with new hierarchies, offered no hope to redeem humanity from suffering. Here lies Artaud’s legacy: the absolute demystification of utopias and the fusion with pain as creative condition. His reconciliation with pain and his own emotional agony precede the birth of his literary Self, setting him apart as a sovereign voice, indifferent to the critics and in tune with the intuitive dimension of existence. Artaud listens to himself and speaks to the world in a permanent soliloquy, in dialogue with his emotions and always in touch with his unconscious. In The New Revelations of Being, Artaud declares, “I no longer want to be one of the Deluded. Dead to the world, to what composes the world for everyone else, fallen at last, fallen, risen in this void which I was denying, I have a body which suffers the world and disgorges reality.”27 Artaud’s rejection of illusion comes as rebirth into a reality that is exclusively his own. He is dead to a world that fails to understand him, just like other artists before him. Thus Artaud falls into madness and seclusion, into further illness and suffering. Ironically, it is a fall elevating Artaud as survivor in the reality that has attempted to murder and silence him. By virtue of the fall, Artaud rises beyond the reality that confines him. And it is speech, the elusive words translating his intuitions, that saves him and brings him back to himself. Artaud lives in speech, in the dramatic cry, the unregistered silence and the disturbing intonation. As Derrida concludes in The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud, There is probably nothing more constant than this from his very first texts, Artaud always calls us back to intonation .  .  . intonation must remain in motion, it must be the very act that launches the missile, the force necessary to traverse the object when it is an obstacle, a receptacle or a subjectile.28 Derrida’s praise of intonation as a necessary force suggests the relationship between speech and identity in the style of Artaud’s own rhetoric in New Revelations. Intonation defines the Self as a dialectical entity, in conflict with the outside world and with existence in general. New Revelations acts as Artaud’s declaration of independence, a resolute statement of his existence as having been misunderstood by society. Artaud emancipates himself from social judgment and accepts himself and the reality that rejects him as part of his new enlightened Self. No longer prey to illusion, he returns to the refuge of his intuition and speaks for himself. Rather than pleasing others, he prefers the suffering associated with his disruptive crusade. Society drives

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him into madness, but fails to silence him. In an ironic posthumous twist, Artaud’s voice vibrates beyond mortality. *** Masterpieces of the past are good for the past: they are not good for us. (ARTAUD, An End to Masterpieces)29 The fury of Artaud’s life has reignited the debate over madness as revolt and social dissidence.30 For his readers and interpreters, Artaud’s writing is a performance in itself, rather than a mere text awaiting to be read quietly and with detachment. Artaud’s language demands an audacity from the reader to walk, like a flâneur or a vagabond, through the world of insanity and agitation, the social taboos that Artaud himself inhabits. Words and shouts attempt to represent the pulse of a suffering body, a soul in agony who wants to surrender to intuition and to the freedom of the unconscious. In reaching incoherence, Artaud’s words become strident sounds and cacophony, the onomatopoeic shrieks of an animal going to be sacrificed. Listening to Artaud’s pulse, Derrida captures the sense of the primal at odds with an artificial reality founded on constraints, double standards, and disciplinary codes. The tyranny of the rule, both artistic and social, asphyxiates Artaud and ultimately leads him to the asylum, the absolute prison until his moment of death. Finally, Derrida assimilated aspects of Artaud’s own pursuit of the intuitive in The Animal That Therefore I Am. In a section of the posthumous work, he writes, I move from “the ends of man,” that is the confines of man, to “the crossing of borders” between man and animal. Passing across borders or the ends of man, I come or surrender to the animal, to the animal in itself, to the animal in me and the animal at unease with itself.31 Derrida’s proximity to the animal, his will to cross the border between the being of reason and the beast both evoke Artaud’s surrender to intuition and his emancipation from the limits of the mind. Derrida’s animal resembles Artaud’s voice and pulse in tune with the dark side of our unconscious as well as with its natural side, namely, the instinctual. This pursuit of the animal echoes Artaud’s abandonment to the toxic state that lead him to a permanent struggle between Eros and Thanatos. Remaining in the universe of logos, Derrida takes the risk to write about the other side of humans in their raw state, using the animal as a word that evokes the rabid intonation of Artaud. Listening to Artaud, Derrida finds himself by writing through Others. As if through miraculous intervention, the philosopher

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confesses: “As soon as I speak, the words I have found no longer belong to me . . . I must first hear myself. In soliloquy as in dialogue, to speak is to hear oneself.”32 The miracle of listening occurs by the simultaneous action of monologue and conversation. The Self in conversation with itself, but also in conversation with Others, accomplishes the feat of inaugurating its voice and affirming its singular identity. No one will ever write like Artaud: speech remains the capital of a single voice as a singular existence, unique and unrepeatable. Tied to existence, speech is the living pulse of the creative mind which irrupts in the theater of history, at a given time and place. Words appear as approximations and attempts to translate the pulse of the body in conflict, in pain and sometimes in pleasure. As evidenced in Writing and Difference and The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud, the author of No More Masterpieces always occupied the thinking of Derrida. Artaud’s presence always haunted the philosophy of Derrida and Derrida’s understanding of speech as a reality beyond concepts. Between lines and between whispers, Artaud teaches Derrida to listen to the self as a way of creating a language that, perhaps one day, will become a masterpiece. Rejecting the past as an obstacle to the future, Artaud calls for a permanent state of creativity, a never-ending revolt, anchored in the present and independent from the standards and the styles of predecessors. This is the secret art of Antonin Artaud: the self must create without regards for the others. Public judgment and the work of the critics are the enemies of the creative self and of the voices that want to be heard for the rebirth of society. What Artaud accomplishes in his lifetime is the crusade in defense of an art that remains faithful to the self, in reason and in madness. Even if the ultimate cost is insanity and seclusion in the asylum, Artaud decides to follow no one but himself, becoming a Nietzschean prophet and a lost wanderer in a society that misunderstands him. As Derrida states in Writing and Difference, That which belongs to Artaud without recourse—his experience itself—can without harm be abandoned by the critic and left to the psychologists or doctors. That which no longer belongs to Artaud, as soon as we can read it through him, and thereby articulate, repeat, and take charge of it, that to which Artaud is only a witness, is a universal essence of thought.33 Derrida’s celebration of the afterlife of Artaud in the archive of his writings reaffirms the value of the text as an archaeological repository and a literary landmark. Perhaps against Artaud’s own wishes of becoming a masterpiece for future generations, his figure stands as legend and inspiration for those who dwell in the territory of nonconformity. Artaud’s excess reconstructs the legitimacy of the intuitive as the foundation of art, of speech, of life, of

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the multiplicity of voices in the unison of personal polyphony. An “affair of sonority, of tone, of intonation, of thunder and detonation,”34 Artaud voices the other side of Derrida, the hidden desire for the total liberation of speech and for the expression of the dark and repressed dimension that coexists with human reason. A thunder that eludes oblivion, Artaud’s creative irruption exorcises the corpse of European art by transforming it into living pulse, an evolving animal that refuses to be caged in and wanders around, with no holds barred. Through Artaud’s speech, Derrida may have found his promised land.

Notes 1 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 11; Antonin Artaud, The Umbilicus of Limbo, in Antonin Artaud Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag and trans. Helen Weaver (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 59. 2 Artaud, “On the Balinese Theater,” “An End to Masterpieces,” The Theater and Its Double (1931) in Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings, 215. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid, 218, 220, 222. 5 Jacques Derrida, The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 70, 74. 6 Jacques Derrida, “La Parole Soufflée,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 175. 7 Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), x. 8 “What is ‘meaning,’ what are its historical relationships to what is purportedly identified under the rubric ‘voice’ as a value of presence, presence of the object, presence of meaning to consciousness, self-presence in so called living speech and in self-consciousness? . . . it is not spoken language that is natural to man, but the faculty of constituting a language, that is, a system of distinct signs . . . that is, the possibility of the code and of articulation.” Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (New York: Continuum, 2002), 5, 21. 9 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 12. 10 Ibid, 8, 12. 11 Antonin Artaud, «Déclaration du 27 janvier 1925» in Artaud. L’aliénation et la folie, ed. Gérard Durozoi (Paris: Larousse, 1972), 79. 12 Antonin Artaud, Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society (1947) in Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings, 485. 13 Artaud, Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society, 483, 484. 14 Derrida, The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud, 65, 67.

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15 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 219–20. 16 See Artaud, “Letter to Jean Paulhan,” in Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings, 208–09. 17 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 11–12. 18 Ibid, 220. 19 In “Artaud-Immunity: Derrida and the Mômo,” Howard Caygill adds: “Once inside Moma, Derrida voices the Mômo by opening and closing his talk with the ‘voice of Artaud’ . . . The madman may be admitted to the museum on its terms, but might the Mômo not devour the Moma?” Derrida Today 8, no. 2 (2015): 132–33. 20 Derrida, “La Parole Soufflée,” 169. 21 Antonin Artaud, «Lettre aux recteurs des universités européennes» (Texte collectif sur une proposition originale d’Antonin Artaud). In La Révolution surréaliste n°3 (1925). http://dormirajamais.org/lettre/ 22 Antonin Artaud, “First Contact with the Mexican Revolution,” “What I came to Mexico to do,” in Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings, 369, 372. 23 See Jacques Derrida and Henri Ronse, “Implications,” in Positions, 1–14. 24 Derrida, Positions, 7. 25 Jacques Derrida, “La parole soufflée,” 241. “All of The Theater and Its Double could be read—this cannot be done here—as a political manifesto. . . . Renouncing immediate political action, guerrilla action, anything that would have been a waste of forces in the economy of his political intentions, Artaud intended the preparation of an unrealizable theater, without the destruction of the political structures of our society.” Writing and Difference, 424–25. 26 Antonin Artaud, “In Total Darkness, or the Surrealist Bluff” (1927), in Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings, 139. 27 Artaud, The New Revelations of Being (1937) in Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings, 413. 28 Derrida, The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud, 84. 29 Artaud, An End to Masterpieces (1933), in Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings, 252. 30 See Julia Kristeva, “Le sujet en procès,” in Polylogue (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1977), 55–106. 31 Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow), trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 3. 32 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 223. 33 ibid, 215. 34 Derrida, The Secret of Antonin Artaud, 73–74.

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Works cited Artaud, Antonin. Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings. Edited by Susan Sontag. Translated by Helen Weaver. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Artaud, Antonin. «Déclaration du 27 janvier 1925» In Artaud. L’aliénation et la folie, edited by Gérard Durozoi, 79. Paris: Larousse, 1972. Artaud, Antonin. «Lettre aux recteurs des universités européennes» (Texte collectif sur une proposition originale d’Antonin Artaud). In La Révolution surréaliste n°3 (1925). http://dormirajamais.org/lettre/ Caygill, Howard. “Artaud-Immunity: Derrida and the Mômo.” Derrida Today 8, no. 2 (2015): 113–35. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Translated by David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press, 2006. Derrida, Jacques. “La Parole Soufflée.” In Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass, 212–45. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967. Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Derrida, Jacques. Positions. Translated by Alan Bass. New York: Continuum, 2002. Derrida, Jacques. The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud. Translated by Mary Ann Caws. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. Kristeva, Julia. Polylogue. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1977.

8 Derrida on Bataille: From dueling to duet Claire Lozier

In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985), Jürgen Habermas dismisses Jacques Derrida’s and Georges Bataille’s attempts “to break out of the prison of modernity, out of the closed universe of an Occidental rationalism that has been victorious on the scale of world history.”1 In each case, Habermas’s criticism is based on the author’s attitude toward language. Derrida is charged with reducing all discourses to aesthetics, espousing a form of instrumental rationality where the main criterion is rhetorical success over the value of discursive objects, which ultimately destabilizes the foundation for social critique.2 Contrastingly, Habermas considers that Bataille has managed to escape the foreclosure of the language of modernity through his erotic writing which uses language in a poetic way. Nonetheless, he judges that Bataille remains eventually trapped in the modern logos as his essays use rational language to perform a radical critic of reason, a position which, for Habermas, is emblematic of anti-Enlightenment thinking.3 For Habermas, Derrida and Bataille lose the same battle as philosophers confined by and to modernity because of their respective alienation from and by language. As a writer, however, Bataille finds a way out. The sole way out of the discourse of modernity, Habermas tells us, is offered by literature in the way practiced by Bataille in his erotic fiction, using language poetically. Defined in terms of their poetic quality,4 Bataille’s fictions are also prominent examples of modernism, whether one considers them as classical or extreme variations of the genre.5 In this regard,

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modernism would then be a way out of modernity. As a commentator of Bataille, Derrida could have used the literary texts of the writer as a vantage point into—or, for that matter, out of—the modernity from which he tried to escape, in vain, according to Habermas. However, despite Derrida’s overarching and consummate interest in literature, especially in its modernist form, when engaging with Bataille, he virtually omits the literary work to focus almost exclusively on theory. That said, Derrida’s engagement with Bataille’s theoretical oeuvre still takes, for the most part, the form of literary critical analysis. This would tend to support Habermas’s critique of the philosopher for adopting an approach oriented toward rhetorical success and instrumental rationality. It is at this crossroad between literature and theory, modernism and modernity, rationality and rhetoricity that the encounter between Bataille and Derrida takes place. The only essay Derrida dedicated entirely to Bataille, “From Restricted to General Economy. A Hegelianism without Reserve,” was first published in May 1967 in L’Arc and then included the same year in Writing and Difference. Its focus is the implications of an economy of signification based on the principles of excess and expenditure as analyzed by Bataille in The Accursed Share, his seminal 1949 book of economic theory. Derrida explores and applies Bataille’s economic theory to the field of writing, using illustrations from Bataille’s oeuvre to highlight its limits. While Derrida’s first engagement with Bataille may seem to have led to a rejection, it appears on closer examination that the very letter of Derrida’s text reflects characteristics of the process of general writing he examines in Bataille. Taking this initial observation as its starting point, this chapter reveals Derrida’s dialoguing with Bataille, which moves from apparent dueling to an intimate duet. Starting with an analysis of Derrida’s critique of Bataille’s economic theory, I will discuss the relationship between Bataille’s notion of general economy and Derrida’s concept of general writing in order to understand the reasons behind Derrida’s apparent initial rejection. While Derrida demonstrates the poetic dimension of Bataille’s philosophical discourse, he fails to consider its subversive potential. In the second part of the chapter, I look at the ways in which Derrida’s 1967 essay dialogues with Bataille’s discourse on general economy in order to show that Bataille’s general writing as analyzed by Derrida contaminates in turn Derrida’s own writing. The initial apparent duality becomes duplication. Having infiltrated the letter of Derrida’s discourse, the spirit of Bataille’s oeuvre continued to namelessly haunt Derrida’s work from that time onwards. While Derrida never wrote solely on Bataille again after 1967, acknowledging the influence of his early engagement with The Accursed Share is key not only to understanding some of his later books, such as Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money (1991), which is openly concerned with matters of general economy, but also to recognizing Bataille’s contribution to the founding concepts of Derrida’s work, from différance to supplement, pharmakon, and spectrality. The third part of the

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chapter focuses on the discreet but decisive presence of Bataille’s economic voice in Derrida’s philosophical discourse. From duel to intimate duet, the writers join forces in order to break free from the constraints of modernity.

From general economy to general writing: Derrida’s duel with Bataille In content and title, Derrida’s essay on Bataille, “From Restricted to General Economy. A Hegelianism without Reserve,” refers explicitly to Bataille’s book The Accursed Share, whose first 1949 edition had the subtitle An Essay on General Economy. Despite this obvious connection, Derrida only mentions Bataille’s book three times (twice in the footnotes) and never cites from it, whereas quotations from other texts by Bataille not concerned with general economy abound in the essay (notably from Method of Meditation, The Inner Experience and from the article “Hegel, death and sacrifice”). The expression “accursed share” is also absent from Derrida’s essay, while the concept of general writing that he develops is directly related to it. Derrida focuses on economics, though, and follows Bataille’s analysis of the circulation of natural energies—by definition always in excess in order to enable life to grow—within the universe conceived as a macrostructural economic system. In that system, the accursed share is the name given to “that excess of energy translated into the effervescence of life”6 and corresponds to the surfeit of wealth available to a given society. Depending on whether this surfeit of energy or wealth is invested to contribute to the expansion of the considered structure or whether it is spent with no end other than the spectacle of its own consumption, the accursed share constitutes a “productive expenditure”7 following a “useful conduct,” or a “unproductive expenditure”8 representing a “glorious conduct.” The first model relates to the classical political economy, that is, the restricted economy, the second to the general economy. In the Preface to his book, Bataille alludes to the fact that the accursed share does not solely operate within the macroeconomic systems of wealth and energy, but also within the arts. He writes, The first essay addresses, from outside the separate disciplines, a problem that still has not been framed as it should be, one that may hold the key to all the problems posed by every discipline concerned with the movement of energy on the earth—from geophysics to political economy, by way of sociology, history, and biology. Moreover, neither psychology nor, in general, philosophy can be considered free of this primary question of economy. Even what may be said of art, of literature, of poetry has an essential connection with the movement I study.9

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Bataille had anticipated the disbelief of his reader here and considered it important to mention that the accursed share also operates in areas which could easily be considered to not be concerned by it, but which have in fact “an essential connection” with it, as he emphasizes, starting with writing. This comment is not elaborated further though, and in the rest of the book Bataille focuses on the economic, political, and social manifestations of the accursed share in human history. More on this “essential connection” can however be found in “The Notion of Expenditure” (1933), Bataille’s first article on economics in which he did not speak yet about the accursed share, preferring expressions such as “principle of loss” or “unconditional expenditure.”10 In order to explain what he means, Bataille draws on “a small number of examples taken from common experience,”11 the last one being “artistic productions.”12 He explains that these should be divided into two categories: “architectural construction, music and dance” which require “real expenditures”; and literature and theater which imply a “symbolic expenditure.”13 Bataille continues by specifying that literature and theater can take two forms: major and minor. The former “provoke[s] dread and horror through symbolic representations of tragic loss,” while the latter “provoke[s] laughter through representations which, though analogously structured, exclude certain seductive elements.”14 The first is tragic, the second, comic. The distinction does not end there. Bataille continues: “The term poetry, applied to the least degraded and least intellectualized forms of the expression of a state of loss, can be considered synonymous with expenditure; it in fact signifies, in the most precise way, creation by means of loss.”15 Poetry is the name of the major form of writing per excellence, that which is produced by the destruction of its very material, that is, by consuming words in pure loss.16 In that sense, the expenditure is unproductive and the spectacle of destruction stands as creation. The accursed share has found its linguistic expression. We can also note here that the definition of poetry Bataille develops corresponds to the one he elaborates with respect to erotic activity: in both cases, it involves a state of loss and of expenditure for its own sake in which the symbolic destruction of the concerned material (words and bodies) paradoxically creates the object that is pursued (the poetic text, the erotic scene). It is then no surprise that Bataille’s erotic fictions involve this poetic operation, as acknowledged by Habermas. Although poetry and erotic activity are for Bataille two very similar occurrences of general economy, Derrida focuses on the former only. While Bataille only ever uses the term “poetry” to name the functioning of the general economy within language, Derrida multiplies the ways in which to talk about it. He coins the expressions “general writing,” which clearly derives from Bataille’s economic theory, as well as “major writing” and “sovereign writing,” to which he respectively opposes “minor writing” and “servile writing,” here again drawing on Bataille’s vocabulary. “Minor

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writing” abides by the laws of logic, produces meaning (and its expenditure is therefore real) and formulates a discourse which amounts to mastery. Conversely, “general,” “major,” and “sovereign” writing “exceeds the logos”;17 they make concepts slip and meaning limp with a view to accessing sovereignty. Here Derrida alights on the opposition between minor and major articulated by Bataille in “The Notion of Expenditure” and elaborates on it: the minor becomes servile, productive, and utilitarian; the major adopts the specificities of poetry—and of the erotic activity, one could add. The latter type of writing is also, for Derrida, the very one practiced by Bataille. He writes, Bataille’s writing thus relates all semantemes, that is, philosophemes, to the sovereign operation, to the consummation, without return, of meaning. It draws upon, in order to exhaust it, the resource of meaning. With minute audacity, it will acknowledge the rule which constitutes that which it efficaciously, economically must deconstitute. Thus proceeding along the lines of what Bataille calls the general economy.18 Bataille’s writing in The Accursed Share is therefore, for Derrida, a sovereign one that takes part in the general economy. Unlike the minor form of writing which produces a product (i.e., meaning), it is a process which makes meaning slip: rather than working toward the accumulation of meaning and the expansion of knowledge and discourse, it brings them into play with a view to ruining them. The accursed share of the economy of meaning is consumed by this specific form of writing that makes the discourse stumble. For Derrida, Bataille’s writing is thus inhabited by the very excess and expenditure that it aims to apprehend, which, as a result, prevents it from doing so in a rational fashion, and deems the scientific validity of the whole project to be questioned. Derrida’s criticism of Bataille’s system therefore contradicts Habermas’s approach; according to the latter Bataille’s attempt at formulating a radical critic of reason failed due to his entrapment in rational language. If Derrida’s textual analysis is correct, Bataille’s theoretical writing would indeed be informed by the same poetic process which, for Habermas, makes his erotic texts slip out of the rational prison of modernity. What Derrida shows here is that Bataille does indeed write in the same way in his erotic fictions as he does in his economic essays and philosophical texts. Derrida does not appreciate this aspect of his own demonstration though, and his criticism of Bataille looks more like a straightforward rejection, even a debunking. According to him, Bataille’s system of general economy is invalidated by the very fact that it does what it says: the rational language of restricted economy is undone by the accursed share of meaning. However, Derrida’s own writing on the topic is, in turn, contaminated by the very phenomenon he analyses. Universal and transdisciplinary, the accursed

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share of general writing is pervasive to the point of entering the letter of Derrida’s writing.

Write it like Bataille: The formation of a duo Derrida’s task, in the wake of Bataille, is a difficult one: how to discursively account for the destruction of discourse? Derrida goes about this methodically, by adopting a rigorous objective approach. This is made clear in a footnote at the end of his essay where he explains that his aim has been to “detach an interpretation from its reinterpretation and submit it to another interpretation bound to other propositions of the system.”19 The idea is therefore to perform a rigorous and systematic critical analysis: Derrida proposes to undo the links (ana-lusis: undoing links) so as to be able to judge the system (kritikos: ability to judge, to criticize) against itself, and “within the closure of knowledge.”20 This critical analysis is then meant to operate within the closed rational discourse of modernity. However, Derrida also stresses that his approach “is justified by what we are writing here, in Bataille’s wake, about the suspension of the epoch of meaning and truth.”21 He is aware that his project—that is, accounting for the accursed share within the closure of knowledge—is inherently jeopardized by its very object in the same way as was the case for Bataille. In spite of Derrida’s careful and conscious treatment of the topic, by inscribing his text in the Bataillean tradition—the original French reads “dans la trace de Bataille”22—his own writing is in turn inflected by the accursed share of general meaning. Here as well, the closed discourse of rational knowledge starts to slip. Commenting on what he calls the “potlatch of signs” at work in Bataille’s theoretical essays, Derrida writes, “Destruction of discourse is not simply an erasing neutralization. It multiplies words, precipitates them one against the other, engulfs them too, in an endless and baseless substitution whose only rule is the sovereign affirmation of the play outside meaning.”23 In illustration, Derrida quotes a sentence from Method of Meditation (1947) that accumulates a variety of expressions used by Bataille to designate the sovereign operation (namely: “interior experience,” “extreme of the possible,” “meditation” and “comical operation”) without, in the end, selecting any of the proposed terms. Derrida observes, In sum, nothing has been said. We have not stopped at any word; the chain rests on nothing; none of the concepts satisfies the demand, all are determined by each other and, at the same time, destroy or neutralize each other. But the rule of the game or, rather, the game as rule has been affirmed; as has been the necessity of transgressing both discourse and the negativity of the bothersomeness [sic] of using any word at all in the reassuring identity of its meaning.24

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Interestingly enough, the same process takes place in Derrida’s text. As we saw earlier, Derrida uses a variety of terms to name the work of general economy within writing that he analyses. The expressions “sovereign writing,” “major writing,” “writing of sovereignty,” and “general writing” are employed indifferently, once again preventing the fixing of meaning, even though this is supposed to be a rigorous and methodical discourse of critical analysis taking place within the closure of rational knowledge. Derrida’s text is slipping. Quotations from Bataille also abound in Derrida’s essay, both in the body of the text and in its footnotes. While reference to The Accursed Share is absent from the essay—its specter remains, in a sense, haunting the text—other texts by Bataille are consumed in excess in a potlatch of quotations. In doing so, Derrida does not treat Bataille in the manner of the restricted discourse of conventional critical analysis which covers its object in order to exhaust its meaning. Instead, Derrida allows Bataille’s voice to interrupt his own. Quoting an extract of Method of Meditation where Bataille writes that poetry must be “accompanied by an affirmation of sovereignty providing the commentary on its absence of meaning,” Derrida adds that this “untenable formulation .  .  . could serve as the heading for everything we are attempting to reassemble here as the form and torment of his writing.”25 Derrida’s essay therefore attempts to provide a commentary on the absence of meaning in Bataille’s writing. He intends to do Bataille justice by refusing to subordinate Bataille’s writing, preferring rather to insert it into his own discourse, in line with Bataille’s statement from Method of Meditation. Indeed, if poetry (Bataille’s writing, both fictional and theoretical) is not accompanied by commentary on its absence of meaning (which is the aim of Derrida’s essay), it “would be, in the worst of cases, subordinated and, in the best of cases, ‘inserted.’  ”26 As the task of creating a commentary on the absence of meaning of Bataille’s writing is, ultimately, untenable, Derrida opts for the lesser of the two evils. Rather than subordinating Bataille’s writing, he has mingled,27 inserted,28 or grafted29 it into his own material. Bataille’s quotations are not inserted in order to produce meaning: their status is not servile and Derrida’s essay refuses to adopt the “useful behavior” of restricted writing and economy. Instead, the citations are chosen to expose the depths of meaninglessness onto which they open: their status is sovereign and the conduct of Derrida’s text is ultimately glorious in spite of his own claim to closure and control. Rather than rejecting Bataille’s theory, it actually adopts his practice. Moreover, Derrida’s critical analysis is also visually kept open by the very layout of an essay the final page of which resists closure. The page is cut up by three lines of dots separated from the previous paragraph by a typographical gap. This makes the text literally gape, introducing silence by marking its suspension. Upon reaching the end of his reflection,

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Derrida seems to be implementing that which he had called for earlier with the second-person plural subject pronoun, as if speaking in both his and Bataille’s name: “We must find a speech which maintains silence. Necessity of the impossible: to say in language—the language of servility— that which is not servile.”30 This is what he attempts to put into practice at the end of the essay. Derrida’s three lines of dots mirror the ones that can be found in the pages of most of Bataille’s modernist erotic fictions (Story of the Eye, The Impossible, Madame Edwarda, My Mother). These dots can be considered to “surround with a visualised silence an important event.”31 In a similar fashion, the final quotation from Bataille that features in Derrida’s essay is stitched into the text by these three lines of dots and thus catches our attention, not only because of its content, but also because of the very fact that, having already been cited the page before, it is here, hapax of the whole text, repeated. It reads: “The condition in which I would see would be to get out of, to emerge from the ‘tissue’! And doubtless I must immediately say: the condition in which I would see would be to die. At no moment would I have the chance to see!” (Method of Meditation).32 The “important event” here is also signaled by the quotation’s meta-discursive isotopic dimension: it applies first and foremost to Derrida’s essay. His text is coming to an end and we are about to emerge from the “tissue”—let us recall that the word “text” comes from the Latin textus meaning “tissue.” At the point of exiting the modernist text-tissue, Derrida and his reader, even if they cannot see, will at least have caught a fleeting glimpse of what Bataille wanted to show: the movement of the excess of energy at work in the universe—writing, language, and meaning included. The formerly closed discourse of knowledge has been opened up, through Bataille accompanying Derrida.

The Bataille legacy: An intimate duet The final repeated quotation of “From Restricted to General Economy” reminds us that, for Derrida, all texts refer to other texts (in this case, those of Bataille, Hegel, Plato, etc.). Just as Bataille repeats Hegel through engaging with his work,33 Derrida repeats Bataille and makes the différance of the two writers and their texts appear. If all texts are part of a network of texts, of a game of differences, différance, as the central concept of Derrida’s thought, is “the playing movement that ‘produces’—by means of something that is not simply an activity—these differences, these effects of differences.”34 Thus, as is the case with general writing, différance transcribes the movement that exceeds the economy of meaning—that which Bataille would have called its accursed share. It appears that the notion of the accursed share—poetic in its own right in the sense that it destroys rational “useful” limited meaning

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and makes it slip—pervaded Derrida’s thought as much as it did his writing and continued to circulate in his oeuvre. The dialogism does not end here, then. Bataille’s voice is present and at work in the body of Derrida’s oeuvre, the silent voice of an intimate duet. The influence of Bataille’s thought on Derrida’s philosophy is an established fact—one only needs to think about the link between base materialism and deconstruction—and directly refers to Bataille in Derrida’s work abound. After featuring in Writing and Difference (1967), Bataille reappears in Margins of Philosophy (1972), where he is mentioned in “Différance” (written in 1968, that is, one year after “From Restricted to General Economy”). He figures in “The Double Session,” the chapter from Dissemination (1972) focusing on Mallarmé, published for the first time in 1970; in Glas (1974), the book jointly dedicated to Hegel and Jean Genet, at the end of which the Bataillean “acephalic” subject reappears; and in the texts devoted to the work of Emmanuel Levinas (“Violence and Metaphysics” (1964), “At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am” (1980) and Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas (1997)). Bataille is also present in On Touching, Jean-Luc Nancy (2000), as well as in Derrida’s work on feminism and in the last interviews that the philosopher gave. Yet, despite The Accursed Share being Derrida’s entry point into Bataille’s work and having been instrumental in elaborating Derrida’s conceptual system, the work is never mentioned again—not even in Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, which is openly indebted to it but where Bataille’s name is only mentioned once in passing.35 Nonetheless, Bataille’s economic voice can be heard throughout Derrida’s work. In an interview from 1964, when asked about the influence of his latest book Critical Essays, Roland Barthes explained: “I’m not sure what an ‘influence’ is; to my mind, what is transmitted is not ‘ideas’ but ‘languages,’ i.e., forms that can be filled in different fashions; that’s why the notion of circulation seems to me more appropriate than influence; books are ‘currency’ rather than ‘forces.’  ”36 Beyond the force of influence, the slippery language used by Bataille, which embodies the characteristics of general writing and meaning as seen above, can be conceived as a currency circulating within Derrida’s work. Derrida has changed the Bataille’s currency into his own scriptural money by hosting it in the letter of his essay on general writing. This currency is then converted in other cash forms whose circulation shore up the Derridean philosophical economy. The main concepts of Derrida’s oeuvre indeed invest the form of the accursed share in different fashions. The case of différance and supplement is, in this regard, emblematic. The concept of différance, which appears for the first time in Derrida’s work in 1963, is formalized in “Différance,” the lecture Derrida gave at the French society of philosophy on January 27, 1968, that is, a few months after he had written “From Restricted to General Economy.” While Derrida

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directly mentions Bataille and general economy in his lecture, he does not refer to the accursed share. Perhaps for that very reason, the two concepts share significant formal similarities. Like the accursed share, différance is an excess that is continuously generated and distributes itself freely without asking for any compensation. It is the product of its production: différance creates a supplement and the accursed share generates surplus. Both concepts precede being: the accursed share comes from solar energy and différance refers to the original absence of origin. The creation of the world and the appearance of logos: their genesis is, in both cases, only accessible through a mythos, that is to say, through fiction. They can only be thought of beyond metaphysics and they destroy, as a result, the Hegelian possibility of Aufhebung: they cannot be reasoned, reduced, or subsumed. As such, they therefore escape the closed rational discourse of knowledge. They are also both concerned with writing: the excess from which they generate as supplement and surplus is materialized in writing in its major form. Opening onto radical alterity, the drifting of signs, and an exuberant violence of excess, they inexorably lead to destruction and death, that is unless they are integrated into the systems of general writing and meaning. The form of the accursed share also informs the concepts of the pharmakon and of spectrality. Derrida develops the concept of pharmakon in “Plato’s pharmacy,” a text from 1968 here again written shortly after the publication of “From Restricted to General Economy.” Both remedy and poison, the pharmakon can be used interchangeably for growth and destruction: like the accursed share, it appears always as excess. It can thus contribute to the growth of the system (useful conduct), be gratuitously consumed (glorious conduct), or become harmful if unwisely handled. Its “power of fascination,”37 its ambivalence, and its characteristic of essential excess cause it to “resist any philosopheme”:38 it cannot be subsumed in a closed system, be it the one of Aufhebung or that of restricted economy and minor writing. It only fits within a general model of economy of meaning. Derrida indeed also compares writing and pharmakon. Writing is pharmakon insomuch as it can, on the one hand, produce and repair, increase knowledge and reduce oblivion, and, on the other erase and deceive, destroy its own material, and open up onto silence. Pharmakonic writing therefore has a double form, a minor and a major one, which permits entry to the game of the general economy of meaning. The specter, the damned soul who cannot find peace and rest, appears later in Derrida’s work, notably in 1993 with the publication of Specters of Marx. The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, a text also concerned with questions of economics. The specter is that which exceeds both life and death, the visible and the invisible, sensitivity and insensitivity, the tangible and the nontangible:39 it is the scandalous40 third term, which destabilizes the structure and makes it falter. The ambivalence

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of the pharmakon makes room for the neutrality of the specter: that which is neither-nor (ne-uter) and can thus outplay all systems and categories. Consequently, it is no more possible to integrate the pharmakon than the specter into the enclosed system of the restricted economy of signification: only the general model can account for it. This is because the specter demands to be acknowledged in its différance in order to be consumed; conversely, it consumes those who refuse its right to exist (droit de cité) and to speak (droit de citer). Indeed, for Derrida the figure of the specter haunts and exceeds all writing in that it, like writing, simultaneously engenders and extinguishes the living while refusing and escaping definition. The major form of writing is thus one which accepts and acknowledges its spectrality alongside its accursed share.

Conclusion As a form of conclusion, we should go back to Derrida’s original take on Bataille, when the duet was still being played out as a duel, in order to outplay Derrida’s postulation that “Bataille .  .  . has in mind the servile project of serving life—the phantom of life—in presence.”41 As I have shown, and as Derrida corroborates in evolving an oeuvre haunted by Bataille’s voice, Bataille’s conception and practice of general writing are not servile, nor do they serve the phantom of life in presence. Rather, they are properly spectral: they convey that which exceeds meaning, cannot be logically assigned, destabilizes structures, and opens up the discourse of philosophy to the beyond of rational modernity in a properly modernist fashion. To pick up from where we started, we can now then assert that both Bataille and Derrida after him managed to devise ways through which to slip out of the prison of modernity. The elusive poetic ability which Habermas recognizes in Bataille’s modernist erotic fictions is in fact specific to Bataille’s scriptural practice as a whole. This is indeed what Derrida implicitly established in his initial engagement with Bataille, which resulted in a debunking, without acknowledging the subversive potential of his findings. At that point, as I demonstrate in this chapter, Derrida’s text itself was already invested in the accursed share of general writing. The apparent duel was in fact shored up by the presence of a dialogical duo. From then onwards, it appears that Bataille’s spectral voice accompanied Derrida’s discourse throughout in an ongoing duet that lifts the barriers between literature and philosophy, rationalism and rhetoricity, modernism and modernity. If we are to unlock the door to understanding Derrida’s relation to modernism, we will need to use the key supplied by Bataille.

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Notes 1 Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 213. Habermas makes this statement about the relationship to modernity of Heidegger and Bataille, not Derrida. However, further in his argument, Habermas makes a similar claim about the latter when he writes that Derrida is “sensitized in the same way against definitive, totalizing, all-incorporating models, especially against the organic dimension in works of art.,” ibid, 187. The rapprochement of the thinkers’ positions is set by Habermas himself. 2 See Lasse Thomassen, “Introduction,” in The Derrida-Habermas Reader, ed. Lasse Thomassen (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 1–7 (3). 3 See Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 237. 4 See also Roland Barthes, “The Metaphor of the Eye,” trans. J. A. Underwood, in Story of the Eye, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (London: Marion Boyars, 1979). 5 See Michèle Richman, “Georges Bataille’s Classical Modernism,” L’Esprit Créateur 53, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 104–16, and Raymond Spiteri, “Georges Bataille and the Limits of Modernism,” in Melbourne Art Journal 4 (2009): 1–27. 6 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share. An Essay on General Economy. Volume 1. Consumption, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 10. 7 Ibid, 12. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid, 10. My emphasis. 10 See “The Notion of Expenditure,” in Georges Bataille. Visions of Excess. Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 116–29. 11 Ibid., 118. 12 Ibid., 119. 13 Ibid., 120. Emphasis in the original. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Similar comments on poetry can be found throughout Bataille’s oeuvre, the most emblematic one being arguably the famous and often quoted statement: “Of poetry, I will now say that it is, I believe, the sacrifice in which words are victims.” Georges Bataille, The Inner Experience, trans. Stuart Kendall (New York: SUNY Press, 2014), 135. 17 Jacques Derrida, “From Restricted to General Economy. A Hegelianism without Reserve,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2001), 317–50 (338).

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18 Ibid., 341. Emphasis in the original. 19 Ibid., note 42, p. 441. 20 Ibid., 442. 21 Ibid. 22 Jacques Derrida, “De l’économie restreinte à l’économie générale. Un Hegelianisme sans réserve,” in L’Écriture et la différence, Paris, Seuil, 1967, 369–407 (404). 23 Derrida, “From Restricted to General Economy,” 347. Emphasis in the original. 24 Ibid. 25 Derrida, “From Restricted to General Economy,” 330–31. A discrepancy between the English translation and the French original must be noted here. While Derrida cites from Méthode de méditation, the English translation attributes the quotes to Inner Experience. 26 Ibid., 331. Emphasis in the original. Derrida quotes here again from Méthode de méditation which is here again wrongly identified as Inner Experience in the English. 27 See all the Bataillean vocabulary which circulates in Derrida’s essay. 28 Quotations by Bataille can interrupt the text for over a whole page (see Derrida, “From Restricted to General Economy,” 325 and 326), for instance, or fragment it by their accelerated succession (see Derrida, “From Restricted to General Economy,” 336 and 337). 29 Be it by directly incorporating quotes into the text’s sentences thanks to quotation marks and/or italics, or by integrating them to the prosthesis that are the numerous footnotes accompanying the text, a rather unusual phenomenon in Derrida’s body of work. 30 Ibid, 332. 31 Gilles Ernst, “Notes et variantes” to Histoire de l’œil, in Georges Bataille. Romans et récits, ed. Jean-François Louette (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 1028. My translation. 32 Derrida, “From Restricted to General Economy,” 350. Emphasis in the original. 33 Derrida starts his essay by reading Bataille against Hegel. He writes: “Taken one by one and immobilized outside their syntax, all of Bataille’s concepts are Hegelian. We must acknowledge this without stopping here. For if one does not grasp the rigorous effect of the trembling to which he submits these concepts, the new configuration into which he displaces and reinscribes them, barely reaching it however, one would conclude, according to the case at hand, that Bataille is Hegelian or anti-Hegelian, or that he has muddled Hegel.” ibid., 320. 34 Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1982), 11. Eight pages further, Derrida explicitly refers to Bataille and the essay he dedicated to him in 1964: “Elsewhere, in a reading of Bataille, I have attempted to indicate what might come of a rigorous and, in a new sense, ‘scientific’ relating of the ‘restricted economy’ that takes no part in

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expenditure without reserve, death, opening itself to nonmeaning, etc., to a general economy that takes into account the nonreserve, that keeps in reserve the nonreserve, if it can be put thus. I am speaking of a relationship between a différance that can make a profit on its investment and a différance that misses its profit, the investiture of a presence that is pure and without loss here being confused with absolute loss, with death.,” p. 19. It is interesting to note here that Derrida makes a point to insist on the rigor and scientificity of his approach. 35 Bataille is explicitly mentioned “in passing,” alongside Nietzsche, in relation to what Derrida names “the Zarathustrian high noon,” that is, questions of excess and generosity at play in society and in the short story by Baudelaire on which the book focuses. See Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 162. 36 Roland Barthes, “I Don’t Believe in Influences,” in The Grain of the Voice, trans. Linda Coverdale (New York: Hill and Wang, 1991), 25–29 (26–27). Emphasis in the original. 37 Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London, Athlone Press, 1981), 61–172 (70). 38 Ibid. Interestingly, the vocabulary here is also the same that Derrida uses to describe Bataille’s writing. See Derrida, “From Restricted to General Economy,” 341. 39 See Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, “Spectrographies,” in Echographies of Television, trans. Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 113–34 (115). 40 Etymologically, scandalous is that which appears as incomprehensible, poses problem to consciousness, throws reasoning off balance, or disturbs faith. In Greek, the scandal is a trap placed on the way to make stumble. Derrida uses the word in Derrida, “From Restricted to General Economy,” 339. 41 Derrida, “From Restricted to General Economy,” 336.

Works cited Barthes, Roland. “I Don’t Believe in Influences.” In The Grain of the Voice, translated by Linda Coverdale, 25–29. New York: Hill and Wang, 1991. Barthes, Roland. “The Metaphor of the Eye.” Translated by J. A. Underwood. In Story of the Eye, translated by Joachim Neugroschel, 119–27. London: Marion Boyars, 1979. Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share. An Essay on General Economy. Volume 1. Consumption. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1988. Bataille, Georges. The Inner Experience. Translated by Stuart Kendall. New York: SUNY Press, 2014. Bataille, Georges. “The Notion of Expenditure.” In Georges Bataille. Visions of Excess. Selected Writings, 1927-1939, edited and translated by Allan Stoekl, 116–29. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.

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Derrida, Jacques. «De l’économie restreinte à l’économie générale. Un Hegelianisme sans réserve.» In L’Écriture et la différence, edited by Jacques Derrida, 369–407. Paris: Seuil, 1967. Derrida, Jacques. “From Restricted to General Economy. A Hegelianism without Reserve.” In Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass, 317–50. London: Routledge, 2001. Derrida, Jacques. Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992. Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1982. Derrida, Jacques. “Plato’s Pharmacy.” In Dissemination, translated by Barbara Johnson, 61–172. London: Athlone Press, 1981. Derrida, Jacques, and Bernard Stiegler. “Spectrographies.” In Echographies of Television, translated by Jennifer Bajorek, 113–34. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002. Ernst, Gilles. «Notice, notes et variantes» to Histoire de l’œil. In Georges Bataille. Romans et récits, edited by Jean-François Louette, 998–1034. Paris: Gallimard, 2004. Habermas, Jürgen. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Twelve Lectures. Translated by Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990. Richman, Michèle. “Georges Bataille’s Classical Modernism.” L’Esprit Créateur 53, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 104–16. Spiteri, Raymond. “Georges Bataille and the Limits of Modernism.” Melbourne Art Journal 4 (2009): 1–27. Thomassen, Lasse. “Introduction” to The Derrida-Habermas Reader, edited by Lasse Thomassen, 1–7. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006.

9 A cross in the margin: Inscription and erasure in Derrida and Pound Mark Byron

Loco Signi EZRA POUND, Canto

XLII1

Given Ezra Pound’s sustained interest in languages, translation, and systems of inscription, as well as his formidable literary archive, it seems odd at first glance that Derrida should show relatively little direct interest in a poet whose shadow still looms over modern and contemporary poetry in English––not to mention poetry in Italian, French, Chinese, and Japanese. Pound’s lifelong fascination with Neoplatonism exposed him to negative theology, and his experiments with the Chinese language and systems of inscription in his epic poem, “The Cantos,” marks out his poetics as one of sustained meditation on the nature of the sign and the latencies of signification. One might consider Pound’s aesthetics, his philosophical outlook, and even his politics, and think of a number of Derrida’s more well-known works as candidates for direct dialogue: Of Grammatology for “The Chinese

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Written Character as a Medium of Poetry”; Archive Fever for Pound’s own immense, porous archive; Acts of Literature for The Cantos; and so on. Derrida famously professed an aversion to writing on Samuel Beckett by virtue of what he saw as an inhibiting intellectual proximity.2 Derrida and Pound seem to be in little danger of any similar problem, and the paucity of direct engagement might be seen to confirm a sense of indifference. The following discussion will argue that Pound and Derrida share important intellectual terrain despite the divergences in their attitudes, aesthetics, and modes of thought. By necessity it will be selective rather than exhaustive, taking the themes of signification, archives, and negative theology as points of orientation. There exist numerous excellent studies of Pound from a Derridean or deconstructionist perspective, demonstrating the utility of reading Pound via the work of Derrida.3 As much as these studies comprise a buttress for this essay, space precludes any sustained attention to them except as they directly press upon specific points arising.

Neoplatonism and negative theology in Pound and Derrida The central role of Neoplatonism in Pound’s thought and writing is well understood: the gold standard remains Peter Liebregts’s Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism, but new work suggests there may be significant terrain still to be fully understood, especially in relation to his interest in the theology of the Eastern Church Fathers in preparation for what became The Pisan Cantos.4 Numerous studies explore how this body of thought shapes Pound’s philological and poetic interests in the Troubadour poets and Guido Cavalcanti, and how it informs his project in The Cantos to “have gathered from the air a live tradition” (LXXXI / 542).5 Neoplatonism shares in Pound’s intellectual formation with such subjects as Aristotelianism, Chinese history, Greek and Roman literature, Italian Fascism, the founding documents and events of the United States, and Western artistic and intellectual history more broadly. Yet Pound’s specific interests in Neoplatonism from early in his career reflect his preoccupations with what he considered to be occluded texts and traditions more generally––Stesichorus, John Scottus Eriugena, Guido Cavalcanti, and so on––and provides him with an apparatus by which to disclose hidden or suppressed influences in intellectual history. Neoplatonism provides Pound with a tradition and system of thought to inform the anti-materialist strains of his aesthetics, such as the presence of the Greek gods in The Cantos––“Venerandam, / In the Cretan’s phrase, with the golden crown, Aphrodite” (I / 3). He also deploys a Neoplatonic sensibility to assert the inheritance of ancient music and medieval poetry in Gerhard Münch’s modern arrangement of Clément Janequin’s Le Chant

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des Oiseaux, transcribed in Canto LXXV––“its ancestry I think goes back to Arnaut Daniel and to god knows what hidden antiquity.”6 In Guide to Kulchur and elsewhere, Pound rejects the strain of Aristotelian logic he saw in the theology of Thomas Aquinas, turning instead to ancient rites (Pythagoras, the Eleusinian Mysteries) and to the submerged tradition of Eastern Neoplatonism. Pound read volume 122 of the Patrologia Latina in Venice and Genoa in 1939–40, giving him access to John Scottus Eriugena in lightly edited ninth-century Latin and Greek. Eriugena read, translated, and produced commentaries on several early medieval Eastern thinkers including Pseudo-Dionysius, Maximus the Confessor, and Gregory of Nyssa. Pseudo-Dionysius developed a complex apophatic theology in his Mystical Theology, in which the concept of negation becomes a vehicle by which to speak of divinity.7 Despite its transcendental impulses, Neoplatonism informs Pound’s materialist concerns (economics, printing, manuscripts, and manual craftsmanship) and instills a conceptual discipline in his poetics as it aspires to a paradisal condition. Derrida’s lifelong negotiations with Neoplatonism and negative theology are plainly evident. From the moment deconstruction entered into philosophical discourse its relation to negative theology has generated spirited debate, with the scholarly majority siding with Derrida in denying their conflation.8 The fulcrum upon which this debate rests is the distinction between a philosophy of absence and the deconstruction of opposing concepts of absence and presence. Luke Ferretter deploys PseudoDionysius as an example of negative theology that deconstructs positive theology. Similarly, Kevin Hart reads Derrida’s use of negative theology as a deconstruction of ontotheology rather than simply a phase within it.9 These claims bear affinities with recent scholarship by Paul Rorem concerning the early medieval reception of Pseudo-Dionysius, where apophatic theology cannot be understood as simply a matter of negation but is instead a perspectival theology positioned in the movement between Being and NonBeing.10 Derrida’s 1968 lecture “Différance,” later published in Margins of Philosophy, explores such Pseudo-Dionysian concepts as superessentialism–– that to apply the concept of Being to God is to limit what is limitless, and thus God is both not-Being and more-than-Being––in relation to différance as the scission that leads to all concept formation.11 Among Derrida’s recurrent concepts such as the trace, the supplement, and writing under erasure, his installation of différance as the axis upon which theological concepts turn becomes a point of contact with principles in Buddhist thought that dismantle oppositions between Being and NonBeing, presence and absence, and immanence and transcendence. Toby Avard Foshay explores this intersection with an emphasis on the Dōgen principle of nonduality, and finds common ground between Buddhism and Derrida in their nontheological frameworks.12 While Derrida makes little mention of this spiritual tradition, the importance of nonduality and apophasis in

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his thinking situates Dōgen alongside Neoplatonism as particularly fertile modes by which to understand his project. Stephen Gersh provides a comprehensive account of the influence of Neoplatonism upon Derrida’s thought, as well as how Neoplatonism might be understood in the light of deconstruction.13 Gersh’s rationale stems partly from the way Neoplatonism has itself been sidelined in the history of philosophy, as scholars “leap from Aristotle to Descartes” and bypass this rich tradition.14 This occlusion is precisely the mechanism that draws Pound to the major figures in his own “minor tradition” such as Pseudo-Dionysius, Eriugena, and, in his poetic performance of esoteric thought, Guido Cavalcanti. This nexus of concepts and traditions informs the way both Derrida and Pound negotiate their theories of language, and particularly the Chinese written form.

Pound’s Chinese written character and Derrida’s Sinographies Pound famously edited the notebooks of Ernest Fenollosa––bestowed upon the poet by Fenollosa’s widow Mary in 1913––to produce “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” in 1916. Despite Pound excising much of Fenollosa’s Buddhist and Daoist material, the essay concentrates on how the Chinese written sign sharply contrasts with European logic: where Western thought is governed by a continuously receding series of definitions, the Chinese written character still attains to things it represents. This view has been criticized as naïvely logographic, petrifying semantic agency in the remnant pictorial stylization of archaic scripts.15 Fenollosa and Pound engage in a wayward interpretation of Chinese ideograms by ignoring the role of radicals and phonetic elements, and overvaluing the small percentage of characters that actually demonstrate a pictographic tendency. The locus classicus of this view of Chinese writing as the “vivid shorthand picture of the operations of nature” is the example: 人

見

馬

Man Sees Horse Fenollosa elaborates on this quality of Chinese writing, and suggests its basis in action: “Chinese poetry has the unique advantage of combining both elements [of space and time]. It speaks at once with the vividness of painting, and with the mobility of sounds.”16 Recently this critical consensus has begun to turn. Chinese classical poetry did in fact place great stock in characters bearing pictographic residue. As Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas contends in a forthcoming essay, this tradition, along with the now-defunct Confucian education system

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within which it was preserved, runs somewhat counter to scholarly preconceptions at a temporal or cultural remove.17 Pound had already published his “translations” of Chinese poetry in Cathay (1915), and wasn’t as misinformed as critical consensus would have us believe. Fenollosa’s essay goes on to claim that semantics is embedded in the Chinese sign associatively, where red is signified by the abbreviated pictures of cherry, rose, iron rust, and flamingo.18 This formulation is in keeping with Saussurian linguistics, where the locus of meaning is found in the sign’s difference to other signs within the same system. In one sense Fenollosa is dealing with an empirical and practical view of language––from a position outside the target language, it must be noted––but the semantic theory embedded in his formulation expresses an anti-essentialism similar to what Derrida elaborates in his response to Saussure and Lévi-Strauss in Of Grammatology and elsewhere. Haun Saussy writes in his introduction to The Chinese Written Character that the essence of Pound’s poetics, the “ideogrammic method,” runs counter to the orientalist views of the preceding century which saw, from Champollion onwards, a backwardness in Chinese writing compared to alphabetic systems.19 Following Fenollosa, Pound saw the sign emerging from the state of nature it represents in ways foreclosed to phonetic writing. Its etymology is plainly visible: for example, the ideogram for light, 明 (ming), combines the signs for sun and moon. Pound sees beyond the Chinese linguistic context however, and discerns the trace of an entire metaphysics and ethics in this character: “The sun and moon, the total light process, the radiation, reception and reflection of light; hence, the intelligence. Bright, brightness, shining. Refer to Scotus Erigena, Grosseteste, and the notes on light in my Cavalcanti.”20 Fittingly Fenollosa concludes his essay by drawing together poetry and light in a globalizing metaphor: “In all poetry a word is like a sun, with its corona and chromosphere; words crowd upon words, and enwrap each other in their luminous envelopes until sentences become clear, continuous light-bands.”21 The dynamism of the ming ideogram, embodied in its physical composition and its function as noun, verb, or adjective, also draws Pound to such other ideograms such as 誠 (cheng / zheng) or “sincerity”: “the precise definition of the word, pictorially the sun’s lance coming to rest on the precise spot verbally.”22 These two ideograms combine in the Confucian principle of 誠 明 (zheng ming), or “rectification of names” set out in Analects 13.3.23 To stand by one’s word, to shine light upon the actual state of affairs, is to engage in ethics as First Philosophy. This totalizing gesture–– the truth of the world––bears a closer resemblance to Heidegger’s notion of “worlding” than to a Levinasian ethics as First Philosophy. It differs from Derrida’s anti-essentialist view of the sign, but attempts a similar critique of phonocentrism as in Of Grammatology: “The man standing by his word would accept phonetic analogy only as a necessary makeshift, when

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ideographic alternatives had been exhausted. It was a matter of jurisdiction: to do otherwise would be to cede the territory of Chinese writing to the transitory nonsense of sound, of flatus vocis.”24 Fenollosa’s essay remains a kind of modernist ars poetica, yet Pound assembled the essay from multiple essay drafts, lectures, and other materials excerpted from the notebooks. It is a work without a singular origin, consisting rather in a series of displacements. Saussy notes how Pound’s editorial intervention removed most of the material pertaining to Buddhist principles, particularly Shin Bukkyō (New Buddhism) that sought to renovate Buddhism in light of Western philosophy, and Tendai (天台), in which the Middle Way or the “threefold truth” is a central teaching: “First, all things are empty (of inherent existence); second, all things have a provisional or interrelated reality; and third, all things are both empty of ultimate reality and provisionally real at the same time.”25 This teaching illustrates Fenollosa’s attempt to bring East and West together in philosophy and aesthetics, but it also resonates with Derrida’s thought regarding the absence of the transcendental signified, and the role of différance and non-identity in systems of signification. Fenollosa elaborates on this anti-essentialist impulse, where all things are contingent and mutually constitutive. He speaks of how motion “leaks everywhere” and how “processes in nature are interrelated . . . one causes or passes into another.”26 This notion also recalls the Kegon (華嚴) or Flower Ornament Scripture School, which posits that all things are finally interconnected in Indra’s net.27 Fenollosa is equipped with an aesthetic principle of interconnectedness that is also reminiscent of Pound’s notion of the image as a “radiant node or cluster . . . a vortex, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.”28 Diverging from Fenollosa’s view of China’s future at the center of world history,29 Pound finds that Chinese history, thought, and aesthetics serves to guide the revolution of modernism and to redeem the West from ethical and political decline. Pound downplays his editorial intervention in his 1918 Preface, claiming to have “done little more than remove a few repetitions and shape a few sentences.”30 Yet his removal of the Tendai and Shin Bukkyō material also removed an important element of Fenollosa’s critique of Western philosophy: “Whether or not he knew at the time what he was doing, Pound as editor cut very closely around a specific way of thinking about reality, relation, and symbolization, a version of ‘radical empiricism’ subjected to the test of East Asian philosophical critique.”31 Fenollosa saw in China a looming challenge for the West, which was guilty of having ignored its rising significance by virtue of tired stereotypes of Chinese materialism: “The Chinese problem alone is so vast that no nation can afford to ignore it. We in America, especially, must face it across the Pacific, and master it or it will master us.”32 Fenollosa also saw injustice and danger in disparaging the Japanese “as a nation of copyists.” Ironically Fenollosa’s Japanese tutors

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Ariga Nagao and Mori Kainan mediated his access to Chinese poetry, and his own notebooks display extensive exercises in copying Chinese characters and providing cribs to them. The pivotal modernist vehicle of Chinese writing and poetry is decentered at the very moment its centrality is most forcefully asserted.33 In developing his concept of différance, Derrida plays on its silent distinction from difference: “So-called phonetic writing, by all rights and in principle, and not only due to an empirical or technical insufficiency, can function only by admitting into its system nonphonetic ‘signs’ (punctuation, spacing, etc.).”34 Derrida returns repeatedly to what he considers the quintessential nonphonetic script: Chinese. In his critical account of the history of writing early in Of Grammatology, he identifies the theological problem embedded in traditional histories of writing, where a script is considered to be divinely bestowed. Only with improved knowledge of non-occidental scripts did the first displacement of this theologism occur, providing the grounds for a history of writing in the West: “It is the ‘Chinese’ prejudice; all the philosophical projects of a universal script and of a universal language, pasilaly, polygraphy, invoked by Descartes, outlined by Father Kircher, Wilkins, Leibniz, etc., encouraged seeing in the recently discovered Chinese script a model of the philosophical language thus removed from history.”35 Derrida claim that, for Leibniz, this also liberates Chinese script from the voice. In the context of European Enlightenment philosophy, Chinese writing thus acts as a counterpoint to the “philosophy of presence” and the “eschatology of parousia,” traced by Derrida to Plato’s Phaedrus in which writing is a mnemotechnique, an agent for forgetting. Hegel renounces writing in favor of speech on these terms: “Writing is that forgetting of the self, that exteriorization, the contrary of the interiorizing memory, of the Erinnerung that opens the history of the spirit.”36 Hegel finds merit in phonetic (alphabetic) writing, however, due to its self-effacement before the voice. Yet he agrees with Leibniz in giving priority to nonphonetic writing as less dependent on auditory remnants in its work of representation, existing in an “hieroglyphic” sense as deaf and mute writing (ein taubes Lesen und ein stummes Schreiben). “What writing itself, in its nonphonetic moment, betrays, is life. It menaces at once the breath, the spirit, and history as the spirit’s relationship with itself. It is their end, their finitude, their paralysis.” This cutting short of breath requires an exegetical sensibility, and writing is thus “to speech what China is to Europe.”37 China is a culture in which the exegetical factor is high, where writing is confined to the elite responsible for the “spiritual culture” of society. Chinese writing “breaks the noun apart [and] describes relations and not appellations. The noun and the word, those unities of breath and concept, are effaced within pure writing.”38 Thus Leibniz’s preference for the hieroglyphic and nonphonetic is as disturbing to a standard Western conception of language as China is to European

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consciousness, effacing the breath and the centered subject, ousia, as well as the noun. By outlining this history of writing from the European Enlightenment, with Chinese as a “sort of European hallucination,”39 Derrida illuminates Fenollosa’s attempt to rectify the Western misunderstanding of Chinese writing––its verbal energies rather than a perceived nominal reification–– but which still inscribes a foundational division between speech and writing. Derrida’s outline of the early modern reception of China, and particularly his intensive study of Rousseau’s “Essay on the Origin of Languages,” in which Chinese is postulated as a language that does not surrender expressiveness,40 confirms his linking phonetic writing with logocentrism: We have known for a long time that largely nonphonetic scripts like Chinese or Japanese included phonetic elements very early. They remained structurally dominated by the ideogram or algebra and we thus have the testimony of a powerful movement of civilization developing outside of all logocentrism. Writing did not reduce the voice to itself, it incorporated it into a system.41 This view, following the sinologist Jacques Gernet, softens any a priori bifurcation of speech and writing, rather seeing East Asian languages as having avoided the valorization of speech, and of vowels, as occurred across the Mediterranean and the Indian subcontinent. Derrida answers his own rhetorical question––“Can it be thought that the system of Chinese script is thus a sort of unfulfilled alphabet?”––by arguing for an examination of what underwrites writing per se, “this heliocentric concept of speech . . . a sort of graphic monogeneticism that transforms all differences into divergences or delays, accidents of deviations.”42 Where Fenollosa and Pound frame the poetic and philosophical dynamism of Chinese writing in terms of light (the sign for which is literally half-comprised of the Chinese character for the sun), Derrida deploys a similar trope to decry a pre-Copernican concept of speech in the West, a heliocentrism that constrained a proper understanding of writing, including attempts to understand Chinese writing. Derrida acknowledges how radical Fenollosa’s insights proved to be: “This irreducibly graphic poetics was, with that of Mallarmé, the first break in the most entrenched Western tradition. The fascination that the Chinese ideogram exercised on Pound’s writing may thus be given all its historical significance.”43 Derrida’s view of Chinese writing as having somehow escaped logocentrism and ethnocentrism is now seen as misplaced or even symptomatic of an orientalism in poststructuralist thought more generally.44 Given that his critique attempts a kind of antiessentialist “first philosophy” of writing, can Chinese play a credible role in his thinking? He distinguishes between a history of writing based on empirical questions of “where” and “when,” “hitherto .  .  . practiced

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by nearly all archaeologists, epigraphists, and prehistorians who have interrogated the world’s scripts,” and a history that exceeds “the logic of the onto-phenomenological question of material traces.”45 This anti-essentialism takes Derrida back to the Greek root γράφειν (graphein), where “To write means to graft. It’s the same word. . . . There is no more any thing than there is any original text.”46 Textual grafting is thus a process of transformation rather than quotation, where the text’s separation from itself is evident in such spatial elements as hyphens, numerals, and punctuation. Derrida uses the example of Philippe Sollers’s experimental text Nombres (Numbers) and its use of Chinese ideograms in counterpoint to the “exoticism” displayed by Pound: Up until now the use of Chinese graphic forms––one thinks of “Pound” in particular––had as its aim, according to the worst hypothesis, the ornamentation of the text or the decoration of the page through a supplementary effect of fascination, which would haunt it by freeing the poetic from the constraints of a certain system of linguistic representation; according to the best hypothesis, is was intended to allow the forces of the designs themselves to play directly before the eyes of those who are not familiar with the rules of their functioning.47 This analysis severely underestimates Pound’s understanding of Chinese writing by the time he was composing Rock-Drill and Thrones in the later 1940s and 1950s––the sections of The Cantos most densely populated with Chinese characters––not to mention the capacities for at least some of his readers to process these elements of the text beyond sheer ornamentation. Such scholars as Hwa Yol Jung take issue with Derrida’s inelegant handling of Chinese philology, including his reference to such Chinese classics as the Dao De Jing of Laozi. The claim that East Asian languages bypassed the “Western curse” of logocentrism, despite all languages having to navigate the so-called phonocentric necessity as their scripts slowly emerged, misunderstands the phonological dimension of Chinese writing.48 Despite these orientalizing residues, Derrida’s method of reading Chinese writing as anti-essentialist, and as a network of traces immune from logocentrism, still has it perform a recuperative function with regard to Western logocentric scripts.

A is for Archive Both Derrida and Pound are drawn, in their particular ways, to the idea of Chinese writing as a kind of storehouse for cultural memory or as proof of a persistent alternative to phonocentrism and logocentrism. A storehouse, at once virtual, material, and historical, also describes the archive. In Archive

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Fever Derrida bases his critique of grammatology (and the ontotheology of Western metaphysics) on the motility and anti-essentialism of the trace. He is able to articulate an elegant theory of the archive that operates at linguistic, psychic, and material registers: as a “nomological principle” that etymologically signifies the domicile of civic authority; and as the hypomnemic site of externality and repetition, or external apparatus of memory. The archive’s bond with arche-writing as well as with printing technology for Derrida provides a remarkably cogent platform by which to begin theorizing Pound’s use of archival material in his poetry and prose, as well as his own substantial literary archive. Pound was trained to graduate level in Romance philology and spent considerable time in archives, particularly earlier in his career as he compiled scholarly editions of Troubadour poets and the Rime of Guido Cavalcanti. These practices translated into his processes of poetic composition in manifold ways: most prominently in direct verbatim quotations of documents and sources throughout The Cantos, but also in the archiving of poetic history and personal memory within the poem––a feature starkly illustrated in the elegiac roll-call of friends and associates in The Pisan Cantos, largely composed in the United States Army Detention Training Center outside of Pisa following Pound’s arrest for treason in 1945. Derrida opens Archive Fever by tracing its etymology to the Greek word Arkhē, commencement and commandment, the “nomological principle”: “the meaning of ‘archive,’ its only meaning, comes to it from the Greek arkheion: initially a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded.”49 The “privileged topology” of the archive is a sustained inheritance, a location that houses authoritative documents and governs their meaning and available modes of access to them provided by the archon. The archive is thus where the visible and invisible cohabitate, where the act of consignation literally brings them together, aiming to provide a single configuration of signs and a single mode of classification. The process of consignation is not this simple, however, and the archive also raises issues of classification open to deconstructive processes. Archive Fever speaks to the question of Freud’s archive––the text began as a lecture on the occasion of a colloquium at Freud’s London house (and location of his archive) marking its opening as a museum. Derrida’s focus radiates out to archives generally, where the question of politics “runs through the whole of the field and in truth determines politics from top to bottom as res publica. There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory.”50 This conjoining of politics, domicility, and memory opens the question of the archive to deconstructive analysis. Drawing on Plato’s theory of writing as a pharmakon in the Phaedrus––remedy, poison, and scapegoat all in one–– Derrida asserts the archive is hypomnemic (i.e., an external memorizing apparatus) and thus external to the self. This creates a site of repetition, a

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function which in turn is tied to the death drive for Freud. The conserving function of the archive here becomes coexistent with its destructive function: “Consequence: right on that which permits and conditions archivization, we will never find anything other than that which exposes to destruction, and in truth menaces with destruction, introducing, a priori, forgetfulness and the archiviolithic into the heart of the monument.”51 The death drive is archive fever (le mal d’archive). This psychic apparatus combines with the effects of technology to pose a further question: how is the archive changed by mechanisms more attuned to archivization, such as the technology of print, mechanized retrieval, and computerized search indices? If the archive is a collection of memory prostheses, must it, pro Phaedrus, degrade the role and function of memory?52 Derrida postulates the infrastructure of printing and typography as part of process of archivization, a process that (in Freud’s case) leads to a break within his own theory of psychoanalysis––in his case the pure loss found in the death drive.53 The consequences for archival logic, as well as for associated fields such as philology, is found in the difference between repression and suppression (Verdrängung and Unterdrückung), that is, between the absence of a trace altogether and its displacement. By returning to the logic of the trace, Derrida is able to weigh this rift in the archive’s conceptual and material structure in relation to an impression.54 This term recalls the subtitle of Archive Fever, “A Freudian Impression,” by showing how Freud’s archival logic, and the logic of classical philology and scholarship generally, is founded upon this indeterminacy, with material implications. The “trouble” of the archive (trouble de l’archive) is located in this ambivalence between authority and secretion, documentary singularity and iterability: “With the irreplaceable singularity of a document to interpret, to repeat, to reproduce, but each time in its original uniqueness, an archive ought to be idiomatic, and thus at once offered and unavailable for translation, open to and shielded from technical iteration and reproduction.”55 Further, en mal de l’archive is to need or require the archive, thus expressing the nostalgia and homesickness latent in all concept formations: “It is to run after the archive, even if there’s too much of it, right where something in its anarchives itself.”56 Derrida returns to Freud’s famous essay, “Delusion and Dream in Jensen’s Gradiva,” on the subject of Wilhelm Jensen’s 1902 novel. Norbert Hanold, the novel’s protagonist, is an archaeologist who upon visiting Pompeii is met each midday by a specter. He mistakes the apparition for Gradiva, a woman depicted in a bas-relief, and who turns out a psychic transference of Zoë Bertgang, a childhood friend long suppressed in Hanold’s memory. This figure of the specter haunts Freud as a narratological feature as well as forms the initiating point for psychoanalysis. It is real inasfar as it is a suppressed (or repressed) trace, a truth with its own verisimilitude overshadowed by material truth until it is able to return as a haunting––one which inhabits a

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symbolic space (the charged archaeological topos of Pompeii) and a spectral history of languages, as Gradiva replies to Hanold’s addresses in Greek and Latin by suggesting he speak in his native German. This spectrality of the truth for Freud poses a contradiction underwriting the entire psychoanalytic process: All the Freudian theses are cleft, divided, contradictory, as are the concepts, beginning with that of the archive. Thus it is for every concept: always dislocating itself because it is never one with itself. It is the same with the thesis which posits and arranges the concepts, the history of concepts, their formation as well as their archivization.57 Freud’s struggle with Jensen’s subtle tale demonstrates that the archive and archaeology are fundamentally at odds, despite their proximities in method and approach. How might these reflections aid in producing a theory of the archive for Pound and a methodology for its use? Pound left a formidable archive of literary documents, letters, executive correspondence with literary journals, social and political essays, and swathes of notes taken from an extensive array of sources across very many fields. Much of this archive is housed in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, with important holdings in other locations such as the Lilly Library at Indiana University, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and Schloss Brunnenburg––the home of Pound’s daughter, Mary de Rachewiltz, and her family. Material continues to emerge from these archives in new critical editions, volumes of letters, and a steady flow of biographies. Yet the questions “what is the Pound archive, what does it signify in relation to his published work, and how may it be understood as its own intellectual field?” still await full articulation. Taking Derrida’s paradoxical notion of the archive as both a repository of knowledge and a prosthetic memory device, Pound’s archival practices are found embedded in The Cantos and in his other writings: from outsized quotations to individual words, from subtle uses of technical vocabulary to the mimicry of official documents on the text’s surface. Evidence of what David Ten Eyck describes as Pound’s “documentary method”58 abounds throughout the poem, whereby conventional, if dense, literary reference transforms into what Peter Nichols has called “an autonomous and continuous discourse of its own,”59 and, as Jerome J. McGann has demonstrated, often with a textual apparatus in full view.60 Pound first deploys this archival logic in the Malatesta Cantos (VIII-XI), quoting extensively from Sigismundo’s correspondence and other quattrocento sources, continued in Cantos XXIV and XXVI. Pound quotes liberally from various sources throughout The Cantos, but at particular points these citations assert an independence from the logic of the poem, taking on a

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textual immanence of their own: decrees of various Venetian Doges (Canto XXV); letters of the Founding Fathers of the United States (Cantos XXXI and XXXII); the Works of John Adams (XXXII-XXXIII); and much later in the poem, Paul the Deacon’s History of the Lombards (Canto CXVI), the ninth-century Book of the Eparch of Byzantine emperor Leo the Wise (Canto XCVI), Emperor Kangxi’s seventeenth-century Confucian Sacred Edict (Cantos XCIII-XCIX), and Edward Coke’s Institutions of the Laws of England (Cantos CVII-CIX). The two most prominent documentary archives in The Cantos are Joseph de Mailla’s thirteen-volume Histoire Générale de la Chine (1775–85) and the ten-volume Works of John Adams (1856), excerpts from which comprise almost all of Cantos LI-LXXI––the China Cantos and the Adams Cantos. These sections of The Cantos have received comparatively little critical attention (with some notable exceptions in studies by David Ten Eyck and John Nolde61), due perhaps to the density of the material and the strange logic of poetry comprised almost entirely of quotation. Yet these archival gestures are not only consistent with the modernist impulse to “shore the fragments of our ruin” against the tide of history and perceived threats to cultural patrimony, they are consistent with Pound’s dedication to the archive as a creative locus. The ambivalence between the conservational ethos of the archive and the role of curator and editor in bringing such materials to light in the public sphere is Pound’s own archival trace, marking out the hypomnemic apparatus as the very locus on which to inscribe the impulse of poetic composition and the psychic machinery of memory. The presence of extensive archival material on the poetic surface of The Cantos does not displace creativity for Pound, but constitutes a certain kind of documentary testimony: one not frozen in curatorial atavism but rather one that presents an argument for social, historical, and political diagnosis, bearing its own aesthetic, rhetorical, and ideological frameworks. Just as the poem comprises an extended seminar in learning How To Read, this archival impulse is also evident in Pound’s prose writing from the later 1920s onwards, evident in the primers ABC of Economics (1933), ABC of Reading (1934), and Guide to Kulchur (1938). Pound’s attempts to produce scholarly editions often included substantial documentary and archival material as witness to the literary and intellectual value of the poet or writer in question. His edition Guido Cavalcanti Rime (1934) explains his philological processes and editorial decisions in detailed argument as well as photographic plates of important Cavalcanti manuscripts he consulted across Italy.62 His extended efforts to produce adequate editions of the works of Confucius––from Ta Hio, The Great Learning (1928), to Confucian Analects (1951), Confucius: The Great Digest & Unwobbling Pivot (1952) and The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius (1954)–– is matched by a complementary archival impulse in The Chinese Written Character, to trace a culture’s store of knowledge in the particularities

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of its writing system. Pound’s entire aesthetic project comes down to the search for a textual locus for memory, and the remembering of texts, where the hypomnemic and the mnemic are unified: “the formèd trace,” “where memory liveth” (XXXVI / 178, 177). Derrida asserts that the archive is an interventionist technology, “produc[ing] as much as it records the event.”63 His Freudian theory of the archive pays close attention to Freud’s historical moment: specific modes of communication within the history of media technology, such as physical epistolary exchange in Freud’s case, materially shape the contents of an archive as well as its aspect toward past, present, and future. Pound’s contemporaneity with Freud means that a similar condition holds for his archive: “Archivable meaning is also and in advance codetermined by the structure that archives.”64 It is understandable then that scholarly attention is attuned to Pound’s letters and editorial correspondence, his poetic manuscript drafts, and his very numerous unpublished essays.65 More recent projects have brought to light other unpublished works, including material situated somewhere between aides-mémoires and preparatory drafts.66 Yet if a theory of Pound’s archive ventures its traces as the conjunction of memory and the hypomnema, then the archive undergoes a transformation from repository to a new structure of thinking literature, writing, and creativity.

Conclusion This essay has traced out, in preliminary fashion, the ways in which negative theology, Chinese writing, and the archive intersect with the intellectual and aesthetic projects of Ezra Pound and Jacques Derrida. Beyond the synergies of theme, concept, and method in their work, these shared concerns suggest a deep affinity in outlook in both writers, despite their very different ways of apprehending various traditions of thought and artistic practice. Perhaps the most striking feature is the willingness of both Pound and Derrida to examine the foundations of their intellectual inheritance, to conduct deeply rigorous evaluations of formative discourses and to seek out alternative traditions and modes of thinking in an effort to improve their respective intellectual milieux. For Derrida, the turn from phenomenology and hermeneutics to deconstruction, and for Pound, the pursuit of “hidden” traditions of thought both East and West, each enable to establish agendas we are still yet to see in their full potentiality. Of course the absences, gaps, margins, erasures, and archival burials are as much a part of their projects––these negations are fundamental challenges to duality––and it is in this sense that their legacies will remain “unstill, ever turning” (CXIII / 810).

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Notes 1 Canto XLII in Ezra Pound, The Cantos, fifteenth printing (New York: New Directions, 1995), 210. All subsequent references to The Cantos will be from this edition and given parenthetically by Canto and page number, thus (XLII/210). 2 “‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 60. 3 Jean-Michel Rabaté’s Language, Sexuality, and Ideology in Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1980) draws on Derrida’s strategies and a number of his texts in a broad-ranging discussion of Pound’s poem, also drawing on Lacan and Heidegger; Daniel Tiffany’s Radio Corpse: The Cryptaesthetic of Ezra Pound (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995) provides a searching account of the Image in Pound’s intellectual and political apparatus, deploying Derrida’s work in a deft critique of positivist understandings of his aesthetics and of modernist poetic practice. 4 Peter Liebregts, Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004). For an extensive discussion of Pound’s Neoplatonist interests in the later 1930s, see Mark Byron, Ezra Pound’s Eriugena (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 5 Representative examples include the following: Stuart McDougal, Ezra Pound and the Troubadour Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972); Peter Makin, Provence and Pound (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1978); Maria Luisa Ardizzone, Guido Cavalcanti: The Other Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002); and Ronald Bush, “La filosofica famiglia: Cavalcanti, Avicenna, and the ‘Form’ of Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos,” Textual Practice 24, no. 4 (2010): 669–705. 6 Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (New York: New Directions, 1970), 152. 7 Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987). 8 Luke Ferretter, “How to Avoid Speaking of the Other: Derrida, Dionysius, and the Problematic of Negative Theology,” Paragraph 24, no. 1 (2001): 50. 9 Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology, and Philosophy, 2nd ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000). For an illuminating appraisal of this debate, see Mary-Jane Rubenstein, “Dionysius, Derrida, and the Critique of ‘Ontotheology,’ ” Modern Theology 24, no. 4 (2008): 725–41. See also Harold Coward and Toby Foshay, eds., Derrida and Negative Theology (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992). 10 Paul Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary on the Texts and an Introduction to Their Influence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 11 Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 8–9.

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12 Toby Avard Foshay, “Denegation, Nonduality, and Language in Derrida and Dōgen,” Philosophy East and West 44, no. 3 (1994): 543–58. For an examination of Derrida’s work in relation to Daoism, see Steven Burik, The End of Comparative Philosophy and the Task of Comparative Thinking (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2009). 13 Stephen Gersh, Neoplatonism after Derrida: Parallelograms (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2006) and Being Different: More Neoplatonism after Derrida (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014). 14 Gersh, Neoplatonism, 6. 15 One of the earliest scholarly objections arose in George A. Kennedy, “Fenollosa, Pound, and the Chinese Character,” Yale Literary Magazine 126 (1958): 24–36. 16 Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition, ed. Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 45. 17 Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas, “Ezra Pound and Chinese Poetry,” in The New Ezra Pound, ed. Mark Byron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). For an early defense of Fenollosa’s essay see Wai-lim Yip, Ezra Pound’s Cathay (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969). 18 Fenollosa and Pound, The Chinese Written Character, 56. 19 Haun Saussy, “Fenollosa Compounded: A Discrimination,” in Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition, ed. Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 5–6. 20 Ezra Pound, Confucius: The Unwobbling Pivot, the Great Digest, the Analects (New York: New Directions, 1951), 20. 21 Fenollosa and Pound, The Chinese Written Character, 60. 22 Pound, Confucius, 20. 23 Wing Tsit-Chan identifies the Confucian principle of zheng ming as specifically ethical, distinct from such similar theories as the Taoist metaphysical principle, the utilitarian principle of the Legalist School, or the School of Logicians’s focus on logic. See A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, trans. Wing TsitChan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 40–41. 24 Saussy, “Fenollosa Compounded: A Discrimination,” 8. 25 Ibid, 20–21. 26 Pound and Fenollosa, Chinese Written Character, 46–47. 27 Saussy, “Fenollosa Compounded: A Discrimination,” 22–23. 28 Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (New York: New Directions, 1970), 92. 29 See Ernest Fenollosa, “The Coming Fusion of East and West,” Harper’s Magazine 98 (1898): 115–22. Here, Fenollosa sets out a geopolitical strategy

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whereby Britain and the United States combine with Japan to keep the integrity of China from spoliation by Russia, France, and other aggressors. 30 Pound and Fenollosa, Chinese Written Character, 41. 31 Saussy, “Fenollosa Compounded: A Discrimination,” 40. 32 Pound and Fenollosa, Chinese Written Character, 42. 33 This does not necessarily diminish the importance of China in the modernist imaginary. Eric Hayot and Christopher Bush have each written of how an idea of China is installed at the center of modernist practice. Bush also traces how Derrida’s critique of writing inflects the way the modernist ideograph is understood. See Eric Hayot, Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004) and Christopher Bush, Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 34 Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 5. 35 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 76. 36 Ibid, 24. 37 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 25. 38 Ibid, 26. 39 Ibid, 80. 40 Donald Wesling, “Methodological Implications of the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida for Comparative Literature: The Opposition East-West and Several Other Observations,” in Chinese-Western Comparative Literature: Theory and Strategy, ed. John J. Deeney (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1980), 109. 41 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 90. 42 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 91. 43 Ibid, 92. 44 For the former view, see Sean Meighoo, “Derrida’s Chinese Prejudice,” Cultural Critique 68 (2008): 163–209; and for the latter, see Jin Suh Jirn, “A Sort of European Hallucination: On Derrida’s ‘Chinese Prejudice,’ ” Situations 8, no. 2 (2015): 67–83. 45 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 74, 75. 46 Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. and intro. Barbara Johnson (London: Athlone, 1981), 355. 47 Derrida, Dissemination, 356. 48 Hwa Yol Jung, Transversal Rationality & Intercultural Texts: Essays on Phenomenology and Comparative Philosophy (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2011), 138, 140. 49 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 2.

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50 Ibid, 4, n1. 51 Ibid, 12. 52 Ibid, 15. 53 Ibid, 8–9. 54 Ibid, 28. 55 Ibid, 90. 56 Ibid, 91. 57 Ibid, 84. 58 David Ten Eyck, Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 35. 59 Peter Nichols, Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics and Writing (London: Macmillan, 1984), 134. 60 See especially Chapter 6, “Pound’s Cantos: A Poem Including Bibliography,” in McGann’s The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 129–52. The chapter title is a reference to Pound’s definition of an epic––“a poem including history”––in his essay “Date Line,” Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. and intro. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968), 86. This phrase was adapted again in Lawrence S. Rainey, ed., A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in The Cantos (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). 61 John Nolde, Blossoms from the East: The China Cantos of Ezra Pound (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1983). 62 These materials as well as Pound’s detailed notebooks dealing with variants between manuscripts are housed in the Ezra Pound Collection at the Beinecke Library. A solid overview of these matters is provided in David Anderson, Pound’s Cavalcanti: An Edition of the Translations, Notes, and Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). 63 Derrida, Archive Fever, 17. 64 Ibid, 18. 65 Dozens of published editions of Pound’s correspondence have been published. In addition to Ten Eyck’s study of the Adams Cantos and Rainey’s edited collection mentioned above, two pathbreaking studies of Pound’s manuscripts are Ronald Bush, The Genesis of Pound’s Cantos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976) and Christine Froula, To Write Paradise: Style and Error in Pound’s Cantos (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). 66 A draft detective novel, long quiescent within the Beinecke archive, is forthcoming as Ezra Pound’s and Olga Rudge’s The Blue Spill: A Manuscript Critical Edition, ed. Mark Byron and Sophia Barnes, Modernist Archives (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). The Pisan Cantos typescript drafts also contains two sets of notes Pound prepared on John Scottus Eriugena, intended for use as material for the Paradiso section of The Cantos he began composing in Italian in 1945. These notes are transcribed and annotated in Mark Byron, Ezra Pound’s Eriugena, 113–205.

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Works cited Anderson, David. Pound’s Cavalcanti: An Edition of the Translations, Notes, and Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Ardizzone, Maria L. Guido Cavalcanti: The Other Middle Ages. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Burik, Steven. The End of Comparative Philosophy and the Task of Comparative Thinking. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2009. Bush, Christopher. Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Bush, Ronald. “La filosofica famiglia: Cavalcanti, Avicenna, and the ‘Form’ of Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos.” Textual Practice 24, no. 4 (2010): 669–705. Bush, Ronald. The Genesis of Pound’s Cantos. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976. Byron, Mark. Ezra Pound’s Eriugena. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Byron, Mark, and Sophia Barnes, eds. Ezra Pound’s and Olga Rudge’s The Blue Spill: A Manuscript Critical Edition. Modernist Archives. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. Coward, Harold, and Toby Foshay, eds., Derrida and Negative Theology. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992. Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Translated and introduction by Barbara Johnson. London: Athlone, 1981. Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Derrida, Jacques. “‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’: An Interview with Jacques Derrida.” In Acts of Literature, edited by Derek Attridge, 33–75. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. Eyck, David T. Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos. London: Bloomsbury, 2012. Fenollosa, Ernest. “The Coming Fusion of East and West.” Harper’s Magazine 98 (1898): 115–22. Fenollosa, Ernest, and Ezra Pound. The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition. Edited by Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Ferretter, Luke. “How to Avoid Speaking of the Other: Derrida, Dionysius and the Problematic of Negative Theology.” Paragraph 24, no. 1 (2001): 50–65. Foshay, Toby A. “Denegation, Nonduality, and Language in Derrida and Dōgen.” Philosophy East and West 44, no. 3 (1994): 543–58. Froula, Christine. To Write Paradise: Style and Error in Pound’s Cantos. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. Gersh, Stephen. Being Different: More Neoplatonism after Derrida. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014. Gersh, Stephen. Neoplatonism after Derrida: Parallelograms. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2006.

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Hart, Kevin. The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology, and Philosophy, second edition. New York: Fordham University Press, 2000. Hayot, Eric. Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. Jirn, Jin Suh. “A Sort of European Hallucination: On Derrida’s ‘Chinese Prejudice.’” Situations 8, no. 2 (2015): 67–83. Jung, Hwa Yol. Transversal Rationality & Intercultural Texts: Essays on Phenomenology and Comparative Philosophy. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2011. Kennedy, George A. “Fenollosa, Pound, and the Chinese Character.” Yale Literary Magazine 126 (1958): 24–36. Liebregts, Peter. Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004. Makin, Peter. Provence and Pound. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1978. McDougal, Stuart. Ezra Pound and the Troubadour Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972. McGann, Jerome J. “Pound’s Cantos: A Poem Including Bibliography.” In McGann’s The Textual Condition, 129–52. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Meighoo, Sean. “Derrida’s Chinese Prejudice.” Cultural Critique 68 (2008): 163–209. Nichols, Peter. Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics and Writing. London: Macmillan, 1984. Nolde, John. Blossoms from the East: The China Cantos of Ezra Pound. Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1983. Pound, Ezra. The Cantos. 15th Printing. New York: New Directions, 1995. Pound, Ezra. Confucius: The Unwobbling Pivot, the Great Digest, the Analects. New York: New Directions, 1951. Pound, Ezra. Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir. New York: New Directions, 1970a. Pound, Ezra. Guide to Kulchur. New York: New Directions, 1970b. Pseudo-Dionysius. The Complete Works. Translated by Colm Luibheid. New York: Paulist Press, 1987. Rabaté, Jean-Michel. Language, Sexuality, and Ideology in Ezra Pound’s Cantos. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1980. Rainey, Lawrence S., ed. A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in The Cantos. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Rorem, Paul. Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary on the Texts and an Introduction to Their Influence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Rubenstein, Mary-Jane. “Dionysius, Derrida, and the Critique of ‘Ontotheology.’ ” Modern Theology 24, no. 4 (2008): 725–41. Saussy, Haun. “Fenollosa Compounded: A Discrimination.” In Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition, edited by Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein, 1–40. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Tiffany, Daniel. Radio Corpse: The Cryptaesthetic of Ezra Pound. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.

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Tsit-Chan, Wing, trans. A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969. Twitchell-Waas, Jeffrey. “Ezra Pound and Chinese Poetry.” In The New Ezra Pound, edited by Mark Byron. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming. Wesling, Donald. “Methodological Implications of the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida for Comparative Literature: The Opposition East-West and Several Other Observations.” In Chinese-Western Comparative Literature: Theory and Strategy, edited by John J. Deeney, 79–111. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1980. Yip, Wai-lim. Ezra Pound’s Cathay. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969.

10 Derrida after Valéry (after Derrida) Suzanne Guerlac

“The same me” (Le même moi), Valéry affirms, “plays many different roles.” What does it mean, then, to come after Valéry? Who or what one would be following—or coming after? The neoclassical poet? The obscure symbolist poet? The celebrity poet of La Jeune Parque, or perhaps the modern poet, whose prose poems have recently been published?1 Do we have in mind the poet who abandoned poetry writing for almost twenty years because he had more important things to do? Is it a question of Valéry the matinal figure, who wrote every morning at dawn in his Notebooks, examining how the mind works, ramifications of the principles of thermodynamics and other questions that interested him? Or is it the afternoon Valéry, the member of the Académie Française who represents both Poetry and France in official matters, speaking and writing on demand, officiating at various cultural events and generally playing the role of France’s most celebrated man of letters? Are we speaking of the man identified with an “authoritarian cult of form” (Adorno), the creator of Monsieur Teste, the idolater of intellect?2 Or the lover of Jean Voilier (Jeanne Loviton), whose remarkable and passionate letters have recently been published?3 Perhaps we have in mind the professor at the Collège de France who held forth on the science of poetry, who defines what makes literature literary? And when we speak of Derrida after Valéry, who or what is coming after, if not the philosopher who devoted a career to challenging the very notion of self-identity (ipseity), as well as ideas of before and after? If Derrida comes after Valéry, is following him the same as coming after him? Why might Derrida come after Valéry? Who comes after whom?

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There is a first and simple sense in which Derrida comes after Valéry. In “Force and Signification,” Derrida challenges structuralism in literary criticism as it was championed by the phenomenological critic Jean Rousset. Rousset cites Valéry in the introduction to his book, Form and Signification, in order to authorize a study in which he attempts to derive the meaning of literary works from their formal structure. Rousset then refers this meaning back to the consciousness of the author, that he calls the writer’s “mental universe.”4 In order to grasp these structures through which form carries meaning, he maintains, one must “render the work present” to the eye of the critic or reader “in all its parts, simultaneously” (xiii). It is necessary, in other words, to turn the work into an “ideal space” (xiii). To Derrida, this appeal to totality affirms presence as a prerequisite for meaning, and he then proposes a different notion of meaning, one that does not precede the signifying act but is engendered by it, through its differential operations.5 The corollary to this axiom will be that there is no source, no origin, of meaning in any presence or self-presence—hence, no ground for truth. Subtly, Derrida lets us know that, pace Rousset (and a whole slew of proto-structuralist critics who allude to the celebrated poet as a formalist), Valéry would be on his side in this contest over the meaning of meaning.6 Not only does he mention Valéry’s Introduction to the Method of Leonardo in support of his conception of writing, but he also identifies writing with pure poetry as presented by Valéry: “Paradoxically,” Derrida writes, “inscription . . . alone has the power of poetry, that is, to evoke speech independently of the somnolence of the sign” (FS 23).7 One of the central tenets of Valéry’s poetics is that poetry cannot be paraphrased; poetry cannot be reduced to meaning. Words take on poetic value precisely at the cost of their meaning. Pure poetry blocks comprehension and creates the need for words “to be heard again” (d’être encore entendue), just as they are, without fully passing into meaning. The poet acts on language, Valéry insists by rendering it “completely other” (tout autre).8 In “Force and Signification,” Derrida announces both the project and the practice of what will be known as deconstruction. Instead of relying on oppositions such as form and content (or even form and force), he writes that “it is necessary to look for new concepts and new models, an economy that escapes from this metaphysical system of oppositions.” Conceding that one can never really escape from this system, as long as one uses language, he proposes the following strategy: “One can only announce the break . . . through a . . . certain strategic adjustment [aménagement] that .  .  . turning its own strategies against it, produces a force of dislocation that spreads through the whole system, fissuring it in every direction/in all its meanings [dans tous les sens]” (34). In this chapter, Derrida challenges a phenomenological school of literary criticism that authorizes an appeal to an ideality of meaning through a formalist Valéry and he does so in

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resonance with another Valéry, one who claims that “in language form plays the role of matter,” thus anticipating what post-structuralists will call the materiality of the signifier.9 As if generalizing Valéry’s notion of pure poetry as an othering of language, Derrida substitutes a vouloir écrire, or force of writing, for vouloir dire (intending a meaning) and moves toward a (para)philosophical challenge to the whole edifice of metaphysics and its associated epistemology. Derrida’s implicit concern with the question of origin in this chapter becomes explicit and philosophical in Speech and Phenomena, where he challenges the pretensions of Husserl’s phenomenology to escape metaphysics through protocols of intuition. Critically examining Husserl’s account of relations between language and meaning, he reminds us that Husserl claims that pure meaning (meaning untainted by anything empirical) occurs in events of solitary mental life, conveyed through the closed circuit of hearing oneself speak that enacts self-presence. Against this view Derrida argues that Husserl’s own analysis of internal time consciousness implies that there can be no ground of presence to make pure meaning possible. Rather, “the present is itself derived from a more primordial nonpresence.”10 Autoaffection (hearing oneself speak) includes temporal difference. Meaning can only be accounted for in terms of “a groundless play of differences.”11 Readers of Valéry’s Cahiers (Notebooks) will recognize here that Valéry had already raised the issues Derrida treats in Speech and Phenomena. It is not Derrida but Valéry, for example, who wrote: “I tend to think identity as the product of difference.”12 It is Valéry who wrote “interior language creates an Other in the Same” (24.321), and “there is an interval of time between me and me” (12.524).13 But of course in 1967, when Speech and Phenomena appeared, Valéry’s Notebooks had not been published yet.14 In “Qual Quelle: The Sources of Valéry” from 1972, Derrida takes up Valéry’s treatment of these questions. “It is thanks to the work of Michel Lechantre,” he writes, “that I reread Valéry and discovered the Notebooks.”15 Michel Lechantre is the author of “Valéry, Bouchoreille,” a text dedicated to Derrida and which explicitly links Valéry’s treatment of hearing-oneselfspeak (through Valéry’s figure of the Bouchoreille [mouth-ear]) to the work of Derrida. In “Qual Quelle,” Derrida tracks Valéry “tracking the source” (334). Backtracking then, returning to Valéry in light of the Notebooks, he does not return to the Valéry that was quoted in “Force and signification.” Here Valéry clearly came before him, authorizing both his own position and that of the critics he challenges, but this Valéry might appear to come after him. For, by the time Derrida turns back to reread Valéry, he has already set up the framework and the stakes of the question of origin in the context of post-structuralism.16 Inevitably, then, after the Notebooks are published, Valéry’s fragmentary reflections on language, time, the self, the voice, identity, and difference can be read through Derrida, as if Valéry came after him.

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Indeed, Valéry and Derrida are on the same page when it comes to the question of origin, both holding “the impossibility for a present, for the presence of a present, to present itself as source” (360) as Derrida puts it in “Qual Quelle.” But the two are at odds when it comes to their respective valorizations of the voice (or speech) and writing. While not subscribing to the phenomenological claims concerning the inner voice as guarantor of self-presence (or truth), Valéry gives the voice a privileged status both in his conception of poetry (in which the notion of timbre plays an important role) and of mental operations generally—what he calls le travail de l’esprit (the work of the spirit). “The Self is the Voice,” the poet maintains.17 And when he criticizes philosophy for its false pretenses to truth, its metaphysical nature, its failure to recognize that it depends upon mere words, Valéry identifies it, in derogatory terms, with writing. So Derrida finds it “paradoxical” that for Valéry writing implies (false) continuity, whereas the voice implies productive difference and discontinuity, which is just the reverse of Derrida’s position. Just after pointing out this ostensible paradox, Derrida surprises us with a feint deconstructive gesture: “Is not timbre,” he asks, “the singular presence, the very springing forth [sourdre] of the source,” for Valéry (352)? For a moment, we think that Derrida was coming after Valéry and had waited patiently to throw this punch. But he immediately backs off. Timbre does not belong to the structure of hearing oneself speak, he clarifies, because, for Valéry, “I neither hear nor recognize the timbre of my voice” (cited 352). However, he does not let Valéry completely off the hook. At the very end of his essay, he comes after Valéry for not having aligned his thought with those of Freud and Nietzsche. This gesture effectively separates Derrida from Valéry, who was perhaps drawn too close for comfort. Valéry is left behind on the far side of the modern epistemic break, implicitly tainted as intellectually reactionary. Thus Derrida positions himself after Valéry, in the sense of being more theoretically advanced than the poet.18 “The Self Is the Voice.”19 But what about the collective self? What about cultural identity? This is a question Valéry addressed in a series of lectures and essays from the period between the wars, essays that he characterized as “quasi-political.”20 Derrida takes them up in a second encounter with Valéry, “L’autre Cap. Mémoires, réponses et responsabilitiés.”21 His point of departure is the common ground he established with Valéry in “Qual Quelle,” which he now applies to collective identity: “What is specific to a culture” (le propre d’une culture), he writes, “is to never be identical to itself.”22 Derrida writes The Other Heading in the early 1990s. By this time, deconstruction has been criticized for lacking an ethical or political perspective.23 Although Derrida insists that “there never was in the 1980’s or ‘90’s . . . a political or ethical turn in ‘deconstruction,’ ” the political and ethical stakes of his work became more pronounced during this period.24

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Things had changed since the 1970s and thus his second encounter with Valéry is quite different from the first. In L’Autre cap, initially presented as a lecture for a conference on European identity that took place soon after the fall of the Berlin wall and in the wake of perestroika, Derrida asks how we are to inherit established discourses of European cultural identity that assume and profess its preeminence. The problem is fraught because, as Derrida points out, the question of European preeminence is inseparable from what has become the language of human rights, which, especially since the Cold War, has become an essential feature of discourses of democracy. When it comes to European cultural identity, Derrida insists, we find ourselves in a double bind: breaking from these traditions, which risks breaking with, or breaking down, the discursive foundations of democracy, is just as unsatisfactory as (if we read between the lines) repeating the racist, sexist, and ultimately neoliberal perspective of eurocentrism. L’Autre cap is governed by this double bind. Here is what Valéry wrote of the accomplishments of human civilization: Of all these achievements the most numerous . . . the most fertile/prolific [fécond] were accomplished by a quite limited subset of humanity . . . and on a very small territory, relative to the whole of habitable lands. Europe was this privileged place; the European, the European spirit [esprit] the author of these wonders [prodiges]. What then is this Europe? It is a sort of headland [cap] of the old continent, a western appendage [appendice] of Asia.25 Derrida picks up Valéry’s characterization of Europe as a point or headland, a cap, emphasizing the phallic thrust of the point, but also noting the broader semantic field of this word, which suggests the positions of head, master, or captain, and links to the words “capital” (with connotations of centrality) and of course, “capitalism,” all elements that Valéry knowingly puts into play in his essay, a lucid and often darkly comic analysis of a cultural crisis that he takes absolutely seriously. Derrida works with the motif of domination the word cap carries, even though for Valéry, writing at the end of one devastating world war and at the approach of another, the image of the cap doubtless also conveys fragility. Europe is at risk he announces in the famous opening line of La Crise de l’esprit (Crisis of the Spirit): “We civilizations, we now know that we are mortal” (OCI, 988). Europe is coming undone. In L’Autre cap Derrida rhetorically masters a dual response to the double bind he has identified, criticizing Valéry’s statements while not breaking from them—“It’s a logic I don’t want to criticize here,” he writes after one citation, “I would even be ready to subscribe to it, but with one hand only, for I reserve the other for writing or seeking something else, perhaps outside

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Europe” (AC, 68). Even as he treats Valéry’s more questionable statements with a certain sophisticated tolerance that calls attention to itself as a strategic maneuver, he attempts to open up another path, one that would precisely not pit Europe against its outside (reversing a hierarchy of domination), but that would nevertheless offer an alternative to the phallocentric preeminence of white European identity. What is at stake here is not only capitalism, but an idea of cultural capital, a capitalization that requires collective memory and so becomes what Valéry called “ideal capital” (cited AC, 68) to distinguish it from the material capital implied by his economic metaphor.26 This citation is not an occasion to kick up the dust of arguments worked through in “Qual Quelle.” It introduces the issue of universality, or, more precisely, the problem of the paradoxical relations between singularity and universality that attach, Derrida maintains, to any discourse of cultural identity, for this always depends on the structure of exemplarity that “inscribes universality in the very body [corps propre] of a singularity” (AC, 71). Derrida sets Valéry himself up as a (mere) example: “I find him .  .  . as typical or arch-typical [architype] as any other” (AC, 72), he writes slyly, inscribing and effacing the exemplary status of Valéry, confounding the relation of singularity to universality. Valéry proves to be an exceptionally clear-eyed example; he is lucid with respect to the very structure of exemplarity that Derrida investigates through him. Derrida cites Valéry’s “personal impression of France” in which the poet writes of the French: “Our distinctive feature (what sometimes makes us ridiculous but is often our most valued quality [plus beau titre]) is that we believe ourselves . . . to be universal . . . Observe the paradox: to have as a specialty the sense of the universal (AC, 73).”27 Derrida glosses the aporetic structure of exemplarity as “the self-affirmation of an identity” which performs “a call for the claim to universality” (l’assignation de l’universel) (AC, 71). In keeping with the structure of the double bind that Derrida both analyses and practices, Valéry himself both exposes the paradox of exemplarity and exemplifies it; he does exceptional service as an example by lucidly maximizing (even ironically caricaturing) what Derrida affirms as a general discursive tendency. Surprisingly, however (and this is crucial to the double reading Derrida proposes in response to the double bind he diagnoses), Derrida suggests that, by exposing the paradox of exemplarity through his gallocentric characterization of the French, Valéry . . . has “begun to imagine [deviner], to see coming .  .  . the other of the cap [l’autre du cap] in general” (AC, 74, emphasis in the original). Paradoxically, then, it is the paradox Valéry jokingly attests to (and exemplifies) that introduces the alternative Derrida evokes as a way out of the double bind: responsibility. For in the matter of responsibility, he writes, “the unique ‘I’ has the responsibility to serve as witness for universality” (AC, 72). Derrida’s analysis of the paradox of exemplarity successfully dislocates the cap’s logic of domination; it implies

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an imperative for Europe to “open onto that which is not, has never been and will never be Europe” (AC, 75). The deconstructive strategy enables Derrida to rewrite the logic of (preeminent) identity according to another economy, that of hospitality, which imposes a double obligation: “the same obligation requires . . . that one welcome the stranger to integrate” him or her but also “to recognize and accept [his or her] . . . alterity” (AC, 75). L’Autre cap both exposes a certain reactionary streak in Valéry, through citations that suggest European cultural preeminence, and refuses to explicitly reject him on either ethical or political grounds. With Kant, Derrida maintains that ethics does not involve following prescribed rules. Instead it requires one to “recognize both the typical or recurrent form and the inexhaustible singularity [singularisation]—without which there would never be . . . responsibility, or ethics [moral] or politics” (AC, 78). The ethical paradox (the double obligation that includes antinomy) mirrors not only the double bind of the question of inheritance but the aporia of exemplarity, opening onto the épreuve [ordeal or test]) of an ethics of undecidability. Derrida flips the neither-nor of the double bind over into an ethical paradox that opens a promise or possibility—even the possibility of the (presently) impossible that he invokes through the structure or the figure of the “to come.” This is how Derrida replaces an old notion of the political, one based on identity or sameness, with one that depends on difference, including even the difference between sameness and difference. In notes to L’Autre cap, Derrida comments that Valéry does not determine European identity by race, language, or custom, but by l’esprit, the mind or the spirit (AC, 98–101). He explains that L’Autre cap developed out of a comparative study of the treatment of esprit—and specifically of the European spirit—in Valéry, Husserl, and Heidegger that culminated in the book De l’Esprit, Heidegger et la Question. In the end, Derrida discusses Valéry in a long note to this work. And then L’Autre cap takes up the question of Valéry’s discourse of l’esprit in another footnote. In note 8, Derrida returns to Valéry’s analogy between material and spiritual capital, which, as we have seen, had led to the discussion of exemplarity. But now he maintains that in Valéry “the concept of esprit is both originary and transcategorical, making analogy possible, not belonging completely to the analogy—that is, the analogy between mental and spiritual capital” (AC, 96). The moment we have seen coming arrives: Derrida goes after the poet, accusing him of logocentrism. For Valéry, he writes, “esprit is logos, speech or verb . . . this original spiritualism presents itself as a logocentrism” (AC, 96). In this note, then, Derrida returns to what he had only intimated in “Qual Quelle” when he identified a paradox in Valéry concerning the values attributed to voice and writing, and tried out the charge that, for Valéry, the voice was, after all, an origin or a site of self-presence. Within the metaphysical tradition whose very foundation Derrida challenges, logos (or what Derrida calls logocentrism) implies a relation

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to meaning; it grounds meaning in presence, thus shoring up truth. What matters for Valéry, however, is not meaning or Truth, but Action. “Axioms of true knowledge,” he holds, “can only be formulas of action.”28 “The work of the spirit” (l’oeuvre de l’esprit) “only exists in action. Outside that act, what remains is nothing but an object.”29 The voice is crucial to Valéry’s reflection on language because it pertains precisely to language in action. If “the Self [le Moi] is the Voice,” it is as “Me, you, him [Moi, toi, Lui]—this triangle—Trinity!” (342); it is because the voice instantiates the pronominal positions associated with what the linguist Emile Benveniste calls “the formal structure of the apparatus of enunciation,” through which “language is set to work through an individual act of using it.”30 This setting to work of language through the voice performs the positioning of the subject: “I is the being defined by the voice,” Valéry writes, making the same argument we find in the linguist.31 This “I” has no fixed identity; it changes with each act of speech. Just as importantly, the voice performs a relation of alterity for Valéry— No me without “you” (toi), he insists.32 Again, the linguist concurs: the “I-you relation,” as Benveniste writes, “is produced only in and by enunciation” (82) which performs an act of address. It is the formal apparatus of enunciation that establishes “the polarity of persons” (260), as Benveniste explains. The speaking subject thus “sets up [implante] the other opposite him or her” (82), and does so each time differently. Derrida challenges a metaphysical notion of esprit by identifying it with logocentrism along with sameness, claims to truth and a refusal of alterity. However, Valéry often invokes a notion of esprit but he explicitly states that it is not a metaphysical term: “by this word esprit” he writes, “I don’t at all understand a metaphysical entity. I understand [J’entends] quite simply a power of transformation“ (OCI, 1022). Esprit, for Valéry, is “the symbol .  .  . of an ensemble of completely objective observations [constatations tout objectives] (OCI, 1023). Once again, it is a question of shifting from the plane of meaning to the register of action. Moreover, in keeping with the terms of the critique of the origin that Derrida attributes to Valéry in “Qual Quelle,” Valéry writes that esprit is “the being that never stops dividing itself against itself” (OCI, 1022). And this is not a dialectical negation but an effect of temporalization, of becoming past and becoming future. Esprit, then, is not unitary, for Valéry, for it is heterogeneous. Esprit, he writes, is the collective pseudonym of a whole host of quite diverse characters . . . such as the stomach/womb [ventre] the heart, the sex and the brain itself . . . [a] probably chemical plurality, whose emissaries come to excite [and] irritate the centers of images and of signs, to dominate each one according to the circumstances. . . . Sometimes the one answers, sometimes the other demands . . . they only have one apparatus of emission-reception.33

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Here we see that, precisely as a power of transformation (or a force of modification), esprit operates as an apparatus of emission-reception, for Valéry, much as the voice (or bouchoreille) implies a reversible apparatus of enunciation—Moi, toi, lui, ce triangle—Trinité ! (342). Might this not be just what the serpent, with its “emerald triangle,” represents in Valéry’s celebrated poem, “Ébauche d’un serpent” (Sketch of a serpent),” a poem that dates, more or less, from the years of the quasipolitical essays?34 The serpent thus speaks: Et mon triangle d’émeraude / Tire sa langue à double fil.  .  .  /  Bête je suis, mais bête aigüe (“My emerald triangle / Darts out its double tongue/language . . . Beast I am, but a sharp beast).”35 This voice in the first person then addresses the sun: Toi, le plus fier de mes complices . . . Tu gardes les coeurs de connaître / Que l’univers n’est qu’un défaut/ Dans la pureté du Non-être! (“You, my most proud accomplice / You keep hearts from knowing / That the universe is but a flaw / in the purity of Non-Being!”). The sun stages, precisely, an illusion of presence: “Grand Soleil, qui sonnes l’éveil / A l’être,” the serpent says, Fauteur des fantômes joyeux . . . Toujours le mensonge m’a plu/ Que tu répands sur l’absolu! (“Great Sun, who rings the awakening  /  to being  /  Fomenter of joyous phantoms / I’ve always liked the lie you give the absolute!”). Who is this serpent, hissing out the verses of this poem? He is not only a figure of seduction (the biblical snake), not only a figure of the poet who charms through style, but also a figure of Esprit as power of transformation. Je suis Celui qui modifie (“I am He who modifies)” sputters the serpent. He boasts a vast intelligence (Innombrable Intelligence), seduces Eve with the “the scent of an idea” and with his voice, fills her ear with esprit—Que d’esprit n’ai-je pas jeté/ Dans le dédale duveté/ de cette merveilleuse Oreille! (“How much spirit / Have I not poured into / The downy labyrinth / Of that marvelous ear!).” The serpent is the accomplice of the tree of knowledge, carrier of des fruits de la mort/ De désespoir et de désordre! (“the fruits of death, despair and disorder!”). The burlesque poem then ends on the invocation of nothingness, l’étrange toute-puissance du Néant (“the strange all-powerfulness of Nothingness).”36 Perhaps for strategic reasons, Derrida ignores the critical force—indeed, the venom—of Valéry’s quasi-political essays, whose force intensifies as Europe approaches the Second World War. Valéry never intimates that it is possible to construe the motif of the preeminence of European civilization— of the esprit Européen—as a foil for a denunciation of what the European has become, that is “a sort of monster” (OCI, 1007), simply through an intensification of its mode of being as a power of transformation. In the course of his quasi-political essays, Valéry exposes the “appalling ends” (épouvantables desseins) (OCI, 989), to which the energies of European civilization have been put and the “powerlessness of knowledge to save anything at all” (OCI, 990). Even science has been debased, “dishonored by the cruelty of its applications” (OCI, 991). Moreover, like the serpent of

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Valéry’s poem, this European spirit is venomous—“We are poisoned” (OCI, 1049). By 1933, Valéry’s tone becomes, if anything, more urgent: “Never has there been such a profound and swift transformation,” he writes, the whole earth seized [reconnue], explored, equipped, and I would even say appropriated .  .  . our ideas and our powers over matter and over time, over space, conceived of and utilized completely differently than they were before [jusqu’à nous]. Who is the thinker, the philosopher, even the most profound, the wisest and the most erudite historian, who would risk even the slightest prediction today? Who is the politician and who is the economist in whom we might have faith, after all the errors that have been committed?37 There are “no ideas, no principles, no truth, as one would say formerly, that isn’t subject to revision, to retouching, to recasting” (OCI, 1017). Europe is entering a “critical phase,” which means “a sort of intimate disorder, defined by the coexistence of contradictions in our ideas and the inconsequential character of our actions” (OCI, 1018). This was exactly the message of the serpent, the arch modifier, a message of “death, despair and disorder.” Hence, we can still hear unmistakable echoes of Valéry’s urgent bewilderment today: We are witnessing a recomposition of the global order .  .  . a run on the commons that extends even to our shared planet, the earth. Since the last third of the twentieth century, we have witnessed a structural transformation of the human condition—one that is about to accelerate with the explosive growth of artificial intelligence.38 Just as Valéry in the thirties faced a loss of confidence in ideas, in knowledge, and in language, so today critical thought finds itself ill prepared to meet the demands of the day.39 The challenges to foundationalist thinking that Derrida brilliantly pursued remain indispensable, but are perhaps, not, on their own, fully adequate to what needs to be thought. The poet, informed by years spent wrestling with language in the exercises of pure poetry, on the one hand, and engaging with institutional hypocrisies on the other once he had become the nation’s emblematic man of letters, also offers us a critical perspective worthy of our attention: “[European] Man is this separated animal,” he wrote in Note (ou l’Européen), this bizarre living being that opposes all others, elevating himself above all the others by his .  .  . dreams [songes]—by the intensity, by the logic [enchaînement], by the diversity of his dreams [songes]! by their extraordinary effects, that go so far as to modify his nature, and not only

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his nature, but also the nature that surrounds him, that he tries tirelessly to subject to his dreams [songes]. (OCI, 1001, dots in the original) What we might call Valéry’s “theory of pure illusion”—for that is what the serpent hisses and what the analysis of “songe” performs—speaks to us differently than Derrida’s writing of responsibility.40 It is not certain which of the two voices is younger, which has more to say to us today, Derrida’s notion of democracy to come, or Valéry’s clear-eyed denunciation of its attested historical failures. However, it may not be necessary to choose between the two. After all, the alleged “paradox” concerning the valuation of the voice and writing that Derrida attributed to Valéry in “Qual Quelle,” implicitly taking it as a symptom of his logocentrism, might not really be Valéry’s paradox. If there is a paradox at all, it should concern the relations between Derrida and Valéry: they are paradoxical not because the two speak differently of the voice and writing, but because they do so on the basis of a shared critique of origin, of a shared refusal of an ontology of presence and the metaphysics of identity. What if we applied Derrida’s ethics—his épreuve of antinomy—to the difference between Valéry and himself? Here might be the aporia that we have to appreciate in order to cultivate a critical “tolerance of different practices.”41

Notes 1 Paul Valéry, Poésie perdue. Les poèmes en prose des Cahiers, ed. Michel Jarrety (Paris: Gallimard, 2,000). 2 Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1951), 138. 3 Paul Valéry, Lettres à Jean Voilier (Paris: Gallimard, 2014). 4 Jacques Derrida, “Force et Signification,” in L’Ecriture et la différence (Paris, Seuil, 1967). Subsequent references will be given in the text in parentheses, translations mine. Rousset, Forme et Signification (Jose Corti, 1970, first published in 1963) vi, xii. Subsequent references to this work will be given in parentheses in the text (translations mine). 5 The axiom is “ne pouvoir faire précéder l’écrire par son sens,” in “Force et Signification,” p. 21. 6 These critics include, but are not limited to, Gerard Genette and the early Barthes. Concerning this tradition see Florian Pennanech, “Valéry et la Nouvelle Critique” in Paul Valéry et l’idée de littérature, ed. William Marx, 2011 (URL: http://www.fabula.org/colloques/document 1427). 7 Derrida, “Force et signification” 18, note 1. Valéry, “Poésie et pensée abstraite” (I, 1324).

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8 Valéry, OC I, 1290 (“Questions de poésie”), my translation, emphasis added. 9 Cited in Nicole Celeyrette-Pietri, Valéry et le Moi, des cahiers à l’oeuvre, 348 from Valéry, Cahier VII, 606). 10 David Allison, Speech and Phenomena, translator’s introduction, xxxvii. 11 Ibid, and page xxxviii. 12 Valéry, Cahiers 21,617 (1938) cited in Lechantre, “Valéry Bouchoreille.” Subsequent references to the Cahiers will be given in parenthesis in the text (all translations mine). 13 These citations are given by Michel Lechantre in “Valéry Bouchoreille,” Le Langage et l’Homme, #18, Brussels, 1972 (translations mine). Lechantre references Valéry’s Notebooks 24.321 and 12.524. 14 Valéry writes the Cahiers from 1894 to 1914. Two volumes of material from the Notebooks were published in 1973–74, edited by Judith Robinson. The Notebooks were republished, in full beginning in 1987, edited by Nicole Celeyrette-Pietri. A selection from the Notebooks has been translated in English (editor in chief Brian Stimpson) as Cahiers/Notebooks 1 (Peter Lang, 2010). Derrida published La Voix et le phénomène in 1967. It was published in English, together with two other essays by Derrida on Husserl, in the volume Speech and Phenomena (tr. David Allison, Northwestern Press) in 1973. 15 Derrida, “Qual Quelle: Les sources de Valéry” in Marges de la philosophie (Paris. Minuit, 1972), p. 325. Subsequent references to this work refer to this edition and are given in parenthesis in the text (translations mine). The English version of “Qual Quelle: Valéry’s Sources” is to be found in Margins of Philosophy, translated by Alan Bass (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982), 273–306. 16 Derrida had challenged the phenomenological notion of the origin in Voice and Phenomena, and later in “Différance,” trans. by Alan Bass, Margins of Philosophy, 1–27. 17 Valéry, Cahier XIV, 390, cited by Ceylerette-Pietri in Valéry et le Moi, 346. 18 This seems an odd turn of argument, given that Valéry, who identifies with the figure of Robinson Crusoe “Je suis le Robinson” (Notebook XIV, 890, cited in Celeyrette-Pietri, 12), made a point of not aligning his thought with any other thinker. Hence, the strictly private, and autonomous, project of the Notebooks. What he admires in Descartes was not the content of the philosopher’s thought but the form it took, the gesture of ushering in a tabula rasa. To Valéry, Descartes is a model of Egotism that he characterizes (without naming Nietzsche) as a “will to power.” 19 Valéry’s Notebook XIV, 390, Cited by Ceylerette-Pietri, 346. 20 “Essais quasi politiques” is the heading Valéry gave for a number of essays, including “La Crise de l’esprit” and “La Politique de l’esprit” (OCI, 971–1153). 21 L’Autre cap. Suivi de la démocracie ajournée (Paris: Minuit, 1991) was translated as The Other Heading. Reflections on Today’s Europe (Indiana University Press, 1992). 22 Derrida, L’Autre cap, p. 16 (translation mine, emphasis in the original).

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23 “Deconstruction fails to thematize the question of politics” Simon Critchley wrote in Deconstruction and Ethics (Edinburgh UP, 1992, cited in Cheah and Guerlac, Editors’ Introduction to Derrida and the Time of the Political [CUP, 2009], p. 2). 24 Cited in Cheah and Guerlac, editors’ introduction, p. 3. In Monolinguism of the Other or the Prosthesis of Origin (Stanford University Press, 1998,) Derrida describes his experience of colonialism: “For never was I able to call French, this language I am speaking to you, my mother tongue. My culture was right away a political culture,” p. 34. 25 Derrida, L’Autre Cap (Paris, Minuit, 1991), 25–26. Subsequent references will refer to this edition and will be given in the text in parenthesis (all translations mine) as AC and page number. Here, Derrida quotes Valéry’s “Note (ou l’Européen)” in OCI, 1000–14. 26 Cited from Valéry, “La Liberté de l’esprit,” (OCII, 1090). 27 “Observez le paradoxe: avoir pour spécialité le sens de l’universel.” Here Derrida cites Valéry’s “Pensée et art français,” OCII, 1058. 28 Cited in Suzanne Guerlac, Literary Polemics: Bataille, Sartre, Valéry, Breton (Stanford University Press, 1997), 120. 29 Valéry, OCI, 1349 (“Première leçon du cours de poétique” [1937]), (my translation, emphasis in the original). 30 Valéry’s Notebook XIV, 390, cited by Michel Jarrety (Valéry devant la littérature, Mesure de la limite [Paris, PUF, 1991], 127) my translation. See Benveniste, Problèmes de Linguistique Générale II (Gallimard, 1974), 80. Subsequent references to this work refer to this edition and will be given in parenthesis in the text (translations mine). For Benveniste, the “me” (moi) would be an “I” (Je).” See Chapter XXI, “Subjectivity in language.” Here, Valéry is reflecting on the action of the voice and identity from the outside. 31 Valéry Notebook X, 568, cited by Jarrety, 128. Benveniste makes the same argument in Chapter XXI of Problèmes de linguistique générale II. 32 Valéry’s Notebook X, 568, cited by Jarrety, 128. 33 Valéry, Cahier V, 380, cited in Guerlac, Literary Polemics, 123. 34 “Ébauche d’un serpent” first published in the NRF in 1921, was republished in 1922 in Charmes, and again, in a deluxe and illustrated edition, in 1926. “La Crise de l’esprit,” initially published in 1919 was republished in 1924. Note (ou l’Européen) was published in 1924; Propos sur l’Intelligence was published in 1925; and again in 1926. Derrida discusses the poem from a different vantage point in The Animal That Therefore I Am, tr. David Wills (Fordham University Press, 2009), 65–68. 35 Valéry, “Ébauche d’un serpent,” translated by Jan Schreiber, is available on line: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Valery_Serpent.pdf (here, translation modified). 36 This is Valéry’s own term: “I used alliterations and assonances,” Valéry writes of Ébauche d’un Serpent, “to reinforce a certain burlesque intention [burlesque d’intention]” quoted in OCI, 1681.

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37 OCI, 1018, “La Politique de l’esprit.” 38 Bernard E. Harcourt, “Counter-Critical Theory: An Intervention in Contemporary Critical Thought and Practice,” Critical Times 1:1:18, online journal of the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs. 39 In the same essay, Harcourt writes that the tradition of critical thought struggles “to elaborate . . . a critical practice for these troubled times.” 40 I borrow the expression “theory of pure illusion” (which resonates with Valéry’s serpent) from Harcourt who invokes it affirmatively in relation to what he proposes as “counter theory.” 41 I am adapting Harcourt’s notion of “counter-critical thought,” with the suggestion that the language of “countering” might remain too oppositional. We could be inspired by Valéry’s more heterogenous (and embodied) notion of ensembles of heterogeneous forces within a fundamentally dialogic framework.

Works cited http://history_philosophy.enacademic.com/403/Deconstruction_and_Derrida Adorno, Theodor W. Notes to Literature. Foreword translated by Siylle Mullerb. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1951, my translation from this book. REVISE. Celeyrette-Pietri, Nicole. Valery et le moi. Des Cahiers à l’oeuvre. Paris: Klincksieck, 1979. Cheah, Pheng and Guerlac, Suzanne, eds. Derrida and the Time of the Political. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Literature, edited by Derek Attridge. New York: Routledge, 1992. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I am. Translated by David Wills. Critical Inquiry 28, no. 2 (winter 2002): 369–418. https://www.e skop.com/ images/UserFiles/Documents/Editor/derrida_cat.pdf Derrida, Jacques. “Force et Signification” in L’Ecriture et la difference, edited by Jacques Derrida. Paris: Seuil, 1967. Derrida, Jacques. L’Autre Cap. Suivi de la démocratie ajournée. Paris: Minuit, 1991. Translated as The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Derrida, Jacques. La Voix et le phénomène. Paris, 2003, 3rd edition. Translated as Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, by David B. Allison. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Derrida, Jacques. Monolinguism of the Other, or, the Prosthesis of Origin. Translated by Patrick Mensah. Stanford University Press, 1998. Derrida, Jacques. “Qual Quelle. Les sources de Valéry.” In Marges de la philosophie (Paris, Minuit, 1972) available in English as “Qual Quelle. Valéry’s Sources.” In The Derrida Reader; Writing Performances, edited by Julian Wolfreys (University of Nebraska Press, 1998).

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Florian, Pennanech. “Valéry et la Nouvelle Critique.” In Paul Valéry et l’idée de littérature, edited by William Marx. 2011. http://www.fabula.org/colloques/ document 1427. Guerlac, Suzanne. Literary Polemics: Bataille, Sartre, Valéry, Breton. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Jarrety, Michel. Valéry devant la littérature. Mesure de la limite. Paris: PUF, 1991. Lechantre, Michel. “L’Hiéroglyphe intérieur.” MLN 87, no. 4. French issues Paul Valéry, MLN (1972): 630–43. http:www.jstor/stable/2907840. Lechantre, Michel. “Valéry Bouchoreille.” Le Langage et l’homme, #18 ( Brussels, 1972). Sollers, Philippe. Tel Quel 1 (Présentation): 3–4. Valéry, Paul. B, volumes I and II, edited by Jean Hytier. Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade, 1987, abbreviated as OCI and OCII followed by page number. Valéry, Paul. Cahiers 1894-1914. Paris: Gallimard, volume I–III (1987, 1988, 1990), edited by Nicole Celeyrette-Pietri, volume IV–VI (1992, 1994, 1997), edited by Nicole Celeyrette-Pietri, volume VII–XIX (1999, 2001, 2003), Nicole Celeyrette-Pietri and Robert Pickering. Valéry, Paul. Lettres à Jean Voilier. Paris: Gallimard, 2014. Valéry, Paul. Poésie perdue. Les poèmes en prose des Cahiers. Edited by Michel Jarrety. Paris: Gallimard, 2000. Valéry, Paul, “Sketch of a Serpent” translation of Valéry “Ébauche d’un Serpent,” by Jan Schreiber, https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Valery_ Serpent.pdf.

PART THREE

Différance as performance: Pushing modernism beyond its borders

11 Three ways of looking at Derrida’s encounter with Austin Raoul Moati

I was of three minds, Like a tree In which there are three blackbirds. WALLACE STEVENS, “Thirteen

Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”

Introduction In 1971, Derrida gave a lecture whose last section was devoted to the analytic philosopher of ordinary language, John Langshaw Austin and his famous How to Do Things with Words. After that lecture and its publication, a violent controversy opposed Derrida and the American philosopher John Searle who, as a philosopher of speech acts theory, challenged Derrida’s interpretation of Austin. Indeed, Searle wanted to prove that Derrida’s reading was entirely wrong. Derrida responded to Searle in a no less scathing and ironical book entitled Limited Inc. I have already devoted much effort trying to understand and untangle that ferocious confrontation between two philosophers coming from so different horizons and unleashing torrents of abuse on each other (Moati 2009 and Moati 2014). This chapter will focus on the various interpretations of how

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Derrida understood Austin. My gesture of comparison is facilitated by the fact that the sectarian controversy, one might even say the cultural war, opposing continental and analytic philosophy has subsided. Now, indeed, a dispassionate assessment seems possible. The controversy between Derrida and Searle about ordinary language has led to the emergence of two main positions in the pursuit of this debate today. The first position remains faithful to Derrida’s attitude facing Austin: Austin came quite close to the deconstruction of the “metaphysics of presence,” while many aspects of his work remained embedded into that very metaphysics. This classical reading of Austin can be named the deconstructionist view. Another reading has emerged thanks to the work of Stanley Cavell and Judith Butler among others, who insisted more on what Derrida and Austin share; they tended to minimize their divergences that they felt to be irrelevant or not so crucial. I call this interpretation the conciliation reading. The goal of my chapter is to outline my main reasons for disagreeing with both views.

Derrida and Austin beyond the representationalist picture of language What has been called linguistic representationalism was rejected by Austin under the name of “descriptive fallacy” and by Derrida under the name of “metaphysics of presence.” Stanley Cavell believed that Austin and Derrida were converging on the idea of a similar rejection of the “metaphysical voice,” a voice that would be immunized against the risks of finitude and failure. According to Cavell, both authors were keenly aware of the senses in which one can say that there is some “failure” in language. Austin would be sensitive to a “failure” to realize performative utterances in the cases when conditions for their success did not obtain: for instance, you cannot declare two people married if you are not invested with the necessary authority to accomplish that ritual. Derrida, on the other hand, would be sensitive to a “failure” of speech that tends to avoid the effects of the “trace” of the written word. The true name of this proposed move away from a metaphysical voice, of this return to finitude and concreteness, would consist, for Austin, in the defense of the “ordinary voice,” while Derrida thinks of it as the rejection of the “voice”—which is by essence compromised with metaphysics—in favor of writing. The conciliation reading, which as I mentioned, highlights what Derrida and Austin have in common, suggests that both Derrida and Austin share a same wish to bring language down to earth, either by moving from the so-called metaphysical voice to the ordinary voice as with Austin or by

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enhancing writing, as Derrida did. In the case of Austin, this return to a down-to-earth language consists in the description of the conditions that any utterance, whether performative and constative, must satisfy in order to achieve an actual linguistic performance. In the case of Derrida, such a return to finitude implies an insistence on the power of disruption of the signs in any linguistic performance. In both cases, what is rejected is what Cavell calls the “metaphysical voice,”1 which coincides with the traditional representationalist picture of language. The conciliation reading that both Austin and Derrida reject, each in his own way, entails a representationalist picture of language. Let us define it. The representationalist picture presents language as being essentially descriptive. However for Austin, to speak does not mean exclusively to describe the world, for it means also to act upon the world. When the mayor says, “You are married,” he does not describe a state of affairs, he does something: he marries two people. This is why Austin claims that one should be careful to note that our language contains “performative” utterances beside our “constative” utterances. This is the first aspect of the Austinian critique of what he calls the “true/false fetish.” There are three ways of understanding such a critique: First, the true/false opposition is not operative for the evaluation of all linguistic operations. Moreover, in How to Do Things with Words, Austin, after the first lecture, no longer insists on the distinction between constatives and performatives but on distinctions between locutory, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts. This means that Austin does not only say that alongside our constative statements there are performatives, but that our constative discourse is structured by the same triad of acts as our performative utterances. One should then be careful about the fact that exactly as in the case of performatives, constative utterances have to satisfy criteria in order to be realized. For example, in the case of the performative: “I declare you husband and wife,” I must be the mayor of a city in order to marry those two people. Austin’s point is to state that constatives are exposed to the same type of requirements: I also have to be in a position that allows me to assert something in order to do so. Austin gives the following example: if I did not get into a room I am not in the epistemic position required in order to state how many people are in the room. For that reason, it is not true that n’importe qui peut affirmer n’importe quoi (anyone can assert anything).2 Constative utterances are not only true or false; they are, like performatives, exposed to hitches and failures. We have examined two main aspects of Austin’s critique of the True/False Fetish. There is another aspect of Austin’s critique of true/false fetish that clearly converges with Derrida’s main philosophical concerns and renders the conciliation reading partially right.

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Austin’s critique of linguistic representationalism—the conciliation reading (partially) right The two authors converge on the same critique of the myth of “pure” statements. However, their joint rejection of the myth doesn’t lead them to produce the same conclusions about the nature of language. Derrida says that the mythology of the pure statement is one crucial aspect of the mythology of speech and the voice (la voix) that careful attention to “writing” deconstructs. Austin, on the other hand, shows how the critique of the mythology of a “pure” statement does not lead to the rejection of “speech” but, on the contrary, must be assumed to provide an alternative picture of speech open to vulnerability and contextuality. Accordingly, the same assessment does not lead Austin and Derrida to the same alternative conception of language. In showing that writing is not the right alternative to language, we would like to show that the critique of the pure statement does not lead to a repudiation of the human voice as Derrida thinks, but on the contrary to a better understanding of it. The only way Derrida proposes to understand this new, Austinian, consideration of human speech activity is to say, with a lot of suspicion, that the contextual account of speech generates nothing else than a new form of the metaphysical repression of writing by speech. But such a claim would be based on the idea that Austin had not accomplished a true destabilization of the myth of a “pure statement.” I would assume that there is a complete identity between the pure and “metaphysical” statement on the one hand, and the “ordinary/contextual statement” on the other: in other words, this would mean that speech acts are nothing else than a sophisticated form of the intentional/metaphysical speech that Derrida had deconstructed in Voice and Phenomena.3 From that identification of Austin to Husserl, which he never justifies, the deconstructionist can easily conclude that the only alternative to the metaphysical speech lies in writing. Such a conclusion is simply based on a wrong reading of Austin, whether deliberate or not, that denies that Austin’s philosophy contradicts the traditional and metaphysical conception of language. Let us see why.

Pure statements as a linguistic ideal For Austin and Derrida, “pure” statements consist in linguistic ideas that can never be embodied by our usual forms of language. The metaphysical move that both thinkers critique coincides with an obliteration of the traits of

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finitude, which is constitutive of any linguistic performance, an obliteration from which an abstract and ideal state of language results, a state actually never embodied by any of our finite linguistic performances. These traits of finitude4 coincide in Derrida with what the French philosopher calls the “graphematic predicates,” like archi-writing, trace, repetition, iteration, and so on.5 These same traits coincide in Austin with the contextual dependency of any form of discourse. By contrast, a pure statement would coincide with a universal proposition that is true or false per se, which means independently of any contextual dependence. Usually, the metaphysical mythology of pure statements is predicated upon a scientific discourse; it would be full of such “pure statements,” that is, of propositions that are true or false independently of any context, of the purposes of the agents, the practical and actual interests they pursue. For that reason, in that picture, these pure statements would be identical to logical propositions that would be grasped from an ideal third realm by the philosopher or the scientist. It is this mythical vision that Austin is going to destabilize from top to bottom. First, Austin shows that there is no speech that does not imply a pragmatic/illocutionary force. Exactly like performatives, constatives acts are acts, that is, they express a certain illocutionary force (stating). Second, there is no activity of speaking that is not exposed to pragmatic failures. In the cases of constatives statements, it is not true to say that they can be simply true or false: our linguistic performances can also be perfectly inadequate to certain circumstances and fail to embody an actual activity of asserting something. In this sense, much like in the case of performatives, the speaker must be sensitive to circumstances around in order to be able to make actual statements. In a classroom, in the context of a discussion on the content of a book with students, often it is inaccurate to describe things in a certain way. From the point of view of our actual activities the right way to speak about the object that we are speaking about is to say: “that’s a book,” and not: “that’s a parallelepiped.” There would be something strange and inaccurate to say to someone standing in the class: “give me this parallelepiped” and in the idea that the second description would be better than the first one in all cases, the idea that the first, everyday language one (“book”) is less pertinent and representational than the more “technical” one is exactly the descriptive mythology that Austin criticizes. Both statements have certain conditions of achievement, the first one fulfills those in the context of running a class while the second one might fulfill those in the context of geometrical considerations—if for example the class is a class of mathematics it will make sense for the professor who elaborates a demonstration to say “please calculate the volume of this parallelepiped.” This description will be perfectly accurate then, but not because of its universality but because of its contextual relevance:

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“In the case of stating truly or falsely, just as much as in the case of advising well or badly, the intents and purposes of the utterance and its context are important; what is judged true in a school book may not be so judged in a work of historical research.”6 Or again: “The truth or falsity of a statement depends not merely on the meaning of words but on what act you were performing in what circumstances.”7 This is why what Austin calls the “pure statement” is something that nobody can encounter in the actual world where we live. Austin presents it as a pure abstraction from our actual constative utterances: With the constative utterance, we abstract from the illocutionary (let alone the perlocutionary) aspects of the speech act, and we concentrate on the locutionary: moreover we use an over-simplified notion of correspondence with the facts—over-simplified because essentially it brings in the illocutionary aspect.8 As a matter of fact, a lot of our constative utterances are “rough” and correspond in a better way than more technical utterances to the facts, while they cannot be simply said true or false: Suppose that we confront “France is hexagonal” with the facts, in this case, I suppose, with France, is it true or false? Well, if you like, up to a point; of course, I can see what you mean by saying it is true for certain intents and purposes. It is good enough for a top-ranking general, perhaps, but not for a geographer. “Naturally it is pretty rough,” we should say, “and pretty good as a pretty rough statement.” But then someone says: “But is it true or false? I don’t mind whether it is rough or not; of course it’s rough, but it has to be true or false—it’s a statement isn’t it?” How can one answer this question, whether it is true or false that France is hexagonal? It is just rough, and that is the right and final answer to the question of the relation of “France is hexagonal” to France. It is a rough description, it is not a true or false one.9 For a top-ranking general in a context of war “France is hexagonal” provides the representation of France required and relevant in that situation, the good one in that precise context, which would not be the case of a more technical description of France. This is why the pure statement, the statement that would be perfectly independent from all these contextual considerations, remains for Austin an unreachable linguistic ideal—the ideal of a language freed from the illocutionary dimension and capable of a simple, univocal, and universal correspondence to the facts: “The ‘pure’ statement is a goal, an ideal, towards which the gradual development of science has given the impetus, as it has likewise also towards the goal of precision.”10 Or: “This is

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the ideal of what would be right to say in all circumstances, for any purpose, to any audience, etc.”11 As we can see, there is a gap, for Austin, between the “pure” statement and the language as it is actually embodied by our (finite) linguistic performances. The statement can no longer be understood—as it usually is—as the over-simplified relation of words in their locutionary aspect (meaning of words) with facts. Again, as Austin explicitly says: “The truth or falsity of a statement depends not merely on the meanings of words.”12 For that reason, there is no possible statement that would not imply an illocutionary aspect, no possible statement the success of which would not depend on its adequacy to the context and the intents and purposes of the agents at stake in that context.

Two names and two consequences for impurity Both Austin and Derrida denounce the metaphysical mythology of the pure statement which is based on an abstract account of language ignoring the illocutionary component of the statement (Austin)  /  the graphematic component of the statement (Derrida). Both deny that there is such a thing as a statement that could not be impure: affected by illocution and contextual dependence for Austin, by writing for Derrida. Of course, those two notions—illocution and writing—are not identical. And it is here that we meet the limits of the conciliation reading. The consideration of illocution against abstract statements leads Austin to the rejection of the “metaphysical voice” in favor of the “ordinary voice,” while “writing,” for Derrida, is supposed to lead to the “deconstruction” of the “metaphysical voice,” within which he includes Austinian speech acts. Such an inclusion is explainable from the fact that Derrida starts with the unquestioned assumption that there is no speech that is not by essence metaphysically compromised. Let us move to the consideration and the critique of this Derridean claim.

Must the critique of representationalism lead to Undecidability? The blind presupposition of the deconstructionist view Some years before the writing of Voice and Phenomena (1967), in his introduction to Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry (1962), Derrida

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developed his own critique of the representationalist picture of language. In this text, Derrida tries to show why for Husserl the notion of pure statement must be understood as an “Idea in the Kantian sense” which means as an unreachable goal for the human finite knowing subject. In a similar move to Austin’s one, Derrida, influenced on that point by Husserl,13 will identify the mythology of “presence” as a result of the theoretical replacement of our finite/impure/approximate statements by an abstract linguistic ideal that can actually never be achieved by humans: “Husserl specifies in a note that the scientific statement, without being questioned in its truth (sans être remise en cause dans sa vérité), always remains provisional, and that ‘Objective, absolutely firm knowledge of truth is an infinite idea’ (166).”14 For the first time in his work and far before his discovery of Austin, Derrida mentions the notion of the “speech act” to designate the cultural embodiment of any sort of discourse and the equivocity which results from that unavoidable embodiment: In effect, absolute univocity is imaginable only in two limiting cases. First: only if the designated object is not only absolutely one (absolument un), immutable and natural, but also an existent whose unity, identity and Objectivity would in themselves be prior to all culture. Now if we suppose that such a thing and such a perception exist (à supposer qu’une telle chose et une telle perception existent), the intervention of the linguistic ideality and of the project of univocity—i.e. the speech act itself (l’acte de langage lui-même)—will place immediately (d’entrée de jeu) that supposition in a culture, in a network of linguistic relations and oppositions, which would load a word with intentions and lateral and virtual reminiscences. Equivocity is the congenital mark of every culture (L’équivocité est la marque congénitale de toute culture). The hypothesis of a univocal and natural language is therefore absurd and contradictory.15 What Derrida calls the “speech act” here prevents the discourse from being pure and univocal. The speech acts for Derrida here coincide with our finite forms of discourses as being contaminated by equivocity. A discourse freed from “speech act,” says Derrida, must be considered as an abstraction and an unreachable ideal (“an Idea in the Kantian sense”): “Absolute univocity is inaccessible, but only as an Idea in the Kantian sense can be. . . . Univocity is the absolute horizon of equivocity.”16 Exactly like for Austin, as we have seen, the pure locution deprived of illocutionary value would no longer be a speech act and remains for that reason a linguistic Ideal. Metaphysics starts for both authors when one wants to replace the description of our concrete discourses by the ideal—when the illocutionary dimension of our discourse is denied (Austin) or when the equivocity entailed by the

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cultural embodiment of our concrete discourses is concealed by an idealistic conception of language representing it as something pure and univocal (Derrida). Here one can perceive a move that will be constitutive of all the ulterior developments in Derrida’s thought. The influence of Husserl led Derrida to a conclusion that he will never question; it works in his thought as a blind presupposition that informs his reading of Austin. The blind presupposition of the deconstructionist (BPD) is the following: since the hallmark of impurity in language is equivocity, everything that is not equivocal must be pure. As Derrida affirms explictly, following Husserl here, “Exactitude and univocity are overlapping notions.”17 If one takes exactitude to be an unreachable goal for any statement, then once one accepts Husserl’s identification, one must also accept that equivocity works as a sort of law for ordinary language. Accordingly, the deconstructionist will produce the following unjustified inference about Austin: if Austinian speech acts are not equivocal, that must mean that they embody another variety of the metaphysical/intentional voice. Derrida then believes that he can find a proof about that idea in the very misleading reading of Austin he proposes, when he states that intentions play a constitutive role in the achievement of speech acts,18 whereas Austin shows with his example of a promise that even a promise made with no intention of fulfilling it remains a promise.19 Such an initial reading mistake by Derrida reinforces the deconstructionist delusion that Austin is a thinker of purity in language, in other words that illocution is nothing else than a new name for the old linguistic scheme based on intentionality, presence, locution and correspondence. Against that very disputable perspective, one should assume beyond Austin that the meaning of a speech act must be recognized as undecidable.20 For that reason, the deconstructionist is able to recognize that Austin was right in assuming that an utterance like “the lake became a weak ice surface” can have two illocutionary/pragmatics meanings: it can either be a description (we are walking and I am saying that to my interlocutor) or a warning (my interlocutor is going to walk on the lake and I am warning him about the danger). Derrida is certainly sensitive to the capacity of the utterance to work with these two meanings. But because of BPD, the deconstructionist rejects the idea that in one case the utterance works as a descriptive while in the other as a warning. According to BPD, there is no way one speech act could find a stabilized and univocal meaning. From there the deconstructionist concludes that when I am describing I am also warning (and more), and when I am warning I am also describing (and more). In light of this belief in BDP, the deconstructionist imposes a perfectly unjustified challenge to the Austinian thinker, claiming that the Austinian inability to recognize the equivocity inherent in any speech acts (the impossibility of stabilizing their value) reveals that he is still

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defending a certain concept of truth as correspondence leading us back to the metaphysical belief in the linguistic purity of utterances. The poem is the cry of its occasion, Part of the res itself and not about it. (WALLACE STEVENS, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”)

Beyond the purity and impurity alternative However, as I have tried to show, there is, from Austin’s perspective, a conceptual incompatibility between the notion of illocution and the notion of purity: simply, one cannot go with the other. Accordingly, in reducing illocution to a variety of intentional purity, the deconstructionist just generates a conceptual contradiction without being aware of it since: this reading of Austin is overdetermined by the blind necessity of proving that speech is essentially compromised with metaphysics. For the deconstructionist, only an account of the effects of the writing trace—as an element introducing equivocity and undecidability in any speech—can be considered as a reasonable, non-metaphysical account of language. But to insist a little more, such a forced critical reading of Austin is based on an absolute confidence given to Husserl’s way of conceiving the impurity of the statement (as identical to equivocity). From there, Derrida is going to oppose the pure univocal statement as an unreachable ideal (an “Idea” in the Kantian sense) and the equivocal / impure statement. Since for Derrida writing implies a rupture between the original intentional meaning and the sign in its reception by a distant reader, he is also committed to the view that writing must be considered as the impure element that any speech activity contains within itself, which entails the undecidability of the value of any speech act.21 But this, again, leads the deconstructionist to the wrong inference that Austinian speech acts are varieties of a metaphysically driven linguistic representationalism. Since this claim is based on the idea that Austin’s speech acts require intentions in order to be realized, the deconstructionist considers the illocution as another form of the “pure” statement. But as we have seen, Austin explicitly criticizes the naïve conception of “pure statements” that is rooted in the representationalist/intentionalist conception of language. For that reason, one must conclude, against the deconstructionist, that it is not true that the voice and speech are by essence metaphysically compromised, that there would be no other way to take into consideration our linguistic finitude than by accepting writing (i.e., for Derrida dissemination of the meaning and undecidability) as its actual manifestation. Only if one bases one’s reading of Austin in a mistaken conception of what Austin is actually elaborating, will one be forced to draw that conclusion.

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Conclusion: The ordinary voice as an alternative to the metaphysical voice As I suggested earlier, the conciliation reading is partially right: it is true that Austin and Derrida are looking for alternatives to the traditional representationalist picture of language; but it is only partially right, since it effaces the profound gap between Derrida’s and Austin’s mutually exclusive accounts of what that alternative might be. The deconstructionist’s mistake is to think that Austin is still committed to the “metaphysics of presence” because there is no room in his theory for the identification of the impurity of speech with its undecidability. As we have tried to show such an identification is nothing else than a blind presupposition that no argument can justify. For Austin, the noncentral role of intention and the recognition of the impurity of our statements never leads to the deconstruction of the so-called metaphysical privilege of the voice. But the fact that Austin is not a deconstructionist or that he does not attempt to deconstruct this purported metaphysical privilege of the voice is not a proof that he upholds the old metaphysics of speech and the voice. On the contrary, Austin’s account of language leads to the discovery of a new form of voice, a finite and ordinary voice, that the BPD (based on a blind confidence in Husserl’s way of presenting the problem) will prevent from recognizing. I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after. (“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”).

Notes 1 Stanley Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 59. 2 J. L. Austin, “Performatif-Constatif,” in La Philosophie Analytique, Cahiers de Royaumont (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1962), 278. See Raoul Moati, Derrida et le langage ordinaire (Paris: Hermann, 2014), 287, and sq. 3 See Jacques Derrida, Voice and Phenomena, Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press [1967] 1990). 4 I use this terminology for reasons of commodity: finitude is a theme that the first Derrida in his work on Husserl explicitly assumes. See Moati, Derrida et

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le langage ordinaire, chapters 1 and 2. It is only later on that Derrida became reluctant to formulate his main ideas in terms of finitude. 5 See Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988). 6 J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press [1962] 1975), 143. 7 Ibid, 148; emphasis mine. 8 Ibid, 146; emphasis mine. 9 Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 143. 10 Ibid, 72–73; emphasis mine. 11 Ibid, 146; emphasis mine. 12 Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 148. 13 For a systematic investigation of such influence, see Moati, Derrida et le langage ordinaire, chapters 1 and 2. 14 Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction (Lincoln, NE: Nebraska University Press [1962] 1989), 104; translation modified. 15 Ibid, 103; translated modified and emphasis mine. 16 Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, 104. 17 Ibid, 102. 18 «One of those central elements—and not one among others—remains classically, consciousness, the conscious presence of the intention of the speaking subject in the totality of the speech act. As a result, performative communication becomes once more the communication of an intentional meaning even if that meaning has no referent in the form of a thing or a prior or exterior state of things . . . no «dissemination» escaping the horizon of the unity of meaning» Derrida, Limited Inc., 14; emphasis mine. 19 See Raoul Moati, Derrida/Searle, Deconstruction and Ordinary Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 42–43. 20 See my analysis of Derrida’s notion of undecidability regarding the speech act in Moati, Derrida/Searle, Deconstruction and Ordinary Language, 48–64. 21 About that point, see my analysis in Chapter 1 of Derrida/Searle, Deconstruction and Ordinary Language.

Works cited Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, (1962) 1975. Austin, J. L. “Performatif-Constatif.” In La Philosophie Analytique, edited by Jean Wahl. 271–81. Cahiers de Royaumont. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1962.

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Cavell, Stanley. A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Derrida, Jacques. Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction. Lincoln, NE: Nebraska University Press, (1962) 1989. Derrida, Jacques. Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988. Derrida, Jacques. Voice and Phenomena, Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, (1967) 1990. Moati, Raoul. Derrida/Searle, Deconstruction and Ordinary Language. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014a. Moati, Raoul. Derrida et le langage ordinaire. Paris: Hermann, 2014b.

12 Writing in the shadow of Sartre’s Genet: Derrida’s Glas and the ethics of biography Robert Doran

At bottom Saint Genet and Glas express the desire either to fuck Genet, be fucked by him, or both. ROBERT HARVEY1

It is a singular fact that two of the twentieth century’s most important thinkers evinced an intense fascination for the life and oeuvre of Jean Genet, to the point of devoting major works to the petty-criminal-turned-writer: Sartre’s Saint Genet, comédien et martyr (Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr), published in 1952, exerted an enormous influence on Genet criticism (and, apparently, on Genet himself, who could not write for many years afterward); and Derrida’s Glas, published in 1974, with its juxtaposed readings of Hegel and Genet on facing pages, is perhaps Derrida’s most unusual and unwieldly book (John Sturrock describes it as “a scandalously random experience,”2 while Christina Howells calls it “one of Derrida’s most perverse texts.”3 Although Glas was

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certainly inspired by a desire to emulate Sartre, one hesitates to call Saint Genet a model. This is a more apt description of Genet’s 1967 essay published in Tel Quel, “Ce qui est resté d’un Rembrandt déchiré en petits carrés bien réguliers, et foutu aux chiottes” (What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn Into Four Equal Pieces and Flushed Down the Toilet), whose striking double-column layout Derrida is obviously imitating.4 Nevertheless, as Howells indicates, while “direct reference to Sartre is limited to a few relatively brief passages,” Sartre’s Saint Genet “underlies more of Glas than Derrida is perhaps prepared to acknowledge.”5 Just how much so will be examined in this chapter. Glas was composed during an experimental—or, if you will, modernist— phase in Derrida’s career. After the more conventionally academic and foundational texts of the late 1960s and early 1970s that established Derrida as a leading philosopher—Of Grammatology, Dissemination, Writing and Difference, Margins of Philosophy—he indulged in a decidedly nonacademic, avant-garde/performative style in the mid- to late 1970s, which earned him some praise but also a great deal of scorn. Glas can thus be placed alongside texts such as La verité en peinture (1978) (The Truth in Painting), the dual language edition of Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles/Éperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche (1979), and the mock-epistolary La carte postale: De Socrate à Freud et audelà (1980) (The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond). These form a group of texts that can be characterized as more modernist-literary than specifically philosophical in nature, even if they do broadly echo the deconstructive themes and style of thought of the academic period. To many, it appeared as if Derrida had turned his back on traditional philosophical discourse, leading some to distinguish an “early” from a “later” Derrida.6 According to Richard Rorty, one of Derrida’s few defenders among American philosophers, texts like Glas and La carte postale actually represented an improvement over and an implicit repudiation of the earlier Derrida, who, in his view, was trying too hard to be a “transcendental philosopher.”7 Comparing this shift to Heidegger’s famous Kehre, Rorty sees the Derrida of the Glas period as liberating himself from the constraints of academic philosophy and philosophical expression. Like Heidegger, who renounced his transcendental phase—namely Being and Time’s identification of structuralontological level that conditions the factical-ontic level (i.e., Existentiale versus Existentiell)—Derrida, in Rorty’s telling, abandons his transcendental (or quasi-transcendental)8 notions of différance and archi-écriture (i.e., the conditions of possibility/impossibility of signification). Rorty thus avers, [Christopher] Norris is quite right in saying that, on my view, early Derrida is “falling back into a kind of negative theology that merely replaces one set of absolutes (truth, meaning, clear and distinct ideas) with another (trace, différance, and other such deconstructive key-terms).” But the main justification for distinguishing between an earlier and a later Derrida

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is that he stops doing this. Just as Heidegger stopped using terms like “phenomenological ontology,” “Dasein,” and “existentialism” about five years after Being and Time, so Derrida has pretty well given up using notions like “grammatology,” “archi-writing,” and the rest. This seems to me very sensible on his part. The Derrida of The Post Card is no longer warning us that the “discourse of philosophy” will get us if we don’t watch out. Instead, he alternately plays and struggles with concrete, particular thinkers—e.g., Freud and Heidegger—rather than with a protean, putatively quasi-divinity called “the discourse of philosophy.” As Michael Ryan says, Derrida’s work since 1975 [probably meant 1974, the publication date of Glas] “has become increasingly difficult, self-referential and esoteric.”9 Rorty’s interpretation—this passage is from 1989—would prove to be incorrect, for Derrida did in fact return to the language of his earliest writings and never repudiated the basic tenets of deconstruction they articulated, even if, in the late 1980s and 1990s, Derrida began to shift his focus to different themes, namely ethico-political themes (justice, forgiveness, the death penalty, etc.), in the wake of the De Man and Heidegger controversies.10 Rorty’s broader assertion is, however, well taken insofar as it points to the fact that what we are calling the experimental/modernist Derrida epitomizes the continental urge to erase the boundary line between philosophy and literature. But Derrida had always seen philosophy as having its impetus in a literary desire, and in this respect he was following Sartre explicitly: I recognize my debt, the filiation, the huge influence, the huge presence of Sartre in my formative years. I have never striven to evade it. . . . When I was in the philosophy class in hypokhâgne or khâgne, not only the thought of Sartre, but the figure of Sartre, the character Sartre who allied philosophical desire with literary desire, were for me what is vacuously called a model, a reference point.11 Unlike Sartre, however, who excelled in such literary genres as drama and the novel, bringing his existentialist thought to a larger, non-philosophical audience, Derrida is uninterested in using literary forms to make his thought more accessible. Instead, his dance with the literary represents an effort to make his thought less dependent on traditional philosophical writing, or rather, on this writing’s perceived or real authority. Derrida himself remarks that Glas represents “a contamination of a great philosophical discourse by a literary text that is reputedly scandalous or obscene,” while also “assuming the practical consequences of certain propositions of Of Grammotology concerning the book and the linearity of writing.”12 And Louis Althusser, in personal letter to Derrida, lauds the book for saying “completely new things that go past Hegel and Genet; it’s a philosophical text without precedent which is a poem of a kind I’ve never come across before.”13

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Indeed, Glas is by far the most challenging and most confounding of Derrida’s experimental works (so much so that a guidebook of sorts, Glassary was published in 1986 by John P. Leavey). But is it so idiosyncratic that it ceases to be philosophy? Writing in the New York Times, John Sturrock (hardly a hostile commentator—he edited the collection Structuralism and Since: From Lévi-Strauss to Derrida and wrote a monograph on structuralism) observes: “Glas is philosophy no longer; as a piece of writing it has no known genre. It will disgust orthodox philosophers with its fantastic wordplay, yet seem barbarously abstract to innocent literary persons. In the best avant-garde tradition, it is a work that courts unpopularity, to be idolized by a few and despaired of by the many.”14 I think it too extreme, however, to say that the book is “philosophy no longer.” It in fact represents a challenge to philosophy, to its discursive authority inscribed in conventions that Glas seeks to tear asunder. It thus participates in the discourse of philosophy, albeit from a marginal or heterodox position (which also brings to mind the debates about whether Foucault was a philosopher or a historian).15 Interestingly, Sturrock uses the term “avant-garde”—a marker of modernism—in a pejorative manner to highlight the work’s esoteric inaccessibility. In the same vein, Christopher Norris and Henri Meschonnic compare Glas to the ultimate modernist avant-garde work, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.16 What I shall attempt to suggest in the remainder of this chapter is that Glas represents a quasi-ethical turn in Derrida’s oeuvre,17 one that foreshowed the true ethical turn of the late 1980s in texts such as “Force of Law” (which claimed for the first time that “deconstruction is justice”) and that this was prompted or prefigured by Sartre’s quasi-ethical turn in Saint Genet, which presaged Sartre’s own turn toward the ethico-political in the Critique of Dialectical Reason. Why both of these quasi-turns revolve around the elusive figure of Genet and the question of biography will become apparent in the pages that follow.

Sartre’s Genet At the end of Being and Nothingness, Sartre had promised to explore the ethical implications raised by his phenomenological ontology in a “future work.”18 While it is unclear which work this is supposed to be—most likely it is what is now known as the fragment Notebook for an Ethics, written in 1947–48 but published only posthumously—one can nevertheless see, particularly in view of the failure to complete the text contained in the Notebook, Sartre’s major philosophical tomes after Being and Nothingness, especially Saint Genet,19 as striving to fulfill this role in various ways. In an interview with John Gerassi, Sartre reflects that “my analysis of Genet and his work was purely moral, as is my analysis of Flaubert. Just because I condemn their society and the bourgeois class that oppressed Genet or that Flaubert hated but lusted after has political significance, does not mean

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that I analyzed it politically.”20 Indeed, this interest in social conditions and literary biography derives not from Marxism (to which Sartre will turn only in the late 1950s) but from the method of what Sartre calls “existential psychoanalysis,” articulated in the last part of Being and Nothingness (Part Four, Chapter Two). Sartre summarizes his method thus: This comparison [with Freudian psychoanalysis] allows us to understand better what an existential psychoanalysis must be if it is entitled to exist. It is a method destined to bring to light, in a strictly objective form, the subjective choice by which each living person makes himself a person— that is, makes known to himself what he is. Since what the method seeks is a choice of being at the same time as a being, it must reduce particular behavior patterns to fundamental relations—not of sexuality or of the will to power, but of being—which are expressed in this behavior. .  .  . The behavior studied by this psychoanalysis will include not only dreams, failures, obsessions, and neuroses, but also and especially the thoughts of waking life, successfully adjusted acts, style, etc. This psychoanalysis has not yet found its Freud. At most we can find the foreshadowing of it in certain particularly successful biographies. We hope to be able to attempt elsewhere two examples in relation to Flaubert and Dostoevsky. But it matters little to us whether it now exists; the important thing is that it is possible.21 Here Sartre effectively foreshadows his later forays into biography as a putting into practice of this methodology of existential psychoanalysis (thereby finding “its Freud”). Sartre’s biographical studies of French writers such as Baudelaire, Flaubert, and, of course, Genet, in addition to Sartre himself in The Words22—but interestingly not Dostoevsky—must be seen in light of this methodology and of the moral aspect that accrues to it in practice. Existential psychoanalysis is primarily a matter of uncovering, as stated above, “the subjective choice by which each living person makes himself a person,” namely what Sartre terms the “original project” or “fundamental project.”23 This focus on an “original choice”24—that is, a complex of freedom and responsibility—marks the decisive difference between “empirical” (Freudian) and “existential” (Sartrean) psychoanalysis, even if both seek to understand individual motivations and acts through the analysis of root causes.25 The question is where to locate these root causes and how to describe their nature. Sartre rejects the Freudian unconscious as a kind of determinism, as well as an obfuscation of the real conscious unity that seemingly “unconscious” acts must possess if they are to be coherent (as in Sartre’s famous analysis of “bad faith,” la mauvaise foi, a deconstruction of Freud’s economy of the psyche).26 Thus, “the fundamental project is fully experienced by the subject and hence wholly conscious.”27 But if it is knowable, it is nevertheless not known; it is what Sartre calls “non-thetic” (implicit, nonreflective) awareness.

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The project is “comprehended” pre-ontologically, in the sense that one is one’s project: “Only will he be able to know what he already understands.”28 Sartre’s notion of le vécu (lived experience) is in effect his equivalent for the Freudian unconscious. Discussing his biography of Flaubert, Sartre observes in an interview that “when I show [in The Family Idiot] how Flaubert did not know himself and how at the same time he understood himself admirably, I am indicating that which I call lived experience [le vécu], that is to say, life aware of itself, without implying any thetic knowledge or consciousness. This notion of experience is a tool I use, but one which I have not theorized.”29 Sartre’s psychanalysis is thus not truly psychological; it is an ontology; that is to say, it relates to the basic structures of existence and to the meaning of “human reality”—Sartre’s translation of Heidegger’s Dasein (Heidegger’s Being and Time is the inspiration for much of Sartre’s thinking in Being and Nothingness). Both Heidegger and Sartre were keen to deny to psychoanalysis, and to psychology more generally, a privileged place in regard to what they reinterpreted as properly onto-existential issues. However, unlike Heidegger’s authentic being-toward-death (which Sartre criticizes as “unrealizable”), Sartre defines the authentic self-choosing revealed by existential psychoanalysis in terms of a “project of being”:30 “The original project of a for-itself can aim only at its being.”31 It is perhaps futile to try to deduce what Sartre means concretely by these pronouncements (and the section entitled “existential psychoanalysis” is relatively brief) when we have the perfect illustration of this method in Saint Genet. In the final pages of this work, Sartre describes his methodology as an attempt to indicate the limit of psychoanalytical interpretation and Marxist explanation and to demonstrate that freedom alone can account for a person in his totality; to show this freedom at grips with destiny, crushed at first by its mischances, then turning upon them and digesting them little by little; to prove that genius is not a gift but the way out that one invents in desperate cases; to learn the choice that a writer makes out of himself, of his life and of the meaning of the universe, including even the formal characteristics of his style and composition, even the structure of his images and of the particularity of his tastes; to review in detail the history of his liberation. It is for the reader to say whether I have succeeded.32 Sartre’s intellectual positioning vis-à-vis psychoanalysis and Marxism is significant in view of the fact that, with existentialism on the wane and structuralism just starting to break through, these are the two dominant discourses Sartre must contend with. Sartre sees both as forms of determinism and thus as incapable of understanding the specifically moral meaning of freedom. Building on the framework of Being and Nothingness, the existential psychoanalysis in Saint Genet amounts to an ethical interpretation of Sartre’s famous pronouncement that “man is condemned to be free”: that is,

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one cannot not be free; authenticity means accepting this difficult freedom and the responsibility it entails (and to deny one’s fundamental freedom is to be in bad faith). Sartre had been much criticized for this view, which appeared to make the individual responsible for his or her oppression. Saint Genet can thus be seen as an attempt to refine the idea of an inscrutable and unavoidable freedom, by showing that “you can always make something out of what you’ve been made into.”33 Let us now examine how Sartre describes Genet’s original project, the key to his existential psychoanalysis. Sartre locates the decisive event in Genet’s childhood, the moment when he is declared a thief: The child was playing in the kitchen. . . . There is now no one in the room. An abandoned consciousness is reflecting utensils. A drawer is opening; a little hand moves forward. Caught in the act. Someone has entered the room and is watching him. Beneath this gaze the child comes to himself. He who is not yet anyone becomes Jean Genet. . . . The child alone is in ignorance. In a state of fear and shame he continues his signal of distress. . . . A voice declares publically “You’re a thief.” The child is ten years old. That is how it happened, in that or some other way. In all probability, there were offenses and then punishment, solemn oaths and relapses. It does not matter. The important thing is that Genet lived and has not stopped reliving this period of his life as if it had lasted only an instant.34 As can be seen from the use of the passive voice and an anonymous witness, Genet is being socially condemned on the basis of an act, whose meaning, at ten years old, he is only dimly aware of. He has been categorized according to this act as if it were his essence; he becomes an “in-itself” (an object), a “thief” in the eyes of society (the anonymous “voice” is a metonym for the collective) but also a thief-object to himself through the eyes of others. His being has thus been expropriated, alienated, and for the remainder of his life he will endeavor to reclaim himself from this original definition. To be sure, existentialism involves a choice of being through action, but the young Genet has not at this moment chosen to be a thief, as if a ten-yearold could have formed such a project. It is rather a matter of what Sartre calls “the look” or “the gaze” (le regard), a notion elaborately developed in Being and Nothingness. In this work Sartre argued that interpersonal relations are inherently conflictual or agonistic; they involve dueling gazes: the mutually defining but ultimately unstable dialectic between a looklooking (le regard-regardant) and a look-looked-at (le regard-regardé). Sartre makes the connection explicit a few pages later: “By the gaze that surprised him, by the finger that pointed at him, by the voice that called him a thief, the collectivity doomed him to evil.”35 In Saint Genet, Sartre shifts from the gaze of the Other (the individual, interpersonal level) to the gaze of the Others, the social. The designation “thief” is the objectifying gaze

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that takes away Genet’s freedom even before he is physically imprisoned. It is not the gaze of anyone in particular but of the entire social body as incarnated in a particular gaze. One might call it the social gaze (although Sartre does not use this term in the book) insofar as the collective is assumed in it (in Heideggerian terms, it would be the gaze of das Man). Thus, as Sartre says, “the thief cannot have an intuition of himself as thief . . . it is of social origin and presupposes a prior definition of society, of the property system, a legal code, a judiciary apparatus and an ethical system of relationships among people.”36 But “thief” possesses ontological force for the Others, for whom “a thief is a palpable reality, like a tree or a Gothic church.”37 In other words, the thief is an in-itself for society, a designation that an individual for-itself cannot effectively resist due to the structural asymmetry, which is not the case in the interpersonal relations examined in Being and Nothingness, thus seemingly putting into question the possibility of individual freedom (self-choosing) vis-à-vis society. What is interesting in this analysis from Saint Genet is the specifically moral tone and social context brought to bear here, so different from Being and Nothingness and its famous analysis of the being-in-itself versus being-foritself of the café waiter, which is made exclusively from the perspective of the individual (i.e., the café waiter). In the case of a moral designation like “thief” Sartre realizes that the individual perspective elides the essential, namely social condemnation, the perspective of the Others. In his “philosophical biography” of Sartre, Thomas Flynn in fact remarks that Saint Genet “serves a bridge role in Sartre’s oeuvre”: “Saint Genet brings to term many established ‘existentialist’ concepts even as it opens the door to dialectical and praxisoriented conditions and comprehension.”38 Saint Genet thus appears as a way station on the route to the full-blown social ontology, the fusion of Marxism and existentialism, elaborated in Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960). That Genet will seemingly do the impossible—escape social stigmatization by embracing it—is what Sartre finds extraordinary in his example. Genet’s life will consist in owning this thief-identity and of turning it against his oppressors: “‘I decided to be what crime made of me,’” as Sartre quotes Genet,39 commenting that “he stole because he was a thief; he now steals in order to be a thief.”40 It is a scenario of what Sartre calls “loser wins”: “As a result, this defeat, which has been prepared for, meditated, carried to an extreme, will change, in the esoteric religion of the Thief, into the finest of victories.”41 The abject criminal transforms himself into a thief-saint (“Genet will do Evil in order to be a saint”).42 In sum, this will involve a shift from inauthenticity (definition by others) to authenticity (self-definition through freedom), from social conformity (the social gaze) to individual self-creation (value creation in the Nietzschean sense of revaluation). In Saint Genet, we reach the paroxysm of the antihero (or as Annie Cohen-Solal puts it, Genet is “the Sartrean hero par excellence”):43 Genet is the perfect antithesis of the bourgeois, so perfect he is better than fiction,

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better than all the heroic-antiheroic protagonists of existentialist/absurdist novels, such as Roquentin and Meursault. Genet is the true antihero, since he is a true antihero, an updated and real-life Jean-Valjean, Hugo’s thief-saint. In short, Genet has demonstrated what it means to live authentically in the early twentieth century. Sartre thereby asserts a continuum between life and art, for Genet has made himself, in Nietzschean fashion, into a work of art.44 Art alone cannot truly grasp this, hence the recourse to the biography or autobiography of the writer-artist (including Sartre himself in Les mots).45 The paradox of Sartre’s book is that, in telling the story of Genet’s liberation from the objectification of (bourgeois) society, he is in fact being objectified, dominated—by Sartre himself, by the Sartrean gaze, a pendant to the social gaze that had oppressed and defined the ten-year-old Genet. In his interview with Sartre, John Gerassi relates: “I had lunch with Genet last week, and he complained, jokingly perhaps, that your book had so completely dissected and analyzed him through his novels and plays that he couldn’t write anymore. It’s true he hasn’t written for a long time, has he?” To which Sartre retorts: “Ha-ha! Don’t blame me for that. I think he simply does not feel like fighting for a cause he has won.”46 However, in her biography of Sartre (published five years after Sartre’s death), Annie CohenSolal maintains that “Genet was embalmed alive by Sartre”47 and that Sartre’s text “was nearly a rape.”48 But Genet was complicit. Having seen the manuscript before publication, Genet could have, as Cohen-Solal puts it, “kept it, lost it, or even burned it. But he did not. He tacitly accepted it, and also accepted all the consequences.”49 Genet’s close friend Jean Cocteau writes in his journal that “Jean has changed since the publication of Sartre’s book. He looks as if he were at once trying to follow it and to escape it.”50 Sartre had effectively altered the course of Genet’s life by writing about it. Sartre himself seems to realize while writing the text that what he has done is in effect a kind of embalming, but insists that this is justified. As he remarks in what amounts to a metatextual reflection on Saint Genet itself: Some people have objected to the length of the present study: “When one writes so much about a living person, it is because one wants to bury him.” But why should I want to bury him? He doesn’t bother me. The fact is that a certain Genet has just died and that Jean Genet has asked me to deliver the funeral oration. I myself have been buried alive so many times that he thinks I’m an expert.51 But unlike perhaps any biography that had come before, in this case the biographer is more famous than his subject. Genet could defeat society but not Sartre. This is the ethical conundrum that Derrida faces, the challenge he accepts, as he endeavors to write about Genet. Derrida’s Glas must thus be read in light of the ethical issues raised by Saint Genet, both in and outside the book.

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Derrida on Sartre’s Genet In 1965 Paule Thévenin, the indefatigable editor of Antonin Artaud and Genet’s “protector,”52 introduces Derrida to Genet. She thought of Genet as a “second Artaud” and was “in search of new critical discourses to rekindle interest in Genet’s work, a work which had been a bit smothered by Sartre’s celebrated Saint Genet.”53 She thought Derrida could be a new champion; ironically, she ended up disliking Glas. Like Sartre, Derrida formed a “close bond”54 with Genet. Another prominent French philosopher would take up Genet’s cause,55 but this time would be different. Realizing that his text on Genet would be compared to that of Sartre and thus carry with it the accusation of one-upmanship, Derrida embraces an unusual format. By writing a book on Genet and Hegel, Derrida introduces an asymmetry that is difficult, if not impossible, for the would-be commentator on either writer to overcome. But one can also interpret this unlikely pairing as a way of avoiding, at the level of form, the totalizing gesture of Sartre’s tome. In short, Derrida wants to write a book on Genet without writing a book on Genet. That is, he wants to make a similar gesture to that of Sartre without thereby falling into the trap Sartre fell into: “Not to stop the path of a Genet. For the first time I am afraid, while writing, as they say, ‘on’ someone, of being read by him. Not to arrest him, not to draw him back, not to bridle him.”56 Derrida wants to avoid appropriating Genet— even better, he wants to liberate Genet from Sartre. In an interview, Derrida noted that Sartre’s biography was “a project of explanatory mastery that again imprisoned Genet in his truth, in a truth supposedly inscribed in his originary project.”57 In Glas itself Derrida observes that Genet “almost never writes anymore, he has interred/buried [enterré] literature like no one.”58 Derrida will thus endeavor to break Genet free from this explanatory prison, the prison of Sartrean-existential psychoanalysis. Derrida will deconstruct Sartre’s Genet, albeit from a safe distance (Sartre’s name occurs only twice in Glas)—even if, as Robert Harvey observes, “by literally eliminating Sartre from the body of Glas, by turning him into a mere allusion, Derrida redoubles Sartre’s virtual presence everywhere.”59 Glas (strategically avoiding Genet’s name in the book’s title) will constitute an ethical treatment of the doubly accursed writer (by society and by Sartre), in contrast to a book that had used Genet to articulate an ethics. Indeed, Derrida’s text evinces a keen awareness of the problem posed by Sartre’s Saint Genet. Near the beginning of Glas, Derrida writes, To try once more to arrest it, as in 1952, when at the exit from prison, the ontophenomenologist of the liberation

liberation—under this title, first and at the least, must be thought the avoidance of psychoanalysis and Marxism in the name of freedom, of the “original choice,” and of the “existential project.”

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. . . insisted on handing back to you, right into your hand, to a safe place, the “keys” to the-man-and-the-complete-work, their ultimate psychoanalytico-existential signification.60 I attempt to reproduce Derrida’s highly unusual textual presentation, which indents and puts in a smaller font part of the text above along with a lengthy quotation from Sartre’s Saint Genet in the ellipsis (in quotation marks, but with no page reference). With the phrase “ontophenomenologist of the liberation” Derrida ironizes Sartre’s metaphysics of freedom in its relation to historical freedom—that is, the liberation from Nazi occupation (Sartre’s Being and Nothingness was published in 1943, and France was liberated in 1944), as well as Sartre’s effort to forge an intellectual path that steered clear of Marx and Freud. But we should note Derrida’s own avoidance of Marxism. Like Sartre, Derrida engaged with Marxism only later in his career, in Specters of Marx (1993). Even as he mocks Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis, Derrida’s engagement with Freud and Lacan can be similarly described as phenomenological, as an attempt to co-opt psychoanalysis for the project of deconstruction, just as Sartre’s was an attempt to co-opt it for existentialism. More broadly, Sartre and Derrida can be said to represent two rival forms of phenomenology derived from Husserl and Heidegger, the one onto-existentialist and the other textual-deconstructive. The invocation in this passage of the second-person “you” is eminently strategic: it evinces a personal, ethical tone that disrupts third-person objectification, as if Derrida were addressing Genet directly, manifesting concern and regret for what Sartre has done to his friend. Derrida appears to be particularly irked by Sartre’s claim to have found the “key” to understanding Genet. Derrida quotes Sartre, “This is the keys to his conduct and his disorders. . . . The Other than self. Here we have the key to Genet. This is what must be understood first: Genet is a child who has been convinced that he is, in his very depths, Another than Self. .  .  . Our certainty of ourself finds its truth in the Other.”61 As we saw above, it would seem that, from Derrida’s perspective, by dint of providing the “key” to Genet, Sartre silently strips Genet of his for-itself, of his freedom of self-definition, precisely by defining it. Derrida further observes that “a note from Jacques Lacan’s Ecrits (Genet is one of the very rare ‘French writers’ modern or otherwise, not to figure in the Index of Names Cited) names this object ‘that we could not designate better than by calling it the universal phallus (just as we say: universal key).’”62 Thus “key” is tied to the operation of psychoanalysis itself: the psychoanalyst provides the key to the individual, a way of “unlocking” the psyche. This would seem to imply that psychoanalysis tout court, whether existentialist or empirical, is being taken to task for its authoritarian impulse, its presupposition of mastery.

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Furthermore, “key” is attacked as having “transcendental” pretentions: General enough to introduce into the transcendental structures of the ego, it was as effective and as undifferentiated as a passkey [passe partout], a universal key sliding into all signifying lacunae. . . . This transcendental key, the condition of all determined signifiers and the concatenation of the chain, was prescribed and inscribed, but as a piece and an effect in the text, was enchained, entrained in the Miracle of the Rose.63 In other words, Genet’s text resists the transcendental impulse that would reduce everything to structure. Noting that “the two main accusations he levels against Sartre’s reading of Genet are that it is ‘thematic’ criticism and that it purports to provide a ‘key’ to the interpretation of Genet’s works,” Christina Howells objects that “Derrida interprets this [the universal key] as being no more than a rephrasing of the notion that the ego is synthetic and transcendent, in other words a universal phenomenon not specific to Genet.” But, she continues, “Sartre’s point is that Genet’s ‘self’ is not merely transcendent like the ego of all of us, it is also experienced as alienated.”64 That is, it is alienated by the objectification of the Others (the social gaze), which defines it for all time, gives it its “truth.” More generally speaking, however, the aim of Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis is not to provide a “universal” key, for the “key” must be constructed and reconstructed on the basis of the situation of the particular individual, even if general structural principles (like the idea of the social gaze) emerge from a given analysis. Sartre had warned in Being and Nothingness that “existential psychoanalysis will have to be completely flexible”: “The method which has served for one subject will not necessarily be suitable to use for another subject or for the same subject at a later period.”65 The “original project” is not fixed, but involves a retrospective reorganization of a life based on its current orientation. Another oblique reference to the Sartrean text is contained in Derrida’s invocation of the idea of the gaze (le regard): “The word ‘regard’ that opens the right column fixes you again at the end of the left column. You think you are the one who regards, and it is the text of the picture (Rembrandt) that oversees and informs against you, sketches and denounces you—what? from elsewhere.”66 Derrida is referencing Genet’s text, “What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn Into Four Equal Pieces and Flushed Down the Toilet,” mentioned at the outset of this essay as a model for Glas’s double-column format (Gene Plunka notes that the two columns reflect “Genet’s divided self after the Sartre crisis from 1952 to 1955”).67 Derrida here describes it as one side “looking” at the other—much like Derrida’s own text, which has Genet “facing” Hegel. But one can also read the passage as a gloss on the domineering Sartrean gaze (Sartre’s “look-looking”) that is Saint Genet. It is thus Sartre who “oversees and informs against you, sketches and denounces you.”

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Later in Glas, Derrida takes aim at Sartre’s “loser wins” thesis in a section entitled “GENET’S FAILURE [ECHEC].”68 Derrida would appear to be offering a rebuttal to Sartre’s contention that in the case of Genet, it is failure that is the real object of his undertaking. . . . Genet is a man-failure: he wills the impossible in order to be sure of being unable to achieve it and in order to derive from the tragic grandeur of this defeat the assurance that there is something other than possible . . . because he knew it all in advance, because he knew about his future failure in detail, he knew it by heart, and because he nevertheless willed the impossible.69 To which Derrida retorts: “Genet’s Failure.” What a title. A magical, animistic, scared denunciation. What is the sought-after effect? But hasn’t Genet always calculated the “failure.” He repeats it all the time; he wanted to make a success of failure. And now through the simple provocation of his text, he constructs a scene that obliges the other to unmask, to stammer, to become unhinged, to say what he wouldn’t have wanted to, should not have said. It is this, the text (Genet) that traps, fleshes, reads the reader, judgment, criticism. Like Rembrandt. Paradigmatic scene.70 Derrida would appear to want to deflate Sartre’s “loser wins” thesis by implying that Genet effectively says it himself in the idea of making “a success of failure,” a mantra he “repeats all the time.” Sartre’s Saint Genet is thus on some level superfluous, since Genet himself has already given us the “key.” Although Derrida is ostensibly referring to, as Howells puts it, the “hostile seduction” of Genet’s text, the “invitation to share the subjectivity of a pederast and a thief,”71 Derrida’s Genet can perhaps be seen as having “read the reader”—Sartre—anticipated his “judgment” and his (literary) “criticism.” The invocation of “Rembrandt” refers to the earlier passage quoted above that concerned the regard/gaze. Thus a close reading of Genet allows for a return-gaze against Sartre, the return-gaze of Genet’s text that “unmasks” or deconstructs the Sartrean gaze as holder of the key and the reader par excellence (the psychoanalyst). Ultimately, however, Derrida must reckon with the specter of his own failure to write an ethical biography: He is going to be furious with me [m’en vouloir à mort]; I know from experience the law of this proceeding/trial [procès]. He will be furious with me for all sorts of reasons I will not undertake to enumerate. And at all events and cases. If I support or valorize his text, he will see in this a sort of approbation, verily of magisterial, university, paternal or maternal appropriation. It is as if I were stealing his erection from him.72

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Derrida sees his text on Genet as a lose-lose proposition: to not write against Sartre’s Genet is to let its “rape” stand as definitive, but to write “on” Genet is to risk repeating the Sartrean violation. Perhaps Harvey said it best when he wrote that “at bottom Saint Genet and Glas express the desire either to fuck Genet, be fucked by him, or both.”73 In other words, there is no ethical biography of a living author. Nevertheless, as I suggested above, Glas can be seen, like Saint Genet, as an effort to test out and develop ethical approaches that had not been explored in the earlier work. Derrida attempts in Glas to perform an ethical biography under the sign of its impossibility, and it is this textual intention that would appear to separate him from Sartre.

Notes 1 Robert Harvey, “Genet’s Open Enemies: Sartre and Derrida,” Yale French Studies 91 (1997): 105. 2 John Sturrock, “The Book Is Dead, Long Live the Book!” The New York Times, September 13, 1987. 3 Christina Howells, Derrida: Deconstruction from Phenomenology to Ethics (London: Polity, 1998), 86. 4 Derrida refers to this text on the first page of Glas. This layout, where one column serves as an explicit or implicit commentary on the other, had already been employed by Derrida in more modest fashion in “Tympan,” the prologue to Marges de la philosophie (1972). 5 Christina Howells, “Derrida and Sartre: Hegel’s Death Knell,” in Derrida and Deconstruction, ed. Hugh J. Silverman (New York: Routledge, 1989), 165. 6 While Derrida did return to more traditional (by continental standards) philosophical writing in the 1980s and 1990s, he still occasionally published “experimental” works such as the collaborative ventures Chora L Works: Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman (1997) and Jacques Derrida (1993), by Geoffrey Bennington and Derrida (which includes an autobiographical “Circumfession”), that hark back in some fashion to the texts of the 1970s. 7 See Richard Rorty, “Is Derrida a Transcendental Philosopher,” in Richard Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 119–28. 8 See Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 268. 9 Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others, 113, n. 8, original emphasis. 10 See Robert Doran, “Derrida in Heidelberg: The Specter of Heidegger’s Nazism and the Question of Ethics,” in Robert Doran, The Ethics of Theory: Philosophy, History, Literature (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). 11 Quoted in Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography (London: Polity Press, 2013), 33. 12 Jacques Derrida, Points... Interviews, 1974-1994, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 350.

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13 Quoted in Peeters, Derrida, 261, original emphasis. 14 Sturrock, “The Book Is Dead.” 15 See Clare O’Farrell, Foucault: Historian or Philosopher? (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989). 16 Christopher Norris, Derrida (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 46; Henri Meschonnic, Le signe et le poème (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 468. 17 In a recent article, “Political Glas” (Diacritics 44, no. 1 [2016]), Saul Setter appears to come to a similar conclusion regarding the place of Glas in Derrida’s oeuvre: “Glas sets up the course of Derrida’s later writings, where the thinking and the practice of deconstruction would open up to explicit political and ethical considerations of justice and responsibility” (89). 18 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956/1985), 798. 19 Thomas Flynn notes that Sartre’s “578-page ‘introduction’ to the collected works of Jean Genet (1952) was seen by some as the long-awaited ethics promised by Being and Nothingness” (Sartre: A Philosophical Biography [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014], 275). 20 John Gerassi, Talking with Sartre: Conversations and Debates (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 161–62. 21 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 734 (original emphasis). 22 Jean-Paul Sartre, Les mots (Paris: Gallimard, 1963). 23 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 721. 24 Ibid., 731. 25 According to the psychoanalyst and one-time Sartre student, Jean-Bertrand Pontalis: “One day the history of Sartre’s thirty-year long relationship with psychoanalysis, and ambiguous mixture of equally deep attraction and repulsion, will have to be written and perhaps his work reinterpreted in the light of it” (quoted in Flynn, Sartre, 221, original emphasis). 26 “By rejecting the conscious unity of the psyche, Freud is obliged to imply everywhere a magic unity linking distant phenomena across obstacles” (Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 94–95). 27 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 728–29. 28 Ibid., 729, original emphasis. This of course draws on Heidegger’s idea that “the question of being is nothing else but the radicalization of an essential tendency of being that belongs to Dasein itself, namely of the pre-ontological understanding of being” (Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh and rev. and fwd. Dennis J. Schmidt [Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010], 12). 29 Quoted in Flynn, Sartre, 222, translation adapted. 30 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 722. 31 Ibid., 721, original emphasis. 32 Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, trans. Bernard Frechtman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 628. 33 Quoted in Flynn, Sartre, 375. Original source: Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations, IX: mélanges (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 101. Flynn calls it “the abiding mantra of Sartrean existentialism” (Flynn, Sartre, 375).

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34 Sartre, Saint Genet, 26–27. 35 Ibid., 31. 36 Ibid., 39. 37 Ibid. 38 Flynn, Sartre, 276, 277. Similarly, Annie Cohen-Solal notes that “Saint Genet marked a new stage in the dynamics of Sartre’s work, an intersection between the (auto)biographical path—Baudelaire, The Words, Flaubert—and the philosophical one—the Morale and the Critique of Dialectical Reason” (Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre: A Life, trans. Anna Cancogni and ed. Norman Macafee. [New York: Pantheon Books, 1987], 315–16). 39 Sartre, Saint Genet, 59. 40 Ibid., 69. 41 Ibid., 68. 42 Ibid., 193. 43 Flynn, Sartre, 314. 44 As Sartre had stated presciently in his (in)famous 1946 lecture “Existentialism Is a Humanism” (reprinted as “Existentialism,” in Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writings, ed. Stephen Pries [New York: Routledge, 2001]): “No one can tell what the painting of tomorrow will be like; one cannot judge a painting until it is done. What has that to do with morality? We are in the same creative situation. We never speak of a work of art as irresponsible; when we are discussing a canvas by Picasso, we understand very well that the composition became what it is at the time when he was painting it, and that his works are part and parcel of his entire life. It is the same upon the plane of morality” (41). 45 On Glas and the question of autobiography in particular, see Jane Marie Todd, “Autobiography and the Case of the Signature: Reading Derrida’s Glas.” Comparative Literature 38, no. 1 (1986): 1–19. 46 Gerassi, Talking with Sartre, 161. 47 Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre: 1905-1980 (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 536. My translation. Quotation in French version only. 48 Cohen-Solal, Sartre: A Life, 314. 49 Ibid. 50 Quoted in Simon Critchley, “Writing the Revolution: The Politics of Truth in Genet’s Prisoner of Love,” Radical Philosophy 56 (1990): 25. 51 Sartre, Saint Genet, 574. 52 On the relation between Genet and Paule Thévenin, see Chapter 29 of Stephen Barber, Jean Genet (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), entitled “Paule Thévenin and Genet.” 53 Peeters, Derrida, 158. 54 Ibid. 55 However, in 1965, when they met for the first time, Derrida was little known outside a small circle of Parisian intellectuals. 56 Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 36.

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57 Quoted in Peeters, Derrida, 262–63. 58 Derrida, Glas, 36. 59 Harvey, “Genet’s Open Enemies,” 106. 60 Derrida, Glas, 28–29. 61 Quoted in ibid., 29. Ellipses in the original. Original source: Sartre, Saint Genet, 35. 62 Derrida, Glas, 29. 63 Ibid., 30. 64 Howells, “Derrida and Sartre,” 166, original emphasis. 65 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 732, my emphasis. 66 Derrida, Glas, 44. 67 Gene A. Plunka, The Rites of Passage of Jean Genet: The Art and Aesthetics of Risk Taking (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1992), 120. 68 Derrida, Glas, 219. 69 Sartre, Saint Genet, 191. 70 Derrida, Glas, 219. 71 Christina Howells, “Sartre: Desiring the Impossible,” in Philosophy and Desire, ed. and intro. Hugh J. Silverman (New York: Routledge, 2000), 94. 72 Derrida, Glas, 199. 73 Harvey, “Genet’s Open Enemies,” 105.

Works cited Barber, Stephen. Jean Genet. London: Reaktion Books, 2004. Bennington, Geoffrey and Derrida, Jacques. Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Cohen-Solal, Annie. Sartre: 1905-1980. Paris: Gallimard, 1985. Cohen-Solal, Annie. Sartre: A Life. Translated by Anna Cancogni and edited by Norman Macafee. New York: Pantheon Books, 1987. Critchley, Simon. “Writing the Revolution: The Politics of Truth in Genet’s Prisoner of Love.” Radical Philosophy 56 (1990): 25–34. Derrida, Jacques. Glas. Paris: Gallimard, 1974. Derrida, Jacques. Glas. Translated by John P. Leavey, Jr. and Richard Rand. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. Derrida, Jacques. Marges de la philosophie. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1972. Derrida, Jacques. Points... Interviews, 1974-1994. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995. Doran, Robert. “Derrida in Heidelberg: The Specter of Heidegger’s Nazism and the Question of Ethics.” In Robert Doran, The Ethics of Theory: Philosophy, History, Literature, 60–78. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Flynn, Thomas. Sartre: A Philosophical Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Genet, Jean. “Ce qui est resté d’un Rembrandt déchiré en petits carrés bien réguliers, et foutu aux chiottes.” Tel Quel 30 (1967): 3–13.

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Genet, Jean. “What Remained of a Rembrandt Torn Up into Very Even Little Pieces and Chucked into the Crapper.” In Jean Genet, Reflections on the Theatre and Other Writings, translated by Richard Seaver, 75–91. London: Faber, 1972. Gerassi, John. Talking with Sartre: Conversations and Debates. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. Harvey, Robert. “Genet’s Open Enemies: Sartre and Derrida.” Yale French Studies 91 (1997): 103–16. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh and Revised and Foreword by Dennis J. Schmidt. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010. Howells, Christina. Derrida: Deconstruction from Phenomenology to Ethics. London: Polity, 1998. Howells, Christina. “Derrida and Sartre: Hegel’s Death Knell.” In Derrida and Deconstruction, edited by Hugh J. Silverman, 164–76. New York: Routledge, 1989. Howells, Christina. “Sartre: Desiring the Impossible.” In Philosophy and Desire, edited and introduction by Hugh J. Silverman, 85–95. New York: Routledge 2000. Leavey, John P. Glassary. Foreword by Jacques Derrida. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. Meschonnic, Henri. Le signe et le poème. Paris: Gallimard, 1975. Norris, Christopher. Derrida. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. O’Farrell, Clare. Foucault: Historian or Philosopher? New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. Peeters, Benoît. Derrida: A Biography. London: Polity Press, 2013. Plunka, Gene A. The Rites of Passage of Jean Genet: The Art and Aesthetics of Risk Taking. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1992. Rorty, Richard. Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. New York: Washington Square Press, 1956/1985. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Critique of Dialectical Reason. Translated by Alan SheridanSmith and foreword by Fredric Jameson. London: Verso, 2004. Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Existentialism Is a Humanism” (1946). Reprinted as “Existentialism.” In Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writings, edited by Stephen Pries, 20–57. New York: Routledge, 2001. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Les mots. Paris: Gallimard, 1963. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Notebook for an Ethics. Translated by David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr. Translated by Bernard Frechtman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Saint Genet, comédien et martyr. Paris: Gallimard, 1952. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Situations, IX: mélanges. Paris: Gallimard, 1972. Setter, Saul. “Political Glas. ” Diacritics 44, no. 1 (2016): 78–99. Sturrock, John. “The Book Is Dead, Long Live the Book!” The New York Times. September 13, 1987. Sturrock, John. Editor and Introduction. Structuralism and Since: From LéviStrauss to Derrida. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. Sturrock, John. Structuralism, second edition. Introduction by Jean-Michel Rabaté. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003. Todd, Jane Marie. “Autobiography and the Case of the Signature: Reading Derrida’s Glas.” Comparative Literature 38, no. 1 (1986): 1–19.

13 Derrida, Cixous, and (feminine) writing Marta Segarra

Jacques Derrida’s thinking on literature and writing was nourished by his close friendship, since the early 1960s, with the writer, theorist, and playwright Hélène Cixous. The philosopher was, admittedly, the first reader of Cixous’s writings, and she also had access to Derrida’s texts before their publication, as shown by the multiple, although sometimes well hidden, cross-references and “counter-signatures” that can be found in their respective works.1 Both have publicly recalled their first discussion, in which the rising philosopher who was Derrida, awestricken by the novelty and powerful appeal of the young writer’s still undisclosed pieces of writing, encouraged Cixous to publish them and to pursue her literary endeavor. In the following years, while Jacques Derrida’s first seminal books appeared, Hélène Cixous became a renowned and awarded writer: she was granted the Prix Medicis in 1969 for Dedans,2 a “novel,” although she finally preferred to call her narrative works “fictions,” a term that suits better than “novels” for her transgenre texts. At this time, Derrida was fully engaged in building a complex philosophical oeuvre, whereas Cixous regularly published highly literary texts as well as pieces of literary criticism, in academic journals as well as in newspapers such as Le Monde, mostly on anglophone writers: James Joyce (to which she devoted her PhD, published in 19683), Ezra Pound, Lewis Carroll, William Golding, Iris Murdoch, or Muriel Spark, among others. This distinction between philosophy-theory and literature-criticism was progressively blurred in the work by both Derrida and Cixous—and, especially, in the reception of their work—although one

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may argue that Derrida had always been interested in literature and Cixous in philosophy/theory.4 The mutual impregnation of ideas and images became conspicuous after the publication of Veils in 1998,5 a volume which gathers a text by Cixous (“Savoir”) and one by Derrida (“A Silkworm of One’s Own”). Veils opened the path6 to a sort of public “correspondence,” an exchange of book-length essays: Jacques Derrida paid homage to Hélène Cixous in H.C. For Life, That Is to Say... (2000)7 and in Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, and Genius: The Secrets of the Archive (2003),8 while she responded in Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint (2001)9 and Insister of Jacques Derrida (2006),10 among other shorter texts, more numerous after Derrida’s passing in 2004. However, the intellectual exchange between Derrida and Cixous, which sometimes succeeds in obscuring precedence in the use they make of the same images or coined words (such as nostalgérie, algériance, animot, etc.), began much earlier than this 1998 intellectual coming out. For instance, while a pivotal concept in Derrida’s thinking, since his very first works, is “writing,” Cixous, for her part, launched the notion of “feminine writing,” in an article that has become her most popular text, “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975).11 By this expression, “feminine writing,” Hélène Cixous did not refer to “women’s writing”—as some readers, still today, misunderstand it—nor to a specific way in which women would write, a set of traits that would encompass texts written by women in a special field, which could even be considered a ghetto, within “literature.”12 “Feminine writing” would, instead, stand as an alternative of mainstream writing, which “has been run by a libidinal and cultural—hence political, typically masculine—economy.”13 In other words, most of the texts that form what is called “literature” are, for Cixous—in the Derridean idiom—“phallogocentric”; only some “poets” engage in a “feminine practice of writing.”14 This practice is difficult to describe, and doing that would entail a regrettable oversimplification of the notion; through the examples given by Cixous, which range from Heinrich von Kleist to Marguerite Duras, Jean Genet, or Clarice Lispector, the reader understands that this is not (only) a “modern”—nor a “postmodern” or avant-garde—writing, and that “feminine writing” does not correspond to a precise “style.” In fact, “feminine writing” and “style,” terms rejected by both Cixous and Derrida, would be poles apart. In Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles (1978),15 the philosopher considers “style” as a “phallocentric” category, since it is associated with a violent penetration or incision, marking the author’s mastery over his work. On the contrary, in order that “events” take place in language, “one must give up on performative authority,” says Derrida.16 Cixous adheres to the same view, saying that the author must not be the “pilot” in the journey of writing, but must “submit” to the power

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of language.17 This shared conception of language and writing shows that, for both Derrida and Cixous, who have been associated to postmodern style due to an intensive use of signifiers’ versatility and possibilities, this apparently playful use of language cannot be equated to simple wordplay but, more accurately, to a very serious quest for meaning and truth. However, their conception of literature seems to slightly differ: if Derrida seemingly considers literature as an essentially modern practice that deals with ethical and political questions that inform his own philosophical reflection, for Cixous literature is a space outside historical time: she treats on equal terms Sophocles, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Proust, or Lispector: all of them are her kin (“parents, friends, ancestors”18) and her “contemporaries.” Language, as if it were a living being, keeps memory of all the “resources” that these “poets” brought to life through their writing; an author is thus compared to a midwife, or else to a witness of this “coming to writing”19 of language itself. That is why “writing” cannot be defined by a set of “properties,” nor is ever “proper” to its author as “style” would be, but on the contrary, it consists of “what cannot be reappropriated,” in Derrida’s words.20 For Cixous, then, literature has nothing to do with modernism as a historical period, or with the modern era in historical terms: literature consists of the eternal return to the same original “wounds,” which shout powerful cries,21 in ancient Greek tragedy and in Roland’s Song, Kafka’s short stories, or Tsvetaieva’s poems. That does not mean at all that Cixous is blind to the historical and political context of literary works: her account of her painful and at the same time pleasurable reading of Roland’s Song in colonial Algeria,22 in a time when the fight between “Moors” and “Christians” was reenacted by the first manifestations of the Algerian struggle for independence and its fierce French repression, reveals her awareness of the political implications of literary masterpieces; this consciousness—and her own political texts, especially as playwright23—refutes the apparent immanence of her readings. Moreover, the image of the wound that Cixous repeatedly uses referring to literature or, more precisely, to the act of writing sheds light on the meaning of an expression that has been often used to characterize “feminine writing,” that is, “writing (with) the body.” Again, this perspective on writing has been criticized as essentialist, assuming that this sort of writing is “feminine” since “women” are closer to “nature,” hence to their bodies, than “men,” and also more “open to the other,” to alterity, especially through maternity. However, if we understand “feminine” as a “libidinal” position, as Cixous, and not as an essence of actual women, this body-writing cannot exclusively be associated to women. The frequent assimilation that readers made between “feminine” and “women” led Cixous, nonetheless, to later drop the adjective, and to refer only to “writing.”

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In fact, “writing with the body” or, more broadly, (feminine) writing might be assimilated to a performative writing that not only thematizes the body in unusual ways in literary tradition, but writes the body, inscribing it in the text. Cixous thinks that Derrida achieves this kind of writing in Circumfession,24 a semi-autobiographical text, of which she states: I think that Derrida . . . is one of the rare “men,” or perhaps the only one, to risk his active body in the text. A body movement on the order of circling around inscribes and is inscribed in Circumfession. You yourself [she addresses Derrida] circle around this real and metaphorical penis, this blinded, wounded, healed, resuscitated, etc, penis, you circle around this sex.25 Circumcision is, in Derrida’s text, not only a biographical memory inscribed in his own body, but at the same time a metaphor, a lever to thinking on a wide range of topics such as the place of the subject in the community, Judaism as a heritage, the opening of the self to the other, desire and sexuality, among others. “To risk” the writer’s own “active body in the text” may also be considered an ethical engagement, which has frequently been related to a feminist way of writing, at least as it was undertaken by some women writers, Cixous among them, in France at the time of the Women’s Liberation Front (MLF), the 1970s. “The Laugh of the Medusa’s” famous assertion, “Let the priests tremble: we’re going to show them our sexts!”26—which was at the origin of Nancy Spero’s installation that bears this title (1998)—clearly shows that this performative poetics is also a “poethics.”27 However, this engagement concerns reading as well as writing. A “feminine reading” would thus be the logical counterpart to “feminine writing.” But, since Cixous does not make a difference between reading and writing—she coins the term “readwriting”28 in order to show this continuity—there was no need for her to use this adjective related to reading. Cixous conceives reading as a bodily experience too, comparing it to a “wound”29 that opens the reader’s body: this body loses its closure in order to welcome the other, conveyed by literature. This opening might also be identified to the “feminine” in feminine readwriting. This hospitality to the “wholly other” coincides, moreover, with Derrida’s conception of literary works, according to J. Hillis Miller, since this type of texts allows the “invention of the impossible”—of what was thought to be impossible—giving place to “events” that, by definition, were not planned by the author.30 (Feminine) readwriting, as it has been defined above, would thus be characterized by its “opening, destabilizing language,”31 which amounts to destabilizing the subject that produces—and reads—this text. Hence, literature plays a key role in the “Humanities to come,”32 as dreamed by Derrida in “The Future of the Profession or the University

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without Condition.”33 Although these “Humanities of tomorrow” should intertwine several disciplines, including law and philosophy, literature would have a privileged place in them, since the reference to public space “is also what fundamentally links the university, and above all the Humanities, to what is called literature, in the European and modern sense of the term, as the right to say everything publicly, or to keep it secret, if only in the form of fiction.”34 This “assumed freedom to say everything in the public space” has as its ambitious goal, that of “re-thinking the concept of man, the figure of humanity in general,”35 by deconstructing what is considered “proper to man,” the “humanity of man,”36 and in particular the “traditional opposition” between “man” and “animal.”37 Derrida claims that all the answers given to the question of what is proper to man (of which he provides a list in another text: “speech, reason, experience of death, mourning, culture, institution, politics, technique, clothing, lying, feigned feint, effacement of the trace, gift, laughter, tears, respect, etc.”38) would not withstand “a consistent scientific and deconstructive analysis.”39 Significantly for our argument, most of the elements of this list have to do with language and speech, associated to logocentrism and to the distinction between constative and performative speech acts, a distinction that Derrida also problematizes. He posits, thus, that speech is not proper to human beings, or, more precisely: The idea according to which man is the only speaking being . . . seems to me at once undisplaceable and highly problematic. Of course, if one defines language in such a way that it is reserved for what we call man, what is there to say? But if one reinscribes language in a network of possibilities that do not merely encompass it but mark it irreducibly from the inside, everything changes. I am thinking in particular of the mark in general, of the trace, of iterability, of différance. These possibilities or necessities, without which there would be no language, are themselves not only human.40 Therefore, the deconstruction of the radical distinction between human and nonhuman animals links, quite paradoxically, the continuity of what is usually thought as a radical divide between different species and even categories of living beings to one of the traits that seem more exclusive to humans, speech, and “writing,” if we understand the latter as “an exemplary case of what Derrida means by ‘text’ or ‘trace’ .”41 Judith Butler also offers an enlightening account of Derrida’s conception of “writing,” in relation to the divide human/animal: Writing understood in this way is not a degraded version of speech, but offers a non anthropocentric way of understanding language by virtue of its distinction from speech. It opens up a version of language in which the

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decentred subject registers a form of humility. . . . Does writing, in other words, conduct a critique of anthropocentrism, its ties to onto-theology, and their common dream of mastery?42 This destabilization of the subject is the starting point of “Eating Well or the Calculation of the Subject” (1988), a dialogue between Derrida and JeanLuc Nancy. Derrida, however, objects to the question (“Who comes after the subject?”) that triggers his response since, for him, this formulation implies that the subject has “simply” been “liquidated”43 by what could be called postmodern or post-metaphysic thinking. Derrida postulates instead that twentieth-century epistemologies preceding deconstruction (he mentions Lacan, Althusser, Foucault, and some of the thinkers on whom they rely: Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche) did not pretend to eliminate the subject (or the human, as we shall see) but that they “reinterpreted, displaced, decentered, re-inscribed, then” this subject.44 Nancy accordingly reformulates the question, which becomes, instead of “Who comes after the subject?,” “What is the place of the subject?”45 To this second query, Derrida had cunningly responded in a previous interview with Christie McDonald, entitled “Choreographies.”46 Having been asked about the “woman’s place,” the philosopher concludes that this question should not be formulated in this way, contrary to what “‘reactive’ feminism”—a feminism that fights to place women in the same situation or position than men—thinks. Derrida (and there is little doubt that he is influenced here by Cixous’s complex and nuanced position about feminism) chooses to “challenge a certain idea of the locus [lieu] and the place [place],” a certain “topography” proper to Western metaphysics, which goes along with the idea of “progress.”47 Applied to the “subject,” this deconstruction of “topography” would open the subject, depriving it from its “unity,” “its qualities of stance or stability, . . . everything that links the ‘subject’ to conscience, to humanity, to history.”48 Following this conception of the subject, “the relation to self can only be différance, that is to say alterity, or trace.”49 The “who” (of “Who comes after the subject?”) who comes in the place of the “classical” subject is not, for Derrida, bound to be only human. “Responsibility,” which underlies “metaphysics of subjectivity,” is not exclusive to man.50 Responsibility is also intimately linked to language and speech, since it can be read, following Donna J. Haraway,51 as response-ability, the capacity to respond to the call of the other. For his part, Jean-Luc Nancy also associates the question of the subject with language and, more precisely, with writing, suggesting that, rather than reflecting on the subject’s “place,” one should maybe think on the subject itself as a “place of passage,” “like the writer for Blanchot.”52 Derrida accepts this proposition, specifying that “text” or “writing,” in the sense that he gives to these terms, may be identified, rather than to a “place,” to

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“an instance (without stance, a ‘without’ without negativity) for . . . a ‘who’ besieged by the problematic of the trace and of différance.”53 As for Cixous, she prefers to call “poetry” this “writing” that connects the self with the radical other, as she poetically recounts in a text that is entitled (almost) after a cat, Messie (1996).54 Its narrator faces the challenge of communicating by telephone with her cat (who belongs “to a race which cannot talk long distance”), since “all mammals bear a trace of the first telephone cord.” The solution they both found is to “telephone in person. So several times a day she comes to give me a little telephone call on the leg, using her own body briefly as apparatus, for the number she rubs.” The aporetic images of the telephone cord—which associates a bodily link (the umbilical cord) with the physical distance of the telephone—and of telephoning “in person,” by touch, allude to “(feminine) writing” as it has been described above.55 This also called “body-writing” is thus characterized by an “almost-touching” approach to the objects of writing, as Cixous herself described in Clarice Lispector’s texts.56 The deconstruction of the “classical subject” accomplished by writing reveals furthermore the deep connection that this subject keeps with what Derrida calls a “sacrificial structure,” based on the presumption that the radical divide between humans and animals allow the first to a “noncriminal putting to death” of the latter.57 The subject “does not want just to master and possess nature actively. In our cultures, he accepts sacrifice and eats flesh,”58 as a “symbolic operation” but also as a “real” one when he eats animal meat: “the idealizing interiorization of the phallus and the necessity of its passage through the mouth, whether it’s a matter of words or of things, of sentences, of daily bread or wine, of the tongue, the lips, or the breast of the other.”59 This conception of the subject, which Derrida assimilates to the “virile figure,” is thus based on carno-phallogocentrism.60 This association between carnivorism and phallogocentrism brings us back to the intimate relationship between Hélène Cixous’s and Derrida’s texts. Take, for instance, a passage in one of the latest books by Cixous, Les Sans Arche (2018), in which she comments on a video by Algerianborn artist Adel Abdessemed, entitled “Lise.” We see in it a young woman breastfeeding a piglet, a scene that shocked many spectators.61 This scene is disturbing not only because it blurs the stable border between humans and animals, but also, and foremost, because it alludes to birth and the mother-infant relation. For the immense majority of people, animals “are not part of the family,” and thinking differently amounts to endangering “the world’s order, this order that distinguishes the eaters from the eaten, like the masters from the slaves. Resuscitating meat into baby disturbs consumers,” says Cixous, adding that this is a scene where “one does not think, does not calculate [in contrast with the “calculation of the subject”], one touches the other’s body one only gives, and one loves-the-other-asoneself.”62 Breastfeeding, as an intimate contact between mother and

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infant that blurs the border between their two bodies, but also as an act of nourishing the other, suggests that there may be not only friendship and affection or even love between a nonhuman and a human animal, but also a biological kinship. Moreover, and above all, Abdessemed’s video, and Cixous’s text on it, reverses the “passage through the mouth” of “the breast of the other,”63 thus blowing up the carnophallogocentric structure that underlies the subject “sacrificial structure.” This is done, in both works, through what Derrida, elaborating on Kant, calls “the strange modality of the ‘as if,’ ”64 which is proper to “the modern institution named literature” and “its links to fiction,”65 in contrast to the “as such,” “whose authority founds and justifies every ontology as well as every phenomenology, every philosophy as science or knowledge.”66 But of course, Derrida problematizes what might otherwise seem a facile distinction between “philosophy” or “science” and “literature” or “art,” namely the “precious distinction between performative acts and constative acts,”67 or the discrepancy between philosophy as the place of truth and literature as fiction. Both Cixous’s and Abdessemed’s works are, thus, powerful “cries.”68 In Cixous’s words, speaking of Abdessemed, they do not “make discourses, an image takes flight. . . . Before theory. Before the thing is fixed in theorem. / The body is still warm.”69 The last sentence is especially compelling since it also alludes to dead or about-to-die animals, featured in Abdessemed’s work. Its meaning is thus literal as well as metaphorical, also conjoining the constative and the performative. We could thus conclude that, by virtue of “the performative force of the ‘as if’”70 informing “poetry” or “writing” (in visual arts as in literature), Abdessemed’s film, as well as Cixous’s text building on it, achieves “the sacrifice of sacrifice” that philosophers such as Heidegger or Levinas, in spite of their powerful displacement of the “classical subject,” did not accomplish, according to Derrida.71 Writing, in the broad and at the same time specific sense that both Derrida and Cixous give to the term, would therefore be a unique way—maybe the best or even the only one—to make “deconstruction” arrive.

Notes 1 This mutual reading and influence has been analyzed by a number of critics, and in an especially detailed and subtle way by Ginette Michaud, who devoted two volumes to this analysis: Battements du secret littéraire: Lire Jacques Derrida et Hélène Cixous, Vol. 1 (Paris: Hermann, 2010); and “Comme en rêve”: Lire Jacques Derrida et Hélène Cixous, vol. 2 (Paris: Hermann, 2010). 2 Hélène Cixous, Inside, trans. Carol Barko (New York: Schocken Books, 1986). 3 Hélène Cixous, L’Exil de James Joyce ou l’art du remplacement (Paris: Grasset & Publications de la Faculté des lettres et sciences de Paris-Sorbonne, 1968).

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4 A condensed account of Derrida’s relation to literature can be found in Joseph Hillis Miller, “Derrida and Literature,” in Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader, ed. Tom Cohen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 58–81. As for Cixous’s relation to philosophy and theory, see Peggy Kamuf, “To Give Place: Semi-Approaches to Hélène Cixous,” Yale French Studies, no. 87 (1995): 68–89; and Mairéad Hanrahan, Cixous’s Semi-Fictions: Thinking at the Borders of Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014). 5 Hélène Cixous, Veils, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001). 6 In fact, this public exchange had begun earlier, with the conference in 1990 and subsequent collection of papers, Lectures de la différence sexuelle, ed. Mara Negrón (Paris: Des femmes–Antoinette Fouque, 1994), which featured Cixous’s paper, “Contes de la différence sexuelle” (“Tales of Sexual Difference,” trans. Eric Prenowitz, a fragment of which was included in The Portable Cixous, ed. Marta Segarra [New York: Columbia University Press, 2010], 48–60), and Jacques Derrida’s, “Fourmis” (“Ants,” trans. Eric Prenowitz, The Oxford Literary Review 24 [2002]: 17–42). 7 See Jacques Derrida, H.C. for Life, That Is to Say..., trans. Laurent Milesi & Stefan Herbrechter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006). 8 Jacques Derrida, Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, and Genius. The Secrets of the Archive, trans. Beverly Bie Brahic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). 9 See Hélène Cixous, Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). 10 See Hélène Cixous, Insister of Jacques Derrida, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). 11 First published in French in L’Arc, no. 61 (1975): 39–54; translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1, no. 4 (Summer 1976): 875–93. 12 For a brief insight on what “feminine writing” is and is not, see AnneEmmanuelle Berger, “L’invention de l’écriture féminine,” Le Magazine littéraire (April 2016): 83. For a longer account on this notion, see the chapter “Feminine Writing” in Ian Blyth and Susan Sellers, Hélène Cixous: Live Theory (New York: Continuum Press, 2004), 16–34. 13 Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs 1, no. 4 (Summer 1976): 879. 14 Ibid, 883. 15 Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles/Éperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1979). 16 Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Lengua por venir/Langue à venir. Seminario de Barcelona (Barcelona: Icaria, 2004), 79. 17 Ibid, 80. 18 Ibid, 81.

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19 Hélène Cixous, “Coming to Writing” and Other Essays, ed. Deborah Jenson, trans. Sarah Cornell et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). For the French original edition, see La Venue à l’écriture, with Madeleine Gagnon and Annie Leclerc (Paris: U.G.E., 1977). 20 Cixous and Derrida, Lengua por venir/Langue à venir, 78. 21 See Hélène Cixous, Ayaï! Le cri de la littérature (Paris: Galilée, 2013), a forceful and very poetic manifesto for literature. (“Ay yay! The Cry of Literature,” trans. Eric Prenowitz, in Ways of Re-Thinking Literature, eds. Tom Bishop and Donatien Grau [New York and London: Routledge, forthcoming 2018]). 22 See Hélène Cixous, So Close, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity [2007] 2009), 65–69. 23 Cixous’s plays for the Théâtre du Soleil have always tackled contemporary and sometimes highly sensitive political issues, such as the HIV-contaminated blood scandal that took place in France in the 1990, in The Perjured City, or the Awakening of the Furies (1994), trans. Bernadette Fort, in Selected Plays of Hélène Cixous, ed. Eric Prenowitz (London: Routledge, 2004), 89–190. 24 Jacques Derrida, Circumfession, in Jacques Derrida, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 25 Cixous, “Tales of Sexual Difference,” 53–54. 26 Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 885. 27 See, for instance, Adele Parker, “Living Writing: The Poethics of Hélène Cixous,” Postmodern Culture 9, no. 2 (1999). DOI: 10.1353/pmc.1999.0011. Morag Schiach’s title, Hélène Cixous: A Politics of Writing (London and New York: Routledge, 1991) is also significant in this sense. 28 “Lirécrire” appears in several works by Cixous, such as Philippines (2009), trans. Laurent Milesi (New York: Polity, 2011). 29 Cixous, So Close, 67. 30 Joseph Hillis Miller, “Derrida and Literature,” in Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader, ed. Tom Cohen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 69. 31 Ibid. 32 See Tom Cohen’s introduction to Jacques Derrida and the Humanities, 1–23. 33 Jacques Derrida, “The future of the profession or the university without condition (thanks to the ‘Humanities,’ what could take place tomorrow,” in Jacques Derrida and the Humanities, 24–57. 34 Ibid, 27. 35 Ibid, 29. 36 Ibid, 32. 37 Ibid, 51. 38 Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet & Ginette Michaud, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, vol. 1 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 130.

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39 Derrida, “The future of the profession . . . ,” 51. 40 Jacques Derrida, “Eating Well or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in Who Comes after the Subject?, eds. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 116. 41 J. Hillis Miller, “Derrida and Literature,” 73. 42 Judith Butler, introduction to Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), xv. 43 Derrida, “Eating Well or the Calculation of the Subject,” 96. 44 Ibid, 98. 45 Ibid. 46 Derrida, “Choreographies,” Diacritics 12, no. 2 (1982): 66–76. 47 Ibid, 68–69. 48 Derrida, “Eating Well or the Calculation of the Subject,” 99. 49 Ibid, 100. 50 Ibid, 101. 51 Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2007). 52 Derrida, “Eating Well or the Calculation of the Subject,” 99. 53 Ibid, 99–100. 54 Hélène Cixous, Messie (Paris: Des femmes–Antoinette Fouque, 1996). Partial English translation by Beverley Bie Brahic in The Portable Cixous, 165–72 (all the quotations in this paragraph come from p. 172 in this edition). 55 See also Joana Masó, “So Close and Other Essays: On Hélène Cixous’s writing,” philoSOPHIA 2, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 131–44, for an account of an approach to objects in Cixous’s writing that conciliates distance and closeness. 56 See Hélène Cixous, Reading with Clarice Lispector, ed. and trans. Verena Andermatt Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990). 57 Derrida, “Eating Well or the Calculation of the Subject,” 112. 58 Ibid, 114. 59 Ibid, 112–13. 60 Ibid, 113–14. 61 Especially when it was shown in an exhibit that took place in a French Catholic Church and related to Renaissance paintings depicting a Madonna breastfeeding Jesus (Nuit Blanche Mayenne, October 2013: http://www. nuitblanche-mayenne.com/2013/adelabdessemed.html; see also: https://www. christianophobie.fr/breves/mayenne-labomination-dans-la-basilique-notredame). 62 Hélène Cixous, Les Sans Arche (Paris: Gallimard, 2018), 20.

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63 Derrida, “Eating Well or the Calculation of the Subject,” 113. 64 Derrida, “The future of the profession . . .,” 39. 65 Ibid, 52. 66 Ibid, 53. 67 Ibid, 52. 68 Cixous, “Ay yay! The Cry of Literature.” 69 Cixous, Les Sans Arche, 11–12. 70 Derrida, “The future of the profession . . . ,” 52. 71 “Discourses as original as those of Heidegger and Levinas disrupt, of course, a certain traditional humanism. In spite of the differences separating them, they nonetheless remain profound humanisms to the extent that they do not sacrifice sacrifice.” Derrida, “Eating Well or the Calculation of the Subject,” 113; emphasis in the original.

Works cited Berger, Anne-Emmanuelle. “L’invention de l’écriture féminine.” Le Magazine littéraire (April 2016): 83. Cixous, Hélène. Ayaï! Le cri de la littérature. Paris: Galilée, 2013. Cixous, Hélène. “Ay yay! The Cry of Literature.” Translated by Eric Prenowitz. In Ways of Re-Thinking Literature, edited by Tom Bishop and Donatien Grau. New York and London: Routledge, forthcoming. Cixous, Hélène. “Coming to Writing” and Other Essays. Edited by Deborah Jenson. Translated by Sarah Cornell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.. Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs 1, no. 4 (Summer 1976): 875–93. First published in French in L’Arc, no. 61 (1975): 39–54. Cixous, Hélène. La Venue à l’écriture. With Madeleine Gagnon and Annie Leclerc. Paris: U.G.E., 1977. Cixous, Hélène. Les Sans Arche. Paris: Gallimard, 2018. Cixous, Hélène. L’Exil de James Joyce ou l’art du remplacement. Paris: Grasset & Publications de la Faculté des lettres et sciences de Paris-Sorbonne, 1968. Cixous, Hélène. Inside. Translated by Carol Barko. New York: Schocken Books, 1986. Cixous, Hélène. Insister of Jacques Derrida. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. Cixous, Hélène. Messie. Paris: Des femmes–Antoinette Fouque, 1996. Cixous, Hélène. The Perjured City, or the Awakening of the Furies. Translated by Bernadette Fort. In Selected Plays of Hélène Cixous, edited by Eric Prenowitz, 89–190. London: Routledge, (1994) 2004. Cixous, Hélène. Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint. Translated by Beverley Bie Brahic. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.

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Cixous, Hélène. Reading with Clarice Lispector. Edited and translated by Verena Andermatt Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. Cixous, Hélène. So Close. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity, (2007) 2009. Cixous, Hélène. “Tales of Sexual Difference.” Translated by Eric Prenowitz. In The Portable Cixous, edited by Marta Segarra, 48–60. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Cixous, Hélène. Veils. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. Cixous, Hélène, and Jacques Derrida. Lengua por venir/Langue à venir. Seminario de Barcelona. Edited by Marta Segarra. Barcelona: Icaria, 2004. Cohen, Ted, ed. Jacques Derrida and the Humanities. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2002. Derrida, Jacques. “Ants.” Translated by Eric Prenowitz. The Oxford Literary Review 24 (2002): 17–42. Derrida, Jacques. The Beast and the Sovereign. Edited by Michel Lisse, MarieLouise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington. Vol. 1. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Derrida, Jacques. Choreographies. Interview with Christie V. McDonald. Diacritics 12, no. 2 (1982): 66–76. Derrida, Jacques. Circumfession. In Jacques Derrida, translated by Geoffrey Bennington, 3–315. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Derrida, Jacques. “Eating Well or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida.” In Who Comes after the Subject?, edited by Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy, 96–119. New York and London: Routledge, 1991. Derrida, Jacques. Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, and Genius: The Secrets of the Archive. Translated by Beverly Bie Brahic. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Derrida, Jacques. H.C. for Life, That Is to Say... Translated by Laurent Milesi & Stefan Herbrechter. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. Derrida, Jacques. Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles/Éperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche. Translated by Barbara Harlow. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1979. Hanrahan, Mairéad. Cixous’s Semi-Fictions: Thinking at the Borders of Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2007. Kamuf, Peggy. “To Give Place: Semi-Approaches to Hélène Cixous.” Yale French Studies no. 87 (1995): 68–89. Masó, Joana. “So Close and Other Essays: On Hélène Cixous’s writing.” philoSOPHIA 2, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 131–44. Michaud, Ginette. Battements du secret littéraire: Lire Jacques Derrida et Hélène Cixous, Vol. 1. Paris: Hermann, 2010. Michaud, Ginette. “Comme en rêve”: Lire Jacques Derrida et Hélène Cixous, Vol. 2. Paris: Hermann, 2010.

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Miller, Joseph Hillis. “Derrida and Literature.” In Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader, edited by Tom Cohen, 58–81. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Parker, Adele. “Living Writing: The Poethics of Hélène Cixous.” Postmodern Culture 9, no. 2 (1999). DOI : 10.1353/pmc.1999.0011. Schiach, Morag. Hélène Cixous: A Politics of Writing. London and New York: Routledge, 1991.

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14 Reading between the lines: Derrida, Blanchot, Beckett Leslie Hill

In the course of a lengthy writing life, Derrida not only addressed many, if not most of the principal works in the history of Western philosophy, but also found time, as this volume shows, to write extensively in response to a far less predictable set of modern or not so modern literary texts: those of Rousseau and Mallarmé, Artaud and Bataille, Valéry and Ponge, Jabès and Kafka, Cixous and Sollers, Baudelaire and Poe, Genet and Joyce, Blanchot and Celan, not to mention Leiris, Laporte, or Shakespeare. And there were other, ostensibly more marginal literary figures that Derrida also had occasion to mention, sometimes only in passing, sometimes in more sustained fashion: Defoe and Hugo, or Sartre and Camus, even Beckett and Duras. But what is it, one may ask, that prompts the decision to write, as Derrida once put it, “on,” or “with,” or “towards,” or “in the name of,” or “in honour of,” or “in response to,” even perhaps “against”1 a given author or text? The reasons are obviously many: an invitation, a demand, a conscious or unconscious desire, or simply a challenge or discursive necessity, not to say some institutional or professional requirement. One always writes, it seems, to repay some debt, and by becoming implicated, as a result, in a vast, potentially boundless economic network of gift and counter-gift, sacrifice and return, acknowledgment and responsibility. But no less indispensable for any decision, Derrida insisted, as its very condition of possibility, as countless sleepless nights confirm, is an encounter with the undecidable, an exposure

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to the singularity of an unprecedented event, leading to an unpredictable gamble, governed not by that which is calculable, but amounting instead to what he would often call, paradoxically but ineluctably, an ordeal: an experience, in other words, of the impossible. This is also to say, as Derrida frequently emphasized too, that reading, writing, if and when they occur at all, always belong to the future. Neither reading nor writing presupposes established values that have to be honored, unbreakable rules that must be obeyed, abiding norms that ask to be enforced—which is of course why, faced with such persistent disobedience, moral crusaders, political censors, even academic curricula do everything they can to limit the corrosive consequences. “The essence of literature,” Blanchot once wrote, “is precisely to escape any essential determination, any assertion that stabilises it or even turns it into reality: it is never already there, it always has to be rediscovered or reinvented.”’2 “Literature in its limitlessness,” Derrida later agreed, “cancels itself out”; there is accordingly, he added, “no essence of literature, no truth of literature, no being-literary of literature.”3 This does not mean that literary texts, just like other bodies of texts, do not exhibit general or localized conventions or codes, protocols or presumptions, or that they are somehow not embedded in social, political, cultural, economic, juridical, or discursive practices of all kinds; on the contrary, it means that the possibility of literature, being coextensive with the whole of language, including everything which is no longer or not yet language, or even finds itself excluded, like a mute trace, from language entirely, can always lend itself to being transformed within this or that historical context—while yet remaining, for that very reason, irreducible without remainder to any single context, genre, manner, or epoch. Whence Derrida’s principled reluctance to subscribe to such inevitably teleological, periodizing concepts as modernity or postmodernity, modernism or postmodernism. Literature, then, is transhistorical or it is not. This is not the same as saying it is unhistorical or anhistorical. In fact, quite the opposite. The example of Shakespeare, Derrida told Attridge, is instructive. “What better demonstration is there,” he argued, that texts fully conditioned by their history, loaded with history, and with historical themes, are so easily available to be reread in historical contexts quite remote from their original time and place, not only in the twentieth century throughout Europe, but also by being restaged or transposed to Japan or China?4 This is only one of the paradoxical features Derrida has in mind when he describes literature, in the same discussion, as “the strangest of institutions.” “The space of literature,” he observes, “is not only that of an instituted fiction but also a fictive institution which in principle allows one to say

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all [tout dire]. To say all is of course, while translating them, to gather up together all possible figures and, by giving them form, totalise them. To say all is also, however, to overstep limits.” In citing or paraphrasing Sade’s famous maxim (that “philosophy should say all”), Derrida recognized that, in reality, for numerous contingent factors, limits were always set on what this “all” might involve. The principle, however, remained: “It means putting oneself beyond the law—in every field where the law can lay down the law. The law of literature tends, in principle, to defy or suspend the law. It therefore allows one to think the essence of the law in the experience of ‘saying all.’ It is an institution which tends to overwhelm the institution.”5 If, then, the norms displayed in literary texts are ironically contingent rather than essential, it follows that literature is forcibly bereft of all prescriptive examples. To the extent that texts are examples, in other words, like, say, the plays of Shakespeare, they are merely singular examples simply of themselves. Any stable hierarchy is unsustainable, except on grounds of personal, rhetorical, or ideological preference. There is, in a nutshell, no Derridean top ten. This is not at all to say that the whole of literature should be seen as bathed in indifference, or that all texts are somehow the same. It is plain enough that, for Derrida, as for most readers, there are some texts which are stronger, more affirmative, more challenging, or more probing, or technically more accomplished than others. Jeffrey Archer, for instance, is not Mallarmé. But it also follows that there is no essential difference, but rather—perhaps no less importantly—a strategic or contextual one, rooted in desire or circumstance, calculation or chance, between, say, the texts of Beckett, to which Derrida, apart from various early, hitherto undocumented seminars with students, seems to have devoted no more than a few improvised remarks in response to direct questioning by Derek Attridge,6 or those of Blanchot, to which Derrida devoted at least two books, Parages and Demeure, together with many other passages in other texts, and to whom in 1976 he paid the fulsome compliment of “never having imagined him so far ahead of us, waiting for us, still to come, still to be read and reread by the very people who have being doing so ever since they first learned to read and thanks to him.”7 It is admittedly sometimes argued that Derrida’s apparent reticence with regard to Beckett is revealing of a kind of deep-seated discomfort, as though there was something in Beckett uniquely resistant to deconstruction, not least the capacity of the writer’s own works to deconstruct themselves, as witnessed for instance by his famous description in conversation with Israel Shenker in 1956 of the difficult straits in which his writing had left him: “No ‘I,’ no ‘have,’ no ‘being.’ No nominative, no accusative, no verb.” Conversely, it is at times suggested by critics that the reason Derrida returned so regularly to Blanchot was because the latter’s work proved more accommodating than others to a deconstructive style of reading. But in reality, if one takes Derrida at his word, the situation is almost exactly the reverse.

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In his 1986 preface to Parages, which brought together for the first time a sequence of papers written during the preceding decade, Derrida acknowledged a long-standing familiarity with Blanchot’s critical writings. But what had mobilized his interest in writing “on” Blanchot above all else, he went on, was an encounter with the latter’s still somewhat neglected novels and narratives, not least such works as Thomas l’Obscur (Thomas the Obscure), L’Arrêt de mort (Death Sentence) or La Folie du jour (The Madness of the Day). “The fictions,” Derrida pointed out, “remained inaccessible to me, as if they were enveloped in a thick mist, with only fascinating reflections ever managing to reach me, and, only on occasion, at irregular intervals, the light of a beacon invisible from the coast.” “I will not say that from now on,” he hastened to add, “these fictions have fully emerged from their discretion, on the contrary. But in their dissimulation itself, in the distance of the inaccessible as such, because, in giving it names, they open onto it, they introduced themselves to me once more.”8 If what counted most, for Derrida, then, was this unmeasurable distance from the depths of which Blanchot’s fictions presented themselves, the same was not the case with Beckett. Beckett, Derrida told Attridge, “is an author to whom I feel or would like to feel very close, but also too close.” “Precisely because of this proximity,” he added, “it is too hard for me, too easy and too hard.” Artaud, Derrida went on, “being paradoxically more distant, more foreign to me than Beckett,” nevertheless—or, more accurately, precisely for that reason—“made various writing transactions possible for me,” whereas this was not the case with Beckett “whom I will have ‘avoided,’” Derrida conceded, “as if I had always already read him and understood him too well.”9 There was admittedly nothing dogmatic or definitive about this difference in treatment. However much aspects of Beckett’s writing might seem overly familiar, even to some degree “metaphysical” or “nihilistic,” as Derrida put it, this was not everything. Reading—as event, intervention, response — still belonged to the future, and Derrida’s decision not to write on Beckett “for the moment” was accordingly only provisional. No doubt, it also had something to do with critical reception of the two writers in the 1970s. For if by that point, Beckett’s plays or narrative prose might be thought to have been largely assimilated—for good or for ill—by mainstream literary culture, in particular following the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, the same was far from being the case with Blanchot’s own fictional writing, which Derrida thought indispensable to reclaim for current debate. Even more relevant, perhaps, was Derrida’s dogged refusal, for essential reasons, to identify deconstruction with anything resembling a formulaic “method” that might be applied, in uniform or mechanical fashion, to any given canonical text, with the implicit purpose, as in the case of so many other recent phenomenological or hermeneutic or psychoanalytic

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or semiotic or structuralist or poststructuralist or historicist or geneticist approaches to reading, of aiming to tell the truth about a work of literature and establishing on that basis its definitive meaning, significance, or value. Deconstruction for Derrida had very different concerns, which is why it is properly neither a theory of literature nor a literary critical method— not least because of the irretrievably normative assumptions that all such “theories” or “methods” bring with them. Far more important for Derrida was the urgent need, in response to the writings of Blanchot, Beckett, and a multitude of others, to think the conditions of possibility or impossibility of literature, its institutional economy and the event or encounter from which it is inseparable. In this regard, the only lessons or conclusions to be drawn from Derrida’s different treatment of the works of Blanchot and Beckett regarding those texts themselves are trivial ones. Derrida’s decision to write on the one and not, for the time being, on the other merely serves to underline the fact that, like decisions, all readings of a singular text are themselves singular, and, as such, are a function of the unprogrammed relationship of proximity or distance adopted in and by each such reading. The fact is, Derrida puts it apropos of Kafka, as Beckett or Blanchot could likewise have been called upon to testify, the only object of reading—not an object at all, just like the law itself, with which it shares “a condition of possibility,” suggests Derrida—is forcibly inaccessible. To read, in other words, is to be confronted with the unread or unreadable. “Reading a text,” Derrida notes in the margins of Kafka’s “Before the Law,” “may indeed reveal that it is untouchable, properly intangible, precisely because it is readable, and as a result unreadable in so far as the presence within it of a perceptible, graspable meaning remains as unavailable as its origin. Unreadability, then, is no longer in opposition to readability.”10 Literature, then, he added elsewhere, is forever traversed by an abiding secret without a secret, for which no interpretative keys exist, impossible to penetrate, impossible to avoid, legible only in so far as it is illegible, and defiant and demanding, in equal measure, of interpretation or translation.11 In no case, then, whether the text in question is signed Blanchot or Beckett, can any reading wholly grasp or take possession of the text that is its elusive or inaccessible target. There is always an obstinately inassimilable remainder beyond the power of any dialectic, any protocol of reading, however resourceful or ingenious. Derrida’s emphasis on the singularity of the work of literature and the singularity of its multiple readings does not however imply solipsism. To affirm singularity is not to retreat into silent, beatific contemplation. Every text, in so far as it is constituted in and by a differential network of written or spoken traces, is always iterable, that is to say, according to Derrida, necessarily repeatable and, in so far as it is repeatable, always differs from itself, and it is this, not the alleged autonomy or self-coincidence of the

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artwork which so much modern criticism or theory has assumed to be selfevident, that is responsible for the singularity of a text. As Derrida explains in Glas and elsewhere, the underlying logic is the same as that which governs signatures. Any signature, whether handwritten or mechanical, analogue or digital, can testify to the unique presence, authority, or responsibility of its author only because it can continue to be what it is in the absence of the author (who, as in the case of a will or last testament, may in fact have died in the interim), and only because it can survive every past context in which it appears in order to reappear in the future elsewhere. It can be what it is, then, only by dint of the necessary possibility of its iterability or repetition. And with iterability (the word, says Derrida, combines repetition with otherness) comes the necessary possibility of dispossession, falsification, theft, or fraud. This is why, in order to function properly at all, any signature must always run the risk of being misinterpreted or interpreted otherwise than how it may originally have been intended. The paradox, Derrida insists, is rigorously inescapable, and it is one that also applies to all literary texts, which are similarly governed by the logic of ex-appropriation, that is to say, by the necessary circumstance that a text can be the embodiment of a uniquely irreplaceable experience only in so far as that experience is no longer owned or controlled by the so-called subject of experience, but has always already been forfeited as belonging to another or others, be it of course that subject itself. The singularity of a text does not therefore mean it is an island, entire of itself, but that it is always already in relation with a potential infinity of other texts, other writings, other inscriptions. Derrida emphasizes this in various ways in a number of essays. Reading Mallarmé in 1969, for instance, he was especially attentive to the way Mallarmé’s prose text “Mimique” staged an implicit reading of Plato’s Philebus, and vice versa.12 In reading Hegel in 1974, he was likewise particularly interested in the way Hegel’s text was already a reading of the works of Jean Genet, and, again, vice versa.13 In a famously teasing footnote to a discussion of Plato’s Phaedrus in 1968, he similarly not only suggested how Plato’s writing implicated that of Georges Bataille, but also pointed out, “as readers will have quickly realised,” how his own essay on Plato “was itself nothing other than a reading of Finnegans Wake,” a work that is otherwise nowhere mentioned in Derrida’s presentation.14 And in 1977, when invited to contribute to a collection of essays on Shelley’s unfinished poem “The Triumph of Life,” a volume that would subsequently accredit the existence of the so-called Yale School of Criticism, he responded with an essay on Blanchot’s L’Arrêt de mort—a narrative similarly devoted to an affirmative triumph—not least as a way of prolonging the following question, raised in and by his reading of Blanchot’s story: “How can one text,” Derrida asked, “assuming it to be unified, give or present another to be read, without touching it, without saying anything

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about it, practically without even referring to it? How can two ‘triumphs’ read one another, both the one and the other, without even knowing each other, at a distance?”15 If, then, there is perhaps some kind of telepathic resonance between Shelley’s poem and Blanchot’s story, not only disrupting the traditional separation between one text and another, even in this case between one genre and another, or one language and another, might not the same be said of the relationship between the writings of Blanchot on the one hand and those of Beckett on the other? After all, it was easy enough to surmise that Beckett by the late 1940s had read various texts by Blanchot, such that, when, in December 1949, he delivered himself of his famous pronouncement, apropos of Tal Coat (Pierre Jacob), that what now remained for the artist was “the expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express,”16 he plausibly had in mind—or was simply emboldened by—a sentence published by Blanchot six years earlier in Faux Pas, a book Beckett by that time had most likely read, which similarly had it that “the writer finds himself in the increasingly ludicrous condition of having nothing to write, no means with which to write it, and being constrained by extreme necessity always to write it.”17 In May 1951, learning of Blanchot’s unwavering efforts to have Molloy awarded the Prix des Critiques for that year, Beckett’s partner, Suzanne Dumesnil, wrote to Jérôme Lindon, Beckett’s publisher, expressing the writer’s thanks: “Whatever the outcome,” she wrote, “the main thing will have been having the support of someone like Blanchot.”18 Later still, according to Blanchot’s 1990 obituary piece in Critique, it seems Beckett, in some way, “was willing to recognise himself” in Blanchot’s 1962 narrative-cum-meditation, L’Attente L’Oubli (Awaiting Oblivion),19 conscious as he did so no doubt that he was repaying a debt to his slightly younger contemporary (only seventeen months separated their birth) for the two important and influential articles on L’Innommable and Comment c’est published by Blanchot in 1953 and 1961, respectively.20 All this and more would have been known to Derrida when he began addressing Blanchot’s work in the 1970s, which he did in the first instance by paying close attention to Blanchot’s two short narratives, L’Arrêt de mort (published May 1948) and La Folie du jour (which appeared twelve months later), which it is not impossible Beckett may have read at the time, and which were almost exactly contemporary with the work on Malone meurt (completed May 1948) and on L’Innommable (written between March 1949 and January 1950). At any event, as Derrida was well aware, the writings of Beckett and Blanchot shared, if not a historical condition, at least an abiding, if forcibly unanswerable question. Blanchot had said as much in 1947. “Let us accept,” he wrote at the time, “that literature begins at the moment when literature becomes a question.” But it was not a matter, Blanchot

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hastened to add, of any writerly self-doubt. It was rather that “once the page is written, the question that kept posing itself to the writer while writing it, perhaps even without realising it, is now present on the page; and now, at the heart of the work, awaiting the approach of a reader—of any reader, superficial or profound—there lies the same question, addressed to language, behind whoever is writing and reading, by language now become literature.”21 Reading these lines, as he may have done at the time, or even if he encountered them only later, Beckett would no doubt have been reminded of his own words, from almost a decade earlier, when he too had been prompted to define art or literature as “pure interrogation, rhetorical question without the rhetoric.”22 And Derrida too, in the interview with Attridge, made a similar, if more expansively argued point. “The event of literature,” he explained, is perhaps more of an event (because less natural) than any other, but by that token it becomes most “improbable,” and hard to vouch for it. No internal criterion can guarantee the essential “literariness” of a text. There is no essence nor any secure existence of literature. If you go about analysing all the elements in a literary work, you will never encounter literature itself, only various characteristics that it shares or borrows from elsewhere, and which you find in other texts, including language, meanings, or referents (whether “subjective” or “objective” ones). And even the convention which allows a given community to agree upon the literary status of this or that phenomenon is itself precarious, unstable, and always subject to revision.23 This threefold formulation of literature’s founding question or, better, of the question of the very possibility of literature’s foundation is arguably crucial. What it suggests is that, if there is indeed, between the writings of Beckett and Blanchot, in their dissymmetry and difference, a mute dialogue or infinite conversation, a holding apart, so to speak, that is also a holding together, then, it is perhaps Derrida who has so far most convincingly addressed its significance, not of course by authoring a comparative critical analysis of the pair’s work, but rather by seeking to elucidate instead, as Blanchot put it in 1952, in words made famous by Mallarmé, and with a challenging nod to Heidegger, what it is, in the end, that “is at stake for being, if one says that ‘something like Literature exists’?”24 If literature is a question without an answer, as Derrida, Beckett, and Blanchot seem to agree, it is not surprising, then, that in each case their experience or thinking of literature should begin with the question of the proper name, of that which, traditionally and, in juridical terms, still today, is routinely given the task of providing literature with its specificity, authority, and justification. But to assume that literature is primarily, or even at all, in the full sense of the word, a form of subjective expression is to fail to take

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account of Derridean iterability, from the perspective of which, as we have seen, as in the case of my very own signature, the name I may take to be my own, by dint of the necessary possibility of repetition, belongs precisely not to me, but to other or others than me, and, in the first instance, to those others who, for whatever reason, reaching back in time, gave it me in the first place. “What’s in a name?” Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus famously asked in Ulysses. “That is what we ask ourselves in childhood,” he replied, “when we write the name that we are told is ours,”25 a question that Samuel Barclay Beckett, Maurice Léon Alexandre Blanchot, and Jackie (Élie) Derrida would each waste no time in repeating in their turn. As all readers of Beckett know, it is this question of the name that, from the outset, is persistently asked or eluded by all the author’s diverse narrators, most emblematically perhaps by the unnamed speaker or writer in the first part of Molloy, which begins with the first-person narrator living and sleeping “in [his] mother’s room,” and ends with him abruptly concluding, in the third person, that “Molloy,” whoever that is, “could stay, where he happened to be.”26 It is sometimes assumed, and often was by early critics of Beckett’s novel trilogy, that at the end of the three books, a properly proper name or, at the very least, a true, authentic, embodied or, more often, disembodied self might somehow emerge or announce its arrival. But this, as Derrida demonstrates, and as Beckett’s writing is itself in the end only too aware, is a fantasy, albeit one that is no less alluring or powerful for being so. For even as Beckett sought to imprint onto his French-language texts his own personal signature by emphasizing their Irish landscapes and onomastics, by advertising to excess his own uncouth and tasteless repudiation of received literary norms, even in rehearsing time and again the oral motions enacted in articulating his own family and given name, he could but concede in the end, in the words of L’Innommable— with which Blanchot would in time conclude his 1953 review—that “the words are everywhere, inside me, outside me, well well, a minute ago I had no thickness, I hear them, no need to hear them, no need of a head, impossible to stop them, impossible to stop, I’m in words, made of words, others’ words, what others, the place too, the air, the walls, the floor, the ceiling, all words.”27 It is precisely here, as Derrida would no doubt later recall, that Blanchot makes a crucial intervention, which was to reject the phenomenologically inspired, existentialist humanism adopted by so many early (and not so early) commentators on Beckett. Writing, for Blanchot, as his own narratives show, was in no sense conceived as a quest for subjective selfcoincidence.28 It was an experience of the impersonal and the anonymous, radically irreducible to the inwardness of any self-present consciousness. L'Innommable, he wrote, was “experience pursued under the threat of the impersonal, an approach to a neuter speaking [parole neutre] that speaks to itself alone, traverses whoever is listening, is without intimacy, excludes

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all intimacy, and cannot be silenced because it is that which is unceasing, interminable.”29 Impersonality, here, has nothing to do with abstract objectivity. Not unlike Derridean “différance,” it much rather implies the proliferating motion of difference, difference irreducible to being and nonbeing alike and in excess of all positionality. What it thereby serves to address in Blanchot is the radical otherness of language, that is, that exappropriative logic following which, as Derrida famously put it, “I have only one language, and it is not mine.”30 Any language system, even as it provides a speaker with some temporary residence, necessarily denies the speaker any permanent place in that language. Moreover, any single, given language, having as its condition of possibility its difference from other languages, necessarily implies the concomitant existence of other languages from which it is forcibly distinct, but which are always likely to transgress its boundaries. All bilingual or multilingual speakers know this. But there are many different forms of bi- or multilingualism. Beckett’s parallel writing in French and in English, and selftranslation from the one to the other, is one such case. But equally revealing, suggests Blanchot, is that bilingualism within a supposedly single language practiced by Mallarmé, by which the poet subtracts, so to speak, from one state of language a second, radically different idiom, proof, he suggests, that “any writer is underway towards a language that is never already given: speaking, waiting to speak. In completing that journey, the writer draws ever closer to the language that history intends, a proximity that can but challenge, sometimes gravely, all belonging to any native tongue.”31 Crucial here for Blanchot, as for Derrida and Beckett too, is the realization that no language is ever properly identical with itself. All writing simultaneously requires yet resists its translation into another, which is also to say that, from the outset, it is always inhabited, in uncanny fashion, by an inassimilable otherness, and always subject to interference or alteration by that which it excludes. In this way, French readers of a novel called Molloy can never be sure the book’s title is a French word or not, and, if so, how it should even be pronounced. And English-language readers of Beckett may at first be satisfied that the words “Where now? Who now? When now? Unquestioning. I, say I. Unbelieving” are an acceptably accurate rendering of the opening lines of L’Innommable (“Où maintenant? Quand maintenant? Qui maintenant? Sans me le demander. Dire je. Sans le penser”)—were it not that shifts in idiom, in sentence structure, even in word order, already testify to the way in which one version, supplementing its fellow in ghostly fashion, is simultaneously inseparable from it while being irreducible to it. This simultaneous possibility and impossibility of translation is itself only one instance, of course, of a more general phenomenon that Blanchot had begun addressing, as early as 1943, under the rubric of “linguistic aporias.” He would later use the same expression in reading Kafka’s

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Diaries. “Such aporias in language are rarely taken seriously,” he noted in the introduction to Faux Pas, before then going on to demonstrate their crucial importance. His first example, prompted by Arthur Rimbaud or Paul Valéry, was in the form of a simple phrase: the writer who writes “I am alone” but thereby forgets that whoever says that he or she is alone, by that very token, cannot be, and is not, alone. To be truly alone is to be without any recourse to language. To claim in words that one is alone is therefore to fall victim to what Molloy, in similar vein, describes as “the convention that demands you either lie or hold your peace.”32 This was not to say, as readers sometimes conclude, that silence is more truthful than its absence, but much rather, as Blanchot has it in L’Attente L’Oubli, that “the event” to which literature refers “consist[s] in the way in which it [is] neither true nor false.”33 Such undecidable aporias are of course many, not only in Blanchot, but also in Beckett, and it was no doubt these Derrida had in mind when he explained to Attridge how in discussion with students he would “take three lines” from Beckett, and “spend two hours on them,” before “giving up,” “because,” he said, “it would not have been possible, or honest, or even interesting, to extract from a Beckett text a few ‘meaningful’ lines.”34 It is often assumed, wrongly, that the interest in textual aporetics shared by Derrida, Blanchot, and Beckett is evidence of a dispiritingly negative conception of literature. Not so: much more important for all three was the unmasterable weakness of the negative, the fact that all negativity is always preceded and exceeded by an affirmation manifesting itself as the impossible: as that which, for Derrida, announces the future, which, for Blanchot, is inseparable from an impossibility of dying, and, for Beckett, from an impossibility of being born. What spoke in “literature,” then, for all three, is nothing negative, but an affirmative, singular, futural demand. This was Derrida’s signature, which he duly bequeathed to readers of Blanchot and Beckett alike.

Notes 1 Jacques Derrida, “This Strange Institution Called Literature,” interview with Derek Attridge, in Derrida d’ici, Derrida de là, ed. Thomas Dutoit and Philippe Romanski (Paris: Galilée, 2009), 260–61; Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), 41. 2 Maurice Blanchot, Le Livre à venir (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 244; The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 201; translation modified. On this motif of literature’s “disappearance,” see my “The Disappearance of Literature: Blanchot, Surrealism, Futurity,” Nottingham French Studies 50, no. 3 (Autumn 2011): 117–27.

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3 Jacques Derrida, La Dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 252–53; Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 223; translation modified. 4 Derrida, Derrida d’ici, Derrida de là, 282; Acts of Literature, 63; translation modified. 5 Derrida, Derrida d’ici, Derrida de là, 256; Acts of Literature, 36; translation modified. 6 See Derrida, Derrida d’ici, Derrida de là, 278-280; Acts of Literature, 60–61. 7 Jacques Derrida, Parages (Paris: Galilée, 2003), 51; Parages, ed. John P. Leavey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 43; translation modified. 8 Derrida, Parages, 11, Parages, 3; translation modified. 9 Derrida, Derrida d’ici, Derrida de là, 279; Acts of Literature, 60–61; translation modified. 10 Jacques Derrida, “Préjugés: Devant la loi,” in La Faculté de juger (Paris: Minuit, 1985), 109, 115; Acts of Literature, 191, 197; translation modified. 11 See Jacques Derrida, Donner la mort (Paris: Galilée, 1999), 161–209; The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret, trans. David Wills (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2008), 121–58. 12 See Derrida, La Dissémination, 201; Dissemination, 175. 13 See Jacques Derrida, Glas (Paris: Galilée, 1974); Glas, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. and Richand Rand (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1986). 14 Derrida, La Dissémination, 99n17; Dissemination, 88n20; translation modified. 15 Derrida, Parages, 116; Parages, 107–08; translation modified. 16 Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (London: Calder and Boyars, 1965), 103. 17 Maurice Blanchot, Faux Pas (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), 11; Faux Pas, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 3; translation modified. In a letter to Duthuit dated January 3, 1951, Beckett mentions reading the introduction to Faux Pas, which he was considering translating into English. See The Letters of Samuel Beckett Volume II: 19411956, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 215–17, 18 The Letters of Samuel Beckett Volume II: 1941-1956, 253–54; translation modified. 19 See Maurice Blanchot, La Condition critique: articles 1945-1998, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 457–59; The Blanchot Reader, ed. Michael Holland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 298–300. 20 On L’Innommable, see Blanchot, Le Livre à venir, 256–64; The Book to Come, 210–17. In a letter to Peter Suhrkamp, dated January 9, 1954, reproduced

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in The Letters of Samuel Beckett Volume II: 1941-1956, 441–43, Beckett described Blanchot’s 1953 review as “the most important thing of all [la chose capitale].” On Comment c’est, see Blanchot, L’Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 478–86; The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 326–31. 21 Maurice Blanchot, La Part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), 293; The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 300–01; translation modified. 22 Samuel Beckett, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Drama Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (London: John Calder, 1983), 91. 23 Derrida, Derrida d’ici, Derrida de là, 290–91; Acts of Literature, 73; translation modified. 24 Maurice Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), 35; The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 43; translation modified. Compare Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, ed. Bertrand Marchal, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1998–2003), vol. II, 65. 25 James Joyce, Ulysses, edited by Declan Kiberd (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), 269. 26 Samuel Beckett, Molloy (Paris: Minuit, 1951), 7, 141; Molloy, Malone Dies, the Unnamable (London: Calder and Boyars, 1959), 7, 91. 27 Samuel Beckett, L’Innommable (Paris: Minuit, 1953), 203–04; Molloy, Malone Dies, the Unnamable, 390. Blanchot cites the passage at greater length in Le Livre à venir, 263; The Book to Come, 216–17. On naming and the body in Beckett, see my Beckett’s Fiction: In Different Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1990] 2009), 100–120, and Radical Indecision: Barthes, Blanchot, Derrida, and the Future of Criticism (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2010), 2–26. 28 I examine Blanchot’s reading of Beckett in more detail in “Poststructuralist Readings of Beckett,” Palgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett Studies, ed. Lois Oppenheim (New York: Palgrave, 2004), 68–88. 29 Blanchot, Le Livre à venir, 259; The Book to Come, 213; translation modified. 30 Jacques Derrida, Le Monolinguisme de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1996), 13; Monolingualism of the Other, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 1. 31 Maurice Blanchot, L’Amitié (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 171; Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 148; translation modified. 32 Beckett, Molloy, 135; Molloy, Malone Dies, the Unnamable, 87–88. 33 Maurice Blanchot, L’Attente L’Oubli (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), 13; Awaiting Oblivion, trans. John Gregg (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1997) 4; translation modified. 34 See Derrida d’ici, Derrida de là, 279; Acts of Literature, 62; translation modified.

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Works cited Beckett, Samuel. Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Drama Fragment. Edited by Ruby Cohn. London: John Calder, 1983. Beckett, Samuel. The Letters of Samuel Beckett Volume II: 1941-1956. Edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Beckett, Samuel. L’Innommable. Paris: Minuit, 1953. Beckett, Samuel. Molloy. Paris: Minuit, 1951. Beckett, Samuel. Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. London: Calder and Boyars, 1959. Beckett, Samuel. Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit. London: Calder and Boyars, 1965. Blanchot, Maurice. Awaiting Oblivion. Translated by John Gregg. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. Blanchot, Maurice. The Blanchot Reader. Edited by Michael Holland. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. Blanchot, Maurice. The Book to Come. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Blanchot, Maurice. Faux Pas. Paris: Gallimard, 1943. Blanchot, Maurice. Faux Pas. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. Blanchot, Maurice. Friendship. Translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. Blanchot, Maurice. The Infinite Conversation. Translated by Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Blanchot, Maurice. La Condition Critique: Articles 1945-1998. Edited by Christophe Bident. Paris: Gallimard, 2010. Blanchot, Maurice. La Part du feu. Paris: Gallimard, 1949. Blanchot, Maurice. L’Amitié. Paris: Gallimard, 1971. Blanchot, Maurice. L’Attente L’Oubli. Paris: Gallimard, 1962. Blanchot, Maurice. Le Livre à venir. Paris: Gallimard, 1959. Blanchot, Maurice. L’Entretien infini. Paris: Gallimard, 1969. Blanchot, Maurice. L’Espace littéraire. Paris: Gallimard, 1955. Blanchot, Maurice. The Space of Literature. Translated by Ann Smock. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. Blanchot, Maurice. The Work of Fire. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995. Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Literature. Edited by Derek Attridge. London: Routledge, 1992. Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Derrida, Jacques. Donner la mort. Paris: Galilée, 1999. Derrida, Jacques. The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret. Translated by David Wills. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2008. Derrida, Jacques. Glas. Paris: Galilée, 1974.

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Derrida, Jacques. Glas. Translated by John P. Leavey, Jr. and Richand Rand. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. Derrida, Jacques. La Dissémination. Paris: Seuil, 1972. Derrida, Jacques. Le Monolinguisme de l’autre. Paris: Galilée, 1996. Derrida, Jacques. Monolingualism of the Other. Translated by Patrick Mensah. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Derrida, Jacques. Parages. Paris: Galilée, 2003. Derrida, Jacques. Parages. Edited by John P. Leavey. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. Derrida, Jacques., Vincent Descombes, Garbis Kortian, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jean-Luc Nancy. “Préjugés: Devant la loi.” In La Faculté de juger, 87–139. Paris: Minuit, 1985. Derrida, Jacques. “This Strange Institution Called Literature.” Interview with Derek Attridge, In Derrida d’ici, Derrida de là, edited by Thomas Dutoit and Philippe Romanski, 253–92. Paris: Galilée, 2009. Hill, Leslie. Beckett’s Fiction: In Different Words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1990) 2009. Hill, Leslie. “The Disappearance of Literature: Blanchot, Surrealism, Futurity.” Nottingham French Studies 50, no. 3 (Autumn 2011): 117–27. Hill, Leslie. “Poststructuralist Readings of Beckett.” In Palgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett Studies, edited by Lois Oppenheim, 68–88. New York: Palgrave, 2004. Hill, Leslie. Radical Indecision: Barthes, Blanchot, Derrida, and the Future of Criticism. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2010. Joyce, James. Ulysses. Edited by Declan Kiberd. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992. Mallarmé, Stéphane. Œuvres complètes. Edited by Bertrand Marchal. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1998–2003.

PART FOUR

Glossary Jean-Michel Rabaté

15 Aporia

The term of aporia sends us back to Plato, who used it in several contexts. Etymologically, the word is made up of a-, the privative prefix, and poros, which means “way,” hence the general sense of being “without a way,” or having no passage, no exit, no way out in a discussion. Plato used poros alone to mean “expediency” in Diotima’s myth that he created about the genealogy of love in the Symposium. One calls “aporetic” those Platonician dialogues in which no consensus can be established or no conclusion found. In the philosophical tradition, an aporia alludes to an insurmountable difficulty, a theoretical impasse, or the state of puzzlement generated by a paradox that gives the sense that one cannot proceed further. As Derrida notes in Aporias, “For many years now, the old, worn-out Greek term “aporia,” this tired word of philosophy and of logic, has often imposed itself upon me, and recently it has done so even more often. Thus, I speak here in memory of this word, as of someone with whom I would have lived a long time.”1 He explains that he will have to use the word in the plural, for he has applied it often, to different contexts and authors he reads. Among these, chiefly Heidegger, in whose dense texts Derrida looks for words that he sees as loaded and overdetermined. He mentions as an example the question of the “present,” a question which leads to “a certain impossibility as nonviability, as nontrack or barred path” (A, 13). Thus we can see how Derrida goes back to a philosophical tradition, in which each new philosopher inherits other philosophers’ aporias and then tries to solve them. Following their example but differently, Derrida confirms that, for a long time, he has been used to thinking through such impossibilities, hoping to find in this experience of thinking through impassable difficulties his own way out; for indeed, as he notes, the word “experience” also means “passage, traversal, endurance, and rite of passage, but can be a traversal without line and without indivisible border” (A, 14–15). Surveying his previous works, Derrida confesses to having been prey to a certain “aporetology”

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or “aporetography” (A, 14) when he discussed terms like the undecidable, the double bind, paralysis, psychic introjection, iterability, the gift, decision dependent upon political or ethical responsibility, and so on. In all those cases, his strategy was to treat “the conditions of possibility as conditions of impossibility” (A, 15), in a neat reversal of Kant’s transcendental method. However, Derrida explains that he prefers the concept of “aporia” to the Kantian concept of “antinomy.” He finds it more reliable than the rhetorical figure of the paradox, for it brings with it a sense of endurance, of passing through the impasse, which should help go beyond mere puzzlement: “I suggested that a sort of nonpassive endurance of the aporia was the condition of responsibility and of decision” (A, 16). This choice has another advantage: it allows one to avoid the easy tricks of a Hegelian dialectical movement always able to play with opposites and assured of winning in the end, which would result in a dead end, and not an aporia. The word “aporia” thus tends to avoid the mirage of dialectical synthesis, poetic closure, or purely ironical twists. Because of the multiplication of levels of meaning, a same aporia can open to different futures. Their very profusion should reinstate passages, steps, or a possible working through. Precisely because there is no more path, the impasse itself seems impossible: “There would not even be any space for the aporia because of a lack of topological condition itself” (A, 21). When the impasse of the aporia becomes the impossible, one can hope to move beyond conditions if one keeps on looking at the unconditional, in a radical opening to the future. This way of thinking via impossibilities has crucial applications for the strategies of an impossible closure in texts of major modernist writers like Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Fernando Pessoa, and Ezra Pound.

16 Autoimmunity

This concept is borrowed from biology and medicine and refers to some diseases occurring when an organism unleashes immune responses that produce antibodies. Instead of fighting against invading antigens, they begin to attack the body’s healthy cells and tissues. The body’s failure to recognize itself thus generates pathological processes. Any disease resulting from such an aberrant behavior can be called an autoimmune disease. Some types of diabetes, lupus, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, Graves’ disease, Addison’s disease, and many others derive from the possibility that one’s defenses will go haywire and wage war against their own organism. It has been reckoned that between 5 percent and 10 percent of any population group is affected by such a disease. Scientists have speculated that this paradoxical behavior might follow an evolutionary logic, for if high levels of autoimmunity are dangerous, low levels can be beneficial. Once in a while, self-defense mechanisms lose the ability to distinguish between self and non-self, viral enemy and friendly input. These burning medical issues echo with Derrida’s earlier problematic of auto-affection, a process that he demonstrated to be paradoxical when he discussed Husserl’s Origin of Geometry. If truth is defined by my ability to hear myself speak truthfully, this reflexive moment presupposes a division that ends up destroying the unity of consciousness that had been postulated. In 1975, Derrida gave a seminar on the topic of Life and Death in which he discussed at length The Logic of Life (1970), a book written by Nobel Prize winner François Jacob. With his research team, Jacob had made important discoveries about DNA encoding, a process described in terms of an organic writing that determines the evolution of our cells, chromosomes, and genes. When in June 1989 Derrida developed a facial paralysis due to Lyme disease—a disease often considered to be due to autoimmune factors— he went back to these interlocking questions. He wrote eloquently about the traces that this unpleasant condition left on him: it became an “invisible scar” on his body as he puts it in “Circumfession.”2 This incident, happily

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short-lived, renewed the wish to investigate the complex links between viral diseases and autoimmune diseases. Contrarily to what has been said, the fascination for autoimmune diseases does not come from the moment when Derrida learned about his pancreatic cancer in the spring of 2003. In fact, he had always been obsessed by the presence of death in life, and the metaphor provided by an inner disease blurring the boundaries between friendly agent and enemy virus proved irresistible. However, when he knew about the cancer, like Freud before him in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Derrida reconsidered the apparent paradox that a cancer is caused by the refusal of the organism to let certain diseased cells die.3 However, autoimmunity, a term that was invented in 1957 only, refers more pointedly to the way an immune system fails to distinguish between self and non-self. The notion of autoimmunity was developed by Martin Hägglund’s Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (2008). In his book, Hägglund rethinks the entire philosophy of Jacques Derrida in order to posit a theory of radical atheism based on the concept of survival. Derrida would disavow both religion and traditional atheism by refuting the desire for immortality, the existence of the divine, and so on. Very cogently, Hägglund had put an end to the spreading myth that Derrida was turning to religion, as well as challenging the then prevalent view of Derridean thought being grounded in a non-violent conception of ethics, a turn that some saw looming in the essays gathered in Acts of Religion. Connecting Derrida’s earlier concept of différance with his later theory of autoimmunity, Hägglund’s Radical Atheism was able to give a single and unified perspective on Derrida’s works. Indeed, in Rogues, in a systematic parallel between human bodies and political bodies, Derrida pointed out that democracy was afflicted by “autoimmunity,”4 which alluded to the way fascism or totalitarianism could come to power by distorting the very democratic institutions it inhabited. Deploying the concept of survival opposed to the idea of eternal life, Hägglund shows that Derrida’s thought remained true to Heidegger in the sense that it consistently deployed a philosophy of radical finitude. Hägglund then engaged with the field of modernist literature in Dying for Time,5 a book that offers original readings of works by Proust, Woolf, and Nabokov, all three envisaged from the point of view of temporality. Once more, Hägglund operates with the concept of “survival.” This vantage point allows him to tackle the question of time in the corpus of these authors. For instance, he dispels the concept of “pure time” in Proust, often viewed as a sign of the alleged Platonism of the author. If a form of timelessness is apparently reached at the end of La Recherche, this may not have been the true goal of the narrator. Hägglund’s book manages to query or deconstruct current clichés about canonical modernists by applying productively his understanding of Derrridian difference and autoimmunity.

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More surprisingly perhaps, the term of autoimmunity was applied by Derrida to the attacks of September 11 in the United States as being “a distant effect of the Cold War.” The hangover from the dispute between opposed blocks would have mutated to create an autoimmunitary process, here defined as “that strange behavior where a living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, ‘itself ’ works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its ‘own’ immunity.”6 Recently, Francesco Vitale has analyzed the theme of “biodeconstruction,” a concept that he takes to be Derrida’s main contribution to philosophy. In Biodeconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences,7 Vitale shows how Derrida was able to link together the domains of biology, politics, and religion. Indeed, Derrida insisted that his philosophy always consisted in a systematic analysis of the co-implication of life and death.

17 Biography/Autobiography/ Autothanatography

Derrida has been often interviewed, two films were made about him, and he appears in many documentaries; therefore one can say that his life has been made visible. For a while he became a public intellectual, while at the same insisting on the idea of the secret, the need to keep some things private, a need that, as we have seen, would be identified with literature. Derrida often shifted to a confessional mode in the middle of a book; we know a lot about his youth, his fights, and his passions. The publication of Benoît Peeters’s biography in 2010 allowed us to reconsider Derrida’s work in light of his high-strung and flamboyant personality. Thanks to Peeters, we discover a different Derrida, who appears driven, excessive, impassioned, ready to take personal or intellectual risks—not exactly what we expect from a world-renowned philosopher who should just be born, publish, and die, as Heidegger famously said of Aristotle. How much should we know about a philosopher’s or writer’s life? This question is posed during the discussion of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in Ulysses, a play interpreted as autobiographical by Stephen Dedalus. Early on, the poet George Russell rejects Stephen’s “prying” into the life of the bard: “I mean when we read the poetry of King Lear what is it to us how the poet lived? As for living our servants can do that for us, Villiers de l’Isle has said.”8 Against this idealist position, Derrida would side with Stephen; he even go further: when Amy Ziering Kofman, in her 2002 documentary Derrida, asked him what he would like to know about philosophers, he quipped that he would be eager to learn more about their sex lives! Peeters’s biography presents thus Derrida as a Byronian who worries that his ineradicable narcissism must be kept in check but knows his power of seduction is almost unlimited. However, he also evinces darker, brooding, melancholy traits. Indeed, I can testify to this personally, Derrida would confide that he was obsessed by death, his own and that of his loved ones, and

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that quite often he could only think about death. In moments of depression, as we see in The Post Card for instance,9 he would contemplate suicide. However, he stuck until the end to a grueling schedule of international lectures that only an athlete in the physical and intellectual sense could carry through. To explain the difficulties created by this effort at biographical neutrality, Peeters published a book in which he recounted his arduous progression.10 Explaining how he spent three years “living with” Derrida, he meditates on the inevitable limits of a biographical approach to philosophy. What makes this biography invaluable is the modesty of its author and the thoroughness of his documentation. Peeters quotes or summarizes countless letters, manuscripts, and unpublished seminars. For instance, by having a look at the long letter sent by Derrida in April 1961 to his École Normale Supérieure friend Pierre Nora after Nora had published a book attacking the role of the French colons in Algeria, we get a good sense of Derrida’s political allegiances and ethical position facing the bitter Algerian war. This letter, now included in the revised edition of Nora’s book, is surprising: Derrida sides with Albert Camus, not with Sartre as most intellectual did then; he does not endorse his friend’s Communist position. Derrida seems to be closer to the liberals of the time while entertaining doubts about the nationalism of the Algerian Liberation Front, often tempering Nora’s enthusiasm for it. All the while, he remains uncompromising on issues of ethics and human rights.11 Peeters insists on the “wars” waged by Derrida whose career was marked by violent clashes with former friends, like Michel Foucault, his former mentor at the École Normale Supérieure, Philippe Sollers, and Julia Kristeva, who had published him but abandoned him after he had attacked Lacan in the mid-1970s, or former students who had moved away like Bernard-Henri Lévy, violently pushed away from a meeting in Paris. This leads us to the huge controversy that Derrida called the “de Man wars” in which Derrida was engulfed, a vast quarrel that opposed him to American intellectuals who had been shocked by the posthumous revelation that Paul de Man had authored a few anti-semitic articles in Belgian newspapers during the Second World War. As I said, Derrida did not hesitate to take risks, and for instance he was even jailed in Prague under trumped charges because he had helped a resistance movement in December 1981. He gave courageous testimonies for Nelson Mandela, and fought to prevent the African-American journalist and activist Mumia Abu-Jamal, accused of having murdered a policeman in Philadelphia, to avoid being executed. The death sentence given in 1982 was changed to life imprisonment in 2011. This creates a wish to know more about Derrida’s past, about his secrets, some of which are hidden in his huge archive, in his letters, in his library now housed in the Princeton library. His work has always been mixed up in his private life, his theoretical positions and his ethical or political

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commitments are intermingled. At least several texts look autobiographical, and I will focus on two: the “Envois” section of The Postcard and the “Circumfession” sequence in Geoffrey Bennington’s Jacques Derrida. But before, a strong caveat is necessary; it is given by Derrida himself in his posthumous book, The Animal That Therefore I Am, in an aside about autobiographies: Autobiography, the writing of the self as living, the trace of the living for itself, being for itself, the auto-affection or auto-infection as memory or archive of the living would be an immunizing movement (a movement of safety, of salvage and salvation of the safe, the holy, the immune, the indemnified, of virginal and intact nudity), but an immunizing movement that is always threatened with becoming auto-immunizing, as is every autos, every ipseity, every automatic, automobile, autonomous, autoreferential movement.12 Here, Derrida reintroduces the logic of autoimmunity in the work of autobiographers by pointing out that they never retrieve a pure and unblemished past, even in the works of two important models for him, JeanJacques Rousseau and Augustine, who both wrote their Confessions. As Paul de Man had stated repeatedly, one should never expect total sincerity when an autobiographer writes that the stakes are too high, especially if the issue is salvation, redemption, or simply the judgment of posterity. One can compare Derrida’s series of love letters that constitute the text of “Envois” with a later autobiographical sequence. The main conceit of “Envois” is that these fragments of letters were written to an unnamed lover on postcards bought in Oxford. Why? They represent Plato dictating a text to Socrates, thus transformed into a scribe, a blatant reversal of all we know about the two philosophers. The preface states that these letters are “the remainders of a recently destroyed correspondence.”13 We may wonder whether the addressee is always the same woman, even though she is always called “my love.” In fact, most of the letters seem to discuss philosophical or literary issues: Plato and Socrates, Heidegger and Freud, Joyce and Celan, Kafka and Proust. They document the busy life of an itinerant lecturer who teaches in Oxford, Paris, Yale, New York, Zurich, Antwerp, Cornell, Strasbourg, and so on. He also meditates on the technologies of communication, whether by phone or post, on trains or in airplanes. He even writes to his partner as she is asleep or working in the same room. One recognizes names of friends and places, but the bewildering spiral of messages with their alternation of exhilaration and depression leaves the reader wondering whether this mixture of erotic and theoretical outpouring is not primarily addressed to Derrida himself, as a revealing passage suggests: “You will follow me everywhere. And I will never know if I am suffering in you or in me. This is my suffering” (P, p. 227). One thinks of Kafka writing

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to his bride-to-be, never married Felice, explaining why he is unable to come and see her, despite his protestations of enduring love. A totally different note is sounded in “Circumfession.” There we are treated to an unheard of philosophical strip-tease; as Derrida writes, he must be the only philosopher who “will have dared describe his penis” (JD, 115), at least insofar as we hear everything about the author’s circumcision. We are also privy to glimpses of the mother, naked, demented, in her last weeks, and to countless private issues that strike one with urgency and immediacy. Why is this? The decision to write those fifty-nine fragments (one for each year of his life up to then) reflects a wish to outdo or subvert the work of his younger friend Geoffrey Bennington. Bennington explains Derrida’s philosophy in a very eloquent and systematic manner, providing competent and informed chapters on “The Sign,” “Différance,” “The Proper Name,” “Time and Finitude,” “The Gift,” “Femininity,” “Transcendental Questions,” and so on that are remarkably lucid and clear. However, Derrida feared the risk of closure brought about by such a systematic, even if brilliant, exposition. Then he decided to exceed it in boldness and novelty, which led to this pastiche of a frank “confession” that looks back to Augustine as much as to Rousseau, whose sexual explicitness is often matched. The result is a book divided in two parts, a solid scholarly text above called a systematic “Derrida database” and a sequence of beautiful personal jottings at the bottom. Of course, readers only glimpse at the survey of Derrida’s concepts and jump to the wonderfully provocative snippets of “Circumfession.” As Augustine once famously stated: “It was made manifest to me that it is because things are good that they can be corrupted” (JD, p. 299).

18 Deconstruction

Derrida did not coin the word “deconstruction” (it is found in the Littré dictionary in several technical senses, for instance, in architecture, as the act of tearing apart a building), and regularly sends his readers back to the double use of Abbau and Destruktion in Heidegger’s essays, both of which call up his wish to “destroy,” or more precisely, to “dismantle” Western metaphysics. The choice of the term is accounted for in Derrida’s wonderful “Letter to a Japanese friend,” one of the shortest and most eloquent introductions to Derrida’s thinking.14 Derrida foregrounds the cultural context, which corresponded to the peak of structuralism. Derrida had noticed that the term of “structure” intervened at strategic points in Husserl’s account of the interwoven strands of knowledge and culture, from The Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891) to the posthumously published Experience and Judgment (1938). Husserl’s attempt at founding logical categories within human intuition refuses to compromise with Dilthey’s historicism that he found tainted with subjectivism or sociologism. “Structure” imposed itself in an effort to think rigorously eidetic connections between things or events as they are inscribed in consciousness. Husserl highlighted the structural correspondence between logical universals and grammatical categories provided by language. Often, he resorts to the concept of “structure” so as to move beyond particular judgments: “From this exposition of the original givenness of a universal content ‘in general,’ it is evident that the universal being thus ‘in general’ is a higher structural form which includes in its sense the idea of a particular ‘in general’ and raises it to a higher form.”15 What is a “structure” in this case? It is an abstract model of organization composed of a set of elements and the law of their organization; what matters is the inner coherence of the whole. These elements can be clusters in a snow-flake, totemic identifications underpinning the circuits of exchange of women in an Amerindian tribe, or images arranged in a sonnet. In a structure, the relationships between the elements are more important than the intrinsic

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qualities of each element. In Husserlian phenomenology as in Saussurean linguistics, the genesis of individualities is subsumed under the global idea of the system. Genetic randomness and empirical chaos are replaced by an order whose ideality underpins the very notion of classification. The ontological status of such structures can be left between brackets by an “epokhé,” Husserl’s name for a phenomenological reduction reaching pure eidetic essences. For Saussure, a reduction of the noise of linguistic utterances makes the function of axes of combination and selection appear clearly. If structures hesitate between the objective and the subjective poles, language nevertheless remains a universal constituent of human nature. What happens when we realize that language keeps a link with Being in general? This is where Heidegger’s meditation on ontological difference takes its point of departure. Being and Time is still in debt to phenomenology but ready to subvert its foundations. Heidegger shifts from an initial investigation of the “Formal Structure of the Question of Being” (the title of paragraph 2) and takes into account a “hermeneutical circle” created by a not so “selfevident” concept of Being before moving on to a more aggressive agenda, “The task of a Destructuring (Destruktion) of the History of Ontology” (title of paragraph 6).16 The destructive program is stated by Heidegger: If the question of being is to achieve clarity regarding its own history, a loosening of the sclerotic tradition and a dissolving of the concealments produced by it is necessary. We understand this task as the destructuring of the traditional concepts of ancient ontology which is to be carried out along the guidelines of the question of being.17 Heidegger wrote Destruktion but the translator preferred to render it as “destructuration.” He also used the term of Abbau (“un-construction”), although Destruktion recurs more often in Being and Time.18 Heidegger’s critique should not be confused with a relativist debunking of a worn-out metaphysical tradition. Heidegger launches a series of readings to see what can be made of ancient insights before Socrates and Plato, while introducing a phenomenology of Dasein, the “being-there” of men and women, a term whose etymological root contains “Being” (Sein). Heidegger will then speak of a “temporalization-structure,” of “end-structures” and even “forestructures” all converging in the more complexly intertwined “structural totality of being-in-the-world.” As Derrida understood early, if the first Structuralists were Husserl and Saussure, then Heidegger should appear as the first “post-structuralist.” Like all “post-structuralists,” he needs a concept of structure to proceed with his constructive destruction or his systematic destructuration. Derrida begins here, adding a more critical twist to Heidegger’s destructuration, for it takes into account the very structure of language. Western metaphysics did not only forget Being but also reduced all language

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to spoken language, the ideal representation of transparent thinking. Derrida grafts on this view of an opaque language made up of iterable traces—a function that places it in close proximity to technology. Derrida’s strategy consisted in revisiting Heidegger’s destructuration of phenomenology by opposing one kind of structuralism, Husserlian phenomenology and its wish to provide a rigorous foundation for the idealities of science, history, and culture, to another structuralism, Saussure’s linguistics of relations, codes, systems, and binary oppositions. Criticizing Husserl with de Saussure, he criticized de Saussure with Heidegger. Saussure is called upon to provide a conception of language as a system devoid of ontological weight, because it is made up of pure relations, thus only differences. Heidegger is called upon to provide a counter model whenever structuralism or phenomenology appear blind to issues of origins and teleology, of event and production, of constitution and historicity. This led Derrida to take a stringent view of the structuralism put forward by Lévi-Strauss in the 1950s, in which he saw a return to positivism or scientism, which cannot but repeat the history of metaphysical delusions it pretends to avoid. Derrida’s strictures put in question the history of the “structurality of structure,” a history as ancient as that of metaphysics, which entailed rethinking concepts such as sign, form, essence, history, nature, truth, culture, and so on. Fundamentally, one cannot avoid philosophical questions: “What I want to emphasize is simply that the passage beyond philosophy does not consist in turning the page of philosophy (which usually amounts to philosophizing badly), but in continuing to read philosophers in a certain way.”19 Lévi-Strauss’s structural schemata of kinship relations or creation myths are adduced as hypotheses allowing anthropologists to introduce some order into the baffling diversity of human practices. Empirical diversity finds a logic thanks to an epistemic totalization and universals assumed to be the foundational constituents of the human mind. They remain precariously poised between nature and culture, as they name the very divide between nature and culture. In this impassioned discussion, Derrida announces both an “event” that would take the form of a radical rupture, and a redoubling of the structure upon itself.20 Repetition and redoubling were of course critical gestures aimed at folding back structurality upon itself.

19 Différance

The transformation of the common enough word of “difference” thanks to an apparent misspelling, différance, has been one of Derrida’s most recognizable gestures. The essay with this title was given as a lecture in January 1968 at the French Society of Philosophy. The two words are pronounced exactly in the same way in French. By introducing an a, Derrida alludes slyly to the silent operation of writing. This extraneous a adds the meaning of a dynamism of difference, which could be translated properly as “the process of differing.” The dynamic meaning alludes to a general process, in which one can see the agency of writing as such. Différance deploys its agency along two axes, one temporal (thus closer to the idea of deferring, temporizing, or postponing something), the other spatial (it calls up the idea of a location in which, for instance, one tries to distinguish twins seen side by side, a difference called “infra-thin” by Marcel Duchamp). If Derrida alludes to philosophers like Heraclitus, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, and Levinas, his main debt is to Heidegger who multiplied analyses of what he called “ontological difference” in Being and Time, the foundational distinction between Being (Sein) and existence or “Beingbeing-here” (Dasein). Heidegger’s Identity and Difference21 includes “The Principle of Identity,” which was a lecture given in 1957 discussing what is commonly known as the Principle of Identity taken as the fundamental principle of logic, hence of science. Heidegger points out that this principle implies the question of ontology, a discourse upon Being, for the traditional principle, A = A, causes confusion, since here “equality” entails two terms, whereas “identity” implies one term only. This leads Heidegger to rewrite the principle of identity as “A is A.” Such a principle claims that it itself is the same as it itself, thus questioning the notion of identity that is supposed to have been launched by Parmenides. From this point on, questions abound: Can thinking be the same as Being? Can they belong together?

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Heidegger elaborates on what it means for humans to belong to Being: such a belonging entails the duty of being open to the disclosure of a forgotten Being, forgotten by the Western tradition of metaphysics. Such a forgetting is exemplified by the modern world of technology, by what is called Gestell, literally the “basic framework.” To this impoverishing reduction, Heidegger opposes Ereignis, literally understood as an “appropriating event” by which Being and humans can give and be given over to each other. For such a reciprocal interaction to happen, it would be necessary to leave behind Western metaphysics. If one wants to unveil Being, poetic language offers a solution. In the deployment of poetic language, one glimpses moments when Dasein turns into a “shepherd of Being.” This brief summary gives a sense of the philosophical background from which Derrida emerges. The key modification that he brings is to rethink the loaded role played by language and bring it closer to technology. For Derrida, techne should not be limited to instruments, or to the calculating reason of metaphysics, for it includes writing, whether poetic or not. It is no coincidence that Derrida’s “Différance” essay ends with a close reading of Heidegger’s text on “The Anaximander fragment.” He even suggests that différance might be more ancient than ontological difference. The forgetting of Being, which means the forgetting of ontological difference, had been forgotten by metaphysics, but if one can follow the logical structure of language as made up of traces (a trace is defined as a “simulacrum of presence that dislocates itself, displaces itself, refers to itself,” thus it “has no site—erasure belongs to its structure”), then the trace is constitutive of language in itself: “it is a trace, and a trace of the erasure of the trace” (MP, 24). All this is an effect of writing as condensing the logic of the trace: “Does not the dis of différance refer us beyond the history of Being, and also beyond our language, and everything that can be named in it?” (MP, 25) Given the controversies discussed in the last entry, the Heideggerian context makes this question clearer. If there can be no essence of différance, if it always escapes beyond and before in an elsewhere that is the very locus of language, no one can say when language really begins and ends. Hence Derrida concludes with this statement: “Older than Being itself, such a différance has no name in our language. But we ‘already know’ that if it is unnameable, it is not provisionally so” (MP, 26). There is no name for différance because it eschews any nominal unity and keeps dislocating itself “in a chain of differing and deferring substitutions” (MP, 26). One understands why Derrida could be fascinated by Beckett’s novel The Unnamable, and why he can conclude by reconciling Nietzsche and Heidegger—Nietzsche, because his affirmation of différance is accompanied by laughter and a dance; Heidegger, because the alliance of Speech and Being is possible under the condition that both submit to différance.

20 Hauntology

The theme of the ghost was relatively slow to emerge as such in Derrida’s works. It came to the fore visibly in his confrontation with Marx in Specters of Marx.22 At the same time, the figure of the ghost embodies all the characteristics of writing as différance: a ghost exists without existing, its presence is also absent; a ghost borders on a collective or singular hallucination; its evanescent image haunts people’s minds, a reminder that something has taken place before, in proximity with the netherworld, with unsolved crime, with damnation perhaps. Here is an adequate image to call up a differential origin without origin. Stephen Dedalus asks in Ulyssses: “What is a ghost?” and answers: “One who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners.”23 Like Joyce, Derrida goes back to Hamlet in order to dramatize the return of one who, in French, is called a revenant. Derrida participated in a 1983 film directed by Ken McMullen entitled Ghost Dance. The young actress Pascale Ogier asks him whether he believes in ghosts. Derrida embarks on an inspired disquisition on ghosts in which he states his belief that the modern technologies of the image multiply ghosts. For him, the link between film and psychoanalysis is a “science of the ghost.” He confesses to feeling like a ghost himself, knowing in advance that he is being filmed, that his words will sound as if ventriloquized by another. Freud had explained that we can be haunted by something that never happened in the present. The whole of cinema would be a fantômachie, a phantasmagoria in which teeming specters struggle for supremacy. The term “haunting” relays that of difference to subvert of ontology, hence the perfect pun “hauntology.” All discourses about being are devoured from within by ghosts that substitutes absence and representation to the belief in full presence. Everything has already begun before beginning—this is the law of hauntology. Aporias then develops infinite variations on “the series constituted by hostage, host, guest, ghost, holy ghost, and Geist.”24

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Specters of Marx, at first a lecture given in a conference punningly entitled “Whither Marxism?” begins in a militant tone; Derrida writes in an “exordium”: “If I am getting ready to speak at length about ghosts, inheritance, and generations, generations of ghosts, which is to say about certain others who are not present, nor presently living, either to us, in us, or outside us, it is in the name of justice” (SM, xix). By splicing the first sentence of The Communist Manifesto (“A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of communism”), with Hamlet’s ghost, and the recurrent quote from Hamlet, “the time is out of joint,” Derrida revisits earlier texts in which the “logic of spectrality” dominates (see SM, note 3, p. 178) while ushering in a new tone, a passionate denunciation of the ills of late capitalism. Specters of Marx concludes with another quote from Hamlet: “Can one, in order to question it, address oneself to a ghost? To whom? To him? To it, as Marcellus says once again and so prudently? ‘Thou art a Scholler; speake to it Horatio. Question it.’” Derrida inverts the question and replaces it with the question: “Could one address oneself in general if already some ghost did not come back?” Hamlet plays a decisive role in Derrida’s book by foregrounding the ghost, whose role, as Joyce reminds us, was played by Shakespeare himself in the first performances of the play. Horatio and Hamlet, those “scholars,” like us, then learn how to talk to the king’s ghost. The splicing of Marx and Shakespeare discloses that a condition for the establishment of justice (which is the aim of Hamlet at the end of Hamlet, and the aim of Marx and Engels) is to address all our ghosts. Any pursuit of justice has to begin by facing an original haunting.

21 Hospitality

As Anne Dufourmantelle states in the introduction to seminars on the theme of hospitality given by Derrida in January 1996, these sessions are ideally suited to get an idea of Derrida’s intellectual charisma and infectious charm, of his rhythm and breadth of reference.25 These freewheeling seminars exemplify his intellectual acumen, his subtle cross-references, and the culture he mobilizes in such an alert and stimulating manner. The readers share with the philosopher a true experience of thinking. In just two seminars, Derrida discusses Plato’s Sophist, Kant’s essays on perpetual peace, cosmopolitanism and lies, Levinas’s conception of the Other as host, guest, and hostage, Benveniste’s etymological speculations about the root of hostis suggesting both “enemy” and “friend,” or “guest” and “host,” which generates the coining of “Hostipitality,” “Sophocles’ Antigone and Oedipus at Colonnus,” the evocation of the destruction of Sodom in Genesis, Pierre Klossowski’s novel The Laws of Hospitality, Hannah Arendt’s remarks on her link to German as a native language despite her rejection of the country, the politics of French colonialism in Algeria (whose groups were offered citizenship and when, or why), the issues deriving from regulations on the Internet with problems of privacy and censorship, pornographic websites in the United States and Germany, the status of displaced populations throughout the world, and so on. Derrida always managed to move from one to other with superb wit and grace, linking nimbly one topic to the other, always carried by the force of following questions: What is the law of hospitality? What is its relation to the laws of hospitality in the plural? And why are these at odds with one another? Derrida ends up contrasting an absolute law of hospitality, a law that he finds in the later Emmanuel Levinas, mostly in Otherwise then Being, a law that has to be called “unconditional,” that is without any limit, with a more limited version of hospitality. As often, Derrida keeps searching for an absolute measure known to be “impossible,” yet needed to measure social reality with this essential yardstick. Hyperbole, or the “passage to the

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limit,” is once more the dominant trope, which is why Derrida speaks of a hyperbolic hospitality. However, he has a realistic streak and never forgets the network of performative constraints imposed by any society. For Derrida, therefore, one should consider “pure hospitality” and it can have extreme consequences; it consists “in leaving one’s house open to the unforeseeable arrival, which can be an intrusion, even a dangerous intrusion, liable eventually to cause harm.”26 Pushing the request for unconditionality to its limit, one risks losing one’s safety or one’s possessions. In contradistinction to this absolute law, there is also a variety of relative norms that regulate access to one’s inner sanctum. These are made up of old customs, written or unwritten rules specifying when and how one can accept a guest. They distinguish between others who are close enough to be considered as brothers and cousins, and others who are excluded and can be considered as nonhuman or even animals, for instance. The power of Derrida’s analysis is to combine those two forms of hospitality. As Samir Haddad explains in Derrida and the Inheritance of Democracy, “The unconditional law, on its own, is not enough to achieve hospitality, for following this law as such is impossible.”27 However, the conditional laws provide imperfect instantiations of the unconditional law, without which hospitality would be impotent. Haddad sums up this aporia clearly: “One could say that the unconditional law depends on the conditional laws in order to be a law, whereas the conditional laws depend on the unconditional law in order to be hospitable” (DD, p.15). In this asymmetrical relationship, there should be a radical openness of one’s home to the other, while at the same time one establishes regulations limiting access to the home. In order to keep its efficiency as a law, unconditional hospitality calls for its own transgression. In the same way, in order to be hospitable, conditional laws of hospitality look for their overcoming in a striving for an absolute perspective. This analysis of an ethics of the other person has important consequences for modernism, as I have tried to show for Joyce.28 A short story like “The Dead” in Dubliners thus exemplifies the paradoxes of what Derrida describes as the constant tension between the foreigner and the homely, between those who are the “victims” of the law of hospitality and those who transgress them. Fundamentally, for Derrida as for Levinas, the notion of hospitality should be able to accommodate the Messiah, if one can believe in him, with or without a religion—as Benjamin suggests when he wants to combine Marxism and Jewish theology. Derrida launched a specific concept of the “messianicity without a messianism” in a group of texts going from Archive Fever to Monolingualism of the Other, from Force of Law to Hostipitality in Acts of Religion. The expression was coupled with a recurrent interrogation about the future of politics. Of Grammatology had announced forcibly the end of the Book and the beginning of Writing: the future could only present itself under the figure of absolute danger, or “in the species of monstrosity.”29

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In Specters of Marx, Derrida develops a related notion of the messianic that he describes as “the coming of the other, the absolute and unpredictable singularity of the arrivant as justice” (SM, 33). This messianicity implies a future that is not calculable or predictable. It is an “awaiting without horizon,” linked to a “hypercritical faith.” Derrida’s most often rehearsed argument is that the future has to remain to come because it is nothing other than the affirmation itself, the “yes” conditioning all promises and hopes beyond or before the regulations offered by science or religion. Benjamin noted in the last “Thesis on the Philosophy of History” that the Torah prohibits investigations of the future: the future must retain its messianic potential. Derrida agrees and insists on the structural function of messianism, even when he thinks history in materialist and dialectical terms. This would be the absolute event, if it could be thinkable, since for Derrida, an event always “implies surprise, exposure, the unanticipatable.”30 A true event should arrive as the “untimeliness of the infinite surprise,”31 which would be the very experience of the “impossible.”

22 Iterability

“Iterability” is not a new coinage by Derrida: it can be found in the dictionary as referring to the condition or possibility of being repeated (from Latin “iterum,” meaning “once more,” or “again,” and not from “iter,” the way). It is one of Derrida’s favored terms because it refers to the capacity that words, things, and situations have to be repeated. The term, however, is not identical with “repetition.” It is mostly a structural possibility of repetition, even if there is no actuality or occurrence. The term derives its importance from the central place occupied by writing in Derrida’s philosophy. “Iterability” allows him to question the belief in direct communication, in proper or stable meanings, and in the existence of a linguistic “context” from which local and temporal meaning could be derived. As Derrida asserts in “Signature, Event, Context,” the meaning of a text cannot be limited to its context, even if a certain context helps making sense of a text. A text is not reducible to a context: any written sign carries with it “a force of breaking with its context.”32 This force is structural, for it introduces a wedge between the originator of the text and its readability. Even if I use “I” in a precise context, and to mean something I may believe I am fully in control of, the fact that I can understand “I” and use if for my own purposes in different contexts tears it off from the original situation. Indeed, writing implies that no one can be sure of what the written words really meant at the time a message was produced, even if one is their “author.” Turning now to the semiotic and internal context, there is no less a force of breaking by virtue of its essential iterability; one can always lift a written syntagma from the interlocking chain in which it is caught or given without making it lose every possibility of functioning, if not every possibility of “communicating,” precisely. (MP, 317) In the end, the very iterability that constitutes the text as a written text destroys any self-identity. Moreover, this destruction also affects spoken language, hence the “totality of experience,” as Derrida glosses,

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to the extent that it is not separated from the field of the mark, that is, the grid of erasure and of difference, of unities of iterability, of unities separable from their internal or external context, and separable from themselves, to the extent that the very iterability that constitutes their identity never permits them to be a unity of self-identity? (MP, 318) Any element of language is predicated upon such a structure of dehiscence, thus turning into the “nonpresent remaining of a differential mark cut off from its alleged “production” of origin” (MP, 318). After a discussion of Husserl’s theories of language that bring us back to Voice and Phenomena and the Introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, Derrida engages with Austin’s theory of the performative, which led to the famous controversy with Searle (see “Performative” here). What remains dominant for the concept of iterability is that it moves from being a simple feature of written signs to considerations of subjectivity: in its name the possibility of being a whole, complete entity capable of verifying its operations in presentia is denied—here is where numerous commentators have tried to interpose objections. However, “iterability” is one of the names of difference, a temporal structure generating always possible repetitions of any trait, which also entails pervasive local dislocations.

23 Lies

Derrida’s “History of the Lie”33 was given at the Tuscaloosa conference devoted to Futures in 1995. He responded to sneering remarks made by Tony Judt on French intellectuals like Derrida who allegedly never dealt with the Vichy years. Refuting this allegation, Derrida discussed Hannah Arendt‘s famous essays, “Truth and Politics” (1967) and “Lying in Politics” (1972). Arendt discussed the Pentagon papers, addressing the official lies revealed during the Vietnam War, which had created a loss of credibility for the American administration. She writes, The famous credibility gap, which has been with us for six long years, has suddenly opened up an abyss. The quicksand of lying statements of all sorts, deceptions as well as self-deceptions, is apt to engulf any reader who wishes to prove this material, which, unhappily, he must recognize as the infrastructure of nearly a decade of United States foreign and domestic policy.34 This essay leads Derrida to sketch a “history of the lie” that would blend the factual and the transcendental. Commenting on that paragraph, he adds after “self-deception” a question in brackets: “Is ‘self-deception’ possible? Is it a rigorous and pertinent concept for what interests us here, that is, the history of the lie? In strictest terms, ‘does one ever lie to oneself?’—J.D.” (F, 71). He argues that if lying is defined by the fact that I know one thing and say another, then how can I lie to myself? If a lie is defined by an intention to be deceitful and dishonest, how can there be an intention to betray oneself? This unassailable question leads to an aporia: if lying is to be understood as a purely inner process, how can one catch anybody lying? Derrida is consistent when he asserts that one can never be caught lying: one can always say, “I was wrong but I did not mean to deceive; I am in good faith”

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(F, 68). If the lie is restricted to an intention to deceive (as it has been since Plato and Augustine), undecidability prevents any possibility of verification. Hence, the only “proof” would have to come from the subject. This is why for centuries torture was considered a logical way of extracting a confession. Derrida notes that the lie, in Greek pseudos, covers several meanings—pseudos means “lie” and “falsehood,” but also “cunning” or even “mistake.” It includes the senses of “deception” or “fraud” as well as of “poetic invention.” As Derrida wryly concludes his etymological review, this polysemy increases “the possible misunderstanding about what is meant by ‘misunderstanding’” (F, 66). However, in some cases, one can appeal to documents and archives. Derrida provides his own examples of factual truth in the case of the attacks by Judt. He has no difficulty in proving that he had called attention to the responsibility of the French state about the extermination of Jews under the Vichy regime. Alluding to contested “truths” about boundaries and borders, as in the ex-Yugoslavia, Israel and Chechnya, he observes that there is always a performative violence of those who make the laws, those who decide upon legitimacy and shape public consensus: Who tells the truth and who lies in those areas? For the better and for the worse, this performative dimension makes the truth, as Augustine says. It therefore imprints its irreducibly historical dimension on both veracity and the lie. (F, 91) Neither Kant nor Hannah Arendt could take into account the performative dimension of the lie, just as they failed to pay attention to the unconscious dimension of the phenomenon. When discussing the “performative violence of law-givers and the impossibility of knowing whose truth we face,” Derrida argues that we need to approach them with the combination of a “logic of the unconscious” and a theory of the “performative” (F, 82). This does not mean that the discourse of psychoanalysis or the theory of speech-act theory will be sufficient for such a task (F, 82). Moreover, we may wonder how to reconcile these pragmatic or psychoanalytic approaches with the position first mentioned, when Derrida seemed to stick to an entrenched version of lying as defined by intentionality. First, Derrida retraces the steps of a general history of the lie as debated by major philosophers. Surveying theses on the lie by Augustine, Kant, and Plato, Derrida concludes that the lie cannot be reduced to an error. The idea of a “history of the lie” presupposes something like the history of false witnesses and of perjury; this would be a chronicle of “radical evil” that would have little to do with the history of truth or of error. Finding a

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complicity with Augustine, who had written a lot on lies and lying, Derrida accepts with the Bishop of Hippo that one cannot lie to oneself, but uses the theory of the performative to go further: In its prevalent and recognized form, the lie is . . . an intentional act, a lying. There is not the lie, but rather this saying or this meaning-to-say that is called lying: to lie would be to address to another (for one lies only to the other; one cannot lie to oneself, unless it is to oneself as another) a statement or more than one statement, a series of statements (constative or performative) that the liar knows, consciously, in explicit, thematic, current consciousness, from assertions that are totally or partially false; one must insist right away on this plurality and on this complexity, even on this heterogeneity. (F, 68) Derrida began by refuting the division between the big truths and smaller factual truths that had been the aim of Arendt’s essay. By not harping on the division itself, whose refutation he leaves to Heidegger, he can move forward. He overcomes the limitations of a pure phenomenological approach by presupposing the possibility of reaching a pragmatic conclusion. In conclusion, Derrida offers a parallel between Heidegger’s notion of truth and Arendt’s thesis on the lie (F, 93–98). If he is skeptical of Arendt’s optimism facing an inevitable victory of truth over lies, for as he argues, one should consider the possibility of a radical perversion of truth, and the technologies that create a “simulacrum of the iconic substitute” for the truth, in the end, he does not despair of laying down the lineaments of an accurate history of the lie.

24 Methods

When he defined what “deconstruction” would entail to a Japanese friend, Derrida was adamant in stressing what it was not: above all, it could not be a method of reading, a hermeneutics of the text: Deconstruction is not a method and cannot be transformed into one. . . . It is not enough to say that deconstruction could not be reduced to some methodological instrumentality or to a set of rules and transposable procedures. . . . Deconstruction takes place, it is an event that does not await the deliberation, consciousness, or organization of a subject, or even of modernity. It deconstructs it-self.35 Like Heidegger, whose famous letter to a Japanese friend is taken as a model, Derrida insists on a certain experience of thought coupled with the absolute singularity of his object. Therefore he strongly rejects anything that would look like a “scientific” method with its meta-language and protocols of repeatability and verification. Whenever Derrida summed up the process leading to the transformation of his deconstructive problematic into a methodology that would be applicable everywhere, he would provide quasiparodies of Descartes’s Discourse on Method. Here is one example of how he evokes the introduction of deconstruction into American universities, especially in literature departments. Referring to paradigms and questions he himself had launched, he nevertheless is the first to note how quickly these paradigms turned into a network of “possibilities and powers” that would have to be imported, imitated and implemented: That is to say, organized bodies of rules, of procedures and techniques, in a word, methods, know-how applicable in a recurrent fashion. One could even formulate or formalize (and I applied myself in this way at first) a certain consistency in these laws which made possible reading processes at once critical and critical of the idea of critique, processes

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of close reading, which could reassure those who in or outside the wake of new criticism or some other formalism felt it necessary to legitimize this ethics of close reading or internal reading. And among the examples of these procedural or formalizing formulae that I had proposed .  .  . there was the reversal of a hierarchy. After having reversed a binary opposition, whatever it may be—speech/writing, man/woman, spirit/ matter, signifier/signified, signified/signifier, master/slave, and so on—and having liberated the subjugated and submissive term, one then proceeded to the generalization of this latter in new traits, producing a different concept, for example another concept of writing such as trace, différance, gramme, text, and so on.36 It is rare to see the inventor or initiator of what passes as a critical method present such an honest and critical assessment of a systematization. Derrida rejects the idea that deconstruction means a few conceptual tricks and philosophical questions applied to literature. The indictment of what has passed as deconstruction paradoxically should attest to the validity of the problematic. What has to be opposed at any cost is when these questions turn into easy refrains, functioning by themselves. Texts are then read only as “examples” or “pretexts” for a pre-existing theory. Here Derrida seemed caught in a delicate dilemma: the more powerful his theory was, the more possibilities it would open in the name of concepts like “différance” or “hauntology,” but then the readings would be mass-produced and totally predictable. To avoid this danger, Derrida kept inventing new terms like différance, trace, hymen, invagination, dissemination, parergon, aporia, undecidability, and so on. They suggest that “theory” should be understood in the etymological meaning of “procession,” of a ritual parade. It deals with idiomatic and untranslatable signifiers (or better “signatures”) to prevent instrumentalist reduction on the one hand, and epistemological closure on the other. An awareness that this movement could not continue forever led Derrida to assess the concept of instrumentality candidly: This slightly instrumentalizing implementation tended to reduce the impetus of the languages, the desire, the arrival so to speak, the future, of deconstructions, and might well arrest them at the possible: that is, a body of possibilities, of faculties, indeed of facilities, in a word, a body of easily reproducible means, methods, and technical procedures, hence useful, utilizable; a body of rules and knowledge; a body of theoretical, methodological, epistemological knowledge; a body of powerful knowhow that would be at once understandable and offered for didactic transmission, susceptible of acquiring the academic status and dignity of a quasi-interdisciplinary discipline.37

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Here is why Derrida would have to bet on the “impossible.” After a survey of the paradoxes, aporias, and double binds his thinking has traversed; he requests precisely the contrary of such an instrumental reduction: his concepts keep only their relevance if they open to the event as event, that is, precisely to an event that will exceed any program, a radical novelty incommensurable with protocols elaborated after having computed logical possibilities from which one will finally be chosen. By recirculating the slogan dating from May 1968: “Demand the impossible!,” deconstruction finds a way back into a process of thought, even if the process is never satisfied with pat answers or repeatable methodologies. Deconstruction was poised between the amassed weight of dead texts, dead signs, and dead writers that altogether makes up a whole tradition and a messianism promising “new life,” life as new, but in the future.

25 Performative

Derrida began discussing the notion of the performative in “Signature Event Context,” a text dating from 1971 in which, as we have seen, he systematized the idea that iterability was the mark of writing in general. Then he announced that he wanted to go further by examining J. L. Austin’s celebrated book How to Do Things with Words. Derrida first mentions Austin’s coining of “perlocution” and “illocution,” two concepts that derive from the concept of the performative, a concept defined prudently by Austin. Austin had begun his investigation by identifying a category of utterances that, unlike what he calls “constative” utterances, will not describe anything but only perform actions. He gives examples of what is needed to be able to baptize a ship, marry a couple, open a conference, apologize for a mistake, and so on. What interests Austin is how linguistic utterances are bound to social conditions that make these actions possible. If I am not a priest, judge, or rabbi, I am not allowed to marry newlyweds, except as a parody that will not have any value later. Derrida sums up the main feature of the performative as being a communication that will not convey a meaning but communicate a “force,” and this is done “by the impetus of a mark” (MP, 321). Indeed, performative statements do not describe (if in a conference, I say the words: “And now I open the session” and if I am qualified to do so, I will not have said anything about its length, what will be discussed, etc.): they produce, transform, operate. Soon after, Derrida points out two problems. The first is that the “total context” (MP, 322) then tends to determine the meaning; included in it, we find the conscious presence of the locator. Here is why Derrida thinks that Austin remains within the sphere of intentional meaning (MP, 322), a point rejected by Raoul Moati in these pages. The second problem is more damaging. Austin does not accept that a performative could be cited as a text (MP, 324), such a possibility being “abnormal, parasitical” (MP, 324, italics in text). His usual sense of an “ordinary language” would be defined by the exclusion of the “literary

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language” seen as anomalous, exceptional, or “non-serious.” Any form of citation, as on a stage, in a poem, in a soliloquy, falls into “non-seriousness” (MP, 325). Here is where Derrida launches his main attack, because he then argues that the very fact that a performative can be recognized as such (and it has to be recognized, otherwise it is a joke, as if I would show a can-opener when I state that I “open the session”) introduces the principle iterability, an iterability that as we have seen, marks all citations: Could a performative statement succeed if its formulation did not repeat a “coded” or iterable statement, in other words if the expression I use to open a meeting, launch a ship or a marriage were not identifiable as conforming to an iterable model, and therefore if they were not identifiable in a way as “citation”? (MP, 326) There should be, as Austin says, a “relative purity” of performatives. Derrida tries to demonstrate that this purity has to reject or avoid all kinds of iterations (MP, 326). He concludes that, given the structure of iteration that for him is a condition of all language, whether spoken or written, the “intention which animates utterance will never be completely present in itself and its content” (MP, 326). It remains to be seen, as Moati contends, whether the concept of intention applies to Austin’s theory of the performative. Has Derrida fallen back on ancient tracks, simply recycling the concepts of the signature, of différance, of dissemination? The American language philosopher Searle had no difficulty in rejecting Derrida’s queries in “Reiterating the Differences,” for his starting point is that any rule-bound system of representation has to be repeatable, otherwise rules would not apply.38 He then accuses Derrida of confusing permanence (a feature of the written text) with iterability (LI, 25). He rejects Derrida’s contention that writing destroys the author’s intentions (LI, 26). There is no way for him of eliminating intentionality, for meaningful sentences would be predicated on the possibility of corresponding intentional speech acts (LI, 26). Searle disputes that Austin’s exclusion of citations had any metaphysical function; it was a “research strategy” in order to reach a clear definition (LI, 26). He opposes citationality and parasitic discourse in those loaded terms: “in parasitic discourse, the expressions are being used and not mentioned” (LI, 27), a distinction that had been, of course, refused by Derrida. But on his side, Searle has rejected the theses put forward by Derrida one by one. Derrida’s reply was by turns facetious and scathing. He makes fun of the statements made by Searle, whom he calls (in French) SARL, meaning “Limited Inc,” hence the title of Limited Inc. Space lacks to follow all of Derrida’s arguments and sum up eighty dense pages. If he seems to have won the debate, this is mostly because Searle had simplified Austin’s subtle approach. The following debate with Gerald Graff was less tense. Graff

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objected to Derrida that he seemed to follow an “all or nothing” strategy: there would be either pure self-presence or complete undecidability (LI, 114). This would miss the drift of a pragmatic approach to language. Derrida replied by justifying his “all or nothing” position (LI, 116–17). This would be the condition for any “idealization” that he sees as presupposed when one takes a concept rigorously. Just a little later, one of the “envois” in The Postcard offered a conclusion to this endless debate in which each philosopher talks at cross-purposes to the other by referring to Plato as the “master of the perverformative” (P, 136). Here, quoting Plato’s Letter XIII, a letter addressed to Denys of Syracuse but whose authenticity has been questioned, Derrida imagines that Plato is writing to Searle, because he begins it by writing that the way he begins his letter will be a sign or symbol that it is indeed his. Derrida comments thus, Here is the master of the perverformative, he writes to you; it is indeed me, here is my signature, you will be able to recognize it, it is authentic . . . . Wait, it’s even more vicious, and visibly destined to Searle and company, with their entire axiomatoque of the serious/not serious. (P, 136) Derrida coins the word “axiomatoque” to suggest a phony, spurious axiomatics, like that of Searle. Indeed, Plato himself tells his addressee that when he writes a serious letter, he begins with “God.” If he does not, it will be a less serious letter. The idea enchants Derrida, quite pleased to have found an ally against Searle in his old enemy Plato. Plato confirms that it is a vain effort to try and distinguish between serious and non-serious performatives as it would be between authentic and spurious letters. The written performative will always be perverse, which will not prevent it from retaining its illocutionary and perlocutionary force.

26 Poetry

In 1988, responding to an invitation by the Italian poetry journal Poesia to define in a few lines “what thing poetry is,” Derrida published a short essay entitled “Che Cos’è la Poesia?”39 This was Derrida’s unique attempt at defining poetry as such. In order to live up to the ontological question that echoes with Socrates’s or Plato’s ti esti ? (“What is x?),” Derrida stages a poetic performance, and offers a sort of parable that compares poetry with a hedgehog, a hérisson, or istrice. The little animal tries to cross a road, a highway, an autostrada or autoroute, at the risk of being run over by speeding cars. The fable of the hedgehog evokes both the contingency of the poetic experience and the fragility of its being. The text unpacks and fleshes out this image of helpless road kill. The poor hedgehog serves as a metaphor for poetry caught between the singular and the general of the trace. It lies as a little ball in the dangerous middle ground of the road for it has been crushed when trying to get to you, its readers. On the road to finding the poetic trait that distinguishes poetry, Derrida considers the body of this poem-hedgehog “thrown onto the road, absolute, solitary, rolled up in a ball, next to itself” (CC, 233). As most commentators have pointed out, Derrida’s hedgehog combines references to Heidegger and to the German romantics. The most remarkable and surprising statement in “Che Cos’è la Poesia?” is this simple definition of poetry: a text that requires to be “learnt by heart.” The essence of poetry should thus be defined by two conditions: the “economy of memory” (the poem must be “brief,” and is “elliptical by vocation”) and “the heart.” If they are combined, the “poetic” is created, it turns into “that which what you desire to learn.” Derrida adds: “but from and of the other, thanks to the other and under dictation, by heart; imparare a memoria” (CC, 227). The expression apprendre par cœur (learn by heart) can evoke the dry or scholarly exercise of rote memorizing famous poems at elementary school. That poetry should be an exercise of memory can sound traditional, but

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it chimes in with Ezra Pound’s echoes of Cavalcanti’s “formed trace” in The Pisan Cantos, as Mark Byron has shown here. For Derrida, moreover, poetry should see “itself (as) dictated.” In fact, poetry soon begins to speak for itself, saying urgently: “I am a dictation, . . . learn me by heart, copy me down, guard and keep me, look out for me” (CC, 223). By another reversal, halfway through the text, the first wish to be learned by heart is presented as a pure “dream”: Thus the dream of learning by heart arises in you. Of letting your heart be traversed by the dictated dictation. .  .  . You did not yet know the heart, you learn it thus. From this experience and from this expression. I call a poem that very thing that teaches the heart, invents the heart, that which, finally, the word heart seems to mean, and which, in my language, I cannot easily discern from the word itself. (CC, 231) Here Derrida speaks in the first person after having responded in the second person (“you are asked to know…,” CC, 224). His definition of poetry evolves from “that which wants to be learnt by heart” to a capacious and mysterious “heart that learns” in a movement of “keep-it-all-in” similar to the rolled-up ball of the hérisson. The heart liberates itself and is no longer “pure interiority” for it welcomes a “certain exteriority” brought about by letters and meaning (CC, 231). With its spherical shape, the peculiar body of the hedgehog illustrates how the poetic corpus might strive for literary completeness, while remaining a trace of all other poems, which in the end undermines any attempt at achieving a totality or closure: You have to commemorate amnesia, savagery, even the stupidity [la bêtise] of the “by heart”: the hérisson. It blinds itself. Rolled up in a ball, prickly with spines, vulnerable and dangerous, calculating and illadapted (because it makes itself into a ball, .  .  . it exposes itself to an accident). No poem without accident, no poem that does not open itself like a wound, but no poem that is not also just a wounding. (CC, 233) The accidents and wounds of the poem-hedgehog entail that it be readable as well as give a wound the reader, as Kafka wanted. Similarly, Derrida claims that the poem-hedgehog is “a writing become your body: writing in (it)self” (CC, 229). The absorption of the poem into one’s memory becomes a bodily act of incorporation. As Pound reminds us, our literary memory is constitutive of our innermost subjectivity: “what you love well remains”— in the heart, a synecdoche both for the body and the mind. A loved poem becomes a part of one’s individuality. The choice of an animal was not random—Derrida asserted in The Animal That Therefore I Am that there was a deep connection between

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poetry and animals, as Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei highlights in those pages. Ten years later, Derrida remembers that he had “let pass a little hedgehog, a suckling hedgehog (un nourrisson hérisson) perhaps, before the question: “What is poetry?” For thinking concerning the animal, if there is such a thing, derives from poetry.”40 Indeed, The Animal That Therefore I Am is full of references to poetry, from Rilke and Trakl to Baudelaire and Valéry via Apollinaire and Mallarmé.

27 Undecidability

The concept of undecidability derives from modern mathematics. It was launched in 1931 when Kurt Gödel demonstrated the limitations of all formal axiomatic systems. Gödel’s incompleteness theorems show that any program aiming at finding a complete and consistent set of axioms for mathematics is doomed. The cause of undecidability in Gödel’s theorems is the inability of expressive systems to model self-reference, as has been explained by Douglas Hofstadter’s 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. The 1931 discovery offered a conclusion to the discussion that had opposed Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, who in 1901 had noted that the set of all sets that are not members of themselves appears to be a member of itself. The paradox was enough to show to Frege that the axioms he was using to formalize mathematical logic were inconsistent. Derrida rarely refers to the scientific underpinning of the concept, but uses it philosophically to mean that if any concept has more than one meaning, then one should decide what the correct meaning is, even if one is unable to provide it. Quite systematically, Derrida tackles a term and shows that it contains at least two meanings that are at odds with one another, as with the Greek word “pharmakon,” meaning both remedy and poison. This is often helped by the use of terms that in themselves can have several meanings, as with reste (remainder and resting place), tombe (first person of the verb to fall, a tomb), demeure (dwelling and the imperative form of to stay in place), and so on. Derrida’s syntax also multiplies ambiguities, as when he writes je t’appelle mon amour, mon amour41 at the beginning of the “Envois” section of The Post Card, one can read this as: “I’ll call you (on the phone), my love” or “I call you my love, my love.” Later on, he played on the statement Tout autre est tout autre, which can mean, “Wholly other is Wholly Other” (an apparent tautology, used here to undermine all tautologies) or “Every other is fully Other” (a rephrasing of Levinas’s ethics of the Other). In the same way, he begins his book on Politics of Friendship by glossing a sentence attributed to Aristotle (in fact, most likely a mistranslation): “O my friends, there is no friend” (O philoi, oudeis philos).

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Other strategies involve coining compounds that follow the double logic of Joyce’s puns or portmanteau words, such as “double blind” (instead of “double bind”), “destinerrance” (destination and errancy), “hauntology” (haunting and ontology), “perfumatif” (perfume and performative), and so on.42 Quite often, Derrida complicates that process by using several languages at once. For instance, in Ulysses Gramophone, he reads the French Oui, oui (yes, yes) as “We, we.” In The Post Card, he splices the French blesser (to wound) and the English “to bless.” The title of the essay on Paul Valéry discussed here by Suzanne Guerlac mixes German (Qual Quelle meaning “torment” and “source,” the phrase can signify “the source of torment”) and Quelle in French (“Which” in the feminine). Indeed, the “source” of this expression is in Hegel, who in his Encyclopaedia had juxtaposed Qual and Quelle in a discussion of Jakob Boehme’s concept of “ipseity.” In other contexts, Derrida is even more playful. In his long essay on Freud in The Post Card, he abbreviates Freud’s “Pleasure Principle” as “P.P.” and then takes this as calling up Pépé, a familiar term for “granddaddy.” In The Post Card, the English word “poster” (in “the poster of Socrates”) is heard in French as the verb poster, meaning “to mail.” Has Derrida abused these undecidables? He seems to have become aware of the danger of loose and wild punning, the risk of being swallowed by proliferating idioms looking like the “counterpointed words” of Finnegans Wake and not clear and distinct concepts of philosophy. In some cases, one will need a good French dictionary like the Littré to follow the meanings of one word declined by Derrida—Pas is a good example, since it means both “steps” and “not.” Thus Rachel Bowlby could not translate by one phrase the title of the second session in Of Hospitality. Derrida’s announced title Pas d’hospitalité, had to be rendered as “Step of Hospitality/No Hospitality.” Even though he was sticking to a poetic use of philosophical language, Derrida noted nevertheless in Parages, a collection of essays on Maurice Blanchot, that there is a danger in an all too systematic practice of the conceptual Witz. In fact, it seems that Derrida is attacking here the practice of equivocation encouraged by Jacques Lacan, and generalized by his disciples: Finally, there is always in the Witz, when it is practiced, authorized, cultivated, this economic vulgarity. .  .  . Psychoanalysis should have drawn us away from this, instead of precipitating us into it: conscious and deliberate Witze, when perceptible and mastered, always come as a denegation or an apotrope, that resist both the other and the unconscious.43 If this remark questions the use of equivocation and glib punning among psychoanalysts, it cannot avoid reverberating on Derrida’s own writing practice.44 Indeed, in the late 1980s, one can see that the use of conceptual

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punning becomes more limited, focused, and strategic. What remains constant is the factor of the undecidable that recurs in Derrida’s texts—as the introduction to Parage reiterates, one will never tell whether they are to be seen as paraphrases, citations, commentaries, translations, readings, or interpretations.45 Alain Badiou’s homage to Derrida in his Pocket Pantheon46 insisted on the politics at work in deconstruction. For Badiou, Derrida was a “man of peace” because he was intent upon destroying dichotomies, whether philosophical, like Being and being, racial, like Jew versus Arab, or political, like democracy versus totalitarianism. Key in Derrida’s thinking would be the “indistinction of distinction,” another variation on the concept of the undecidable. As Leslie Hill showed, the oxymoron of “radical indecision”47 helps us read the history of literary criticism while considering links between texts, ethics, philosophy, and the hermeneutics of literature.

28 Writing/Texting

If writing is one of Derrida’s main concepts, as Edward Baring has noted,48 at first Derrida did not insist on his ownership of the term, preferring Greek sounding terms like gramma or grammatology. This may be attributed to the Zeitgeist of the 1960s, a period marked by the emergence of a term that Roland Barthes’s Writing Degree Zero had put on the map. However, the emphasis had changed: for Barthes, writing would offer a space of freedom between language and style, two immutable systems or bodies; introducing this mobile term, Barthes rejected Sarte’s simplified binary of “form” and “content” once for all. Thus écriture had become a fashionable term in the 1960s. One has to remember that for Derrida, however, writing was less a historical negotiation with a newly found freedom granted to language than considered first as a set of dead letters, which allowed him to introduce death—technological death, one might say—as a wedge in the myth of a living language condensed in speech. As we have seen, Derrida felt the need to oppose phenomenology and structuralism, using phenomenology under its Heideggerian guise in order to attack structuralism, then using linguistic structuralism, above all Saussure’s insight that there are only differences in language, to dismantle the metaphysical conception of language as transparent medium that he found in classical phenomenology. When in the early 1960s, Derrida introduced the concept of writing so forcibly into phenomenology, we have to remember that at that time personal computers and the Internet were more than two decades away. Derrida made this claim at a time when books seemed to be about to disappear given the dominance of film and television, in fact of all the audiovisual media. This was the well-known and respected thesis of Marshall McLuhan: he was announcing the end of the book, and most people agreed with him. By contrast, Derrida looked like a passéeist thinker clinging to an obsolete conception of writing, whose main foundation, so critics first thought, would be found in Talmudic Jewish theology, as the most radical formulation of

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what has been called the religion of the “people of the Book.” The mistake these critics made was to identify writing with the Book. Derrida’s genius was to dissociate these two notions. He showed that even if books may disappear as objects and dominant modes of archiving culture, if they fade away as technologies disseminating information and only remain as repositories of sacred texts, nevertheless writing is bound to survive—it will even surpass all the other modes of techne. Thus, the first chapter of Of Grammatology is entitled “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing” (OG, p. 6). In fact, one does not find a discussion of the “end of the book” in this chapter, which is devoted to systematic analyses of metaphysics in a Heideggerian mode: metaphysics is shown as being underpinned by logos, speech, and the reduction of writing to mere instrumentality. In fact, Derrida had already been alerted to a disjuncture between writing as a way of preserving the ideality of basic concepts in sciences and the “bound” nature of the book. In his 1962 discussion of Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, he mentions Goethe’s Faust that had been quoted by Husserl as an example of literary ideality, then quotes Valéry, Mallarmé, Blanchot, and Joyce.49 This was in the context of what Gaston Bachelard called a “bibliomenon,” which is glossed as “this ‘being of the book,’ this ‘instance of printed thought’ whose ‘language is not natural’” (OG, 91). Husserl had been aware of the crucial fact that writing defines and completes the ambiguity of all language, even if no book can be found to place writing in a material context. Today, indeed, writing is everywhere. We text all the time on our iPhones, smartphones, and tablets. We send e-mails several times a day, and we read messages that keep pouring from all directions. Maurizio Ferraris has analyzed this evolution that he calls a “documedial revolution,”50 by which he means that the medium used to create documents is made up of written signs, and moreover that through them, social reality is conditioned by writing. Today, writing and technology have all but merged, confirming Derrida’s surprisingly prescient insight in the early sixties. We are all aware of the fact that today, globalization does not depend on faster trains or airplanes but on that very ancient technique, writing. Thanks to the electronic revolution, it is writing that transfers almost instantaneously social values like money, news, and even our identities. The Web has relayed the transformative power of capitalism as analyzed by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto, and accomplishes a globalization of the world in more efficient ways. Thus it is time to dispel the notion that Derrida was a “textualist” willing to identify the world with a book. He was very vocal in rejecting the misconception that when he said that one could not set a limit to a text, he would imply reducing all the given to textuality. This became more poignant in this case, because he was responding to criticism by two activists, Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon, who objected to what they saw as a disengaged

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attitude facing the horrors of the Apartheid in South Africa. If it was easy for Derrida to show his credentials in this case—he had never stopped attacking the monstrous regime of South Africa in lectures and even personal trips to the country—he had to respond to the error stating that his “method” of reading (a term he rejected) would hinge around the idea that nothing could be found outside texts. Derrida replied eloquently, An hour’s reading, beginning on any page of any one of the texts I have published over the last twenty years, should suffice for you to realize that text, as I use the word, is not the book. No more than writing or trace, it is not limited to the paper which you cover with your graphism. It is precisely for strategic reasons . . . that I found it necessary to recast the concept of text by generalizing it almost without limit, in any case without present or perceptible limit, without any limit that is. That’s why there is nothing “beyond the text.” That’s why South Africa and apartheid are, like you and me, part of this general text, which is not to say that it can be read the way one reads a book. That’s why the text is always a field of forces: heterogeneous, differential, and so on.51 Derrida explained that his own political struggles (one of them landed him a jail in former Czechoslovakia) were also fights with the “texts” of these institutions. However, he categorically rejected the accusation that he could remain enclosed in what Fredreic Jameson famously called the “prisonhouse of language.” Quite logically, following in this case the example of Kant, he showed that there was no distinction between the textual and the practical, or between theory and praxis. As Kant made it clear in a political essay debunking the common phrase, “This May be True in Theory, but it does not Apply in Practice,” doctors and lawyers fail because they are good in theory but ignorant of their theories’ applications. Kant concluded that any amelioration would come from more theory, not less.52 Here is why Derrida, too, affirms that “the opposition between ‘textual’ and ‘practical’ has no meaning” for him.53 Thus for Derrida, the perversion of the apartheid system had to be seen as a dangerous excrescence of a Western concept of white superiority, and of what he called “globalatinization,” the inheritance of a long tradition going back to Greece and Rome, which should not prevent us from denouncing, combating, and attacking these abuses as violently as possible in the present. This is why he concludes with these words: “Deconstruction is much more ‘practical’ and political than so many people believe” (Si, 184). As he adds, neither de Man nor he ever stated something like “Literature is All!” (Si, 185). As all our contributors have shown, deconstruction thrives by submitting literature to the force of a questioning that harnesses both critical understanding (there is a lot of political power invested in “understanding,” for, as Joyce reminded us, letting Shaun, his dominant and abusive character, speak to his brother, Shem the writer: “I overstand you, you understand.”54) and the rereading of

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our age-old texts, which leads to ethical dismantling and political destruction of current abuses. For this, a newly unleashed performative will need to remember that it is driven by justice, a quest and a request for justice, the only concept that, according to Derrida, cannot be deconstructed.55

Notes 1 Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 12–13. Hereafter, A and page number. 2 Jacques Derrida’s “Circumfession” is a series of footnotes added to Geoff Bennington’s Jacques Derrida (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993). For mentions of this temporary paralysis, see pp. 97–98 and 120. 3 For the links between immunology and the “thinking body,” see Francisco J. Varela and Mark R. Anspach, “The Body Thinks: The Immune System and the Process of Somatic Individuation,” in Materialities of Communication, trans. William Whobrey, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 273–85. For how this disease can be treated as a “biography,” see Warwick Anderson and Ian R. Mackay, Intolerant Bodies: A short history of autoimmunity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2014). 4 Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 13. 5 Martin Hägglund, Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 6 Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 94. 7 Franceso Vitale, Biodeconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences, trans. Mauro Senatore, (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2018). 8 James Joyce, Ulysses, Gabler edition (New York: Random House, 1993), 155. 9 See “Envois” in The Post Card, 156, 196, 198, and passim. 10 Benoît Peeters, Trois ans avec Derrida: les carnets d’un biographe (Paris: Flammarion, 2010). 11 Pierre Nora, Les Français d’Algérie, édition revue et augmentée (Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 2012). 12 Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 47. 13 The Post Card, 3. I recommend Alan Bass’s very useful glossary, xiii–xxx. 14 Jacques Derrida, “Letter to a Japanese Friend,” trans. David Wood and Andrew Benjamin, in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 270–76.

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15 Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment, trans. James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 372. 16 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996) 3 and 17. 17 Ibid., 20. 18 See Theodore Kisiel’s The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 19 Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), 288. 20 Ibid., 278. 21 Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (1969, reprinted, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 22 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. by Peggy Kamuf, (New York: Routledge, 1994), hereafter SM and page number. 23 Joyce, Ulysses, 154. 24 Aporias, 60. See also Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinker (New York: Verson, 1999), and the huge compilation of The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory, ed. María Del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). 25 Anne Dufourmantelle, in Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 10 and 12. 26 Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 59. 27 Samir Haddad, Derrida and the Inheritance of Democracy (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013), 13. Hereafter DD and page number. 28 Jean-Michel Rabaté, James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 153–93. 29 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, revised translation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univeristy Press, 2016), 5. 30 Jacques Derrida, “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event,” Critical Inquiry 33 (Winter 2007): 441. 31 Specters of Marx, 37. 32 Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf), 1982, 317. Hereafter MP and page number. 33 Jacques Derrida, “History of the Lie,” Futures of Jacques Derrida, ed. Richard Rand (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 65–98. References to the text as F and page number.

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34 Hannah Arendt, “Lying in Politics,” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1972), 3–4. 35 “Letter to a Japanese friend,” Between the Blinds, 273–74. 36 Jacques Derrida, “Deconstructions: The Im-possible” in French Theory in America (New York: Routledege, 2001), 19. 37 Ibid. 38 “Summary of “Reiterating the Differences”” in Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc., (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 25. 39 Jacques Derrida, “Che Cos’è la Poesia?,” trans. Peggy Kamuf, in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 221–37. Here CC and page number. 40 The Animal that Therefore I Am, p. 7. 41 Jacques Derrida, La Carte Postale (Paris: Flammarion, 1980), 12. 42 One will find an almost exhaustive list in Charles Ramond, Le Vocabulaire de Jacques Derrida (Paris: Ellipses, 2001). 43 Jacques Derrida, Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986), 55, my translation. 44 See Gregory Ulmer, “The Puncept in Grammatology,” in On Puns: The Foundation of Letters, ed. Jonathan Culler (Oxford: Blackwell,1988), 164–89. 45 Parages, 12. 46 See Alain Badiou, Pocket Pantheon: Figures of Postwar Philosophy, trans. David Macey (London: Verso, 2009), 125–44. 47 Leslie Hill, Radical Indecision: Barthes, Blanchot, Derrida and the Future of Criticism (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2010). Radical Indecision unpacks all the nuances of Derrida’s concept of the undecidable by relating it cogently to the idea of a “Justice to come” in the field of literary studies. 48 “The thematization of writing has often been seen as Derrida’s personal contribution to modern philosophy, but it is significant that in his earliest extended discussions of it, he presented it as a sign of the times.” Edward Baring, “The Politics of Writing: Derrida and Althusser,” in A Companion to Derrida, ed. Zeynep Direk and Leonard Lawlor (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 287. Baring foregrounds the influence of Althusser more than that of Barthes, who, it is true, had made his mark in 1953. When Derrida returned to Barthes in 1981, after his demise in “The Deaths of Roland Barthes,” he was indeed looking at the spectrality of Camera Lucida, a far cry from the neoMarxist early Barthes who presented writing in a revolutionary context and as a tool of social empowerment. 49 Jacques Derrida, Introduction to Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, trans, John P. Leavey (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), 67. Hereafter, OG and page number. 50 Maurizio Ferraris, Documentality: Why it is necessary to leave traces, trans. Richard Davis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012). See also his essay “The Documental Revolution and the Archives of the Future,” in After

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Derrida: Literature, Theory and Criticism in the 21st century, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 212–25. 51 “But, beyond… (Open letter to Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon),” in Signature Derrida, ed. Jay Williams (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013), 77. Hereafter referred to as Si and page number. Derrida’s essay was published in Critical Inquiry in the fall of 1986. 52 Immanuel Kant, “Toward Perpetual Peace,” (1795), in Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary J. Gregor, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 279. 53 “Biodegradables,” in Signature Derrida, 184. This text was written in 1989, at the time of the de Man controversy. 54 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber, 1939), 444, line 30. 55 See Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law,” in Acts of Religion, ed. Anidjar, (New York: Routledge, 2002), 286–93.

Works cited Anderson, Warwick and Ian R. Mackay. Intolerant Bodies: A Short History of Autoimmunity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2014. Anidjar, Gil. editor of Jaques Derrida, Acts of Religion. New York: Routledge, 2002. Arendt, Hannah. Crises of the Republic. New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1972. Badiou, Alain. Pocket Pantheon: Figures of Postwar Philosophy. Translated by David Macey. London: Verso, 2009. Bennington, Geoff. Jacques Derrida, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993. Borradori, Giovanna. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003. Culler, Jonathan, ed. On Puns: The Foundation of Letters. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988. Del Pilar Blanco, María, and Esther Peeren. The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. Esther Peeren, New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. Derrida, Jacques. Aporias. Translated by Thomas Dutoit. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Translated by David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Derrida, Jacques. “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event.” Translated by Gila Walker. Critical Inquiry, 33 (Winter 2007): 441–61. Derrida, Jacques. Introduction to Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry. Translated by John P. Leavey. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1978. Derrida, Jacques. Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988. Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982.

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Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Revised translation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univeristy Press, 2016. Derrida, Jacques. Parages. Paris: Galilée, 1986. Derrida, Jacques. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and beyond. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994. Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978. Derrida, Jacques, and Anne Dufourmantelle. Of Hospitality. Translated by Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Derrida, Jacques, and Elisabeth Roudinesco. For What Tomorrow… Translated by Jeff Fort. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. Direk, Zeynep and Leonard Lawlor, ed. A Companion to Derrida. Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2014. Ferraris, Maurizio. Documentality: Why It Is Necessary to Leave Traces. Translated by Richard Davis. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, ed. Materialities of Communication. Translated by William Whobrey. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994. Haddad, Samir. Derrida and the Inheritance of Democracy. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013. Hägglund, Martin. Dying for Time: Proust, Wollf, Nabokov. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. Hägglund, Martin. Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996. Heidegger, Martin. Identity and Difference. Translated by Joan Stambaugh (1969, reprinted) Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Hill, Leslie. Radical Indecision: Barthes, Blanchot, Derrida and the Future of Criticism. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2010. Husserl, Edmund. Experience and Judgment. Translated by James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Joyce, James. Ulysses. Gabler edition. New York: Random House, 1993. Kamuf, Peggy, ed. A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Kant, Immanuel. Practical Philosophy. Translated by Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Kisiel, Theodore. The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Lotringer, Sylvère, and Sande Cohen, eds. French Theory in America. New York: Routledege, 2001. Nora, Pierre. Les Français d’Algérie, édition revue et augmentée. Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 2012. Peeters, Benoît. Jacques Derrida. London: Polity, 2013.

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Peeters, Benoît. Trois ans avec Derrida: les carnets d’un biographe. Paris: Flammarion, 2010. Rabaté, Jean-Michel. James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Rabaté, Jean-Michel, ed. After Derrida: Literature, Theory and Criticism in the 21st Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Ramond, Charles. Le Vocabulaire de Jacques Derrida. Paris: Ellipses, 2001. Rand, Richard, ed. Futures of Jacques Derrida. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. Sprinker, Michael, ed. Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx. New York: Verso, 1999. Vitale, Franceso. Biodeconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences. Translated by Mauro Senatore. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2018. Williams, Jay, ed. Signature Derrida. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013.

302

INDEX

ABC of Economics (Pound)  169 ABC of Reading (Pound)  169 Abdessemed, Adel  232, 233 absolute  5 absolute univocity  202–3 Académie Française  178 The Accursed Share (Bataille)  143–52 Acts of Literature (Derrida)  158 Adams, John  168, 169 Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas (Bataille)  150 Adorno, Theodor W.  5, 8, 9, 10 Agamben, Giogio  12, 29, 53, 59–60, 63–4 Aggadah  62–3, 64 Akhmatova, Anna  17 Alake  117–18 Alice in Wonderland (Carroll)  83 allereigensten  97 alms  28–30, 32, 42 Althusser, Louis  210 Alvarado-Díaz, Alheli  14 am haaretz  53, 64 ana-lusis  147 aneconomy  39, 42 animals  74–6 abyss  82 human versus nonhuman  230 interior  77–8 openness and  76–7 otherness  80–1 perspective  76–7 poetic thinking about  77–8 poetry and  76–84 relationality of  77 specificity  81 The Animal That Therefore I Am (Derrida)  16, 76, 77, 79, 82, 137

Antheil, George  117 antinomianism  62 apophasis  159–60 Aqedah  39 Aquinas, Thomas  159 Arcades Project (Benjamin)  7, 8, 9 arche-writing  210 Archer, Jeffrey  242 archive  165–70 Archive Fever (Derrida)  158, 165–6, 167 Aristotle  1, 3 Artaud, Antonin  4, 5, 14–15, 126–39, 243 creativity  135–6 Derrida revoicing  126–39 language  126, 127–8 legacy  136 speech  126–7, 129, 131–2, 134, 136, 138–9 with surrealism  129 writing  128–39 arts  2, 6, 102, 127, 133 “As one”  97 Atemwende (Breathturn): Die Welt ist fort, ich muss dich tragen (Derrida)  98 “At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am”  150 Attridge, Derek  17, 242, 247 Aufhebung  121, 151 Austin, John Langshaw  16, 195–205 conciliation reading  198 impure statements  201 linguistic representationalism and  196–204 pure statements as linguistic ideal  198–201

304

INDEX

purity and impurity alternative  204–5 speech acts  202–4 true/false fetish  197 authenticity  214 auto-affection  180 automatons  101, 102 autonomy  6, 40, 244 avant-garde  211 “The Bad Glazier”  31 Badiou, Alain  31 Balzac, Honoré de  3, 28 Barthes, Roland  150 Bataille, Georges  4, 5, 15, 33 Derrida on  142–52 economic theory  143, 145–7 fictions  142–3, 145, 149 legacy  149–52 writing  145–52 Baudelaire, Charles  4, 7, 10, 19 n.16, 23–35 Baudrillard, Jean  2 The Beast and the Sovereign (Derrida)  13, 94, 100, 103 Beckett, Samuel  5, 6, 9, 10, 16, 17, 19 n.28, 158, 240, 242–50 “Before the Law” (Kafka)  54–7, 58, 244 beggar  29–30 Beinecke Rare Book  167 Being  69–71, 159 Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology (Sartre)  211–15, 218 Being and Time (Heidegger)  73, 74, 84, 85, 209, 210, 213 Benjamin, Walter  6–9, 12, 13, 19 nn.15, 17–18, 21–2, 26, 53, 60, 61–3, 121 Benveniste, Emile  185 Bergson, Henri  9 Bertgang, Zoë  167 Bible  118 “Black Cat” (Rilke)  80, 82 Blanchot, Maurice  5, 6, 17–18, 241–50 “Blick” (Rilke)  76, 80

blind presupposition of deconstructionist (BPD)  203 bliss  8 Bloom, Molly  14 body-writing  228, 232 Book of the Eparch  169 Borges, Jorge Luis  10 Bourgeois, Bernard  119 BPD. See blind presupposition of deconstructionist (BPD) Buber, Martin  99, 100 Büchner, Georg  102, 103 Buddhism  159, 162 Bürger, Peter  7 Butler, Judith  17, 196, 230–1 Byron, Mark  15 Cambridge Introduction to Derrida (Derrida)  18 Camus, Albert  240 The Cantos (Pound)  157, 158, 165, 166, 168, 169 capitalism  26, 182–3 capitalist economy  26 carnivorism  232 Carroll, Lewis  83, 226 The Castle  62 Cathay (Pound)  161 Cavalcanti  161 Cavalcanti, Guido  158, 160, 166 Cavell, Stanley  196 Celan, Paul  5, 12–13, 94–104 celestial economy  39–48 charity  41 “Che Cos’è la Poesia?” (“What Is Poetry?”) (Derrida)  77, 80, 83 China  163 Chinese materialism  162 Chinese poetry  160–3 Chinese writing  163–5 Chinese written character  160–5 The Chinese Written Character (Pound)  160, 161, 169 “Choreographies” (Derrida)  231 Christianity  40, 43 Church Missionary Society  118 Circumfession (Derrida)  229 Cixous, Hélène  5, 10, 17, 113, 226–33

INDEX

The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius (Pound)  169 Claudel, Paul  25 Cocteau, Jean  216 Cohen-Solal, Annie  215–16 Coke, Edward  169 colonization  119 Comment c’est (Beckett)  246 Concerning a Journey to the Land of the Tarahumaras (Artaud)  133 conciliation reading  196–7, 198 Confucian Analects (Pound)  169 Confucian education system  160–1 Confucian principle of zheng ming  172 n.23 Confucius: The Great Digest & Unwobbling Pivot (Pound)  169 consubstantiality  119, 120 Counterfeit Money  15 “Counterfeit Money”  25–6, 27–35 counterword  104 credit  28 Crépon, Marc  99, 102 Critical Essays  150 Critique of Dialectical Reason (Sartre)  211, 215 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant)  43 “Critique of Violence” (Benjamin)  61 “The Crowds”  30 “Cyclops”  119 Daniel, Arnaut  159 Danton’s Death  100 Dao De Jing  165 Dasein  73–4, 83, 210 dates as metonymy  97 in poetry  97–8 death  98 “Deathfugue” (Lefèbvre)  94 debt  27, 28, 30, 40–1 deconstruction  1–2, 134, 179, 181–2, 242 materialism and  150 modernism and  6–7 Neoplatonism and  160 of ontotheology  159 philosophy  134–5



305

Dedalus, Stephen  120, 248 Dedans (Cixous)  226 Defoe (Daniel)  240 de Fournival, Richard  82 De l’Esprit, Heidegger et la Question  184 Deleuze, Gilles  6–7, 10 “Delusion and Dream in Jensen’s Gradiva” (Freud)  167 de Mailla, Joseph  169 de Man, Paul  10, 121, 210 Demeure (Derrida)  242 democracy  3, 34 de Rachewiltz, Mary  168 Der Geist des Christentums (Hegel)  57–8 Derrida, Jacques  1–16, 18 nn.5–7, 19 n.19, 39–48, 53, 240–50 Artaud and  126–39 with Austin  195–205 on Bataille  142–52 Baudelaire and  23–35 Celan and  94–104 Cixous and  226–33 with Heidegger  69–85 impure statements  201 Joyce and  111–21 Kafka and  52–64 linguistic representationalism and  196–204 negative theology in  158–60 Neoplatonism in  158–60 Pound and  157–70 pure statements as linguistic ideal  198–201 purity and impurity alternative  204–5 on Sartre’s Genet  217–21 Sinographies  160–5 Valéry and  178–88 de Sade, Marquis  242 “Des Tours de Babel” (Derrida)  121 différance  14, 16, 18, 57, 58, 63, 64, 70, 149, 150–2 disclosure, language as  70, 71–6 dissemination  34 Dissemination (Derrida)  150, 209 Dōgen principle of nonduality  159

306

INDEX

Doran, Robert  16 Dostoevsky, Fyodor  212 Dubliners (Joyce)  11 du Bouchet, André  94 Duino Elegies (Rilke)  75 Dumesnil, Suzanne  246 Duras, Marguerite  227, 240 duty  46–7 “Eating Well or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida” (Derrida)  231 “Ébauche d’un Serpent” (Valéry)  186 economy  10–11, 39–48, 144–7 Ecrits (Lacan)  218 “Eden”  97 Edward VII  118 Elegies (Rilke)  83 Eliot, T. S.  5, 9, 13 equivocations  111–15, 202–3, 204 Eribon, Didier  123 n.28 Erigena, Scotus  161 Eriugena, John Scottus  158, 159, 160 esprit  184–6 “Essay on the Origin of Languages” (Rousseau)  164 Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers (Rorty)  210 European Enlightenment  163–4 European identity  182–4 event  30–3 excess  33–4 existentialist  210, 215, 216, 218, 248 exoticism  165 expenditures  26, 34, 145 Eyck, David Ten  168, 169 Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism (Liebregts)  158 faith  11, 42–8 Faux Pas (Blanchot)  246, 250 Fear and Trembling  39, 40 Felstiner, John  96 feminine readwriting  229 feminine writing  17, 227–33 Fenollosa, Ernest  160, 161–4 Ferretter, Luke  159

fiction  28, 142–3, 145, 149 filiation  119, 121, 210 Finnegans Wake (Joyce)  113, 114, 117, 211, 245 Flaubert  3, 4, 10, 211, 212, 213 Flower Ornament Scripture School  162 The Flowers of Evil (Baudelaire)  33 Flynn, Thomas  215 “Force and Signification” (Derrida)  179 “Force of Law” (Derrida)  211 forgiveness  25–6, 40 Form and Signification (Rousset)  179 Foshay, Toby Avard  159 Foucault, Michel  10, 29–30, 134 “Franz Kafka. For the Tenth Anniversary of his Death” (Benjamin)  61, 63 freedom  58–9 Freud, Sigmund  57, 95, 98, 166, 167, 168, 170, 181, 210, 212–13, 218 Freudian unconscious  212, 213 friendship  32, 34 “From Restricted to General Economy. A Hegelianism without Reserve,” (Derrida)  143, 144 From Threshold to Threshold (du Bouchet)  94 Gasché, Rodolphe  11, 19 n.25, 62 general economy  144–7 general writing  143, 144–7, 148. See also writing Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, and Genius: The Secrets of the Archive (Derrida)  227 Genesis 22  39 Genet, Jean  5, 16–17, 150, 208–21, 227, 245 George, Stefan  7 Gerassi, John  211, 216 German language  95–7, 102 Gernet, Jacques  164 Gersh, Stephen  160 Geulincx, Arnold  9 ghetto  227

INDEX

Gide (André)  7 The Gift (Mauss)  27 The Gift of Death (Derrida)  11, 39–48 gifts  27–8, 32 Given Time 1. Counterfeit Money (Derrida)  23, 24–6, 143, 150 giving  25–6, 27. See also alms; gifts Glas (Derrida)  15, 16, 119, 150, 208–11, 217, 220–1, 245 Glassary (Leavey)  211 Glen, Patrick J.  65 n.5 God  42–4, 54, 115, 120 Gogh, Van  129–30 Golding, William  226 Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna  12 Gospel of Luke  41 grammatology  81, 134, 135, 166, 210 Greenberg, Clement  9 Gregory of Nyssa  41 Grosseteste, Robert  161 Grossman, Evelyne  95, 96 Grøtta, Marit  10–11 Guide to Kulchur (Pound)  159, 169 Guido Cavalcanti Rime (Pound)  169 Habermas, Jürgen  2, 142, 143, 145–6, 152 Hägglund, Martin  13 Halakhah, Jewish law  61–3, 64 Hamlet (Shakespeare)  120 Hanold, Norbert  167 happiness  43 Haraway, Donna J.  231 Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin  168 Hart, Kevin  159 Harvey, David  26 Harvey, Robert  217 Haussmann, Baron  26 H.C. for Life, That Is to Say... (Derrida)  227 heart  77–8 Hegel, G. W. F.  1, 7, 14, 16, 57–8, 150, 163, 245



307

Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language (GosettiFerencei)  12 Heidegger, Martin  1, 5, 12, 15, 69–85, 101–2, 161, 209, 210, 218 Hill, Leslie  6, 10, 18, 19 n.30 Histoire Générale de la Chine (1775-85) (de Mailla)  169 History of the Lombards  169 Hölderlin, Friedrich  70, 71, 72, 74, 102 homoousion  120–1 Homo Sacer (Agamben)  29 Howells, Christina  208, 209, 219 How to Do Things with Words (Austin)  195, 197 Hugo, Victor  4, 216 Hulme, T. E.  9 human being  79–84 Husserl, Edmund  1, 9, 10, 14, 102, 111–13, 201–3, 218 Joyce, James alternative to  111–21 metaphysics  180 pure statement, notion of  202 “Idea in the Kantian sense”  202 ideograms  161, 164 idiom  13, 95–6 as counterword  104 as desire  96 language and  95–104 mourning and  97–8 ominousness and  102 testimony and  98–9 illocution  201 The Impossible (Bataille)  149 impure statements  201 inclusive exclusion  29 The Inner Experience (Bataille)  144 Insister of Jacques Derrida (Cixous)  227 institutionalization of art  133–6 of life  136 Institutions of the Laws of England (Coke)  169 internal exclusion  29 intonations  14, 136

308

INDEX

Introduction to Metaphysics (Heidegger)  101, 102 Introduction to the Method of Leonardo (Valéry)  179 Islam  40 Jabès, Edmond  4 Jacob, Pierre  246 Jameson, Fredric  6, 18 nn.11, 13 Janequin, Clément  158 Jardins des Plantes  76 Jarry  7 Jensen, Wilhelm  167 Jerade, Miriam  13 Jewish law  60, 61 Joyce, James  4, 5, 10, 14, 111–21, 211, 226 as alternative to Husserl, Edmund  111–21 egoism  115–17 equivocation  111–16 hypermnesia  115–16 invention  117 as scissors and paste man  117–18 Judaic law  54–5, 57–8, 60, 61–2 Judaism  40, 229 Jugendstil  7–8 Jung, Hwa Yol  165 justice  62 kaddish  100 Kafka, Franz  5, 10, 12, 52–64 law in parable  53–5, 59–64 parable  52–64 reading  61–3 Kainan, Mori  163 Kant, Immanuel  1, 2, 11 celestial economy  39–48 particular rule  44 philosophy of religion  44–8 universal rule  44 Kegon  162 Kehre (Heidegger)  209 Kenner, Hugh  9 Kierkegaard, Søren  39–40 Kircher, Athanasius  163 knowledge  11, 147 kritikos  147

Lacan, Jacques  218 La carte postale: De Socrate à Freud et au-delà  209 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe  4, 18 n.9, 103 La Folie du jour (Blanchot)  243, 250 Laforgue, Jules  7 La Jeune Parque  178 language  4, 5, 241 alterity  96, 103 Artaud’s vision  126, 127–8 autobiographical  80 constative utterances  197 as disclosure  70, 71–6 equivocation of  111–12 German  95–7, 102 idiom and  95–104 impurity of  201, 203 of knowledge  79 literature and  4–5 of marketplace  40 performative utterances  197 poetry  76–84 representationalist picture  196–7, 202 of revealing  79 spectral errancy in  70–1 testimony and  98–9 thought  74 unidentity of  99 “La Parole Soufflée” (Derrida)  135 Laporte, Roger  17 L’Arc  143 L’Arrêt de mort (Blanchot)  243, 245, 250 Latham, Sean  5 L’Attente L’Oubli (Blanchot)  246, 250 L’Autre cap (Derrida)  181–4 Lavergne, Philippe  113 La verité en peinture  209 law  52–3 access  59, 64 authority  54, 55, 57–8 fear of  63 fulfillment  59–60 hope  63 Jewish  60, 61

INDEX

Judaic  54, 55, 57–8 in Kafka’s parable  53–5 of laws  55, 57 literature and  55–7 of modernity  12 moral  55, 57 reading  61–3 religious  54–5, 57 secular  54–5, 57, 61 state  61 of witnessing  103 “Law and Literature”  54 lawlessness  55, 61, 62 Leavey, John P.  211 Le Chant des Oiseaux (Janequin)  158–9 Lechantre, Michel  180 Lefèbvre, Jean-Pierre  94 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm  163 Le Monde  226 Les Sans Arche (Cixous)  232 “Let’s Beat Up the Poor”  31 Levinas, Emmanuel  2, 11, 13, 17–18, 30, 150 Lewis, Wyndham  9, 13 Leyb-Halpernde, Moshe  96 liberty  34 Liebregts, Peter  158 Lilly Library, Indiana University  168 Limited Inc (Derrida)  195 Lindon, Jérôme  246 linguistic representationalism  196–204 L’Innommable (Blanchot)  248, 250 Liska, Vivian  12 Lispector, Clarice  10, 17, 227, 228, 232 literariness  56 The Literary Absolute (LacoueLabarthe)  4, 5 literature  1–4, 145, 230, 241–2 Cixous and  228 and democracy  3, 34 historical reconstruction  4 language and  4–5 law and  55–7 as modern absolute  5 modernity and  12 philosophy and  23



309

reading  61–3 spirit  4 and subversion of moral law  57–9 loan  40–1 logocentrism  14, 15, 70, 72, 164–5, 184–5, 188, 230 “Long live the King!” (Lucile)  101 Loviton, Jeanne  178 Lozier, Claire  15 luxury  26 Lyotard, Jean-François  2 Madame Edwarda (Bataille)  149 madman  130, 133 major writing  145, 146, 148 Malabou, Catherine  17 Mallarmé, Stéphane  3, 7, 30, 164, 245, 247, 249 Manuscript Library, Yale University  168 Margins of Philosophy (Derrida)  16, 128, 130, 150, 159, 209 marionettes  102 Marxism  217 Massa  119 Matthew 25  44 Mauss, Marcel  27 McDonald, Christie  231 McGann, Jerome J.  168 The Meridian (Celan)  97, 100, 101–2 Meschonnic, Henri  211 Messianism  13 Messie (Cixous)  232 metaphor  77, 82 metaphysical voice  196–7, 201 metaphysics  113–14, 196 Method of Meditation (Bataille)  144, 147, 148 Mexico  133–5 Michaud, Ginette  98, 233 n.1 Miller, Eddis  N.  11, 39–48 Miller, J. Hillis  229 ming ideogram  161 minor writing  145–6 Moati, Raoul  16 modernism  2–3, 5–6, 9, 142–3 alms and  28–30 canonical  13–16

310

credit and  28 and deconstruction  6–7 definitions  7, 10 and economy  10–11 emergence  9 money and  25, 26–8 in poetry  13–16 and religion  11 Modernism: Evolution of an Idea (Rogers)  5 Modernism and Theory: A Critical Debate (Ross)  6 modernists  10 modernity  1–3, 7 discourse of  142–3, 147 law of  12 literature and  12 Molloy (Beckett)  246, 248, 249, 250 The Moment of My death  17 money  25, 26–8 The Monolingualism of the Other or the Prosthesis of Origin (Derrida)  13, 96 monstre  74 monstrosity  74 Montaigne, Michel de  228 montrer  74 morality  30, 34, 43, 57, 65 moral law  45–7, 55, 57 subversion  57–9 Morkan, Mary Jane  117 Mulligan, Buck  120 Münch, Gerhard  158 Murdoch, Iris  226 Mute Speech (Rancière)  3 My Mother (Bataille)  149 Mystical Theology  159 mythos  151 Nagao, Ariga  163 Nancy, Jean-Luc  4, 18 n.9, 231 Napoleon III  34 narration  32 Nash, John  118 negative theology  158–60 Neoplatonism  158–60 Neugroschel, Joachin  95, 99 neuter  17–18

INDEX

“Never Be Sober” (Baudelaire)  33 New Poems (Rilke)  75 The New Revelations of Being (Artaud)  136 Nichols, Peter  168 Nietzsche, Friedrich  1, 9 Nolde, John  169 No More Masterpieces  138 Non-Being  159 nonduality  159–60 The No One’s-Rose (Die Niemandsrose) (Celan)  99 “No pasarán”  97 Norris, Christopher  1–2, 18 n.2, 211 Notebook for an Ethics (Sartre)  211–12 Notebooks (Valéry)  178, 180 nothingness  58 “The Notion of Expenditure” (Bataille)  145, 146 Notre-Dame de Paris (Hugo)  4 Occidental culture  130, 133 Of Grammatology (Derrida)  15, 82, 157–8, 161, 163, 209, 210 ominousness  101–2 ontology  12, 15, 70–2, 75, 85, 188, 210–13, 215, 233 ontotheology  69–70 On Touching, Jean-Luc Nancy  150 openness  75, 76–7 ordinary voice  196–7, 201 Origin of Geometry (Husserl)  14, 111, 201 The Other Heading (Derrida)  16, 181 “The Panther” (Rilke)  76–80 Parages (Derrida)  242, 243 Parmenides  1 passivity, poetic value of  112, 114, 115 Patrologia Latina  159 performativity  16 Perloff, Marjorie  9 Phaedrus (Plato)  3, 70, 163, 245 phallogocentrism  232 pharmakon  151–2

INDEX

phenomenology  14, 75, 170, 180, 218, 233 Philebus (Plato)  245 The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Habermas)  142 philosophy  1, 2, 3, 11, 128 deconstruction and  134–5 discourse of  210 European Enlightenment  163–4 literature and  23 of presence  163 of religion  44–8 phonetic writing  163, 164 phonocentrism  70, 161, 170 “The Pipe” (Baudelaire)  33 The Pisan Cantos  158, 166 Plato  1, 2, 3, 4, 70, 245 Plunka, Gene  219 “Poetics and Politics of Witnessing” (Derrida)  94 poetry  4–5, 12, 25, 145, 178–81 absurd, majesty of  101–2 animals and  76–84 Celan’s  94–104 Chinese  160–3 dates in  97–8 definitions  102, 145 as disclosure  70, 71–6 gathering  71–2 interpretation  71–6 language  71–6 modernism in  13–16 with mourning  99–100 ontological significance  73 present, majesty of  101, 102–3 versus prose  78–9 spectral errancy in  70–1 testimony and  98–9, 101, 102 as univocal message  78–9 political economy  144–7 politics of singularity  99–100 Ponge, Francis  5 “The Poor Child’s Toy”  31 Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint (Cixous)  227 “Portraits of Mistresses” (Baudelaire)  33 Positions (Derrida)  128



311

The Post Card (Derrida)  210 postmodernism  1–2, 5 Pound, Ezra  5, 11, 13, 15, 157–70, 226 in archives  165–70 Chinese written character  160–5 negative theology in  158–60 Neoplatonism in  158–60 prose writing  169 works of Confucius  169 poverty  74 Prisoner of Love (Genet)  16 prose  4, 25–6, 30 prose poems  10, 25, 31, 32, 34 Proust, Marcel  3, 4, 10, 228 Proverb 19:17  41 Pseudo-Dionysius  159, 160 pure statements  198–201, 204 “Qual Quelle: The Sources of Valéry” (Derrida)  180, 181, 183, 185, 188 Qur’an  41 Rabaté, Jean-Michel  66 n.37, 111 racism  119 radiance  58, 60 radical empiricism  162 Rams: Uninterrupted Dialogue Between Two Infinities, the Poem (Derrida)  13, 94, 98 Rancière, Jacques  3, 18 n.8 reading  6, 241, 243 readwriting  229 redemption  6, 8–9 regards  219 religion Christian  44 and modernism  11 philosophy of  44–8 as spectral theology  44 Religion (Kant)  44, 48 religious law  54–5, 57 reward  44–8 Rilke, Rainer Maria  5, 12, 69–71, 75–7, 80–5 Rimbaud, Arthur  250 Rime (Cavalcanti)  166

312

The Rites of Passage of Jean Genet: The Art and Aesthetics of Risk Taking (Plunka)  219 Rock-Drill  165 Rogers, Gayle  5 romanticism  5 Ronse, Henri  134 Rorem, Paul  159 Rorty, Richard  2, 209, 210 Ross, Stephen  6, 18 n.12 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  4, 164 Rousset, Jean  179 Russell, Bertrand  9 Ryan, Michael  210 Sachs, Nelly  100 Sacred Edict  169 sacrifices  26 alms versus  29–30 and economy  39–48 reward for  44 St. Basil  41 Saint Genet, Comedian and Martyr  16, 208–9, 211–21 Sartre, Jean-Paul  16, 17, 33, 80, 208–21 Saussy, Haun  161, 162 Schibboleth (Derrida)  13 Schloss Brunnenburg  168 Scholem, Gershom  61 Schönberg, Arnold  5, 10 Schonfeld, Eli  65 n.16 script  163 Searle, John  16, 195 The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud (Derrida)  14, 128, 131, 136, 138 secrets  2–3, 32–3, 42 secular law  54–5, 57, 61 Segarra, Marta  17 Seinsgeschichte  70 Self  128–39 self-interest  45–6, 47 “The Self is the Voice” (Valéry)  181 self speech  126–7, 129, 131–2, 134, 136, 138–9 Senn, Fritz  119 servile writing  145, 146

INDEX

Shakespeare  228, 241 Shechinah  60 Shenker, Israel  242 Shibboleth (Derrida)  94, 95, 98, 99, 100 Shin Bukkyō  162 singularity  13, 53 of German  95 of idiomatic mark  99–103 in-person  81 of language  97–8 of literary object  13 of literature  244–5 of modernism  9 politics of  99–100 A Singular Modernity (Jameson)  6 sins  40 skepticism  83 “The Sluice” (“Die Schleuse”)  99 social condemnation  215 Socrates  70 sole  98 Sollers, Philippe  165 Sophocles  228 sovereignty  101–4 sovereign writing  145, 146, 148 Spark, Muriel  226 specter  151–2 Specters of Marx (Derrida)  13, 151, 218 spectrality  151 speech acts  202–4 Speech and Phenomena (Derrida)  180 speech of self  126–7, 129, 131–2, 134, 136, 138–9 Spero, Nancy  229 Spirit of Christianity (Hegel)  58, 119, 120 Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles/Éperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche (Derrida)  209, 227 squaw  119 state laws  61 Stesichorus  158 Story of the Eye (Bataille)  149 Structuralism and Since: From Lévi-Strauss to Derrida (Sturrock)  211

INDEX

“Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourses of the Human Sciences”  113 Sturrock, John  208, 211 style  227–8 superessentialism  159 surrealism  129, 135–6 “Surrealism and Revolution” (Artaud)  133 Surrealists  4 swamp world  61–2 Szondi, Peter  94, 97–8 Ta Hio, The Great Learning (Pound)  169 The Tain of the Mirror (Gasché)  11 talmid hakham  53 Tarahumaras  133 teaching, Jesus’s  44 Tel Quel  209 Tendai  162 terrestrial economy  39–40 testimony idiom and  98–9 language and  98–9 textual grafting  165 theatre  145 “The Book is Dead” (Sturrock)  208, 211 Thévenin, Paule  217 thinking  74 Thomas l’Obscur (Blanchot)  243 thought  74 Threadsuns  96 Thrones  165 tobacco  33–4 Torah  41, 60 translation  14, 94–5, 102, 112–13 of am haaretz  94 art of  119 of Celan’s poetry  94 French  95 intertextuality  117 multimodal  119–21 The Trial  57, 58, 62 trickster’s economy  23–35 true/false fetish  197



313

Twitchell-Waas, Jeffrey  160 “Two Words for Joyce” (Derrida)  113–16, 121 Ulysses  117, 120, 248 “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce” (Derrida)  116 Ulysses Gramophone (Derrida)  14, 166, 122 unconscious  4 unheimlich. See ominousness The United Irishman (Griffith)  117, 118, 119 univocity, absolute  202–3 Valéry, Paul  5, 15–16, 82, 178–88, 250 characterization of Europe  182 esprit, concept of  184–6 material and spiritual capital, analogy between  184 poetry  179–81 voice  181 writing  178–88 Veils (Cixous)  227 Victor Hugo  4 violence  31 “Violence and Metaphysics” (Levinas)  120, 150 virtue  42 voice  181 Voice and Phenomena (Derrida)  198, 201 Voilier, Jean  178 von Kleist, Heinrich  227 Walkup, Massa  117 wealth  74 What Is Called Thinking? (Heidegger)  73 Wilde, Oscar  7 Wilkins (John)  163 wine  33–4 Wood, David  2 Woolf, Virginia  5, 9 The Words  212 The Work of Mourning (2001): Chaque fois unique la fin du monde (Derrida)  98

314

Works of John Adams (Pound)  169 world-building  74–6 worldlessness  74–6 writing  3, 4, 6, 15, 163, 201, 241 Artaud’s  128–39 Bataille’s  145–52 Beckett’s  242–50 Blanchot’s  242–50 Chinese  163–5 Cixous’s  226–33 economic theory to  143 equivocation of  111–12

INDEX

feminine  227–33 pharmakonic  151 phonetic  163–4 Writing and Difference (Derrida)  14, 15, 126, 131, 132, 138, 143, 150, 209 Yeats, William Butler  7, 9, 10, 11 yiskor  100 Ziolkowski, Theodore  64–5 n.4 Zizek, Slavoj  10, 31 Zvi, Shabbetai  60

315

316